Unbridled Murder

by Leigh Hearon

  “She’s dead.” Ashley’s voice registered astonishment.

  Behind her, her friend slid to the floor in a dead faint.

  CHAPTER 1

  MONDAY, MAY 2

  A piercing shriek brought Annie Carson out of her reverie. Not to mention her rear firmly back down on her saddle.

  She’d been standing in her stirrups to get the maximum view of her sheep pasture. It was a panoramic view—her mount was a 16-hand Thoroughbred, which already put her more than five feet off the ground. The sight of seventy-five ewes and as many lambs in the grassy lea reminded Annie of a Constable painting she’d once seen in a museum. Even the billowing clouds overhead looked painted.

  Now she wheeled Trooper around and nudged him forward. The horse took off at a hard canter, turning abruptly in response to Annie’s rein onto the trailhead of an old logging road. She pulled the horse up short a few seconds later.

  “Hannah! Thank God you’re safe!”

  “Shhhh!”

  If Annie thought it odd that an eight-year-old who’d just issued an earsplitting scream was now telling her to be quiet, she didn’t say so. Instead, she calmly walked her horse closer to Hannah’s. Bess, fortunately, was not making any noise. She was munching grass, very quietly.

  “What’s going on?” Annie kept her voice neutral.

  “I saw someone in the woods! A man! I think he had a gun.”

  Annie scanned the thick trees in front of her. It was early May, and the Pacific Northwest was in the full flower of spring. She saw nothing but a suffusion of ferns and undergrowth forming a luxuriant pillow against densely packed Douglas fir.

  “What was the man doing?”

  “Hiding! He was behind a tree. Then I saw him run to another one. I didn’t scream until I saw his weapon.”

  Hannah’s father ran a security business that included transporting Loomis trucks filled with cash from local businesses. She was well acquainted with different caliber handguns and shotguns.

  “What kind of weapon?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it was a pistol. But I screamed, and then he ran away back there.” Hannah pointed with her left arm into the woods.

  “Why did you scream? Were you afraid?”

  “Just a little. But I thought if I screamed, he’d go away. If he started to shoot at me, I figured I’d just gallop away. Maybe.”

  Annie was sure Hannah had every intention of galloping away. The problem was Bess, Annie’s twenty-five-year-old Morgan who thought indulging in anything beyond a stately walk did not befit her dignified age.

  “What did Bess do when you screamed?”

  “Grazed.”

  So much for Hannah’s fast getaway from the bad guy. But Annie was more concerned about Hannah’s near encounter than she let on to her little companion.

  The sound of shifting leaves caught both riders unawares. They started and whipped around in their saddles. Hannah clapped her hands over her mouth to make sure another scream wasn’t forthcoming. From the dark forest floor, a fawn emerged, almost perfectly camouflaged against the lush, green backdrop. Walking carefully on its long and spindly legs, it wended its way through the thicket and out of sight. Hannah and Annie remained motionless on their saddles.

  “A fawn!” breathed Hannah. “A baby deer! I thought I was going to jump out of my saddle, Annie, but I didn’t! Even Bess jumped. A little.”

  “That’s because you’re nice and relaxed in your seat, Hannah,” Annie replied. “So when something like this happens, it’s easy to stay balanced.”

  Annie was a stickler who told all of her riding students not to grip the horse’s ribs with their knees. It didn’t help their equilibrium, and it impacted their horse’s ability to move freely.

  Hannah looked thoughtfully at Annie and nodded. “Do you think the fawn will find its mother?”

  “I’m sure it will. The fawn isn’t going to move far just because a couple of horses are passing through. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a deer clearing in the next hundred feet.”

  “Let’s go find it!”

  “Nice try, kiddo. Fawns only want to be found by their mommies. Besides, hot chocolate awaits us.”

  This was the traditional ending to Hannah’s riding lesson, and afterward Annie had driven the little girl to her doorstep. Usually, she let Hannah walk back to her home through a well-worn path; after all, the Clare household was only a quarter mile away. But now Annie recalled recent news stories of young children who’d been abducted just a short distance from their own homes, and she had no intention of taking unnecessary chances.

  Taking care of her own safety was just as important. When Annie had opened Carson Stables, her training facility for equines, every man she’d encountered had flat out told her that a single woman who weighed a mere 125 pounds would never be able to handle the workload, let alone adequately protect herself from things that went bump in the night, both animal and human.

  “Don’t expect me to come to your rescue every time you hear a scary noise in the woods,” Suwana County Sheriff Dan Stetson had grumbled after she’d dismissed his advice for the tenth time.

  Annie had merely laughed. “I won’t,” was her breezy reply.

  That conversation had occurred fifteen years ago. In the intervening time, she’d proven Dan and everyone else wrong. Not one of her detractors knew how hard she worked to make sure no harm came to her or her animals. She’d learned that the best way to keep danger from coming to her doorstep was to meet it head-on.

  After dropping off Hannah, she parked her F-250 near the stables and called for Trooper, now contently munching on a flake of orchard grass in the paddock. It was time to find out exactly who had been lurking off the old logging road. If the man Hannah had seen was simply taking a shortcut through her property, he’d be long gone by now. She certainly hoped so.

  As usual, the thoroughbred was up for another trail ride. She slipped a hackamore over his nose and, using a rail post, hopped on his back, deciding to eschew his saddle on this trip. At forty-three, Annie was less enthused about playing leapfrog over a horse’s back to mount as she’d been in her twenties, but the joy of riding on a horse, sans saddle, still held a certain thrill. The connection with the animal was undeniable. After whistling for Wolf, her Blue Heeler, she cantered the short mile back to the sheep pasture and entered the now-familiar logging trail.

  What she found in the interior brush was not a deer clearing, but rather one made by a human, or humans. True, the rough campsite was on the edge of Annie’s property, but it looked as if it had been recently used, and for all she knew would be occupied again that evening. The folded army bedroll and cigarette butts littering a small fire pit were enough to confirm that no one had broken camp yet. The only item that was incongruous to the site was a small stuffed animal scrunched partway under a blanket. Annie slid off Trooper to take a closer look, and discovered it to be a very worn, and therefore presumably very much loved, toy lamb. Annie looked it over carefully, then back at the campsite. There was nothing else to intimate a child had been sleeping or living here—just a person who enjoyed inhaling carbon monoxide. She positioned the lamb in the vee of a nearby tree. She figured it wouldn’t hurt for whomever was staying here to know that their secluded home had been busted. And for some unknown reason, she felt like keeping the inanimate toy safe. Maybe it was the remnant of a homeless person’s former life that he or she carried with them.

  Maybe Dan knows who might be living here. Annie snorted as soon as the thought came into her head. Fat chance. The county abounded with homeless people, and the only transients the sheriff knew were the ones who landed in the county jail. However, there was no sign of a man in the vicinity, armed or otherwise.

  Annie clambered onto Trooper’s back, turned her reins toward the horse trail paralleling the sheep pasture, and headed for home. She waved to Trotter, her donkey of indeterminate age, still fully capable of keeping any would-be predator out of the electrified barriers that encased him, her ewes
, and their offspring. When summer ended and the sheep returned to Johan Thompson’s farm where they wintered, Trotter would rejoin the rest of Annie’s horses. The rotation would begin again in the spring, just before birthing season. Annie kept her sheep for their prized wool, not their taste. She had nothing against meat but preferred that anything she ingested had not first been fed and sheltered by her. It was a specious rationale, but Annie didn’t spend too much time worrying about it.

  When the barn and tack room loomed ahead and her four horses nickered to her from across the pasture, Annie put the makeshift campsite out of her mind. She leaned forward slightly, Trooper’s cue to canter. Normally, Annie wouldn’t let anyone canter a horse back to the barn—it was a bad habit and hard to break—but Trooper, bless his equine soul, was a perfect gentleman and knew exactly how far he could go and when to stop.

  Annie quickly ushered the horses into the paddock, which adjoined the row of stalls inside the stable. Everyone was ready for dinner and a warm stall, and each horse knew his or her place, although Rover, a once-starved horse Annie had rescued, predictably veered toward Trooper’s stall, which held a flake more of Timothy hay than his own. It took one quick sideways look from the thoroughbred to convince Rover he’d made a mistake.

  Watching each equine politely enter its stall, she thought smugly, My horses behave better than most children. Annie was more than satisfied with playing big sister to Hannah and other youngsters who loved horses. She was less than thrilled at playing the same role to her real half sister, Lavender, who’d trekked out from Florida earlier this year and temporarily found refuge in Annie’s home. Lavender had left their father’s home after learning he intended to marry a woman younger than she was. Annie couldn’t have cared less about her father’s marital exploits; he’d divorced her own mother more than twenty years before, and she hadn’t had contact with him in years. But Lavender, despite being a full-fledged adult—at least in age, if not maturity—had always relied upon their father’s financial support. Annie had discovered that her half sister now expected her to provide the same level of care and feeding she’d enjoyed in Florida. There were so many things in her own universe to explore, she explained to Annie, she simply didn’t have time for a paying job. Annie noticed that Lavender still had plenty of time to criticize the way she lived, however. Fortunately, the situation had remedied itself, and Lavender now lived a safe three miles away. Annie had made sure Lavender returned her extra house key.

  Before turning off the stable light, she stepped inside each stall and quickly ran her hands down each horse to make sure all was well. Normally, she would have lingered by them, inhaling and loving the smell of their manes and quietly grooming them as they munched their dinners.

  But tonight she had a phone date with Marcus Colbert, the man who had given her Trooper. A few months earlier he’d mysteriously disappeared after his wife, Hilda, was murdered, and he resurfaced—by way of a cryptic postcard—only after the case was solved. The entire world had been convinced that Marcus was on the run from the crime of killing his wife, but Annie’s faith in Marcus’s innocence had never wavered and she’d been proven right when the real killer was apprehended. Tonight, she would speak to him for the first time in almost two months. His personal assistant in San Jose had set up the phone appointment last week and had promised that Marcus would answer all her questions. And she had a bucketful.

  Photo by Julie Austin Photography

  Leigh Hearon began her own P.I. agency, Leigh Hearon Investigative Services, in 1992. Her cases have appeared on In the Dead of Night, Forensic Files, 48 Hours, Court TV, City Confidential, Unsolved Mysteries, America’s Most Wanted, and CBS Evening with Connie Chung. Hearon was an avid rider of horses throughout her childhood. She currently has a Saddlebred mare, Jolie Jeune Femme, and enjoys watching two rescue mares cavort on a 55-acre farm she shares with her husband. Visit her on the web at leighhearon.com.