by Tami Hoag
“Hey, take it easy,” he said quietly. “Just try to breathe slowly.”
I pushed at him, wriggled away from him, got to my feet again. I tried to say something—I don’t know what. The sounds coming from me weren’t words. I put my hands over my face, trying to hold myself together.
“It’s Irina,” I said, fighting to regulate my breathing.
“Irina? Irina from Sean’s?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Elena, you should sit down.”
He told one of the deputies to call in a crime-scene unit, and ushered me not to my car, but to his. I sat down sideways in the passenger seat, bent over my knees, my hands cradling my head.
“You want something to drink?”
“Yeah. Vodka rocks with a twist.”
“I have water.”
He handed me a bottle. I rinsed my mouth out.
“Do you have a cigarette?” I asked, not because I was a smoker per se, but because I had been, and like a lot of cops I knew—Landry included—had never entirely abandoned the habit.
“Look in the glove compartment.”
It gave my trembling hands something to do, my mind something small to focus on. It forced me to breathe slowly or choke.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
I took a deep pull on the smoke and exhaled as if I was blowing out candles on a birthday cake, forcing every last bit of air from my lungs.
“Saturday. Late afternoon. She was anxious to go. I offered to feed the horses and take care of night check.”
Unlike myself, Irina had an active social life. Where it took place and with whom, I didn’t know, but I had often seen her leave her apartment above the stables dressed for trouble.
“Where was she going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where might she go?”
I didn’t have the strength to shrug. “Maybe The Players or Galipette. Maybe clubbing. Clematis Street.”
“Do you know her friends?”
“No. I imagine they were mostly other grooms, other Russians.”
“Boyfriend?”
“If she had one, she didn’t bring him to the farm. She kept her business to herself.”
That was one thing I had always liked about her. Irina didn’t burden those around her with raunchy details of her sex life, or who she had seen, or who she had done.
“Has her mood been any different lately?”
I tried a weak laugh. “No. She’s been churlish and arrogant, like always.”
Not sought-after qualities in a groom, but I had never really minded her moods. God knew I made her look like an angel. She had opinions and wasn’t shy about voicing them. I respected that. And she was damn good at her job, even if she did sometimes act like she was in forced labor in a Siberian gulag.
“Do you want me to take you home?” Landry asked.
“No. I’m staying.”
“Elena—”
“I’m staying.” I put out the cigarette on the running board of the car and dropped the butt into the ashtray.
I figured he would try to stop me, but he stepped back as I got out of the car.
“Do you know anything about her family?”
“No. I doubt Sean does either. It would never occur to him to ask.”
“She wasn’t a member of the taxpaying club?”
I gave him a look.
Undocumented aliens made up a large part of the work force in the South Florida horse business. They migrated to Wellington every winter just like the owners and trainers of the six or eight thousand horses brought here to compete in some of the biggest, richest equestrian events in the world.
From January to April the town’s population triples with everything from billionaires to barely getting by. The main show grounds—Palm Beach Polo and Equestrian Club—was a multinational melting pot. Nigerians worked security, Haitians emptied the trash cans, Mexicans and Guatemalans mucked the stalls. Once a year the INS would make a sweep through the show grounds, scattering illegal aliens like rats being run out of a tenement.
“You know I’m going to call this in and people are going to come out here,” Landry said.
By people he meant detectives from the Sheriff’s Office—not my biggest fan club, despite the fact that I had been one of them. I had also gotten one of them killed in a drug raid three years prior. A bad decision—against orders, of course—a couple of twitchy meth dealers, a recipe for disaster.
I had not escaped unscathed physically or mentally, but I hadn’t died, either, and there were cops who would never forgive me for that.
“I found the body,” I said. “Like it or not.”
Not, I thought. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to know the person who had become a corpse ravaged by an alligator. But somehow this trouble had managed to find me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
Some sooner than others.
MISMATCH
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam Loveswept edition published March 1989
Bantam mass market edition / July 2008
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1989 by Tami Hoag
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Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90522-9
v3.0