River Road

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “That’s a good idea.” Teresa rose and collected the empty cups. “He was three years older than us at the time. He had a different circle of acquaintances.”

  “Good point. Thanks for the help on this.”

  “No problem. It was an interesting experience. That’s the sort of thing you do for a living?”

  “Yes. Usually, I’m looking for lost heirs. This was a different kind of search, which is probably why I didn’t get very far.”

  Teresa glanced at her watch. “I’d better get back to the shop. Summer afternoons are always busy. My assistant will be wondering where I am.”

  Lucy smiled. “All those tourists looking for wine-country casual outfits.”

  “It may be a niche market, but it’s my market. Let me know if you come up with another approach to identifying Nolan Kelly’s drug connection.”

  “I will.”

  Teresa walked back through the square and disappeared onto Main Street.

  Lucy sat quietly for a time. She was overlooking something important. She was sure of it.

  She gave up, hoisted the tote and walked back to the inn. She went upstairs to her room and took a few minutes to refresh herself in the bathroom. When she looked at her image in the mirror she thought about the night of the party. It had been thirteen years, but doing the Brinker tree had brought back memories.

  Maybe she had been asking the wrong questions. She and Teresa had been looking at those who had been in Brinker’s inner circle. Maybe she should be looking at the wannabes.

  She was not the only outsider who had been at the ranch on the night of Brinker’s last party. There had been a lot of other kids hanging around the fringes, moths drawn to the flame.

  Mason said it sometimes helped to revisit the scene of the crime.

  She grabbed her tote and went back downstairs. Outside, in the parking lot, she got into her car and drove the short distance to Harper Ranch Park.

  As usual, there were a number of people walking dogs, jogging and sunbathing in the main section of the park. She found a parking place close to the secluded area near the river where Brinker had staged his parties. She took the charts out of her tote and studied them, one by one, trying to remember who had been where the night of the party.

  Teresa’s words came back to her. “. . . Kelly wasn’t much good at chemistry.”

  The name in one of the boxes that was very distant from Brinker’s box suddenly stood out as if it had been written in neon. She put the paper down on a nearby picnic table and circled the name twice.

  It was you, she thought. You were there all the time.

  She hurried back to the parking lot, used her key fob to unlock her car and slipped into the front seat. She left the car door ajar to allow in the slight breeze while she took out her phone. She found Mason’s name on her contacts list.

  The passenger-side door opened abruptly. Beth Crosby slid into the seat. She had a gun in her hand.

  “Give me the phone,” Beth said.

  Lucy handed her the phone. Beth tossed it out the window.

  “Now we’re going to take a scenic drive along River Road,” Beth said. “Close the door.”

  Lucy realized she was still holding the sheet of paper that contained the Brinker cult family tree. When she turned to pull the car door closed she let the paper slip from her hand. It landed on the ground and fluttered a little. It would no doubt blow away, she thought. But at that moment she could not think of anything else to do.

  “Drive,” Beth ordered.

  46

  You figured it out, didn’t you?” Beth said.

  “That you were the one who brewed up the hallucinogens for Brinker all those years ago?” Lucy asked. “Yes. You’re the one person on the Brinker family tree who had the skill. You were a star in science class back in high school. That year you were studying for your degree in wine-making at the local community college. Probably taking a lot of chemistry classes.”

  “I was the science geek back in high school. I loved chemistry. Started playing around with hallucinogens in my senior year.” Beth frowned. “What did you mean by a Brinker family tree? Brinker didn’t have any family except his father.”

  “I did a chart showing the names of all of the people who hung around Brinker thirteen years ago. It came out looking a lot like a family tree.”

  “So that was what you were doing with Teresa this afternoon. It made me nervous watching you two together. But when Teresa went back to her shop a few minutes ago, she saw me on the street and said hi as if nothing was wrong, so I thought maybe everything was okay. When I saw you come out of the inn, get into your car and drive toward this section of the park, though, I got a bad feeling.”

  “I didn’t put it together until I came here and started asking the right questions. Tell me, how in the world did you end up as Brinker’s drug supplier? You didn’t move in his circles.”

  “Nolan Kelly was the one who approached me,” Beth said. “We went to school together. He knew I could make some very special stuff, and he wanted to impress Brinker.”

  “How much did Brinker pay you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You just gave him the drugs? Why would you do that? Wait, don’t tell me. You thought you were in love with him, didn’t you? You wanted to make Brinker pay attention to you.”

  “Shut up,” Beth hissed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Brinker needed me. It was my drugs that made him a rock star here in Summer River that year. And it was my drugs that made it possible for him to make those videos of those whores.”

  “Please don’t tell me that you were the one who filmed the rapes. That would be just too awful.”

  “They deserved it, all of them,” Beth said. “They were the kind of A-list girls who made fun of girls like me.”

  “You were sure Brinker would fall in love with you once he understood how much he needed you.”

  “He would have realized he loved me if your aunt hadn’t murdered him,” Beth said, very fierce now. “I knew when he disappeared that something terrible had happened. He came to see me after that last party, you know.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Drugs. But he said he wanted me to make something extra-special. He wanted something stronger, something that would be lethal. He went on and on about how he was going to kill everyone connected to Mason Fletcher. I got scared.”

  “Because you knew that if a number of people in a small town like Summer River started to die from an overdose of illicit drugs, there would be an investigation and sooner or later the trail would lead straight back to you.”

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Beth said. Her tone slipped from fierce to anxious in the blink of an eye as if she was reliving the emotions she had experienced at the time. “I was afraid that if I didn’t give him the drugs he wouldn’t want me anymore.”

  “He never did want you. He just used you.”

  “Stop saying that. You don’t know how it was between us.”

  “Yeah, right. So what did you tell him the last time you saw him?”

  “I told him it would take me a while to come up with the kind of heavy drug that he wanted. The truth is, I thought that once he calmed down he would realize that killing off everyone around Mason was maybe not the smartest move in the playbook.”

  “Did he calm down?”

  “No,” Beth admitted. “He just got angrier. Called me all sorts of names and . . . and he hit me. He said he couldn’t be bothered to screw an ugly bitch like me, and then he left. I never saw him again. The next day it was all over town that he had left Summer River. Three days later, the rumors that he had been killed in a drug deal gone bad started to circulate.”

  “Did you ever wonder who started those rumors?” Lucy asked softly.

  “Who c
ares?”

  “For the record, I think my aunt might have fired up that gossip.”

  “It’s almost impossible to believe Sara Sheridan murdered Brinker,” Beth whispered, sounding a little awed.

  “I had a hard time believing it, too, at first, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Sara really did kill Brinker. I think he returned to Summer River in secret to carry out his revenge. Sara was his first target. But she was waiting for him. She had set a trap of some sort. He didn’t take into account all that yoga and wood chopping. The physical activity made her a very strong woman.”

  “All these years I thought he was dead in a drug deal, and all the time he was in your aunt’s fireplace.”

  “Did you kill Nolan Kelly?” Lucy asked.

  “He came to me the day after Brinker’s body was discovered.” Beth was composed once more. “The fact that Sara had made a point of putting the newspaper with the Scorecard Rapist headlines into the fireplace along with the body had him terrified. He was afraid that she had found some of the videos. He searched the place, but when he couldn’t find anything, he came up with the scheme to burn down the whole house.”

  “Why was he concerned about the videos?”

  Beth snorted. “Because he starred in one of them. Brinker secretly filmed Nolan bragging about how he could get some high-end designer drugs for the parties as well as pot and cocaine. Afterward, Brinker showed Nolan the video and warned him that if he ever decided to spill his guts to the cops, Brinker would give the video to the police.”

  “The video was blackmail material in case Brinker ever wanted to use it against Kelly.”

  “Yes,” Beth said.

  “I still don’t understand why you killed Kelly.”

  “Don’t you get it? He got scared after you found Brinker’s body. I was scared, too. We were both afraid that the cops would reopen the investigation. I knew that if that happened, Nolan would be questioned because half the town was aware of his history as the local pot dealer. Nolan was weak. I knew that if the police came down hard on him, he would break in a second.”

  “And give you up as the supplier,” Lucy said. “If they got that far, the cops might also figure out that you were the one who filmed the rapes.”

  “At the very least, the scandal would have ruined my career as a winemaker. I couldn’t let Kelly destroy everything I’ve worked for all these years.”

  “Did Brinker make a video of you, too?”

  “Yes, it showed me laughing about the rapes,” Beth said, back in anxiety mode. “But I knew he would never use it against me. It was just for fun.”

  “Right. Still, the fact that it existed and might turn up when I packed Sara’s things made an excellent reason to go ahead and burn down the house. Nolan told you of his plan to torch Sara’s place. You went there that night, shot him and then set the fire yourself.”

  “You got it.”

  Lucy drove around a curve. The Colfax Winery came into view.

  “Drive around the back to the employee parking lot,” Beth ordered. “No one will see your car there.”

  Lucy looked at the empty visitors’ lot. “Where are the tourists?”

  “The winery is closed today because of a family emergency. Haven’t you heard? The lovely Mrs. Colfax is in intensive care. The staff was sent home.”

  “You shot her, didn’t you? It wasn’t Warner. It was you.”

  “I wanted to make sure she was dead, but I heard Cecil’s car in the drive and I didn’t dare fire another shot. I knew he would hear it. I had to get away.”

  Lucy drove slowly around to the back of the Mediterranean villa. Mentally, she ran through her limited options. She considered ramming the car head-on into one of the buildings in a low-speed crash, but the impact might cause Beth to pull the trigger, whether she intended to or not. The nose of the gun was less than two feet away. Beth could not miss at that distance.

  47

  Someone’s got her,” Mason said.

  He was standing in the nearly deserted parking lot at Harper Ranch Park. He had his phone crushed to his ear. He was holding Lucy’s busted phone and a sheet of paper with a weird-looking family tree in his other hand.

  “Son of a bitch,” Deke said softly.

  “Lucy was here at the park but she never got back to the inn. Car’s gone. I found her phone. Deke, she figured it out. She’s got Beth Crosby’s name circled on the damn tree.”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” Deke said. “But we need to think about this before we go charging over some damn cliff. Why would anyone grab Lucy? The merger offer will soon be off the table. Dillon has to know that. It’s all going to fall apart.”

  “She wasn’t kidnapped because of the shares.” Mason looked down at the heavily circled square that contained Beth’s name. “This is personal. It has been from the start.”

  “But if we’re right about Cecil Dillon—”

  “I don’t think he’s the one who grabbed her.” Mason climbed into his car and fired up the engine. “He’s a rare bird in the crime world, a long-range strategist. I can’t see him grabbing Lucy at a public park. No, Beth is the one who took Lucy, I’m sure of it.”

  “But why?”

  “A mix of revenge and panic and a lack of impulse control.”

  “Bad combination. Where are they headed?”

  “Colfax Winery. Beth’s out for revenge. She’s obsessed, and she’s panicking. She’ll head there. It’s her world—her creation. She’ll want to destroy it before she makes a run for it. Probably plans to use Lucy as a hostage. Call Whitaker and tell him what’s going on.”

  He ended the call and concentrated on his driving. If he got to the winery in time—he would get there in time—he would be dealing with a classic hostage situation. He needed help from someone who knew the winery. He made another call.

  Quinn answered on the second ring. “Fletcher? What the hell do you want now?”

  Mason told him.

  48

  You moved on after Brinker, didn’t you?” Lucy said. She couldn’t think of anything else to do except keep talking. “You found another abusive male to love and admire, Warner Colfax. What happened? Did he turn on you, too?”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” Beth said. “I never loved Warner Colfax. But we had a deal. I’m making the Colfax name a legend in the wine world, and how does he repay me? He plans to betray me.”

  “Why do you say that? He gave you everything you wanted when you graduated with your degree in wine-making—the latest technology, state-of-the-art equipment—everything.”

  “I found out the bastard intends to let me go. He’s going to bring in another, better-known winemaker.”

  “I gather that’s not going to happen now?”

  “No.” Beth smiled. “It’s not just Warner’s company that’s going to fail. His precious winery is going down, too. He needed me, but he never appreciated me. I finally realized that.”

  “Who helped you to see the truth? Wait, let me guess—Cecil Dillon, right?”

  “Cecil found out that Colfax plans to replace me.”

  “Cecil probably lied.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he needed your help, you twit. For a smart woman, you are about as dumb as a brick when it comes to men.”

  Beth stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Think about it for half a second. It was Cecil’s idea to get rid of Sara and Mary, wasn’t it?”

  “Mary,” Beth said quickly. “He just wanted to get rid of her. He needed those shares to go to Quinn, you see. He was afraid that Mary would side with Warner when it came time to vote on the merger. But Sara and Mary went everywhere together. We didn’t have any choice when we arranged the accident.”

  “I believe the polite name for it
is collateral damage. You really are dumb. Trust me, Cecil Dillon lied to you from the start. He used you, just like Brinker did.”

  “What is it with men?” Beth said, clearly bewildered. “You give them everything and they walk all over you. Stop the car.”

  Lucy brought the car to a halt and slowly unfastened her seat belt.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Give me the keys.”

  Lucy obeyed.

  Beth opened the passenger-side door and backed out of the seat, never taking the gun off Lucy.

  “Now you get out,” she ordered. “Slowly.”

  Lucy obeyed. There was an eerie silence around the winery today. The place truly was deserted.

  “Shouldn’t there be someone here?” she asked. “A security guard or one of the workers?”

  Beth snickered. “Not when the boss orders everyone to leave.”

  “Colfax did that?”

  “While I held a gun to his head.” Beth angled her chin toward the large building that housed the fermentation tanks, the bottling room and the rest of the equipment required for wine-making. “Inside.”

  Lucy walked toward the entrance. She stopped in front of the computerized lock.

  “I’ll give you the code,” Beth said. “Key it in.”

  She rattled off a string of numbers. Lucy dutifully touched the keypad in sequence. She heard the muffled sound of the bolt. Maybe if she could get inside first and haul the door closed behind her . . .

  “Stand back,” Beth said. “I’ll get the door.”

  So much for plan B.

  Beth grabbed the door handle and hauled it open with one hand. “Go inside. Walk slowly and stay where I can see you. Understand?”

  “Got it,” Lucy said.

  When she moved inside, she discovered that only a portion of the cavernous structure was fully illuminated by the overhead fluorescent fixtures. The far end of the room lay in shadow. If all else failed, she would have to make a run for it and pray that Beth was not a good enough shot to hit a moving target.