Fenway stood for a moment, holding her breath, unblinking at the handgun that had been hidden behind the speaker enclosure. She hadn’t been prepared for this. No evidence bag, no gloves, nothing.
Soft footsteps on the carpet stopped next to her.
“Oh.” It was Charlotte’s voice.
Fenway tensed up at her stepmother being so close. “I’m as surprised as you.”
“That’s a Sig Sauer p226,” Charlotte whispered.
“How can you tell?”
“Double stack magazine instead of the single stack of the p220, and it’s got about an inch more barrel than the p229.”
“I didn’t know you knew your guns so well.”
Charlotte shrugged.
Fenway pointed to the recessed lettering. “It also says ‘Sig Sauer p226’ on the barrel.”
Charlotte smirked. “Well, yes. That was a dead giveaway.”
Fenway turned to her. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Go and grab my fingerprint kit. It should be next to my purse.”
Charlotte nodded and strode purposefully up the aisle.
Fenway watched Charlotte walk away. The last few weeks made Fenway reconsider every assumption she’d made about Charlotte. She and her father might even really be in love, despite the age difference.
Fenway felt a pang of guilt, or maybe even hypocrisy. McVie was a good fourteen years older than she was. Maybe her father and Charlotte shouldn’t be judged like that either.
She shook her head, as if clearing the cobwebs out of it, and turned her attention back to the handgun. She eased up on the pressure she had on the speaker enclosure, but it started to slide back—and silently, too.
Unusual, for sure. It’s not like this speaker enclosure would be pulled in and out frequently. So why the need to have it slide—and so smoothly, too?
Fenway closed her eyes. When had these been installed? Piper had said they’d finished over the weekend.
Friday morning was when Professor Cygnus’s arraignment had been announced. Her father’s too.
She remembered waking up in McVie’s bed, tangled in his sheets, finally together with him the way she’d dreamed about almost since the moment she met him. And he’d felt the same way. He might have even felt it more strongly than she did.
The phone call waking them up, McVie rolling over to answer it even though Fenway was trying to distract him. The arraignment would be the day after the Veterans Day three-day weekend.
Did she love him too?
Maybe she hadn’t heard him correctly. It had been loud, a man had been shot and killed—McVie didn’t know what danger he might be running into.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to block everything out but the speaker enclosure and the gun.
When had the order to install the speaker enclosures been created? Piper could likely find out who’d been in charge of the audio system.
And no one in the courtroom had gloves on.
She wondered whose fingerprints might be on the gun. The shell casing too.
Charlotte walked toward Fenway, holding the fingerprint kit lightly by her beautifully manicured fingernails.
“Thanks,” Fenway said. “Set it next to my feet for now.” She motioned to Jennifer Kim with her head. “Can you come over here?”
Kim hurried behind Fenway. “What do you need?”
“Hold this open for me.”
“Okay.” Jennifer Kim reached out and gripped the side of the speaker enclosure with both hands.
“It’ll try to slide back in if you don’t hold it firmly,” Fenway said.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it.”
Fenway took her hands off, and Jennifer was right: she had it. The spring-loaded mechanism didn’t faze Jennifer at all as she held it open.
“Do you know if this was part of the original audio design?” Fenway asked Kim, putting on another pair of gloves and getting an evidence bag for the gun.
Jennifer shook her head. “I don’t know anything about the audio design of the courthouse. I wasn’t on any of the design committees. I’m just as lost in this new courtroom as you are.”
“Kind of an unlucky start, isn’t it?”
“What, a murder in the new courtroom on the first day?” Kim nodded. “Yeah, I guess it really couldn’t get much more worse from here, huh?”
“No, I guess it couldn’t. Maybe an earthquake or terrorist attack.”
“Or a tornado full of sharks. Something like that.”
“Right.” Fenway reached out her gloved hand and took the Sig Sauer, placing it in an evidence baggie.
“Holy shit,” Jennifer Kim said under her breath. “That was in the speaker enclosure?”
“It sure was,” Fenway muttered. “And you feel how easily and silently this slides in and out?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone spent a lot of money to get this sliding mechanism in here, and they made sure that it was as quiet as possible.” Fenway looked at the gun in the baggie and looked at the hole in the wall with the ledge behind it. “Seems like a lot of trouble to go through.”
“I don’t know,” Kim said. “Maybe it was opportunistic.”
“Opportunistic? Like whoever shot Professor Cygnus just happened to pull on the speaker enclosure and find a great hiding place for a gun?”
“Well, no, that doesn’t make much sense.” She paused. “Can I let this go now?”
“In a second—I have to test the ledge inside there.” Fenway put the bagged gun into the fingerprint kit and looked at Jennifer. “Do you know when the metal detectors were set up?”
“They were installed yesterday,” Piper said.
Both Fenway and Jennifer jumped at the sound of Piper’s voice.
Piper grimaced. She held her open laptop in one hand and typed with the other. A long Ethernet cable trekked down the center aisle behind her. “Oh—sorry. Didn’t mean to sneak up on you. But I figured you’d need access to some of the information I was able to pull up.”
“I hope none of this was pulled up through unauthorized access,” Jennifer said icily.
Fenway rolled her eyes. “Jennifer, we’re talking about trying to solve a murder with limited resources here. I think we’re allowed to provide a little wiggle room so we can have access to the information.”
Piper shook her head. “Nope. I didn’t need any authorized access to get into this. All public records. You have to know where to look.” She smiled at Jennifer Kim, half in amusement but half in mocking as well. “Sorry to disappoint you. I know it’s your lifelong dream to see me behind bars.”
“It’s where your boss would have gone after the arraignment,” Kim said to Piper.
Fenway grunted. “I’m glad you feel comfortable enough with me to tell me my father’s going to jail right in front of me.”
Jennifer paused, taken slightly aback. “I didn’t think you two got along.”
“Well, I guess we don’t, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear you gleefully say you can’t wait to get him in prison.” Fenway reached down and pulled out the cylindrical plastic container of gunshot residue pads. She unscrewed the lid and carefully pulled one out, wiping the ledge with the pad.
“The metal detectors were installed yesterday,” said Piper, tapping on the laptop keyboard. “Two officers performed a sweep of the courthouse building yesterday morning, and after about forty-five minutes, they didn’t find anything.”
“What about the audio service?” Fenway looked at the pad. Several small spots on the pad were turning a bright blue. The gun had been recently fired—which indicated that it was likely the murder weapon.
“Everything was installed about two weeks ago by a company called Yesterday Audio,” Piper said, reading from the screen.
“Yesterday Audio?”
“I guess they specialize in antique radios, tube amplifiers, turntables, that kind of thing. They were out of here the day before Halloween.” Then Piper squinted at the screen. “Wait—hold on. That’s not quite right. They reported a recall on the speakers they’d installed and asked for access to the building to replace them.”
Fenway’s ears perked up. “When did they report that?”
Piper clicked a few times. “Saturday morning. About ten o’clock.”
“You can let it go back now, Jennifer.” As Jennifer Kim eased the speaker enclosure back in place, Fenway turned back to Piper. “That’s odd that it was over the weekend. And were they able to get access to the courtroom?”
“Yes. It was authorized on Saturday morning—”
“By who?”
Piper clicked another four of five times. “Hang on. Huh. That’s weird.”
“What’s weird.”
“Signed off by Jennifer Kim.”
Fenway’s head swiveled to the ada.
“You authorized Yesterday Audio to come in and reinstall these speaker enclosures?”
“Uh…” Kim blinked several times. “What did I supposedly do?”
“You signed off on the audio company coming in an replacing the speakers.”
“Oh—well, what, that was Saturday? Oh, right. I had to prepare for not one, but two arraignments, and both of them the most famous people in town. I had my hands full, and so did my staff. Someone said there was an issue with some equipment safety recall, so I signed it. I didn’t know it was the speaker enclosure.” Kim set her jaw. “But look, even if they told me it was the speaker enclosures, and even if they’d told me they were installing a sliding drawer mechanism, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. Wiring, electrical work, appliances—if the people who installed say there’s a safety issue, I let ’em fix it.”
“But why did you sign off on it?”
“Because no one above me was working on Saturday. It was just me.”
“Just you? High-profile cases like these and your boss doesn’t come in?”
“You’ll notice that he’s not at the prosecution table either. It’s the boring arraignment part of it. The trial? Yeah, you can be sure that he’ll be first chair. But this is the arraignment. He’s back in his office taking questions from the press, probably.”
“So who came to do the replacement?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who was it? Or was it more than one person? Did they have names?”
“Oh, honestly, Fenway, I didn’t even see. Someone came in and handed the clipboard to me. I think I was on the phone.” Kim tapped her foot. “Okay, yes, maybe that’s not the best way to do business, but I was swamped. I couldn’t do one more thing.”
“Well, I think I know how the gun got into the courtroom. It didn’t get it past the metal detector this morning.”
“It didn’t?”
“No. The audio company brought the gun in. Inside the speaker enclosure.”
“But there were still metal detectors here on Saturday.” Kim frowned and crossed her arms.
“That’s true, but the speakers have big magnets in them. They wouldn’t have put them through the detectors. They might have searched the boxes they were in, and I’m sure they had the audio installer walk through the metal detector, but no one checked for weapons inside the speaker enclosure.
Jennifer Kim shook her head. “You mean that I signed off on the people who brought the gun into the courtroom?”
Fenway tilted her head. “It’s possible. It’s only a theory, and it’s a lot of conjecture, but it seems like a reasonable scenario.” She started to snap off her gloves, and then reconsidered. While she had the gloves on, she wanted to see if she could find the second bullet.
The first bullet might be recoverable too, if it had been a through-and-through, but from the back of the gallery to in front of the defense table had to be thirty or thirty-five feet, easily, and she didn’t think the 9mm bullet could go all the way through a person’s head from that distance. She tried to remember the rows and columns of the calculations from the class where she studied the mass and force of different projectiles, but it wasn’t coming to her.
Still, it was worth examining the body again for an exit wound.
Fenway picked up the fingerprint kit and her eyes scanned both the mahogany façade of the judge’s bench and the back wall. She pushed her way through the gate, Piper following her trying to pull the ridiculously long ethernet cable out of the way.
“What are you doing?” Piper asked.
“Looking for bullet holes.”
“You thinking it was a through-and-through?”
Fenway shook her head. “No, but I should check.”
“Well then—”
“Piper,” Fenway said, as quietly as she could, as she crouched over the head of the dead professor, “how many shots did you hear?”
“Two,” Piper replied, keeping her distance from the dead body and trying to look calm but failing.
“Right. And were the shots ‘bang-bang’—quick and right next to each other, or was there a small pause?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. Maybe there was a small pause.”
Fenway nodded. “The second bullet whizzed right past my ear as I leaned to the side.”
Piper’s face went ashen. “You mean—you almost got hit?”
“I think so,” Fenway said, “but lower your voice. Maybe the shooter was nervous and didn’t intend to fire the second bullet.”
“Maybe the first bullet was the one that missed, and the shooter had better aim on the second.”
Fenway shook her head. “No, I don’t think that’s what happened. The bullet hit Cygnus right in the head. That’s either excellent aim or an incredible coincidence. And I don’t really like coincidences in my line of work.”
“So you don’t think the second bullet hit the professor?”
“I don’t. I think it hit the front panel of the judge’s desk somewhere. And if we can find the bullet, we’ll be that much closer to finding the killer.” Fenway looked over her shoulder. Most of them had moved from the gallery and were crowded in the back, talking to each other. Only Evans Dahl, Leda Nedermeyer, and Judith Cygnus remained sitting in the chairs in the gallery. No one was paying attention to them.
Piper spoke in a whisper. “Do you really think it was one of the people in the courtroom?”
Fenway grimaced. “Ordinarily I’d say no. A shooter would want to leave the scene as soon as possible. But there are a couple of things that bug me.”
“What?”
“First of all, the gun—and I’m positive that’s the murder weapon—was placed in its hiding place after the shooting. I can’t imagine that anyone would have had time to put the gun behind the speaker enclosure and leave the courtroom. There wasn’t enough time.”
“I don’t know, Fenway,” Piper said carefully. “There was a lot of confusion after those gunshots. Sure, the shooter would have to be quick, but I bet it could be done. Especially with enough practice.” She paused. “But there’s a second thing, too, isn’t there?”
Fenway nodded.
“What is it?”
“I think I’m the second target,” Fenway said. “And the shooter hasn’t killed me yet.”
Piper was silent.
Fenway carefully lifted Cygnus’s head. The bullet wound was a clear red splotch that had made a mess of his temple and the surrounding area. She carefully scoured his head with her eyes. She searched through his thinning hair, then his neck and throat—although she was sure the angle of the projectile wouldn’t result in an exit wound so low, but it paid to be thorough. It was as she suspected: there was no exit wound. When the body got to San Miguelito, Dr. Yasuda could dig it out of his skull.
Fenway then studied the rest of Professor Cygnus’s body. If that second bullet had hit him, it would have been lower. Given where Fenway had sat, it could have been his lower torso. Maybe as low as his thigh, although he was behind the table.
Piper kept silent as Fenway searched for a bullet rip in clothing and the sight of any blood, but again found nothing.
“It’s got to be in that wooden panel,” Fenway said. She put Cygnus back into the position she found him and stood, feeling her back open up and give a couple of short satisfying cracks. Ugh. Not even thirty yet and already her back was popping like she was eligible for the senior discount.
She got her phone out of her pocket and turned the flashlight on. She briefly worried about the battery, but Piper had enough cords to recharge it if she needed to. Besides, they’d probably get out of here in the next hour, easy.
Wait, no. No they wouldn’t. McVie and the other officers were looking for the gun. The gun Fenway had found in the back wall.
“Piper, did you message McVie that I found the gun?”
“Not yet.”
“Do it now. He needs to know that they can stop looking for the gun out there, because it’s in here.”
“Right.”
Piper disappeared with her laptop back up to the judge’s bench, pulling the Ethernet cable with her. It snaked around Fenway’s ankle. Looking down, Fenway stepped over it as she kept shining the phone’s light on the front mahogany panel of the judge’s bench.
There it was. A shadowy pockmark with the faintest hint of brass, about three feet off the ground.
She shined her light closer. Surprisingly, it didn’t go through the judge’s bench—the mahogany must be thick and not a veneer. She wondered how much that cost the taxpayers. This courtroom was palatial in its extravagance.
Fenway turned her head around to look at the back of the room. She closed one eye. It was a straight line from the bullet hole in the wood, right past the gallery seat in the front row that had been Fenway’s, all the way to the seat in the back row where she had found the shell casing.
“I was almost killed,” Fenway murmured.
In spite of the chill that ran down her spine, Fenway chuckled.
It means I’m getting closer to whoever is behind the conspiracy.
There was no way she was getting the bullet out of the mahogany. It was too far in. Maybe the San Miguelito csi team could do it. Or maybe they’d have to cut around the bullet. She knew from her class that walls with embedded bullets often had to be cut in order to preserve the bullet’s shape.
She sat down, took her gloves off, and exhaled.
“You okay, Fenway?” asked Piper.
“Yeah. Found the bullet hole. Judge Miller was lucky that it didn’t go all the way through the wood. She might have gotten one in the leg.”
“Bulletproof fiberglass.”
“What?”
“There’s a layer of bulletproof fiberglass behind the wood panel. It’s in the jury box and the witness stand too.”
“You’re kidding.”
Piper shrugged. “Can’t be too safe, right?”
“I mean, I’ve heard of bulletproof glass in armored cars, but in courtrooms? I didn’t know it was in the budget.”
“It was surprisingly affordable. I spec’d it out myself. It wasn’t the u752 level 8, of course, but it’ll work.”
“The what level 8?”
“Level 8 protects against armor-piercing bullets from sniper rifles. I figured there wouldn’t be a whole lot of people bringing sniper rifles in here.”
“You know, for not knowing anything about guns, you sure know a lot about guns.”
“I don’t know how to shoot them effectively, but you need anything else, I’m your girl.” Piper’s laptop dinged. “Oh, all right, here’s McVie’s response now.” She ducked her head back, then audibly sighed. “Well, that’s no good.”
“What is it?”
“He says they’ve reviewed camera footage, and they’re sure the shooter is still in the building.”
“The cameras all worked except the ones in the courtroom?”
“I guess so. He says that even though the gun turned up in here, they’re not letting anyone go until the shooter is caught.” Another ding. “And he says the system’s locks are all tied together. They can’t unlock the courtroom doors without opening the outside doors too.”
“Are you kidding? We’re stuck in here until they let everyone out?”
“I wish I were.”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“You should have seen the price of the multi-zone locking system. We never thought we’d justify the expense.”
“You spec’d a multi-zone locking system too?”
Piper shrugged. “I’m good at research.”
Fenway stood and lowered her voice. “Let’s hope you’re good at figuring out how to get to the outside world before we all go crazy in here.”
Piper bobbed her head from side to side. “At least you found where the shooter stashed the gun. Now if the killer’s in here with us, they won’t have their weapon.”
Fenway nodded. “True.” She looked across the courtroom at Rose Morgan. “But I wish they’d open the doors so we can either interview Rose or take her into custody. I think we’d all feel a little safer with her out of the courtroom.”
Piper stared over at Rose. “You don’t think she’s a little too obvious of a suspect?”
Fenway rolled her eyes. “And Dez says I watch too many cop shows. I think Rose is just obvious enough.”
Piper shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, she’s obviously hiding something.”
“I don’t have a lot of faith in our justice system if you think when anyone exercises their Fourth Amendment rights they automatically have something to hide.”
“This isn’t just anyone,” Fenway said. “Rose stole the usb drive from our last murder victim’s office. She ran away after I tried to arrest her. She assaulted me.”
“She threw a hardbound edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare at you. I’m not sure I’d call that assault.”
“It’s enough to get her a night in jail.”
Piper was silent for a moment. “Hey, Fenway, speaking of usb drives, did you take a look at the anonymous gift I heard someone left on your desk on Saturday morning?”
“It’s amazing you didn’t get caught.” Fenway nodded, but frowned. “I started going through the files you copied, but there’s so much information on there. I didn’t get very far, but I know it’s important. I was planning to work on the files more today, after the arraignments.” She glanced at the clock on her phone. “Half past ten. I should have been working on them by now.”
“You have the usb stick with you, don’t you? I think I saw it when you emptied out your purse.”
Fenway nodded. “I copied it to my home pc over the weekend. I didn’t want anything to mysteriously happen to it at the office.”
Piper tilted her head, a quizzical look on her face.
Fenway leaned over the tall judge’s bench and whispered, “We think there’s a mole in the sheriff’s department.”
Piper recoiled. “What?”
“I know. I didn’t want to tell you before because we’re trying to keep it hush-hush.”
“A mole for what, exactly?”
Fenway shook her head. “We’re not sure. We believe whoever it is let Robert Stotsky into Dylan Richards’ jail cell to kill him.”
“Wait—you’re telling me that this has been going on for six months? You knew there was a mole in the department for six months and you didn’t think to tell me?”
“We don’t know for sure, Piper. And we didn’t know who we could trust.”
Piper looked at Fenway incredulously. “You can trust me, surely.”
“No one knows about this but me and McVie. Dez and Mark don’t even know about it. Well—Dez has figured it out, but I didn’t tell her. And you know how much I trust both of them. Rachel doesn’t even know.”
The corners of Piper’s mouth turned down. She went back to typing.
They were silent for a moment. Fenway turned and surveyed the gallery again.
Rose Morgan was still sitting morosely in the back, staring with unfocused eyes at the wall to the right of the flagpoles.
Evans Dahl still sat with his left leg on the chair next to him, looking more uncomfortable. Sweat formed on his brow, and he was blinking quite a bit behind his glasses. Fenway wondered if he needed another couple of ibuprofen.
Leda Nedermeyer stood up, a stricken look on her face, and made her way slowly over to Judith Cygnus. Hmm. The mistress and the wife—Fenway wondered if Nedermeyer would apologize or argue. She caught Jennifer Kim’s eye and motioned with her head towards Nedermeyer. Kim turned her head to watch, then nodded at Fenway.
Fenway turned back around to address Piper. “Oh, come on, you’re honestly telling me you’re hurt that I didn’t tell you about the mole in the department? You’re literally the third person who knows.”
“You said Dez was the third.”
“Fine, the fourth. But you’re the first person I’ve told. And I’m only telling you because you don’t work in the department anymore and you don’t have access.”
Piper was still frowned, but her eyes sparkled. “Actually, Fenway, I do still have access.”
“Not the kind of access that would allow a person with a gun to come into the courtroom, though.”
“That’s true,” Piper said, “but the kind of access where I can still get to the files with the forensic accounting information.”
Fenway raised her eyebrows.
“While you’ve been interviewing Ms. Schimmelhorn and Mr. Heissner, I’ve been doing some more digging into the payments made between all the parties involved in the embargoed oil transport. Including Global Advantage Executive Consulting.”
“Is that—is that legal?”
Piper grinned. “I’ve still got a valid username and password into the network. And the way my separation agreement was worded, I’m officially a county employee until the end of my unused vacation period.”
Fenway gaped at her.
“I know. California is an accrual state. I guess the county used a template that didn’t take that into account. Kind of a loophole.”
“But you weren’t planning to point it out to them.”
Piper’s grin widened—then faltered as her eyes focused behind Fenway.
Fenway spun around in time to see Judith Cygnus slap Leda Nedermeyer across the face. The English department head seethed with anger, drew herself up to her full height, and pointed at the professor’s widow.
“You can’t get away with that, you bitch! You’re the one who killed him!”