“Insubordination?” Fenway asked from the open doorway of Sheriff Gretchen Donnelly’s office. Fenway’s voice was calm—the rage simmered under the surface, but she could hear the pot lid clinking.
The sheriff looked up from the paperwork on her desk and narrowed her eyes. “Shut the door.”
Fenway closed the door, resisting the urge to slam it. She wanted the walls of the building to shake.
“I told Celeste no overtime.” Donnelly stood and walked to her bookshelf, taking a binder out. “Not two days after we have that conversation, she’s staying late at the storage facility. And then she puts in another four hours last night when she drove you to Hutash Bridge. Where I come from, disobeying a direct order is insubordination.”
“I asked her to do that. I was planning to tell you I’d allocate her overtime to my budget. But I got pulled away by a suspect interview.”
“Yes, well, you didn’t allocate Sandoval’s overtime to your budget. And don’t get me started on the red tape if we attempt to change the cost center number after the fact.”
“Changing the cost center requires just two forms—and that’s on me, not Celeste. Besides, the overtime is justified. We found another murder victim!”
Donnelly set the binder on her desk, but remained standing. “Why don’t you explain that to the Board of County Supervisors when I’m hauled in there for going three million dollars over budget?”
Fenway hesitated—three million dollars for a county as relatively small as Dominguez County was hefty. She put a hand on the back of the guest chair in front of Donnelly’s desk. “The voters put you here for a reason, Gretchen.”
“The reason is, McVie handpicked me.” Donnelly leaned forward. “And I’m not stupid. I’m not Craig McVie. He would go a couple million over budget and smile his easy smile and go in there, and charm Alice Jenkins and let Barry Klein get just enough of his complaints out there so he felt he was being heard.” Donnelly raised out of her chair and pointed at Fenway with two fingers, half-standing. “Well, guess what? Alice and Barry aren’t around anymore, and the new people they have in place are former accountants. They want murders solved between eight and five.” She glared at Fenway. “Tell me, why don’t you have to deal with the politics I do?”
Fenway blinked.
Oh no. Could it be…
Donnelly scoffed. “You may not have the same last name as your father, but the specter of Nathaniel Ferris is still strong in this county.” She shook her head. “You don’t realize all the interference he runs for you, do you? He’s happy to suggest cuts for the sheriff’s office, but the coroner’s budget isn’t touched.”
“Then I’ll take one of your problems off your hands,” Fenway said. “Celeste scored high on the detective exam. And if you’re worried about all the overtime she’s pulling, then rescind the write-up so I can hire her. Make her overtime my problem, not yours.”
“Just like all the murders in this county. Your problems, not mine.”
A sharp tone in Donnelly’s voice put Fenway on edge. She chose her words carefully. “It’s literally my job description. I’m the coroner. My job is to investigate all deaths outside of a home or hospital.”
“And my job is to write up my employees when they disobey direct orders.”
“What—” Fenway almost said, what’s your problem? But that would have been extremely unhelpful. “I’m sorry this is a bad situation,” she said instead. “I want Celeste to work for me. You have a problem with her overtime. It’s a win-win.”
Donnelly’s gaze softened, and she sat back down in her chair. “Solution-oriented as always, Coroner.”
Fenway wasn’t sure if that was sarcastic or not, but she let it slide.
Donnelly steepled her fingers and looked at Fenway over the top of her hands. “What do I get out of it?”
Fenway blinked. “What do you get out of it? I just told you, it’s a win-win. You get rid of an employee who was giving you budget issues.”
Donnelly folded her arms. “I need something more than that.”
Fenway paused, then nodded. “I can’t make up for the shortfall, but once she’s reporting to my department, I’ll transfer all of Celeste’s overtime into my budget. At least for this quarter—I don’t think we can go back further than that.”
“Something more,” Donnelly repeated.
Fenway blinked. “Like what?”
Donnelly put her hands down on her armrests. “You’ve shown that you’re a savvy, intelligent woman. I’m sure you’ll figure something out—and I’ll bet you figure it out soon.”
Fenway pursed her lips. What did that mean?
Hold on—no.
Was Donnelly asking for a bribe?
Where in the world did Donnelly get the idea that Fenway could afford a bribe? Oh, of course. Fenway’s father was rich.
A bubble of rage grew again in the pit of her stomach, but she tamped it down. She always thought she could trust Gretchen Donnelly, but no more. Should she reach into her purse and start recording this conversation on her phone?
Hang on—was Donnelly recording her, trying to catch her offering a bribe? While her nemesis, Dr. Barry Klein, was no longer mayor, Fenway knew she still had enemies. But California was a two-party recording state. Donnelly couldn’t use any of the recording unless Fenway agreed to it—not without a warrant.
Fenway nodded, her head spinning, doing everything she could to keep her face neutral. “All right, I’ll give it some thought. Thanks for your time.”
Fenway opened the door, using every ounce of self-control not to scream.
She turned down the corridor and was heading toward the front doors of the sheriff’s office when a voice called out. “Coroner!”
She turned at the low, somewhat familiar voice. There, hurrying down the row of cubicles, was Captain Steve Alvidrez.
“Glad I caught you, Coroner.”
“Everything all right?”
“Better than all right.” His face broke into a grin. “The eighteen wrapped bags discovered at the cabin belonging to Miranda Duchy?”
Fenway tilted her head. “Has that already gone through the lab? It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.”
“I know a guy.” Alvidrez winked. “You were right, Coroner. It’s morpheranyl. Matches another batch of Nyllie that the Riverside County Sheriff seized two weeks ago. That narrows down where we search for the packaging and distribution center.”
“That’s good news.”
“There’s better news. You should talk to a certain someone in the drunk tank.”
Fenway tilted her head. “The drunk tank? Did Tyra Cahill get blind drunk and cause a disturbance?”
Alvidrez shook his head. “What would I care about the victim’s ex-wife? No—this is someone who could take down the Nyllie dealers in SoCal.”
Fenway furrowed her brow.
“Calvin Banning.”
Fenway walked over to the jail, Captain Alvidrez following a step behind her. The windy morning was getting humid and hot, and she broke out in a light sweat underneath her blazer. She and Alvidrez showed their identification to the guard, signed in, then they waited in an interview room on the right side of the hallway past the metal detectors, with a metal table and three uncomfortable plastic chairs.
The door opened, and a guard walked in with a tall, thin man in front of him. The man had pale skin, but his face was ashen, his eyes were bloodshot, and he walked with a little uncertainty.
“Calvin Banning?” Fenway said.
Banning shifted his eyes to Alvidrez, a look of mild disgust on his face, then his gaze turned to Fenway. Although she was sitting down dressed in a blazer and trousers, Banning’s eyes raked over her, and she felt like she had to take a shower.
“Have you dropped from heaven, love?” Some kind of British accent, maybe from the northeast. Geordie, perhaps. Not quite Scottish. She’d seen a patient from Newcastle in the clinic in Seattle, almost an identical Geordie accent. Like her former patient, Banning was a long way from home.
Alvidrez bristled. “That’s enough, Mr. Banning. Our coroner is investigating the death of the guy who’s been storing the Nyllie for you.”
“Not our Nyllie, mate.”
“The bad news for you, Mr. Banning, is that a thumbprint belonging to you was found on one of the Nyllie bricks.”
“Had nothing to do with it, did we.” The end was a question spoken like a statement—and used the Newcastle way of referring to himself in the plural.
“How did your prints end up on it, then?”
A smile came over Banning’s face. “I say by sorcery.”
Fenway rolled her eyes. “Mr. Banning—”
“Yes, love?”
“You don’t understand. That Nyllie brick was discovered near a dead body. With seventeen other Nyllie bricks, by the way.”
Banning shifted in his chair—losing track of that many morpheranyl bricks might have rattled him. He frowned. “A dead body? Whose dead body?”
“Mathis Jericho.”
Banning’s eyes widened, but only briefly—then his face returned to leering impassivity. “Is that name supposed to mean something to us?”
“We’re aware that you, Seth Cahill, and Mathis Jericho would meet. Maybe once a month, every six weeks. There’d be an exchange of money and a storage locker at Cahill Warehouse Storage would magically become unavailable.” Fenway suspected this scenario was true—and if she could read the look on Banning’s face correctly, it was.
“There’s no crime in meeting your mates,” Banning said.
“If you’re storing drugs, there is,” Alvidrez said.
“Are we under arrest?” Banning said.
“For drunk and disorderly, yes,” Alvidrez responded. “And with your fingerprint on the Nyllie brick, and given where we found it, I bet we can find a prosecutor who can make a case for possession with intent to distribute. And that’ll keep you locked up until we figure out whether we want to charge you with murder.”
“I didn’t hurt no one,” Banning said.
“I’ve got a corpse in the morgue with two rotational fractures to the fingers of his left hand that suggests differently,” Fenway said. “Twisting your fingers until they break? That would hurt.”
Banning looked down at the table, not meeting Fenway’s eyes. “Weren’t us.”
A lie. Fenway blinked. What had Dr. Yasuda said? His fingers had been broken three to four months before. Was that timeline important? She couldn’t know for sure.
“It was two fingers the first time he said no,” Fenway said. “What was his punishment this time, when you found out he’d lost the storage facility outright? And what was Mathis Jericho’s punishment for asking to take over for Seth?”
“It were nae—” Banning said, then clamped his mouth shut and crossed his arms.
“It wasn’t like that?” Fenway said. “You’d allow someone to simply walk away?”
Banning raised his head and looked from Alvidrez to Fenway, this time without the leer, then shook his head incredulously. “Haddaway and loss yasel—you’re nae wanting us. Thinking we’ll turn, is that it?”
Fenway leaned forward and stared Banning in the eye. “I’m the coroner. I only care about solving murders. If you killed Seth Cahill, I don’t care if you’re the biggest lieutenant in the Venn cartel—I want to put you away for murder. But if it wasn’t you, I want you to tell me what you know.”
“This Jericho fellow,” Banning said, leaning in toward Fenway, his eyes open and pleading. “Nine-millimeter, yeah? Two in the heart, one between the eyes, like?”
Fenway rubbed her forehead. Banning wasn’t trying to hide the truth this time. He was describing a Venn cartel’s murder-for-hire. Banning didn’t have the facts of how Jericho died. He might be responsible for dozens of overdose deaths in Southern California from morpheranyl, but he wasn’t responsible for Mathis Jericho’s death.
Fenway shot a quick glance at Alvidrez. The captain winced—if Banning had talked about who’d be responsible for contract killings, maybe that could solve other murders up and down the California coast. She paused. Would this be the break that Alvidrez needed for other cases? And was there an opportunity for Banning to talk about who might have committed other murders?
Fenway tried to keep her disappointment from showing. This might be good for Alvidrez, but Banning’s possible identification of a hit man had no bearing on the murders of Seth Cahill or Mathis Jericho. Unfortunately for Fenway, Banning had started opening up to her. She’d have to follow this through.
“Two in the heart and one between the eyes,” Fenway replied. She was deliberately misleading him, but in some cases, maybe the end justified the means.
Banning’s mouth turned into a snarl. “That’s not right,” he said. “You send a message, you do it for accountability, yeah? Mathis were just a kid. He weren’t hurting no one.” He bowed his head. “Had no clue they knew who Mathis were.”
“Sounds like you have a pretty good idea who was responsible?”
Banning turned his tongue over in his mouth a couple of times, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. Finally, he slapped his hands on the metal table. “If Mathis was supposed to be a message, then we’re a dead man anyroad.”
“We can get you protection,” Alvidrez said.
“In prison? Not bloody likely.”
“Maybe not in prison,” Alvidrez said. “I can ask the D.A. to set you up with a new life.”
Banning folded his hands and stared at them for a long time. Finally, he lifted his face to Fenway. “What do we have to do?”
“Let’s hear what information you have,” Fenway said.
“And what if you don’t like what we have to say?”
Fenway shrugged. “You think if you don’t say anything to us, you’ll be safe if you go back into general pop?”
Banning chuckled softly. “You’re a right straight talker. Pretty, too. Shame we’re opposite sides of the law.”
Fenway was silent for a moment. There was nothing she could say; it was all up to him. A minute went by, each second feeling like an hour.
“There were a bloke out of the San Fernando Valley,” Banning began, speaking directly to Fenway.
Fenway looked at Alvidrez. He was rapt with attention. Fenway needed to get back to the murder investigation—but the way Banning was speaking so emotionally, directly to her, she didn’t think she’d get out of there for a while.
An hour later, after Alvidrez had called the D.A. and set up the first steps of witness protection, Fenway stepped out of the interview room. She took a deep breath—handing Banning off to Captain Alvidrez was no simple task. But Banning had no information on either murder.
She looked at her phone. A message from Dez.
Fenway put the phone back in her purse and walked past the guard and the security station, and out of the jail.
The morning was still warm, but instead of the eerie pink and lavender, now dark gray clouds covered half the sky.
Some of her friends who had gone to college in the South were fond of a joke: if you don’t like the weather in Houston, wait fifteen minutes. But California wasn’t like that. With the morning so sunny and clear, rarely would the sky change so dramatically. With the sky this gray, the weather would often become chilly, even in summer. But the air was still warm—and humid. Fenway wished she’d brought an umbrella this morning as she stepped into the crosswalk toward her workplace. Hopefully, Alonso wouldn’t make landfall in Dominguez County. Still, heavy rain was certain.
The IT department was in the same building as the coroner’s office, down the corridor. She considered stopping for a coffee at Java Jim’s—but with an hour spent discussing the Venn cartel’s hit man from San Fernando Valley, Fenway couldn’t justify getting her caffeine fix.
She opened the door into the IT office. Jordan Daniels, the IT director, was coming out of his office about ten feet behind Patrick Appleby’s cubicle. He nodded at Fenway in greeting. “Hi, Coroner.”
“Hi, Jordan. Here to see Patrick.”
Patrick’s back was to Fenway, headphones clamped on his ears. She’d learned to get in his line of sight first, instead of tapping him on the shoulder. She walked around the side of his cubicle, trying to make herself as visible as possible. He looked up, nodded, and removed his headphones.
“Good morning, Coroner Stevenson.”
“Hi, Patrick. I heard you wanted to see me.”
“I have completed my review of the doorbell camera footage from Ms. Duchy’s home. The footage started at 9:02 PM on Monday and continued through the time you and Sergeant Roubideaux removed the boxes from the front lawn on Wednesday.” He clicked on his screen. “The camera only records when it detects movement, resulting in seven hours and thirty-three minutes of footage to review.”
“You got it done fast.”
“There was little of note. Often, it was simply a car driving by. The mail delivery on Tuesday. A package delivery that Ms. Duchy signed for on Wednesday morning. People walking their dogs in front of the house.”
“Anyone walking to the side of the garage?”
“Only you and Sergeant Roubideaux.”
Fenway scrunched up her nose. “Then that really doesn’t look good for Miranda Duchy. Hard for anyone to argue beyond a reasonable doubt that she wasn’t the one who put the hammer in her own shed.”
“Possibly, but I did note there are no cameras in the back of the house. It’s possible someone who knew about the doorbell camera came over the back fence. We could potentially access the doorbell cameras for the houses behind Ms. Duchy.”
“I suppose we’ll have to do that. Due diligence, right?”
“Correct. However, the assistant district attorney believes there is now sufficient evidence to arrest Ms. Duchy.”
Fenway raised her eyebrows. “He’s usually pretty cautious.”
“If you would like, I could download the form to apply for the doorbell camera warrant and email it to you. Judge Azurra canceled his docket for the day except for a single arraignment at two o’clock.”
“Oh—thanks, Patrick. That’s very kind. I appreciate it.”
He hesitated. “I feel compelled to point out a door from the side of the garage next to the shed.”
“Right. Our theory is that Ms. Duchy used that door to take the hammer from the car in her garage to the shed.”
“The camera does not cover everything, as I said,” Patrick said. “The technology is not flawless. Someone may have been able to trick the camera not to activate.”
“How would they do that?”
“Movements so slow that the camera would not pick it up. Or keeping out of the camera range until reaching the corner of the house, then staying close against the wall and ducking under the camera doorbell.”
“Aren’t those cameras wide-angle? Designed with that kind of deception in mind?”
“True,” Patrick said. “It’s unlikely that someone would have been able to sneak along the front of the house without the camera picking up at least some of their movements.” He tapped his chin. “If the camera were covered and tricked into not activating, perhaps at night—”
“Two people working together?” Fenway said.
“If two people were working together, the first person makes sure the camera is focused on them, and it’s easier for the second person to sneak by the camera.”
“Right.” Fenway nodded. “Thank you for being thorough.”
“I’ll send you the links to the footage in case you want to review it yourself.”
Yes, that’s just what she needed for the last two days McVie was in town: reviewing seven hours of doorbell camera footage. Oh, and screening over two dozen applicants for Sergeant Trevino’s position.
“You’re quite certain,” she said, “no one was hanging out around the edges of the screen? Waiting to avoid the camera?”
Patrick thought a moment. “The camera shows that the only people who went around the side of the house from the front yard were you and Sergeant Roubideaux.” He ran his tongue along his teeth, debating with himself. “It is possible that the defense will see this and suggest that one of you planted the bloody hammer in Ms. Duchy’s shed.”
“How? Neither of us is carrying a bloody framing hammer.”
“You are both carrying boxes. You could be hiding the hammer behind a box.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I make no judgement other than to say the defense might suggest it. Reasonable doubt.”
Fenway hadn’t considered this possibility, but of course she should have. Half of her was insulted, the other half relieved that Patrick had told her before the defense suggested it at trial.
“Then it’s of prime importance we look at the footage from the doorbell cameras behind Duchy’s house.”
“Remember, Judge Azurra,” Patrick repeated.
“Thank you, Patrick.”
Patrick turned back to his computer screen and put his headphones on.
Fenway turned and walked out of the IT office. The beige carpet of the corridor stretched in front of her, the next steps toward a light she still couldn’t see at the end of this tunnel.