A Case of Sour Grapes

by Gae-Lynn Woods

  “Twenty-five percent because...” Cass asked.

  “Blue had motive: jealously or revenge.”

  “Means and opportunity?”

  “You’ll have to see if you can find eye drops out at the winery or in Blue’s house and check her schedule around the time of Annie’s death.”

  “Which was?”

  “Wednesday, probably in the afternoon,” Grey answered.

  “The other seventy-five percent?” Mitch asked.

  “This is where it gets interesting,” Kado said. “We found a wine glass in the dishwasher with Bret Ivey’s and Annie’s prints on it.”

  “With tetrahydrozoline residue?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were his prints anywhere else in the house?”

  “Everywhere,” Kado said. “Her bedroom, the bathroom, the living room, the desk where the computer sat. We also found guitar parts in a box in her bedroom.”

  “No guitar?”

  “No, but the instrument they came from had been broken. The headstock still had the tuners on it, but it had been broken from the guitar’s neck. A piece of the body still had the pickup on it. Another piece had the volume and tone control knobs on it.”

  Mitch frowned. “Bret went to his house and got pieces of one of the broken instruments and brought them to Annie’s apartment?”

  “Or pieces from several instruments. But given that she died on Wednesday and the instruments didn’t get smashed until Friday night, it’s more likely the guitar was at Annie’s when it was smashed.”

  “That’s a reasonable bet,” Truman said. “The door frame had been recently repaired, and Annie’s landlord said someone broke in a week or so ago. They took her DVD player and television, but she didn’t file a police report.”

  “Why not?” Cass asked.

  Truman shrugged. “The landlord said she didn’t have renter’s insurance so a report wouldn’t have mattered. When I pushed him, he said he didn’t want a report filed either. It might make it difficult to rent the apartment in the future.”

  “But you don’t think the break in is related to her murder?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. There’s no evidence anyone has broken in since.” Truman sipped his coffee. “I think Annie knew her killer and opened the door to him.”

  PHYSICAL EXERTION

  IT WAS AS I finished breakfast at The Golden Gate that I realized how deeply entrenched I was in the mystery surrounding the missing Poison Ivy and the Dismembered Bunnies tapes. The cover for their first album was quite good, once you got past the shock of seeing two world leaders holding four boys as slaves. The composition was solid, their expressions perfect for the situation. It must’ve generated some controversy at the time.

  I stood and stretched, realizing that although I’d been honing my detecting skills over the last few days, I’d neglected my physical fitness. And then I remembered the date I’d had to cancel Friday night with Harvey. I sent him a text and took a sip of coffee. By the time I put my cup back on the table, I had a reply.

  With a smile, I picked up the album, waved to Stan and Sally, and prepared for a late morning bout of pleasurable physical exertion.

  __________

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, I hovered over Harvey, watching with satisfaction as his eyelids slipped shut, closing the window on those gorgeous chocolate eyes. He groaned and I smiled.

  “That’s it,” he whispered. “The sweet spot.”

  Sweat glistened on his handsome brow and I hunched a shoulder to wipe away a drop from the tip of my nose. I couldn’t change position. Not now. I took a moment to look down, relishing the sight of his sculpted torso beneath me. His biceps bulged and he squirmed, finding a better spot.

  “Easy now,” I said. “No hurry. Nice and slow. That’s the way.”

  He looked up and followed a bead of sweat as it ran from the hollow of my neck down between my breasts. “Oh, Lord. You’re killing me.”

  His muscles contracted and he grunted, then thrust the barbells up and placed them gently in the rack over his shoulders. He lay panting while I stood behind him.

  “Nice work,” I said. “That was three hundred.”

  “Told you.”

  “Seeing is believing, big guy.”

  Harvey stood and grabbed me by the waist, lifting me over the rack and setting me next to the bench. He waved a hand at the weights. “Your turn.”

  WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

  “DO YOU THINK IT’S more likely Bret killed Annie than Blue did?” Cass asked.

  “We think the odds are about even, which takes care of fifty percent of Truman’s estimate,” Kado said. He looked at the young officer. “Tell them the rest.”

  “The scene at Annie’s has been manipulated, and it’s possible someone is trying to make it look like either Bret or Blue killed Annie. Like Cass said, it doesn’t make sense that someone would be careful about fingerprints with one thing and not with another. So, I think there’s a fifty percent chance someone is trying to set up either Bret or Blue, or provide enough confusion that we’ll never identify her killer.”

  Mitch and Cass digested this, and then Cass asked, “What about Daphne?”

  “Everything we have points to Blue.”

  “What’s everything?”

  “The wine bottle has Blue’s thumb print on it. In blood,” Truman said.

  Cass raised an eyebrow. “Daphne’s?”

  “Type doesn’t match,” Kado said. “It’s probably Blue’s. Maybe she hurt herself during the attack.”

  “What else?”

  Truman held up a plastic baggie that held a bloody sharpened brass tube protruding from a wooden handle. “This is a round hole cutter, used in pottery making.”

  “So?”

  “Blue Ivey has a reputation as a potter. All the crockery at the winery is stuff she’s made. She even has a kiln out there.”

  “Where?”

  “In the workshop next to the winery,” Truman said. “I saw it yesterday when we were processing the bottles of weed killer.”

  Cass cocked her head to one side. “I think I’ve missed something.”

  “Me, too,” Mitch said. “Why were you processing weed killer?”

  Kado looked sheepish. “I should’ve told you, but we got busy with Annie’s apartment and then with Daphne’s car this morning. Somebody poisoned some vines out at Cedar Bend Winery on Friday night. They were wilting pretty badly Saturday morning. We swabbed them and the chemical matches the weed killer they use on woody brush. They have several jugs of it in the shop, and a bucket tested positive for the stuff.”

  “Somebody did it on purpose?” Mitch asked.

  “Daphne did it, and given that Blue fired her Friday night, she probably did it on purpose. Her prints were on the bucket and the jug.”

  “So Blue has two reasons to get even with Daphne: for sleeping with her husband and for killing her vines.”

  “She had means,” Cass added. “If that pottery thing is something she used. Were Blue’s fingerprints on it?”

  “No,” Truman said. “It was wiped clean.”

  “And again, we’ll have to wait and see on opportunity,” Mitch said.

  “We have another connection between the girls,” Kado said. “Truman found pieces of a guitar in the trash at Daphne’s house. They were in a big curb-side can the family keeps in the garage.”

  “The VanZandt’s alarm system went off a couple of weeks ago,” Truman said. “Their alarm company responded. Someone had broken a window. They stole some small electronics and tried to break into a gun safe. Mr. VanZandt included the smashed guitar on the inventory report he gave to the officer who responded, but he said no one in the family played the guitar and it might’ve belonged to one of the kid’s friends.”

  “Or maybe to Bret Ivey,” Cass said.

  “That crossed my mind,” Truman said. “But I don’t know why he’d leave instruments at his girlfriend’s houses. These weren’t cheap guitars. One had a Martin headstock and the other w
as a Gibson with a script logo. That means it was made before 1948, which would make it very valuable.”

  “I wonder if Bret could’ve done this?” Mitch asked. “He’d dumped Daphne, right?”

  Cass nodded.

  “Maybe she wouldn’t leave him alone and he decided to get rid of her permanently and make it look like Blue killed her.”

  “We need to find the man and ask him,” Cass said. “Or talk to Blue. Or both.”

  Mitch looked at Grey. “Did anything come up on autopsy for either girl?”

  The medical examiner opened the folders and pushed them across the table. “There are two sets of marks around Annie’s neck. The horizontal marks,” he demonstrated by placing his hands around his throat, “were left when she was strangled.”

  “Did the strangling or the hanging kill her?” Cass asked.

  “The strangling. Whoever did this crushed her wind pipe.”

  Cass bent over the photos. “I see finger marks and rope marks along that path. They used both?”

  “I think so. He could’ve crushed her wind pipe with the rope, but it makes sense when you look at the damage that he did it with his hands. The bruising on her neck here,” he pointed, “is dark, as if he pushed his thumbs into her throat.”

  “Or her thumbs,” Mitch said. “If the killer is a woman.”

  Cass lifted an eyebrow.

  “She’d have to have strong hands,” Grey said. “But yes, a woman could strangle another unconscious woman.”

  “And then get her into a noose. Did you see any scrapes on the rafter she hung from?” Cass asked Kado.

  He looked at Truman. “Pull up the crime scene photos. I don’t remember any.”

  They studied the photos on Kado’s computer screen. Cass pointed. “There are no marks on the rafter.”

  “What are you thinking?” Kado asked.

  “He didn’t toss the rope over the rafter, hook the noose around her neck, and pull her body upright. Whoever did this was strong enough to throw a rope over the rafter, position the noose at the height he wanted it, and get Annie’s head up into the noose without her weight dragging the rope on the rafter.”

  “You don’t think Blue could do that?”

  “It would take some upper body strength. Probably more than she has. I think Bret’s a more likely candidate for Annie’s murder.”

  Mitch held up Daphne’s autopsy file. “A baseball bat? Are you sure?”

  “Almost one hundred percent,” Grey said. “The shape of the depression would match a bat, and we found blue paint flakes in her scalp. There were no splinters, so the bat is probably metal.”

  Kado nodded. “That makes sense. Some bits of head- and tail-light glass we swept up have small amounts of blood on them. A lot of blue paint scraped off on the jagged edges.”

  “Someone whacked her in the head and then went to work on the car,” Mitch said.

  “Looks that way. We found no blood on the driveway or in the grass.”

  “There wouldn’t have been much,” Grey said. He found an autopsy photo. “The split in her skin is small.”

  Cass turned to Truman. “If there’s a fifty percent chance Bret or Blue Ivey killed one or both of these girls, what’s the other fifty percent chance?”

  “Unknown,” Kado said. “There’s no evidence anyone else was at either crime scene when these girls died.”

  “Except the fact that there’s no evidence anyone else was there.”

  “Correct.”

  Mitch looked at Cass. “You want to be not on duty for a little longer and take a ride out to the winery? We need to find a bat.”

  KNOCK YOURSELVES OUT

  SUNDAY’S LUNCH SERVICE WAS in full swing when Mitch and Cass arrived at the winery. They found Blue in the barrel room, climbing down a ladder attached to a massive dimpled stainless steel tank. She held a damp rag in one hand and a small bucket in the other, and stopped on the third rung from the bottom to remove a face mask and breathe deeply, then joined them.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, unstrapping a tank from her back and turning a knob. Sweat plastered her hair to her head and she turned her reddened face into the breeze created by massive fans blowing across the room to wide open doors.

  “What is that?” Mitch asked.

  “Breathing equipment. The grapes are fermenting and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere around the tanks can kill you.” She lifted the mask over her head. “It looks extreme, but everybody who works around the tanks, especially this time of year, wears one. That’s why we keep the fans going, too. What can I do for you?”

  “Daphne’s dead,” Mitch said.

  Blue took a step back. “What happened?”

  “She was murdered,” Cass said. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  __________

  “YOU THINK I KILLED her, don’t you?” Blue asked in a low voice.

  They were seated at one end of the winery’s wide porch. She reached for a glass of tea that was already sweating in the extreme heat. Ice rattled when she lifted it from the table.

  Mitch hesitated, then said, “We have evidence that suggests you were at the scene where we found Daphne’s body, and both you and Bret were at Annie’s.”

  The glass stopped mid-air. “Annie committed suicide.”

  Mitch shook his head, his eyes never leaving Blue’s.

  “She didn’t?”

  Mitch shook his head again.

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded.

  Blue placed the glass back in its sweat ring. “Those poor girls.” She drew a deep breath. “I didn’t kill them, but I doubt you’ll take my word for it. I can’t imagine Bret killing anyone, either. He’s an ass and I can’t wait until he’s out of my life, but he’s not a murderer. What do you need?”

  “We’d like to search your home and the winery.”

  “For what?”

  “Evidence.”

  “I could ask for a warrant, right?”

  Mitch nodded.

  Her fingers danced in the condensation dripping down the glass, and at last she spoke. “I didn’t do it. I doubt Bret did it.” She gestured to the wider property. “Knock yourselves out.”

  SUBMERGED

  THEY RETURNED TO THE barrel room in less than an hour. Blue had a mop and bucket and was scrubbing the floor around a tank when they appeared at the wide open doors, faces grim. She wiped sweat from her forehead. “Well?”

  Cass held out five plastic bags, each containing a bottle of eye drops. “Are these yours?”

  “If they came from the house, probably.”

  “When was the last time you used them?”

  She shrugged. “Over the last few weeks, during harvest. Why?”

  Cass didn’t answer, but instead held up a soft leather roll. “And these?”

  “They’re my pottery tools.”

  Cass rolled the tools out. “Is anything missing?”

  Blue frowned. “One of my hole cutters.”

  “When was the last time you used them?”

  “Ages ago. Months. Maybe a year.” She looked up at Cass, and then at Mitch, her eyes clouded. “One of my tools was used to hurt these girls?”

  Mitch opened a paper bag and pulled out a softball bat. “Is this yours?”

  Blue gasped at the ruddy smear on the bat’s barrel. “Is that blood?”

  “Is this your bat?” he asked again.

  Blue closed her eyes and drew several deep breaths, seeming to compose herself. When she looked at him again, her eyes were clear. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the garage bay where the Corvette is parked.”

  She blinked. “Where the Corvette is parked?”

  “The end bay farthest from the house. A yellow Corvette, license plate WINE-O is parked there. Is that your vehicle?”

  “It’s Bret’s, but he’s not here.”

  Mitch glanced at Cass and then back at Blue. “Does he drive another vehicle?”

  “Occasion
ally the Range Rover. Were all the cars there?”

  “All the bays were full, if that’s what you’re asking. Where can we find him?”

  “If he’s here at the winery or somewhere on the property, I’m not aware of it. He wasn’t in the house this morning when I left.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She hesitated. “I didn’t check all the rooms. But the alarm was still set when I went to leave. The security log should show whether it was disabled in the night and reset.”

  Mitch motioned to the bat.

  Blue nodded. “If you found it in the garage, then yes, it belongs to Bret. Or, more accurately, to the winery. We have a pile of sports equipment used by the staff or for special events.”

  “Where would your husband be on the property?” Mitch asked.

  “We have a hundred acres. About twenty of it is vines, but most of it is uncleared woodland. He could be anywhere.” She pulled her phone out. “If he’s here and has heard about Annie and Daphne, maybe he’ll answer.”

  She tapped a contact and lifted the phone to her ear. After a moment, a distorted double ring sounded. Blue looked around the barrel room. “Do you hear that?”

  Mitch and Cass moved away from the doors, heads cocked.

  The ringing stopped and she looked down at her phone. “Voice mail.”

  “Try again,” Mitch said.

  The distorted ringing sounded again. Cass stopped in the middle of the wide barrel room and turned in a slow circle. “Turn off the fans.”

  Blue did, and tried calling again. Mitch and Cass honed in on the massive silver tank where Blue had been working.

  “It’s coming from in there,” Cass said. She started for the ladder welded to the side of the tank.

  “No,” Blue called. “Don’t go up there.”

  Cass turned, a frown on her face. “Why not?”

  “The carbon dioxide. That’s a tank of Vermentino grapes. The cap is raised to let the gasses out so the tank doesn’t explode. You need the right safety equipment. I can go up.”

  “No, ma’am. If Bret’s phone is in there, the tank could be a crime scene.” Cass looked at Mitch. “What do we do?”