Dark Horse (15 page)

17

Jill let herself into Jade’s tack room
and turned on the small lamp that sat on an antique chest. She grabbed a jug of leather oil from the supply shelves, twisted off the top, pulled open the drawer with Jade’s show breeches in it, and doused the pants with oil. She knew from looking in the catalogs those breeches cost at least two hundred dollars each. She threw open the armoire, pulled out his two custom-made jackets, and soaked them both, then did the same with his freshly pressed, custom-made shirts.

It didn’t seem enough. She wanted more satisfaction.

She was supposed to have cleaned the stalls at the end of the day because Javier, the Guatemalan guy, had to leave early. But Jill didn’t like pitching shit, and so she had simply stirred the bedding around to cover it. She snickered now as she went to the first stall and took out Trey Hughes’ gray horse. She put the horse in the empty stall where Stellar had lived, then took a pitchfork into the gray’s stall and uncovered the piles of manure and the spots wet with urine. The smell of ammonia burned her nose and she smiled a malicious smile.

Setting the fork aside, she went back to the tack stall and grabbed up the pile of clothes.

Jade would have a fit when he found this mess. He would know she had done it, but he wouldn’t be able to prove it. And he was supposed to be in the showring in the morning. He wouldn’t have any clothes. His horses wouldn’t be ready. And Jill would be busy lying on the beach, getting a tan and looking for a hot guy.

She spread the clothing out in the stall, over the piles of shit and spots of pee, then went around and around the stall, stomping on Don Jade’s expensive clothing, grinding it into the mess. This would teach him not to treat people like servants. He couldn’t humiliate her and get away with it. Big asshole. He was going to regret what he’d done to her. She could have been his ally, his spy. Instead, he could rot.

“Fuck you, Don Jade. Fuck you, Don Jade.” She chanted the words as she marched around the stall.

She had no fear of being caught by Jade. He was back at that snotty club, trying to impress some client or some woman. Paris was supposed to have night check, but Jill knew for a fact she hardly ever did it when it was her turn.

It didn’t occur to Jill that someone from another stable might come through the barn, or that a security guard might be making rounds. She almost never got caught doing stuff. Like keying stupid Erin’s car. Everyone assumed Chad did it because Chad had been there that night and he and Erin had argued. And Jill had once had a job at a Wal-Mart where she had stolen all kinds of stuff, right under her manager’s nose. It served the store right, getting ripped off, if they were stupid enough to hire a guy as dumb as that guy had been.

“Fuck you, Don Jade. Fuck you, Don Jade,” she chanted, happily grinding his clothes into the muck.

And then the stable lights went out.

Jill stopped marching and stood very still. She could feel her heart beating. The sound of it in her ears made it impossible to hear if someone was coming. As her eyes adjusted she could make out shapes, but the stall she was in was too far to the back of the tent to get much light from the big light pole out by the road.

Some of the horses turned around in their stalls. Some nickered—nervously, Jill thought. She felt around the wall blindly, trying to find the pitchfork. She’d left it on the far side of the stall. She turned her back to the door as she groped for it.

It happened so fast, she couldn’t react. Someone rushed in behind her. She heard the rustle of the stall bedding, felt the presence of another person. Before she could scream, a hand was over her mouth. Her own hands closed desperately on the handle of the pitchfork, and she twisted around, trying to wriggle from her captor’s grasp, breaking the hold, stumbling backward, swinging the pitchfork in a wide arch, hitting something. Her grip on the handle was too near the end of it, giving her little control or strength in her swing, and it flew out of her hands and thumped against the canvas wall.

She tried to scream then, and couldn’t. As in a nightmare, the sound died in her throat. In that split second she knew she was going to die.

Still, she tried to run for the door. Her legs felt as heavy as lead. Her feet tangled in the clothes on the floor of the stall. Like a lasso around her ankles, the clothes pulled her feet out from under her. She fell forward, heavily, knocking the wind from her lungs. Her attacker came down on top of her from behind.

There was a sound—a voice—but she couldn’t hear it above the pounding in her ears and the wrenching sound from her own throat as she tried to breathe and sob and beg. She felt the miniskirt being pulled up over her butt, a hand digging between her legs, tearing at the too-small thong.

She tried to pull herself forward. There was a terrible pressure in the middle of her back, then against the back of her head, forcing her head down, pushing her face into the manure she was supposed to have cleaned out of the stall that day. She couldn’t breathe. She tried to turn her head and couldn’t; tried to suck in air and her mouth filled with shit; tried to vomit and felt a terrible burning in her chest.

And then she didn’t feel anything at all.

18

The Seabrights’ neighborhood was silent,
all the big lovely homes dark, their inhabitants blissfully ignorant of the dysfunction next door. There were still lights on downstairs on one end of the Seabright home. The second story was dark. I wondered if Krystal really was sleeping.

Bruce had “sent her to bed,” Molly had said. As if she were a child. Her daughter had been abducted and her husband told her to go to bed. He would handle it. If Krystal hadn’t seen the tape, I wondered if Bruce would have simply thrown it in the trash like a piece of junk mail.

Molly let us in the front door and led the way to Bruce Seabright’s home office, the source of the lights. The office door stood open. Bruce was inside, muttering under his breath as he searched the bookcases near the television.

“Looking for this?” I asked, holding up the video.

He spun around. “What are you doing here? How did you get into my house?”

His glare hit on Molly half hiding behind me. “Molly? Did you let this person in?”

“Elena can help—”

“Help with what?” he said, choosing denial even while I stood there with the tape of his stepdaughter’s kidnapping in hand. “We don’t need her help for anything.”

“You think you can handle this on your own?” I asked, tossing the tape on his desk.

“I think you can leave my home or I can call the police.”

“That threat doesn’t work with me. I thought you learned that lesson this morning.”

His mouth pulled into a tight knot as he stared at me with narrowed eyes.

“Elena used to be a detective with the Sheriff’s Office,” Molly said, moving out of my shadow. “She knows all about those people Erin worked with, and—”

“Molly, go to bed,” Seabright ordered curtly. “I’ll deal with you tomorrow, young lady. Eavesdropping on conversations, coming into my office without permission, bringing this person into my home. You’ve got a lot to answer for.”

Molly kept her chin up and gave her stepfather a long look. “So do you,” she said. Then she turned and left the room with the dignity of a queen.

Seabright went to the door and closed it. “How did she know to call you?”

“Believe it or not, the people living in
your
house do have lives and minds of their own, and allow themselves to think without asking your permission. I’m sure you’ll put a stop to that, now that you know.”

“How dare you criticize the way I run my house? You don’t know anything about my family.”

“Oh, I know all about your family. Believe me,” I said, hearing an old bitterness in my tone. “You’re the demigod and the mortals revolve around you like planets around the sun.”

“Where do you get off speaking to me this way?” he asked, advancing toward me, trying to get me to back away literally and figuratively. I didn’t move.

“I’m not the one who has explaining to do, Mr. Seabright. Your stepdaughter has been kidnapped and Molly is the only person who seems to care whether she’s ever seen alive again. What do you have to say about that?”

“I don’t have anything to say to you. None of this is any of your business.”

“I’ve made it my business. When, where, and how did this tape arrive?”

“I don’t have to answer your questions.” He walked past me as if to dismiss me, going back to the bookcases to close the doors on his television.

“Would you rather answer the questions of a sheriff’s detective?” I asked.

“They said no police,” he reminded me as he moved a bookend two inches to the left. “Do you want to be responsible for the girl’s death?”

“No. Do you?”

“Of course not.” He straightened a stack of books, his eyes already moving in search of the next piece of his kingdom out of place. Nervous, I thought.

“But if she simply never came back, you wouldn’t exactly mourn her loss, would you?” I said.

“That’s an obnoxious thing to say.”

“Yes, well . . .”

He stopped rearranging and put on a face of high affront. “What kind of a man do you think I am?”

“I don’t think you’d really like me to answer that right now. When did this tape arrive, Mr. Seabright? Erin hasn’t been seen or heard from in nearly a week. Kidnappers usually want their money ASAP. It’s rather the point of the thing, you see. The longer they hang on to a victim, the shorter the odds of something going wrong.”

“The tape just came,” he said, but he didn’t look at me when he said it. I was willing to bet he’d had it for a couple of days.

“And the kidnappers haven’t called.”

“No.”

“How did the tape arrive?”

“In the mail.”

“To the house or to your office?”

“The house.”

“Addressed to you or to your wife?”

“I—I don’t recall.”

To Krystal. And he’d kept it from her. He probably screened all her mail, the controlling prick. And when she’d finally seen it, he’d sent her to bed and gone out for a drive.

“I’d like to see the envelope,” I said.

“I threw it out.”

“Then it’s in your trash. Let’s go get it. There could be fingerprints on it, and the postmark could provide valuable information.”

“It’s gone.”

“Gone where? Your trash was at the curb yesterday. If the tape arrived today . . .”

He had no answer for that, the son of a bitch. I heaved a sigh of disgust and tried again.

“Have they called?”

“No.”

“God help you if you’re lying, Seabright.”

His face flushed purple. “How dare you call me a liar.”

“You are.”

We both turned toward the door to find Krystal standing there looking like an aging crack whore. Her face was drawn and pale. Mascara ringed her eyes. Her bleached hair stood up like a fright wig. She wore a short pink robe trimmed with feathery flounces around the neck and cuffs, and matching high-heeled mules.

“You are a liar,” she said, glassy eyes fixed on her husband.

“You’re drunk,” Bruce accused.

“I must be. I know better than to speak to you out of turn.”

I watched Seabright. He was furious, trembling with anger. If I had not been there, I don’t know what he might have done. But then, if I hadn’t been there, Krystal would never have had the nerve to say anything. I turned to her, taking in the dilated pupils and the smudged lipstick.

“Mrs. Seabright, when did you first see the tape of your daughter’s kidnapping?”

“I had seen the box. It had my name on it. I didn’t know why Bruce hadn’t given it to me. I thought it was something I had ordered through the mail.”

“Krystal . . .” Bruce growled.

“What day was that?”

Her mouth trembled. “Wednesday.”

Two days.

“I didn’t see any point in upsetting you with it,” Seabright said. “Look at you. Look what it’s done to you.”

“I found it today,” she said to me. “My daughter’s been kidnapped. Bruce didn’t think I should know about that.”

“I told you, I will handle it, Krystal,” he said through his teeth.

Krystal looked at me, tragic, pathetic, terrified. “In our family, we leave the decisions to the person best equipped to make them.”

I looked hard at Bruce Seabright. He was perspiring. He knew he could intimidate a woman like Krystal, but he could not intimidate me.

“I’m going to ask you one last time, Mr. Seabright. And before you answer, know that the Sheriff’s Office can pull your local usage details from the phone company and verify the information. Have the kidnappers called?”

He put his hands on his hips and looked up at the ceiling, weighing the pros and cons of denial. He wasn’t the type to openly defy the cops. If he took my word on the phone records, and thought about what would happen if the Sheriff’s Office became involved . . . his public image could be damaged . . . I held my breath.

“Last night.”

A strange sound of anguish wrenched out of Krystal Seabright and she doubled over the back of a fat leather chair as if she’d been shot.

Seabright puffed himself up like a furious pigeon as he tried to justify his behavior. “First of all, I think the whole thing is a hoax. This is just Erin trying to humiliate me—”

“I’m up to my back teeth with men and their persecution theories today,” I said. “I don’t want to hear yours. I saw the tape. I know the kind of people Erin has been mixed up with. I wouldn’t be willing to bet her life against your fear of embarrassment. Who called? A man? A woman?”

“It sounded like the voice on the tape,” he said impatiently. “Distorted.”

“What did it say?”

He didn’t want to answer. His mouth pulled into that pissy little knot I wanted to slap off his face.

“Why should I tell you any of this?” he said. “I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know who you’re working for. I don’t know that you’re not one of them.”

“For God’s sake, tell her!” Krystal cried. She slipped around the side of the leather chair and crawled into it, curling herself into a fetal position.

“And how do I know you’re not?” I returned. “How does your wife know you’re not?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Seabright snapped.

“
Ridiculous
isn’t the word I’d use to describe it, Mr. Seabright. Erin has been a source of considerable irritation to you. Maybe you saw a way to eliminate the problem.”

“Oh my God!” Krystal cried, putting her hands over her mouth.

“That’s absurd!” Seabright shouted.

“I don’t think the Sheriff’s Office will think so,” I said. “So you’d better start coming up with the details.”

He heaved another sigh, the put-upon patriarch. “The voice said to put the money in a cardboard box and leave it in a specific spot at the Equestrian Estates horse-show grounds out in Loxahatchee somewhere.”

I knew the area. Twenty minutes from Wellington, Equestrian Estates was an as-yet-undeveloped development. More or less wide-open spaces with a show grounds used only several times a year.

“When?”

“Today. Five o’clock.”

“And did you leave the money?”

“No.”

Krystal was sobbing. “You killed her! You killed her!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Krystal, stop it!” he snapped. “If she’s really kidnapped, they aren’t going to kill her. What would be the point?”

“The only point is to get the money,” I said coldly. “They’ll try to get it whether she’s alive or not. Did they promise you would see Erin at the drop site? Did they say you’d be able to pick her up somewhere else if you came through with the cash?”

“They didn’t say.”

There was no guarantee Erin wasn’t already dead. If the kidnapper was ruthless enough, she might have been killed in short order after the abduction to eliminate her as a possible witness later, and simply to make the kidnapper’s life easier. Or that might have been the point all along—to eliminate her—with a dummied-up kidnapping plot thrown over it for camouflage.

“Have they called since?”

“No.”

“I find that hard to believe. If I was expecting three hundred thousand at five in the afternoon and it didn’t show, I’d want to know why.”

He lifted his hands and walked away to a window where half-opened plantation shutters let in the darkness. I watched him and wondered just how cold a man he was. Cold enough to knowingly throw his stepdaughter to a sexual predator? Cold enough to have her killed? Maybe.

The one thing I had difficulty accepting was the idea of Seabright relinquishing control in any kind of collaborative scheme that would leave him vulnerable. But his only other choice would have been to dirty his hands himself, and that I didn’t see at all. Conspiracy was the lesser of evils. Conspiracy could always be denied.

My gaze fell on Seabright’s desk, immaculate in its organization. Perhaps I would see a file lying there labeled:
KIDNAP ERIN
. Instead, I stopped at the telephone, a Panasonic cordless with a caller ID window on the handset. The same phone I had in Sean’s guest house. I went behind the desk, sat down in the leather executive’s chair, and picked up the phone. The caller ID light on the base was blinking red.

“What are you doing?” Bruce demanded, hurrying back across the room.

I pressed the search button on the handset, and a number appeared in the display window. “I’m taking advantage of the miracle of modern technology. If the kidnapper called you on this line from a phone that wasn’t blocked, the number will be stored in the memory of this unit and can be checked against a reverse directory. Isn’t that terribly clever?”

I jotted the number on his spotless blotter, scrolled to the next stored number, and noted it. He wanted to snatch the phone out of my hand. I could see the muscles working in his jaw.

“My clients and business associates call me here,” he said. “I won’t have you harassing them.”

“How do you know one of them isn’t the kidnapper?” I asked.

“That’s insane! These are wealthy and respectable people.”

“Maybe all but one.”

“I don’t want people dragged into this mess.”

“Do you have any enemies, Mr. Seabright?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

“You’ve never pissed anybody off? A man in land development in south Florida? That would be astonishing.”

“I’m a reputable businessman, Ms. Estes.”

“And you’re about as likable as dysentery,” I said. “I can’t believe you don’t have a list of people who would be pleased to see you suffer. And I’m only thinking of your immediate family.”

He hated me. I could see it in his small, mean eyes. I found the notion satisfying, the feeling mutual.

“I will have your license number,” he said tightly. “I have every intention of reporting you to the proper authorities.”

“Then I would be stupid to give it to you, wouldn’t I?” I said, making note of another call. The phone reported having stored thirteen numbers since last having been cleared. “Besides, I don’t see that you’re in any position to complain about me, Mr. Seabright. I know too much you’d rather not read about in the newspapers.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I’m always amazed when people have to ask that question,” I said. “Do you owe money to anyone?”

“No.”

“Do you gamble?”

“No!”

“Do you know a man named Tomas Van Zandt?”

“No. Who is he?”