Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

  I picked up his business card and looked at it. It was late, but I could still call him on his cell phone, apologize again for Irina’s behavior, ask to meet him for a drink. . . . Maybe I’d get lucky and have to kill him in self-defense at the end of the evening.

  I was reaching for the phone when something hit my front door with force. My hand went for the Glock I’d laid on the table to clean. My mind raced through scenarios in the blink of an eye. Then the pounding started and a small voice penetrated the wood.

  “Elena! Elena!”

  Molly.

  I pulled the door open and the girl fell inside as if she’d been blown to the house by a hurricane. Her hair was matted with sweat. She was as pale as parchment.

  “Molly, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  I guided her to a chair and she melted into it like a limp noodle, so out of breath she was panting.

  “How did you get here?”

  “My bike.”

  “God. It’s the dead of night. Why didn’t you call me if you needed to see me?”

  “I couldn’t. I didn’t dare.”

  “Have you heard something from Erin?”

  She pulled off the jacket she’d worn tied around her waist and fumbled through the folds of cloth. Her hands were shaking violently as she fished out a videotape and thrust it at me.

  I took the thing to the VCR, rewound it, and hit the play button. I watched the drama unfold as I knew Molly had, but with a quality to my sense of dread I knew she didn’t have because she hadn’t lived as long as I had or seen the things that I had seen. I watched her sister knocked to the ground and shoved into the white van. Then came the voice, mechanically altered to disguise or to frighten or both: “We have your daughter. Call the police, she dies. Three hundred thousand dollars. Directions later.”

  The picture went to static. I stopped the VCR and turned to look at Molly. Molly the Mini-Exec was gone. Molly the adult in disguise was nowhere in sight. Sitting at my table, looking small and fragile, was Molly the child, twelve years old and terrified for her big sister. Tears trapped behind the lenses of her Harry Potter glasses magnified the fear in her eyes.

  She was trying very hard to be brave as she waited for something from me. That almost frightened me more than the video had.

  I crouched in front of her, my hands braced on the arms of the chair. “Where did you get this, Molly?”

  “I heard Mom and Bruce fighting about Erin,” she said quickly. “When they went out of his office, I went in, and I found it.”

  “They’ve seen it.”

  She nodded.

  “What did they do?”

  The tears rolled out the sides of the glasses and down her cheeks. She spoke in a very, very small voice. “Nothing.”

  “They didn’t call the police?”

  “Bruce said he would handle it. Then he sent Mom to bed.” She shook her head in disbelief. I could see the anger rise up inside her, bringing color to her face. “And he went for a drive to clear his head, because he had a bad day! I hate him!” she cried, slamming a small fist on the table. “I hate him! He won’t do anything because he doesn’t want her back! Erin’s going to die because of him!”

  The tears came in earnest now, and Molly fell against me, throwing her arms around my neck.

  I’ve never known how to comfort people. Perhaps because I wasn’t taught by example. Or perhaps I had always taken my own personal pain so deeply within me, I wouldn’t allow anyone to touch it. But Molly’s pain was overflowing, and she gave me no choice but to share it with her. I closed my arms around her and stroked her hair with one hand.

  “It won’t be up to him, Molly,” I said. “You’ve got me, remember?”

  In that moment I knew real fear. This was no longer a case I didn’t want with a probable outcome of no big consequence. It wasn’t a simple matter of working a job. I had a connection to this child in my arms. I had made a commitment. I who had wanted nothing more than to hide with my misery until I could find the nerve to check out.

  I held her tighter, not for her, but for me.

  I made a copy of the videotape, then we put Molly’s bike in my trunk and headed for Binks Forest. It was nearly midnight.

  Chapter 17

  Jill let herself into Jade’s tack room and turned on the small lamp that sat on an antique chest. She grabbed a jug of leather oil from the supply shelves, twisted off the top, pulled open the drawer with Jade’s show breeches in it, and doused the pants with oil. She knew from looking in the catalogs those breeches cost at least two hundred dollars each. She threw open the armoire, pulled out his two custom-made jackets, and soaked them both, then did the same with his freshly pressed, custom-made shirts.

  It didn’t seem enough. She wanted more satisfaction.

  She was supposed to have cleaned the stalls at the end of the day because Javier, the Guatemalan guy, had to leave early. But Jill didn’t like pitching shit, and so she had simply stirred the bedding around to cover it. She snickered now as she went to the first stall and took out Trey Hughes’ gray horse. She put the horse in the empty stall where Stellar had lived, then took a pitchfork into the gray’s stall and uncovered the piles of manure and the spots wet with urine. The smell of ammonia burned her nose and she smiled a malicious smile.

  Setting the fork aside, she went back to the tack stall and grabbed up the pile of clothes.

  Jade would have a fit when he found this mess. He would know she had done it, but he wouldn’t be able to prove it. And he was supposed to be in the showring in the morning. He wouldn’t have any clothes. His horses wouldn’t be ready. And Jill would be busy lying on the beach, getting a tan and looking for a hot guy.

  She spread the clothing out in the stall, over the piles of shit and spots of pee, then went around and around the stall, stomping on Don Jade’s expensive clothing, grinding it into the mess. This would teach him not to treat people like servants. He couldn’t humiliate her and get away with it. Big asshole. He was going to regret what he’d done to her. She could have been his ally, his spy. Instead, he could rot.

  “Fuck you, Don Jade. Fuck you, Don Jade.” She chanted the words as she marched around the stall.

  She had no fear of being caught by Jade. He was back at that snotty club, trying to impress some client or some woman. Paris was supposed to have night check, but Jill knew for a fact she hardly ever did it when it was her turn.

  It didn’t occur to Jill that someone from another stable might come through the barn, or that a security guard might be making rounds. She almost never got caught doing stuff. Like keying stupid Erin’s car. Everyone assumed Chad did it because Chad had been there that night and he and Erin had argued. And Jill had once had a job at a Wal-Mart where she had stolen all kinds of stuff, right under her manager’s nose. It served the store right, getting ripped off, if they were stupid enough to hire a guy as dumb as that guy had been.

  “Fuck you, Don Jade. Fuck you, Don Jade,” she chanted, happily grinding his clothes into the muck.

  And then the stable lights went out.

  Jill stopped marching and stood very still. She could feel her heart beating. The sound of it in her ears made it impossible to hear if someone was coming. As her eyes adjusted she could make out shapes, but the stall she was in was too far to the back of the tent to get much light from the big light pole out by the road.

  Some of the horses turned around in their stalls. Some nickered—nervously, Jill thought. She felt around the wall blindly, trying to find the pitchfork. She’d left it on the far side of the stall. She turned her back to the door as she groped for it.

  It happened so fast, she couldn’t react. Someone rushed in behind her. She heard the rustle of the stall bedding, felt the presence of another person. Before she could scream, a hand was over her mouth. Her own hands closed desperately on the handle of the pitchfork, and she twisted around, trying to wriggle from her captor’s grasp, breaking the hold, stumbling backward, swinging the pitchfork in a wid
e arch, hitting something. Her grip on the handle was too near the end of it, giving her little control or strength in her swing, and it flew out of her hands and thumped against the canvas wall.

  She tried to scream then, and couldn’t. As in a nightmare, the sound died in her throat. In that split second she knew she was going to die.

  Still, she tried to run for the door. Her legs felt as heavy as lead. Her feet tangled in the clothes on the floor of the stall. Like a lasso around her ankles, the clothes pulled her feet out from under her. She fell forward, heavily, knocking the wind from her lungs. Her attacker came down on top of her from behind.

  There was a sound—a voice—but she couldn’t hear it above the pounding in her ears and the wrenching sound from her own throat as she tried to breathe and sob and beg. She felt the miniskirt being pulled up over her butt, a hand digging between her legs, tearing at the too-small thong.

  She tried to pull herself forward. There was a terrible pressure in the middle of her back, then against the back of her head, forcing her head down, pushing her face into the manure she was supposed to have cleaned out of the stall that day. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to turn her head and couldn’t; tried to suck in air and her mouth filled with shit; tried to vomit and felt a terrible burning in her chest.

  And then she didn’t feel anything at all.

  Chapter 18

  The Seabrights’ neighborhood was silent, all the big lovely homes dark, their inhabitants blissfully ignorant of the dysfunction next door. There were still lights on downstairs on one end of the Seabright home. The second story was dark. I wondered if Krystal really was sleeping.

  Bruce had “sent her to bed,” Molly had said. As if she were a child. Her daughter had been abducted and her husband told her to go to bed. He would handle it. If Krystal hadn’t seen the tape, I wondered if Bruce would have simply thrown it in the trash like a piece of junk mail.

  Molly let us in the front door and led the way to Bruce Seabright’s home office, the source of the lights. The office door stood open. Bruce was inside, muttering under his breath as he searched the bookcases near the television.

  “Looking for this?” I asked, holding up the video.

  He spun around. “What are you doing here? How did you get into my house?”

  His glare hit on Molly half hiding behind me. “Molly? Did you let this person in?”

  “Elena can help—”

  “Help with what?” he said, choosing denial even while I stood there with the tape of his stepdaughter’s kidnapping in hand. “We don’t need her help for anything.”

  “You think you can handle this on your own?” I asked, tossing the tape on his desk.

  “I think you can leave my home or I can call the police.”

  “That threat doesn’t work with me. I thought you learned that lesson this morning.”

  His mouth pulled into a tight knot as he stared at me with narrowed eyes.

  “Elena used to be a detective with the Sheriff’s Office,” Molly said, moving out of my shadow. “She knows all about those people Erin worked with, and—”

  “Molly, go to bed,” Seabright ordered curtly. “I’ll deal with you tomorrow, young lady. Eavesdropping on conversations, coming into my office without permission, bringing this person into my home. You’ve got a lot to answer for.”

  Molly kept her chin up and gave her stepfather a long look. “So do you,” she said. Then she turned and left the room with the dignity of a queen.

  Seabright went to the door and closed it. “How did she know to call you?”

  “Believe it or not, the people living in your house do have lives and minds of their own, and allow themselves to think without asking your permission. I’m sure you’ll put a stop to that, now that you know.”

  “How dare you criticize the way I run my house? You don’t know anything about my family.”

  “Oh, I know all about your family. Believe me,” I said, hearing an old bitterness in my tone. “You’re the demigod and the mortals revolve around you like planets around the sun.”

  “Where do you get off speaking to me this way?” he asked, advancing toward me, trying to get me to back away literally and figuratively. I didn’t move.

  “I’m not the one who has explaining to do, Mr. Seabright. Your stepdaughter has been kidnapped and Molly is the only person who seems to care whether she’s ever seen alive again. What do you have to say about that?”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you. None of this is any of your business.”

  “I’ve made it my business. When, where, and how did this tape arrive?”

  “I don’t have to answer your questions.” He walked past me as if to dismiss me, going back to the bookcases to close the doors on his television.

  “Would you rather answer the questions of a sheriff’s detective?” I asked.

  “They said no police,” he reminded me as he moved a bookend two inches to the left. “Do you want to be responsible for the girl’s death?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Of course not.” He straightened a stack of books, his eyes already moving in search of the next piece of his kingdom out of place. Nervous, I thought.

  “But if she simply never came back, you wouldn’t exactly mourn her loss, would you?” I said.

  “That’s an obnoxious thing to say.”

  “Yes, well . . .”

  He stopped rearranging and put on a face of high affront. “What kind of a man do you think I am?”

  “I don’t think you’d really like me to answer that right now. When did this tape arrive, Mr. Seabright? Erin hasn’t been seen or heard from in nearly a week. Kidnappers usually want their money ASAP. It’s rather the point of the thing, you see. The longer they hang on to a victim, the shorter the odds of something going wrong.”

  “The tape just came,” he said, but he didn’t look at me when he said it. I was willing to bet he’d had it for a couple of days.

  “And the kidnappers haven’t called.”

  “No.”

  “How did the tape arrive?”

  “In the mail.”

  “To the house or to your office?”

  “The house.”

  “Addressed to you or to your wife?”

  “I—I don’t recall.”

  To Krystal. And he’d kept it from her. He probably screened all her mail, the controlling prick. And when she’d finally seen it, he’d sent her to bed and gone out for a drive.

  “I’d like to see the envelope,” I said.

  “I threw it out.”

  “Then it’s in your trash. Let’s go get it. There could be fingerprints on it, and the postmark could provide valuable information.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone where? Your trash was at the curb yesterday. If the tape arrived today . . .”

  He had no answer for that, the son of a bitch. I heaved a sigh of disgust and tried again.

  “Have they called?”

  “No.”

  “God help you if you’re lying, Seabright.”

  His face flushed purple. “How dare you call me a liar.”

  “You are.”

  We both turned toward the door to find Krystal standing there looking like an aging crack whore. Her face was drawn and pale. Mascara ringed her eyes. Her bleached hair stood up like a fright wig. She wore a short pink robe trimmed with feathery flounces around the neck and cuffs, and matching high-heeled mules.

  “You are a liar,” she said, glassy eyes fixed on her husband.

  “You’re drunk,” Bruce accused.

  “I must be. I know better than to speak to you out of turn.”

  I watched Seabright. He was furious, trembling with anger. If I had not been there, I don’t know what he might have done. But then, if I hadn’t been there, Krystal would never have had the nerve to say anything. I turned to her, taking in the dilated pupils and the smudged lipstick.

  “Mrs. Seabright, when did you first see the tape of your daughter
’s kidnapping?”

  “I had seen the box. It had my name on it. I didn’t know why Bruce hadn’t given it to me. I thought it was something I had ordered through the mail.”

  “Krystal . . .” Bruce growled.

  “What day was that?”

  Her mouth trembled. “Wednesday.”

  Two days.