Forging Fire

by Lisa Preston

  “Tell me everything you know about Vicente Arriaga.”

  “Okay.” I paused a second, quit thinking about horse colors and their heritability, then told him, “I’m done.”

  “You’re done? You think you’re leaving? You in charge here?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you have a hearing problem or is it something else?” He gave one sharp downward tip of his head that was meant to be a reprimand.

  Hate that. Especially from guys do I hate it. Oh, the face I put on could resemble a stiff, close-lipped smile but was all about telling him what a jackass he was. And I wouldn’t excuse my potty mouth and mind for thinking of him as a jackass. Which got me thinking about how a decent donkey jack is what I needed to find, one that had been bred to the right mare. The resulting mule baby would be earmarked for Melinda. I had Charley back. Once I got Ol’ Blue going, I could pick up the stock trailer and be home tonight and these last couple days would be just a bad daydream. And I have been known to daydream. But I can control it and I proved it right then with, “I hear pretty good still, though I’ll surely lose my hearing early.”

  “Wilson!” Mr. Special Agent called out as he lurched to his feet and the door opened.

  Plaid Shirt man entered the interview room with a photo of the livestock protection collar I’d handed over to the deputy fellow in the wee hours. Super Special Agent and Plaid Shirt looked at me then stepped out together and muttered to each other long enough to get over themselves about whether or not I’d killed Vicente. I reckon people who had a hand in doing someone in are a mite more skittish in a police interview than I was, even if it wasn’t my favorite indoor place to be.

  Plaid Shirt came back in and shut the door. No more special agent for us. “You know, Miss Dale, Deputy Steinhammer—”

  “She’s the one with the ponytail?” I twisted my ponytail into a tight stick then set it free, trying to picture him in yesterday’s plaid shirt, trying to keep all these police people sorted out in my mind.

  “Yeah, she’s the one who did the preliminary interview with you after you called nine-one-one. Said you hadn’t known the Beaumonts before Saturday morning. She sold me on your digging up a body where your dog lay down. Quite a story.” He clicked his pen and poked the photo of the livestock protection collar. “Where exactly did you find this thing?”

  “In a locker in the bunkhouse. I was looking for my stuff. See, some tools were stolen from my truck Saturday morning—”

  “At that bull sale? And you were assaulted there.”

  “Right. So yesterday, after I did some shoeings for them, I grabbed a shower and sort of took it upon myself to peek into all those lockers at the foot of the beds. Found my track nippers, crease nail pullers, cutters and rasps.”

  He shook his head. “You’re speaking Greek to me. I’m not sufficiently familiar with horseshoeing to know the difference between these things.”

  “You’ve heard of horses, haven’t you?”

  He glared at me. “You got this out of Herbert Stuckey’s locker?”

  Well, no wonder he went by Stuckey. I nodded. “Stuckey can get baffled by a water glass, but I think he might have a good heart after all.”

  Plaid Shirt blinked a few more times. “When did you go into his locker?”

  “Yesterday. Afternoon. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the stuff, but I wanted my track nippers back. They’re new.” While he studied the photo, I wondered again, did Oscar or Gabe plant the stuff in Stuckey’s locker? Poor Stuckey didn’t seem much smarter than a nail. “We heard through Ivy’s lawyer that the dead man didn’t have a bullet inside himself.”

  His face darkened, like he hated that we knew something. After a hesitation, he said, “Clothes have no puncture wounds. X-rays show no fragments or bullets. No broken bones. No signs of trauma. Those livestock protection collars carry enough poison to kill five men. And there’s no antidote to the poison.”

  I nodded. “That’s the way I heard it, too.” I thought about the neighbor rancher’s story about one of the hands killing a dog with an M-44 in Nevada, and Stuckey admitting he’d shot and killed Fire. And Stuckey or someone cutting Charley’s ears. I didn’t have to make these guys understand me, but I gave it a quick whirl. “Someone on that ranch hurt my dog a couple of years ago. Nobody’s going to care about that but me.”

  He frowned and waved me down, tried to soothe me but I was getting madder than a gut-shot cat. “I’m talking to you about another case. But let’s think about this for a minute. These tools that were stolen—”

  “But really, it was my dog that I—” I stopped as he shook his head. Took one big breath and let it out with, “Gabe’s sure that Stuckey was the one who jumped me at the sale grounds. And that was over the same dog.”

  Plaid Shirt sighed. “This dog of yours sure seems to get some undue attention.”

  “I’ve been thinking that myself.”

  “How long are you going to be a guest on the Beaumont ranch, Miss Dale?”

  “I’m out of there today. One way or the other. I’m calling a tow truck if I can’t get my truck started and hoping to get my mom to pick me up.”

  “That’s great.”

  I thought of my buddy Melinda pontificating after she went to police school about the proper ways they had of doing things. I made a mental note to ask her when I got a chance. “Going into those lockers in the bunkhouse like I did, is that what you police people call a bad search?”

  Plaid Shirt gave a flat smile. “Not when a civilian does it.”

  Chapter 26

  THE GOOD COP DETECTIVE WITHOUT A tie leaned back in his chair, riding its back legs, rearing the fronts, and pushed another photo at me. It showed scrubby oak on Ivy’s hilltop—the rock cairn was clear in the background. Someone had carved letters and a scene on the oak.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  I’m for honest observation. “Looks like someone carved something on a tree.”

  He folded his arms behind his head. “Eliana Gomez has her own bedroom in the house, but Oscar De La Rosa stays in the bunkhouse?”

  “That’s the way I understand it.” I wondered why we were discussing the sleeping arrangements.

  “They’re not a couple?”

  If Oscar and Vicente and Eliana had been in one of those three-way stories where a bunny gets boiled, so to speak, it could explain a few things. I shook my head.

  “I guess I don’t rightly know. Reckon it’d be easy for everyone to assume that, I suppose because they’re the two who work in and around the house, but I think they met here. Hey, aren’t you the one interviewing Eliana?”

  “A specialist does polygraphs. Takes a while to prepare for—there’s a preinterview and the attorney is sitting in on that—then the actual test is run a few times.”

  I opened my big yap some more. “Ivy wanted her attorney to be here when you talked to me.”

  “What do you want?” he asked. “I’d like to talk to you. Do you want to talk to me? Can we talk about mules?”

  This, I could do. I leaned forward, nodding eagerly. “I saw a real good-looking john—”

  “A john? They’re into prostitution, too?” He looked at his notes, frowned and leaned out the interview room door. “Hey, Mattingly, you know anything about Beaumont managing prostitution?”

  A man’s voice came back with, “First I’ve heard.”

  He took his time sitting down, then reared his chair again. “Miss Dale, what have you seen or heard?”

  “About mules, right?”

  “Right.” He nodded encouragement at me. “Drug mules.”

  “Drug mules? Oh, you’re … not talking about the sixty-three-chromosome hybrid between a horse and a donkey.”

  He frowned. “A donkey?”

  Air escaped my sails, my lungs. This conversation was not going my way at all. “You’re not talking about the pig-mules either.”

  “Pig-mules?”

  “Wild pigs running around these hills,” I said. �
��From European boars and feral domestics.”

  The door opened and the super special agent leaned in to wave Plaid Shirt out of the room. Just outside the heavy door, Super Special asked a question.

  “Is she retarded or something?”

  There are times when my excellent hearing is not a good thing. A couple of people laughed out there, but then I was rewarded with a comment from a voice I recognized as Ponytail’s.

  “The second one.”

  “Yeah,” Plaid Shirt agreed, “or something. I’ve seen this before. My sister is one of them.”

  “One of what?” Mr. Special Agent asked.

  “A horse person. They’re just … different.”

  “As in stupid?” Special, My Not-Fan said. “Johns? Prostitution? Beaumonts are cocaine incorporated.”

  “That they are. That they are.” Plaid Shirt laughed as he came back in the interview room and gave me a sideways glance.

  Thinking about the baggies of salt and sugar in the forge room, I replayed Ivy’s reaction to the find.

  I’m such a big, fat hairy idiot that sometimes even a big, fat hairy idiot like me can see it.

  What and all with the Beaumonts maybe being busy, big deal drug dealers, no, I guess they didn’t have time to check all their land for disappeared employees. I whistled. Ivy’s hired help did some very odd jobs for her. Had Vicente the herder had another job beyond tending sheep?

  My mental note to ask Melinda about a few things kicked in as I stepped into the sunshine outside the building where the local police had their offices. Across the street was a Starbucks, and there was Ivy in the plate glass window, phone in one hand, five-dollar coffee in the other. I whispered to Charley through the few inches of open window on Ivy’s Hummer, “Hang in there.” I texted my mama that I’d be in the coffee shop across the street, then walked over to make it true. Ivy didn’t notice me enter the coffee-soaked air, and I caught her end of the call.

  “Well, that is quite concerning. Thank you. You’ll keep on top of this with the others?” Ivy hung up. As I sat down across from her, she gave me a look of triumph.

  I asked, “How old would Fire have been now?”

  She looked startled by my question and flipped her long hair from the sultry pose it held seconds before, half-draped across her face. “Let me think.” Her nose wrinkled and her lips moved as she counted up the memories. “Thirteen. He was eleven, just bred his last litter when … I thought Vicente took off with him.”

  Sick to my stomach is what I felt. Charley, Fire’s littermate, was thirteen now. That was years older than I’d guessed my dog’s age. I felt like some of my future years with him had just been stolen.

  This weekend had whipped me in every way.

  Ivy folded her arms and pushed back in her chair, looking like she was about to take on the world. “Eliana is showing deception in her interview.”

  “Deception?”

  “That’s what they called it. Leonard heard one of the policemen talking to another. They think she’s being deceptive.”

  I thought about how Ivy had four employees on her ranch, three in the bunkhouse and one in the big house. I’d only searched three of those four bedrooms. What would have been found in the fourth? I asked, “What would Eliana be lying about?”

  “Obviously,” Ivy said, “about Vicente. That’s what they’re interviewing her about.”

  I thought about the other things the cops had asked me. No one in this mess ever showed all their cards. I was no different. It didn’t make sense for me to talk to Ivy about the cocaine business. Instead, I asked, “Can you picture Eliana up on that hilltop, burying Vicente?”

  Ivy shook her head “She’s not really outdoorsy, likes the indoor work.” Then she gawked out the window. “Oh, my God! What is she doing here?”

  Solar walked right in and sat herself down at our table. She wore an ultralight windbreaker like the one Guy wears to run in the rain, over all the stretchy, bright yoga clothes. She plunked down a little brown package that could have been the one Ivy set down in Ol’ Blue Saturday morning.

  Ivy’s gawk morphed into a glare. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing? The police are right across the road.”

  Looking from Solar to Ivy and back again didn’t clear things up for me. A two-door convertible pulled up in the parking slot straight at our table and flashed its headlights. The woman driver wore sunglasses, but I was pretty sure—

  Ivy gave the orders. “Solar, get out of here. And take that with you.”

  My mama flashed her headlights again. I was safe. I relaxed enough to think and smiled at Ivy who peered at the convertible and pointedly ignored Solar.

  After a good long minute or three, Solar took her package and flounced out.

  I said, “Eliana made the meals for Vicente.”

  Ivy smacked her coffee cup down. “Oh, my God, Rainy, you’re a genius.”

  It was a sentence I’d never heard. But Eliana had made breakfast, lunch, and dinner since I’d been in Black Bluff.

  Ivy said, “Eliana poisoned Vicente. She put poison in the stew and had someone else bring it up to Vicente.”

  I considered the accusation. “Do you figure the person delivering the thermos had no idea or was in on the murder?”

  Ivy snapped her fingers. “Oh. Oscar. That explains why he took off. Maybe it wasn’t Eliana who poisoned Vicente. It was Oscar. Oscar put the stuff in the thermos. But, no, Eliana must have been in on it, since she’s failing her polygraph.”

  “Where’s Vicente’s money?” I asked.

  “What?” Ivy sounded like she was snapping at me, but the espresso machine whirred suddenly, making enough noise that we had to raise our voices to hear each other.

  Inklings of ideas that made more sense than at first blush were creeping in on my mind. I sounded them off for Ivy. “You said Vicente didn’t use a bank. You didn’t take him to La Tienda to wire money home to family, like Eliana and Oscar do. So where’s Vicente’s money? What did he spend it on? Where did he keep it?”

  Instead of answering me, Ivy answered her phone’s chime. She listened for a piece then said, “Right. Right. Then, get the key back from her. Right. No, my house key. Yes, she has one, she lives there, Leonard. So, get the key back.” When Ivy hung up, she gave me a look like goodbye. “Can you get a ride? Gabe will be in town with Stuckey in another hour or so. I’m swamped. And I have to meet with my attorney, like, immediately.”

  I blinked, as dumped as Eliana. But I’d never wanted to be dependent on Ivy. I kept my voice even. “My mama’s here for me. Just let me get Charley out of your car.”

  ***

  These days, my pretty mama was driving a sea-green Mercedes two-door, ragtop lowered. Her fake blonde bob fluffed in the breeze as she peered over her sunglasses at Ivy and me crossing the street. When I got Charley out of the Hummer, my mama watched us in her rearview mirror. Charley was barely at my side when Ivy drove off with careful determination that did not include attracting any attention through aggressive driving. She never chanced a glance toward my mama. It was like two panthers thought about fighting but went back to their own territory.

  “Hey, horseshoer.”

  I turned. Ponytail’s head poked up from the other side of a row of parked cars beyond hedges at the back of the police building.

  “Who’s in the car at Starbucks?” she asked.

  “My mom.”

  “Good. Take care.”

  From the Starbucks lot, Charley and my mama and I watched Ivy’s attorney drive away from the police station. I figured Eliana was still inside, with no one in her corner. It stunk.

  Mama managed to not look thrilled when Charley and I both piled into her car. She wanted to tell me all about the new part she’d gotten in a modern western where she’d play the plucky ranching woman—she’d sold them on her massive familiarity with horses.

  “You haven’t been near a horse since I was five.”

  “Practically yesterday. Now tell me what you’re
wearing—”

  I cut off her questions by raising my cell, and waved her toward the Beaumont ranch while I got Melinda on the line, and my mama went on about how my Daddy was pulled over near Black Bluff, waiting to see if we needed him to come into town. Only because my folks were heading up north for my wedding was I able to have them handy when I needed them.

  Mel had to listen for a while to get caught up to speed. Not enough time. I hit the high points, including having just been interviewed by the local police. “She sent her attorney in with the gal, Eliana, was going to send him in with me, but I guess the cops were talking to both of us at the same time and the lawyer couldn’t be in two places at once.”

  “Why’d she send her attorney?”

  “I suppose because she’s got a snootful of cash.”

  “Shit fire,” Melinda said. “If it’s her attorney, then the man is working for Ivy Beaumont, not the interviewee.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “I think he did do that,” Melinda said. “Might not hold up in court or church.”

  “Farting in a rain suit don’t make you a balloon,” I explained. I saw my mama wince. Then I told Melinda all about the detective and his buddy, Mister Special. It was a great way to fill my mama in at the same time.

  Wow, the looks she shot me while I gave Melinda the scoop about all I told the cops and all they asked me while I was behind those heavy doors. And my arm got slapped when I twisted my ponytail into a stick with my left hand, holding the phone in my right.

  Melinda asked, “So, you thought you weren’t free to leave the police interview?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Then it was custodial interrogation without Miranda and nothing you said can be … wait a minute. Have you done anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you know that Guy is …” The connection crackled but I finally caught Melinda saying something about mules and then, “You ought to get out of there.”

  “We’re either getting Ol’ Blue started or towed in the next hour.”