Fenway looked up at Mathis. “What’s happening tomorrow?”
“I—what?” Mathis stuttered.
She lifted the ledger book from her lap and put it on the desk. “I’ve got a transaction of almost forty grand that Seth Cahill expected to close tomorrow.”
“He’s not working here anymore. I don’t know what transaction that could be.”
Fenway stared into Mathis’s eyes for a moment, and he cast his eyes down only a moment later. He knew something, but he wasn’t about to tell Fenway.
She sat in Seth’s chair, shifting her eyes from Mathis in the doorway to the leather-bound ledger on his desk. Fenway—or maybe the forensic accountants—would need to go through the ledger. Maybe Seth was skimming money from his “shady” activities, as Mathis had put it. And, of course, Mark’s theory of the squatters killing Seth Cahill if and when he had tried to kick them out.
Soon, sheriff’s deputies would be sitting on Unit 112, but the squatter was likely long gone. If the squatter had killed Seth Cahill, they probably left as soon as they’d wrapped the body in the rug and dumped it in Unit 176. Yes, they’d left their sleeping bag and portable toilet and some other items, but their escape would have been considered more important.
If the squatter hadn’t killed Cahill, though, they could have witnessed what really happened. But they’d have no reason to stick around and get questioned by law enforcement, especially if they thought they’d be suspected of the murder.
The body had been in full rigor, so if the squatter had been the killer—or a witness—they had six hours to escape. Finding them would be difficult, if not impossible.
Dez appeared in the doorway next to Mathis. “I’ve wrapped up with Miss Chan. You need anything?”
“An evidence baggie big enough for this ledger.” Fenway motioned with her head to Mathis. “And Mr. Jericho here—we’ll need to talk with him again.”
“What for?” Mathis’s eyes widened.
Fenway tapped the ledger with a gloved hand. “Once we fingerprint the ledger, I’d like you to go through it with our team.”
“Why?”
“You may recognize a few of the transactions.” Although it might be tricky to get Mathis to admit anything. But Fenway was certain Mathis had knowledge of at least some of the business deals Seth had made and tracked in the ledger.
“I’m just the maintenance guy.” A whine of desperation crept into Mathis’s voice. “Besides, Tyra’s the one who took care of all the money.”
Fenway raised her eyebrows. “Really? Tyra oversaw all the money—even though I found this ledger in Seth’s drawer in a safe?”
Mathis shifted his weight from foot to foot.
Fenway shot a meaningful look at Dez. Seth obviously had two sets of books. The clean set of financial records that showed the money coming in from the rental units, payroll going out, expenses like utilities, rent, insurance. And then this ledger.
Something pinged in Fenway’s head. Maybe the squatter and the hidden ledger weren’t separated. If Seth had been involved in drug trafficking, maybe the squatter was there because of the drug transaction. Fenway didn’t have evidence for that, though. She shook her head.
Another scenario: the squatter was an off-book renter. Perhaps the date of the transaction referred to a move-out date of tomorrow—with the payment due at the time of their departure.
Fenway frowned. Not likely at all. Thirty-seven thousand dollars was way too much money for the rental cost of a space like that.
Oh—unless Seth Cahill was taking on a substantial risk by using Unit 112 as a hotel room. And perhaps other units as places for people to stay.
Fenway suppressed a shudder. She’d seen specials on human trafficking: hundreds of children huddled in the back of a trailer, in basements, and yes—even in storage units.
Drug trafficking or human trafficking. With a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar mystery payment, those were the only two conclusions that made any sense.
Dez stepped into the room and handed Fenway a large evidence baggie. Fenway took it and slipped the ledger book inside, then handed it back to Dez.
Dez put the bagged-up book under her arm. “Melissa and Kav pulled up. You want me to walk them back to Unit 176?”
“Yes.” Fenway paused. “On second thought, send one of them back to Unit 176, but ask the other to come in here and take fingerprints of this office.”
“Will do.”
“After the officers get here to babysit Unit 112, you and Mark can head back to the sheriff’s office.” Fenway turned to Mathis as Dez stepped out. “And Mr. Jericho, we’re finished for today, but please stay in the county. We’ll need to talk with you again.”
“Am I under arrest?” Mathis asked.
Fenway furrowed her brow. Why would he think that? “The ledger. As I mentioned before, we need you to go through it.”
“What if I don’t know anything?”
Fenway smiled. “You’ll still have the gratitude of the coroner’s office.”
Mathis was quiet for a moment. Then: “Can I get back to work?”
Fenway nodded, putting her hands on her hips. “Again, Mr. Jericho, please keep your availability open.”
“Got it,” Mathis said. He rushed outside, pushing by Dez, who was coming back in.
“Problem?”
Dez waited until the door closed. “He’s lying about his relationship with Seth, you know.”
“Right. Seth made Mathis go to the harbor to get fresh fish.” Fenway chuckled. “I don’t know what he was hiding, but it was something to do with the harbor. Check if there are cameras at the harbor—maybe we can spot Mathis or his car. Find out what he was really doing there.”
“I’m on it.” Dez cleared her throat. “I hate to bring this up,” Dez began. “Since you and he are, well—”
Fenway blinked. “Me and Mathis?” Then she got it. “Oh. McVie.” He’s the one who had rented the storage unit. The squatter in Unit 112 and the dead body of Seth Cahill in Unit 176 were there before either unit had been assigned to McVie. “Does he really need to be questioned? I don’t think that’s part of the required procedure.”
“You think once we make an arrest, the defense attorney won’t be asking us if we interviewed the person who rented the unit? No, you’re right, it’s not strictly necessary, but I know ADA Pondicherry will be asking.”
Fenway nodded. “I’ll have him go to the sheriff’s office.”
“Mark will have to interview him. And if Mark thinks McVie is involved in any way, you’ll have to recuse yourself.”
“That’ll give me more time to help him pack,” Fenway cracked. Dez had a point: couldn’t very well have McVie’s girlfriend interviewing him on a murder case. Appearance of impropriety.
Fenway kept staring at the door that had closed behind Jericho.
“What do you think Mathis is hiding?” Dez asked.
“Seth Cahill’s activities in the ledger,” Fenway said. “All kinds of scenarios spinning around in my head. Nothing concrete, though. Let’s see what the ledger can tell us.”
Dez tapped her chin. “Ordinarily, I’d get Friedman from the San Miguelito forensic accounting team—”
“Right, but Friedman’s on maternity leave. What about Patrick Appleby?”
Dez shook her head. “If the research is attached to a computer, he’s almost as good as Piper, but he doesn’t make the connections that she did.”
A grin crept over Fenway’s face.
Dez barked a laugh. “You seriously want to suggest Piper?”
“Why not? She’s done it before. And everyone involved with her firing is gone. We can give her a temporary contract until Friedman comes back.”
Dez sighed. “Fine, I’ll run it by Sheriff Donnelly. If we have the budget, maybe.”
“I’ll meet you back at the office,” Fenway said to Dez.
Dez nodded and walked down the hall.
A buzz on Fenway’s phone. A text from Patrick.
Fenway frowned. That wasn’t good news, either. She scratched her head. Had the killer disconnected the tracking system?
Fenway heard the front door open, then the low sounds of Dez’s voice, and then a woman’s voice. But it wasn’t Melissa. She stood up.
“Hello?” the voice called.
Oh—Tyra Cahill.
“Ms. Cahill?” Fenway called, stepping around the desk into the doorway. Cahill was standing on the threshold between the front office and the hallway.
“Sorry,” she said, eyeing Fenway warily. “I forgot why I came to the facility in the first place—I left my earbuds.” She looked Fenway up and down. “What are you doing here?”
“Reviewing the contents of your ex-husband’s office,” Fenway said. “And I’m glad you came back.”
“Me?” Cahill stepped into her office for a moment, returning with a tiny black faux-leather pouch in her hand—the earbuds. “What do you want to talk to me for? I told you everything in the back storage unit. You want anything else from me, like I said, set it up with my lawyer.”
“How often are you in the office?”
“Every day,” Cahill said. “Well, I take Thursdays off. Fridays are when a lot of people show up in the afternoon to move stuff in. All weekend, really.”
Fenway turned her next step over in her mind. Should she tell Tyra about finding the ledger? Fenway would be able to gauge by her reaction whether she knew about it. And that would direct her investigation. There were downsides, too: if Tyra did know about the ledger, she’d have more time to explain it away. But it might make her panic, make a mistake. Fenway decided to tell her.
“And how often do you go into your ex-husband’s office?”
“Since we separated? Almost never. Why?”
“I thought you’d be interested in what I found.”
Cahill made a disgusted face. “If it’s evidence of his affair, I don’t want to know about it.”
“It’s a ledger.”
Cahill almost dropped the black pouch. “What?”
“Looked like a bunch of payments, all in sets of eight or ten. Going back two years.” She cocked her head. “Last entry was for more than thirty-seven thousand dollars, but the transaction date was for tomorrow. Does that ring a bell? Some sort of balloon payment made to your company? A large corporation renting a big block of storage units?”
Cahill put a hand on the door frame to steady herself.
“You’re the one who runs the finances, right?”
Cahill was silent.
“I wondered if you knew about this ledger. Looks like your ex was taking payments, but I doubt these payments are showing up in your files.” Fenway paused. “Thirty-seven thousand dollars seems like something you should be aware of.”
Cahill’s mouth opened, shut, opened, then shut again. “I didn’t—” she began, then took a slow, deep breath. “My lawyer would tell me not to say anything.”
How much of Cahill’s reluctance to talk was due to caution, and how much did she know? Shadow payments separate from the corporate receipts. People using a storage unit as a hotel room. This screamed illegal trafficking. Even if Cahill had no knowledge about the payments—or whatever the payments were for—as the current owner of Cahill Warehouse Storage, she might think she was criminally liable. Smart of her to lawyer up, though not helpful to Fenway’s murder investigation.
Tyra Cahill had started to say she didn’t know—probably about the payments—and Fenway was inclined to believe her.
“I’d cancel your plans for tonight, Ms. Cahill,” Fenway said. “Why don’t you ask your lawyer to meet us at the sheriff’s office?”
After Tyra Cahill declared that she was quite capable of driving herself to the sheriff’s office, she left in a huff, and Kavish Jayakody from the San Miguelito’s medical examiner’s office walked in, catching the door as Cahill let it go.
He stared after Cahill for a moment, then turned toward the coroner. “Afternoon, Fenway.”
“Hi, Kav.”
“That the ex-wife?”
“It is.”
“She doesn’t seem sad or upset about her ex-husband’s death.”
Fenway shrugged. “We all grieve in different ways. You should know that better than most people.”
“She isn’t grieving much at all.” Kav raised his eyebrows. “You’re letting her go?”
“She’s meeting us at the sheriff’s office with her lawyer.”
Kav pointed to Seth’s door. “Dez asked me to fingerprint the decedent’s office. It’s in there?”
“That’s right. I bagged up a ledger—found it in a safe in the bottom right drawer under the desk. Dez took it back to the sheriff’s office.” Fenway shuffled her feet. “Is Melissa with the body?”
“She is. Not much in the way of storage in there. Just the body.”
“Wrapped in the rug, yeah.”
The front door opened again, and Fenway snapped her head up. It was McVie.
“Craig?”
McVie had changed from his flip-flops into close-toed sneakers, a much better choice for moving boxes for a few hours. He furrowed his brow. “What’s going on?”
“There’s been—” Fenway began, then caught the withering look from Kav. Yes, McVie was a civilian now, not sheriff. And more than that, he needed to go to the sheriff’s office for questioning. “There’s been an incident,” Fenway said. “We found—uh, something—in the storage unit assigned to you. I’m afraid they need to interview you at the sheriff’s office.”
McVie’s eyebrows knotted. “That sounds serious.”
“It is.”
He nodded grimly. “If it helps, I’ve been at the beach for the last three hours. A hundred witnesses. I’ve got a receipt from the root beer float stand.”
Fenway almost rolled her eyes. McVie was such a Boy Scout—a root beer float, indeed. “You’ve been on this side of investigations before. Your name is on the contract, so—”
“Right. Covering your bases.”
“And since you and I are dating, Mark will have to question you, not me.”
McVie frowned. “What happened to my boxes?”
“Still in your car,” Fenway replied. “Kind of hard to unload the boxes when—when there’s been an incident.”
McVie rubbed his forehead. “I have to be on the road Friday.”
“If timing is an issue, you’ll need to find another storage facility,” Kav said. “We can’t have you going into a crime scene.”
“I’ll pull the Highlander around the front,” Fenway offered. “We can switch cars back.”
McVie grimaced. “I’ll really have to find a new storage place?”
“Really,” Fenway said.
He sighed. “It’s like the universe is against me moving.”
Fenway stared at the floor.
After a moment of awkward silence, McVie shifted from foot to foot. “How long will you be?”
“Before meeting you in front with your SUV? Five, maybe ten minutes.”
He took his phone out of his pocket as he turned to leave. “Might as well find another storage place.”
Fenway nodded as McVie pushed the door open. “You good here, Kav?”
“Sure am. Fingerprinting should take about forty-five minutes.”
“We’ve got McVie’s on file, so if he comes up—” A mischievous smile touched the corner of Kav’s mouth.
“Very funny.” Fenway pointed to the office. “I’m sure I don’t need to say this, but pay particular attention to the drawer the safe is in—and the safe itself. If our victim was tracking payments for illegal activity, someone might have tried to get into the safe and take the ledger.”
“Sure thing.”
Fenway turned and walked out the rear door of the main office. She couldn’t see the front parking lot from where she was, but assumed McVie was out there waiting for her.
She walked briskly as she took her phone out of her purse. A few months ago, she’d connected with the human trafficking detective in San Miguelito, but she figured she’d cross off the drug angle first—and she had a way to get in touch with an informant she’d used before. She kept one eye on where she was walking as she scrolled through her contacts. There it was: Parker Richards. She hesitated for a moment; had she talked to him since his brother was a suspect in her very first murder case? She stared at his name for a moment. It didn’t matter—Parker was the only one she knew who could connect her to someone with the right information. She tapped his name. It rang twice.
“Uh, hello?”
“Hi, Parker. This is Fenway Stevenson with the county coroner’s office.”
Silence.
“Sorry for calling you out of the blue like this, but I need to get in touch with Zoso.”
“I don’t do that stuff anymore,” Parker said.
“Didn’t say you did.” Fenway tried to get easy nonchalance sliding into her voice. “I need his expertise on a couple of things.”
“Like, his expertise on pills?”
“Background information only,” Fenway replied. “Know where I can find him?”
A pause. Fenway could almost hear the gears grinding in Parker’s head.
“Okay—uh—what day is this?”
“Tuesday.”
“Oh, right.” Another pause. “He’s got a contact at the Epsilon Zeta Epsilon house.”
“On the Nidever campus?”
“Two blocks away. It’s on El Tirigo.”
“Gotcha.”
“Dinner at Eazy-E starts at six. Zoso shows up a little before that.”
“Eazy-E?” As the words came out of her mouth, she heard it: E for Epsilon, Z for Zeta. E-Z-E. “Oh—right.” She checked her watch; five minutes to five o’clock. She had enough time.
The interview with Tyra Cahill and her lawyer would have to wait. Wouldn’t be great to leave them waiting for her, but for an hour or so, they’d be fine.
“Keep my name out of it,” Parker said. “I don’t want anyone thinking I gave him—”
“I’m not vice, Parker.”
“Shit,” Parker said, “if you’re still the coroner, does that mean another murder?”
“I investigate all suspicious deaths,” Fenway said evenly. “And you have my word—I won’t mention your name.” She turned the corner to Unit 176, the medical examiner’s van parked twenty feet in front of the Highlander. “Gotta go. Thanks.”
She tapped End on her phone screen and stuck her head into the storage unit. Melissa de la Garza was crouching next to the body.
“Hey, Melissa.”
“Liver temp is eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit,” Melissa said.
“Almost the same as the temperature in here.” Fenway looked up to the left. “So time of death is, what, eighteen hours?”
“Yes, a little over eighteen hours.” Melissa touched the dead man’s forearm and tried to move it. “Though with the temperature fluctuations last night, I’m giving it an hour on each side.”
“Full rigor.”
“Right,” Melissa said. “Seventeen to nineteen hours.”
“So time of death is between—” Fenway looked at her phone. “Between ten p.m. and midnight.” An hour or two after Tyra had seen her ex pull up in his Corvette.
“Right.”
Fenway pointed at the bloodstain next to Seth Cahill’s head. “It looks like this rug was used to transport the body.”
“Rolled up in the carpet.”
“Someone would have to be pretty strong to carry a body rolled up in this rug,” Fenway pointed out. “I mean, the rug itself is what, forty or fifty pounds?”
Melissa nodded. “And I estimate Mr. Cahill is about one-fifty.”
“So we’re looking at someone who can carry two hundred pounds.”
“Or drag it. A lot easier to drag a body rolled up in a carpet than carry it.”
“He was wrapped in the rug postmortem?”
“I think so,” Melissa said. She took two squatting steps to her right until she was even with Seth Cahill’s shoes. She put a gloved hand under one ankle and lifted. “Do you see that?”
Fenway crouched and squinted. “What am I supposed to see? Drag marks on the heel?”
“Correct. No dirt. I think he was killed outside, on concrete or asphalt, not on grass or dirt. He was dragged onto the carpet, and the concrete or asphalt scuffed his shoes.”
“I don’t suppose you could analyze the type of hard surface?”
Melissa laughed. “If you want to wait a month for the analysis, sure, we could get traces out of the scuff marks and tell you the kind of concrete or asphalt it is. I bet we’d find profiles matching ten thousand different locations in Dominguez County.”
“I bet the concrete and asphalt will match the walkways and blacktop at Cahill Warehouse Storage?”
“Oh,” Melissa said, “you think he was killed here?”
“Mark brought up the theory,” Fenway said. “Someone was sleeping in Unit 112.”
“You mean like a squatter?”
“That’s what I thought at first, but then we found a hidden ledger in Seth’s office. One with hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments reported.” Fenway rubbed her chin. “Obviously, we suspect illegal activity, probably at this storage facility. And while I don’t have any evidence that the person staying in Unit 112 was tied to the records in the ledger, we need to follow that possibility.”
“Oh.” Melissa furrowed her brow. “What’s your best guess so far?”
“Seth lost ownership of this place in the divorce,” Fenway mused. “So here’s a possibility. He goes to confront the people staying in Unit 112. Maybe he says now that Tyra is in charge, they can’t use the facility for their illegal activities anymore. One of them gets mad and kills Seth. Then, using Seth’s keys, they find a rug in a storage space here, wrap his body up, leave it in an empty storage unit, then steal his Corvette and drive away.”
Melissa shrugged. “The evidence I’ve seen supports that theory,” she said.
“A lot of assumptions.”
“You have to start somewhere.”
“Oh!” Fenway snapped her fingers. “I found a screw on the floor. A little unusual. Did you see it?”
Melissa nodded. “Dark green head, about three-quarters of an inch. Doesn’t look like the kind you buy at a hardware store.”
“What other types are there?”
“Commercial. The kind companies order in bulk and use in assembling their stuff. The color of the screw is painted like that to match the color of the product.”
“Like furniture?”
“Sure. Folding chairs, lamps, all kinds of things.”
“Can you figure out where it came from?”
Melissa shook her head. “Not quickly, anyway. Maybe I can do some research, but it’s low on my priority list. Now the victim’s sports car, on the other hand...”
Fenway scratched her head. “I’ve asked Patrick to put out an APB on Seth Cahill’s Corvette. If we find someone driving it through San Diego—”
“We might have our killer.” Melissa stood. “At least a Corvette sticks out. Someone will find it.”