Joe woke to morning light slashing across his face, the sheets twisted around his ankles, and the rumbling of Dave’s chair rolling across the rough-hewn boards on the floor below. He remembered now, the late-night call from Dave, the drive to Napa.
He heard Dave talking with Jeff the Chef clearly enough to get the gist. They were insulting each other like old friends, going over the menu and getting ready for the day.
Joe had a job, too. Or call it a moral obligation. All he had to do was solve the mystery of Ray Channing’s suspicious death without having a badge or any authority at all.
Joe no longer believed that Dave had killed his father.
But he had become convinced that some of Dr. Perkins’s hospitalized patients had been murdered. That wasn’t enough to bring in the law. There had to be a viable suspect. And there had to be evidence.
Currently, he didn’t even have a theory.
Joe kicked off the sheets and thought about the people he had met over the last couple of weeks: Dr. Perkins himself; Ted Scislowski, who’d slept in the bed next to Ray, who’d been wheeled out of the room, his face covered with a sheet.
He thought about meetings with three of the people who’d lost loved ones—all Perkins’s patients—his interviews with night-shift nurses and four people who worked in the winery itself, including the elderly handyman who brought his dogs with him in his truck when he mowed the lawn.
Motive, anyone?
One person rose to the surface of Joe’s mind. Not as a suspect but because he felt he hadn’t given the man enough attention, hadn’t asked enough questions.
Johann Archer, the writer who’d lost his thirty-eight-year-old fiancée, Tansy Mallory, and had written a touching tribute to her in Great Grapes. Tansy had been a fit long-distance runner and had shown no signs of cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Daniel Perkins had been the attending doctor the day Tansy Mallory was brought in to Saint John’s small ER. The surgeon had treated her for heat exhaustion and ordered her kept overnight for observation. Typical recovery time should have been a matter of hours, but Tansy had died overnight.
What distinguished Tansy from the other two cases was her survivor’s take on her death. Archer believed Perkins had killed Tansy through either neglect or intent. Joe hadn’t bought the murder plot at that time, but now? Dave Channing and Johann Archer had never met, but Dave had gotten Johann’s contact info, and Joe had left him a voice mail last week.
Joe sat up, retrieved his phone from the floor near the bed, and tapped in Archer’s number.
“Yes?”
“Johann. It’s Joe Molinari. I called you last week? Sorry to call again so early. Do you have time to see me? I’d like to get your thoughts about suspicious deaths at Saint John’s Hospital.”
“Good. I’m having plenty of them,” said Archer. “Something—or rather someone—occurred to me, and it might be the guilty party. I need to tell you.
“And I mean you, Joe, specifically.”