Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  “Dibs on the angry vineyard manager,” I said quickly as Eller caught the guy. “Old ladies always love you, Jake.”

  Harley gave an icy glare to all of us. “Dammit, get that man out of here!”

  “Sir, you will leave or be arrested!” Eller was insisting.

  I shimmied between the boards of the fence and went over to them. The vineyard manager was speaking almost in a shout at Eller. “This block is for a client and we’ve got to pick it now! Since the body wasn’t on this side of the fence, there’s no reason for you to stop us from-”

  “This side may have been used to access the property,” I said strongly. The man had mussed brown hair and his shirt was buttoned wrong. Far in the distance was the road, where the picking crew was hanging around at vehicles parked along the curb. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  In a fit, the man said, “I’m Jerry Gregory and I manage the vineyards for Roman Wines.” He whipped a business card out of his shirt pocket and offered it to me.

  I took it. Scanning the information, I said, “Who’s the client?”

  There were deep circles under his eyes, like he hadn’t been getting enough sleep since harvest began in August. “Roman’s winemaker sold this block to Daffodil. It’s long overdue to be picked and the Brix is sky-high. They finally called it in just yesterday evening, told us to rip it off the vines and get the grapes there by nine in the morning, so I had to scramble to find a crew to augment mine and cancel another pick we were doing. How soon until I can get them in here?”

  “I can’t say,” I replied, although I knew it was going to be a while. This entire area had to be gone over for evidence. “How many entrances are there to this vineyard? Are they blocked off when not in use?”

  “Two entrances. The main drive from the road has an automatic gate that you need a code to activate, and then there’s the one by the reservoir way over there. That gate has a padlock.”

  “What else does this vineyard have besides the merlot?”

  “What? Why?” Jerry asked temperamentally. I only looked at him for a quiet moment and he conceded. It was amazing how effective that strategy was on people. “Most of the blocks here are pinot. They were picked ages ago. All we’ve had left to do since then at this property is the merlot that Daffodil has been stalling on.”

  “How recently has anyone from Roman been here?”

  “Other than my assistant coming to take samples for the lab to test every few days, no one. We’ve been focusing on Roman’s other vineyards.”

  “Nearby?”

  “No. This is the furthest one. The rest are scattered around the north side of Darby, Sonoma, and Napa, and then we have the one at the winery itself on Silverado Trail.”

  “And your assistant never reported seeing anything unusual here?”

  “No, never. She comes early in the morning, gets the grapes, and leaves for the next property on her list. She was here just yesterday and would have told me if she’d noticed anything out of place.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Gianna Morton.”

  “How long is Gianna here each time to sample?”

  “When she was just grabbing the merlot? Fifteen, twenty minutes tops. All she had to do was walk down one row and walk up another, clipping bunches along the way. And she always checks over by the reservoir on her way out to make sure nobody has dumped trash over there. People toss mattresses and other garbage now and then.”

  I started to walk to the dirt driveway. Apparently accepting that the merlot block would not be picked today, the vineyard manager came with me.

  “Did all of Roman’s crew and the hired crew show up today?” I asked.

  “My crew did, or my foreman would have let me know. I’ll have to talk to Armando about his people. He’s the supervisor for the Rogo crew.” Calling in Spanish to the people at the curb, another man’s voice replied. I could only pick out about half of the words.

  “All here,” Jerry said with a sigh. “I’ll have to call my winemaker and tell him to contact Daffodil.”

  “Who was it that found the body?” I asked.

  Again he called out in Spanish. Several voices replied. “It was almost all of them, basically,” Jerry said. “The lights were pulled into the row near the end and they saw it as they went over with their picking pans behind the tractor.”

  We would need the names of the two crews and their contact information before they left, if the uniforms hadn’t already collected the information. Jerry got on his phone with a miserable expression. “Yeah, it’s me. I’m at the west Darby vineyard. Stan, we can’t pick the merlot today . . .” A male voice roared like a furious bear on the other end.

  Halloran called my cell. Without preamble, he said, “Mrs. Doris Wengly is partially blind, refuses to wear her hearing aids most of the time, and spends all day and all night in her living room recliner with the curtains drawn and the TV on full blast. She only gets up to use the bathroom and get food from the kitchen, and neither of those rooms overlooks the backyard.”

  Great. So she hadn’t seen or heard shit. “And she lives alone?”

  “Yeah. She’s got a daughter who lives in the U.K. and a son residing in Georgia, so they can’t just drop in for visits on the regular. Once a week on Thursday afternoons she gets a food delivery from Service on Wheels. They bring up her mail from the box, too, and take out her trash. Those are her only visitors most of the time. She’s a shut-in. This guy could have been going back and forth for weeks on that driveway and she’d never have known.”

  “Would she have forgotten with her dementia even if she had?”

  “She doesn’t strike me as so far gone as to forget something like that. I asked questions about the date, current events, and she knew the answers to most of them. The month if not the day, name of the president is, all of that. She substitutes words here and there when she can’t find the one she wants, like picture box for TV, but she’s still pretty cognizant. And I talked to the son on the phone. He says he chats with his mom every week, has her bills paid online, and she’s never mentioned anything out of the ordinary to him. He wants to put her in an assisted living center but she’s been fighting it, and he can’t fly out to help with things since his wife is struggling with MS.”

  “We’ll have to canvass the neighbors and see if they noticed an unfamiliar car in her driveway,” I said. But this was a farm area. Each property was large to allow for crops or pastures, and the homes were set back from the road. It wasn’t going to surprise me at all if we came up with nothing. “He was cutting it real close tonight. I wonder if he was still at the maze when the picking crews turned up unexpectedly for that last block of grapes. He would have had to hightail it out of here.”

  “Farm-side, or they would have seen him,” Halloran said. “But it was safe to use this driveway, especially at night. We’re going to need an official task force to get through all of this.”

  “So the maze is inactive, but is the pumpkin patch as well?” I had only seen a few pumpkins scattered in the front among weeds on my way in, but it had been dark out there.

  “Yeah, inactive,” Halloran said. “All of it was her husband’s. She’s just let it die with him. Usually he bought the hay each fall for real cheap from another farmer, hired some guys from a corner to set up the maze for late September through Halloween, and then sold the bales off to people with horses and ranchers at the start of November. But not last year. He died before he could sell them. She got a little mad when I was questioning her about it, said it wasn’t her job to sell those off. It was his. I think she’s hanging on since dealing with them is too hard.”

  “Now no one is going to want those rotting bales,” I said.

  “I asked when was the last time she left the house and she said Easter when a friend drove her to church. Did the perp know that?” Halloran asked. “How? How did he know this was an okay place for him to mess around?”

  “He’s like a ghost,” I said.

  “Mo
re like the Devil,” Halloran replied, and hung up.

  Chapter Nine

  It was a long and terrible day.

  Francisco Hernandez had lived in a tiny rental house with his wife and young son. Her English was accented but perfect. Too stunned to cry, Rosario Hernandez just sat on the sofa in the afternoon and answered my questions as equally stunned neighbors filled the kitchen with meals and tended to the toddler. He was sick, and too young to grasp what had happened.

  For the past three years, Francisco had worked for Dalezo Vineyard Management Company in Napa. Unlike many of the seasonal workers who picked the grapes in autumn and left the area, he stayed year round in Darby. Just this summer, he was promoted to foreman. He and his wife had been saving to buy their first home in Vallejo, which would cut down on his commute to work. They almost had enough for a down payment.

  Now it would be going to funeral costs.

  His company was night picking in vineyards belonging to several different wineries, and he had left the house a little before midnight. The plan was to catch a ride with another Dalezo employee for a pick scheduled to start at half past one north of Napa. Usually he took the family car to work, but his wife needed it to take their child to the doctor for a persistent cold. Francisco was supposed to walk the five blocks to the corner of Mission Road, and wait there to be picked up.

  The coworker had been running a little behind. Night picking was hard work, trying to sleep through the day was harder, and the guy had overslept his alarm. He rushed through getting ready and ran out to his car, but when he arrived at the corner, it was empty.

  No one answered when he called Francisco’s cell phone. He sat there for five minutes, waiting for Francisco to appear and repeatedly calling. Not wanting to be late, and assuming that Francisco had taken the family car after all, he then went on to work alone. Everyone in the crew was surprised and worried when Francisco failed to appear over the next hours. It was not like him to miss work. Someone else came to cover his duties. Dalezo’s main office wasn’t open in the night, so they could not get his wife’s number on his emergency contact form to see what was going on. But she could not have given them answers. Waking up around four to check on their child, she had seen that her husband was gone and thought nothing of it. She naturally assumed he was at work.

  Francisco Hernandez had had no enemies. He had received no strange or threatening communications. His parents and siblings lived in Darby and the surrounding cities, a close family who all worked in various parts of the wine industry and hospitality as well. Married for eight years, Francisco and Rosario both had fertility issues that made conceiving unlikely without reproductive assistance, which they had no chance of affording. Their son had come as a complete surprise. They considered him a miracle.

  As for trouble with the law, Francisco had never had any except for parking tickets in his teenage years. I spoke to members of his extended family, his boss and coworkers and neighbors, and by all accounts he had been a hardworking, peaceable, and well-liked man. Proud, his brother said. We called him the little rooster even as a boy. He was never tall, but as tall as a mountain with his pride.

  Serum tests had come back positive for Quell. It was delivered to him in coffee. As to where he had gotten the coffee from, it was either a food truck on Mission, or the perp himself. Francisco hadn’t made coffee at home before he left, not wanting to wake up his wife and son. Halloran had gotten the names of the food trucks to service Mission and was chasing them down. They were plentiful along this stretch of the road, setting up shop in parking lots and serving customers all night long. Especially with harvest underway, there were always hungry people around.

  I thought it more likely that the perp had prepared the coffee himself. Prepared it and carried it around with him as he went prowling for a victim. And then he came across Francisco walking alone down the roads of his neighborhood to get to his pick-up. What had the perp done? Joined him on the walk, queried for directions or pretended to be working the grape harvest too, and asked if he wanted some coffee?

  Night picking had been going on for more than a month now, and everyone was tired. The perp must have come across as normal for that brief interaction, Francisco feeling no qualms about accepting the coffee. There were no signs on his body that it had been forced on him. I was curious if Francisco was the first attempt the killer had made that night for a victim, or if he had had to troll for some time to find a person willing to take a drink.

  But maybe not. The killer had had to sneak the Quell into Chloe’s drink at Bounce and there was a reason for that. Women had to be warier of men than men had to be of other men. I doubted it had crossed Francisco’s mind that the coffee could contain a drug, whereas if a strange man came up to me in the night and offered me a drink, it would be one of the first things to pop into my mind.

  The worst moment for me came when I was leaving the Hernandez home. As I opened the door to my car, a wail of agony tore through an open window in the living room. Rosario had been waiting for me to leave before she fell apart. Although I hadn’t eaten a thing all day, the sound killed whatever appetite I had worked up.

  Yesterday, their small family had been full of dreams. Now those were gone.

  I drove along the route Francisco would have taken to reach the corner of Mission Road. It didn’t lead me past any stores that might have cameras. There were only lines of small houses, and most people would have been fast asleep within at the time he walked by.

  I ran through the two mazes in my mind. I needed to sit at my desk and watch the videos of each. Maybe I would figure out what was bothering me about them.

  My phone rang. Assuming it was Halloran, I slipped on my ear bud and answered it. “What?”

  There was silence for a moment, save a droning sound. Then a tentative, young-sounding male voice said over the drone, “Uhh . . . hi. Is this Ms. Pengram?”

  I didn’t check the name of the caller since a driver up ahead was stomping on his brakes and speeding up at random. “Speaking. Who is this?”

  “My name is Tyler Cavil. I’m calling to apologize for the texts I sent you-”

  It was hard to make out his voice. “Tyler, what is that annoying sound I’m hearing?”

  “Oh, I’m at the U-Clean. I was washing Dad’s car. Let me turn that off.” The drone stopped immediately.

  I was less than a block away from the U-Clean. Putting on my blinker, I merged into the slow lane. “Tell you what. I’ll be there in just a few seconds. You can tell me to my face.”

  Startled, the kid said, “Okay.”

  I was there half a minute later. Tyler had gotten taller since the website’s picture was taken, and lost some of the baby fat on his cheeks. However, the full impact of puberty had yet to strike; there was still a lot of boyishness in his narrow frame and sweet face. His T-shirt and jeans damp, he waved when I turned in.

  A black minivan was parked in one of the three cleaning stalls, which were open at both ends. The others were empty. Beyond them, Brendan Cavil was sitting at a table with a cell phone in one hand as he ate from a basket of fries.

  I parked behind the minivan and got out. Wiping off his palms on his jeans, Tyler walked straight up to me and offered his hand. I shook it, asking, “How are you so sure it’s me?”

  “We looked you up online,” Tyler said. “There was a picture of you in an old newspaper. You were quoted on a murder case. You’re, like, a homicide detective, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Do you have a gun on you right now? Under your coat?”

  “Yup. And handcuffs. But I’m not planning to use either of those things on you.”

  “I read in an article that police like the Sig Sauer because . . .” Looking nervous, Tyler cut himself off. “Never mind. Dad said I did a great job. I managed to piss off a cop who could arrest me, and a lawyer who could sue the pants off me, and a slaughterhouse worker who could disembowel me when the other two were done.”

  “You hit
the jackpot.”

  “I’m really sorry. Those texts I sent you were rude. I thought I was being funny, but . . .”

  “How do you think they made me feel?”

  He paused. “Like I was stupid.”

  “Well, yeah, there was that,” I said. “I thought you were an asshole. But how do you think it made me feel as a woman to get texts like that from a guy? How were you treating me?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, looking agitated and ashamed. “Like you were an object.”

  “Yeah. It made me feel like shit, Tyler. When I get dick pics I haven’t asked for, when I get random messages from strange guys demanding a blow job, when I get told a man thought he’d be getting laid just for having coffee with me, it’s upsetting as hell. It’s like nothing else matters but my body. I don’t have a name or a career or a personality or hobbies, just sex organs.”

  Tyler nodded in distress. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking about it like that. I just thought . . . I guess I just thought you’d tell me to fuck off and it’d be done.”

  “But I’m not on that website because I want to mess around or fight with men,” I pointed out. “I’m looking for a relationship, not an argument or trading insults.”

  “I know. I know that now. I feel like an idiot. I wasn’t thinking that through.”

  He looked like he was about to cry, so I gave him a break. “All right then. I accept your apology.”

  He gave me a wavering grin. “You’re the only one.”

  “What happened with the other two women?”

  “The lawyer yelled at me that I was sick and needed therapy, and some other things. The woman who works in the slaughterhouse won’t let me apologize at all. She wrote back to Dad thanks for explaining, but she doesn’t ever want to hear from me. I wish I could tell her anyway how sorry I am. Do you think I should?”

  “No,” I said. “I think that’s stepping on her boundaries again.”

  “It makes me feel so bad not to say anything.”