The Candidate Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  Fenway was quiet.

  “What is it?”

  “Uh—it’s just—look, I know I don’t like Charlotte, but I can’t believe she’s a killer. She doesn’t have the attention span for it.”

  “You don’t have to believe it, Fenway.” McVie leaned back in his seat. “You’re not working the case anymore.”

  Chapter Eight

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED IN Estancia, Fenway went back to the coroner’s office. Dez hung up the phone as soon as she walked in.

  “That was McVie,” Dez said. “Looks like I’ll be taking on the Kapp case.”

  Fenway nodded. “That’s right. He told me you’ll be reporting to Gretchen during the investigation.”

  Dez nodded. “Yeah, he said that too. I don’t know her that well, but the officers in P.Q. seem to like her. He scheduled a conference call with her in half an hour. Said he wanted you on the handoff call too.”

  Fenway looked at the clock on her phone. “So I can walk you through the case—at least from my perspective. And you can talk to Melissa too. She found the gun.”

  Fenway walked into her office. Dez followed, holding her notebook, and Fenway shut the door behind them. Fenway took the chair on her side of the desk and Dez pulled up one of the guest chairs.

  Fenway outlined everything she had discovered: the cocaine under the victim’s nose, the earring in the planter, the evidence in the hotel room registered to the Potemkins.

  “Potemkin?” Dez said.

  “Yeah. I was thinking he was trying to be clever.”

  “Like Catherine the Great’s lover?”

  “Yes! That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “So I’ll keep my eyes peeled if one of his mistresses is named Catherine.”

  “Exactly. It’s like you’re reading my mind.”

  “You’re not the only one who took nerdy lit classes in college,” Dez said.

  “And his wife—Cricket Kapp—she apparently knows Zoso.”

  “Zoso—isn’t he the same guy you talked to about that designer drug a few months ago?”

  “Yep.”

  Dez thought for a minute. “He knows Rachel’s brother-in-law, right? What’s his name? Peter?”

  Fenway laughed. “Parker. Wrong half of Spider-Man.”

  “Okay. I’ll see if I can get Zoso in here.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good first step.” Fenway tapped her fingers on the desk. “See if he can vouch for her alibi. Although her son was pretty clear she was there. Kind of embarrassed her. I don’t think she realized her kids knew about her pills.”

  “So—uh, you know, you’re not going to be able to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do for this, right? You’re off the case now. Just a handoff.”

  “Right. Of course. Sorry.” Fenway sat back. “But, uh, Zoso doesn’t trust the cops.”

  “He shouldn’t. He’s a drug dealer.”

  “Yeah, but he’s a drug dealer who broke open a case for us,” Fenway pointed out. “And he trusts me. He said he’d never come down to the station again—not if he wants to keep his distributor, which he does.”

  “Oh, terrific. A drug dealer with standards.”

  “Do you want to get good information from this guy or not?”

  Dez pursed her lips. “How about I talk to him first? If it doesn’t work out, we can see where we are in the investigation. Maybe we can get some sort of special dispensation to involve you.”

  “Yeah, if my involvement is limited to Zoso, we should be okay, right?”

  Dez smiled. “I can’t believe you thought you didn’t want to be coroner.”

  Fenway tried not to return her smile, but had a hard time suppressing it. “Yeah. You were right. My father was right, which is even harder for me to say.”

  “Well, he has to be right if he agrees with me.” Dez started to stand up. “Anything else?”

  “Yep. The gun.”

  “Ah. The gun.”

  “Right. Melissa found it on the beach. She said it looked like it had been thrown in the ocean to try to get rid of it.”

  “Was the serial number still on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was your stepmother’s gun.”

  “Right. Recently fired. One bullet out of the magazine.”

  “Which matches the bullet in Mr. Kapp’s forehead?”

  “Too soon to tell.”

  “Is there a connection between Charlotte and Kapp?”

  Fenway nodded. “We think she might be Mrs. Potemkin.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Apparently, Mr. Kapp had an affinity for sleeping with his clients’ wives.”

  “Your father is one of his clients?”

  “His biggest, apparently. At least according to his son.”

  Dez paused, shaking her head. “I hate to ask you this, Fenway, but what makes everyone think Charlotte did it, and not your father?”

  Fenway’s mouth dropped open. “I mean, that’s crazy.”

  “Is it?” Dez looked at Fenway, right in the eyes.

  “All of the evidence points to Charlotte.”

  “But if she had been sleeping with Jeremy Kapp, your father could have framed her out of revenge and planted all that evidence. He had access to her gun and her earring.”

  “My father can be an asshole, but he’s no killer,” said Fenway. But even as the words were leaving her mouth, she wasn’t sure she believed it. She thought of Professor Solomon Delacroix, his dead body floating in the Squalicum Waterway in Bellingham.

  “You’ve only been back for six months,” Dez said, a gentle tone in her voice, but firm. “You don’t know the man. Not really. He was gone from your life for twenty years.”

  Fenway turned this over in her head, thinking of the Bellingham MCU detective’s conversation with her earlier.

  She didn’t want to think about her father’s involvement in her professor’s death, but if he were involved, he would have told someone else to pull the trigger. Or bash the head, or hold the face underwater, or whatever. Fenway didn’t think her father, he of the pheasant entrées and the private jet and the fancy Mercedes, could be the one to pull the trigger himself.

  And maybe it wasn’t Nathaniel Ferris trading in Charlotte for a newer model. Maybe it was Charlotte. Fenway remembered the awkward dinner they had had a few months before, and how bored Charlotte looked. Maybe she had jumped at the chance to have an exciting affair with a landscape architect, someone with whom she could spend a few days when Ferris was out of town on business.

  Fenway felt a pang of jealousy. Charlotte would never have to worry about paying off credit card debt or a hundred thousand dollars in student loans. Charlotte ate fancy food prepared by her personal chef every night. And still she was bored and unhappy.

  The realization hit Fenway suddenly: perhaps Charlotte was looking for the same thing she was, namely time and attention from Nathaniel Ferris. But, she knew, Ferris was physically and mentally incapable of treating any situation as though it weren’t a monetary transaction. She was angry at Charlotte for—for what, exactly? For taking her father away? He had already been gone for a decade when he married Charlotte.

  Perhaps Nathaniel Ferris was as incapable of loving his wife as he was of loving his daughter.

  And maybe that’s why Joanne Stevenson Ferris had packed up his daughter one day while he was at work and had driven to Seattle.

  “Fenway?”

  She shook her head and snapped back to the present. “I’m sorry, Dez—I, uh, I went somewhere else for a minute there.”

  “You sure did. I didn’t mean to give you an aneurysm when I suggested your daddy might have had something to do with this. I mean, if our victim was having an affair with your stepmother—”

  “Can you not call her that?”

  Dez furrowed her brow. “Uh—sure. What do you want me to call her? Charlotte?”

  Fenway nodded.

  “Anyway—we have to look at your father too. When there’s a murder w
ith a cheating spouse, you know we have to look at both the cheater and the cheat-ee.”

  “I know.”

  Dez looked at Fenway, a serious look on her face, but a smile at the corners of her mouth. “I know you know.”

  Fenway closed her eyes. She didn’t get along with her father. She had never gotten along with Charlotte. Yet she didn’t want them to have to go through this. She didn’t picture her father pulling the trigger. Truth be told, she didn’t picture Charlotte pulling the trigger, either.

  Although guns were funny things. Fenway never thought she’d have one, but she’d been put in danger several times in the last six months, and had finally given in and taken firearms training. The thought had even crossed her mind of buying a handgun.

  Fenway stood up. “Let’s go over to McVie’s office,” she said. “We can take the conference call from there.”

  “We’ve got ten minutes—and we can take the call from your desk.”

  “But then we wouldn’t be able to stop at Java Jim’s on the way.”

  “Oh, I see. An ulterior motive.”

  “Guilty as charged,” Fenway said. “Come on, I’m buying.”

  FENWAY SAT IN MCVIE’S office with her half-full latte, not paying attention to Gretchen Donnelly’s voice on the other end of the line. Fenway had laid everything out for Donnelly, and stared at a point on the far wall, thinking about both what McVie might wear on their first real date, and what she would order at the Argentine steak house.

  Fenway’s phone rang. She looked down at her purse on the floor and pulled it out. It was Millicent.

  “I’ve got to take this,” she said, meeting McVie’s eyes. “Campaign.”

  She accepted the call, but walked out of the room, closing the door, before bringing it to her ear.

  “Hey, Millicent.”

  “Hi, Fenway. Your car’s done. Rory’s driving it back to the parking garage now. Can you meet him and switch cars?”

  “That was quick.”

  “They got to it while the paint was still fresh.”

  “Let me pay Rory’s dad.”

  “I already tried. He won’t take it.”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll be in the parking garage in about five minutes.”

  Millicent hung up without saying goodbye; Fenway had gotten used to it.

  Fenway went back into McVie’s office just as Dez stood up to leave. “Hey. Got everything you need?”

  Dez nodded. “I’m going to take a uniform over to talk to your—to Charlotte.”

  “Oh.”

  “Thanks for the rundown, rookie,” said Dez, stepping past Fenway into the hall. “Very helpful.”

  “Sure.” Fenway nodded and picked up her purse. “You need me for anything else, Sheriff?”

  McVie looked up. “What? Oh. No, Fenway. I don’t need to keep you here any longer.”

  Fenway stood for a moment. Something in McVie’s voice didn’t sit right with her.

  “Except—” McVie started.

  He lapsed back into thoughtful silence.

  “What?” Fenway asked.

  “Well—the name Charlotte doesn’t sound anything like Catherine, does it?”

  Fenway shifted her weight from foot to foot. “No.” She looked at the floor. “But maybe that’s another inside joke.”

  “Wasn’t Catherine the Great—there were some, uh, rumors about her, right?”

  “Like having sex with the horse? That’s what you mean?”

  McVie chuckled. “I wasn’t going to come out and say it, but yes. Maybe she’s got a horse or something. Maybe that’s the inside joke with them.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Does Charlotte own a horse?”

  “Of course she does. One of the first things my dad bought her when they were dating. A Camarillo White mare.”

  McVie screwed up his mouth. “It’d fit a little better if it was a stallion, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe Jeremy Kapp isn’t as clever as you’d like to think.”

  “Right. Maybe. Maybe the joke doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  Fenway thought for a moment. “You told me that Mrs. Kapp didn’t name Charlotte as one of her husband’s mistresses. Did she name anyone?”

  McVie shook his head. “She knew he was cheating. She suspected a couple of women but didn’t know their names. Apparently, he was discreet.”

  Fenway clicked her tongue. “Not around his kids.”

  McVie shrugged. “Kids are a lot more intuitive than grownups give them credit for.”

  Fenway thought about McVie’s daughter, and how she knew Amy was having an affair, in spite of her attempts to cover it up—rather poor attempts, Fenway thought, but still. McVie had gotten the faraway look in his eye again, and, she suspected, was thinking about his imploding family life.

  Dr. Klein hadn’t yet dragged the sheriff’s divorce proceedings through the public eye, which honestly surprised Fenway. Klein could have easily gotten under the sheriff’s skin with a pointed remark or two. As much as Fenway liked McVie, he could react a bit irrationally, especially right at first. If Fenway were running Klein’s campaign, she would have at least gotten Klein to subtly hint at family values, playing up his stable marriage. Fenway shuddered at the thought of what Millicent Tate could do with a tidbit like the sheriff’s impending divorce hanging tantalizingly in front of her.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  She walked out of the coroner’s suite, this time leaving the door open, and out the front doors of the building.

  The autumn sunshine was dappling the ground. Estancia was too temperate for the leaves to turn, and the Halloween decorations had efficiently disappeared in front of the City Hall building across the street. Fenway had gotten Halloween candy, but had no trick-or-treaters in her apartment complex. She’d heard of well-organized parents in complexes like hers who herded their broods around, checking for allergens and razor blades, before divvying up the candy, Solomon-like, amongst the children, from the obnoxious teens demanding more candy to the shy toddlers who could barely squeak out the request. But not in her complex.

  She arrived at the parking garage before she realized it, and saw Rory idling in her car, parked in the fire zone in front of the parking garage. The paint was pristine; it looked as good as new, freshly waxed and detailed.

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me, Rory.”

  “What?”

  “Your father did not have to detail the car.”

  “It’s part of the whole thing. The wax helps get the paint off. It’d look weird otherwise.”

  Fenway paused. “Please tell him I appreciate it.”

  “I will.”

  Fenway fished the minivan key out of her purse and handed it to Rory. “Thanks again. I’ll tell Millicent you did good work.”

  Rory smiled. “You’re welcome, Miss Stevenson. Any time.”

  Fenway pointed into the garage. “The van’s parked at the top of this incline, on the second floor there. See it on the right?”

  Rory nodded. “Yep. I’ll get it back to my dad pronto.”

  He took off at a run into the parking garage. Fenway watched him go, a gangly teenager getting involved in local politics and not complaining about the worst kind of crappy work, driving all around town to get the candidate’s car cleaned off. She’d definitely have to tell Millicent what a good job he had done.

  She turned her back on the parking garage and walked toward her car. She hit the unlock button on her key.

  The world ended.

  Chapter Nine

  SHE COULD FEEL MOVEMENT, but she didn’t know which way was up.

  It felt like an hour.

  Fenway opened her eyes.

  She saw the tire of her Accord in front of her. And the dark pavement underneath the car.

  She lay on her side—her left side, sore from breaking her hand two months before, her arm scraped and bleeding, her dress torn at the shoulder. Her arm hurt.

  A hum
filled her ears and then was replaced with a ringing sound.

  She coughed. She saw a thin layer of white dust on her car.

  She pulled herself up to a kneeling position. People were streaming out of both City Hall and the sheriff’s office, running toward the parking garage.

  The ringing was so bad she couldn’t hear what was going on. Her ears felt plugged up, like she had a sinus infection.

  She saw the officer from the front desk—she couldn’t remember his name—run toward her, his mouth working furiously. She couldn’t hear his words. She gingerly stood up.

  She turned around and looked up at the mouth of the parking garage, the first-floor ramp emptying onto the second floor, where she had parked Rory’s father’s minivan. Several cars were damaged, their windows blown out. A car was on its side, on fire. The shell of the minivan, the windows broken and the doors blown off, was still on fire.

  Rory.

  All around her, chaos. A fire truck materialized and parked at the entrance of the garage, and a firefighter in head-to-toe yellow gear jumped down and turned a hose on two of the cars still burning, including the minivan.

  McVie was there, talking to her, but all she could hear was the ringing in her ears. He was checking her, perhaps for broken bones, and suddenly he touched the side of her face, tenderly, looking right into her eyes, and she realized she was crying. How long had she been crying? How long had McVie seen her like this?

  “I can’t hear anything,” Fenway tried to say, but it came out as hiccups and sobs, and she choked on her own phlegm. She couldn’t even hear herself coughing.

  He mouthed something, and she leaned on him, and they started to walk down the sidewalk in front of the parking garage. An ambulance, lights flashing, came around the corner quickly and braked hard, stopping at an angle to the curb. Fenway thought the sirens were probably blaring, too, though she could only hear the ringing.

  An EMT jumped out of the back of the ambulance and the sheriff flagged him down, running to meet him. They were talking to each other as they walked back, and the EMT turned to Fenway and asked her a question she couldn’t hear.

  “I can’t hear anything except ringing,” Fenway managed to get out, though her voice sounded like it was underwater. “I think I’m okay otherwise. There was a boy who was driving the van. You need to see if he’s hurt.”