The Riesling Retribution (11 page)

“Sounds like a party. Shall I get it or do you want to?”

“I’ll go. Can you, uh, clean—”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll get rid of the evidence. Drink more coffee. You got breath that would stop a charging elephant.” He picked up my bottle and glass as the doorbell rang.

“Coming!” I called, then dropped my voice. “A charging elephant?”

“Better than a whole herd.”

He disappeared down the back hall to the kitchen as I opened the door. Bobby Noland stood there with Biggie Mathis and Vic Fontana behind him. He held out a folded paper.

“Morning, Lucie. I got a search warrant here for your father’s gun cabinet. I believe you still have his guns? All of them?”

I took the search warrant and nodded, not trusting my voice or my breath.

“We’d like to take a look, if you don’t mind.”

It didn’t matter whether I minded or not. He was just being polite, and that small courtesy, I figured, was because we had known each other for so long.

“What’s this all about?” I asked finally. “Did you identify the body already? Savannah Hayden was out here yesterday looking for something. What did she do, work all night?”

Maybe that meant she hadn’t been with Quinn very long, after all.

“We, ah, had a breakthrough,” he said.

A breakthrough that brought them to Leland’s gun cabinet.

“You know who it is, then?” I leaned against the door frame. My legs felt weak and my head was starting to spin again. “Did you identify the remains?”

“His name is Beauregard Kinkaid. Went by ‘Beau.’ Ever heard of him?”

“No. Should I?”

“According to his ex-wife, Beau had a falling-out with your father over some business deal they had going on. He told her he was going to pay your father a visit and straighten things out.”

I did not like where this was going. “And did he?”

“She doesn’t know. It was the last time she ever saw him.”

I opened the door wider and let Bobby inside. Fontana and Mathis followed, filing past me with their eyes averted as though they wanted to spare me any further embarrassment.

Bobby pointed across the foyer to the library, which had once been Leland’s office. “The room over there, guys.”

He knew our house probably as well as he knew his own. I half wished he’d been a stranger. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so betrayed and vulnerable.

“You want to get the key?” he asked me.

Leland always kept it above the doorjamb, which was out of my reach. I showed Bobby where to feel for it as Quinn arrived in the foyer.

“Morning, Bobby,” he said. He leaned over and said in my ear, “What’s going on?”

“They have a warrant to search Leland’s gun cabinet.” My eyes locked on his, beseeching him not to ask any more questions.

He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “It’ll be okay.”

I wondered if it would.

My father’s gun cabinet was a large glass-fronted hutch that sat on top of a two-drawer base. As gun cabinets go, it was top-of-the-line. Cherry, rather than the customary oak or pine, so it matched the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and all the other woodwork in the room. A deer standing atop a mountain had been etched into the
glass, but even so, it was possible to see that the collection of firearms inside was equally impressive.

“His revolvers are in those drawers?” Bobby asked.

“Yes. The one on the left. Ammunition is on the right.”

Biggie Mathis knelt, his joints cracking, and removed my father’s Smith and Wesson .38. The room was silent as he placed it in a bag along with a couple rounds of ammunition.

When he was done, Bobby thanked him and asked if he’d wait outside with Fontana. This time both of them acknowledged me as they exited the room, as somber as if they were leaving a wake.

Bobby glanced at Quinn, but before he could speak, I said, “Quinn can stay, Bobby. I want him here.”

“Okay.” Bobby positioned himself in front of us, feet apart and hands clasped together, like a lawyer about to bring it home in his closing remarks to a jury. “I wanted to let you know that Annabel Chastain, Beau Kinkaid’s ex-wife, is driving up from Charlottesville to talk to us. I’m sure you and I will be talking after that.”

“How did you identify him so quickly?” I asked. “There must have been something obvious…”

Bobby looked like he was debating how much to tell me. Finally he said, “We caught a lucky break when we found that missing mandible. Kinkaid had some dental work done, a special kind of metal implant in his jaw that actually had a serial number on it. We traced him that way. His dentist also took care of the ex-wife. The guy was retired but he remembered that blade thing he put in. Apparently they were pretty rare thirty years ago.”

Then why had they sent Savannah back? What else were they looking for?

Bobby saw the look in my eyes.

“I’ve said enough,” he said. “The investigation’s not finished.”

“Can you at least tell me why Beau’s ex-wife never reported the fact that he didn’t come home after his meeting with Leland, not once in thirty years?”

“Because she wasn’t sorry he didn’t come home,” Bobby said.

“What do you mean?”

“She said he abused her.”

Until now, every time I pictured those bones out in the field I’d
had only an out-of-focus image of a man in my head with no idea about his life or what kind of person he’d been. Now I knew he was married and someone who beat his wife.

“Doesn’t that give his ex-wife a motive for killing him, too?”

“We’re checking into that. Right now she’s agreed to come in for questioning of her own free will,” he said. “Look, try to take it easy and we’ll go through this one step at a time. You’re not in any trouble.”

“Sure.”

Bobby nodded at Quinn. “I’ll see myself out.”

After he left, Quinn pulled me into his arms. “It’ll be all right,” he said into my hair. “We’ll get through this.”

My voice was muffled on his shoulder. “I may not be in any trouble, but I sure as hell feel like I’m on trial.”

Quinn urged me to take yet another day off and get lost somewhere, but as I told him, that only made it look like I had something to hide. It didn’t help that Gina Leon, who worked in the tasting room with Frankie, was overly solicitous when I arrived at the villa, fussing over me while trying to pretend it was business as usual. It meant word had already gotten around about Beau Kinkaid and Bobby’s visit to confiscate Leland’s gun.

A lot of our customers wanted dark-haired, dark-eyed Gina to wait on them—especially the men, who liked the way she laughed and flirted, tossing her head and flashing her dazzling smile. Her personality was as effervescent as champagne fizz, but I learned to be careful what I said around her. I knew Gina was well-intentioned. She just leaked like a sieve.

Now she picked up a cream-colored vase filled with hydrangeas that had been sitting on an oak trestle table we used for additional wine tastings when the bar got too crowded.

“I made coffee and bought some croissants at the bakery in Middleburg. If you sit on the terrace, I’ll bring you a tray as soon as I change the water for these flowers. The
Trib
’s on the bar.”

“Why are you fussing over me?”

“Who’s fussing? I’ll pour coffee in a mug and slap a croissant on a plate.”

“Gina—”

“Stop arguing. Go on out. I’ll be right there.”

I got the newspaper and went. The day was drenched in sunshine with a sky the limitless blue of a picture postcard. A soft breeze stirred the impatiens and pansies in the planters and hanging baskets and the air smelled of freshly cut grass. Most days it was the kind of glorious weather that made you glad to be alive. I unfolded the paper.

The short article about the body in our vineyard was at the bottom of the front page of the
Washington Tribune.
Kit Eastman, my oldest and dearest friend in the world, had written it. The paper must have gone to bed before they identified Beau because he was still referred to as an “unidentified victim.” I was in the middle of reading when Gina arrived with the coffee and croissant.

Her eyes darted back and forth between the newspaper and my impassive face.

I folded the paper and set it aside as though I’d been looking at something as innocuous as the weather report.

“Maybe I’ll take this in my office,” I said. “I’ve got bills that need paying.”

She looked puzzled. “Whatever you want. Let me bring it in to you.”

I didn’t bother to insist that I could manage the tray, despite my cane. But as I left I saw her retrieve the newspaper and unfold it. Her hand went to her mouth and I knew she hadn’t known about the article.

When she showed up in my office, I said, “Anyone who walks on eggshells around me is going to be fired. Got it?”

She nodded wide-eyed, then burst out laughing. “Okay. I’m sorry. We’re all worried about you, Lucie.”

“Forget it. I’ve got to deal with it. And no more hiding things from me, okay?”

Her eyes grew big. “Sure.”

Gina couldn’t lie any more than she could keep a secret.

“What else?” I asked. “You know I’m going to find out sooner or later.”

“Chance called awhile ago. Apparently they’ve already had to
chase a couple of reporters and a photographer away from the place where you found the grave.”

I groaned. “I didn’t know that. Someone should have told me.”

“Don’t say you heard it from me.”

As soon as she left, I called Chance. “We had reporters on the property?”

“How’d you find out?”

“I tortured someone.”

“Guess I’ll lock up the sharp objects when you come over to the barrel room,” he said.

“So it’s true?”

“Yeah, unfortunately it’s true.”

“I hate to detail one of the guys to babysit, but maybe someone should be out there keeping an eye on things until this quiets down.”

“We sent Tyler. He took his musket. Said he needs the practice before the reenactment.”

I yelped. “Shooting at the press with a Civil War musket? My God, Chance, are you out of your mind? Whose idea was that?”

“Relax. He doesn’t have live ammo. Says he needs to practice loading and reloading so it doesn’t take him twenty minutes each time. He’s not going to shoot at anyone, even if it’s only blanks. Just scare ’em off.”

“Call him and tell him absolutely no guns. You got that? I don’t care if it’s a water pistol. No guns.”

He chuckled. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll drop by and get it.”

“Good. Do it now, please.”

“Sure. But first any chance you might pay the crew this week? It’s Friday and they have this thing about liking to get paid regularly.”

“I wrote a check and left it in the barrel room yesterday. Didn’t you find it? Just cash it as usual and pay them like you always do.”

“I found it. But according to the folks at Blue Ridge Federal, you’re the only person authorized to do anything on that account. That includes cashing checks, especially ones made out to cash.”

“Who told you that?”

“One of the tellers. The lady with the blue hair and the mustache.”

“It’s not a mustache, it’s…down. And I made some changes to my account about restricting the access. I guess they took it to an extreme. Let me call and straighten it out.”

“Thanks. I’ll pay Tyler a visit, then drive back to Middleburg and try to charm old blue-hair one more time.”

“Don’t take that musket to the bank. Drop it off somewhere.”

“Probably have an easier time cashing the check if I did,” he said, and hung up.

I paid the bills and waited until I cooled down before calling Kit Eastman.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said. “I was expecting your call.” She sounded tired.

“The front page of the
Washington Tribune?”
I said. “Aren’t there more important things going on in the world? Wars? A mortgage crisis? Unemployment? The environ—”

“I’ll make sure you get invited to the next editorial meeting so you can remind us about all those things. I guess we just forgot. We can also discuss the declining readership of newspapers in general, and the
Trib
in particular, and when our next round of buyouts will come down, how many of us will get offers we can’t refuse. I mean that literally.”

“So you put that article on the front page to sell newspapers?”

“It may surprise you, but that’s our business. Or what’s left of it. Do you have any idea how many people get their news beamed to their cell phones these days? And that’s it, as far as what they read?”

“Okay,” I said, “okay. Sorry about your lousy readership numbers. But that doesn’t mean you had to put that story on the front page.”

“Au contraire.
It’s exactly the kind of story that people are interested in,” she said. “A skeleton lying in a shallow grave for nearly thirty years out in tony horse-and-hunt country. Unearthed by a tornado, no less. People are fascinated. They want to know who it is and how he got there.”

“And you’re going to turn it into a lurid tabloid scandal.”

“Look, some poor schmo turns up dead in some godforsaken part of D.C., maybe somewhere in Anacostia, same circumstances, and what happens? People moan about the high crime rate in our
nation’s capital and turn the page. One news cycle, the guy’s ancient history. You know as well as I do there’s a prurient interest in what goes on behind closed doors in the lives of the rich and famous. Especially people who play polo and foxhunt and send their kids to boarding school and men have names like Bunny or Fluffy.”

“I’m not rich or famous. As for that stereotype, you live here, too. You know better.”

She sighed. “I gotta go to the nine-thirty staff meeting.”

“It’s ten o’clock.”

“I know. And I’m holding the damn meeting. I know you’re upset, Luce. Why don’t you meet me at the Coach Stop at noon and we can talk about it? I’ve got an errand in Middleburg so I’ll be over there anyway.”

“I guess you know they identified him,” I said.

She knew immediately which “him” I meant. “Beauregard Kinkaid.”

“You know anything about the guy?”

“Not yet, but I will.”

“I’m telling you up front that I never heard of him until Bobby mentioned his name. So I hope you weren’t planning to ask me any questions over lunch.”

“Of course not.”

“You lie worse than I do. See you at noon.”

Before I left for Middleburg, I did an Internet search for Beauregard Kinkaid, which turned up nothing. Same result when I looked for Beau Kinkaid. Annabel Chastain, on the other hand, was a gold mine. Her name appeared as one of the organizers or main contributors at almost every major Charlottesville charity fund-raiser. The hospital. The symphony. A homeless shelter. The library.

Chastain wasn’t her maiden name, either. It looked like she’d remarried since her name kept popping up along with Sumner Chastain, CEO of a construction company bearing his name. According to the website, Chastain Construction was a multiaward-winning leader in the industry, advertising itself as “one-stop shopping” for any type of building project from retail to residential to commercial. Most of their work was on the East Coast. They even had a slogan: “Building Your World, Building by Building.” Catchy.