Drip Dead (26 page)

“I’ll have him call you.” Wade hesitated. “What’s this about, Georgie? Is there any way I can help?”

I took a deep breath and plunged in. “What do you know about Gregory’s house? The one he had built?” I hurried on, trying not to think about the risk I took by telling him what I’d done.

“I was out there,” I said. “This afternoon.” I held up a hand. “I know what you’re going to say. Don’t. I had Mom’s key and the house is hers, so I had every right to be there.

“I didn’t find the wine, Wade. There should have been two hundred cases of wine, Burgundy and Bordeaux and Syrah, and there wasn’t a single bottle of red wine in the house. All I found was a refrigerated cabinet the size of a closet with some whites and a few sparkling wines.

“No red.”

“There has to be,” Wade said. His brow furrowed with worry. “There has to be or Gregory was involved in a scam of immense proportions. He had an insurance rider put on the place for a quarter million on wine, and he was getting storage fees from Veritas for the bottles that were on that spreadsheet you found.

“It has to be there.”

We went back and forth about what it meant that I hadn’t found the wine. Wade was adamant that it was there and I had missed it. He couldn’t believe that Gregory had lied.

We hadn’t settled anything by the time he left, and I didn’t tell him I was going back to have another look.

I think he knew anyway.

After Wade left I settled down with a cup of tea and the computer files. It was late, but I didn’t have to get up for work in the morning. The search for Gregory’s files was pulling me back into the world of all-night computer sessions.

It was familiar territory.

Picking apart the e-mail archive was tedious. My tea grew cold and my neck stiffened. It was more of a challenge with one hand, but I meticulously followed each thread and link, re-creating the original files.

It was like untangling a knotted ball of yarn, and it required patience and discipline. Pull one thread the wrong way and it tightened into an unyielding mass.

The reward for my patience came in the wee hours of the morning. I found the encryption key for the address file, and all at once I had Gregory’s contacts.

Names, companies, e-mail addresses—some even had phone numbers. There were address groups, too. Including a group named Veritas.

I’d found Gregory’s partners.

Excitement shot through me, a bolt of energy like the rush from a triple-shot mocha with extra chocolate syrup.

I tracked the names in the group to the individual e-mail addresses within the contacts file. [email protected] was obvious, as was [email protected].

The other two were a little more difficult.

I started backtracking the names through domain registries, and found Taylor Parkson behind another one of the addresses. No surprise.

The fourth address was my downfall. The domain,
wineconsultantsoregon.net
, ended in a proxy site. Proxy sites provided an anonymous registry for domain names, and they prided themselves on their ability to disguise the identity of the actual registrants. Even with my skills I couldn’t crack the wall surrounding the site’s records. And without a warrant they weren’t going to share any information with me.

For once, a computer problem stopped me in my tracks.

I stretched, feeling the muscles in my neck and back creak in protest. My right hand was cramped and aching from doing the work of both hands. I yawned so wide I thought my jaw might never close again.

Time to sleep.

 

 

Dogs do not have any respect for all-nighters. No matter how late I went to bed, they expected me to get up and let them out as soon as the first rays of morning sun reached the backyard. They also have the uncanny ability to force you to wake up by staring at you.

Which is what Daisy did way too early the next morning.

While the dogs explored the backyard—in case it had changed overnight—I called Dave Young. Although it was early, he was already at his desk, and sounded as though he had been up for several hours.

I told him about my visit to the sheriff’s station the night before and the invitation to return.

“It’s good for her to be able to see you,” he said. “But it must be hard for you.”

“I’m okay for now,” I told him. I wasn’t sure it was true, but I had to do what I could.

And one of the things I could do was look for the missing wine.

I asked Dave if he could talk to Mom about Gregory’s wine cellar. I didn’t explain why, and although it must have sounded like an odd request he didn’t ask. I had the feeling he didn’t want to know. Besides, if I was wrong, if somehow there wasn’t any wine, then I’d look like an idiot.

I hate looking like an idiot.

Better to wait until I had something useful to tell him.

I went back to work on Gregory’s files, and halfway through my second pot of coffee I struck more pay dirt.

This time it was actual mail archives. The message files had been zipped and encrypted, but I teased out a string of messages and slowly unraveled the entire file.

Now I had the actual messages that went with the addresses, and it was fascinating reading. One message header in particular caught my eye: “Authentication Report, Lot 755.”

I scrolled down to the mail and began to read with a growing sense of dread. Gregory had hired a wine expert to check on a lot he’d bought in an online auction.

A lot that had been shipped from Paris—France, not Texas.

There were four cases in the lot, and he had paid five figures a case. The total outlay was nearly fifty grand.

The expert’s opinion was that the wine was counterfeit.

Worth about fifty bucks a bottle.

That was bad news when he’d paid almost a thousand bucks a bottle. It was also several thousand reasons to kill him.

But there were several big ifs between the e-mail in the file and Gregory’s body under Mom’s house, and I had no way to prove it was connected.

I wasn’t sure who I could trust with the information I’d found. Dave Young was the likeliest candidate, but when I tried to reach him he was out of the office.

In a perfect world I would turn the information over to the sheriff and he would be able to find the connections that would lead him to the killer.

But in a perfect world he wouldn’t have arrested my mother in the first place.

I tried to keep busy around the house, waiting for Dave Young to call me back. I told myself there wasn’t anything I could do until I knew if the wine was in the house.

But something in the back of my brain kept nagging at me. There had been something odd about Gregory’s house, something that didn’t fit. And I had to know what it was.

This time I went alone.

I drove the Beetle to Mom’s house, thankful for the automatic stick shift, and switched to the rented van. I changed into my coveralls and padding, and put on my ball cap. I was ready to explore Gregory’s house again.

This time I put a grid pad and several pencils in the top tray of my toolbox. There was something wrong with my mental picture of the house. There should be a wine cellar, a large one, somewhere in that building and I was determined to find it. If that meant drawing out every square foot of the house, that was what I would do.

I forced myself not to look at the house across the street as I backed the van into the driveway. I didn’t know if the guy was home, but if he was I didn’t want him to notice me noticing him. A workman arriving to finish a job would pay no attention to the neighbors.

I locked the front door behind me and left my toolbox in the entry. I would retrieve it on the way out. Taking my cell phone, the grid pad, and a couple pencils, I set out to study Gregory’s house.

There was a secret here, and I had to find it if I wanted to get my mother out of jail.

And no matter how crazy she made me, I wanted my mom to be a free woman again.

I started with the entry, estimating the size of the room and making note of doors and windows. I had a measuring tape in my toolbox, but I was already juggling paper and pencil and the tape would have been impossible one-handed.

I could come back with Sue later, if I had to, but I didn’t want to get her in any deeper than she already was. I would manage alone for now.

The sun crept across the great room as I worked my way through the house. A map of the house began to emerge, taking shape in smudged pencil lines and erasures, in squiggles and arrows and scribbled notes.

At last there was one large blank area left. The place I knew I would eventually have to go. The one place I wasn’t sure I could face.

The master bedroom.

Somehow, invading the private room my mother had shared with Gregory would cross a barrier in our relationship, even if she never knew I’d been there.

I would know I’d been there. I’d invaded her privacy. Whatever I saw couldn’t be unseen. It would be in my brain forever.

What was I, nine? It’s just a bedroom. Get over yourself, Neverall.

I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

The room looked like something in a magazine layout. Every detail was perfect. Unlike my house, there were no dirty socks on the floor, or books left splayed open across the night table. No jumble of pocket debris on the dresser, or empty water bottles next to the bed.

This was what I was obsessing about? I’d driven myself crazy avoiding
this
—a room that looked like no one lived there?

I laughed at myself, and the sound echoed through the empty house. It was a sudden reminder that I was alone in a strange house that belonged to a dead man.

A shiver ran down my spine, and it felt as though someone was watching me.

It was silly—all the doors and windows were locked— but I still found myself looking over my shoulder, wondering if I could have somehow left something open.

I knew I hadn’t, but the feeling persisted until I gave in to my growing paranoia. I backtracked to the entry and double-checked the front door. It was securely bolted.

I hadn’t opened any windows or any other door. It was nothing more than an overactive imagination and maybe a guilty conscience.

I went back to work.

When I got to Mom’s closet I gasped aloud. I’d swear it was as big as my bedroom, maybe bigger. Big enough to hold a dressing table and a jewelry armoire as well as custom-fitted rods and shelves, and an array of sweater boxes and shoe racks.

Especially shoe racks. There must have been at least thirty pairs of stiletto heels in a rainbow of colors and styles. The one thing they had in common was the high, thin heel that had become Mom’s trademark.

I didn’t see a single pair of flat shoes in the entire closet.

Gregory’s closet, in contrast, was fairly modest. It held several racks of suits and sport coats, and stacks of carefully starched and pressed dress shirts.

But it looked tiny next to the luxurious indulgence of what could more properly be called my mother’s dressing room.

I was sketching in the bedroom wing when my cell phone rang. The sudden noise in the empty house set my heart racing.

I dropped the pencil and fumbled for the phone with one hand. The number wasn’t one I recognized.

“Hello?” I answered in a voice just above a whisper. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to speak out loud.

“Georgiana? Dave Young here.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and replied in a slightly more normal tone. “Hi, Dave. Have you seen Mom?”

“I just left her,” Dave replied. “She’s doing okay.

“The reason I called,” he continued, “is that I asked her about the wine cellar. She thought it was a pretty random question, but she did say he had a large storage cellar.”

“Did she say where the cellar was, Dave?”

“Just that he’d had it specially built into the new house.”

There was a minute of silence on the other end of the line. I could imagine Dave trying to figure out why I had asked. But he still didn’t question me.

There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. I thanked Dave for calling and hung up.

I had confirmation there was a storage cellar, but not where it was.

I went back to my sketches.