“Richard told Antonio he had until Monday,” I said.
The ugly truth was that Antonio had a very strong motive to kill Richard. The Antonio I knew would never resort to violence. And yet, as his financial difficulties worsened, his personality had changed. Desperation made people do the most unimaginable things.
Yet I didn’t believe that Antonio could turn into a cold-blooded killer.
Unless.
What if Aunt Pearl’s attraction spell had unintended effects? Passion could drive a person to do both good and evil. Antonio was passionate about the winery, and it was about to be wrenched away from him.
Maybe Aunt Pearl had cast a second spell that I knew nothing about. More importantly, if a spell had tampered with the biometric lock, how could I prove that? I needed to somehow find that out.
I turned to Antonio. “If no one but you can unlock the wine cellar, what’s your backup plan if something happened to you? Surely you have one. How else would anyone get in the wine cellar?”
Antonio tilted his head toward Trina. “I had planned to add Trina, but then Jose objected and I hadn’t come up with a plan ‘B’ yet. I know how stupid that sounds now.” Antonio leaned against the building looking exhausted. He slid down into a sitting position with his legs outstretched.
Tyler didn’t say anything.
He didn’t have to because we were all thinking the same thing.
Antonio broke the silence. “You think I’m the only one who could do this?”
“I didn’t say you did or you didn’t, Antonio,” Tyler said. “I’m just gathering the facts right now. But based on everything you’ve said so far, nobody else can get inside the wine cellar except you. Which means no one could have let Richard in but you.”
“I swear I didn’t kill Richard. There has to be a logical explanation.”
Antonio had made no mention of the second set of footprints. Either he hadn’t noticed them or didn’t think we had.
“Is there an override where you don’t need to use your fingerprint?” I asked. “What if there’s a power failure? Does the lock have a memory or does it just reset itself?”
Antonio shook his head. “The settings stay in memory. SecureTech told me there’s a backup battery so nothing gets erased.”
Tyler turned to me. “Cen, can you find out more about the lock’s manufacturer?”
I nodded. The Shady Creek medical examiner and crime scene techs provided support for major crimes in Westwick Corners, but the overall investigation was still Tyler’s, unless he formally requested help. He would only do that as a last resort.
Tyler asked, “Did you touch anything inside the winery or wine cellar?”
Antonio nodded. “The light switch at the top of the cellar stairs, the stair railing, uh…lots of stuff. Everything happened so fast.”
I pointed to his bloodstained hands and shirt. “The blood…”
“I fell on top of him. It must have happened when I got myself off him and stood back up. Also, I had just cut my arms on the gate’s barbed wire…”
Tyler scratched his chin. “Hmm…so the blood was fairly fresh. He wasn’t there long.”
“Do you have any surveillance cameras, Antonio?” Tyler asked.
“We have a camera set up outside the building but it stopped working about a year ago. I never got around to replacing it.”
“Convenient for the killer,” Tyler said.
It struck me as odd that Antonio didn’t replace the camera before installing an expensive state-of-the-art lock. But maybe a lock was a better deterrent since cameras only showed crimes after they occurred and didn’t actually prevent unauthorized entry. Even so, the wine cellar security system seemed like overkill. Theft was rare in our small town. Or maybe not so rare, considering that Aunt Pearl had taken Antonio’s wine. She had also managed to get past the locked gate, but that was easy enough for a witch. It didn’t make her a killer, but it did mean that she had almost the same access as Antonio. Did she have a magical way of breaching the supposedly failsafe SecureTech lock too? If that was the case, it could explain wine cellar access by someone other than Antonio.
That thought had me both relieved and scared to death.
Chapter 13
It was early afternoon by the time Tyler dropped me off at the office so I could follow up on Antonio’s SecureTech lock. Tyler headed to the Harcourt ranch to notify Richard’s wife, Valerie. I didn’t envy him one bit.
My legs felt heavy as I trudged up the stairs to my office. This weekend hadn’t turned out anything like I had expected. A fun day at the wine festival followed by Tyler’s promised surprise had now morphed into a murder investigation and uncomfortable inconsistencies about our neighbor and friend. How had so much gone wrong so quickly?
The Shady Creek police had transported Antonio to their headquarters an hour away, where samples of his DNA and fingerprints would be taken and his clothes, shoes, skin, and fingernails would be examined for forensic evidence. Depending on the initial results, Antonio would be either released or held until Tyler’s arrival there.
Having the Shady Creek police complete the forensics exam was a practical necessity since Tyler was the only law enforcement officer in town and he couldn’t be in multiple places at once. Antonio and Tyler also knew each other fairly well. Since they were friends, it made sense for a third party to collect the forensic evidence. It ensured impartiality and eliminated any accusations of bias. Those elements would be important whether or not Antonio was charged and tried for Richard’s murder.
I powered up my computer and searched for any information on SecureTech. I soon found their website which had photos of different locks. Some were key locks; others were combination locks; and others, like Antonio’s, had biometric security features. I recognized Antonio’s biometric lock immediately but found very few details in the description, other
