by Lisa Preston
“Can you zoom in more, so we can read the library card?” I asked.
Ivy swooped two fingers apart on her computer monitor repeatedly then we inspected the cards one by one.
“Do you know if your local library has online access?”
Ivy pointed at the Pleasures business card. “I think the massage parlor is more important.” Then she frowned. “But I suppose the police noticed the card and are checking on that angle.”
“Get us into the library,” I said.
Ivy opened a search tab on the Internet and soon was in the library’s website.
Clicking back to the blown-up photo, we were able to enter the correct identification number and be given access, signed in as Vicente Arriaga. The library portal offered the borrower’s history right there on the screen. Ms. Computer I am not, but I can sure click a thingy.
“DNA,” I said. “And clinical parasitology. Huh. Your herder had some serious tastes in reading material.”
Ivy peered over my shoulder. “Wow.”
We gaped at the screen, then at each other.
“Okay,” I said. “Parasitology. You said he’d asked you for the microscope.”
Ivy drummed her fingers on Milt’s desk. “We missed something. I missed something.”
“Let’s go look at that microscope,” I suggested.
***
Halfway to the barn, I stopped at Ol’ Blue, unlocked it, and made Charley come give us company in the dark.
Chromey and the buckskin nickered at us from one side of the barn aisle, Decker and the Appy mare from the other.
“Indigo Eyes,” Ivy said.
I’d never known her name. As we paused in the dark, I asked, “She’s the dam of that mule?”
A hulking shape came at us in the end of the dead dark barn aisle and a male voice boomed. “What’s going on?”
I jumped. Charley was already gone, skittering out in a flash.
Ivy assumed her boss voice. “We’re looking at the forge.”
“I lost her coke shovel,” I said. “I’ll need to replace it for her, and I’m showing her what I mean.”
“It’s the little flat spade that goes with the forge,” Stuckey said.
“Go to bed, Stuckey,” Ivy said. “Go back to the bunkhouse and call it a night. Things are going to be okay tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Miz Beaumont. I was just doing a night check on the horses.”
***
We found what we were looking for in a space between cinder blocks under the forge. The dust was so thick on the two baggies of white powder, they looked brown and blended into the cobwebbed crevices.
“Oh, my God, Vicente was … ” Ivy stared hard. “I never suspected him. Never.”
“The police would probably like to know about that stuff.” I wasn’t going to get my fingerprints on the baggies. I was in enough trouble for digging up a body on the ranch and didn’t need to add possession of the white powder—cocaine or heroin?—to my rap sheet. During the few dozen days of high school that I managed to attend, baggies of white powder were something I stayed away from. Those dope users were some of the hardest-to-figure kids I’d ever known, or never come to know.
“It doesn’t look right.” Ivy opened both baggies and sniffed the white powder. She tasted them. And then she asked, “Why would he have salt and sugar in baggies?”
“Huh?”
“This isn’t coke,” Ivy said.
Smacking my forehead helped me think. I did it twice. “I get it.”
“I don’t,” Ivy said.
“You have to make a special saline solution, a salt solution. With sugar in it, too, to do a flotation test at home.”
“Flotation test?” Ivy asked.
“To do a fecal,” I said, “To examine manure for worm eggs and count them. You know, flotation. You said Vicente was learning to do flotation tests. That’s just another name for the fecal counts.”
I tried to remember the Internet tutorials I’d read and watched on making the sugar-saline flotation solution and doing the fecal tests. How I’ve coveted a microscope like the one Vicente had talked Ivy into buying.
“Look at this,” Ivy said, kneeling below the forge where the baggies of salt and sugar had been stored. She pulled out a folded wad of papers, blew the dust off them.
Just a dozen sheets of beat-up paper. Maybe he’d printed them out at the library. A complete set of directions on how to make the saline-sugar solution for a fecal float test, set up the slides, and do the count.
Ivy nodded. “He was learning to do fecals for the ranch.”
I considered that. So, Vicente had printed off material at the library on how to do fecals. He’d ordered a book on veterinary parasitology. He’d asked Ivy for a microscope and slides.
But that wasn’t all. I shook my head and looked at Ivy. And thought about white powder, and a police drug dog showing interest in Ol’ Blue. And being where I should not be.
Missing something.
I frowned, fingering the knobs that change which eyepiece was centered under the microscope’s viewer, and considered the strength of the optics, the textbooks Vicente had requested on his library account. DNA? We couldn’t look at something as small as an intracellular double helix with this hundred-dollar machine. What else had Vicente been doing?
“The sequence of events,” I said, deciding as I spoke, “is Stuckey kills Fire not long before the breeding to Reese Trenton’s female, they cut Charley’s ears and use him to breed, Vicente tries to prove it, someone kills Vicente. Vicente wanted to study DNA. I think that’s what he really wanted to do with the microscope, but he didn’t know it wasn’t powerful enough.”
He’d been trying, I decided. Vicente had been trying to honor Charley, or rather, Flame.
***
To cover a counterfeit dog breeding didn’t seem like a good enough reason to murder someone.
“What did Vicente spend his money on?” I asked Ivy when we were back under the stars, out of the dark barn and forge room.
“I have no clue.” Ivy tossed the baggies of salt and sugar in the air beside me, her other hand holding the sheaf of papers Vicente had printed off on how to do a fecal exam.
“But you paid him in cash?”
“Right.”
“So, he didn’t have to use a bank.” I stopped at Ol’ Blue and told Charley to come with me though a part of me thought about climbing in the cab with him and sleeping there, locked inside. It was late at night, and my truck wasn’t going anywhere. But maybe Ivy would give me some space to talk to Guy in privacy. I grabbed the big paper bag on the floor’s center hump, wrapping the rest of my recovered tools in it as I followed Ivy back to the big house. Charley followed me. When we went inside, it was the first time I’d seen her lock the front door.
And it became the first time Ivy told me to use the kitchen phone if I wanted to make a call. I showed her my tools. She wasn’t impressed but still shook her head over what Stuckey had done to me. As I handled the rasps and crease nail pullers and nail cutters one by one, I felt something small and squishy inside the paper bag. I’d assumed it was an empty bag wrapping my tools, but when I looked inside for the first time, I knew what Stuckey had been warning me about earlier.
Though I still didn’t know who’d done it, or why, I now knew how Vicente Arriaga was killed. I was holding the murder weapon.
Chapter 24
THE LIVESTOCK PROTECTION COLLAR INSIDE THE paper bag had one rubber bladder still packing its poison. The other had been slit long ago, now empty and dry. Right there in the foyer, I held the paper bag wide open and showed it to Ivy, explaining as she looked inside. “That’s what was in the thermos, salting some Zuni stew or some such.”
Ivy shook her head as she peered into the bag. Her brow didn’t wrinkle, so I couldn’t tell if she was thinking hard.
“Who prepared Vicente’s food, and who delivered it?” I asked. “Who’s lying? Oscar? Gabe? Stuckey? Eliana?”
“What are you sa
ying, Rainy?”
I squeezed the intact bladder through the paper bag, bulging the black rubber before her eyes. “This stuff’s poison. And your lawyer told you that the cops think Vicente didn’t have a bullet in him, right?”
Ivy shook her long blonde hair. The roots were dark, the tresses clumping with a day’s worth of worry.
“I don’t have a clue,” Ivy said. “I wish Milt would get here.”
Her comment gave me pause. “How often does he come to the ranch?”
She waved a hand. “Almost never. This ranch was supposed to be our retreat. But I’m the one who really wanted it. It’s my escape from that other world. I wish I could call someone.”
Those last words sunk like a stone in my chest. I couldn’t help blurting, “Me, too.”
But I could, if she’d let me. I had people to call. Guy. I so wanted to talk to him, not just read texts or listen to messages we left for each other, but really talk.
Actually, I wanted to be with him, face-to-face, touching while we talked. Or while we didn’t say a word. That’s what it’s like with me and him. We are happy together. We just want to spend time together. All our mornings, our evenings, our free time, our lives. I’m going to marry that boy. Maybe he was asleep now. Should I wake him?
“What?” Ivy asked. “You are or aren’t?”
“Huh?”
“I asked if you’re hungry.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure.” I’m always hungry. The part of my mind that flickered a warning about poisoned food had to be shut down for the sake of my stomach. In Eliana’s absence—she was earlier to bed than us night owls—Ivy pulled out two neatly wrapped plates full of the sandwich fixings that had been on the table at lunch-time—cheese, tomatoes, onion, lettuce leaves, and much meat. The fridge also held a plate of roasted chicken—the good-smelling, uneaten dinner. I could have cleaned up all three plates.
Without Eliana to get things cuted up, we’d have plain sandwiches. Ivy pulled out a loaf of artisan-type bread, definitely not Wonder-white. Oatmeal bubbled the top edges of the brown crust. The slices were thick, meant for open-faced sammies. Ivy picked at a lettuce leaf, toying with it, nibbling. I pushed my hands deep into my front jeans pockets and sealed my lips, trying not to think, thinking. Trying.
“You wanted to call somebody,” Ivy said, her voice whisper-soft. “I’d like to call a friend.”
She was lonely, I realized. She had no one to call. I felt myself go soft with sympathy. She shook herself, like a horse getting up from rolling in dirt, and put the lettuce down. “Help yourself. I’m going to bed.”
And I’d be going to bed next to the cook.
I used Ivy’s kitchen phone and dialed. Felt like a thousand hours ago that the woman cop with the ponytail had given me her card.
Can we count on you?
She’d posed the question mid-morning. Now it was midnight. I took a breath and dialed, thought I heard a click on the line, and wondered if someone else had picked up Ivy’s house phone. For the first time, I wondered what Eliana’s bedroom was like. Did she have a phone extension in there?
Did she—like Stuckey—have something hidden in her room that didn’t belong to her?
“Steinhammer.” Her way of answering the phone seemed intended to let me know she was someone who stayed on top of things and slept a lot less than me.
“This is Rainy Dale,” I said. “The horseshoer from—”
“I know who you are. Didn’t recognize the phone number on my cell. Are you still at the ranch?”
“Yeah. I wanted to tell you, well I mean, there’s that rifle in the bunkhouse over the mantel—”
“We saw the .22—”
“And one of the men has a pistol in his locker—”
“Which one?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I heard your dead man might not have been shot anyways.”
There was a good long pause, as maybe she weighed what I was asking against my right to know, what she and I might share. She said, “They’re hoping for good results from the toxicology screen.”
Making myself give this information was hard, but it was the right thing to do. I glanced around the empty kitchen, cupped my palm to the phone, and said in lowest decibels, barely moving my lips. “Sodium fluoroacetate.”
“What’s that?”
“A poison you should tell them to look for in your dead guy. I found a cut livestock collar. One pouch is intact, but the other has been sliced open and it would have had plenty of power to kill a man. Or six.”
“Sodium … spell it.”
“Can’t.” But I said the name for her again and added, “It’s also called Compound 1080.”
I heard the clatter of typing on her end. “Google says this 1080 stuff is almost impossible to acquire.”
“Except for sheep sometimes walk around wearing rubber pouches of it.”
“The hell you say.”
“Wear it around their necks. It’s called a livestock protection collar. They’re still legal in lots of places. Nevada, Texas.”
Her breath came out in an exhale that probably used up thirty seconds and both lungs. Then she said we’d talk later, ’cause she had to make another call.
***
My next call, to home, went straight to voice mail.
The outgoing message on our home machine had been changed. It used to be my voice, saying, “You’ve reached Guy and Rainy’s. If you have a message about a horseshoeing appointment, please be sure to leave complete information about your horse and how I can reach you.”
Now it was Guy’s voice. “We’re out of town. Leave a message.”
As I left him a solid message about how much I missed him and I’d be home as soon as I could get Ol’ Blue running, I wondered why he’d done changed our home message, and I wondered what my cell’s voice mails would say, if I could play them. I wanted to call my friend Melinda, but I have just enough decency to not do that after midnight. I called my mama. She shouldn’t be too busy, should be heading north for my wedding. I told her voice mail that I was having truck trouble and I was stuck in Northern California. Maybe she could come get me.
***
The knocking on my bedroom door made Eliana stir in the next room. Maybe even whimper. I opened it to Ivy, who was not happy.
“The police are here for you.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t want them here. If you’re going to talk to them, if you’re taking sides against me, you have to leave my place.”
“Ivy, I haven’t hurt you or the ranch in any way. I’ve no bad intentions, please believe me. I haven’t done anything to bring trouble to your place.”
She gave a twisted smile. “Except for that little part about digging up a dead body on my ranch?”
“Yes, ma’am, except for that.”
***
A uniformed deputy with hair so short I couldn’t tell what color it was stood waiting outside on Ivy’s flagstone doorway. Younger than me, twice my size, with all the goodies on his hip belt, including a nice big gun opposite the radio. Snaking from that radio was a coiled black wire that ran to a combination speaker and mic on his shoulder. He pushed the button when I came out and agreed that I was Rainy Dale.
“Ten-four,” he announced. “I’ve made contact.” Then he nodded at me. “Ms. Dale, I’m here to collect a collar of some sort.”
Ivy snapped at both of us. “This couldn’t wait until morning?”
They went at it until he calmed her down, staying on the flag-stone side of her open front door, and I agreed to tell the police to call if they had more questions. They were not to come to the house. Ivy said I could give them the house phone number, but I knew they already had it
Charley pressed his head against my knee. He hates tension, people having any kind of argument. I’m with him.
The cop said, “You told an off-duty day-shifter you found something.”
“Day-shifter?”
“Deputy Steinhammer.”
Like
Ivy, I’d assumed handing over the livestock collar could wait ’til morning. “I didn’t expect them to send someone out in the middle of the night.”
He gave me a bland, lip-locked smile. “Yeah, we’re funny like that. Like to secure evidence immediately.”
When I went to the spare bedroom for the paper bag and my tools, I didn’t hear a sound from Eliana’s room.
But I didn’t think that was because she was asleep.
I looked back and noticed Ivy standing there watching me.
She didn’t look pleased.
My rasps, nail cutter, crease nail puller, and track nippers were laid out on the paper bag which still held the squishy little bladder of death and the Velcro straps that form a protection collar.
I brought the works to the cop at the door. “You should be careful with what’s in this bag. You should put on rubber gloves before you touch it.”
He looked me in the eye, cocked his head, and, from his left front pocket, pulled out a pair of yellow latex gloves and donned them with the stretchy snap sound.
This man was a Boy Scout, I thought, prepared. I could practically feel the rubbery tug to the backs of my own hands as I watched his knuckles bulge under the Latex second skin.
“And what do we have here?” He was staring without comprehension at the contraption of black rubber pouches—one full, one dry—that he’d pulled out of the paper sack.
“It’s called a livestock protection collar. It looks old. And you see, one of those bladders has been cut.”
“Did you wear gloves?”
I shook my head. I do have rubber gloves in Ol’ Blue, wear ’em with some of the glues I use in specialty shoeing jobs. “I was real careful. Well, not at first. I didn’t know what it was. I thought the paper bag was just wrapped around my tools.”
“And you say these were your stolen tools that you’ve recovered?”
I nodded.
He inspected them one by one. I could have fallen asleep on my feet in the time it took the uniform to finally announce, “How could you be sure these are your tools? They bear no engraving, no identification marks.”
“They’re mine. I’m sure enough to have liberated them.”
