Killer Summer by Ridley Pearson Read Free Book Online Page B

dinner thing tonight to do with the wine auction, and obviously I’m not invited since the drinking age is twenty-one, which might lead you to ask why he brought me on this trip in the first place since I can’t do anything he has planned. And the obvious answer would be how stupid it was for him to bring me along and how I did not want to come, but, then again, he is seriously stupid, or can be, and therefore here I am.”
    “I’m not supposed to interact with guests.” He just threw it out there.
    “Yeah? So?” she asked.
    His eyes ticked furiously back and forth. He was cute enough but immature.
    “So, I’ll meet you just after eight in the medical-building parking lot. It’s over by the inn. You know where that is?”
    “I’ll find it.”
    “If you’re not there by quarter after, I’m gone,” he said.
    I doubt that, she thought. “Oh, I’ll be there,” she said, smiling.

14

    B ut if it’s vinegar,” Fiona said, standing on a small stepladder in the glare of fluorescent lights, her camera mounted on a tripod and aimed straight down, “then why would anyone bid anything for it?”
    Walt had set her up in the Command Center, a room laid out like a college lecture hall that sat fifty. There were half a dozen flat screens suspended from the ceiling and an electronic white board. He carefully rotated the first of the three bottles exactly as Remy had instructed. It, along with the others, remained cradled in gray foam. The initials, etched into the glass below the label, came into view:
    J.A.

    “John Adams,” he said. “ The John Adams. The wine was a gift to Adams from Thomas Jefferson upon Adams’s return from Holland, where he’d just secured the financing necessary to save the republic. These bottles celebrate the United States before it existed.”
    “But a million dollars!?”
    “It’s an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar reserve. They could go far higher than a million,” Walt said. “They sell as a single lot. Remy says his experts claim the wine is still drinkable, but to get that price it doesn’t have to be.”
    “You can’t be serious.”
    “There’s ego involved. Since it benefits the center, a nonprofit, the bids get ginned up to astronomical prices. It’s all about who gets what, who can spend what, not drinkability.”
    “The more I learn about this place, the less I understand.”
    “It’s a pissing contest . . . Pretty easy to understand.”
    Walt continued rotating the bottles. She fired off shots.
    “Does he get them back after this?”
    “No. It’s on us to protect and transport them. A motorcade for a couple of wine bottles. All because they’re evidence in a homicide.”
    “You think other sheriffs deal with this sort of thing?”
    It was a question his father might have asked. He reacted defensively, muscles tensing, a spike of heat up his spine, then calmed himself down and said, “It is what it is. We have to assume they may try for them again. Wine is like fine art: there’s always a black market willing to pay. These people were obviously well organized, well informed. I’m assuming they have a backup plan.”
    She climbed down the stepladder. He liked the way she moved, enjoyed watching her . . . hadn’t realized how much he enjoyed it, in fact, until that moment.
    They were interrupted by a deputy trying to suppress his contagious excitement.
    “Sheriff, we’ve got something.”
     
     
     
    T hirty minutes later, Walt was riding shotgun in the Hummer, a vehicle anonymously donated to the Sheriff’s Office by a Hollywood star. Ostentatious and unnecessary most of the time, the Hummer rode high and carried four easily. Its roof rack, light bar, and the whoop-whoop of its siren cleared the three northbound lanes like a snowplow in winter.
    “It’s possible,” he told the other three, all of whom were decked out in SWAT gear, “that the suspects may possess paralyzing gas. They’re to be considered armed and dangerous. I saw two men out Democrat