Steve Cline Mysteries - 01 - At Risk

by Kit Ehrman

  "Well, if it ain't Sherlock Holmes." Brian gestured to a six-pack on the lower level of the mow. "Want some?"

  When I didn't respond, he said, "Oh yeah. That's right. I forgot. You don't drink, don't smoke." He gulped some beer. "Let's see. You don't cuss. Not much anyway. You're polite as hell. Work like a dog."

  He peered at me and rolled the cigarette filter between his lips. "Just what is it you do for fun?"

  I gritted my teeth. "Get up."

  "'Get up.'" He chuckled. "Get it up, you mean?" He took the cigarette from between his lips and spit, like he'd gotten a piece of tobacco on his tongue. "You do do that, don't you? Get it up with Mrs. Elsa 'if it moves, fuck it' Timbrook."

  I lunged forward, twisted my fingers in his shirt, and hauled him to his feet. His chair toppled backward, and beer sloshed down the front of my jeans. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was having trouble focusing on my face.

  Brian smirked. "So, I guess you're not so special after all."

  I spun him around and leaned into him so that my mouth was close to his ear. "Fuck you." I shoved him outside.

  He stumbled when his shoes hit the gravel in the lane.

  "Pick up your check in the office," I said. "And don't come back."

  "You gotta be kidding? Who'd want this job anyway, working for a self-righteous bastard like you? Slingin' shit all day long 'til you smell like it." His gaze drifted from my face to what was left of his six-pack. He looked back at me, his pale eyes wide and unblinking, and flicked his cigarette into the building. It landed on the ground behind me.

  The skin on the back of my head contracted.

  He gestured to the west wall where the graffiti had been. "Maybe they'll fix you."

  I watched him start toward the office, then I spun around and searched for the cigarette. It was smoldering under the hay elevator. A couple more feet, and it would have landed in the chaff that littered the floor at the base of the mow.

  I ground out the butt with the toe of my boot and exhaled breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

  Brian hadn't wasted any time. By the time I got to the office, he'd already left.

  The room was crowded. A thin woman with tanned, wiry arms and mousy brown hair held back with a bandanna was leaning on Mrs. Hill's desk with her fingers splayed across the bare metal. ". . . couldn't come, so one of my other girls wanted to take her place, and . . ."

  A young girl had borrowed the office phone. She covered her ear with the palm of her hand and hunched forward while, behind her, three riders debated whether the times posted for their rides were running to schedule.

  Mrs. Hill frowned at me, then waved me off. Though I knew she'd be irritated because we were short an employee on such a busy weekend, she wouldn't want to talk about Brian then. I cut through the lounge and bought a Coke, then went outside and sat on one of the benches that were positioned down the length of the arena. Several clinic participants and a handful of boarders were working their horses in the sandy footing. On the far side of the judges' stand, a group of spectators were watching the clinic up close.

  Someone sat down next to me. The wooden slats moved under my butt. I glanced to my right and was surprised to see that that someone was George Irons.

  "Hey there, Mr. Irons. How ya doin'?"

  "Not bad. Be a lot better if I was out on the bay, kickin' back a few, instead of watchin' a bunch of fancy horses trot round in circles." He gestured toward the dressage arena. "Got half my barn here today."

  I turned the Coke can in my hands and pulled back on the tab.

  Mr. Irons waved at a large gray that was being walked along the rail on a loose rein. The gelding's nose almost touched the ground, and his back looked supple and relaxed. "My daughter's up next. That's her new horse. Got an overstep you wouldn't believe."

  "Nice looking animal," I said.

  Irons nodded as a bay horse walked in front of us. "Paid too much for him of course, but . . ." His attention drifted from the bay to its rider, and he seemed to lose his train of thought. "Well, lookit that. Ol' Vic's gone from bad to worse. I know they don't care what jumpers look like, but really, that one's got a knot between its eyes, makes you think somebody'd hauled off and whacked it with a ball bat."

  "You know Mr. Sanders, do you?"

  "Yeah, I know 'im, all right. I'll tell you one thing, though. He sure as shit wishes he'd never heard of me. When those bastards stole my horses, they took his, too."

  Mr. Irons continued speaking, oblivious to the fact that I'd become still or that my breathing had slowed even though my heart was pounding faster than a freight train, the blood swooshing past my eardrums.

  "He'd hauled in his gelding," Irons continued, "looking for someplace temporary to keep it while he was waitin' to get in somewheres else. Then it goes and gets stolen. Only had a week to go before he was plannin' on movin' it, too."

  I cleared my throat. "What was the gelding's name?"

  "Portage something or other. Don't remember now. Some big ol' gray. Part draft, part thoroughbred. Ugly head, but not as bad as that." He gestured after Sanders' bay gelding.

  "Light gray?" I said.

  Irons shook his head. "Dark gray with dapples."

  Sanders guided his horse between a pair of jump standards and circled toward us. Steel had been a dark gray, heavily dappled. A draft cross of some sort. His theft from Foxdale had netted Sanders twenty grand.

  Sanders looked down his nose at us as he rode past. My face felt stiff.

  "Was the horse insured?" I asked, though I expected I already knew the answer.

  "You bet he was." Irons scowled. "Better'n I can say for myself."

  "By chance," I said, "do you recall which insurance company?"

  "Sure do. Same company that handles my liability coverage. Liberty South. He told me he was thinking 'bout gettin' his horse insured and asked me who I used and was I happy with 'em. I introduced him to my agent. Lucky timing for him, huh?"

  I asked Irons if the gelding had any distinguishing marks or blemishes, but his description was vague and could have matched a thousand horses in any given county.

  "Did the horse have any unusual behaviors," I said, "any quirks, weird habits?"

  Irons squinted at me. "What you wantin' to know for?"

  "Did he?" I said.

  "Well, now. Let me think." He rubbed the bristles on his chin. "He was tense for his breedin'. Mouthy, too. Couldn't leave nothin' alone."

  "What about when you handled him? Did he do anything out of the ordinary?"

  "Now you mention it, he wasn't happy unless he had part of his lead in his mouth. Always had to have something to chew on."

  A steel gray draft cross with a fetish for lead ropes, who just so happened to belong to Victor Sanders, gets stolen from George Irons' dressage barn only to show up at Foxdale two years later where he's stolen again. Even when Steel had been in the trailer that night, he had fooled with the chains the entire time. They had to be one and the same.

  I wondered if he was still alive. If any of the others were. Were they being masqueraded somewhere else under different names, waiting for their turn to be "stolen?" I didn't know what Sanders did for a living, but it took a hunk of change to board a horse at a facility like Foxdale and keep it active on the show circuit. Sanders never wore anything that wasn't top-of-the-line, and the Mitsubishi 3000GT he owned had to have cost him a bundle, not to mention the money he shelled out entertaining the string of young women he brought to the farm. Then again, maybe they didn't cost him much.

  "So, what you wantin' to know all this for?" Irons said.

  I looked at the tightness around his eyes and the heavy lines crinkling his face. "I'll tell you when I know more."

  "Tell me now."

  I shook my head. "When I know more."

  * * *

  I checked that everything was running smoothly in the barns, then drove home. Greg's vetmobile was parked at the barn entrance with the compartment doors popped open. As I headed for the st
eps, he walked out of the barn and set a stainless steel bucket on the gravel.

  He flipped a towel off his shoulder and wiped his hands. "Cuttin' out early?"

  "Nah. I'm heading back in a couple minutes." I crossed the lot and stood alongside the back bumper. "Remember Victor Sanders' horse? That steel gray draft cross that got stolen?"

  Greg frowned as he uncapped a green bottle and squirted some sharp-smelling disinfectant into the bucket. He stretched the hose out of the back of the truck and lifted a dental float out of the sudsy water. "Vaguely."

  I told him my theory while he hosed off and dried the floats and stowed them in a bin.

  He shook his head. "I don't know Steve. Lots of horses have quirks like that, and now that the horse isn't around anymore, there's no way to prove it was the same one that was stolen from Ironsie's place."

  Ironsie? "Well," I said, "I'll let the insurance company know, and they can take it from there."

  I took the steps two at a time. When I reached the deck, I glanced over my shoulder. Greg had let the hose recoil back into the storage area under the compartment, and as he closed the lid, he looked up at me, his expression thoughtful.

  I flipped through the clutter in the junk drawer until I found the packet Marilyn had sent me. I unfolded the copy of Sanders' insurance policy and smoothed out the pages on the countertop. On the first page of the mortality insurance application, question number fourteen asked: "Have you filed an insurance claim in the past three years for any of the proposed horses?" Sanders had answered no.

  I got Marilyn's number from her brother and told her what I'd learned.

  "And you said the company's name was . . . ?"

  "Liberty South." I gave her the agent's name. "What will happen now?"

  "We'll contact them," she said. "Start an investigation. If we can't prove it was the same horse, or that he was involved in the thefts . . . I don't know. Maybe we can get him for intent to defraud." She signed. "Depends on what we find."

  * * *

  Around five-thirty, I went into the lounge, snagged three sodas from the caterer, and walked over to the main dressage arena. Most of the auditors were clustered around the clinician who, according to Rachel, was short-listed for the Olympics.

  Michael Burke was his name, and he was younger than I'd expected, somewhere in his late-twenties, early-thirties, and soft-spoken. He was slouched in his chair with his feet propped on an arena marker, his fingers laced together over his stomach. He'd tipped his cowboy hat low on his forehead and looked half asleep as he watched a rider guide her big chestnut across the diagonal in a leg yield.

  When I scooted an empty chair up close behind Rachel's and sat down, she smiled slightly, and I knew she'd seen me. I passed the Coke over to Michael, then handed her a root beer.

  "Keep the front of the horse straight," Michael called to the rider. "Point his nose at F and push his haunches to the outside."

  I settled back into my seat. The girl on the chestnut straightened her horse at F, then guided him through the corner.

  "Better," Michael said.

  I popped the tab on my Coke and waited for the fizz to dissipate. Rachel had a yellow legal pad balanced on her thigh, and she'd been taking notes with a pink ink pen. Her handwriting was neat and precise and loopy and reminded me of love letters furtively passed in an afternoon geometry class.

  As I looked up from the page, Elsa walked around the row of chairs and stopped in front of Michael. I glanced at Rachel's profile, then studied the Coke can in my hand. I took a gulp and glanced sideways at them.

  Mrs. Timbrook was wearing a man's dress shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and she'd twisted the shirttails together and knotted them above her navel. She hadn't bothered with the buttons.

  Or a bra.

  She leaned forward to offer Michael a food tray from the caterer, and I almost choked. I shifted in my seat and looked across the front field toward the old Ritter farm.

  The scrapers had finished cutting and reshaping the land, and earlier that morning, the graders had begun smoothing gravel along the cul-de-sacs.

  Elsa squeezed a chair into the space next to Michael and sat down.

  I risked another glance. Michael was pretty much ignoring her, but Rachel's eyebrows were bunched together, and her lips were pursed as if she'd eaten something sour.

  The close proximity was suddenly too much.

  I got up and left.

  In barn B, halfway down the aisle near the cut-through to the arena, I slouched onto a hay bale and leaned against a stall front. The barn was cool and dark, and as I sat there, listening to the slow, measured breaths of the horse dozing in the stall behind me, I was fairly certain I was the only one in the barn except, of course, for the horses. I finished the Coke, crumpled the can, and tossed it at the trash can positioned just inside the boarders' tack room. It bounced hollowly off the rim and rolled across the asphalt.

  In the square of bright light at the end of the long aisle, Michael crossed the expanse of asphalt that shimmered under the late afternoon sun.

  I pushed myself off the hay bale and picked up the can as Elsa passed the doorway. And she wasn't heading to her barn.

  Chapter 17

  The final ride of the evening was followed up with a party of sorts. When the last of the participants headed for their lodgings, I walked through the barns. I had just finished checking on the clinic horses when Michael and Rachel entered the barn together.

  She was gazing up at him with a faint smile on her lips. Her hair bounced on her shoulders when she nodded in response to something he'd said. I watched her with an odd mixture of love and sadness. I no longer cared that I'd gone from attraction to infatuation to love faster than was healthy. I loved her, and if she didn't feel the same, then I would just have to hope she'd catch up.

  She said something I couldn't hear.

  "That's right," Michael said, "and eventually the horse will respond to the release, which is absolutely phenomenal."

  She smiled at him and brushed the bangs from her eyes. "I can imagine."

  "Ask for a little shoulder-in and counter bending to get him soft, and like I said earlier, do lots of transitions within the gait to keep him focused."

  I turned away from them and stared at one of the clinic horses without really seeing him.

  They paused alongside me. "Rachel tells me you're going to lock the place up tonight."

  "Yep."

  "I'm going to sleep in the trailer. That okay?"

  I jerked my head around. "You're kidding?"

  "No. I always ask for the hotel's rate to be paid directly to me, so if I want to cut corners and keep the money myself, I can. Right now, every penny counts, and I'm used to sleeping just about anywhere. . . . Don't look so surprised. Even with good sponsors, I'm still scrambling to pay the bills."

  The thought of Michael staying on the grounds overnight normally wouldn't have bothered me one little bit. But nowadays . . . I could just see it: "Top Dressage Instructor Murdered at Local Horse Farm: details inside."

  No one expects trouble until it's too late. I'm sure that woman in Pennsylvania never thought something so horrible would happen to her.

  "You're welcome to stay in my apartment," I said. "I don't have a spare bed, but you could use my sleeping bag."

  "I have one, but that's okay. I'll be comfortable enough in the trailer."

  "It still gets cold at night, especially after midnight."

  "I'm used to it."

  "You'll be more comfortable in the apartment, even on the floor. In the morning, I'll drive you back whenever you want."

  Michael frowned. "Do I have time to squeeze in a ride?" His face was flat, without emotion, but there was an edge to his voice that I hadn't heard before.

  "Sure," I said.

  "Your apartment it is, then." Michael spun around and walked down the aisle to get his bay horse ready.

  He'd hauled two of his horses with him, and he'd only had time to work one of them during h
is lunch break.

  Rachel stepped closer and peered at my face. "Is everything okay? You seem," she shrugged, "I don't know, tense."

  "Not me." I jerked my head in Michael's direction. "You're impressed with him, aren't you?"

  "He's great. Very insightful. He picks up on everything, the smallest detail. Everyone wa--" She frowned. "You're jealous."

  "No, I'm not."

  "Yes, you are."

  When I didn't respond, Rachel slid her arms around my waist and pulled me against her. I grabbed a handful of her silky dark hair and kissed her hard on the mouth. There was a subtle shift in her demeanor, and it took me a minute to realize what it was. She may have been taken off guard, but she wasn't scared. Wasn't backed off by so much overt, irrepressible emotion.

  She rested her head on my chest. Her mussed hair brushed against my chin. I kissed her sweet-smelling hair and whispered, half afraid to say it out loud, "I love you, Rachel."

  She slowly lifted her head. Her eyes were dark and unreadable. "But you don't really know me."

  "I know you well enough."

  She slid her arms up my back and pulled me down to her level. She kissed me with passion, and I felt relief flood through my body. Maybe I wasn't totally off base after all.

  I could have stayed there all night, but Michael, looking somewhat amused, wordlessly led his horse down the aisle and broke the spell.

  Rachel stepped back and combed her fingers through her hair. "I'd better go, or I'll end up falling asleep on the drive home."

  We walked out of the barn and headed down the lane. As we stepped beyond the protection of the buildings, a westerly breeze cut across the parking lot. Rachel wrapped her sweater tighter around her chest. Before she unlocked the door, she turned to face me, and I took her into my arms and kissed her again.

  I wanted her so bad, I hurt, but I needed to stay in control. If all she felt from me was lust, she wouldn't believe in the love, and I wouldn't blame her.