The Upstaged Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  She slammed the door shut.

  Fenway exhaled. “Sorry, Craig. I thought that would work.”

  McVie turned around and started down the driveway, with Fenway following behind. “It might have worked if I hadn’t screwed up in the first place,” he said bitterly. “I can’t believe I read her wrong. I know better than that.”

  Fenway was silent and waited at the passenger door for McVie to unlock it. But McVie passed the Highlander and walked across Sunrise Terrace, stepping onto the sidewalk and looking at the large yellow house opposite Rose’s, in the same Spanish style but much more opulent.

  “Craig?”

  He stood staring at the front of the house, looking from one corner of the house to the other.

  Fenway looked both ways and walked across the street too. “What are you doing?”

  “Would you look at that,” McVie muttered under his breath.

  Fenway followed his gaze to two security cameras, one at each corner of the house, aimed at the street.

  “We might catch a break after all.”

  He strode up to the front door and rang the bell. Fenway followed him.

  The door creaked open and an elderly Asian man peered out. “Hello, Officer. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” McVie said, “but I noticed that you’ve got security cameras out here.”

  “Oh, yes,” the man said, nodding vigorously. “About a year ago, my car got broken into there on the street. Some other cars did, too, down the block. I put in the camera system then. We caught one of them. The other one, you never saw his face.” He clicked his tongue. “Turns out it was a boy from the neighborhood. His parents are rich—he drives a bmw. Just wanted the thrill of taking things that weren’t his.”

  “I remember being young and stupid,” McVie said.

  “I do too,” said the man, “but never that stupid.”

  McVie laughed, although the man didn’t.

  “Well, sir,” McVie continued, “I believe there may have been a crime committed. Much like the problem you had—stolen property.”

  “And you think my cameras might have caught it?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “How much of the street do those cameras cover?”

  “All the way across—even part of the house over there,” replied the man. “I want to make sure I get as much of the street as I can.”

  “Do you record it?”

  “I do.”

  “And do you keep the recordings?”

  “For about two weeks,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose I could review the footage?” McVie said.

  The man opened the door wide, and McVie and Fenway walked into the house.

  The hallway was dark, and Fenway’s eyes slowly adjusted to the light. A low table on her left featured three framed photos, all of the same young man at various ages. The first was of a high school graduation, at what looked like the field at Estancia High, with the man who had let them in standing on one side of the boy and a woman on the other, all grinning. In the second photo, the young man wore a suit a little too large for him and stood next to a large trophy, shaking hands with an older white woman in a prim turquoise dress. Finally, he appeared in dress blues, a serious look on his face.

  “Is your son a police officer?” she asked.

  “Yes, he is.” The man beamed. “Been with Long Beach p.d. five years. He’s taking the detective exam next month.” He coughed. “You know, I didn’t like telling the sheriff’s office who I was before my complaint was taken seriously. I appreciate that you caught the kid who broke into the cars, but I didn’t like the police treating me like I didn’t know what I was talking about. If I hadn’t reminded them that my son was a police officer and that I’ve supported several police fundraisers, I don’t think they’d have followed up.”

  McVie nodded as the man led them through the living room and down another hallway. “I remember that. It was embarrassing. The officer who took your complaint was written up. He’s moved on from the sheriff’s department; I don’t think the work was a good fit for him.” McVie rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “And I remember the incident, too. You had a Lexus suv, right? But forgive me—I can’t remember your name.”

  “Raymond Le,” the man said, holding out his hand. “I voted for you for mayor. My wife liked you, too. I’m sure she would have voted for you.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Le,” McVie said. “I’m so sorry about your wife.”

  “Yes,” he said, blinking. “Liver cancer. She didn’t suffer too long, fortunately. She liked you, though. Voted for you for sheriff every time you ran.” He crossed his arms. “Will Barry Klein be as bad for the city as I think?”

  “Worse,” Fenway said under her breath.

  “I don’t know.” McVie crossed his arms. “I hope to do everything I can to make sure the city stays on track, though.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Le said, turning into a side room used as both a shrine to the Los Angeles Dodgers and an office. A pc sat on a large desk, amidst at least forty bobbleheads of different Dodgers players. A stack of hard drives hummed quietly beside the large monitor. Los Angeles Dodgers pennants and banners covered the walls, and a display case held at least a dozen baseballs, bats, and gloves, all covered in signatures.

  “This is quite a collection,” Fenway said.

  “I voted for you in spite of your first name, Miss Stevenson.” Mr. Le smiled.

  “It was my father’s idea.”

  “I wanted to name our son Hershiser. My wife fortunately talked me out of it.” He went to the cabinet and pulled out a wooden bat. “My pride and joy. Signed by every member of the 1988 World Series team.”

  “That was the series where Kirk Gibson homered off Eckersley, right?” Fenway said.

  Mr. Le chortled. “Oh yes. Barely made it around the bases.” He walked over to the pc. “All right, don’t get me started on the Dodgers. You didn’t come to hear my stories. All the footage is on this machine. You can view it here.” Mr. Le clicked the mouse and the system woke up. “I only keep two weeks’ worth of video on the hard drives.” He set his mouth in a line. “I don’t have enough storage to save much more than that at high resolution. I don’t want to set the resolution lower—you can’t make out the license plate numbers across the street unless it’s at high res.” He typed in his password and double-clicked an icon. “Okay—this is the PixelImage Security Platform—are you familiar with it?” He leaned the bat against the desk.

  Fenway nodded. “I am. Maybe a slightly older version, but I’m sure I can figure it out.”

  McVie looked at Fenway.

  “We used this at the clinic up in Seattle,” Fenway said. “People kept breaking in to steal the painkillers. I had to review footage a few times, and I learned how to reset the system when it hung up.”

  “The latest release is much more stable,” Mr. Le said, a little defensively.

  Fenway smiled. “We didn’t have the greatest hardware at the clinic,” she said. “It was probably more us than the program.”

  Mr. Le grunted noncommittally and pulled up a window with bins of footage. “Okay, starting from two weeks ago Friday. I have it set to delete files for any day older than two weeks. So that previous Thursday was deleted this morning.” He chuckled. “I was interested in what would happen at Halloween—someone in the neighborhood usually gets their house egged or with all the toilet paper all over it. But everyone behaved themselves.” He said the last sentence with disappointment in his voice.

  This guy must be a lot of fun at parties. “How about showing me this previous Friday?” Fenway asked, and Mr. Le scrolled down and then opened a folder. “Do you want to start at midnight?”

  “No,” Fenway said, “let’s see this at—uh—six a.m. That should do it.”

  Mr. Le stood up. Fenway nodded, slipping into the chair in front of the keyboard. “I was about to make a pot of coffee,” Mr. Le said. “Would you like some?”

  “I would love
some coffee,” Fenway said, a little too enthusiastically.

  Mr. Le nodded and left the room.

  “Okay,” McVie said, “You meant six p.m., right? That’s when Domingo Velásquez disappeared. If he went anywhere, it was Rose’s house, right?”

  Fenway shook her head. “I want to see that, too, but remember, we were called out to Jeremy Kapp’s body at about five-thirty a.m. I want to see if anything happened once word got out about his death.”

  “We didn’t release Kapp’s name until that afternoon. After the family had been notified.”

  “Right.”

  “So why do you think someone heard about it earlier?”

  Fenway looked at McVie. “Because there’s a mole in the department.”

  McVie looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know that for sure. I think there’s a mole in the department.”

  Fenway nodded. “Right. Look—if nothing shows up on this video, then we still won’t know for sure if there’s a mole. But if something does, it supports the theory that someone’s leaking confidential police information to at least one person involved in the money laundering.”

  McVie cocked his head. “Yes. That makes sense. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.” He grabbed a straight-backed chair and pulled it over in front of the desk, sitting down next to Fenway. They both turned to the screen.

  The street was still dark at six in the morning, and the streetlights shone off puddles on the road and the sidewalk. No cars were in Rose’s driveway.

  “Is she even home?” Fenway said. “Her car isn’t there.”

  There was no movement for several minutes, except for a single suv driving from the left side of the screen to the right, out of the development; someone beginning a morning commute. Fenway scrubbed the video forward bit by bit. The sky lightened; a few more cars went past, also driving toward civilization and the promise of a paycheck.

  At 6:23 a.m., a blue Acura ilx came from the right of the screen into the development, pulled into the driveway, and parked in front of Rose’s garage. Fenway stopped fast-forwarding and backed up to where the ilx entered the picture. “I’ve seen that car before,” muttered Fenway.

  A woman with long, wavy hair, dressed in a gray hoodie and black jeans, got out of the Acura with a large gray duffel bag. From the way she carried the bag, it seemed heavy. Fenway couldn’t see her face, as she had her back to the camera almost the whole time. She hurried to Rose’s front door and knocked. The door opened and Fenway could barely make out a figure in the doorway; the figure was Rose’s height, with long hair. Fenway paused and zoomed in, and sure enough, it was Rose.

  “Who’s the other woman?” McVie’s eyes were transfixed on the screen.

  Fenway shook her head. “I didn’t get a good look at her. But when she leaves, she’ll have to show her face.”

  They didn’t have to wait long. Ten minutes later, the sky even lighter now, the front door opened once more and the Acura driver stepped out onto the porch, no longer holding the duffel bag. The woman lifted her chin and Fenway hit pause and zoomed in again.

  “Holy shit,” McVie mumbled.

  Jessica Marquez.

  Chapter Eighteen

  McVie flinched. “Isn’t that—”

  “Yes,” Fenway nodded. “That’s our murder victim.”

  “What’s the general manager of a university Shakespeare group doing with an auto-body shop accountant?”

  “Maybe they’re friends.”

  “Jessica is at least a decade older than Rose.”

  “I’ve seen romantic relationships that have a more pronounced age difference,” Fenway said. She shot a look at McVie, but he seemed oblivious to the jibe.

  “Sure,” McVie said, “but this doesn’t look like they’re lovers. This looks like a business transaction. What business would they have together? Even if Rose is spying on her employer, how would Jessica be involved?”

  Fenway shrugged. “We know Central Auto Body was involved in the money laundering. The only theory that occurs to me is that somehow The Guild was also involved in it. Rose managed the books at the auto shop, and Jessica managed the books at The Guild.”

  McVie nodded. “But we haven’t gone over their books yet. Nidever is fighting the warrant.”

  “Why? Isn’t the warrant narrow in scope?”

  “I thought it was clear to Dr. Pruitt that we only wanted to look at the North American Shakespeare Guild, but apparently there’s a scholarship fund with donors who want to keep their gifts private.”

  Fenway chuckled.

  “I know,” McVie said. “The scholarship fund is the perfect place to launder money without drawing suspicion. That fund could have anonymous donations of millions of dollars and then have The Guild hire that Global Advantage consulting firm for—jeez, anything. Script consulting, set design, talent booking, travel scheduling—I bet millions of dollars are being laundered through this fund, and it all looks aboveboard.”

  “And since it’s a private organization that runs separately from the university, there may not be any oversight. If there is—maybe it’s only oversight from Dr. Pruitt.” Fenway looked at McVie. “Have we determined where Dr. Pruitt was the night of the murder?”

  “He says he was at home asleep.”

  “So no.” Fenway hit Play again, and the ilx backed out of the driveway and drove out of the development the same way it had come in. “I wonder if we can get the names of any of the scholarship fund students?”

  “We’d have to get the name of the fund first,” McVie said. “I got the feeling when I spoke to Dr. Pruitt about it yesterday, he thought he’d given up too much information even saying that.”

  “Okay,” Fenway said, “I’m sure there’s a way we can find out what that scholarship fund is. For now, let’s go through the rest of this footage and see if there’s anything else happening with our friend Rose.” She paused for a moment. “Hey—this scholarship fund—I wonder if it has anything to do with the note I found in Jessica Marquez’s office.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the note referred to something that was over twenty-seven million dollars. Maybe it was referring to the balance in the scholarship account.”

  “I don’t know. We’d have to get a lot more information to see if we can get some confirmation on the account.”

  “If you knew the actual amount in the account on a particular date, would that help?”

  “Most definitely.”

  McVie turned and looked at Fenway, a glint in his eye. “You know, you’ve got—”

  Fenway’s head whipped back to the screen. “What? Something I missed?”

  “No, no.” McVie looked down at his hands. “Ah, forget it.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t miss anything.” He stopped, hesitated, and began again. “I started to say that you’ve got a fire lit under you on this case. You’re intent on figuring this out.”

  “That’s me, Little Miss Nose-to-the-Grindstone.” She looked in his eyes. “What’s bothering you?”

  He grimaced and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. It’s stupid.”

  “If it’s bothering you, it’s not stupid.”

  He looked out the window and squinted. “You’ve got a passion for the work that I haven’t had in a while. I have no idea what I’ll do after January first. I’ve been a police officer all of my adult life.”

  Fenway reached out and took his hand in hers. “A lot of people in this town love working with you, Craig. You’ll figure something out. You’ll be drowning in opportunities before you know it.”

  “I guess.” He rubbed his hands together. “Anyway, let’s see if that duffel bag makes an appearance when Rose leaves.”

  They both watched in silence, fast-forwarding through the next two hours, watching dozens of cars leave the development until a black Lincoln entered from the right and pulled up next to Rose’s house.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Fenway said, pausing the video, backi
ng it up to the Lincoln coming into the frame.

  “You’re enjoying this.”

  “This case is a big deal, Craig. I’m taking this seriously.” Fenway hit the space bar.

  “I didn’t say you weren’t. I’m just saying that you’re enjoying it. Your eyes lit up just now.”

  “Well, sure. That’s Peter Grayheath’s car. He’s visiting Rose, too.”

  McVie nodded.

  Grayheath walked up to the door, which opened for him. Less than five minutes later, he walked out with the duffel bag, popped his trunk, put it inside, then got in the car and drove off.

  “Did Peter Grayheath just accept payment for a hit?” Fenway asked.

  “That’s a stretch.”

  “It’s impossible to prove from the video, for sure.” Fenway fast-forwarded more.

  Twenty minutes after that, the garage door opened slowly, and Rose’s Mazda 6 backed out, onto the street. She drove away as the garage door closed.

  McVie nodded. “So Rose car parked in the garage Friday morning. Why do you think she left her car in the driveway today?”

  “Could be for any number of reasons.”

  “Like there’s something else in the garage.”

  “You’re thinking Domingo’s car?”

  “Right.”

  Fenway fast-forwarded more, and started to go faster. She watched the time code as the hours went by. “Okay—this is lunch time… no one came home. Now it’s two o’clock, three o’clock….”

  The Mazda 6 came back into the frame and pulled into the garage.

  “She came home early,” McVie said.

  “Right,” Fenway said. “I wonder if she went into work or if she went somewhere else.”

  Fenway fast-forwarded past four o’clock. The sky started to darken, then it was five o’clock and the streetlights came on. It was completely dark by six o’clock when an older Chrysler 300 with its headlights on parked in front of Rose’s house. Domingo Velásquez got out.