Ninety minutes later, Dez and Fenway pulled the red Impala up to the numeric keypad in front of the gate at Cahill Warehouse Storage. Dez rolled down the window, the foggy chill of the morning blowing into the car. Fenway gave the number to Dez, she punched it in, and the gate opened. Mathis’s car sat in the employee area on the right-hand side. Fenway ran her finger along the edge of the folder on her lap.
“Office?” Dez asked.
“Let’s drive around,” Fenway said. “Mathis does maintenance and landscaping. I bet he’s out here.”
Dez nodded. “I still can’t believe Judge Solano signed the warrant without an affidavit.”
Fenway shrugged. “I think it’ll hold up in court.”
“Ha—let’s hope it never comes to that.”
As they rounded the corner of Building A, Mathis, dressed in beige cargo shorts, a white T-shirt, and a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap, pulled weeds from a planter next to the fence. He looked up as the Impala rounded the corner and narrowed his eyes when he saw Fenway and Dez.
The Impala slowed to a stop six feet from the planter, and Fenway got out with her folder.
“Good morning, Coroner,” Mathis said, his voice flat. Bags under his eyes.
“We’ve got a warrant to search your car, Mr. Jericho.”
His jaw dropped open. “My car?”
“That’s right.” Fenway cocked her head. “Remind me again where you were late Monday night, early Tuesday morning.”
He squinted. “Monday night?”
“That’s correct. The night Seth Cahill was killed.”
“My apartment. Asleep.”
Mathis Jericho’s lies were at least consistent. Fenway cocked her head. “You sure you weren’t near Puerto Avila beach?”
Mathis hesitated. “I’m not sure where that is.”
“By the Vista del Rincón turnoff. There’s a beach there, perfect for a catamaran coming from Mexico to anchor for an hour or two.”
Mathis’s expression hardened for a moment, but his face was otherwise inscrutable. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“You have a wetsuit?”
Mathis paused. “There’s nothing illegal about owning a wetsuit.”
“You know how to scuba dive, right? You were an instructor.”
“Nothing illegal about that, either.”
“All right.” Fenway hooked her thumb over her shoulder toward Mathis’s car. “Meet us at your vehicle. You got your keys?”
“Let me see the warrant.”
“Sure.” Fenway took the warrant paperwork out of the folder and handed it to Mathis. He took it, his hands shaking slightly, and began to read. He likely found the legalese inscrutable. Mathis flipped the first page over, then began to read the second page. He blinked three or four times, then handed the set of paperwork back to Fenway. His mouth turned down at the corners, but he nodded.
Dez made a three-point turn on the asphalt between the buildings, and Fenway followed a few steps behind Mathis Jericho on foot.
A few moments later, they arrived at Mathis’s navy blue sedan. It could have been the same car Fenway had seen on the road near Portico Inlet early in the morning, but she couldn’t be positive.
“Open the trunk,” Fenway said.
Mathis reached into his pocket lethargically, his mouth twisted in regret. He pulled out a key fob and pushed a button. The trunk of the sedan popped open, the lid flinging itself upward and stopping at a sixty-degree angle to horizontal.
Fenway leaned over the open trunk. What a mess: empty Coke cans, fast food wrappers, a gym bag, a dirty beach towel. The bottom of the trunk had a rubberized weatherproof liner. Fenway leaned over further; a tiny patch of white powder was in one of the square crevices near the left taillight. She looked closer; another small patch of white two-thirds of the way on the right side.
Fenway straightened up, careful not to make contact with the powder. “I see a white powder on the liner, Mathis.”
He was silent. How was Mathis so calm about the powder in his trunk?
She bobbed her head toward the Impala. “I’ve got an MTS kit in the back of the car. You know what that is?”
Mathis was quiet.
“We’ll go over your trunk with this little vacuum cleaner. We only need two milligrams of powder to run the test—and I can see there’s plenty. We mix it with water in a little test tube, we put a morpheranyl strip into the mixture. One pink line is a positive. That holds up in court—California vs. Washburn, if you want the history.”
“I know what an MTS kit is.”
“That’s great, Mathis. So you know what the lab results will be. It’ll go easier on you if you give us a statement now, rather than making me fill out hours of paperwork to get a lab report.”
Mathis hesitated. “These are dangerous guys.”
“Was Seth skimming money off the top?”
Mathis frowned and looked into Fenway’s eyes. “If Seth was stealing money, he didn’t tell me about it. But I don’t think Seth would do that. He knows how crazy these people are.”
Fenway cocked her head. “You think they killed Seth?”
Looking down at the dirt in the planter, Mathis bit his lip.
Fenway cocked her head. “Are you afraid of them?”
Still no answer.
“If you cooperate, we could take them off the street. You wouldn’t be in danger.”
“I’m not sure you can do that.”
“Then how about this?” Fenway asked. “The MTS kit can stay in our car.”
Mathis paused. “Immunity for anything I say.”
“Regarding the drug deals? I can ask the A.D.A. about immunity in exchange for your testimony.” Fenway studied his face. “But not for murder. Did you kill Seth Cahill?”
“No!” His eyes went wide. “I’d never—”
“Because maybe Seth was stealing from you. Or maybe you wanted to take over Seth’s business. Morpheranyl is quite lucrative. Four hundred million per shipment, by my calculations.”
Mathis scoffed. “No way. Not that much. Not even close.”
“But still a lot, right?”
Mathis was quiet.
“Come on,” Fenway said. “Let’s go into the station where we can have a conversation.”
Dez drove them to the sheriff’s office, but the interview room was taken. Fenway decided to improvise and sent Dez back to her desk before taking Mathis Jericho into the break room. More informal. Maybe he’d be more willing to talk.
Mathis wandered around the edge of the empty break room, stopping for a few seconds at the vending machine, then took a seat in one of the plastic chairs at a corner table.
Fenway tapped her card to the payment mechanism on the vending machine. After a beep, she tapped a button, then bent down and retrieved a bag of chips. “You want anything?”
Mathis slumped in his seat and folded his arms.
“You sure?”
He hesitated. “I think I saw a chocolate and peanut butter thing in the third row.”
Fenway tapped her card to the machine again. After Fenway got the candy bar, she walked to the small table and Mathis reached for it.
Fenway pulled it away. “The truth.”
Mathis hesitated, then nodded. She dropped the candy bar into his outstretched hand.
“How did you get involved in the morpheranyl trade?”
“I was only working as a scuba instructor for a few hours a week,” Mathis said. “My main gig was at the sandwich shop down the street. Man, what a crappy job. My manager kept messing with my hours, but what else could I do? The scuba place wasn’t even cutting paychecks half the time.”
Fenway leaned back against the vending machine.
“Every so often, these two guys would come into the sandwich shop. An older guy who smokes weird cigarettes, and a tall, skinny, wiry guy. Not every week, but at all hours. Sometimes I worked the overnight shift, and they’d come in at two, three in the morning.”
“How long was this going on?”
Mathis scratched his head. “Maybe six months. You remember there was a fire in those warehouses over on St. Ignatius Street?”
Fenway frowned. “When was this?”
“Two or three years ago.”
“Ah, that explains it. Before I moved here.” She pushed herself off the vending machine and took a seat across from Mathis. “So what happened?”
Mathis pressed his lips together. “So this warehouse on St. Ignatius Street—I think they stored their Nyllie there. But the place burned down, then suddenly they had a storage issue.”
“They talked about it in front of you?”
Mathis shrugged. “I’ve worked in the service industry long enough to know that sometimes workers behind the counter don’t even register as real people.”
Fenway nodded. Nurses, too—she remembered a few incidents when she worked at the clinic in Seattle.
“So I say, hey, there’s a guy who owns a storage place down the road.”
“Seth?”
“Right. He was in my scuba class. Anyway, the tall skinny one—that’s Cal—he gives me a look like he’s about to tell me to shut up. But the older guy, he had this white scraggly beard, like he was in some commercial for fish sticks—”
“Stephan Butler?”
“I never heard his name,” Mathis said. “He told Cal to hold his horses. ‘Maybe the kid can help us.’ So Cal says, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s getting into,’ so I went back to making their Italian Club, but the old guy asks me to set up a meeting with Seth. Tells me when the two of them will be back.”
“No way to contact them?”
Mathis shook his head. “They come to you, not the other way around.” He tore the candy bar open and took a big bite, chewing with his mouth open. Fenway opened the bag of barbecue chips and put one in her mouth.
“Next time Seth has a scuba lesson,” Mathis said through his chewing, “I tell him what time they want to meet, and then the day after the three of them met, Seth asks if I want a job at the storage place. It paid an extra three bucks an hour, more hours, and I wouldn’t have to work overnights.” Mathis paused. “Well, not at first.”
“So you didn’t know you were trafficking morpheranyl?”
Mathis put the candy bar down on the table and stared at it for a moment. “I kept my mouth shut. I figured if I didn’t ask questions, they’d be able to trust me. Plus, I didn’t want to know.”
“Not a defense that will hold up in court.”
Mathis shrugged. “Little late for that now.”
Fenway took another chip out of the bag. “But you got more involved in the business.” She popped the chip in her mouth and chewed.
“Yeah.”
Fenway crinkled the bag of chips. “So as a former scuba instructor, are you the one who takes the morpheranyl out of the containers attached to the hulls of the Ariel?”
Mathis spun the half-wrapped candy bar around on the tabletop. “I mean, yeah, when the Ariel came along the beach, I’d be the one in the water. Seth wanted to learn, but he didn’t have the knack for it.”
“When we go through that ledger,” Fenway said, “will we see a percentage of the sales go to you?”
Mathis shrugged. “You might see a percentage of sales go out. I don’t think you’ll see my name.”
Fenway steepled her fingers, then leaned forward. “You showed up alone early Tuesday morning at Puerto Avila.”
Mathis was quiet.
“I heard that Cal and Stephan didn’t want to do business with you unless Seth was there.”
He pushed the candy bar a few inches away. “I tried to find him. Had to decide if I wanted to show up alone or show up late. I showed up alone.”
“Did the meeting go well?”
“Well—uh, not exactly. They asked where Seth was. When I said I didn’t know, Cal said I better not be trying to trick him. I was like, what’s to trick? You drop off the product, Seth and I store it, Venn picks it up when he’s ready to process it—”
Fenway flinched and Mathis’s eyes widened.
Anton Venn. Kingpin in the Central Valley. Fenway hadn’t thought his business extended to the coast. She took a normal breath, trying to make it seem like he’d said nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe Mathis wouldn’t notice that she’d heard. “And you get paid, you give Cal and Stephan their cut?”
Mathis gave a dry chuckle. “If only it were that easy. No, Cal always stuck around until V—” He coughed. “Until the product got picked up. He got the money and gave Seth the, uh, storage fee.”
“Thirty thousand dollars.”
“For a big shipment, or if they need to store it a week or two, yeah.”
“Thirty thousand is a lot of money for a storage unit.”
“They lost over three million in product in the St. Ignatius fire. The Cahill storage facility has sprinklers, fire alarms, the whole thing. Gates with electronic monitoring, and an owner willing to put his ass on the line. That was peace of mind, and I think Seth was a good salesman. Able to convince Cal that peace of mind costs some money.”
Fenway rustled the chip bag. “But that peace of mind went away.”
Mathis grabbed the candy bar, pulled the wrapper down a little, and took another bite.
“When did Cal find out that Seth lost the storage facility to Tyra?”
Mathis swallowed. “Seth didn’t want to tell him. We talked about the situation a couple of weeks ago after they picked up the last shipment for packaging.”
“So it’s not clear to you whether Seth told Cal that the storage facility would no longer be available for morpheranyl?”
Mathis shook his head.
“When did he tell you?”
“Uh—he didn’t, really. I mean, I knew that he and Tyra were getting divorced. The walls in the office aren’t thick enough to cover up their arguments. I knew Tyra asked for the storage business—she’d put in a lot of the investment, and Seth needed the money.”
“Even with thirty-thousand-dollar payments every few weeks?”
“What do you think kept the business from going under?” Mathis said. “Seth worked it so that he spread those payments out into a few services to fake customers. Or that some storage units were rented that didn’t get rented. Some of the storage unit numbers in the computer—fully rented—don’t exist in the buildings.”
“And Tyra never caught on?”
Mathis shook his head. “Seth was careful. He made everything look legit.”
Fenway clasped her hands together and spoke carefully. “Mathis, you didn’t just get three dollars an hour more when you came to work here. You got a cut of those ‘storage fees’ Seth got. You were the diver. Seth couldn’t have done it without you.”
Mathis stared at the top of the table.
“I bet he didn’t give you anywhere close to half.”
Mathis shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. But what was I gonna do? I couldn’t make that kind of money anywhere else. Yeah, I had to work eight or ten hours three or four nights a month, and yeah, it’s not fun going out into the Pacific in February, but I made good money, and like I said, I couldn’t get it anywhere else.”
Fenway bit her lip. So far, Mathis had cooperated. Maybe that would all change with Fenway’s next question.
“What if you wanted to cut Seth out of the equation?” Fenway said.
Mathis frowned. “What?”
“The divorce agreement kicked Seth out of the storage business. Tyra’s taking over. The way I see it, the morpheranyl trade can keep going as long as there’s a diver to take the drugs from the blister to someone’s car. Seems to me like Seth is not only keeping most of the money, but he’s the least vital part of the whole business.”
Mathis grinned. “I don’t think you’ve ever done business with these guys before.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they didn’t trust me. They trusted Seth.” He took another bite of the candy bar, then spoke with his mouth full. “Seth knew the accounts. He had the econ background. They saw me as an assistant—nothing more.”
That was true. Fenway had pointed out that they didn’t want to do business with Mathis when he showed up without Seth. “You might not have known that.”
Mathis started laughing and put his hand over his mouth.
“What’s so funny?”
“You seriously think I killed Seth to take over his business? How would that work? Without Seth’s storage units, I don’t have anywhere to put the Nyllie.”
“You could rent another storage unit.”
Mathis looked as if Fenway had insulted his mother. “Are you kidding? The storage places all close by nine o’clock in this town. And they’ve got cameras I can’t turn off. No way.”
“It doesn’t take up much space,” Fenway said. “A spare room in your apartment.”
“Are you kidding? My roommate would kill me. If the people in charge of the Nyllie didn’t kill me first.”
Fenway looked thoughtfully across the table. He may have been right about not having other storage options, yet he picked at the corner of the candy bar wrapper. He was hiding something.
“Did Tyra know about Seth’s business arrangements?” She remembered the look of utter confusion on Tyra’s face when Fenway showed her the ledger—but maybe Tyra had great acting talent, and she and Mathis were working together.
“I don’t know if she found out about Seth storing the drugs.”
Fenway sat back in her chair and thought for a moment, her chin in her hand. Had Tyra discovered that the illegal storage of morpheranyl propped up the storage business? Had she found out after she’d already taken control of Cahill Warehouse Storage? She and Seth could have fought over a number of things: getting the drugs out of the storage facility, misrepresenting the viability of the business during the divorce proceedings, not to mention his infidelity. Any of those might anger her enough to kill her ex-husband.
If Tyra found out about the morpheranyl, she’d have a terrible decision to make: either go out of business or keep the operation going. Maybe she’d want to replace Seth in the operation. That might be amenable to all involved except Seth: same location, same deal, no finding a new place. Tyra had the business background that Mathis didn’t.
Mathis had said nothing, of course, but he might be purposely misdirecting Fenway.
Neither Mathis nor Tyra would have to pull the trigger, so to speak. If Tyra could replace Seth, that meant that Seth was expendable. But Seth would have been a loose end: his knowledge of the morpheranyl business, the identity of the players, and the operational logistics would make him a liability. Killing Seth would make sure he couldn’t talk. Tyra and Mathis could plan to cut Seth out of the business, install Tyra as the new storage representative, and be sure that someone else would see that Seth was killed.
“You ever talk to Tyra about the business?”
Mathis shook his head. “I remember one day, right before Thanksgiving, we had Channel 12 on the TV in the office, and the news showed a special story on how there’d been forty morpheranyl deaths that year. A new record for Dominguez County. And Tyra—man, maybe she’d been drinking or what, because she starts swearing, yelling, breaking things.”
“Breaking things?” If Tyra had a history of violence, Fenway might look more closely at her.
“Just a cheap plastic clipboard—she raised it over her head and slammed it down on the counter so hard it broke in half. But I’ve never seen her like that before. After the clipboard broke, she stared at it for a while. It felt like an hour. Then she went into her office and slammed the door.”
“Did you ever find out what got her so upset?”
“No.”
“You think the morpheranyl report triggered something? That Seth kept the business afloat with something illegal and she couldn’t get out from under it?”
“Maybe.” Mathis shrugged. “Like I said, I heard them fighting. The occasional screaming match where one of them says something about the business—or Seth hooking up with another woman. But otherwise, I don’t know what goes on between the two of them.”
“Tyra didn’t talk about it after she broke the clipboard?”
“No. I went out and fixed a sprinkler head, came back in, and knocked on her office door. Asked if she was all right. Tyra asked me to stay late. Said she had to go downtown for something—she wouldn’t tell me what. Happy Thanksgiving to me.”
“Where was Seth when all this happened?”
Mathis put the candy bar down on the table. “He told me he was out of town.”
Fenway arched an eyebrow. “Does that mean he was with Miranda Duchy?”
“He didn’t tell me in so many words, but I assume so. Pretty obvious that he and Miranda were together. Come on—a conference for storage vendors the week of Thanksgiving in San Diego? It’s like he thought Tyra was stupid.”
Maybe that’s why Tyra lawyered up. Seth had not only brazenly humiliated her with Miranda Duchy, but he’d possibly tricked her into giving him money for his half of a business that would fail without the illegal activity to support it.
“One more thing,” Fenway said. “We were reviewing the video footage from Monday night and early Tuesday. The storage facility has cameras all around.”
Mathis was silent.
Fenway cocked her head. “Yeah, you already know that we saw a whole lot of nothing. Seth turned off the cameras, didn’t he?”
Mathis rolled his shoulders like his muscles were too tight. “We turn them off on shipment days. Can’t have either of us on camera bringing Nyllie into the storage facility.”
Of course. Seth wouldn’t have to hide or destroy evidence that hadn’t been captured in the first place. “Final question,” Fenway said.
Mathis’s eyes glazed over.
“We ran into the Ariel’s captain on Belvedere Beach this morning,” she said.
Mathis flinched.
“From what you’ve told me, he and Cal wouldn’t trust you with the Nyllie. But it seems they trusted someone with it last night.” She tilted her head. “Do you know anything about that?”
He shrugged. “Nope. Those guys must have figured out another place to store the Nyllie.”
She asked a few more questions, but Mathis was running out of steam.
“Okay, we’re done for now,” Fenway said. “Thanks for your cooperation. I can take you back to the storage facility.”
Mathis popped the rest of the candy bar in his mouth, then stood and went to the door of the break room, leaving his wrapper in the middle of the table. Fenway threw it in the trash.
Tyra and Mathis were the top two suspects right now, at least in Fenway’s mind.
But those in the morpheranyl business couldn’t be overlooked either. Maybe the killer had simply patched up a loose end.
Or maybe Seth’s murder was meant to send a message.
Fenway walked out to the parking garage, Mathis following close behind her—then stopped in her tracks.
“What’s wrong?” Mathis said.
“My car. It’s still in the parking lot at Puerto Avila beach. Come on, I’ll ask someone else to drive you back.”