Dark Horse (3 page)

The ten-dollar bill the girl had given me was on the small writing desk beside my laptop. Inside the folded bill was Molly’s own little homemade calling card: her name, address, and a striped cat on a mailing label; the label adhered to a little rectangle of blue poster board. She had printed her phone number neatly at the bottom of the card.

Don Jade had been sleeping with one of his hired girls when the horse Titan had died half a decade past. I wondered if that was a habit: fucking grooms. He wouldn’t have been the first trainer with that hobby. I thought about the way Molly had avoided my eyes when she’d told me her sister didn’t have a boyfriend.

I walked away from the desk feeling anxious and upset. I wished I’d never gone to Dr. Dean. I wished I had never learned what I’d learned about Don Jade. My life was enough of a mess without looking for trouble. My life was enough of a mess without the intrusion of Molly Seabright and her family problems. I was supposed to be sorting out the tangle of my own life, answering inner questions, finding myself—or facing the fact there was nothing worth finding.

If I couldn’t find myself, how was I supposed to find someone else? I didn’t want to fall down this rabbit hole. My involvement with horses was supposed to be my salvation. I didn’t want it to have anything to do with people like Don Jade, people who would have a horse killed by electrocution, like Stellar, or by shoving Ping-Pong balls up its nostrils, cutting off its air supply, like Warren Calvin’s Titan.

That was how suffocation was accomplished: Ping-Pong balls in the nostrils. My chest tightened at the dark mental image of the animal panicking, throwing itself into the walls of its stall as it desperately tried to escape its fate. I could see the eyes rolling in terror, hear the grunt as it flung itself backward and hit a wall. I could hear the animal scrambling, the terrible sound of a foreleg snapping. The nightmare seemed so real, the sounds blaring inside my mind. Nausea and weakness washed through me. My throat felt closed. I wanted to choke.

I went outside onto the little patio, sweating, trembling. I thought I might vomit. I wondered what it said about me that in all the time I’d been a detective, I’d never gotten sick at anything I’d seen one human being do to another, but the idea of cruelty to an animal undid me.

The evening air was fresh and cool, and slowly cleared the horrible images from my head.

Sean had company. I could see them in the dining room, talking, laughing. Chandelier light spilled through the tall casement windows to be reflected in the dark water of the pool. I had been invited to dinner, but turned him down flat, still furious with him for the
Sidelines
fiasco. He was probably, even as I stood there, telling his pals about the private investigator who lived in his backyard. Fucking dilettante, using me to amuse his Palm Beach pals. Never giving a thought to the fact that he was playing with my life.

Never mind he had saved it first.

I didn’t want the reminder. I didn’t want to think of Molly Seabright or her sister. This place was supposed to be my sanctuary, but I felt as if half a dozen unseen hands were grabbing at me, plucking at my clothes, pinching me. I tried to walk away from them, going across the damp lawn to the barn.

Sean’s barn had been designed by the same architect who designed the main house and the guest house. Moorish arches created galleries down the sides. The roof was green tile, the ceiling teak. The light fixtures hanging down the center aisle had been taken out of an art deco–era hotel in Miami. Most humans don’t have homes that cost what his stable cost.

It was a lovely space, a place I often came to at night to calm myself. There are few things as quieting and reassuring to me as horses browsing on their evening hay. Their lives are simple. They know they are safe. Their day is over and they trust the sun will rise the next morning.

They trust their keepers absolutely. They are utterly vulnerable.

Oliver abandoned his food and came to put his head out over his stall door to nuzzle my cheek. He caught the collar of my old denim shirt between his teeth and seemed to smile, pleased with his mischief. I hugged his big head and breathed in the scent of him. When I stepped back, extricating my collar, he looked at me with eyes as kind and innocent as a small child’s.

I might have cried had I been physically able to do so. I am not.

I went back to the guest house, glancing in again at Sean’s dinner party as I passed. Everyone looked to be having a grand time, smiling, laughing, bathed in golden light. I wondered what I would see if I were to walk past Molly Seabright’s house. Her mother and stepfather talking around her, preoccupied with the details of their mundane lives; Molly isolated from them by her keen intelligence and her worry for her sister, wondering where to turn next.

When I went inside my house, the message light on my phone was blinking. I hit the button and braced myself to hear Molly’s voice, then felt something like disappointment when my attorney asked me to please return his call sometime this century. Asshole. We’d been waging the battle for my disability pay since I had left the Sheriff’s Office. (Money I didn’t need, but was entitled to because I had been injured on the job. Never mind that it had been my own fault, or that my injuries were insignificant compared to what had happened to Hector Ramirez.) What the hell didn’t he know about the situation after all this time? Why did he think he needed me?

Why would anyone think they needed me?

I went into my bedroom and sat on the bed, opened the drawer of the nightstand. I took out the brown plastic bottle of Vicodin and poured the pills out on the tabletop. I stared at them, counted them one by one, touching each pill. How pathetic that a ritual like this might soothe me, that the idea of a drug overdose—or the thought that I wouldn’t take them that night—would calm me.

Jesus God, who in their right mind would think they needed me?

Disgusted with myself, I dumped the pills back in the bottle, put the bottle back in the drawer. I hated myself for not being what I had always believed myself to be: strong. But then I had long mistaken being spoiled for being strong, being defiant for being independent, being reckless for being brave.

Life’s a bitch when you find out in your thirties that everything you ever believed to be true and admirable about yourself is nothing but a self-serving lie.

I had painted myself into a corner and I didn’t know how to get out of it. I didn’t know if I could reinvent myself. I didn’t think I had the strength or the will to do it. Hiding in my own private purgatory required no strength.

I fully realized how pathetic that was. And I had spent a lot of nights in the past two years wondering if being dead wasn’t preferable to being pathetic. So far I had decided the answer was no. Being alive at least presented the possibility for improvement.

Was Erin Seabright somewhere thinking the same thing? I wondered. Or was it already too late? Or had she found the one circumstance to which death was preferable but not an option?

I had been a cop a long time. I had started my career in a West Palm Beach radio car, patrolling neighborhoods where crime was a common career choice and drugs could be purchased on the street in broad daylight. I had done a stint in Vice, viewing the businesses of prostitution and pornography up close and personal. I had spent years working narcotics for the Sheriff’s Office.

I had a head full of images of the dire consequences of being a young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. South Florida offered a lot of places to get rid of bodies or hide ugly secrets. Wellington was an oasis of civilization, but the land beyond the gated communities was more like the land that time forgot. Swamp and woods. Open, hostile scrubland and sugarcane fields. Dirt roads and rednecks and biker meth labs in trailer houses that should have been left to the rats twenty years past. Canals and drainage ditches full of dirty black water and alligators happy to make a meal of any kind of meat.

Was Erin Seabright out there somewhere waiting for someone to save her? Waiting for me? God help her. I didn’t want to go.

I went into the bathroom and washed my hands and splashed water on my face. Trying to wash away any feelings of obligation. I could feel the water only on the right side of my face. Nerves on the left side had been damaged, leaving me with limited feeling and movement. The plastic surgeons had given me a suitably neutral expression, a job so well done no one suspected anything wrong with me other than a lack of emotion.

The calm, blank expression stared back at me now in the mirror. Another reminder that no aspect of me was whole or normal. And I was supposed to be Erin Seabright’s savior?

I hit the mirror with the heels of my fists, once, then again and again, wishing my image would shatter before my eyes as surely as it had shattered within me two years ago. Another part of me wanted the sharp cut of pain, the cleansing symbolized in shed blood. I wanted to bleed to know I existed. I wanted to vanish to escape the pain. The contradictory forces shoved against one another inside me, crowding my lungs, pushing up against my brain.

I went to the kitchen and stared at the knife block on the counter and my car keys lying beside it.

Life can change in a heartbeat of time, in a hairsbreadth of space. Without our consent. I had already known that to be the truth. In my deepest heart I suppose I knew it to be true in that moment, that night. I preferred to believe I picked up the keys and left the house to escape my own self-torment. That idea allowed me to continue to believe I was selfish.

In truth, the choice I made that night wasn’t safe at all. In truth, I chose to move forward. I tricked myself into choosing life over purgatory.

Before it was all over, I feared I might live to regret it—or die trying.

3

Palm Beach Polo Equestrian Center
is like a small sovereign nation, complete with royalty and guards at the gates. At the front gates. The back gates stood open during the day and could be reached from Sean’s farm by car in five minutes. People from the neighborhood regularly hacked their horses over on show days and saved themselves the cost of stabling—ninety dollars a weekend for a pipe-and-canvas stall in a circus tent with ninety-nine other horses. A guard making night rounds would lock the gate at some point late in the evening. The guard hadn’t made his rounds yet that night.

I drove through the gates, a yellow parking pass stolen from Sean’s Mercedes hanging on my rearview mirror, just in case. I parked in a row of vehicles along a fence opposite the last of the forty big stabling tents on the property.

I drove a sea-green BMW 318i convertible I bought at a sheriff’s auction. The roof sometimes leaked in a hard rain, but it had an interesting option that hadn’t come from the factory in Bavaria: a small, foam-lined metal box hidden in the driver’s door panel, just big enough to hold a good-sized bag of cocaine or a handgun. The Glock nine millimeter I kept there was tucked into the back of my jeans, hidden by my shirttail as I walked away.

On show days the show grounds are as busy and crazy as the streets of Calcutta. Golf carts and small motorcycles race back and forth between the barns and showrings, dodging dogs and trucks and trailers, heavy equipment, Jaguars and Porsches, people on horses and children on ponies, and grooms walking charges done up in immaculate braids and draped in two-hundred-dollar cool-out sheets in the custom colors of their stables. The tents look like refugee camps with portable johns out front, people filling buckets from pump hydrants by the side of the dirt road, and illegal aliens dumping muck buckets into the huge piles of manure that are carted away in dump trucks once a day. People school horses on every available open patch of ground, trainers shouting instructions, encouragement, and insults at their students. Announcements blare over the public address system every few minutes.

At night the place is a different world. Quiet. Almost deserted. The roads are empty. Security guards make the rounds of the barns periodically. A groom or trainer might drop by to perform the ritual night check or to tend an animal with a medical problem. Some stables leave a guard of their own posted in their elaborately decorated tack room. Baby-sitters for horseflesh worth millions.

Bad things can happen under cover of darkness. Rivals can become enemies. Jealousy can become revenge. I once knew a woman who sent a private cop everywhere with her horses after one of her top jumpers was slipped LSD the night before a competition offering fifty thousand dollars in prize money.

I’d made a couple of good busts at this show grounds when I’d worked narcotics. Any kind of drug—human or animal, remedial or recreational—could be had here if one knew whom and how to ask. Because I had once been a part of this world, I was able to blend in. I had been away from it long enough that no one knew me. Yet I could walk the walk and talk the talk. I had to hope Sean’s little joke in
Sidelines
hadn’t taken away my anonymity.

I made the dogleg turns from the back area known euphemistically as “The Meadows,” the tent ghetto where show management always sticks the dressage horses that ship in for only several shows each season. From those back tents it takes twenty minutes to walk to the heart of the show grounds. Earth-moving equipment sat parked at one corner, backed into freshly cleared land amid the scrubby woods. The place was being expanded again.

Lights glowed in the tents. A woman’s melodic laugh floated on the night air. A man’s low chuckle underscored the sound. I could see the pair standing at the end of an aisle in tent nineteen. Elaborate landscaping at the corner of the tent set the stage around a lighted stable sign with one golden word on a field of hunter green:
JADE
.

I walked past. Now that I had found Jade’s stalls, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I turned on the far side of tent eighteen and doubled back around, coming up through the aisles of nineteen until I could hear the voices again.

“Do you hear anything?” The man’s voice. An accent. Maybe Dutch, maybe Flemish.

I stopped breathing.

“Gut sounds,” the woman said. “She’s fine, but we’ll go through the drill with the vet anyway. Can’t be seen looking careless after Stellar.”

The man gave a humorless laugh. “People have made their minds up about that. They believe what they want.”

“The worst,” the woman said. “Jane Lennox called today. She’s thinking of putting Park Lane with another trainer. I talked her out of it.”

“I’m sure you did. You’re very persuasive, Paris.”

“This is America. You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.”

“Innocent always if you’re rich or beautiful or charming.”

“Don is beautiful and charming, and everyone believes he’s guilty.”

“Like O.J. was guilty? He’s playing golf and fucking white women.”

“What a thing to say!”

“It’s true. And Jade has a barn full of horses. Americans . . .” Disdain.

“I’m an American, V.” An edge to the tone. “Do you want to call me stupid?”

“Paris . . .” Smarmy contrition.

“Stupid Americans buy your horses and line your pockets. You should show more respect. Or does that just prove how stupid we are?”

“Paris . . .” Smarmier contrition. “Don’t be angry with me. I don’t want you angry with me.”

“No, you don’t.”

A Jack Russell terrier came sniffing around the corner then and stared at me while he raised his leg and peed on a bale of hay, considering whether or not to blow my cover. The leg went down and the dog went off like a car alarm. I stood where I was.

The woman called out: “Milo! Milo, come here!”

Milo stood his ground. He bounced up and down like a wind-up toy every time he barked.

The woman rounded the corner, looking surprised to see me. She was blond and pretty in dark breeches and a green polo shirt with a couple of gold necklaces showing at the throat. She flashed a thousand-watt toothpaste-ad smile that was nothing more than jaw muscles flexing.

“Sorry. He thinks he’s a Rottweiler,” she said, scooping up the Russell. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t know. I’m looking for someone. I was told she works for Don Jade. Erin Seabright?”

“Erin? What do you want with her?”

“This is kind of awkward,” I said. “I heard she was looking for another job. I have a friend in the market for a groom. You know how it is during the season.”

“Do I ever!” She gave a dramatic, put-upon sigh, rolling the big brown eyes. An actress. “We’re looking too. Erin quit, I’m sad to say.”

“Really? When was that?”

“Sunday. Left us high and dry. Found something more interesting up in Ocala, I guess. Don tried to talk her out of it, but he said her mind was made up. I was sorry to hear it. I liked Erin, but you know how flighty these girls can be.”

“Huh. I’m surprised. The way I understood it, she wanted to stay in the Wellington area. Did she leave an address—to have her paycheck sent?”

“Don paid her before she left. I’m Don’s assistant trainer, by the way. Paris Montgomery.” Keeping the dog tucked against her, she held a hand out and shook mine. She had a strong grip. “And you are . . . ?”

“Elle Stevens.” A name I had used undercover in my past life. It fell off my tongue without hesitation. “So, she left Sunday. Was that before or after Stellar went down?”

The smile died. “Why would you ask that?”

“Well . . . a disgruntled employee leaves and suddenly you lose a horse—”

“Stellar bit through an electrical cord. It was an accident.”

I shrugged. “Hey, what do I know? People talk.”

“People don’t know shit.”

“Is there a problem here?”

The man stepped into the picture. Mid-fifties, tall and elegant with silver temples highlighting a full head of dark hair. He wore a stern, aristocratic expression, pressed tan slacks, a pink Lacoste knit shirt, and a black silk ascot at his throat.

“Not at all,” I said. “I was just looking for someone.”

“Erin,” Paris Montgomery said to him.

“Erin?”

“Erin. My groom. The one that left.”

He made a sour face. “That girl? She’s good for nothing. What would you want with her?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “She’s gone.”

“What’s your friend’s name?” Paris asked. “In case I hear of someone.”

“Sean Avadon. Avadonis Farm.”

The man’s cold blue eyes brightened. “He has some very nice horses.”

“Yes, he does.”

“You work for him?” he asked.

I supposed I did look like hired help with my hacked-off hair, old jeans, and work boots. “He’s an old friend. I’m leasing a horse from him until I can find what I’m looking for.”

He smiled then like a cat with a cornered mouse. His teeth were brilliantly white. “I can help you with that.”

A horse dealer. The third-oldest profession. Forerunners of used-car salesmen the world over.

Paris Montgomery rolled her eyes. A truck pulled up at the end of the tent. “That’s Dr. Ritter. I’ve got to go.”

She turned the big smile back on and shook my hand again. “Nice meeting you, Elle,” she said, as if we’d never had that moment of unpleasantness at the mention of Stellar’s death. “Good luck with your search.”

“Thanks.”

She set the Russell down and followed the barking beast around the corner as the vet called for her.

The man held his hand out to me. “Tomas Van Zandt.”

“Elle Stevens.”

“My pleasure.”

He held my hand a little too long.

“I’d better be going,” I said, drifting back a step. “It’s getting late for a wild-goose chase.”

“I’ll take you to your car,” he offered. “Beautiful women shouldn’t go around unescorted here in the dark. You don’t know what kind of people might be around.”

“I have a pretty good idea, but thanks for your concern. Women shouldn’t get into cars with men they’ve only just met either,” I said.

He laughed and placed a hand over his heart. “I am a gentleman, Elle. Harmless. Without designs. Wanting nothing of you but a smile.”

“You’d sell me a horse. That would cost me plenty.”

“But only the best horses,” he promised. “I will find you exactly what you need and for a good price. Your friend Avadon likes good horses. Maybe you could introduce us.”

Horse dealers. I rolled my eyes and gave him half a smile. “Maybe I just want a ride to my car.”

Looking pleased, he led the way out of the tent to a black Mercedes sedan and opened the door for me.

“You must have a lot of satisfied customers if you can rent a car like this for the season,” I said.

Van Zandt smiled like the cat that got the cream
and
the canary. “I have such happy clients, one gave me the loan of this car for the winter.”

“My goodness. If only my ex had made me so happy, he might still be considered in the present tense.”

Van Zandt laughed. “Where are you parked, Miss Elle?”

“The back gate.”

As we started down the road toward The Meadows I said, “You know this girl, Erin? She’s not a good worker?”

He pursed his lips like he’d gotten a whiff of something rotten. “Bad attitude. Smart mouth. Flirting with the clients. American girls don’t make good grooms. They’re spoiled and lazy.”

“I’m an American girl.”

He ignored that. “Get a good Polish girl. They’re strong and cheap.”

“Can I get one at Wal-Mart? I’ve got a Russian now. She thinks she’s a czarina.”

“Russians are arrogant.”

“And what are Dutchmen?”

He pulled the Mercedes in where I pointed, alongside my Beemer.

“I am from Belgium,” he corrected. “Men from Belgium are charming and know how to treat ladies.”

“Slick rascals, more like,” I said. “Ladies should be on their guard, I think.”

Van Zandt chuckled. “You are no pushover, Elle Stevens.”

“It takes more than a smile and an accent to sweep me off my feet. I’ll make you work for it.”

“A challenge!” he said, delighted at the prospect.

I got out of the car without waiting for him to come around and open the door, and dug my keys out of my hip pocket. The back of my hand brushed over the butt of the gun tucked in my waistband.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“Thank you, Elle Stevens. You brightened an otherwise boring evening.”

“Don’t let Ms. Montgomery hear you say that.”

“She’s all gloom, talking about the dead gelding.”

“Losing a horse worth that kind of money would bring me down too.”

“It wasn’t her money.”

“Maybe she liked the horse.”

He shrugged. “There’s always another.”

“Which I’m sure you’ll be happy to supply to the grieving owner for a price.”

“Of course. Why not? That’s business—for me and for her.”

“You sentimental fool, you.”

In the harsh glow of the security light from above I saw the muscles of Van Zandt’s jaw flex. “I am in this business thirty years, Elle Stevens,” he said, a thread of impatience in his voice. “I am not a heartless man, but for professionals horses come and horses go. It’s a shame the gelding died, but with professionals a sentimental fool is just that: a fool. People have to move on with their lives. Owners too. The insurance will pay for the dead horse, and his owner will buy another.”

“Which you will be happy to find.”

“Of course. I know already a horse in Belgium: clean X rays and twice as good as that one over the fences.”

“And for a mere one-point-eight million he can belong to some lucky American and Don Jade can ride him.”

“The good ones cost, the good ones win.”

“And the rest can bite through electrical cords in the dead of night and fry themselves?” I asked. “Careful who you say that to, Van Zandt. Some insurance investigator might hear you and think the wrong thing.”

He didn’t shrug that off. I sensed him tense.

“I never said anyone killed the horse,” he said, his voice tight and low. He was angry with me. I wasn’t supposed to have a brain. I was supposed to be the next American with too much money and too little sense, waiting for him to charm me and sweep me off to Europe on a buying trip.