Margo stirred up three cups of instant coffee in chipped and broken-handled mugs, then sat waiting for the detectives’ questions.
"I can't believe this is happening," she said, pushing a shock of her long brown hair from her too-tan face. "I mean, Jilly's a good rider, you know? And Best-Boy--that's her horse--Best-Boy..." She looked helplessly at the two detectives. "...is such a good horse," she finished lamely.
Kazmaroff opened his notebook and bent his leg up over his knee. He leaned forward and Burton could see the impression of a medallion of some kind under his knit shirt. The only thing he lacks for oiliness, Burton thought, trying not to look at him, was a gold tooth.
"Is Mrs. Travers married?" Kazmaroff asked.
"Uh, she was." Margo's eyes flitted to a framed picture on the wall of a line of horses and riders, obviously taken at some horse show. "She's divorced. Has a son," she added.
Kazmaroff cocked an eyebrow.
Margo bit her lip.
"This is really unbelievable," she said. "I can't imagine where she...what could've happened to her." She looked at Burton. "Do you think she's dead?"
He watched her eyes.
"It doesn't look good," he said. "How old is her son?"
"Oh, he doesn't live with her." She picked up her cooling coffee and took a sip. "He's, like, eighteen or something. And they weren't very close."
"Oh?" Kazmaroff encouraged her with a smile.
"I mean, I got the impression that they weren't, you know?" She spoke hurriedly, putting her coffee down on the desk. "I mean, Jilly complained about him a lot, you know? Like they weren't..." She looked unhappily at Burton. "...weren't very close."
"What can you tell us about the two women who rode out with Ms. Travers?" Burton asked. His smile seemed frozen in place now.
She took a big breath. This was obviously the question she had been waiting for.
"Tess Andersen and Portia Stephens," she said. "They're, like, best friends, right? Always out here together."
"Friends of Jilly Travers?" Kazmaroff asked.
Margo licked her lips and glanced again at the photo over her desk. Burton noticed.
"Well, I guess," she said slowly. "I don't know. They were always kind of sniping at each other, you know?"
"Sniping?" Burton prompted.
"Well, not so much Portia. She's pretty easy to get along with. I guess mostly just Jilly and Tess. I'm not sure why they rode together so much."
"But they did?"
"Oh, yes, quite a lot." Margo took a big breath. "Do you think they had anything to do with this?"
"What do you think, Miss Sherman?"
"God, I don't know what to think." Her lips trembled and Burton thought she might be on the verge of an emotional outburst but she seemed to restrain herself. "I like Tess a lot. I suppose I consider her a friend of sorts."
"Of sorts."
"Well, I mean, I do work here and all. It's not like we live in the same circle. But when she's here she always treats me..." Margo looked as if she wished she hadn't begun this line of thought. "...you know, quite well."
"Not like the hired help, in other words?" Kazmaroff's voice boomed out jovially and Burton found himself surprised and grateful for his partner's open and cheery slamming of the hammer on the nail's head.
"That's pretty...pretty rude, isn't it?" she said, looking at Burton in dismay as if asking for his support. "I do a job here, that's right." Her face flushed darkly. "That doesn't make me some dirty stable hand or something...I...my relationship with Tess is based on..." She looked around her office as if looking for the words among her trophies. "...on mutual respect. She doesn't fly in here and ask me to fetch her horse from the pasture for her or mend her tack or deal with the farrier for her. I mean, she respects the value of my time."
"But you do muck out her horse's stall?" Burton asked.
"I don't, personally, no," she responded hotly.
"Did Jilly Travers ask you to do things for her?" Burton touched one of the trophies on the shelf nearest to him. It had been dusted recently.
"From time to time." Margo wrung her hands. "That's not unusual, you know. Most of the boarders...some of them need things and I am the barn manager."
"Lot of great trophies you got here." Kazmaroff stood up and swept his hand in a wide arc at them all. "You win all these?"
Margo nodded.
"Did people like Mrs. Travers?" he asked her as he held a trophy up to his face and squinted to read the inscription.
"Fairly well," she said, watching him.
"Did you like her?"
"Well enough. Look, am I suspect or something?" Her voice had become shrill and she was now wringing her long fingers in front of her.
Burton exchanged a look with Kazmaroff, amazed at the lack of friction he normally felt with him during a questioning.
"We're just collecting information, Miss Sherman," Burton said quietly moving to his feet. "It's not pleasant, but it does take awhile, I'm afraid. We'll probably have to spend some time here."
Margo nodded and stole another glance at the picture across from her desk. She looked totally miserable.
"Of course," she said.
5
The clearing was not large. It huddled in the center of a group of spindly but towering Georgia pines. A mass of grass and weeds, twitching in the softly falling rain, sat in forlorn bunches along the perimeter marking the borders of the crime scene.
Burton and Kazmaroff parked their car alongside the coroner's wagon, three police cruisers, and two dark-colored vans, belonging to the photographer and forensic specialists. Kazmaroff tossed a cigarette butt into the night as they stepped out of the car. A tall, barrel-chested man with sandy-blond hair and pale green eyes, he was considered by most women to be good looking, and downright hunk material by the precinct’s secretaries. A faint, jagged scar across his right eyebrow did little to diminish the assessment.
He pointed at the mess of muddy tire tracks around them.
"You're not thinking what I'm thinking, are you?" he asked in a disgusted grunt.
Burton noted the tracks and shook his head. "They wouldn't be so stupid." He looked up at the darkening sky and flipped his collar back against the light rain which ran like cold flecks of rice down his neck. "God, I hope they wouldn't be so stupid."
They entered the clearing, the opening in the dense brush surrounding it had been hacked considerably wider since the first police cruiser had been called to the scene nearly six hours ago.
"Jesus! Is there anything they didn't drive over, park on, or rip through? Who was first on the scene?" Kazmaroff said in disgust.
Burton slid a little in the dense mud as he trudged ahead of Kazmaroff. A hundred yards away, he heard the burping of police radios and the drift of voices on the wind.
Beyond the perimeter of yellow banner guard tape corralling the clearing, a makeshift tent had been pitched against the drizzle. In the fading light, Burton could make out the standing silhouette of Jim Merritt, the medical examiner. Not much to do without a body, Burton thought grimly as he and Kazmaroff approached. Two uniformed officers stood outside the tent while a photographer set up his camera for pictures of every angle of the scene. A fifth man emerged from a wall of honeysuckle and jasmine bushes clutching a video camera. Both photographers were draped in county-issue ponchos.
A mild scent of iron fillings and wet fur filled Burton’s nostrils and he steeled himself not to hold his breath. The whole point, he reminded himself, was to experience it all, notice it all.
"Smells like a massacre's worth of blood," Kazmaroff said, sniffing, still struggling up the slippery path behind Burton. "Smells like half a platoon died here."
More Iraqi war references. Did he never let up?
The two detectives stopped at the tent opening where Merritt waited with the two police officers. Without bothering to greet them, Burton jerked his head toward the path they'd just left.
"Which one of you guys was the first on the scene t
his afternoon?" He knew his admonishment was going to sound limp--after all, this was the second visit he and Kazmaroff had made to the crime scene.
"Frikens, sir," the youngest-looking cop said and stiffened as he did so, almost coming to attention. He was fair and pink-faced. Burton softened a little.
"And where is Frikens?" Kazmaroff wiped the rain from his face and ducked under the eaves of the tent.
"He had to leave." The man’s eyes never left Burton.
He may be green but he knows which superior to keep his eyes on.
"Did anyone check tire tracks off the main road into this place?" he asked with a sigh.
"Tire tracks?"
"Yeah, you know, on the ground we're all using for a parking lot? Tire tracks?"
The young cop swallowed and allowed his eyes to flicker toward the direction where he knew the police cars and vans were parked.
"I...I'm not sure, sir."
The weariness came back to Burton and he gently pushed past the man. "Check it out," he said as he entered the tent.
Kazmaroff and the medical examiner followed him inside. Burton walked to a small table stacked with styrofoam cups and two large thermoses of coffee. He poured himself a cup. He didn't offer to do the same for Kazmaroff, who waited patiently to pour his own.
Jim Merritt, the medical examiner, blocked the opening of the tent with his body. He was a large man, tall and fat, his bulk quivering under his thin polo shirt. His eyes were sharp but kind, and his upper lip stuck out over the bottom lip, reminding Burton of a petulant bird's beak. Jim was a jovial soul, good at what he did, and generally pleasant to have around.
“Where’s the police agent?” Burton asked. “What’s his name?”
“Darwin,” Merritt answered. “He’s out there somewhere. They've combed for the last six hours," he said. "Still nothing."
"Have they stopped for the day?" Burton turned with his steaming cup, and squinted in the man's direction.
"It's raining, Jack," Merritt said. "Been raining for nearly an hour now. It won't stop any time soon."
"What did we get?" Kazmaroff spoke over his shoulder as he tipped the coffee into his cup, its fragrance mercifully blotting out the stale air of the tent.
Merritt shrugged and half turned to open the tent flap and peer out.
"Lots of blood," he said. "We should at least be able to match it to the alleged victim’s blood-type."
"But...?" Kazmaroff prompted.
"Would help to have a body," Merritt said turning back to face Kazmaroff. "Or something." He shrugged. "Teeth, hair, a body limb..."
"Anything else?" Burton interrupted.
"Darwin checked the bushes, twigs, kindling, insects, scratches on trees, depressed areas in the grass--seems the clearing also serves as a deer bedding ground--we found some animal spoor and tiny bones..."
"And there's nothing." Burton said. He took a long sip of his coffee and stared out the opening into the darkening landscape. A pair of juncos seemed to stare down at him from the limb of an ancient magnolia tree. They tittered briefly.
"Oh, there's a lot of blood," Merritt said softly. "There's blood on the ground, on the bushes, on a tree or two. One of my men found a few drops in her horse's hair."
"How about an escape route?" Kazmaroff's voice seemed to boom out and suck up all the air in the tent. Burton began to feel too warm. "Figure out how the bastard got away?"
Merritt shrugged.
"The assumption at this point is that he left the way he came."
"Which was?"
"Probably from the road." Merritt nodded toward the path the two detectives had just walked up. "But you'll need to talk to Darwin about that." He smiled. "Or better yet, officers, check it out yourselves. It's a very tight circle of shrubbery and trees. He'd have to be half rabbit to have come any other way."
"Barn manager says riders come through this trail all the time."
"There's no evidence the guy was on horseback."
"No evidence he wasn't," Kazmaroff said smugly.
"You gotta scenario, Dave?" Burton said, turning to his partner.
"Yeah, okay," Kazmaroff said, puffing his chest out an inch. "How about this? How about the three girls fight, one of 'em or both of 'em kills the Travers girl..."
"From horseback?" Burton sipped his coffee and glanced at Merritt's slowly grinning face as they both listened.
"Okay, they got off their horses. Okay? On their horses, off their horses...the point is..."
"Jesus, Dave, the point is, how did they dispose of the body if they're all on horseback?" Burton shook his head and turned back to the medical examiner.
"I'm just saying, there's more than one way outta this clearing," Kazmaroff said, frowning.
"That's true," Burton said. He nodded as he spoke and tossed his empty cup into a paper bag. "But nobody heard a helicopter land and we've found no evidence of a tunnel, so I'm afraid we're--"
"Oh, give it a rest, man." The fury in Kazmaroff's voice was real and it was sudden.
"Let's all give it a rest," Merritt said, trying to gloss over the moment between the two men. "It's been a long hard afternoon and it looks like it's all coming to nothing." He waved a hand at the falling rain.
Burton avoided looking at Kazmaroff, concentrating, instead, on watching the rain as if the body might somehow be hidden up in the branches of the trees. "What about the dogs?” he asked calmly. “When are they coming?”
Merritt shrugged and Burton turned his body a few inches towards Kazmaroff.
“The guy said he’d get here as soon as he could,” Kazmaroff said. “Tonight, some time.”
“All this blood...the murder weapon has to be a knife, or a pick-axe or something, right?" he said to no one in particular.
"My guess is a very large knife."
The voice was attached to a slim African-American male who spoke as he pushed the flap back on the tent.
“Gus Darwin,” he said, shaking hands with both detectives. "We haven't found anything yet but obviously some major arteries or veins were cut." He turned again to survey the clearing, thick with cloudy shadows.
"Any sign of the body being dragged away?" Burton asked.
"No, and that’s really strange, you know?” Darwin said. “No dragging marks, no blood leading off to someplace. The path to the road? Not a drop, not a hair."
"That you could find," Kazmaroff said.
Burton looked at Kazmaroff and gave him a sour look.
"That is correct, Detective Kazmaroff," Darwin said cheerfully. "Any coffee left? And although it's true that, technically, my job involves collecting and recording evidence of the site and the corpus, as it were--which investigating officers have not yet provided for me," he said, smiling pointedly at Kazmaroff, "I did while away some time here this pleasant afternoon helping out the searchers--"
"Look, man, I'm sorry, I--"
"--and I must report that, you're right, there was no trace of body or murder weapon to be found." He paused. "Except for, of course, the footprint."
Burton and Kazmaroff both looked up at once.
"I didn't mention the footprint?" Darwin smiled enigmatically. "There were several, of course, there would have to be, wouldn't there?" He moved outside and they followed. The rain was harder now coming down in a gentle but insistent flow.
"There'd been an attempt to obfuscate,” Darwin continued. “See? It looks too deliberate, all this scraping...like it was done with the side of a boot or something." He pointed to a small cordoned off area on the ground, now only recognizable as a four foot by five foot patch of mud. "So I guess you guys will be determining whether or not this indicates if there had been a struggle, or not. There are really no direct signs leading to it..."
"But you got a print?" Kazmaroff interrupted, spilling his coffee on his hand as he attempted to pull his shirt collar against the rain.
"Quite a good one, actually," Darwin said happily. "I’ll transport the cast back to the lab to have a shoe track made of it.
" He shrugged. "It's something," he said.
Burton watched the photographers wrap up their expensive equipment and hurry down the pathway to their waiting vans. He and Kazmaroff would need to coordinate with them later on, pick up the finished prints, cart the forty or so paper boxes of twigs and blood-splotched leaves and dirt clods back to the police lab, send a sketcher back out at first light. Had Kazmaroff gotten the names of all the boarders? He glanced at his watch. A little after seven and they still had to visit Jilly Traver's condo tonight.
"It's great," he said absently. "A print is really great."
Normally, he knew, the first twenty-four hours in a case were the most critical in establishing clues and identifying physical evidence. He looked at the scene around him and watched the grass and bushes as they turned into black murky shadows in the downpour. Then, he turned, with the others, to the protection of the tent.
Chapter Two
1
"If you're going to sit that pony like a comatose jellyfish, I’m not going to waste a minute further of my time with you!"
Margo strode over to the quivering child atop a Welsh pony and clapped her hands together smartly.
"Now, wake up, Haley!"
"I'm trying, Miss Margo," the child whimpered, the tendrils of her auburn hair escaping her bulky black velvet hard-hat.
Margo patted the pony's neck and felt suddenly overwhelmed by the lesson, the heat, the interaction with the child. She nodded.
"I know you are, dear," she said, patting the child's booted leg now. "Let's try again next week, shall we? Do you want to ride around the ring or are you ready to untack?"
"I want to go home." The girl's pretty face looked like a cloud of waiting tears and Margo felt instantly sickened by her own behavior.
God, I'm starting to act like Jilly.
"All right, darling," she said, taking the pony's reins. "Hop down, then. I'll take care of Dancer." She watched the girl scramble off the animal and run, without looking back, to her mother and their waiting Mercedes sports vehicle. Margo waved feebly at the woman, who squinted at her through dark sunglasses.
I can kiss that fifty bucks a week good-bye, she thought, as she watched the mother remove the girl’s riding hat and smooth back her damp curls. The child talked with animation to her concerned parent.
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