Ellen Crosby: The Riesling Retribution

I’d nearly lost the house once in a fire, but I’d rebuilt what had been destroyed. Thank God this time I’d been damn lucky.

I took a sponge bath instead of a shower to save water and didn’t bother to dry off. The landline on my bedside table rang as I was in the bathroom pulling my wet hair into a ponytail. The answering machine would be knocked out, but at least the phone worked.

“Two deputies are waiting at the villa for you, and you’ll be happy to hear the Gator is back in business,” Quinn said when I answered.

“I’ll be right there. What was wrong with the Gator?”

He snorted. “Someone put the gas-and-oil mixture we use for the weed whacker in the tank. I figured it might be some dumbass stunt like that. I drained the tank. Caught it before it fouled the plugs and we had a real mess on our hands.”

“So it was an accident.”

“Accident my ass. Those gas cans are labeled in English and Spanish plain as the nose on your face. The only way you could have screwed up is if you had your eyes closed while you were filling the damn gas tank,” he said. “If I find out who did this, he’ll be cleaning wine barrels from now to harvest.”

“I’ll talk to the guys and say something about paying attention and being more careful.”

“That would include your boy Chance.”

“He’s not ‘my boy.’ Plus he knows better. It might have been Tyler. He can be sort of scatterbrained.”

“You mean the Tyler who caused a volcano this morning when Chance let him top off one of the barrels of Pinot?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed a spot on my forehead. A volcano was our term for filling something too full. If the wine was still fermenting and someone overfilled the barrel, it caused the kind of explosion that resulted from shaking a bottle of beer and opening it, or popping a champagne cork too quickly. Not something anyone wanted to happen to a five-thousand-dollar barrel of wine.

“Yes, okay, that Tyler. Maybe he shouldn’t be topping off barrels anymore.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t be working here.”

“I promised Jordy and Grace—”

“Yeah, yeah. That we’d babysit him until he finds a real job. Wherever he goes next, he shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy equipment or be around sharp objects.” I heard him sigh. “You’re the boss, so if you want him to stay, he stays. But wait ’til he forgets to take the valve off one of the tanks and it blows up. Or runs the forklift through it. I do plan to say ‘I told you so.’”

“You know, I was sort of dreading the meeting with those deputies,” I said. “But after all that cheery news, I think I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Because they can’t wait to talk to you.”

Though I knew a few of the deputies who worked for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, I didn’t recognize either of the men who waited by their cruisers when I pulled up in the winery parking lot five minutes later. Their name tags said Mathis and Fontana. Mathis was a gray-haired African American built like a football linebacker, with eyes that looked like they could pin me to a wall, metaphorically speaking. Fontana was small and muscular, dark haired and dark eyed. His uniform stretched taut across his chest, showing off the physique of someone who hit the gym regularly.

After we got through the introductions, Mathis said, “How do we get to where you found the body?”

“It’s probably best if I take you there in one of our ATVs,” I said. “Some of the terrain is pretty rough on a car, especially if you don’t have four-wheel drive.”

Mathis sat next to me on the drive over to the grave site and flipped open a spiral notebook. He asked the usual questions.

“Has anyone else been to the site besides you and Mr. Miller?” His voice reminded me of melted butterscotch.

I knew the two of them were going to hate my answer.

“Chance’s dog, unfortunately. I’m sorry. It was an accident. She found a bone near the skull and started playing with it.”

“You let a dog dig around a grave site?” Fontana said.

“We stopped her as soon as we realized what she was doing. But she wasn’t the first animal to get hold of that bone. The ends had already been chewed.”

I pulled up a few feet from where I’d found the skull and they got out. Mathis must have had a sixth sense for locating dead bodies because he walked straight over to the place before I could tell him where it was. For a heavy man, he moved gracefully. He knelt and pulled on a pair of latex gloves he got from his back pocket. Fontana photographed the scene. I stayed out of the way and waited.

“Vic,” Mathis said, “you’d better call it in. Have them get hold of Noland. And bring a search warrant.”

I’d known Bobby Noland, one of my brother Eli’s close friends, since we were kids. By the time Bobby was in high school, he’d gone from the honor roll to the detention hall, hanging out with a tough crowd who spent nights getting wasted on booze and drugs at the fields near the old Goose Creek Bridge. At least, that’s what I heard. After he graduated I figured Bobby’d leave town, but he surprised everyone by saying he wanted to fight for his country and signing up for the army. Two years later he came home from Afghanistan with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star he didn’t want to talk about and joined the sheriff’s office. By the time he made detective and got assigned to Narcotics, he’d picked up another award for bravery. A year ago he moved to Homicide.

“You won’t need a search warrant,” I said to Mathis. “You’re welcome to do whatever you need to do.”

Fontana joined us. “Noland and the ME are coming. Also a crime scene guy, but that’s it for now. Everyone else is busy handling tornado stuff,” he told Mathis. To me he said, “Thanks, but Biggie, here, likes to do things by the book, so we’ll be getting that search warrant just the same. Saves a lot of headaches down the line, especially if we have to go to court.”

Biggie. I’d bet money that’s not what his mother named him. But I wasn’t going to object if Mathis wanted to dot his i’s and cross his t’s by getting a search warrant, so I nodded in agreement.

“Do you have any idea how long he’s been here?” I asked.

“Long enough to change the terrain,” Fontana said. “See how much greener the grass is around here? And that indentation where the ground has collapsed? You’d see it pretty good if you looked down from above—if you knew what you were looking for.”

He did an air sketch with his finger indicating where the earth seemed to have settled. “If that other bone belongs to this body, the remains could be pretty scattered. A grave needs to be at least six feet deep so an animal won’t dig it up. This one looks like it’s no more than two feet.”

Mathis stood up and I heard the joints in his knees crack. “You’re quite sure you have no idea who this might be, Ms. Montgomery? An old family feud, maybe? Ever hear anyone talk about something like that? How about any skeletons in the closet?” He smiled with his eyes as he peeled off his gloves, but if there had been a wall, I would have been pinned to it. “No pun intended.”

I tried to meet his gaze. “We wouldn’t be normal if we didn’t have our share of problems and a few family secrets, but I can tell you for sure that there are no skeletons in the closet that would lead anyone to kill someone, if that’s what you mean.”

Mathis kept that laser vision trained on me and I did my best to project self-assured confidence.

“We own five hundred acres, Deputy Mathis. It’s a lot of land. Whoever did this, a complete stranger, could have come and gone without anyone ever seeing him or her.”