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

or what, but you need to take some time off.”

“Listen, Fenway, if Dana Perino can brief the press with one eye, I can do my job after everything that happened to me this week.”

“One eye?” Fenway cocked her head to the side.

“Yeah, remember at that press conference during the Iraq war? That one reporter threw his shoe at George W. Bush?”

“Vaguely...”

“Dubya ducked, and the shoe hit Dana in the eye.”

Fenway was about to argue about how getting hit in the eye with a shoe is not the same thing as finding out your husband was arrested for murder, and then found dead in his cell, but she realized it would be counterproductive. Instead, she walked over to Rachel’s desk.

“Be that as it may, Rachel, I don’t know anyone who’s been through what you’ve been through this week. I’m worried, frankly. You need to take care of yourself.”

Rachel patted Fenway’s hand. “I heard Lana Cassidy shot at you yesterday, and here you are back at work. In fact, I heard you kicked Lana’s ass. If she had done her job, maybe none of this would have happened.” She sighed. “Besides, you guys are super shorthanded right now. Piper’s getting me a computer so I can do some tracking and get the latest info from the M.E. in San Miguelito. And there are still a ton of files to go through from that asshole’s office.”

Fenway thought for a minute. “If you need the distraction for a little bit, I guess you can stay today.” The words were out of her mouth and she instantly regretted it. “If you feel tired, or overwhelmed, or stressed out, you go, okay? You don’t even have to tell me. Promise me you’ll go if you start feeling it.”

Rachel waved her hand. “Fine, fine. And while I’m waiting for something to do, maybe we can go see Dylan’s truck. They found it on a fire road about a mile off 326.”

“Absolutely not.” Fenway folded her arms. “You realize I’d get in a ton of trouble if I let you do that, right?”

“Figured I’d ask.”

Fenway turned to Migs. “Migs, split up the file work with Rachel.”

“Sure thing.”

“I’m going to grab Dez and head to the truck. Rachel, do you know if there’s a CSI team there?”

“That’s what I heard. They’re fingerprinting the truck and assessing the damage.”

“Thanks. It’s good to have you back, Rachel.”

Fenway walked out of the office.

She heard a whisper behind her. “Fenway!”

She turned. Migs had followed her out.

“What is it?”

“You’re really going to let Rachel stay?”

Fenway sighed. “I guess that wasn’t the best idea,” she admitted, “but she was so insistent. I think she’s in denial.”

“I don’t feel right about it.”

Fenway thought for a minute. “Okay, look, can you keep an eye on her? I think if she can finish out the day and keep her mind off everything, it will help her.”

Migs looked skeptical, but nodded and went back in.

Fenway went back across the street and told Dez about the truck. Dez was in the observation room, watching Bradley eat his third taco.

“Not only did we find Dylan’s truck,” Fenway said, “but I also kicked McVie off the case.”

“How did you do that?” Dez followed her out of the building.

“I basically told him he was a liability, and whoever we arrested would get everything he touched thrown out.”

“You certainly don’t lack balls, Fenway.”

Fenway pursed her lips. “He didn’t like it too much. Said I was accusing him of planting evidence.”

“I guess I wouldn’t like getting pulled off a case either, but I thought he’d take it a little better.”

“Yeah.”

Dez called in for the location of the truck, and once she heard it was on a fire road off the state highway, she decided to take a cruiser. “I’m not subjecting either one of our cars to the fire road,” she said. Since Dez knew the roads better than Fenway, she went to the transportation department and got a sheriff’s cruiser.

They drove to 326, then turned and drove north until they were about a half-mile from the entrance of Coast Harbor Park. There was an open metal gate on the left between a couple of fallen trees, and Dez pointed out a single pair of fresh tire tracks on the fire road behind the gate. “I think the CSI van is still here.”

“How do you know?” Fenway asked.

“There would be two sets of tire tracks if they’d left. Come on, Fenway. Detective work 101.”

They drove for a few minutes, taking the gravel road at about 20 miles an hour, until they saw the rooftop lights of the CSI van. They got out, with Fenway holding the side of the car for balance, tottering on her heels on the uneven surface. Dez looked at Fenway’s black dress and heels again and shook her head.

Dez walked over to the CSI van. “Melissa, have you met our new coroner?”

The first tech didn’t look up from her work. “New coroner, huh? I thought she was your prom date, Dez.”

Dez suppressed a laugh. “How’s the fingerprinting coming?”

“Plenty of fingerprints all over the place. We’ve lifted five sets so far.”

“And Sergeant!” The second tech waved his hand from beside the truck. “You and the coroner might want to take a look at this.”

Dez tut-tutted. “Mother mercy, it’s the file drawer.”

In the back seat of the truck was the missing drawer, and it was still full of files.

Fenway was still holding onto the side of the cruiser. “Dez, can you see if the Ferris Energy file is in the drawer?”

“Come on now, Prom Queen. You dressed too fancy to do real police work?”

Fenway glared at Dez, but managed to make it over to the truck without falling down. “I’m never coming to work in heels again,” she muttered under her breath.

Dez already had her head in the truck. “So, Fenway, what do we expect to get out of this?” She lowered her voice so the techs couldn’t hear her. “I mean, we think the sheriff is a suspect, and obviously we don’t think Dylan was the one to drive his truck into the building, right? We think someone stole the truck and did it, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What do we think we’re going to find in these files?” Dez already had a pair of latex gloves on. She handed Fenway a pair too.

“I guess it would depend on who smashed through the wall.” Fenway pulled on the gloves.

“What if McVie stole the file?”

“I guess McVie could have been the one to steal the file,” Fenway admitted. “He could have stolen the car, smashed through the wall, driven off, hidden the truck somewhere close, then gotten the cruiser to go get me. I guess we could time it—it’d be awfully close. But if he wanted to frame Dylan, I guess he could have.”

“Okay. Let’s suppose McVie did all that. Then he’d get the truck and dump it way out here. But why keep the files in the truck?”

“You said earlier McVie was the lead investigator on the accident at the refinery. Maybe he wanted to get rid of the evidence.”

“So, he’d just destroy all the files, right?”

“I don’t know, Dez. Maybe there’s too much stuff in there related to other cases he worked on.”

“I guess. I don’t know, I thought if McVie did it, he would have taken the file and burned it, or trashed it. Or planted evidence in the file placing the blame on Dylan for something—so it would look like Dylan did it.”

Fenway pursed her lips. “I don’t think he’d do that. He got really upset when I suggested that he planted evidence.”

“I wonder if the sheriff doth protest too much.”

“Okay, the moment of truth.” Fenway looked under the Fs until she found the Ferris Energy file. “It’s still here. Let’s see what’s in it.”

She opened it up. The file contained autopsy notes for both Carl Cassidy and Lewis Fairweather. Both men had died of “suffocation from bronchial hemorrhaging.” The toxic fumes had done their work quickly. The toxicology report identified a chemical, that Fenway couldn’t pronounce, as the culprit, and suggested both men were unconscious before their demise.

The investigator’s notes were in the file as well, with separate pages of handwritten notes clipped to the autopsy forms, and toxicology reports, respectively. There were three sets of notes total.

One set was dated the day after the autopsy, which covered the material found on the controls for the fume disposal and ventilation systems that directed the toxic fumes into the room the two men were in. It stated the men shouldn’t have been in the room at the time, and referenced a schedule of fumigation venting. The conclusions were that the men were in the room despite security controls, someone may have altered the schedule without company knowledge, and Ferris Energy, as a company, “could not be reasonably found to be at fault.”

“That’s a weird thing for the coroner to say,” said Dez. “He’s not supposed to offer legal opinions.”

“Migs did say Walker was always going outside his depth on the legal issues, though.”

“Yeah—but this is too much, even for him.”

A second set