The scalpel! Talk about being too close to something to see it clearly. I’d been focused on the who, and not enough on the how. Someone had to have stolen a scalpel that already had Mark’s fingerprints on it. If we could figure out how they’d done it, it might lead us to the real killer.
12
There was only one place I could think of that someone would have been able to get a scalpel with Mark’s fingerprints on it—the morgue.
Because our county was a small one, Mark’s office and the morgue were part of Cavanaugh funeral home, run by his brother Grant.
As soon as I was in my car and headed back to Fair Haven, I called Grant’s phone. It went straight to voicemail. I left a message. While I could text him, Grant regularly ignored his texts and routinely sent replies to the wrong people. As good as he was with people, he was equally as bad with technology.
I tried his wife, Megan, instead. She answered, and I explained what I needed.
“Come on by.” Piano music played faintly in the background. “I’ll help when I have a break if you need me, but Grant isn’t going to be free for hours. We have a funeral and two visitations going on right now.”
I’d always thought it was unfair that life didn’t pause for you when something bad happened. Megan and Grant had to keep running their business even though Mark had been accused of murder. I had an advantage. My job allowed me to actively do something about Mark’s situation.
I thanked Megan and told her I’d be there in about half an hour. I couldn’t stand the idea of going home and not making any more progress today. I’d be so distracted that I shouldn’t even be allowed to do anything around Sugarwood anyway.
By the time I got to Cavanaugh Funeral Home, no spaces remained in the parking lot, and cars lined up down the street. I ended up parked two blocks away. Megan hadn’t been kidding.
I stopped on the front steps and glanced up. The front of the building had two cameras monitoring it. Having been here at closing a couple of times with Megan, I knew the front door had an alarm keypad and the camera system that turned on as soon as the alarm was armed. It’d seemed excessive to me for a small town. Megan said it was because Mark worked out of the building. The case files and bodies for autopsy had to be kept secure.
The back door would be armed with the same setup.
Megan and Grant hadn’t mentioned anything about an attempted break-in. We had to assume the perpetrator knew about the cameras and alarm system. That meant he either had the alarm code and a key to the building, plus knowledge of how to erase the video footage, or he’d gotten in some other way. I didn’t know how their video surveillance worked, but if they could tell whether the recordings had been tampered with, we’d be off to a good start. Then we’d unfortunately also have to look at any of their employees who had a key and the code.
Megan stood just inside the front doors, asking people who they were here for and directing them. Her white blouse and black skirt and blazer looked so out of place compared to the colorful clothes she usually wore.
I waited for a slight break in the stream of people and stepped up to her.
She gave me a smile that looked borrowed from someone else. “As soon as the funeral starts, one of our employees is stepping in to give me a quick break. Do you need me for anything?”
I wanted to tell her no and that she should use her break to rest, but I did need her help. I explained about the videos.
“I’ll check,” she said quickly as another group of people flooded through the doors. “We only keep two weeks of footage, but it’ll be easy to tell if it was tampered with by running a system report.”
I headed down the hall toward the back of the building where Mark’s office and the morgue were located. His office would be locked, and not even Megan and Grant had a key, but he didn’t keep scalpels in his office anyway.
I swung by the back door and opened it. The key pad flashed, indicating it was still functioning, and the camera looked intact. That meant they hadn’t somehow damaged the system to get in unnoticed.
Hopefully Megan found something in the system report.
Halfway down the hall toward where I remembered the morgue to be, Megan caught up with me.
Her face told me the answer before she spoke. “The video wasn’t tampered with. Maybe they came more than two weeks ago?”
Maybe. We had to hope that wasn’t the case, though. If it was, it’d be a struggle to prove it happened at all.
It was also possible I’d given to much credit to the intruder. The murderer might not have come themselves. They could have bribed or blackmailed one of Grant and Megan’s employees to steal a scalpel. That person might not have thought to erase themselves from the video. “Are you able to send the recordings to my firm? I’ll have our intern watch through them to see if anyone came in at a time when they shouldn’t have.”
A long shot perhaps, but it was still a shot.
I texted her the email address for our intern and told Megan what to put in the subject line.
“Excuse me,” a soft female voice said from behind Megan. “Could you tell me where the Ainsley visitation is?”
A look of exhaustion flashed over Megan’s face. Providing comfort to others when your own heart was troubled had to be one of the most draining things in the world.
She wiped her expression clean before turning around. “You took a left when you should have taken a right. I’ll show you.”
I continued on in the direction of the morgue. The best thing I could do for Mark and the whole Cavanaugh family was to stay focused and figure this out. They didn’t need comfort. Mark wasn’t dead. They needed the truth.
I stopped outside the door marked Staff Only. I’d forgotten to ask Meagan for the key, and she’d likely be busy for a while now.
At least I could see if there were any signs of someone clumsily picking the lock. Before I’d learned that there weren’t any signs of forced entry into Mark’s house, I’d watched over a dozen videos online about lock-picking and read even more articles. The hope was that I’d recognize signs and know which kinds of locks could be picked and how. It turned out I didn’t need that information for Mark’s house, but it might still come in useful now.
I dropped to one knee so I was eye level with the keyhole, leaned in, and placed a hand on the door to steady myself.
The door swung open, and I planted belly first onto the floor like a seal leaping out of the water and onto dry land.
Oh boy did I hope the floor had been washed recently. Thankfully I’d stopped my fall before my face hit the ground. Even if the floor was perfectly clean, the idea of face-planting onto a morgue floor made my skin want to escape my body.
I crawled back up to my feet. They must leave the door unlocked during the day while they were moving bodies in and out of the mortuary fridge. Regular people would see the Staff Only sign and keep out.
The real killer could have pretended they were here for a visitation or a funeral and have stolen a scalpel. That was good in one way for our argument that it could have been planted.
It was bad in another. I’d hoped we’d be able to narrow down suspects based on who had access to the morgue. Now it seemed like all of Fair Haven could have had access.
Megan should still send the surveillance video to the firm’s intern, but the odds were good it wouldn’t show anything out of the ordinary.
