A Tainted Finish: A Sydney McGrath Mystery (25 page)

He pulled the truck up the gravel drive, lost in thought. He would have to tell Sydney everything. He and Jim had decided it would be best coming from him, considering her recent outbursts toward Jim. Secretly he thought Jim was showing surprising cowardice for a sheriff, but he also understood. Jim was defeated in a way that men of his fortitude rarely were. He turned off the headlights and sat in the truck, contemplating the nightmarish day: Sydney getting shot, his helpless terror and anger, the guilt of having treated her so badly, and his pursuit of Rosa. And then it got much worse.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, formulating some kind of plan in his exhausted mind. He knew she had lost almost everything. She would be grateful that he found Rosa. But the guilt of having missed her absence – of having known that her disappearance was odd but ignoring the nagging in the back of his mind – was unforgivable. Deep down, he feared it was a product of his own Argentine class snobbery; his father's gift to him. Rosa was the Mexican help. Did he ignore her absence because of his own classism? He shook his head. It was useless to blame himself. After all, he wasn’t the one who tied her up without food or water for days, beat her, and left her to die. He wasn't culpable. But the man who did this to Rosa wasn't sitting in a jail cell either. He shuddered and got out of the truck. He would sleep outside of Sydney's door himself if he had to.

He moved across the drive under the clear night and paused to gaze up at the night sky. The tendrils of the Milky Way striped the black sky in muted celestial clouds. It was beautiful. A different night sky than the one he was used to in Argentina. But he wouldn't have to work hard to love this celestial offering. He could stay here indefinitely. His heart beat a little faster at the thought of seeing Syd, with her arm in a sling, still belligerent on her pain meds. He inhaled deep cool breaths and steadied himself as he thought of what to say to her. It wasn't over. He scanned the drive and the road for the cruiser that should have been parked outside the house. The sheriff cars had all been called to the shed where he found Rosa, including the one Jim had posted here. He was glad that he was back at least. He shuffled toward the house but stopped when a light caught his eye.

The motion light flared on up in the winery. A moment later, just as Olivier looked up to the winery, the inside light shut off. He stared, trying to see who was coming out of the doors. He could hardly make out the doors from the distance, so he strode quickly up the drive. As he moved up the drive, the hair on his neck stood up and he began to step softly. He quickened his pace to a sprint on instinct. Something wasn't right. No one left through the doors. No one was leaving the winery. Someone
went inside
.

He heard her scream as he reached the doors. He ran into the cavernous dark room and stared toward the sound of a struggle. She gasped and screamed again, her sounds punctuated by the grunts of a man struggling too. He strained to see in the darkness. He stepped lightly around the fermentation tanks to see Syd rushing blindly into the room, hitting hard against a tank and crumpled back. He grabbed the punchdown tool and raised it into the air to strike her assailant, who bound into the room a few feet away.

A flash of metal caught light, and Sydney collapsed to the ground. A flash of light from the punchdown tool momentarily lit up the attacker’s face. It was a face tinged with focused triumph as the man watched her fall. Olivier cocked his arms and swung with all his might in a violent, bone-breaking strike at the man's triumphant eyes. He fell back to the sickening sound of crunching bone and metal. It echoed as the man slumped onto the concrete. A deep scream bellowed from his lungs, echoing in his ears as he raised the metal tool to strike the prone and motionless figure again. But he heard a guttural whimper that ran a cool shiver through him and he lowered his weapon. He looked down at Syd, scratching her nails pitifully on the concrete. His weapon fell to the ground in a clatter of metal.

Olivier fell to the ground next to her and turned her over onto his legs. He pulled her up to his chest and shushed her whimpering with frantic consolation. Her breath was labored and a gash in the back of her head bled freely. Blood pooled and congealed on the floor, mingling with that of the man lying next to them. The dark pool from his head was larger and seeped ominously from the other side of his body. Olivier held his left hand to Syd's scalp and felt the warm blood oozing between his fingers. Her skull was unnaturally soft under his fingers and his heart seized up in absolute terror. The room grew quiet, and he realized that she had stopped whimpering. Desperate, he remembered that his phone was in the lab. He gently lay her head against the cold floor and tried to rise on legs of mush. He cursed himself when his hands slipped on the floor, covered in blood as he tried to get up. He glanced at the man’s lifeless body as he crawled past him and shuddered. His head was twisted at an unnatural angle.

He quickly found his phone inside the dark lab. He made his way back to the two lifeless bodies and called 911. Then he called Jim and Charlie. Then he lay his phone down and slumped on the floor.

He held her head with both hands, desperately trying to stanch the bleeding. He faced the lifeless man in such a way that his foot was ready to strike if he got up again. But he never did.

Rosa sat day and night next to Sydney's bed for a solid week. Although she had a broken finger from the nefarious attempt at extracting information via torture and quite a few bruises of her own after taking a substantial beating, everyone at the hospital knew the best medicine for her was to nurse Sydney. They put her up in the bed next to Sydney for several nights until the doctors released her. But she never left. Someone in the hospital had the good grace to keep the bed next to Sydney empty.

Charlie stayed all day long each day, but left at night with Olivier. He kept his vigil outside in the waiting room, pacing a path in the purple Berber carpet. He left to work at the winery but always returned to pace in silence. Jim was busy tying up the loose ends of his case, but he came morning and night to see Syd and whisper details to Olivier. Charlie alone kept the men fed and cared for, making sure Rosa showered daily and brushed her teeth. She retrieved tea and coffee for everyone, always in a constant state of motion.

Syd lay in an induced coma. She had sustained a brain injury that the doctors were confident was mild. Her skull was fractured in several places, but the blow to her head from a heavy wrench was flat and dispersed over the area of her skull instead of through it. Still, she had a mild depressed injury and she wasn't out of the weeds just yet. The potential swelling of her brain could bring on clotting and more serious brain damage. She had been in the hospital for eight days since her attack. Eight days since Olivier had killed Joe Donner with a single blow.

On a crisp autumn Monday morning, Charlie, Olivier, and Rosa stood at the foot of the hospital bed and stared at Syd. The barbiturates used to force Sydney into a coma were wearing off, and Syd was expected to wake at any moment. Jim and Alejandro sat in the waiting room on plastic orange chairs, sipping terrible hospital coffee. Jim's phone rang.

“Yup,” he answered impatiently. “Nope. Not yet. Nothing yet. I'll let you know, Jack.” He sat quietly and nodded “Yup, okay. I'll let her know when she wakes up.”

He took the phone from his head and touched the screen. Alejandro looked over at him with raised eyebrows. A nurse walking by and scowl at him. She nodded at the sign on the wall.
No Cell Phones
.

“Life insurance funded. Somehow Jack thinks that'll be good news to Syd,” Jim said, shaking his head.

“
Pinche cabrón.
Lawyers!” Alejandro smiled wryly at Jim, realizing they had forged an unlikely friendship in the past few weeks.

Jim's phone rang again. He swore under his breath, retrieved it from his pocket, and squinted at it. “District attorney. I've got to take this one,” he said to Alejandro. He got up to walk outside onto the wet and blustery balcony where cell phones were allowed.

Alejandro took the moment to peek his head inside Syd's room. From the crack in the door he watched the three friends keeping vigil and holding their breaths. Syd lay motionless, but her eyes fluttered and opened slightly. They locked onto his from across the room, peering from the cracked open door.

“Hey, Allie,” she whispered in a dry cracked voice.

“Hey, Siddy,” he said. He entered the room sheepishly and sat down next to Rosa. She gasped and wrung her hands. “
Dios
mío
!
Dios mío
!” she said, holding back her tears. Charlie grinned back at her when Syd panned the room. Olivier took a deep breath and let it out in a slow heavy sigh. His face was implacable. Syd was annoyed.

“You've got nothing to say?” she croaked out, her mouth unfathomably dry. Her eyes were locked on Olivier's. “I've been in this bed for god knows how long and you don't even come visit? What kind of man are you?”

They all looked at each other uncomfortably.

“Olivier’s been here the entire time, Sydney,” Charlie said.

“Oh,” Syd said, closing her eyes against the confused faces staring at her. She fell back asleep for a while, falling into the warm watery place where she had been. Voices emerged and faded around her. She could make out a few words and tones. She felt comforted to know that they were right outside her pool, or whatever this place was. She felt herself rising to the surface now and then and listened to her loved ones banter in worried whispers. She smiled to Rosa to let her know that she was alright. She floated at the top of the water, arms and body splayed out face down. Her eyes opened and she made out the dark figure at the bottom of the pool, blood swirling around his head. She gasped for air.

“What happened? What happened?” she said, choking back the water in her throat but finding that her mouth was dry and sore.

“Okay. It's okay now,” Charlie said. She was sitting on the bed next to her, caressing her right arm. Rosa jumped over to her other side. Alejandro stood up at the foot of her bed. There was no sign of Olivier.

“What happened?” Syd asked again. She said
water
in a desperate plea that seemed comical to herself, like a cartoon character on a deserted island. She smiled as she sipped from a cup offered by Rosa.

Charlie mouthed something about a coma and a head injury.
Blah, blah, blah
. Syd pursed her lips and refused Rosa's ministrations.

“What happened in the dark? The winery?” They glanced back and forth in collusion. Syd grew more annoyed.

“Fuck,” she muttered. Rosa clucked her tongue and offered more water. Charlie got up and left with a smile. Syd sipped to appease the burn in her throat, but mulled over her confusion. Was no one going to talk to her?

A few moments later Charlie returned with Olivier at her heels. She beckoned the others to leave and they paraded out of the room. Olivier stood stiffly and clutched a bed post.

“Do you mind if I sit?” he asked politely.

She shook her head. “Nope, Ollie. You may sit.” He sat down next to her and avoided her eyes. His hand darted out and he grabbed her own, squeezing it too tightly. His face hardly registered any emotion but she knew him well enough to know that he was tortuously mulling over the words he needed to say to her. Syd waited for him to say something while she tried to piece together that night in the winery. She managed a flood of shattered memories. She thought of her face pressed against the cold concrete floor, the whiskey, and his caresses while she surrendered to her grief and sobbed in his arms. She thought of his hands on her skull while the life bled out of her. She remembered the tangle of his fingers and her hair holding her life hard against her skull.

“So you’re capable of murder, aren't you?” she asked. He stared at her blankly for what felt an eternity.

“It appears so,” he finally said. His face slackened and he dropped her hand.

“Well, I'm certainly grateful for
that,
” she said, taking his hand back. She smiled wryly at him. He grinned back at her with a toothy smile that melted her. His eyes shut back forming tears, and he worked to collect himself before he spoke again. And then he told her
almost
everything.

Joe Donner would stop at nothing to prevent the truth from coming out, or so it seemed. Of course, in the end it did all come out in the horrid tabloid style of intrigue and murder. And, of course, Sydney McGrath and her arsenal of defenders were right in the middle of it. She had the indispensable protection of the Sheriff's deputy at her door for weeks, a lawyer ready and waiting, and friends who buffered her from the outside world. Still, she was the subject of many articles, news stories, and blogs gone viral. Somehow the romance of her uncle's murder took hold of the hearts of the public, eventually running amok. And she was the heroine in distress, saved by the love of her life in the eleventh hour. Truth was often the seed of the story, but time and age-old archetypes made for better reporting.

The District Attorney never released the entire story, nor did he reveal any notion of the intrigue that really went on. It was a story greater than fiction, best kept to the minds of the parties involved. Although it was an election year and he could perhaps garner some political traction from it – after all, it was the juiciest conspiracy to hit the Columbia Gorge since the Rajneeshpuram cult's water poisoning – he showed considerable grace in leaving it alone. Jim Yesler was duly impressed. Charlie, however, was not swayed with his grace. Charlie knew it was bad business to uncover something so big when running virtually unchallenged. She suspected he might save it for later.

Charlie had left Seattle for good by then. She had no job left anyway after having taken such a long leave of absence. Syd promised her a job at the winery in sales or something. Whatever Syd needed, Charlie would do with a smile. She was really quite finished with the part of the wine industry that built rockstar careers out of nepotism and mediocrity. The subtle collusion it took to create the frankenstein of Joe Donner's career – all perpetrated by her friends and colleagues –sickened her to the core. They all helped make a giant of a little man sick with narcissism and sociopathic tendencies. It was an exercise in building alliances that created a ladder to better field their own rises to stardom; most of them having no talent or scruples. Nepotism with the wrong sort can quickly sour a relationship, especially if the person with whom you are colluding is willing to kill people to protect a reputation.

Of course, Marcus was out of the picture as soon as Charlie understood what happened that night. He had been texting Charlie when he found out that Syd was shot. He had texted when she was in the hospital and texted again while she was making dinner that night. He was desperate for information, and Charlie had refrained from responding for reasons she couldn't explain. Except maybe it was a kind of clairvoyance. She returned his call at three in the morning, in the hospital waiting room for the second time that day.

“Hullo,” a sleepy voice answered after five rings.

“Marcus. This is Charlie. Sorry to wake you. Syd is back in the hospital from a head injury. They’re not sure if she’ll pull through. Your friend Joe Donner shot her yesterday morning and went back later to finish the job last night. He's dead, by the way.”

“What?” he stupidly answered. Charlie hung up.

He hadn't tried to call since. Later, she found out that he had been calling Olivier who dutifully delivered updates.

Charlie kept the news about Marcus to herself. Olivier asked her once if Marcus was ever going to come visit Sydney. He was perplexed. But Sydney remained uninterested in finding closure with Marcus. The thought of him made her shudder with disgust. Alejandro took the perspective that Marcus was a threat to Sydney. Charlie was undeniably involved in these conclusions. Marcus became the ghost of Sydney's past, a ghost who haunted a life that no longer had meaning to the Sydney they knew and loved. Charlie felt little guilt for being responsible for excising Marcus out of her friend's life. But she suspected that Sydney never missed him anyway.

Of course, Sydney wondered how Marcus would take it all. He wasn't culpable in the least. But still, she didn't want to see him or talk to him. His worse offense was being a very poor judge of character. She often felt sorry for Marcus and knew he felt cut off from her. But so much had changed since her life in Seattle.

Syd had long hours to think through the details of the past months. She stayed in the hospital for nearly three weeks, which was much longer than she felt she needed. But she was not the only decision-maker in her recovery. A battalion of friends barraged the doctors for information on a daily basis. Her recovery was quick enough, but there was some concern that she might suffer a blood clot; a particular hazard to the kind of injury she sustained. The induced coma had sped up her recovery, but blood thinners had slowed it down again, especially when her gunshot wound became infected. And although she was anxious to get home again, she was also grateful for the time to lie down and do nothing but heal. She no longer trusted her judgment under the weight of guilt and remorse.

Her healing was as much emotional as it was physical. She lay for hours talking to Clarence's ghost and working through their problems. Olivier helped by telling her stories of his own childhood, his mother, and Clarence. Olivier would show up with the chessboard, replete with the queen bequeathed to Hans Feldman returned to her mates. They would play in silence for hours. She might ask a single question and he would answer with economic terseness, measuring out her healing in teaspoon-sized doses. She would often grow angry at his cryptic answers and beat him without mercy in just a few moves. But more often she sensed tenderness in Olivier. At times it felt so much like her uncle talking to her that it hurt sometimes to sit near him. During these times she let him win. Unlike Clarence, however, Olivier was unaware of the gesture of kindness, leaving her charmed by his youthful bravado.

On a day near her release, he sat triumphantly over a win and stretched like a cat in the light of a late autumn afternoon. Syd felt a sudden sense of alarm at the pull in her gut when she looked at him too long, an experience that had become far too frequent for her comfort.

“When are you going to tell me about finding Rosa?” she asked. She knew it was an ambush, but she was curious about why he kept it from her.

He stopped in mid-yawn and stiffened. She sighed, somehow happier in the safety of his formality.

“I told you,” he said evasively.

“No, you just said you went looking for her. You left the hospital...” She looked him straight in the eye, challenging him.

He sighed imperceptibly. “Okay, I left the hospital when I watched Charlie help you into the car.”

“And then?” she said, egging him on. She feigned an impatience that she hardly felt. She wanted him to stay longer and she could wait for the story to unfold at his own pace.

“And then I went to Rosa's house,” he said. ”She was not there, obviously. So I went inside, using the Key under the mat,” he explained his foray into breaking and entering with a modest amount of embarrassment. “She had not been home for a few days. She had mail piled up for two days from a slot in the door. Her coffee pot was on and the pot was fully evaporated but the lines in the pot made it look like it was once half-full. But there was no sign of struggle. So I thought that she must have left with someone she knew. Someone she would open the door for, but maybe she left with at gun-point.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Rosa? You think Rosa would take a day off when you were going through hell? She had to have been kept from coming to work. She had to have been held against her will.”

Syd shook her head. She had been weighed down in the hospital bed by the guilt while thinking that Rosa had taken the day off.

“I asked the neighbors and they hadn't seen her,” he said. “I was about to come home when a boy playing ball outside their complex said he saw her leave with a white man wearing a cap in a Jeep. I called Jim right away and I took off to the vineyards behind Ted's place. The direction the boy saw the Jeep head.” He clipped his words as if to end the story.

“When was this? When did he take her?”

“The day after Jack's accident, I think. In the afternoon.”

Syd nodded, still frowning. “And then?”

He sighed again, this time with more weariness. “Well, it took me a while but I found the little shed where he took her. I found her tied up in a corner. On some old seed sacks. I called Jim again and we took her to the hospital.” He avoided her eyes.

“She was beaten?” she asked in a whisper.

“Yes. And she was half-dehydrated and frozen to death.” His voice was flat and disgusted. Anger flashed over his eyes. She was reminded of his behavior in the vineyard when she was shot. She decided to steer him away from the gory details.

“How did you know where to look?”

“I didn't go straight to Rosa's actually. I went to look up in the trees where the shooter must have been when he shot you.”

“Was he in the shed where you found Rosa when he shot me?” she asked, shivering. Rosa was there in the shed, held captive and beaten nearly a stone’s throw away from her when she was blissfully working the vines.

“No. He had made a kind of... nest. A hunter's blind of sorts. He had built up a camouflaged place where he watched the house.” He watched Sydney carefully. She winced, as he suspected she might, but she hammered on.

“Had he been there for long?”

“It looked like he had made himself quite comfortable. He had several binoculars and scope sights. He had food and cooking utensils. A bed roll. I think he had been camping there.”

“Watching?”

“Watching,” he said. “Watching for an opportunity to take the thumb drive from you, I think. But he could have been up there when he killed Clarence. I think he was certain Clarence was going to send the thumb drive to his publishers.”

“So he killed him. And planned to remove the evidence of his writing a crooked review.”

“Yes,” Olivier answered. “He tried earlier too. He was at a conference for wine writers in Portland the weekend Clarence's plane was tampered with. Jim found a credit card receipt from a gas station in Hood River the day of his accident. It's circumstantial, but it points to Donner.” Olivier frowned. “I came clean to Jim about your conversation with Frank.”

Syd scratched under her head turban of bandages in deep thought.

“It looks like he may have just been trying to steal the evidence from you when he first came down to the house.”

“I suspected that too. But then he tried to kill Jack before he came looking around here.”

“I think he assumed Jack knew about it. But he couldn't let you live after Bertrand had been talking to the police. It was Bertrand's blunder that made you a victim of a murder attempt instead of robbery. Feldman baited Bertrand too many times and Bertrand lost control. Feldman and Bertrand would have stayed quiet to avoid discrediting themselves, but as soon as you learned of their complicity you would have let it out of the bag.”

“But Bertrand could have blabbed?”

“Bertrand was no threat. He would never have revealed himself as a fraud. In fact, he would have colluded with Joe Donner to expose Feldman in his new venture as a shady broker with a criminal history if Feldman didn't use him as the head winemaker. Bertrand and Donner were threatening Feldman.”

“So why did Bertrand attack Feldman?”

“Bertrand only attacked Feldman when he called his bluff. Feldman was forced to keep them in the loop in the new deal to keep his real identity safe. Donner was just looking for another opportunity, I think. And maybe a reason to be sticking around here. But Bertrand was clearly losing it, not a natural criminal. He was coming unglued, and I imagine Feldman began to play his own hand at blackmail with the bribery. He knew about it.”

“Or he plotted it himself.”

“Well, it wasn't until Feldman started talking to the police that you became a threat to Donner. I think he began to care less about being exposed as a fraud and more concerned about having murdered Clarence. He had to remove the evidence of his motive and pin the murder on Feldman while he could.”

“And remove all of the people who knew about the thumb drive, that he knew of, at any rate.”

Olivier nodded.

“But how did he know that the police were talking to Feldman?” Syd asked.

“He must have run to the shed after shooting you. That might be why he disappeared when Alejandro was chasing him. The shack is only visible from the top of the hill. He waited it out and then he watched the police talk to Feldman in the vineyard from a distance. And then he must have panicked. He already had Rosa, so he. . .uh. . . questioned Rosa again. He was desperate to find the thumb-drive. More motive for murder. Rosa didn't tell him anything.”

“And then we came home from the hospital,” Syd said, swallowing hard. “He must have been watching the entire time. And he knew that I was alone in the winery. A Jeep, you say? I think I saw him drive down the hill when Charlie was taking me home. I thought I recognized him.” Her voice trailed off and she shuddered at another thought, shaking her head. “He would have had to kill Rosa after he killed me. She knew it was him.”

“There is not a good deal of logic in the behaviors of a sociopath, Sydney. He was a delusional narcissist. A man who would stop at nothing for his own ambitions. From what I understand from Charlie, he hated you nearly as much as he hated Clarence.”