Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

  Jade stared at him for a moment, speechless, or knowing the wisdom of holding his tongue. Finally, he stood up. “I don’t like the direction this conversation is taking. Are you charging me with something, Detective Landry?”

  Landry stayed in his seat. He leaned back in the chair and rested his elbows on the arms. “No.”

  “Then I’d like to leave now.”

  “Oh. Well . . . I just have a few more questions.”

  “Then I’d prefer to have my attorney present. It’s becoming clear to me you have an agenda that isn’t in my best interest.”

  “I’m just trying to get a clear picture of the things going on in your business, Don. That’s part of my job: to map out the victim’s world, put all the pieces in place. You don’t want me to get to the truth behind Jill Morone’s death?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Do you feel you need an attorney present to do that? You’re not under arrest. You’ve told me you don’t have anything to hide.”

  “I don’t.”

  Landry spread his hands. “So . . . what’s the problem?”

  Jade looked away, thinking, considering his options. Landry figured he was maybe good for another five minutes, tops. A sergeant supervisor sat in a room down the hall watching the interview via closed-circuit TV, watching the readout of a computer voice-stress analysis machine, looking for lies.

  “Feel free to call your attorney if you like,” Landry said generously. “We can wait for him . . .”

  “I don’t have time for this,” Jade muttered, coming back to the table. “What else?”

  “Mr. Berne said he heard Jill tell you she knew something about Stellar—this horse that died. What did she know?”

  “I have no idea what she was talking about. The horse died accidentally in the middle of the night. There was nothing for her to know.”

  “There was plenty to know if it wasn’t an accident.”

  “But it was an accident.”

  “Were you there when it happened?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t really know what happened. If it was an accident, why did the horse have a sedative in its system?”

  Jade stared at him. “How do you know that?”

  Landry looked back at him like he was an idiot. “I’m a detective.”

  “There was nothing criminal in Stellar’s death.”

  “But the owner stands to pick up a big check from the insurance, right?”

  “If the insurance company decides to pay, which is unlikely now.”

  “Would you have gotten a cut of that money?”

  Jade stood again. “I’m leaving now.”

  “What time did you leave Players last night?”

  “Around eleven.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Home. To bed.”

  “You didn’t swing by the show grounds, check on your horses?”

  “No.”

  “Not even after what went on the night before? You weren’t worried?”

  “Paris had night check last night.”

  “And she didn’t notice anything wrong? She didn’t see the vandalism?”

  “Obviously, she was there before it happened.”

  “So, you went home to bed. Alone?”

  “No.”

  “Same friend as Thursday night?”

  Jade sighed again and looked at the wall.

  “Look, Don,” Landry confided, rising from his chair. “You need to tell me. This is serious business. This isn’t just some nags running around in the middle of the night. A girl is dead. I realize in your world, she might not have counted for much, but in my world, murder is a big deal. Everyone who knew her and had a problem with her is going to have to account for their whereabouts. If you have a corroborating witness, you’d better say so or I’m going to end up wasting a lot more of your valuable time.”

  He thought Jade might let his arrogance get the best of him and just walk out. But he wasn’t a stupid man. Landry imagined the guy’s mind sorting information like a computer. Finally he said, “Susannah Atwood. She’s a client. I would appreciate if you didn’t mention this to any of my other clients.”

  “Everybody wants to be the trainer’s pet?” Landry said. “That’s quite a gig you’ve got going, Don. Ride the horses, ride the owners too.”

  Jade went for the door.

  “I’ll need her address and phone number, and the name and number for Jill Morone’s next of kin,” Landry said.

  “Ask Paris. She takes care of my details.”

  His details, Landry thought, watching him go. That was what a young girl’s life came down to for Don Jade: details.

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. Jade.”

  J ade needs to run his business differently,” Van Zandt pronounced.

  We stood alone along the rail of one of the competition rings, watching a pint-sized rider take her pony over a course of small, elaborately decorated fences. Both girl and pony wore expressions of absolute concentration, eyes bright with determination and the fire of competitive spirit. They were a team: girl and pony against the world.

  I remembered that feeling well. Me and a bright copper pony called Party Manners. My very best friend and confidant. Even after I had outgrown him, I had taken all my troubles to Party and he had listened without prejudice. When he died at the ripe old age of twenty-five I mourned his loss more deeply than the loss of any person I had known.

  “Are you listening to me?” Van Zandt asked peevishly.

  “Yes. I thought you were making a rhetorical statement.” I had offered to buy him lunch, he had declined. I had offered to buy milk shakes and he had told me they would make me fat. Asshole. I bought one anyway.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Murder puts off potential clients.”

  Van Zandt scowled. “I am in no mood for your sense of humor.”

  “You think I was joking? One groom disappears. One turns up dead—”

  “Disappears?” he said. “That one left.”

  “I don’t think so, Z. The detective was asking about her.”

  He turned sharply and looked down his nose at me. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I’ve never even met the girl. I’m just letting you know. He’ll probably ask you too.”

  “I have nothing to say about her.”

  “You had a lot to say the other night. That she flirted with clients, that she had a smart mouth— Come to think of it, pretty much the same things you said about Jill. You know, you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, Z. Especially not when there’s a detective in earshot.”

  “They have no right to question me.”

  “Of course they do. You knew both girls. And frankly, you didn’t have a very good attitude toward either of them.”

  He puffed up in offense. “Are you accusing me?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Behave this way with the cops and they’ll pin the murder on you out of spite. And I’ll volunteer to push the plunger when they stick the needle in your arm.”

  “What are you talking about? What needle?”

  “This is a death penalty state. Murder is a capital offense.”

  “That’s barbaric,” he said, highly offended.

  “So is burying a girl in a pile of horseshit.”

  “And you think I could do such a terrible thing?” Now he put on his expression of hurt, as if he were being betrayed by a lifelong friend.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “This is all because of that Russian whore—”

  “Watch it, Van Zandt,” I said, giving him a little temper back. “I happen to be fond of Irina.”

  He huffed and looked away. “Are you lovers?”

  “No. Is that your attempt to offend me? Accuse me of being a lesbian?”

  He made a kind of shrugging motion with his mouth.

  “That’s pathetic,” I said. “I’ll bet you say every woman who won’t fuck you is a lesbian.”

 
; A hint of red came into his face, but he said nothing. The conversation was not going his way. Again.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I informed him as the girl and the pony concluded their round and the spectators applauded, “but as it happens, I am happily heterosexual.”

  “I don’t think happily.”

  “Why? Because I haven’t had the pleasure of your company in my bed?”

  “Because you never smile, Elle Stevens,” he said. “I think you are not happy in your life.”

  “I’m not happy with you trying to get inside my head—or my pants.”

  “You have no sense of purpose,” he announced. He was thinking he was back in control of the situation, that I would listen to him the way too many weak, lonely women listened to him. “You need to have a goal. Something to strive for. You are a person who likes a challenge and you don’t have one.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I muttered. “Just having a conversation with you is a challenge.”

  He forced a laugh.

  “You have a nerve, making presumptions about me,” I said calmly. “You don’t know a thing about me, really.”

  “I am a very good judge of people,” he said. “I am a long time in the business of assessing people, knowing what they need.”

  “Maybe I should set solving Jill’s murder as my goal,” I said, turning the tables around on him again. “Or solving the disappearance of the other girl. I can start by interviewing you. When was the last time you saw Erin Seabright alive?”

  “I was more thinking you need a horse to ride,” he said, unamused.

  “Come on, Z., play along,” I needled. “You might start me on the path to a career. Did you hear her say she was going to quit, or is that just D.J.’s story? Inquiring minds want to know.”

  “You are giving me a headache.”

  “Maybe she was kidnapped,” I said, pretending excitement, watching him carefully. “Maybe she’s being held as a sex slave. What do you think of that?”

  Van Zandt stared at me, his expression blank. I would have paid a fortune to know where his mind was at that moment. What was he imagining? Was he thinking about Erin, hidden away somewhere for his own perverse pleasure before he cashed in? Was he remembering Sasha Kulak? Was he considering me as his next victim?

  His cell phone rang. He answered it and started conversing in fluent French. I sucked on my milk shake and eavesdropped.

  Europeans generally make the correct assumption that Americans can barely speak their own language, let alone anyone else’s. It never occurred to Van Zandt that I had an expensive education and a talent for languages. From listening to his side of the conversation, I gleaned that Van Zandt was cheating someone in a deal and was pissed off that they weren’t being entirely cooperative pigeons. He told the person on the other end of the call to cancel the horse’s transportation to the States. That would teach them they couldn’t fuck with V.

  The conversation segued then into arrangements for several horses being flown to Florida from Brussels via New York, and two others being sent on the return flight to Brussels.

  The horse business is big business in Europe. As a teenager I had once flown back home from Germany with a new horse, traveling in a cargo plane with twenty-one horses being shipped to new owners in the States. Flights like that one land every week.

  Van Zandt ended the conversation and put the phone back in his pocket. “My shipping agent, Phillipe,” he said. “He is a stinking crook.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. He is always wanting me to send things to him from the States. Pack it in with horse equipment and ship it with the horses. I do it all the time,” he confessed blithely. “No one ever checks the trunks.”

  “And you’re angry because he’s cheating customs?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Who pays customs? Fools. I am angry because he never wants to pay me. Five hundred dollars’ worth of Ralph Lauren towels, for which he still owes me. How can you trust a person like that?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I might have been standing with a serial sex offender, a kidnapper, a killer, and his biggest concern was getting stiffed for five hundred bucks of smuggled towels.

  I disentangled myself from him when another dealer came by and they started talking business. I slipped away with a little wave and a promise that I was off in search of the meaning of my life.

  A sociopath’s stock-in-trade is his ability to read normal humans in order to see their vulnerabilities and take advantage of them. Many a corporate CEO hit the Fortune Five Hundred on those skills, many a con man lined his pockets. Many a serial killer found his victims . . .

  Van Zandt wasn’t smart, but he was cunning. It was with that cunning he had lured Irina’s friend to Belgium to work for him. I wondered how he might have used that instinct on Erin, on Jill. I didn’t like the way he had turned it on me when he’d said he didn’t believe I was happy. I was supposed to be the carefree dilettante to him. I didn’t like to think he could see anything else. I didn’t like to think anyone could see inside me, because I was embarrassed by what little there was to see.

  He was wrong about one thing, though. I had a goal. And if I found him in my crossshairs on my way to that goal, I was going to be all too happy to take him down.

  I made my way back to Jade’s barn on foot. Yellow tape blocked off the stalls from either end of the aisle. Despite the warning printed on the tape, Trey Hughes had crossed the line and was sitting in a chair with his feet up on a tack trunk, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  He squinted and grinned. “I know you!”

  “Not really,” I reminded him. “Are you part of the crime scene?”

  “Honey, I’m a one-man walking crime scene. What’s going on around here? It’s like a goddam morgue.”

  “Yes, well, that would be because of the murder.”

  “But that was days ago,” he said.

  “What was days ago?”

  His thoughts were tripping over each other in his beer-soaked brain. “I think I missed something.”

  “I think I missed something if there was a murder here days ago. Who are you talking about? Erin?”

  “Erin’s dead?”

  I ducked under the tape and took a seat across from him. “Who’s on first?”

  “What?”

  “What’s on second.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Third base.”

  Hughes threw his head back and laughed. “God, I must be drunk.”

  “How could you tell?” I asked dryly.

  “You’re a quick study. Ellie, right?”

  “Close enough.”

  He took a drag on his cigarette and flicked a chunk of ash onto the ground. I’m sure it never entered his head that he might start a fire in a tent full of horses. “So, who died?” he asked.

  “Jill.”

  He sat up at that, sobering as much as he probably could. “You’re joking, right?”

  “No. She’s dead.”

  “What’d she die of? Meanness or ugliness?”

  “You’re a kind soul.”

  “Shit. You never had to be around her. Is she really dead?”

  “Someone murdered her. Her body was found this morning over by barn forty.”

  “Jesus H.,” he muttered, running the hand with the cigarette in it back through his hair. Despite his comments, he looked upset.

  “So far, no one misses her,” I said. “Poor thing. I heard she was hot for Don. Maybe he’ll miss her.”

  “I don’t think so.” Hughes leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “He’d have gotten rid of her a long time ago if he’d known it was that easy.”

  “She was a problem?”

  “She had a big mouth and a little brain.”

  “Not a good combination in this business,” I said. “I heard she was at The Players last night saying she knew something about Stellar.”

  One bleary blue eye tried t
o focus on me. “What could she know?”