Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) by Danielle Girard Read Free Book Online

need some shades.”
    Roger laughed without looking up. “It’s the halogen spotlights, man. They reflect the bald well, don’t they?”
    Hal palmed his own bald head. “I guess so. How do I look?”
    “Not as reflective, I’m afraid,” Roger told him. “To really make it work, you’ve got to be both totally bald and pasty white. You’re only one of the two.”
    “I’ve got some pictures where I shine pretty bright, too.” He crossed the room and stopped beside Roger. “Find anything interesting?”
    Roger nodded. “Couple things, actually,” he said, standing up. “There was only one wineglass out on the counter, but we found a second one up in the cupboard. Rinsed out and put away in a hurry from the looks of it.”
    “Any prints?”
    “Prints on both glasses. Won’t know if they’re the same or if they belong to the victim until we get them back to the lab.”
    If the two had wine together, then the killer was someone Stein knew.
    Did they wash the glass only to hide their prints, or because they were trying to hide the fact that Stein was killed by someone she would drink wine with, someone she knew? “So maybe she had a guest here.”
    “You talked to the neighbor?” Roger asked.
    “Yeah, but she didn’t hear anything.”
    “These places are pretty solid,” Roger noted. “Unless someone was really loud, I doubt you’d hear anything from across the hall.”
    “Definitely the high-rent district.”
    “You’re not kidding. The way the market is in the city, these places probably go for two or three million.”
    Hal whistled. That was about what he’d make in his entire career, and someone was paying that on maybe twelve hundred square feet of living space. Without rent control, he wouldn’t be living in the city at all.
    Rents on places like his were close to four grand. He’d been there sixteen years and paid $1,175.
    These days you couldn’t rent the shelter of a doorway in an alley for that. “Prices like that, you’d think they could afford a better security system.”
    “You’d think. The computer squad is checking. They suspect it was a virus that shut down the system. Happened about fifteen minutes before three o’clock, which is when—”
    “The front deskman gets off duty,” Hal finished for him.
    “Right.”
    “So someone sends a virus, and the whole system is down. Makes it easy to get in and out without being captured on film.” That implied planning, but Hal already knew that this murder was not an act of blind rage. It had been carefully choreographed, which would almost certainly make it tougher to solve.
    Hal tried to imagine Schwartzman married to a man capable of something like this.
    “It may not even be as sophisticated as all that. According to the front deskman, they have virus problems pretty regularly. Something about how they perform the nightly update and some issue with their antivirus software.”
    Hal palmed his head. “So you’re saying this wasn’t a planned attack? That’s a pretty big coincidence.”
    “It definitely is,” Roger agreed. “It basically happened about fifteen minutes before the end of the shift. The front desk guy says he called tech support and waited on hold, but when he called in to tell his boss that he had to stay, guy told him to take off. Kid said he would have stayed. Could’ve used the overtime pay.”
    Hal groaned. “So no surveillance all night.”
    “The computer guys will see if they can locate the source of the virus and track it. But we might not get anything.”
    “So besides the wineglass and the security system failure, we find anything else noteworthy?”
    “Not yet. We collected the flowers to compare with the ones Dr. Schwartzman received at her house. They were a low priority until now.”
    Everyone would step up the focus on Schwartzman. Comparing the flowers for any similarities, usable prints, skin cells—epithelials—that could be run for DNA.
    Anything to link to a suspect.
    “That will