Fenway walked back to the nook, slowly, and noticed a few pairs of eyes following her. None burned more harshly than those of Evans Dahl, who looked sickly and pained, but whose flaming anger at Fenway talking to Rose was evident.
“I’ve got some other interesting stuff that I found too,” Piper said.
“On more than just the money laundering? On my father’s murder case maybe?”
“Nothing on that quite yet,” Piper said, “though since ada Kim was planning to introduce more charges, and that Bryce Heissner is set to take over as ceo when your dad gets fired, I have a few more roads to go down.”
“You almost seem to relish this,” Fenway said.
“I kind of do,” Piper said. “I mean, I know that what you and your dad and your stepmom are going through is horrible, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But figuring out the pieces of how this all fits together is, uh, an adrenalin rush, I guess.”
“It’s okay, Piper. You can enjoy this. I do, too. It’s probably why I stuck around as coroner.”
Piper breathed a sigh of relief. “Yeah. I guess you understand what it means. It’s like one of those massive video game puzzles masquerading as an adventure game. Only it’s real.”
“And you don’t regenerate when you get killed,” Fenway said drily.
“Right.”
They were back in the nook, and each of them took a seat where they’d been before.
“So what is it?”
“So—first of all, I still think Judith Cygnus is a viable suspect,” Piper said. “He was cheating on her and she didn’t want to be the laughingstock of the county anymore.”
“She’s known about the affair the whole time,” Fenway said. “She said she was relieved that he had someone to, uh, experience his passion about Shakespeare with. Apparently there was only so much Merchant of Venice she could take.”
“It’s a nice story,” Piper said. “But I know a few poly people and they’re not like that at all. And everyone else I know gets really pissed off when their partner cheats on them.”
“It’s not poly, Piper. It’s—I don’t really know what it is, but I think I believe her.” She remembered how hurt she’d been when McVie had tried to repair his marriage to Amy, even though she’d cheated on him. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this, Piper, but you know Craig tried to get back together with Amy. Even after he found out that Amy had been cheating on him. And with Amy, it wasn’t a one-time thing. It was something that went on for months. It wasn’t all about the sex, either. But he still thought they had something worth saving.” She looked down at her hands. “And the Cygnuses were together for twice as long as Craig and Amy were. They raised kids together. They built a life together. That’s not something you throw away, I guess.” Fenway laughed. “I mean, I wouldn’t know, not really. I haven’t even had a serious relationship yet. Not one that’s lasted more than a few months. But Craig went through a lot of effort and it just brought him pain.”
Piper nodded. “I guess. I mean, I’d kill Migs if he cheated on me, but he and I haven’t been going out that long. Maybe if we’d been together for years it would feel different.”
Fenway shrugged. “What do I know? Nothing. Only that it’s not a foregone conclusion that Judith Cygnus wanted her husband dead just because he had a decade-long affair. It’s not something you’d see on a tv sitcom, but it didn’t necessarily mean they didn’t have a happy marriage.”
Piper was quiet for a moment.
“Did you have anything else?”
“Yeah. The real reason I wanted to talk to you. You know how I said that Leda Nedermeyer had been at ucla as a student when your professor from Western Washington was a grad student?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, that’s not all I found out about Leda.” Piper leaned forward. “Professor Cygnus sued her for copyright infringement three years ago.”
“Sued—three years—” Fenway couldn’t get the words out, but then her thoughts arranged themselves. “So, Cygnus and Nedermeyer are having an affair. And it’s been going on for about a decade. So what happened three years ago?”
“I guess Professor Nedermeyer wrote a textbook on reading classic literature. It’s not that popular, but there are a few universities who use it as part of their curricula.” Piper looked sideways at Fenway. “Including, obviously, Professor Nedermeyer’s own English classes.”
Fenway’s mouth twitched. “This is my shocked face.”
“So anyway, about a month after it comes out, Professor Cygnus sues Professor Nedermeyer, stating that the chapter on Shakespeare is taken directly from his writings and notes.”
“What happened?”
“They settled out of court.”
“Of course they did.”
Piper leaned forward. “I can do some more digging.”
“Maybe it was a lovers’ quarrel that got out of hand.” Fenway sat back. “I guess she makes a decent suspect too. There’s too much between everything for her not to connect the dots.”
“Isn’t that from a cop show too? How you don’t like coincidences?”
“Yeah, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” Fenway said.
“Yeah, but sometimes it’s the motive behind a killing.”
Fenway grinned. “Oh, Piper, you haven’t even been gone from the sheriff’s office for a full workday and I already miss you.”
Piper’s face fell. “Oh—shit! I can’t believe I didn’t tell you the most important thing about the ledgers!”
“What?”
“You remember when I found Peter Grayheath’s name in the ledger? There was a codename in that line, too. Carpe8765.”
“Carpe—like ‘carpe diem’?”
“Right. And Carpe8765 is all over the spreadsheets. And most of the payments to that name—especially about four business days after the empty tankers leave port in East Timor—come from another codename. And but it’s not like the other codenames. It’s just a set of initials.”
“Not a word-and-number combination like the others?”
“No. And because it’s so different to the other codenames, it makes me think that maybe this is the leader of this merry band of treasonous murderers.”
“I suppose. Or it could be someone who was just very insistent on these initials. Or maybe it’s a company name. What’s the codename?”
“It’s l.i.w.”
“Really? l.i.w.? That’s—an odd combination of letters.”
“It is, isn’t it? I tried searching for it online, but it doesn’t seem to stand for anything. There’s a tiny little village in Poland about fifty miles east of Warsaw spelled l-i-w, and it’s the airport code for a small airport in Burma that only has one commercial flight a day.”
“Maybe someone is from those areas.”
“Maybe. I did a cursory search of everyone who’s connected to Ferris Energy and any of the companies who’ve been laundering money. No one seems to be connected—no one was born there, for sure.”
“I suppose it could be a person’s initials, but that seems—well, wrong. Not a real person, anyway. Maybe a movie character, or a character out of a book?”
“Maybe,” Fenway said. She blinked hard. “I—I don’t know,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“It’s like I can feel like I have the information in my brain to make the right connection. It’s in one of those file cabinets in my head, but in the back room, where it’s all dusty. And I don’t know what cabinet it’s in or what file folder. But it’s in there, I know it is.”
“File cabinets in your brain?”
“You—you don’t do the same thing when you’re trying to think of something and it’s not quite there?”
Piper shook her head.
“Maybe my brain is weird.” Fenway squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Dammit, it’s in there somewhere. If I can figure out where I’ve seen it before….”
“Maybe the l.i. stands for Long Island?”
“Maybe.” Fenway sighed. “No. That doesn’t sound like it’s on the right track. I mean, it’s possible that I’m not on the right track either, so maybe Long Island does mean something.”
“I can see if any of the people we know are involved have any ties to Long Island.”
“Thorough as always, Piper.” Fenway opened her eyes and dropped her hand to her lap. “Might as well see if all the people left in here have any ties to Long Island, too.”
“You don’t think Judith Cygnus is the mastermind behind all this, do you? Or Charlotte?”
Fenway shrugged. “Leave them until last, but yeah.”
“And the lawyers?”
“Sure. I don’t think either of them have ever lived outside of California, but you might as well look.”
“Want me to leave you alone to figure it out?”
“l.i.w…. l.i.w.” Fenway chewed on the letters for a moment, then threw up her hands. “No. It’ll come to me. I’ll leave the door to the file room open in my mind and try and figure it out. Maybe I’ll wake up three in the morning with everything solved.”
“That’ll be a little late to catch the killer, if he’s in here.”
“Or she,” said Fenway. “And if McVie keeps up this glacial pace, three in the morning isn’t out of the realm of possibility.”
“If you can figure out who it is,” Piper said, “it might be the key to the whole thing. If I get a name, I can match the l.i.w. payments up to other financial transactions in their accounts.”
“Maybe you could run it against the dozen people in here.”
Piper shook her head. “That’s a nice idea, but it’s way too much work. I’ve already begun to compare it to the financial information your dad has given me, but he’s got so many accounts with so many transactions, it’ll take at least a week to sort through all of it. Maybe only a few hours with someone like Judith Cygnus, but even so.”
“Is it possible that Professor Cygnus is l.i.w.?”
“With so many large transactions? It’s unlikely, but possible, I suppose. I haven’t done any research on his financials yet.”
“Okay.” Fenway leaned forward. “I’ll have a chat with Professor Nedermeyer, and tell her that we know about the copyright lawsuit. See how she reacts.”
“And what about her time at ucla?”
“Maybe,” Fenway said. “I’m trying to solve one murder at a time, though.”
Piper nodded and left the nook with her laptop.
Fenway leaned back in her chair again. What would she say to Leda Nedermeyer? How did she expect Leda to answer?
She stood slowly, turning the question over in her mind, trying to figure out how to say it so it didn’t sound too accusatory. Leda had already flown off the handle at Judith Cygnus, and Fenway didn’t want any drastic actions to wreck this investigation.
She scoffed aloud. Investigation. As if this were a by-the-book, formal investigation, instead of a make-it-up-as-you-go-along set of enquiries. She just hoped anything she would uncover would be helpful in the long run.
Just getting a piece of evidence that could be submitted at trial, she knew, would be a win. Having her wits about her enough to get not only a shell casing but the gun itself was commendable, even if there was no one around to commend her. Her father might have been proud of her if he weren’t so wrapped up in his own trial. Yes, Fenway was always angry with her father for his self-involvement, but this time she felt it was justified.
She took a deep breath in and exhaled slowly and fully, feeling the tension—some of the tension, anyway—leave her body, and then she walked out of the nook and over to Leda Nedermeyer.
Pride and Prejudice was open on the professor’s lap, but her eyes were glazed over. “Professor?” Fenway asked gently, and Leda Nedermeyer jumped. “Oh—Miss Stevenson. I didn’t notice you there. Lost in my own thoughts, I’m afraid.”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Professor Nedermeyer. I’m sure this is a difficult time for you. I’m—I’m sorry for your loss.”
Leda crinkled her nose. “I suppose everyone in the courtroom knows of my affair with Professor Cygnus.”
“I hate to tell you this, Professor, but it’s kind of an open secret on campus. I don’t think Professor Cygnus was as careful about his personal life as you might have been.”
“I didn’t know that Judith knew about us until today,” Professor Nedermeyer said, folding a corner of the book and closing it. “You must think I’m quite a fool to be having an affair with a married man for eleven years and thinking no one would notice.”
Fenway shrugged, remembering her tryst with McVie before he was officially separated from Amy. “I hear that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. So you won’t be hearing anything from me.”
“Men are awful,” Nedermeyer said quietly.
“Most of them, yes,” Fenway replied. She took a seat in front of the professor and turned her body to look at her face. “Professor Nedermeyer, I have to look under a lot of rocks when I do a murder investigation.”
“I expect so, yes.”
“And then I have to ask people about what crawls out from under those rocks. Sometimes they have everything to do with the murder. Sometimes nothing. Do you understand?”
Nedermeyer nodded. “You’re going to ask me about the fight that Virgil and I had last week.”
Fenway tried not to let the surprise register on her face. She nodded. The question about the copyright infringement could wait. “Can you tell me what the fight was about?”
“Well—he never goes home during his preparation for the Shakespeare production.” Nedermeyer pursed her lips. “For the last several years, he and I spent many of those evenings together. He often gets to my house late, but he wakes me up and we talk about the progress in the play, and about the meaning of different objects, or words where the scholars disagree, and we both get, well—a bit impassioned.” She closed her eyes and shuddered slightly. “It’s—uh, one of my favorite times of the year.” She placed the book on the chair next to her. “He never really spent that much time with me otherwise. Yes, maybe the odd afternoon here or there, but those six weeks, with the play preparation and the performances—it was magical.”
“But last week, something changed.”
“You’re damn right something changed,” Nedermeyer said. “He couldn’t concentrate, didn’t even want to talk about what kind of weapon Othello should have in his hand during the climactic scene. He was pacing up and down, and then finally he said it was a mistake to come over.”
“Ah.” Fenway nodded. “And you didn’t like that.”
“Of course I didn’t like it. Listen—ever since my divorce thirteen years ago, I haven’t really dated. My ex-husband was a professional athlete.”
“A professional athlete?”
“Opposites attract, Miss Stevenson.” Leda smiled coyly, giving Fenway a glimpse of what Professor Cygnus found so attractive. “Doug spent three years in the nfl with Carolina, and then blew his knee out. After he rehabbed it, no one wanted him. His contract was up—he hadn’t really been used as more than a backup anyway—and no one else signed him. He was depressed and he wanted to lie around the house, but I had finally finished my Ph.D. and I was ready to go into the academic world. I got a job on the tenure track at Tryon College, but Doug just turned himself off. Not excited about my job. Not excited when I got promoted after my first year—which, I don’t know if you know academia—never happens.”
“Not the most supportive husband.”
“Precisely.” Nedermeyer cleared her throat. “Then when I got the offer at Nidever and wanted to move across the country, he put his foot down and said I couldn’t take it. Well, I fought with him, and he started throwing things, and I got scared. Then I told him I was sorry and that I wouldn’t leave, and the next day instead of going to work, I went to see a divorce lawyer. And I accepted the job at Nidever for the next academic year, and when the lawyer drew up the papers, I signed them and left them on the table and drove away with two suitcases that I’d sneaked out to the trunk of the car the night before, after he’d passed out drunk.”
Fenway bit her lip. Sometimes people confused her with a confessor, but she sensed that Nedermeyer was going somewhere with the story, and didn’t want to interrupt.
“Anyway—I got to Nidever and I threw myself into my work. I didn’t date. Suddenly, here’s this handsome, older professor who wants to talk with me about the things I’m interested in. And although he’s stayed handsome, but you should have seen him a dozen years ago. Some of the undergraduate girls were quite taken with him.”
“He taught Cynthia Schimmelhorn.”
“Oh—yes, she’s quite the celebrity alumna at Nidever. But that would have been a good ten or fifteen years before my time,” Nedermeyer said.
“Do you think Ms. Schimmelhorn and the professor ever….” Fenway let her voice trail off and looked at Nedermeyer.
But the professor only shrugged. “If he did, I never knew. He didn’t talk about her. Of course, I was probably as moony-eyed over Professor Cygnus as those giggling undergraduate girls were, but I could go toe to toe with him when he got those wild hares. He’d go off on some crazy idea that spun him around until he couldn’t see the logic in anything—but he’d still want to argue about it.” She shook her head. “I don’t see how Judith stayed with him for forty years. I was the only woman who could tame him—and his flights of fancy.” She paused. “And the first time we argued—I was in my third year by then, and already assistant chair to the English Department—he said, ‘Leda, the two of us have been arguing for an hour,’ and I said, ‘I’m here for as long as it takes for you to realize you’re wrong.’ And then he stepped forward and took me in his arms and—well, Miss Stevenson, I’m not ashamed to say I’d never been kissed like that in my life before that. Virgil made me feel everything I felt when I was falling in love with Doug plus everything I felt when you read a great book, all rolled up into a single kiss. You ever read a book like that?”
“Maybe once or twice,” Fenway said.
“For me, I know it’s so stereotypical, but Emma.”
“Jane Austen,” Fenway said, nodding to Nedermeyer’s copy of Pride and Prejudice.
“Right.”
“So what was different two weeks ago? How come he didn’t engage with you?”
“At first I thought it was Judith’s health,” she said, “but then he said that Jessica Marquez had questioned him about the accounts. I assumed it was about the Guild’s finances, but, you know, the more I hear, the more I think it was this scholarship fund that everyone’s been whispering about.”
“And you fought.”
“Virgil never fought about money—but there we were, fighting about money.” Leda paused. “Now, listen, I don’t make a ceo’s wage as a professor, but as the head of the department, I do all right. But I never moved out of that tiny house I bought a couple of years after I moved to Estancia. I thought I could wait it out until Virgil left his wife, but now—well, I have quite a bit of money socked away. I came out quite well in the divorce—half of that nfl money was mine—and I told him I would be glad to lend him whatever he needed to cover it. But that just seemed to make him more agitated. He had a pained look on his face and he said, ‘But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.’”
“Is that from The Merchant of Venice?”
Nedermeyer nodded. “Jessica. It’s when she realizes she’s betrayed Shylock, but goes and leaves him anyway.”
Fenway nodded. “I think Professor Cygnus treated his relationship with Jessica Marquez like a Shylock/Jessica relationship too. And I think he felt betrayed when she told her bosses about him skimming money.”
“I suppose. He always did love inserting himself in those roles.” Nedermeyer tapped her chin. “Anyway, we fought, and he said he was leaving—and I asked if he was coming back, and he, of course, gave me another quote.”
“Which was?”
“I would be, sweet madam, if my miseries were in the same abundance as my good fortunes are.”
Fenway shook her head. “I can’t place that one. Is that still Merchant?”
“In a way,” Nedermeyer said. “It’s the first thing Nerissa says to Portia, but she says you and your, not I and my.”
“Putting himself in the play again,” Fenway said.
“I suppose.” She tapped her fingers on the book. “Still—it’s odd. He always said the text was sacred. He’d never make any kind of change, even one that small. Not only that, but he inverted the meaning—Nerissa is trying to tell Portia that everything is going to be all right, but Virgil was all doom and gloom.”
“Unless he was telling you something?”
“Even then,” Nedermeyer said, and a pall of sadness came over her face. “Oh, Virgil,” she whispered. “I would have given you that money. And you’d still be alive.”
“One more thing,” Fenway said quickly, trying to stave off Nedemeyer’s tears, “do you know a Solomon Delacroix?”
“Solomon who?”
“Delacroix. He would have been a grad student at ucla when you were there.”
“I got my undergraduate at ucla. I didn’t mix with many grad students.”
“I know sometimes they work as teaching assistants and they lead small discussion groups for large lecture courses, though. Maybe he was one of your tas?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry.”
Fenway nodded, rising from her chair. Then she stopped. “Oh—one more thing, Professor.”
“Yes?”
“Did Professor Cygnus sue you for copyright infringement a few years ago?”
Leda shook her head, rolling her eyes. “That was both the stupidest thing ever—and the most Virgil thing ever.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve been working on a theory about A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a decade or so. Namely, that the play-within-a-play isn’t meant to be played for laughs. That the faeries interfere and imbue dark magic upon the workmen, turning it into a brilliant dramatic tragedy.”
“That’s—kind of odd.”
“Yes. But Virgil loved the idea. He ran with it. Even did a production that year of Dream where he inserted that interpretation.” Leda chortled. “But in typical Virgil fashion, he fell so in love with my idea, he thought he’d come up with it.”
“Really?”
“It’s not the first time he stole one of my ideas, but it’s the first time he took me to court over it.”
“What did you do?”
“I showed him my notes from before we met. He couldn’t believe the idea was mine, even then, but he withdrew the lawsuit.”
Then Evans Dahl’s voice boomed across the courtroom and Fenway’s head snapped up.
“Are you still trying to get around—”
“People are talking willingly, Mr. Dahl,” Fenway shot back. “If you hadn’t noticed, there’s still a dead body up here, there’s still a gun that was used to kill him, and there’s a very real possibility that someone in this room is the killer.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she knew she’d made a mistake. Everyone—except her and Piper and ada Kim and the killer—thought the murderer had escaped with everyone else. They didn’t like being in the courtroom, but they’d assumed they were at least safe. The faces fell around her.
“What do you mean?” Xavier Go got to his feet. “Didn’t the killer leave when everyone else did? I thought you were fingerprinting us to eliminate us as suspects!”
“I was, but I—” Fenway began.
“It seems to me,” Evans Dahl said, “that it’s very convenient that you’re the one doing the investigating, when your father has a very clear motive for wanting the professor out of the way.”
“My father didn’t kill anyone,” Fenway said. “He was at the wrong angle. He wasn’t even by the—”
“I don’t mean that he could have killed them, Miss Stevenson,” Evans Dahl said. He turned his face toward her and his eyes burned with heat. “I mean you could have.”