Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

  I called Landry and left a message on his voice mail. Then I turned off the television and left the house.

  At one end of the barn Irina was stretched out in a lounge chair in a bikini top and short shorts, dramatic black sunglasses shading her eyes.

  “Irina,” I called on my way to my car. “If Tomas Van Zandt comes by, call nine-one-one. He’s wanted for murder.”

  She raised a hand lazily to acknowledge me, and rolled onto her stomach to tan her back.

  I went to the show grounds, to Jade’s barn, for a second shot at Javier. There was less chance on a Monday of his being caught speaking to me. The stables were closed. There was no reason for Trey Hughes to show up, or Paris. Perhaps he would feel more free to tell me what he knew.

  But there was no one at Jade’s stalls. The stalls had not been cleaned and the horses were clamoring for lunch. It appeared they had been abandoned. The aisle was an obstacle course of forks, rakes, brooms, and overturned muck buckets. As if someone had come through in a very big hurry.

  I raided Jade’s feed stall and tossed each horse a flake of hay.

  “Don’t tell me. Now you’re pretending to be a groom?”

  I looked out the back of the tent to find Michael Berne standing there in jeans and a polo shirt. He looked as happy as I had seen him since this mess had begun. Relaxed. His rival was in jail and all was right with the world.

  “I’m a multitalented individual,” I said. “What’s your excuse for being here?”

  He shrugged. I noticed for the first time he held a small box in his hand. Something from a vet’s office.

  “No rest for the weary,” he said.

  “Or the wicked.”

  Rompun. One of the sedatives used commonly on horses. Everybody has the stuff around, Paris had said as she spoke of the drug found in Stellar’s bloodstream.

  “Having a party?” I asked, looking pointedly at the box.

  “I’ve got one that’s hard to shoe,” Berne said. “He needs a little something to take the edge off.”

  “Was Stellar hard to shoe?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. You haven’t seen Paris today, have you?”

  “She was here earlier. Just in time to watch the INS cart her last groom away.”

  “What?”

  “There was a raid this morning,” he said. “Her Guatemalan guy was one of the first rounded up.”

  “Who tipped them off? You?” I asked bluntly.

  “Not me,” he said. “I lost a guy too.”

  The INS rolled in for a surprise raid, and a man in barn nineteen was one of the first to go. The one person left in Jade’s camp who might have been persuaded to tell the truth—if he knew it—gone just as the case seemed to be breaking.

  Trey had seen me speaking with Javier. He might have told Paris. Or perhaps Bert Shapiro had wanted the Guatemalan out of the country in the event he might know something about Jade.

  “I hear he’s in jail,” Michael Berne said.

  “Jade? Yes. Unless he’s made bail. Kidnapping charges. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Maybe you were here the night it happened. A week ago, Sunday, late in the day at the back gate.”

  Berne shook his head and started to walk away. “Not me. I was at home. With my wife.”

  “You’re a very devoted and forgiving husband, Michael,” I said.

  “Yes, I am,” he said smugly. “I’m not the criminal here, Ms. Estes.”

  “No.”

  “Don Jade is.”

  No, I thought as he walked away, I don’t believe that either.

  Chapter 50

  My phone rang as I walked back to my car.

  “Meet me for lunch,” Landry said.

  “Your telephone etiquette is sorely lacking,” I pointed out.

  He named a fast-food place ten minutes away and hung up.

  E rin Seabright caught Jade in the stall with the dead horse,” Landry said. We sat in his car. A sack of food lay on the seat between us, filling the car with the aroma of charbroiled meat and french fries. Neither of us touched it. “She caught him doctoring the electrical cord on the fan.”

  “Erin told you that?”

  “I’m on my way to ask her about it now. We didn’t get into the whole dead horse saga this morning. I only asked her for details about her abduction. Paris Montgomery came in on her own and told me. There was a story on the morning news about Erin’s escape from the kidnappers. Apparently, that put the fear of God in Ms. Montgomery.”

  “More like a vulture circling a dying animal,” I said. “She smells opportunity.

  “She says Erin caught Jade, and at the end of the day Jade kidnapped her? It doesn’t track, Landry.”

  “I know. The kidnapping plot was already in motion.”

  “If that’s what it was,” I said. “Have the technical wizards enhanced that first videotape?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it. Why?”

  “Look for the bracelet I handed you this morning.”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you think the kidnappers gave it to her as a parting gift?” I asked. “I’ve watched that tape fifty times. I don’t see a bracelet, but she was wearing one last night.”

  Landry looked incredulous. “Are you trying to say the girl is in on it? You’re out of your mind. Estes, you haven’t seen her. She’s had the shit kicked out of her. You didn’t see that tape of the perp going at her with the whip. And this morning Weiss and Dwyer found another tape in Seabright’s office. It shows the girl being brutally raped.”

  That brought me up short. “He had it in the house? In his office?”

  “Stuffed behind some things on a shelf.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. It was what I had been hoping for—for Seabright to be made to pay a price. But news of the taped rape was something else.

  “It looked genuine?” I asked.

  “Made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end,” Landry said. “I wanted to take Seabright and choke him till his eyes popped out.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s sitting in a holding cell. The state’s attorney is trying to decide what to charge him with.”

  “What happened at Jade’s arraignment?”

  “Trey Hughes posted bail.”

  “I wonder if Paris knows about that.”

  “I’d bet he’s paying for Bert Shapiro too.”

  “Have you interviewed him yet? Trey?”

  “He’s been asked to come in. Shapiro won’t allow it.”

  “Run his name through the system,” I said. “Trey has a checkered past. He told me yesterday he has a past professional acquaintance with my father. People don’t hire Edward Estes for traffic mishaps.”

  Landry shook his head in disgust. “It’s like a goddam bag of snakes, this bunch.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Now we get to find out how many of them are poisonous.”

  N othing breeds contempt more virulent than unrequited devotion. I drove toward Loxahatchee, thinking of Paris Montgomery walking into the Sheriff’s Office to give up her boss on the horse murder and insurance fraud. Paris was a first-chair kind of girl who had been playing second fiddle to Don Jade for three years. She had helped him build his clientele.

  She had defended him with one hand and dug the foundation out from under him with the other.

  I wondered if it had been Paris who dropped the dime to the INS regarding Javier. She had been with Trey the night before. He might have told her he believed me to be a private investigator, and that he had found me conversing in fluent Spanish with the one Jade employee left who might have known something valuable.

  Or perhaps Trey had called them himself. For reasons of his own. I tried to picture him as one of the kidnappers. Had the years of debauchery so warped him that he might consider kidnapping a girl to be a game?

  The afternoon was already half-gone as I tu
rned down the road to Paris Montgomery’s house. In the dense woods of rural Loxahatchee, much of the light had already fallen victim to the long shadows of tall thin pine trees.

  I drove past the house Paris lived in to the cul-de-sac where I had nearly shot Jimmy Manetti the night before. The half-built houses had been abandoned by their work crews for the day. I parked my car, took the Glock out of its hiding place, and made my way back down the road, ducking into the cover of trees as quickly as I could.

  The house was much like Eva Rosen’s: a pseudo-Spanish seventies rambler with mildewed white stucco and a cedar shake roof crusted with moss. I let myself in a side door to the garage, which was stacked with the property owner’s lawn equipment and Christmas decorations. The money-green Infiniti was not there.

  The door into the house was locked, and the lights on the security system panel showed that the system was armed. I walked around the exterior of the house, looking for an unlocked door, a partially open window. No luck.

  Through the living room windows I could see a nasty once-white shag carpet and a lot of cheesy “Mediterranean” furniture no one from the Mediterranean would ever have laid claim to. The TV looked almost as tall as I was and had every kind of symbiotic machine hooked up to it—VCR, DVD, Dolby sound system with a bank of stereo equipment that looked like something from NASA.

  I went around the side yard to the back, where a big redwood hot tub sat inside the requisite caged patio, along with an assortment of tacky patio furniture and sun-starved plants. The screen door was not locked, but the sliding glass door into the dining room was secure. I could see mail on the dining room table: magazines, bills.

  A second sliding glass door at the far end of the patio led into a bedroom with orange shag carpeting. The drapes were pulled back, revealing a king-sized bed with a red velvet spread. A painting of a naked woman with three breasts and two faces hung above the ornate, fake wood headboard. A TV sat on an open-sided stand at the end of the room. I checked the titles on the stack of videos on the bottom shelf and wondered if I was the only person in south Florida without a collection of porn.

  Somewhere beyond the yard, the engine of a piece of heavy machinery had fired up with a throaty growl. My luck someone had come back to the construction site down the road and was about to bulldoze my car.

  The backyard was dim with shadows, but the sky above the treetops was still an intense blue. The racket was not coming from the direction of the new houses down the road, but from beyond those trees, beyond Paris Montgomery’s backyard, to the west.

  A large motor grumbled constantly, the intermittent crunching and chewing of materials being fed through some big machine. A mulch grinder, I guessed, and I almost turned away. Then I paused.

  Landry had said there was a sound of heavy machinery in the background of the video showing Erin being beaten by her captors. A sound Erin hadn’t been able to remember when he’d asked her about the place where she was held.

  I walked toward the back of the property. Dense with young trees and wild bamboo, vines knitting all of it together, the back border of the yard was a jungle that would have eventually swallowed up the yard and the house if allowed.

  The thump and grind of the machine grew louder. A truck engine revved and the beep-beep-beep of warning sounded as it backed up.

  Trying to see through the curtain of greenery to the property on the other side, I almost missed it. The thing sat in the tangled growth like an ancient ruin. Gray and rusted, once an alien thing that had become almost an organic part of the landscape over the course of time. A trailer. What might have been a construction boss’s office once, with a window on the end of it that was coated with dirt on the inside. Someone had scratched through the filth with their fingertip, writing a single word: HELP.

  Chapter 51

  Life can change in a heartbeat.

  I had nearly missed it. I had been a heartbeat from turning and walking away. Then, there it was: the real reason Paris Montgomery had taken this shitty house too far from the show grounds. I had thought she had come here to be away from prying eyes, and I was right. But her affair with Trey Hughes was not the only thing she had wanted to hide.

  The trailer squatted in the overgrowth like something from a bad dream. The sight of it evoked memories I wished I didn’t have.

  Adrenaline runs through my bloodstream like rocket fuel. My heart pounds like a piston. I’m ready to launch.

  I pulled my gun and moved in close along the side of the trailer. Only when I was right on top of it could I see the path where someone had walked around the end to get to the twisted, rusted metal stairs that hung off the back side of the trailer.

  Despite the fact that the sun hadn’t touched this yard in an hour or more, and the temperature was in fact cool, I was perspiring. I thought I could hear myself breathing.

  I’ve been told to stay put, to wait, but I know that’s not the right decision . . . wasting precious time . . . It’s my case. I know what I’m doing . . .

  I felt the same push now. My case. My discovery. But a hesitation, also. Apprehension. Fear. The last time I had made that decision, I had been wrong. Dead wrong.

  I leaned back against the side of the trailer, willing my pulse to slow, trying to slow my thought process, trying to shut out the emotions that had more to do with post-traumatic stress than with the present.

  Paris would have rented this property months ago, I reasoned. If this place had been chosen because of the privacy, because of the trailer, that extended the period of premeditation to before the season had begun. I wondered if Erin had been chosen for her job because of her potential as a groom or as a victim.

  My hand was shaking as I pulled out my phone with my left hand. I dialed Landry’s pager number, left my number and 911. I called his voice mail, left Paris Montgomery’s address, and told him to get here ASAP.

  And now what? I thought as I closed the phone and stuck it in my pocket. Wait? Wait for Paris to come home and find me in her backyard? Let opportunity and daylight pass, waiting for Landry to call me back?

  It’s my case. I know what I’m doing . . .

  I knew what Landry would say. He would tell me to wait for him. Go sit in my car like a good girl.

  I’ve never been a good girl.

  It’s my case. I know what I’m doing . . .

  The last time I had thought that, I had been very wrong.

  I wanted to be right.

  Slowly, I went up the metal stairs that over time had sunken into the sandy earth and settled away from the trailer, leaving a gap of several inches between the two. Standing to the side of the door, I knocked twice, and called out “Police.”

  Nothing happened. I couldn’t hear any movement within the trailer. No shotgun blasts came through the door. It occurred to me Van Zandt might be inside, hiding out until he could catch his plane to Brussels. He might have been Paris Montgomery’s partner in it all, helping her to oust Jade and secure her place in Trey Hughes’ life, while Van Zandt indulged himself in his hobby of dominating young girls. Perhaps the ransom was to have been his fee for helping to ruin Don Jade.

  And Erin’s role in the game? I wasn’t sure now, in light of what Landry had told me about the videotapes of her being raped and beaten. The tape of her abduction, which I had watched a dozen times, made me question whether Erin was truly a victim. Perhaps Paris had lured her into the plot with the opportunity to punish her parents, and once the plan was in motion had given her over to Van Zandt. The idea sickened me.

  Standing to one side, I held my breath as I opened the door a crack with my left hand.

  Billy Golam jerks open the door, wild-eyed, high on his own home cooking—crystal meth. He’s breathing hard. He’s got a gun in his hand.

  A bead of sweat ran down between my eyebrows and skittered off my nose.

  Leading with the Glock, I ducked into the trailer and swept the barrel of the gun from left to right. There was no one in the first room. I took in only the swiftest impre
ssion of the furnishings: an old steel desk, a pole lamp, a chair. All of it covered in dust and cobwebs. Piles of old newspapers. Discarded paint cans. The stale, musty smells of dust and cigarettes and mildew growing beneath the old linoleum floor assaulted my nose. The sounds of the machinery outside seemed to resonate and amplify inside the tin can trailer.

  Cautiously, I moved toward the second room, still leading with the gun.