Fenway ran out to the parking garage before she realized that her Accord was still back in Seattle. She pulled her phone out and requested an Uber—and fortunately one arrived in just a couple of minutes. She got to McVie’s house about ten minutes later. His daughter’s Jeep was parked on the side of the driveway, the Highlander across the street. Amy’s car must be in the garage, she figured.
McVie stood in the driveway, in black sweatpants and a dri-fit workout shirt. Fenway knew he’d had a rough night, and it showed. She got out of the Uber, thanking the driver, and made her way over to the white Ford Fusion parked at the curb next to the front lawn. The license plate matched.
Fenway nodded in greeting.
“Do you want to get Amy and Megan out of here?” she asked McVie. “I don’t think they should be here if there’s a dead body in the car.”
“They’re already gone,” McVie said in a gravelly voice. “Amy took Megan to a friend’s house, and then she went to work.”
“Everything okay?” Fenway said, hoping for some clues about the night before—if Craig had slept on the sofa, what had happened? She tried to sound concerned, pushing down as much enthusiasm as possible.
“No,” he said, “but I don’t want to get into it right now. We’ve got a problem in front of my house, and I want to figure out what to do.”
“I think we try the door and see if it’s open.”
“You’re not concerned that it might be rigged? Some sort of bomb?”
Fenway paused. “Well, now I am.”
McVie considered for a moment. “I don’t think it’s rigged. I think whoever did this is trying to send a message to me. I don’t think they’re trying to kill me.”
“Still, though, it’s not like losing a twenty-dollar bet. If it’s rigged with a bomb, you’ll die.”
“Yeah,” McVie said. “With the week I’m having, that might be an improvement.” He started to walk over to the driver’s side door.
“Wait!” cried Fenway.
“What?”
“If you’re going to be an idiot and open the door, at least put gloves on. Don’t ruin the fingerprints.” She pulled two pairs of blue nitrile gloves out of her purse.
“What size are those?”
“Mediums,” she said. “You’ll just have to squeeze your big mitts into these.”
He pulled them on with difficulty as he walked over to the car, then tried the handle. It clicked.
Nothing exploded.
McVie pulled the door open. He bent down and popped the trunk.
Nothing exploded.
The trunk lid raised about two inches. Fenway walked over, pulling her pair of gloves on as well, and opened the trunk the rest of the way.
A skinny white man of about forty-five lay supine in the trunk. He had a white oxford shirt on, with a huge bloodstain on the left side of his chest. He had grey slacks on, without shoes or socks, his legs bent at an awkward angle. His eyes were covered with a white index card, just like the one Fenway had found in the trash can in Vista Del Rincón.
McVie came around the back of the trunk and looked at the body. Fenway reached out and picked up the index card. She flipped it over. The handwriting matched the first index card.
I SAID NO COPS
Fenway pursed her lips.
“I take it that we’re looking at Vasily,” McVie said.
“I would assume.”
McVie sighed. “And now is when I’m going to get in some real trouble,” he said. “There’s no way I can’t call this in. And now you and I are going to have to answer a ton of questions about who this guy is. I guess I know what I’m doing the rest of the day.”
Fenway pulled out her phone.
“Not from out here,” McVie said. “Let’s go inside to the kitchen table.”
Fenway grabbed his wrist. She felt the electricity between them again. “No,” she said. “I don’t trust any of this. The killer’s got eyes in places where we think it’s safe. I don’t know if they’ve bugged your house, or my apartment, or what.”
“You don’t have to talk to me about being paranoid, Fenway. I’m the one who thinks there’s a mole in the office. We never found out how Stotsky got into the jail cell to kill Dylan that night.” McVie shook his head. “You know I think he paid off one of the guards to look the other way. And we don’t know who that guard is.”
“But you want to do something to make it obvious to the kidnappers that we’re letting the police in on it?” Fenway asked, exasperation thick in her voice.
“They obviously found out that we hired a private investigator.”
“Right, which is why I don’t want to talk about this inside your house or at my apartment. Because those places might be bugged.”
“Where do you suggest we go?”
“I think we should go pick up Dez and then we should go talk at Rachel’s apartment. The CSI team has been all over that place. If that apartment had been bugged, they would have found it.”
“Dez gets in early.”
Fenway looked at her phone. “I’ll call her. She hasn’t left yet.” She dialed. “Dez!” she said. “Hey—if I come to your place, can you give me a ride to work?”
“I’m starting to regret not letting you drive your precious new car back,” Dez replied. “Fine. I was getting ready to leave, but I can wait. Are you walking here?”
“I’m getting a ride.”
“Girl, you better not have woken up over at the sheriff’s. I thought you learned your lesson last time.”
“No, Dez,” Fenway said, glancing up at McVie. “I can be there in ten minutes. Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.”
Fenway hung up. They closed the trunk of the Fusion and made sure the door closed all the way, and after discussing it, took Megan’s Jeep over to Dez’s apartment.
Dez opened the door in her uniform, with her purse over her shoulder and her keys in her hand.
“Oh—Sheriff,” she said, surprised. She cast a suspicious glance at Fenway. Fenway gave Dez a subtle side-to-side shake of her head.
“Let’s go somewhere we can talk,” McVie said. “Fenway and I don’t trust that our places aren’t bugged.”
They were in Rachel’s townhouse a few minutes later; Dez used her key to get in. All three of them went to Rachel’s kitchen table and sat down. Dez spun Rachel’s keychain around on her finger.
McVie started talking. “Okay, Dez,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”
“Is it about that P.I. you and Fenway were being really cagey about yesterday?”
McVie hesitated. “Yeah, unfortunately, it is about the private investigator. He went missing. And this morning, his rental car was parked in front of my house.”
“Wait, slow down,” Dez put her hands up. “What happened?”
“The P.I. never showed up for our meeting last night,” Fenway said. “I had a tough time sleeping, so I went in early this morning and I talked to my father on the phone.” Fenway skipped the part about visiting Klein in jail, but recounted the conversation with her father, the new head of security finding the license plate, and Fenway calling McVie with the information.
“Okay,” Dez said. She put Rachel’s key down on the table.
“And I took an Uber over to McVie’s house, and he and I opened up the car. It looks like the private investigator was stabbed in the chest, close to the heart, then dumped in the trunk. And there’s an index card, just like the one I found in Fletch’s trash, and it says, ‘I said no cops.’”
Dez closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. She thought for a moment. “So what do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure,” Fenway said. “We pretty much have to call this in. There’s a dead guy in a trunk.”
“What about the missing girl?” Dez said.
“They didn’t mention Olivia.”
“Then she’s still gotta be the first priority. It obviously means something that she’s not in the trunk with the private investigator.”
McVie nodded agreement.
Fenway paused for a moment. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Has Mark found anything yet, Dez?”
“I talked to him just before you called. He’s heading down to Aperture Consulting. He thinks it might have something to do with the audits Fletch did.”
“That sounds like a pretty long road.”
“If it’s the right road, it doesn’t matter how long it is,” McVie interjected.
“This is obviously not a person—or, I guess, it could be a group of people—who are shy about murder,” Dez continued. “And I bet they don’t give a rat’s ass about whether this little girl lives or dies. So why are they keeping her alive?”
“Because they want to be sure that Fletcher is convicted of the murder of his mother—” Fenway began.
McVie cut in. “But why in the world would they want that?” He tapped his fingers on the table. “That just doesn’t make any sense at all. If they wanted to get rid of him, shouldn’t they just kill him?”
“I think someone on the other side thought this would be a neatly wrapped package for the police,” Dez said. “That’s why they don’t want any cops involved.”
“Come on, they must know that I’d have to report this to the police,” McVie said, amazed.
Dez clicked her tongue. “I would wager that they don’t know what a Boy Scout you are when it comes to your job,” she said. “I know how far out of your comfort zone you went just hiring the private investigator, Sheriff. But when you did that, I think that it looked to this outside observer—to this murderer—like you were a civil servant with a price for your silence.”
McVie shook his head.
“So—what are our options, if we don’t go through the official police channels?” Fenway asked.
“Let me think,” said Dez. “If you were the killer, and you did this, what would you expect a regular civil servant who bent the rules to do?”
“Panic, I guess,” said Fenway. “And if you panic, then you close the trunk and drive the car somewhere it can’t be found.”
McVie bristled. “I wouldn’t panic. No one in the sheriff’s office would panic.”
“Right,” said Dez. “But this isn’t about what you would or wouldn’t do. The kidnappers know you’ve been hiding the kidnapping from the cops. And I think they’re counting on you continuing to hide it from the cops. So I think that’s exactly what you should look like you’re doing.”
“Do you think someone is watching us?”
“I have no idea,” said Dez, “but I tell you, I’d at least behave like it.”
“Then I guess we shouldn’t use our phones to coordinate any of this,” McVie said.
“I don’t know,” said Dez. “That may be the wrong thing to do. I don’t want to mess up the crime scene.”
“I think it’ll be more valuable if we can try to get fingerprints off the car, or try to find some other type of evidence. Let’s check for skin under Vasily’s nails. If our killer was careless with the evidence, we might catch a break.”
“But if we do that,” reasoned Fenway, “won’t that put Olivia in danger?”
“They obviously think we’ve already gone to the cops,” said McVie. “Well—I mean, since I am the sheriff of this county, and they left the car in front of my house, they’ve already involved the cops. But they didn’t kill Olivia.”
“Not that we know of,” Fenway said.
“If they’ve already done that, we don’t have anything to lose anyway,” McVie said. “Either they draw the line at killing children, or they want to keep Olivia alive to motivate Fletch to plead guilty to something he didn’t do.”
“I still don’t think it’s worth the risk,” said Fenway.
“It doesn’t have to be,” said Dez. “We can make it look like the cops aren’t being brought into this. Do it so that an outside observer won’t know.”
“How would we do that?” Fenway asked.
“We could just leave it,” Dez suggested. “That actually might be what the kidnappers are counting on you doing. No one knows there’s a body in the trunk but the three of us.”
McVie shook his head. “I think you’re right, Dez, but I can’t do that. Every minute that we waste figuring out what to do about it means there’s evidence we’re not gathering. We’ve got to go through proper channels.”
Dez pursed her lips. “But that puts the little girl at risk. There’s got to be a way to do this without letting the kidnappers know the cops are involved.”
Fenway thought for a moment. “Look,” she said, “the body needs to go to CSI. We’re talking about a crime scene in front of the house. I suppose we could stage something so that it looks like we didn’t mean to tell the police, but that’s just as risky. We’ll call the police out. The CSI team will run what they need to run. That’s not what the killers would expect. Maybe that’ll put them on their heels.”
McVie sighed and looked at Dez. “I don’t really have a better idea.”
Dez was lost in thought for a moment, then said, “No. I don’t have a better idea either.”
“Do we want to involve any other agencies?” McVie asked.
“I don’t think so. The girl hasn’t even been reported missing yet.” Fenway’s voice was firm.
“Do we want to give away what we’re doing to the police?” Dez asked.
“I guess it depends on what questions they ask,” Fenway said.
“I’m going to come clean,” McVie said. “I’ve got to lead by example. It’s what I’d want my people to do if the shoe was on the other foot.”
“Okay,” Dez said. “Fenway, this is your dad’s P.I., right? Do you want to tell him what happened?”
Fenway paused. “Not right now. Let’s keep this as buttoned-up as possible until CSI arrives.”
Dez nodded. “Call it in from here?”
“From there,” Fenway said. “Keep everything on the up and up.”
McVie nodded. “Okay, shall we all go back there, then?”
“Let me go to the bathroom first,” Fenway said.
Dez got up from the table. “See you over there,” she said, her face grim and determined, as she pushed Rachel’s key on the table over to Fenway. “Lock up when you leave.”
“Okay.” Fenway got up as Dez went to the door. “Don’t forget to get the key back from me.”
McVie and Fenway drove Megan’s Jeep back to the house. They were looking out for people who were following them, or anyone who hung out around the neighborhood in a car they didn’t recognize or on a park bench pretending to read a paper. But they saw nothing.
They gathered in the driveway and used McVie’s phone to call it in. Less than five minutes later, Celeste Salvador showed up on the scene. She asked the three of them several rounds of questions, all while following the procedures on securing the scene—police tape and everything. The CSI van arrived about thirty minutes after Celeste, and they watched Kav and Melissa get out of the car with their kits, walk over to the car, open the trunk, and get to work. Kav stayed back with the body, and Melissa dealt with the interior of the car itself.
By the end of the discussion, McVie had told the team everything: Fletch’s missing daughter, the desire to keep it out of the police’s hands until confirmation could be made, and how the shooting at the hospital had put a huge monkey wrench in the middle of everything.
• • •
Fenway rode in silence back to the coroner’s office with Dez. McVie stayed back at his house with Celeste, who had a few follow-up questions. The body in the trunk—no one had been able to identify it, although everyone’s money was on Vasily—rode in the van to San Miguelito and Dr. Yasuda.
While Celeste took their statements, Fenway got a message from Dr. Yasuda to give her a call, but she wanted to settle in back at the office first. She tried to block out Dr. Klein and the pictures he had brought in the day before. The dead body in the trunk did a pretty decent job of keeping it out of her head.
She walked in the door after Dez, and Migs popped his head up.
“Hi, Fenway,” he said. “Piper found out some stuff while you were dealing with—whatever you were dealing with this morning. She’s at her desk.”
“Okay,” she said. “Just give me a second.”
Fenway went into her office and shut the door. It had only been her office for a short time: after the truck had gone through her office wall a couple of months before, the construction to repair the wall had been fast—especially for public works—but had only been completed two weeks ago. The workers definitely piecemealed the wall together—a visible line where the paint changed colors slightly, a small bulge evident to the left of the window in the drywall—but Fenway had never had an office all her own before.
She put her purse on the chair and walked back out.
“Maybe I should come with you,” said Migs.
Fenway smirked. “Oh, yes, I definitely think it’s important for you to come with me to see Piper. You never know what legal ramifications it might have.”
“Okay, fine, Fenway.”
“I’m just busting your chops. You can see your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my—”
“You don’t want to finish that sentence,” Fenway said. “You’ve been following her around like a puppy, and unless you want me to kick your ass—and you know I can—you’ll stop right there.”
Migs looked down and didn’t say anything else. He followed Fenway out the door.
They walked down the hall to the Information Technology and Cybercrimes division. They walked past the propped-open door and saw Piper at her desk, dressed a green dress with cap sleeves, her red hair in a simple French braid.
“Hi, Piper,” Fenway said.
“Oh, hey, Fenway.” Piper looked at Migs and smiled. “Hey, Migs.”
Fenway wanted to roll her eyes—the honeymoon phase of their relationship made her crazy—but she got down to business. “I heard you have some new information for me?”
“Yes,” Piper said, breaking out of Migs’s gaze. “So, I looked into SRB, and it’s very interesting. They don’t seem to be as well-concealed as some of the other organizations that I’ve heard about.”
“Great,” Fenway said.
“Come around so I can show you the papers I found.”
Fenway walked around behind her and pulled over a side chair so she could see Piper’s screen.
“So,” Piper said, clicking on a window, “SRB Investment Holdings is registered in the Cayman Islands. It’s difficult to get any information on the ownership—which you would expect of your typical shell corporation. But I can run a reverse search on some of the payments made with their routing numbers. A lot of the information is obfuscated, but I’ve still been able to find some payments and who they were made to.”
“Don’t you need a warrant for that?” asked Migs.
“I didn’t say you could use this in court,” Piper said.
“But foreign entities don’t necessarily have the same expectations of privacy,” Fenway said. “Even I know that, Migs.”
“True. If there’s reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, you should be okay,” Migs said. “Plus, there are some payments that are a matter of public record.”
“And, as you can see,” Piper said, clicking on another window that showed the photo of a cancelled check, “we would have found out about some payments by looking into certain payees—who were next on my list.”
The screen showed a cancelled check dated July 15, three years prior, for the amount of $150,000.
Made out to Alan Scorrelli.
Fenway stared at it for a moment. “So, I’ve kind of been working off the assumption that Scorrelli was hired to kill Rachel,” she said. “Are you telling me that SRB paid a hit man a hundred and fifty grand three years ago?”
“Yes,” Piper said. “Although we don’t have direct evidence what the payment was for.” She clicked off the application and opened another screen. “But I think I have a pretty good idea. See, I looked into Scorrelli’s whereabouts during the time of the payment. He lived over in San Miguelito at the time, but his mother—Lilith Scorrelli—she lived here in Estancia. In January, three years ago, a car crash injured her pretty badly. There are payments to three different doctors in late January, and Alan Scorrelli paid each of them from his credit cards. Now, I can see the purchase of a wheelchair, a medical bed, oxygen tanks. I can also see payments at pharmacies—some of these are hundreds of dollars. See these payments here? I went through the Medicare co-payment database, and someone on the Medicare schedule would have to pay this amount of money for a month’s supply of Oxycontin—that’s the eighty milligram tablets. I searched the medical database, and there isn’t a single other medication that would result in this exact amount. I know that’s no guarantee that it was Oxycontin, but I think it’s, uh…”
“Suggestive?” said Fenway.
“Sure,” Piper said, smiling. “Especially since I see payments listed every month from February through May.” She clicked again, and a form with hospital information in Monterey appeared on the screen. “Now, no one paid for that medication in June or July. And Mrs. Scorrelli transferred to Diego-Riley Medical down in Santa Monica on May 17. That would have been three years ago.”
“Diego-Riley? That’s quite a change from home care,” Fenway said. “So that payment allowed Scorrelli to move his mom to a better facility?”
“I don’t think so,” Piper said. “Lilith Scorrelli moved two months before her son got the payment. I’m still looking into it. The medical records are sealed, of course, but I’m searching start and end dates for other accidents, anything like that.”
“Diego-Riley’s a research hospital, isn’t it?” said Migs. “Maybe they were studying her in exchange for free care.”
“Maybe,” Piper said. “I’ll see what I can find.”
“So where does SRB fit into all of this?” Fenway said.
“I’m getting to that,” Piper answered. “So, as you’ll see, on July thirteenth, there was an episode in the hospital involving Lilith.” Piper brought up a form from Diego-Riley entitled Report of Workplace Violence. “According to this report, Mrs. Scorrelli pulled her IV out, hit nurses in the face, kicked a security guard. The staff finally got her under control. They sedated her, but she went into cardiac arrest and died.”
“I didn’t hear about that,” Migs said.
“It happened before your time in the coroner’s office,” Piper said. “Dez and Mark might not even have heard about it. The death didn’t happen in Dominguez County.”
“Did they determine the cause of death?” Fenway said.
Piper shook her head. “They never did an autopsy.”
“They never did an autopsy?”
“No,” Piper said. She clicked another window. “The report says that the next of kin refused an autopsy on religious grounds. And the judge ruled that the state didn’t make a compelling enough case to justify overturning the wishes of the family.”
“I can’t really believe the judge would rule that way,” said Fenway. “An old woman going crazy and attacking nurses? Don’t they pretty much make you do an autopsy when something like that happens? I figure they’d make the family agree to open you up to figure out why you died.”
“I downloaded the judge’s decision,” Piper said. “I don’t understand it, but that’s what it is.”
Fenway looked at her crowded monitor. “Holy crap, Piper, how many windows do you have open?”
Piper blushed. “I like to be thorough.”
“Okay, so they issued the payment—what date? The fifteenth?”
Piper nodded.
“Two days after Mrs. Scorrelli died.”
“Yes. And the same day before the lawsuit got filed that stopped the autopsy.”
“And let me guess,” Fenway said, “it was filed by Alan Scorrelli.”
Migs looked adoringly at Piper. “You’re awesome,” he said.
Fenway rolled her eyes. “You know, guys, I thought the disgusting level of hormonal attraction would stop when you two got together for real. If anything, you two have gotten more gross. Especially for those of us who are going through summer without a summer fling.”
Piper blushed. “Sorry. But one more thing,” she said. “I haven’t been able to find any money changing hands between Fletcher Jenkins and Alan Scorrelli. It’s possible that Scorrelli used one of his many aliases, but I would think I would have found it by now. It’s not like he used any brand-new aliases in the last couple of months. Otherwise he would have shown up with the new IDs, right?”
“Probably,” Fenway said, scrunching up her face, “but not necessarily. He might have had his bank account under a name he kept totally clean.”
Piper shrugged. “At any rate, I haven’t found anything that looks even remotely suspicious.”
“Okay,” Fenway said, “any other strange payments?”
“There are several,” Piper said. “I’ve flagged about thirty-five payments so far. There are some that I don’t think I’m going to be able to get to the bottom of, though. This is some first-class financial obfuscation.”
“All right,” Fenway said. “Let me know if any of those payments come through, Piper. Excellent work.”
“And Fenway,” said Piper, “let me know if any of that information leads to anything else you want me to look up. This is sure a lot more interesting than fixing Officer Callahan’s blue screen of death.”
“Yeah,” Fenway said, “the bad guys always keep it interesting.”
Fenway and Migs walked out.
“What do you suppose that hundred and fifty thousand was for?” asked Migs.
Fenway shook her head. “Probably hush money,” she mused. “Although I don’t know why. Maybe SRB holdings is a front for some insurance company for off-the-books payments.”
“Maybe the mayor found out what they were doing,” Migs said.
Fenway stopped. “Of course,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it earlier. Fletch is an accountant. I wonder if he uncovered something. Maybe he audited a company that tied to SRB holdings and he ticked off the wrong person.”
“I heard they’re still holding Fletch,” Migs said. “They’ve got to let him go soon, don’t they?”
“Well,” Fenway said, ‘it’s not that easy. He’s got some issues—his confession, first of all. The police really don’t like letting someone go who’s already confessed. Especially if they haven’t recanted.”
“But they can’t think that he hired—”
“That’s exactly what they think,” Fenway replied.
When they walked back into the coroner’s office, Fenway’s phone rang. She looked in her purse; the phone screen illuminated Rachel’s key. Fenway had forgotten to give it back to Dez.
She pulled the phone out and looked at the screen; it was the medical examiner’s office.
“Hi, Dr. Yasuda,” Fenway said.
“Good afternoon, Fenway,” Dr. Yasuda said, sounding jittery.
“Did you find something, Doctor?”
“You’ll have to excuse my excitement, but it’s not often there’s a first in my line of work.”
“A first?”
“Yes. The first time I’ve ever found pheasant in someone’s stomach.”
“Whose?”
“The mayor’s,” Dr. Yasuda said. “I haven’t yet started work on that unfortunate man you found in the trunk. Hard to specify time of death on that one with all the temperature fluctuations, though. Did you see Kavish’s initial report at the scene?”
“No, I was busy answering questions.”
“Fair enough,” Dr. Yasuda said. “Kavish puts the time of death sometime yesterday evening, between five and seven p.m.”
“Well—hold on, Doctor, tell me about the mayor’s stomach contents.”
“Sure, I’m sorry I got distracted. The mayor’s last meal consisted of pheasant, sweet potatoes, zucchini and yellow squash. Some red wine too. Traces of figs and honey, lots of butter.”
“Maxime’s,” Fenway said.
“What?”
“Maxime’s,” Fenway repeated. “It’s a fancy restaurant here in Estancia. Apparently, it’s the only place on the whole Central Coast that you can get pheasant.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s true,” Dr. Yasuda said. “I had a wonderful pheasant Normandy down in Santa Barbara last year.” She sighed. “In better times.”
“Yes—I know what you’re talking about. It’s a French place, but they took the pheasant off the menu a few months ago,” Fenway said. “My father is a huge fan of pheasant. I just had this conversation with him a couple of days ago—apparently it’s prepared with some sort of avocado brandy.”
Dr. Yasuda was silent on the other end of the line.
“Anyway, thanks for the call, Doctor. Now I at least have a place to start looking to piece together the mayor’s timeline that night.”