Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

  Jesus Christ. If Van Zandt recognized me . . .

  Running through the dining area, I caught a chair with my hip, tripped, stumbled, struggled to stay on my feet, my eyes on the sliding door to the screened patio.

  Behind me I heard a dog barking.

  I hit the patio door, yanked the handle. The door was locked.

  A voice—a woman? “Get him, Cricket!”

  The dog: growling. I could see him coming out of the corner of my eye: a small, dark missile with teeth.

  My thumb fumbled at the lock, flipped it up. I yanked the door back on its track and went through the opening as the dog hit my calf with its teeth.

  I jerked my leg forward and the dog yelped as I tried to slam the door on his head.

  I dove across the small patio for the screen door, fell against it, then through it as it swung open. I was in the backyard.

  Lorinda Carlton’s town house was the last on its row. A tall hedge bordered the development. I needed to be on the other side of that hedge. On the other side of the hedge was an open, undeveloped space owned by the village of Wellington, and at the far end of that property, the Town Square

  shopping center.

  I ran for the hedge. The dog was still coming behind me, barking and snarling. I took a hard right and sprinted along the hedge, looking for an opening to the other side. The dog was snapping at my heels. I pulled my jacket off as I ran, wrapped one sleeve of the windbreaker tight around my right hand, and let the rest of it trail the ground.

  The dog lunged for and caught the jacket between his jaws. I grabbed hold of the one sleeve with both hands, planted one foot, and pivoted around, swinging the dog around on the end of the jacket. Around once, twice, like a hammer thrower in the Olympics. I let go.

  I didn’t know how far the dog’s weight and momentum would carry him, but it was far enough to buy me a few seconds. I heard a crash and a yelp just as I caught sight of a way over the hedge.

  A pickup sat parked beside another of the end unit town houses. I scrambled up onto the hood, onto the roof, and over the hedge.

  I landed like a skydiver—bent knees, drop and roll. The pain that went through my body was sharp and shattering, starting in my feet and rocketing through all of me to the top of my head. For a moment I didn’t try to move, I simply lay in a heap in the dirt. But I didn’t know if anyone had seen me go over the hedge. I didn’t know that horrid little mongrel wasn’t going to come tearing, teeth bared, through the foliage like the shrunken head of Cujo.

  Cringing, I pulled my feet under me, pushed myself up, and moved on, staying as close to the hedge as I could. Twin lightning bolts of pain shot from my lower back down my sciatic nerves to the backs of my knees, making me gasp. My bruised ribs punished me with every ragged breath. I would have been cursing, but that would have hurt too.

  Another fifty yards and I would be at the shopping center.

  I broke into a jog, fell back to a quick walk, and tried to will myself along. I was sweating like a horse, and I thought I smelled of garbage. I could hear a siren in the distance behind me. By the time the deputies arrived at Lorinda Carlton’s/Van Zandt’s town house and got the lowdown on the break-in, I would be safe. For the moment, anyway.

  Of all the rotten luck. If I had left the house two minutes sooner . . . If I hadn’t spent too much time looking at the horse tapes or marveling at Van Zandt’s porn collection . . . If I hadn’t stayed those extra few minutes and gone into the garage to dig through Van Zandt’s gar-

  bage . . . I would never have found the shirt.

  I had to call Landry.

  I walked into the lights of Town Square

  . It was Saturday night. People were on the sidewalk in front of the Italian place, waiting for a table. I walked by, head down, trying to look casual, trying to regulate my breathing. Music spilled out the door of Cobblestones, the next restaurant on the row. I passed China-Tokyo, breathing in the deep-fried MSG, reminding me I hadn’t eaten.

  Normal human beings were having a lovely evening eating kung pao chicken and sushi. There probably wasn’t a woman in the place who had ever broken into a house to search for evidence in a murder.

  I’ve always been different.

  I wanted to laugh and then cry at that thought.

  In Eckerd’s drugstore, I bought a bottle of water, a Power Bar, a cheap denim shirt, and a baseball cap, and got change for the pay phone. Outside, I tore the tags off the shirt and put it on over my sweat-soaked black T-shirt, broke in the bill of the ball cap and pulled it on.

  I pulled a couple of scraps of paper out of my jeans pocket—one: the note from Van Zandt’s garbage, the other: Landry’s numbers. I rang Landry’s pager, left the pay phone number, and hung up. While I waited, I tormented myself wondering how clearly the woman at Van Zandt’s had seen me, wondered who she was, wondered if Z. had been with her.

  I didn’t think she’d gotten a very good look. She had told the dog to get “him.” She’d seen the short hair and assumed, as most people would, that burglars are men. The cops would be looking for a man—if they looked at all. A simple B&E, nothing taken, no one hurt. I didn’t think a lot of effort would go into it. I hoped to hell not.

  Even if they bothered to dust the place for prints, mine weren’t in any criminal database, and no other database was checked as a matter of routine. Because I had been in law enforcement, my prints were on file with Palm Beach County, but not with the prints of the common bad folk.

  Still, I should have worn gloves. If nothing else, they would have been nice to have while I was digging through the trash.

  I kept the wrapper around the Power Bar as I ate it.

  They would have my jacket—or what was left of it when the dog finished with it—but nothing about the jacket connected it to me. It was a plain black windbreaker.

  I tried to think if there had been anything in the pockets. A Tropicana lip sunblock, the end of a roll of Breathsavers, a cash receipt from the Shell station. Thank Christ I hadn’t paid with a credit card. What else? When had I last worn that jacket? The morning I went to the emergency room.

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  The prescription. The prescription for painkillers, which I’d had no intention of filling. I had stuffed it in my pocket.

  Oh, shit.

  Had I taken it out? Had I thrown it away and forgotten? I knew I hadn’t.

  I felt sick.

  I leaned back against the wall and tried to remember to breathe, to think. My name was on the scrip—Elena Estes, not Elle Stevens. The name wouldn’t mean anything to Van Zandt. Unless he had seen the photograph in Sidelines. The photograph with the caption that identified me riding at Sean’s farm. And if that happened, how long before all the puzzle pieces fell into place?

  Stupid, careless mistake.

  If the deputies came knocking on my door, I would deny having been on Sag Harbor Court

  . I would say I’d lost that jacket at the show grounds. I wouldn’t have a witness to corroborate the lie that would be my alibi, but why would I need an alibi, for heaven’s sake? I would say with indignation. I was no criminal. I was a well-brought-up citizen with plenty of money. I wasn’t some crack addict forced to steal to buy my next fix.

  And they would show my photograph to Van Zandt and ask him if he recognized me, and I would be fucked.

  Dammit, why wasn’t Landry calling back? I called his pager again, left the pay phone number with 911 after it, hung up, and started to pace.

  The worst of this mess wasn’t going to be explaining my way out of charges. The worst of this was going to be if Van Zandt found that shirt before Landry could get there with a warrant.

  Damn, damn, damn. I wanted to bang my head against the concrete wall.

  I didn’t dare go back to Van Zandt’s. Even if I could have cleaned up and changed clothes, showed up as Z.’s abandoned dinner date in the hopes of finding him there, I couldn’t risk that woman recognizing me—or Van Zandt himself identifying me
as the person in his garage, if Van Zandt had been in that car too. At this point I didn’t even dare go back to the complex to get my car.

  What a fuckup. I’d had the best of intentions, but there was a real chance my actions were going to result in the loss of a potentially crucial piece of evidence, and a chance I’d blown my cover with Van Zandt—and thereby with all of Jade’s crowd.

  This was why I shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place, a nasty little voice inside told me. If a killer got away because of this, it was on my conscience. Another weight pressing down on me. And if Erin Seabright ended up dead as a result—

  Why didn’t Landry fucking call?

  “Screw him,” I muttered. I picked up the phone and called 911.

  Chapter 26

  The phone on the other end of the line rang unanswered. Landry swore and hung up. He didn’t recognize the number. The 911 on the end of it made him think it was Estes. Up to her pretty ass in God knew what. It was a sure bet she hadn’t stayed home and gotten into the tub with a book.

  She was something. Going off to dinner with a possible sex killer like it was no big deal. Landry supposed he had overreacted to the plan. She was a cop, after all—had been. And she was the last woman any man should have felt compelled to protect, but he had just the same. There was something about her lack of a sense of self-preservation that got to him, that made her seem, of all things, vulnerable. He kept thinking of her jumping on the running board of Billy Golam’s truck, trying to wrench the wheel out of his hands . . . going under the goddam thing . . . being dragged down the pavement like a rag doll.

  She didn’t know enough—or care enough—to take care of herself. And it was a safe bet she didn’t appreciate him doing the job for her. He could still see the look in her eyes when he’d called Weiss and told him to pick up Van Zandt. Anger, hurt, disappointment—all just beneath a scrim of tough indifference.

  He stood in the hall outside an autopsy suite in the medical examiner’s building. He had run straight from interviewing Van Zandt to catch the ME at the tail end of Jill Morone’s slice-and-dice.

  Van Zandt had provided nothing but frustration, mouthing off for fifteen minutes about the inferiority of the United States justice system, then exercising his right to an attorney. End of interview. They hadn’t had anything solid to back up an arrest warrant. As had been pointed out to him recently, being an asshole was not against the law.

  He had really screwed the pooch with this move. If he had waited until after the autopsy to bring in Van Zandt, he would have had some facts to play off, to twist around, to use against the man, maybe get him scared, get him to say something he would never say now.

  Landry told himself again he had needed to maintain control of the situation, not have a wild card—Elena—adding to the mayhem.

  He wondered what she was tangled up in right that moment. Nothing good, he was sure.

  She would want to hear all about the autopsy. She would want to know Jill Morone had been pushed facedown into the floor of a horse stall. There had been pieces of wood shavings and horse manure lodged in her throat and in her mouth and nose. She had died from suffocation. A hand had gripped her neck from behind, exerting enough pressure to leave finger marks on the skin. At some point she had struggled with her assailant, breaking off several fingernails in the process. But there had been no skin or blood or anything else under her remaining nails.

  That didn’t make sense to Landry. If she’d fought hard enough to break fingernails, there should have been something to find. She had been held facedown in filth. There should at least have been traces of the stall bedding and the manure under her remaining nails, wedged there as she tried to struggle to push herself up. But there was nothing.

  And while her clothes had been torn in a way that suggested a sexual assault, there had been no semen present in or on the body. In fact, evidence of rape was minimal. Some scratches on the thighs and labia, but no vaginal bruising or tearing. Could have been Jill’s attacker had worn a condom, or he’d lost his erection and hadn’t been able to close the deal. Or the attempted rape was an afterthought, staged to make a straight murder look like something else.

  Landry could have used all this information against Van Zandt before the man had demanded an attorney, particularly the apparently failed attempt at rape. He could have gone straight at Van Zandt’s ego with that, taunted him, mocked him. Van Zandt would have blown up. The man was too arrogant to stand for having his masculinity questioned, too arrogant to control his temper. He was smart enough to ask for a lawyer, though, and now there would be no questioning, no taunting, no mocking, without that lawyer present.

  Who was too arrogant?

  Landry cursed himself as Weiss came out of the autopsy suite. Weiss, a transplant from New York, was a small man who spent too much time in the gym and consequently had an upper body that looked like it had been inflated to the point of discomfort. Little man syndrome. His arms could not lie entirely flat at his sides.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s pretty goddam strange her fingernails were clean,” Landry said. “What kind of perp kills a girl in what is essentially a public place, then takes the time to clean under her fingernails?”

  “A smart one.”

  “One who’s been caught before—or learned by doing,” Landry mused.

  “One who watches the Discovery Channel.”

  “One who knows there would have been evidence.”

  “Meaning she scratched him,” Weiss said. “Did Van Zandt have any marks on him?”

  “Not that I could see. He was wearing a turtleneck. I couldn’t see anything on Jade either. We’re not going to get a good look at either of them unless we have some pretty strong evidence to hold them on. Any word back on whether or not that was blood in the stall?”

  Weiss shook his head and rolled his eyes. “It’s Saturday night. If Dr.

  Felnick didn’t have his in-laws staying at his house, we wouldn’t have gotten the autopsy tonight.”

  “I think we would have,” Landry said. “The management at the equestrian center have friends in high places. They want this thing solved and swept away ASAP. Murder is bad for morale among the patrons.”

  “People don’t get murdered in Wellington.”

  “No. You have to come to West Palm for that.”

  “What about that assault the other night?” Weiss asked. “When the horses got turned loose. Think they’re connected?”

  Landry frowned, remembering the bruises on Estes’ back that night, though at the time the bruises had hardly registered in his mind. He’d been too stunned by the old scars and lines of demarcation where skin had been grafted over tissue.

  She had taken a beating Thursday night, but she hadn’t said anything about a sex angle. She had surprised someone in the act of letting the horses loose. Wrong place, wrong time. Now he wondered if she’d come off lucky. Jill Morone had been in the wrong place at the wrong time too. Just two tents over.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What did the security people have to say?”

  “Nothing. According to them, the place is virtually crime-free. The odd theft here and there. Nothing serious.”

  “Nothing serious. They’ve got serious now. Estes said she didn’t like the guard she ran into that night. I spoke with him the next day. I didn’t like him either. I meant to run a check on him, then—”

  “Estes?” Weiss looked at him as if he was certain he had heard wrong.

  “The vic,” Landry qualified.

  “What’s her first name?”

  “What’s it matter?” Landry said defensively.

  “Not Elena Estes?”

  “What if it is?”

  Weiss turned his head, and his thick neck made a sound like heavy boots on crushed shell. “She’s a problem, that’s what. Plenty of people would be happy if she was the one on that table in there,” he said, looking at the door to the autopsy suite.

  “Are you on
e of them?” Landry asked.

  “Hector Ramirez was a hell of a guy. That bitch got his head blown off. I have a problem with that,” Weiss said, puffing up, his arms raising another inch from his sides. “What’s she doing in this? I heard she’d gone off and crawled into a bottle.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Landry snapped. “She’s in the middle of this mess because she’s helping somebody out.”

  “Yeah? Her kind of help I don’t need,” Weiss said. “Does the lieutenant know she’s in it?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. What is this, Weiss? Kindergarten? Are you gonna tell on her?” Landry said sarcastically. “She got the crap beat out of her Thursday. Be happy about that and get your head where it belongs. We’ve got a dead girl here and one kidnapped.”