Murder in Paradise Read online

  She wanted to be suspicious, but it was hard to be around Pete. He seemed so blankly unassuming. Kind but empty. The sort of person who probably spent a lot of time fussing over his lawn and hummed Christmas carols year-round.

  She took in a deep breath—to heave a sigh—but ended up inhaling a cluster of fruit flies. She coughed into her fist.

  Pete unscrewed the lens from his camera and began shooting the room and the body. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, between coughs. “Just need…some water.”

  The camera flashed and strobed the room when she headed down the hall to the kitchen. The fruit flies were thicker here, amid the mess of mucked dishes, takeout containers, wine bottles. She ran the water and gulped directly from the faucet and tried to wash away the tickle in her throat.

  As she did, her eyes settled on the unopened mound of mail. The corner of a manila envelope poked out of it. She knobbed off the faucet and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She knelt and pulled at the envelope until it loosed itself from the catalogues and unpaid bills.

  BLACK WINE, it read. The envelope she had delivered here, the envelope she had found hidden in her office.

  Pete’s voice called out. “Everything okay?”

  “Yes!” she said. “If you’ve got this, I’m going to take off.” She tucked the envelope under her arm. “I’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter 16

  After work—after Jeremy filled his final prescription and washed his hands for what must have been the three thousandth time that day, and gathered his backpack and rattled his keys—his head nurse, Stacie, appeared beside him with a smile brightening her face. “Hope you’re not tired.”

  “More like exhausted.”

  “Nope.” She shook her head and her smile widened. “Not allowed.”

  “Why not?”

  She hooked an arm through his. “Because you’re coming with me.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “I can’t. I’ve got to—I should really get home.”

  It was then that he noticed her lips were bright with fresh lipstick. Her blond hair was loose and brushed, though it still carried the crimp of her ponytail. She had changed out of her white sneakers and into leather flats.

  “Oh no. You’re not going to want to miss this.”

  * * *

  He followed Stacie out of town and into Napa Valley, toward Yountville. She drove an ink-black Audi, and on straightaways he muscled the stick and ground the gears on his old Jeep Cherokee, trying to keep up with her. He wondered how she could afford such a car on a nurse’s salary. Maybe she came from a rich family; maybe she divorced with a nice settlement—but he was mostly distracted by questions about what the evening held in store.

  He’d first thought that Stacie had wanted to go out for a drink. He was a little embarrassed that he had wanted to believe it. Was he so weak that anyone who offered him a warm touch, a friendly smile, made him forget his marriage?

  He remembered some statistic he had read: death, divorce, and moving were the three most stressful events someone could face in life. Abi had been distracted, on edge, exhausted for months now. She seemed thankful for him, but only as someone who could take care of what she couldn’t handle, due to her burdened schedule. Maybe it was starting to wear his love thin?

  No. He shook his head and concentrated on the road as it made a hard bend past a grove of aspens. All of these thoughts worming through his head were irrelevant. Because, in fact, Stacie was taking him to meet Eric Stelling.

  His name was all over town. On the free clinic where he worked. On the new wing of the library, the ICU of the hospital, the winery that was known especially for its reds.

  The brake lights on the Audi flashed, and Stacie pulled into the parking lot of a two-story building with a vine-tangled balcony. THE FRENCH LAUNDRY, the sign read. He felt very aware of his rust-spotted Jeep when he parked it between her Audi and a white Bentley polished to a moon glow.

  “French Laundry?” he said. “Isn’t this supposed to be one of the hardest places to get reservations in the country? I heard it was closed. Aren’t they renovating?”

  “It is,” Stacie said with a smile. “They are.”

  He ran his hand along the rough stonework of the wall, as if to test whether the place was real. Then he snorted out a laugh and said, “Well okay, then.”

  The front door was locked, but a woman in a purple shirt and an apron tied at the waist opened the door. She welcomed them in and led them to a table at the very center of the empty restaurant.

  The man who waited for them was pale, small, delicate. His hair was somewhere between white and blond. He must have been in his sixties, but his skin was so untouched by the sun and his features so boyish that he appeared two decades younger. He wore a tan sports coat, a checkered shirt, and tortoiseshell glasses. He did not rise to meet them but smiled and motioned to chairs beside him.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Jeremy,” he said, his voice high, every word carefully enunciated.

  “Mr. Stelling, sir—thanks so much for this treat. It’s an honor.”

  Stelling didn’t offer to shake, but Jeremy couldn’t help himself. He thrust out his hand. It hung there for a long moment.

  Stelling’s smile trembled. But after a pause, he returned the gesture. It wasn’t so much a handshake as a gentle clutch.

  “Please.” Again he motioned to the seats. “Join me.” He removed a small bottle of sanitizer from his pocket and squirted out a dollop to massage into his hands.

  There was a bottle of his own wine—a 2009 Stelling cabernet—already on the table, and the woman in the purple shirt uncorked it and presented it to Stelling before pouring a splash. He swirled it and sniffed it and tasted and nodded and said, “Excellent. But I’m prejudiced, of course.”

  She poured for the rest of the table and then left them.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Stelling said, “but we’re guinea pigs. The chef wants to try out some new dishes on us.”

  Stacie raised her glass in a toast, her face warped on the other side of it. “Of course we don’t mind.”

  “Wow,” Jeremy said, and nearly knocked over his wineglass in his haste to reach for it. “Not at all!”

  Chapter 17

  Jeremy couldn’t wait to tell her. “Abi,” he said as soon as he opened the door, and then, not even a second later, “Abi!”

  He would likely find her on a stepladder, in paint-splattered clothes, working a roller across the wall of the living room. Or maybe in a bubble bath, a candle lit beside her and Norah Jones playing on her phone.

  “Abi!” he called again.

  “In here,” she said, and her voice was so strained and impatient he could almost see her gritted teeth.

  He hesitated only a moment. Whatever was bothering her, his news would cheer her up. He hurried to the bedroom.

  A few days ago, they had painted the walls the faint yellow of early morning sunshine, and the smell of the fresh coat still lingered. A mirror needed to be hung. So did the framed, dried bouquet from their wedding, which they kept in a rounded glass frame. A rod lay on the floor, beside a folded pile of curtains with a screwdriver set on top. But the room was otherwise in order, settled—more than any other space in the house.

  Except it wasn’t. The laundry hamper was now on its side and dirty clothes sprawled across the floor. The closet doors were flung open and the hangers rattled as Abi dug around. “Where are you?” she said.

  “Right here,” he said.

  “Not you,” she said.

  “You’re not going to believe this.”

  The hangers scraped as she shoved several skirts aside. “I haven’t eaten since eleven. I was kind of hoping you’d have dinner ready.” Her posture was rigid. And her expression, when she turned to face him, was clenched as if she had banged a shin. “Where are my pants?”

  “What?” His excitement was draining. “Pants? Which ones?”

  “The white ones. The ruin
ed ones. The ones you were supposed to take to the cleaners.” She was practically yelling.

  When they tried to help the woman at the Mustards Grill—who fell from her table and lay choking on the floor—Abi had stained her pants when kneeling in the puddle of red wine.

  “Shit,” Jeremy said, and cringed. “I forgot. They’re still in the back of the car.”

  He was expecting her to shake her head or sigh with irritation or even scold him. But instead her face brightened and she raced toward him and planted a full kiss on his mouth. “Yes! Oh, you’re the best.”

  She hurried from the room, and he remained there a moment and licked his lips, before following her. “Abi!” he said. “Where are you going? Abi, hold up. You’ve got to hear this.”

  But she was already in the garage.

  It wasn’t just the meal he wanted to tell her about, though that was incredible. Ten courses, and three bottles of wine. They began with a bacon-wrapped date stuffed with chorizo and melted Gouda, and they ended with espresso and a sour cherry pie glazed with dark chocolate. He felt positively drugged from the goodness of it all.

  But then, as they finished their dessert, Mr. Stelling had handed him an envelope. It was jammed in his back pocket now. “Thank you for your good work,” Mr. Stelling had said. “I know it can be difficult, and I want it to be a rewarding experience for you.”

  He leaned forward confidentially, though there was no one else in the restaurant to hear them. “It’s easier if this sort of thing is off the books. For us both. You won’t have to pay taxes and I won’t have to deal with the red tape.”

  Jeremy had counted it twice in the car. Ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills—crisp, fresh from the bank.

  The garage door rattled up. Abi opened the cargo door of the Jeep. Her pants were there, in a garbage sack that she snatched and examined and said, “Good, good, good.” Then she hurried to her Subaru and yanked open the door and climbed behind the wheel.

  “Where are you going?” Jeremy said. “I thought you said you were hungry. I can put together a salad, no problem.”

  “No time,” she said, and cranked the ignition. “We’ll talk soon, okay? Sorry. This is important.”

  Chapter 18

  Abi hoped it wasn’t too late. She hoped the continuity of the evidence hadn’t been compromised by time, by messy handling, by the heat of the Jeep over so many days in the sun.

  She was alone in her office. The sun had set, and she could almost feel the hospital emptying out all around her as visitors’ hours ended and the desperately caffeinated, hollow-eyed nurses and orderlies took over for the night shift.

  She collected a specimen from the stained pants and sent it off to toxicology with priority status. And then…and then what?

  She had shut off her phone after messaging Jeremy: “Busy, will talk soon. Sorry to rush off.” She almost thumbed on the power button now but didn’t. She needed silence. And though she loved her husband, she didn’t want any more men in her life advising her what to do. Pete Rustad, the coroner. Dean Poole, the deputy. Matthew O’Neel, the hospital CEO. All of them had made her second-guess herself—and she felt certain she was right on this. As crazy as it seemed, she was.

  Her gaze floated to the manila envelope labeled BLACK WINE. Paul and Neysa Bures had felt certain they were right too. And maybe it had gotten them killed.

  Caution was part of her training. She was never supposed to jump to a conclusion as a medical examiner. Just because you found a victim charred with third-degree burns didn’t mean you weren’t going to find a bullet in their brain.

  It would be best if she carved out some space for herself, detached herself from the nerve-shredding panic that had seized her earlier, and approached the evidence clinically.

  And quietly. Because if Paul and Neysa had indeed been killed, along with the councilwoman, Mary, then they all had this in common—they made noise. They called attention to themselves. Paul with his hospital-wide emails. Neysa with her drunken rant. The councilwoman with her outspoken agenda against development in Napa.

  Abi needed to build a case without anyone knowing she was doing so.

  She dug into the manila envelope and pulled out the three photocopied autopsy reports nested inside it. A quick Google search revealed the deceased were a high school principal, a Section 8 housing representative, and an ACLU lawyer. They all died from asphyxia. And toxicology indicated the presence of alcohol and poison in their systems. A conotoxin. From a cone snail.

  “Looks like she drank herself to death,” Pete Rustad had said earlier. In more ways than one, Abi suspected he was correct. And if her own wine-stained pants came back from the lab with a positive match, that meant the councilwoman had died as a result of a conotoxin as well.

  “The thing about snails is,” Abi said to herself, “they leave a trail.”

  She would pick up where Paul Bures left off. She was a detective of ruined bodies. She would simply expand her approach. Napa was her victim, and it was a corpse veined with grape vines that carried poison in them.

  She started with Alexei Petrov, the car crash victim. The one who turned out to have died of conotoxin poisoning. She checked the phone book and found nothing. She plugged his name into Google and scrolled through thousands of hits that went nowhere, then Facebook and Twitter. Many of the results were in Cyrillic. Men from Russia. From Ukraine. From London. From New York and Houston. None seemed to be the man she was looking for.

  Then she remembered something. It was a break-in that had happened to her neighbors in Milwaukee. They had gone to a movie, and when they came home, discovered they had been burglarized: part of a string of break-ins with a theater connection. When the police checked surveillance video in the multiplex parking lots, they spotted a man studying the license plates of cars as they pulled in. He had plugged the information into a public search database, pulling up the address of homes he knew would be empty for the next two hours.

  Abi picked up her desk phone to call the police station and ask for the accident report and Alexei’s license plate number. She hesitated, then hung up and instead searched the number for the primary tow company in town. She wondered if they would be closed, but they picked up on the first ring.

  “Yeah?” A man’s voice. Rough.

  “Hi,” she said. “I think you towed my brother’s truck.”

  “Yeah? You going to pick it up? Cash only.”

  “No, it’s totaled. He crossed the median and crashed head-on with another vehicle. About a week ago.”

  Silence…and then, “I think I know the one you mean. Your brother…He okay?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Damn. Sorry to hear that.”

  “He had something of mine in the glove box. Nothing valuable. Just a notebook. Could I come by and pick it up?”

  “Sure, sure. Fine.”

  “You know what—sorry to be a bother, but I just want to make sure I’m going to the right place. There’s probably more than a few totaled trucks in the lots around town. Can you just confirm the license plate for me?”

  There was the sound of shuffling paper as the man searched his desk. And then there it was—three letters, three numbers—that she plugged into the search engine.

  And up came an address.

  Chapter 19

  The address brought her to a trailer park at the edge of town. When Abi drove slowly up and down the rows of mobile homes, she saw the asphalt was crumbled in places and gone altogether in others. Her wheels jutted through potholes. There were streetlights, but only some of them worked. Satellite dishes perched on roofs like gargoyles. Windows glowed with the watery light of televisions.

  A shirtless man with a swollen potbelly sat in a lawn chair, while a grill smoked beside him. An old woman in a muumuu swept her porch. Three children rode bikes while shooting squirt guns. All of them stared at Abi when she passed.

  Some of the mobile homes were well cared for, with a postage stamp of a lawn out front and pots of flow
ers on their porches. Others were sun-faded and rust-streaked with duct tape holding together broken windows and a scattered collection of crushed beer cans winking in the streetlights.

  She finally found the lot number she was looking for, 163, and parked across the street from it. The single-wide trailer was striped brown and off-yellow, up on blocks with cheat grass skirting it. Four cars and a truck were parked in its driveway. The blinds were down, but light seeped through.

  Abi climbed the splintery wooden steps, catching the sound of a television inside. There was a screen door, but no screen. She reached through the frame and knocked. The television muted. She heard voices whispering, the thump of footsteps that shook the trailer—and saw the blinds move as someone peered outside.

  Then, silence.

  She knocked again. Nothing. And again. “Hello! I’m here about Alexei Petrov?”

  She stepped away from the trailer and tried to spot someone in the windows. Just then the children on bikes rolled past. One of them—a boy, maybe ten years old—braked with a squeak. “You ice?”

  “What?” she said.

  His shirtsleeves were cut off and his basketball shoes were three sizes too big. “You with ice? Gonna deport them?”

  Only then did she know what he meant. ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

  “No, I’m not with ICE,” she said.

  “You a cop, then?”

  “Not a cop. Just a…doctor.”

  She looked back at the trailer, which had now gone dark, with a new perspective.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, she was back, this time with a pie picked up from Safeway. The lights were on again, but when she stepped out of the car, she saw the blinds ripple again and the house go dark.

  “I’ve got pie!” she said, loud enough to be heard through the door. “I’m not the police. I’m not with customs. I’m a doctor. I have some questions about Alexei, and I’m hoping you can help me.”