The Upstaged Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  “Same number,” Fenway said. “Two million, two hundred and seventy-seven thousand. What does that prove?”

  “Is it the same number?”

  “Yes, Piper, it’s—” Fenway broke off and stared at the screen. “Hold on, no. It’s five hundred thousand less.”

  “Bingo,” Piper said. “Someone got the bank to deposit part of that payment into a separate account, but with the same transaction number, and kept the full amount in the information window. Tricked the bank into thinking it received the full amount.”

  “Holy shit,” Fenway said.

  “I know.”

  “Why didn’t Jessica see this before?”

  “She probably trusted the bank statement.”

  “How did she find out the money was missing?”

  “The bank issued a correction on Monday.”

  “A correction?”

  “Right. As in, the balance previously reported was wrong. The bank posted a correction of exactly half a million dollars. After the bank issued the correction, someone logged in with Jessica’s credentials and checked the balance on October sixth.”

  “Which was?”

  “Before the correction?” Piper typed and clicked. A new window popped up. “Close of business on October sixth: $27,846,577.48.”

  Fenway pulled up the photo on her phone of Jessica’s note. “But after—half a million less. And that matches these two numbers.” She thought for a moment. “Do you think she figured out who it was?”

  Piper bought up the student spreadsheet and tapped the screen. “I think the answer lies in Jessica’s spreadsheets. The ones we can’t find. She might be getting statements directly from those Cayman Island accounts. Or she might have seen the correction from the bank and made the same mistake you made, assuming two long numbers were the same. She might have recognized the account number.”

  “Who’s authorized to deposit funds to different accounts?”

  “As far as I can tell, it’s just Jessica Marquez and Dr. Pruitt.”

  “So—you’re saying that this important spreadsheet, with payment information, addresses, phone numbers, all of which could destroy the money laundering scheme if it gets out—all of these were just kept on one machine’s hard drive?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that Jessica stole the money?”

  “It’s possible. I don’t have a line on that other account yet. Dr. Pruitt is possible, too. Or—someone could have broken through the security here, just like they exploited a back door on the bank’s firewall.”

  “You know how it was done?”

  Piper shrugged. “I know how I would have done it, but anyone could have gotten in there. The hack is on YouTube—step by step instructions. It’s a script you can copy and paste. Anyone could have done it.”

  “Someone without hacking skills?”

  “I saw the video. My two-year-old nephew could do it, if he could sit still long enough to follow instructions.”

  “Something like this doesn’t get patched?”

  “Well—a patch for the firewall came out months ago. It obviously didn’t get applied.”

  “This is brilliant, Piper.” Fenway said, and it suddenly hit her that Piper wouldn’t be around to connect all these dots anymore, and she felt punched in the stomach. “I just wish we could find Jessica’s spreadsheet. But if the only copy was on her laptop hard drive, it might be lost forever.”

  Piper screwed up her face.

  “What?”

  “I just—well, look, I work all day with computers, so maybe I’m biased, but for a file that important, Jessica must have a backup file somewhere.”

  “Would she?” asked Fenway. “It is a file tracking something illegal. She wouldn’t want anyone to be able to find it. If she backed it up, that increases the chances of someone finding it.”

  Piper shook her head firmly. “Too much can happen to a file like that. Spreadsheets get corrupted. Laptops get stolen. Jessica wouldn’t just access and make changes to the main file that kept track of the illicit payments without backing it up.”

  Fenway sucked in a breath through her teeth. “Okay, let’s say you’re right. Where would the backup file be? We haven’t found it anywhere.”

  “There are a bunch of options—none that I would use if I were doing something illegal, but I guess I’m not most people.” Piper rested her chin on her fist. “The university supplies a shared directory—that’s where all the employees are supposed to back up their files.” She grimaced. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff we find on our shared file servers here.”

  “Try me. I used to be an er nurse.” Fenway sat down on an extra chair. “But that’s too public. Jessica would think there are too many unknowns. What about a usb stick?”

  “We haven’t found anything yet.”

  “Maybe she hid it somewhere we haven’t looked.”

  Piper nodded. “Just like the ledgers at Central Auto Body were under the floorboard.”

  “Right.” Fenway rested her chin in her hands. “If she had a physical backup, where would it be? In a fire safe? Maybe on her person—somewhere that only she could find or get to.”

  “What about a safe deposit box?” Piper suggested.

  “At a bank? I don’t think so. She’d need it somewhere she could access quickly. She can’t go into the bank every time she needs to add a fake scholarship payment, or record a false donation.”

  Piper paused. “You think they were looking for the backup file when they tossed the place?”

  Fenway thought a moment. “It makes sense. Do you have the crime scene photos of the office?”

  Piper nodded. “Yes. The initial ones from Dez, and then the rest we got from csi. Let me pull them up.”

  A moment later, Piper had a set of twenty-four photos stretching across her two screens.

  “Are there more?”

  Piper snickered. “Only about two hundred. These are the ones that give you the best overview of most of the stuff in the room.”

  Fenway looked at the photos, seeing the whole room in context. Her face moved between the screens, and then she pointed. “They tossed the whole room. Both of the rooms.”

  “Right.”

  “Once you’ve found what you’re searching for, don’t you stop looking?”

  Piper shrugged. “Maybe they wanted to throw people off the trail, or maybe they just wanted to mess up the office. It could have been personal against Jessica, right? Didn’t I hear that she was sleeping with the lead actor in the play?”

  “You heard that?”

  “I did.” Piper smiled. “Come on, Fenway, you know I look at the sheriff’s notes as soon as he comes in.”

  “Right.”

  “So you’re looking at the guy’s girlfriend, right?” Piper tilted her head. “The blonde?”

  “Amanda.” Fenway sat back in the chair. “You know, maybe we should see if anyone else was romantically involved with Jessica?”

  “Jessica was single.”

  “Are you sure? Have you looked? Social media accounts, dating apps, anything like that?”

  Piper smiled. “Yes, I have, Miss Smartypants, and no, I didn’t find anything. Jessica doesn’t seem to have been involved with anyone since she’s been here.”

  “Except Xavier.”

  “Right, but no one publicly. No official boyfriend.”

  Fenway turned to the screen and something caught her eye. “Hold on.”

  “What?”

  “All right.” Fenway looked again and squinted, deciding if what she was about to say made sense. “Can you kill all the photos from the outer room and bring up a few more from Jessica’s office?”

  “Sure.” Piper clicked on a few items and brought up another six pictures from Jessica’s office.

  Fenway stared again, looking at one of the pictures of the bookshelf directly behind Jessica’s desk.

  “What is it, Fenway? Come on, spit it out.”

/>   “Fine.” Fenway took a deep breath. “Jessica was professional, right?”

  “You call banging a student actor professional?”

  “No—that’s not what I mean. I mean her appearance. Her office. All work and no play.”

  “I never met her.”

  “No, but look at the stuff in her office. She’s got the plant in the corner, she has her desk arranged to maximize efficiency, she’s got corporate art on the wall. Her books are all on strategy, economics, theater management—not a novel in sight. This is a woman who means business. There isn’t a single personal effect in her office. No photos of her family, no tchotchkes she picked up at conferences, nothing. She works for a theater company, yet there’s nothing that so much as hints at a personal life.”

  “Yeah, that’s weird, but you guys had a theory about that, right?”

  “We did. We realized that Jessica worked for the money launderers you found. That means she was involved with the oil shipping from La Mitad, the refined fuels going to East Timor, and with the money coming back into the country. She made sure that The Guild was an effective front for the money laundering.”

  “A hypothesis without proof.”

  “True,” Fenway said. “Which is another reason we need to find that backup file.” Fenway pointed to the picture, her finger landing on the bookshelf behind the desk, second shelf from the bottom. “Can you zoom in on that?”

  “Sure.” A couple of clicks later, the screen was filled with nothing but the second shelf.

  “That’s a hairbrush,” Fenway said.

  Piper squinted. “Yes, that’s sure what it looks like. But so what? She needs to brush her hair for visitors.”

  “Would she have it out in the open like that?”

  Piper looked at Fenway out of the corner of her eye. “Are you forgetting the room was tossed? It could have been in a drawer.”

  “True enough. Maybe it was in a drawer.” She squinted and looked closer at the photograph. “Even so, I don’t think that’s just a hairbrush.”

  “Not—what?”

  “It’s—well, hang on. You’ve got a regular ol’ browser on this warp drive-powered monster pc, don’t you?”

  Piper clicked. Fenway typed Desert Sands Spy Gear into the search window, then clicked on the first website. The page came up and she scrolled around the menu until she found Diversion Safes.

  “Isn’t this the place that makes those beige-and-orange planters that hid those microphones?”

  Fenway nodded, scrolling through the product list. “I checked out their website earlier, and I think I remember something. Maybe it was an ad, I don’t know.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was a hairbrush,” Fenway said. “And it looked just like—”

  And there it was. A black hairbrush with a silver band and a mottled handle.

  “Thirty-nine dollars with free overnight shipping,” said Fenway.

  Piper stared over Fenway’s shoulder. The top of the hairbrush screwed off, leaving a cylindrical hole. Piper scrolled to the specifications. “Listen to this. ‘Perfect for cash, rings, jewelry, usb drives, and more.’ It comes in an array of fashion colors, too. Oh, look, it even includes a ‘smell-proof’ bag.”

  “Can’t have the k9 units stealing your hairbrush,” Fenway said. “I bet there’s a usb stick in the one in Jessica’s office. And I bet the stick contains the spreadsheets that track the cash deposits and payments that Marquez was using to launder the money.”

  Piper sat back. “That’s a lot of conjecture.”

  “Still, it’s worth checking out.”

  Piper hid the browser and brought up the financial reports. “Let’s see if I can track any orders from Jessica’s bank accounts.”

  “Before you do that,” Fenway said, “I wondered if you’d had a chance to look at the pc that Dez brought from The Guild’s office.”

  Piper shook her head and motioned to a lonely-looking pc tower connected to a small monitor. “They just logged it into evidence and brought it over here—I don’t know, maybe five minutes before you got here. I have it connected, and I ran a preliminary scan, but I haven’t looked at anything yet. It’s up and running, though, if you want to take a look.”

  “Sure.” Fenway walked over to The Guild’s pc and woke it up. “No password?”

  “I’m in admin mode. I bypassed it.”

  “So you didn’t break Jessica’s password.”

  “No. I don’t have time.” Piper clicked around again. “Okay, here’s who had access to the bank account for the scholarship fund. Jessica, no surprise there—oh. And Dr. Alfred Pruitt.”

  “Who else?”

  “That’s it. No one else.”

  “Not Professor Cygnus?”

  “Nope.”

  “Wow—I really thought Cygnus would be on there.” Fenway folded her arms. “So either Dr. Pruitt embezzled the money, or Jessica did.”

  “Unless someone stole their credentials.”

  “Great—can you send me everything you’ve got? And copy McVie on it, too.” Fenway clicked around through the applications.

  “Hey,” Fenway said, “did you know they’ve got the Windows Device Tracker running on this machine?”

  “A nearly useless piece of software to run on a desktop machine.”

  “No, Piper—I mean, if they standardized on Windows Device Tracker at The Guild office, then it’s on Jessica’s laptop, too. Maybe we can log into Jessica’s account and see where it is.”

  “Oh—yeah, that makes sense. I kind of assumed they weren’t savvy enough to turn it on.”

  “Well, it can’t hurt to try.”

  Fenway launched the tracker—and a login prompt popped up.

  “Oh, crap. I can’t go any further without Jessica’s username and password.”

  “Her username is just her email address.” Piper walked over and typed it in. “All the naming conventions are the same for staff.”

  “Now we just need her password.”

  Piper nodded. “Right. Well, I’ve got a password cracker but that will take a while.”

  “A while?”

  “Two or three days, maybe. You can get started on that if you want, but I’ll focus on tracking as much financial information as I can before they drag me out of here.”

  “Maybe I can figure out Jessica’s password.”

  Piper scoffed. “Good luck.”

  Fenway thought, but she had no idea what Jessica would choose. People often choose personal things—and, of course….

  She typed in password and hit Enter. No luck.

  Fenway stood up. “I’m going to my office, Piper. Let me know if you find anything—and I’m for sure coming to say goodbye.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Fenway left Piper in the it room and walked into the coroner’s suite, thinking about what Jessica might use as a password. People tended to use personal information, even if most of them knew better than to use a birth date, or the name of their father.

  Ugh. Now she was thinking about her father, and how to get the information he wanted her to get out of Detective Ridley.

  She pulled her laptop out of its bag and plugged it in. The old Acer slowly woke up, and after launching a browser and logging into the police information system, Fenway researched the life and habits of Detective Deshawn Ridley, writing certain facts on a small yellow notepad. She found him on Facebook and searched a few of his work records, but after about fifteen minutes, she had no new ideas about how to weasel the information out of the detective from Bellingham.

  She didn’t have the element of surprise; Ridley would recognize her and what she was up to right away. She couldn’t get the information herself.

  Oh—but maybe there was someone who could.

  She closed her eyes, picked up the phone and then exhaled slowly as she opened her eyes and dialed.

  Rachel picked up on the first ring. “Wow, they haven’t let you go home yet?”

  “Hey, Rachel. Looks like
they haven’t let you go home either.”

  “It’s been a big week. Elections, Barry Klein getting installed, the whole deal. And you know how Klein loves his press releases. He’ll keep me busy for the rest of his term.” Rachel sighed. “What I can I do for you?”

  Fenway was silent. She thought the way to broach the topic would magically come to her as soon as she heard Rachel’s voice, but no such luck.

  “Fenway? You still there?”

  “Yeah,” Fenway croaked. “There’s no easy way to tell you about the favor I need from you, Rachel.”

  “You need a favor from me?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s totally fine. Name it.”

  “No, you haven’t heard it yet. I need you to, uh, see if you can get some information from a visiting police detective.”

  “That guy from the Bellingham mcu?”

  “Right.”

  “He’s still in town?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think so. His department wants my father extradited to Washington state, and—if I can read him as well as I think I can—he’ll bring him in himself.”

  “And you can’t ask him?”

  “No. He already deflected when I tried to ask him about it yesterday. He’ll see right through me.”

  Rachel clicked her tongue. “What’s the information you need?”

  “Details about the evidence they have against my father. Right now, he thinks it’s just a bank transfer to the supposed hit man. My father heard rumors that someone confessed to the killing and said my father hired him. But that makes no sense, because the hit man was walking free when my father was in jail.”

  “You don’t think the hit man got immunity, do you?”

  “For murder? I can’t imagine how that would go down. ada Kim would fire whoever was responsible for that.”

  Through the phone Fenway could hear the suspicion in Rachel’s voice. “Why do you think this detective will talk to me if he won’t talk to you?”

  “Well—uh—he doesn’t know who you are.”

  “But as soon as I tell him I’m the public information officer—” Rachel paused and then laughed. “Oh, you want me to be a spy.”

  “Uh—yeah, kind of.”

  “And you want me to—what?”