Chapter 12 #5
“She?” Daniel repeated.
Doreen shrugged. “The coroner we work with in Kelowna is female.”
“That’s nice, but we have a male, and he’s swamped.”
“He still should have been able to give you a rough estimate for a time of death.”
“And you’re talking about the movies, not real life,” Daniel said in exasperation. “It can take a lot longer. This guy was buried, and we don’t know for how long.”
“It doesn’t take that long for a seasoned coroner,” she declared.
“And how would you know?” Daniel asked, turning to her.
She stared at him and asked, “Seriously?”
When he didn’t respond, she went on.
“Pete’s exposed nose was fairly intact. No degradation.
No bugs or animals eating it. So the rest of him was buried, but I doubt he was buried for longer than …
a couple days at the most.” Daniel stared at her, flummoxed, and she continued.
“No, of course I can’t prove that, and I don’t have any insider knowledge.
Yet it doesn’t take that much to figure out the body is in decent shape, as in fresh.
Not only that,” she added, “I detected almost no dead-body-decaying smell in that room. There was a little but not like full decomp can be.”
“Just what do you know about decomp?” Daniel snapped.
Nick laughed. “She knows a fair bit.”
Mack nodded. “She’s become quite a successful amateur sleuth.”
“Good God,” Daniel muttered. “What kind of a hick town is it if your department lets somebody like her get involved in your cases?”
Mack stiffened and Doreen growled, her voice low as she spoke. “Somebody like me? By all means, please elaborate.”
Mugs strode up to Daniel, walked around him, and lifted his leg. It took Doreen a moment to register what he was doing. Then she called out, “Mugs, no!”
But it was too late. Mugs managed to soil Daniel’s pant leg. Daniel lashed out to kick at Mugs, but he was already out of the way and safely behind Nick.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” she cried out. “He doesn’t normally do that.”
“He just did it,” Daniel snapped, shaking his leg and sending droplets flying all over. “Good God, what an absolute disaster.”
Mack nudged her off to the side and behind him.
He already had his phone in hand. He stared at Daniel and called his captain.
“Captain Hawkins, Corporal Mack Moreau of the Kelowna RCMP. We have some evidence here that names a Daniel and we think you should be involved in retaining said evidence. … Yes, sir.” He put his phone on Speaker, so everyone could hear.
“Detective Daniel Sherwood,” Captain Hawkins announced, “you are no longer in charge of any investigation regarding deaths on the property in question. Stand down. I will be there shortly.” Then the call ended abruptly.
Daniel seemed nervous to Doreen, ready to take flight. Mack saw it too. “People who run look guilty, Daniel.”
Daniel just glared harder at them but remained in place.
“Wise decision,” Mack muttered.
Just then came a knock on the door, with Mugs barking madly at the noise.
She looked over at Mack and asked, “Are you ready for this?”
“Heck no,” he muttered, “but I don’t see that we have any choice.”
And, with that, their day officially began, first with Detective Davis arriving to oversee Daniel, as everyone awaited the captain’s appearance.
Soon afterward came Scott and his crew. As the Christie’s crew worked, finally Captain Hawkins arrived, with a glare for Daniel, but spoke to Mack, Nick, and Doreen.
Gathering this latest evidence, including Butch’s gun, Captain Hawkins ordered Detective Davis to escort Detective Sherwood to the department for interrogation.
Little did Daniel know that Doreen and Mack had been feeding info to Captain Hawkins long before this delivery arrived. Daniel would find out soon enough.
With them now gone, Doreen had been called to the second floor.
Scott and his team of experts weren’t interested in the knick-knacks or bedding or decor or things of that sort on the second floor, so she sorted through all that was left in each of the guest bedrooms. Eventually she found her way to the master bedroom.
She identified things to donate to the local women’s shelter, others to antique or specialty shops.
She planned to call somebody to pick it up later.
Soon, the second floor would be entirely empty.
She looked forward to that accomplishment.
At one point, Mack called her downstairs, saying, “The police need to talk to you.”
“Of course they do.” She walked into the kitchen to find Mack and Nick and another officer sitting here, having coffee. She greeted them, asking if anybody needed fresh coffee, but nobody did. So she walked over to the coffeepot and poured herself a cup, then sat with them at the kitchen table.
“I’m Detective Clark. I’ll be taking over the lead in the investigations of the deaths of Pete Singer and Butch Weldon. So, I need to go over some questions with you.”
She nodded.
Then he lunged into his questions about the stranger they had met last night. “Why would you have left him in the apartment?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t just kick him out, not knowing whether his story was true or not. We didn’t have any way to prove or disprove his story at that moment, and I wouldn’t leave the man on the streets when we have a space for him in the garage apartment.”
“And yet he could have murdered you in your sleep.”
“The chance of his murdering us all in our sleep wasn’t that great. He couldn’t gain entry to the main house from the garage apartment, not without breaking inside. Plus, I had Mack, an experienced detective, and Nick, my attorney, not to mention the animals. Mugs never barked.”
“Speaking of which,” Clark noted, seeing Mugs at Doreen’s feet, staring directly at Clark, “your dog doesn’t seem to like me.”
“Mugs is very protective of me. So, at the rate you are interrogating me, he’ll like you less and less,” she explained, with a shrug.
Hearing Mack clear his throat, she looked over at him.
“I’m just calling it like it is.” She frowned at him and rolled her eyes, then turned back to Detective Clark. “Please continue.”
He asked more questions, some that Daniel had already asked, but she answered them to bring Clark up to speed faster. “Did you find the gun?” Doreen asked him.
“I cannot discuss this case or the other one with you.”
Undeterred, Doreen proceeded with her own questions. “So you didn’t find the gun that shot and killed Pete? And you didn’t run ballistics on Butch’s own gun either?”
Detective Clark frowned, seemed upset. “Please answer my questions here. So the man in the garage apartment never came inside this house, whether you saw him or not?”
Doreen shrugged. “If we can believe what Butch told us last night, he was inside the house many months ago, speaking with and working with my late husband. So Butch has never been inside this house since we arrived here, about a week ago. Mugs would have barked had Butch been inside here with us. Yet Butch told us that he had just arrived last night.”
“So you didn’t know Butch Weldon?”
She shook her head. “Not before meeting him last night.”
“And the earlier dead man on this property, Pete Singer, did you know him?”
“Nope. Never knew him.”
When Detective Clark ran out of questions, he finally left.
Doreen was relieved. She had a ton of stuff to still deal with here. And on that note, she walked back to the master bedroom, relieved to find Scott still there.
She gave him an apologetic look and shared the latest on speaking to the new lead detective on these murder cases.
“Your life is never dull, is it?” Scott asked in wonder.
“We’ll know more later. So what’s up here?”
He pointed. “Taking apart the master bedroom suite, we found a few secret drawers here, when the back on this dresser … falls away.”
She followed him to the rear of the dresser.
She wasn’t a fan of this bedroom furniture to begin with.
Yet she ignored it for all those years she had lived here.
It was very ornate, very stifling as far as she was concerned, but Mathew selected it for whatever reason, and it had survived the years well.
Yet, if secret drawers were everywhere, Mathew would definitely have loved this furniture and may have chosen it for just that perk.
Scott pointed out the hidden drawer and shared, “I didn’t look at the contents, leaving that to you.”
She nodded, bent down, pulled it open, then stopped and stared. She pulled out her phone and called Mack. “Hey, you need to come up here too.”
“Do I need to?” he repeated in a wary voice.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t know what to do with this.”