Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mystery series)

by Laura Crum

  "And you didn't ask him what he meant to do?"

  "No."

  Ken's horses, not Martha's. I'd never made the connection. The insurance companies had been in touch with me about Ken's horses, and I'd thought nothing of it. Many, if not most, valuable show horses were insured. Casey'd never thought of it, either.

  "It was sheer bad luck that Martha Welch's horse died and she made such a fuss about it." Ken sounded resigned.

  "Bad luck that Dave poisoned eight horses for no reason at all?"

  "I told you; I couldn't control him. I had no idea he was going to poison mine, let alone any others. And I couldn't do anything about it, even if I'd wanted to. He could blow the whistle on me for fraud. If I took him down I was going with him."

  There was genuine emotion in that statement. Going down, losing, failing. That had been intolerable to Ken. And now?

  He looked at me. In the growing light I could see his eyes seeking mine. "You'll turn me in," he said. "You have to." It was a statement of fact, said without emphasis, as close to a plea as he would ever get.

  I matched his tone. "You're right. I wanted to see you first. It's personal with me. Dave tried to kill me, I told you that. I needed to know if that was your idea, too."

  "No." He said it decisively. "Whatever I wanted, I had no intention of killing anyone."

  We stared at each other in the soft gray light of dawn, our faces mutually drained and sad. I believed him. No matter that I thought his essential lack of force had been the catalyst that set Dave loose. It was Ken's money and his passive, cowardly willingness to cheat that had made it possible for Dave to do what he did.

  "So where is Dave?" Ken said it heavily, as if he really didn't want to know.

  Even so, my survival instincts prickled. If Ken could find Dave and make sure he was dead, it would simply be my word against his on all these things.

  "I'm not sure exactly," I lied. "In a barn somewhere."

  "And you hit him over the head and don't know if he's dead or alive."

  I was silent, thinking it had not been my smartest move to reveal that Dave might already be dead. Ken had everything to lose. If luck just fell his way, if Dave was even now food for worms, there was no one but me left to eliminate. That was how it would look to him, anyway.

  The thought seemed to cross his mind. He stared at me steadily, then reached into the soft depths of the basket chair and brought up the gun. A short, businesslike pistol with a silvery sheen. My stomach muscles contracted in earnest and I gripped the gun in my own pocket, pointing it at Ken through the thin fabric. Now what?

  "I've got a gun," I croaked. "In my pocket. It's pointed at you now."

  Ken looked at me as if he didn't believe me and I wondered if I'd have to shoot him. My heart thumped hard, and I willed my face to stay quiet. Despite the rush of fear I felt surprisingly detached. If he points that gun at me I will shoot him, I told myself firmly, adjusting my gun so it was trained roughly at the center of his body.

  Ken held his own gun idly, not pointed at me, but not pointed a long way from me either. He didn't seem worried about my threat; in fact, he didn't seem very aware of me, lost in some train of thought of his own.

  It was all surreal. The dark room, dawn waking in the windows, Ken's expressionless face. I felt like a character in a play. I was afraid all right, but nothing like the fear I'd felt with Dave. Maybe I had just been through too much. I faced Ken quietly, aware of my thumping heart, but calmly planning what I would do if the round black hole of the gun swiveled my way. If I live through this, I thought, I will have gotten an awful lot of practice in how to stare down death. More than I ever wanted.

  As idly as he had picked it up, Ken let the gun drop back into the cushiony seat of the chair. My stomach muscles relaxed a fraction.

  "It's loaded," he said quietly, his face and voice as colorless as ever. "I thought for a while I would shoot myself with it. A minute ago, I thought I might shoot you."

  It was strange to hear him speaking of killing in such uninflected tones. It was as though he'd divorced himself from his emotions, discarded anything in his personality reminiscent of his colorful, flamboyant father. A sort of self-defense, maybe. Even now, with the end of all he'd worked for in sight and a gun in his hand, he sounded unaffected.

  "I've always played to win," he said. "And the more I think about it the more I think I wouldn't win by killing you. I haven't murdered anyone. The most I could be charged with, besides fraud, is being an accessory to murder. It makes a lot more sense to hire a lawyer and buy my way out as well as I can. I've got the money."

  He did at that. For a long moment we stared at each other, some sort of unspoken message passing; at the same time I became aware of the distant whine of sirens. Ken heard them, too.

  "I called them," I said bluntly. "They're coming." And thank you, Bret, I added silently.

  I still wondered if he might pull out the gun in some futile, last-ditch effort, but he seemed to have no such inclination. He watched me quietly as the sirens grew louder, thinking his own thoughts.

  When the noise filled our ears and the tires scrunched on the gravel driveway, he offered one final comment. "I'm sorry about Casey. He was everything I couldn't be-everything my father wanted."

  "Yeah," I said slowly, "he was a real good hand."

  Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

  Three days later I was brushing Gunner as Lonny leaned on the fence, watching me. He'd arrived back from the mountains early that morning and called me at work, and I'd made a date to meet him here at five o'clock.

  Rehashing the story of how I'd acquired Gunner, and my hopes and fears about owning him, as I brushed his warm red coat, just starting to turn thick and fluffy in time for the approaching winter season, I could sense Lonny's puzzled impatience.

  "So, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with him now that Casey's ... dead," I finished lamely.

  "Gail, what happened?" Lonny was direct, as always. "You haven't said a word about it, but I read in the newspaper this morning that Dave Allison was arrested for the murder of Casey Brooks and Melissa Waters, and Ken Resavich is accused as an accessory. I never saw your name, but I know you were involved somehow."

  "How do you know?"

  Lonny grinned. "The amount of trouble you were getting up to, it was inevitable. Now give."

  I picked up the comb and began working on Gunner's mane, untangling the long, coarse black hair and combing it until it ran through my fingers easily.

  "It's a long story," I told Lonny, my eyes on the mane, "and some of it is kind of hard for me to tell."

  "So begin at the beginning and go to the end. After I left that morning ... ," Lonny prompted.

  "Okay. After you left ... ," I began. Slowly but steadily I recounted events as they'd happened, glossing over my terror in the barn as much as possible. By the time I was done, Gunner's mane and tail were combed, silky waterfalls of shiny black hair.

  Lonny was quiet; he'd said little the whole time, but lines of concern framed his green eyes. When he spoke his voice was serious. "I wish you'd called me."

  "When was I supposed to? When I was tied up in the barn? I'd damn sure have called you then if I could."

  "Before. After. The next day. Any time."

  I sighed. "Lonny, this could be a problem. I appreciate your concern, I really do, but remember when you asked me if I was free and I told you I wasn't sure if I wanted a relationship? Well, this is what I mean. I'm used to taking care of myself, and I'm not used to checking in with somebody."

  Lonny's face was grave, but after a minute he nodded slightly. "All right. Accepted. Let me ask you a question. Why in the hell did he put you in Martha Welch's old hay barn?"

  Relieved at a return to the facts, I said, "I'm not sure. He was still lying there, concussed, when I brought the sheriffs-all the paraphernalia he had to tie me up and light the barn on fire right next to him-so they had no trouble believing my story. But Jeri Ward questioned him for hours after he came t
o and he wouldn't say anything, or so she told me."

  Lonny grinned. "So it's 'Jeri' now?"

  I smiled back. "Well, she didn't exactly invite me to call her by her first name and I still think she thinks I'm a royal pain in the ass, but we have spent quite a little bit of time together in the last couple of days. I more or less suggested she keep my name out of things in exchange for my giving her all the information I'd come up with and she was pretty ready to buy that. You'll notice she gets the credit for solving the case in those newspaper articles."

  "Yeah, I noticed."

  "That was our deal. When I signed my statement, she agreed to keep me out of it. As far as Martha Welch's barn is concerned, my theory is that Dave meant to pin my murder and maybe even Casey's on Martha.

  "Martha was at home that night and drunk; I know, I called her. Dave may have done the same. He was her resident hired trainer several years ago; Jeri Ward found that out by questioning Martha, who, as you might expect, was furious. Dave knew all about her place, apparently, knew where that old hay barn in the back pasture was, knew it wasn't used anymore. He also knew Martha had a motive for murdering Casey."

  "You mean that squabble they were having over the horse that died?"

  "The horse that Dave poisoned. Right. Dave poisoned Ken's two horses to get the insurance money for them, and poisoned a few more to make it look as though they weren't a particular target if anybody was nosy. I'm sure he thought it all would be put down to bad hay. Which it would have been. Except for Casey."

  "So it was just bad luck, or good luck, depending on how you look at it, that Martha's horse died?"

  "I would guess so. Dave probably gave Ken's horses whopping great doses, and the other horses less. Martha's horse just twisted a gut and it did him in." I shuddered. "I just can't imagine how anyone, any horse person, anyway, could do that."

  Dave's face jumped into my mind, that weathered, outdoor face, not unlike the face of any fiftyish rancher. Dave had spent his life around horses, as I had, devoted what time and talent he had to the big, graceful, gallant creatures. What would make such a fundamental difference between us?

  The need for power, I supposed, that time-honored human weakness. Power over others, status, the trappings of wealth-all seen as an antidote to some sort of self-perceived lacking. Dave's failure as a trainer had bitten deep, perhaps, corroded away his sense of himself.

  "It's hard to understand," Lonny murmured. "A hard question to solve. The nature of evil."

  "Yeah. Dave was evil, as I read evil. He wasn't aware of anyone or anything as having feelings or needs except Dave. And he was so anxious for power, control, wealth, whatever you want to call it, that he was willing to destroy people, and horses, by the dozen. I call that evil."

  "What about Ken?"

  "I don't know what to think about Ken. That was a strange encounter."

  I remembered the dark room, Ken's quiet words, the sense I'd had that he was being honest with me. "Ken's failure was in being passive, in letting Dave's evil have its way. I'm not sure how I feel about that. There's no denying he bears a lot of responsibility. He could have stopped Dave just by refusing to go along."

  Ken's passivity, I thought, was a response to his father's aggressively dominant personality. Still, that neither excused nor absolved his behavior, though it might explain it. No psychological justifications could ever ameliorate the grievous harm he'd done.

  "Do you think old Will knew he was riding a ringer?" Lonny asked.

  "I don't know," I shook my head. "You'd think he'd know; he's probably ridden hundreds of cutting horses. I'd guess a solid older horse would feel different to him than a three-year-old, no matter how good the three-year-old was supposed to be."

  "You'd think there would at least be a question in his mind."

  "Maybe he didn't want to ask any questions. He won the Futurity, after all." My mind pictured Will George's serene blue-eyed face. "Maybe he suspected and just didn't care."

  Picking Gunner's feet up one by one, I dug the packed-in dirt out of the bottoms with the metal hoof pick, cleaning the pads called frogs, scraping until the soles and fissures were bare. No thrush, no rot, no infections. Nice, healthy feet.

  I stood up and patted his shoulder. "I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with you, fella."

  Lonny smiled. "Let's make a rope horse out of him. He's big enough."

  That was true. Gunner was already 15.2 hands, big for a three-year-old.

  "I don't know how to train a rope horse, any more than I know how to train a cutting horse," I pointed out.

  "I do. I'll help you. He looks like a nice colt, and if Casey Brooks liked him, that's good enough for me."

  "But I don't know how to rope."

  "I'll teach you." Lonny smiled again, that open, infectious smile. "Burt's a babysitter. He'll take care of you."

  "All right." I smiled back at Lonny and felt, for the first time since what I thought of as 'that night,' full of hope.

  "How about tonight?" Lonny asked. "Want to have dinner at a fish restaurant down on the wharf and come home early?"

  "Home early and to bed?" I teased.

  "That's right."

  "You've got a deal."