The Candidate Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  She had a dream about her mother, who was chasing her around their house in Seattle, Fenway laughing, sunlight streaming through the windows covered with white, translucent curtains, and then as she rounded the corner to come back into the kitchen, pots and pans started banging together, and the noise got louder—and Fenway woke up, disoriented and feeling almost hung over. It took her a moment to figure out she was in her own bed in her own apartment, and her mother wasn’t chasing her, and her phone was ringing.

  She dug the phone out of her purse and saw it was five-fifteen in the morning. Sheriff McVie was calling.

  “Craig?” she croaked.

  “Morning, Fenway,” he said. “We’ll need you to come out here as soon as you can. A jogger found a dead body by the refinery.”

  Part II

  Friday

  Chapter Three

  AFTER THE STORM THE night before, the breeze blew frigid off the ocean. Fenway hadn’t seen a colder morning since moving to Estancia six months before, although she was still acclimated to the Seattle weather. The smell of the overnight rain made her feel more at home.

  In fact, Fenway had stood in front of the mirror that morning, debating with herself about putting on a sweater or just a long-sleeved blouse. The sweater proved to be the right decision; the early morning mist put a damp chill on everything, settling in around the refinery’s chain-link fence, obscuring both the smokestacks in one direction and the walking trail to the pedestrian underpass beneath Ocean Highway in the other. The temperature gauge on the dashboard in her Accord read 42°F, a cool morning even by Seattle standards. She would have used the word “brisk” before she moved back to Estancia.

  Fenway didn’t have a problem getting onto the service road next to the refinery’s fence, but there wasn’t a good way to get her car down to the pedestrian walkway running under the freeway. Three metal poles locked into place at the top of the asphalt trail that connected the service road to the walkway leading to the secluded beach on the other side of the highway.

  She parked on the edge of the service road, next to the sheriff’s cruiser, and walked the last quarter of a mile. She had thought about putting on dressy flats, but the walk made her glad she had elected to wear her running shoes.

  She crested the incline of the path and the medical examiner’s van came into view. To the left of the van, Sheriff McVie stood next to Melissa de la Garza, one of the crime scene technicians. Both of them wore winter hats and parkas.

  She walked up next to them. “Thanks for leaving the poles down for me.”

  Melissa smiled. “Hey, Fenway. Yeah, we had to lock them back up. Can’t have the riff-raff driving down here.”

  McVie held a cup of coffee close to his face, the steam rising off the hot liquid.

  “I feel underdressed,” Fenway said. “I must have missed the memo about the Antarctic expedition gear.”

  “Very funny,” McVie said.

  Fenway smirked. “Man, I hope forty-two degrees doesn’t ever feel like a frozen tundra wasteland to me.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s the next best thing to a drawer at the morgue,” Melissa said, gesturing to the body, under a mass of threadbare woolen blankets and several layers of clothing. Melissa handed Fenway two blue nitrile gloves. “Hey, only a few more days till the election. You ready?”

  “Not according to my campaign manager.”

  “You’re not worried about Dr. Klein’s lackey, are you?” Melissa bent down over the body and started pulling back the blankets. “You’ve got a sixty-point lead.”

  Fenway shrugged and turned her attention to the dead man on the ground.

  The body was supine, the face angled crazily off to the side, the open eyes staring at the upper corner of the pedestrian walkway, a neat bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. The dead man was white and had five or six days’ worth of scraggly beard; he was perhaps in his late forties or early fifties.

  “Not a lot of blood pooled underneath the head,” Fenway said.

  “Nope.” Melissa pulled back the blankets near the dead man’s feet. “Those look like drag marks.” She pointed to two faint parallel lines in the concrete running to the beach side of the underpass.

  “Good thing the body is protected from the elements,” said Fenway. “If it had been out in the rain last night, we’d have a lot less evidence to work with.”

  “It looks like the body was dragged in here, the rain’s probably washed the murder scene clean by now.”

  Fenway nodded. “Unless we get lucky.”

  Melissa pulled down the blankets below the dead man’s shoulders, revealing more of his clothing. The sweater and long-sleeve oxford shirt underneath were a little bit dirty; the sweater had a smear of dirt or grease across the stomach. The man’s blue jeans were dark, also dirty, but from a day or two of dirt, not months of it. He wore no shoes or socks.

  Fenway looked at McVie. “This guy doesn’t look homeless,” Fenway said.

  “From the old blankets he does,” replied McVie defensively. “And he’s barefoot.”

  “You have a time of death?” Fenway asked Melissa.

  “Not a specific time,” Melissa replied. “Liver temp is ambient, so he’s been here awhile. With outside temp and lividity, I’d say he’s been here between six and ten hours.”

  Fenway looked at the clock on her phone. “Between ten last night and two this morning. Gotcha.” She squinted at the clothes on the dead body. “Melissa, doesn’t this strike you as a little odd?”

  “What? The clothes? Yeah.”

  “They seem too nice for a homeless guy, right?”

  “Well, maybe not too nice—the shelters sometimes get some quality stuff donated. But definitely too clean. I mean, it’s dirty, but it’s one day worth of dirty. Not ‘I haven’t showered in two months’ dirty.”

  “Right. That’s what I was thinking too.”

  Melissa bent down. “And the clothes are nice. They’re not cheap, for sure, and they’re not ten years out of style, either.”

  “Do you think this guy was killed and made to look like a homeless guy, or did he look like this when he was killed?”

  “Tough to say,” said Melissa. “He certainly hasn’t shaved in a while. I can see how the sheriff would get that impression at first glance.” She glanced at Fenway’s sweater and thin trousers that stopped a few inches above her ankle. “Aren’t you cold?”

  “I’m from Seattle,” Fenway quipped. “If McVie hadn’t called me, I’d be lounging by the pool.”

  Melissa shivered at the thought.

  McVie took two steps closer and bent down. “Okay if I open his mouth?”

  “I’ve already taken pictures,” Melissa said.

  He hesitated a moment, used both hands to gently open the dead man’s mouth, then peered inside. “Look at this.”

  Melissa bent down and peered into the man’s mouth. Fenway crouched and looked over Melissa’s shoulder, although she couldn’t see much.

  “Oh,” Melissa said. “Good dental work.”

  “Clean teeth, too,” McVie said. “Yeah, you’re right. This guy wasn’t homeless. Or if he’s homeless, he hasn’t been for more than a few days.”

  Fenway shook her head. “I don’t think he’s homeless, not even for a couple of days. This looks to me like someone who’s on vacation, not someone who’s living on the streets.”

  “We should look into missing person reports,” McVie said. “At least while we’re waiting for the fingerprints to come back from the lab.”

  “You survey the area yet?” Fenway asked.

  “Not completely,” Melissa said. “I stopped when the sheriff got here.”

  “Any ID?”

  Melissa shook her head. “No wallet, no ID, no money, no keys.”

  Fenway looked around. “Think his wallet’s around here? Maybe a robbery gone wrong?”

  McVie pointed to the drag marks. “Those aren’t consistent with a robbery.”

  “Who found him?”

  “A m
an coming off graveyard shift at the refinery.” McVie stood back up.

  “Did he stick around to talk to us?” Fenway asked.

  “He stuck around for the officer,” McVie said. “Callahan got here just before five-thirty. He took the statement from the guy. He radioed in—I told him he could send him on his way. Didn’t see the point of keeping him too much longer.”

  “You don’t think the refinery worker would have taken the wallet and keys, do you?”

  “I can ask Callahan. That would be a pretty brazen move, though.”

  Fenway nodded, and then thought a moment. “Hang on—you said the guy worked at the refinery?” Fenway stood up too. “What was he doing here? This is a half-mile away.”

  “Jogging,” McVie said. “The guy likes to go for a run on the beach when he gets off work.”

  “Oh, right,” Fenway said. “You said it was a jogger on the phone.”

  “Lucky he ran this way,” Melissa said. “We wouldn’t have found him for a few more hours, at least. This isn’t a heavily trafficked area.”

  “So this guy wasn’t homeless,” said Fenway, “but maybe we should see if anyone who is homeless saw anything. This seems like a good place to hang out if you’re homeless. Good shelter, stays nice and cool in the summer, not a lot of people around to bug you.”

  “No,” McVie said. “No one to bug you, but no one close by to help out or get resources. No services for the homeless, no place to panhandle, no restaurants who throw out food—not even a vending machine. You’ve got to walk for five miles towards Estancia before you even hit a fast-food place. And the homeless shelter is ten miles away.”

  “All right,” Melissa said, looking out past where the drag marks went into the beach. “Let’s divvy up scouting the area.” She looked back over her shoulder. “I’m going to north side of the underpass.”

  “With you in a minute,” Fenway called.

  McVie stepped closer. “Listen, Fenway,” he said in a low voice. “I know it’s been weird the last couple of months with our campaigns. But we can still have dinner together.”

  “And I told you, Craig,” Fenway whispered back, “Millicent said we shouldn’t go on a date until after the election. It looks bad enough you’re going through a divorce right now. Gene told you the same thing, as I recall.”

  “Millicent and Gene were hired to manage our campaigns, not our social lives,” McVie said. “You’ve got a huge lead in the polls, and I’m ahead too.”

  “That last poll was two weeks old. More and more people are starting to be aware you and Amy aren’t living together anymore, and people will start to wonder if your eye has been wandering.”

  “Well, it was her wandering eye, not mine.”

  “First of all,” Fenway hissed, “you know as well as anyone it’s the perception that matters, not the reality. And secondly, if people think she was the cheater, that might be worse. You look like you can’t keep your woman in line.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m saying there are some voters who will think it.”

  “I seriously can’t believe that came out of your mouth.”

  “If you can’t believe that, imagine what I think the voters will say if you start dating a black girl half your age before the ink is dry on your separation papers.”

  McVie shot Fenway a look. “You are not half my age.”

  “No,” Fenway said. “I’m twenty-nine and you’re forty-three, and that is barely—and I mean barely—on the right side of the Creepy Equation.”

  “The Creepy Equation?”

  “Oh, come on, Craig. I know you’ve heard of the Creepy Equation.”

  Craig looked puzzled.

  “Melissa,” Fenway called, “you’ve heard of the Creepy Equation, right?”

  “Like with dating?” Melissa said, shining her light where the bricks in the wall met the concrete.

  “Right.”

  “Sure. Half your age, plus seven. Younger than that, and it’s creepy.”

  Fenway shot a look of triumph at McVie.

  “You thinking about dating a younger man, Fenway? Some sexy college boy getting cougar vibes from you?”

  “Shut up, Melissa,” Fenway said, but she was smiling.

  “I’ll shut up when you start helping me scan the area for evidence,” Melissa said.

  Fenway looked at McVie out of the corner of her eye and started to walk toward the beach side of the pedestrian underpass. She passed the passenger door of the medical examiner’s van and saw movement inside and almost jumped out of her skin.

  “Holy shit!”

  Melissa laughed and covered her mouth.

  Officer Donald Huke rolled down the window. “Good morning, Miss Stevenson,” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “What the hell are you doing in the medical examiner’s van, Don—Officer Huke?”

  Officer Huke was quiet, his face screwed up almost painfully and his ears getting red.

  Fenway turned her head and looked at Melissa, who smirked and shrugged.

  “Never mind, Officer Huke, don’t answer that.”

  He looked relieved.

  “Well, since you’re here,” Fenway said, “you don’t mind securing the crime scene while we look for the decedent’s possessions, do you?”

  “No, ma’am—I mean, no, Miss Stevenson.” He opened the door of the van and hopped out, all business.

  Melissa and Fenway and McVie spent the next twenty minutes combing the scrubby bushes and the sandy areas around the edges of the underpass. They didn’t find anything, and the three of them all found themselves at the edge of the beach.

  “Should we search the beach too?” Fenway asked.

  “We probably should at least do a visual search,” said Melissa. “But if the killer wanted evidence to disappear, a good throw into the ocean might do it.”

  “Maybe fortune will smile upon us today.” Fenway looked toward the cliffs and shaded her eyes. “What’s up that way?”

  “A couple of beachfront hotels,” McVie said. “A little rundown now, but they’re okay. Not like the Cactus Lake Motel or anything. We don’t get many calls out this way.”

  “How far down does the beach go?”

  “This area isn’t too big—maybe five hundred yards. Then there’s an outcropping and a bridge you can walk across to another beach. There are a couple of rock formations beyond that, right where Ocean Highway takes a sharp turn up the ridge.”

  Fenway nodded. She remembered driving down the ridge the day before, seeing the smokestacks of her father’s refinery and looking out over that very beach. She sighed.

  McVie gazed across the water. “If we need to search the beach, we might as well start.”

  “I’ve got a metal detector,” Melissa said. She started walking back toward the van.

  Fenway followed her. “All right, Melissa, you said no wallet or keys.”

  “Correct,” Melissa said, lifting up the police tape Officer Huke had put up. “Whoever killed him left a pretty nice watch on his wrist, though. A Longines. Not top of the line, but someone paid at least five or six hundred bucks for it.”

  “Hmm,” Fenway said. “That’s inconsistent with a robbery, too.” Fenway veered off to walk toward the corpse. She crouched next to it as Melissa came up behind her. “I think someone wanted to make us think he was homeless, but did a pretty poor job of it.”

  “Maybe a last-ditch effort to cover something up? Maybe it wasn’t premeditated?”

  “Maybe.”

  Melissa shrugged. “I don’t know either.”

  Fenway took out her phone, leaned over, and took a picture of the dead man’s face, trying to keep as much of the hole in his forehead out of the frame as possible. “I think we might have luck if we check those beachfront motels up there. Maybe he went to get ice and ran into the killer.”

  Melissa nodded. “I was starting to think maybe it’s a rich guy off his meds or something.”
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  Fenway looked at the picture on her phone. She zoomed in, right on his nose. Then she turned back to the body and activated the flashlight on her phone, shining the light into his nostrils. “Or maybe he was self-medicating.” She motioned at Melissa to come closer. “Does this look like cocaine residue to you?”

  Melissa bent down. “Hmm. Could be.”

  “I can’t see much in his nostrils, but maybe you can see if there’s any tissue damage, or nasal septum perforation, anything symptomatic of cocaine abuse.”

  “We’ll do a tox screen.”

  “Yeah, but those tests take a while to come back. If we can confirm he was using with any tissue damage you find, maybe it’ll point us in the right direction. This could have been a drug deal gone wrong.”

  “Maybe.” Melissa stood back up. “Did you call Dez or Mark yet?”

  “No,” Fenway said, pushing herself to her feet and following Melissa to the van. “Both of them caught cases over the weekend. The overdose at drug house down on twenty-second, and the hunter found shot in the state park. I wanted my sergeants to have at least a little bit of a break.”

  Melissa opened the back of the van and climbed inside. “I thought for sure you’d relish the chance to get back at Dez for calling you back from Seattle.”

  Fenway shook her head. “Ha. Maybe next time. I’ve got this one; we don’t need all hands on deck.”

  Melissa nodded, pulling the metal detector out of a case as McVie walked up to them.

  Fenway acknowledged McVie with a slight nod of her head. “Want to go take a walk with me?”

  “Take a walk with you?”

  “Fenway thinks those beachfront hotels might be a good place to start,” Melissa said.

  “Like our victim might have been a guest at one of them?” asked McVie.

  “Yep,” replied Fenway. “And Melissa and I found what might be cocaine residue below his nose.”

  McVie nodded. “How does that tie into the hotels?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I think it makes sense to go over there.”

  “Sure, let’s go see if he checked in at any of those places. I’ll take a snapshot of his face, see if anyone recognizes him.”