“Even though Mom approves?”
I laughed. “I guess Mom can be right sometimes. It’s complicated.”
“Everyone’s relationships are complicated. Like mine and Fred’s. He keeps arresting my friends, or my friends’ mothers. And then it’s all weird between him and me, and me and my friends, and him and my friends.” Sue sighed. “Now, that’s complicated.”
“By ‘my friends’ I guess you mean me.” I chuckled. “I guess I better watch myself or I’ll end up sinking your romance.”
I thought for a minute. “To be fair, I don’t think he actually arrested me. And I get the feeling it was Vernon, the prosecutor, who wanted my mom arrested. I guess Fred didn’t have a lot of choice.” I shrugged. “It could be worse. At least she’s still in Pine Ridge.”
“I didn’t tell you this, but I know there was an argument with Vernon about that. He wanted to move her to Portland, but Fred wouldn’t let him. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to hear it, but it was right there in my kitchen. What was I supposed to do?”
Sue’s wide-eyed look of innocence was so fake it made me laugh. “In your kitchen, huh?” I chuckled.
“Okay, Fred’s one of the good guys.” I sobered. “But I still have to go see my mother, and Dave Young told me to be careful what we say because someone could be listening.”
“Yeah, like Douglas Vernon. Be careful.”
I nodded and went back to my sandwich.
Forty minutes later we left the dogs napping, and Sue drove me to the sheriff’s office. Even though I’d driven the van to Gregory’s house, Sue said it would look better if I didn’t drive myself to see my mom.
Deputy Carruthers was manning the front desk. He glanced up when we arrived and caught my eye. “Man, Ms. Neverall, I was really bummed to hear about your car. You’re gonna need a really good body man. Working with glass is an art. When you’re ready, I have a guy up in Sandy who does custom work. I’ll have him call you.”
His concern for my car was sweet. Carruthers had offered to help me with the Beetle, and had turned out to be a pretty fair shade tree mechanic. I knew I could trust his recommendations.
“Thank you, Deputy. I’ll be certain to call you when I’m ready.” I smiled, and waited for him to buzz me through the security door.
Once I was inside, Carruthers checked me over with a metal-detector wand like the ones at airport security. He asked for my purse, and told me I could have it back on my way out. He did let me keep the books I’d brought Mom, after he checked those thoroughly, too.
“Procedure,” he said with an uncomfortable grimace.
It wasn’t like we were fast friends, but we’d formed a bond over my aging Beetle. I liked Carruthers, and I respected his encyclopedic knowledge of early VWs. Going through the security procedure with me was awkward. But it was part of his job.
I was escorted to an interview room to wait for my mother.
Mom had only been in jail a few days, and made a single court appearance, but the strain was evident in her posture and her pinched expression when another deputy brought her in.
She started toward me, like maybe she wanted to give me a hug. Her escort put a hand on her arm, and guided her to a chair, sending a clear signal that there was no physical contact.
We sat opposite each other across a bare, wooden table. The silence stretched. Neither of us knew quite what to say.
“How’s your wrist?” Mom asked.
“Just a sprain. The doctor said to take it easy for a couple days and see Dr. Cox for a follow-up.”
“Sheriff Mitchell told me you had an accident. I’m glad it wasn’t any worse.”
With the topic of my accident exhausted we lapsed back into silence. We were both aware, thanks to Dave Young, that we could be overheard. It put a definite crimp in the conversation.
“I brought you some books.” I set the stack of paper-backs on the table. “I wasn’t sure what you’d want, so I tried to get a few different things. Just let me know if you want something in particular.”
“Thank you.”
Silence.
This was getting increasingly uncomfortable. I wanted to see Mom, to see for myself that she was okay, but I didn’t know what to say to her. There were things I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t. Not when Vernon could be listening.
I decided there was one thing I could ask, something that didn’t really have anything to do with Gregory. I hoped.
“Mom? There is one thing I don’t understand. Where did that hatch in the hallway come from? I don’t remember it being there when I lived in the house.”
“Oh, that.” She seemed relieved to have something to talk about. “About the time you went off to that school, your father thought he was going to put in an air conditioner. For some reason he decided it should go under the house.” She shook her head at the memory. “He was a lot of things, but practical wasn’t one of them.”
There was a hint of affection in her voice, something I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. Maybe she was finally moving past the bitterness and resentment. Maybe.
“Anyway, he had that hole cut in the floor, so that he could bring in this whatever-it-was that wouldn’t fit through the outside access hole.
“Then he wanted to get it hooked into the heating ducts so it would cool the whole house. That’s when he found out it would never work.”
“He wanted to put the thing under the house?”
“I know,” she replied. “Besides that, he found out that the piece he cut out would fall through into the crawl space and he had to go down there and haul it back up. That was when he hired a carpenter to come and put hinges on it.”
Mom shook her head. “I just covered it up with a rug and I’d really forgotten all about it until—” She stopped suddenly, refusing to take the thought any further.
“This is ridiculous!” she burst out. “Do you know what they said, Georgie?”
I stared, not knowing what to say.
“They said he was stabbed, with a knife from my kitchen! My knife! That horrible man”—I assumed she meant Vernon—“said there was a knife missing and that I must have thrown it away somewhere after I stabbed him.”
She leaned forward, bracing her arms against the edge of the table. “Those were my Global knives, Georgie. I wouldn’t do that to my knives!”
I remembered the knives in her kitchen, carefully arrayed in the stainless-steel block on the countertop. I couldn’t remember seeing the block when I was in the house, another of the clues the house had been searched.
“I know that, Mom,” I said in what I hoped was a soothing tone. “I know you didn’t do this. It’s impossible.”
There, the one topic we’d been avoiding was out in the open. We were talking about it, and the world didn’t end.
We could get through this.
There were questions I wouldn’t ask, however. I didn’t dare tip my hand to Vernon. He was intent on convicting my mother and I was intent on getting her released.
I kept my plans to myself.
We retreated to careful conversation about the weather and the dogs and when I could go back to work, and my twenty minutes flew by. Before I knew it, Carruthers was in the doorway, signaling that the visit was over.
“You can come back tomorrow after she has dinner,” he said as he escorted me down the hall toward the front door.
He paused a few feet from the door to the lobby. He glanced around as though checking he wouldn’t be overheard, and spoke softly. “She’ll be okay, Ms. Neverall. She’s strong.
“Same time tomorrow,” he said in a flat tone as he opened the door and returned my purse. “Please call if you will be delayed.”
I walked through the door and back into the normal world, the world where people were free to come and go as they pleased, and to reach out for a hug when they needed one.
Which is precisely what Wade offered.
I stood close to him and let him wrap his arms around me. The warmth of his chest against m
y cheek was pure comfort, and I soaked it in.
Wade kept his arm around my shoulders as he guided me toward the door and out to his car.
“I thought Sue was going to wait for me,” I said, finally realizing the switch in escorts.
“I called her, told her it was my turn to take care of you for a while.” He shrugged. “I figured maybe you could use a beer, or something stronger. How about Tiny’s?”
I shook my head. “I have stuff to do at home, Wade. But I have a couple microbrews in the refrigerator. Change in plans?”
“Sure.”
We were back at my place before I was able to talk about what I had seen. “She was all over the place. Quiet and subdued one minute, ranting and raving the next, and then quiet again.
“I know she’s stressed out, but she wasn’t the Mom I was used to. I felt bad for her, but I have to admit, it creeped me out.”
“We’ll get her through this,” Wade promised. “She’s got a lot of people on her side. You, me, Sue, Dave Young. We’re a good team.”
The mention of Mom’s lawyer reminded me of something. “Can you get hold of Dave?” I asked. “There were a couple things I wanted to ask Mom, but I didn’t want to ask her myself.” I repeated Dave’s warning about privacy.
“I’ll have him call you.” Wade hesitated. “What’s this about, Georgie? Is there any way I can help?”
I took a deep breath and plunged in. “What do you know about Gregory’s house? The one he had built?” I hurried on, trying not to think about the risk I took by telling him what I’d done.
“I was out there,” I said. “This afternoon.” I held up a hand. “I know what you’re going to say. Don’t. I had Mom’s key and the house is hers, so I had every right to be there.
“I didn’t find the wine, Wade. There should have been two hundred cases of wine, Burgundy and Bordeaux and Syrah, and there wasn’t a single bottle of red wine in the house. All I found was a refrigerated cabinet the size of a closet with some whites and a few sparkling wines.
“No red.”
“There has to be,” Wade said. His brow furrowed with worry. “There has to be or Gregory was involved in a scam of immense proportions. He had an insurance rider put on the place for a quarter million on wine, and he was getting storage fees from Veritas for the bottles that were on that spreadsheet you found.
“It has to be there.”
We went back and forth about what it meant that I hadn’t found the wine. Wade was adamant that it was there and I had missed it. He couldn’t believe that Gregory had lied.
We hadn’t settled anything by the time he left, and I didn’t tell him I was going back to have another look.
I think he knew anyway.
chapter 29
After Wade left I settled down with a cup of tea and the computer files. It was late, but I didn’t have to get up for work in the morning. The search for Gregory’s files was pulling me back into the world of all-night computer sessions.
It was familiar territory.
Picking apart the e-mail archive was tedious. My tea grew cold and my neck stiffened. It was more of a challenge with one hand, but I meticulously followed each thread and link, re-creating the original files.
It was like untangling a knotted ball of yarn, and it required patience and discipline. Pull one thread the wrong way and it tightened into an unyielding mass.
The reward for my patience came in the wee hours of the morning. I found the encryption key for the address file, and all at once I had Gregory’s contacts.
Names, companies, e-mail addresses—some even had phone numbers. There were address groups, too. Including a group named Veritas.
I’d found Gregory’s partners.
Excitement shot through me, a bolt of energy like the rush from a triple-shot mocha with extra chocolate syrup.
I tracked the names in the group to the individual e-mail addresses within the contacts file. [email protected] was obvious, as was [email protected].
The other two were a little more difficult.
I started backtracking the names through domain registries, and found Taylor Parkson behind another one of the addresses. No surprise.
The fourth address was my downfall. The domain, wineconsultantsoregon.net, ended in a proxy site. Proxy sites provided an anonymous registry for domain names, and they prided themselves on their ability to disguise the identity of the actual registrants. Even with my skills I couldn’t crack the wall surrounding the site’s records. And without a warrant they weren’t going to share any information with me.
For once, a computer problem stopped me in my tracks.
I stretched, feeling the muscles in my neck and back creak in protest. My right hand was cramped and aching from doing the work of both hands. I yawned so wide I thought my jaw might never close again.
Time to sleep.
Dogs do not have any respect for all-nighters. No matter how late I went to bed, they expected me to get up and let them out as soon as the first rays of morning sun reached the backyard. They also have the uncanny ability to force you to wake up by staring at you.
Which is what Daisy did way too early the next morning.
While the dogs explored the backyard—in case it had changed overnight—I called Dave Young. Although it was early, he was already at his desk, and sounded as though he had been up for several hours.
I told him about my visit to the sheriff’s station the night before and the invitation to return.
“It’s good for her to be able to see you,” he said. “But it must be hard for you.”
“I’m okay for now,” I told him. I wasn’t sure it was true, but I had to do what I could.
And one of the things I could do was look for the missing wine.
I asked Dave if he could talk to Mom about Gregory’s wine cellar. I didn’t explain why, and although it must have sounded like an odd request he didn’t ask. I had the feeling he didn’t want to know. Besides, if I was wrong, if somehow there wasn’t any wine, then I’d look like an idiot.
I hate looking like an idiot.
Better to wait until I had something useful to tell him.
I went back to work on Gregory’s files, and halfway through my second pot of coffee I struck more pay dirt.
This time it was actual mail archives. The message files had been zipped and encrypted, but I teased out a string of messages and slowly unraveled the entire file.
Now I had the actual messages that went with the addresses, and it was fascinating reading. One message header in particular caught my eye: “Authentication Report, Lot 755.”
I scrolled down to the mail and began to read with a growing sense of dread. Gregory had hired a wine expert to check on a lot he’d bought in an online auction.
A lot that had been shipped from Paris—France, not Texas.
There were four cases in the lot, and he had paid five figures a case. The total outlay was nearly fifty grand.
The expert’s opinion was that the wine was counterfeit.
Worth about fifty bucks a bottle.
That was bad news when he’d paid almost a thousand bucks a bottle. It was also several thousand reasons to kill him.
But there were several big ifs between the e-mail in the file and Gregory’s body under Mom’s house, and I had no way to prove it was connected.
I wasn’t sure who I could trust with the information I’d found. Dave Young was the likeliest candidate, but when I tried to reach him he was out of the office.
In a perfect world I would turn the information over to the sheriff and he would be able to find the connections that would lead him to the killer.
But in a perfect world he wouldn’t have arrested my mother in the first place.
I tried to keep busy around the house, waiting for Dave Young to call me back. I told myself there wasn’t anything I could do until I knew if the wine was in the house.
But something in the back of my brain kept nagging at me. There had b
een something odd about Gregory’s house, something that didn’t fit. And I had to know what it was.
This time I went alone.
I drove the Beetle to Mom’s house, thankful for the automatic stick shift, and switched to the rented van. I changed into my coveralls and padding, and put on my ball cap. I was ready to explore Gregory’s house again.
This time I put a grid pad and several pencils in the top tray of my toolbox. There was something wrong with my mental picture of the house. There should be a wine cellar, a large one, somewhere in that building and I was determined to find it. If that meant drawing out every square foot of the house, that was what I would do.
I forced myself not to look at the house across the street as I backed the van into the driveway. I didn’t know if the guy was home, but if he was I didn’t want him to notice me noticing him. A workman arriving to finish a job would pay no attention to the neighbors.
I locked the front door behind me and left my toolbox in the entry. I would retrieve it on the way out. Taking my cell phone, the grid pad, and a couple pencils, I set out to study Gregory’s house.
There was a secret here, and I had to find it if I wanted to get my mother out of jail.
And no matter how crazy she made me, I wanted my mom to be a free woman again.
I started with the entry, estimating the size of the room and making note of doors and windows. I had a measuring tape in my toolbox, but I was already juggling paper and pencil and the tape would have been impossible one-handed.
I could come back with Sue later, if I had to, but I didn’t want to get her in any deeper than she already was. I would manage alone for now.
The sun crept across the great room as I worked my way through the house. A map of the house began to emerge, taking shape in smudged pencil lines and erasures, in squiggles and arrows and scribbled notes.
At last there was one large blank area left. The place I knew I would eventually have to go. The one place I wasn’t sure I could face.
The master bedroom.
Somehow, invading the private room my mother had shared with Gregory would cross a barrier in our relationship, even if she never knew I’d been there.
Drip Dead Page 18