Dark Horse (5 page)

Her mother turned a withering, bitter look on her. “If you’ve told this woman some ridiculous story, you’re going to be in such hot water, young lady. I can’t believe the trouble you’re making. You don’t have any consideration for anyone but yourself.”

Two red dots colored Molly’s otherwise paste-pale cheeks. I thought she might start to cry. “I’m worried about Erin,” she said in a small voice.

“Erin is the last person anyone needs to worry about,” Krystal said. “Go to school. Go. Get out of this house. I’m so angry with you right now . . . If you’re late for school you can just sit in detention this afternoon. Don’t bother calling me.”

I wanted to grab a handful of Krystal Seabright’s overprocessed hair and shake her until the hair broke off in my fist.

Molly turned and went outside, leaving the front door wide open. The sight of her wheeling away her little book bag made my heart ache.

“You can leave right behind her,” Krystal Seabright said to me. “Or I can call the police.”

I turned back to face her and said nothing for a moment while I tried to wrestle my temper into submission. I was reminded of the fact that I had been a terrible patrol officer when I’d first gone on the job because I lacked the requisite diplomatic skills for domestic situations. I have always been of the opinion that some people really do just need to be bitch-slapped. Molly’s mother was one of those people.

Krystal was trembling like a Chihuahua, having some control issues of her own.

“Mrs. Seabright, for what it’s worth, Molly has nothing to do with this,” I lied.

“Oh? She hasn’t tried to tell you her sister has vanished and that we should be calling the police and the FBI and
America’s Most Wanted
?”

“I know that Erin hasn’t been seen since Sunday afternoon. Doesn’t that concern you?”

“Are you implying I don’t care about my children?” Again with the bug-eyes and the practiced affront—always a sign of low self-esteem.

“I’m not implying anything.”

“Erin is an adult. At least in her own mind. She wanted to live on her own, take care of herself.”

“So you’re not aware that she was working for a man who’s been involved in schemes to defraud insurance agencies?”

She looked confused. “She works for a horse trainer. That’s what Molly said.”

“You haven’t spoken with Erin?”

“When she left she made it very clear she wanted nothing more to do with me. Living a decent life in a lovely home was just all too boring for her. After everything I’ve done for her and her sister . . .”

She went to the hall table, glanced at herself in the mirror, and dug her hand into a big pink and orange Kate Spade purse. She came out of the bag with a cigarette and a slim lighter, and moved toward the open front door.

“I’ve worked so hard, made so many sacrifices . . .” she said, more or less to herself, as if it comforted her to portray herself as the heroine of the story. She lit the cigarette and blew the smoke outside. “She’s done nothing but give me grief since the night she was conceived.”

“Does Erin’s father live in the vicinity? Might she have gone to spend time with him?”

Krystal burst out laughing, but not with humor. She didn’t look at me. “No. She wouldn’t have done that.”

“Where is her father?”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t heard from him in fifteen years.”

“Do you know who Erin’s friends are?”

“What do you want with her?” she asked. “What’s she done now?”

“Nothing I’m aware of. She may have some information. I’d just like to ask her some questions about the man she’s been working for. Has Erin been in trouble in the past?”

She leaned way out the door, took another hard drag on the cigarette, and exhaled the smoke at a hibiscus shrub. “I don’t see that my family is any business of yours.”

“Has she ever been involved with drugs?”

She snapped a look at me. “Is that what this is about? Is she mixed up with drug people? God. That’s all I need.”

“I’m concerned about where she’s gone,” I said. “Erin’s disappearance happened to coincide with the death of a very expensive horse.”

“You think she killed a horse?”

I thought my head might split in two. Krystal’s concern seemed to be about everyone except her daughter. “I just want to ask her some questions about her boss. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

She stepped outside, tapped her ash into a plant pot, and hopped back into the house. “Responsibility isn’t Erin’s thing. She thinks being an adult means doing whatever you damn well please. She’s probably run off to South Beach with some boy.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?”

She scowled and looked down at the tiled floor. Down and to the right: a lie. “How would I know? She doesn’t check in with me.”

“Molly said she hasn’t been able to reach Erin on her cell phone.”

“Molly.” She puffed on the cigarette and tried to wave the smoke out toward the street. “Molly is twelve. Molly thinks Erin is cool. Molly reads too many mystery novels and watches too much A&E. What kind of child watches A&E?
Law and Order, Investigative Reports
. When I was twelve I was watching
Brady Bunch
reruns.”

“I think Molly has reason to be concerned, Mrs. Seabright. I think you might want to speak with the Sheriff’s Office about filing a missing person’s report.”

Krystal Seabright looked horrified. Not at the prospect that her daughter might have been the victim of foul play, but at the idea of someone from Binks Forest having to file a police report. What would the neighbors say? They might put two and two together and figure out her last house was a double-wide.

“Erin is not missing,” she insisted. “She’s just . . . gone somewhere, that’s all.”

A teenage boy emerged through a door into the upstairs hall and came thudding down the stairs. He looked maybe seventeen or eighteen and hungover. Gray-faced and glum, with platinum-tipped dark hair that stood up in dirty tufts. His T-shirt looked slept in and worse. He didn’t resemble Krystal or her daughters. I made the assumption he belonged to Bruce Seabright, and wondered why Molly had made no mention of him to me.

Krystal swore under her breath and surreptitiously tossed her cigarette out the door. The boy’s eyes followed it, then went back to her. Busted.

“Chad? What are you doing home?” she asked. A whole new tone of voice. Nervous. Obsequious. “Aren’t you feeling well, honey? I thought you’d gone to school.”

“I’m sick,” he said.

“Oh. Oh. Uh . . . Would you like me to make you some toast?” she asked brightly. “I have to get to the office, but I could make you some toast.”

“No, thank you.”

“You were out awfully late last night,” Krystal said sweetly. “You probably just need your sleep.”

“Probably.” Chad glanced at me, and slouched away.

Krystal scowled at me and spoke in a low voice. “Look: we don’t need you. Just go away. Erin will turn up when Erin needs something.”

“What about Erin?” Chad asked. He had come back into the hall, a two-liter bottle of Coke in one hand. Breakfast of champions.

Krystal Seabright closed her eyes and huffed. “Nothing. Just— Nothing. Go back to bed, honey.”

“I need to ask her some questions about the guy she works for,” I said to the boy. “Do you happen to know where I can find her?”

He shrugged and scratched his chest. “Sorry, I haven’t seen her.”

As he said it, the black Jag rolled back into the driveway. Krystal looked stricken. Chad disappeared down a hall. The man I assumed to be Bruce Seabright got out of the car and strode toward the open front door, a man on a mission. He was stocky with thinning hair slicked straight back and a humorless expression.

“Honey, did you forget something?” Krystal asked in the same tone she’d used with Chad. The overeager servant.

“The Fairfields file. I’ve got a major deal going down on a piece of that property this morning and I don’t have the file. I know I set it on the dining room table. You must have moved it.”

“No, I don’t think so. I—”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Krystal? Do not touch my business files.” There was a condescension in his tone that couldn’t have been categorized as abusive, but was, in a subtle, insidious way.

“I’m—I’m sorry, honey,” she stammered. “Let me go find it for you.”

Bruce Seabright looked at me with a hint of wariness, like he suspected I might have a permit to solicit charitable donations. “I’m sorry if I interrupted,” he said politely. “I have a very important meeting to get to.”

“I gathered. Elena Estes,” I said, holding my hand out.

“Elena is considering a condo in Sag Harbor,” Krystal hurried to say. There was a hint of desperation in her eyes when she looked at me in search of a coconspirator.

“Why would you show her something there, darling?” he asked. “Property values in that neighborhood will only decline. You should show her something at Palm Groves. Send her to the office. Have Kathy show her a model.”

“Yes, of course,” Krystal murmured, swallowing down the criticism and the slight, allowing him to take away her sale. “I’ll go find that file for you.”

“I’ll do it, honey. I don’t want anything dropping out of it.”

Something on the stoop caught Seabright’s eye. He bent down and picked up the cigarette butt Krystal had thrown out. He held it pinched between his thumb and forefinger and looked at me.

“I’m sorry, but smoking is not allowed on my property.”

“Sorry,” I said, taking the thing away from him. “It’s a filthy habit.”

“Yes, it is.”

He went into the house to find his errant file. Krystal rubbed at her forehead and stared down at her slightly too flashy sandals, blinking like she might have been fighting tears.

“Just go, please,” she whispered.

I stuck the butt in the plant pot and went. What else could I say to a woman who was so under the thumb of her domineering husband, she would sooner abandon her own child than displease him?

Over and over in my life I’ve found that people are amazing, and seldom in a good way.

5

We never know the quality
of someone else’s life, though we seldom resist the temptation to assume and pass judgment. Plenty of women would have looked at Krystal Seabright’s situation through the filter of distance and assumed she had it made. Big house, fancy car, career in real estate, land developer husband. Looked good on paper. There was even a Cinderella element to the story: single mother of two swept out of her lowly station in life, et cetera, et cetera.

So too with the apparently well-heeled folks who owned the four thousand expensive horses at the equestrian center. Champagne and caviar every day for a snack. A maid in every mansion, a Rolls in every five-car garage.

The truth was more checkered and less glamorous. There were personal stories full of nasty little plot twists: insecurities and infidelities. There were people who came to the Florida season on a dream and a shoestring, saving every dime all year so they could share a no-frills condo with two other riders, take a few precious lessons from a big-name trainer, and show their mediocre mount to anonymity in the amateur arena just for the love of the sport. There were second-tier professionals with second mortgages on farms in East Buttcrack, hanging on the fringes of the big stables, hoping to pick up a real client or two. There were dealers like Van Zandt: hyenas prowling the water hole, in search of vulnerable prey. The lush life has many shades of gray beneath the gold leaf. It was now officially my job to dig up some of those darker veins.

I thought it would be best to put in as much time as possible near the Jade stable before someone attached to Don Jade went into the bathroom with a copy of
Sidelines
and came out with a revelation. I’d spent enough time working undercover as a narc to know the chances of that were small, but there nonetheless. People see what they’re programmed to see, they seldom look for anything else. Still, a cop’s life undercover is never without the fear of being made. It can happen any second, and the deeper under, the worse the timing.

My strategy working undercover had always been to get as much information as possible, as fast as possible; to sketch my illusion boldly and quickly. Dazzle the mark, draw them in close, then hit with the sucker punch and get out. My superiors in the Sheriff’s Office had frowned on my methods because I’d borrowed my style from con artists rather than cops. But they had seldom frowned on the outcome.

Sean’s parking pass still hanging from my rearview mirror, I rolled past the guard at the gatehouse and into the maelstrom of the Wellington show grounds day shift. There were horses everywhere, people everywhere, cars everywhere, golf carts everywhere. A show was under way and would run through Sunday. Horses and ponies would be jumping over fences in half a dozen competition rings. The chaos would work in my favor, like running a game of three-card monte on a corner in Times Square. Difficult to keep your eye on the queen when you’re in the middle of a circus.

I parked in the second lot, cut past the permanent barns and the vet clinic, bypassed the concession stands, and found myself on the show grounds’ version of Fifth Avenue: a row of mobile tack shops and pricey boutiques in tricked-out fifth-wheel trailers. Custom jewelers, custom tailors, antiques dealers, monogramming shops, cappuccino stands. I hit a couple of the boutiques to pick up trappings for my role as dilettante. Image is everything.

I purchased and put on a wide-brimmed straw hat trimmed with black grosgrain ribbon. Men never take seriously a woman in a hat. I chose a couple of silk blouses and long wraparound skirts made from vintage saris. I made sure the clerks went overboard with the tissue paper, making the shopping bags look full to bursting. I bought some impractical sandals and trendy bracelets, and put them on. When I thought I looked frivolous enough, I went in search of Don Jade.

There was no sign of him or of Paris Montgomery at his stalls. An underfed Guatemalan man was mucking out a stall, head down, trying not to attract attention lest the next stranger be an INS agent. The front of another stall had been removed to create a grooming bay. In it an overfed girl in a too-revealing tank top was grudgingly brushing a dappled gray horse. The girl had the mean, narrow eyes of someone who blames everyone but herself for the shortfalls in her life. I caught her looking at me sideways, her expression sour.

I tipped my head back and regarded her from under the brim of the ridiculous hat. “I’m looking for Paris. Is she around?”

“She’s riding Park Lane in the schooling ring.”

“Is Don with her?” Don, my old pal.

“Yeah.” And did I want to make something of it?

“And you are . . . ?”

She looked surprised I would bother to ask, then suspicious, then determined she would take advantage of the opportunity. “Jill Morone. I’m Mr. Jade’s head groom.”

She was Mr. Jade’s only groom by the look of it, and by the anemic way she was wielding that brush, she defined the position loosely.

“Really? Then you must know Erin Seabright.”

The girl’s reactions were so slow, her brain might have been in another time zone. I could see her every thought move sluggishly through her mind as she tried to decide on an answer. She dragged the brush along the horse’s shoulder. The horse pinned its ears and rolled an eye at her.

“She doesn’t work here anymore.”

“I know. Paris told me. Do you know where she went? A friend of mine wanted to hire her.”

Jill shrugged, eyes sliding away. “I dunno. Paris said she went to Ocala.”

“You guys weren’t friends, I guess. I mean, you don’t seem to know very much.”

“I know she wasn’t a very good groom.” The pot calling the kettle.

“And I can assume you are?” I said. “Are you interested in moving?”

She looked pleased with herself, like she had a naughty little secret. “Oh, no. Mr. Jade treats me
very
well.”

Mr. Jade probably barely knew her name—unless she was his latest alibi, which I doubted. Men like Don Jade went for girls who were pretty and useful. Jill Morone was neither.

“Good for you,” I said. “I hope you still have a job to keep after that business with Stellar.”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“A horse dies like that. Suspicious circumstances. Owners get nervous, start making phone calls to other trainers . . . Business can go downhill fast.”

“It was an accident.”

I shrugged. “Did you see it happen?”

“No. I found him, though,” she admitted with a strange spark of pride in her beady little eyes. The chance celebrity. She could be on the fringe of a dark spotlight for a week and a half. “He was just laying there with his legs straight out,” she said. “And his eyes were open. I thought he was just being lazy, so I slapped him on the butt to make him get up. Turned out he was dead.”

“God. Awful.” I looked down the row of Jade’s stalls—a dozen or more—each of them hung with a box fan outside the bars of the stall fronts. “I’m surprised you still have the fans up, considering.”

She shrugged again and swiped the brush over the gray a couple more strokes. “It’s hot. What else should we do?”

The horse waited for her to drift back a step, then whipped her with his tail. She hit him in the ribs with the brush.

“I wouldn’t want to be the person who was careless enough to let that electrical cord hang into Stellar’s stall,” I said. “That groom would never work in this business again. I’d see to that if I had anything to do with it.”

The little eyes went mean again in the doughy face. “I didn’t take care of him. Erin did. See what kind of groom she was? If I was Mr. Jade, I would have killed her.”

Maybe he had, I thought as I walked away from the tent.

I spotted Paris Montgomery some distance away in a schooling ring, golden ponytail bobbing, sunglasses shading her eyes as she guided her mount over a set of jumps. Poetry in motion. Don Jade stood on the sidelines, filming her with a camcorder, as a tall, skinny, red-haired, red-faced man spoke at him, gesturing angrily. He looked like a giant, irate Howdy Doody. I approached the ring a short way down the fence from the two men, my attention seemingly directed at the horses going around.

“If there’s so much as a hint of something rotten in those test results, Jade, you’ll face charges,” the red-faced man said loudly, either not caring or else craving the attention of everyone in the vicinity. “This won’t just be about whether or not General Fidelity pays out. You’ve gotten away with this crap for too long as it is. It’s time someone put a stop to it.”

Jade said absolutely nothing, nothing in anger, nothing in his own defense. He didn’t even pause in his filmmaking. He was a compact man with the rope-muscled forearms of a professional rider. His profile looked like something that should have been embossed on a Roman coin. He might have been thirty-five or he might have been fifty, and people would probably still be saying that about him when he was seventy.

He watched his assistant go over a combination of fences with Park Lane, and frowned as the horse rapped his front ankles and took a rail down. As Paris cantered past, he looked up at her and called out a couple of corrections for her to make to get the horse to bring its hindquarters more fully under itself in preparation for takeoff.

The other man seemed incredulous that his threats had not elicited a response. “You’re a real piece of work, Don. Aren’t you even going to bother to deny it?”

Jade still didn’t look at him. “Why should I bother, Michael? I don’t want to be blamed for your heart attack on top of everything else.”

“You smug bastard. You still think you can get people to kiss your ass and convince them it smells like a rose.”

“Maybe it does, Michael,” Jade said calmly, still watching his horse. “You’ll never know the truth because you don’t want to. You don’t want me to be innocent. You enjoy hating me too much.”

“I’m hardly the only one.”

“I know. I’m a national pastime again. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m innocent.”

He rubbed the back of his sunburned neck, checked his watch, and sighed. “That’s enough for her, Paris,” he called, clicking the camera off.

“I’ll be on the phone with Dr. Ames today,” the other man said. “If I find out you’ve got connections at that lab—”

“If Ames tells you anything about Stellar, I’ll have his license,” Jade said calmly. “Not that there’s anything to tell.”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s a story. There always is with you. Who were you in bed with this time?”

“If I have an answer to that, it’s none of your business, Michael.”

“I’m making it my business.”

“You’re obsessed,” Jade said, turning toward the stables as Paris approached on Park Lane. “If you put as much energy into your work as you do into hating me, maybe you could actually make something of yourself. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Michael, I have a business to run.”

Michael’s face was a twisted, freckled mask of bitter emotion. “Not for long if I can help it.”

Jade walked off toward the barn, seemingly unaffected by the exchange. His adversary stood for a moment, breathing hard, looking disappointed. Then he turned and stalked off.

“Well, that was ugly,” I said. Tomas Van Zandt stood less than ten feet from me. He’d watched the exchange between Jade and the other man surreptitiously, same as I had, pretending to watch the horses in the ring. He glanced at me in a dismissive way and started to walk off.

“I thought men from Belgium were supposed to be charming.”

He pulled up short and looked at me again, recognition dawning slowly. “Elle! Look at you!”

“I clean up good, as they say down at the trailer park.”

“You’ve never been to a trailer park,” he scoffed, taking in the hat, the outfit.

“Of course I have. I once drove a maid home,” I said, then nodded after the man Jade had argued with. “Who was that?”

“Michael Berne. A big crybaby.”

“Is he an owner or something?”

“A rival.”

“Ah . . . These jumper people are so dramatic,” I said. “Nothing this exciting goes on in my neck of the equestrian woods.”

“Maybe I should then sell you a jumper,” Van Zandt suggested, eyeing my shopping bags, pondering my credit card limit.

“I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Looks like a tough crowd. Besides, I don’t know any of the trainers.”

He took my arm. The courtly gentleman. “Come. I’ll introduce you to Jade.”

“Swell,” I said, looking up at him out the corner of my eye. “I can buy a horse and collect the insurance. One-stop shopping.”

Like flipping a switch, Van Zandt’s face went from courtly to stormy; the gray eyes as cold as the North Sea, and frighteningly hard. “Don’t say such stupid things,” he snapped.

I stepped away from him. “It was a joke.”

“Everything with you is a joke,” he said in disgust.

“And if you can’t take one, Van Zandt,” I said, “fuck you.”

I watched him struggle to put Mr. Hyde back in his box. The mood swing had come so quickly, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t given him whiplash.

He rubbed a hand across his mouth and made an impatient gesture.

“Fine. It’s a joke. Ha ha,” he said, still clearly angry. He started toward the tent. “Forget it. Come.”

I didn’t move. “No. Apologize.”

“What?” He looked at me with disbelief. “Don’t be silly.”

“Keep digging that hole, Van Zandt. I’m stupid
and
silly, and what else?”

The muscles in his face quivered. He wanted to call me a bitch or worse. I could see it in his eyes.

“Apologize.”

“You shouldn’t have made the joke,” he said. “Come.”

“And you should apologize,” I countered, fascinated. He seemed incapable of performing the act, and amazed that I was insisting.

“You are being stubborn.”

I laughed out loud. “
I’m
being stubborn?”

“Yes. Come.”

“Don’t order me like I’m a horse to be moved from one place to another,” I said. “You can apologize or you can kiss my ass.”

I waited, expecting an explosion, not sure what would happen after it came. Van Zandt looked at me, then looked away, and when he turned back toward me he was smiling as if nothing had happened.