“What do you think they’d sell for?” asked Miranda.
“Maybe eighty or ninety dollars a bottle, American.”
“So, a thousand dollars a case. A thousand cases, a million dollars.”
“I would imagine they sold many, many more,” said the young woman with authority. “Thousands upon thousands, in the American market — I think if you check out lading bills for Bonnydoon Winery we’ll find they exported far more than they could produce from a paltry vineyard like this.”
“So why is no one around?” said Miranda.
“I think maybe they’ve had a shake-up in management,” said Morgan.
Michelle, or Elke, as she now chose to be called, walked over and stood near the base of a giant stainless steel vat. She moved a little to one side, as if trying to catch an elusive sound floating in the air. She closed her eyes and opened them several times, then she smiled almost shyly.
“I was right here, I was taped to a chair. Duct tape, I can hear it being stripped from the roll. Nothing over my mouth. My eyes were covered. I didn’t scream. I could hear the steel tank, listen, you can hear the faint pulsing of fermentation, no, not fermentation, this would be the final product ready for bottling. You can hear the air pressure against wine on steel … something, I can hear something.”
Miranda stood close beside her but could distinguish no sound emanating specifically from the stainless steel.
“My name is Elke Sturmberg. I know everything now. I work in New York. I work for an auction house. I know who I am. I know I was here, strapped in a chair. There is a disconnect. I was in Rochester, then Buffalo, then a small plane, then I was here.”
Morgan retrieved a chair from the edge of the scene and set it down beside her. She lowered herself onto the chair with her eyes closed, almost as if she were enacting the role of a clairvoyant. Suddenly she shivered and slumped down in the chair, overwhelmed by her vision.
“What is it?” said Miranda, the sharp rise in her voice betraying her close identification with the woman’s overwhelming anxiety.
Elke Sturmberg reached up without opening her eyes and grasped in the air for Miranda’s hand. She seemed to be jolted from within by a series of graphic revelations.
Gradually, she sat more upright in her chair. They waited. She opened her eyes and began to speak. “There was screaming. At first I thought it was me. I might have screamed too. No, I was silent, trying to block out the sound. It was penetrating, a man screaming. There was a loud crash, like an axe against wood, then the screaming stopped. I think he passed out.”
“And what happened to you?” asked Miranda.
“I waited. I could hear the sounds of a body being dragged.”
“What does that sound like?” asked Morgan.
“It just does,” she responded. “Breathing, voices, scraping, rustling —”
“Could you make out what they were saying?”
“Not much English. It was another language. Not European, nothing distinguishable.”
“And then?” said Miranda.
Elke seemed to retreat inside herself, then flinched. “A shot, there was a gunshot.”
“A pistol? The gun you were carrying?” Morgan asked.
“No, a rifle.”
“Not a shotgun?” He wondered if she knew the difference.
“A rifle,” she said.
“Okay. Then what?”
“A man rubbed his hands all over me.”
“How do you know it was a man?”
“You know! He touched my breasts, ran his hand up my skirt —”
“Did you scream?”
“No, I was frozen. Then he stopped.”
“Did he go inside your clothes?” Miranda asked. Swabs had been taken in the psychiatric ward, but there was no evidence of sexual assault.
“No. It wasn’t — it was, there was something cold about the way he touched me, clinical. Like he was doing a gender inventory. He was detached.”
“Did you think you were going to be killed?” Morgan asked.
“No, I did not think I would die. I thought they would hurt me. I wanted to die.”
“But instead, what happened?” said Morgan.
The young woman got up and walked around.
“We’d better call in the Provincial Police,” said Miranda. “And Spivak, he’ll need to know what we’re up to.”
“What are we up to?” said Morgan.
“Good point,” she said.
“No point,” said Morgan. “No point in bringing in reinforcements just yet.”
Miranda realized, as far as Morgan was concerned, that this was their case.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a villain copping a dispassionate feel, we’ve got a chopped-off hand, that was the sound of the axe. We’ve got a rifle shot. What about the pistol? You said it had been fired recently. Maybe not here.”
“Sounds of a body being manhandled before the gunshot, not after — is that right, Elke?”
“Yes, it echoed but it was like a dull ‘thunk.’ I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.”
“And did you hear clambering?” Morgan asked.
“What?”
“On metal?”
All three of them looked at the steep steps leading up the side of the largest stainless steel tank, following them to the top with their eyes, where they could see a closed hatch.
Miranda was first to start up. The other two stood back. When she got to the top, she leaned down and tried the hatch.
“It’ll open,” she announced.
She hesitated, then swung the hatch up and reeled back from the fumes bursting free. She squatted down to look in, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. The tank was half full. She reached around and found a measuring rod, then extended it down until it touched a shadow. As she prodded, the rod broke in half, and the shadow shifted. A dead man’s face drifted slowly into the disk of light below her.
She gazed at the corpse turning in the murky darkness, struggling to make sense of her conflicting responses. The stump of a wrist protruding from a shirtsleeve confirmed this was the man with the gold ring. Her assailant, he was dead. But she did not feel vindication or relief, only anger and a vague sense of renewed violation.
“What you got up there?” called Morgan.
There was a large bullet hole in the dead man’s forehead. A humane gesture? she wondered. To stop him from drowning? Not through the chest, he would have sunk. Was it to relieve the pain of his amputation? Or was it someone guaranteeing his death? The work of a professional? An expression of contempt? Redundancy born of indifference or hatred?
She stood up and took a deep breath. “I think we’d better call in the appropriate authorities,” she said.
“My phone’s in the car,” said Morgan as she rejoined them on the ground.
“Mine too,” she said, “in my purse.”
The three of them walked to the door and as Miranda stepped into the sunlight a rifle shot rang out and the wood in the doorframe exploded into splinters at the level