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Beroni.”
    “Only that he was found this morning in the gazebo. That someone killed him. Do you have any idea who did it?”
    “We have some leads. It was done sniper style, at night, by somebody who was a good shot with a high-powered rifle.” Sunny thought of Wade, standing up behind the house with his .22 Hornet, using the night-vision scope to sight the glowing yellow golf ball lying in the grass across the ravine. Steve Harvey leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, provoking a vision of him on the toilet. Sunny stifled a giggle. “Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable on the couch?” she said.
    He sat upright again. “No, thanks. Was there a particular reason for your visit to Wade Skord this morning?”
    “He called and asked me to come over. Your visit and Jack’s death had his nerves all jangled. He just needed to see a friend.”
    Steve nodded. “Did he tell you what he did last night?”
    “Yes, but I don’t feel right about speaking for him. I’ll tell you what I know directly. Wade can speak for himself.”
    Steve shot her a hard look and said, “Okay. We can always talk about that stuff later.” He looked around the room as though it were evidence. His eyes settled on the blue and green mask. Fringe made from strands of painted plastic wrap hung down half a foot from the bottom. He said, “Tell me about your day yesterday. You worked here at the restaurant?”
    “Yes.”
    “Until what time?”
    “Around five.”
    “And then what did you do?”
    “I drove over to Wade’s place to have a look at the harvest. It’s getting close up there. He’ll bring them in any day now.”
    “What’s he got up there, Zinfandel?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So the two of you were out in the vineyard tasting grapes? What time was that?”
    “Probably around five-thirty. We tasted fruit and took samples from each segment. He has the vineyard divided up into eight segments.”
    “Then what did you do?”
    “We went back to the house to drop off the samples and measure the Brix. Wade opened a bottle of ‘96 late harvest and we took glasses of it with us on a walk up the ridge to the top of the vineyard to watch the sunset. That was about six-thirty. After that I was tired, so I went home. I left around seven or seven-fifteen.”
    “Where did you go from there?”
    “I stopped at the supermarket. The Safeway over by the railroad tracks. Then home. I was home all night after that.”
    “Did you talk to anyone? Did anybody call or come over?”
    “Monty Lenstrom called, I think around nine o’clock. And I sent some e-mail around ten.”
    Steve took a tiny notepad out of his breast pocket and used the little pencil that came with it to write something down, probably Monty Lenstrom’s name. As a wine merchant who sold expensive, hard-to-find wines, Lenstrom circulated to all the better parties and seemed to know everybody up valley, at least well enough to call them customers. Steve probably knew who he was. He sat quietly for a moment with the pencil hovering above the pad. Sunny studied his short, neatly combed blond hair, thinking that it was probably stiff to the touch. He’d have to use a strong gel to freeze it into place and have it last all day like that. His fingernails were perfectly clean, too. She glanced at her own hands, which were comparatively barbaric, her nails shaggy along the edges, the strong tendons too pronounced, theskin scarred from things sharp and hot in the kitchen. Catelina Alvarez, the old Portuguese woman who lived across the street the whole time Sunny was growing up, had small, gnarled hands that could take a live chicken strutting around the backyard and turn it into neat pieces arranged in a baking dish in minutes. Sunny had seen her reach into a pot of boiling water, pull out a potato, and start peeling it with the steam coming off in plumes. Sunny’s hands were already more like Catelina’s than like Monty Lenstrom’s girlfriend’s, who had petal-soft