Read Online Murder Alfresco #3 by Nadia Gordon - Free Book Online Page A

from his mama’s milk.” He held up a forkful admiringly before devouring it.
    Sunny put down her silver. She was divided between feeling ridiculous for her new squeamishness about meat and feeling genuinely squeamish about meat. This was not a sensitivity shecould afford to develop. She took a sip of the potent red wine and loaded her plate with a second helping of mixed greens.
    “I’ve been thinking about your murder,” said Monty. “In my opinion, it had to be somebody who worked at the winery.”
    “It’s not
my
murder,” said Sunny.
    “Otherwise there’s no way they would have risked being seen going there.”
    “Anybody would have looked suspicious at two-thirty in the morning hanging a dead girl from a tree,” said Sunny, “whether they worked there or not. It’s not exactly part of the typical job description. But you can’t see much from the road anyway. It wouldn’t take much research to observe that you would have darkness and solitude at that hour. And it was a particularly dark night. There was just a sliver of a moon.”
    “You think they planned it that way?” said Rivka.
    “I think everything about this crime was planned,” said Sunny. She drank more wine. The astringent alcohol seemed to purify her mouth of the unpleasant topic. She didn’t want to talk about the girl, especially not in the middle of dinner, and yet, it was the topic on everyone’s mind, even her own.
    “So what’s the connection to the winery, then?” said Monty.
    “It has to be sexual,” said Sunny. “The message being sent was blatantly erotic. I would guess some kind of love triangle, but I can’t think of how that would lead to the girl’s death.”
    “I’ve met the winemaker at Vedana several times,” said Monty. “A guy named Ové Obermeier. A clansman of Skord’s, I think.”
    “Ové sounds Norwegian to me, not Swedish,” said Wade.
    “Whatever. Viking type. Gives off a player vibe. Probably he was having an affair with the girl.”
    “Why would that make somebody want to kill her?” asked Rivka.
    “Maybe his wife killed her,” said Wade.
    “I don’t think he’s married,” said Monty.
    “You guys are missing the point. This was not a crime of passion. Nobody got angry, killed a girl on impulse, panicked, and decided to dump her at Vedana. This was a planned, calculated murder done by somebody with a serious screw loose. There may not even be a motive. What I saw was an act of evil.” Sunny picked up a spear of asparagus and ate it. “I just wonder if they can catch him.”
    “What do they have to go on?” asked Rivka.
    “I don’t know. They paid a lot of attention to the road, trying to get tracks from the truck I saw. Other than that, I don’t know what they found. Steve isn’t talking. The ground under the tree was moist but grassy, so I doubt they found much in the way of footprints, and rope and trees aren’t known for holding fingerprints. The most likely place for physical evidence will be the girl herself, I suppose, and I won’t know what they find there until they print it in the paper.”
    “They’ll get him,” said Wade. “A guy like that wants to get caught. Somebody who sets up a scene like he set up is looking for attention.”
    “I agree,” said Sunny. “And following that line of thinking, a guy like that will kill again, looking for another chance to make headlines. That’s what has me worried.” She bit the head off another spear of asparagus. “All I needed to do was look at the license plate and they’d have him by now.”
    “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” said Wade. “You had no reason to believe you’d need to identify that truck later.”
    After dinner, Rivka rifled through the CDs for Lester Young and the Oscar Peterson Trio. “This is a job for the President.”
    Sunny took down a bottle of twenty-three-year-old Bas-Armagnac and four snifters from a cabinet in the living room.They settled into the couch and comfortable chairs and