The Reluctant Coroner by Paul Austin Ardoin (distant reading txt) 📖

on. I don’t have to have the sheriff’s missus tell me they were sleeping together on Sunday night for me to know he’s being set up.”

Fenway looked at Migs. His eyes were big, and he had been holding his breath for about fifteen seconds. “See, Migs? This is why we don’t tell you. Take a deep breath, man.”

“You know they’re going to look at the sheriff for Dylan’s murder,” Dez said.

“Yes, the M.E. said that to me, too.”

“This isn’t going to look good for him: arresting Dylan for murder when his own wife is Dylan’s alibi, the sheriff actually finding Dylan’s body, the murder weapon—a cop-issued murder weapon, might I add—conveniently planted, literally, on Dylan’s property. And what exactly is the sheriff’s alibi going to be?”

Fenway looked away. “I assume he was home with his wife.”

Dez stared at Fenway, blinked, then stood up. “Come with me.” She grabbed Fenway’s elbow and pulled her into the conference room. She closed the door. “Now, Fenway, I’m going to tell you a funny story. Would you like to hear the funny story? Here it is. My niece lives in the apartment complex next to yours.”

“Oh.” Fenway tried not to wince. “That is funny.”

“I know, right? I’d say it was a coincidence, but this is such a small town, I’m sure I know someone in just about every apartment complex around here. Anyway, I’m her favorite aunt. I’m the cool aunt. She’s nineteen and she goes to the community college. Studying accounting. We sometimes go out to the movies, like yesterday. After such a stressful day, it was great to go to the movies with my niece.”

“That sounds nice,” Fenway said weakly.

“I dropped her off last night after the movie—it was around eleven thirty. That’s why I don’t look my best today, because I’m so tired after dropping off my niece at eleven thirty last night. Here’s something else that’s kind of funny: you know I can see right into the parking lot of your complex from my niece’s apartment? And did you know that I know what car the sheriff drives?”

“I didn’t know either of those things.”

“No, I would guess you probably didn’t.” She folded her arms. “You were awfully chipper this morning, Fenway.”

Fenway looked down at the floor.

“Listen.” Dez dropped her voice. “I’ve only known you a few days. You seem to have a pretty good head on your shoulders—compared to the last couple of coroners, at least. And I hate to speak ill of the dead, but you’re actually engaged with the job. Like, your brain is on. And I like that.”

Dez shook her head. “And, I understand; I was young once. I see the sheriff look at you, and I know what he’s looking at. But, girl, you got so much more to offer this department, and this county, than being a notch on the sheriff’s bedpost.” Dez sighed. “And, for the love of God, he’s still a married man. Amy might be cheating on him with a man young enough to be her son, but it don’t change the fact that Craig and Amy are still married. Get your head on straight, girl.”

“He didn’t seduce me, or anything.” Fenway’s tone was defensive. “I got shot at. I didn’t want to be alone last night. He makes me feel safe. I wanted to do it.”

“Oh, that is too much information.” Dez put up her hand. “Just stop it. This gets out, and you’re going to be the girl who sleeps her way into the job. That weakens all us women in the department. That weakens Rachel. And it validates all those piece-of-shit men who are going to hear about Walker and Rachel and think she was asking for it.”

Fenway winced. “That’s not fair, Dez.”

“Of course it’s not fair,” Dez snapped. “There’s a lot of shit that’s not fair. But telling you not to sleep with the married sheriff is not unfair. Sleeping with a married man, especially one you work with, is just stupid.”

Fenway looked at Dez, whose face was angry and determined, although she was keeping her emotions mostly under the surface. Fenway couldn’t figure out if she, herself, wanted to be angry back at Dez. But she didn’t want them to fight. So, she swallowed hard. “Yeah. You’re right, Dez. Yeah, it was probably a mistake.”

“So don’t do it again.”

Fenway nodded.

“And as far as what you’re going to do when the sheriff needs an alibi—let’s hope it doesn’t get to that point.”

Dez started to step past her, but Fenway put her hand on Dez’s shoulder. “Hold on a sec. Have you checked on Rachel? Has anyone told her about Dylan?”

Dez sighed. “No, I don’t think so. I know her sister is with her.”

“Look, I don’t have a problem with her being out for a week or two. Or however long she needs, really. She’s been through a lot, with the assault, and her husband getting arrested. And now it’s going to come out, probably, that her husband was sleeping with the sheriff’s wife, and that her husband was murdered, and I’m worried she’s not going to be okay.”

“I’ll make sure her sister is taking good care of her.”

“Maybe she should get out of town for a few days.”

“On whose dime?”

“The department could pay for her to go to, I don’t know, Sedona or something, for a couple of weeks. We don’t want to get sued for a zillion dollars for employing a sexual predator.”

Dez raised her eyebrows. “You think paying for her to go to Sedona for two weeks is going to stop her from suing the county?”

Fenway considered this. “No, I guess not. Probably not, anyway. But I’m still worried about her.”

Dez nodded, then stepped past Fenway and opened the door.

Fenway followed Dez out into the main office. Migs was standing up at his desk, and he looked a little excited. Piper was standing next to him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to interrupt, but Piper found some emails on Walker’s laptop.”

Fenway managed to smile after her lecture from Dez. “Nice to see you again, Piper. I didn’t realize what a techie bad-ass you are.”

Piper blushed almost as red as her hair. “I don’t know about that.” Fenway saw Migs look at Piper, and he was obviously smitten. Fenway smiled wider.

“Okay, Piper, come around and show us what you found.”

“All right.” Piper picked up Walker’s laptop and brought it over. She put it down and tucked her hair behind her ears with her long fingers. Fenway noticed she had fairly short, neatly trimmed nails, but no polish. “It looks like Walker was using an anonymizer for one of his browsers. But it also looks like he forgot to use it on a couple of occasions. He was trying to be all sneaky, but he was lazy. He had a private ZoothMail address—that’s an encrypted email platform—and I think he usually used the anonymizer to access it. I can’t tell yet if he was using the anonymizer for anything else, but he was definitely using it for this ZoothMail account.” She clicked a few things and Walker’s ZoothMail web page came up.

“How’d you get into his account?”

“That’s the crazy part. He cached his username and password, if you can believe it.” Piper giggled and put a hand in front of her mouth to stifle it. Fenway thought she saw Migs swoon a little. “All that anonymizer stuff, and he was too lazy to type in his username and password.”

“Okay. What are we looking at?”

“There are a couple of interesting items here. It looks like this email account is communicating with only one other email address—this one.” Piper clicked on the email address. It was a jumble of numbers and letters before the @ sign. “Now, I looked at the headers on this email address, and they’ve done a good job of obfuscating the IP address where this originated.”

“So, we’re nowhere?”

“No, no. I mean, if this is all we had, yes, we’d be nowhere.” Piper pulled out a printout from the folder and thrust it in front of Fenway. “But look at the headers on the address the RAT software was sending the video feed to.”

Fenway looked closely, from the screen to the paper and back. Both strings were jumbles of meaningless characters—but they were the same jumbles of meaningless characters.

“They’re the same,” she said.

“Yes.” Piper nodded emphatically. “It’s actually the exact same obfuscation the RAT tracking malware used.”

Dez shook her head. “What does that mean?”

“It means the RAT malware and these emails came from the same person.” Migs was so excited he was almost shouting.

“It’s a high degree of certainty,” Piper agreed.

Migs plowed on. “And it narrows down the possibilities, because if it’s the same obfuscation, it can only be one of a handful of obfuscation tools, because most of the programs out there won’t give the same result twice. The ones that do are cheap.”

“I guess we now know the RAT software guy is cheap.”

Piper nodded. “We might know who the email recipient is—and who the RAT hacker is—by the end of the day.”

Fenway looked between their jubilant faces. “That’s fantastic. No wonder you’re excited. The way Migs talks about you, Piper, I thought he was exaggerating about how talented you are. Turns out he was right.” Piper blushed again and mumbled a thank you. Fenway looked at Migs and winked.

“Okay,” Dez said, “but what do the emails actually say? Is there anything in there that tells us anything?”

Piper typed a little more. “I think so. But let’s take a look. I don’t know what some of this stuff means.”

She finished