by Kit Ehrman
After a minute or two, I got up and walked over to the kitchen sink. I turned on the tap, let the water run until it was icy cold, then took a swallow and felt the chill settle in my chest. I picked up the copy of Sanders' insurance papers off the counter. I had been surprised when they'd arrived in the mail and disappointed when I'd leafed through them. They looked unremarkable, and I could see why the claim wasn't being contested. The only thing that had caught my attention was Greg's signature on the vet exam.
I set the glass on the counter and walked around the loft. I paused at the north windows. The world was quiet and still, everything peaceful and safe. So, why didn't I feel safe? I got back in bed and thought about James Peters. Thought about the awful terror he must have felt before he died. Like Greg had said, no one deserved that.
Chapter 8
After the schooling show, when I had checked the competitors' trailers and had almost gotten my teeth rearranged for it, I had called Detective Ralston and told him what I had in mind. We had agreed that preparations would take at least a week and a half. So it wasn't until a windy afternoon toward the end of March that I headed north to Westminster.
I pushed through the double glass doors of Maryland State Police Barracks "G" and signed in at the desk. The corporal handed me a pass that I pinned to my jacket, then I rode the elevator to the second floor. Each door down the brightly-lit hallway had an identifying sign protruding from the transom that reminded me of a miniature street sign. Interview One, Two, and Three, Storage, Records, Properties, Holding One and Two, and directly across the hall, C.I.U. From the spacing of the doorways, it looked like the Criminal Investigations Unit had been allotted a generous slice of floor space.
C.I.U. was stenciled across the pebbled glass in black rimmed with gold. I opened the door and stepped inside. Two rows of pale blue partitions formed a wide central aisle that stretched to the back wall. The room was freshly-painted in a creamy yellow, and the slate gray wall-to-wall was new. A strong odor of new carpet still hung in the air.
A heavyset black man with a pair of bifocals perched low on his nose glanced up when he heard the door swing shut behind me. He was leaning back in his chair with his ankles crossed on the edge of his desk, a handgun magazine propped on his belly. A glossy advertisement for a Sig Sauer P239 covered the back page. I told him who I was looking for, and he directed me to Ralston's cubicle.
Two other detectives were at their desks midway down the room, one on the phone, the other writing on a legal pad. Neither looked up as I walked past. Ralston's cubicle was the last one on the left, and he was on the phone. He motioned for me to join him. I sat in the chair alongside his desk and half listened to his end of the conversation.
"No. There's no way we won't get an indictment. . . . Tuesday at the latest."
Ralston's desk looked spare and neat. He'd covered his blotter with Plexiglass, which he used to anchor lists of information, and he'd angled his computer monitor so that whoever sat in his visitor's chair couldn't see the screen. Above his desk, a calendar featured a glossy photo of a dirt bike jockey catching air as he flew over the edge of an embankment. The rider, dressed in neon yellow and lime green, stood out against a cloudless blue sky.
"Guerra won't play ball, but—" Ralston frowned and shook his head impatiently. "No. He can dick around all he wants, but we're running with it. We've got Menza locked in good and tight."
A collection of pens and pencils filled a navy blue mug with "The Man" printed in gold. The man himself looked professional in a crisp white shirt and paisley tie. The only thing that distinguished him from the rest of the business world was the gun strapped into a shoulder harness.
Except for the mug, and maybe the wall calendar, there was nothing of a personal nature in evidence. No family photographs, no trinkets, and I wondered if the separation of job and personal life extended to his home and thought it probably did.
"He doesn't have to like it, and there's no disputing the-- Relax Martin. You'll see. . . . Not this time."
Directly across from where I sat, a bank of windows stretched across the back wall. I glanced at my watch. Though it was only five-thirty, the glass behind the vertical blinds was dark. Heavy black clouds hung low in the sky, and gusts of wind whipped the top branches of a nearby tree. As I watched, the first drops of rain splattered across the glass.
Below the windows, conference tables had been shoved against the back wall and were loaded down with computer monitors, a printer, and stacks of binders and reference books. Cardboard boxes were jammed under the tables, and a collection of wall maps, white boards, and rolled up posters leaned against the wall in the corner.
"Yeah, Monday." Ralston hung up and filed the sheet of paper he'd been taking notes on into an open binder. "Thanks for coming in, Steve."
"No problem."
He wedged the binder in among the others that lined the right side of his desk. Each one had a card slipped into a slot on the spine with a name and date typed in bold black letters. Peters, James S. was third from the left. The binder he'd been working on had McCafferty, Margaret A. hand-printed in blue ink. The date was a week old.
Ralston stood and stretched. "Want some pizza? This is going to take a while."
"Sure."
He put in a call to the local pizzeria, then hefted a cardboard box off the floor. I followed him into interview room number two. Crumbs were scattered across the metal table. The room smelled like fried onions and pastrami.
"I haven't received a response from everyone, yet," Ralston said. "But we have more than enough to get started." He lifted a bulky manila envelope out of the box. "Start with this one while I get the MVA lists."
Ralston went back to his office as I emptied the contents of the first packet onto the table. Though I hadn't recognized the make and model of the trailer used in the theft, I'd been able to eliminate some trailers at the schooling show. With a little effort and attention to detail, I figured I could narrow down the field, even if I had to do it on paper. When I'd suggested this to Ralston, he had enthusiastically sent requests to every trailer manufacture in the country.
I scanned the pamphlets sent in by Equifleet Manufactures and saw they'd been more than happy to comply. Equifleet produced top-of-the-line horse trailers in fourteen different models, both bumper-pull and gooseneck, depending on trailer size and customer preference. Their best-selling model was a simple two-horse bumper-pull with a tapered tack room in the front. All of their trailers featured optional living quarters for the competitor who preferred to sleep on the show grounds. Currently, the largest trailer they manufactured was a popular four-horse slant load with an expanded camper section. No six-horse.
I flipped through their brochures and saw that they had switched to an aluminum shell a decade earlier. Though I hadn't thought about it at the time, the trailer I had been imprisoned in had definitely had a steel shell. That, in and of itself, wasn't significant. In the past, all but a few elite brands had used steel.
It wasn't until I opened an older Equifleet pamphlet that I spotted a trailer that was a possibility. As I studied the trailer's floor plan, memories of that night unexpectedly crowded my mind, and the walls in the small, windowless room seemed to close down on me. For the first time, I thought about James Peters being in there, too. In the dark, alone. Tied to one of the metal partitions. And I wondered what it had been like for him. Maybe he hadn't been able to untie his hands, or maybe he had been unconscious. Or it simply could have been that I was the lucky one. The one who had found the old bolt.
The hum of the ventilation system seemed to grow louder, but the room felt airless.
Ralston opened the door, dropped the MVA list and a notepad on the table, and paused before handing me a Coke. "What's up?"
I shook my head and looked back down at the brochure. "Nothing."
Ralston hitched his chair up to the table and grabbed another envelope out of the box. After a few seconds, I sensed that his attention was on me and not the packet in
his hands. I looked up and saw that he was watching me, a slight frown on his face. When I leaned back in my chair and popped the tab on my Coke, Ralston opened his envelope and dumped the contents on the table.
"What are we looking for?" he said. "I don't know the first thing about trailers, or horses for that matter."
I rubbed my forehead and sat up straighter. "First of all, the trailer has to have a steel shell. Most if not all of the companies are using aluminum nowadays, but their older models, like the trailer I was in, were steel. It's gotta be a gooseneck, too, with a loading door and ramp on the right side--"
"Right side? You mean the same side as a car's passenger door?"
"Yeah. The escape door's across from that and a little toward the front, on the driver's side. And see this?" I swiveled the Equifleet pamphlet around and pointed at the diagram I'd been studying. "The layout's very much like this one. It's called a six-horse head to head. The loading door accesses a wide central aisle, and the horses are brought up the ramp and are either backed into one of the three stalls in the front of the trailer or into one of the three in the back. The horses face each other as they travel, and it's easy to unload them. You just lead them out of their stalls and down the ramp."
"Okay. Could that be the one?"
"I don't think so. It's fancier than the trailer I was in, and it has a rear tack room. I'm pretty sure the one I was in didn't." I looked up from the diagram. "But I'm not one-hundred percent certain."
Ralston drew two lines down the top sheet of his notepad and labeled the resultant columns "unlikely," "possible," and "positive."
I opened the last pamphlet Equifleet had sent and scanned the diagrams. "This is the same layout. The same floor plan, anyway."
Ralston stepped around the table and looked down at the diagram.
"But the windows are in the wrong place," I said.
"What about the escape door? Is it the same kind?"
I studied the photograph of their oldest six-horse. "I can't tell."
"Wouldn't details like the style of the escape door and window location be optional?"
"I suppose so," I said.
"And they might make minor changes to the design without going to the expense of printing a whole new batch of pamphlets. I'll list them as a positive for now."
"Sounds good to me."
I was on my third packet from a company named Kennsington, when the door opened.
"Delivery." The detective who'd directed me to Ralston's desk laid a pizza box on the table and began to back through the doorway. There was a look of amusement in his eyes that Ralston picked up on immediately.
Ralston yanked up on the lid. Several slices of pizza were missing. "Schnauz, what's this?"
The detective grinned and began to pull the door closed. "Delivery perks."
"You're a shyster, you know that?" Ralston yelled as the door clicked shut.
We worked steadily for the next two hours. By the time we'd finished, the packets from the trailer manufacturers were separated into three piles that matched the columns on Ralston's list. Thirteen names on the MVA list were now highlighted in yellow. The only positives. I commented on the low number.
"It only takes one," Ralston said. "And don't forget, I haven't heard back from all the companies yet. He lowered the "unlikely" pile into the box.
Phase one completed, now we actually had to look at the trailers in person, and I had the impression Ralston would have been happier if he could proceeded without a "civilian" in tow. But it couldn't be helped.
"I hope the companies sent us all their old pamphlets," I said. "Otherwise, we could have missed it."
"We'll start with the positives and work our way down the list. If we don't get a hit, I'll contact the companies again." Ralston rubbed the back of his neck. "Or, if it comes to it, we could resort to checking all the names on the list in person and hope we don't have to widen the search to the counties I haven't run off."
I groaned. "It's going to take forever."
Ralston grunted. "Contrary to the public's perception, detective work's ninety-nine-point-nine percent tedium. Speaking of which, when can you start?"
I thought about the next two days. Besides the usual workload, Foxdale was hosting a party Saturday to kick off the show season. I told him the earliest would be Sunday morning, late, and we agreed to meet at the farm.
* * *
Lunch time Friday, I spent at a nursery, watching the bumper of my pickup sag closer to the ground as an assortment of shrubs and flowering plants were loaded into the bed.
On the trip back to Foxdale, I braked as I approached the sharp curve on Rocky Ford. A pickup was half in the road. I slowed even more and saw why the driver had parked where he had. Three men were unloading a fancy wooden sign for what would soon be the new housing development. A flatbed with a hoist had delivered a load of bricks the week before, and decorative columns already flanked the entrance.
As I pulled into Foxdale, I saw that a crew from the local rental company had erected a huge yellow and white striped canopy between the indoor and barn A. I bumped the pickup across the grass, toward the rows of banquet tables and folding chairs that had already been set up.
Marty and I unloaded my truck. Afterwards, I gestured toward the potted plants that we'd positioned to keep the guests from walking into the guy wires. "We'll use them around the jumps next weekend if it's not too cold."
"Don't tell me. The first A-rated show of the season."
"That it is."
Marty hung his head. "Man. The winter break was too damn short."
I wiped the sleeve of my shirt across my forehead. "Awh, come on, Marty. Think of all the overtime."
"What overtime?"
"Oh, yeah." I grinned. "Being salaried's the pits, isn't it?"
"Got that right."
We both turned around when a heavy vehicle rumbled down the lane.
"Damn it." I stood and peeled my shirt off the back of my neck. In the last two weeks, the weather had gone from winter to spring. "I forgot about the hay delivery."
Marty lifted the Chevy's tailgate and slammed it home. "Want me to count and weigh the bales?"
"I don't know." I sighed. "Let's take a look at the load and paperwork, then decide."
"Why don't you find another supplier?" Marty said.
"Harrison might not be the most honest guy around, but he's got the best quality hay in the area, and he was only shorting us thirty-five bales or so. I'm hoping random checks will be enough to keep him honest." I sighed. "I don't know. If he tries it again, I'll dump him."
"I have no doubt."
The driver jumped down from the cab and scanned the party preparations with apparent irritation. "Alfalfa-timothy mix like you wanted," he said.
"Good," I said. "Could you drive on over to the implement building? Someone will be down to help unload in a minute."
He stared at me for a second, then wordlessly climbed into the cab.
"Unfriendly sonofabitch," Marty said as the truck lumbered out of sight behind barn B. "I think his face would crack if he smiled."
Marty, I thought, was diametrically opposite. I looked at my watch and frowned. It was later than I'd thought. "Marty, I'll get Cliff and Billy to help me stack the hay. Round up the rest of the guys to do turnouts, okay?"
"So, you're going to check?"
"Might as well."
"You never give up, do you?"
"Go on, Marty."
"Yes, sir . . . boss." He grinned, and I wondered if he found it odd calling someone younger than he "boss." I knew I was caught off guard whenever he said it.
The driver threw the bales off the flatbed, and I tossed them up a level where Cliff and Billy were stacking them in the mow. The quality was good throughout. Even though it was last year's hay, the aroma was sweet. I started to throw a heavy one up to Cliff, when my glove got stuck under the baling twine and almost came off. I set the bale down, straightened the glove, and bent over to grab the twine. The next
bale slammed into my back and almost knocked me off my feet.
I spun around and glared at the driver. Before I could say anything, he said he was sorry, but he wasn't. He was pissed. Except for the last time, we'd never checked his shipments, and my counting the bales was shoving it in his face. I resisted the urge to rub my back, threw the bale to Cliff, and left the one that had tumbled to the ground where it was.
After we stacked the last bale in the mow, I sat down on a row of hay and did some quick calculations while the driver dragged heavy chains across the flatbed and dumped them into piles just behind the cab. I glanced up in time to catch his stare. He had been staring at me the entire time, or so it seemed. I stood and stretched, trying to get the kinks out of my neck, and decided I was getting paranoid. I signed his paperwork without comment, then watched him drive past the muck pile. He ground the heavy truck's gears as he pulled onto the side road on his way back to the office.
* * *
Saturday morning dawned warm, and by late afternoon, it was downright hot. I took off the flannel shirt I'd been wearing over my T-shirt and ran it across my face and down the back of my neck, then tossed it through the Chevy's open window. I leaned against the back fender and watched Marty unload the last case of soda into one of the plastic tubs under the canopy. That done, he walked past me, reached across the tailgate, and picked up a bag of ice.
"Here. This'll cool you off." He tossed the bag at me.
I caught it, just.
"Oooh, good reflexes." He grinned then hoisted another bag out of the bed.
We made a race out of filling the tubs, and by the time I'd dumped my last bag of ice on top of cans of Coke and 7-Up and root beer, my arms were frozen.
Marty ripped open his last bag and dumped the ice into the nearest tub. "You know," he said, "warm as it is, this won't be enough."
"I know. Terry and Cliff are going to haul in some just before the party."
I went into the lounge and bought a soda. When I walked back outside, Marty had already helped himself to a 7-Up.
