Authors: Nadia Gordon
“They might. The question is when and how wide a sweep. You’ve got to understand that this is a genuine threat to the entire industry. These aren’t the blue-green sharpshooters that hang out by the creeks and nibble a leaf now and then. These guys are voracious, highly mobile, and extremely active reproductively. There’s an entomologist over at the Department of Food and Agriculture who says that if a glassy-winged sharpshooter was as big as a person, it would drink forty-three hundred gallons of sap a day. I’m sure you could say something equally shocking about their reproductive capacities. Even if they didn’t spread Pierce’s disease, they’d present a serious problem just based on the damage they do once a certain population is established. Basically the blue-greens suck a whole lot less,” he said with a lopsided smile.
The three of them stared at the candles burning, sleepy and lost in their own thoughts. Rivka and Monty emerged from the kitchen with coffee and cups. “I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the employees at Beroni did it,” said Rivka. “Alex says Jack was a tyrant at work and everybody had it in for him.”
“It doesn’t look like a work-related meltdown to me,” said Monty, sinking into the couch beside Sunny. “The guys who do that always show up midmorning after they’ve tanked up on four or five quadruple vanilla lattes and go on a public rampage. And they always take themselves out afterward. They don’t want to get away with it, they want the drama. They want the guys they hate to know who did it, to see how mad they are. The guy who goes postal wants everyone to see how powerful and revengeful he can be. He wants to be on the evening news.”
“This isn’t somebody going postal, but it could still be work related. It could be somebody who’d had enough and decided to finally get even,” said Sunny.
Rivka poured half an inch of cream in her coffee and drank it fast. She looked at her watch. “I better get going. I’m meeting Alex for a drink.”
Monty yawned and Charlie stood up. It wasn’t long before Sunny closed the door after all three of them. She went back to the couch, put her feet up on the coffee table, and looked at Wade, the only one left. “Do you want to watch a movie?” she asked.
“Did you get a television?”
“No. I just wondered if you wanted to,” she said, smiling at him.
“You are insane.”
“What’s up? You’ve been preoccupied all night. Is it this business with Steve Harvey?”
“You could say that.” He leaned in and poured himself more coffee, then went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of bourbon. “This coffee needs a little something. Fix you up?” he asked, raising the bottle.
Sunny shook her head.
Wade settled back into the leather chair. “After you called, I thought about it and decided you were right. The best thing to do was take the bull by the horns and just give them the gun. I figured they’d be back for it before long, anyway.”
“Is that what Harry suggested?” asked Sunny.
“I didn’t get to talk to Harry. I left him a message but he hasn’t called back.”
Sunny kept quiet despite the urge to pepper him with questions.
“I got nervous just waiting around,” said Wade. “So I went down to the winery to get the gun. I was going to call Steve and ask him if he wanted to pick it up or if I should bring it in.”
“And?”
“Well, it wasn’t there.”
“Your rifle was gone?”
“My rifle was gone.”
“Are you sure? Maybe you left it out.”
“I’m sure. I looked everywhere, all over inside the winery and in the workshop. I looked everywhere in the house. I’ve kept that gun in the same place for at least six years. You know where I always put it, behind the fermentation tank in the corner. You wouldn’t see it if you didn’t know to look behind the tank. Even then, you can’t really see it. You have to feel around.”
“Maybe you put it back somewhere else this time.”
“I may be pushing fifty, but I don’t think I’ve lost it completely yet. I know where I put that gun.”
“You’re pushing sixty and you don’t have to lose it to misplace something. You know how it is. I’ve found things that I put away in odd places before. It’s late, you’re tired, distracted by the harvest, maybe you just put it down somewhere and forgot about it. Maybe you even put it somewhere totally different, like in a closet.”
“No, I’m always careful. I have a system. I always clean it on the first Monday night of the month. Then I put it back in the case with the safety on, in exactly the same place, a place where I didn’t think a thief would find it. I shot that gun last night at nine o’clock. Twice. I put the safety on, zipped it back into the case, and put it where I always keep it. I put the spent casings in the garbage and the extra cartridges back in the box. I always do it exactly the same way. Today when I went to get it, it wasn’t
there.” He scrubbed at his hair until it stood on end. “Sunny, do you know what this means? Well, I guess you and I both know.” He tapped a weathered finger on his knee. “Somebody knows where I keep my gun, somebody who has been to my house.”
He didn’t finish. Sunny was suddenly acutely aware of the picture window in the living room, a massive rectangle of black from the inside, a lighted portrait of her and Wade from the outside. Maybe the killer was watching them right now. “Let’s not panic and jump to conclusions,” she said.
“I’m not panicking, but the conclusion is fairly obvious.”
“Unless you misplaced it.”
“Unless I misplaced it, which I didn’t.”
“I think we should forget about it for tonight. I don’t see what we can do about this right now. I know I’m exhausted and I have a feeling you are, too. I think you should stay here. I’ll make up the couch and in the morning we’ll go over there and find it together in the daylight with our rested eyes. It will be there.”
Wade shook his head. “That’s kind of you, Sunny, but I’ll head home. I’ve never been afraid of the dark and I’m certainly not going to start now.”
Hours after Wade had left, Sunny lay awake in bed. Her old clock radio read 3:13. It was a dingy relic, but she loved to watch the paddles with the numbers on them slap into place. She stared until the tiny card with the four on it flipped over the three in thirteen with a satisfying smack, then she counted slowly to ten six times, feeling the obsessive’s kick of pleasure when the five came up and over the four exactly as she finished. She did this until 3:19 and then made herself stop. Wade had put the gun back exactly where he said he did, she knew that. They would not
find it mislaid around the house or put away somewhere in the workshop. He might not be fastidious about his appearance or his housekeeping, but when it came to equipment of any sort, he maintained the strictest standards. Wade thrived on ritual and accuracy; that was what drew him to shooting in the first place. Who stole Wade Skord’s rifle? How did they know where to find it? Where was it now? Had it been used to kill Jack Beroni, or could there be some other explanation?
She threw off the covers and got up. Out in the kitchen, the floor was cool on her bare feet. The house was pleasantly quiet. She needed to sleep so that she would be clear-headed tomorrow. She would make Catelina’s cure. It was designed for a cold, but worked just as well for a restless mind in the middle of the night. She poured half a cup of red wine in a saucepan, sliced an orange and squeezed the juice in, and turned the heat on low. When it was warm, she added a tablespoon of honey and one clove.
Sunny pulled the drapes in the living room across the picture window and bolted the door. When was the last time she had done that? It was just a precaution, she thought, not fear. This house is the safest place in the world. St. Helena is the safest place in the world. She curled up in the leather chair and wrapped her hands around the cup of hot wine.
Someone had removed Wade’s rifle from its hiding place; that was all she was ready to accept as fact right now. From there, there were two reasonable possibilities: Either the murderer removed the gun, or someone else did. If the murderer removed it, he or she had one of two possible intentions: either to use the gun to commit the murder—maybe to implicate Wade, maybe just to use a stolen gun—or to make it appear that the gun had been used to commit the murder. If someone other than the murderer had stolen the gun, the timing of the theft could just
be a coincidence and have nothing to do with the murder. This scenario she ruled out; it was based on too much coincidence. Then if someone other than the murderer stole the gun, they must have both known about the murder
and
wanted to make Wade appear guilty.
This logical process was not helping Sunny get sleepy.
If the thief was not the killer, the thief must have discovered the murder very soon after it happened and quietly put into place the plan to frame Wade. Unlikely. Or must have been aware of the murderer’s intentions and therefore had time to plan to frame Wade. That would mean two people were involved, working together. Possible.
She stared into the cup of wine.
Okay, focus on who would want to make Wade appear guilty. Aside from the desire to do it, the thief would need the knowledge of where the gun was kept. She agreed with Wade that it would not have been found by accident. Whoever took it had watched Wade take it out or put it away. That limited the range of suspects dramatically. Wade had friends, but not dozens of them. He had acquaintances, and certainly hundreds of people had visited the winery to help with harvest, crush, and bottling, but there wouldn’t have been any Assault Golf on those occasions. Assault Golf was the only time he used the rifle, and it was strictly a two- to four-person game played only with close friends, as far as she knew. She would check with Wade about that. They needed to review every time he had used that gun with anyone around. She’d help him make a list, but the list would not be long. No, she had to face what was most likely the truth: Whoever stole Wade’s gun was probably part of the Skord Mountain extended family, somebody who ate with him, drank his wine, helped harvest grapes, and played Assault Golf after
all the others had gone home. It had to be one of ten or so close friends.
Sunny tried to stop thinking. She sipped the hot wine and felt it go all the way down. A wave of relaxation came over her despite her flickering thoughts. She made her way back to bed and promptly fell into a deep, sound sleep.
It took several rings before she understood that the sound was the telephone, and a couple more rings before she realized that she should get up and go answer it. She shuffled out of the darkness of the bedroom into the kitchen, where a strong late-morning sun shone through the window. She picked up the receiver, struggling to pull herself out of the underworld of sleep. It was Wade. She looked at the clock. Close to eleven.
“Sorry to wake you. You’re sleeping late.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Listen, Sun, I’m in town, down at the police station. Steve Harvey and another officer came by this morning with a search warrant for the rifle. When they found out I didn’t have it, they arrested me.”
Sunny was instantly awake. “Wade, are you in jail?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“Okay. Okay. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m worried, and I’m in jail, but I’m fine.”
“Okay. This is getting sort of serious. We need to get organized. What can I do?”
She was glad he didn’t waste time hedging or apologizing for putting her out. They made a list. Take care of Farber the cat. That was easy enough, he was mostly wild anyway. Bring down a toothbrush and other toiletries. Call Harry and make sure he
has everything he needs to get the legal aspects moving. Take a Brix reading from every other section of the vineyard as often as possible, ideally every four hours. Brix was the measurement of the sugar content in the grapes. If it looked like a section was going to get close to twenty-four degrees Brix within a day, Wade wanted her to let him know as soon as possible.
“From what I can tell, it’s going to be a little cooler today. If that’s the case, we’re probably good for another day or two. Assuming I can get out of here on bail, we can harvest on Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“I can take care of all that, but we need to focus on what’s really important. We need to find that gun,” said Sunny.
“This is one hell of a time to be sitting in jail,” said Wade irritably. “I’ve got twenty-eight tons of grapes just about to turn into either wine or raisins, and I’m doing yoga in a six-byeight cell.”
“Wade, are you being funny? This is not funny.”
“I’m in denial, Sun. And I am doing yoga. What else am I supposed to do in here?”
“I don’t mean to be a downer, but you do realize what this all means.”
He was quiet and she was sorry she’d said it. Of course he knew what this meant, he was in jail on suspicion of murder. When he spoke his voice was low and serious. He said, “Sunny, go find that gun and get me the heck out of here.” It was more prayer than request.
“Don’t worry. I’ll find it,” she said, and set the receiver back in the cradle. The sun warmed her back as she stood staring at the telephone.
In the shower, it occurred to her that from now on, the police would be more interested in proving that Wade Skord was guilty
than that he was innocent. If that gun wasn’t simply misplaced, it would be up to her to prove that Wade didn’t kill Jack Beroni, and to do that she’d have to find out who did. She stood directly under the shower, letting the warm water hit the top of her head. A disturbing sensation, almost a tickle at the back of her mind, interrupted her thoughts. Was there any possibility, under any circumstances, that Wade had actually done it?
Wade’s scrawny old arthritic cat, Farber,
scampered up a tree and heaved himself stiffly onto the roof of the house when Sunny pulled up. She found the key under a potted rosemary and let herself in. The house was quiet. Only two days earlier it had felt like her second home, now it was filled with troubling, unanswerable questions. She shook dry cat food into a bowl and set it on the deck, then quickly gathered the few personal items Wade had asked her to bring, stuffing them into a day pack she found hanging behind the door. She tossed the pack into the truck and walked down to the winery.
It was a perfect early-fall day, bright and fresh, especially on top of Howell Mountain. Catelina’s recipe had certainly worked; she hadn’t felt so rested in weeks, and the world looked vibrant and solid again, like when she was a kid. She cut through the yellowed grass to the old barn that Wade had converted into his winemaking facilities. Using one carefully placed finger, she slid the winery door open and slipped inside, noting that she needed to ask Steve Harvey if they had fingerprinted that handle. The air smelled dusty and sweet like any old barn, and at the same time sour and boozy like all wineries. During fermentation the funky smells of yeast and sulfur would be incredibly strong, and
afterward, when the new wine had been transferred to barrels for aging, the place would reek like a fraternity house after a big party.
She waited for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light. Barrels were stacked several rows deep against one wall and two eightfoot-tall fermentation tanks stood against the other. She checked the narrow space behind the furthest tank, where Wade’s rifle had always been kept. It wasn’t there. She went down to the cellar, where the wine aged for a year or two once it was bottled. She poked around the storage room packed with pumps and hoses. She climbed a ladder made of rope and two-by-fours to peer into what used to be the hayloft. The rifle was nowhere. Half an hour later she emerged from the winery, beat the dust off her jeans and sleeves, and headed back to the house empty-handed.
Wade’s place was rustic verging on Spartan, more cabin than house, and didn’t take long to search, especially for something as big as the .22 Hornet. The gun wasn’t anywhere visible, and neither was the box of shells Wade said he kept in the closet, nor the two spent cartridges he’d put in the garbage. Probably the cops took that stuff, thought Sunny. The gun also wasn’t in the sparse workshop Wade had built out back. His tools hung neatly from their hooks and the workbench was tidy. The storage room held only the predictable supply of fertilizers, wheelbarrows, defunct wine barrels, cover crop seed, coffee cans full of nails and screws, and salvaged scraps of lumber from various projects. By twelve-thirty she’d given up on finding the Hornet anywhere logical. That left just the illogical places, those millions of unknowable places an object can get to without explanation.
In the workshop, she picked up Wade’s collection kit, an old wooden painter’s box with a handle on top and labeled cubbyholes for samples. On her way out she stopped to grab a small
harvester’s knife with a serrated blade shaped like a half-moon, and reached for the old red gardening gloves that always lay on the shelf by the door, but they weren’t there. She hunted for them briefly, then headed out into the vineyard, gathering fruit samples from each of the eight sections of the vineyard. When she got back she cleaned the refractometer, sorted and squeezed the juice from the grapes, and measured each sample, holding the device up to the light to take a reading. Light bounced off the sugar molecules in the juice at a different angle than it bounced off the water molecules, producing a fairly accurate reading of sugar content. She pulled a photocopied recording sheet from a stack on the makeshift desk and noted each reading. Most of the grapes were at seventeen degrees Brix, which meant they could be ready to harvest after the next warm day or two, maybe three if it stayed mild, and would probably be overripe by the end of the week. She folded the paper and tucked it in her pocket.
Near the end of town, the St. Helena police station crouched low and flat at the side of the park like a fugitive, its wide eaves warped and drooping at the edges, and the stucco walls streaked with rust. Inside, two hefty women in uniform sorted and stapled paperwork behind a sliding glass window, like receptionists at a doctor’s office. Sunny stated her business and waited. Twenty minutes later, a female cop waved her through a doorway and into the visiting room. Wade came in wearing an orange jumpsuit. She felt a surge of tears at the sight of him.
He sat down in a metal folding chair on the other side of a wall of glass. “Hey, sis.”
“Hi. I brought your stuff. They said they’d give it to you.”
“Great.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Okay, all things considered. Did you talk to Harry?”
“Yeah. He’s working on everything. He said he won’t know if we can get you out on bail until tomorrow or maybe Monday, depending on when you get to see the judge. He said you’ll probably have to put up the vineyard.”
He nodded and Sunny went on. “I tested the Brix and fed Farber.” She took the paper out of her pocket and pressed it against the glass between them.
Wade studied it. “Looks like we might need to harvest on Tuesday or Wednesday. If I can’t be there, you might have to make some phone calls for me, see who we can get to help. I guess we can talk about that once we know about the arraignment.”
“Right.”
After a minute, Wade said, “I guess you didn’t find anything.”
She shook her head and sighed. “I’m not through looking yet, but I went over the winery, the house, and the workshop pretty carefully. I figure I might as well look around outside, in between the house and the winery. I don’t know how it would get there, but you never know, since we don’t know how it vanished in the first place. And I forgot to check the Volvo.”
“Well, the cops did all that, anyway.” Wade looked away, staring at the far wall. “I guess I thought there was a chance that it was right in front of me and I just couldn’t see it for some reason. Crazy. I don’t know what I thought.”
“I’ll find something, either the gun or the person who took it. We’re going to get you out of here.”
Wade met her eyes. “That’s what’s got me worried, Sunny. This is getting serious. Whoever killed Jack Beroni is still close. They know me, and they know you. This is somebody with enough malice and nerve to kill Jack and send me to jail for it.
They’re capable of anything. It’s not safe for you to be running around out there. Who knows what might happen if they notice you snooping around? Whoever took my gun and killed Jack is probably watching your every move.”
“No, they’ve gotten away with it; they won’t do anything to risk getting caught now. They’re just going to blend back into the woodwork and wait it out.”
Wade rubbed the pressure points at the bridge of his nose. “I never should have gotten you involved in all this. I’m sorry I did. Now I’m asking you to get out of it and stay out. This isn’t your problem anymore.”
Sunny leaned in and talked low, almost whispering. “Wade, this is no time to cross our fingers and hope everything is going to be okay. Do you really want your fate in the hands of Steve Harvey? He’s a nice guy, but do you really want him deciding whether you spend the rest of your life in jail or not? The fact is, somebody is trying to get away with murder at your expense, and I’m not going to let that happen. I’m not going to do anything crazy. I’m just going to go about my business like always, and along the way I’m going to check into a few things, try to find out what the heck is going on around here. Okay?”
Wade looked at her with the faintest suggestion of a smile. “Okay.”
She took a notepad and pen out of her knapsack. “They’re going to make me leave in a second, but before I go we have a job to do.” She pointed the pen at him. “We don’t have time to argue about this.” He didn’t say anything, so she went on. “I want you to try to remember every person who might have seen that gun or even heard about it. That includes anyone who ever spent enough time in the winery to have seen it by accident.”
The glare of the sun blinded her when she stepped outside the doors of the police station. One of the women behind the desk in the reception area had said she would probably find Sergeant Harvey at the taqueria down the street having a late lunch. True to habit, he was sitting alone at a table by the window, eating one of three tacos from a red plastic basket when Sunny came in.
“Hi, Steve.”
“Hi, Sunny.”
“Can I join you for a minute?”
“You bet. Have a seat.”
She slid in across from him in the smooth plastic booth, glancing at his food with a covetous twinge of hunger. Lunch would have to wait. Steve Harvey took another bite of his taco, giving her time.
“I wanted to talk with you about Jack Beroni’s death. I was hoping you could tell me a little more about it, about what you found out there.”
“That’s police business, Sunny. I don’t know that I can tell you much, at least not much more than is already being squawked about all over town,” he said, turning a concerned face back to his meal. He wore a wristwatch that reminded Sunny of the one her father always wore, a gold Timex with a Twist-O-Flex band.
“Well, specifically, I was wondering if you and your team had fingerprinted the handle on the door to Wade’s barn.”
“Wade’s place isn’t a crime scene. We haven’t fingerprinted anything over there.”
“And what about the bullet that killed Jack Beroni?”
“What about it?”
“Has it been checked for fingerprints?”
Sergeant Harvey chuckled. “It’s at the lab, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Even assuming the perpetrator didn’t wear gloves,
and I think that’s not a very safe assumption since we are talking about premeditated murder, there is only a space about an eighth of an inch across where the bullet sticks out of the casing and could pick up a fingerprint. And, to answer your next question, since you’ve become such an investigator, that almost certainly means not much chance of picking up any DNA, either. The bullet expands on impact and then passes through six inches of blood, bone, tissue, and fabric. It’s nice to think the killer’s signature would still be on there, but it’s just not practical in most cases.”
“Still, you might find something.”
“Might. But are you sure that’s going to help your friend? I assume that’s what you’re after.”
“Wade Skord is innocent. If there are someone else’s prints on that bullet and the same person’s prints on the barn door, that would prove his innocence.”
“Not necessarily, but it would be interesting. And extremely unlikely.” Steve Harvey wedged the remainder of taco number one into his mouth.
Sunny said, “You haven’t found the gun. You took a pair of gardening gloves from the workshop at Wade’s. I assume you’ll test those for gun powder residue. You took a box of shells and the two casings out of the garbage can. You have the bullet, and the body. Is that the extent of the physical evidence?”
Steve looked surprised, then smiled. “Not entirely. There’s the angle of entry. That tells us that the shooter was standing about a hundred yards away, probably to the southwest, in the trees beyond that artificial lake they have out there by the gazebo. Whoever did it had to be a good shot, to be that decisive at night. And the coroner has confirmed the time of death at around ten or eleven o’clock Thursday night. There’s some other
stuff, but I think I’ve told you everything I can. This is a police investigation. I’m not at liberty to share all the details.”
“You must have Jack Beroni’s cell phone records. Whoever he was supposed to meet probably called him to set it up.”
“Yes, we have cell phone records, if we need them. And that’s all I’m going to say about that. You understand, don’t you, Sunny? I can’t go around divulging our case.”
Sunny clutched her car keys, thinking. She said, “Somebody is trying to frame Wade Skord for murder.”
“Well, if that’s the case, they’ve done a pretty good job of it.”
Sunny glanced around the taqueria. Two girls about junior-high age were giggling at a table across the room, an old man was reading a newspaper at the window table on the other side of the door, and the crew behind the counter were standing with their arms folded, talking in Spanish. Otherwise, the place was empty. Sunny lowered her voice. “Wade Skord didn’t kill Jack Beroni or anyone else.”
“I wish I could agree with you, Sunny, but the facts are standing in the way on this one.” He tore a bite out of taco number two and chewed robustly while maintaining eye contact. He had big brown eyes lined with dark brown lashes that emphasized the startled look he wore much of the time, like Bambi in uniform. “Facts are facts, Sunny,” he said. He took a hearty pull on the straw stuck in a bottle of Mexican orange soda.
“What facts?”
Steve chewed another enormous bite of taco into submission and worked it into manageable mounds tucked into either cheek, thus freeing up the area in the middle so he could speak. He took his notepad out of his breast pocket, flipping to a page and reading out loud. “Suspect is known to possess a registered firearm of the same make and model as that matching the bullet found at the scene of the crime and determined to be the
cause of death. Suspect is known to have fired said firearm in the vicinity of the murder at the approximate time of death. Suspect has had disputes with victim requiring police intervention in the past, including a recent spate of alleged death threats corroborated by multiple witnesses. Suspect was unwilling or unable to surrender his firearm for ballistic testing. Suspect has no verifiable alibi for the time of the murder.” He looked up from the notepad. “Plus some other stuff I can’t tell you about. It doesn’t look too good.”
“Just because he lives nearby, owns a gun, and can’t prove he didn’t do it doesn’t mean he’s guilty,” said Sunny.
“No, but it establishes probable cause. That’s enough to get a warrant and make the arrest.”
“What good does having Wade in jail do?”
“I can’t let a murder suspect run around town just because he’s a friend of yours,” said Steve. “We will continue to investigate this crime until we get to the bottom of what happened, but for now I need to make sure the suspected perpetrator doesn’t fly to Brazil while I’m taking fingerprints off a dilapidated barn door.” He sipped from the orange soda, rationing the last of it, and wiped the corners of his mouth with his fingers.