The Candidate Coroner

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  “What’s the employee’s name?”

  “I’m sorry, my father didn’t tell me.”

  “Can you tell me where you were on Tuesday, the twenty-seventh of July?”

  “If I remember right, I started quite early with the investigation that day, around five a.m.,” Fenway said. “I interrogated a suspect who was being held in connection with another crime, and then, if memory serves, later that morning we found a second murder victim. It should be pretty easy to track my whereabouts all day—all week, as a matter of fact.”

  “That’s the day your car left the long-term lot.”

  “If you say so. Like I said, one of my father’s employees drove the car back for me.”

  Detective Ridley sighed. “Okay, thank you for your answers, Miss Stevenson. I’ll let you get back to your own murder investigation now.”

  Fenway said her goodbyes and hung up, but she didn’t think she had heard the last from Detective Deshawn Ridley.

  She hadn’t brought it up with her father yet, mostly because she was worried about what would be revealed. He had sent his private jet up to Seattle the morning after he had found out what the Russian Lit professor had done to her. At least one of his employees was on her father’s plane, driving her Honda Accord out of the long-term lot and driving it back to Estancia.

  But.

  Fenway would like to say her father would never send one of his employees—or contractors—to kill someone. But her father was a ruthless businessman and had almost no interpersonal skills. Well, none with her, anyway. So Fenway didn’t know.

  And she didn’t want to know.

  She put the van in gear and drove to the station.

  The air was cool, but the sun was warm. As she turned into the parking garage, Fenway wondered if she had been polite enough with Millicent Tate and then tried to banish the whole thing from her mind. She went up the ramp, and slowly drove straight into the first open space on the second floor—the minivan was much wider than her Accord.

  As she walked to the office, she looked at her phone. It was a quarter after one—maybe Rachel was still in the communications office and could get lunch with her. But she hadn’t been to her office yet. She should at least get to her email and see if any of the evidence had been processed. Although the forty-five-minute drive to the lab would have delayed it. She thought about Dos Milagros and the carnitas taco with lime and guacamole she had ordered three times in the last week already and her mouth started to water.

  But the sheriff was waiting for her as soon as she walked in.

  “Fenway,” he said, “great, you’re finally here.”

  “Finally?” she said. “I’ve been at—”

  He waved his hand. “No, no, that’s not what I was getting at. The Kapp family is already on their way to San Miguelito to identify the body. If you hadn’t gotten here in the next five minutes, I was going to leave without you. Come on, let’s get going.”

  “Do we have time for lunch? I’m starving.”

  “After,” McVie said. “They’ll be waiting for us as it is.”

  “Can’t Dr. Yasuda or Kav do the identification with them?”

  “I want to see the wife’s reaction. And I want to ask her about drugs. We don’t know yet if that was cocaine in the bathroom, but I want to know if Jeremy Kapp had a drug problem.”

  “That makes sense. Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Can you drive?”

  Fenway hesitated. “Um, I don’t have my car right now.”

  “Seriously? What happened this time?”

  “Vandalism,” Fenway said simply. “It’ll be fixed this evening.”

  “Vandalism? Somebody broke your window or something? Did they steal anything?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Fenway said evasively. “Let’s take your car.”

  “Okay, remember to file a police report when you get back.”

  “Sure,” Fenway said, although she had no intention to.

  Fenway wanted to complain they weren’t stopping for lunch, but didn’t want to seem insensitive to the Kapps’ tragedy. And she didn’t much like herself for even thinking about complaining. But still, her stomach rumbled loudly in displeasure.

  “Was that your stomach?” McVie said. “I heard it over the engine.”

  “I haven’t had lunch yet.”

  “Maybe after the identification I can take you to that Indian place in San Mig you’ve told me about. The one Kav is always saying we should try.”

  “Oh, damn, Craig,” she said. “You’re ready to try something besides white-people Indian food?”

  McVie laughed. “Hey, I like spicy.”

  Fenway chuckled. He had no idea what he was in for.

  “If we go to Swaadisht for lunch today, I don’t know if you’re going to be fully recovered by Wednesday to take me to that steak place.”

  “If we go where?”

  “Swaadisht.”

  “Dished with an E-D?”

  “No, with a T. It means sets fire to the white man’s mouth in Hindi.”

  “Now don’t you worry about me, little lady,” McVie drawled, tipping an imaginary cowboy hat as he drove. “I reckon I know a thing or two about tamin’ them Indian foods.”

  Fenway smirked and rolled her eyes.

  They arrived in San Miguelito at the medical examiner’s office and pulled in next to a Jaguar SUV with a license plate that said LANDSCPE. McVie held the door to the entry open for Fenway, and in the anteroom, sitting on the brown plastic chairs, were three people, a woman who looked to be in her early thirties, with two teenagers, all Caucasian, dressed in casual but expensive-looking clothes.

  The woman’s long, straight hair was a light brown carefully streaked with different shades of blonde highlights. She wore a pair of Cartier sunglasses with a large trapezoidal bridge above the nose. Her olive cashmere sweater had a v-neck, revealing a chunky gold chain necklace, and her fitted skinny jeans ended two inches above her ankles. Her arms were folded and the parts of her face that weren’t hidden by the sunglasses were impassive.

  The two teenagers, a boy and girl, were sitting on the other side of the room from the woman, separated from each other by a single chair.

  The tall, lanky boy folded into himself, making his frame appear much smaller; Fenway, knowing the secrets of tall people, recognized the defensive posture. He bit his fingernails. He had pale skin and a handsome face, but a swath of angry acne made a magenta brushstroke across his forehead.

  The girl talked on her phone in a low voice. She appeared both bored and irritated, as if her father’s death inconvenienced her. She didn’t even seem happy to get out of school for the day. She had the same style of hair as the woman, although it was a few inches shorter. Fenway wondered if one of them had copied the other on purpose—and if so, which one it was.

  They looked up when McVie entered the room. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, folks,” he said. “I know this is a difficult time, and we’d like to make this as straightforward and simple as we can.”

  The woman nodded. The boy was paying close attention. The girl ended her call.

  “I’m Sheriff Craig McVie,” he said. “I wish we were meeting under happier circumstances. And this is our county coroner, Fenway Stevenson.”

  “Did you say Fenway?” the boy said. “Like the baseball stadium?”

  “Ugh, stop with the Red Sox stuff already,” the girl said. “I swear, every time you open your mouth you have to prove you’re the biggest Boston fan in the state.”

  “Shut up, Blair.”

  “These,” the woman interrupted, “are my children, Donovan and Blair. And I,” she turned toward McVie and offered her hand, “am Cricket Kapp.”

  Fenway looked closer, and saw the woman’s face revealed the telltale signs of expensive, high-quality plastic surgery, probably putting her in her late forties, not early thirties; her smooth tanned skin, her perfect nose, and her high cheekbones were almost certainly fake. Fenway looked at the girl; while
pretty, she had a nose on the larger side and didn’t have her mother’s prominent cheekbones. The girl’s skin was as tan as her mother’s.

  “Mrs. Kapp,” McVie said. “If you’ll come with me, we can get this over with and you can get back to your family and start making whatever arrangements you need to.”

  Cricket Kapp went through the double doors with McVie. Fenway started to follow but McVie shook his head, almost imperceptibly, and Fenway stood, somewhat stunned, in the anteroom with the two teenagers.

  Did McVie expect her to make some sort of small talk with the kids? She’d thought she was going to get to read Cricket’s face when she talked about her dead husband. Would she play-act, like she didn’t expect the bullet in his head? Or would it be a genuine response?

  One thing for sure, however: Cricket wasn’t Mrs. Potemkin. The description from Lydia Hernandez wasn’t like Cricket at all. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t the killer.

  She looked around at the two teenagers. Donovan unfolded himself on the chair, like an origami bird being pulled in two directions, and then heaved his lanky frame out of the chair into a standing position. His tee shirt, emblazoned with a photo of pop star Abby Herrick holding a microphone and singing, caught her eye.

  “Abby Herrick, huh?”

  “I know,” said Donovan. “She’s such an idiot.”

  “What? Who?” Fenway thought Donovan was talking about his mother.

  “Uh, Abby Herrick. Isn’t that who you just said?”

  “Right,” Fenway said. “You’re wearing her shirt because you hate her?”

  Donovan shook his head, like Fenway was too old to get it.

  “Okay,” Fenway said under her breath.

  She looked straight ahead, practically counting the seconds until McVie and Cricket Kapp would return. She looked at the teenagers out of the corner of her eye, and Blair was staring at her.

  She turned her head.

  At one point in her life, she might have smiled to try to get her to open up or to be more friendly. She wasn’t thinking about being nice today.

  “You’re the coroner,” Blair said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve got a dumb baseball stadium name.”

  Fenway hoped her annoyance didn’t show on her face. “Fenway. Yes.”

  Blair paused, thinking. Then she snapped her fingers. “Oh, I got it. I saw your picture at dinner the other night.”

  “God, shut up, Blair,” Donovan said. “No one wants to hear you.”

  Blair shot Donovan a look and kept talking. “We all went over to dinner at Mr. Ferris’s house. Dad was redoing their garden walk and they had to, I don’t know, choose some sort of rocks.”

  “Oh yeah? I go there for dinner sometimes too.”

  “Why does he have pictures of you around?”

  “Probably because I’m his daughter.”

  Blair scrunched up her nose. “Were you adopted?”

  Fenway cleared her throat. “No. My mom was black.”

  “Oh. So Mrs. Ferris isn’t your mom.”

  Fenway snorted. “Hell, no. She’s barely older than me. My father got remarried.”

  Blair narrowed her eyes. “So how come you’re not rich?”

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  A self-satisfied smile touched the corners of Blair’s mouth. “Please. With that dress?”

  Fenway set her mouth in a tight line.

  Blair sat back in her seat and continued to text on her phone. Donovan, still sitting straight up, leaned back in his seat, then took out his phone too.

  Fenway wondered if she had been that irritating when she was a teenager. She suspected her mom would have seen to it to modify her behavior.

  They sat in silence for another few minutes.

  The door opened and McVie entered the room, followed by an angry Cricket Kapp.

  “This is an outrage,” she said, melodrama dripping from her voice. “I can’t believe what we’ve been put through. I can’t believe I’m going to have to drive from this shitty little rinkydink town back to Birdland. It’s insulting.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” McVie said.

  Cricket Kapp’s lips raised into a sneer. “We moved to the coast because it was supposed to be relaxing and laid-back.” She scoffed. “And Jer puts his heart and soul into that stupid landscape business and you all can’t even keep him safe? Come on, kids, let’s get moving.”

  “I do appreciate you driving all this way to identify the body, Mrs. Kapp. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “I hope you appreciate it, after the hell I’ve been through in the last few days. Your deputy in the Paso Querido office wouldn’t even take the missing persons report!”

  “Again, Mrs. Kapp, I apologize for what you’ve been through.” He pulled his notebook out. “In fact, let me take down the information about that phone call. I’ll make sure whoever took your call gets disciplined. I’m embarrassed by how we’ve treated you.”

  Cricket Kapp’s eyes got bigger, as if she hadn’t expected McVie to take her seriously. “Really?”

  “Of course,” McVie said, a soothing tone in his voice.

  “Thank God someone still knows how to treat people,” Cricket said, batting her eyes at McVie. “But I’m sorry to say I didn’t get his name.”

  “That’s okay. Just tell me when you made the call. There are only a couple of people on shift. I’m sure we can narrow it down.”

  “Um,” Cricket Kapp said, “I know I was upset, but I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.”

  “It would still be good to know. We might have been able to prevent this. When did you make the call?”

  Cricket Kapp stammered. “I suppose it was last night. Probably around midnight. When Jer didn’t come home—for the third night in a row.”

  “So you were on the phone with the police at midnight. What did you do after our deputies wouldn’t take the report?”

  “I went to bed.”

  “You were pretty upset, though, right?”

  “I, uh,” Cricket said nervously.

  “What is it?”

  She cleared her throat. “It’s possible I may have been drinking. Just a little. I may have been a little, how should I say this, upset Jer wasn’t home.”

  “Did you suspect anything?”

  Cricket Kapp, thrown off her game, tried to recenter herself. She smiled, a thousand-watt, trophy-wife smile. “Suspect anything? Like what?”

  “Oh, come on, Mom,” Blair said. “They’re cops. They’re going to find out about Dad and all the women he whored around with. Don’t play dumb.”

  A brief pall of indecision came over Cricket’s face. “Okay, fine,” she said, dropping the façade. “Jer cheated on me.”

  “Would you like to come back to a room where we can talk more privately?”

  “What?” Cricket asked. “So you can interrogate me?”

  “Mrs. Kapp, if you talked on the phone with one of our deputies at midnight, that pretty much clears you. That’s the time of death. So all we have to do is get the phone records. There’s no need to interrogate you. But if you know anything about his, uh, dalliances, it’ll give us more leads to go on.”

  Cricket turned beet red. “Okay, fine, I’m sorry,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air dramatically. “I didn’t call in a missing persons report.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No.” And she started to cry, though Fenway noticed her eyes stayed dry. “I’m upset. I know he was sleeping around, but I loved him. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

  “Stop it, Mom,” Donovan snapped. “They don’t care about that. They want to know if you have an alibi.”

  Cricket’s head jerked around. “An alibi?”

  “If you don’t tell them, I will,” Donovan said, standing up. He looked at McVie. “My mom’s dealer came over to sell her some pills.”

  “Donovan!”

  He gave his mother an exasperated look. “Mom, they’re not go
ing to arrest you for buying some Oxy when Dad just got shot.”

  “I’ve never done—”

  “Sheriff, the dealer came over at about eleven-thirty. My mom answered the door, and I heard two voices in the living room, including hers, for about two hours.”

  “Two hours?”

  “Sure. I kind of think the dealer’s got a thing for her.”

  Cricket had turned pale, like she wanted the floor to swallow her up.

  “Oh, don’t be so bashful about it, Mom. Dad rubbed everyone’s nose in his cheating; you could have gotten him back with that guy.”

  Her face red with embarrassment, Cricket firmly said, “That’s enough, Donovan.”

  Blair looked sideways her brother. “And how do you even know? You didn’t go to the midnight movie?”

  Donovan shook his head. “Nope. I was home by eleven.”

  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “You don’t hear anything when you’re texting with Jasper.” Donovan spat the name out sardonically.

  “Shut up, turd.”

  “All right,” McVie interrupted loudly. He turned to Cricket. “Donovan’s right. I’m much more concerned with finding your husband’s killer than with your Oxycontin. Does your, uh, visitor have a name?”

  “Um,” Cricket said, torn. Then, in a small voice, “I just know him as Zoso.”

  “Zoso?”

  “I know him,” Fenway put in. “I can see if he remembers.”

  “Did Mr. Kapp own any firearms?”

  “Not really,” Cricket said. “He had started to collect some antique weapons. Didn’t have anything yet. An old revolver like you see in Westerns. A little fencing sword. Used in some famous movie, I think.”

  “All right,” McVie said. “Offer’s still good if you want to talk to me about anything in private.”

  Cricket paused, then shrugged. “Okay,” she said.

  McVie nodded, and stepped back to the door to open it. Cricket went through first, and McVie shot Fenway a look before going through himself.