by Kit Ehrman
Chapter 8
After the schooling show, when I had checked the competitors' trailers and had almost gotten my teeth rearranged for it, I had called Detective Ralston and told him what I had in mind. We had agreed that preparations would take at least a week and a half. So it wasn't until a windy afternoon toward the end of March that I headed north to Westminster.
I pushed through the double glass doors of Maryland State Police Barracks "G" and signed in at the desk. The corporal handed me a pass that I pinned to my jacket, then I rode the elevator to the second floor. Each door down the brightly-lit hallway had an identifying sign protruding from the transom that reminded me of a miniature street sign. Interview One, Two, and Three, Storage, Records, Properties, Holding One and Two, and directly across the hall, C.I.U. From the spacing of the doorways, it looked like the Criminal Investigations Unit had been allotted a generous slice of floor space.
C.I.U. was stenciled across the pebbled glass in black rimmed with gold. I opened the door and stepped inside. Two rows of pale blue partitions formed a wide central aisle that stretched to the back wall. The room was freshly-painted in a creamy yellow, and the slate gray wall-to-wall was new. A strong odor of new carpet still hung in the air.
A heavyset black man with a pair of bifocals perched low on his nose glanced up when he heard the door swing shut behind me. He was leaning back in his chair with his ankles crossed on the edge of his desk, a handgun magazine propped on his belly. A glossy advertisement for a Sig Sauer P239 covered the back page. I told him who I was looking for, and he directed me to Ralston's cubicle.
Two other detectives were at their desks midway down the room, one on the phone, the other writing on a legal pad. Neither looked up as I walked past. Ralston's cubicle was the last one on the left, and he was on the phone. He motioned for me to join him. I sat in the chair alongside his desk and half listened to his end of the conversation.
"No. There's no way we won't get an indictment. . . . Tuesday at the latest."
Ralston's desk looked spare and neat. He'd covered his blotter with Plexiglass, which he used to anchor lists of information, and he'd angled his computer monitor so that whoever sat in his visitor's chair couldn't see the screen. Above his desk, a calendar featured a glossy photo of a dirt bike jockey catching air as he flew over the edge of an embankment. The rider, dressed in neon yellow and lime green, stood out against a cloudless blue sky.
"Guerra won't play ball, but—" Ralston frowned and shook his head impatiently. "No. He can dick around all he wants, but we're running with it. We've got Menza locked in good and tight."
A collection of pens and pencils filled a navy blue mug with "The Man" printed in gold. The man himself looked professional in a crisp white shirt and paisley tie. The only thing that distinguished him from the rest of the business world was the gun strapped into a shoulder harness.
Except for the mug, and maybe the wall calendar, there was nothing of a personal nature in evidence. No family photographs, no trinkets, and I wondered if the separation of job and personal life extended to his home and thought it probably did.
"He doesn't have to like it, and there's no disputing the-- Relax Martin. You'll see. . . . Not this time."
Directly across from where I sat, a bank of windows stretched across the back wall. I glanced at my watch. Though it was only five-thirty, the glass behind the vertical blinds was dark. Heavy black clouds hung low in the sky, and gusts of wind whipped the top branches of a nearby tree. As I watched, the first drops of rain splattered across the glass.
Below the windows, conference tables had been shoved against the back wall and were loaded down with computer monitors, a printer, and stacks of binders and reference books. Cardboard boxes were jammed under the tables, and a collection of wall maps, white boards, and rolled up posters leaned against the wall in the corner.
"Yeah, Monday." Ralston hung up and filed the sheet of paper he'd been taking notes on into an open binder. "Thanks for coming in, Steve."
"No problem."
He wedged the binder in among the others that lined the right side of his desk. Each one had a card slipped into a slot on the spine with a name and date typed in bold black letters. Peters, James S. was third from the left. The binder he'd been working on had McCafferty, Margaret A. hand-printed in blue ink. The date was a week old.
Ralston stood and stretched. "Want some pizza? This is going to take a while."
"Sure."
He put in a call to the local pizzeria, then hefted a cardboard box off the floor. I followed him into interview room number two. Crumbs were scattered across the metal table. The room smelled like fried onions and pastrami.
"I haven't received a response from everyone, yet," Ralston said. "But we have more than enough to get started." He lifted a bulky manila envelope out of the box. "Start with this one while I get the MVA lists."
Ralston went back to his office as I emptied the contents of the first packet onto the table. Though I hadn't recognized the make and model of the trailer used in the theft, I'd been able to eliminate some trailers at the schooling show. With a little effort and attention to detail, I figured I could narrow down the field, even if I had to do it on paper. When I'd suggested this to Ralston, he had enthusiastically sent requests to every trailer manufacture in the country.
I scanned the pamphlets sent in by Equifleet Manufactures and saw they'd been more than happy to comply. Equifleet produced top-of-the-line horse trailers in fourteen different models, both bumper-pull and gooseneck, depending on trailer size and customer preference. Their best-selling model was a simple two-horse bumper-pull with a tapered tack room in the front. All of their trailers featured optional living quarters for the competitor who preferred to sleep on the show grounds. Currently, the largest trailer they manufactured was a popular four-horse slant load with an expanded camper section. No six-horse.
I flipped through their brochures and saw that they had switched to an aluminum shell a decade earlier. Though I hadn't thought about it at the time, the trailer I had been imprisoned in had definitely had a steel shell. That, in and of itself, wasn't significant. In the past, all but a few elite brands had used steel.
It wasn't until I opened an older Equifleet pamphlet that I spotted a trailer that was a possibility. As I studied the trailer's floor plan, memories of that night unexpectedly crowded my mind, and the walls in the small, windowless room seemed to close down on me. For the first time, I thought about James Peters being in there, too. In the dark, alone. Tied to one of the metal partitions. And I wondered what it had been like for him. Maybe he hadn't been able to untie his hands, or maybe he had been unconscious. Or it simply could have been that I was the lucky one. The one who had found the old bolt.
The hum of the ventilation system seemed to grow louder, but the room felt airless.
Ralston opened the door, dropped the MVA list and a notepad on the table, and paused before handing me a Coke. "What's up?"
I shook my head and looked back down at the brochure. "Nothing."
Ralston hitched his chair up to the table and grabbed another envelope out of the box. After a few seconds, I sensed that his attention was on me and not the packet in his hands. I looked up and saw that he was watching me, a slight frown on his face. When I leaned back in my chair and popped the tab on my Coke, Ralston opened his envelope and dumped the contents on the table.
"What are we looking for?" he said. "I don't know the first thing about trailers, or horses for that matter."
I rubbed my forehead and sat up straighter. "First of all, the trailer has to have a steel shell. Most if not all of the companies are using aluminum nowadays, but their older models, like the trailer I was in, were steel. It's gotta be a gooseneck, too, with a loading door and ramp on the right side--"
"Right side? You mean the same side as a car's passenger door?"
"Yeah. The escape door's across from that and a little toward the front, on the driver's side. And see this?" I swiveled the
Equifleet pamphlet around and pointed at the diagram I'd been studying. "The layout's very much like this one. It's called a six-horse head to head. The loading door accesses a wide central aisle, and the horses are brought up the ramp and are either backed into one of the three stalls in the front of the trailer or into one of the three in the back. The horses face each other as they travel, and it's easy to unload them. You just lead them out of their stalls and down the ramp."
"Okay. Could that be the one?"
"I don't think so. It's fancier than the trailer I was in, and it has a rear tack room. I'm pretty sure the one I was in didn't." I looked up from the diagram. "But I'm not one-hundred percent certain."
Ralston drew two lines down the top sheet of his notepad and labeled the resultant columns "unlikely," "possible," and "positive."
I opened the last pamphlet Equifleet had sent and scanned the diagrams. "This is the same layout. The same floor plan, anyway."
Ralston stepped around the table and looked down at the diagram.
"But the windows are in the wrong place," I said.
"What about the escape door? Is it the same kind?"
I studied the photograph of their oldest six-horse. "I can't tell."
"Wouldn't details like the style of the escape door and window location be optional?"
"I suppose so," I said.
"And they might make minor changes to the design without going to the expense of printing a whole new batch of pamphlets. I'll list them as a positive for now."
"Sounds good to me."
I was on my third packet from a company named Kennsington, when the door opened.
"Delivery." The detective who'd directed me to Ralston's desk laid a pizza box on the table and began to back through the doorway. There was a look of amusement in his eyes that Ralston picked up on immediately.
Ralston yanked up on the lid. Several slices of pizza were missing. "Schnauz, what's this?"
The detective grinned and began to pull the door closed. "Delivery perks."
"You're a shyster, you know that?" Ralston yelled as the door clicked shut.
We worked steadily for the next two hours. By the time we'd finished, the packets from the trailer manufacturers were separated into three piles that matched the columns on Ralston's list. Thirteen names on the MVA list were now highlighted in yellow. The only positives. I commented on the low number.
"It only takes one," Ralston said. "And don't forget, I haven't heard back from all the companies yet. He lowered the "unlikely" pile into the box.
Phase one completed, now we actually had to look at the trailers in person, and I had the impression Ralston would have been happier if he could proceeded without a "civilian" in tow. But it couldn't be helped.
"I hope the companies sent us all their old pamphlets," I said. "Otherwise, we could have missed it."
"We'll start with the positives and work our way down the list. If we don't get a hit, I'll contact the companies again." Ralston rubbed the back of his neck. "Or, if it comes to it, we could resort to checking all the names on the list in person and hope we don't have to widen the search to the counties I haven't run off."
I groaned. "It's going to take forever."
Ralston grunted. "Contrary to the public's perception, detective work's ninety-nine-point-nine percent tedium. Speaking of which, when can you start?"
I thought about the next two days. Besides the usual workload, Foxdale was hosting a party Saturday to kick off the show season. I told him the earliest would be Sunday morning, late, and we agreed to meet at the farm.