Dark Horse

50

My phone rang as I walked back to my car.

"Meet me for lunch," Landry said.

"Your telephone etiquette is sorely lacking," I pointed out.

He named a fast-food place ten minutes away and hung up.

Erin Seabright caught Jade in the stall with the dead horse," Landry said. We sat in his car. A sack of food lay on the seat between us, filling the car with the aroma of charbroiled meat and french fries. Neither of us touched it. "She caught him doctoring the electrical cord on the fan."

"Erin told you that?"

"I'm on my way to ask her about it now. We didn't get into the whole dead horse saga this morning. I only asked her for details about her abduction. Paris Montgomery came in on her own and told me. There was a story on the morning news about Erin's escape from the kidnappers. Apparently, that put the fear of God in Ms. Montgomery."

"More like a vulture circling a dying animal," I said. "She smells opportunity.

"She says Erin caught Jade, and at the end of the day Jade kidnapped her? It doesn't track, Landry."

"I know. The kidnapping plot was already in motion."

"If that's what it was," I said. "Have the technical wizards enhanced that first videotape?"

"Yes, but I haven't had a chance to look at it. Why?"

"Look for the bracelet I handed you this morning."

"What about it?"

"Do you think the kidnappers gave it to her as a parting gift?" I asked. "I've watched that tape fifty times. I don't see a bracelet, but she was wearing one last night."

Landry looked incredulous. "Are you trying to say the girl is in on it? You're out of your mind. Estes, you haven't seen her. She's had the shit kicked out of her. You didn't see that tape of the perp going at her with the whip. And this morning Weiss and Dwyer found another tape in Seabright's office. It shows the girl being brutally raped."

That brought me up short. "He had it in the house? In his office?"

"Stuffed behind some things on a shelf."

I didn't know what to say to that. It was what I had been hoping for-for Seabright to be made to pay a price. But news of the taped rape was something else.

"It looked genuine?" I asked.

"Made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end," Landry said. "I wanted to take Seabright and choke him till his eyes popped out."

"Where is he now?"

"He's sitting in a holding cell. The state's attorney is trying to decide what to charge him with."

"What happened at Jade's arraignment?"

"Trey Hughes posted bail."

"I wonder if Paris knows about that."

"I'd bet he's paying for Bert Shapiro too."

"Have you interviewed him yet? Trey?"

"He's been asked to come in. Shapiro won't allow it."

"Run his name through the system," I said. "Trey has a checkered past. He told me yesterday he has a past professional acquaintance with my father. People don't hire Edward Estes for traffic mishaps."

Landry shook his head in disgust. "It's like a goddam bag of snakes, this bunch."

"Yes," I said. "Now we get to find out how many of them are poisonous."

N othing breeds contempt more virulent than unrequited devotion. I drove toward Loxahatchee, thinking of Paris Montgomery walking into the Sheriff's Office to give up her boss on the horse murder and insurance fraud. Paris was a first-chair kind of girl who had been playing second fiddle to Don Jade for three years. She had helped him build his clientele.

She had defended him with one hand and dug the foundation out from under him with the other.

I wondered if it had been Paris who dropped the dime to the INS regarding Javier. She had been with Trey the night before. He might have told her he believed me to be a private investigator, and that he had found me conversing in fluent Spanish with the one Jade employee left who might have known something valuable.

Or perhaps Trey had called them himself. For reasons of his own. I tried to picture him as one of the kidnappers. Had the years of debauchery so warped him that he might consider kidnapping a girl to be a game?

The afternoon was already half-gone as I turned down the road to Paris Montgomery's house. In the dense woods of rural Loxahatchee, much of the light had already fallen victim to the long shadows of tall thin pine trees.

I drove past the house Paris lived in to the cul-de-sac where I had nearly shot Jimmy Manetti the night before. The half-built houses had been abandoned by their work crews for the day. I parked my car, took the Glock out of its hiding place, and made my way back down the road, ducking into the cover of trees as quickly as I could.

The house was much like Eva Rosen's: a pseudo-Spanish seventies rambler with mildewed white stucco and a cedar shake roof crusted with moss. I let myself in a side door to the garage, which was stacked with the property owner's lawn equipment and Christmas decorations. The money-green Infiniti was not there.

The door into the house was locked, and the lights on the security system panel showed that the system was armed. I walked around the exterior of the house, looking for an unlocked door, a partially open window. No luck.

Through the living room windows I could see a nasty once-white shag carpet and a lot of cheesy "Mediterranean" furniture no one from the Mediterranean would ever have laid claim to. The TV looked almost as tall as I was and had every kind of symbiotic machine hooked up to it-VCR, DVD, Dolby sound system with a bank of stereo equipment that looked like something from NASA.

I went around the side yard to the back, where a big redwood hot tub sat inside the requisite caged patio, along with an assortment of tacky patio furniture and sun-starved plants. The screen door was not locked, but the sliding glass door into the dining room was secure. I could see mail on the dining room table: magazines, bills.

A second sliding glass door at the far end of the patio led into a bedroom with orange shag carpeting. The drapes were pulled back, revealing a king-sized bed with a red velvet spread. A painting of a naked woman with three breasts and two faces hung above the ornate, fake wood headboard. A TV sat on an open-sided stand at the end of the room. I checked the titles on the stack of videos on the bottom shelf and wondered if I was the only person in south Florida without a collection of porn.

Somewhere beyond the yard, the engine of a piece of heavy machinery had fired up with a throaty growl. My luck someone had come back to the construction site down the road and was about to bulldoze my car.

The backyard was dim with shadows, but the sky above the treetops was still an intense blue. The racket was not coming from the direction of the new houses down the road, but from beyond those trees, beyond Paris Montgomery's backyard, to the west.

A large motor grumbled constantly, the intermittent crunching and chewing of materials being fed through some big machine. A mulch grinder, I guessed, and I almost turned away. Then I paused.

Landry had said there was a sound of heavy machinery in the background of the video showing Erin being beaten by her captors. A sound Erin hadn't been able to remember when he'd asked her about the place where she was held.

I walked toward the back of the property. Dense with young trees and wild bamboo, vines knitting all of it together, the back border of the yard was a jungle that would have eventually swallowed up the yard and the house if allowed.

The thump and grind of the machine grew louder. A truck engine revved and the beep-beep-beep of warning sounded as it backed up.

Trying to see through the curtain of greenery to the property on the other side, I almost missed it. The thing sat in the tangled growth like an ancient ruin. Gray and rusted, once an alien thing that had become almost an organic part of the landscape over the course of time. A trailer. What might have been a construction boss's office once, with a window on the end of it that was coated with dirt on the inside. Someone had scratched through the filth with their fingertip, writing a single word: HELP.