A good prosecutor could spin that so many ways. Chief McTavish was Mark’s accomplice in the murder, and Mark killed him once Troy was dead. Chief McTavish figured out that Mark was planning to kill Troy, tried to stop him, and Mark killed him, too.
None of the possibilities played favorably for Mark.
I’d have to come up with an equally viable alternative for why the two things happened on the same night. “Maybe Mark and Chief McTavish worked a case together, and a family member of someone they sent to prison wanted revenge on both of them.”
Elise’s head moved in what I could only imagine was a shake. “You’ve worked most of the murder cases since Chief McTavish came to town. They’d have targeted you, too. And Mark doesn’t usually present the condemning evidence. I could see someone wanting revenge on a police officer who put the evidence together, but Mark deals in facts—time of death and cause of death stuff.”
“Maybe the killer originally planned to follow Mark outside of town, and Chief McTavish was driving by, and…”
And I had no idea where I was going with that, it was so far-fetched. I was starting to sound like Mandy, throwing half-baked spaghetti-ideas at the wall.
Elise did me the favor of letting my tangled idea die a quiet death.
I sat up, bringing Elise with me. We couldn’t afford to skip steps or jump to conclusions. “Let’s go back to the beginning. We’re assuming this was about someone framing Mark as a way to hurt him. Could it be about someone wanting to kill Troy and cast the blame somewhere else?”
The way we’d been sitting had loosened one side of Elise’s hair. Her sixth sense must have picked it up because she methodically released her hair and swept it back into a neat bun again, holding the bobby pins between her lips as she worked.
She jammed the final pin in. Cousin Elise disappeared and cop Elise took her place. “If it was about Troy, why choose Mark? They weren’t even friends. There had to be easier places to kill Troy and easier people to frame for it.”
We could ask the same if it was about Mark. Why choose Troy? Neither Mark nor I had wanted to say it to each other, but I would have been the obvious choice had someone wanted to hurt Mark.
Elise’s bookshelf full of framed photos caught my attention. Most of them were of Arielle and Cameron growing up, but she also had shots of her and Erik, her parents, Mark and me with my dogs, Megan and Grant with their kids, and the whole Cavanaugh family gathered together at Thanksgiving.
I wasn’t the only more obvious way to hurt Mark. The killer would have had any number of obvious choices if they wanted to hurt Mark. Sending him to prison wouldn’t hurt him as much as taking away someone he loved.
Unless it wasn’t about hurting him.
I turned back toward Elise. “You said Mark deals in facts. It could be that someone was trying to discredit him or prevent him from testifying in an upcoming case.”
Her hand went to her hair like she was considering pulling the pins out and starting over again. “It wouldn’t work. The prosecution could still use his results even if he couldn’t testify, and framing him for murder wouldn’t call into question the results of his autopsies.”
Too bad stomping my foot would have been childish. It would have helped release some steam.
Elise raised her hands and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know how we’re going to get anywhere. We don’t have enough to go on.”
We didn’t. We needed more information, and the obvious place to start seemed to be with whoever had called in and had Dispatch send Mark out into the middle of nowhere.
8
Since Elise could get fired for looking into Mark’s case further, we decided she’d go break the news about Mark’s arrest to the family while I tried to contact the dispatchers.
Elise kept apologizing like I’d given her the easier task. I was too much of a coward to tell her that explaining everything to the Cavanaughs felt like the much more difficult, scarier job. My parents had prepared me to weasel information out of people. They’d taught me to manipulate. They hadn’t taught me how to gently break hard news.
My time would be much better spent trying to find out who called in the fake accident.
I didn’t want to go home to Sugarwood to make the calls, where I might run into someone who’d have questions I also wasn’t prepared to answer. Or who’d try to talk me out of what I was about to do—like Russ.
Elise said I could stay in her house. Arielle and Cameron still had hours left in the school day.
Thanks to my close association with most of the Fair Haven PD, I knew the names of the four regular dispatchers/desk officers. I prayed one of them was on duty the night Troy died. If someone had been out sick, it’d be harder to track down an out-of-town fill-in, and someone who wasn’t a regular might not have recognized the voice of whoever made the call.
Unfortunately, I only knew one of the dispatcher’s phone numbers. Sheila and I took our dogs to the same obedience classes back when Velma was a puppy. In between classes, we’d met a couple times to practice together.
I scrolled through my saved contacts and pulled up Sheila’s number. The call went to voicemail. I opted not to leave a message. Somehow Hey Sheila, were you the one on duty the night Troy died? didn’t seem like the kind of thing you should leave on a recording.
Since she wasn’t answering, she was likely at work. I keyed in the number for the police station’s front desk.
Sheila answered.
“It’s Nicole,” I said.
I wouldn’t say anything more until she responded. That would tell me how much she knew about Mark. Hopefully she was up-to-date, and I wouldn’t need to explain the situation before asking for her help.
“How are you?” Her voice was low enough to let me know she wasn’t completely alone, but she also didn’t have anyone standing over her shoulder at the moment. “This place has gone crazy. It wasn’t even this bad after the Chief Wilson fiasco.”
I’d gone back to Virginia to pack up my belongings after former Chief Wilson went to prison for murdering his wife and my Uncle Stan. I was too busy grieving Uncle Stan, tearing my old life apart, and being conflicted because I thought Mark was married to consider the chaos I left behind in the police department. They’d all come under scrutiny then as well because of the corruption that Chief Wilson had been covering up. Chief McTavish had been sent to Fair Haven not only to replace him, but also to make sure the corruption ended with the removal of Chief Wilson.
“I’m managing.” Sheila had always been skittish talking about work. She used to evade my questions when I’d asked how her day had gone when we were in obedience classes. I didn’t want to spook her by coming right to my point. Thankfully, she’d opened the door a little by saying the department was in chaos. “Were you working the night it happened?”
“I’m on days now. I didn’t even find out about Troy until I came in this morning.”
I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like. She’d come in thinking she knew what to expect from her day—she might deal with tragedy, but it’d be tragedy at a distance. She wouldn’t have expected to walk into it on a more personal level.
“It’s surreal,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
Even though it was a social nicety and she probably didn’t expect me to take her up on it, it was an opening I was going to charge into. “Could you tell me who was on that night and give me their phone number?”
“Nikki.” The way she said my name had a plea to it.
