Crush - Alan Jacobson [12]
Direct, Vail thought. Good. I like direct. But I’m not going to play that hand. She got her first look at him in the light. His face was leathery and lined from too many years spent in the sun. From policework? Possibly, but not likely. “Your name,” she said. “Brix. We passed a restaurant a few miles back called Brix. You own it?”
“Brix is a wine term. A measure of sugar content in the grape.”
Vail stifled a laugh. “So your ancestors named themselves after sweet grapes?”
Brix fixed his jaw. “Name used to be Broxton. My great grandparents, Abner and Bella, lived in the old Chianti area of Tuscany and grew grapes for a living. Bella thought they were working too hard for too little and heard about a wine region in California. She wanted to move, but Abner resisted. She finally convinced him to go, and they sold their land and came here and bought a vineyard. They planted Sangiovese and Chianti vines they’d brought from Italy, and hit it big. Bella disappeared five years later. Never found her. Abner changed the family name from Broxton to Brix to honor Bella, since she was the reason they moved to Napa. And she was a very sweet woman.”
“So I guess you don’t own that restaurant,” Robby said.
“No, I don’t own that restaurant.”
Vail tilted her head. “That’s a very . . . sweet story.”
“Yeah, I think so. Now, you didn’t come over here to ask me about my name. What is it you really want?”
“Answers,” Vail said. “About the murder.”
“Why did I know I hadn’t seen the last of you two?” He turned and pushed through the large light-ash doors a dozen feet to his right. They exited the copper-topped building onto a wide footbridge that spanned the man-made pond, then stopped a few feet away, where the sun was breaking through the clouds.
Brix folded his thick, hairy arms across his chest. “Talk.”
“Your reaction to what you saw in the cave—”
“You mean the dead body?”
“The dead body,” Vail said.
“And just what reaction would you be talking about?”
I hate playing games. “You tell me. Seemed to affect you.”
“Yeah, it affected me. It was brutal. It just got to me.”
Vail said, “Bullshit. You’re a homicide detective. You’ve seen bad shit before.” Vail decided to venture forward with what she really wanted to know. “I had a hard time sleeping last night. I kept replaying what happened in the cave, and I kept coming back to your body language, the look on your face when you saw the woman, the severed breasts—”
“I’m sorry my reaction bothered you. I hope you’ll sleep better tonight. Now, is that it?”
“I’m curious—did you find the breasts at the crime scene?”
“No.”
“Do you know what the killer did with them—and why? Because I do.”
Brix’s facial muscles tightened. “We’ll figure it out, thank you very much.”
“I sure hope so, because knowing what that means is important. Here’s another important question: Have there been any other murders like this one?”
Brix snorted. “If there were, you’d know about it. A murder in the Napa Valley—with the woman’s breasts cut off? Jesus H., it’d make national news.”
Vail’s eyebrows rose. “National news, really?”
“You know anything about this region, Agent Vail?”
“About as much as the average FBI profiler from Virginia visiting the area for the first time.”
“Yeah,” Brix said with a chuckle. “I’ll translate that into ‘not much.’ So here’s the deal. Napa’s economy is a huge revenue generator for the state. Heck, even for the country as a whole. Aside from Disneyland and Disneyworld, Napa is the third most visited place in the country. See where I’m going with this? If anything happened to jeopardize that kind of tourism, that kind of money—you tell me: Would there be a lot of media coverage? Would all the stops be pulled out—at the state or federal level to investigate and figure out what the hell’s going on?”
Vail chewed on that one.
Robby said, “I see your point.”
“That’s assuming,” Vail said, “that the good people of Napa want the media crawling around here. The national headlines. Would put a huge dent in the local trade to