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

“Look.” Fenway emptied out the bag with the packaging onto the desk.

“What are those?”

“Empty 25-packs of USB thumb drives.” Fenway looked up at Dez. “Do you think Rachel copied the video of Walker assaulting her onto all those sticks?”

“Oh no.”

“That’s 125 USB drives. She wouldn’t be distributing them at the service, would she?”

“I don’t know, but if she is planning to do anything at the service, let’s hope it hasn’t started yet.” Dez started out the door. “Let’s go, Fenway, like now.”

Fenway put down the bag and got her purse, following Dez quickly on the way out the door. “We’ll take my car,” Dez yelled at her over her shoulder.

“Yeah, you know where the church is.” Fenway was trying unsuccessfully to keep up.

“Plus, you drive like my grandma.” Dez took off at a sprint. By the time Fenway made it, clattering in her heels, to the ground floor of the parking garage, a Chevy Impala was squealing around the corner of the second-floor ramp. Dez came to a short stop in front of Fenway, who pulled the door open and jumped in.

The United Methodist Church was only about two miles away, near the outskirts of the town limits, but Fenway thought it took forever to get to the other side of the highway. As they got closer to the church, she could see the streets lined with cars on either side.

“Oh man, it’s packed.” She glanced at the clock on the dash—it was already five twenty-five.

“You’re getting out.” Dez pulled hard into the parking lot, which was completely full, and pulled the car up on the sidewalk next to the fire line. Fenway was out of the car, running—as best as she could—to the heavy, tall, wooden front doors of the church. She pulled the doors open and ran through the enormous carpeted foyer. Her heel caught on the carpet and she almost fell, but she regained her balance, and grabbed the door to the sanctuary, pulling it open.

The sanctuary was in the shape of a heptagon, with the chancel taking up the three sections directly across from Fenway. She stood at the top of an aisle with about twenty pews on either side. A man in a purple Damascene robe—Fenway assumed it was the reverend—was talking about how a young Harrison had met his wife.

A few people turned their heads to look at Fenway, but most of the attendees kept their attention on the speech. She did her best to smile in a slightly embarrassed way, even though she desperately wanted to find Rachel.

Although the rear pews were mostly empty, it was a well-attended service; the first ten rows were completely full. Fenway looked at one of the back rows. Every few feet, there was a paper program, with a picture of Harrison Walker, A Celebration of Life printed above the photo, and then Walker’s full name, and birth and death dates below.

A USB stick was on top of each program in the row.

She looked at a few other pews. Wherever there was an empty seat with a program, there was a USB stick on top of it.

Fenway scanned the pews, but she didn’t see the back of Rachel’s head in any of them. A few rows in front of her, though, on the right-hand side, she saw her father.

As stealthily as she could, she started collecting the USB sticks from the empty seats. She picked up more than twenty drives as she walked through a few of the pews, and dropped them in her purse. Fenway looked around—there were many more, and it looked like everyone in a seat had already gotten a USB stick. She walked to the pew behind her father where there were a couple of open seats. Fenway scooted into one of them. She turned and looked up at the back of the sanctuary. There was a small rectangular window above the double doors. The window, Fenway thought, might be the projection room. If the room contained a computer hooked up to a projector, Rachel might be in there. Fenway turned toward the back of her father’s head and knelt down.

“Dad,” she whispered. He jumped a little and turned to look at her. “I need your help. Follow me out the door and grab the USB drives on empty seats on the way out. I’ll meet you in the foyer.” She turned around and collected a few more drives before making her way to the back and out the door.

Dez was in the foyer, panting. Fenway suspected Dez had run all the way from wherever she parked.

“There are USB sticks on everyone’s seat,” Fenway whispered to Dez. “And I think everyone who’s sitting down already has one.”

Nathaniel Ferris came into the foyer. “Fenway? What is it?” He handed her a handful of USB sticks.

She held up one of the USB sticks. “These drives show Harrison Walker attempting to rape a woman. Attempting to rape Rachel, in fact.”

“What are you talking about? Rachel was putting them down on all the seats right before the service. It’s a video full of photos and music from Harrison’s life.”

“Is that what she told you it was?”

Ferris had a puzzled look on his face, and then he went white. “Oh no. Is that why Rob pulled Rachel out of there?”

“What? Why would Stotsky pull Rachel out of the memorial service?”

“Rachel is Rob’s daughter, Fenway.”

Fenway was floored. “Stotsky is the guy who wouldn’t let Rachel go to Princeton? Who had a fit about her spending the semester in Costa Rica?”

Ferris had a blank look.

“You didn’t know he was Rachel’s dad?” Dez said.

“No clue,” Fenway said.

Suddenly, it all came to her, like the last puzzle piece slipping into place.

“Okay, we need to find Rachel. And we need to get the rest of those drives. Where do you think Stotsky took her?”

Ferris paused. “I really don’t have any idea, but I can’t imagine they left the church. Rob and I came together in the limo. He wouldn’t abandon me.”

“He might choose his daughter over you, Dad.”

“Why in the world would Rachel want to give a video of that to everyone?”

“I really can’t talk about it right now. Where do you think they might have gone?”

“I—I don’t know, Fenway.”

“You can help me look for Rachel, Dad. Maybe they went to a conference room or an empty office. You look down here, I’ll go upstairs.”

Ferris nodded and started to walk down the hall.

“And I’ll go in there and try to take as many of the sticks as I can,” Dez said, turning toward the door of the sanctuary.

Fenway grabbed Dez’s arm. “And we need to figure out how to get Stotsky down to the station,” she said in a low voice. “Try to think of some excuse. I hope Bradley’s still eating his tacos.”

Dez got a light of recognition in her eyes, nodded to Fenway, and went into the sanctuary.

Fenway went to the stairway on the side of the foyer and took off her shoes so she could take the stairs two at a time. The hallway’s balcony looked down into the foyer, with a door on the other side. It was roughly the right place for a room that might have a window over the sanctuary. She turned the door handle; it was locked. She put her ear to the door. She could hear a man talking.

She put her shoes down, took three steps back, then ran and smashed her shoulder against the door. Nothing. She wasn’t sure how effective that would have been anyway, although she probably would have a good-sized bruise there the next day. She debated what to do next.

Then the door opened.

“What are you doing?” hissed the fiftyish man who opened the door, angrily. “Don’t you know there’s a service going on?” Behind him, a speaker was broadcasting the reverend’s voice into the room.

“You didn’t get a USB drive from a young woman, did you?” she hurriedly spit out. “Whatever you do, you can’t play the video file on there!”

The man put his finger to his lips, and closed the door in her face. Fenway could hear it lock again. She had no idea if Rachel had gotten the USB drive into the projection room, and somehow convinced the man to play it, but it seemed Fenway couldn’t do much about it.

She picked her shoes back up and turned down the hallway, looking for any open rooms where Rachel and Rob Stotsky might have gone.

The sanctuary may have been full, but the hallways were eerily quiet. All the rooms on either side of the hallway were empty. Fenway came to the end of the hallway and ran back to go to the other side of the projection room. Another quiet hallway, and the rooms again were devoid of people. She gave up and went back downstairs.

Dez was coming out of the sanctuary, carrying a paper bag, when Fenway arrived on the ground floor. “I couldn’t get them all. I couldn’t do it without calling attention to myself, and a few people didn’t want to give them up. I even told them we found a computer virus on there, and still some people were saying they wanted to see the pictures of Walker.” She shook the bag a little. “I got about 80 of them, but about 20 of them are with people who won’t give them up.”

“Did you see Stotsky?”

“No. Did you?”

Fenway shook her head.

And that’s when they heard the voice of the reverend introduce a video of the life of Harrison Walker. They saw the lights under the door dim. And then