A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 3: Murder Alfresco Read online

  She stood in the road, staring after the truck. Something about it struck her as odd. Why had the driver waited so long to turn on his headlights? And what was he doing at the winery at this hour? Except for a pair of flood lights illuminating a few sections of landscaping, the winery stood in darkness. The stone buildings looked as stoic and somber as always, and the massive oak in the courtyard stood with its usual air of permanence, its great spread of limbs forming a wide canopy. Except that it was not exactly the same. Something out of place swayed from its lowest limb. At this distance, the length of a football field, it was hard to discern the shape. All she could make out was a pale form twisting from the limb like a punching bag. The sight gave her a chill. It reminded her of a deer hung up for cleaning. She thought of what it could be. It was difficult to make out more than a rough outline from so far away. It could be a swing caught at a strange angle, or a piñata hung up for a party, or a kite. It could be any number of harmless objects caught or hung up in the tree.

  She walked back to the driveway leading to Vedana Vineyards. A sign next to one of the stone pillars read, “No public tastings. Tours by appointment only.” She stared at the distant shape hanging from the tree and thought of the white truck. Vineyard surrounded the winery with its bare vines like uniform markers in a vast graveyard. She pulled her scarf closer and started down the gravel road.

  2

  The winery and its outbuildings huddled in the mist at the end of the lane. Her steps crunched on the gravel. She thought of the mobile phone in her bag and wished she had remembered to charge it. Staring at the ground in front of her, she walked quickly. Her heart beat faster with each step and her ears strained to hear the slightest sound. Soon she was close enough.

  Wisteria covered the front of the winery. It twisted thickly up posts and tumbled over the eave that shaded the front deck, where a pair of wooden doors were flanked by two large windows. Off to the side of the winery was a small grove of mature olive trees, which Sunny had admired from the road on a number of occasions. The buildings in back were newer and larger, and presumably housed the fermentation tanks, oak barrels, and storage facilities. In between the outbuildings was an open space for parking and maneuvering equipment. Sunny studied these elements while carefully avoiding the oak tree and its strange addition. She had decided to face it, but she had also decided to do so only when she was thoroughly ready. She already knew what it had to be, and if she was right, she wanted to look all at once, not catch sight of it out of the corner of her eye.

  The form had been instantly recognizable from the main road, but her mind had resisted the obvious. It could not be that. Now she was close enough to see the climbing rose trained in espalier along the side wall of the winery and the tractor parked in the middle of the compound. She was close enough. It was time to look. She turned toward the oak tree and saw what she knew would be there, what she had desperately hoped she would not see.

  Time stopped. Standing frozen in place, immobilized by fear, she listened too intently and heard too much. Where she knew there to be silence and ordinary night sounds, she now heard footsteps, the ominous creak of boards, shallow breathing, the rumble of a distant engine approaching. Whoever did this could still be here. She fought the impulse to run, instead holding her eyes on the vision before her. Hanging from the gnarled old tree, gently rocked by an imperceptible breeze, was a young woman.

  She had been tied. Rope ran under her armpits, presenting her almost as if she were standing. Her slender bare feet tipped downward, her delicate toes nearly brushing the ground. A sweep of dark hair fell over her shoulder and onto her breast. She was naked except for the rope that bound her.

  Sunny hardly breathed as she walked closer. The girl’s head had rocked forward onto her chest, her face slightly turned. Forcing herself to look, Sunny took in the large eyes, shapely eyebrows, and petite nose. She was young, maybe in her early twenties. A deep gash opened the flesh over her eye and a rose of color marred her cheek where she’d been struck. Even so, it was clear she had been pretty. Her delicately shaped features reposed gracefully even in the slackness of death. A blue, swollen tongue protruded from full lips. Sunny looked away.

  The girl’s hands were bound behind her back and her slender body had been cruelly trussed. Bands of rough hemp rope pressed into her flesh, circling her torso at neat intervals sectioned by knots. The rope passed twice between her legs, pressing her sex between taut strands. A separate rope had been used to hang her from the branch, tied with expertise in an elaborate knot.

  Sunny reached up two fingers and pressed them to the girl’s neck. The flesh was cold and lifeless, the veins still. Sunny stood before her, helpless. She wanted to take her down, but to do so she would need a ladder, and to hold her up to release the tension while she undid the knot around the branch. The girl would probably have to be cut down. The question was what to do now. It would take too long to go back to Andre’s house. She could go out to the main road and wait for a car, but there was no way to know how long that could take. No cars had passed since she’d set out. She checked her mobile phone in case it had miraculously recharged itself. Nothing. Next she tried the winery door and found it locked, of course. The window on the side of the winery was too high to reach and probably locked anyway. Frantically, feeling the onset of panic, she took up one of the hand-sized stones used to line the path to the winery door. The front windows were divided into panes about the size of a magazine. Starting in the lowermost corner, she smashed several, then knocked out the wooden bracing in between until there was a hole big enough to climb through. With any luck, an alarm was going off somewhere. Inside, she found a phone behind the front desk.

  Sergeant Steve Harvey did not appreciate being woken up at something past three in the morning. He muttered a profanity when he heard who it was.

  “This had better be important, McCoskey,” he said, his tone betraying the fact that he could already tell it was.

  They seemed to run across each other on a regular basis. The last time Sunny had spoken to Sergeant Harvey was at the firefighters’ barbecue fund-raiser a week ago. The time before that, it was when she discovered wine fraud was the motive for the murder of a local restaurateur. Now Sergeant Harvey listened to what she had to tell him, interrupting once to ask her to hold on while he got the officer on duty headed over there, pronto. After a moment he came back on the line.

  “Sunny? I’m leaving now. A patrol car is on the way. You can tell me the rest when I get there.” He paused. “You want to stay on the line while I drive over?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “Good. Stay put and I’ll be there in fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. Don’t do anything, touch anything, or go anywhere. Stay by the phone and call me if anything happens, and I mean anything.”

  “Right.”

  Sunny hung up. Her hands were shaking and her face was wet, with perspiration or tears she wasn’t sure which. As much as she wanted to stay inside huddled against the wall behind the desk, the girl outside was alone and she couldn’t leave her there. There had to be a chance, an impossibly small chance, but a chance nevertheless, that she was still alive. Sunny wiped her face on her sleeve and climbed back out the window onto the porch.

  She noted with surprise that it felt better to be outside. The terror of being watched in the open was preferable to the terror of being trapped inside. And Steve had pointed out that whoever was responsible was unlikely to linger at the scene, waiting to get caught.

  She went back to the girl. Nothing about her suggested life. Sunny took off her scarf and draped it around the girl’s shoulders, covering her body as best she could, then sat down at her feet and waited for the police to arrive. The breeze agitated the body slightly, and her feet, toes neatly painted, each nail a pink oval gem, stirred the air in tiny circles. Her vigil lasted twelve minutes. It was the longest twelve minutes she had ever experienced.

  “Why don’t you start with why the hell you were out wandering around on pri
vate property at three o’clock in the morning,” said Sergeant Harvey.

  “It’s a long story,” said Sunny, shivering despite the jacket he had pulled out of the trunk of the squad car for her.

  “Bore me,” he said, looking hard into her eyes.

  Sergeant Harvey was a solid brick of a man with muscular arms that he folded across his chest when he was asking questions, like he was now. Sunny had woken him up, she was sure of that, but his short blond hair was as meticulously groomed as ever, a tiny army standing uniformly at attention. He had a fundamentally gentle nature, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be intimidating. At the moment, his manner was anything but soothing.

  “Hang on,” he said, looking around. “Let’s do this right the first time.”

  Sunny followed him over to a teak lawn bench. They sat down and she waited while he set up a pocket tape recorder between them, then recited the facts of the situation into it.

  Sunny stared at the police team swarming around the girl’s body. Two police cars and an ambulance had their headlights trained on the oak tree, casting a confusion of shadows. The area had been cordoned off and officers were scouring the scene, gathering evidence. The photographer’s flash illuminated the girl’s face unexpectedly, burning the image of her purple lips and tongue, the black gash above her eye, and the tableau of gray and yellow bruised flesh into Sunny’s mind. She turned away, fighting the urge to be sick. Sergeant Harvey looked at her, silently asking if she was ready. She nodded.

  “I want you to tell me how you came to discover the deceased tonight,” he said, “starting at the very beginning, using as much detail as you can remember, and not leaving anything out, even if it seems inconsequential.”

  She looked away and drew a slow breath. Beginning with Andre’s phone call asking her to join him at the Dusty Vine, she described everything that had happened that evening. When she was done, he asked her to repeat certain parts to be sure he had them right, then turned the tape recorder off.

  “One more question, McCoskey. Off the record.” Sergeant Harvey studied her face. “Why you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In your opinion, why are you the one who found her?”

  Sunny looked at him uncertainly. “I don’t know. I don’t think there is a reason. It just happened.”

  “Wrong. I’ll tell you why,” he said. “You know who finds most of the dead bodies in this world?”

  “The police?”

  “Farm workers. The guys who get up before dawn, drive to remote places where the only thing for miles is grapes or sorghum or sugar beets, and go to work looking at the ground. Those guys find the dead bodies.”

  Sunny nodded, not sure she followed his point.

  “Those guys have no choice,” he said. “They have to get up before dawn and wander around in the middle of nowhere in the dark. That’s how they make their miserable living. But you, you do it for fun.” He shook his head and looked away to the east, where the sky had turned teal blue. “Every time I turn around you’re crashing through the bushes before the sun comes up, getting yourself in trouble. That’s the part I have trouble understanding.”

  He was talking about an incident that had occurred the previous fall. She’d pulled over on the way to work to check a certain intriguing slope for chanterelles, when the owner drove by and called the cops on her. She’d nearly been cited for trespassing, but managed to buy her way out of it by inviting the officer and the property owner to have lunch at her restaurant on the house. They’d since worked out a mutually satisfactory agreement. She could gather mushrooms on his property, he had a standing invitation for lunch at Wildside when chanterelles were in season.

  “Coincidence,” said Sunny. “I happened to be mushrooming before work, when it happens to be very early in the morning. Tonight is different. Tonight I wasn’t thinking straight. I was tired, and I just wanted to get out of there. Then I saw the truck, and then I saw the body. I know that truck is part of it. Whoever was driving it has to be the murderer. Who else could it have been?”

  Steve sighed. “Anything else? Detail about the truck?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  Steve nodded. “You’ve had a tough time. Don’t think about it anymore for the night, okay? Try to get some sleep and forget about all this. Something may come back to you once you’ve had a chance to rest. Maybe you’ll remember part of the license plate. Some little detail you forgot.”

  “I don’t think so. I never looked at the license plate. I don’t think it was lit. And I didn’t see the driver. I’m not even sure what make the truck was. All I know is it was white.”

  “But you referred to the driver as he several times.”

  “That’s just a guess, or intuition, or habit. I don’t think I even saw the driver before he hit the lights. If I did, it was just for a second.”

  “Maybe you saw more than you realize. That’s what intuition is. Subconscious data trying to make itself known.”

  Sergeant Harvey took a long moment to scrutinize her face, going over it for evidence the way she imagined he would go over a car or a hotel room or an object found at the scene of the crime, searching it for clues as if the way she held her mouth or the stray eyelash on her cheek would reveal where to find the white truck.

  He nodded to himself. “We’ll talk again soon. Until then, don’t drive yourself nuts thinking about it. You did all you could.” He looked up at an officer who had been trying to get his attention for some time and signaled he’d be right there.

  “McCoskey, since I know where to find you, and I trust you can keep your mouth shut, I’m going to send you home to get what sleep you can before work. However, I will ask you not to discuss what happened tonight with anyone until we’ve had a chance to talk again, and I mean anyone.”

  “I have to pretend it didn’t happen?”

  “You don’t have to lie. If it comes up, just tell people you can’t talk about it until later. The less you say the better. And under no circumstances talk to anyone from the press. I don’t want any more information out there than is absolutely necessary. Your little hike has gained us a few hours and I want to make the most of them.”

  “The killer will assume the girl won’t be found until morning.”

  “Correct. I assume this show was not put on for your entertainment. I’d say you spoiled somebody’s surprise.”

  Sunny looked away. “What do you do now? I mean, where do you start?”

  “First we gather as much evidence as we can, assuming we can find anything left under your footprints. Then we go to work trying to figure out who she was, what happened to her, and who knows about it.”

  “What about the people who own the winery?”

  “I’ll handle that. You take it easy. I’ll be in touch this afternoon. Meanwhile, all you know is you discovered a woman who was an apparent victim of homicide. End of story. No details.”

  “One more thing,” said Sunny. “I think he saw me when I was standing by the side of the road and he turned on his headlights.”

  Sergeant Harvey made a fist and bounced the thumb side against his lips, thinking. “Anything make you think he came back to check on you?”

  “I didn’t notice anything.”

  Sergeant Harvey frowned and gestured for her to wait a moment. He walked back toward the others and was immediately surrounded. Sunny watched the proceedings around the girl. The forensics group had moved farther out, scouring the ground for evidence, and the ambulance team was cutting the girl down at last. Enough daylight had come to show the marks on her face and body in a rainbow of sickening hues. Sergeant Harvey extracted himself from the group vying for his attention and motioned to a somber-faced officer drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

  “Jute, drive Ms. McCoskey home, will you? Go inside with her and secure the place before you leave.”

  3

  Rivka Chavez had both the ovens on and the music cranked up in the kitchen when Sunny arrived at Wildside later t
hat morning. Rivka was standing at the cutting block, wearing a white tank top and jeans and singing loudly to a Lenny Kravitz song. The blue and red swallows tattooed on the backs of her arms glistened with perspiration.

  Sunny carried her bicycle into her office. It was days like this that made her glad she’d taken a risk on a kid whose sum total experience in a kitchen was the year she spent in cooking school. She couldn’t imagine Wildside running smoothly without Rivka Chavez to pick up the slack.

  Rivka turned around and eyed the bicycle. “You’re feeling ambitious this morning.”

  “You could say that.”

  Or you could say that she forgot she had left her truck at the Dusty Vine until about three seconds after Officer Jute pulled away from her house. It was bike to work or walk, and this time she chose to bike. Sunny changed into her work clothes and tied a fresh white apron around her hips, then stood in front of the mirror. Today would be a game. How long can she pretend to be coherent, and that nothing bad has happened. She smoothed her bangs to the side and caught them in a tiny green barrette.

  Rivka turned down the music. “Andre called,” she said loudly from the kitchen.

  “When?”

  “About an hour ago. He wants you to call him.”

  Sunny opened the window and sat on the edge of her desk staring outside. A bumblebee the size of a thimble was nuzzling lavender blossoms one by one. She watched it embrace each flower with its long, hairy legs, then move to the next.

  “Also, the fan over the grill is making that sound again, there is some kind of milky pink funk in the water out at Pt. Reyes so there are no local oysters until they figure out what it is, and we really have to do something about the Speedy Gonzalez factor.” This last sentence was said close up. Sunny turned to see Rivka standing in the doorway, watching her.