Hoofprints (Gail McCarthy series) (20 page)

As I drove up Empire Grade toward her elaborate setup in Bonny Doon, I fervently hoped the tied-up horse was not the new stallion that rumor had it she'd paid over a hundred thousand dollars for. Imagine doing something wrong on a horse that was worth as much as my whole house. It didn't bear thinking about.

Hilde's rage didn't bear thinking about, either. German, between fifty-five and sixty, spare and fit of body, with a bony, elegant face and well-groomed blond hair, Hilde was attractive if you didn't mind a dictatorial air. This she had in abundance, along with scads of money, which she spent in boatloads on her high-priced warm-blood horses. She was also inclined to big, fierce-looking German-type dogs ... shepherds, Rottweilers, etc.

Thirty minutes later, when I turned in between the two stone pillars that marked her driveway and approached her formal brick, Colonial-type house with its manicured front lawn, I was greeted by a particularly large-toothed, loud-barking specimen-a Doberman in this case. I tried to remember if I had ever met this dog before; was he basically friendly or truly vicious?

Blue barked loudly back through the truck window: I'll kill you, you bastard. Just give me a chance.

"He'd kill you, dummy," I told the old dog, and rolled my window down a few inches, trying a "Hello, big fella," on the Doberman.

Nothing doing. He barked and snarled. Most Dobermans were chickens, though. I was trying to decide if this one would back down when Hilde saved me from what might have been a major error by appearing from the direction of her barn and calling the dog off. I got out of my truck and went to greet her.

"Gail, it has been over an hour since I called." Hilde's blue eyes, German accent, and imperious manner hadn't dimmed a bit since I'd seen her last.

"I'm sorry, Hilde. It does take awhile to get here from Santa Cruz."

"Well." Hilde brushed off this excuse and said brusquely, "Come see Zhivago. He is getting better already," she added over her shoulder as she turned away.

I followed her, thanking my lucky stars. Zhivago was Hilde's old warm-blood gelding, not the new ultra-expensive stallion, who I believed was named Riesling. Also, if Zhivago was already better, he hadn't tied up very badly.

Tying up, technically called azoturia, is not uncommon; some horses seem far more prone to it than others. In essence, an overly large amount of lactic acid in the muscles starts to destroy the muscle fibers. Tying up can be serious if it's ignored and the horse is forced to go on working; I'd had two cases where the animal died as a result. If the problem is caught right away, however, and appropriate steps are taken, most horses recover quickly and completely.

Zhivago was tied to the arena fence, and I could see at once that the big black gelding wasn't in any acute distress.

"I stopped riding him right away," Hilde was saying, "as soon as I noticed, and I gave him some ace."

Ace-promazine was a tranquilizer and one of the better things to do for a horse whose muscles were tying up. The main thing was to stop riding the horse immediately, which Hilde had apparently done.

"He urinated a few minutes ago," Hilde said. "The urine was light brown, but afterward he seemed better."

I checked Zhivago over carefully, taking his temperature, his pulse and respiration rates, looking at his gums, and feeling him over the loins and rump to see how tight his muscles felt. This last was difficult to do, as Zhivago was all of seventeen hands high. Warm-bloods are essentially draft horses crossed on Thoroughbreds; most of them are big.

I gave the horse a shot of vitamin E and selenium and told her, "Keep him in a stall tonight and check on him a few times; don't feed him any grain, just hay. Call me if anything changes, but he looks okay to me. You did all the right things."

Hilde took this good news with poor grace, muttering fiercely with her German accent as she led the horse away. "All the money I spend to have you up here is wasted, then."

"Now I will show you Riesling," she announced when she returned, bad humor apparently forgotten.

Riesling looked like a big gray stud to me, heavy-boned and powerful. If I hadn't known he was a hundred-thousand-dollar-plus warm-blood, imported from Germany, I would have guessed him to be half Percheron, the kind of horse a rancher might keep to breed to his grade mares. Of course, I didn't say any of this to Hilde, who would have been deeply insulted.

She watched with rapt eyes as the horse paced around his pen, the true horseman's fanatic glow on her face. "It is a shame Fred is dead," she said finally. "He would have loved this horse."

"Oh yes. Fred was wonderful with a horse. He worked most of his life for his brother-in-law, who raised Quarter Horses, but when the man died and his snooty little daughter took over, she decided Fred wasn't high-toned enough for her and she ran him off. I hired him right away." Hilde gave me a sidelong look in which amusement and malice were clearly combined. "Perhaps you know Fred's niece? Amber St. Claire."

"Amber?" I parroted blankly.

Hilde waited a moment, hoping perhaps that I would make some clever quip of my own about Amber, but my head was reeling with the implications of what I'd just learned and I said nothing.

Hilde sniffed. "Yes, Amber St. Claire is Fred Johnson's niece, although she didn't want anyone to know it. He was her mother's brother."

I was still silent and Hilde gave up on me as a source of interesting gossip. "Gail, I must feed. I will call you if Zhivago looks worse."

"Sure, Hilde."

I turned to go and she snapped after me, "Tell Jim I do not expect a full emergency charge for being told my horse is fine."

I waved good-bye to her, smiling to myself. Jim would submit the bill and Hilde would pay it. She always bitched and she always paid. It was her style.

Blue's prick-eared face peered from my truck window, scanning eagerly for the Doberman, and I jumped in quickly-no use getting eaten-and pulled out of the driveway with the truck in low gear and my mind in high.

Amber St. Claire was Fred Johnson's niece. Fred Johnson's abandoned property was the place where I had been set up to be killed. These facts were obviously crucially important; I knew they were essential to discovering the killer. The only problem was that the obvious solution-Amber had tried to kill me-wouldn't wash.

I simply could not picture Amber St. Claire hiding alone in that dark barn with a gun, stalking me. It was too dirty, for one thing. And Amber's fingernails were too long. She was just too much of a citified sissy to have the nerve for such a thing, and try as I might, I couldn't believe she'd done it.

But she must be connected somehow, I told myself. I was rolling that interesting fact around in my brain when my pager beeped once again. Double damn.

I stopped and called the answering service from a pay phone. A female voice told me that Paul Cassidy had a lame horse out on Steelhead Gulch Road. She gave me directions to the field where the horse was kept and told me the owner could meet me there in half an hour. The dashboard clock said 7:30; I sighed. It was going to be a long day. Revising my thoughts of a glass of wine and some quiet moments to think, I started trying to decipher the directions.

It took me a full twenty minutes to find Steelhead Gulch Road, which turned out to be a little one-lane dirt affair back in the hills behind Santa Cruz. Bumpy and precariously narrow, it wound down the side of a steep canyon. I crossed my fingers and drove slowly, hoping I wouldn't meet any cars coming up.

The road descended abruptly to a one-lane bridge, spanning the creek fifty feet below. A slender ramp of concrete, the bridge looked insubstantial as hell. I let the truck idle onto it at a creep, staring down at the clear water.

Once across the bridge and up a hill, the terrain opened up suddenly and I found myself in a grassy little valley-the whole thing lit with the slanting golden light of the lowering sun. The road forked left and right. I could see a couple of houses off to the left. My directions said to take the right-hand fork and follow it to the corral.

I followed the road for a half mile, maybe less. It seemed like more because I had to go slowly. The road was a road in name only; in actual fact, it was so rutted and punctured with potholes that I would probably have been better off driving across the field. I bumped along and eventually reached an old wooden corral with posts that leaned drunkenly every which way. Beyond the corral was a scrubby field, full of Scotch broom, greasewood, and poison oak, with a few grassy areas. Three horses grazed in the distance, two bays and a black. Since I didn't know which one was my patient, and the client was a stranger to me, I decided to sit and wait for him. Paul Cassidy, the girl had said. I hoped Paul Cassidy would be reasonably punctual.

He was. I had just settled myself in the cab of the truck when I noticed the black car creeping down the road behind me. It looked sufficiently out of place to make me stare. Judging by the old corral and brushy field, I'd expected Paul Cassidy to drive a battered pickup. A black Jaguar was surprising.

The Jaguar advanced up the road, slowly and purposefully; the potholes in that road were probably making the driver curse. Eventually the car reached the corral and rolled to a stop a little ways from my truck.

A man got out-a man I'd never seen before. The dark suit he was wearing looked as out of place as his long, low black car, and his eyes were hidden by sunglasses. He stood and stared around, almost as if he didn't see me standing by my pickup. I waited.

After a good long minute, he turned and faced me. I got the impression his eyes were looking me over carefully, but I couldn't really tell because of the glasses. Something about him made the hackles rise on the back of my neck. We stared at each other awhile.

"I'm Paul Cassidy," he said at last.

"Dr. McCarthy." I didn't hold my hand out or ask what was wrong with his horse. I just waited.

Paul Cassidy's name was as square and all-American as a varsity football player, but his looks didn't match his name. He was square all right, with big shoulders like a bull and a hard chin, but he looked Hispanic. I would have expected a name like Rodriguez. His skin was dark olive and his hair was black. He had a clean, polished, expensive, big-city look that was somehow ominous. I didn't like him at all.

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I thought he could just wait awhile. It looked like it would do him good to learn patience.

A little more hard staring behind the sunglasses, or so I guessed, and he spoke again. His voice was flat-unemotional, unaccented, and unworried.

"I've got a message for you, Dr. McCarthy."

I noticed the gun right away. He pulled it out of his pocket casually, as if it were a pack of cigarettes, but the sight gave me a shock like a kick in the belly. This was no atypically obnoxious client. Without thinking twice, I knew Paul Cassidy was responsible for Ed and Cindy.

He kept talking steadily, as if pulling out a gun were a normal part of conversation. "I work for some people, Dr. McCarthy, whose names you don't need to know. It has come to these people's attention that you are sticking your nose in the Whitney case. They don't like it. What you need to understand"-he gestured at my stomach with the gun-"is that my people want the Whitney case let alone. They are, let's say, satisfied, with the course of the investigation."

His voice got flatter. "So this is what you do. You go on with your life as a nice little veterinarian and you don't speak to the police again. You don't call them, and if they call you, you tell them you don't know anything. Nothing at all." He moved the gun slowly so it pointed at my crotch. "If you talk to anyone about this case again, I'll come kill you." The sunglasses faced me blankly. "You can count on it."

Words came out of me without volition. "You tried once."

He shook his head. "That was bush league-not me. When I come after you, you won't be able to tell anybody about it. You understand?"

I stared at him. Though I couldn't see the eyes behind the sunglasses, I knew they were as black as his hair and as cold and implacable as glacier ice. I didn't doubt that he meant every word he said.

He spoke again. "You won't tell anybody, anywhere, anytime, that you saw me, and you won't talk to the police except to say that you don't know a thing, or I'll come kill you. And I'll kill anyone you talk to."

Silence followed that remark. I was aware in a vague way of sunshine on the brush, horses in the distance, a small lizard scuttling down the corral post closest to me--everyday life that I had somehow stepped out of. The man in front of me was still, watching me, turning the world into a nightmare. He was waiting. I swallowed and nodded, not knowing what he expected. Another second of implacable silence, his mouth a quiet line, the gun held loosely pointed in my direction, then a short jerk of the chin, as if to express his confidence that he'd gotten the point across.

He turned and walked back to the Jaguar, folded himself into it carefully, and drove slowly away. No adolescent flourishes for Paul, whoever he was. I had the impression of a man who was used to power, despite the fact that he looked barely thirty. The impression of menace was convincingly real.