Which meant there was still something Chief McTavish knew that we didn’t. “Maybe he did clear Quincey, but he hadn’t had a chance to tell his wife yet.”
“Maybe.” Mark glanced down at his lap and shifted a hand. One of the dogs must have read into his tone of voice and decided he needed some comfort. “The best thing we can do is figure out the leader behind all this. That won’t directly clear Quincey, but it’ll be a step.”
Mark didn’t have to say it would also help clear him. It spoke loudly to the kind of man he was that, instead of going to Elise and Erik’s house to rest and clean up, he’d come straight here to work the case. His personal effects still sat in a plastic bag on my kitchen counter.
I flipped the list of names over. We’d both remember them, and we didn’t need Quincey’s name staring us in the face, distracting us. “Whoever’s in charge of this had already started before former Chief Wilson joined. Mrs. McTavish made it sound like the ringleader helped Wilson become chief.”
We had to assume the ringleader didn’t approach anyone and everyone, trying to recruit them. He must see something in them that made him think he could convince them to look the other way when he told them to. Wilson had certainly been ambitious enough.
That was another tick in favor of Quincey not being involved. He wasn’t at all ambitious. He was happy to live a quiet life in Fair Haven, and he hadn’t even tried for a promotion.
Rigman had plans to move into crime scene reconstruction. That was a goal, but it didn’t match as cleanly as Wilson’s goals for advancement would have.
Grady Scherwin, though, liked power and prestige. I didn’t believe in reincarnation, but if I did, Grady Scherwin would come back as a peacock one day.
“Do you know how Chief Wilson became chief?” I asked.
Mark’s hand continued to stroke whoever sat by his knee. It had to be Toby. Velma was the more affectionate one normally, but she also stayed still about as well as a fly at a picnic. I’d been told by the few other Great Dane owners that I’d met that Velma would settle down once she turned two. That seemed like a lifetime away.
“I was still in New York when he took over,” Mark said, “but the previous chief—John Zacharius—had an accident.”
The way Mark said accident, with a gravity reserved only for delivering bad news, I knew the accident had been fatal.
“Wilson became the interim chief, and you know the rest.”
The rest was that Fair Haven’s crime rate appeared to go down under Chief Wilson’s leadership. What no one had known at the time was that was because he’d chosen to cover up a lot of what was actually happening, presumably not only to set himself up for sheriff one day but also because he was receiving a lucrative payoff.
Mark stilled. A whine issued from near him, but he was on his feet. “I have the file. Chief McTavish passed it along to me a day or two before Troy died. I hadn’t had a chance to go through it in detail yet.”
If he had the case file for Chief Zacharius’ seemingly accidental death, then we were definitely on the right path. McTavish must have come to the same conclusion we had.
We had to get that file. “Where is it?”
“At my house.”
We tucked the dogs into their crates and headed for Mark’s house. I let him drive. I’d have been too tempted to speed.
He parked in his driveway. With the crime scene tape gone, I wouldn’t have known that anything bad had happened here only a few days ago. His house looked like it always had.
I reached for the door handle.
Mark laid a hand on my arm, stopping me. “The clean-up crew won’t be here until tomorrow, right?”
“That was the soonest they had an opening.”
“You’d better stay here. The smell will be one you won’t be able to forget.”
I shuddered, removed my fingers from the door handle, and gave Mark’s hand a quick squeeze.
“I won’t be gone long,” he said, and then he was out of the car and headed for the house.
A minute ticked by. Then two.
My ribs started to ache like my lungs were trying to push their way out. I sucked in a breath and realized I hadn’t been breathing. It shouldn’t be taking Mark this long to find the file. His office at Cavanaugh Funeral Home was one of the neatest I’d ever seen, and that was saying something, given that I’d worked for my parents and they didn’t tolerate messiness in their firm.
Could the murderer have come back now that the scene was released? They couldn’t plant any more evidence against Mark, but they could plan to attack him and stage a suicide. That would instantly close the case. The detectives investigating were so sure Mark was guilty that they wouldn’t question whether his suicide was real or not.
Mark came out the door, and I slumped back in my seat. The sooner this case was solved, the better. I was heading straight for a stress ulcer at this point.
He slid back into the car, but his hands were empty—something I’d missed in my relief that the murderer wasn’t forcing pills down his throat or stringing him up.
“It wasn’t there?”
Mark shook his head. “I don’t understand it. It shouldn’t have been confiscated as evidence. It’d be clear to anyone who looked that it had nothing to do with Troy or me. Neither of us were even in Fair Haven at the time. And no one should have taken it thinking it was an open case. All the open cases are kept in my office at the funeral home where it’s more secure, and this file was clearly marked Closed.”
The police weren’t the only ones in his home lately. If we were right about the connection this accidental death had to the corruption scheme in Fair Haven, then there was someone else with a strong motive to take it. “Could the murderer have stolen it when he killed Troy?”
That would help explain why he’d chosen to kill Troy in Mark’s home. He’d had two things he needed to do—frame Mark and make sure that file vanished.
“The file I had was just a copy.” Mark massaged the spot above his right eye, the spot that meant he was getting a headache. “Taking it wouldn’t have stopped someone else from looking at it.”
“No, but would anyone else have been looking for it? You and Chief McTavish were the only ones working on the corruption case.”
He kept his fingers pressed into the spot above his eye. It made him look a bit like he was trying to hold himself together the old-fashioned way. “As far as I know, yes. The timing is more coincidental than I’m comfortable with.”
If we were right, then Chief McTavish reinvestigating the death of the previous chief could have been the trigger that set all of this in motion. The ringleader knew that file could point straight back to him somehow. He had to stop both Mark and Chief McTavish from examining it closely and telling anyone about what they found.
Killing them both would have immediately drawn suspicion. Instead, he’d made Chief McTavish disappear, and he’d done what he could to make sure Mark wouldn’t be working any cases ever again.
