by Tami Hoag
Her name was Irina Markova. I had worked side by side with her for more than a year.
“Elena… Elena… Elena…”
It registered somewhere in the back of my mind that someone ,vas trying to speak to me, but it sounded as if the voice were coning from very far away.
A firm hand rested on my shoulder.
“Elena. Are you all right?”
Landry.
“No,” I said, moving away from his touch.
I fought to stand and prayed not to fall as I walked away. But my legs gave out within a few steps and I went down on my hands and knees. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and yet my stomach heaved and I vomited and choked.
Panic gripped me by the throat—as much from my fear of my own emotions as from what I had seen or from fear of aspirating my own vomit and dying. I wanted to run away from my feelings. I wanted to bolt and run, just as Arli had bolted and run away with me earlier, bringing me to this terrible place.
“Elena.”
Landry’s voice was in my ear. His arm came around my shoulders, offering strength and security. I didn’t want those things from him. I didn’t want anything from him. I didn’t want him seeing me this way—weak, vulnerable, out of control.
We had been lovers off and on for the last year. He had decided he wanted more. I had decided I wanted nothing. Less than ten hours previous, I had pushed him away with both hands, too strong to need him—or so I claimed. I didn’t feel very strong now.
“Hey, take it easy,” he said quietly. “Just try to breathe slowly.”
I pushed at him, wriggled away from him, got to my feet again. I tried to say something—I don’t know what. The sounds coming from me weren’t words. I put my hands over my face, trying to hold myself together.
“It’s Irina,” I said, fighting to regulate my breathing.
“Irina? Irina from Sean’s?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Elena, you should sit down.”
He told one of the deputies to call in a crime-scene unit and ushered me not to my car but to his. I sat down sideways in the passenger seat, bent over my knees, my hands cradling my head.
“You want something to drink?”
“Yeah. Vodka rocks with a twist.”
“I have water.”
He handed me a bottle. I rinsed my mouth out.
“Do you have a cigarette?” I asked, not because I was a smoker per se but because I had been and, like a lot of cops I knew— Landry included—had never entirely abandoned the bad habit.
“Look in the glove compartment.”
It gave my trembling hands something to do, my mind something small to focus on. It forced me to breathe slowly or choke.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
I took a deep pull on the smoke and exhaled as if I was blowing at candles on a birthday cake, forcing every last bit of air from my lungs.
“Saturday. Late afternoon. She was anxious to go. I offered to ed the horses and take care of night check.”
Unlike myself, Irina had an active social life. Where it took place and with whom I didn’t know, but I had often seen her leave her apartment above the stables dressed for trouble.
“Where was she going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where might she go?”
I didn’t have the strength to shrug. “Maybe Players or Galipette. maybe clubbing. Clematis Street.”
“Do you know her friends?”
“No. I imagine they were mostly other grooms, other Russians.”
“Boyfriend?”
“If she had one, she didn’t bring him to the farm. She kept her business to herself.”
That was one thing I had always liked about her. Irina didn’t burden those around her with raunchy details of her sex life, or who she had seen, or who she had done.
“Has her mood been any different lately?”
I tried a weak laugh. “No. She’s been churlish and arrogant, like always.”
Not sought-after qualities in a groom, but I had never really minded her moods. God knew I made her look like an angel. She had opinions and wasn’t shy about voicing them. I respected that, and she was damn good at her job, even if she did sometimes act like she was in forced labor in a Siberian gulag.
Do you want me to take you home?“ Landry asked.
“No. I’m staying.”
“Elena—”
“I’m staying.” I put out the cigarette on the running board of the car and dropped the butt into the ashtray.
I figured he would try to stop me, but he stepped back as I got out of the car.
“Do you know anything about her family?”
“No. I doubt Sean does either. It would never occur to him to ask.”
“She wasn’t a member of the taxpaying club?”
I gave him a look.
Undocumented aliens made up a large part of the workforce in the South Florida horse business. They migrated to Wellington every winter, just like the owners and trainers of the five or six thousand horses brought here to compete in some of the biggest, richest equestrian events in the world.
From January to April the town’s population tripled, with everything from billionaires to barely-getting-bys. The main show grounds—Palm Beach Polo and Equestrian Club—was a multinational melting pot. Nigerians worked security, Haitians emptied the trash cans, Mexicans and Guatemalans mucked the stalls. Once a year the INS would make a sweep through the show grounds, scattering illegal aliens like rats being run out of a tenement.
“You know I’m going to call this in and people are going to come out here,” Landry said.
By people he meant detectives from the sheriff’s office—not my biggest fan club, despite the fact that I had been one of them. I had also gotten one of them killed in a drug raid three years prior. A bad decision—against orders, of course—a couple of twitchy meth dealers, a recipe for disaster.
I had not escaped unscathed physically or mentally, but I hadn’t died either, and there were cops who would never forgive me for that.
“I found the body,” I said. “Like it or not.”
Not, I thought. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to know a person who had become a corpse ravaged by an alligator. But somehow this trouble had managed to find me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Some sooner than others.
Chapter 4
Murder victims are afforded very little dignity at the scene where their bodies are found. Someone finds them, is horrified by the sight of them, calls the cops. Uniformed officers show up, then detectives, then a crime-scene unit with a photographer, someone dusting for fingerprints, someone measuring the distances between items at the scene. The coroner’s investigator arrives, examines the body, turns it over, looks for everything from lividity to exit wounds to maggots.
By necessity, the people who work these scenes—and have worked hundreds before, and will work hundreds more—aren’t able to allow themselves to acknowledge (not openly, at least) the victim as someone’s child, mother, brother, lover. Whoever this person might have been in life, they are no one as they lie there while the scene is being processed. Only when the investigation begins in earnest do they come back to life in the minds of these people as father, sister, husband, friend.
Bodies found in water are commonly referred to as “floaters.”
There is nothing worse than a floater that’s been in the water a few days—long enough for decomposition to begin internally, filling the body with gases, bloating it to grotesque proportions; long enough for the skin to begin to slough off; long enough for fish and insects to feed on and invade the body. I had last seen Irina Saturday afternoon. It was Monday. I didn’t look as she was pulled out of the water—not straight away, anyway. I could have let Landry take me home and
leave me out of this process, but I felt an obligation to stay at least for a little while. She had been part of my ersatz family. I felt a certain strange need to protect her. Too little, too late, unfortunately.
Uniformed deputies were ordered to drag the dead gator up to the bank. The coroner’s people oversaw the extrication of burn tissue from between the reptile’s jaws. I smoked another cigarette. My hands were still shaking. I leaned back against the side of my car, too wired to sit. In the old days, when I was “on the job,” as the cops say, nothing got to me. I was numb. Ice water in my veins. There was no case I couldn’t tackle. I was a woman on a mission: to dole out justice— at least to serve up the bad guys to the DA’s office hog-tied on a platter. I went from case to case to case, like an addict constantly looking for the next fix.
The last murder victim I’d had on the job was someone I knew, someone I had worked with and liked. His murder had been my fault. I’d made a poor decision going into a meth lab in rural Poxahatchee. Jumped the gun, so to speak. One of the dealers, a wild-eyed, mulleted cracker named Billy Golam, had pointed a 57 directly in my face—then turned abruptly and fired. I watched in horror as the bullet hit Deputy Hector Ramirez in the face and blew out the back of his head, blood and brain matter spraying the walls, the ceiling, splattering my lieutenant, who was standing behind him.
Three years had passed, and I still watched that scene play out in my nightmares. The face of Hector Ramirez floated through my memory every night.
I suspected that tonight Irina’s face would supersede that of the man who had died because of me. It would be Irina’s pale blue face that stared up at me through the fog of sleep, her ravaged eyes and lips. The idea made me feel ill and weak all over again.
How well had I known her, Landry had asked.
I had known her for more than a year, and I hadn’t known her at all. Our lives may have revolved around the same center but otherwise never touched. I felt regret for that. The remorse of the guilty conscience—something all of us feel when we’ve lost someone from our lives we had never taken the time to really know. We always believe there will be time later, after this, after that… But there is no time after death.
On the other side of the canal, Landry and the rest of them were engrossed in their task of evaluating the scene and collecting evidence. They would be at it for a long time. They expected— wanted—nothing from me aside from my statement, which Landry would take later.
Irina was dead. There was nothing I could do to change that. I was of no use to her standing there watching as people stepped around her remains like a sack of trash torn open by scavenging animals.
I hadn’t made the effort to get to know her in life. Before this was over, I would know her well. That was what I could do for Irina. I knew even then that the journey was going to take me places I didn’t want to go. If I had known exactly where, I might have made a different decision that day… but probably not.
As if he had sensed the direction my mind was turning, Landry looked over at me, frowning. I got in my car, turned it around, and drove home.
Irina and I had come to Sean’s farm at the same time, for the same job. Happenstance, if you believe in that. Fate, if you believe something more. I didn’t believe in anything at the time.
I had answered an ad in Sidelines, a locally based magazine for people in the horse industry. Groom Wanted. The person looking had turned out to be Sean Avadon.
Sean and I had known each other back in the days when I was a daughter, had parents, lived on the Island (Palm Beach proper). I was filled with rebellion and teen angst, and horses were my escape from the rest of my spoiled, privileged, empty life. Sean, older and wilder, had grown up a couple of mansions down the street. We had been friends, an odd couple, unrelated siblings. Sean was my sense of humor—and fashion, he claimed. What he got out of the deal, I never had figured out.
I had been in a very dark place when Sean came back into my life—or I into his—filled with anger and self-loathing and suicidal fantasies. The two years past had been spent in and out of hospitals while doctors tried to put me back together like Humpty Dumpty. On the day Hector Ramirez was killed in my stead, I had gone under the wheels of a meth dealer’s 4X4 truck and been dragged down the road, the pavement breaking bones and stripping flesh and tissue from my body. Why I hadn’t died, I couldn’t understand, and I had punished myself for it every conscious day I had in the two years that followed.
Sean had given the groom’s job and the apartment that went with it to Irina. He had taken me in like a wounded bird and put me in his guesthouse. When I seemed strong enough, he had put me to work helping to ride his horses, knowing the horses would be more help to me than I ever could have been to them.
Irina’s apartment was located over the plush clubby lounge in Sean’s barn. I went into the lounge, behind the bar, took a bottle of Stoli out of the freezer, and poured some into a heavy crystal tumbler. Leaning against the bar, I looked at the room as if it were an empty stage, remembering a conversation I had had with Irina in this room a year past.
She had just thrown a horseshoe at the head of a Belgian horse dealer who had come calling to tempt Sean into parting ways with substantial amounts of money. She would have killed the man on the spot if she could have. Her rage was a palpable thing, huge and hot and bitter. She had launched herself at him, pummeling him with her fists until Sean grabbed her by her blond ponytail and one arm and pulled her off.
I had brought her into the lounge while Sean tried to smooth things over with the Belgian. She told me the story of a girlfriend from Russia who had gone to work for the dealer, who used and abused her. In the end the girl killed herself. Irina had wanted revenge. I’d admired her for that. There had never been anyone in my life I felt strongly enough about to seek revenge on their behalf.
Full of passion. The heart of a tigress. I wondered if she had fought as fiercely for herself. Was there a killer holed up somewhere with fingernail scratches down his face, missing an eye, unable to walk straight? I hoped so.
I raised my glass in salute and finished off the vodka.
Putting on a pair of thin, tight riding gloves, I climbed the spiral stairs that led to Irina’s apartment. If Landry caught me doing what I was about to do, there would be hell to pay. Of course, the idea of negative ramifications had never stopped me from doing anything in my life.
A very private person, Irina always locked her door, but I knew where the key was hidden and I helped myself to it. The violence perpetrated on her had not happened here. The place looked lived-in, not tossed. A single coffee cup sat in the drain basket in the sink. The latest fashion magazines were strewn across the coffee table.
She had left her makeup out on the counter in the bathroom. I remembered she had been eager to go on Saturday. She had rushed off alone, dressed to kill. She could have been on the cover of one of the magazines in her living room as easily as working in a barn. Even in a T-shirt, baggy shorts, and muck boots, she had exuded an almost royal sense of confidence and elegance. I often referred to her as “the Czarina.”
The drawers in the vanity yielded the usual stuff: nail polish, tampons, cotton balls, condoms. I wondered if she’d dropped a couple of the latter in her purse that evening, anticipating a conquest.
What kind of man would Irina go for? Rich. Very rich. Definitely good-looking. She would never settle for the money if the guy with the purse strings was some short, fat, balding toad with sweaty palms. She thought too highly of herself for that.
Wellington during the season had no shortage of gorgeous men with lots of money. Elite equestrian sports have been underwritten by the wealthy since the time of Caesar, probably longer. Privileged sons and daughters, the princes and princesses of America—and a dozen other countries—were a part of the scenery at the horse show grounds and the international polo fields here. They populated the parties and charity fund-raisers that filled the social calendar from January through March.
Had Irina plan
ned to snag a scion that night? I could too easily imagine the raw, cold terror that must have come over her when she realized her life was about to go horribly wrong.
I went into the bedroom and there found ample evidence of the royal Russian attitude. The bed was strewn with clothes that had been considered, then cast aside, as she dressed for her night out.
She had a very pricey wardrobe for an illegal alien who groomed horses for a living. Then again, in Wellington a good groom could make six hundred dollars or more per month per horse, plus day fees for horse shows, and another thirty-five to fifty dollars per horse per day for braiding manes each day of a show.
There were eight horses in Sean’s barn. And Irina’s apartment was hers rent-free. Her living expenses were minimal—cigarettes (which she smoked outdoors only, away from the barn; there wasn’t so much as a lingering whiff of smoke in the apartment) and food (for which she seemed to have only a passing fancy, from what I’d seen in her refrigerator). Her priority seemed to be clothes.
