Dark Horse (37 page)

50

My phone rang
as I walked back to my car.

“Meet me for lunch,” Landry said.

“Your telephone etiquette is sorely lacking,” I pointed out.

He named a fast-food place ten minutes away and hung up.

E
rin Seabright caught Jade in the stall with the dead horse,” Landry said. We sat in his car. A sack of food lay on the seat between us, filling the car with the aroma of charbroiled meat and french fries. Neither of us touched it. “She caught him doctoring the electrical cord on the fan.”

“Erin told you that?”

“I’m on my way to ask her about it now. We didn’t get into the whole dead horse saga this morning. I only asked her for details about her abduction. Paris Montgomery came in on her own and told me. There was a story on the morning news about Erin’s escape from the kidnappers. Apparently, that put the fear of God in Ms. Montgomery.”

“More like a vulture circling a dying animal,” I said. “She smells opportunity.

“She says Erin caught Jade, and at the end of the day Jade kidnapped her? It doesn’t track, Landry.”

“I know. The kidnapping plot was already in motion.”

“If that’s what it was,” I said. “Have the technical wizards enhanced that first videotape?”

“Yes, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it. Why?”

“Look for the bracelet I handed you this morning.”

“What about it?”

“Do you think the kidnappers gave it to her as a parting gift?” I asked. “I’ve watched that tape fifty times. I don’t see a bracelet, but she was wearing one last night.”

Landry looked incredulous. “Are you trying to say the girl is in on it? You’re out of your mind. Estes, you haven’t seen her. She’s had the shit kicked out of her. You didn’t see that tape of the perp going at her with the whip. And this morning Weiss and Dwyer found another tape in Seabright’s office. It shows the girl being brutally raped.”

That brought me up short. “He had it in the house? In his office?”

“Stuffed behind some things on a shelf.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was what I had been hoping for—for Seabright to be made to pay a price. But news of the taped rape was something else.

“It looked genuine?” I asked.

“Made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end,” Landry said. “I wanted to take Seabright and choke him till his eyes popped out.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s sitting in a holding cell. The state’s attorney is trying to decide what to charge him with.”

“What happened at Jade’s arraignment?”

“Trey Hughes posted bail.”

“I wonder if Paris knows about that.”

“I’d bet he’s paying for Bert Shapiro too.”

“Have you interviewed him yet? Trey?”

“He’s been asked to come in. Shapiro won’t allow it.”

“Run his name through the system,” I said. “Trey has a checkered past. He told me yesterday he has a past professional acquaintance with my father. People don’t hire Edward Estes for traffic mishaps.”

Landry shook his head in disgust. “It’s like a goddam bag of snakes, this bunch.”

“Yes,” I said. “Now we get to find out how many of them are poisonous.”

N
othing breeds contempt more virulent than unrequited devotion. I drove toward Loxahatchee, thinking of Paris Montgomery walking into the Sheriff’s Office to give up her boss on the horse murder and insurance fraud. Paris was a first-chair kind of girl who had been playing second fiddle to Don Jade for three years. She had helped him build his clientele.

She had defended him with one hand and dug the foundation out from under him with the other.

I wondered if it had been Paris who dropped the dime to the INS regarding Javier. She had been with Trey the night before. He might have told her he believed me to be a private investigator, and that he had found me conversing in fluent Spanish with the one Jade employee left who might have known something valuable.

Or perhaps Trey had called them himself. For reasons of his own. I tried to picture him as one of the kidnappers. Had the years of debauchery so warped him that he might consider kidnapping a girl to be a game?

The afternoon was already half-gone as I turned down the road to Paris Montgomery’s house. In the dense woods of rural Loxahatchee, much of the light had already fallen victim to the long shadows of tall thin pine trees.

I drove past the house Paris lived in to the cul-de-sac where I had nearly shot Jimmy Manetti the night before. The half-built houses had been abandoned by their work crews for the day. I parked my car, took the Glock out of its hiding place, and made my way back down the road, ducking into the cover of trees as quickly as I could.

The house was much like Eva Rosen’s: a pseudo-Spanish seventies rambler with mildewed white stucco and a cedar shake roof crusted with moss. I let myself in a side door to the garage, which was stacked with the property owner’s lawn equipment and Christmas decorations. The money-green Infiniti was not there.

The door into the house was locked, and the lights on the security system panel showed that the system was armed. I walked around the exterior of the house, looking for an unlocked door, a partially open window. No luck.

Through the living room windows I could see a nasty once-white shag carpet and a lot of cheesy “Mediterranean” furniture no one from the Mediterranean would ever have laid claim to. The TV looked almost as tall as I was and had every kind of symbiotic machine hooked up to it—VCR, DVD, Dolby sound system with a bank of stereo equipment that looked like something from NASA.

I went around the side yard to the back, where a big redwood hot tub sat inside the requisite caged patio, along with an assortment of tacky patio furniture and sun-starved plants. The screen door was not locked, but the sliding glass door into the dining room was secure. I could see mail on the dining room table: magazines, bills.

A second sliding glass door at the far end of the patio led into a bedroom with orange shag carpeting. The drapes were pulled back, revealing a king-sized bed with a red velvet spread. A painting of a naked woman with three breasts and two faces hung above the ornate, fake wood headboard. A TV sat on an open-sided stand at the end of the room. I checked the titles on the stack of videos on the bottom shelf and wondered if I was the only person in south Florida without a collection of porn.

Somewhere beyond the yard, the engine of a piece of heavy machinery had fired up with a throaty growl. My luck someone had come back to the construction site down the road and was about to bulldoze my car.

The backyard was dim with shadows, but the sky above the treetops was still an intense blue. The racket was not coming from the direction of the new houses down the road, but from beyond those trees, beyond Paris Montgomery’s backyard, to the west.

A large motor grumbled constantly, the intermittent crunching and chewing of materials being fed through some big machine. A mulch grinder, I guessed, and I almost turned away. Then I paused.

Landry had said there was a sound of heavy machinery in the background of the video showing Erin being beaten by her captors. A sound Erin hadn’t been able to remember when he’d asked her about the place where she was held.

I walked toward the back of the property. Dense with young trees and wild bamboo, vines knitting all of it together, the back border of the yard was a jungle that would have eventually swallowed up the yard and the house if allowed.

The thump and grind of the machine grew louder. A truck engine revved and the beep-beep-beep of warning sounded as it backed up.

Trying to see through the curtain of greenery to the property on the other side, I almost missed it. The thing sat in the tangled growth like an ancient ruin. Gray and rusted, once an alien thing that had become almost an organic part of the landscape over the course of time. A trailer. What might have been a construction boss’s office once, with a window on the end of it that was coated with dirt on the inside. Someone had scratched through the filth with their fingertip, writing a single word: HELP.

51

Life can change in a heartbeat.

I had nearly missed it. I had been a heartbeat from turning and walking away. Then, there it was: the real reason Paris Montgomery had taken this shitty house too far from the show grounds. I had thought she had come here to be away from prying eyes, and I was right. But her affair with Trey Hughes was not the only thing she had wanted to hide.

The trailer squatted in the overgrowth like something from a bad dream. The sight of it evoked memories I wished I didn’t have.

Adrenaline runs through my bloodstream like rocket fuel. My heart pounds like a piston. I’m ready to launch.

I pulled my gun and moved in close along the side of the trailer. Only when I was right on top of it could I see the path where someone had walked around the end to get to the twisted, rusted metal stairs that hung off the back side of the trailer.

Despite the fact that the sun hadn’t touched this yard in an hour or more, and the temperature was in fact cool, I was perspiring. I thought I could hear myself breathing.

I’ve been told to stay put, to wait, but I know that’s not the right decision . . . wasting precious time . . . It’s my case. I know what I’m doing . . .

I felt the same push now. My case. My discovery. But a hesitation, also. Apprehension. Fear. The last time I had made that decision, I had been wrong. Dead wrong.

I leaned back against the side of the trailer, willing my pulse to slow, trying to slow my thought process, trying to shut out the emotions that had more to do with post-traumatic stress than with the present.

Paris would have rented this property months ago, I reasoned. If this place had been chosen because of the privacy, because of the trailer, that extended the period of premeditation to before the season had begun. I wondered if Erin had been chosen for her job because of her potential as a groom or as a victim.

My hand was shaking as I pulled out my phone with my left hand. I dialed Landry’s pager number, left my number and 911. I called his voice mail, left Paris Montgomery’s address, and told him to get here ASAP.

And now what? I thought as I closed the phone and stuck it in my pocket. Wait? Wait for Paris to come home and find me in her backyard? Let opportunity and daylight pass, waiting for Landry to call me back?

It’s my case. I know what I’m doing . . .

I knew what Landry would say. He would tell me to wait for him. Go sit in my car like a good girl.

I’ve never been a good girl.

It’s my case. I know what I’m doing . . .

The last time I had thought that, I had been very wrong.

I wanted to be right.

Slowly, I went up the metal stairs that over time had sunken into the sandy earth and settled away from the trailer, leaving a gap of several inches between the two. Standing to the side of the door, I knocked twice, and called out “Police.”

Nothing happened. I couldn’t hear any movement within the trailer. No shotgun blasts came through the door. It occurred to me Van Zandt might be inside, hiding out until he could catch his plane to Brussels. He might have been Paris Montgomery’s partner in it all, helping her to oust Jade and secure her place in Trey Hughes’ life, while Van Zandt indulged himself in his hobby of dominating young girls. Perhaps the ransom was to have been his fee for helping to ruin Don Jade.

And Erin’s role in the game? I wasn’t sure now, in light of what Landry had told me about the videotapes of her being raped and beaten. The tape of her abduction, which I had watched a dozen times, made me question whether Erin was truly a victim. Perhaps Paris had lured her into the plot with the opportunity to punish her parents, and once the plan was in motion had given her over to Van Zandt. The idea sickened me.

Standing to one side, I held my breath as I opened the door a crack with my left hand.

Billy Golam jerks open the door, wild-eyed, high on his own home cooking—crystal meth. He’s breathing hard. He’s got a gun in his hand.

A bead of sweat ran down between my eyebrows and skittered off my nose.

Leading with the Glock, I ducked into the trailer and swept the barrel of the gun from left to right. There was no one in the first room. I took in only the swiftest impression of the furnishings: an old steel desk, a pole lamp, a chair. All of it covered in dust and cobwebs. Piles of old newspapers. Discarded paint cans. The stale, musty smells of dust and cigarettes and mildew growing beneath the old linoleum floor assaulted my nose. The sounds of the machinery outside seemed to resonate and amplify inside the tin can trailer.

Cautiously, I moved toward the second room, still leading with the gun.

I hadn’t seen the video of Erin’s beating, but I knew from Landry’s description this was where it had taken place. A bed with a metal-framed headboard sat against the back wall. A filthy, stained mattress with no sheets. Bloodstains.

I pictured Erin there as Landry had described her: naked, bruised, chained by one arm to the headboard, screaming as her assailant beat her with a whip. I pictured her as a victim.

A few feet from the foot of the bed stood a tripod with a video camera perched atop it. Behind the tripod a table littered with empty soda cans, half-empty water bottles, opened bags of chips, and an ashtray full of butts. There were a couple of lawn chairs, one with a copy of
In Style
magazine left on the seat, the other with clothes tossed carelessly over the arm and back and dropped on the floor beside it.

A movie set. The stage for a twisted drama with a final act yet to be played out.

The roar of the machines outside had ceased. I felt the silence like a presence that had just come through the door. The skin on my arms and the back of my neck prickled with awareness.

I moved to stand beside the wall next to the doorway into the first room, the Glock raised and ready.

I could hear, but not see the exterior door open. I waited.

Movement in the front room. The sound of shoes scuffing and thumping on the old linoleum. The rattle of the old paint cans knocking together. The smell of paint thinner.

I wondered, if I stepped through the doorway, who I would confront. Paris? Van Zandt? Trey Hughes?

I moved into the doorway and leveled my gun on Chad Seabright.

“You’re going to lose your seat on the student council for this.”

He stared at me as paint thinner puddled on the floor around his shoes.

“I’d ask what you’re doing here, Chad, but that seems obvious.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, eyes wide. “You don’t understand. It’s not what you think.”

“Really? I’m not watching you prepare to destroy evidence of a crime?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it!” he said. “Erin called me from the hospital. She begged me to help her.”

“And you—a complete innocent—just dropped everything to commit a felony for her?”

“I love her,” he said earnestly. “She screwed up. I don’t want her to go to prison.”

“And what would she go to prison for, Chad?” I asked. “She’s supposed to be the victim in all this.”

“She is,” he insisted.

“But she told you to come here and burn the place? She told the detectives she didn’t know where she’d been held. How is it you knew to come here?”

I could see the wheels spinning in his mind as he scrambled for an explanation.

“Why would Erin be in trouble, Chad?” I asked again. “Detective Landry has the videotapes of her being beaten and raped.”

“That was her idea.”

“To get beaten? To be raped? That was Erin’s idea?”

“No. Paris. It wasn’t supposed to be real. That’s what Erin said. It was supposed to be like a hoax. That’s what Paris told her. To ruin Jade so she could take over his business. But everything got way out of hand. Paris turned on her. They almost killed her.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

He looked away and heaved a sigh, agitated. Sweat greased his forehead. “I don’t know. She only talked about Paris. And now she’s scared Paris will try to take her down with her.”

“So you’ll burn the crime scene and everyone calls it even. Is that it?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I know how it looks.”

“It looks like you’re in it up to your eyeballs, Junior,” I said. “Up against the wall and spread ’em.”

“Please don’t do this,” he said, blinking back tears. “I don’t want any trouble with the cops. I’m supposed to go to Brown next fall.”

“You should have thought of that before you agreed to commit arson.”

“I was only helping Erin,” he said again. “She’s not a bad person. Really, she isn’t. She just— It’s just that— She always gets a raw deal. And she wanted to get back at my father.”

“And you didn’t?”

“I’ll graduate soon. It won’t matter what he thinks. Erin and I can be together then.”

“Up against the wall,” I said again.

“Can’t you have a little sympathy?” he asked, crying now, taking a step toward the wall.

“I’m not the sympathetic sort.”

I moved farther into the room as Chad moved toward the wall that divided the spaces. A slow dance of unwilling partners trading places. I kept the gun on him. My gaze darted to the side as I stepped past the open door.

Paris Montgomery was coming up the steps.

As I turned my head, Chad turned and charged me, his face twisted with rage.

My gun went off as he hit my forearms and deflected my aim. I stumbled backward, his weight coming against me, paint cans and stacks of old newspapers tripping me. My breath went out of me as we hit the floor, the back of my head banging so hard I saw stars.

The Glock was still in my right hand, my finger jammed through the trigger guard. The gun was out of position, my trigger finger bent at an unnatural angle. I couldn’t shoot, but brought the gun up and slapped the body of it as hard as I could against Chad Seabright’s head. He grunted, and blood ran from a gash in his cheek as he tried to get a hand around my throat.

I swung and hit him again, the barrel of the Glock tearing across his right eye. The eyeball exploded, fluid and blood raining out of the collapsing tissue. Chad screamed and threw himself off me, hands over his face.

I rolled away from him, trying to get my legs under me, slipping through paint thinner, clawing at anything that might give me purchase.

“You bitch! You fucking bitch!” Chad screamed behind me.

Grabbing the leg of the metal desk, I pulled myself up. I glanced back to see Chad, one hand pressed against his ruined eye, the other swinging a paint can. The can caught me on the left jaw and snapped my head sideways.

I fell across the desktop, grabbed the edge with one hand, and dragged myself over as Chad struck at me with the empty can again and again.

Hitting the floor on the other side, I fumbled to pull my gun free of my broken finger. Adrenaline blocked the pain. I would feel it later—if I was lucky.

I expected Chad to come over the desk, but instead as I looked up I saw the translucent flash of orange and blue across the room as the paint thinner was ignited and the gases exploded upward.

Gripping the Glock, my left forefinger on the trigger, I pushed myself to my feet and fired as Chad went out the door and slammed it shut behind him.

The far side of the room was in flames, the fire licking hungrily up the cheap paneled wall to the ceiling, catching on the piles of paper on the floor. It burned toward me. It burned toward the second room. The trailer would be fully engulfed in a matter of minutes. And as far as I could see, there was no way out.

L
andry could see the glow of the fire a mile away, though he hoped against hope—even as he stepped on the gas and went with lights and sirens—that the source of the blaze would be something else, somewhere else. But as he neared the address Elena had given him, he knew it wasn’t. The county dispatcher was calling the code over the radio.

Landry pulled in the yard, jumped out of the car, and ran to the back of the property.

The walls and windows of a small house trailer were silhouetted against the backdrop of orange.

“Elena!” He screamed her name to be heard above the roar. “Elena!”

Jesus God, if she was inside . . .

“Elena!”

He ran toward the trailer, but the heat pushed him back.

If she was inside, she was dead.

C
oughing, I ran for the second room, flames chasing me, flames already shooting up the wall around the doorway. I could smell the paint thinner that soaked my shirt. One lick of a flame and I would be swallowed whole.

Another exit door was located in the far back corner of the second room. The smoke was so thick, I could barely see it. Stumbling over chairs, I ran for it, hit it running, turned the doorknob and shoved. Locked. I twisted the deadbolt and tried again. Locked from the outside. The door wouldn’t give.

The fire rolled into the room like a tide on the flimsy ceiling.

Jamming the gun in the back of my jeans, I grabbed the video camera off the tripod, tossed the camera on the bed and swung the tripod like a baseball bat at the window where Erin Seabright had written the word HELP in the dust. Once. Twice. The glass fractured but stayed in the frame.

I slammed the end of the tripod against the glass, trying to knock the glass out, afraid that when I did the flames would rush to the fresh oxygen. It would char my skin and melt my lungs, and if I didn’t die instantly, I would wish that I had.

I saw the flames coming and thought of hell.

Just when I’d thought I might redeem myself . . .

One last time I rammed the tripod against the glass.

E
lena!” Landry screamed.

Once more he tried to approach the trailer and was knocked flat as something inside the place exploded. Flame rolled out the broken windows in billowing clouds of orange. In the distance he could hear sirens coming. Too late.

Shaken, sick, he pushed himself to his feet and stood there, unable to do anything or think anything.

M
y first thought was that it was Chad standing in the yard, watching his handiwork, thrilled with the idea that he had killed me. Then he started toward me and called my name, and I knew it was Landry.