A Good Day for Chardonnay by Darynda Jones
6
Did you accidentally go shopping on an empty stomach
and are now the proud owner of aisle 4?
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—SIGN AT DEL SOL FITNESS & MORE
The muscular purr of a big engine block hummed through the frigid night. Soothed her when she just wanted to sleep. She was warm at last. Safe at last.
“Stay awake, Shine,” he said, his voice deep and rich and youthful. She knew who it belonged to but couldn’t quite place its owner.
Everything inside her hurt. Everything around her spun. And her stomach wanted nothing more than to empty its contents onto the floorboard.
She felt a firm hand wrap around to the back of her skull, lifting her slightly. Her lips parted as the hard plastic of a water bottle pressed against them. Cool water filled her burning mouth. She tried to swallow but it scorched her throat. She ended up choking and spitting it all back up. Her stomach contracted painfully, doubling her over. When she vomited, a metallic taste flooded her mouth. She felt bad but the guy’s hoodie was ruined anyway. It was covered in blood. She just didn’t know whose.
“You okay, boss?”
Sun jerked awake and tried to open her eyes, but a white so bright it blinded her convinced her to keep them shut. At least until she figured out where she was.
She felt a tug on a wayward strand of hair.
After a moment, she opened her eyes just enough to check the clock on her phone. 7:58.
In the morning?
She bolted upright and squinted through the pain. The landscape, while beautiful and similar to parts of New Mexico, was definitely not.
“We aren’t in Kansas anymore,” the man beside her said.
“I thought we were taking two-hour shifts?” She stifled a yawn, then winced at a jolt of pain in her neck.
“We are,” Quincy said. “I just took several in a row. You have some drool.” He pointed to the side of his mouth.
Sun wiped at her mouth and glowered at him. “Why didn’t you wake me? I need to call the prison to give them a heads-up.”
“Anita did that for us.”
Anita Escobar was their administrative assistant who moonlighted as dispatch and, honestly, the woman worked more than Sun did.
“She’s already in?”
“Daylight savings time.” He tapped his watch. “She got to the station an hour ago. Also, you snore.”
Her clock had changed from Mountain to Pacific while she slept. Arizona was one of the few states that didn’t honor daylight savings time. A perk that Sun had prayed for since childhood. She hated spring forward with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.
“Keith Seabright?” she asked, inquiring about their stabbing victim.
“Out of surgery. Critical but stable.”
“Oh, thank goodness. I really don’t want any murders on my watch.”
“But multiple stabbings are okay?”
“The jury’s still out.”
“You know it’ll happen, Sunbeam.”
“Bite your tongue. Levi?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. The guy’s a ghost. And nothing on our assailants, either.”
“True. They won’t find Levi until he wants to be found, but I was really hoping to get a hit on that Tundra. No dead bodies along the interstate?”
“Have you been cleaning out your closet again?”
She grinned just as her stomach growled. Taking his reply as a no, she switched her focus and said one word. “Sustenance.”
“I’m not sure what this town has to offer, but I figured breakfast would be in order. We can’t get into the prison until after the nine o’clock headcount anyway.”
“An actual sit-down breakfast? Hell yes. Or I have a can of tuna in my bag.”
“Oh, yeah.” He thought back. “From that time with the thing and the man.”
“Exactly.”
“Sweet, but I don’t think we’ll need it. Anita found us a café close to the prison.”
“Is there anything that woman can’t do?”
“Not that I know of. Maybe pee standing up. Or hot yoga on account of her vertigo. You can tell me all about that dream you had while we eat.”
Startled, she looked over at him. The dream came back to her in a rush. So vivid and gut-wrenching and surreal. She’d had similar dreams before, but this time it rang truer, as though more a memory than a figment of her brain’s hypervigilant imagination.
There was something about the voice. And the hands. If only she could see the man’s face. Either way, she wasn’t sure she wanted to share just yet. Maybe it was only a dream even though it felt real. Dreams did that. They all felt real at the time. But like all of the flashbacks from that period of her life, it was grainy and distorted and more emotion than substance.
Maybe she could use it as a bargaining tool. “I’ll tell you everything about my dream, Chief Deputy Cooper. Right after you tell me what you’re hiding.”
He nodded. “Breakfast in absolute silence, it is.”
Damn. So close.
She brought out her phone to check up on her little pasta primavera, which was a nickname Auri hated. Not that her loathing stopped Sun from using it. Auri would need something to tell her therapist.
After texting the same word seven times and discovering autocorrect changed it to something different each time only after she hit SEND—seriously, how does one go from pumpernickel to colonoscopy—and having her daughter type back things like, Mom, stop, and This is getting painful, and, Mom, really, stop, Sun gave up and called her.
“What the heck, Mom?” she said.
“Sorry. Freaking autocorrect.”
“It’s not autocorrect when you can’t spell.”
“Pumpernickel is a hard word. Now knock-knock.”
“I already know this one.”
“Not this one. It’s new. And you’re on speakerphone. We have to entertain Quincy.”
“Hi, Quincy!” she shouted.
“Speaker. Phone. You don’t have to yell.”
“Sorry!” she yelled to spite her.
“Hey, bean sprout,” he said with a chuckle.
Sun only bristled a little that he got a hi and she got a what the heck. “Knock-knock.”
Auri exhaled. It was a long, drawn-out ode to every tragedy Shakespeare ever wrote. “Who’s there?”
“Pumpernickel.”
“Pumpernickel who?”
“If I had a pumpernickel for every time I found a boy in your room—”
“Oh, my God, Mom! Did you tell Quincy?”
“Tell me what?” Quincy asked, the smirk on his face manifesting in his voice.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Bean Sprout Vicram,” he teased, “did you have a boy in your room?”
“No.”
Sun made a strangling sound, trying to suppress a giggle. “I’m going to assume your grandparents made sure Cruz left you with your virtue intact.”
“Mother.”
Sun’s brows shot up at the formality their relationship had sunk to, and she had a full-on scuffle with the giggle fighting tooth and nail to escape. The kid had a boy in her room. She had to know there would be consequences.
“My virtue is right where you left it.”
“In the laundry room?”
“Are you guys there yet?” she asked, wisely changing the subject.
“Just about. We’re going to grab some breakfast, then hit the prison. I can get some numbers in case you want to invite any more boys into your room once they get paroled.”
“Mother,” she said again. “I’m going to start recording our conversations so I’ll have something to present to the judge during my emaciation hearing.”
When Quincy tossed her a questioning look, she covered the phone and whispered, “Emancipation.”
“Ah.”
“She’s been threatening it for years, but I figure as long as she can’t pronounce it, no judge in the state will know what she’s asking for.”
He nodded and tapped his temple.
“Stellar idea, honey,” she said into the phone.
“Did you find him?” Auri asked, doing a one-eighty.
Because Auri’s tone held a sadness that hadn’t been there a moment earlier, Sun knew exactly who she was talking about. “Not yet, sweetheart. I don’t think Levi will be found until Levi wants to be found.”
“What if he’s really hurt? He could be lying dead somewhere.”
Sun had worried about that very thing. “We’ll find him, bug. Maybe you should ask Jimmy if they’ve heard anything.” A long shot since she’d just spoken to Jimmy, but Levi could’ve gone home last night.
“Okay. I’ll text him now.”
“Let me know. Are you helping your grandparents with the attic?”
“About to. Grandma made pancakes and Sybil is coming over.”
“Awesome. You guys have fun. And keep me updated.”
“Be careful, Mom. You know—”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “I know what they do to cops in jail. You tell me in minute detail every time I threaten to kill your grandparents. Love your face.”
“Love yours, too. Bye, Quincy!”
“Bye, sprout.” He chuckled softly when Sun hung up. “Emaciation? That’s hilarious.”
“Which is why I never correct her when she mispronounces anything. One, it’s adorable. And, two, my need to be entertained supersedes her need to cinch a full ride to Harvard.”
“I don’t know, Sunbeam. I think the kid has a shot at the Ivies.”
“She does, doesn’t she?”
“If she doesn’t get pregnant first.”
Sun slammed her lids shut. “That child’s virtue had better be right where I left it when I get back.”
“Good luck with that,” he said, his laugh a little too jovial as he turned into the parking lot of the Florence Café.
Breakfast turned out to be a pancake lover’s dream. Unfortunately, Sun had decided to cut back on the carbs, so she had bacon and eggs while living vicariously through her BFF, trying not to drool as he cut into a huge stack of fluffy goodness and refused to answer any of her questions on the subject of whatever he was hiding from her. It didn’t happen often, so the curiosity was eating her alive.
“Oh,” he said, steering the conversation away from the topic at hand again, “Anita wants us to stop by the St. Anthony’s Monastery and pick her up some olive oil.”
“Odd request.” She checked the seven texts Carver, her blind date, had sent her. She had no idea the guy was going to be so obnoxious. She would have to let him down easy, but not over text. She’d meet him for coffee when things calmed down. After firing off a quick text telling him she was out of town, then texting Levi for the 275th time, she asked, “Olive oil? Is that a secret code for something?”
“She swears the monastery has some of the best cold-pressed olive oil in the world.”
“Oh. That settles it then. I’ve always wanted to see St. Anthony’s anyway.”
Florence, Arizona, a pretty town sprinkled with palm trees and saguaro cacti, sat surrounded by miles of desert, a gorgeous vineyard, and a world-famous olive orchard. It boasted a population of over 26,000, but about 17,000 of those were residents of the massive Arizona State Prison Complex.
An hour after arriving in the town, Sun and Quincy drove through the first set of gates the prison had to offer. The guard told them where to go and roughly how to get there, but once inside, his directions seemed convoluted. The place was a maze.
“It’s like a small town in here,” Quincy said, leading Sun this direction and that with an index finger. She decided to rename him the Pathfinder. Mostly because he got them totally lost.
“I think we’re lost,” she said. “We may have to make a run for it.”
“If we do, I’m using you for cover.” He pointed to an armed guard in a watchtower looking down at them, sunglasses in place, rifle at the ready.
“At least we’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
“Well, a blaze at least. I thought New Mexico was hot. This is like the seventh level of hell.”
New Mexico was hot, they just happened to live in one of the cooler areas. Which, while still hot, was not Southern Arizona hot.
They retraced their steps and followed the guard’s directions again. This time they ended up at the level three facility. Precisely where they needed to be. Concrete gray buildings formed the prison units with huge, hangarlike structures surrounding a massive yard. Chain-link and razor wire completed the décor, adding an industrial feel to the already military-like establishment.
The inmates were starting to file out, so the count was over.
“I like it,” Quincy said, scanning the area. “It’s homey.”
Sun threw the cruiser into park. “I agree. A few curtains, a good desk lamp, I’d live here.”
“You seem nervous,” he said.
She lifted a shoulder. “More curious than nervous. But, yeah, nervous, too.”
“Because of the venue?”
“Nah. I’m just anxious about what Wynn knows. Or, more likely, doesn’t know.”
They got out and walked up to the speaker, their IDs at the ready.
“I’ve never met Wynn Ravinder,” he said.
“You and I were in middle school when he went inside the first time.”
“What’s he in for?”
With all the sleeping on the road and lack of small talk over breakfast, they hadn’t really discussed the particulars of Wynn or their expectations.
“Murder,” she said. “Though he swears he didn’t do it.”
“Don’t they all. Still, he’s in level three. Must be a model prisoner.”
“Let’s hope so. If he’s anything like his brother Clay, we are packing up and heading home. I’m not putting up with any shit.”
“Agreed.”
She pushed the button and began the process of entry anew, the sweltering heat and her anxiety making her light-headed.
Half an hour later, they’d secured their sidearms and were shown to a small interview room. Gray with a steel door and a metal table bolted to the floor, the barren space offered nothing a prisoner could use as a makeshift weapon. A guard stood in the open doorway while they waited.
“What do you know about this guy?” he asked them.
The kid looked too young to be a prison guard. Too chubby and fresh-faced, but he was built like a sumo wrestler, minus a hundred pounds or so. Sun had little doubt he knew how to handle himself.
“Ravinder?” she asked. “Just that he’s served eleven years of a life sentence without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder, and yet he’s managed to earn his way into a level-three facility.” Most inmates with more than thirty years left on their sentence were in a maximum facility. Level four or five, depending on the prison.
“Exactly.” The guard nodded while checking his phone. “Be careful.” He looked up at them. “To the untrained eye, Ravinder’s a model prisoner. Well-liked, even by the guards. He’s also an electrician, which helped get him bumped to level three. But just so you know, he’s the shot caller.”
“A shot caller?” she asked, surprised.
Judging by Quincy’s expression, he concurred. Inmates doing time for murder who’d earned the title of shot caller didn’t often fall into the model-prisoner category.
“Let me reiterate,” the guard said. “He’s the shot caller.”
Sun had done her research, but criminal records rarely listed little things like the fact that a prisoner might be a shot caller. Or, apparently, the shot caller. She’d need to see his prison jacket for information like that.
The fact that Wynn held such a lofty position meant the other inmates either respected or feared him. Most likely both. That kind of role was rarely earned through niceties and good manners. Wynn Ravinder could be ruthlessly violent when he needed to be and probably had a cruel streak.
Having never been to prison, Sun couldn’t blame the guy for doing anything to survive in such a hostile environment, but rising to the position of a shot caller in a prison of over 17,000 inmates took a lot more than just surviving.
She leaned closer to Quince and spoke quietly. “He’s starting to look more and more like his brother Clay than I’d hoped.”
“You think this is bullshit?”
“It’s starting to look that way, but first, what does he want? And second, if he’s dying, why aren’t we in the medical ward?”
“Well, fuck,” Quincy whispered. “He played us.”
“Maybe. Let’s see what he has to say and try to get a peek at his jacket.”
“Until then …” Quincy looked at the guard. “I want a stab vest for the sheriff.”
“What?” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous, Quince. It’s not like we’re going out into the yard.”
He bent closer. “Sunny, maybe he’s called you here to find out what you know about your abduction. Not the other way around. Do you know how easily a shot caller can get to you in here? He’ll have hundreds below him. Possibly thousands if he truly is top dog. All waiting to do his bidding just to get noticed.”
She looked at the guard and held up two fingers as though ordering drinks at a pub. “We’ll take two.”
Ten minutes after they’d strapped into the hard body armor, a single guard led a handcuffed man into the room. If he were truly violent, he would have had two escorts. The fact that he only had one eased her mind, though just barely. Still, when they started to uncuff him, Sun held up her hand. “He’s fine just like he is.”
The guard looked at Wynn as though gauging his reaction. When Wynn only smiled at Sun, the guard nodded and left the room. That exchange depleted what little confidence she had that they’d make it out alive.
Wynn Ravinder, a startlingly handsome muddy blond in his late forties, watched her like a hawk watches its prey. He was tall and slim, rock hard, and covered in tattoos from the looks of his forearms and neck, though thankfully she saw no Aryan tattoos.
He was attractive in the same way Levi was, as though chiseled by the gods, yet they looked nothing alike. Besides the lean, solid bodies and razor-sharp jawlines, the resemblance ended there. Since Levi was most likely not blood related to Wynn—rumors abounded that Levi’s mother had strayed and that his real father was part Native American—their lack of resemblance was no surprise.
But like Levi, Wynn looked as though he would be equally as comfortable in Armani gray as prison orange. His striking features and obsidian-sharp gaze answered her questions as to how he became such an elevated shot caller.
Unfazed about the cuffs, he lifted the pant legs of his orange uniform and folded himself into the chair across from them. Sun took out a pen and notepad and waited. After studying her a solid minute, he eased back in the chair and eyed her from underneath his lashes.
“You came,” he said at last.
“You called,” she countered. “I doubt we have much time, what with you dying and all.”
“You worried about me?” He gestured toward the rigid stab vests they both wore, which only looked like Kevlar. They were a hard, almost impenetrable plastic. Kind of like wearing a cutting board.
“They insisted we wear these,” she lied.
He nodded. “They do that. You look like your mother.”
Sun felt Quincy tense.
“Mr. Ravinder,” she said, ready to get out of there, “you said you had information about my abduction.”
“I do.”
“You also said you were dying, yet you look like the healthiest person in this place. Guards included.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I work out.”
“You aren’t dying.”
“No.”
“Okay, let’s go,” she said to Quince, even though the disappointment crushed her.
She started to rise, when Wynn stayed her with, “But I do have information.”
She leveled a dubious look on him.
“I didn’t lie about that.”
After weighing the pros and cons, she sat back down and gave him a slow once-over to establish some semblance of dominance. She doubted it worked. “What information?”
“First, you should probably know, I killed my brother Kubrick fifteen years ago.”
Auri sat in the same spot for two hours, scouring the newspaper clippings her grandparents had saved about a series of old missing persons cases in Del Sol. They had clippings on several other cases as well, but this one spoke to her.
Multiple people went missing over the span of a decade in the late fifties and early sixties, and the cases were never solved. A steelworker. A businessman. A young woman whose relations seemed more worried about a necklace she was wearing at the time of her disappearance than the girl herself. And more. Then one day the disappearances suddenly stopped.
“Did you see this?” Sybil asked, leaning toward her with a police report.
Sybil St. Aubin had been Auri’s best friend since moving to Del Sol. Maybe that was why the missing persons cases spoke to her so loudly. Just over four months ago, Sybil was one of them. She’d gone missing and her captor held her for days, waiting until her birthday to kill her. He’d wanted revenge on Sybil’s mother, which was just messed up.
Thankfully, Auri’s mom was on the case. As well as the best tracker in the state, Levi Ravinder. They found Sybil but lost her again when the kidnapper tried a second time. If not for Zee and her remarkable sharpshooting abilities, both Sybil and Auri’s mom would be dead.
The thought crushed Auri. Her mom was one thing. She didn’t know if she would survive losing her. But the thought of losing Sybil was almost as bad. She glanced up at her friend and marveled once again at their similarities. Red hair and, well, red hair. That was pretty much their only similarity other than their interests and hobbies and general outlook on life. And boys. Mostly boys.
Sybil’s hair was a light auburn while Auri’s was an embarrassingly bright copper. People stopped her in the street and asked if they could touch it. Not creepy at all. And Sybil had a light sprinkling of freckles that Auri envied. They were so cute. Auri had a darker complexion and no freckles to speak of. Also, no round-rimmed glasses like the ones that made Sybil look book-nerd adorable.
When she’d met Sybil at the lake on New Year’s Eve, Auri’s first thought was that she looked like an American Girl doll she’d had when she was little. The one her grandparents bought her because it had red hair, and who looked more like a schoolmarm than a little girl.
Her opinion had yet to change.
They sat cross-legged on the attic floor.
“They may have caught the killer, after all,” Sybil said, referencing the police report, “but it never went to trial, so they never knew for certain.”
Auri took the report but held it so Sybil could read with her. A musty police blotter with faded ink on yellowed paper described an incident at the county jail that happened on August 12, 1965. “Oh, my God,” Auri said. “They killed him.”
“Yes.” Sybil flipped to the second page. “A drifter named Hercules Holmes. He escaped and disappeared, but they found his body a couple of weeks later. Someone killed him before he could go to trial.”
“That’s awful,” Auri said.
Her grandmother weaved toward them through boxes and furniture. “The Holmes case?”
They looked up and nodded.
“What do you know about it, Grandma?”
She sat in a dusty rocking chair and put her elbows on her knees. “Just what’s in that box, I’m afraid.”
Auri looked at the piles of clippings around her. “Why do you have this stuff anyway?”
“History,” her grandfather said, panting from the climb up. He’d brought strawberry sparkling water and handed them each an ice-cold can.
“Thanks, Grandpa.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sybil said.
“Sybil, if you don’t start calling me Cyrus, I’m kicking you out. For good this time.”
She grinned and popped the top on her can. “Okay.”
They had a fan going, but it was getting hot fast. Auri’s grandfather fanned himself and took in all the work they had yet to do. “We’re going to have to pick this up when it cools down in the evening.”
“Oh,” Auri said, jumping up. “Well, I’m okay. Do you mind if I keep looking?” She didn’t miss the knowing glances they exchanged.
“Of course not, peanut.”
“You saved all of this, all of these cases, for history?” Auri asked.
“Sure.” He sat on an old trunk next to his wife. “We’re actually working on opening a Del Sol history museum, and those old newspapers are gold.”
“But these are just clippings from old, unsolved cases. Except maybe the missing persons cases. They apparently caught that guy.”
“Do you believe they did?” her grandmother asked.
Auri and Sybil exchanged glances, too, testing each other’s reaction. “I guess,” Auri ventured. “I mean, it says that they caught this drifter named Hercules Holmes with one of the missing persons’ wallets.”
“So that makes him guilty?” her grandmother asked. “That makes him unworthy of a fair trial?”
“No,” she said adamantly. “Never.” She knew enough about the law from watching her mother scour over cases for years to know things were rarely that simple. She put the report down and looked at them. “You think he was innocent.”
Auri’s grandmother held up her palms. “I’m just asking what you think.”
She pressed her mouth together and thought about it. “The way I see it, he was either guilty and so he escaped or innocent and someone helped him escape.”
Cyrus narrowed his lashes at her, and if Auri didn’t know better, she’d say there was a sparkle of pride in his eyes. “What do you mean?” he asked, coaxing her to go deeper. He did that a lot.
“Well, he magically escapes a heavily guarded jail cell and then ends up dead two weeks later? According to the report”—she bent and read aloud—“he died from a single gunshot wound to the head shortly after escaping.” She looked back at him. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t somehow manage to get himself killed, but right after his magical escape? It seems more than a little suspect to me.”
Both he and her grandmother nodded in agreement.
“And he was a drifter passing through town,” she added. “These cases went back years. Where was he then?”
“Go on,” her grandmother encouraged.
“And what about the boardinghouse?”
“What boardinghouse?” Sybil asked, combing through the clippings for more.
Auri handed her a clipping from just before the drifter was killed. “According to the sheriff’s investigation, at least five of the missing victims were travelers who stayed at the same boardinghouse.” She rummaged around until she found another report. “The Fairborn House.” She stopped and thought about it. “The Fairborn House? As in Mrs. Fairborn? That sweet old lady who confesses to all of the crimes in Del Sol?”
“Really?” Sybil asked her.
“Yep. She’s been doing it for years. Every time a crime happens in Del Sol, she confesses to it. She even confessed to Kubrick Ravinder’s murder.”
The girl’s mouth formed a perfect O. “Did she do it?”
Auri giggled. “Of course not, silly. Can you find anything else on the boardinghouse?”
“I’ll try.”
By the time they looked up again an hour later, her grandparents were gone.
“Sybil, I may have spoken too soon. Maybe she did kill Kubrick after all. I think Mrs. Fairborn was a serial killer before they even called them serial killers.”
“Wow,” Sybil said, just as intrigued. “Wait, what did they call serial killers before that?”
Auri shrugged. “Maybe pancake killers? Bacon-and-egg killers?”
They devolved into a fit of giggles and only sobered when a thought hit Auri like a line drive at a major-league game. “I think we need to investigate,” she said.
“Really? Can we do that?”
“Sure. My mom does it every day. How hard can it be?”
