The Candidate Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  “Uh... I don’t think so. Not unless there’s still some in the pot from this morning.”

  “These are nice,” Fenway said, looking down at the weapon display. “This is a .44, right?”

  Donovan screwed up his mouth and walked over next to her. “I don’t know. That sounds right, I guess. My dad started collecting these when we moved here.”

  Fenway squinted. “Unless I’m mistaken, that’s a Colt Single Action .44 Special.”

  “I guess.”

  Fenway moved on to the coin collection. “Some of these coins look expensive.”

  “I guess.”

  Fenway walked to the sofa and took a seat. “Your mom here?”

  “No,” Donovan said. “She went to see a friend in Santa Barbara.”

  “Oh. When will she be back?”

  “Late tonight, I think. She’s got an appointment with the funeral director tomorrow morning around ten.”

  “Ah,” Dez said. She was still standing next to the love seat. “I guess we should have called first. Of course, it’s almost never a convenient time right before a funeral.”

  “I saw the news tonight,” Donovan said, a little carelessly. “I guess you let your stepmother go.”

  “Yeah,” Fenway said. “Turns out she’s got a pretty airtight alibi. Video footage and everything. She couldn’t have done it.”

  “Oh,” Donovan said.

  “You sound disappointed. You were hoping Charlotte was guilty?”

  “Uh...no, it’s not that.” Donovan paused and walked to the love seat. “I thought you had my dad’s killer. It was, uh, a little easier to sleep at night, I guess.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sure surprised you didn’t keep her longer.” Donovan sat down on the arm of the love seat.

  “Hah. I wasn’t even on the case,” Fenway said.

  Donovan cocked his head to the side. “You weren’t even on the case?”

  “I got kicked off as soon as my stepmother’s gun was found at the crime scene. Conflict of interest.”

  “Oh,” Donovan said. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “You wanted me on the case?”

  Donovan folded his arms. “Well, yeah.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You caught the mayor’s killer a few months ago, didn’t you? And he was some super-rich guy with a lot of big-time connections. And the old coroner’s murder before that. I thought you make sure rich people with powerful friends don’t get away with it.”

  “You think Charlotte got away with something?”

  Donovan shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Just because she’s rich and powerful doesn’t mean she did anything.”

  Donovan barked laughter. “That’s a good one. Let me tell you—she did something, for sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something. Rich people lie and cheat and steal as a way of life.”

  “Even you? You’re rich.”

  Donovan smiled. “My dad was rich. It’s not the same thing.” He paused thoughtfully. “I guess if Charlotte has an alibi, she didn’t kill my father. But she could have hired someone, right?”

  Fenway looked at Dez. “We’ll make sure to look into all the angles, Donovan.”

  Dez said, “Is your sister home?”

  Donovan shook his head. “She went down to L.A. to visit Jasper.”

  “So soon after your father was killed?”

  Donovan shrugged.

  “Will she be back tomorrow too?”

  Donovan shrugged again.

  “So you’re holding down the fort.”

  “I guess.”

  “While I have you here, then,” Fenway said, “let me ask you a couple of questions.”

  Donovan’s eyes flitted from Fenway to Dez. “Sure, I guess so.”

  “You said when I talked to you a couple of days ago your mom’s dealer was here Thursday night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You still say he was here for a couple of hours?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t look at the clock though.”

  “Because he has a thing for her.”

  Donovan shrugged. “He sure seemed like he was into her. Trying to get her alone, being all cutesy with her.”

  “I spoke to him. He says he was only here for ten minutes.”

  Donovan shifted his weight from foot to foot. “That doesn’t surprise me. His girlfriend gets crazy jealous. He’d probably deny the whole thing.”

  “His girlfriend? How do you know her?

  Donovan smiled. “I don’t. That’s what the dealer says to my mom. ‘We better be careful. My girlfriend gets crazy jealous.’”

  “You heard the dealer say that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Even though your door was closed?” Dez asked.

  “They’re loud.”

  “Zoso says he didn’t see either you or your sister that night,” Fenway said.

  “He didn’t even notice, he was so busy trying to get in Mom’s pants.”

  “Your mom says she doesn’t remember anything.”

  “Yeah, well, she was pretty out of it. She tries to hide it from us, but we know.”

  “Okay. A couple more things, if you don’t mind.”

  Donovan opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it again. He shuffled his feet, and looked at Fenway. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m a minor, right? My mom probably wouldn’t want me talking to you without her here.”

  “I just have a couple of tiny things I want to clear up.”

  “No, Fenway,” Dez interrupted. “It’s true. He’s a minor. We can’t talk to him without his parent or guardian present.” Dez handed Donovan her business card. “Have your mom give me a call as soon as she gets back.”

  Donovan nodded. Fenway and Dez left the house, Donovan closing the door quickly behind them, and they walked back to the Impala.

  “What do we do now, Dez?” Fenway said. “I think we’ve got to talk to Cricket Kapp. Should we go down to Santa Barbara and try to find her?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Dez was quiet for a moment, unlocking the car. “Did you think Donovan acted strange?”

  “Sure I did,” Fenway replied, sliding into the passenger seat. “I think we need to consider him a suspect too, just like his mom.”

  “He’s hiding something,” Dez mused. “His evasiveness. He kept touching his face. He seemed to be fine when he opened the door to see us, but by the time we left, he was sweating. Not a great liar.”

  “He could be covering for his mom. He seemed to have an alibi all laid out for her.”

  “What about the daughter?” Dez asked.

  “I guess he could be covering for her too. Let’s see what she has to say when she gets back from L.A.”

  “Maybe she’s not in L.A. Maybe she fled the country.”

  “We should check,” Fenway admitted.

  “Or maybe he’s covering for himself,” Dez said.

  Fenway thought for a minute. “He’s the one who said Zoso was there until two in the morning. Why would he lie if it’s something so easily disproven?”

  “Maybe he didn’t think we’d believe a drug dealer.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe Zoso is lying and covering to keep his girlfriend from knowing where he was. He protested a little too much when I talked about being hot and bothered for Cricket.”

  “If Zoso was there for two hours, wouldn’t Cricket say something? I read McVie’s interview notes. Cricket Kapp said she had no recollection of seeing Zoso at all. So Donovan might be lying.”

  “Or Cricket might have been so high she doesn’t remember.”

  Dez tapped the steering wheel. “We might have results from those emails and doctored photos in the next two or three days. It might tell us the type of laser printer or inkjet ink that was used.”

  “Or the type of paper.”

  “Don’t hold your breath on that one, rookie. Ten to one that paper is generic and cheap.”

  “You ne
ver know. It might get us closer.”

  Dez turned onto the freeway, going back to Estancia. They rode in silence for a few minutes.

  “Two or three days?”

  “If we’re lucky.”

  Fenway thought for a moment. “Dez, how much of the footage from my father’s security cameras did you get?”

  “Just from Thursday night,” Dez replied.

  “You know the Kapps had dinner over at my father’s house the week before, right?”

  “That’s how Charlotte’s name first came up, isn’t it? That your father was one of Jeremy Kapp’s clients, and he had a thing for sleeping with his rich clients’ wives.”

  “I wonder,” Fenway said.

  “What do you wonder?”

  “I wonder if Cricket Kapp stole Charlotte’s gun while she was over at my father’s house the other night.”

  “Or Donovan.”

  “Right. Or Donovan. Or Blair, for that matter.”

  “You think it would be on the security footage?”

  Fenway shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

  Dez watched the road, twitching her lips back and forth. “You think your father’s going to be okay handing over those security tapes to us?”

  “Ordinarily, probably not,” Fenway conceded. “But since his only daughter just got his loving wife out of jail, maybe he’ll consider it.” She took the phone out of her purse and called her father.

  “HI, DAD,” FENWAY SAID, stepping into the mansion.

  Her father, barefoot in a track suit, eyed her warily. “Hi, Fenway.” Even dressed as casually as he was, Ferris looked better than he had the night before; the distracted, lost look was gone from his eyes.

  “You know Sergeant Roubideux, right?”

  “Call me Dez, please,” she said, leaning around Fenway and shaking Nathaniel Ferris’s hand. “Your dad and I have met several times before, Fenway. Good to see you again, Mr. Ferris.”

  “Listen,” Ferris said, holding his hands out in front of him, “I’ve had a hell of a day. Charlotte just got home this afternoon. This isn’t going to take too long, is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Fenway said. Dez followed her in and Ferris closed the door behind them. “I need to see the footage from the night the Kapps came over for dinner.”

  Ferris shook his head. “I don’t know what you’d need that for,” he said. “It was about a week and a half before Jer was killed.” He set his jaw and looked at Fenway. “Listen, we already went over the footage proving Charlotte and I were here all night. We came in, and we didn’t go out again.”

  “I know,” Fenway said. “But you know Charlotte’s gun ended up in the murderer’s hands.”

  “I’ve already told the police we don’t know how. We’ve already asked Sandrita. Roderick, too. In fact, we asked everyone who works for us. Do you want to interview them? I’ll make them available. Sandrita’s cleaning up from dinner.”

  Fenway shot a look at Dez. “Yes, that would be excellent. And we won’t have to have them come down to the station house. Dez?”

  Dez looked sideways at Fenway, but nodded. “Sure. I can ask them questions about Charlotte’s gun.”

  “And I can look at the video footage.”

  Ferris looked between Dez and Fenway. “Okay,” he said.

  “Should I go into the kitchen, then?”

  “Sure,” Ferris said, a bit preoccupied. Dez walked through the foyer and into a butler’s door to the kitchen.

  “Okay,” Fenway said. “The footage.”

  “Right,” Ferris said, nodding. “The cameras record everything but it’s sent via a live feed to the security company—well, the footage is stored in the cloud, but the security company has all the access privileges. I can review the footage whenever I want.”

  “Is there a monitor somewhere?”

  “I usually view it on my phone,” Ferris said. “I mean, I hardly ever have a reason to, but that’s how I found the footage from Thursday night.”

  “So can you find the footage of when the Kapps were here?”

  Ferris stroked his chin. “I’m trying to remember.”

  “Maybe Charlotte knows.”

  “She’s upstairs right now. I don’t want to bother her. I can find it. Here—let’s go into the study.”

  Ferris’s study was a masterpiece of set design for what one would think a rich person’s library should be. Three walls were lined with books, mostly leather-bound tomes Fenway doubted Ferris ever opened. There was a freestanding dark wood stand about five feet in front of the desk, whose spherical basket contained a massive globe in grays and sepias.

  The desk itself was mahogany, with thoughtfully arranged sets of items: expensive-looking pens and pencils, a leather desk blotter, and perched on the corner of the desk, a little precariously, was the latest Mac laptop, with a single wire disappearing under the lip of the desk.

  “You’ve been in the study before, right?”

  “Not for a long time,” Fenway said. She hadn’t been in the study on her infrequent visits to the house since she moved back, but she vaguely remembered this room from her childhood. She stepped closer to the shelves. The titles of the rows of leather-wrapped books came more fully into focus: some of the classic books, from Don Quixote to the collected works of Plato, but she also saw some Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison among the Shakespeare and Swift. A smaller title, both in height and thickness, revealed itself as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko upon closer inspection. Fenway wondered if her father hadn’t read all of these books—these titles seemed strangely curated. Perhaps some of it had been her mother’s influence.

  “Now, listen,” Ferris said, “I don’t have this available to you to go putting it into evidence. I talked to Charlotte’s lawyer this afternoon, and she doesn’t want us handing anything over without talking with her.”

  “But you’ll let me see the footage.”

  Ferris shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I don’t think her lawyer would like it, but yes. But you have to promise you won’t use any footage in court.”

  “Without a warrant or a subpoena.”

  Ferris shrugged. “Fine.”

  “Dad, I’m on your side. If I find someone taking the gun, it’ll help Charlotte out.”

  “I said it was okay, Fenway,” Ferris said. He picked up the laptop and opened it. He balanced it with one hand and typed and clicked the trackpad with the other. Fenway went around the back of the desk and sat down in the leather armchair. It sank, satisfyingly, under her weight, but made a squeaking noise, like the leather chairs in Dr. Tassajera’s office. Fenway wondered how much the sound of the leather chairs in the therapist’s office reminded her father of his study—and how much that had to do with her father’s decision to use him as their therapist.

  “Okay,” Ferris said, setting the laptop down in front of her, “it was two Saturdays ago. You can see their SUV pulling into the driveway right here—a couple of minutes after five o’clock.” He pointed to the screen. “You’ve got all four cameras: front entry, driveway, and then long views of the front and back of the house.”

  “Anything by the garage?”

  Ferris shook his head.

  “Are all your cameras outside, or do you have anything inside?”

  Ferris scoffed. “What, and risk someone selling videos of Charlotte on the dark web?”

  Fenway flinched. Had her father made an insensitive reference to her Russian Lit professor? She set her jaw. “I take it someone had a visit from the Bellingham police force.”

  “Yeah. He was a wiry-looking black guy with a big Barry White-type voice,” Ferris said absently.

  Fenway sighed. “Detective Ridley.”

  “Oh, so he’s talked to you, too?”

  “Yep.”

  Ferris shook his head. “I don’t know why he made the trip. He was here when we got back from picking Charlotte up.”

  “We?”

  “Roderick was driving me, Fenway.”

  She nodded.
“Sorry.”

  “Anyway, Ridley sat right out on my sofa, made himself comfortable, and started asking all kinds of questions about the professor. I told him it wasn’t a good time, but he said he had flown all the way from Seattle. As if a two-hour flight is something to write home about. Boo hoo.”

  “Yeah, he talked to me too. Last night.”

  Ferris shrugged. “I didn’t even know the professor was dead. Did you know before he talked to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “A couple of days after—uh... after I told you. About what he did.” She swallowed. “To me.”

  Ferris pursed his lips. “And you didn’t mention it.”

  “Well, no.”

  “Did the cops up there call you to tell you?”

  “I read an article online about it.”

  Ferris nodded. “How come you didn’t mention it to me?”

  Fenway looked back at the laptop screen and shrugged.

  “Because you thought I had something to do with it,” Ferris said evenly.

  “I don’t know, Dad. I guess I thought the timing was a little weird.”

  “You think I’d kill somebody?”

  “No, you were here when he died. I knew you weren’t the one to do it.”

  “Then what?”

  Fenway was quiet.

  “Oh,” Ferris said, and Fenway could almost hear the gears in his head clicking into place. “You think I hired someone to do it.”

  Fenway shrugged. “I don’t think anything, Dad.”

  Ferris was quiet, and Fenway looked at the footage of the Kapp family arriving. There was no sound, and her father’s even, deliberate breathing put her on edge.

  “I guess if you saw your professor was killed right after I found out what he did to you, it would explain why you thought I might have something to do with Jeremy’s death,” Ferris said softly.

  “I try to go where the evidence leads,” Fenway replied.

  On the screen, the SUV parked without incident. All the Kapps, including Blair and Donovan, got out of the vehicle. Cricket Kapp almost lost her footing on the driveway and Donovan grabbed her arm to prevent her from falling.

  They all walked toward the front door, Cricket leaning heavily on Donovan.

  Jeremy Kapp was in an aloha shirt, untucked, and khakis, with sandals on. Cricket and Blair were both in loose print dresses, Blair’s with cap sleeves with orange flowers, and Cricket’s with wide shoulder straps and no sleeves, with a blue and lime green design. They both carried white purses, Cricket’s a little larger than Blair’s. Donovan brought up the rear, with a dark polo shirt, a little large for him, tucked into his faded jeans, with a hole ripped artfully at the knee.