A death technician prepared the body for shipment to Napa County. He swabbed it down with a long-lasting disinfectant. The intestines and other soft abdominal organs were pulled out of the dead man through the only available natural body opening and discarded. Because of the stab wounds and the autopsy that had taken place the previous night, there was not much unclotted blood or other fluids remaining in the corpse, but those last few dollops were forced out nonetheless; embalming fluid took their place.
The technician whistled a Donny and Marie Osmond hit while he labored over the dead man.
The Angels’ Hill Mortuary was not responsible for any cosmetic work on the corpse. That would be handled by the mortician in St. Helena. The Angels’ Hill technician merely tucked the sightless eyes shut forever and sewed up the lips with a series of tight interior stitches which froze the wide mouth in a vague eternal smile. It was a neat job: none of the sutures would be visible to the mourners–if there were any mourners.
Next, the deceased was wrapped in a opaque white shroud and put into a cheap aluminum coffin that met minimum construction and seal standards set by the state for the conveyance of a dead body by any and all means of public transportation. In St. Helena, it would be transferred to a more impressive casket, one that would be chosen by the family or friends of the loved one.
At 4:00 Friday afternoon, the body was taken to the Los Angeles International Airport and put into the cargo hold of a California Airways propjet destined for Monterey, Santa Rosa, and Sacramento. It would be taken off the plane at the second stop.
At 6:30 Friday evening, in Santa Rosa, there was no one from Bruno Frye’s family at the small airport. He had no relatives. He was the last of his line. His grandfather had brought only one child into the world, a lovely daughter named Katherine, and she had produced no children at all. Bruno was adopted. He never had married.
Three people waited on the Tarmac behind the small terminal, and two of them were from the Forever View Funeral Home. Mr. Avril Thomas Tannerton was the owner of Forever View, which served St. Helena and the surrounding communities in that part of the Napa Valley. He was forty-three, good-looking, slightly pudgy but not fat, with lots of reddish-blond hair, a scattering of freckles, lively eyes, and an easy warm smile that he had difficulty suppressing. He had come to Santa Rosa with his twenty-four-year-old assistant, Gary Olmstead, a slightly-built man who seldom talked more than the dead with whom he worked. Tannerton made you think of a choirboy, a veneer of genuine piety over a core of good-natured mischievousness; but Olmstead had a long, mournful, ascetic face perfectly suited to his profession.
The third man was Joshua Rhinehart, Bruno Frye’s local attorney and executor of the Frye estate. He was sixty-one years old, and he had the looks that would have contributed to a successful career as a diplomat or politician. His hair was thick and white, swept back from brow and temples, not chalk-white, not yellow-white, but a lustrous silver-white. A broad forehead. A long proud nose. A strong jaw and chin. His coffee-brown eyes were quick and clear.
The body of Bruno Frye was transferred from the aircraft to the hearse, then driven back to St. Helena. Joshua Rhinehart followed in his own car.
Neither business nor personal obligations had required Joshua to make this trip to Santa Rosa with Avril Tannerton. Over the years, he had done quite a lot of work for Shade Tree Vineyards, the company that had been wholly owned by the Frye family for three generations, but he had long ago ceased to need the income from that account, and in fact it had become considerably more trouble than it was worth. He continued to handle the Frye family’s affairs largely because he still remembered the time, thirty-five years ago, when he had been struggling to build a practice in rural Napa County and had been helped immeasurably by Katherine Frye’s decision to give him all the family’s legal business. Yesterday, when he heard that Bruno was dead, he hadn’t grieved at all. Neither Katherine nor her adopted son had ever inspired affection, and they most certainly had not encouraged the special emotional ties of friendship. Joshua accompanied Avril Tannerton to the Santa Rosa airport only because he wanted to be in a position to manage the arrival of the corpse in case any reporters showed up and tried to turn the event into a circus. Although Bruno had been an unstable man, a very sick man, perhaps even a profoundly evil man, Joshua was determined that the funeral would be carried out with dignity. He felt he owed the dead man that much. Besides, for most of his life, Joshua was a stalwart supporter and promoter of the Napa Valley, championing both its quality of life and its magnificent wine, and he did not want to see the fabric of the entire community stained by the criminal acts of one man.