Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1) (27 page)

Something clicked. That scholarship had covered her tuition, her books. Meanwhile, Ava had insisted Schwartzman let her pay for living expenses.

“You can pay me back when you’re a doctor,” she’d said, but she hadn’t allowed that either.

Every December, Ava had sent a check with ample money for room and board. Surely it was no coincidence that Schwartzman had gotten that scholarship. If there even was a scholarship. Ava had put her through medical school.

Ava had sent her something each birthday, notes and a gift at Hanukkah, at Rosh Hashanah. Schwartzman had responded with quick phone calls and the rare note, always pressed for time with school and work. Ava always respectful of the crazy schedule.

On the shelf was another hardback book that looked out of place. This one was James Patterson. Hesitant, she reached out and touched the top of the book. When she pressed down, she felt the same hard material where the pages didn’t give. “Oh, God.”

She slid the book out and turned it over. Another drawer. She was afraid to look.

Maybe it was a note, something else from Ava.

But this one, too, was filled with cash. More hundreds, fifties, some twenties. She returned the drawer to the book and turned it over in her lap, read the book’s description. “On the run from a dangerous criminal . . .”

Schwartzman held the book to her chest and let her tears fall.

It was too much.

How would she have reacted if Ava had given this to her in person? What could she possibly have said? How could you thank someone for this?

Ava knew.

She wouldn’t have been able to accept the gift. She would have told herself there was another way.

Ava was dead now. Spencer had left Schwartzman with no choice but to accept the gift just as her aunt had wanted.

She stacked the two books and tried to think what to do with them before deciding that they were safest back on the shelf. She spread them out, moving other books in between, and then picked up Ava’s note.

Through the paper, she saw writing on the back side.

P.S. I didn’t forget your mother was a reader, too.

God, was there more?

Her mother really wasn’t a reader. Schwartzman took books off the shelf, one at a time, thumbed through them for notes or another secret compartment until she had run out of books. The library was filled with law volumes.

Her mother would not have read those.

The only things Schwartzman recalled her mother reading were gardening magazines and cookbooks. She straightened the books on the shelves and went downstairs. The kitchen light was gray, the sun’s light muted by storm clouds. The house creaked above her, and she paused to listen.

The wind. It had to be.

Cookbooks. She opened cabinets until she found two cookbooks above the microwave. She couldn’t recall if Ava used cookbooks, but the two books were ancient.
The Joy of Cooking
was as old as she was or older. The other was called
The Busy Woman’s Cookbook
, and it couldn’t have been much newer.

Schwartzman set
The Joy of Cooking
on the countertop, expecting more cash. She flipped open the book.

Gasping, she slammed the cover closed and checked over her shoulder.

Ava had hidden a gun in the cookbook. This was what Ava meant by the book her mother read. It had to be. Cash, a gun. All for Schwartzman. All to help her deal with Spencer. The cash might buy her freedom and time, but the gun implied something altogether different.

An end to the running and hiding.

Schwartzman pulled down the second cookbook and opened it. Inside was an unopened cardboard box, not much larger than a pack of playing cards. Ammunition.

Schwartzman closed the book and reopened the first, sneaking another peek at the gun. The book in her arms, she sank onto the floor of the kitchen. The hard kitchen cabinets pressed into her spine as a reminder that this was not a dream. This was real. She had everything she needed to be rid of Spencer MacDonald once and for all.

Had Ava expected Spencer to come after her? She couldn’t have. While Ava understood the depth of Spencer’s depravity, even she had underestimated how far he would go to get Schwartzman back.

If Ava kept a gun for self-defense, certainly she would have kept it in her bedroom. Or at least somewhere more accessible than inside a gun-shaped cutout in a cookbook on a shelf in the kitchen.

Schwartzman closed her eyes.

Why hadn’t she ever come back? She might have saved Ava from Spencer.

Instead she’d let this happen. Even if she had nothing to do with Ava’s death, she’d allowed it to occur. Spencer was too clever to get caught by the police. Even if Hal and Harper believed her, how could they catch him? How could they stop him?

They couldn’t. She squeezed the cookbook tightly against her chest. But she could. She could stop him. She imagined holding the gun to his head. Pictured the head wounds she’d seen in the morgue. She shuddered. The damage to the brain and skull. Right-handed, her bullet would more likely strike the left hemisphere of his brain. The center for language, for logic.

He would be dead.

She pictured the blood splatter from a head wound.

No.
She couldn’t imagine pulling the trigger.

Maybe there was a way to find something in his house, some evidence to prove that he was responsible for Ava’s death. Surely something there would prove his guilt. She could find it.

And if she couldn’t?

She lowered the cookbook, cracked the spine, and let the gun fall into her lap. It was murder. Premeditated murder. She touched the gun, fingered the ridges on the grip. A flash of heat, excitement, adrenaline. It would mean the rest of her life in prison. But where was she now, if not in prison? Spencer’s prison. South Carolina had capital punishment. Death?

You’re not living.

She lifted the gun and extended her arm. Imagined lining up the sight on the flesh between Spencer’s eyes. She would make certain that Ava was Spencer’s last victim.

She would finally be free of the fear.

37

Charleston, South Carolina

Schwartzman locked herself in the downstairs den, the only room on the main floor without windows other than the tiny powder room. She debated using her phone to do research. Her search history could be used against her if she was caught, but what choice did she have? She could go to the library or a public café, but not with the gun. In the end, urgency won out. Her first search request was for the date the last person was killed by capital punishment in South Carolina: 2011. That was promising. Only forty-three total since 1985. Surely, then, odds of a life in prison were higher than getting death. Lethal injection was the method used most recently. That would be preferable to electrocution.

It took almost no time to confirm her suspicions about Ava’s gun. She recognized it as a revolver and from its size, guessed it was a .38 special. She’d seen enough of them in the files of cases she worked. The .38 had been the standard service weapon for most police departments from the 1920s to the 1990s. Even after departments replaced the .38 with pistols—San Francisco used the Sig Sauer P226, New York a Glock model—the .38 remained the most used backup weapon for police officers. Dating back to 1898, the revolver was favored for its small size—it could easily be concealed in an ankle holster under a pant leg—and for its reliability.

Unlike pistols, revolvers almost never jammed.

With newspaper spread across the rug, Schwartzman followed the instructions from a YouTube video to clean the gun, substituting the WD-40 for gun oil. The gun only had to work once, and everything she read online suggested that WD-40 was used extensively in the firearms industry. When that was done, she burned the paper in the fireplace, packed the gun back into the book, and replaced the book on the shelf in the kitchen while she worked her way through the rest of the house.

Other than the gun and the ammo, there was no sign that Ava ever owned a weapon. No paperwork in her files, no cleaning supplies anywhere, nothing with the NRA logo on it. The model number on the .38 dated it back to the mid-1940s, decades before gun registry laws were introduced in 1968.

Even if the gun was registered, matching ballistics required the gun and the bullet. That was easy to fix; Schwartzman would simply dump the gun. As her final act, Schwartzman took pictures of everything in Ava’s house with her phone. She hoped to come back, but if she couldn’t, she wanted to know what was there, exactly as she’d found it.

Using a duffel bag from under Ava’s bed, Schwartzman packed up a change of clothes, the two hardback books from the bedroom, and the two cookbooks from the kitchen. The only other thing she took was the black-and-white photograph of her grandparents, her father, and Ava when Ava was maybe five or six and her father eight or nine.

It was nearly two when she left the house, loading the duffel into the trunk. She wondered if Spencer was watching, but it made no difference at that point. She drove straight to the gas station, filled the tank of the rental car, and stopped at a gourmet deli for a baguette and cheese, grapes and almonds, a bottle of pinot noir, and two bottles of water. It could as easily pass for a single woman’s grocery list as sustenance for a road trip.

The pinot was for courage or maybe to celebrate.

She paid cash.

She headed north on Interstate 26 toward Greenville. It was just past five when she arrived at Sumter National Forest. As she drove, she tried to recall the campground where she and her father had pitched their small brown dome tent. She had only camped twice in her young life, both times here with her father.

Though she was a teenager and might have been helpful, she and her father were awkward campers. Setting up the tent took forever, the fire made with a log starter never burned longer than it took to make s’mores. One night was all they lasted, even though they’d originally set out for two.

What she remembered was that the spot where they camped was mossy and lush, hidden under a canopy of trees so thick that the morning sun hit the ground only in thin wisps of light. She wanted to find that place. There, she could practice shooting the gun without the risk of being seen or, worse, hitting a camper or hiker.

As she drove in, nothing looked familiar. It wouldn’t be dusk for another couple of hours, but the clouds above her were dark, making it seem later than it was. She consulted the screenshot of the map on her phone, located the Horn Creek trailhead, and tried to orient herself. Horn Creek was far enough back in the forest and away from the campgrounds that she was unlikely to run into campers. She turned down one road but reached a dead end. With no room to turn around, she had to reverse straight out. She doubled back to the main road and set out again.

It took two more tries to find Horn Creek Trail. She pulled down the dirt road until it ended at the trailhead. There, not ten feet off the trail, was a small red tent.
Damn. What now?
She turned around and retraced her path, checking the map for another trail that looked smaller, more secluded. She did not want to see anyone out here, but the map offered no insight into which were the most popular trails. The only other trail nearby was one that led to a lake called Lick Fork. Schwartzman made her way down the bumpy dirt road, praying there weren’t campers there, too.

The parking area came into sight. Empty. The first drops of rain fell as she opened the windows and listened for sounds. Human sounds. There was always the risk of animals. Someone else might have been frightened, but there was nothing Schwartzman feared out here. Being killed by a mountain lion didn’t scare her. That would make her death a fluke, the unlucky winner of nature’s odds.

Being killed by Spencer. Being held by him. Being owned by him.

These were the fears that kept her awake at night and caused her to wake in a cold sweat. Sitting in the quiet car, she surveyed her surroundings again, then got out and went to the trunk for the satchel. Unzipped it slowly and studied the gun, the ammo.

She opened the box of ammo and put a fistful of bullets in her pocket.

She closed the trunk door quietly and, while the car light was on, thumbed the release to open the cylinder. Six slugs. Six chances. She remembered the one time she had shot a gun. She’d been maybe eleven or twelve and they were at a reunion of her mother’s family. Some cousins she barely knew were shooting a 0.22 rifle at cans lined along the fence. Mostly boys, they taunted her until she tried.

That day, she lay on the grass with total focus, lined the sights on the can, exhaled, and pulled the trigger. Knocked the can right off the fence, got up, and walked away.

She only hoped she was still that good.

She drew three bullets from her pocket and slid them into the chambers. The car light clicked off. She stood, surrounded by quiet, and closed the cylinder, felt it lock. Careful not to drop anything, she walked up a short hill toward a patch of trees maybe sixty yards from the car.

The loblolly pines stood high over the cluster, their treetops swallowed by the low-lying cloud cover. Among the pines were bushes and other trees—sycamore, sweet gum, and elm. Standing in their midst, she could hear the rain hit their high branches, but the drops didn’t reach the forest floor. Ghost-like tendrils of the clouds swirled through the high branches.

She blinked multiple times, urging her eyes to adjust to the dim lighting. She chose one of the loblolly pines, maybe three feet in diameter, and studied the bark, searching for a good target. Schwartzman settled on a knot oozing sap.

A little above his chest level, she estimated.

The perfect shot would be maybe two or three inches lower and an inch to the right. Hitting the cardiac notch of the left lung was ideal. Puncture the lung and the heart in a single shot.

Death would be fast. Not entirely painless but shock would likely dull his senses quickly.

She turned and took five long strides. Turned around. Raised the gun. Right hand wrapped on the grip, left hand cradling the right. There was no safety. Just cock it and shoot. She widened her stance, lowered her shoulders, imagined Spencer in front of her. That tree. Felt his kiss on her face, her lips.

The sound was deafening. The barrel kicked upward. Not as bad as she’d expected. She lowered the gun again. Pulled the trigger once, twice in quick succession. A little breathless, she moved to the tree, stared at the knot. Searched the surface. Nothing. She ran her fingers over the bark, searching for metal. Nothing. She’d missed. All three times.

She opened the chamber and turned the gun upside down, releasing the empty shells into her left hand. Three of them. Put them in her left pocket, zipped it close. Reloaded. Moved back again. Loaded four more. Took two steps closer this time, telling herself that she would be able to get close to Spencer when the time came.

Again she drew back the hammer and aimed. Fired. Twice. Three times. Four. Returned to the tree and saw nothing.

Who was she kidding? She couldn’t do this. She would end up dead.

She sank down and pressed her forehead to the rough tree bark.
Damn.
What was she thinking? She should ditch the gun and go home, she told herself. Stop wasting time. As she rose to her feet, a glint of metal caught her eye. Her pulse steadied to a strong, clear drum. She touched the slug. How had she missed it?

The metal was maybe two or three inches from the knot. The same distance between the center of an average adult male’s lung to the lung’s edge. Four inches below the first, perhaps an inch to the right, was another. Maybe the spleen or the liver. Not as good as hitting the heart, but it would kill him.

She’d hit two for seven. Not terrible.

A moment later, she saw two more bullets side by side, maybe six inches lower. That would be his thigh, perhaps a knee. Better than 50 percent. She would have six chances. She could do this. Schwartzman could kill Spencer MacDonald. Six tries, she might even be able to kill him twice.

She pushed her finger into the hard wood, following the grooves created by the bullet. How deep the bullet had drilled into the wood. She pictured Spencer’s chest. An easy through-and-through. Maybe the bullet would catch a rib and ricochet. She remembered a victim where a single bullet had created three separate wounds on the heart, all by ricochet. A small-caliber gun. The wife had shot him. She recalled the bitter woman who’d sat hunched down in her chair at the defense table when Schwartzman had testified in the trial.

How many bullets had she pulled out of victims? Her chest grew heavy. Fear and disappointment mixed into something with a nasty taste. The gun in her hand, she sank onto the soft, marshy ground, pressing her back into the tree’s hard trunk.
Oh, God.
She could not kill Spencer. Not even once.

She dropped her head and let the gun slip from her hands. She was not a killer.

There was no question that Spencer MacDonald deserved to die. Perhaps she had even earned some cosmic right to be his executioner, but she wouldn’t. Because that was a reality she would have to live with.

Wake with every day and lay down with at night.

She was a physician. She had taken the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Even if her patients were dead people, she had vowed to take care of them in that death, to prove what had happened, how and by whom.

She was also part of the judicial system.

How could she continue to do her job and fight for justice after she’d committed murder? And she couldn’t believe Ava had left that gun for Schwartzman to murder Spencer.

For self-protection, maybe, but not for murder.

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She would have to find another way to solve the problem of Spencer MacDonald. She rose slowly, picked up the gun gingerly, and released the cylinder, dropping the remaining bullets into her hand. She had decided that she would dispose of the gun on the way back to Charleston.

Keeping the gun only invited trouble.

Back at the car, she opened the passenger side door and knelt down to tuck the gun under the seat. She noticed a long hair on the barrel—hers, most likely. She pulled the hair free and studied the tiny white bulb on one end. The root.

Staring at the strand of hair, Schwartzman knew exactly what she had to do.