Revenge at Bella Terra (11 page)

She used the handle of her flashlight to push Massimo’s shirt up. “Here’s the reason for the blood. A knife wound. Went in right below the ribs. He was probably already dying and this was the end. Poor guy.” She dropped the shirt. “They killed him in the heat of summer, or he wouldn’t have mummified like this.”

Eli asked the obvious question. “But what did they kill him for?”

The sirens came closer.

“The still?” Chloë suggested.

“Why torture him? Why kill him? Blackmail, yes. If corrupt revenuers found him here, they could have demanded a portion of the profits. This”—Eli waved a hand at the body—“is different. They wanted something, and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give it to them.”

Again Eli had Chloë’s attention.

“You said your great-grandmother thought Massimo was involved in crime that had nothing to do with liquor.”

“That’s right.”

“But no one knows what.”

“No one even knows if it’s true.” The sirens were so close to the water tower, Eli stuck his head out to make sure the police weren’t driving among the vines.

Two cars bumped along the gravel access road, one after the other, lights spinning red and blue.

But Bryan DuPey had lived his whole life in Bella Valley. He knew better than to risk Eli’s wrath by driving into a vineyard.

He parked as close as he could, though, cut the siren, and got out on the driver’s side. Some guy Eli didn’t recognize got out on the passenger side.

One of DuPey’s officers and the coroner exited the other car.

Eli turned back to Chloë. “They’re here.”

“I wish they hadn’t been so fast.” She stood and rubbed her hands on her pants, leaving black streaks behind. “I’d like to search Massimo’s pockets.”

“Go ahead.”

She flinched. “I’m not quite thick-skinned enough.”

“Points to you,” Eli said. “No reason to, either. His executioners, whoever they were, ripped the lining out of his jacket. If there was ever anything in his pockets, it’s gone now.”

“So whatever they were looking for was small enough to be kept in his pockets.”

DuPey shouted from below, “Hey, up there!”

“It could have been a key that led to something big.” Leaning out, Eli hollered, “Take the cherry picker up.” He turned back to Chloë. “The coroner is Mason Watson. Don’t tell him you touched the body. He is a fanatic about a pristine crime scene.”

“I won’t,” she promised. “I corresponded with a coroner about bodies and what affects them and how, and she told me to always, always stay back.”

“You didn’t go view an autopsy?”

“If I watch
NCIS
too close to bedtime, I have nightmares.” She smiled painfully. With soot smeared across her cheek, dirty fingers, and that bright white upstanding hair, Chloë looked like a modern Dickens urchin.

Odd to see her not as a tool he would use to keep his vineyard, but as a woman who thrived on solving a riddle, who sought vengeance for a man long dead, who lived recklessly and with enjoyment.

When Eli put aside the resentment at having to marry her . . . he liked her. More than that, she stirred desire in him. Not the simple physical need, but possessiveness, too, and a shadowy fear.

She gazed at him from such clear, guileless eyes he wondered whether she saw beyond the Eli of everyday life, beneath the iron control he imposed on himself, and into his darkest depths.

Perhaps she was not a simple mystery writer after all.

Perhaps she was not merely his future wife.

Perhaps she was the one person against whom he couldn’t defend himself.

Chapter 14

C
hloë thought she and Eli had been, well, not enjoying themselves—discovering a body wasn’t fun, exactly—but finding common ground. They’d been communicating with an ease she seldom was able to savor with another person . . . especially not an available man.

But now he watched her so intently that she asked, “Do you think it’s stupid that someone who writes about murder is too squeamish to view a simple procedure?”

He shook himself like a dog shaking off rain. “Not at all. The sight of an open, bleeding body is not a nightmare easy to shake off.” He sounded so normal, but—

What an odd thing to say.

He was a vintner.

When had he seen an open, bleeding body?

With most people, Chloë would pose the question—she loved to hear personal stories—and most people confided in her.

With Eli Di Luca . . . she just didn’t have the nerve.

Like an alarm, the mechanical beeping of the lift started, loud and rhythmic.

She tore her gaze away from Eli’s, moved away from Massimo’s body. By the time the men jumped off the cherry picker onto the water tower, she stood off to the side of the still, mouth dry, looking everywhere but at Eli and wishing she had a drink from that water bottle she’d left below.

Four guys leaped through the hole Eli had created.

The guy in the lead was of medium height, wiry, with thinning brown hair and tired eyes.

“Hi, DuPey.” Eli introduced him: “Bryan DuPey, this is my guest, Chloë Robinson. Chloë, DuPey is our chief of police. We went to high school together.”

DuPey shook her hand. “The good thing about my being chief of police is that he doesn’t call me Dopey anymore. At least, not to my face.”

“Not while you’re carrying a gun,” Eli said.

Another sign of humor.

DuPey looked harmless, but he summed up her and the scene with one comprehensive glance. “Hey, Eli, I hope your family isn’t going to make a habit of finding bodies.”

Startled, Chloë glanced at Eli.

“That makes two of us.” But he didn’t offer any further explanation.

The patrolman who stepped up to Chloë was a little older than she was, probably twenty-eight, a little taller than her, probably five-foot-seven, handsome, and clad in a uniform so precisely ironed he made her feel as if she’d shown up for a formal party dressed like an electrician. But when Eli introduced her—“Finnegan Balfour”—Finnegan smiled as he shook her hand a little too long.

So even with her dandelion-puff hair, she knew she could still attract a man . . . or maybe he had a manuscript he wanted her to look at.

Man. When had she become such a cynic?

When she pulled her hand away, he smiled some more, tipped his hat, and headed toward the still. “Oowee!” He had a drawl Chloë couldn’t quite place. “This is a
big
one.”

The coroner was somewhere in his fifties. He wore jeans, a button-down shirt, spotless white running shoes, and a baseball cap, and he carried two bulging leather bags and looked at the body with an almost spooky gleam of joy in his hazel eyes. “Good to meet you,” he said to Chloë, but she was pretty sure he would never recognize her unless she were stretched out on a slab in his morgue.

The last man stood back, silhouetted against the light, waiting to be introduced.

DuPey gestured him forward. “Chloë Robinson, this is Wyatt Vincent.”

Wyatt joined them, a man of about forty, tall, well built, well dressed. He shook her hand. “Miss Robinson, I admire your work. I’m hoping for a new book soon.”

She gave him her standard smile and answer. “Thank you. I’m hoping for that, too.”

“Wyatt comes from a long line of police officers,” DuPey said.

“The family is rotten with them.” Wyatt’s mouth quirked; he sounded self-deprecating, but to Chloë he seemed to be the kind of guy who got your attention and held it. He seemed sure of himself, yet his sandy hair, blue eyes, and light tan probably made him a good candidate for a stakeout. He looked as if he could blend in anywhere in the United States.

She’d bet he was good at anything he did.

Certainly DuPey sounded as if he admired him. “Wyatt was in the FBI for years, worked all over the country, then wanted to come back to California, so he brought a whole lot of knowledge about criminals and criminal behavior back to Sacramento and opened his own firm for consulting with police departments on how to sharpen their investigative skills and head off trouble before it happens. After our little problem last month, I called him in to help us brush up on procedures.”

“Welcome to Bella Valley.” Eli shook his hand.

“Thank you. I’ve been in the valley before. My family’s lived in central California for . . . oh, I guess we moved here in the forties, must have been, from Chicago.” He dipped his head to Eli. “Hope you don’t mind that I tagged along. Sometimes I miss the actual work on the ground, and this sounded like an unusual case.”

“His dad knew my dad,” DuPey said, then told Chloë, “My dad was the chief of police here when we were kids.”

“Did anybody disturb the body?” Mason asked.

“I walked over by him.” Chloë figured she might as well confess; someone had clearly disturbed the dust and soot of the past eighty years, and it wasn’t Eli; his feet were at least twice the size of hers.

“And knelt here.” The coroner was observant. “Fascinated, were you?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she admitted. “Never even heard of something like this.”

“Me neither,” Finnegan said from behind the still, “and I’m originally from Kansas.”

“What has that got to do with anything?” DuPey snapped.

Finnegan stuck his head out. “Kansas is dry by default, unless the county decides otherwise.”

“Dry?” Chloë understood. She didn’t think these Californians had a clue. “You mean . . . no liquor is sold there?”

He tipped his hat to her. “Yes, ma’am. I saw plenty of stills there, but no dried-up old corpses.”

With an edge of irritation in his voice, DuPey asked, “What did we talk about, Finnegan?”

“Oh. That.” Again Finnegan tipped his hat in Chloë’s direction. “Pardon me, ma’am.”

“For what?” she asked.

“We’re supposed to call them bodies. It’s more aesthetically pleasing.” He winked at her. “If we use the right words, we won’t get into trouble on TV when we report the crimes, and the ladies won’t call and complain because we’re insensitive.”

She gave a laugh, which she quickly muffled.

DuPey looked not at all pleased.

Finnegan ducked behind the copper still again. Metal rattled.

DuPey said, “Finnegan, don’t touch anything!”

“No, sir.” Finnegan appeared again, saluted with a pipe elbow he’d somehow gleaned off the still, and vanished.

DuPey sighed as if discouraged, and his tired eyes grew even more tired.

Chloë walked over to the opposite side of the body and knelt. “Do you mind if I watch?”

“You’re the author, right?” Mason asked.

“Yes.” Did everyone in town know who she was?

“Yes,” Eli answered as if she’d spoken out loud. “In this town, you can’t say something in a Porta Potty on a south-side construction site that isn’t reported in a north-end saloon within ten minutes.”

“It’s not that bad, Eli.” DuPey sounded absentminded as he examined the still. “No one gives a damn about most of us. It’s you Di Lucas with your celebrity aura who attract attention. And last month made all of you headline news again.” Before Chloë could ask what had happened last month, DuPey added, “For all that this is old, this is a nice still.”

“How old do you figure it is?” Eli asked.

DuPey whipped around. “How old do
you
figure it is, Eli?”

“If that guy over there built the still, then it’s Prohibition for sure.” Eli put his hands on his belt. “Why? You think I’ve been making brandy up here?”

DuPey took the lid off and sniffed. “No . . .”

Wyatt knelt beside Chloë. “I haven’t seen anything like this since we caught the Twilight Slayer in Phoenix.”

Chloë glanced at him. “You were involved in that case?”

“I had a hand in the solving of it,” Wyatt said. “He captured women he thought were vampires, staked them out in the desert, and let them bake. When a body dies of dehydration and then shrivels, that mummified look comes on fast. ’Twasn’t pretty.”

She observed as Mason took pictures, then carefully moved the clothes aside to view the injuries. “So I was right? Whoever killed this guy did it in the heat of summer. They handcuffed him, tortured him, killed him, left him to dry.”

“Good deductions,” Mason said.

“Why do you say ‘they’?” Wyatt asked. “Could be one killer.”

Chloë knew she was being tested. She didn’t care; right or wrong, this was information she could somehow put to use in a book—preferably in her current book. The horror of finding a body had faded, to be replaced by an endless realm of plot possibilities that bubbled in her mind. “Possible. But he built a still up here where no one could catch him, and from the amount of soot on the roof where the smoke vented, on the walls and on the floor, he used it for a long time. So he was smart. He’s well dressed, so he was prosperous. He would have made sure no one could sneak up on him, so he worked some kind of early warning system and probably some booby traps.”

“You’d make a good investigator,” Wyatt said.

“Indeed. Very good, Miss Robinson.” Mason pointed at the corpse’s hands. “Observe that the skin on his knuckles was scarred, so he knew how to fight.”

A thump brought Chloë’s head around, and the boards behind her shook.

Eli was down on one knee, his hands pressed to the floor. “Be careful. There’s an uneven place on the floor.”

“You fell?” She couldn’t believe it. He didn’t seem the type to ever make a misstep. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.” Standing, he grimaced at his filthy hands. “Only my dignity is hurt.” Pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped his palms and grimaced again as the big square of white cotton turned black. “Chloë, you look pale. Is the heat up here getting to you again?”

She got the message, sighed, and stood. “Yes. I hate to leave, but I was a little faint before, and I need to go lie down.”