Forged (Gail McCarthy Mystery) (18 page)

NINETEEN

I told Blue. What else could I do? I could hardly hide my fear from him; one look at my face as I got out of the truck and he was by my side.

"What happened, Gail?"

So I told him. "And I am not, I am absolutely not, going to tell the police anything," I said. "Don't try to convince me."

"All right. I won't." Blue squeezed my shoulders reassuringly. "This man has no reason to harm you. You haven't done him any harm."

"Do you think he killed Dominic? Or his so-called business partners did?"

"Hard to say," Blue answered. "It's clear you believe he was capable of it."

"Yes," I said emphatically. "Definitely yes. And I believe he could have been involved with the sort of people who might have done it without a second thought. But why kill Tracy?"

"Maybe they were two separate crimes, with different killers."

"Oh," I said. "Carlos or his friends killed Dominic and Sam killed Tracy. Is that what you think?"

"Stormy, I'm not sure I think anything, except that you're getting way too involved in this."

"Blue, what the hell can I do? Do you think I wanted to be right there when those two people were killed? Do you think I arranged for Carlos to threaten me?"

"No, of course not. I'm sorry. I just want you to stay safe."

"I'm sorry, too." I hugged him. "I'm just upset."

"Who wouldn't be?"

We both heard the phone ring at the same time. "Oh no," I said.

But it wasn't the answering service. It was Jeri Ward. "Thought you'd like to know, Gail. Matt Johnson found the gun that killed Tracy in Sam's tack room under a pile of old saddle blankets."

"With Sam's fingerprints?"

"No prints at all. Wiped clean. Same as the gun that killed Dominic. Pretty much every idiot knows enough to do that these days."

"Has Sam been arrested?" I asked.

"Not yet," Jeri said crisply. "The evidence is just circumstantial. But I think Matt's close."

"Has Barbara King been found?"

"No. No one's seen her since she disappeared on Thursday. You've got to wonder."

"Yeah," I said, "you do."

"How many horses did she have? Do you know?" Jeri asked.

"Two or three, I think. One of them's a real flashy black-and-white paint. It's been a while since she called me out to do any work. I can't really remember the others."

"It just seems odd that all her horses disappeared, too."

"Yeah," I said. I was feeling overwhelmed. I simply could not reconcile all the things I knew. I thanked Jeri for informing me, hung up the phone, and turned to Blue. "They found the gun that killed Tracy," I said, and repeated what Jeri had just told me.

"So how does Carlos Castillo fit in?" Blue said ruminatively, once I was done. "Why did he want to know what Dominic said?"

"Maybe he was wondering if Dominic accused him? Blue, this guy was creepy. So young and so polished. I had the gut feeling he's probably killed several people in his short life."

"He struck you as a professional criminal?"

"Oh yeah. I'd guess some kind of drug baron. Something that makes money. I believed him when he said he didn't need money."

"In these parts, it could be fighting chickens," Blue said.

 
"Fighting chickens? I thought that was a poor man's sport." "Not any more. The police raided a place near where I work, confiscated thirty thousand dollars."

"Wow."

"So, yes, your friend Carlos could be making good money on fighting chickens. But why would he kill Dominic?"

"I really have no idea. Revenge for the way his father treated him, maybe. Or maybe Carlos does need a big sum of money right now to payoff his partners in crime. Maybe that part of his story was true. If it was Carlos, it would explain why Dominic covered up for him-his own son and all. Maybe Carlos was the unknown person who called Barbara to find out where Dominic was. It was a young man's voice, the detective said."

"Yeah," Blue said slowly. "Or a woman with a deep voice. Which rather accurately describes your new horseshoer."

 
"Tommie," I said. "I forgot all about Tommie. And Lee's son, Dom, is a young man, too. It could have been any of them."

 
"Or someone whose horse threw a shoe," Blue reminded me.

"Maybe. But Dominic died. Someone drove out here and shot him. And now Tracy's dead, and Barbara may be dead, too."

 
"Do you still think Barbara rode into Lorene Roberts and shot herself?" Blue asked.

"I don't know what to think anymore. The fact that there were two horses makes me wonder if someone rode in there with her. I wish Mountain Dave would call and tell us where they went."

"Maybe the horses didn't come from Barbara's place," Blue said. "We didn't track them out of her barnyard. Maybe she's got neighbors who ride across that orchard and into the park, too."

"She very well may have," I agreed. "Oh Blue, I'm really confused."

Blue put a comforting arm around my shoulders and hugged me. "It isn't up to you to solve this, Stormy. Maybe our friend the detective already has."

"So Sam killed Dominic because of Tracy, and then he killed Tracy, and finally he killed Barbara because she knew something that would incriminate him, and hauled her body away in the horse trailer. Or," I said, "maybe Sam killed Dominic and Tracy, and Barbara killed herself. Or lost herself."

"Lost herself? What do you mean?" Blue looked down into my face.

"Lorene Roberts is huge," I said slowly, "and nobody gets back in there much. People get lost. I was driving down Eureka Canyon one morning on the way to my first call of the day when I saw a girl walking down the road. She looked lost, so I stopped and asked if I could help her.

"Turns out she'd gone hiking in Lorene Roberts the day before; she started in Aptos. She'd walked and walked and when night fell, she was lost. She kept walking, wandered around in there all night. Early in the morning she struck Rider Road, probably came out right through that apple orchard. She walked down Rider to Eureka Canyon, which was where I found her."

"So, are you suggesting that Barbara could be lost in the park? For three days?"

"I don't know," I said. "I just don't know. Lost on purpose, maybe. Two sets of hoofprints could mean she was leading a pack animal. Maybe she's living in the park, sort of like Mountain Dave, with horses instead of a bike."

Blue considered this awhile. "Why?" he asked.

"To get away. Rethink her life. It's something I could see myself doing."

 
Blue hugged me again. "After all, we met on a pack trip."

 
"That's right, we did."

I stared straight ahead, feeling the comforting warmth of Blue's arm around my shoulders, seeing sunlight break through the clouds outside the window. But my mind was somewhere else. "I wish Mountain Dave would call," I said. "I want to know where those horses went."

Blue opened his mouth to say something else and the phone interrupted us once again. This time it was the answering service, with "a severely lame horse at Lee Castillo's place."

"Oh shit," I said, as I hung up the phone. "Another person with a reason to have killed Dominic calling me out."

"Let me go with you, Gail." Blue took my hand in his.

"It's really not necessary. Lee can hardly page me to come out to her place with an emergency and then shoot me. It's like signing her own death warrant. I'll be fine. And there's plenty to do around here."

"That's true enough, and I do need to go by work today and check on some plants." Blue squeezed my hand. "But I'll keep my cell phone with me. Call me if anything looks odd."

"I will. I promise."

And back into the truck I went.

TWENTY

Lee Castillo's place, when I reached it, looked deserted. A brisk wind had blown the rain clouds away, and sunlight spattered the old barn and farmhouse. Chickens pecked in the manure pile, horses grazed in the pasture, but no humans were in sight.

Here we go again, I thought. Despite my confident words to Blue, I was nervous. The encounter with Carlos Castillo had shaken me right down to my core. Clutching my cell phone in my hand, I climbed slowly out of the truck.

"Lee?" I called tentatively.

No answer.

At a guess, she was in the barn. Straightening my spine, I walked in that direction. "Lee?"

Still no answer. After a moment, I stepped inside the doorway.

It was an old building, perhaps of the same vintage as the barn on Elkhorn Slough, where Blue and I had camped. Like most barns of that era, the central space was open and high-roofed, meant to store hay. Lee's barn, I saw, housed a hefty stack of alfalfa. A row of box stalls ran down the two facing walls.

Horses peered out at me over the lower halves of their stall doors. Arabian faces-elegant, chiseled, black and gray and bay.

"Lee!" I called again.

Nothing.

The horses watched me; pigeons cooed in the rafters. Somewhere outside, I heard the plaintive descending call of a mourning dove.

For a long second I stared. The interior of the barn was dim and shadowy; barely perceived motion in the depths resolved itself into a black cat, leaping down from the haystack. I turned away.

Back outside, I took a deep breath of the clean air. The little spring rain was gone as if it had never been. A bright, sunny breeze tossed the eucalyptus trees behind the barn.

Lee must be in the house, I decided. Clients did sometimes wait by the phone, veterinarians being prone to calling in a warning of lateness. Resolutely, I marched toward the back porch.

The house was as old as the barn. The sagging wooden steps creaked and complained at my footfalls. I rapped on the doorframe as loudly as I could; the door itself stood ajar.

"Lee!" I shouted.

No response. The open door led to what was plainly the kitchen, which was obviously empty.

"Lee!" I yelled.

Nothing. Hesitantly, I stepped into the room. What could possibly have happened to Lee?

I crossed the kitchen and stuck my head through the open doorway on the far side. The living room, apparently. Couch, two armchairs by a fireplace, a piano. No people.

Holding my breath, I listened. I could hear the old house murmur, the tiniest of creaks and groans, a soft subtext to the silence. As in a redwood grove, the quiet felt palpable, even personal, as though somewhere there were eyes, watching me. I shivered, and turned to go.

"Jesus!" I yelped. There he stood in the doorway, eyes watching me intently. Dom.

I grabbed the back of the couch to steady myself, felt the great thumping whoosh as my heart took off in overdrive. Desperately I searched this hulking teenager's face for his intent.

I couldn't tell much. Dom's face was expressionless, the remains of his pudgy adolescence visible in the heavy, pasty features, puffy cheeks, sagging jawline. But the overall impression was of a meaty muscularity, a dormant power coiled sullenly in a torpid shell.

"Where's Lee?" I got the words out, finally.

"Mom's gone."

The tone was flat, but at least he'd replied in a relatively normal way to my question. There was no gun in his hand. Maybe my run-in with Carlos had made me overly nervy. Dom was just, I reassured myself, a normally sulky young male.

"I was called out here to see a lame horse," I said.

"I called you."

"All right. Can we see the horse? I couldn't find anyone out at the barn."

"I was out back. Working." Dom's impassive face told me nothing. Those odd light brown eyes, so like his mother's, were as unreadable as two marbles. I had no idea what was going on inside his head.

"I'll show you the horse." Dom turned and left the room.

I followed him with an audible sigh of relief. Perhaps there was nothing strange happening here after all. Just a lame horse and a morose teen.