Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

  “But she’d know his voice, because of the accent,” Landry said. “Maybe he’s smarter than he looks.” He sighed and shook his head. “She won’t make a good witness.”

  He was frowning, and I could tell I had only a fraction of his attention. He was mentally replaying what Erin had told him, trying to find a way to work it into a lead or lead him to a piece of evidence.

  “She doesn’t need to be a good witness, yet,” I reminded him. “You’ve got enough for Jade to be arraigned. Maybe you’ll come up with some forensic evidence.”

  “Yeah. Don’t strain yourself in your enthusiasm,” he said sarcastically.

  I shrugged. “What do you have on him I don’t know about? Have you come up with anything from his condo?”

  He said nothing.

  “Anything from the girls’ apartment?”

  “Some snapshots of Jade. One of him and Erin together. Someone wrote on the back: ‘To Erin. Love, Don.’ Jill had the pictures stashed. She had scratched out Erin’s face and name with a ballpoint pen.”

  “All the girls love Donnie.”

  “I don’t see it, myself,” Landry muttered.

  “Have you found whether or not he owns or rents property other than the condo?”

  “He wouldn’t be stupid enough to hold Erin on property that could be traced back to him. And I couldn’t get that lucky.”

  “How did she get away?”

  “She says they let her go. They figured they weren’t getting the money, so they tossed her in the back of the van, drove her around, and dumped her like an old rug.”

  “So, she can’t say where they held her.”

  “No. A trailer house. That’s all she knows.”

  “Could you tell anything from the last videotape? Any background sounds?”

  “There was some noise in the background. The techno-geeks are trying to figure it out. Sounded like heavy machinery to me.”

  “What did Erin say about it?”

  He looked out the window. “That she wasn’t sure. That they kept her drugged. Special K, she says. It’s easy to come by,” Landry said. “Especially for people who work around veterinarians.”

  “But it’s not a sedative we use on horses,” I told him. “It’s commonly used on small animals.”

  “Still, the access is there.”

  “What about Chad?”

  “He never left the Seabright house last night,” Landry said, opening his phone again. “Besides, Erin and Chad had an intimate relationship. You think she wouldn’t recognize him while he was raping her?”

  “Maybe he was the silent one. Maybe he just watched the partner do her. Maybe they had her so drugged up, she wouldn’t have recognized Santa Claus if he was bending over her.”

  Landry scowled at me while he checked his messages. “You know what? You’re a pain in the ass, Estes.”

  “Yeah, like that’s news.” I slipped down from the ledge. “Well, what the hey, Landry. Just kill them all and let God sort ’em out.”

  “Don’t tempt me. Half the people involved in this girl’s life belong in prison, if you ask me,” he muttered as he listened to the phone. “We’ll be executing a search warrant at the Seabright house in a couple of hours. I’ll be sure Dugan includes drugs as part of the warrant inventory.”

  “What else are you looking for?”

  “Erin keeps saying the kidnappers called Bruce Seabright multiple times, and that they made more than one video in the trailer. Three or four, she says.”

  “Jesus God, what’s he doing with them?” I asked. “Selling them on eBay?”

  “Yeah, and he’ll claim he was just trying to defray the cost of the ransom,” Landry muttered. “Asshole.”

  I sat down on the deep window ledge, the early morning sun hot on my back, and thought about Bruce Seabright’s possible involvement. “So, let’s say Seabright wanted Erin gone. He sets up the kidnapping scheme with no intention of ever bringing the cops in, or ever bringing Erin home. Why wasn’t she killed right away? They could have made the tapes in an hour, killed her, and dumped her.

  “Then I get involved and bring you in,” I went on. “Now Bruce has to play along. Again, why not just have the accomplice get rid of her?”

  “Because now we’re watching him, asking questions. The accomplices see cops nosing around and they get scared.”

  “So they let Erin go so she can help you build a case against them?” I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I’m playing with the cards I’ve got, Estes,” Landry said impatiently. “Erin says it was Jade. I’m going with that. It’d be stupid not to. If the thing tracks back to Bruce Seabright, I’ll go with that too. Felony makes strange bedfellows.”

  I didn’t say anything. Occasionally, I do realize the value of discretion. Landry had his suspect and his circumstantial evidence. He had a half-sure victim and doubts of his own.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, closing his phone. “The state’s attorney wants a meeting before Jade’s arraignment.”

  I thought I might be able to slip into Erin’s room after he’d gone, but I could see the deputy assigned to the post had already come back from his coffee break.

  “Landry?” I asked as he started down the hall. He glanced back at me. “Any sign of Van Zandt yet?”

  “No. He never came back to the town house.” He started to turn away and I called him back a second time.

  I took Erin’s bracelet from my pocket and held it out to him. “I found this on the floor of the examination room Erin was in last night. Ask her about it. Maybe it was a gift from Jade.”

  He took it from me, his fingers brushing mine. He nodded.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For filling me in.”

  Landry tipped his head. “Your case first.”

  “I thought you didn’t share.”

  “First time for everything.”

  He looked at the bracelet in his hand, then walked away.

  I left the hospital and took a drive around the parking lot with an eye peeled for a navy blue Chevy, but Van Zandt wasn’t there. Nor was Krystal Seabright’s white Lexus or Bruce’s Jaguar. Ever the loving parents. Erin had told them to go, so they’d gone. Off the hook.

  I have never understood people who have children but don’t raise them, don’t nurture them, don’t help them become human beings. What other reason is there? To carry on the family name? To get a welfare check? To preserve proof of a relationship? Because that was what one was supposed to do at a particular time in one’s life: get married, have kids. No one ever explained why.

  I didn’t know much about Erin Seabright’s upbringing, but I knew she hadn’t gotten where she was by being loved. She was, by her own sister’s account, an angry, bitter girl.

  I didn’t like her sketchy tale. I knew from personal experience that angry, bitter girls want the people who hurt them most to pay for their sins. I wondered if she might blame whom she wanted to blame. Perhaps Jade hadn’t loved her. Perhaps he’d broken her heart. And, in pain, in terror, under the influence of drugs, she might have projected his identity onto her tormentor.

  Or perhaps the tormentor had put the idea there for her to believe.

  I thought of Michael Berne again. It would have been simple for him to call Radio Shack and ask for that cell phone to be set aside. He could have sent a minion in to get the thing. If he had known about Erin’s attraction to Jade, he could have played on that during Erin’s captivity.

  But who would Michael’s partner be? He had no connection to the Seabrights I was aware of. He was on the wrong side of the relationship with Trey Hughes.

  Trey Hughes, who kept my father’s phone number in his wallet. Trey with his eye for the girls and his connection to every aspect of this sordid tale.

  I didn’t want to believe he could be a part of something so vicious as what had been done to Erin Seabright. I was still putting money on Van Zandt.

  But it seemed to me I had pieces from three different puzzle
s. The trick would be coming up with a final picture that wasn’t an abstract.

  Chapter 45

  The assistant state’s attorney seemed unperturbed by the fact that Erin Seabright had not seen the faces of her captors. As Elena had said, they had enough evidence to hold him on the charges, to arraign him and make a strong argument for high bail or no bail. They would then, by Florida law, have 175 days to bring Jade before a jury. Ample time to put the case together, provided the additional evidence was there to find.

  The blood that had been found in the stall where Jill Morone had died had been typed. If they could match it to Jade, they were on their way to a murder indictment to add to the kidnapping charge. They had put Jade’s alibi for the night of Jill’s death in doubt. He had no alibi for the night the horse had been killed, the event Estes believed had kicked everything into motion.

  Landry thought of Elena as he left the prosecutor’s office. He didn’t like that she had doubts about Jade’s involvement, and he didn’t like that it mattered to him what she thought. She had dragged him into this mess, and he wanted it to lay out as simply as her original theory had. Most crimes were like that: straightforward. The average murder was about money or sex, and didn’t require Sherlock Holmes to solve. Kidnapping for ransom—the same. Good basic police work led to arrests and convictions. He didn’t want this case to be any different.

  And maybe the reason Estes’ doubts bothered him so much was that some of those same doubts were chewing at the back of his mind. He tried to shake them off as he walked down the hall. Weiss came out of the squad room to meet him.

  “Paris Montgomery is here. Asking for you,” he added with an eye roll.

  “Did you find anything at the Seabright house?”

  “Jackpot,” Weiss said. “We found a videotape stashed on a shelf in Seabright’s home office. You won’t believe it. It actually shows the girl being raped. We’ve got Seabright in the conference room. I’m on my way now.”

  “Wait for me,” Landry said, fury burning in his gut. “I want a crack at that son of a bitch.”

  “There’ll be a line,” Weiss assured him.

  Paris Montgomery was pacing behind the table as Landry walked into the interview room. She looked upset and nervous, though her emotional state had not prevented her from putting on makeup or styling her hair.

  “Ms. Montgomery. Thank you for coming in,” Landry said. “Have a seat. Can I get you anything? Coffee?”

  “God, no,” she said, sitting down. “If I have any more caffeine I’m going to start spinning around the room like a top. I can’t believe any of this is happening. Don in jail. Erin kidnapped. My God. Is she all right? I just tried calling the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “She’s been roughed up,” Landry said. “But she’ll recover.”

  “Will they let me see her?”

  “Immediate family only, for the time being. Maybe later today.”

  “I feel terrible about what happened. I mean, she worked for me. I should have looked out for her.” Tears filled the big brown eyes. “I should have done something. When Don said she’d quit and gone— I should have tried harder to contact her. I should have known something was wrong.”

  “Why is that? Did you have reason to be suspicious?”

  She glanced away; her expression seemed to have the kind of glazed look people get when they are watching memories run through their minds.

  “Erin had seemed happy with the job. I mean, I knew she was having boyfriend trouble, but what girl her age doesn’t? I just— I should have questioned her leaving so suddenly. But you have to understand, grooms come and go during the season. There’s too much opportunity. Someone offers more money or health insurance or an extra day off and they’re gone.”

  Landry offered no platitudes, no absolution. Someone sure as hell should have been paying closer attention to what was going on with Erin Seabright. He wasn’t inclined to let anyone off the hook.

  “Were you aware of any relationship between Erin and Don?” he asked.

  “Erin had a crush on him.”

  “To your knowledge, did he act on it?”

  “I—well—Don is very charismatic.”

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “He’s a magnetic kind of person. Women are drawn to him. He enjoys that. He likes to flirt.”

  “With Erin?”

  “Well . . . sure . . . but I didn’t think he would take advantage of her. I don’t want to believe that he did.”

  “But he might have.”

  She looked uncertain, which was answer enough.

  “Did Erin say anything to you about the death of the horse?”

  “She was upset. We all were.”

  “Did she hint that she knew something about what happened?”

  She looked away again and pressed two fingers against the small crease digging in between her eyebrows. “She didn’t believe it was an accident.”

  “She took care of the horse, right?”

  “Yes. She was very good with him—with all the horses. She put in extra time with them. She would come and check on them after hours sometimes.”

  “Had she checked on them that night?”

  “Around eleven. Everything was fine.”

  “Why did she think it wasn’t an accident?”

  Paris Montgomery began to cry. She looked around the room as if looking for a crevice to disappear into.

  “Ms. Montgomery, if Don Jade did what we believe he did, you don’t owe him any loyalty.”

  “I didn’t believe he’d done anything bad,” she said in a small voice, making the excuse for herself, not for Jade.

  “What happened?”

  “Erin told me Don was at the barn already when she got there that morning. Early. Really early. We had horses showing that day, and Erin had to get there early to braid manes and get the horses ready. She told me she saw Don in Stellar’s stall, doing something with the cord of the electric fan. She went over to the stall to ask him why he was there so early.”

  She stopped and tried to compose herself, her breath catching. Landry waited.

  “She saw Stellar was down. Don told her the horse had bitten through the cord of the fan, and he held the cord up. But Erin said he had something in his other hand. Some kind of a tool.”

  “You think he cut the cord to make it look like an accident.”

  “I don’t know!” she sobbed, covering her face with her hands. “I don’t want to believe he could have killed that poor animal!”

  “And now that might be the least of what he’s done,” Landry said.

  He sipped his coffee impassively while Paris Montgomery cried for her sin of omission. He turned the new facts over in his mind. Erin could have fingered Jade for staging the accident. That might logically have led to her death, he thought, as it may have led to Jill Morone’s death. But the evidence regarding the cell phone purchase indicated the kidnapping had been planned in advance of the horse murder. Therefore, the one thing had nothing to do with the other.

  “What did you do when Erin came to you with this information?” he asked.

  Paris dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “I got angry. I told her of course it was an accident. Don wouldn’t—”

  “Despite the fact that Don had on several occasions previous.”

  “I never believed that was true,” she said adamantly. “No one ever proved anything.”

  “Except that he’s clever and adept at evading the consequences of his actions.”

  Even now, she rose to Jade’s defense. “In three years I have never known Don to do one cruel thing to a horse in his care.”

  “What was Erin’s reaction when you didn’t believe her?”

  “She was upset at first. We talked some more. I told her what I just told you about my experience working for Don. I asked her if she could believe him capable of hurting anyone. I made her feel ashamed for even thinking it.”

  “So, when Jade told you she had quit
later that day—”

  “I wasn’t that surprised.”

  “But you didn’t try to call her.”

  “I tried to call her, she didn’t answer. I left a message on her voice mail. I went to her apartment a couple of days later, but it looked like she had moved out.”

  She sighed dramatically and looked at Landry with the big eyes, looking for forgiveness. “I would give anything if I could go back to that day and change what happened.”