Deputy Celeste Salvador was the first one at Cahill Warehouse Storage. Fenway drove her Accord up behind the cruiser. Celeste was striding up to the office door.
Fenway threw the car into Park and got out of the car. “Celeste!”
Deputy Salvador stopped and nodded. “Coroner.”
So formal.
Oh.
“I’m sorry,” Fenway said. “I’ve been so busy with this investigation. But I haven’t forgotten about you. I’ve emailed HR for updates. I’m just waiting for their response. But listen, Celeste, you’re at the top of my list.”
“You haven’t talked to HR yet?”
Fenway’s heart dropped into her stomach, taking up uneasy residence next to the Ortega Dream Burger. “I submitted most of the paperwork weeks ago. I’m sure everything will be fine as soon as they give me an update.” She hoped. “But things have been busy. And the HR specialist leaves early.”
Deputy Salvador pressed her lips together.
“I’ll make it a priority,” Fenway said.
“You know, Dez says you’re a pretty good boss.”
“Oh.” Fenway felt the color rise to her face. “I appreciate that. I think she’s a pretty good sergeant, too.” A smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Even if she is a pain in the ass sometimes.”
“The one thing she says is that you don’t like doing paperwork.”
“Heh. Who does?”
“Yeah, but you’re late with it.”
Fenway paused. True, she didn’t always hand in her reports on time, but she usually handed everything in within a few days of the due date. “I don’t know—I mean, I’m not perfect, but I don’t have stacks of unfiled paperwork on my desk or anything.”
“Except when it comes to replacing Sergeant Trevino.” Salvador looked at her feet. “Just saying—you’ve had a while. And now whoever you choose won’t have the benefit of getting trained on the job by Mark.”
“No. You’re right.” Fenway swallowed hard. “I’ve been remiss, and I apologize.”
Salvador smiled—despite herself, it seemed. “Dez also said you’re the first boss she’s had who can admit when you’re wrong.”
“Don’t fool yourself, Celeste. Lots of people can admit when I’m wrong.” Fenway began walking toward the office. “Let’s make sure we cordon off the area. You called CSI?”
“Melissa is on her way. But if we think Seth Cahill died on Monday night, those bloodstains have been there almost forty-eight hours.”
“Right.” Fenway paused. “Has anyone tried to contact Mathis Jericho?”
“Mark is trying to reach him now,” Salvador said. “His phone rang and went to voicemail.”
They opened the door to the office and Isabella Chan stood behind the counter, the color drained from her face. “Thank God,” she said. “Thank God.”
“Ms. Chan, would you mind showing us where these junipers are?”
“I didn’t touch anything.”
“I’m not saying you did,” Fenway said. “We need to tape off the area.”
“Will we have to shut down again?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Chan clenched her teeth, then smacked her hands on the counter. “I’m sick of this. First, Seth gets killed, and I had to be the one to see his dead body. Now I find blood all over the wall on the side of Building B, and I—”
“Miss Chan,” Deputy Salvador said forcefully, “please take us to the walkway you’re talking about. Now.”
Chan folded her arms, then took a deep breath and put her arms at her side. “Sorry. It’s been a rough week.”
“I know,” Salvador replied.
Chan came out from behind the counter, shoulders slumped. She hadn’t put on makeup, and she wore sweats instead of the smart blouse and tailored trousers she’d worn the day before. “Follow me.” She exited the office on the rear side, following a path into the storage unit buildings.
Striding across the asphalt, sneakers a blur, Chan must have wanted to get this over with. Fenway and Deputy Salvador followed her.
After a moment, Chan turned right. There seemed to be nothing at first. Then, a narrow opening between the two buildings came into view. The three of them walked between the buildings, single file, and the gap led into a wider area with junipers and a small ironwood tree on each side of the walkway.
“There.” Chan pointed.
Nothing but the thick fronds of junipers were visible.
“Behind the right side of those branches.”
Fenway squinted and saw a stack of lumber on the ground under the junipers: short flat boards, maybe three feet long, and two-by-fours that were a foot to two feet long. A small plastic toolbox sat next to it.
Fenway handed a pair of blue nitrile gloves to Deputy Salvador, snapped a pair on herself. Then she stepped to the right of the greenery area and pulled the thick juniper branches away from the wall.
Chan was right. A splattering of blood on the wall—only a few dried droplets were visible, but enough that Fenway suspected this might be the spot where Seth Cahill had been attacked.
She looked at the small stack of wood, too: more blood had landed there.
“The spray went this way,” Fenway said in a low voice to Deputy Salvador. “Cahill stood about five-six, so if his head came to here—"
“Right-handed killer, correct?” Salvador asked.
“That’s right.” Fenway was impressed; Salvador had done her homework and read the M.E.’s report.
“We’ll have to wait for CSI to make the determination,” Salvador continued, “but a blow with the claw end of a framing hammer could have caused this blood spatter pattern.” She dipped into a crouch. “Do you think this will tell us anything about the height of the assailant?”
“Let’s wait to hear what Melissa says.”
Salvador nodded, pulling the thick juniper branches at the bottom. Her glove came away with a small smear of mostly dried blood on it. She showed her palm to Fenway.
“Ick,” Chan said.
“Ms. Chan, do you know if this walkway is commonly used?” Fenway asked.
“Mostly by employees,” she said, her eyes on the junipers.
“So—you, Mathis, Seth, Tyra?”
“And when Seth and Tyra have their friends here,” Isabella said. “They’ll cut through here to get to the back of the property or whatever.”
“Seth and Tyra had friends on the property? What for?”
Isabella shrugged. “I don’t ask. Seth has this one friend, a tall, skinny white guy. British or Australian or something. I’ve only seen him once or twice. Kinda creepy.”
Hmm. Maybe Calvin Banning.
“And Tyra’s friends?” Fenway moved herself between Isabella and the junipers.
That snapped Isabella out of it—she lifted her eyes to meet Fenway’s. “You interviewed them before. Hope and George.”
“Are they here a lot?”
Isabella tilted her head from side to side. “A couple times a week, maybe. They’re pretty tight.”
“All three of them?”
“Yeah.” Isabella scoffed. “That’s weird, right? Hanging out at a storage unit?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t know what George sees in Hope, frankly.” She leaned forward. “You know, I think they’re only together because George thinks he owes her.”
“He owes her? For what?”
“We all went out for drinks after work,” Isabella said. “Hope met us at Winfrey’s, and she drank a little too much and started talking about how George got into massive debt in one of his businesses when they were still dating. I guess Hope’s family bailed him out—financially, I mean. He had terrible credit for years.” She gave Fenway a half-smile. “George didn’t want to be thought of as a gold-digger, I guess.”
“Uh-huh.” Fenway leaned forward to get a better look at the wall—and Isabella craned her neck, trying to steal a glance over Fenway’s shoulder.
“Ms. Chan, would you be so kind as to wait for us in the office?” Fenway asked.
Chan didn’t move.
“You don’t want to miss any customers.”
“Sure. Of course.” Chan stepped away, then hurried down the walkway out of sight.
Salvador stared after Chan. “You don’t think she had anything to do with Seth Cahill’s murder?”
“No.” Fenway considered a moment. “No,” she said again, this time with more finality. “Seth Cahill weighed one-fifty or so, but Isabella is five-foot-nothing. She couldn’t have dragged his body into the storage unit.” Fenway blinked. “Besides, she’s the one who assigned me Unit 176. If she’d killed Seth Cahill, she’d have wanted to keep me out of there. And she would have washed the blood off the wall here when she found it.”
“Which way is Unit 176?”
Fenway pointed forward, away from the office, farther down the walkway.
Deputy Salvador turned in her crouch and examined the concrete, then tilted her head and squinted.
“Fibers from the Persian rug?”
“Right.” Salvador pointed the way they’d come. “I saw on the video that the Persian rug—the one wrapping up Cahill’s body—lay on the floor of Seth’s office. So I’m thinking that the killer met Seth Cahill in his office, then Cahill walked out here with him. And the killer took advantage of this area. Look.” Salvador pointed to the walls. “No cameras.”
“Cahill had turned the cameras off.”
“Maybe our killer didn’t know that. Or maybe this felt like a safer place to commit murder. So the killer attacks Cahill, smashes him in the back of the head. The blood splatters all over the bushes, and the killer doesn’t realize a bunch of the blood went through the branches and got on the wall.”
“That follows.” Fenway was impressed. Salvador would make a great replacement for Mark.
“I don’t know if the killer planned this. The back of a hammer—that suggests a crime of passion or opportunity.”
“Or both.”
“But not lying in wait. Not premeditation.”
“I don’t know.” Fenway looked back and forth along the concrete walkway. “This suggests someone who knew the facility well. Maybe someone who suggested coming this way.”
Salvador pursed her lips.
“And,” Fenway continued, “the killer knew the Persian rug’s exact location. Knew it would be easier to drag the dead body wrapped up in a rug.” She pointed to the ground. “No blood on the ground. If Seth’s body had been dragged—or moved at all—without being wrapped up, blood would’ve dripped all over the concrete.”
“Unless the killer—or a maintenance person—washed it off.”
Fenway pressed her lips together. “Possibly.”
“And remember, it rained early Tuesday morning.”
“Not enough to clean off blood spatter from the wall.”
“Probably not,” Salvador said, “but let’s see what Melissa has to say.” She cocked her head. “You’re thinking something.”
“She’s got motive,” Fenway said, “but I’m thinking it’s less and less likely that Miranda Duchy did this. She knew Seth had the Persian rug in his office, but I don’t buy her wrapping the body up and dragging it to Unit 176.”
“Is it a long way to the unit?”
Fenway turned and walked down the walkway. Twenty feet later, the walkway ended—right into the asphalt, with the back gate across the blacktop, only a dozen yards away from Unit 176. She turned back. “No. Not far at all.”
“So maybe Miranda Duchy could have done it.”
“She had the financial motive.” Fenway shook her head. “But I don’t believe she’d do that. Even a crime of passion. Why take the hammer back home?”
“People do crazy things. Maybe she was in shock.”
“And she invited Dez and me into her shed where the hammer was sitting on a shelf in plain sight.”
“If Miranda was in shock, maybe she put the hammer in the shed and forgot she did it.”
Fenway tilted her head. “Do you really believe that?”
Salvador thought for a moment. “Not really. The evidence points to Miranda, but I’m not sure I trust it.”
“Me neither.” Fenway bit her lip in thought. “But the blood spatter, the murder location—if this is indeed where the killer attacked Seth Cahill—I’m thinking the killer knew this place a lot better than Miranda Duchy did.”
“Someone who knew this facility? Are you thinking Mathis Jericho?”
“Especially since we can’t find him. He doesn’t have an alibi, he isn’t answering his phone, and he’s in charge of maintenance. There must be twenty framing hammers he has access to. Plus, his gravy train was about to run dry. Means, motive, opportunity.”
Salvador was quiet.
“Or Tyra,” Fenway said.
“Tyra? But—didn’t we uncover that the life insurance money went to Miranda, not Tyra?”
“That’s right, and Miranda is in a lot of debt. But the motive might have been personal.”
Salvador tilted her head. “Personal?”
Fenway told Salvador about Scott Behrens and how he had reconnected with his birth mother after twenty years. And then how the same morpheranyl that Seth Cahill had stored illegally might have been responsible for Scott’s overdose. “If she blamed Seth for her son’s overdose, maybe it was still a crime of passion. Just not for money.”
Salvador pointed at a spot on the concrete walkway. “Red fibers. Looks like they might be silk.”
Fenway took out her phone and took a picture, first a wide shot, then a close-up.
“And another here.”
Deputy Salvador, still crouching, scooted down the walkway and continued to find fibers—most of them a dusky gold or navy blue color, which had been two of the dominant colors of the Persian rug Cahill had been wrapped in—and Fenway followed. She tapped and pinched the phone screen to take pictures, zooming in and out. She took out an evidence baggie and began picking the fibers up with gloved fingers. Should she put them all in separate bags? No, she didn’t have enough. Better to put them all together than to leave them out another night—or even another hour.
A dusky gold fiber had stuck to the edge of the wall when the walkway narrowed at the edge of the buildings. The asphalt met the walkway, only thirty or forty feet from the corner of the Building C—where Unit 176 stood.
Celeste stood and drew herself to her full height. “So we know the way the killer came.”
“Seems so.”
“And the killer probably worked alone.”
Fenway cocked her head.
“The murderer wouldn’t have dragged the rug on the ground otherwise.” Salvador thought for a moment. “Unless the second person didn’t want to get their hands dirty, or if they were incapacitated. But my money is on the killer working alone.”
Fenway nodded. Deputy Salvador kept proving why she was the right choice for the detective position. Fenway would call HR as soon as she could to make sure the process was still moving forward. Salvador might get promoted to sergeant within a couple of years.
Salvador looked up. “The Corvette’s still missing?”
“Yes.”
“They’ve checked the local airport lots?” Salvador paused. “Don’t Corvettes come with tracking devices? SafeBoard? Something like that?”
Fenway nodded. “But it’s not responding. Our IT specialist thinks someone disconnected it.”
Salvador blinked a few times. “Okay—let’s try to recreate this killing. Maybe an hour before and in the aftermath.”
“Sure.” Fenway started walking around the building, back to the office. Salvador followed. “We already know that Seth Cahill got here at a quarter after ten, then turned off the cameras at 10:18.”
“Was anyone else here?”
Fenway thought back to her earlier phone call with Melissa de la Garza. “No one else was on the property when Cahill turned the cameras off.”
“The killer had to arrive after 10:18, then.”
“And we think Seth turned off the cameras because he didn’t want the cameras recording his receipt of the drugs.”
“So anyone involved in the drug transaction would have shown up after the cameras were off.”
“And we can’t rule any late-arriving person—or people—out. We’re pretty sure Mathis Jericho—the maintenance guy—was here, and he might have wanted to take over Seth’s business.” Fenway shook her head. “But we’re looking for a guy named Calvin Banning. He travels on the ship that smuggles the morpheranyl into Estancia, and then oversees the handoff and the placement of the drugs in storage—or that’s what I’ve been able to piece together.”
“But right now, our lead suspect is Miranda Duchy.”
“Yes. She says she was driving back and forth to Vista del Rincón during the time in question. No one—at least, no one so far—can place her in any of the places where she said she’d been. Not to mention the murder weapon being found at her house.”
“Pending the blood analysis.”
“Right.”
Salvador frowned. “And she knew Seth had a rug in his office?”
“She gave it to Seth. Asked for it back, as a matter of fact.”
“That’s bold.” Salvador folded her arms and stared at the ground in thought. “And would she be able to drag Seth’s body from the middle of the concrete walkway into Unit 176?”
Fenway scrunched her nose. “Probably. Dragging a one-hundred-fifty-pound dead body in a forty or fifty-pound rug? Miranda could have done that.”
“It’s not that far. A hundred feet, tops.”
“True.”
They reached the office, and Fenway reached out for the handle, then she stopped.
“What is it?” asked Salvador.
“We put out an APB on the Corvette, and it disappeared. That’s strange.”
Salvador nodded. “I thought the same thing.”
“We know Seth drove the Corvette the night he was murdered. So the killer would have had to get rid of the car.”
Salvador spread her arms wide. “I would imagine several units within this facility are large enough to store a vehicle.”
“I was thinking the killer might have driven it somewhere else, then somehow gotten a ride back.” Fenway rubbed her chin. “But if the Corvette is hidden here, no need for a ride back.”
“And if the car isn’t hidden here,” Salvador said, “how did the killer get the Corvette out of the facility? It’s not like the cameras will magically turn back off.”
Fenway squinted. “They would if the owner of the facility was the killer.”
“Tyra?”
“Right.”
Salvador nodded. “Or Miranda might have known how to do it. She and Seth were sneaking around for, what? A year?”
“I know the physical evidence points to her, but Miranda Duchy wouldn’t even carry a heavy box to the shed. She doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman to get her hands dirty.”
“When it comes to extramarital affairs, maybe you’d be surprised at how dirty your hands can get.” Then Salvador stopped, took a sharp breath as if to say something else, then thought better of it.
Oh no. Dez wasn’t the only one who knew Fenway and McVie had a dalliance before the divorce. How far had that knowledge spread?
And maybe Deputy Salvador didn’t have the context that McVie had found out his wife had been carrying on a yearlong affair of her own.
Fenway shut her eyes tight. Celeste doesn’t care that you and McVie have a past. She wouldn’t want to work for you if she did. Focus, Fenway. You’re in the middle of a murder investigation—with a woman who might very well be your next detective.
“Oh,” Fenway said. “Tyra Cahill is gonna love us.”