Dark Horse (2 page)

The photograph was in color. Me on D’Ar, riding through thin ribbons of early-morning fog. The sunlight made his coat shine as bright as a new penny. My hair was pulled back in a thick ponytail.

I had no memory of being photographed. I had certainly never been interviewed, though the writer seemed to know things about me I didn’t know myself. The caption read:
Private investigator Elena Estes enjoys an early-morning ride on D’Artagnon at Sean Avadon’s Avadonis Farm in Palm Beach Point Estates.

“I’ve come to hire you,” Molly Seabright said.

I turned toward the barn and called for Irina, the stunning Russian girl who had beat me out for the groom’s job. She came out, frowning and sulky. I stepped down off D’Artagnon and asked her to please take him back to the barn. She took his reins, and sighed and pouted and slouched away like a sullen runway model.

I ran a gloved hand back through my hair, startled to come to the end of it so quickly. A fist of tension began to quiver in my stomach.

“My sister is missing,” Molly Seabright said. “I’ve come to hire you to find her.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not a private investigator. This is some kind of mistake.”

“Why does the magazine say that you are?” she asked, looking stern and disapproving again. She didn’t trust me. I’d already lied to her once.

“I don’t know.”

“I have money,” she said defensively. “Just because I’m twelve doesn’t mean I can’t hire you.”

“You can’t hire me because I’m not a private investigator.”

“Then what are you?” she demanded.

A broken-down, busted-out, pathetic ex–sheriff’s detective. I’d thumbed my nose at the life I’d been raised in, been ostracized from the life I’d chosen. What did that make me?

“Nothing,” I said, handing the magazine back to her. She didn’t take it.

I walked away to an ornate park bench that sat along the end of the arena and took a long drink from the bottle of water I’d left there.

“I have a hundred dollars with me,” the girl said. “For a deposit. I expect you have a daily fee and that you probably charge expenses. I’m sure we can work something out.”

Sean emerged from the end of the stable, squinting into the distance, showing his profile. He stood with one booted leg cocked and pulled a pair of deerskin gloves from the waist of his brown breeches. Handsome and fit. A perfect ad for Ralph Lauren.

I headed across the arena, anger boiling now in my stomach. Anger, and underlying it a building sense of panic.

“What the fuck is this?” I shouted, smacking him in the chest with the magazine.

He took a step back, looking offended. “It might be
Sidelines,
but I can’t read with my nipples, so I can’t say for certain. Jesus Christ, El. What did you do to your hair?”

I hit him again, harder, wanting to hurt him. He grabbed the magazine away from me, took another quick step out of range, and turned to the cover. “Betsy Steiner’s stallion, Hilltop Giotto. Have you seen him? He’s to die for.”

“You told a reporter I’m a private investigator.”

“They asked me who you were. I had to tell them something.”

“No, you didn’t have to. You didn’t have to tell them anything.”

“It’s only
Sidelines
. For Christ’s sake.”

“It’s my name in a goddam magazine read by thousands of people. Thousands of people now know where to find me. Why don’t you just paint a big target on my chest?”

He frowned. “Only dressage people read the dressage section. And then only to see if their own names are in the show results.”

“Thousands of people now think I’m a private investigator.”

“What was I supposed to tell them? The truth?” Said as if that were the most distasteful option. Then I realized it probably was.

“How about ‘no comment’?”

“That’s not very interesting.”

I pointed at Molly Seabright. “That little girl has come here to hire me. She thinks I can help her find her sister.”

“Maybe you can.”

I refused to state the obvious: that I couldn’t even help myself.

Sean lifted a shoulder with lazy indifference and handed the magazine back to me. “What else have you got to do with your time?”

Irina emerged from the barn, leading Oliver—tall, elegant, and beautiful, the equine version of Sean. Sean dismissed me and went to his teak mounting block.

Molly Seabright was sitting on the park bench with her hands folded in her lap. I turned and walked to the barn, hoping she would just go away. D’Artagnon’s bridle hung from the ceiling on a four-pronged hook near an antique mahogany cabinet full of leather-cleaning supplies. I chose a small damp sponge from the work table, rubbed it over a bar of glycerine soap, and began to clean the bridle, trying to narrow the focus of my mind on the small motor skills involved in the task.

“You’re very rude.”

I could see her from the corner of my eye: standing as tall as she could—five-feet-nothing—her mouth a tight little knot.

“Yes, I am. That’s part of the joy of being me: I don’t care.”

“You’re not going to help me.”

“I can’t. I’m not what you need. If your sister is missing, your parents should go to the cops.”

“I went to the Sheriff’s Office. They wouldn’t help me either.”

“
You
went? What about your parents? They don’t care your sister is missing?”

For the first time Molly Seabright seemed to hesitate. “It’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about it? She’s either missing or she’s not.”

“Erin doesn’t live with us.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighteen. She doesn’t get along with our parents.”

“There’s something new.”

“It’s not like she’s bad or anything,” Molly said defensively. “She doesn’t do drugs or anything like that. It’s just that she has her own opinions, that’s all. And her opinions aren’t Bruce’s opinions . . .”

“Who’s Bruce?”

“Our stepfather. Mom always sides with him, no matter how asinine he is. It makes Erin angry, so she moved out.”

“So Erin is technically an adult, living on her own, free to do whatever she wants,” I said. “Does she have a boyfriend?”

Molly shook her head, but avoided my eyes. She wasn’t so sure of that answer, or she thought a lie might better serve her cause.

“What makes you think she’s missing?”

“She was supposed to pick me up Monday morning. That’s her day off. She’s a groom at the show grounds for Don Jade. He trains jumpers. I didn’t have school. We were going to go to the beach, but she never came or called me. I called her and left a message on her cell phone, and she never called me back.”

“She’s probably busy,” I said, stroking the sponge down a length of rein. “Grooms work hard.”

Even as I said it I could see Irina sitting on the mounting block, face turned to the sun as she blew a lazy stream of cigarette smoke at the sky. Most grooms.

“She would have called me,” Molly insisted. “I went to the show grounds myself the next day—yesterday. A man at Don Jade’s barn told me Erin doesn’t work there anymore.”

Grooms quit. Grooms get fired. Grooms decide one day to become florists and decide the next day they’d rather be brain surgeons. On the flip side, there are trainers with reputations as slave masters, temperamental prima donnas who go through grooms like disposable razors. I’ve known trainers who demanded a groom sleep every night in a stall with a psychotic stallion, valuing the horse far more than the person. I’ve known trainers who fired five grooms in a week.

Erin Seabright was, by the sound of it, headstrong and argumentative, maybe with an eye for the guys. She was eighteen and tasting independence for the first time. . . . And why I was even thinking this through was beyond me. Habit, maybe. Once a cop . . . But I hadn’t been a cop for two years, and I would never be a cop again.

“Sounds to me like Erin has a life of her own. Maybe she just doesn’t have time for a kid sister right now.”

Molly Seabright’s expression darkened. “I told you Erin’s not like that. She wouldn’t just leave.”

“She left home.”

“But she didn’t leave
me
. She wouldn’t.”

Finally she sounded like a child instead of a forty-nine-year-old CPA. An uncertain, frightened little girl. Looking to me for help.

“People change. People grow up,” I said bluntly, taking the bridle down from the hook. “Maybe it’s your turn.”

The words hit their mark like bullets. Tears rose behind the Harry Potter glasses. I didn’t allow myself to feel guilt or pity. I didn’t want a job or a client. I didn’t want people coming into my life with expectations.

“I thought you would be different,” she said.

“Why would you think that?”

She glanced over at the magazine lying on the shelf with the cleaning supplies, D’Artagnon and I floating across the page like something from a dream. But she said nothing. If she had an explanation for her belief, she thought better of sharing it with me.

“I’m nobody’s hero, Molly. I’m sorry you got that impression. I’m sure if your parents aren’t worried about your sister, and the cops aren’t worried about your sister, then there’s nothing to be worried about. You don’t need me, and believe me, you’d be sorry if you did.”

She didn’t look at me. She stood there for a moment, composing herself, then pulled a small red wallet from the carrying pouch strapped around her waist. She took out a ten-dollar bill and placed it on the magazine.

“Thank you for your time,” she said politely, then turned and walked away.

I didn’t chase after her. I didn’t try to give her her ten dollars back. I watched her walk away and thought she was more of an adult than I was.

Irina appeared in my peripheral vision, propping herself against the archway as if she hadn’t the strength to stand on her own. “You want I should saddle Feliki?”

Erin Seabright had probably quit her job. She was probably in the Keys right now enjoying her newfound independence with some cute good-for-nothing. Molly didn’t want to believe that because it would mean a sea change in her relationship with the big sister she idolized. Life is full of disappointments. Molly would learn that the same way as everyone: by being let down by someone she loved and trusted.

Irina gave a dramatic sigh.

“Yes,” I said. “Saddle Feliki.”

She started toward the mare’s stall, then I asked a question for which I would have been far better off not having an answer.

“Irina, do you know anything about a jumper trainer named Don Jade?”

“Yes,” she said casually, not even looking back at me. “He is a murderer.”

2

The horse world is populated
by two kinds of people: those who love horses, and those who exploit horses and the people who love them. Yin and yang. For every good thing in the world, there is something bad to counterbalance. Myself, I’ve always felt the bad far outweighs the good, that there is just enough good to buoy us and keep us from drowning in a sea of despair. But that’s just me.

Some of the finest people I’ve known have been involved in the horse business. Caring people who would sacrifice themselves and their own comfort for the animals who relied on them. People who kept their word. People with integrity. And some of the most loathsome, hateful, twisted individuals I’ve ever known have been involved in the horse business. People who would lie, cheat, steal, and sell their own mother for a nickel if they thought it would get them ahead. People who would smile to your face, pat you on the back with one hand, and stab you in the back with the other.

From what Irina told me, Don Jade fit into that second category.

Sunday morning—the day before Erin Seabright didn’t show to pick up her little sister to go to the beach—a jumper in training with Don Jade had been found dead in his stall, the victim of an allegedly accidental electrocution. Only, according to gossip, there was no such thing as an accident where Don Jade was involved.

I went online and tried to learn what I could about Jade from articles on horses daily. com and a couple of other equestrian sites. But I wanted the story in full, uncensored, and I knew exactly who to
call.

If Don Jade defined my second category of horse people, Dr. Dean Soren defined the first. I had known Dr. Dean for a lifetime. Nothing went on in the horse world Dean Soren didn’t know about. He had begun his veterinary career in the year aught on the racetrack, eventually moving on to show horses. Everyone in the business knew and respected Dr. Dean.

He had retired from his veterinary practice several years before, and spent his days holding court in the café that was social central of the large stable he owned off Pierson. The woman who ran the café answered the phone. I told her who I was and asked for Dr. Dean, then listened as she shouted across the room at him.

Dr. Dean shouted back: “What the hell does she want?”

“Tell him I need to ask him a couple of questions.”

The woman shouted that.

“Then she can damn well come here and ask me in person,” he shouted back. “Or is she too goddammed important to visit an old man?”

That was Dr. Dean. The words
charming
and
kindly
were not in his vocabulary, but he was one of the best people I had ever known. Whatever softer elements he lacked, he more than made up for in integrity and honesty.

I didn’t want to go to him. Don Jade interested me only because of what Irina had said about him. I was curious, but that was all. Curiosity wasn’t enough to make me want to interact with people. I had no desire to leave my sanctuary, especially in light of the photo in
Sidelines
.

I paced the house, chewing at what was left of my fingernails.

Dean Soren had known me off and on most of my life. The winter season I was twelve, he let me ride along with him on his rounds one day a week and act as his assistant. My mother and I had moved to a house in the Polo Club for the season, and I had a tutor so that I could ride every day with my trainer, and not have a school schedule interrupt my horse show schedule. Every Monday—rider’s day off—I would bribe the tutor and slip off with Dr. Dean to hold his instrument tray and clean up used bandages. My own father had never spent that kind of time with me. I had never felt so important.

The memories of that winter touched me now in an especially vulnerable place. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt important. I could hardly remember the last time I had wanted to. But I could remember very clearly riding beside Dr. Dean in the enormous Lincoln Town Car he had tricked out as a rolling vet clinic.

Perhaps it was that memory that made me pick up my car keys and go.

The prime property Dr. Dean owned was populated by hunter/jumper people in one large barn and by dressage people in the other. The offices, Dr. Dean’s personal stable, and the café were all located in a building between the two large barns.

The café was a simple open-air affair with a tiki bar. Dr. Dean sat at the centermost table in a carved wooden chair, an old king on his throne, drinking something with a paper umbrella in it.

I felt light-headed as I walked toward him, partly afraid to see him—or rather, for him to see me—and partly afraid people would come out of the woodwork to stare at me and ask me if I was really a private investigator. But the café was empty other than Dean Soren and the woman behind the counter. No one ran over from the barns to gawk.

Dr. Dean rose from his chair, his piercing eyes on me like a pair of lasers. He was a tall, straight man with a full head of white hair and a long face carved with lines. He had to be eighty, but he still looked fierce and strong.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he said by way of a greeting. “Are you in chemotherapy? Is that what happened to your hair?”

“Good to see you, too, Dr. Dean,” I said, shaking his hand.

He looked over at the woman behind the counter. “Marion! Make this girl a cheeseburger! She looks like hell!”

Marion, unfazed, went to work.

“What are you riding these days?” Dr. Dean asked.

I took a seat—a cheap folding chair that seemed too low and made me feel like a child. Or maybe that 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 pronounced. “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 café 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 assistant 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 Titan.

Titan 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, Titan’s owner, Warren Calvin, a Wall Street trader, had lost a fortune in the stock market. And suddenly one day Titan 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 Titan 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 Titan’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 Titan’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 hell out of a jump course. You can argue with success all you want, Elena, but you’ll 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.