A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery 4: Lethal Vintage

by Nadia Gordon

  Cynthia came out of the kitchen and walked down the steps to where they were sitting. She frowned when she saw Oliver rubbing his temples. “Mike asked me to tell you he’s back with the truck,” she said, picking up their dishes.

  Sunny stood up. “Thank you for being honest.”

  Oliver jerked his head up. “How would you know if I’m being honest?”

  Sunny studied his face for a moment. Inscrutable. Was he making some kind of joke? She decided not, thanked Molly for her help, and walked back up past the lawn and the little creek cascading down and into the chill of the air-conditioned house. Out front, Mike Sayudo was talking to the pool guy.

  Sunny walked over. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “No problem.”

  She looked at the pool guy. “Where does all the water come from around here? I mean for the pool and the lawns. The hills look so dry.”

  “From a well they put in last year.”

  “And it comes out of the ground crystal clear like that?”

  “It comes out looking like lemonade and smelling like rotten eggs. To get it just right, you have to work with it,” he said with obvious pride. “We’ve got five filtration systems running here twenty-four-seven. You could bottle the water in that pool. It’s as close to perfect as money can buy.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “We’re running upwards of a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of equipment, and that doesn’t include maintenance and operating costs. But it sure is pretty.” He gave her a grin.

  Sunny looked up at the rocky hillside behind the house. A rough path led up through chaparral. She glanced back at the house and the double garage doors and got in the truck. She drove down the strip of cement that wound down the hillside like a pale gray ribbon running past Cynthia’s garden, the pig’s enclosure and the little cabin where the chickens roosted, the tennis court, Cynthia’s house, and finally the winery. Almost nine o’clock. Rivka would be wondering what happened to her. She picked up the phone and dialed the restaurant.

  “Steve called,” said Rivka when she answered. “He said to remind you to drop by the station today to comply with his request. Those were his exact words. He said you’d know what he meant.”

  Sunny hung up and dialed Wade Skord. “I think I need a lawyer. The police want a DNA sample. Who was that guy who helped you out with the Beroni business?”

  “Harry? I’ll have to look up his number,” said Wade. “Don’t do anything until you talk with him.”

  If giving a DNA sample was really no big deal, Sergeant Harvey wouldn’t mind if she didn’t comply right away.

  15

  Rivka straightened the candles in a tarnished silver candelabrum and lit them. The flames stood upright in the stillness of the warm evening. They’d opened the French doors off the dining room, and now the air inside the restaurant was as heavy and hot as it was outside. Sunny had finally finished the last of the cleaning, prepping, ordering, accounting, and other chores she’d let slide recently. Now she came out to the patio with two glasses of white wine. She handed one to Rivka.

  “You call Skord?”

  “He’s on his way,” said Sunny.

  They heard a grunt and Monty Lenstrom peeked over the fieldstone wall that hemmed in the patio. “Hey! Is someone going to let me in or do I have to climb the tree? I’ve been knocking for half an hour.”

  “Come round the back,” said Rivka.

  She returned with Monty trailing behind. “Didn’t you hear me knocking? My knuckles are raw,” he said.

  “Who uses the front door after closing time?” said Rivka.

  Between the three of them they had the table set, the salads plated, and the salmon steaks off the grill in under ten. Wade Skord banged on the back door just as they were sitting down.

  “I can’t believe I’m eating salmon again,” said Sunny. “I feel like a grizzly bear.”

  “Makes your coat shiny,” said Wade, taking his seat.

  “Riv, please tell me this is the last of it.”

  “It is. I divided what was left between the dishwashers.”

  “Good. At least they’ll get their omega-three fats.” Sunny looked around the table at her friends. She settled on Wade. “You’ll never guess what happened after I left your house this morning.”

  Wade looked up with his mouth full and a gloss of olive oil on his chin. He shook his head. “No idea.”

  “The Ranger let me down. Ran out of gas right after I got on 29.”

  “So that’s why you were late!” said Rivka.

  “Serves you right for driving that heap,” said Monty.

  “I’ll forget you said that,” said Sunny. “That’s just the beginning.” She told the story of how Molly Seth had pulled over in her black Jag and everything that had happened at Oliver’s house. “As incredible as that house is, it still gives me the creeps,” she said. “All that water makes me nervous. You look around and you see a landscape that’s just a couple of rainstorms ahead of the Gobi Desert, and meanwhile his place is nothing but lawns and waterfalls. It’s like Las Vegas. You get the feeling everything is being used all at once and one day the taps are going to dry up and it’ll be like Road Warrior.”

  “That’s the bootstrapper talking,” said Rivka. “Always conserving resources. You’d make a terrible rich person.”

  “He’s lying for sure,” said Wade.

  Sunny followed his glance and handed him the plate of grilled salmon. “About what?”

  “Everything,” said Wade, taking a slab from the plate and squeezing a lemon over it. “As someone with extensive experience sitting on hills contemplating stars, I can tell you this guy is no stargazer. I buy the part about him sitting in his car firing off text messages. That makes sense. There are only a few different ways to cope with life. You can work, you can drink, you can go to the gym, or you can wander around the countryside looking at stars. This guy’s a worker.”

  “Hard to know for sure.”

  “I’m sure. You said he evaded your question, right? You asked him if he was telling the truth and he made a joke.”

  “More or less. I thanked him for being honest and he asked me how I would know he was.”

  “It’s human nature. Even the worst of us are still programmed to avoid outright lies. You tried to force him to say whether or not he was telling the truth. He avoided the question. He’s lying. End of story as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Even if he was lying, that doesn’t tell us much,” said Sunny. “Lying about what? And why?”

  “What about all this encryption business?” said Rivka. “He admitted the system gets backed up each night to his office in Brazil. That could only happen online. Obviously, he must be able to access everything online somehow. He could turn that access over to the police right now. But he won’t. Ergo, he has something to hide.”

  They sat around the table thinking. Sunny broke the silence. She took an envelope out of her bag and handed it across to Rivka. “I’ve been wanting to show you this for a couple of days. It’s a printout of some e-mails Anna forwarded to me the night she died. I got it on Monday. The police made the gist of it public in yesterday’s paper, so there’s no reason not to share it now.”

  Wade took a final bite of salmon and pushed his plate away. “Explain.”

  “The night she died, Anna got into Oliver Seth’s e-mail. She found some correspondence between him and one of his employees, a woman named Astrid. She forwarded it to me for safekeeping.”

  “They sound like lovers,” said Rivka, skimming the e-mails. “That must have been what they were fighting about that night,”

  “Presumably.”

  “Definitely lovers,” said Rivka, holding up the photograph of Oliver Seth and Astrid with the little yellow convertible in front of the Coliseum.

  “Nice gams,” said Monty, taking it from her.

  “Nice ride,” said Wade, leaning over. “That’s the new Smart Roadster, if I’m not mistaken.”

&
nbsp; “The question is, why did she think this e-mail would protect her?” Sunny held out her hand and Rivka handed her the papers. Sunny read from them. “‘Please keep this safe for me. Call it an insurance policy. I must control my fate.’”

  “That’s what Oliver writes in one of his e-mails,” said Rivka, taking the papers back. She flipped through them. “Here it is. ‘See attached. Remember to control your fate. She’s bullish on the new vintage.’ What does he mean by that?”

  “It has something to do with his winery, Taurus Rising,” said Sunny. “Oliver showed me a bottle. There’s a bull on the label with a girl on its back. ‘She’s bullish on the new vintage’ is clearly a reference to the label. But what does it mean, if anything? Maybe it’s just some silly in-joke between them.”

  “A girl on a bull,” said Rivka. “Is it the rape of Europa?”

  “Exactly,” said Sunny. “What about ‘Control your fate’?”

  “It could be another threat,” said Wade. “The rape of Europa is another Greek myth, like Scylla and Charybdis. Points to your Sicilian friend, if you ask me. Rape, abduction. Maybe you control your fate by keeping your mouth shut so you don’t end up like Europa carried off on a bull.”

  “It’s some kind of riddle,” said Monty. “Having to do with the attachment. That’s the photograph of them, right?”

  “Maybe it’s just some kind of romantic innuendo,” said Sunny. “Oliver is a Taurus, the bull. He’s the bull carrying off the girl.”

  “It still doesn’t make any sense,” said Rivka.

  “I’m with Monty on this one. It sounds like a riddle to me,” said Wade.

  “I love riddles,” said Monty. “We have to crack it or I’ll be up all night. Bella won’t let me near the Times crossword anymore.”

  “I thought you were obsessed with some My Little Pony video game,” said Rivka. “Annabelle called me a few nights ago practically in tears because you wouldn’t stop for ten minutes to help her with your wedding plans.”

  “While no one appreciates the diminutive horse more than I do, the activity to which you are referring is called The Legend of Zelda, and it’s not a video game, it’s an artificial universe where one can push the boundaries of the human experience.”

  “Do you actually stay up all night playing a kid’s game?” asked Rivka.

  “Occasionally a long period of focused time is necessary to truly experience the Zelda world.”

  “It’s an illness. You do realize that, right? You’re an addict. You need help.”

  “Why don’t you mind your own beeswax and go get another tattoo, Jezebel.”

  “Would you two stop, please?” said Sunny.

  “And you want to know what the big wedding-planning crisis was?” said Monty. “What font to use on the invitations. By the time this is over, the woman is going to need medication, or I will. Finally she gave up and let me pick.”

  “And?” said Rivka.

  “Hello? Copperplate. Letterpress on acid-free heavy cream stock. Very tasteful.”

  “So I guess nobody has an answer to the riddle,” said Sunny. Three blank faces stared back at her in the candlelight.

  * * *

  “This printout kind of sucks,” said Wade, squinting hard at the picture of Oliver and Astrid. “It’s all grainy. Maybe there’s some detail we’re missing.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like what’s that on the seat of the car?”

  Sunny stared at the image. “I can’t tell. I’ll bring out my laptop and we can have a closer look.”

  She came back with her laptop and put it in front of Wade, illuminating his face with a blue glow. He held up his glass. “It’s bad enough to bring a computer to the table, but to leave your guest on empty?”

  Sunny sighed and went inside. She found an open bottle of Flowers Pinot behind the bar. When she came back Rivka had opened the e-mail from Anna. She hesitated at the attachment.

  “Eight megabytes? Isn’t that kind of huge? Pictures are usually not more than a couple megs.”

  “Oliver probably has some crazy high-tech camera,” said Sunny.

  “Maybe they planned to make a poster,” said Rivka. She zoomed in on the front seat. “It’s nothing. Just her handbag.”

  They all stared at the picture, then at one another.

  “We’re barking up the wrong tree here, folks,” said Wade. “And meanwhile, it’s getting late and I gotta put the grapes to bed.”

  “Maybe the police will figure it out,” said Rivka. “Anybody check the papers today?”

  “Look online,” said Sunny. “You can jump on Bismark’s WiFi from here.”

  They all waited, staring at the screen. Nothing happened.

  Monty looked at his watch, an expensive TAG Heuer Annabelle had given him that he was immodestly proud of. “I gotta get going.”

  “You don’t want to keep Zelda waiting,” said Rivka.

  “Shoot, it’s frozen,” said Sunny.

  “Control-Alt-Delete,” said Monty, putting on his coat.

  “Control your fate,” said Rivka.

  There was a pause just long enough to take a slow breath during which three bodies stopped, their expressions frozen, while three overworked brains labored, crunching data, sorting it into categories, making links and associations. The spark of discovery leaped from their eyes simultaneously as the same words formed on their lips at the same moment.

  “Control-F8!” said Rivka, Monty, and Sunny in unison.

  Wade, who had been holding his glass of Pinot up to the candlelight and studying it intently, lowered it to look at them in astonishment.

  Sunny carried the laptop back into the office and hooked it up to the Internet. With Rivka at the controls and the others looking over her shoulders, they went to Taurian’s Web site and tried typing Control-F8. They tried the Web site for Taurus Rising wines and looked for Taurian Web sites in Brazil, Italy, and Russia. They googled Oliver Seth and tried Control-F8 at every site that seemed officially connected to him. Nothing happened. Wade was the first to give in and go home. A few minutes later, Monty called it quits.

  “Maybe we’re wrong,” he said, looking up from the marks he was making on a piece of notepaper. “Maybe it’s an anagram. ‘Control your fate’ could be ‘Fool not ate curry.’”

  Rivka and Sunny looked at him.

  “I’m just saying we could be wrong. Maybe Control-F8 has nothing to do with anything. Either way, I have to go home and get some sleep.”

  “He’s right. Whatever it means, we’re not going to figure it out tonight,” said Sunny. She looked at Rikva. “I need some sleep and so do you. We have to be back here in six hours.”

  “I’m out of here,” said Monty. “Thanks for the grub and the puzzle hour. Next time we can do the crossword. Oh, and don’t forget we have to get our heads together on the menu for the engagement party. It’s coming up fast. Annabelle said she wants peaches in the salad. You think that’s possible?”

  “Definitely,” said Sunny. “A fine idea.”

  “I mean, do you think you can find some peaches that taste like peaches used to taste. Like maybe from those guys who gave us that box last year that was so amazing.”

  “Those guys sold out. Hasta la vista, peach trees; hello, multiplex theater and parking lot. But I have some other connections. I think I can score for you.”

  “Great. You’re the best, you know that, McCoskey? See you guys.”

  They heard the back door bang shut and Monty stomp down the stairs.

  “You said yes?” said Rivka. “I thought you were boycotting weddings forever.”

  Sunny shrugged. “How could I say no?”

  “But Annabelle? She’s going to make you crazy.”

  “It’s just the engagement dinner. I’m the host. She can only micromanage so far.”

  They heard someone come back up the stairs and open the door. A second later Monty stood in the office doorway. “No utter fool racy!”

  “Meaning?”
said Sunny.

  “I was hoping you would know. Nothing? Never mind, then.”

  He left and the door slammed again. “What a waste of time,” said Sunny, giving a great yawn and stretch. “I desperately needed to go to bed.” She rocked her head back and tipped it side to side, popping the vertebrae in her neck audibly. Her feet hurt, her skin felt like the sweaty inside of a leather sneaker, and she had a headache that was getting worse like the whirring of an engine getting louder and louder. She scrubbed her hands through her short hair, skimming out the clips that held a fringe of bangs off her forehead while she worked. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’m beat. We can try again tomorrow.”

  Rivka closed the last of the Web sites and stared at the image of Oliver and Astrid glowing on the screen in the gloomy room. “I’d like to control your fate, Mr. Seth, and your little hot-body girlfriend’s, too,” she said, and hit Control-F8 one last time. She stared at the computer. “Uh, Sun…”

  “No more. I can’t see. I’m going blind, I swear. I need to go to bed.”

  “Still, I think you’re going to want to see this.”

  Sunny walked over. On top of the photograph was a pop-up box. “Passwort eingeben.” She looked at Rivka. “Where’d that come from?”

  “Control-F8. Are we agreed on Europa?”

  Sunny nodded. Rivka typed in the letters and hit Enter. Nothing happened.

  “Maybe it has to have a number in it,” said Sunny. “The new vintage is also the only vintage. His first. I think it was 2001.”