Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

  “Was that Sunday? Oh, yeah.” Chad nodded and looked at Landry. “At the movies.”

  “Which movie?”

  “Hostage. It was great. Have you seen it?”

  “I don’t go to movies,” Landry said.

  “You don’t happen to have a ticket stub, do you?” I asked.

  Chad flashed a goofy smile with a little laugh. “Who keeps those things? Anal-retentives?”

  “Then I’ll ask you, Mr. Seabright. You strike me as a man who would keep his stub and have it laminated.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re just the kind of man who would encourage his child to lie to a sheriff’s detective,” I said.

  “Did you go with friends?” Landry asked. “Anybody who could say they saw you there?”

  “No,” Bruce said. “It was a father-son outing.”

  “Which theater?”

  “The big one on State Road Seven.”

  “What time did the movie start?” I asked.

  Seabright was on the verge of losing his temper again. “The late matinee.” He glared at Landry. “Why are you standing here grilling us? If someone has taken Erin, they probably knew her from the equestrian center. Aren’t there all kinds of lowlifes involved in the horse business? Shouldn’t you be speaking with them?”

  “Have you?” I asked. He looked at me blankly. “You set her up for that job through Trey Hughes. Have you spoken with him? Asked him if he’s seen Erin, if he knows anything, if he’s heard anything?”

  Seabright’s mouth moved, but nothing came out.

  “After you saw the tape and knew Erin had been taken from the show grounds, you didn’t call the one person you knew who had a connection to her?”

  “I—well—Trey wouldn’t know anything about it,” he stammered. “Erin was just a groom.”

  “To Hughes. She’s your stepdaughter.”

  Landry’s cell phone rang and he excused himself from the office, leaving me and the Seabright males looking at each other. I thought they both should have been strung up by their scrotums and beaten with canes, but that isn’t proper procedure even in south Florida.

  “I’ve dealt with a lot of cold, rotten people in my time,” I said to Bruce. “But you, Mr. Seabright, really must be crowned king turd on the shit pile. I’m going to step out for a moment now. I’m having anger management issues.”

  Landry was standing near the front door, brows drawn together as he spoke quietly into the phone. I looked upstairs and saw Molly, still sitting against the railing. She looked small and forlorn. She had to feel absolutely alone in this house. Krystal was of no help to her, and Bruce and his spawn were the enemy.

  I wanted to go up the stairs and sit with her, and put my arm around her shoulders, and tell her I knew how she felt. But Landry had finished his call.

  The look on his face made my stomach clutch.

  “What is it?” I asked quietly, braced for the worst. And that was just what I heard.

  “A girl’s body has been found at the equestrian center.”

  Chapter 21

  There is nothing so humbling to a self-proclaimed cynic than to be so deeply affected by something as to be knocked breathless by it.

  I literally felt the blood drain from my head when Landry told me about the body. He left me standing in the hall and went to tell Bruce Seabright.

  Was it Erin? How had she died? Had she died because I’d failed her? What a selfish thought. If Erin was dead, the blame went first to the perpetrator, second to Bruce Seabright. In terms of culpability, I ranked way down the list. I thought perhaps it wasn’t Erin, and in the next microsecond thought it couldn’t be anyone else.

  “What’s happened?”

  Molly suddenly appeared at my side. My tongue, which was usually quicker than my brain, was stuck in my mouth.

  “Is it about Erin?” she asked, frightened. “Did somebody find her?”

  “We don’t know.” It was the truth, but it tasted like a lie, and it must have sounded like one too. Molly took a step back from me.

  “Tell me. I deserve to know. I’m not some—some stupid child everyone has to talk around and hide things from,” she said angrily.

  “No, you’re not, Molly,” I said. “But I don’t want to scare you without knowing all the facts.”

  “You already have.”

  “I’m sorry.” I took a breath to buy a moment so I could think through my delivery of the news. “Detective Landry just had a call from his captain. A body has been found at the equestrian center.”

  Her eyes went huge. “Is it Erin? Is she dead? It’s because of the police. On the tape they said no police!”

  “We don’t know who it is, Molly,” I said, taking hold of her by the shoulders. “But I can tell you, no one has killed Erin because Landry is here. The kidnappers have no way of knowing who he is or that he’s from the Sheriff’s Office.”

  “How do you know?” she demanded. “Maybe they’re watching the house. Maybe the house is bugged!”

  “That’s not what’s happened. The house is not bugged. That only happens in the movies. In real life, criminals are lazy and stupid. And whoever this dead body is, she’s been dead longer than Landry has been in this house,” I said. “I’m going to the show grounds now. I’ll let you know as soon as I find out what’s what.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said stubbornly.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “But she’s my sister!”

  “And I’m doing my job. I can’t have you there, Molly, for a whole list of reasons. And I don’t want you there for a whole list of reasons.”

  “But I hate just sitting here,” she argued. “Erin’s in trouble. I want to help.”

  “If you want to help, keep your eyes open for any kind of a delivery. If the kidnappers send another video, we need to know about it the second it lands. That’s your assignment. All right?”

  I understood her frustration. She was the one person who had taken action to find Erin, and now she was being made to feel helpless.

  “All right,” she said on a sigh. I started to turn away. “Elena?”

  “What?”

  She looked up at me with wide eyes. “I’m really scared.”

  I touched her head as if I were giving some kind of benediction, wishing I had that kind of power, and knowing too well that I didn’t. “I know. Hang in there. We’re doing everything we can.”

  Landry came out of the office. Bruce Seabright did not emerge. I wondered if he was giving Krystal the news over the intercom.

  “I’ll call as soon as I know anything,” I said to Molly, and went out the door, Landry right behind me.

  “Do you know where barn forty is?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s at the rear of the property. Follow me. I’ll take you in the back way. It’ll be much faster. Do you have any details?”

  He shook his head. “Not that made any sense to me. The lieutenant said somebody dug her up. I don’t know what that means—if it’s a fresh body or a skeleton or what.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” I said, going around the front of my car. That sounded like a lie too. Every minute I didn’t know felt like an hour. Because of Molly. I didn’t want to have to tell her her sister was dead.

  I took a route from Binks Forest through Aero Club—a housing development for people with their own planes—on to Palm Beach Point, to the dirt road that led to the back gate of the equestrian center. The gate where Erin Seabright had been snatched nearly a week before. Barn forty was in The Meadows, just beyond that gate.

  As it was every weekend during the season, the area was bustling with riders and grooms and dogs and kids; cars and trucks and golf carts and motor bikes. The biggest crowd, however, was gathered around a rusty yellow front-end loader and a dump truck parked near one of the three-sided muck pits out in front of the tents. I could see a number of blue shirts. Security. A white and green county cruiser had parked in the mud at the edge of the road.


  I pulled into a parking spot opposite the excitement, grabbed a hat out of my backseat, and got out of the car. Landry stopped in the road and opened his window. I leaned down and said, “You don’t know me.”

  He rolled his eyes. “My fondest wish.”

  He drove ahead and pulled up alongside the radio car.

  My heart was thumping as I neared the scene. I asked a girl with a ponytail sticking out the back of a baseball cap if she knew what had happened.

  She looked excited. “They found a dead body.”

  “God. Does anybody know who it is?”

  “Someone said a groom. I don’t know.”

  I moved past her and threaded my way around the crowd. The security guards were telling people to go back to what they had been doing. The driver of the dump truck was sitting on his running board, blank-faced, hands hanging down between his knees. The driver of the front-end loader was standing beside his machine, gesturing as he spoke with a security guard, the deputy, and Landry.

  I had reached the front of the mob. Beyond the loader, the muck pit was half dug out. Sticking out of the pile was a human arm. Female, purple fingernails, a cuff of bracelets sparkling in the blazing sun. A horse blanket had been thrown over whatever other body parts had been exposed.

  “Miss?” Landry said, coming over to me. “The guard said you might be able to help us. If you could . . .”

  “Oh— I don’t know. I’m sure I couldn’t,” I said for the benefit of the spectators who were looking at me and wondering who the hell I was.

  Landry took me by the arm and led me, protesting, toward the muck pit. When we were out of earshot of the crowd, he said, “The guy was cleaning out this pit and dug her up. Buried in shit. There’s respect for the dead. He says this pit hasn’t been cleaned out since Thursday, but it was emptied to the ground then.”

  “If it’s Erin, I want ten minutes alone with Bruce Seabright and a large serrated knife.”

  “I’ll hold him down, you cut his heart out.”

  “Deal.”

  Making a face at the smell of manure and urine, he leaned over the body and lifted the edge of the horse blanket.

  I steeled myself for the worst. The body was white and stiff. Smudged mascara, blue eye shadow, and berry-red lipstick gave the face the impression of a macabre work of art. There was a thumb-sized bruise on the cheek. Her mouth was partially open, crumbled chunks of old manure spilling out.

  I let go of my held breath, relieved and sickened at once. “It’s Jill Morone.”

  “You know her?”

  “Yes. And guess who she worked for.”

  Landry frowned. “Don Jade. She told me yesterday she was sleeping with him.”

  “Yesterday? What were you doing out here?” I asked, forgetting the audience, forgetting the role I was supposed to be playing.

  He looked perturbed and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Following up on your assault.”

  “Gee. And I thought you didn’t care.”

  “I care that you caused me paperwork,” he complained. “Get out of here, Estes. Go play dilettante. Make yourself useful.”

  I put on a tragic face for the onlookers and hurried away to my car, where I called Molly Seabright to tell her her sister wasn’t dead . . . as far as I knew. Then I set off to Don Jade’s barn in search of a killer.

  Chapter 22

  When I arrived at the Jade stalls there was a major cleanup under way. Paris was supervising as the Guatemalan man carried articles of clothing out of a stall and dumped them into a muck cart. She alternated snapping at the man with snapping at someone on the other end of her cell phone.

  “What do you mean clothing isn’t covered? Do you know what this stuff is worth?”

  I looked at the pile in the muck cart. White and buff show breeches; an olive green three-season wool jacket, probably custom-made; custom tailored shirts. All of it worth a lot of money. All of it stained with manure.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Paris clicked her phone shut, furious, dark eyes burning with anger. “That rotten, ugly, stupid, fat girl.”

  “Your groom?”

  “Not only has she not shown up, not gotten the horses groomed, did not clean the stalls yesterday when Javier was gone; she did this.” She thrust a finger at the pile of ruined clothing. “Spiteful, hateful, little—”

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  Paris pulled up mid-tirade and looked at me like I’d sprung a second head. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Haven’t you heard? They found a body in the manure pile at barn forty. It’s Jill.”

  She looked at me, then looked around as if there might be a hidden camera somewhere. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. I drove in the back way. The cops are there now. I’m sure they’ll be here soon enough. They know she worked for Don.”

  “Oh, great,” she said, thinking about the inconvenience, not the girl. I saw her catch herself mentally and put on an appropriate expression of concern. “Dead. That’s terrible. I can’t believe it. What happened to her? Did she have an accident?”

  “I don’t suppose she accidentally buried herself in horseshit,” I said. “She must have been murdered. I wouldn’t move anything around here if I were you. God knows what the detectives will think.”

  “Well, they can’t think any of us would kill her,” she said huffily. “She’s the only groom we had left.”

  As if that was the only reason not to kill her.

  “Why do you think she made this mess?” I asked, pointing at the clothes.

  “Spite, I’m sure. Don said he saw her at The Players last night and he reprimanded her for something. Oh, my God,” she said, eyes widening. “You don’t think she was killed here, do you?”

  I shrugged. “Where else would she have been?”

  “I don’t know. She might have been meeting a guy in one of the other barns or something.”

  “She had a boyfriend?”

  Paris made a face. “She talked about guys like she was the village slut. I never believed she had one.”

  “Looks like she had one last night,” I said. “You jumper people have all the excitement. Murder, mayhem, intrigue . . .”

  Javier asked her in Spanish if he should keep cleaning the stall. Paris looked in through the bars. I looked too. The stall was a mess of churned-up muck and pine shavings and leather oil.

  “Is that blood?” I asked, pointing. There were some drops that might have been blood splashed on curls of white pine bedding. It might have belonged to the dead girl. It might have belonged to her killer. It might have belonged to the horse that normally occupied the stall. Only a lab would tell us for sure. Who knew what else had already been dug out of the stall and hauled away.

  Paris stared. “I don’t know. Maybe. Oh, this is just too creepy for words.”

  “Where’s Don?”

  “Off buying clothes. He has to show today.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that. He saw Jill last night. She came here and did this, and now she’s dead. I think the cops are going to want to talk to him.”

  Paris found her way to a director’s chair with JADE embroidered on the seat back. “Elle, this is just horrible,” she said, sitting down, as if she suddenly didn’t have the strength to stand. “You don’t think Don could have . . . ?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. I barely know the man. What do you think? Is he capable of something like that?”

  She stared off into the middle distance. “I want to say no. I’ve never seen him violent. He’s always so in control . . .”

  “I heard he’d been in trouble for killing horses for the insurance money.”

  “Nothing was ever proven.”

  “What about Stellar?”

  “That was an accident.”

  “Are you sure? What did the claims adjuster say?”

  She put her head in her hands for a moment, then smoothed them back over her golden hair. On her right hand she wore an ant
ique emerald and diamond ring that looked to be worth a fortune.

  “The company will look for any reason not to pay,” she said with disgust. “Because Don’s involved. It’s fine for owners to pay thousands in premiums, but God forbid they actually file a claim.”

  “But if it was an accident . . .”

  “The adjuster called this morning and claimed the postmortem on Stellar turned up a sedative in the horse’s bloodstream. It’s ridiculous, but if they can deny the claim, I know they will. Trey is going to be furious when he hears.”