Death By the Glass #2 (21 page)

The memory of a dream washed over her. It was tantalizingly close. She lay very still, reaching for each image. She was in a Gothic-looking workshop or laboratory, dense with dark vials and menacing, twisting contraptions. Dahlia stood over a cauldron, ripping out her knitting and letting each length of wool drop into the bubbling water. She tossed the ball of yarn and bamboo needles in last. Sunny said, “That won’t help. You’ll ruin it.” Dahlia stirred the pot and said, with almost cheerful nonchalance, “The needles give it soul. Anything will release its soul
in the right conditions.” Sunny lay in bed chasing more of the dream, sensing there was more, but nothing else would come.

Finally she got up and went into the dark living room, where her laptop was set up on a narrow table against the wall. She turned the machine on and headed to the kitchen to put water on for coffee. The clock read just after four. She tried to remember people’s reaction at staff dinner Sunday night when Dahlia mentioned the yew tree. There had been a shifting in seats and the exchange of glances around the table when she fished the needles out of the glass. They’d heard her Tree of Death speech before. Everyone knew the tree was poisonous.

She left the water to boil and returned to the living room, where the blue glow emanating from the computer screen filled the dark room with a futuristic aura. She typed
yew
and
poison
into the search engine, which promptly pulled up thousands of entries. Yew’s toxicity, like hemlock, was apparently notorious. Dozens of web sites described how the yew tree had been worshiped by the Druids and the Celts, especially at winter solstice. There were accounts of assassinations, suicides, and murders going back thousands of years using infusions and extracts of yew. Ancient arrows had been tipped with poisonous extract of yew. Legend warned even of sleeping under a yew tree. Then she read how Roman soldiers had died after drinking wine that had been stored in casks made of yew wood.

The water in the kettle had almost boiled away when she finally went back to the kitchen, and she settled for a strong cup of coffee instead of a whole pot. Palms moist with a mixture of dread and excitement, she went back to the computer. The more scientific of the sites described the effects and attributes of taxine, the poisonous compound in yew, and taxol, the miracle cancer drug recently discovered in the same branches. The
description of poisoning by yew made the room sway, and she had to remind herself to keep breathing as she read. Wrote one researcher, “Yew exerts its toxic action upon the heart. The primary (and often the only) sign of poisoning is sudden death. All parts of the tree are poisonous, particularly the needles.” According to the same site, death could occur within a few minutes or a few hours later, depending on the dose. If the dose was high enough, the heart simply stopped.

She typed up her thoughts and printed them out, then waited while the computer ran through its signing-off ritual. Her toes felt icy on the wood floor. She shivered, noticing for the first time her bare arms and legs.

The sun was just beginning to light the eastern horizon as she pulled up in front of the St. Helena Police Station. To the west, the last of the stars persisted in a cobalt blue sky. A layer of frost silvered the sidewalk. Inside the station, a monastic hush pervaded the dimly lit receiving room. Sunny waited for the clerk to turn her attention to her. Behind the clerk, a dispatcher reported a dog without a collar on Spring Street. Sunny stated her business and learned that neither Sergeant Harvey nor Officer Dervich was currently on duty, but Sergeant Harvey would be arriving shortly. Sunny placed an envelope on the counter.

“Could you give this to Sergeant Harvey when he arrives?”

“I’ll see that he receives it,” said the woman, turning back to her computer.

“It’s important.”

“I understand.”

“What time did you say he’ll be in?”

“Some time this morning.”

Outside, the birds had started to welcome the day. Sunny glanced at her watch. Bismark’s wouldn’t be open for another twenty minutes. It was tempting to wait. The cozy atmosphere of the café was addicting, and she could use the comfort of its scarred wooden tables, the morning paper, the aloof camaraderie of the espresso jockeys, and the predictably salty and chewy bagel with cream cheese and tomato. But there would be no relaxing until this business with Nathan Osborne was resolved, and she was going to see it resolved. She cast a last longing look up the street and got in the truck.

The kitchen at Wildside was icy and dark when she arrived, but there was plenty to do and the ovens would heat the place up in no time. She thought with relief of having to prepare the chickpea purée that she’d added to the menu last week, served with rosemary olive oil and goat cheese crostini. It would be a fine way to kill time until she could talk with Steve.

She’d only just changed into her work clothes when Steve Harvey rang the mobile line.

“What’s this rant you left me, McCoskey?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’ve gone off your cracker. Let me be more specific. On page three of five, paragraph three, you reference the witches of
Macbeth
. Shakespeare, I believe. And I quote, ‘Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’ Sunny, have you lost your mind?”

“That’s just historical background material, establishing how widely known the poisonous qualities of the yew tree are. That’s what the witches say as they toss sprigs of yew into the pot with the eye of newt. Yew is highly toxic.”

“I see.”

“Didn’t you read the important part? How a good dose of yew causes a sudden heart attack, often with no other signs or symptoms? It’s a powerful cardiac depressant. Steve, there’s a yew tree right in the backyard at Vinifera and plenty of people on staff knew about its poisonous properties. Dahlia even mentioned it the night I was there. You don’t have to eat very much of the stuff, and if you made some kind of extract, which is not very difficult, you’d need even less. You could figure out how to do it from a book or online, or you could pay somebody to do it for you. Since the poison takes effect within a few minutes and Osborne had just ingested a glass of wine when he died—the source of which is coincidentally very much in question—my guess is you’re going to find a great big dose of taxine in that glass. That’s the toxic element in yew. Taxine A and B. You guys keep that sort of thing, right?”

“You mean the wine left in the glass.”

“Yeah.”

She heard the creak of him leaning back in his chair. A telltale thump indicated he’d put his feet up on the desk. “Well, as I stated before, in a case like this, we don’t necessarily treat the area as a crime scene, since no crime is known to have been committed. When it’s fairly clear that the victim has succumbed to natural causes with no signs of injury or foul play apparent, it wouldn’t be automatic protocol to collect extensive material evidence from the scene of death.”

Steve sometimes had a way of sounding like a legal document spoken in triplicate with footnotes. She stepped up the volume on the mobile and held it out from her ear, hoping to minimize the radiation.

“So you didn’t keep a sample,” she said.

“In this particular situation, we did not have a verified medical history of heart disease. There were no witnesses, and we also had several elements present that might have suggested a more involved scenario.”

“So you did keep a sample.”

“I believe Officer Dervich thought it prudent to collect samples of the wine on the floor and in the glass, on the off chance they might prove useful.”

“That’s great. How soon do you think you can find out?”

“We’ve got two big problems. One is access. Assuming you’re right, how do you suppose they got the yew into the wine? Second is logic. Assuming you’re right, why wouldn’t the perpetrator remove the evidence?”

“I cover that. Page four, I think. All you’d have to do is inject the extract through the foil and cork. And the perp was befuddled after they failed to remove the evidence without messing up the scene. They panicked and got out of there fast. Besides, with what looks like a natural death, they wouldn’t need to worry too much about leaving the juice on the scene.”

“Sunny, this is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been meaning to talk with you about. I believe we’ve talked about it before, but I find myself forced to remind you that it is illegal to practice criminal investigation in California without a license. It is also stupid. You already found out the hard way once. It can land you in serious trouble.”

“I’m not investigating anything. I’m just a concerned friend trying to help the local authorities.”

“Right now I’m also a concerned friend. I’m concerned that you are far too involved in something that is none of your business.”

“But doesn’t finding out what happened matter?”

“It does. I’d simply like you to observe the appropriate division of labor. You run Wildside, I’ll handle the police work.”

“Fine. I’m done. How long is it going to take?”

“This is the situation. I’m going to go out on a limb to check this out for you. Frankly, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell there’s taxine in that wine. But if it will get you off my back, I’m thrilled to do it. As luck would have it, there’s an officer driving up to Sacramento later today to testify at the capitol and he can drop off the sample. I had to pull in a few favors up there to get them to stop what they’re doing and find a way to identify taxine. Luckily I have a buddy in forensic toxicology who said he’d take a look.”

“You mean you already arranged to have the wine tested? You’re great, Steve. But why did you give me such a hard time just now? Never mind. Thanks.”

“The St. Helena Police Department thanks you for your interest and diligence. You have officially done your duty as a concerned citizen, and now I would like to request that this be our last conversation on the matter.”

“This is the last you’ll hear of it from me. Except, will you let me know the outcome?”

He sighed and she heard the shuffling of papers on the other end of the line. “I’ll have Officer Dervich call as soon as we know.”

The certainty of the results
was a given in Sunny’s mind. The toxicology, the opportunity, and the logic fit perfectly. The wine would test positive for taxine. The difficulty now was establishing who did it.

Sunny pulled a lump of pizza dough from the batch she was making and smelled it, then added two more large pinches of kosher salt. She attempted to keep her mind on her work, but her thoughts returned again and again to the facts, or the need to connect them. There was a thread called Marceline running from Nathan’s fatal glass of wine to Remy, unfortunately to Andre Morales, and to Dahlia. There was one more person who might be able to shed more light on these people.

“When do you think you’ll hear?” asked Rivka, breaking into Sunny’s thoughts.

“I don’t know.”

“What if it’s positive?”

“I’ll leave it to Steve and I can get back to work. I want to tackle all those projects we talked about, and put together a bunch of menus for special Tuesday lunches. I thought about Monty’s idea of offering a faster, cheaper prix fixe option every day, but that’s not what Wildside is about. I want people who
come here to do something they don’t normally do. I like that it takes a couple of hours to eat. I don’t want to change that. But I do want to make it possible for people who only have an hour for lunch to come here. I’m thinking Tuesdays. On Tuesday, you’re not in Pays Basque or Perugia or Haute Provence. You’re in Milan or Paris or London and you’ve got an hour to eat a nice, hot bistro lunch and get back to work.”

“Power Tuesday,” said Rivka.

“That’s getting there,” said Sunny.

“Upwardly Mobile Tuesdays.”

“Maybe it should be Monday.”

The two of them worked in silence. Rivka put the lid on a pot of braised greens. Over the white noise of kitchen appliances, soft piano cords announced the imminent arrival of a Puccini aria.

Sunny was restless, but she couldn’t possibly get away until the last of the butternut squash ravioli were made. They took more time than most of the other entrées and she couldn’t leave Rivka with that kind of challenge. She needed to leave soon, though. She was cutting it close. Andre seemed to come in around noon. The later it was in the day, the more likely he was to be at work, and she didn’t want to risk running into him with no good excuse for being at his restaurant.

“You’re intense this morning,” said Rivka, watching her.

“I need to get everything done. I have an appointment at eleven, but I’ll be back before twelve, I promise.”

“Oh no. I thought you were satisfied now that Steve Harvey is testing your theory. Don’t tell me you’re going to go stir up more trouble.”

“Not trouble. Answers.”

Years of practice paid off at times like this. Her hands glided from task to task, and she moved with such speed and focused
attention that the clock on the wall seemed frozen. By ten minutes to eleven, the day’s preparations had advanced far enough that she felt comfortable turning the kitchen over to Rivka for the last half hour before they opened. Rivka gave her an imploring look as she opened the door and stepped outside.