The Reluctant Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  Fenway walked out of the office.

  She heard a whisper behind her. “Fenway!”

  She turned. Migs had followed her out.

  “What is it?”

  “You’re really going to let Rachel stay?”

  Fenway sighed. “I guess that wasn’t the best idea,” she admitted, “but she was so insistent. I think she’s in denial.”

  “I don’t feel right about it.”

  Fenway thought for a minute. “Okay, look, can you keep an eye on her? I think if she can just finish out the day and keep her mind off everything, it will help her.”

  Migs looked skeptical, but nodded and went back in.

  Fenway went back across the street and told Dez about the truck. Dez was in the observation room, watching Bradley eat his third taco.

  “Not only did we find Dylan’s truck,” Fenway said, “but I also kicked McVie off the case.”

  “How did you do that?” Dez followed her out of the building.

  “I basically told him he was a liability, and that whoever we arrested would get everything he touched thrown out.”

  “Well, you certainly don’t lack balls, Fenway.”

  Fenway pursed her lips. “He didn’t like it too much. Said I was accusing him of planting evidence.”

  “Well, I guess I wouldn’t like getting pulled off a case either, but I thought he’d take it a little better.”

  “Yeah.”

  Dez called in for the location of the truck, and once she heard that it was on a fire road off the state highway, she decided to take a cruiser. “I’m not subjecting either one of our cars to that fire road,” she said. Since Dez knew the roads better than Fenway, she went to the transportation department and got a sheriff’s cruiser.

  They drove to 326, then turned and drove north until they were about a half-mile from the entrance of Coast Harbor Park. There was an open metal gate on the left between a couple of fallen trees, and Dez pointed out a single pair of fresh tire tracks on the fire road behind the gate. “I think the CSI van is still here.”

  “How do you know?” Fenway asked.

  “There would be two sets of tire tracks if they’d left. Come on, Fenway. Detective work 101.”

  They drove for a few minutes, taking the gravel road at about 20 miles an hour, until they saw the rooftop lights of the CSI van. They got out, with Fenway holding the side of the car for balance, tottering on her heels on the uneven surface. Dez looked at Fenway’s black dress and heels again and shook her head.

  Dez walked over to the CSI van. “Melissa, have you met our new coroner?”

  The first tech didn’t look up from her work. “New coroner, huh? I thought she was your prom date, Dez.”

  Dez suppressed a laugh. “How’s the fingerprinting coming?”

  “Plenty of fingerprints all over the place. We’ve lifted five sets so far.”

  “And Sergeant!” The second tech waved his hand from beside the truck. “You and the coroner might want to take a look at this.”

  Dez tut-tutted. “Mother mercy, it’s the file drawer.”

  In the back seat of the truck was the missing drawer, and it was still full of files.

  Fenway was still holding onto the side of the cruiser. “Dez, can you see if the Ferris Energy file is in the drawer?”

  “Come on now, Prom Queen. You dressed too fancy to do real police work?”

  Fenway glared at Dez, but managed to make it over to the truck without falling down. “I’m never coming to work in heels again,” she muttered under her breath.

  Dez already had her head in the truck. “So, Fenway, what do we expect to get out of this?” She lowered her voice so that the techs couldn’t hear her. “I mean, we think the sheriff is a suspect, and obviously we don’t think that Dylan was the one to drive his truck into the building, right? We think someone stole the truck and did it, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do we think we’re going to find in these files?” Dez already had a pair of latex gloves on. She handed Fenway a pair too.

  “Well, I guess it would depend on who smashed through the wall.” Fenway pulled on the gloves.

  “What if McVie stole the file?”

  “I guess McVie could have been the one to steal the file,” Fenway admitted. “He could have stolen the car, smashed through the wall, driven off, hidden the truck somewhere close, then gotten the cruiser to go get me. I guess we could time it—it’d be awfully close. But if he wanted to frame Dylan, I guess he could have.”

  “Okay. Let’s suppose that McVie did all that. Then he’d get the truck and dump it way out here. But why keep the files in the truck?”

  “Well, you said earlier that McVie was the lead investigator on the accident at the refinery. Maybe he wanted to get rid of the evidence.”

  “So, he’d just destroy all the files, right?”

  “I don’t know, Dez. Maybe there’s too much stuff in there related to other cases that he worked on.”

  “I guess. I don’t know, I thought that if McVie did it, he would have taken the file and burned it, or trashed it. Or planted evidence in the file that placed the blame on Dylan for something—so it would look like Dylan did it.”

  Fenway pursed her lips. “I don’t think he’d do that. He got really upset when I suggested that he planted evidence.”

  “I wonder if the sheriff doth protest too much.”

  “Okay, the moment of truth.” Fenway looked under the Fs until she found the Ferris Energy file. “It’s still here. Let’s see what’s in it.”

  She opened it up. The file contained autopsy notes for both Carl Cassidy and Lewis Fairweather. Both men had died of “suffocation from bronchial hemorrhaging.” The toxic fumes had done their work quickly. The toxicology report identified a chemical, that Fenway couldn’t pronounce, as the culprit, and suggested that both men were unconscious before their demise.

  The investigator’s notes were in the file as well, with separate pages of handwritten notes clipped to the autopsy forms, and toxicology reports, respectively. There were three sets of notes total.

  One set was dated the day after the autopsy, which covered the material found on the controls for the fume disposal and ventilation systems that directed the toxic fumes into the room that the two men were in. It stated that the men shouldn’t have been in the room at that time, and referenced a schedule of fumigation venting. The conclusion was that the men were in the room despite security controls, that someone may have altered the schedule without company knowledge, and that Ferris Energy, as a company, “could not be reasonably found to be at fault.”

  “That’s a weird thing for the coroner to say,” said Dez. “He’s not supposed to offer legal opinions like that.”

  “Migs did say that Walker was always going outside his depth on the legal issues, though.”

  “Yeah—but this is too much, even for him.”

  A second set of notes was dated about a week later. Those notes summarized the findings into Fairweather, covering his personal life, credit card and student loan debt, and family background.

  The last set of notes was dated about a week after that, detailing Cassidy’s life. But the topics weren’t the same: notes on Cassidy’s EAP participation; detailed reports of an affair between Dylan Richards and Lana Cassidy; a statement from a private investigator; photos of a hotel out near Paso Querido; and photos of Dylan’s truck parked outside a home identified as the Cassidy residence.

  “If I’m reading this right,” Fenway mused, “I’m supposed to conclude that the person who was having an affair with Lana Cassidy somehow altered the ventilation system to kill Carl Cassidy? And that Fairweather was collateral damage?”

  “And that Dylan Richards was that person.”

  “Right.”

  Dez had a confused look on her face. “This doesn’t make any sense. There would have to be a trail of phone calls if that affair actually happened, right?”

  “I don’t know. But this file h
as been out of our hands for a few days now. The thief could have tampered with it.”

  Dez examined the handwritten notes closely. “I can’t tell. You see how these two sets of notes”—she indicated the Fairweather and Cassidy files—“are on different paper stock, with different color pens. Now, it looks like the handwriting is the same, but I can’t be sure.” The handwriting was printed, and not very neatly. Some of the printed letters were connected to the next letter, in sort of a half-cursive, but there were no traditionally cursive shapes in the b, s, or f letters that would be expected in traditional cursive writing. The lowercase g letters were almost always connected to the next letter, an r, a, or e.

  Fenway looked at the notes also. “Look here, Dez.” She pointed to the page. “The loop of the g on this page and the loop of the g on this other page are of different sizes, but it does kind of look like they were written by the same person. Look, same shape of the uppercase Ds here. And the crossbar on the ts and the uppercase As are the same.”

  “Do we have any written notes from Walker to compare this to?”

  Fenway selected a file from the front. Ellsworth, James M. “Let’s look at this one.”

  “I remember this one,” Dez said. “Drug overdose. Mother found his body in his apartment. It wasn’t pretty.”

  Fenway thought the handwriting on this one looked less neat, although overall looked similar. But some of the quickly printed letters didn’t connect the way they did in the Ferris Energy file. “Look at this.” She pointed at the word gastrointestinal. “This g-a combination isn’t connected. But the g-a combinations in the Cassidy notes are.”

  “It looks like Walker was in a hurry on this one. Not so much here.”

  “Yeah, but if you’re in a hurry, aren’t you more likely to connect letters, not less?”

  Dez gave her a look. “You’re asking me like I’m a handwriting expert. You need to get someone on Yasuda’s team to look at that.”

  “Well, I took a class a few months ago,” Fenway said, “and I don’t think these were written by the same person.”

  “Make sure you tell that to Yasuda. I’m sure she’ll appreciate your educated opinion.”

  “All right, Dez, jeez. I’ll let their handwriting expert deal with it.”

  Dez stuck her head out of the truck. “Did you guys find any fingerprints on the drawer?” she called.

  “Wiped clean,” the first tech called back. “Keep your gloves on for those files, though. We’ve got to take them back to the lab.”

  “Tag this Ferris Energy file for handwriting analysis, too. Prom Queen thinks it might be forged.”

  “Will do.”

  Dez and Fenway finished up with the truck. They looked between the seats, under the seats, and in the glove box. Dez did a lap around the truck, looking for any signs of additional damage. The crime scene techs were still scouring the surrounding brush for telltale signs of anything that might be useful. Dez told the techs that they were all finished up as Fenway wobbled back to the squad car.

  “Well, that was interesting.” Fenway looked out the window as they started driving back down the fire road toward the highway. “What do you think?”

  “Well, as much crap as I gave you back there, Fenway, I think we have to consider the likelihood that those notes weren’t written by Walker.”

  “Right. Are we thinking McVie?”

  “I don’t know. If it were McVie, wouldn’t he know we’d catch on to the fake handwriting?”

  “Maybe.” Fenway said. “I was thinking more that the fake information doesn’t really help McVie out.”

  “Well, it does give Dylan the motive for crashing through the wall and stealing the files.”

  “Yeah, but it points people right in the direction of Dylan having an affair with a married woman.” Fenway drummed her fingers on the door handle. “Wouldn’t McVie have realized that a good investigator would start digging? Wouldn’t he have realized that would probably open a line of inquiry into Dylan’s phone records, and then his affair with Amy would have come out? Wouldn’t it make more sense if the files were just missing altogether, as if Dylan had destroyed them?”

  “I don’t know.” Dez shook her head. “Maybe it was an emotional decision for Craig. Maybe he wanted to show Amy that she wasn’t special to Dylan, and he wanted her to think that Dylan did this with lots of other married women too. Maybe he thought that getting rid of Dylan—and having Amy think that he wasn’t really in love with her—would somehow save his marriage.” They arrived at the end of the fire road, and Dez turned back onto 326, heading back to the office. “Sometimes the emotional decision can outweigh logic.”

  Fenway nodded.

  They traveled in silence for a while.

  “Almost time for the memorial service, right?” Fenway said.

  “Yeah. You’ll finally be someplace today where those shoes aren’t going to be a liability.”

  “You’re going to it, right? I’m not sure where it’s being held.”

  “The United Methodist on Santa Clarita Street.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  After they pulled into the parking lot, Dez said it was going to be a scramble for them to drop off their paperwork and get over to the church in time. They got into the office at about a quarter to five. Migs was still there, but Mark and Rachel weren’t.

  Fenway stood in front of the counter where Migs was working. “Are Mark and Rachel already at the service?”

  “Rachel is.” Migs didn’t look up from his keyboard. “Mark is still over at the sheriff’s office, watching Bradley go through the mug shot binders. It’s probably a long shot.”

  “When are you going?”

  “Oh.” Migs got a little red, and smoothed down his tie. “Piper told me there were some password-protected files on Walker’s hard drive, and she thought she’d have it cracked by five. I thought you’d want to see them tonight, if they’re important.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Dez folded her arms. “Instead of going to your boss’s funeral.”

  Migs didn’t say anything. Fenway looked at Dez, who glared back at her.

  Fenway sighed. “You know, Migs, those files can wait a little while for me to get back from the service.”

  “Um, okay, I guess I should go to Mr. Walker’s funeral.”

  “Great,” Dez said. “You can ride with us.”

  Migs closed the file he was working on. “We’re going to have to hurry. There’s going to be a ton of people there.”

  Fenway looked at the clock. “Give us ten minutes. We just have to enter our notes into the system.”

  “That’ll make us ten minutes late.”

  “Oh, now you’re worried about being late? Go hang out with Piper for ten minutes if you’re that concerned about our punctuality.”

  Migs apparently didn’t catch Fenway’s sarcasm, because his face lit up and he was out the door before she even realized that he was leaving.

  There weren’t a lot of entries to make, but the system was slow, and it took Dez and Fenway closer to fifteen minutes to finish up.

  “Migs was right, we are going to be pretty late.” Fenway saved the changes to the system and closed her laptop.

  “These things never start on time. I wouldn’t worry too much.”

  Fenway shuffled her papers together. “Binder clip?”

  “Rachel has a few in her top left drawer.”

  She walked over to Rachel’s desk and opened the top drawer. Fenway didn’t see binder clips, but there was a bag from the office supply store. “Did Rachel put the binder clips in here?” She took the bag and looked inside.

  There were five empty packages, torn open, all saying FileMore USB Sticks 25 Value Pack, and a receipt with the date and time stamp just hours before.

  Fenway looked on Rachel’s desk. There was no laptop, but there were two cheap-looking 7-port USB hubs with prominent Property of Estancia IT Dept stickers.

  “Find them?” Dez grabbed her purse.

  “Oh shit,
Dez.”

  “What?”

  “Look.” Fenway emptied out the bag with the packaging onto the desk.

  “What are those?”

  “Empty 25-packs of USB thumb drives.” Fenway looked up at Dez. “Do you think Rachel copied the video of Walker assaulting her onto all those sticks?”

  “Oh no.”

  “That’s 125 USB drives. She wouldn’t be distributing them at the service, would she?”

  “I don’t know, but if she is planning to do anything at the service, let’s hope it hasn’t started yet.” Dez started out the door. “Let’s go, Fenway, like now.”

  Fenway put down the bag and got her purse, following Dez quickly on the way out the door. “We’ll take my car,” Dez yelled at her over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, you know where the church is.” Fenway was trying unsuccessfully to keep up.

  “Plus, you drive like my grandma.” Dez took off at a sprint. By the time Fenway made it, clattering in her heels, to the ground floor of the parking garage, a Chevy Impala was squealing around the corner of the second-floor ramp. Dez came to a short stop in front of Fenway, who pulled the door open and jumped in.

  The United Methodist Church was only about two miles away, near the outskirts of the town limits, but Fenway thought it took forever to get to the other side of the highway. As they got closer to the church, she could see the streets lined with cars on either side.

  “Oh man, it’s packed.” She glanced at the clock on the dash—it was already 5:25.

  “You’re getting out.” Dez pulled hard into the parking lot, which was completely full, and pulled the car up on the sidewalk next to the fire line. Fenway was out of the car, running—as best as she could—to the heavy, tall, wooden front doors of the church. She pulled the doors open and ran through the enormous carpeted foyer. Her heel caught on the carpet and she almost fell, but she regained her balance, and grabbed the door to the sanctuary, pulling it open.

  The sanctuary was in the shape of a heptagon, with the chancel taking up the three sections directly across from Fenway. She stood at the top of an aisle with about twenty pews on either side. A man in a purple Damascene robe—Fenway assumed it was the reverend—was talking about how a young Harrison had met his wife.