The answering machine beeped. “It’s Jack. I’m trying to get a hold of Lucy.” Dougherty cleared his throat. “Her father’s been arrested in Arizona.”
Clay stared at Rita’s stricken face, but his mind was elsewhere. If they’d arrested Tanner, had it been for Coke’s murder?
“Oh, God,” Rita said. She tottered on her stiletto heels, reaching out for him. If he didn’t catch her, she would have fallen. She steadied herself against him and tucked her head against his chest. “She’s going to need us more than ever now,” she said.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Dakota couldn’t believe it. After all this time, they’d caught her father’s killer.
“We’re holding him for questioning,” Derek Blue told her. “The kids saw your dad run off the road, and they ID’d the truck. We’re trying to match the tire up now.”
Dakota closed her eyes and sighed with relief.
“We also found a two-by-four we believe he used to bludgeon your horse. He says he beat a dog to death with it, but he can’t remember where he buried it. Said he got mad at the dog when he was drunk. Pretty convenient, huh?”
Dakota couldn’t speak.
“Just thought you should know, so you won’t worry.”
‘Thank you.” She set the receiver down, feeling suddenly weak. It had been Tanner. She’d been right all along. He had killed her father out of spite, just as he had killed poor, harmless Something Wicked. Just as he had tried to kill Shameless.
Dan returned to the ranch later that day. The crisis was temporarily over, although the doctors thought there might be something wrong with the new heart. They were looking for a replacement, but it didn’t look good.
“I can stay here a little longer,” Dakota said. “If you’d rather be in Tucson with your wife—”
“No! No, it’s all right. She’s stable for now. I can’t be any help there. I just don’t know what to do . . .” He turned away from her in anguish, hands in his rear pockets, a big man laid low by circumstances. “It’s going to cost so much, but I can’t think about that. If we can’t find another donor, there’s not much they can do.”
“Maybe I could help,” Dakota said. “I have some money—”
“We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars! You have that kind of money? Anything else is just a drop in the bucket. Oh, Jesus!” He covered his face with his hands. “I can’t believe this, it looked so good, why the hell did it have to happen now?”
There was nothing Dakota could say. He was distracted by his grief, and the only thing she could do was let him work it out. “The offer’s there,” she said quietly and withdrew.
Later, Dan came to apologize.
“No apologies are necessary. I don’t know how you’ve borne up under it this long.”
He cleared his throat. “I just need to get back to work, get my mind off it.”
“Then you want me to go?”
He looked at her gratefully. “There’s no need for you to stay around here. You have to get that filly ready for the All American, and there’s nothing you can do here. Really.”
“I’ll go back tomorrow then.”
His relief was palpable.
Later that evening, Marcie caught Dakota as she walked toward the house. “Can I talk to you a minute?”
“Come on in.” Dakota opened the door to the office and led Marcie to the study. Marcie sat down, looking at the Route 66 sign on the wall. “Your dad had such great stuff!”
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
Marcie smiled triumphantly, as if she were about to deliver a bombshell. “The horse in Darkscope’s stall isn’t Darkscope.”
Dakota was at a loss for words. She managed to say, “What?” It came out in a croak.
“Well, see, it was simple once it occurred to me. I was real puzzled that Scope didn’t like the licorice, you know? I mean he really scarfs that stuff. So I tried him again today, after he’d calmed down a little. No deal. Wouldn’t touch it.”
“But that doesn’t—”
“He wasn’t acting like Darkscope either. Nothing I could put my finger on, but when you’re around a horse, you just know. If I wasn’t at the wrong stall, I’d swear it was Wicked. So I looked at his night eyes.”
“His night eyes.”
“You know what they are, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know.” Night eyes was another name for horse chestnuts, the putty-colored pads on the inside of a horse’s legs that had been second and third toes eons ago, when the horse had been a tiny animal called eohippus. “Darkscope has a real unusual one. Looks just like an hourglass.”
“Oh. You know.”
“So let me guess,” Dakota said. “You didn’t find an hourglass. Couldn’t you have been mistaken?”
“Nope.” Marcie stood up. “I’m positive the horse in that stall is Something Wicked.”
For a long time afterward, Dakota sat in her chair, stunned. The implications were incredible. If what Marcie said was true, then Something Wicked didn’t die. Darkscope must have died in his place. How could that have happened?
If Something Wicked was still alive—
No. Impossible. She’d seen the horse buried. Checked the tattoo herself.
There was an easy way to find out. She had the original AQHA birth certificate for Something Wicked. She also had a copy of the bill of sale to Dan for Darkscope, showing the horse’s tattoo number, which matched his tattoo number in the catalog.
She went down to check the horse in Darkscope’s stall.
Marcie was wrong. The tattoo didn’t match Something Wicked. It matched Darkscope.
Stifling her disappointment, Dakota tried to reconcile what the girl had told her. Marcie had been here three years. She knew the horses well. Probably as well as a mother would know her identical twins. On the face of it, it didn’t make sense that she’d be wrong about something like this.
Still, it didn’t alter the facts. Tattoos didn’t lie, which was why the American Quarter Horse Association used them. It was impossible to change a tattoo. Cutting that part of the lip could cause a horse to bleed to death. The horse in that stall was Darkscope. The horse at Dr. Ames’s clinic had to be Something Wicked.
Dakota didn’t know what to do. The facts were irrefutable, but her gut told her that Marcie was right.
There was one other way of telling for sure. She could have Something Wicked blood-typed. Blood-typing didn’t lie either.
Jared Ames still had Something Wicked’s corpse. She could ask him to do the blood-typing, then send it to AQHA and see if it matched their records.
Dakota remembered the stubborn set of Jared Ames’s jaw when she’d told him to autopsy Something Wicked. No doubt he’d give her a fight over this request as well.
Dakota decided to stay for another couple of days. She needed to find another vet and wanted to supervise Something Wicked’s blood-typing before he was buried again. Her change of plans didn’t make Dan happy, but he could hardly argue when she suggested he could go to Tucson and be with his wife. She kept her own counsel regarding Jared Ames. She knew Dan and Ames were good friends.
Gearing up for unpleasantness, Dakota called Dr. Ames to tell him that he would no longer be working for her.
“That’s fine by me,” he replied curtly. “By fall, you won’t have a farm anyway.”
“Then you shouldn’t mind so much.” When she hung up, her stomach ached. She called Clay, got his voicemail machine. No doubt he was at the track.
Damn, but she missed him! It would have been nice to talk to Clay about what was going on at Black Oak. He’d lived here all these years, so he’d have a better feeling for what was going on.
Dakota remembered that Clay’s vet was Beverly Johnson. She called the vet and asked if she would go out to Ames’s clinic and do the blood-typing.
“That could be awkward,” Dr. Johnson told her. “Perhaps you’d better have the horse sent to my clinic.”
Dakota tried not think about
the gruesome aspect of all this. The poor horse was being moved around like an MX missile. She called Dr. Ames back and told him that Something Wicked would be going to Dr. Johnson’s clinic. He told her to arrange it herself and hung up.
She ought to write a book on how to make enemies.
Restless, she called Clay again that evening, got the machine again. He called her back late.
“Where were you?” Dakota asked, annoyed.
“Would you believe go-carting?”
“What?”
“I got dragged into going with Rita and Lucy.”
The feeling of jealousy that wormed into her heart was unworthy of her. She ignored it, telling Clay about Marcie’s revelation, and her decision to fire Doc Ames.
“You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that. Ames worked for your dad for—”
“Seventeen years. So he’s told me on numerous occasions. But what else could I do?”
“You really think there’s something in what Marcie says?”
“I don’t know. It’s pretty far-fetched, don’t you think?”
Clay was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “That kind of thing’s happened before.”
“You think Dan and Ames switched the stallions?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time. Say you’ve got five mares ready to be artificially inseminated by Something Wicked, but you only have enough semen for three of them. And there, in the refrigerator, is some of Darkscope’s semen. You’re under the gun, these mares have to be bred today or it’ll be too late. Who’s going to know? Especially when those studs look so much alike. Their colts won’t be all that different. And you’re making out like a bandit, getting paid a Something Wicked stud fee for a Darkscope service. That’s two thousand dollars profit on each mare.”
“If Coke had done it, it would make sense—not that he would. It was his stallion, and the money was paid to him. But how would it benefit Dan?”
“I don’t know. Unless he’s got a percentage of Something Wicked.”
“I don’t think so.” But Dan was secretive. If he and Coke had some kind of handshake agreement, she would never know. “Why would they bother to switch the horses at all? If you’re artificially inseminating the mares, why not just switch vials?”
“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense. Something Wicked’s a proven producer. They’d only need Darkscope if they ran out of Something Wicked.”
“If they did switch horses, wouldn’t someone notice the tattoo on his lip?” Dakota asked. “A groom or someone?”
“What’s Shameless’s tattoo number?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you pick Shameless out in a herd of horses that looked just like her?”
“Of course I could.”
“Because you know her.” He cleared his throat. “Think about it. A groom starts working for Dan. Dan points out the horse he’ll be working with. That’s Something Wicked, he says. Is the groom going to think any different?”
“No. He’s going to accept at face value that Something Wicked is who Dan says he is,” Dakota finished for him.
“To that groom, the horse is Something Wicked.”
“Right.”
“But I checked the tattoo on Something Wicked. It’s the same as the number on his papers.”
“Then I guess we just indulged in a flight of fancy. It’s getting tougher to do that kind of thing anyway, with the blood-typing of stallions, and now they’re doing it with the foals. With DNA testing up the road, soon it will be impossible to cheat.” Clay changed the subject. “When you coming back?”
“I could leave day after tomorrow. I want to make sure Something Wicked gets over to Dr. Johnson’s clinic, and it looks like I’m going to have to find someone to take over for Dan while he’s in Tucson.”
“He’s not going to like that.”
“I’m thinking that Marcie could do it. He needs an assistant. Someone who knows what’s going on here, so that when he has to go to Tucson, everything around here doesn’t fall apart. It’s only temporary. We won’t have any mares left in another month,” she added glumly. “So we won’t be needing a stud farm manager much longer. He could keep up the grounds, see to old Canelo Red and Cochita, but I don’t think he’ll like that. Lone Star’s taking those last seven mares sight unseen.”
“I wish you hadn’t agreed to that.”
Dakota said nothing, although she regretted it, too. With Something Wicked dead, and the outside mares going home, Black Oak was slowly winding down. Soon it would be empty.
Clay must have sensed her desolation. “The wolf rally’s on Friday evening. If you’re coming through about that time, why don’t you meet me there?”
“All right.”
He told her where in the White Sands National Monument the rally would be, and Dakota wrote it down. She wanted to get out of here, before the last of the mares left. Wanted to be with Clay, in Ruidoso, working with her filly, preparing her for the All American. She wished the summer would never end. Because she knew after Shameless’s campaign was over, there would be no Black Oak to come home to.
THIRTY-EIGHT
On her way out of town, Dakota stopped by Dan’s place to catch him up on what had gone on at Black Oak during his absence. His truck wasn’t there, even though he’d called her early this morning to say he would be back for morning feeding.
Dakota was surprised by the uneasiness she felt as she stepped out into the quiet of the morning.
The Bolin house had an empty, shuttered look, as if its occupants had left for good, even though there were several improvements obvious to even the casual eye: a newly blacktopped driveway; a front walk half completed, the remaining bricks stacked to the side. Even the satellite dish looked new. Coke hadn’t paid for his employees’ insurance, but had tried to make it up to Dan by giving him a high salary. Still, Dan’s private insurance must be enormous in light of Marie’s illness. And yet he was adding improvements to the house.
Dakota wondered if Marie would ever see these improvements.
A breeze sprang up. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was an intruder here. It was almost as if the house was watching her, a colonial brick extension of a grim, secretive Dan Bolin. Silly. It was just a house. And a nice one at that. What was scary about privet hedges, carriage lamps, white shutters? Or the covered speedboat in the shiny new driveway?
She was here; she might as well try the barn. It, too, was colonial brick with a gray slate roof. Such a neat stable. Compulsively so.
“Dan?” she called, stifling the urge to whisper. At any moment she expected him to come around the comer, and—
And what? Chase her with a pitchfork? Her imagination was working overtime. She raised her voice. “Dan? Anybody here?”
The barn was as empty as the morning. Dakota walked down the center aisle, surprised to see he had so many young horses. She noticed that all of them were blanketed and wore traveling boots, which was strange—
An engine droned. Dakota shielded her eyes and saw a puff of dust in the distance, coming this way. Her heart went from a trot to a gallop in the space of a second. Her first instinct was to hide. Dan sure as hell wouldn’t want her snooping around his barn.
Stupid, the truck’s out there in plain sight. All you have to say is you came looking for him before you left for Ruidoso. Which is God’s honest truth.
Dakota strode to her truck, started the engine and drove onto the dirt road leading back to the main house.
An unfamiliar pickup pulling a six-horse trailer met her on the brow of the hill. As they drew abreast, Dakota recognized the driver as Rudy Gallego, the horse dealer from Hermosillo. Jared Ames sat on the passenger side. Dakota waved cheerily, hoping she didn’t look guilty as hell. The vet’s double take was almost comic.
The trailer’s brake lights flared, and the rig slowed to a halt. Dakota’s pulse quickened.
Ames got out of the truck and walked over. “You looking for Dan?”
“I w
as. I’m headed out for Ruidoso now.”
“He’s been delayed. Can I give him a message?”
“What? No. No message. I just came to say goodbye.” Dakota knew she sounded lame. She had a tendency to babble when she was nervous. “I was just looking at Dan’s colts. They sure look good; you can tell they’re in perfect health. You taking them somewhere?” she added, remembering the traveling boots.
Ames tapped his fingers on the roof of her cab. “Nope. We’re just picking up Dan’s roping horse. I’m borrowing him for the rodeo in Patagonia today. I’ll tell Dan you came by.”
“Okay.” She didn’t know what else to say, and he was already walking back to the truck. In another minute, the rig started forward again. The horse trailer swayed as it rattled over a cattle guard before disappearing over the hill.
On the drive back to Ruidoso, Dakota’s mind lingered on her conversation with Ames. She could have sworn they had come for the colts, since the colts all wore traveling boots and Gallego was pulling a six-horse trailer. She knew it wasn’t any of her business, but it made her uneasy. Dan Bolin made her uneasy.
Dakota wondered if there was any link between Dan’s colts and Marcie’s belief that the horse in Darkscope’s stall wasn’t Darkscope. She couldn’t think of one. Besides, tattoos didn’t lie, did they? That was the bottom line.
Just beyond Las Cruces, a black GMC truck with dark windows hurtled past her at eighty miles an hour, making her own vehicle sway in its wake. It looked a lot like Dan’s truck.
She had Dan on the brain.
She reached the gates to the White Sands National Monument around six thirty in the evening. The rally had kicked off at five o’clock; obviously a plan to beat the heat.
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