“Okay, you first,” said Fenway.
“So there were two payments made to this 37cuckoo37 person in the ledger—one the day before Dylan Richards was killed, and one two days after.”
“And who used the keycards?”
“There was quite a bit of action on the keycards that night, but we weren’t looking for any pattern because there were so many people going in and out.” Piper paused. “Besides, once his murderer was caught, it didn’t seem that important to catch the person who let him in.
“I sense a breakthrough moment coming,” said Fenway.
“Yep. The key is that door to the annex. That was used only twice that night—once on the outside to get in, and once on the inside to get out—about thirty minutes apart, and definitely within the timeframe of Dylan Richards’ death.
“That doesn’t necessarily prove anything.”
“Yes, but it’s the only time that person used their keycard in that door. Ever.”
Fenway cocked an eyebrow. “Still not conclusive, but definitely interesting. Who?”
Piper leaned forward. “Jennifer Kim.”
“So the cuckoo is from the town where she was born?”
Piper shrugged. “I guess so. Or maybe she really likes Cocoa Puffs. But the two thirty-sevens—I’m still working on the second one. But the first is Highway 37. She grew up in Novato before her parents divorced and in Vallejo after. Highway 37 connects the two cities.”
“And—hang on, you said she was born in July?”
“Right.”
“What day?”
“The third.”
Fenway rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe I didn’t see that. She was born in Germany. Europeans put the month before the day. So July third is three seven in Germany.” More puzzle pieces fell into place in her mind. The fingerprints. The broken laptop. The speaker enclosure.
“Okay—now what’s your big epiphany?”
“All right—you’ll have to bear with me for a moment, Piper. I want to make sure we’ve got the evidence to back this up.”
“Okay, fine.” Piper picked up her tablet. “That sounds like you need me to do some digging.”
“Should be fairly straightforward,” Fenway said. “First of all, did Cynthia Schimmelhorn’s daughter take any classes from Professor Solomon Delacroix?”
Piper’s eyes widened. “Wait—you think that your lit professor might have done the same thing to Schimmelhorn’s daughter as he did to you?”
“It’s only a working theory,” Fenway said, thinking of the threats Schimmelhorn had made that Fenway had assumed were hypothetical. “But I know my father didn’t hire Peter Grayheath to kill him.”
Piper tapped on the tablet, her fingers flying.
“Did you get any texts from McVie?”
“One thing at a time,” Piper mumbled.
“Sorry.” Fenway looked out across the courtroom and spied Jennifer Kim. The lines of worry in her face, the stress in her shoulders, it all made sense now.
Cynthia Schimmelhorn stood at the back of the room. “Did she really blame my father that much?” Fenway murmured to herself.
Piper took her hands off the tablet and took a deep breath. “Okay, I got it. Nerissa Schimmelhorn was, in fact, enrolled in Professor Solomon Delacroix’s Russian Lit class. Eight years ago, spring semester.”
“Did she complete the class?”
“No. Oh—that’s interesting.”
“What?”
“She withdrew on March eighteenth.” Piper tapped several items on the tablet, scrolled, then tapped again. “That was—” Piper blinked hard and she swallowed hard.
“That was what?”
“A little over a month,” Piper said softly. “A month before she killed herself. According to this news article, her body was found on April twentieth.”
Fenway closed her eyes. “And when did my father do his little power struggle move with Petrogrande Western?”
“April nineteenth,” Piper said. “The memo to Petrogrande shareholders hit their inboxes about seven o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth.”
Fenway opened her eyes and was quiet for a moment.
Piper sniffled and hunched over the tablet, pulling her hair down from her shoulder to hang down. It hid her face. She tapped rapidly, hardly pausing. One minute went by, then another, Piper still typing and tapping and scrolling furiously. Then she paused, and pushed the tablet over to Fenway, keeping her head down and her face hidden.
Fenway scooted her chair closer to the table and read the screen. It was an old travel database, but there was no mistaking what it said.
schimmelhorn, cynthia j.
17 april $568.45 purchase
dep lax 1351 arr pdx 1545
dep pdx 1705 arr bli 1815
19 april $368.45 refund/cancel
“She was going to see her daughter,” Fenway said. “And she canceled that morning because my father had Ferris Energy take over her division.”
“Tap the other window,” Piper whispered.
Fenway did.
Phone logs.
From a 310 area code to a 360 area code. Los Angeles to Bellingham. Mother to daughter. Starting on March twenty-first, back and forth, first twenty minutes, then two hours, then another two hours, barely skipping a day. A final call on April seventeenth, placed at 9:28 am.
Then two calls that evening from the 310 number. One minute—it must have gone to voice mail.
The next day, another four calls, one minute each.
The next day, fifteen calls, one minute each.
The next day, eleven calls, the last one at 2:44 pm.
Fenway pushed the tablet back over to Piper and sat back in her seat.
“How did—” Piper’s voice broke, and she cleared her throat. “How did you know?”
“Leda called Xavier an angel in disguise,” Fenway said, “and that’s when it hit me. Angel in disguise. Lady-in-waiting. l.i.w. Nerissa, in The Merchant of Venice, is Portia’s lady-in-waiting.”
“l.i.w.,” Piper repeated.
“And Cynthia Schimmelhorn has been waiting for eight years to destroy the company—and the man—who took her daughter away.”
“I feel awful,” Piper said.
Fenway crossed her arms. “And I feel worse that we still have to prove it.”
Piper nodded. “Now that we know exactly who l.i.w. is, though, I can dig into more financial records and see how to connect Cynthia Schimmelhorn to the l.i.w. accounts. I know I can’t do it through the normal financial channels because of the privacy rules in the Caymans, but I bet there’s an electronic trail. Just like the one that proves your dad didn’t hire Peter Grayheath.”
Fenway gave Piper a tight smile and leaned forward, her hands on her knees. “That sounds like it’ll take time.”
“Yeah. We’ll probably get out of here before I make any headway at all.”
Fenway paused and looked up at the ceiling, the mahogany of the crown molding, the angles on the lighting fixtures, with their nickel-plated arms jutting to spread the light across the large courtroom. “They must know we’re getting close.”
“Well, yeah.” Piper sighed. “My poor laptop. I barely had it three days.”
“This whole operation has netted over a billion dollars just this year, right, Piper?”
“If my calculations are correct.”
“That’s enough to go around, certainly. Everyone in charge here—Cynthia Schimmelhorn, Jennifer Kim, and who knows who else—they’ve got more than enough money to walk out of here and disappear. Move to a country with no extradition treaty and live like royalty the rest of their days.”
“You don’t think Rose Morgan falls into that category?”
Fenway furrowed her brow, thinking. “No. From what she told me, I bet she isn’t getting the big bucks from this operation. I think she’s been paid well, but not the millions that the ringleaders are getting. She’s too desperate for cash, and she knows she’s fallen out of favor with them.”
“From what she told you?”
Fenway nodded slowly. “I know I shouldn’t trust anything she says, but it was more the stuff she implied. She didn’t come right out and say she needed money or that she was being cut out of anything.”
Piper cocked her head at Fenway. “I think Rose Morgan is extremely good at manipulating people, and I think you might overestimate your ability to see through her.”
Fenway bristled. “Look, Piper, I know—” Then she paused. “Hm. Maybe you’re right.” She’d vacillated between thinking Rose was guilty for everything and then thinking she was far less responsible. Maybe Rose did know how to talk to Fenway to elicit maximum sympathy.
“You want to stall for time?”
Fenway shook her head. “We can’t. Judith Cygnus needs a doctor. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get Kim and Schimmelhorn taken into custody.”
“They were working together,” Piper said. “So which one of them do you think pulled the trigger?”
Fenway opened her fingerprint kit and pulled out the fingerprints from the bottled water. “You didn’t make any mistakes with the bottles, Piper. And I’m sorry I suggested you did.”
Piper tilted her head. “Then—how—”
“Jennifer Kim offered to take Cynthia Schimmelhorn’s fingerprints,” Fenway said. “Only she put her own fingerprints on that card and labeled them with Schimmelhorn’s name.”
“Oh—so when the bottle labeled as Jennifer Kim’s came back with the prints on Schimmelhorn’s card—”
“Exactly.” Fenway nodded. “It sent us in the wrong direction. I assumed the cards were right and the bottles were wrong—not the other way around.”
“That’s proof enough, isn’t it?” Piper said. “Maybe not that Schimmelhorn hired Peter Grayheath to kill all those people, but certainly for the murder of Professor Cygnus.”
“It’s enough to have the lab take Schimmelhorn’s prints. If she gets taken into custody.”
“So if you think Schimmelhorn is planning to escape as soon as the doors are opened,” Piper asked, “how do you want to handle this?”
Fenway had grandiose plans of confronting Schimmelhorn in front of everyone and exposing the truth. Even though the fingerprint match on the water bottle was the only concrete evidence they had—and who knows if that would stand up in court—maybe Schimmelhorn’s sense of revenge would get the best of her and she’d confess.
Shaking her head, Fenway looked across the courtroom. Schimmelhorn was too savvy for that. She’d never admit anything, and if she knew Fenway was onto her, she’d resist all efforts to cooperate with the sheriff. Cynthia Schimmelhorn would be out of the country five hours after getting out of the courtroom, that much she was sure of—unless Fenway could figure out how to convince the sheriff’s office to hold her.
“Piper,” Fenway said, “tell McVie that we have a fingerprint match of Cynthia Schimmelhorn on the gun that killed Professor Cygnus. Ask him to bring gsr swabs too. I don’t know if that will be enough to for them to put Schimmelhorn in custody when they get out of the courtroom, but it’s better than nothing.”
“Oh—well, that’s actually one thing I haven’t figured out,” said Piper. “The tablet is searching for a cell signal when the messaging app comes up, and when I launch the messaging app through the remote desktop interface, it brings up the tablet’s messaging app, not the laptop’s. It’s a glitch—it definitely shouldn’t be doing that—but I’m not sure I can fix it. Definitely not in the next fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Something itched in Fenway’s brain again, and she closed her eyes.
Oh yes.
The bullet whizzing by her right ear—dumb luck that she’d bent to the side just as the bullet had been fired.
And Cynthia Schimmelhorn’s voice from an hour ago.
“But you have to know, Fenway, he loves you very much. He knows he has to make up for two decades of lost time, and it will kill him if he doesn’t figure out how to move past this with you.”
It will kill him if he doesn’t figure out how to move past this with you.
Schimmelhorn’s revenge plot wasn’t just about destroying Nathaniel Ferris’s company, or damaging his reputation, or framing him for the murder of her daughter’s rapist. She also wanted him to feel the pain of losing a daughter. And knowing that he could have stopped it.
Cynthia Schimmelhorn had tried to kill Fenway. And if given the opportunity, she’d do it again.
bang.
Fenway’s head snapped up. The double doors reverberated. The sheriff’s department was trying to break down the doors again.
Fenway, a mixture of relief and panic flooding her mind, raced around the side of the witness stand and through the gate. She had to stop Cynthia Schimmelhorn from fleeing as soon as the doors were open.
bang.
This time, the bangs were louder and heavier, the instrument used to deliver the blows much bigger. The doors shook in their frame and a crack in the wall appeared above the left-hand corner of the door.
The doors wouldn’t budge. The wall would split before the doors would open up. Piper and the others who had picked the security system had done an excellent job of keeping people out. Unfortunately, they’d done just as good of a job keeping people in.
bang.
The siren went off, and Fenway immediately clapped her hands to her ears. Cynthia Schimmelhorn was in sight, and she didn’t know if the doors would actually break open.
But the walls were cracking. One crack zigzagged from the middle of top of the doorframe and disappeared behind the art-deco clock. If McVie and his team noticed the cracking on the other side, they might stop. Or, given that they knew it was a medical emergency, the doorframe might get ripped from the wall and the clock would be stopped at two minutes to one forever.
Fenway hoped the wall wasn’t load-bearing.
The siren was so loud she couldn’t think straight. There was no way she’d be able to capture Cynthia—or convince McVie to—with the shrill wailing of the alarm. She took a last look at Cynthia, behind the last row of chairs on the defense side, near the speaker enclosure, and at Rose Morgan, mirroring Cynthia behind the last row of chairs on the prosecution side, standing warily in front of the other speaker enclosure.
Swearing at herself, she turned and ran to the safe in the wall of the judge’s bench and yanked the cover open.
The siren was louder here, and Fenway said her thanks to the universe that whoever had picked the alarm code had been so careless.
She punched in 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 and the siren fell silent.
But so had the banging.
Fenway looked behind her. The crack in the drywall above the door went all the way to the ceiling in a near-45-degree angle. It must have been visible from the other side.
“Keep going!” she screamed. “Medical emergency! You have to break the door down!”
Nothing.
Cynthia Schimmelhorn turned from the double doors. She met Fenway’s eyes.
Schimmelhorn’s brow furrowed and she tilted her head ever so slightly to the left.
She knows.
Fenway was livid with herself. Any advantage she might have gotten from the element of surprise was gone.
And without the sheriff’s team bursting through the door, and without any way to prevent Schimmelhorn from escaping on her private jet to wherever, Fenway had to make a split-second decision.
Eleven to two were pretty good odds.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she bellowed, feeling more like a carnival barker than a coroner, “we know who killed Professor Virgil Cygnus.”