Forged (Gail McCarthy Mystery)

by Laura Crum

  "And I don't know what to do. Dominic's gone, I've got nowhere to go, Sam's my husband, what am I supposed to do?"

  "Do you have any family?" I was almost done stitching.

  "They're all back in Texas."

  "Any friends you could stay with?"

  "Not really. I've only been out here a year."

  "I don't know what to tell you, Tracy. I think if I were you I might go back to Texas and stay with family awhile."

  Tracy shook her head firmly. "I'm not doing that. I'll get by somehow. Sam wants me; he wants me to stay. I'll work around it."

  "If you're afraid that Sam killed Dominic"-I put the last stitch in the palomino horse's neck-"you shouldn't stay here. Do you want to come home with me?"

  That brought a weak smile to Tracy's face. "No, Gail. But thank you."

  I tried one more time. "Tracy, it doesn't sound like it's a good idea for you to be here with Sam. Really."

  Tracy met my eyes. For the first time I noticed, beneath the pretty-girl exterior, a flat, cynical, hopeless quality. "I'm not sure I really care," she said.

  "I'm sorry." I was done with the horse; I was ready to go. Whatever Tracy's problems were, it was clear that I couldn't solve them. I gave her antibiotics and instructions for dealing with the animal and took my leave.

  It was black dark as I made my way out to the truck, no moon at all. A spring breeze tossed the redwood boughs above me, sounding like surf on the beach. There was a chill in the air. I shivered.

  Climbing in the cab of the pickup, I drove out through various parked horse trailers and a couple of trucks. The big white dually that Sam drove still appeared to be absent. I hoped for Tracy's sake that it would stay gone all night. And then, at last, I was headed home, towards Blue and my little house and the animals.

  Not for long. To my absolute dismay, my cell phone rang just as I hit the freeway. It was the answering service operator. "Sandy McQuire has a colicked horse and needs a vet right away."

  "Tell her I'll be there in ten minutes," I said resignedly. Sandy McQuire lived along Summit Road, not all that far from Sam Lawrence. I would have to backtrack five slow miles before I reached her little stable.

  What had Tommie Harper said about Sandy? That she was one of Dominic's many ex-girlfriends, and one that particularly hated him. Hell, I thought, the ground is thick with 'em. There seemed to be a woman with a motive to murder Dominic around every comer. And there were probably several dozen more that I didn't even know about.

  Not, in many ways, a very nice fellow, Dominic. And yet Tracy Lawrence had decided to leave Sam for him. How had that come about? Tracy was probably half Dominic's age. Why fall for an aging horseshoer who was a known womanizer?

  Well, I did know the answer to that, I reflected. Dominic could be charming. Charming and flirtatious and apparently chivalrous. Contrast that to Sam, who, even at his best moment, was still a rough-edged fireball. Tracy was probably tired of being singed and ready to be courted awhile.

  But damn. Any woman with the brains of a turnip ought to be able to see that Dominic was a bad bet. Of course, I realized a second later, quite a few otherwise intelligent women had already fallen for him. It just wasn't my weakness; I didn't find handsome, flirtatious men particularly alluring. That was why I didn't get it.

  Following Summit Road, I drove through dark ranks of redwood trees, around hilly, tortured curves. Houses spangled the meadows with light. Not too far to Sandy's now.

  In another five minutes I was there, pulling into a bumpy driveway to arrive at a well-lit barn. Sandy McQuire stepped out to meet me.

  In her thirties or early forties, Sandy was thin and trim and had the hardest face I could imagine on a woman of that age. Fine lines radiated out from steely eyes; deeper lines scored her cheeks from nose to lips. Her chin jutted out aggressively and her mouth clamped shut in a narrow seam. She had sandy-beige hair and sandy-tan skin, and all in all, Sandy seemed an appropriate name for her.

  I remembered Tommie telling me that this woman had gone through a boob job to attract and attach faithless Dominic; there was certainly no sign of that now. Sandy McQuire was, as they say, a carpenter's dream. Perhaps she'd had a reverse job done. I shook her lean, sinewy hand and asked how the horse was.

  "You're not going to believe it." Sandy laughed. Lighting a cigarette, she went on. "Half an hour ago he was thrashing on the ground and now he's standing there as normal as you please." She sucked in a draft of smoke and coughed. "Have a look at him."

  I followed her down the barn aisle, passing box stalls filled with happily munching horses. Bays, sorrels, the occasional buckskin or gray. I wished sadly that I was munching on something myself.

  Sandy stopped in front of a stall where an unremarkable dark bay horse stood chomping hay like the rest of them. Gesturing in his direction, she said, ''Thirty minutes ago he was flailing around on the ground, moaning and groaning. And now the silly son of a bitch seems fine."

  "Colics can be like that," I said. "He seemed to be in a lot of pain?"

  "Sure looked like it."

  "I'll check his pulse and respiration, make sure everything's normal, then leave you with some painkiller; you can give it to him intermuscularly if he gets painful later. Whose horse is he?"

  "Barbara King's. I didn't call her, though, what with all she's been through."

  I nodded. Stepping into the stall, I asked, "What is he?"

  "Four-year-old colt. Prospective rope horse. Gentle as a pup. Aren't you, Leo?"

  Automatically sizing Leo up as I stepped into the stall with him, I revised my impression of unremarkable. Medium-sized, medium-boned, and a solid bay, not a white hair on him, Leo had a head that was neither pretty nor homely, and a quiet, steady eye. To a non-horseman, he was just another reddish-brownish horse. But I saw the overall congruity, the near-perfect structure, good round feet, muscling that was neither too heavy nor too light. My eyes widened in appreciation.

  Patting Leo's shoulder, I said over my shoulder to Sandy, "Nice looking horse."

  "He is that. Real easy to work with, real athletic, too. Barbara has a good eye."

  I checked the gelding's pulse and respiration-all within the range of normal-and listened for his gut sounds, which seemed normal also.

  "Are you starting him for Barbara?" I asked Sandy.

  "That's right. I started a couple of horses for her, must be ten years ago now. She just brought me this guy last month." Sandy laughed. "I guess she thought I did a good enough job on the last two."

  "Must be," I said politely. "This colt seems fine. Sometimes sand in the gut will cause this kind of intermittent colic, or a stone can do it. I'd keep a close eye on him for a while."

  Walking out to my truck, I filled a syringe with eleven cc's of banamine and gave it to Sandy. "Call me if you have any problems," I said, praying she wouldn't.

  "Will do."

  And then I was back in my truck, headed, at last, for home, blissfully unaware of the fact that trouble had begun to coalesce, like some strange brew bubbling on a stove. Things were coming together, and I was a part of them, like it or not.

  FOURTEEN

  Wednesday morning did not differ markedly from Tuesday, at least for the first ten minutes. I reviewed my scheduled calls, bemoaned their number, and looked up to see Detective Johnson striding through the office door. That's when things started getting different fast. The expression on the detective's face was significantly more dire than it had been the previous morning.

  "We need to talk. Now," he said.

  Once again, I gestured at my office door and followed Detective Johnson inside.

  "Where were you, yesterday evening, between seven and nine?" he asked, as soon as the door closed behind me.

  "Where was I?" Confused for a second, I rubbed my forehead. "I guess I was stitching up a horse for Tracy Lawrence? Why?" I asked, as premonition dawned.

  "Tracy Lawrence was murdered last night. Shot through the head. Sometime during that window."
/>   "My God." I sat down abruptly at my desk. I was aware that the detective was watching me narrowly, I knew that I was no doubt a suspect, but I didn't really care. "I should have made her leave," I said slowly. "I should have. Was it Sam?"

  "Sam Lawrence has not been arrested," the detective said formally, as he got out a notepad and pen.

  I had lost all desire to protect Sam, or anyone else for that matter. All I wanted was that the killing stop.

  "Tracy told Sam she was leaving him for Dominic. Last Friday, the day Dominic was killed. Ever since then, they were at each other's throats, or that's what it looked like to me. Tracy admitted that she was somewhat afraid of Sam. I tried to get her to leave, even tried to get her to come home with me. She wouldn't. Poor Tracy."

  "Why didn't you come forward with this information?"

  "I meant to," I said miserably. "I meant to. I thought I might see you when I got home, you had said you might come by, but by the time I finally did get home, you'd already left. And Tracy ..." I swallowed. "I didn't leave her place until after eight. She must have been killed right after I went."

  The detective said nothing, merely nodded in an encouraging way.

  "Sam wasn't home then. I remember noticing that his truck wasn't there."

  "Did you see anyone?"

  "No," I said. "But it was dark. There were trucks and horse trailers parked here and there in the barnyard, but I didn't see any people. That's not saying much, though. A dozen people could have been hiding there and I never would have spotted anyone." I shivered. Had Tracy's killer been lurking in that barnyard as I drove out?

  "Where did you go after you left Tracy Lawrence?"

  I recounted my visit to Sandy McQuire and my arrival home at ten-thirty.

  "And after that you stayed home?”

  "That's right." No more calls, thank God.

  Detective Johnson looked down at his notes and then up into my eyes. "I'll need to ask you to come down to the office with me and make a statement."

  I sighed. "I'm not surprised. I seem to have been Johnny-on-the-spot at two murders in a row." Two almost certainly connected murders, I added to myself. I just hoped that the detective would hit on some connection besides me. "Just let me tell the office staff that I'm leaving."

  Ten minutes later I was seated on the passenger side of the dark green sheriff's sedan as Detective Johnson drove us downtown. I'd canceled all my calls for the day, having no idea how long this would take.

  Several hours, it turned out. Once we were seated in a bare little interview room and the tape recorder had been flipped on, the detective took me through my call to Tracy Lawrence step by slow step. Next we went through my earlier call out to Redwood Ranch, and finally we recapped my discovery of Dominic Castillo in the hay barn. All in excruciating detail. It was noon by the time we were done.

  Exhausted and depressed, I arrived back at the clinic in no mood to do any work. I didn't even walk into the office. Instead I hitched my truck to the spare horse trailer we kept for emergencies, gave Mr. Twister a little IV painkiller to make the trip easier for him, and loaded him up. As I expected, he hobbled gamely into the trailer on three legs and looked at me calmly.

  I petted his forehead as I tied him in the front of the trailer. "I'm taking you home, fella," I said. "To a nice place. You'll like it there."

  And he seemed to. There were the usual long, rolling snorts as he greeted the other horses, the pinned ears and the sudden squeals. All routine. Each horse asserting his claim to dominance.

  I put Twister in the small pen I'd made for him and promised him that once he healed up, he'd have a big corral like the others. Then I sat down on a hay bale and watched the horses for a while.

  It was so soothing, like wind in the trees, or light on water. The animals pricked their ears, stared with curiosity, ambled from here to there, switched their tails, rolled in the dust, and all in all behaved like horses do. I watched them as though I couldn't get enough, like a thirsty man drinking cold water. Or a poison victim swallowing the antidote.

  I watched the way the muscles moved under the shiny hair coats, the way manes and tails lifted in the breeze, the particular cadence of a relaxed walk. I especially watched the calm, interested, aware eyes, the lively and yet docile expressions. I watched until all four horses had assumed classic resting poses under the oak trees, heads a little low, one hind leg cocked. At that point I climbed off my bale and walked up the drive.

  Letting Roey out of her pen, I took a tour of the garden. So much to see, and all of it a welcome contrast to the sterile gray precincts of the sheriff's office.

  Every day a new rose was in bloom. Today it was the aptly named Reve d'Or-Dream of Gold-twining through the posts of the porch and proffering butter yellow blossoms to mingle with the lavender wisteria.

  And then there was the magnificently huge salvia bush called Tequila, spangled all over with firecracker red flowers. Not to mention its smaller relative, Maraschino, with blooms of exactly that hue. Pale pink jasmine and lavender heliotrope wreathed the railing of the stairway and filled the porch with their scent. An especially beloved rose draped itself alongside the chair where I usually sat; Etoile de Holland offered huge, voluptuously scented flowers-rich dark red in color, silken, full and elegant in form, always a comforting presence.

  I sat in my chair and inhaled the sweet damask perfume of the rose, Roey at my feet. A hummingbird whirred through the air to perch on a branch beside me. As I quieted myself to observe, I could see tiny gray bushtits fluttering in the oak tree nearby, could hear and see a chickadee chirping as he tugged a bit of fluff free from a manzanita bush, watched a red house finch warble his song from the peak of the porch roof.

  Sun shone, a little breeze flickered through the leaves. Slowly, slowly the heavy, leaden weight began to lift. Things were as they were. I couldn't change them. Tracy was dead, but Nature still sang its endless lively song. Someday I would be dead, too, but the song would go on.

  As I watched, the quail clucked uneasily; my chickens squawked a warning. In another second, a bobcat stepped from the nearby brush and paused to look around. I drew in my breath and glanced down at the dog. Roey's nose was on her paws; her eyes were closed. She hadn't a clue the bobcat was there.

  A young bobcat, I thought. Much smaller than some I'd seen previously, he was only a little bigger than a domestic cat, though considerably taller in the rear-end. His short, smooth coat was golden brown, cougar color, and he had some white fur on his belly. His ears were distinctively pointed, like a lynx's, and his stubby tail twitched.

  To my surprise, my flock of chickens, having spotted the bobcat, too, not only burst into louder squawks but also charged in the direction of the predator. Led by Jack, the senior rooster, the army of chickens ran screeching and flapping toward the cat.

  Holding perfectly still, I waited. The bobcat stared at his potential attackers in the detached way of his kind; I fully expected him to select a victim from the herd and grab it. However, perhaps because he was young or caught by surprise, he turned tail. First walking, then trotting, he retreated from the noisy chicken attack and vanished up the hill into the brush.

  I grinned. It was amazing, the things I saw out here. The animal world, like the plant world, was infinitely surprising, constantly fascinating. I could spend several lifetimes just sitting on my porch without getting bored.

  Imagine seeing the chickens chase a bobcat. Of course, I reminded myself, I'd occasionally seen quail chase my domestic cats in defense of their chicks. And like the bobcat, the cats had run. The ways of Nature were mysterious and wonderful.

  Looking out over the garden, I let my mind open up, allowed myself to think about things I'd been pushing away all day. What strange pattern had I been drawn into with Dominic's murder? In what sense was Nature operating here? Was I an accidental element or a pivotal point?

  I had no idea why I was involved or if I really was involved at all. The whole mystery surrounding Dominic seemed to hav
e nothing to do with me, and yet here I was virtually present at two murders, which apparently centered on Dominic Castillo. What could it possibly mean?

  Like chickens chasing a bobcat, the events were inexplicable, almost unbelievable, and yet they had happened. Even if my presence was strictly a coincidence, I was, in some sense, involved. I sat in my familiar chair, on my pleasant porch, my dog at my feet, and cast my mind back on all my past interactions with Dominic. What was I missing? Nothing, absolutely nothing, came to mind. And yet the notion that I had twice coincidentally stumbled upon murders that were connected seemed equally unbelievable.

  Unless ... I sat up straight. Unless the fact that the first murder had happened in my barn was indeed chance, but my appearance at the scene of the second was not. I had been called out to Redwood Ranch, after all. To stitch up that odd cut. A cut-I took a deep breath-that looked as it if had been made with a knife. What if, in fact, it had been?

  Slowly I settled back down in my chair. Gazing out over my garden and the horse corrals, I rested my eyes on the ridge to the east. A spring wind tossed the blue-green eucalyptus tree crowns so that they sparkled in the sunshine. I breathed. And I thought.

  I was still sitting there thinking when Blue drove in. Roey trotted down to greet Freckles and I stood up. Stiffly, very stiffly. How long had I been sitting here, I wondered. At least a couple of hours.

  Walking down the hill, I helped Blue feed the animals and filled him in on the day's sad events. We stood for a while, side by side, admiring Twister while he ate. I told Blue about my ruminations on the porch.

  "And," I finished up, "I have an idea. It's not much of an idea, but it's the best I can come up with."

  "What's that?" Blue asked.

  "I think I was set up to be a suspect at that second murder. I think someone slashed that palomino horse's throat so that Tracy would call me out.

  "Poor Tracy. My God. But Blue, I've gone over it a million times in my head, and I don't know what I could have done differently. I did try to help her," I said.