A Taste of Blood and Ashes

by Jaden Terrell

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  He said, “You’re a thorough man. But what does it matter? Whether he was with her or with someone else, or drinking alone in his car, Tommy’s death was a tragedy, not a murder.”

  “Then why would someone pay her to lie about it? And why was his blood alcohol level so low?”

  He rocked back on his heels, not stepping away, but putting space between us. “I can’t explain that. All I know is, Sam and I didn’t murder anyone.”

  “Someone tried to kill Zane less than a day after he remembered being with Owen Bodeen. And Owen’s bones were found in the ruins of the Underwoods’ barn. Odds are, he was killed the night he vanished. The night he told Zane about Cole’s murder.”

  Doc’s face went pale beneath his tan. “What makes you think they’re Owen’s bones? There are a lot of transients in this business. Grooms. Stable hands. They come and go. One of them could have gone missing, and no one would be the wiser.”

  “Like Owen?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t have called him a transient. He’d have been missed.”

  “But he wasn’t. Because of Zane’s accident. Think about it. Owen sees—or thinks he sees—you and Trehorne kill a man. Then someone takes advantage of the confusion around Zane’s accident to make sure Owen doesn’t talk to anybody else. Did you ever actually see him after Zane was hurt?”

  His gaze slid up and to the right. “There was a lot of confusion. I can’t say for sure if he was there or not. My sense of it is he wasn’t. But his truck was missing, along with some of his clothes and other effects. We figured he must have just picked up and gone.”

  “Whoever killed him must have gotten rid of them. So, Doc, you need to make me understand what anyone but you and Samuel Trehorne would gain by killing Owen and by trying to kill Zane.”

  Doc held up a hand. “Slow down there, Sparky. If Sam and I were going to kill Owen Bodeen over a murder we didn’t commit, we’d have done it forty years ago.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But all indications are he was solid then and had a recent change of heart. He’d been diagnosed with cancer, wanted to make things right.”

  “And you think he came to us with that, and we killed him? Now you’re moving into tinfoil hat territory.”

  “I think he told Zane, and Junior overheard him. Are there any drugs that could make a normal horse go bat-shit crazy?”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Some drug that might have made Rogue go nuts when Zane went into his stall?”

  “Maybe. Is it possible?”

  “You’d have to know when he’d be going in there. You’d have to know how much to give and when to give it so it was at its peak right when he went in. But then the horse would be showing aberrant behavior, which would have tipped Zane off.”

  “What about an electric buzzer? Something where you could control the timing from a distance?”

  “It would still be iffy. You couldn’t know how badly the horse would hurt him, or if it would hurt him at all. Zane was an athletic guy. He might have just gotten out of the way. But even if you could guarantee it, why go to all that trouble?”

  “If I’d killed someone forty years ago,” I said, “and someone who was with me started talking, I might want to shut him up. And then I’d shut up the guy he told.”

  He pushed away from the wall. “I might do that too. If I’d murdered someone forty years ago. But Tom Cole’s death was not a murder. It was just a tragic accident. Now, are we finished here? That line back there’s not getting any shorter.”

  35.

  There was a missed call from Frank on my cell phone. I called him back, and he answered on the first ring. “Quick update,” he said. “The lead detective on the Tom Cole case said he’d always been pretty sure somebody held Cole underwater. Said it always bothered him he couldn’t make a case.”

  “No physical evidence?”

  “Not a shred. Might be different if it happened today. We could maybe pull prints from the body, but back then, tests were less sophisticated.”

  “But your guy is pretty sure?”

  “Sure as you can be. But the guys he suspected were all solid. They and their wives. Nobody would give anything away. He says he calls one or another of them every now and then. They never budge.”

  “Must be frustrating.”

  “He says Cole’s wife would call him once a year on the anniversary, send him a dozen roses from her garden. He thought it was her way of reminding him he’d let her down. Nice gesture, he said, but not so nice under the surface.”

  “If it was a conspiracy, it was a big one. Hard to keep that many people quiet.”

  “They were a brick wall. He said he never saw anything like it. None of them ever faltered. Not once.”

  “One of them might have, but he never got the chance.” I told him about Owen Bodeen.

  “Bodeen’s name didn’t come up. Could be the detectives never knew about him.”

  “He was a hired hand,” I said. “I’m not even sure why they brought him along.”

  “Scapegoat,” he suggested. “Someone to blame it on if things went wrong. Now about your fires . . .”

  He sent a printout to my phone and my computer. The print was too tiny to read on my cell phone, so he gave me the high points.

  No wonder the sheriff was worried.

  I found Hap drinking coffee in front of the donut booth. I handed him the buckle wrapped in a handkerchief. He unwrapped it carefully and squinted at it in the sun, his jowls trembling, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. It was a look I’d seen before, on young men hearing the clang of a prison door for the first time, on parents opening their front doors to men in dark suits, bad news on their faces.

  Hap Trehorne was afraid.

  He wrapped the buckle back up and put it in his shirt pocket. Said, “Where did you find this?”

  “Last night at the Underwood barn.”

  “So why am I just now seeing it?”

  I shrugged. “It was late. I was tired.”

  “You should have called me. I’d have come out to get it. But now . . . You broke the chain of evidence. You could have gotten this anywhere.”

  “Or I could have found it anywhere and put it in the ashes before I called you. Could have done that the day after the fire, in fact. Pretty lax, for a crime scene.”

  He sucked in an angry breath. “As far as we knew, it wasn’t a crime scene that first night. Barns catch fire all the time. Especially soring barns. They’re like meth labs. Lots of unstable chemicals.”

  “But the Underwoods weren’t soring.”

  “So they say. But that’s not what it looked like. No reason to look deeper. Not until you found those bones.”

  “Owen’s bones.”

  “Likely. Not certain. We’ll never be certain. Not enough there to do much with.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Could be, if you called in the guys from the TBI, you might still get mitochondrial DNA from the teeth.” I knew this because I knew a forensic dentist who’d identified a victim in exactly this way, more than a decade after the body had been burned and buried.

  The muscles around Hap’s eyes tightened. I guessed he didn’t like the idea of bringing in outsiders. “Maybe,” he said finally, “but it wouldn’t do us any good. There’s nothing to compare it to.”

  “No family?”

  “Not that anybody knows.”

  I made a que sera sera gesture with one hand. “We may not be able to prove it, but I think we know. What we don’t know is who put him there.”

  He gave me a measured look, then took a swig from his coffee cup and grabbed a donut from a grease-stained cardboard box open on the counter. “The simplest explanation is usually best,” he said carefully. “Zane or Gonzales put him there.”

  “Considering when Owen went missing, Zane has a pretty ironclad alibi.”

  “You got me there.” He looked annoyed at his own carelessness. “Gonzales, then. And whoever set the fire, assuming it was
set, didn’t know about it. Why you got to make things so complicated?” He shook the excess sugar off the donut, stuffed it into his mouth.

  “I don’t make ’em complicated. They just get that way. I hear you get a lot of fires around here. About double the state rate.”

  He chewed methodically, finally swallowed. “Is that so?”

  “Seems like a lot of them belonged to your brother’s enemies.”

  “Probably a lot of ’em belonged to his friends too. In this county, pretty much anybody with horses is connected to my brother one way or another. As for fires, this is horse country. Lots of barns. Lots of hay. These young guys get impatient, don’t give it time to dry.”

  This was true enough. When hay is baled damp and stored before it’s fully dried, microscopic organisms at the center of the bale start reproducing. Being brainless and without the distractions of Facebook and cable TV, they reproduce until they generate a mighty heat—enough to ignite the surrounding hay. Still, there was no reason for there to be more fires in Hap’s little kingdom than in, say, nearby Bedford County.

  “I grant you that,” I said. “But with those kinds of statistics, I’d think your fire department would be a little quicker. Forty minutes to get to Zane and Carlin’s farm? I could be almost to Nashville by then.”

  He brushed a dusting of sugar off his shirt. “They’re volunteer. It’s not like they just sit around at the fire department waiting for something to happen. These guys have jobs. Families. Sometimes it takes awhile to round ’em up.”

  I said, “It’s a little too coincidental for my blood.”

  “Your blood will just have to get over it.” He took another donut from the box and raised it in a toast. His voice was light, his smile forced. “To coincidence. Next time you have a breakthrough, you call me, you hear?”

  I gave him a mock salute and walked back to the stables. At Trehorne’s, Junior and Esmerelda stood in front of the lobby area, playing hopscotch on a grid scraped onto the concrete. She tossed the marker, hopped, and toppled.

  “Nice try.” He tousled her hair, looked up when he saw me.

  I said, “Lobbying for brother of the year?”

  “I deserve it too,” he said. “Plus maybe hazard pay.”

  “Around our house, it’s Beanie Babies. They multiply like coat hangers.”

  Esmerelda held out a stone. “You want to play? Junior, tell him we want him to play.”

  Junior sighed. “How about it? Care for a match?”

  “Mighty generous of you,” I said.

  “I’m a generous guy.”

  “Really?” I lifted an eyebrow. “I heard you were pretty rough on Dan Bitmore before he died.”

  He hunched a shoulder. “Dan turned on his own. I didn’t give him any grief he didn’t deserve.”

  “Still. You don’t feel bad about that now? Considering what happened?”

  A muscle in his cheek pulsed. “I might feel bad if I’d ’ve shot him. I don’t feel bad about calling bullshit when I hear it.”

  “Bullshit because he reported the soring?”

  “Bullshit,” Esmerelda sang. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

  “Now look what you’ve done,” he said to me. Then, to her, “Princess, go get your My Pretty Ponies and find Mama. And don’t say that word. Mama will skin me alive and wash your mouth out with soap.”

  She pouted until he put his hands on her shoulders and spun her around. Giggled as he gave her a nudge in the direction of the arena. She broke into a skip, and he watched with a protective eye until she passed out of sight.

  “Dan Bitmore,” I said. “Why exactly were you calling bullshit?”

  “Because he was one of us, and he gave the other side ammunition he knew they’d use to hurt us, all of us, whether we sore or not. You’re supposed to take care of your own. We Trehornes know that. Apparently Dan didn’t.”

  “What about Zane? You hold a grudge against him too?”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “He pretty much declared war on us when he jumped feet first into Carlin’s anti-Big Lick camp. Just because he’s crippled doesn’t mean he ain’t a traitor.”

  “Interesting word, considering the penalty for treason is death.”

  “Aw, man.” He spat onto the ground beside his feet. “You can’t pin that on me. I was out at Jake’s bar with a couple dozen witnesses.”

  “Mace Ewing one of them?”

  “I don’t know where Mace was. I’m not his keeper.”

  “I was thinking more his handler. There’s some evidence he was at Zane’s trailer the night of the attack.”

  “And you think I’m the one who sent him there? Good luck proving that.” He laughed again, and reached for a lead rope on the little display table. “I gotta go get Rogue ready to show.”

  “Sweet horse,” I said. “I met him at your father’s barn.”

  “Aw, he’s a clown.” He smiled at some secret joke. “But at least he ain’t sore.”

  I watched Carlin ride her classes, while Zane looked on from his chair and Gerardo kept a watchful eye, adjusting a stirrup here, a bit there. Junior rode two classes in between, a competent rider, light hands, good seat. Trudy had said he could ride anything, but there was little artistry in it. Rogue did his job well. Once in the ring, he was all business.

  While Junior rode, I walked over to Carlin. She was fiddling with Tesora’s girth, her gaze turned away from the ring. Gerardo hovered nearby.

  “I can’t stand to watch him,” Carlin said as I came to stand beside her. “I used to think he was the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen, and now I can’t even stand to look at him.”

  “What was he like?” I said.

  “He took his job seriously.”

  “And when he wasn’t working?”

  “He was a worrier. Any big change, he’d get those worry wrinkles around his eyes. He really wanted to please you. And once he got to know you, he was a sweetheart. He used to come and lay his head in my lap.”

  “You trusted him.”

  “I guess that’s why it hurt so much. I wanted to put him down, but Sam Trehorne offered to buy him, and we needed the money, and . . . Well, it’s not like Sam didn’t know what he was getting.”

  “You think Sam Trehorne sores.”

  She shrugged, didn’t answer.

  “So you were punishing Rogue?”

  “I didn’t think of it that way.” She reached up and smoothed Tesora’s mane. “But maybe you’re right. I shouldn’t wish that on any animal, but maybe I did. Maybe I think he deserves whatever he gets.”

  “Would you have called Rogue a clown?”

  “He was a thinker. A little reserved at first, but a lover once you got to know him. He was so serious. We used to call him Your Honor.” She gave a sad little smile and gestured toward the ring. “They’re calling me. I have to go.”

  She finished her classes, and as we left the arena, a group of brown-skinned children playing soccer kicked a ball across our path. A taller boy darted past and snatched it up, gave us a crooked grin before loping back to his teammates. The others laughed, and another boy called out something in Spanish.

  Not far away, in the lobby of the empty Trehorne block, Esmerelda sat in a chair too large for her, kicking her feet and heaving aggrieved sighs. Even her Cartier watchband seemed to have lost its appeal.

  “Hey, Kiddo,” I said. “Why the long face?”

  She brightened, then scooted off the chair and scampered over.

  She dismissed Khanh and Gerardo after a quick glance, then stared at Zane until he gave her a crooked grin and said in his robotic voice, “BOO.”

  She gave him an uncertain smile. Looked at Carlin, then at Zane again, and slunk behind me as if suddenly realizing she was fraternizing with the enemy.

  She tugged at my shirt. “Do you want to play Chutes and Ladders with me?”

  I nodded toward the soccer game. “Why don’t you ask those guys if you can play?”

  “I can’t play with them.
It wouldn’t be proper.” She held up her watchband, shook it so the diamonds caught the light and splintered it. “They aren’t like us.”

  Gerardo sucked in a quick hiss of breath.

  I said, “I’m not like you either. How come you can play Chutes and Ladders with me?”

  She gave me a bewildered look that said I didn’t know much. “Aren’t you buying a horse from my papa?”

  “I don’t know yet. The price is a little steep.”

  She looked uncertain, her classification system suddenly awry.

  Gerardo said, “These children. They’re people, just like you.”

  “Oh no.” She screwed up her face and jangled her watchband again. “They aren’t like me. I’m a young lady, and they’re just a bunch of wetbacks.”

  The innocence with which she said it was somehow worse than if she’d said it with hatred or contempt.

  Gerardo looked like he’d been slapped. Carlin, on the other side of Tesora, reached across and squeezed his hand. Esmerelda looked from one face to another. She’d said something wrong, her expression said, but she wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

  “Oh, kiddo,” I said. While the others stood back and watched, I took her little brown hand and walked her back to Trehorne’s tricked-out lobby, picked her up, and sat her in the too-big chair. If she’d been mine, I would have known what I should say. I would have talked about how people are the same, no matter how much money they have or the color of the skin they were born with.

  She wasn’t my child, and it wasn’t my place, but I told her those things anyway. She listened with her brows knit and her mouth in a skeptical “o,” and when her mother called her name, she gave my hand a sympathetic pat and skipped away not having understood a word I’d said.

  “Madre de Dios,” Gerardo said as I walked back to rejoin the group. His voice broke. “Look what they’ve made of her.”

  36.

  I thought the Trehornes had meant well. They’d bought their daughter nice things, tried to make her happy. And in the process, they’d neglected to teach her that the world was more than other people living in her universe. Like Junior, the Trehornes’ crown prince, Esmerelda had been steeped in entitlement since the day she was born. I wondered how long it had taken Gerardo to realize the magnitude of his mistake.