An unkindness of ravens took flight at the sound of the gunshot, shaking one of the cypress trees on the edge of the field. They broke apart the rays of the sun as they rose into the air.
It seemed to take a long time for Donovan’s body to fall, crumpling to the ground. Fenway saw her hand reach out toward him, grasping for a rip cord that wasn’t there.
Fenway closed her eyes.
She heard the waves crash into the rocks and the cypress tree, heard their deafening cacophony merge with the chattering of the ravens and the gunshot echoing across the field, echoing to the cliff, echoing to the butterfly waystation, and to the grove of trees, and beyond that to the dead-end street, and beyond that to Fenway’s apartment, where her mobile phone waited for her, and from which, twenty minutes later, choking back tears and trying to stop from shaking, she dialed 911.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
MILLICENT TATE FLITTED between interviews at Channel 12 and the Estancia Courier, and had to juggle half a dozen scheduling sessions with constituents as well. She confidently said there had been a big break in the Jeremy Kapp murder case, and Fenway was unavailable—fighting for justice was more important than her campaign schedule. Millicent had no choice in the matter—Fenway was a mess. After Celeste Sandoval took Fenway’s statement, Millicent spent two hours giving Fenway a pep talk and pulling her into and out of the shower, getting her makeup and clothes on.
Millicent drove Fenway to her polling place, a church about six blocks away from the apartment complex. Fenway pulled the ice pack off her knee, and got out of the car, walking purposefully, trying to minimize her limp, a serious expression on her face, making sure she looked calm and professional. She stood in line, went into the voting booth, then stood a hundred feet from the entrance and took pictures with Millicent, and then by herself, the oval “I Voted” sticker prominent on her lapel.
Back in the BMW, Millicent turned to Fenway. “Can you do any more campaign activities today?”
Fenway swallowed hard. “Absolutely. I’m ready. Lunch with the paramedics’ union, right? Then do you think we can reschedule any of the events I had to miss this morning? Maybe squeeze them in?”
Millicent looked hard at her, and then sighed. “I’m not sure you need to do this to yourself, Fenway,” she said softly. “This morning, when I told the reporters outside the sheriff’s department there was a break in the case, and your job was more important than campaigning, you should have heard the cheer from the people on the sidewalk. I’m all about optics and getting in front of your opponent and controlling the story. Well, this is a good story. And your opponent has gone into hiding.”
“You think I can win without doing any more campaign events?”
“I do,” Millicent said. “I think getting back to work and closing this case out is the best thing you can do for your campaign.” She leaned forward. “And if you ever repeat that, I’ll work for your opponent next election.”
Fenway smiled, but she knew it was a tired, sad smile. “Thank you.” She closed her eyes and immediately saw Donovan in front of her, gun at his temple. “And I feel like I need to talk to Cricket. She lost her husband last week and her son this week. She’s going to be a mess, and she deserves to hear the news from me.”
Millicent shook her head, a smile playing at the corner of her mouth. “And that’s why this county loves you, Fenway.” She started the car. “I predict a landslide.”
In front of her office building, Fenway struggled to get out of the BMW, then stood blinking in the sunshine. She looked to her left; the parking garage was already under repair, with a crane on one side, where the blast had been. A few steel girders were already in place. She walked into the coroner’s office and immediately saw Dez.
“I heard what happened,” said Dez. “You okay?”
Fenway smiled and lowered her voice. “No, I’m not okay. I’ve got to make it through the end of the day, and I’ve got to go to my victory party. I’d call in sick tomorrow, but there’s too much to do.”
Dez looked at Fenway’s face, searching for answers to questions she hadn’t asked. “Okay,” she said. “What do you need to get through your day?”
“I need the door closed,” Fenway said. “I need to finish up some paperwork. And then I need a ride to Paso Querido to talk to Cricket Kapp. She deserves to know what happened.”
“I can shut your door,” Dez said, “and I can take you to P.Q.”
“Thanks, Dez.”
Fenway hobbled to her office, shut the door, and sat behind the desk. Turning on her PC, she pulled out all her police identification, pulled her favorite pen out of her pencil cup, then got Incident Report Form 310B from her filing cabinet. She spent the next couple of hours printing other forms and filling them out.
At about two o’clock—she hadn’t eaten and didn’t want to—Dez knocked on her door and told her it was time to go to Paso Querido to see Cricket Kapp. Dez wore an “I Voted” sticker, and Fenway remembered she had the post-election party to go to. She wasn’t sure she could put a smile on her face at the victory party.
She looked at the forms she’d filled out and sighed. She got up, grabbed her purse, and walked with Dez to her car.
“Where did you park?” Fenway asked.
“With the garage under construction, a couple blocks away.” Dez smiled. “Leaving my Impala on the street. What’s the world coming to?”
“Yeah,” Fenway mumbled, her eyes on the ground. While the murder of Jeremy Kapp would be closed, it had uncovered a conspiracy that ran deep and wide, a conspiracy which might be at the center of the two other murders that Fenway needed to solve. She realized she—along with Piper, Dez, and McVie—had barely scratched the surface of the issue, and this all started with her looking into the deaths of Carl Cassidy and Lewis Fairweather in the refinery accident. It hadn’t even been a week since Lana had asked her to look into her husband’s death, and already it had resulted in more pain and anguish than she cared to think about.
“All right,” Dez said, when they arrived at the Impala, “you can’t be like this when you talk to Mrs. Kapp. She’s going to pick up on your energy, and it’s negative. You’ve got to figure out how to pull yourself out of it.” She unlocked the car and they both got in.
“Her son—”
“Yes,” Dez said, starting the engine and pulling out onto the street, “her son killed himself in front of you this morning. The wounds are still fresh. You have every right to be shell-shocked and stunned. But you don’t have the right to do it in front of her. She lost half her family in the last week. You don’t get to grieve in front of her. You have to receive the grief, and you’re going to do it professionally.”
Fenway looked at Dez, and she studied the older woman’s face.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Fenway said.
“I know I’m right. You going to do it?”
Fenway was quiet.
“You have permission from me to fall apart as soon as you get back in the car. We’ve got a twenty-minute drive back to Estancia. You’ve just got to take her grief while you’re talking to her.”
“I can do that,” Fenway murmured.
They pulled off Querido Valley Road onto Whippoorwill Terrace, up the long driveway, and came to a stop in front of the door.
Fenway closed her eyes, and again she saw Donovan pull the gun up to his temple.
“Are you ready?” Dez asked gently.
I’m never going to be ready, Fenway thought, but she nodded.
She opened the door and got out.
WHEN FENWAY TOLD HER Donovan was dead, Cricket Kapp fell apart. She sank to her knees, wailing, in a way she hadn’t even approached when informed about her husband’s death. Fenway had been professional, and had given her a shoulder to cry on, quite literally; she helped Cricket get up, then walked with her into her kitchen where Fenway made a pot of herbal tea and Cricket calmed down.
Cricket asked a lot of questions about Donovan’s last moments, and Fenway answe
red them as clearly as possible, leaving out the speech about heroism and cowardice, and leaving out the gunshot and the gore and the ravens.
Blair was back from her visit to USC, where Jasper had broken up with her the night before. Fenway wondered what kind of parent would let her eighteen-year-old daughter skip a Monday at school in order to go shack up with her boyfriend, but she bit her tongue—Cricket had been through enough. Besides, it might have been another teacher in-service day. Blair came out from her bedroom halfway through the interview, her clothes and hair again startlingly like Cricket’s. Listening to music with her headphones, she had neither heard Fenway and Dez enter nor her mother’s stricken cry. But after Cricket told Blair what had happened, mother and daughter cried together.
After about half an hour, they had no more questions, and Fenway left the business card of a grief counseling service on the end table. The card didn’t seem to be enough to contain the emotions of the moment. Neither Cricket nor Blair got up from the sofa, and Dez and Fenway saw themselves out.
Although she had gotten permission from Dez to break down emotionally when back in the car, Fenway shed no more tears. She looked out the window at the Birdland greenery, then the scrub brush, then the trees. She looked up at the sky, where she saw a single raven flying across the highway until it darted into a clump of ironwoods.
She thought of the party she would be going to, the smile she would have to force all night. She thought of how hard Millicent had worked, and all the campaign workers and volunteers. She thought of the old department store her father had rented for the campaign headquarters and how it would be empty the next week.
And she thought of the murders she hadn’t solved yet.
She thought of Dr. Jacob Tassajera.
She thought of Rory Velásquez, a kid with a promising future, taken too soon, another innocent bystander caught in the middle.
She thought of Carl Cassidy and Lewis Fairweather, two Ferris Energy employees who saw too much and paid for it with their lives.
Fenway knew her work was just beginning.
THE PARTY WAS IN FULL swing when Fenway arrived about a quarter after five. Dez had insisted she eat something, and once she had the first bite of the turkey sandwich Dez brought her, she realized how ravenous she had been. Millicent wore a flattering red dress, her hair done up, and Fenway was comfortable in a navy business suit, even if it looked a bit conservative.
Fenway saw her father across the room. Nathaniel Ferris was in a similar suit to the one he had worn to the George Nidever Dinner, but the suit was neatly pressed, his shirt was crisp, and the crestfallen look that had been on his face was replaced by a radiant smile. Next to him, and looking radiant herself, was Charlotte. Her evening dress was more subdued than what she usually wore, and her eyes looked a bit tired—although Fenway was probably the only one who would notice.
Ferris caught Fenway’s eye and raised his glass—it looked like scotch. Fenway smiled and nodded in return.
Callahan appeared by her side. “Hey, Miss Stevenson,” he said.
“Hey, Brian. I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Rachel invited me.” He pointed, a beer in his hand, at Rachel, who was animatedly talking to Millicent.
“Rachel invited you, huh?”
Callahan shrugged. “Yeah. We got to talking when I was protecting you.”
“You guys dating?”
“No. Well, not yet, anyway.” He took a sip of his drink. “Oh, I hear congratulations are in order.”
“They haven’t announced anything yet, Brian. Don’t jinx it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of jinxing anything.” Brian smirked. “I meant for closing the Jeremy Kapp case.”
“Oh,” Fenway said. “Thanks, I guess.”
“You’re not happy about it?”
“You didn’t hear what happened?”
“No,” Callahan said. “It’s all very hush-hush. Millicent Tate has been saying there was a big break in the case, and you were busy making sure the suspect was apprehended.”
“Did she say ‘apprehended’?”
“Yeah. Did the suspect get away or something? Off on a technicality?”
Fenway hesitated. “He committed suicide right in front of me.”
“Oh.” Callahan winced. “I guess I put my foot right in it. I’m sorry. And now you have to show up all smiles at this party.” He looked at her. “You okay?”
“I wasn’t okay earlier. I’m doing better now.”
“All right,” Callahan said. “You let me know if you need anything.”
“Will do.”
Fenway made the rounds with her supporters and volunteers and campaign staff, shaking a lot of hands, kissing a lot of cheeks. She had to resist the urge to check her watch—the minutes seemed to crawl by. She hoped the results would be in quickly after the polls closed at eight o’clock, because she didn’t think she could take another hour or two—or three or four—of not knowing. Of having to be the candidate for any longer than she had to.
She was talking to a woman who said she had made over a thousand calls for Fenway when the screen at the front of the room turned on, showing Channel 12’s newsroom cutting away from the newly elected governor’s victory celebration.
“And for local elections,” the anchorwoman said, “with forty-five percent of the precincts reporting, we’re projecting Fenway Stevenson will be the winner of the coroner’s race in Dominguez County.” A bar graph appeared on screen; Fenway had more than three-quarters of the vote.
She didn’t think she had been stressed about it—there were certainly far more important things to worry about—but as soon as she heard the words come out of the anchorwoman’s mouth, she felt lighter and stronger.
The anchorwoman reviewed other local elections too—as expected, McVie’s handpicked successor, Gretchen Donnelly, won the sheriff’s race handily. The mayor’s race was closer, with Barry Klein and McVie within a hundred votes of each other—but Klein was in the lead.
“Congratulations!” Fenway turned and saw Millicent Tate smiling and happier than she had ever seen her. Millicent pulled her into a hug, bouncing her side to side. “You better enjoy this moment,” Millicent said into her ear. “Very few people in this world ever win an election. You’ve done well. Your father is delighted. And he’s proud of you too.”
Fenway drew in her breath sharply. “Thank you, Millicent. Tell him he could say that to my face every once in a while.”
“Have a drink or something,” Millicent said, still embracing her. “You need to look like you’re enjoying yourself, like you want to be coroner.”
“You know I want to be coroner.”
“I know it,” Millicent said, “but the cameras need to see it.”
“You’re right,” Fenway said.
“Of course I’m right.” Millicent broke from the embrace and looked Fenway in the face, holding her by her upper arms. “And before you spend the next twenty minutes trying to figure out how to ask me when you can leave, you need to stay here at least another hour. Minimum.”
“I have a lot of work to do tomorrow.”
“Of course you do,” Millicent said, smirking. “You were a refreshing candidate to work for, Fenway. Infuriating, but refreshing.”
Five minutes later, Fenway was summoned to a side room to take a call from a subdued Dr. Richard Ivanovich.
“Congratulations on a well-run campaign,” he said, a little robotically.
“You too,” Fenway said.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t—” Then he caught himself, and Fenway heard silence on the other end for a few seconds.
“Dr. Ivanovich? Are you still there?”
“Best of luck for the next four years,” he said, and hung up.
Fenway felt oddly calm. She left the room and told Millicent, and Millicent got up in front of the room, told everyone Ivanovich had conceded, and a huge roar went up from the two hundred or so attendees. Millicent had a victory speech prepared, and Fenw
ay read it with animation and effervescence, although she barely processed what she was saying. As she finished, she saw on the screen that Barry Klein had widened his lead over McVie to four percentage points, with sixty percent of the precincts reporting, and Fenway felt her heart sink.
Then it struck her how much she missed McVie, not just how much she missed the ebb and flow of their bodies together, but how much she missed his camaraderie, how much she missed working on cases with him. The election cycle had robbed her of a lot of joy the last three months.
The camera operator from Channel 12 started to pack up; Fenway supposed it was to cover other, closer races. Perhaps even the mayoral race.
She distracted herself by thanking supporter after supporter profusely, expressing her appreciation to volunteer after volunteer, and shaking hands with all the staff people who had worked under Millicent. She remembered more names than she expected to, and she was somewhat astonished they all chose to support and work for her, giving their money, time, and effort to get her elected.
When Fenway finally checked the time on her phone, she was surprised it was almost ten o’clock, and she was far from the first person to leave the party. She told everyone she had work early in the morning, there were still open investigations, and the people of this county didn’t hire her to come in late after a night of celebrating. Her supporters—about sixty were left—cheered her short speech, and let her leave. Fenway walked out of the building and realized her car was still in the evidence lot. She sighed.
A beige Toyota Highlander pulled into the parking lot and Fenway felt her pulse race a little bit. It was McVie. He was in a dark gray suit with a light gray shirt and a blue-and-red striped tie. He looked good.
She started to walk over to the Highlander. The driver’s side window rolled down.
“Hey, Craig.”
“Hey, Fenway. Am I late to the party?”
“It’s still going, but I’m leaving. I’ve got work in the morning, you know.”
The Candidate Coroner Page 33