Roped (Gail McCarthy Mysteries) (17 page)

I started to open my mouth, but he held up his hand, pushing my words away. "Gail, it's my life and I don't want any cops mixed up in it. I know you mean well, but leave it alone."

I stared at him for a long minute. He wouldn't meet my eyes. Was he some kind of masochistic martyr, I wondered, determined to suffer on until he was killed? Or more likely, was he just plain afraid to find out who the stalker was? Surely it couldn't be distaste for scandal that was causing him to put up with this harassment.

I glanced over at Lisa. All the fire seemed to have gone out of her; she looked mute and miserable. No help there.

''All right," I told Glen. "I'll respect your wishes. But I want you to know, I think this is serious. Someone very sick is behind this, and there are a limited number of people who it could be. Think about it." Turning to Lisa, I said, "Would you mind taking me home?"

"It's okay," I said. "I understand. He's pretty stressed. But, Lisa, keep your eyes open. I'm really worried."

"I know," she said. "So am I. But you see how he is. I just don't know what to do. You'll come up this weekend?"

"I'll try," I promised.

SEVENTEEN

Wednesday morning dawned bright and shiny. I sighed as I looked out my kitchen window at the tangle of redwood branches, gleaming green in the sun's first sharp rays. Not a trace of fog. Just how long was this heat spell going to last?

I made a pot of coffee and poured some into my favorite blue willow cup, then added honey and cream. This honey-and-cream thing was a new development for me, one I'd learned from Lonny. I was enjoying it.

Lonny. Damn. What in hell was I going to do about Lonny? The ball's in his court, I reminded myself. What was Lonny going to do about Sara? While he was deciding, I remained in limbo. Lonely limbo.

Settling myself at one end of the couch, I took a sip of coffee and stared out the window at the sunny morning, not seeing a thing. My life, once so simple and straightforward, had suddenly gotten impossibly convoluted. Did I want to marry Lonny? If I didn't agree to marry him, would I lose him completely? Could I handle going back to a solitary life?

So many questions to which I had no ready answers. I stared around my familiar living room, wondering what the future was going to be like. If this house sold quickly, I would have to figure out what I wanted pretty damn fast. I'd always assumed I could move in with Lonny, at least temporarily. But now, now what?

I wasn't sure. But I could hear a steady refrain, somewhere in my inner ear, that voted for independence. Buy your own place, it said. Let Lonny sort things out for himself.

Well, I could do that. And if he sorted himself away from me, I'd have to live with it.

Oh, hell. I took a long swallow of coffee, feeling intolerably confused, an unusual emotion for me. I wanted to feel secure in my direction and goals, as I had been for many years. I definitely did not want to feel like this.

Jerking my mind firmly off the subject of my own future, I went back to my other most pressing problem-Glen and his stalker. What I ought to do, I told myself, is call the cops. Call Jeri Ward, a woman I knew who was a detective with the Santa Cruz County sheriff's department. Tell her my story. Ask her what I should do.

I replayed this scenario in my mind. How in the world was I going to make dead colts, tractors left in gear, open gates, and irrational rope horses sound like anything other than the normal twists and turns of life on a ranch? Jeri was not going to be impressed with the fact that Glen had actually managed to sprain his ankle.

Not to mention Glen would be furious if he got a call from the sheriff's department. At me and Lisa both. And what good was it going to do? They would hardly mount a twenty-four-hour guard on him.

And yet I was sure that the accidents were not accidents. The stalker was real. And I didn't think he or she was done yet. If only I had a strong conviction who it was, I could try confrontation. At the very least, I could tell Lisa and Glen what I thought.

The trouble was, I had no such conviction. What I had was half a dozen suspects. I rolled them around in my mind. First one would pop to the top, then another. No consensus.

The obvious choice was Sonny Santos. Lisa, I knew, believed Sonny was the culprit. But Lisa was paranoid about Sonny. Still, Sonny had been hiding in that camper. What else could it mean?

That he was hanging around hoping for a glimpse of Lisa. I supplied a further answer: hoping perhaps for a chance to talk to her, maybe even abduct her. It was quite possible that Sonny was entirely ignorant of the attacks on Glen and was interested only in some plan of his own concerning Lisa.

Charles Domini. I didn't like Charles. But was it really his style to sneak around someone else's ranch digging holes in their arena?

Susan Slater? I had a hard time believing it. Susan seemed to me to be basically well-intentioned, just misinformed. I honestly couldn't see Susan doing something that might result in a dead horse.

I could, however, imagine Al Borba killing a horse. I doubted he would turn a hair. But what motive did he really have?

And Janey. I was damned if I could figure Janey out. I gave a moment's serious consideration to the notion that she might really have had an affair with Glen-the woman scorned and all that.

Of course, there was Joyce. She was Lonny's choice. But Joyce had been married to Glen for close to thirty years. Why start stalking him now?

But Tim, Tim made sense. I didn't like this thought. Tim had been right at hand when every single accident had taken place. And Tim had a motive as old as Oedipus. Not to mention the sense I'd had lately that the violence in Tim was barely suppressed. Tim was very clearly angry at Lisa and her insistence on a stalker. It did, indeed, make sense.

Shit. Maybe Glen was right to persist with his head firmly in the sand. How could he face the knowledge that his own son might be trying to kill him? The thought made me shiver, and I put my cup down so abruptly that a little coffee spilled on the marble top of the antique dresser. I wiped it off absently with the cuff of my sweatshirt. Tim couldn't be trying to kill Glen.

Was the stalker actually trying to kill Glen, after all? It didn't seem clear. The dead foal, for instance, was no threat to Glen's physical well-being. But drugging Smoke, now, that could easily have resulted in a fatal accident. What in the hell was the stalker after?

Making Glen's life miserable, apparently, and he/she had no objections to said life being short, as well. I got up suddenly from the couch and went to the phone, determined to call Jeri Ward, after all. But I hung up after punching the first two numbers. What could I say? What good would it do?

I was now running late. Grabbing a clean shirt and a pair of jeans, I dressed in a hurry, my mind still churning away on the subject of the stalker. I thought about it all the way to work-that is, until I pulled into the driveway of the clinic. Pandemonium was the only word for the back lot.

A horse, or rather a large pony, was thrashing about at the end of his lead rope and flung himself down on the ground as I watched. The woman standing by the horse trailer was half-shouting, half-screaming, the man with her was ineffectually trying to calm her, and Jim was in the process of cutting the pony's lead rope so the animal didn't throttle himself. "Epinephrine!" Jim yelled at me at the top of his voice.

I ran to the back of my truck, sorting things out in my head as I went. Epinephrine. That meant the pony had had a massive allergic reaction to something, maybe a vaccination. I filled a syringe with ten cc's of epinephrine and ran toward Jim. Anaphylactic shock was nothing to dawdle about. The pony would be dead if we didn't hurry.

The animal was flat on his side now, legs twitching and shuddering. Jim had cut the lead rope and was sitting on the pony's head, holding the neck as still as possible so I could get the shot in the jugular vein. I put one knee on the pony's neck, rolled my fingers across the groove to find the vein, put the needle in, and saw reassuring drops of blood well up. I injected the shot.

Jim let out a deep breath, but we all stayed frozen in place, waiting for the medication to take effect. I could hear the woman's sobs in the background.

A minute passed. The pony quit moving his legs. I glanced at his flanks. In and out, in and out, steady, regular breaths. Jim looked at me. Slowly we both got up. The pony's eyes were wide and startled. In another second, he scrambled to his feet.

"Damn." Jim shook his head as he tied the lead rope back together. "First one I've ever had to do that."

"What was it?" I asked.

"Penicillin," he said. "He's got a puncture wound." He pointed to the animal's knee, and I could see, now that all the scuffling was over, that the knee was grossly swollen. There was a small surface wound. "It goes in about two inches," Jim said. "I gave him a shot of penicillin and he reacted to it."

I nodded. Jim turned to the clients and began explaining what had happened; I backed away as unobtrusively as I could. Reactions to penicillin were rare but not unknown. Jim would prescribe another antibiotic, and all would probably be well. But it would no doubt take him a while to reassure the woman.

I didn't blame her. Seeing your animal almost die before your eyes is scary, and many of our clients, normally quite sane people, became almost irrational in the face of their horse's distress. Coping with the people and their degree of upset was a big part of this job, sometimes the most wearing part. Leaving Jim to his work, I headed into the office to check the schedule.

The receptionist met me at the door. "Gail, there's a colic up in Felton. Lacy Carson. She says it's bad."

"Tell her I'll be right there."

Back in the truck and up Graham Hill Road. I pulled in Lacy Carson's driveway and breathed the sweet, earthy smell of redwood dust already warm in the air. Lacy was standing by the corral fence and walked to meet me. "I'm afraid you'll have to put him down," she said.

A woman in her sixties, Lacy was a competent horsewoman of the old school; she seldom called a vet unless the situation was dire, preferring to treat her horses herself. Her knowledge was sufficient for most situations, but I had several times found myself at odds with her when my treatment of choice was one she'd never heard of. Fortunately, Lacy was as intelligent as she was hardheaded, and most of the time I was able to convince her that newer ideas weren't necessarily bad.

"So what's going on here?" I asked her.

She waved a hand at the corral. "Colicked," she said. "He got sick yesterday and I gave him some banamine and he seemed to come out of it. He was fine last night. But this morning he's worse. You might as well put him down. I'm not going to do surgery."

None of this was unreasonable. Banamine was frequently the best treatment for colic, and the fact that Lacy wouldn't contemplate surgery to fix the horse made sense, too. Colic surgery these days costs roughly five thousand dollars, often more than a given horse is worth. Not to mention the recovery period is almost a year and many horses never do recover.

Dealing with colic and its ramifications was my most frequent occupation; colic, which is a generic term for any sort of digestive disturbance in a horse, is the most common cause of death in the equine species. Nature has provided horses with a digestive tract that becomes upset easily, and since horses can't vomit, the incidences of upset stomach turning into ruptured guts are all too common.

I stared at the paint gelding in the corral. He was staggering around, his head stuck straight up in the air, walking blindly. He was clearly in distress, but his behavior seemed odd.

Lacy picked up a halter from the rail. "Get the kill shot," she said. "I'm tired of watching him suffer."

"All right." I went to the truck.

Lacy got the horse out of the corral, and I walked up to him and put a hand on him, feeling the stiff, trembling muscles under the wet hide. This horse was suffering, no doubt about that. "I'm going to give him a shot of muscle relaxant first," I said. "I don't like to give a kill shot to a horse in this degree of distress; they react too violently."

Lacy nodded her head without a word. She was smoking a cigarette and her face was expressionless; she appeared completely unmoved by the horse's plight. I knew better. Lacy Carson had owned horses all her life, and she was fond of them. She just wasn't big on showing emotion.

I injected the six cc's of ace promazine in the horse's jugular vein; in a minute I could see the effect. The horse relaxed and looked quietly around him. In another minute he put his head down and began eating the grass that grew on the verge of the driveway, appearing for all the world like a perfectly normal horse.

Lacy looked away. I stared at the gelding. A red-and-white paint, he was short-coupled and stocky, with lots of white on his face and blue eyes. I noticed that the rims around the eyes had a faintly yellowish cast.

Stepping up to the horse, I took hold of his muzzle and lifted his upper lip. His gums, too, were yellowish.

I looked back at Lacy. "I'm not going to put this horse down," I said. "There's something else going on here. This isn't a normal colic. Has anything unusual happened to this horse in the last few days?"

Lacy shook her head, her eyes on the gelding. "I had him out yesterday; I was going to take him to a team penning. He started acting funny while I was getting ready to go, pawing the ground and sticking his head up in the air. I finally decided he was colicked and gave him some banamine. The rest you know."