Two
Yorkton Hill Police Detective Janice McCabe did another walk-through of the house before returning to the upstairs bedroom.
The coroner was there, and once she was done, McCabe could have a closer look at the bodies, move them as necessary, then
have them sent to the forensic science center in Toronto.
A nice house, she thought to herself. Nicer than what she could afford on her salary. She had not yet asked the son, Reece Chartwell,
what his parents did for a living, or if they were both retired. She had the sense Brent Chartwell was, given that Reece believed
he’d find his father home on a Friday.
McCabe found on a console table in the front hall the two books Reece had brought to return to his father, both hardcovers.
A Richard Russo novel, Everybody’s Fool, and an early John Irving, A Widow for One Year. So that part of his story checked out.
Judging by the house and the furnishings—tasteful, modern, leaning toward minimalist—it was clear the Chartwells had money
or, at least, had had it.
She took out her phone, opened a browser, and did a search on Chartwell’s name. Up came a Yorkton Hill–based consulting firm
called Chartwell Strategies. Scanning information about the company, she learned the firm run by the Brent Chartwell who lived
at this address had wound down operations two years ago.
Consulting evidently had been good to him.
McCabe wasn’t surprised. She’d seen enough of politics and the business world to know everyone was terrified to make decisions and happily threw hundreds of thousands of dollars at consultants to make choices for them.
Then, when things went south, they could always blame the consultant.
Not that any of this had much to do with the matter at hand. This investigation, at least so far, did not look overly complicated.
Husband shoots wife, turns gun on himself. And while Janice McCabe liked to solve life’s mysteries, her job here was simple.
Who did it? That gun on the floor, a 9mm Beretta just inches away from Brent Chartwell’s dangling arm, was a glaring clue.
It might be nice to know why he did this, but even if she learned his motivation, it wasn’t as though she could charge him
with anything.
Nearby residents might be shocked when they found out what happened here, but it wasn’t anything McCabe hadn’t seen before.
Behind some of this idyllic community’s closed doors lurked drug dealers, white slavers, child pornographers. But they were
careful not to bring attention to themselves. They had Mercedes and Range Rovers in their driveways, kept their lawns cut,
didn’t have wild parties on Saturday night.
It wasn’t likely this case would keep her up at night. Truth was, if McCabe could put her head on a pillow right now she’d
be as dead to the world as those two upstairs. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, Moira, had ignored her ten o’clock curfew and
didn’t respond to her mother’s texts asking where she was and why she wasn’t home. When you’re a cop, and all too aware of
the trouble a teenager can get into, there’s no sleep until that kid’s home. Shortly after eleven McCabe had pulled on her
clothes, slid her sockless feet into a pair of Skechers, grabbed her car keys, and headed out. She found Moira, close to midnight,
on the back deck of a friend’s house where the smell of pot was wafting through the air.
Lost track of time, Moira’d said. Forgot I’d muted my phone. The interrogation that followed once they got home went on till well past one. And the weekend grounding would begin that
evening.
Still, McCabe thought, bringing herself back to the moment now, due diligence was in order. She’d want to know, for example, where Brent Chartwell got that gun, whether it was registered, why he’d believed he needed one.
In the kitchen, she noted a half-full carafe in the coffee maker. She put the back of her hand to it, feeling it for warmth.
Stone-cold. There were a few dishes in the sink, but otherwise the place was tidied. She opened the fridge, looked inside.
Plenty of provisions there. A just opened container of half-and-half. An open bottle of wine, a temporary cork in the top,
stood upright in the door. Some leftover lasagna on a plate under plastic wrap.
Do you save that bottle of wine, cover up unfinished pasta, when you’re planning to end it all?
Maybe. Especially if you’re the wife and don’t know what’s coming.
McCabe looked out the window over the sink to the backyard and beyond. Saw the pond and woods Reece had referred to.
How tranquil.
In the hallway out of the kitchen was a door to the basement. Down there, McCabe found no surprises. A large sectional couch,
a huge screen on one wall, a home theater projection system hanging from the ceiling. In the center of the room, a pool table,
balls perfectly set up in triangular form, waiting for a game.
There was a basement bathroom and utility room, where McCabe found a washer and dryer combo. She lifted the lid on the washer
and found a load of washed, damp clothing. The dryer was empty.
Janice McCabe said, “Hmm.”
If gender stereotypes were in play here, and Catherine Chartwell did the laundry, this was more evidence to suggest she didn’t
know what plans her husband had in store for her.
Back upstairs, she passed the uniformed officer standing in the front hall, making sure no one entered who shouldn’t be there.
McCabe asked him, “Williams, right?”
“Yes, Detective. Williams.” She nodded and walked into the living room.
There were shelves built into one wall and stuffed with books.
A lot of nonfiction. Political bios of a couple of Canadian prime ministers, four books by that Woodward guy who helped bring down Nixon decades ago and had written about all the presidents who’d come after him, a celebrity memoir or two, including that doorstopper by Barbra Streisand.
Fiction by Margaret Atwood, more novels by Russo and Irving.
Half a dozen art books, stored sideways because they were too big to fit upright in the shelves. Small items of Inuit sculpture.
Family photos.
McCabe examined those. All displayed in sleek black frames with white matting, they featured the Chartwells, some with only
the couple, others with two young men McCabe presumed were their grown children. She recognized Reece. There were the Chartwells
at a wedding. Chartwells at the beach. The couple at a restaurant table, champagne flutes raised, celebrating some occasion.
McCabe told herself she might be reading too much into them, given the scene in that upstairs bedroom, but there seemed, despite
the physical closeness in these pictures, a kind of distance between the Chartwells. As though they were strangers who’d been
asked to stand next to each other by the photographer.
They weren’t together in all the photos. There was one of Brent Chartwell with some buddies standing on a golf course green.
In another, Catherine Chartwell sat on a dock, dangling her feet in the water, her jeans rolled up to her knees.
McCabe picked that one up, took a closer look.
She was an attractive woman. Dark blond hair with a hint of red in it, high cheekbones, bold eyebrows. Something in the eyes
that suggested a fierceness, McCabe thought. A mole dead center in her right cheek. Not much of a smile, not unlike the pictures
where she was paired with her husband, as though she was tolerating having her photo taken but wanted it to be over with.
McCabe put the picture back. Time to see whether the coroner was done.
She mounted the stairs to the second floor, catching the coroner on her way out.
“Well?” she asked her.
“We’ll know more later, but looks pretty straightforward,” she said. “Woman died of a gunshot wound to the head, ditto the
husband. Bagging his hands for GSR. They’re all yours.”
McCabe gave her a nod and entered the room, taking in the scene for a second time. It was as Reece had described it. He’d
said he hadn’t touched anything, had bolted from the room to be sick. She couldn’t blame him there.
She stood for a moment, puzzling it out. If you’re angry enough with your wife to shoot her, and then take your own life,
do you do it in bed? Incidents of domestic violence could take place anywhere in the house. The bedroom, for sure. Bathroom.
Plenty occurred in the kitchen, where there was access to knives.
McCabe wondered whether she was overthinking it. Why not in bed? Maybe the part that bothered her was that they were both
naked. It implied intimacy, which didn’t exactly match what had happened here.
Maybe anger wasn’t the motivation. Technically a murder-suicide, but more like a suicide pact, perhaps. If you were each going
to down a bottle of sleeping pills, you could do the deed simultaneously. But if you opted to use a gun, someone had to go
first. So she’d have had to know it was coming and opted not to protest. McCabe imagined those final seconds between the first
and second shot. That moment after Brent sees what he’s done to Catherine and then has to put that gun under his chin and
pull that trigger a second time.
Something seemed off.
The woman had been shot in the back of the head. If the husband had shot her while sitting in the bed, she would more likely
have been hit in the temple. If she’d been trying to talk him out of killing her, she’d have been looking at him, and taken
the bullet head on. Face, neck, or chest.
Perhaps, at the last second, she’d had second thoughts. Her body’s position suggested she was starting to roll, like she was headed for the floor on that side of the bed.
McCabe looked down at the Beretta on the floor. The outstretched hand. Her eyes went up to the bedside table. There was a
cell phone sitting there, face down, pinning a small piece of paper with some writing on it. Next to it, a pen.
With her gloved hand, McCabe moved the phone, and as she turned it over the motion prompted a series of unread texts to pop
up. She’d check those in a moment, but first she wanted to look at the paper. Across the top: FROM THE DESK OF brENT CHARTWELL.
Below that, a short note, handwritten:
I am so sorry for all the hurt I have caused. I did this. I bear all responsibility. Brent
She set the note back on the table, then looked at the four unread text previews on the phone. They read:
Might be late (90 min ago)
Going to a gallery after the lunch (1 hr ago)
Are you there? (50 min ago)
Is everything okay? (30 min ago)
All four were from “Cath.”
McCabe looked at that name for several seconds, then walked around to the other side of the bed to get a better look at the
woman, still on her left side, facing the wall. McCabe put a gloved hand on her shoulder to turn her onto her back, her head
rolling onto the blood-soaked pillow to allow McCabe to get a better look at her face.
“Hmm,” she said again.
She went back down to the living room and retrieved the photo of Catherine Chartwell sitting on the dock in her swimsuit. She took it back to the bedroom and held the picture not far from the dead woman’s face.
Where was the mole?
There wasn’t one to be found on the cheek of the woman in this bed. Which meant she’d either had it removed, or this woman
was not who everyone had, up to now, assumed her to be. And if she really was Catherine Chartwell, how was she sending texts
to her husband after she was already dead?
She didn’t want to bring Reece back up here to ascertain whether this woman was, in fact, his mother. Not with the father’s
body still here, his brains splattered across that painting. With her phone, she took a close-up photo of the dead woman’s
face she could show to the son.
McCabe went back downstairs, past Williams, and out the front door.
Reece Chartwell was not sitting on the wrought-iron bench. McCabe scanned the yard but didn’t see the man anywhere.
The BMW was gone.
“Where’s the guy?” she asked Williams, nodding at the bench.
The uniformed cop said, “He left.”
“When?”
Williams shrugged. “Five, ten minutes ago? He wasn’t supposed to stick around, was he?”