“Against Tyra?” Fenway asked. “What for?”
“Miss Duchy says that Tyra stopped by her house about an hour ago.”
“Not a good idea for Tyra, but that in itself isn’t illegal.”
“According to Miss Duchy, Tyra was threatening her,” Dez said. “Apparently, Tyra dumped about thirty cardboard boxes all over the front yard.”
Fenway chortled. “All of Seth’s boxes he was supposed to take with him last night. Now she’s giving everything to the mistress.” She paused. “But we don’t take applications for restraining orders. Duchy has to go online. Form CH-100. Or she needs to talk to her lawyer.”
“Miranda Duchy is, uh, not content with filling out forms online,” Dez said dryly. “Nor with talking to a mere sheriff’s deputy.”
“Aha. She wants to speak to the manager.”
Dez chuckled. “Salvador said she could handle it, but I thought we could use Duchy’s insistence as an excuse to interview her.”
“Mark interviewed her, but yeah, you and I should talk with her, too. Especially now that we know more.”
“And you saw Mark’s notes—Duchy didn’t provide a good alibi. Out for a drive, she said.”
Fenway nodded, then turned to Dr. Yasuda. “You okay here?”
“I’ll be fine,” said Dr. Yasuda. “I’ll see you at home, Dez.”
“You’ll shower before I get back, right?”
Dr. Yasuda rolled her eyes.
Fenway and Dez left the morgue and walked up the stairs at a much more reasonable pace than they’d come down. They stopped in the lobby.
“She says she’ll shower,” Dez muttered, “but I bet she’s gonna shower here. This place smells like formaldehyde and blood, and she’ll get home and still have the morgue stink on her.” She shook her head. “I’ll meet you at the car.” She turned and walked down a hallway with a sign that said “Restrooms” with an arrow.
Fenway stepped out of the lobby into the parking lot and took her phone out. She texted Melissa.
Three dots—Melissa was typing back. Fenway walked to the Impala as she waited for the text to appear. A ding.
So Seth hadn’t just turned off the cameras; he’d been taking pains to hide all evidence of the drug transactions and transport.
The Impala chirped as it unlocked, and Dez appeared with the key fob in her hand. “Ready to go?”
They got in.
Fenway tapped the phone app on her screen and called Sarah as Dez started the engine.
“Hey, Fenway,” Sarah answered. “Did the body tell you anything?”
“Only that the murder weapon was a framing hammer, and we’re looking for a right-handed killer.”
“So, no.”
“Add it to the report anyway. Also, I need you to look into something. You might need Patrick’s help.”
“Sure,” Sarah said.
“A will. Life insurance. Anything like that. Did Seth Cahill leave anything to anyone? Did he have any beneficiaries to his life insurance?”
“Anyone who’d benefit from his death.”
“That’s right.” Fenway paused. “You know how to fill out those IT forms so Patrick gives you the right info. I may have taken him to dinner at Dos Milagros, but he still won’t process my requests if I don’t fill out the forms the way he wants.”
Sarah paused.
“What?”
“He talks all the time about when you took him to Dos Milagros. I think it was the highlight of his year.”
“Are you kidding me? We talked about how duck tongues have bones that explode when you cook ’em.”
“A little grace, Fenway.”
Fenway blinked.
“What do you mean, a little grace?”
“Oh, Fenway, you’re not stupid. You’re often very compassionate. You made me feel welcome in the office. But you’re not doing the same for Patrick.”
Fenway bit her lip. Patrick was infuriating.
But more infuriating was that Sarah was right.
“I’ll work on it,” Fenway mumbled.
“And I’ll work on Seth Cahill’s beneficiaries.”
“Thanks.”
It took twenty minutes to get back to Estancia and another five to drive to Sycorax Hill and pull up in front of Miranda Duchy’s house. On the way, Fenway filled Dez in on all the information she’d gotten from her interview with Mathis, and what little she had gleaned from the body after Dez had left the room.
“We meeting Celeste there?”
“No. Salvador said she didn’t feel she could do anything else. She’s taken the statement, but Duchy will be waiting to talk to someone ‘in charge.’”
“Celeste will be the one in charge before too long.”
“How’s the process going?” Dez looked out of the corner of her eye at Fenway.
“I asked HR for a status update yesterday. They should have all my interview notes.”
“You’re not thinking about giving the job to Callahan, are you?”
Fenway looked at Dez out of the corner of her eye. “He’s a good guy, but he doesn’t have the head for detective work. He’s still a little green. Really showed when I interviewed him.”
“He has more service years than Celeste.”
“The years haven’t un-greened him.” Fenway frowned. She checked her email. Nothing from HR. Her morning had started at three o’clock and she’d barely been in the office. She promised herself she’d call HR as soon as she got back.
Miranda Duchy’s house was just as ostentatious as Fenway’s father’s house, but on a smaller scale and without acreage. Still five or six times as big as the square footage of Fenway’s apartment, but not quite a third of the size of Nathaniel Ferris’s oceanfront mansion.
Still, there were faux-marble columns going up twenty feet and a stone façade surrounding two ten-foot-high double doors. Fenway sighed. She and Dez got out of the Impala, which Dez left in the circular driveway.
A wide expanse of well-manicured lawn ran between the front porch and the sidewalk, and in the middle of the verdant grass sat five stacks of moving boxes of varying sizes. A few of them said “Seth” in a scrawl.
“Tyra’s handiwork,” Dez said.
Fenway and Dez strode up to the double doors.
Fenway reached out and rang the doorbell—a PorchRight camera doorbell. Miranda Duchy may have had impressive Doric columns, but the presence of the cheap PorchRight suggested no expensive camera-based security system around the house’s perimeter.
A pale-skinned white woman answered the door, perhaps five or six years older than Fenway. Her blonde hair had a touch of auburn—an expensive color treatment, if Fenway had to guess—and she was elegant and gorgeous, dressed in a simple asymmetrical blouse with one shoulder exposed, and expensive-looking designer jeans in a deep denim blue.
“Miranda Duchy?”
The woman nodded. Whatever Fenway expected, Miranda Duchy wasn’t it. She supposed she’d thought Miranda Duchy would be twenty years younger than Seth Cahill, maybe a little trashy. Not older, not elegant.
“Coroner Fenway Stevenson.” She motioned to Dez. “And Sergeant Desirée Roubideaux.”
“I could tell the deputy thought I was being silly,” Duchy said, “but I don’t feel safe with Seth’s ex-wife being so confrontational. I know it’s only a piece of paper, but I think a restraining order—at least so she can’t come to my house—would work. Tyra doesn’t seem unreasonable. Perhaps she’ll see that coming to my house and screaming isn’t rational.”
“Can you lead us through what exactly happened?” Fenway asked.
“I was working from the office, near the back of the house,” Duchy began. “I was on a conference call when the bell rang.”
“Did you answer the door?”
“No, it’s usually a delivery,” Duchy said. “When it’s not a delivery, it’s a salesperson or a teenager selling chocolate bars to send their basketball team to some tournament in Arizona.”
“So you didn’t get the door.”
“Not at first. But the bell rang twice, then three times, and then I heard pounding on the door. I excused myself from the call and looked at my phone—I’ve got one of those doorbell camera apps—and I could see Tyra, slamming her open palm against the door.”
“You answered the door when she was so clearly agitated?”
“Uh—no. I needed to get back to my call,” Duchy said. “Tyra isn’t exactly my friend, but until today, I wouldn’t call us bitter enemies. Seth and Tyra—their romance had run its course. They’d been separated twice before and had gotten back together. But it was clear Seth was simply going through the motions, and after a few months of knowing each other, both Seth and I had to admit we’d fallen in love. He was a client of my previous employer; that’s how we met. When I left my husband and started my new job, Seth and I started seeing each other romantically. I’ll admit the timing wasn’t ideal, and I can understand that Tyra feels wronged. I’d feel the same in her situation. But I never thought she’d be so hostile.”
“My understanding is that Seth had agreed to take his belongings from the house that he and Tyra used to share, and that he had failed to do so on multiple occasions.”
Duchy folded her arms. “Unfortunately, that sounds like something Seth would do. Just to push Tyra’s buttons.”
And that didn’t scream ‘red flag’? But Fenway kept her mouth shut.
“But look—leaving all those boxes on the lawn like that? And screaming at me? That’s uncalled for.”
“I understand that it’s not an ideal situation.” Fenway gave Miranda her best sympathetic face, Sarah’s words about compassion ringing in her ears. “But try to understand—Tyra was grieving the loss of her marriage. Now she has to grieve her ex-husband, and their recent divorce must make her feelings rather complex.”
“I’m sure that’s what you think is going on—” Then Miranda stopped talking.
Fenway pressed her lips together. What was that supposed to mean? For a second, Fenway thought Miranda implied that Fenway and Dez took Tyra’s side because they were all Black. Ganging up on Miranda. Fenway studied Miranda’s face. Were her cheeks reddening?
Then Miranda sniffed and put her hands on her hips, all trace of embarrassment gone. “I understand there are a host of good explanations why she behaved in an abusive and irrational manner, but her actions are affecting me. This isn’t acceptable—I don’t care who she is or what excuses she gives you.”
Dez nodded. “We can point you to the form to apply for a restraining order. You can fill it out online, but you’ll have to make the trip into the sheriff’s office in order to get it processed.”
Miranda nodded. “I expected as much.”
“I noticed you have one of those doorbell cameras. Would you mind letting us see the footage of Tyra coming here?”
“Yes. You can see the threats for yourself. Let me get my phone.”
Duchy pushed the door closed as she disappeared into the house.
“What do you think, Dez?”
“I think someone isn’t processing their grief very well. Her therapist will have a field day.”
“I mean, how do you think we should transition this into an interview?”
Dez shrugged. “Let’s watch the footage. We might be able to slide the conversation from where Tyra is to where Miranda was.”
“Right.”
After a moment, the door opened again. “Okay,” Duchy said, out of breath. “I’ve cued it to where they show up.”
Fenway raised her eyebrows. “They?”
“She came with a man. White guy, gray at his temples, mustache and goatee. New boyfriend, maybe?”
Or maybe an old high school friend—Miranda’s description sounded like George Pope.
Duchy tapped the screen and the footage started. She turned the screen so Fenway and Dez could both see it.
The camera showed the same SUV that George Pope had driven the afternoon that Fenway found Seth Cahill’s body at the storage unit. The SUV pulled up in the circular driveway. A white man got out of the passenger door—Fenway had to squint before she could make out George Pope’s features—and the rear tailgate popped open and raised to its full open height.
A Black woman appeared, her back to the camera. She turned; it was Tyra Cahill. She hefted a box out. George Pope hurried to the back of the SUV and took the box from Tyra, then rested it on the bumper and put another box on top of it. Tyra traipsed over the lawn and pointed for Pope to set the boxes down at her feet. Between the small speaker on Duchy’s smartphone and the distance from the doorbell, they heard no audio.
This went on for ten minutes as Tyra and George pulled more than twenty boxes from the back of the SUV and put them on the grass, with Pope placing the boxes less and less neatly on the lawn as the minutes ticked by.
Then Tyra came up to the doorbell and rang. She stood directly in front of the doorbell camera, her light blue blouse all that could be seen. Her voice boomed, even over the tinny smartphone speaker. “Hey, Miranda, come get my ex-husband’s shit!”
She stood in front of the camera for what seemed like an awkwardly long time. She reached out and rang the doorbell again.
“Miranda! I said get your shit! You wanted him—well, now you can take what’s left of him!” An edge crept into Tyra’s voice—not anger exactly, but displeasure. Exasperation. But her voice cracked on what’s left of him, and for a brief moment, Tyra’s lip trembled. Then she stepped forward, her face out of the camera frame, and banged on the door loudly.
Nothing was visible onscreen for a full three minutes except for Tyra’s blouse, every thirty seconds or so another knock. It felt like an hour.
Finally, Tyra backed away from the door a couple of feet, though she still took up most of the frame. A man’s voice behind her—George Pope, it sounded like, but Fenway couldn’t see him. The voice was too far away to be distinct.
“No, I’m sure her car is in the garage. She’s home, I can feel it.”
Another unintelligible string of syllables from Pope.
“This isn’t my job, George. He promised me he’d take all his shit, but these boxes have been in my living room for a month.”
George spoke again. “You’ve returned them now, but…” Then his voice got quieter, and Fenway couldn’t understand anymore.
“She’s home. I know she is. If we leave those boxes there and someone steals them, it’s her own damn fault.”
Pope said something else.
“Yeah, fine, I guess you’re right.” Tyra slumped her shoulders. She walked off the porch—then turned and hurried back onto the landing, where she extended both middle fingers right in front of the doorbell camera. “Chicken shit,” Tyra yelled. “Homewrecker chicken shit. You’re the reason he’s dead.”
Suddenly George appeared at her side, taking her elbow, pulling her away.
They walked back to Tyra’s SUV. Tyra started to walk to the driver’s side, but George stopped her, leaned close to her ear. Tyra stopped, nodded, and the rest of the fight went out of her. She let George lead her to the passenger door. He opened it for her, and she got in. George went around the back of the SUV, stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath, then walked to the driver’s side. A moment later, the engine started, and the SUV drove out of the camera eye.
Miranda Duchy tapped the phone screen to stop the video.
She raised her head, a triumphant look in her eye.
Fenway cocked her head. “What do you think this proves, Ms. Duchy?”
“It’s clearly a threat,” Duchy said.
Fenway blinked. “I didn’t hear Tyra make any threats.”
“She called me a ‘chicken shit.’” Miranda bristled. “She wanted to fight me.”
Fenway bit her lip. “I didn’t hear her challenge you—”
“Of course, she didn’t say that directly.” Miranda scoffed. “But it’s like when organized crime families say, ‘I’ll take care of him,’ and everyone knows ‘take care of’ means ‘kill.’”
Fenway raised one eyebrow.
“She called me a coward,” Miranda insisted, “to lure me into a fight. How else could it be interpreted?”
Fenway shifted her weight from foot to foot. She glanced at Dez’s face, but Dez stared impassively back as if to say, You’re doing great, no need for me to intervene. So she turned back to Duchy. “I’m not sure the judge will interpret Tyra’s words that way. If not, you won’t get a restraining order.”
“If she didn’t threaten me, what would you call it?” Duchy folded her arms.
“An angry ex-wife delivering her ex-husband’s belongings.”
“She came over specifically to create an excuse to fight me. I don’t want her to come over anymore.”
Fenway shook her head. “Tyra wanted Seth to take those boxes, and Seth agreed to take the boxes.” Fenway looked Miranda in the eyes. “If I review their divorce paperwork, will I find out that a written agreement includes a date when Seth will remove his belongings from the house?”
Miranda looked at the ground.
“You might not have wanted his stuff—”
“No. It’s all hideous.”
“—but if the judge said they’re his, then Tyra is responsible for giving them to Seth. Or, in this case, bringing his belongings to where Seth lived.” Fenway crossed her arms. “Even if Tyra planned to lure you into fighting her, she was following the divorce agreement.”
“Seth is—” Miranda Duchy’s face, taut and tense, suddenly crumpled. She bowed her head and squeezed her eyes tight. Her shoulders began to shake.
After a moment, Dez cleared her throat. Fenway looked up at her, and Dez motioned with her head toward Duchy.
“I’m sorry,” Fenway said, taking a step closer to Duchy, and suddenly Duchy leaned against Fenway, body wracked with sobs. “Hey,” Fenway said, “hey, hey. It’s—” She swallowed hard. She’d been here, too. After Fenway’s mother died, so many people—friends, former co-workers, neighbors—had stood awkwardly in the room as Fenway sobbed and tried to get herself under control.
Duchy shifted her weight after a moment, then wiped her eyes delicately with the back of her hand. “Sorry,” she gulped. “I—I don’t know what came over me.”
Fenway patted Duchy’s shoulder. “You’ve been through a lot.”
Duchy took a deep, shuddering breath, straightening up and stepping back from Fenway. “Tyra’s right. This is all Seth’s stuff. And I didn’t want him to bring it here.”
Fenway stood in silence for a moment. The buzz of insects in the flowerbed next to the front porch.
“I guess I don’t need to file a restraining order,” Duchy finally said.
“I can see why you’d want to,” Fenway said, “but you’re right. A restraining order won’t accomplish much, and it’ll heighten the tension between you and Tyra.”
“She’s not a bad person,” Duchy mumbled.
Fenway stole another glance at Dez, but again couldn’t read her. “Is there somewhere you can store these boxes?”
“Uh,” Duchy said. “Yeah. I’ve got a storage shed around the side. My ex used to keep his tools in there. Lawn mower, that kind of stuff. I’ve got some shelving, but it’s empty. I told Seth to put his stuff in there until I figure out where to put everything.” She looked up at Fenway, a question in her eyes she was reluctant to ask.
Fenway blinked hard. She didn’t want these words to come out of her mouth, but they were coming out anyway. “Would you like some help carrying the boxes back there?”
Dez groaned faintly.
“Oh!” Duchy said. “Yes. Very much. I’m afraid I’m not very handy.”
Don’t need to be handy to carry boxes—but then Fenway admonished herself. Miranda Duchy had just been through a trauma. Even though she’d been cheating with a married man, Fenway reminded herself that she and McVie had started their relationship under—well, questionable circumstances. She pressed her lips together. You never know what people are going through.
Fenway stepped back, then walked over to the lawn and picked up one of the smaller boxes. “Lead the way.”
“Around the corner.” Duchy walked toward the side of the house—and Fenway stepped in front of her and handed her the small box. She hurried back to the lawn, grabbing a larger box—oof, this one was heavy—and followed Duchy around the corner of the garage. Dez followed a few steps behind, a medium-sized box in her hands.
About ten feet past the corner of the garage, a storage shed, about ten feet wide by five feet deep, stood on a concrete pad next to the house. Miranda Duchy grabbed the handle of the barn-style door and pulled it to the right. The door slid smoothly—the shed looked expensive and was made of solid wood, maybe oak—and Miranda placed the box in front of her.
“Might be better to put that in the corner,” Dez said.
Miranda nodded and pushed the box with her foot so it moved closer to the corner—but not in it. She obviously thought Fenway and Dez would do all the work for her.
Fenway stepped into the shed. A shelf of tools stood on the left, all the way against the edge of the shed, and plenty of room for the boxes, if they stacked them properly. She carried the large box to the rear of the shed and placed it snug against both corners. There were a few more large boxes which should go next to—and on top of—this one. Maybe Dez could put down her box a few feet to Fenway’s left.
“Dez, how about you put your box against the back wall in the center?”
No response.
“Dez?” Fenway turned around.
Dez held the box in front of her, staring at the shelving unit against the leftmost wall.
“Dez?” Fenway repeated.
She followed Dez’s eyes to the second shelf from the bottom. A box of motor oil, a coil of rope—
And a framing hammer.
The claw end was covered in blood.