Revenge at Bella Terra

  The last man stood back, silhouetted against the light, waiting to be introduced.

  DuPey gestured him forward. “Chloë Robinson, this is Wyatt Vincent.”

  Wyatt joined them, a man of about forty, tall, well built, well dressed. He shook her hand. “Miss Robinson, I admire your work. I’m hoping for a new book soon.”

  She gave him her standard smile and answer. “Thank you. I’m hoping for that, too.”

  “Wyatt comes from a long line of police officers,” DuPey said.

  “The family is rotten with them.” Wyatt’s mouth quirked; he sounded self-deprecating, but to Chloë he seemed to be the kind of guy who got your attention and held it. He seemed sure of himself, yet his sandy hair, blue eyes, and light tan probably made him a good candidate for a stakeout. He looked as if he could blend in anywhere in the United States.

  She’d bet he was good at anything he did.

  Certainly DuPey sounded as if he admired him. “Wyatt was in the FBI for years, worked all over the country, then wanted to come back to California, so he brought a whole lot of knowledge about criminals and criminal behavior back to Sacramento and opened his own firm for consulting with police departments on how to sharpen their investigative skills and head off trouble before it happens. After our little problem last month, I called him in to help us brush up on procedures.”

  “Welcome to Bella Valley.” Eli shook his hand.

  “Thank you. I’ve been in the valley before. My family’s lived in central California for . . . oh, I guess we moved here in the forties, must have been, from Chicago.” He dipped his head to Eli. “Hope you don’t mind that I tagged along. Sometimes I miss the actual work on the ground, and this sounded like an unusual case.”

  “His dad knew my dad,” DuPey said, then told Chloë, “My dad was the chief of police here when we were kids.”

  “Did anybody disturb the body?” Mason asked.

  “I walked over by him.” Chloë figured she might as well confess; someone had clearly disturbed the dust and soot of the past eighty years, and it wasn’t Eli; his feet were at least twice the size of hers.

  “And knelt here.” The coroner was observant. “Fascinated, were you?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she admitted. “Never even heard of something like this.”

  “Me neither,” Finnegan said from behind the still, “and I’m originally from Kansas.”

  “What has that got to do with anything?” DuPey snapped.

  Finnegan stuck his head out. “Kansas is dry by default, unless the county decides otherwise.”

  “Dry?” Chloë understood. She didn’t think these Californians had a clue. “You mean . . . no liquor is sold there?”

  He tipped his hat to her. “Yes, ma’am. I saw plenty of stills there, but no dried-up old corpses.”

  With an edge of irritation in his voice, DuPey asked, “What did we talk about, Finnegan?”

  “Oh. That.” Again Finnegan tipped his hat in Chloë’s direction. “Pardon me, ma’am.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “We’re supposed to call them bodies. It’s more aesthetically pleasing.” He winked at her. “If we use the right words, we won’t get into trouble on TV when we report the crimes, and the ladies won’t call and complain because we’re insensitive.”

  She gave a laugh, which she quickly muffled.

  DuPey looked not at all pleased.

  Finnegan ducked behind the copper still again. Metal rattled.

  DuPey said, “Finnegan, don’t touch anything!”

  “No, sir.” Finnegan appeared again, saluted with a pipe elbow he’d somehow gleaned off the still, and vanished.

  DuPey sighed as if discouraged, and his tired eyes grew even more tired.

  Chloë walked over to the opposite side of the body and knelt. “Do you mind if I watch?”

  “You’re the author, right?” Mason asked.

  “Yes.” Did everyone in town know who she was?

  “Yes,” Eli answered as if she’d spoken out loud. “In this town, you can’t say something in a Porta Potty on a south-side construction site that isn’t reported in a north-end saloon within ten minutes.”

  “It’s not that bad, Eli.” DuPey sounded absentminded as he examined the still. “No one gives a damn about most of us. It’s you Di Lucas with your celebrity aura who attract attention. And last month made all of you headline news again.” Before Chloë could ask what had happened last month, DuPey added, “For all that this is old, this is a nice still.”

  “How old do you figure it is?” Eli asked.

  DuPey whipped around. “How old do you figure it is, Eli?”

  “If that guy over there built the still, then it’s Prohibition for sure.” Eli put his hands on his belt. “Why? You think I’ve been making brandy up here?”

  DuPey took the lid off and sniffed. “No . . .”

  Wyatt knelt beside Chloë. “I haven’t seen anything like this since we caught the Twilight Slayer in Phoenix.”

  Chloë glanced at him. “You were involved in that case?”

  “I had a hand in the solving of it,” Wyatt said. “He captured women he thought were vampires, staked them out in the desert, and let them bake. When a body dies of dehydration and then shrivels, that mummified look comes on fast. ’Twasn’t pretty.”

  She observed as Mason took pictures, then carefully moved the clothes aside to view the injuries. “So I was right? Whoever killed this guy did it in the heat of summer. They handcuffed him, tortured him, killed him, left him to dry.”

  “Good deductions,” Mason said.

  “Why do you say ‘they’?” Wyatt asked. “Could be one killer.”

  Chloë knew she was being tested. She didn’t care; right or wrong, this was information she could somehow put to use in a book—preferably in her current book. The horror of finding a body had faded, to be replaced by an endless realm of plot possibilities that bubbled in her mind. “Possible. But he built a still up here where no one could catch him, and from the amount of soot on the roof where the smoke vented, on the walls and on the floor, he used it for a long time. So he was smart. He’s well dressed, so he was prosperous. He would have made sure no one could sneak up on him, so he worked some kind of early warning system and probably some booby traps.”

  “You’d make a good investigator,” Wyatt said.

  “Indeed. Very good, Miss Robinson.” Mason pointed at the corpse’s hands. “Observe that the skin on his knuckles was scarred, so he knew how to fight.”

  A thump brought Chloë’s head around, and the boards behind her shook.

  Eli was down on one knee, his hands pressed to the floor. “Be careful. There’s an uneven place on the floor.”

  “You fell?” She couldn’t believe it. He didn’t seem the type to ever make a misstep. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” Standing, he grimaced at his filthy hands. “Only my dignity is hurt.” Pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped his palms and grimaced again as the big square of white cotton turned black. “Chloë, you look pale. Is the heat up here getting to you again?”

  She got the message, sighed, and stood. “Yes. I hate to leave, but I was a little faint before, and I need to go lie down.”

  “Probably a lady like you is suffering from delayed shock at discovering the body, too,” Finnegan said.

  Against all evidence, Mason and Wyatt nodded solemnly.

  These superior men set her teeth on edge.

  But before she could contradict them, Eli put his hand under her elbow and pulled her to her feet. “I’ll take you home,” he said.

  That made the law enforcement men exchange grins, which irritated her even more.

  But not as much as Eli; his face turned to granite and in a goaded voice he said, “As a favor to her father, I’m allowing Miss Robinson to stay in the cottage to finish her book. I’d appreciate it if you’d remember that.”

  Mason and Wyatt sobered and leaned over the bo
dy again.

  Finnegan disappeared behind the still.

  DuPey said, “I’ll walk you to your truck. I need to question you both about your find here. Just a formality. I’m pretty sure you didn’t commit the murder.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Eli said.

  They descended in the cherry picker together—Eli let Chloë handle the controls while DuPey stood tigh-lipped and white-knuckled—and when they got to the ground, he started asking his questions. By the time they got to Eli’s truck, they’d covered why they’d come and how they’d discovered the body.

  Eli helped Chloë into the truck, then turned to DuPey. “You were acting funny in there. Has someone used that still recently?”

  “Not recently. But I expected to see a little more corrosion in there.” DuPey shrugged. “I’d have a lab check the still and date the last time it processed liquor, but it’s such an old crime scene that I can’t justify the expense.”

  “So I can have it removed?” Eli dug into his cooler and handed Chloë a cold water; then, while they were damp, he wiped his hands again.

  DuPey took a bottle as well, drained it, and handed it back. “Yep. Mason’ll take the body to the morgue and do his thing, but if it’s Massimo, as we all suspect, there’ll be no way to know. According to the stories, he had no family and no children, so no DNA.”

  “Poor guy. No family to mourn when he disappeared. No gravestone with his name.” Chloë’s heart ached.

  Eli glanced up at her. “If what Nonna says is true, he chose his life and by all rights had no reason to expect anything else.” He headed around the truck and got in.

  “He doesn’t care now,” DuPey said.

  “No, I suppose not,” she said, more to herself than to them. “But I bet in those last moments of his life, he wanted vengeance.”

  Eli started the truck.

  DuPey waved them off.

  As soon as Eli put the F-250 in gear, executed a three-point turn, and started up the bumpy gravel road toward Bella Terra, Chloë twisted to face him. “So tell me, Eli—what did you pick up off the floor of the water tower?”

  Chapter 15

  Eli made her wait until they reached the cottage to answer her question, and by the time they got there, she was hopping up and down with frustration. Because he hadn’t fallen down by accident, any more than he had believed she was overcome with horror at the scene in the water tower. He had discovered something, something related to Massimo and the crime, and she wanted to know what.

  He showed her his hands. The filth of that floor hung in the creases and under his fingernails, and he used that as an excuse to make her punch in the security code.

  All the while he was grinning. Teasing her, as if he were almost human.

  As soon as they were inside, she kicked the door shut, grabbed his shirt, and in the low, guttural, threatening voice of a demon, said, “Tell me all.”

  He set her aside as if she were a girl. “Do you have a mesh strainer?”

  “A mesh strainer. You want a mesh strainer?” Her voice rose.

  He tapped her nose—he had her total attention and he was playing it for all he was worth.

  “You are really frustrating.” She rubbed her nose, knowing he had smeared soot on it, and tagged along as he went into the kitchen.

  He found the strainer, put it in the sink. Reaching into his pocket, he brought out his now-grimy handkerchief, laid it in the strainer, and carefully spread it across the mesh.

  Gobs of sticky soot and filthy wood splinters filled the handkerchief. He turned on the sprayer. “It’s going to take a minute to wash the dirt away. In the meantime, look at this.” Reaching into his other pocket, he pulled out the cigarette butt he’d removed and handed it to her.

  It was grimy, too, old and disgusting, and she stared at it, trying to figure out why he would pick up and keep a cigarette used to burn Massimo. That was macabre. Unless . . . “This thing has a filter on it,” she said.

  “No cigarette without one could survive up there so long.”

  “When did they start making filtered cigarettes?”

  “I don’t know, but I doubt it was during the Depression.”

  She pulled out her computer, put it on the counter and opened it, and searched for the answer. “Filters on cigarettes were specialty items until the 1950s, because there weren’t a lot of machines that could make them.” She picked up the butt and examined it again. “Brand is . . . Kent? Looks like. Kent started using a filter in 1952. So someone was up in that place in the fifties or later? With Massimo’s dead body? Doing what?”

  “Might have been using the still. DuPey seemed uneasy about that.”

  “With a dead body watching? That’s cold.”

  “So was the torture.” He turned off the water. “Where’s your flashlight?”

  She pulled it out of the case and handed it to him.

  He flicked it on and pointed into the strainer in the sink. “There. Look.”

  Something glinted. Sparkled. A small cut stone. She bent toward the sink. She took a long breath, trying to quiet the sudden thunder of her heart.

  Handing her the flashlight, he picked up the stone and placed it in his still-grimy palm.

  It sparkled like a diamond against a black velvet setting.

  “No . . .” she whispered. “It can’t be.”

  “It’s a gem. Maybe a diamond?”

  “Yes. Maybe a diamond.” She shone the flashlight, and the stone gathered the light, blazed with sparks of blue and red and . . . “About a half carat. It looks pink. A pink diamond?”

  “Let’s find out. Let’s use it to cut some glass.” He turned toward the window.

  “Not the window! Let me get my travel mirror.” She hurried into the bathroom and returned with the round, cheap mirror she kept in her makeup case. Putting it on the counter, she gestured to him to proceed.

  She watched, breathless, as Eli used the edge to cut through the glass.

  “I don’t suppose that’s a conclusive test, is it?” Her voice quavered with excitement.

  “I don’t suppose. But if this is a diamond”—he placed the gem in his palm again—“it would explain what the torturers were looking for. Why someone in the fifties took a chance and returned to the scene of the crime.”

  “Yes . . .” She couldn’t take her eyes off the stone. “But you picked it up off the floor. Was it unseen on the floor for eighty years?” Without drawing a breath, she answered her own question. “Yes, of course. If it had been seen, it wouldn’t have been there. How did it go unnoticed, especially if someone was up there?”

  “I didn’t see it right away. Neither did you.”

  She nodded in agreement.

  “At one point, when the tower was full of water, the wood was probably damp and soft.” Eli rolled the stone around with his thumb. “We know a thick layer of soot and dirt covered everything. This was buried, and its sharp edges kept taking it deeper.”

  “Right. It wasn’t until you knocked out the wall and let the light in that we even had a chance to spot the, er . . .” She found herself unable to say the word. Knowing what it was, knowing it was in her cottage, made her nervous, as if villains lurked outside waiting to torture her as they had tortured Massimo.

  “Our biggest stroke of luck was the coroner. Mason wears running shoes, and when he stepped on the stone, it clung to the tread and came up in a clod of dirt. The clod dropped and I saw the diamond flash.” Eli seemed unworried, more interested in the mystery than in any danger.

  “So the diamond gave us the clue we needed. I told you Massimo wanted revenge!”

  Eli looked at her as if she were nuts.

  The man had no imagination. “Okay, maybe it was pure chance. But the other is a better story!”

  “You’re the writer.” It did not sound like a compliment. “Anyway, I pretended to trip, picked up the stone before someone else saw it, and figured we’d better get out of there.”

  “I knew you were faking.”


  “I hope the others aren’t as suspicious as you.” He put the diamond onto a plate, set it aside, and used the dish soap to really scrub his hands. “Especially not DuPey. I’ve known him since high school.”

  She dismissed that with an airy wave of the hand. “He thinks you’re an upstanding citizen. He as good as said so.”

  “Yeah. I’ve got him fooled.” Eli sounded amused.

  “So Massimo disappeared in 1930?” Chloë took her computer to her desk, typed in “pink diamond,” “robbery,” and “1930.” This search took a little longer, and required some digging on her part, but finally she said, “I had to have Google translate this old news story from Dutch, so it’s a little sketchy, but I think this is it.” She read, “‘Amsterdam, December twenty-sixth, 1929. On Christmas Day, a Vermeer titled View of the Harbor was stolen from the Rijksmuseum by a talented team of burglars. The carefully planned robbery bears the hallmark of other thefts in Italy and France. Vermeer, noted for his work with light, was one of the finest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.’”

  “What has that got to do with our diamond?” Eli used paper towels to dry his hands.

  Chloë held up one finger. “‘Amsterdam, December twenty-seventh, 1929. A cache of prized pink diamonds vanished from a shipment on its way to be set in platinum for the Duchess of Wheatley. The diamonds range in size from a half carat to the proposed diamond centerpiece, a six-point-eight-carat pink diamond, the Beating Heart, with an inclusion that, when viewed through a jeweler’s loupe, looks like a red heart that appears to pulse.”

  “My God. Massimo had guts.” Eli’s tone was reverent.

  “I assume he stole the painting on commission for an art collector, then used the police’s distraction with the theft to take the diamonds undetected.”

  “It’s possible he had done it before.”

  “But this time someone caught on.”

  “Probably the guys he stole the diamonds from.”

  “Security had to be hands-on and pretty harsh in those days.” Eli leaned over the counter toward her. “Did anyone ever find the pink diamonds?”