The Reluctant Coroner by Paul Austin Ardoin (best ebook reader ubuntu txt) 📕
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“Do you know what the next steps are?”
McVie breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay—well, first, I should take you to meet the team. Two sergeants, a paralegal, and an assistant. Pretty standard for a small county like ours.”
“Wait—people would be reporting to me?”
McVie nodded.
“I’ve never managed anyone before.”
McVie nodded again. “I know.”
“What if the whole team quits?”
“I’m not worried. Even if you’re a horrible manager, they’ll all gut it out for six months.”
“Gosh, Mr. Sheriff, sir.” Fenway clasped her hands and fluttered her eyelashes. “You sure know how to make a girl feel special.”
McVie chuckled. “I’m not going to lie to you, Fenway. I expect this will be out of your comfort zone. But I did my homework on you, and now that I’ve met you face to face, I bet you can do it.” He leaned back. “In fact, I bet you’ll be good at it.”
Fenway took another bite, a big bite, and chewed thoroughly before she swallowed. The ex-boyfriend who’d shown up at her door in the middle of the night had been charming too, but he’d been a child, really. Here was a grown man, a county sheriff, telling her that she could do this.
Not like she had any other options.
Fenway nodded. “When can we go meet the team?”
“How about this afternoon?”
Once Fenway had agreed to go to the office, Sheriff McVie was visibly more relaxed. He spoke about how the sheriff and the coroner worked together, what a collaborative environment it was. How the coroner—both Harrison Walker for the last five years and the coroner who preceded him—had been vital to solving open cases. Fenway found it surprisingly easy to talk to the sheriff, and she even felt some excitement about the investigations.
When they’d finished eating, the sheriff pushed his empty plate to the middle of the table. “The community will like this. They’ll like you. And if we get this appointment done quickly, people might actually think we have our act together.”
After they paid, they got back in the cruiser. When the car doors closed, their conversation, so animated in the restaurant, just died. Fenway watched McVie’s hands tapping the steering wheel.
“So, uh, Sheriff,” she said, trying to sound casual. “What kind of music do you like?”
“All kinds of stuff. Funk is probably my favorite. Parliament, Sly and the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield.”
Fenway narrowed her eyes at him. Was he just saying that? For all McVie knew, Fenway could be a classical violinist. Although that surely would have been revealed in the background check.
“Maybe ten years ago,” McVie continued, “I went to Reno for the weekend with a few of my buddies from Fresno State. I couldn’t win a blackjack hand to save my life, so I went to the box office to see who was playing—and it was the Godfather of Soul himself.”
“Get out!” Fenway said, slapping McVie lightly on the shoulder. “James Brown?”
“Yep. I couldn’t believe it, but they still had tickets left. So I go running to my buddies, super excited, but no. They want to go to a sports bar instead.”
“Oh no,” Fenway said. “What did you do?”
“I bought a ticket and went by myself.”
“You went by yourself?”
“Yep. I never go by myself to anything—I don’t go to movies by myself, I don’t eat out by myself, nothing.”
“Did you have a good time?”
He grinned. “It was amazing. I didn’t have to worry about whether the other guys were enjoying themselves. No one made fun of my dancing. Or my off-key singing along to ‘Cold Sweat.’ I danced my ass off for three hours. I bought two T-shirts. It was fantastic. One of the best nights of my life.”
“Really?”
“I mean, when my daughter was born, that was amazing, too. Better. But in a different way.”
“And your wedding day.”
McVie nodded, unsmiling. “Also in a different way.”
Huh. Maybe that ring wasn’t indicative of marital bliss. She tried to banish the thought from her mind.
“James Brown passed away about six months after that Reno show. I’m so glad I didn’t go to a sports bar that night.”
“You’re lucky,” Fenway said. “I never got to see James Brown.”
McVie scoffed. “I bet you’ve seen your share of interesting concerts.”
Fenway hesitated slightly and fidgeted with her sleeve. “I was always too busy with school. And then the hours in the ER and the clinic when studying for your master’s? That doesn’t really gel with concerts.”
McVie looked over at her.
Could he see right through that lie? Could he tell that she never had the money to go to concerts? Dance clubs, yes. Especially when guys bought her drinks. But not hundred-dollar concerts.
McVie pulled into the apartment complex. “You know he never had a number one hit? The ‘Macarena’ was number one for three months straight, but James Brown never had a number one hit. That’s a crime right there.”
As they parked in Fenway’s assigned spot, she saw her mother’s dresser ascending the stairs. She remembered her mother using her good charcoals to number the bottom of each drawer. A lanky Latino man in jeans and a T-shirt was on one end, and a burly white guy with a long beard and plaid shorts was on the other, awkwardly trekking to the second floor.
This was really happening. She was on the verge of accepting a coroner position—in a county where coroners got shot.
What the hell was she thinking?
With six people unloading, the truck was empty before lunchtime. In another couple of hours, the apartment met Fenway’s definition of livable: bed assembled; dresser, sofa, dining table and chairs in place; boxes of linens and clothes in the bedroom; plates and silverware in the proper cabinets and drawers. The sheriff stepped out a few times, probably to get updates on the coroner’s murder. Every time he stepped back in, he was somber for a few minutes before helping to put a nightstand together or carrying a box into the bedroom.
Fenway offered to get pizza and beer, but all of Ferris’s people said they had to get back to the refinery.
Only the sheriff accepted. “Why don’t we get pizza on the way to the coroner’s office?”
“I’m not meeting the staff in sweats,” she said. “Give me half an hour. I’ll meet you at the Coffee Bean.”
She wrapped her hair and showered, then pulled out some decent clothes: her black trousers weren’t great but were at least no-iron. Paired with a crisp, pale-pink Henley top with a tab collar, they looked professional. She checked herself in the mirror; the ocean air had been kind to her skin but not her hair, and there was no time to fix it. She put on a pair of black-and-white flats and headed out the door into the hazy sunshine. The fog had finally burned off.
McVie was finishing a coffee in front of the Coffee Bean, and they both got in the cruiser and drove toward downtown.
“Do you have a car?”
Fenway shook her head. “I sold it before I left Seattle. I thought I’d buy a used one once I got here.”
He nodded. “If you need it, the number 14 bus stops in front of the Coffee Bean every half hour or so. Drops you off right at City Hall.”
“It’s nice of you to assume I’ll like the office enough to take the job.”
“The Owner won’t take no for an answer.”
Fenway turned to look at McVie. “The what?”
“Oh.” He stopped. “I guess I shouldn’t call him that. A lot of people call him The Owner, capital O, because he owns so much in the county: the refinery, a few restaurants, a bunch of real estate—and that includes your apartment complex.”
“The Owner,” Fenway said, chewing the charged words. She looked at McVie’s face, but there was no malice in it.
“Yeah.”
She let it go. “I’ve called him worse when I was growing up.”
Estancia was the seat of Dominguez County, and the quaint downtown had a more sterile feel than Fenway’s neighborhood. The cruiser made a left from Broadway onto Fifth Street, which narrowed into a two-lane boulevard with angled parking on each side and a median with grass and small trees. Fenway looked out the windows. An ice cream shop, a music store, a tattoo parlor, a theater with a sign for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and a bakery before the government buildings appeared.
City Hall, with its white stone façade and thick, unadorned columns, sat back about two hundred feet from Fifth Street, behind a plaza that looked like a small amphitheater with a quarter-circle of cement benches cascading up in short steps. The
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