Free Dying on the Vine by Aaron Elkins Page B

killed her and not the other way around? You said a minute ago that there were a lot of them.”
    “Well, two of them, anyway,” Rocco said in a choked, constricted voice while he pulled in his first lungful of smoke. He held it there a moment with his eyes closed and then let it out in a long
hoosh
. “The other thing was the way their bodies were lying—hers right up against this big rock and his up against hers, which means she would have had to come down first, so how could
she
have killed
him
?”
    “Well, what about this?” John asked as they began walking again. “Someone else killed them both and tried to make it look like a murder-suicide. You know, rearranged the bodies and all.”
    Rocco took two meditative drags. “Look, John, anything’s possible, but there’s just nothing, nothing at all, that points in that direction.” And then, in a muttered afterthought, “Until today, anyway.”
    John shrugged. “Okay.” He didn’t think the idea held water either.
    “You didn’t come up with any other suspects?” Gideon asked. “At all?”
    Rocco bristled. “What do you mean, ‘at all?’ Like we didn’t do a thorough enough investigation or something?” But on reconsidering his words he cooled down. “Well, we didn’t, that’s true. We didn’t do a whole lot of searching. I mean, sure, we interviewed his family, the people who knew him best, and we looked into things, but it was all so obvious. . . . Hell, it
seemed
obvious. . . . The facts spoke for themselves, you know? He killed her and then he killed himself. Why would we go hunting for other suspects?”
    “Yes, I can see that it would have seemed like a waste of money and manpower.”
    “Anyway, no, there weren’t any other viable suspects. Oh, wait, there was one other thing: we found the gun. It came down the cliff with him, and it was his, all right. A wartime Beretta. Had it for forever.”
    “Any prints?” John said, then jerked his head. “No, what am I talking about? There wouldn’t be, not after all that time out in the weather.”
    “As a matter of fact there were. It wound up caught in the opening of his jacket, sort of wedged into his armpit. And it was a good leather jacket, so it was pretty well protected from the elements. So, yeah, we did manage to lift a couple of partials off it.”
    “And?”
    “And they’re his. I mean, I wouldn’t want to go to court on it because, as I said, they’re only partials. Besides, his prints aren’t on file anywhere. But we found prints that matched what we had on the gun all over his things at home . . . hundreds of them. I don’t know, maybe thousands. On his shoes, his eating utensils, his toothpaste tube, everything. We took prints of his family and the winery staff, and there’s definitely no match there. Our tech guy says the odds are ninety-nine out of a hundred they’re his.”
    “You’re right,” John said. “Good odds, but they wouldn’t cut it in a courtroom.”
    “There’s something that seems a little hinky to me here, Rocco,” Gideon said. “Am I the only one who thinks it a little, shall we say, unusual that the gun stayed with him all the way down and never bounced away anywhere where you couldn’t find it? That lady we looked at today sure did some bouncing, so I presume he did too, since he took the same route.”
    “Well—” Rocco began.
    “And then the gun just happened to end up in the very best possible place to preserve any fingerprints that happened to be on it?”
    Rocco shrugged. “Sometimes we get lucky. It happens.”
    “It happens,” John agreed.
    “Yeah,” said Gideon, but he wasn’t satisfied.
    “Rocco, you got a motive?” John asked.
    “Uh-huh. He thought she was having an affair. This was what you might call an ultratraditional kind of guy, a real dinosaur, and that was all the motive he would’ve needed: she deserved to die, and he couldn’t stand to live. And fossils like him, they don’t do