“No mistake, Jose. The hotel manager recognized you. Said you’re a regular there. He did say that this time you weren’t driving your Cadillac. He saw you pull up in a cube van—your delivery truck, I’m guessing. We’ll confirm that on the surveillance video. The manager said he saw you leave in a white pickup truck later on, same make and model as Antonio’s. The truck rental place also confirmed that someone using your drivers’ license rented a truck on Friday and returned it this afternoon. I think you were trying to impersonate your brother.”
“That’s ridiculous! Why would I do that?” Jose stared at him.
“Why rent a pickup truck when you already had the cube van and your Cadillac at your disposal? Unless you wanted to drive around here undetected. Unless you wanted to lay down some incriminating evidence against your brother.”
Jose reddened. “That’s a lie! Antonio killed Richard and you know it. Antonio even threatened Richard on Friday. Right in front of me and other witnesses, Sheriff. Ask Cendrine, Pearl, or Trina. They all heard Antonio say he was going to kill Richard.”
“An unfortunate choice of words,” Tyler said. “But Antonio’s threats in the heat of an argument don’t prove murder. Your actions are what I need an explanation for.”
“I’m not answering these baseless accusations. You have no proof.”
Tyler took a few steps closer, blocking Jose’s exit. “I’ve got plenty of proof.”
Jose’s face flushed. “Maybe I should be calling myself a lawyer.”
“Probably not a bad idea.” The muscles in Tyler’s jaw tensed.
As Antonio listened to Jose’s accusation, his eyes grew wide. “Have you ever seen me violent?”
Trina squeezed Antonio’s arm and pulled herself closer to him. “You’re the kindest man I know. You wouldn’t hurt a soul.”
Jose swore under his breath. “Why would I kill Richard? I was working with Richard, trying to reason with Antonio to sell our money-losing winery. I was helping Richard avoid a messy foreclosure while at the same time getting a fair price for our winery.”
“Liar,” Antonio said. “You wanted to sell to Desiree, our competition. Everything’s clear to me now. Mom and Dad would be so disappointed in you. Selling out to someone who bottles cheap wine blends and passes them off as estate-grown. Then killing someone and pinning it on me? That’s a new low.”
“It’s impossible for me to have killed Richard,” Jose protested. “The wine cellar has a biometric lock. Only Antonio’s fingerprint can unlock it.”
“That’s a tough one,” Tyler said. “It’s true that it’s very hard, if not impossible, to fool a fingerprint scanner. Fingerprints are unique – the odds are 1 in 64 billion chance of two people having identical fingerprints. That makes it extremely unlikely, especially because there are only 8 billion people in the world. Even though you and Antonio are brothers, your fingerprints will be different from each other. It’s hard to fake a fingerprint. Aside from the fingerprint grooves visible to the naked eye, there are other ridges and depressions that are only visible under a microscope. The manufacturers have taken all that into account in the security of their design.”
“Then why all this?” Jose threw his hands up in the air.
Tyler’s expression was blank. “Because there is another way to bypass the biometric scanner. A person with administrative access can disable the scanner completely by resetting it back to the factory default setting.”
Jose frowned. “How would I do that? I don’t know the first thing about that security lock. I’ve never even touched it. Antonio didn’t even consult me before getting it installed, though it cost us a small fortune.”
“Everything you need to know is right here.” I held up the SecureTech instruction manual, the one that came with my magically manifested lock, the exact same model as the one on the Lombard wine cellar.
Antonio cried, “Hey, you found my instruction manual. Where was it?”
I said, “It’s not really important at the moment, Antonio.”
Tyler turned to Jose. “Antonio didn’t misplace the SecureTech instruction manual. You found the manual inside the house on the kitchen table and read it. You studied the set-up. Antonio had left the instruction manual out for you to read so you would understand how the lock worked, and how to set up your own code and fingerprint. Then you saw that Antonio had written his security code inside the manual. That’s when you realized that you could frame Antonio for killing Richard. Richard’s body in the wine cellar provided an open-and-shut case because nobody other than Antonio could possibly unlock the wine cellar door. At least that’s what you wanted everyone to think. That’s why you refused to get your own code and didn’t want Trina to have one either. There had to be only one person with access to the locked wine cellar: your brother, Antonio.”
“That’s a lie!” Jose crossed his arms.
“You waited until a day when Antonio was distracted with something outside when the wine cellar was open. That’s when you followed the instructions in the manual to reset the biometric fingerprint reader on the door back to the default factory setting, which is no fingerprint at all.
“According to the owner’s manual, all you needed was for the administrative user, Antonio, to open the door to start the process. Once opened, you entered his security code to disable the fingerprint scan option. Once the fingerprint scanner was disabled, one only needed to use the five-digit security code to unlock the door. The biometric security feature was no longer in place. It couldn’t be activated until the user inserted the special tool and recorded and stored his or her fingerprint again.
“As far as Antonio knew, the lock was functioning normally. He entered his security code and then scanned his fingerprint on the reader. He didn’t know that you had deactivated the fingerprint scanner, so he continued to scan his fingerprint after entering in his five-digit code. He complained about the light no longer flashing green when he scanned his
