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

take us a few days. We’ve also got all the trash from the kitchen and bathrooms. We’ll run through it for prints and evidence. We’re looking for the wine bottle itself. There’s evidence of broken glass on the kitchen floor, but no glass in the trash. I’ve got someone going through the dumpsters.”
    “We get lucky, might find some usable prints.”
    “That’s the hope,” Roger said. “You talk to the victim’s sister?”
    “Not yet,” Hal said. “Stein wasn’t supposed to be back until tomorrow at noon, so she had a key to let herself in. The neighbor buzzed her in the front door,” he added. “I’ll check her out.”
    The apartment had offered precious little about the victim. He needed a list of friends, her work contacts. Someone knew something. It was a matter of following the trail. He just needed one bread crumb to start.
    Roger drew a plastic bag out of his pocket. “Ken collected this and gave it to me.”
    Hal flipped over the bag and looked at the receipt inside.
    “It’s a gas receipt. The sister filled up on Vasco Road in Livermore at nine fifty.”
    Hal pulled out his phone to map the distance from Livermore to Stein’s apartment.
    “Already Google Mapped it,” Roger said.
    Hal stopped fiddling with the phone. “And?”
    “Purchase was made an hour and twenty-five minutes before we got the call,” Roger said. “The drive from there is at least an hour, hour and ten.”
    Hal pocketed his phone. A solid alibi. “That doesn’t leave her time to get here, kill her sister, clean it up, stage her, then leave, get buzzed back in by the neighbor, and call us. Plus—” He remembered the image Ken Macy had shared of the petite woman tucked into a ball on the couch.
    “Your gut says no,” Roger supplied.
    “Something like that.”
    “Mine, too.”
    Hal trusted his instincts. Roger’s, too. The sister wasn’t their killer.
    He scanned his memory for anyone else who should have stood out. The victim was staged, which meant there was a chance that the killer stuck around to see the reactions. Naomi had taken pictures of the people on the street, but most were dressed in nightclothes and huddled in small groups. Neighbors most likely. No one looked out of place.
    “Any other leads?” Roger asked.
    As he handed Roger the bagged receipt, Hal considered the people closest to the scene. The neighbor was one, but the careful staging of the body implied a sexual element to this murder. This just didn’t feel like a case of two female neighbors fighting over who had to water the plant that separated their front doors. “I’m going to check the front desk staff. One of them is new. Kid named Liam. Then we’ll try to talk to the folks at her job, but, basically, I got nothing.”
    Hal also had to locate Schwartzman’s ex-husband. He couldn’t imagine that any man would seek out a woman who looked like his ex-wife, kill her, and pose her with flowers and a necklace, all in the name of rattling his ex. If he wanted to scare the crap out of Schwartzman, why not break into her place? Or at the very least attack someone she knew. Other than looking similar and being from neighboring towns that were across the country, there was no obvious connection between Victoria Stein and Schwartzman.
    Yellow flowers and the necklace.
    Not enough.
    The two bouquets could hardly be considered compelling evidence. As for the pendants, it wasn’t impossible to imagine that two of those existed. So Schwartzman thought her dad had designed it for her mom. That was a nice, romantic story. Didn’t make it true.
    And yet the pendant stuck with him. The design was unique, the two pendants identical. He couldn’t believe that the fact that the victim had one identical to Schwartzman’s was a coincidence.
    Roger loaded his tools into his ActionPacker. “I got the pendant from Hailey. I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve got any information.”
    “Let’s check the pendants as soon as possible,” Hal said.