A Vintage To Die For (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries Book 2) (13 page)

I nodded and closed the door. I circled the truck and headed for the back door.

“Do you think Samson might have done it?” Victor yelled at me through his open window and my spirits dipped as low as they had ever been. If Victor, one of Samson’s closest friends, could ask that question, Samson really was in trouble.

I stopped and turned back. “No,” I shook my head, but I have to admit there was a splinter of doubt buried in my mind. What Marjory had said about finding Samson with the body…I shook it off. “Samson’s a fool and a grouch, but he’s no killer.”

Victor nodded. He seemed relieved by the reassurance. He backed away with a wave.

Reluctantly, I entered my silent house as the last rays of the sun slipped down the hillside in a golden cascade.

I wandered the bottom floor of my home in a fitful, uneasy way, trying to digest all that had happened in the last few days while dreading the nightmare of lawyers and courtrooms to come. The circumstantial evidence against Samson was piling up like flood water behind a dam. While Hunter seemed reluctant to believe Samson was Dimitri’s killer, that reluctance was not preventing him from building a very solid case. With the threatening letters, the bloody fingerprints and the fact that Samson had been discovered manhandling the body—but wait! Suddenly I remembered what Jorge had said yesterday morning in Angela Zorn’s driveway. He had implied he knew who the real killer was!

I was out the door and in my Jeep in less than two minutes. I considered calling Jorge, but I wanted to catch him cold. He
had
to come forward now. And if he wouldn’t? Then I might just end up in jail on a murder charge.

Chapter 14

The sun was just
a faint glow on the horizon, the sky darkening to purple at the edges, when I pulled into the driveway at Angela’s vineyard. Instead of heading for the house, I angled off the driveway just before the almond grove, onto a gravel track that led to her winery.

The winery - set at the toe of the trellised slope of the vineyard, just east of the house - was a purely industrial metal building surrounded by a concrete parking lot. As I drove toward the large building, I couldn’t help but run a critical eye over the forty acres of incredibly steep slopes Angela and Jorge had planted just over ten years ago. They had terraced the slopes, carving benches, like stadium seating, for rows of new vines that were supported on wire trellises stretched between tall metal braces called California Ts. This type of trellising provided better airflow for acreage like this, which had been planted in an east-west orientation rather than the more typical northeast-southwest orientation. But the terracing looked too wide and too flat. And there was far too much foliage on the vines. Bad drainage and too much inferior fruit was the obvious outcome, a fact Blake had attested to Saturday night after being beaned by Angela.

Far up the slope, almost at the center of the acreage, I saw an old red International Harvester tractor parked in one of the rows. It was just an outline in the darkness, but I know my tractors. It was turned at a slight angle, its nose buried in the vines. There was no driver in sight.

Jorge’s truck was parked in front of the metal building, beside a pedestrian door set between a pair of larger roller doors. I parked beside his truck and killed the Jeep’s engine. As I stepped down from the Jeep, the muffled rumble of the tractor’s engine reached me. Someone must be up there.

“Jorge!” I yelled up the slope.

Nothing.

“Jorge!” I tried yelling louder.

Silence except for the rumble of the tractor.

I crossed to the pedestrian door. It was unlocked, so I opened it and ducked inside.

Banks of fluorescent lights set in the high ceiling illuminated a huge expanse of concrete. There were six 3,000 liter tanks lining the walls, their lids open to the air. The rich, earthy-yeasty smell of young wine entering the first stages of primary fermentation under its thick cap of must was cloyingly thick. Most of the floor space was taken up with machinery of the trade. Pumps and hoses, bins and picking gondolas, cases of empty bottles, labeling machinery, all the same things I had in my own cellar. To my right was a stairway that led down and back into the hillside, to the cellar below ground where the wine was aged and matured.

“Jorge!” I yelled, but there was no reply. I stepped to the stairs. All was dark below. I went down three steps and yelled into the gloom. “Jorge!” More nothing. He had to be in the rows. Or back at the house boozing it up with Angela…

I stepped back outside, pulled the door closed behind me and looked up the slope at the idling tractor, then across the vines to Angela’s home. In the darkness, the yellow lights that lit the bottom floors looked warm and inviting. I looked back at the tractor.

What would a tractor be doing idling in an empty vineyard at nightfall? The incongruity of it seemed sinister. A cool wind rippled through the vines with a sound like the rustle of wings, shivering the tangled greenery and sending a chill right through me.

“Jorge!” I yelled again, and the sudden sound of my own voice, large in the silence, only deepened my feeling of foreboding. Something was wrong, I could feel it.

I went to the Jeep and took my flashlight from the glove box. I flicked it on and aimed it up the slope, illuminating the first few rows of vines in a flat, pale light that made the shadows even deeper and darker. But the light didn’t penetrate far enough for me to make out anything around the tractor. I flicked the light off and went back to my Jeep. I started it and backed away from the metal building, but I didn’t turn toward the house - I went around the winery and turned up a gravel track that led up the hill, into the rows.

I stopped when I was even with the tractor and killed the engine. Once again, the tractor’s drone was the only sound, much louder now. I grabbed the flashlight off the seat and aimed it down the row without exiting the Jeep, but the beam was too weak to illuminate the tractor. Reluctantly, I stepped out, circled the Jeep, and entered the row, the flashlight playing out a narrow swath of light before me.

If I had been a little spooked at the winery below, I had shifted gears into fearful by that point. As I neared the tractor I heard - barely audible below the tractor’s engine - a churning, scraping sound, and my fear deepened.

“Jorge!” I tried to yell again, but it came out as a croak. I stopped dead, extending the light before me. I was close enough by then that the light picked out the faded red flanks of the tractor. I panned the light over it and realized it wasn’t in neutral. The rear left wheel was slowly churning at the ground between the rows, digging a rut in the soil. Only the wire trellis it was buried in was keeping the tractor from plowing down the slope.

I took another step forward, shifting the light along the flanks of the tractor.

“Jor—” I began to yell again, but the word got lodged in my throat, cutting off my airflow. There was a dark blot on the ground in front of the tractor, wedged between its front wheels and the base of one of the metal Ts that supported the trellis wire. A shape that was almost unrecognizable beneath the hanging vines. Almost.

I took a step forward and the light picked out a pair of boots, then blue jeans and a flannel shirt, and finally the distorted and bloody face of Jorge McCullers.

The light almost fell from my hand as I staggered back. Jorge’s head was caught between the front tire and the metal brace, his head twisted at a sharp angle, the churning rear wheel of the tractor keeping the pressure on his skull, forcing it into the T. My stomach heaved and bile filled my throat, but, despite the absolute terror of the moment, I remained frozen for only a split second. I am, after all, a farm girl, and farming is an occupation that is made possible by dangerous machinery that can harvest a hand or a foot as easily as grapes or barley. I have seen too many accidents and injuries in my life to count. I ran forward, reached up under the steering wheel and flipped the ignition switch to off.

The engine died in a rattling growl and the rustling of the vines was the only sound.

I went around the tractor and knelt beside Jorge. Up close there was no doubt he was dead. His head was angled down at ninety degrees from his shoulders, his eyes were open but unseeing, and his face was smeared with blood from a wound on the right side of his skull. There was nothing I could do for him.

I started to rise when something glinted in the darkness. Something on Jorge’s wrist. I ducked back down and looked closer to see a double strand of trellis wire wrapped tightly around his wrist, grooving the skin painfully. The other end was wound around the trellis post. I ducked closer still and that’s when the smell of the whiskey on Jorge’s breath hit me in the back of the palate, the bitter tang spiking the nausea already roiling my stomach. I stood abruptly and backed stiffly away, my hand covering my mouth.

Something rattled in the vines behind me and I spun around, waving the flashlight like a sword, slashing at the night but seeing nothing but greenery and bare earth. Another rattle came from behind me - probably just a gust of wind in the vines – and I took off running, the flashlight pumping in my hand, throwing semaphores on the path ahead of me as my breath came in ratcheting gasps. I reached the Jeep and clambered into the driver’s seat. I twisted the key in the ignition and was jamming it into reverse before the engine had even caught.

I rocketed back down the slope in reverse, the front end weaving as my trembling hands and the uneven ground conspired to spin me right into the rows. In a matter of seconds, my rear wheels hit the concrete of the parking lot and I spun the steering wheel and jammed on the brakes, the headlights aimed up the slope at an angle, illuminating the now silent tractor.

I was breathing hard, my heart racing, but I wasn’t running any farther. I dug the phone from my purse and dialed Hunter’s cell phone.

He answered with a bleary “Hello?” obviously half-asleep.

“Jorge’s dead,” I told him, my voice trembling as badly as my hands. “In the rows behind Angela’s winery.”

“Are you safe?” Hunter asked, now fully awake.

“Yes,” I replied, my panicked eyes panning the dark rows of vines, a darkness alleviated only by the single narrow ribbon of light from the Jeep’s headlights.

“But hurry!”

Hunter came blasting down
the highway, sirens wailing, just fifteen minutes later. Gravel flew as he made the turn off the concrete driveway that led to Angela’s residence and raced toward the winery. He slowed as he crossed the parking lot and pulled to a stop beside me, facing up the gravel road. Both the front windows of his truck were down. He looked across the seat and out the passenger window at me. I started to tell him about Jorge, but he held up a palm at me and said, “Get in.”

I didn’t argue. I climbed into the truck and started talking fast, the rush of words a grim relief to my racing thoughts. “He’s by the tractor. He’s dead. His head was wedged between a trellis support and the front tire.” Just saying it brought the image back to the front of my mind, and I shivered and hugged myself tight. “His neck was broken.”

Hunter nodded but said nothing. He drove up the slope and stopped where I had parked just fifteen minutes before, perpendicular with the row where Jorge lay dead. He made no move to exit the truck.

“What were you doing here?” he asked, looking past me, down the row at the tractor, still illuminated by the Jeep’s headlights aimed up from below.

“The tractor was running when I got here. I checked the winery and the cellar then came up here—”

“That’s not what I’m asking you,” Hunter said, flashing me an impatient look. His lips were bloodless, his eyes flinty. “Why did you come here to begin with?”

I heard the accusation in his tone, but I had nothing to hide. “I was doing what
you
should have been doing - trying to clear Samson of a murder charge.”

“Claire—” he began but I hurried on.

“Jorge said he knew who had killed Dimitri when I ran into him yesterday,” I said. “I was going to convince him to talk to you. To clear Samson. Jorge implied he was going to blackmail the killer. He also implied what he knew was going to get Angela out of her contract with Blake Becker.” That last line was a little speculative on my part, but it was what I had deduced. And it pointed the finger of blame away from Samson. Not fair to Blake, probably, but I would worry about that after Samson was exonerated.

“Where’d you run into Jorge?” he asked, his anger barely controlled. “You snooping around again?”

“No. I came to see Angela about something else and ran into Jorge,” I said defensively, but Hunter seemed unconvinced. I took that as an unspoken accusation I was a liar. As usual, rather than thinking about what I was saying, I got angry and chose to get even.

“Jorge said he would have talked to you if you had treated him with respect,” I bluntly stated. I almost instantly felt petty for saying it, but I didn’t regret it.

“Jorge had a chip on his shoulder as big as a boulder,” Hunter said, getting defensive himself. “I liked him fine when he was sober, but he was a mean, loudmouthed drunk.”

“He’s neither of those things anymore; he’s dead not forty feet away. Murdered.” I don’t know why I said that – what I had seen down the row could have been a horrible accident set in motion by a tractor left in gear – but it was just too coincidental that the
only
man who knew who had murdered Dmitri was now dead. But I didn’t get a chance to get any of that out.

Hunter shot up straight in his seat. “Murdered?” He popped the door handle and stepped out, his hand on the pistol strapped to his belt. “Why didn’t you say that to begin with?” He was looking down the row. “From what you told me on the phone I figured this for an accident. What did you see?”

“It could be an accident,” I conceded. “But the way Jorge is laid out…” I swallowed hard, unwilling to articulate what I had seen. Hunter could see for himself.

“Okay,” Hunter said, still looking down the row. “Stay here and I’ll check it out.” He circled the truck and walked down the row, the light of his flashlight bobbing and weaving as he moved away from me.

He was gone only five minutes. When he got back, he climbed into the truck, made a K-turn and headed back down to the winery. He parked at the foot of the slope, turned to me and started to say something, but we were interrupted by the arrival of a sheriff’s squad car, its lights flashing blue and red. It turned in off the highway then paused at the Y in the driveway where the winery’s gravel path veered off from the concrete that led to the house. It paused there and Hunter blinked his truck’s headlights. The cruiser turned our way, bumped down the road, crossed the lot and pulled in beside Hunter, facing the opposite direction, up the slope.

Midge Tidwell was behind the wheel. Despite the darkness of the patrol car’s interior, I could see the deep lines around her mouth and the dark circles under her eyes. She was dressed in civilian clothes and looked tired. She had a long night ahead.