Bitter Finish - Linda Barnes by Linda Barnes

Bitter Finish - Linda Barnes by Linda Barnes

Author:Linda Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub


14

A shower, a shave, a change of clothes—those were minimal requirements before the eight o'clock tasting. A couple hours sleep wouldn't hurt.

Spraggue stomped the brakes as a grape-loaded gondola pulled out of a driveway fifty yards ahead, resigned himself to a 25 mph creep behind the vehicle, and, for the first time in days, really took note of his surroundings.

The valley bustled with its annual September fever. Mechanical harvesters rumbled across a vineyard to his left; the chatter of a picking crew competed to his right. The musty grape-smell was everywhere, overwhelming. Spraggue rolled down his window, drank it in.

With crush in full swing, getting that cellar book out of Howard's hands might be trickier than Kate suspected.

Ask Howard, she'd said. Ask Howard about sulfur dioxide. Why? Damn it, there was something he should know, something he should recall about sulfur dioxide.

Industrial accident . . . Enright would follow that trail straight out of the county if he could. Spraggue wondered how political Enright's decision was. Had he powwowed with the elusive Sheriff Hughes, decided that one unsolved murder was more than sufficient for the sheriff s current term of office? That a crazed double-murderer was unthinkable? Industrial accident . . .

What the hell was SO2 used for? Spraggue's mind veered back to long-ago chemistry classes. Making sulfuric acid. Bleaching paper? It might have something to do with refrigeration ....

But the smell, dammit, that sharp, biting stink. SO2 wasn't any carbon monoxide insinuating itself into the bloodstream, lulling the victim to final dreamless sleep. Anyone breathing sulfur dioxide would know immediately, flee—unless . . .

Unconscious. Locked in. God, what an ugly, horrible, burning death.

Spraggue felt pain in his chest and realized he was holding his breath. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead into his left eye. He rolled up the window, flipped on the noisy air conditioner.

Industrial accident. And some foreman discovered the dead man, drove the corpse to the valley, dumped it in a convenient car trunk after stoving in the skull. Why? To prevent determining the cause of death? Garbage. The man's trachea and lungs would yield more than sufficient evidence. To prevent identification, then. If he could just find out who Mr. X was ....

He turned into the narrow driveway by the house, drove the twisting half-mile to the winery. He parked the station wagon far up, on the right-most verge of the gravel lot, so the gondolas would have easy access to the weight scales.

Just finding Howard might be tough work. The yard teemed with workers. The whine of a gondola inching up the steep driveway drowned out all but shouted words. One load of grapes had already been dumped into the stainless-steel hopper. The helical screw conveyor revolved slowly, bringing the blackish-purple bunches up to the crusher-stemmer. The smell was incredibly intense, a fact seemingly appreciated by the swarms of vinegar flies and yellow jackets. The crusher-stemmer whirred, churning tons of pulped fruit, its paddles slapping the grapes and skins through holes in the rotating drum, freeing the juice from the berries, leaving the stems behind.



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