Elena Estes - Dark Horse Part 3

was just Dean Soren's effect on me. "I'm riding a couple of Sean's." "You don't look strong enough to ride a pony." "I'm fine." "No, you're not," he p.r.o.nounced. "Who is Sean using for a vet now?" "Paul Geller." "He's an idiot." "He's not you, Dr. Dean," I said diplomatically. "He told Margo Whitaker her mare needs 'sound therapy.' She's got headphones on the poor horse two hours a day, playing the sounds of nature."

"Gives Margo something to do."

"The horse needs not to have Margo hovering around. That's what the horse needs," he growled. He

sipped his umbrella drink and stared at me.

"I haven't seen you in a long time, Elena," he said. "It's good you're back. You need to be with the

horses. They ground you. A person always knows exactly where they stand with horses. Life makes more sense."

"Yes," I said, nervous under his scrutiny, afraid he would want to talk about my career and what had

happened. But he let it go. Instead, he quizzed me about Sean's horses, and we reminisced about horses Sean and I had ridden in years past. Marion brought my cheeseburger and I dutifully ate.

When I had finished, he said, "You said on the phone you had a question."

"Do you know anything about Don Jade?" I asked bluntly.

His eyes narrowed. "Why would you want to know about him?"

"A friend of a friend has gotten mixed up with him. It sounded a little sketchy to me."

His thick white brows bobbed. He looked over toward the jumper barn. There were a couple of riders out on the jump field taking their mounts over colorful fences. From a distance they looked as graceful and light as deer bounding through a meadow. The athleticism of an animal is a pure and simple thing.

Complicated by human emotions, needs, greed, there is little pure or simple about the sport we bring the horses into.

"Well," he said. "Don has always made a pretty picture with some ragged edges."

"What does that mean?"

"Let's take a walk," he suggested.

I suspected he didn't want anyone showing up to eavesdrop. I followed him out the back of the cafe to a row of small paddocks, three of them occupied by horses.

"My projects," Dr. Dean explained. "Two mystery lamenesses and one with a bad case of stomach ulcers."

He leaned against the fence and looked at them, horses he had probably saved from the knackers. He probably had half a dozen more stashed around the place.

"They give us all they can," he said. "They do their best to make sense out of what we ask them to do- demand they do. All they want in return is to be cared for properly and kindly. Imagine if people were like that."

"Imagine," I echoed, but I couldn't imagine. I had been a cop a dozen years. The nature of the job and the people and things it had exposed me to had burned away any idealism I might ever have had. The story Dean Soren told me about Don Jade only confirmed my low opinion of the human race.

Over the last two decades, Jade's name had twice been connected to schemes to defraud insurance companies. The scam was to kill an expensive show horse that hadn't lived up to potential, then have the owner file a claim saying the animal had died of natural causes and collect a six-figure payout.

It was an old hustle that had come into the spotlight of the national media in the eighties, when a number of prominent people in the show-jumping world had been caught at it. Several had ended up in prison for a number of years, among them an internationally well-known trainer, and an owner who was heir to an enormous cellular phone fortune. Being rich has never stopped anyone from being greedy.

Jade had lurked in the shadows of scandal back then, when he had been an a.s.sistant trainer at one of the barns that had lost horses to mysterious causes. He had never been charged with any crime or directly connected to a death. After the scandal broke, Jade had left that employer and spent a few years in France, training and competing on the European show circuit.

Eventually the furor over the horse killings died down, and Don Jade came back to the States and found a couple of wealthy clients to serve as cornerstones for his own business.

It might seem inconceivable that a man with Jade's reputation could continue on in the profession, but there are always new owners who don't know about a trainer's history, and there are always people who won't believe what they don't want to believe. And there are always people who just plain don't care. There are always people willing to look the other way if they think they stand to gain money or fame. Consequently, Don Jade's stable attracted clients, many of whom paid him handsomely to campaign their horses in Florida at the Winter Equestrian Festival.

In the late nineties, one of those horses was a jumper called t.i.tan.

t.i.tan was a talented horse with an unfortunately mercurial temperament. A horse that cost his owner a lot of money and always seemed to sabotage his own efforts to earn his keep. He earned a reputation as a rogue and a head case. Despite his abilities, his market value plummeted. Meanwhile, t.i.tan's owner, Warren Calvin, a Wall Street trader, had lost a fortune in the stock market. And suddenly one day t.i.tan was dead, and Calvin filed a $250,000 claim with his insurance company.

The official story pieced together by Jade and his head groom was that sometime during the night t.i.tan had become spooked, had gone wild in his stall, breaking a foreleg, and had died of shock and blood loss. However, a former Jade employee had told a different tale, claiming t.i.tan's death had not been an accident, that Jade had had the animal suffocated, and that the horse had broken his leg in a panic as he was being asphyxiated.

It was an ugly story. The insurance company had immediately ordered a necropsy, and Warren Calvin had come under the scrutiny of a New York State prosecutor. Calvin withdrew the claim and the investigation was dropped. No fraud, no crime. The necropsy was never performed. Warren Calvin got out of the horse business.

Don Jade weathered the rumors and speculation and went on about his business. He'd had a convenient alibi for the night in question: a girl named Allison, who worked for him and claimed to have been in bed with him at the time of t.i.tan's death. Jade admitted to the affair, lost his marriage, but kept on training horses. Old clients either believed him or left him, and new pigeons came to roost, unaware.

I had learned pieces of this story from my research on the Internet, and from Irina's gossip. I knew Irina' s opinion of Jade had been based on the stories she'd heard from other grooms, information that was likely grounded in fact and heavily flavored with spite. The horse business is an incestuous business. Within the individual disciplines (jumping, dressage, et cetera) everyone knows everyone, and half of them have screwed the others, either literally or figuratively. Grudges and jealousies abound. The gossip can be vicious.

But I knew if the story came out of Dean Soren's mouth, it was true.

"It's sad a guy like that stays in business," I said.

Dr. Dean tipped his head and shrugged. "People believe what they want. Don is a charming fellow, and he can ride the h.e.l.l out of a jump course. You can argue with success all you want, Elena, but you'l never win. Especially not in this business."

"Sean's groom told me Jade lost a horse last weekend," I said.

"Stellar," Dr. Dean said, nodding. His ulcer patient had come to our corner of the paddock and reached her nose out coyly toward her savior, begging for a scratch under the chin. "Story is he bit through the cord on a box fan hanging in his stall and fried himself."

The mare stepped closer and put her head over the fence. I scratched her neck absently, keeping my attention on Dean Soren. "What do you think?"

He touched the mare's head with a gnarled old hand, as gentle as if he were touching a child.

"I think old Stellar had more heart than talent."

"Do you think Jade killed him?"

"It doesn't matter what I think," he said. "It only matters what someone can prove." He looked at me with those eyes that had seen-and could see-so much about me. "What does your friend's friend have to say about it?"

"Nothing," I said, feeling sick in my stomach. "She seems to be missing."

O n Monday morning Don Jade's groom, Erin Seabright, was to have picked up her little sister to take her to the beach. She never showed and hadn't been in contact with her family since.

I paced the rooms of the guest house and chewed on the ragged stub of a thumbnail. The Sheriff's Office hadn't been interested in the concerns of a twelve-year-old girl. It was doubtful they knew anything about or had any interest in Don Jade. Erin Seabright's parents presumably knew nothing about Jade either, or Molly wouldn't have been the only Seabright looking for help.

The ten-dollar bill the girl had given me was on the small writing desk beside my laptop. Inside the folded bill was Molly's own little homemade calling card: her name, address, and a striped cat on a mailing label; the label adhered to a little rectangle of blue poster board. She had printed her phone number neatly at the bottom of the card.

Don Jade had been sleeping with one of his hired girls when the horse t.i.tan had died half a decade past. I wondered if that was a habit: f.u.c.king grooms. He wouldn't have been the first trainer with that hobby. I thought about the way Molly had avoided my eyes when she'd told me her sister didn't have a boyfriend.

I walked away from the desk feeling anxious and upset. I wished I'd never gone to Dr. Dean. I wished I had never learned what I'd learned about Don Jade. My life was enough of a mess without looking for trouble. My life was enough of a mess without the intrusion of Molly Seabright and her family problems. I was supposed to be sorting out the tangle of my own life, answering inner questions, finding myself-or facing the fact there was nothing worth finding.

If I couldn't find myself, how was I supposed to find someone else? I didn't want to fall down this rabbit hole. My involvement with horses was supposed to be my salvation. I didn't want it to have anything to do with people like Don Jade, people who would have a horse killed by electrocution, like Stellar, or by shoving Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s up its nostrils, cutting off its air supply, like Warren Calvin's t.i.tan.

That was how suffocation was accomplished: Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s in the nostrils. My chest tightened at the dark mental image of the animal panicking, throwing itself into the walls of its stall as it desperately tried to escape its fate. I could see the eyes rolling in terror, hear the grunt as it flung itself backward and hit a wall. I could hear the animal scrambling, the terrible sound of a foreleg snapping. The nightmare seemed so real, the sounds blaring inside my mind. Nausea and weakness washed through me. My throat felt closed. I wanted to choke.

I went outside onto the little patio, sweating, trembling. I thought I might vomit. I wondered what it said about me that in all the time I'd been a detective, I'd never gotten sick at anything I'd seen one human being do to another, but the idea of cruelty to an animal undid me.

The evening air was fresh and cool, and slowly cleared the horrible images from my head.

Sean had company. I could see them in the dining room, talking, laughing. Chandelier light spilled through the tall cas.e.m.e.nt windows to be reflected in the dark water of the pool. I had been invited to dinner, but turned him down flat, still furious with him for the Sidelines fiasco. He was probably, even as I stood there, telling his pals about the private investigator who lived in his backyard. f.u.c.king dilettante, using me to amuse his Palm Beach pals. Never giving a thought to the fact that he was playing with my life.

Never mind he had saved it first.

I didn't want the reminder. I didn't want to think of Molly Seabright or her sister. This place was supposed to be my sanctuary, but I felt as if half a dozen unseen hands were grabbing at me, plucking at my clothes, pinching me. I tried to walk away from them, going across the damp lawn to the barn.

Sean's barn had been designed by the same architect who designed the main house and the guest house. Moorish arches created galleries down the sides. The roof was green tile, the ceiling teak. The light fixtures hanging down the center aisle had been taken out of an art decoera hotel in Miami. Most humans don't have homes that cost what his stable cost.

It was a lovely s.p.a.ce, a place I often came to at night to calm myself. There are few things as quieting and rea.s.suring to me as horses browsing on their evening hay. Their lives are simple. They know they are safe. Their day is over and they trust the sun will rise the next morning.

They trust their keepers absolutely. They are utterly vulnerable.

Oliver abandoned his food and came to put his head out over his stall door to nuzzle my cheek. He caught the collar of my old denim s.h.i.+rt between his teeth and seemed to smile, pleased with his mischief. I hugged his big head and breathed in the scent of him. When I stepped back, extricating my collar, he looked at me with eyes as kind and innocent as a small child's.

I might have cried had I been physically able to do so. I am not.

I went back to the guest house, glancing in again at Sean's dinner party as I pa.s.sed. Everyone looked to be having a grand time, smiling, laughing, bathed in golden light. I wondered what I would see if I were to walk past Molly Seabright's house. Her mother and stepfather talking around her, preoccupied with the details of their mundane lives; Molly isolated from them by her keen intelligence and her worry for her sister, wondering where to turn next.

When I went inside my house, the message light on my phone was blinking. I hit the b.u.t.ton and braced myself to hear Molly's voice, then felt something like disappointment when my attorney asked me to please return his call sometime this century. a.s.shole. We'd been waging the battle for my disability pay since I had left the Sheriff's Office. (Money I didn't need, but was ent.i.tled to because I had been injured on the job. Never mind that it had been my own fault, or that my injuries were insignificant compared to what had happened to Hector Ramirez.) What the h.e.l.l didn't he know about the situation after all this time? Why did he think he needed me?

Why would anyone think they needed me?

I went into my bedroom and sat on the bed, opened the drawer of the nightstand. I took out the brown plastic bottle of Vicodin and poured the pills out on the tabletop. I stared at them, counted them one by one, touching each pill. How pathetic that a ritual like this might soothe me, that the idea of a drug overdose-or the thought that I wouldn't take them that night-would calm me.

Jesus G.o.d, who in their right mind would think they needed me?

Disgusted with myself, I dumped the pills back in the bottle, put the bottle back in the drawer. I hated myself for not being what I had always believed myself to be: strong. But then I had long mistaken being spoiled for being strong, being defiant for being independent, being reckless for being brave.

Life's a b.i.t.c.h when you find out in your thirties that everything you ever believed to be true and admirable about yourself is nothing but a self-serving lie.

I had painted myself into a corner and I didn't know how to get out of it. I didn't know if I could reinvent myself. I didn't think I had the strength or the will to do it. Hiding in my own private purgatory required no strength.

I fully realized how pathetic that was. And I had spent a lot of nights in the past two years wondering if being dead wasn't preferable to being pathetic. So far I had decided the answer was no. Being alive at least presented the possibility for improvement.

Was Erin Seabright somewhere thinking the same thing? I wondered. Or was it already too late? Or had she found the one circ.u.mstance to which death was preferable but not an option?

I had been a cop a long time. I had started my career in a West Palm Beach radio car, patrolling neighborhoods where crime was a common career choice and drugs could be purchased on the street in broad daylight. I had done a stint in Vice, viewing the businesses of prost.i.tution and p.o.r.nography up close and personal. I had spent years working narcotics for the Sheriff's Office.

I had a head full of images of the dire consequences of being a young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. South Florida offered a lot of places to get rid of bodies or hide ugly secrets. Wellington was an oasis of civilization, but the land beyond the gated communities was more like the land that time forgot. Swamp and woods. Open, hostile scrubland and sugarcane fields. Dirt roads and rednecks and biker meth labs in trailer houses that should have been left to the rats twenty years past. Ca.n.a.ls and drainage ditches full of dirty black water and alligators happy to make a meal of any kind of meat.

Was Erin Seabright out there somewhere waiting for someone to save her? Waiting for me? G.o.d help her. I didn't want to go.

I went into the bathroom and washed my hands and splashed water on my face. Trying to wash away any feelings of obligation. I could feel the water only on the right side of my face. Nerves on the left side had been damaged, leaving me with limited feeling and movement. The plastic surgeons had given me a suitably neutral expression, a job so well done no one suspected anything wrong with me other than a lack of emotion.

The calm, blank expression stared back at me now in the mirror. Another reminder that no aspect of me was whole or normal. And I was supposed to be Erin Seabright's savior?

I hit the mirror with the heels of my fists, once, then again and again, wis.h.i.+ng my image would shatter before my eyes as surely as it had shattered within me two years ago. Another part of me wanted the sharp cut of pain, the cleansing symbolized in shed blood. I wanted to bleed to know I existed. I wanted to vanish to escape the pain. The contradictory forces shoved against one another inside me, crowding my lungs, pus.h.i.+ng up against my brain.

I went to the kitchen and stared at the knife block on the counter and my car keys lying beside it.

Life can change in a heartbeat of time, in a hairsbreadth of s.p.a.ce. Without our consent. I had already known that to be the truth. In my deepest heart I suppose I knew it to be true in that moment, that night. I preferred to believe I picked up the keys and left the house to escape my own self-torment. That idea allowed me to continue to believe I was selfish.

In truth, the choice I made that night wasn't safe at all. In truth, I chose to move forward. I tricked myself into choosing life over purgatory.

Before it was all over, I feared I might live to regret it-or die trying.

Palm Beach Polo Equestrian Center is like a small sovereign nation, complete with royalty and guards at the gates. At the front gates. The back gates stood open during the day and could be reached from Sean's farm by car in five minutes. People from the neighborhood regularly hacked their horses over on show days and saved themselves the cost of stabling-ninety dollars a weekend for a pipe-and-canvas stall in a circus tent with ninety-nine other horses. A guard making night rounds would lock the gate at some point late in the evening. The guard hadn't made his rounds yet that night.

I drove through the gates, a yellow parking pa.s.s stolen from Sean's Mercedes hanging on my rearview mirror, just in case. I parked in a row of vehicles along a fence opposite the last of the forty big stabling tents on the property.

I drove a sea-green BMW 318i convertible I bought at a sheriff's auction. The roof sometimes leaked in a hard rain, but it had an interesting option that hadn't come from the factory in Bavaria: a small, foam-lined metal box hidden in the driver's door panel, just big enough to hold a good-sized bag of cocaine or a handgun. The Glock nine millimeter I kept there was tucked into the back of my jeans, hidden by my s.h.i.+rttail as I walked away.

On show days the show grounds are as busy and crazy as the streets of Calcutta. Golf carts and small motorcycles race back and forth between the barns and showrings, dodging dogs and trucks and trailers, heavy equipment, Jaguars and Porsches, people on horses and children on ponies, and grooms walking charges done up in immaculate braids and draped in two-hundred-dollar cool-out sheets in the custom colors of their stables. The tents look like refugee camps with portable johns out front, people filling buckets from pump hydrants by the side of the dirt road, and illegal aliens dumping muck buckets into the huge piles of manure that are carted away in dump trucks once a day. People school horses on every available open patch of ground, trainers shouting instructions, encouragement, and insults at their students. Announcements blare over the public address system every few minutes.

At night the place is a different world. Quiet. Almost deserted. The roads are empty. Security guards make the rounds of the barns periodically. A groom or trainer might drop by to perform the ritual night check or to tend an animal with a medical problem. Some stables leave a guard of their own posted in their elaborately decorated tack room. Baby-sitters for horseflesh worth millions.

Bad things can happen under cover of darkness. Rivals can become enemies. Jealousy can become revenge. I once knew a woman who sent a private cop everywhere with her horses after one of her top jumpers was slipped LSD the night before a compet.i.tion offering fifty thousand dollars in prize money.

I'd made a couple of good busts at this show grounds when I'd worked narcotics. Any kind of drug- human or animal, remedial or recreational-could be had here if one knew whom and how to ask. Because I had once been a part of this world, I was able to blend in. I had been away from it long enough that no one knew me. Yet I could walk the walk and talk the talk. I had to hope Sean's little joke in Sidelines hadn't taken away my anonymity.

I made the dogleg turns from the back area known euphemistically as "The Meadows," the tent ghetto where show management always sticks the dressage horses that s.h.i.+p in for only several shows each season. From those back tents it takes twenty minutes to walk to the heart of the show grounds. Earth-moving equipment sat parked at one corner, backed into freshly cleared land amid the scrubby woods. The place was being expanded again.

Lights glowed in the tents. A woman's melodic laugh floated on the night air. A man's low chuckle underscored the sound. I could see the pair standing at the end of an aisle in tent nineteen. Elaborate landscaping at the corner of the tent set the stage around a lighted stable sign with one golden word on a field of hunter green: JADE.

I walked past. Now that I had found Jade's stalls, I didn't know what I was going to do. I hadn't thought that far ahead. I turned on the far side of tent eighteen and doubled back around, coming up through the aisles of nineteen until I could hear the voices again. "Do you hear anything?" The man's voice. An accent. Maybe Dutch, maybe Flemish. I stopped breathing. "Gut sounds," the woman said. "She's fine, but we'll go through the drill with the vet anyway. Can't be seen looking careless after Stellar."

The man gave a humorless laugh. "People have made their minds up about that. They believe what they want."