Dark Horse

by Tami Hoag

  “I think I should see that tape,” the public defender said.

  Roca looked at him. “It’s quite convincing. She’ll be a very sympathetic witness.”

  “That’s a lie,” Chad said, sulking, petulant, scared. “Erin wouldn’t do that to me.”

  “Wouldn’t do what?” Landry asked. “Tell us how you grabbed her out of the hospital while the guard was trying to put out the fire you set?”

  Chad shook his head emphatically.

  “You don’t think Erin would tell us how you raped her and kept her doped up on ketamine?” Roca said.

  The public defender sat there like a toad, his mouth opening and closing, no words coming out.

  Landry sighed and stood up. “You know, I’ve just about had it with this,” he said to Roca. “This little shit wants to take the fall. Fine. Let him rot. His father was an asshole. He’s an asshole. Get him out of the gene pool. Go make a deal with the girl. You know a jury will get out the hankies for her.”

  Roca pretended to consider, then looked to the PD. “Talk to your client. The charges are going to be a potpourri of felonies: kidnapping, rape, attempted murder, arson—”

  “I never raped anybody,” Chad said. “I only went to that trailer yesterday to help Erin.”

  “To destroy evidence for her because she was the mastermind of the whole plot?” Roca said.

  Chad closed his eye and tipped his head back. “I told you: Erin told me she was in it to start, but Paris turned on her. I didn’t have anything to do with it! None of this is my fault. I was just trying to help Erin. Why should I be punished for that?”

  Landry leaned across the table, looming over him. “People are dead, Junior. You tried to kill a friend of mine. You’re going away.”

  Chad put his head in his hands and started to cry. “It wasn’t my fault!”

  “And what about the tape we took out of your father’s home office, Chad? The tape showing the alleged rape. The tape that was conveniently left on a bookshelf. How did it get there?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “I do,” Landry said. “You put it there.”

  “I didn’t! I didn’t have anything to do with it!”

  Landry sighed in disgust. “Well, you know what, Chad? I know for a fact that you did. You can either take responsibility and do yourself a favor here, or you can dig that hole deeper with every lie that comes out of your mouth.”

  He went to the one-way mirror in the wall, raised the blinds, and flicked a switch on the intercom.

  Roca stood up. “Think about it, gentlemen. The best deal goes first. He who hesitates loses.”

  W hy would Chad take you from the hospital, Erin?” Landry asked.

  “He must have been the other one,” the girl said in a voice as weak as a kitten’s. She kept her eyes downcast, as if she were afraid or ashamed. Tears fell like tiny crystal beads down her cheeks. “He must have been the other kidnapper. That must be why he never talked. He knew I would know it was him.”

  “And so he walked into your hospital room in broad daylight, and kidnapped you a second time so you couldn’t tell anyone how you couldn’t identify him in the first place?” Landry said.

  She put a trembling hand over her mouth and cried. Her public defender, a plump motherly woman named Maria Onjo, patted her on the shoulder.

  Landry watched impassively. “Chad tells us you and he are in love. That you went with him willingly.”

  Erin’s jaw dropped. “No! That’s not true! I— We—had a relationship for a while. Before I moved out of the house.” She shook her head at her own stupidity. “We only did it to make Bruce crazy. He couldn’t stand the idea of his perfect boy involved with me,” she said bitterly. “Chad was furious when I broke it off with him. He told me. He told me he wouldn’t let me go.”

  Maria Onjo offered her a box of tissues.

  “Erin,” Roca said. “Chad claims you were in on the kidnapping, not him. That the whole thing was a play to discredit Don Jade, and to embarrass and extort money from your stepfather, and that things got out of hand.”

  “Out of hand?” Erin said, incredulous and angry. “They raped me!”

  “And you didn’t notice that one of them was Chad?” Landry said. “The guy you’d been involved with, slept with.”

  “They kept me drugged! I told you that. Why won’t you believe me?”

  “It might have something to do with the fact that the doctor who examined you the night you came in couldn’t conclusively say you’d been raped.”

  “What? But—but— You saw the tape.”

  “Oh, I saw it,” Landry said. “It was horrible, brutal, vicious. And if it was real, you should have had massive bruising and tearing in your vagina. You didn’t.”

  Her expression was that of someone trapped in a nightmare. “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” she murmured to herself. “They beat me. They raped me. Look at me!”

  She shoved her sleeves up to show the red welts the whip had left.

  “Yeah,” Landry said. “That’s very convincing. So, you’re telling us Don Jade and Chad were partners in your kidnapping, along with Paris Montgomery. How does Chad know Don?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And why would he be partners with the man who stole you away from him?” Landry asked. “I don’t get that.”

  He could see her frustration level rising. Her breathing was becoming shallow and rapid.

  The PD gave Landry a glare. “You can’t expect Erin to make your entire case for you, Detective. She can’t know the minds of the people involved in this.”

  “I don’t know about that, Ms. Onjo. Erin was intimate with Chad, worked for Don Jade, claimed to be in love with him. Seems to me if anyone could know the answer to these questions, it would be Erin.”

  Onjo patted the girl on the back. “Erin, you don’t have to do this at all—”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong!” Erin said to her. “I don’t have anything to hide. It wasn’t my fault!”

  Landry looked at Roca and rolled his eyes. “So how did Chad hook up with Jade, Erin? As far as I can see, the only thing Don Jade and Chad Seabright have in common is knowing you. I can’t picture them being friends.”

  “Ask them!” she snapped. “Maybe they fell for each other. I wouldn’t know.”

  “And they were both in on it with Paris Montgomery, right? They held you in a trailer in her backyard.”

  Erin put her face in her hands. “I don’t know!”

  “Erin is the victim in this,” Onjo said. “She’s the last person who should be sitting in jail.”

  “That’s not what Chad is saying,” Roca said. “That’s not what Paris is saying. They’re both saying the kidnapping was Erin’s idea. Paris came up with the plot to kill the horse and implicate Jade. Erin pushed her to fake the kidnapping to extort money from her stepfather and drive a wedge between Seabright and her mother, as well as to implicate Jade in a crime that would ruin his career.”

  “And you know what?” Landry said. “That story makes a lot more sense to me than Chad and Jade as sociopathic secret bisexual lovers.”

  “This is a nightmare!” Erin sobbed. “They raped me!”

  Landry sighed, got up, stretched his shoulders, rubbed his face. “I’m just having a hard time with that, Erin.”

  Onjo pushed her chair back and stood up. She was no taller standing than sitting. “This is barbaric, and it’s over.” She called to the guard outside the door.

  “You’re not going to stay for the movie?” Landry asked, gesturing toward the television and VCR on a metal cart in a corner of the room.

  Onjo scowled at him. “What are you talking about? What movie?”

  “They made videos,” Erin said. “They made me do things. It was horrible.”

  “I don’t think they made this one for public consumption,” Roca said. “You may want to reconsider your strategy, Erin. I tend to give the best deal to the person telling me the fewest lies.”
/>   Landry pushed the play button on the VCR.

  “You’re a very talented actress, Ms. Seabright,” he said. “If you hadn’t turned to a life of crime, you might have made it all the way to triple-X porn.”

  The tape was a copy of the one that had been in the video camera Elena had saved from the trailer. Behind the scenes of the alleged kidnapping. Outtakes. The actors rehearsing.

  The image that filled the television screen was of Erin posing suggestively on the bed, smiling seductively at the camera. The same bed she had been chained to in the videos that had been sent to Bruce Seabright. The same bed she had huddled into in the video that showed her taking a beating so brutal, even hardened cops had been shocked to see it.

  Maria Onjo watched the tape, the color in her face draining away with her defense.

  Erin looked from her attorney to Landry. “They made me do that. I had to do exactly what they said or they beat me!” she cried. “You think I wanted to do that?”

  Her own image stared out at her from the television screen as she touched herself between her legs, then licked her fingers.

  “Yeah,” Landry said. “I do.”

  A male voice in the background on the tape mumbled something, then he and Erin both laughed.

  Erin shoved her chair back from the table and got up to pace. A caged, cornered, angry little animal. “I had to play along,” she said. “I was afraid they would kill me! What is wrong with you people? Why won’t you believe me? It was Chad. I know that now. He was punishing me.”

  Something struck the one-way mirror from the back side. Erin and Onjo jumped. Landry looked at Roca.

  On the screen, Chad Seabright walked around in front of the video camera and joined Erin on the bed. They kneeled face-to-face on the stained mattress.

  “How do you like it, baby?” he asked.

  Erin looked up at him and smiled like a vixen. “You know how I like it. I like it rough.”

  They both started to laugh. Two kids having fun. Actors rehearsing.

  Landry glanced over at the one-way mirror, nodding to someone on the other side, then went to the door and opened it on the excuse of telling something to the guard outside.

  “You fucking bitch!” Chad Seabright screamed into the room as a deputy pulled him past in handcuffs. Seabright tried to jerk away, lunging toward the interview room. “I loved you! I loved you!”

  He tried to spit at her from ten feet away. Landry stepped to the side, frowning in distaste.

  “Some people just aren’t well brought up,” he commented as he closed the door.

  Onjo puffed up. “This is outrageous! Terrorizing my client with her attacker—”

  “Give it up, Counselor,” Roca said wearily. “A jury takes one look at this tape, and your client can kiss her movie future good-bye.”

  “I want a deal!” Chad shouted. “I want a deal!”

  Erin jumped up from her chair. “Shut up! Shut up!”

  “I did it for you! I loved you!”

  Erin glared at him with venomous disdain. “You stupid fucking idiot.”

  L andry went out onto the sidewalk to stand in the hot afternoon sun and smoke a cigarette. He had to get the taste of other people’s lies out of his mouth, burn out the stink of what they had done.

  Chad Seabright had copped to everything, giving up his claims of innocence in order to hurt Erin. He claimed Erin had come to him with the plan. They would fake her kidnapping, and collect the ransom from Bruce Seabright. If he didn’t pay one way, he would pay another: with his reputation, with his marriage. At the same time, Don Jade would be implicated and ruined, and Paris Montgomery would get what she wanted—Jade’s business and Trey Hughes’ stables.

  A simple plan.

  The three of them had sat down together and come up with the scripts for the videotapes as if they were shooting a movie for a film class. According to Chad, the beating had been Erin’s idea. She had insisted he actually strike her with the whip for the sake of realism.

  It was Erin’s idea. It was Paris Montgomery’s idea. It wasn’t Chad’s fault.

  Nothing was ever anybody’s fault.

  Chad had been deceived and used by Erin. He was an innocent. Erin’s mother hadn’t raised her right. Bruce Seabright didn’t love her. Paris Montgomery had brainwashed her.

  Paris Montgomery had yet to be questioned, but Landry would eventually have to listen to her while she cried and told him how her father made her play the skin flute when she was three, and how she lost out on being the homecoming queen in high school, and how that all warped her.

  Chad claimed not to know anything about Tomas Van Zandt or about the death of Jill Morone. Landry figured that would turn out not to be anyone’s fault either.

  What Landry wanted to know was: If nothing was ever anybody’s fault, then how was it people ended up murdered, orphaned, lives destroyed? Paris Montgomery and Erin Seabright and Chad Seabright had made decisions that had ruined people’s lives, ended people’s lives. How was all that nobody’s fault?

  Chapter 60

  In the uncertain hour before the morning

  Near the ending of the interminable night . . .

  I recalled those lines again as I sat tucked up against the back of the chaise on my patio, watching the sunrise the day after Chad Seabright had cut a deal with the state’s attorney.

  Chad had turned on Erin. Erin had turned on Paris Montgomery. Paris had fingered Van Zandt as Jill Morone’s killer, trying to win herself points with the state’s attorney. They all deserved to rot in hell.

  I thought of Molly, and tried to apply T. S. Eliot’s words as a caption to what she was going through, and to the journey of her life. I tried not to dwell on the irony that it had been Molly who had fought to bring her family back together by hiring me to find her sister, and at the end of it, Molly was the only one left.

  Bruce Seabright was dead. Krystal’s mind had shattered. If she had ever been of any real support in Molly’s life before, it was doubtful she ever would be again. And Erin, the sister Molly had loved so much, was lost to her forever. If not by a prison term, by Erin’s betrayal.

  Life can change in a heartbeat, in an instant, in the time it takes to make a wrong decision . . . or a right one.

  I had given Molly the news about Erin’s involvement in the plot the night before and held her in my arms while she cried herself to sleep.

  She came out onto the patio then, wrapped in an enormous green blanket, climbed onto the chaise, and curled up beside me without saying a word. I stroked a hand over her hair, and wished I had the power to make that moment last a long, long time.

  After a while I finally asked, “So what do you know about this Aunt Maxine person?”

  The Sheriff’s Office had located Krystal Seabright’s only living relative in the area, a sixty-something widow in West Palm Beach. I was to drive Molly to her in the afternoon.

  “She’s okay,” Molly said without enthusiasm. “She’s . . . normal.”

  “Well, that’s highly overrated.”

  We were silent for a time, just looking off across the fields at the sunrise. I searched awkwardly for words.

  “You know I’m terribly sorry for everything that happened in the end, Molly. But I’m not sorry you came to me that day and asked me to help you. I’m a better person for knowing you.

  “And if I don’t like this Maxine broad,” I added in my crankiest tone. “You’re coming straight home with me.”

  Molly looked up at me through her owlish little glasses and smiled for the first time since I’d known her.

  G reat-aunt Maxine lived in a nice complex of apartments, and seemed as advertised: normal. I helped Molly in with her things and stayed for a cup of coffee and a fresh oatmeal cookie. Normal.

  Molly walked me out, and we suffered through good-bye.

  “You know, you can call me anytime for anything, Molly,” I told her. “Or even for nothing at all.”

  She smiled a soft, wise smile and nodded. Behind
the lenses of her glasses, her earnest blue eyes were shimmering with tears. She handed me a small card cut out of a piece of stationery. She had printed her name and new address and phone number beside a tiny sticker of a purple pansy.

  “You have to send me your final bill,” she said. “I’m sure I owe you quite a lot of money. I’ll have to pay you in installments. We can work something out.”