End of the Line_Maple Syrup Mysteries

by Emily James

  Mark came out the door, and I slumped back in my seat. The sooner this case was solved, the better. I was heading straight for a stress ulcer at this point.

  He slid back into the car, but his hands were empty—something I’d missed in my relief that the murderer wasn’t forcing pills down his throat or stringing him up.

  “It wasn’t there?”

  Mark shook his head. “I don’t understand it. It shouldn’t have been confiscated as evidence. It’d be clear to anyone who looked that it had nothing to do with Troy or me. Neither of us were even in Fair Haven at the time. And no one should have taken it thinking it was an open case. All the open cases are kept in my office at the funeral home where it’s more secure, and this file was clearly marked Closed.”

  The police weren’t the only ones in his home lately. If we were right about the connection this accidental death had to the corruption scheme in Fair Haven, then there was someone else with a strong motive to take it. “Could the murderer have stolen it when he killed Troy?”

  That would help explain why he’d chosen to kill Troy in Mark’s home. He’d had two things he needed to do—frame Mark and make sure that file vanished.

  “The file I had was just a copy.” Mark massaged the spot above his right eye, the spot that meant he was getting a headache. “Taking it wouldn’t have stopped someone else from looking at it.”

  “No, but would anyone else have been looking for it? You and Chief McTavish were the only ones working on the corruption case.”

  He kept his fingers pressed into the spot above his eye. It made him look a bit like he was trying to hold himself together the old-fashioned way. “As far as I know, yes. The timing is more coincidental than I’m comfortable with.”

  If we were right, then Chief McTavish reinvestigating the death of the previous chief could have been the trigger that set all of this in motion. The ringleader knew that file could point straight back to him somehow. He had to stop both Mark and Chief McTavish from examining it closely and telling anyone about what they found.

  Killing them both would have immediately drawn suspicion. Instead, he’d made Chief McTavish disappear, and he’d done what he could to make sure Mark wouldn’t be working any cases ever again.

  “With McTavish gone,” Mark was saying, “it could be months before they replace him, and whoever they send would have to try to catch up on what he’d already done. They might never make the same connections.”

  At the very least, it would delay things long enough for the ringleader to cover all his tracks and slip away.

  The idea that he’d slink away like that grated on my mind a bit, like it didn’t fit with how meticulous and determined he’d shown himself to be. It seemed like he was much more inclined to find a way to keep and expand what he’d put in place than to give it up and flee. He liked the situation he’d created for himself, and he’d spent years cultivating it.

  Maybe he felt that this time he had no choice.

  If we were going to prove who was behind all of this, we needed that file. And the only place to get a copy was the Fair Haven police station.

  17

  Mark put the car into drive. “Let’s make sure the police didn’t take the file before we do anything rash.”

  Mrs. McTavish’s warning still burned in my ears every time there was a moment of silence. This was a good time to be methodical rather than rash. We didn’t need to be drawing the killer’s attention by poking around if it wasn’t going to help us identify him. “How do you plan to do that?”

  “Ask.”

  At first, I thought he meant he wanted me to ask him again. Then it clicked that he planned to simply ask the police if they took the file from his house. While we’d eventually have access to a list of the evidence they’d taken from his house that the prosecution planned to use in their case against him, that list wouldn’t include an unrelated file that’d been taken because it was police property.

  “Detective Dillion isn’t going to tell you that. He thinks you killed someone.”

  Mark gave me a trust me smile that made his dimples pop out. “I’m going to tell him that I have to be sure everything is accounted for when my temporary replacement takes over. If they didn’t collect that file already, I want to be sure to take it to my office and leave it with whoever is filling in.”

  Sneaky. And brilliant. And much too much like something I would have come up with. “I think I’m a bad influence on you.”

  “Let’s wait to see whether I succeed or not before we call it good or bad.”

  He parallel parked in front of the police station like parallel parking was easy and he wasn’t about to try to get evidence that could clear his name from the very man who thought he was guilty. He should have been a surgeon on live people instead of dead ones. I bet his hands never shook.

  “If we’re really lucky,” I said, “he’ll have it and he’ll let you take it with you now to bring to your replacement.”

  His smile didn’t quite make it deep enough to create dimples this time though. “Keep the getaway car warm.”

  For the second time today, Mark came back to the car with empty hands.

  He had the same look to him as someone who hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, kind of pale and shaky. He didn’t have to tell me what had happened. The police hadn’t taken the file. Whoever killed Troy had.

  I still needed to hear it. “I guess we still need the file.”

  “We still need the file.” Mark scrubbed his hands over the steering wheel like he didn’t know what to do with them otherwise. “We can’t walk into a station full of detectives who think I’m a murderer and nab the file.”

  I held in a snort at his use of the word nab, like we were playing cops and robbers. It was the kind of word Elise would think was perfectly normal to use.

  The fact that I still found it humorous given the circumstances showed how much I was feeling the stress. I’d be crazy-laughing soon if we weren’t careful.

  He was right despite his odd word choice. Not only was trying to get a file from the police station ourselves impractical, but it came a bit too close to theft. Mark still technically had a right to that file. He’d been assigned it by Chief McTavish, and it dealt with an independent case. Detective Dillion wouldn’t see it that way, though.

  On the upside, if he caught us trying to take the file, he might at least look at it and investigate why we wanted it so badly.

  Then he’d throw us both in jail for tampering with an active investigation.

  “We need someone else to get us a copy of the file,” I said before I’d thought it through.

  Mark put the car in drive and pulled out onto the road. If I hadn’t known him as well, I might have thought he was planning to take us to someone who could help. I did know him. We’d be driving in circles as soon as he could get out onto the main roads. It was his version of pacing. Hopefully it worked better for him that it had for me. I’d driven around for nearly an hour, and I still ended up breaking into Isabel’s food truck.

  “Who?” Mark asked. “Everyone who’s been taken off active duty has also had their access restricted. They can’t get to the files any more than we can. They’re not even supposed to go to the station.”

  We passed by the police station. I almost wished Mark would have chosen a different road. All we needed was for someone to realize they’d seen our car one too many times and think we were up to something.

  Which we, of course, were.

  “Who’s still allowed to work?”

  Mark shot me a you’re-not-going-to-believe-me look.

  I leaned my temple against the window. Perfect. “Don’t tell me. Rigman, Grady Scherwin, and Quincey.”

  “Lawrence is still there, too, but he and Quincey have been put on traffic. If they’re caught accessing files, it’ll mean their jobs. Erik said the only reason they kept Lawrence and Quincey on at all was because they wouldn’t have been able to cover all the shifts otherwise.”

  Thi
s had to be some kind of a twisted joke. Of the fourteen officers who weren’t dead or missing, ten had been removed from duty because of their connections to Mark. In a way, that spoke more highly of Mark than almost anything else.

  But it left us with two bad options.

  We either couldn’t get the file that looked like it held the key to all of this. Or we had to play Russian roulette with who to trust.

  Mark made another right turn. We drove past Quantum Mechanics.

  “What about one of the dispatchers?” he asked. “When they’re working the desk, they’re often asked to pull a file for someone. It wouldn’t look suspicious. Aren’t you friends with Sheila?”

  I held back a flinch. “Sheila wasn’t willing to even give me a name when I wanted to know who was working the night Troy died. Both Henry and Case would require us to lie to them. And, at this point, I’m not sure they’d buy it. If I was accessing that file officially, I wouldn’t need to ask one of them to get it for me. Neither would you. We’d get it from Detective Dillion.”

  Henry might still do it. He hadn’t seemed to care so much about whether I was telling him the truth or not as long as he had a story he could tell to cover his hind end if anyone asked. That also meant he’d likely turn us in without resistance to save himself if it came to that, though.

  “I think we should ask Rigman,” I said at the same time as Mark said, “I think we should ask Scherwin.”

  I’d rather smooch a creepy, crawly forest creature than ask Grady Scherwin for help. “Really? Grady Scherwin?”

  “The only reason you don’t want to ask Scherwin is you don’t like him,” Mark said.

  My inner child wanted to cross her arms and pout at the implication, but that would only prove his point. “You don’t like him, either.”

  “I don’t, but this isn’t about who we like or don’t like. It’s about who we think is least likely to have been involved in the corruption going on.”

  I slumped back in my seat. Grady Scherwin was a jerk, but did that mean I thought he was also a dirty cop? Just because someone was a police officer and followed the rules didn’t necessarily mean they also had to be a nice person. “Let’s each make our case, then. You said yourself that Scherwin is badge-heavy. He likes power. He’d probably love to be controlling everything behind the scenes and congratulating himself on how he’s getting away with it.”

  Mark was shaking his head before I even finished. It hit my nerves about as well as wet shoes squeaking on a linoleum floor. It made me feel like he hadn’t listened to everything before deciding I was wrong.

  I also knew that Mark always listened, even when it appeared like he wasn’t. Now wasn’t the time to pick a fight over something unrelated.

  Mark pulled into the animal shelter parking lot. He must have finally realized, too, that we couldn’t keep driving by the police station without drawing attention. “Grady likes respect. He likes exercising his authority as an officer because it publicly gives him that respect. Shady backroom deals aren’t going to give him the kind of validation he’s looking for.”

  He had me there. “Okay, but Grady Scherwin grew up here, and he’s been with the Fair Haven PD longer than Rigman. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to study the pictures in the lobby.”

  One of the walls in the lobby of the Fair Haven police department was lined with a picture taken on January second of each new year. I’d looked at them multiple times over the past months while I waited for Elise or Erik or whoever else I’d come to meet or talk to.

  Assuming I remembered correctly, the people who’d been there before Wilson took over as chief were Lawrence, Quincey, Grady Scherwin, Henry McCloud, Case Hammond, and the chaplain. Elise and Rigman had joined shortly after, when a couple of the older officers must have retired. Everyone else filled in the gaps along the way.

  “Rigman grew up here, too,” Mark said. “He only worked on another force waiting for a spot to open here. He wouldn’t be in the picture the year Chief Wilson took over because it was taken a month or two before Rigman got hired. He was here that year. I know because he beat Elise out for the spot.”

  That was suspicious timing. So was that Rigman would have waited so long for a job “back home” only to decide later on in his career that he wanted to make a change and specialize in crime scene reconstruction, a job that would likely move him to a bigger city. Maybe he saw that he was about to get caught, and he was ready to close up what he was doing in Fair Haven and move on.

  “What if they’re both involved?” I asked softly.

  Mark went gray around the lips. “Then we’re screwed.”

  We had to take a risk on one of them. We needed to see what was in that case file that the killer wanted to hide so badly. “I don’t suppose saying Grady Scherwin makes my skin crawl would change your mind?”

  Mark’s dimples peeked out. “The opposite, actually. I think whoever managed to run this scheme for this long has better people skills than Grady Scherwin.”

  Point taken. The best deceivers were usually charming or forgettable. Grady Scherwin was neither.

  “You win. Grady Scherwin it is.”

  18

  We decided to grab take-out fish and chips from A Salt & Battery before we headed to the police station to wait for shift change. Grady Scherwin would either be coming into work or heading home from work since they were short-handed. It was the best time to catch him. Neither of us knew where he lived or had his cell phone number.

  I paid for our meals, since Mark forgot his wallet at my house, and we ate in the car parked out front of A Salt & Battery. It would have been warmer inside, but neither of us felt like facing the stares Mark would get.

  Nearing the end of his meal, Mark yawned again large enough that his jaw looked like it was going to fall off his face.

  I crumpled up my now-empty container and shoved it back into the plastic bag it came in. I tossed it into the back seat, next to my purse. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait until tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be fine. Just didn’t sleep well the last few nights.” Mark clamped a hand over his mouth, but the twist to his features gave it away that he was yawning again. “We need to do this tonight. Our wedding is coming fast. I can’t leave the country anymore, so we’ve already lost our honeymoon. And we don’t know what else this guy has planned.”

  I’d completely forgotten that I was supposed to go into the dress shop sometime today to try on my dress again. Between my late, then sleepless, night with Isabel, Mark getting out on bail today, and the pieces we’d fit together since then, it’d gotten pushed to the back of my mind.

  But marrying Mark and getting to spend the rest of our lives together was the important part, not what I wore to get married. The priority was this case. “At least let me drive then.”

  He handed over the keys without an argument. He must be exhausted. Mark was easily the better driver of the two of us, especially on winter roads.

  We swapped seats, and I drove us down to the Fair Haven police station, going around the back side into the parking lot normally reserved for staff. Unlike much of Fair Haven, street lights lit the parking lot. I picked the corner with the most shadows, in order to wait. With our luck lately, Detective Dillion would come out before we spotted Grady Scherwin. Then we’d have some real explaining to do.

  Mark and I fell into silence, and the clock on my dashboard ticked another minute closer to shift change. The staff coming in should be arriving soon, slightly before the staff leaving.

  I sent up a small prayer that Grady would arrive alone rather than at the same time as another staff member.

  A truck with wheels almost as tall as I was rolled into the parking lot, a low rumble ensuring everyone knew it was a diesel engine. The driver pulled up almost directly under one of the street lights. He took two spots, angling his truck so that no one could park too close. The driver had to be a man—no woman I knew felt the need to drive a truck like that.

  Maybe it was because
I was from Washington, DC, where parking spots were at a premium, but people who took up two spaces to protect their paint job was one of my pet peeves.

  The door opened, and Grady Scherwin stepped onto the running boards and then down to the ground. I couldn’t see his sandy blond buzz cut under his beanie, but the physique was right—body-builder arms and a gut that said he needed more cardio and less weight training.

  The fact that he didn’t climb back in upon seeing that he was taking up two spots made it clear he’d intended to do it. It figured. Just when I thought I couldn’t like him any less, he dropped even lower in my estimation. And it had to be right before I needed to ask him a favor.

  Mark already had his door open. I scrambled out after him.

  Grady parking under the street light would highlight us for anyone else coming or going, but at least his massive truck should partly obscure us. His driver’s-side door faced away from the door into the building. And the truck was taller than any of us.

  Mark called his last name—just loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to draw attention from anyone inside.

  Grady stopped and turned back. The light shining down on his face emphasized his brow line and cast shadows over his eyes, making it almost impossible for me to gauge his expression.

  “Cavanaugh,” he said.

  He tossed a glance in my direction, but other than that, he didn’t acknowledge me. If I hadn’t been sleep deprived, I might have been thinking clearly enough to realize it would have been better had I stayed in the car. Instead, I did the second-best thing and hung back.

  “I won’t hold you up long,” Mark said. “But I need you to grab a file for me. My copy somehow disappeared.”

  Grady leaned against his fender. “I thought you were off until all this gets cleared up.”

  A warm little bubble that felt an awful lot like softening bloomed in my chest. Grady’s tone implied he was sure it would all get sorted and Mark would be back to work.