COFFIN COVE a gripping murder mystery full of twists (Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 1)

by JACKIE ELLIOTT

  Adrian liked the changes. He’d had several photos of himself taken with various C-list celebrities, which boosted his Instagram following quite nicely, and he regularly invited local politicians and businessmen for dinner at the bistro.

  “You are who you surround yourself with,” Adrian was fond of quoting.

  Adrian was shown to his regular table overlooking the Fraser River by an immaculately dressed, smiling hostess. A cappuccino materialized with an artistic chocolate swirl in the shape of the Hades logo, and the hostess placed a leather-bound menu in front of him. He studied it for a while. It was all good. No sign of pancakes, waffles or greasy fried eggs. The head chef had worked at several international restaurants and had written on his resume that he’d been trained by Gordon Ramsay himself. Adrian wasn’t sure if anyone had checked, but he used it for marketing purposes and paid the man more than his entire office staff put together.

  Adrian couldn’t help but notice that he was alone in the bistro. Just early in the season, he told himself.

  Lately, Brenda had been fussing at him about cash flow.

  “You have a lunch-bucket mentality,” he said, trying to brush her off. “We have to spend money to make money.”

  But she persisted, asking questions about incoming volumes of fish, sales invoices and payments to fishermen.

  “None of this adds up,” she said. “We just don’t have the quantity of fish delivered to support these sales figures.”

  He’d sent her out of his office but knew that she’d be ferreting around every chance she could, so he made a mental note as he sipped his coffee to hire a different bookkeeper and move Brenda onto filing or something. Perhaps she’d finally leave.

  As he sat waiting for his breakfast to arrive, he decided to make a call. To follow up on another project. One he was convinced would top up Hades’ less-than-healthy bank account. Steve was in charge, but lately, he had been leaving Adrian out of the loop. So he called Steve and was irritated when the call went straight to Steve’s voicemail.

  His meal arrived. He was fiddling with the artistically arranged slithers of smoked salmon over poached eggs when his phone buzzed. He grabbed it.

  “Steve, where are you? What’s going on?” He stopped as Steve interrupted him.

  He dropped his fork and got up from the table and started to pace nervously as he listened. Twice he tried to say something, but the voice at the other end gave him no chance to interrupt. Eventually, he turned the phone off and sat down again. Steve had been reassuring, confident that they were on track.

  But Adrian was uncertain.

  Had they done the right thing, he thought, as he held out his cup for another cappuccino, wondering if it was too early for something stronger than coffee.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Brenda watched Adrian leave the office for breakfast. Amy was watching too, and as soon as she heard the reception door swing shut, she slipped her phone in her purse and grabbed her coat.

  “Just off to take some shots of the river,” she announced brightly and disappeared before Brenda had a chance to answer.

  Brenda rolled her eyes. Digital marketing manager, indeed, she snorted to herself. But the empty office gave her some privacy to make a few phone calls. She knew Adrian wouldn’t return for hours, and Amy knew that too. So it was a good bet that she’d have a chance to dig a little deeper through the invoices and receipts.

  Brenda was loyal to Nikos Palmer. At sixteen, she’d been broke and had a sister to support. Both her parents had died in a car crash. They left virtually nothing behind, just enough for Brenda to pay funeral expenses. She left school and started looking for work.

  Nikos Palmer gave her a job.

  He was just starting out, a recent immigrant from Greece with his young gorgeous wife. Brenda translated for him when he was dealing with the fishermen, handled all the cash and made sure he wasn’t shorted, and did a lot of the heavy lifting as well. They sold direct to local restaurants at first, so Brenda became skilled at filleting and packing the fish in ice, making sure the quality of produce was top-notch. Soon, restaurants were putting in regular orders with “the Greek”, and they started to expand.

  Nikos paid her well and treated her with respect.

  One day, he appeared at her tiny rental apartment and handed her a cheque for $10,000 so her sister could go to college. A gift, he said, for her loyalty.

  He had her loyalty, she told him, without the gift. But he insisted.

  Adrian was another story. Iris’s health had never been good. She lacked the energy to discipline the boy, and his father was working too hard to notice how spoiled and unruly his son was becoming.

  Brenda remembered Adrian as a happy toddler, his father sometimes bringing him to work early and having breakfast with the fishermen. Plump and curly haired with long eyelashes, he melted Brenda’s heart, and even she, she had to admit, had been complicit in indulging his every whim.

  She sighed. All the old man wanted was to pass on the family business to his son. To see Hades Fish Co. prosper under his son’s management in his golden years.

  Sadly, it happened too quickly. Iris passed away and Nikos’s heart wasn’t in it anymore. Knowing that Adrian was far from ready, he implored Brenda to help him.

  “He’ll grow into it, Bee, with your help.”

  She doubted it. Adrian had none of his father’s work ethic and business savvy. He cared little for the fishermen bound to the company or the staff who worked in the processing plant. He was charming and charismatic but often spiteful. Brenda did not understand where he’d learned how to be so callous. Iris was kind and loving, and Nikos Palmer was a gentle man.

  Brenda shook herself mentally. She didn’t have time to lament her boss’s shortcomings. She had work to do. First, she made a call to the fisherman she had put through to Adrian earlier. He’d been waiting for three months for payment. She noted down how much they owed him, reassured him he wouldn’t have to wait much longer and ended the call.

  It wasn’t just incompetence. Adrian, with Steve’s guidance, had purposely been squeezing the fishermen tighter and harder, cutting their margins down to the bare bones. They let these hard-working men struggle, waited until they were facing financial ruin, and at the last moment offered to buy their quotas and licenses. It seemed like a good deal on the surface. A chunk of cash to help them out of a hole, and they could still rent back the license and fish for Hades Fish Co. Quick and easy, Adrian explained. “Just to help out.”

  It came with strings, of course. The fishermen were bound to sell only to Hades, who controlled the price and charged a hefty fee for the license rental. Some fishermen were literally working for free.

  Brenda shuffled through the papers and debris on Amy’s desk. Amy was responsible for processing all the marketing and PR invoices. Brenda tutted at the extravagance. Adrian had cleared out his father’s office and ordered top-of-the-range new furniture — a solid wood desk, leather office chair, two overstuffed easy chairs and a coffee table. He also bought an espresso machine — Brenda couldn’t think why, Adrian wouldn’t dream of making his own coffee — and he also expensed his thousand-dollar suits to the business. Brenda sighed, but it wasn’t why she was rifling through these papers. She found the stack of cheques that Amy had prepared for Adrian’s signature. Brenda wrote out a cheque for the fisherman and slid it into the pile. She knew that neither Adrian nor Amy would notice. And although Amy jumped at any opportunity to fawn over the boss, she always dumped the cheques on Brenda’s desk to put into envelopes and mail out.

  Satisfied that she had made good on her promise, Brenda turned her attention to Adrian’s office.

  A slight waft of expensive cologne lingered in the air. It was hard not to compare. Brenda was wistful for a moment.

  Nikos had an open-door policy. He spent many hours with fishermen and staff, listening to their problems and handing out his own brand of forthright advice. He was the heart of the company, he liked to say, while Brenda was the
head.

  The office had always smelled of sweat and the ocean back then. A working smell, she thought, and she missed it.

  Adrian was careless with paperwork. The top of his desk was polished, and neatly arranged with his iMac and an expensive planner, still in its plastic wrapping. When Brenda pulled out the drawers, they were stuffed with papers. The top one was just credit card receipts, paper clips and old Post-it notes.

  But in the bottom drawer, Brenda found two manila folders. She laid them open on the desk and went through the contents carefully. There was nothing unusual about the contents for a fishing company, at first glance. Shipping and packing receipts, export documents, everything that Brenda would expect to find — except that Adrian hardly ever bothered himself with the daily operations of the processing plant. Usually, Brenda would have all this paperwork to carefully record each incoming delivery. So why had Adrian kept this file? She frowned when she saw a note scrawled to Adrian on one of the receipts. It was Steve’s handwriting.

  Brenda had warned Adrian against hiring Steve. He’d been in the industry for years and had earned his reputation as a cheat and a poacher. He’d fished in unauthorized areas, out of season and with outlawed equipment. He’d sold fish illegally, and one time, he’d nearly killed someone by selling them crab that had been dead for days. He’d been hauled into court at least three times that Brenda knew of. He’d been fined and immediately declared bankruptcy before returning to his shady business. Over the years, Steve had slipped under the radar, and although Adrian insisted that Steve was a changed man, Brenda suspected that Steve had just got better at not being caught.

  It was beyond her comprehension, Brenda thought, why Adrian had employed him. It worried her that Steve was becoming more than an employee. He was taking charge of the company, and Adrian was lazy enough to let him. And she knew now that whatever they were up to, it wasn’t legal.

  Brenda had been suspicious for a while. The volume of paperwork required for incoming fish deliveries, processing and final sales was immense and complex. Just lately, she’d been finding sale receipts for product that Hades Fish Co. had sold, but, according to the paper trail, they had never purchased or processed.

  She laid out the contents of the manila file, noting dates and times. Hades had imported salmon. It wasn’t against any law to do that. But it was illegal if it was spoiled or if Hades was mixing it with other supplies and passing it off as locally caught.

  That would make sense, she suddenly realized. A couple of days ago, she got a call on her cell phone from one of Hades’ oldest customers, a restaurant on Denman Street, in downtown Vancouver.

  “Brenda, what’s going on?” the chef asked. “Twice I’ve returned a delivery because it’s off, and twice it’s been replaced with the same shit. I’ve talked to Steve, but he basically told me to fuck off.”

  Brenda tried to talk to the plant supervisor, a gangly young man with dirty nails and a pockmarked face who she found smoking outside the break room. He stared at her belligerently and refused to look into the complaint. Finally, Brenda returned the call and told the chef that she too had been told to fuck off.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Things aren’t the same around here.”

  Brenda sorted through the papers again. There was nothing in here that proved her suspicions, but there were still unanswered questions. Lots of these papers had nothing to do with fishing, she realized. Consultancy? Leases? Was Adrian branching into real estate? She thought of the bistro and the cash that had been poured into that failing venture and hoped that Adrian wasn’t getting in over his head for a second time. A bankruptcy would break his father’s heart. She pondered what to do next. Maybe nothing? After all, it wasn’t really her business, was it?

  But she had promised Nikos she’d keep an eye on Adrian. He probably didn’t think, though, that she’d end up spying on his son.

  Time to get out of here. She didn’t want Adrian or Amy to find her.

  One document caught her eye. It was a receipt, but not for fish. It was a substantial amount of money, and she recognized the name printed at the top, but couldn’t place it. On an impulse, she picked up Adrian’s phone and dialled the number she found next to the name. No answer. It went through to voicemail, and Brenda hung up without leaving a message.

  She rubbed her eyes, suddenly feeling tired.

  She gathered up the papers, put them back in the file and replaced it in Adrian’s desk.

  Maybe it’s just time I quit, she thought.

  * * *

  Steve Hilstead topped up his teacup and added a heaped spoon of sugar. The meeting was over, he supposed, as he noisily stirred his tea and sat back in the armchair.

  From his vantage point he could see people were slowly gathering on the boardwalk, attracted by the sounds of sirens. Hephzibah herself had left the café and the fishermen — just like gossipy women — had followed suit, unable to ignore the drama unfolding outside.

  He wasn’t interested. His phone had pinged a minute ago and now, in real time, he was watching Brenda in Adrian’s office, on the small screen. During the office renovation, Steve had taken the trouble (at his own expense) to install tiny cameras in the office, and all around the plant, that streamed directly to his smartphone. They were strategically placed so he could spy on Adrian from every angle and notified him every time someone entered or left the office. Just insurance, he figured. Just in case. But now, he observed Brenda with interest, as she riffled through Adrian’s desk and pulled out the very file he’d handed to Adrian for safekeeping.

  For safekeeping. Adrian was a fuckwit. He turned his attention back to Brenda as she spread out all the shipping receipts of the Russian delivery of last year’s salmon that had arrived the week before.

  Brenda had been asking far too many questions lately. It wouldn’t take long for her to work out the details of their scheme. Steve knew that he’d have to monitor her.

  Luckily, he thought, laughing inwardly, there’s an app for that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Andi remembered something. She shoved her hand in her pocket and pulled out a cell phone. She put it on the desk in front of Jim.

  “I forgot about this.”

  Jim picked it up.

  “Whose is it? Andi, you didn’t . . .” He looked at her, and Andi guessed from his horrified expression what he was thinking.

  “No, I didn’t take it from the scene. But I do think it belongs to Pierre Mason.”

  They were both sitting in the office drinking coffee. Jim wanted Andi to go over the events of the morning in detail before they started writing.

  “Due diligence,” he’d said, and Andi agreed.

  This was a scoop, but they had to confirm details first. She knew they couldn’t screw it up.

  Andi told Jim about Brian McIntosh at Hephzibah’s café that morning.

  “He dropped the phone when he took off running, when he heard the police sirens.”

  “He could have stolen that from anywhere,” Jim said. “At any time. Doesn’t mean it’s connected to the body. It isn’t significant . . . yet.”

  “True. It’s still got a charge, though, so he must have stolen it within the last day or two.”

  “Can we see who it belongs to? By looking at the call history?”

  “Not unless we have the password. But there was one call that came through . . .” Andi told Jim about the received call from Hades.

  “So it could belong to a fisherman. If Hades means Hades Fish Co.”

  At that moment, the phone vibrated. Andi looked at Jim.

  “Answer it,” Jim said. “Then we’ll know.”

  “Hello?” Andi took the call. “No, I just picked up the cell phone,” she said in answer to the confused caller. “Someone dropped it. Who is this? Who are you trying to get hold of? Oh . . . I see.”

  Andi lowered the phone from her ear, her gut telling her that now, this was significant.

  “The phone,” she said to Jim, “belongs to Pierre
Mason.”

  Jim looked serious.

  “So how did Brian McIntosh get hold of it?” he asked.

  There were too many unanswered questions to put anything in print. Jim was adamant about that.

  “Hand in the phone,” he told Andi, “and see if you can get any more details from the police. I’ll see if I can get any information from Mason’s posse.”

  * * *

  The RCMP detachment at Coffin Cove was manned by only two officers, who were on call almost all the time. The detachment was locked when Andi arrived with the cell phone, so she headed back to the fish plant, guessing correctly that all available officers would be there.

  The coroner had arrived. A forensics team, all dressed head to foot in white overalls, masks and booties, were entering the building just as Andi got there. A white tent covered the car. Apart from the squad cars, Andi noticed several dark-coloured SUVs inside the taped-off area.

  IHIT, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, or Major Crimes Unit, Andi thought. So she was right: if they were bringing in the heavy hitters, this was no accident.

  One of the figures in white stopped and looked in Andi’s direction.

  “Hey, Silvers!”

  Andi saw that he was carrying a camera in his gloved hand.

  “Hey, Terry!” she called back. “Thought you were doing weddings these days?”

  “Fuck no!” he shouted. “Couldn’t deal with fuckin’ bridezillas.”

  Andi laughed. She liked Terry Pederson, a crime scene photographer who said he enjoyed taking pictures of still life. “Very still life,” he always added with a smirk.