Dark Horse
Contents
This book was inspired by the adventures of Tess and Mati.
May there be many more, and may they live to tell the tales.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I have several people to thank for sharing with me their professional expertise as I wrote this story. Lieutenant Ed Serafin, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, Robbery/Homicide division. Robert Crais. Eileen Dreyer. Jessie Steiner. Mary Phelps. And most of all, Betsy Steiner, true friend and partner in international intrigue.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Welcome to my other world.
In my life away from my desk, I am a competitive equestrian. In fact, I’ve been a rider longer than I’ve been a writer. Over the years horses have been my joy, refuge, therapy, salvation, and comfort. I’ve ridden in nearly every equestrian discipline, from barrel racing to jumping. When I was thirteen and my girlfriends were baby-sitting to earn spending money, my father was bringing home young horses for me to break to saddle.
Several years ago I settled on the equestrian sport of dressage as my out-of-office passion. Dressage is all about control and precision and the mastery of imperceptible cues between rider and horse. The ultimate result is something like equine ballet, which appears elegant and effortless but requires the same physical and mental fitness as power yoga.
I began competing in dressage in 1999. Being me, I didn’t ease into the sport. I have one gear in everything I do: full-on. I bought a wonderful—if difficult—horse named D’Artagnon from Olympic rider Guenter Seidel, and within a year’s time went from my first dressage competition to being a nationally ranked amateur rider in the U.S. Dressage Federation. At the end of my first season, my coach, trainer, mentor, and great friend, Betsy Steiner (a world-class rider herself), encouraged me to bring D’Artagnon along with several other horses from her stable to Florida for the winter season.
Every year top equestrians from the East Coast, Midwest, Canada, and Europe migrate to Welllington in Palm Beach County to spend three months in constant training and competition in some of the most prestigious dressage and jumper shows in the country. Thousands of horses and hundreds of riders converge to create a fascinating world, a world driven by the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and lots of money. A world populated by the ultrarich and the very poor; celebrities, royalty, and ordinary people who scrimp and save year-round in order to “do the season”; philanthropists, dilettantes, professionals, amateurs, con men, and criminals. People who love horses, and people who love to exploit people who love horses. A world with a glamorous surface and a tough underbelly. Yin and yang. Positive and negative.
By the end of that first season in Florida, my imagination was running wild with story ideas that would blend my two worlds. The result is
Dark Horse,
a classic private-eye novel set against the backdrop of international show jumping. I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the dark side of my other world.
If you come away from this book thinking the horse business is all bad, I’ll tell you that’s not so. Some of the finest, kindest, most generous people I have ever known have been in the horse business. But on the flip side of that coin, some of the most vile, vicious, loathsome people I have ever known have been in the horse business. The horse world can be a world of extremes and amazing adventures. I’ve had horses drugged, horses stolen. I’ve been stranded in a foreign country with a sociopathic horse dealer who canceled my transportation home. I’ve masqueraded as a groom and flown in the belly of a cargo plane with a horse bent on killing me. But these adventures don’t happen every day. Every day I go to the stables and find friendship and partnership and calm within my soul.
My own horses appear in this book, in Sean Avadon’s stable. But, in answer to the inevitable question, Elena is not me (if my life were so exciting, when would I write a book?). However, I do agree with her when she says, “On the back of a horse I felt whole, complete, connected to that vital place in the center of me . . . and the chaos within me found balance.”
ACT ONE
SCENE ONE
FADE IN:
EXTERIOR: PALM BEACH EQUESTRIAN CENTER—SUNSET
Flat, open fields of scrub stretching to the west. A dirt road running north onto equestrian center property and south toward small horse farms some distance away. No one around. The fields are empty. No people, no horses. Sunday night: everyone has gone home.
Erin stands at the back gate. She’s waiting for someone. She’s nervous. She thinks she’s here for a secret purpose. She thinks her life will change tonight.
It will.
She looks at her watch. Impatient. Afraid he won’t show. She’s not aware of the camera filming her. She thinks she’s alone.
She’s thinking: maybe he won’t come, maybe she’s wrong about him.
A rusted white van approaches from the south. She watches it come toward her. She looks annoyed. No one uses this back road this time of day. The gate to the show grounds has already been chained shut for the night.
The van stops. A masked assailant leaps out.
ERIN
No!
She starts to run toward the gate. He catches her arm from behind and spins her around. She kicks him. He backhands her across the face, knocking her sideways. She wrenches free of his grasp as she stumbles, and she tries to run again but can’t get her feet under her. The assailant knocks her down from behind, coming down on top of her, his knee in her back. He pulls a hypodermic needle from the pocket of his jacket and rams the needle into her arm. She makes a sound of pain and starts to cry.
He pulls her to her feet and shoves her into the van. He slams the door shut, gets in the van, the van turns around and drives away.
Life changes in a heartbeat.
FADE OUT
1
Life can change in a heartbeat.
I’ve always known that. I’ve lived the truth of that statement literally from the day I was born. I sometimes see those moments coming, sense them, anticipate them, as if they have an aura that precedes their arrival. I see one coming now. Adrenaline runs through my bloodstream like rocket fuel. My heart pounds like a piston. I’m ready to launch.
I’ve been told to stay put, to wait, but I know that’s not the right decision. If I go in first, if I go in now, I’ve got the Golam brothers dead-bang. They think they know me. Their guard will be down. I’ve worked this case three months. I know what I’m doing. I know that I’m right. I know the Golam brothers are already twitching. I know I want this bust and deserve it. I know Lieutenant Sikes is here for the show, to put a feather in his cap when the news vans arrive and to make the public think they should vote for him in the next election for sheriff.
He stuck me on the side of the trailer and told me to wait. He doesn’t know his ass. He doesn’t even know the side door is the door the brothers use most. While Sikes and Ramirez are watching the front, the brothers are dumping their money into duffel bags and getting ready to bolt out the side. Billy Golam’s four-by-four is parked ten feet away, covered in mud. If they run, they’ll take the truck, not the Corvette parked in front. The truck can go off-road.
Sikes is wasting precious time. The Golam brothers have two girls in the trailer with them. This could easily turn into a hostage situation. But if I go in now, while their guard is down . . .
Screw Sikes. I’m going in before these twitches freak.
It’s my case. I know what I’m doing.
I key my radio. “This is stupid. They’re going to break for the truck. I’m going in.”
“Goddammit, Estes—” Sikes.
I click the radio off and drop it into the weeds growing beside the trailer. It’s my case. It’s my bust. I know what I’m doing.
I go to the side door and knock the way all the Golam brothers’ customers knock: two knocks, one knock, two knocks. “Hey, Billy, it’s Elle. I need some.”
Billy Golam jerks open the door, wild-eyed, high on his own home cooking—crystal meth. He’s breathing hard. He’s got a gun in his hand.
Shit.
The front door explodes inward.
One of the girls screams.
Buddy Golam shouts: “Cops!”
Billy Golam swings the .357 up in my face. I suck in my last breath.
And then I opened my eyes and felt sick at the knowledge that I was still alive.
This was the way I had greeted every day for the past two years. I had relived that memory so many times, it was like replaying a movie over and over and over. No part of it changed, not a word, not an image. I wouldn’t allow it.
I lay in the bed and thought about slitting my wrists. Not in an abstract way. Specifically. I looked at my wrists in the soft lamplight—delicate, as fine-boned as the wing of a bird, skin as thin as tissue, blue-lined with veins—and thought about how I would do it. I looked at those thin blue lines and thought of them as lines of demarcation. Guidelines.
Cut here.
I pictured the needle-nose point of a boning knife. The lamplight would catch on the blade. Blood would rise to the surface in its wake as the blade skated along the vein. Red. My favorite color.
The image didn’t frighten me. That truth frightened me most of all.
I looked at the clock: 4:38
A
.
M
. I’d had my usual fitful four and a half hours of sleep. Trying for more was an exercise in futility.
Trembling, I forced my legs over the edge of the bed and got up, pulling a deep blue chenille throw around my shoulders. The fabric was soft, luxurious, warm. I made special note of the sensations. You’re always more intensely alive the closer you come to looking death in the face.
I wondered if Hector Ramirez had realized that the split second before he died.
I wondered that every day.
I dropped the throw and went into the bathroom.
“Good morning, Elena. You look like shit.”
Too thin. Hair a wild black tangle. Eyes too large, too dark, as if there was nothing within to shine outward. The crux of my problem: lack of substance. There was—is—a vague asymmetry to my face, like a porcelain vase that has been broken, then painstakingly restored. The same vase it was before, yet not the same. The same face I was born with, yet not the same. Slightly skewed and strangely expressionless.
I was beautiful once.
I reached for a comb on the counter, knocked it to the floor, grabbed a brush instead. Start at the bottom, work upward. Like combing a horse’s tail. Work the knots out gently. But I had already tired of looking at myself. Anger and resentment bubbled up through me, and I tore the brush through my hair, shoving the snarls together and tangling the brush in the midst of the mess.
I tried maybe forty-five seconds to extricate the thing, yanking at the brush, tearing at the hair above the snarl, not caring that I was pulling hair out of my head by the roots. I swore aloud, swatted at my image in the mirror, swept the tumbler and soap dish off the counter in a tantrum, and they smashed on the tile floor. Then I jerked open a drawer in the vanity and pulled out a scissors.
Furious, shaking, breathing hard, I cut the brush free. It dropped to the floor with a mass of black hair wrapped around it. The pressure in my chest eased. Numbness trickled down through me like rain. Calm.
Without emotion, I proceeded to hack away at the rest of my mane, cutting it boy-short in ten minutes. The result was ragged with a finger-in-the-light-socket quality. Still, I’d seen worse in
Vogue
.
I swept up the mess—the discarded hair, the broken glass—tossed it in the trash, and walked out of the room.
I’d worn my hair long all my life.
T
he morning was cool, shrouded in a thick, ground-hugging fog, the air ripe with the damp scents of south Florida: green plants and the murky canal that ran behind the property; mud and manure and horses. I stood on the patio of the little guest house I lived in and breathed deeply.
I had come to this farm a refugee. Jobless, homeless, a pariah in my chosen profession. Unwanted, unloved, abandoned. All of it deserved. I had been off the job two years, most of that time spent in and out of hospitals as doctors repaired the damage done to my body that day at the Golam brothers’ trailer. Piecing together shattered bone, patching torn flesh, putting the left side of my face together like a three-dimensional puzzle. They had been less successful with my psyche.
Needing something to do until I could make up my mind about reaching for that boning knife, I had answered an ad in
Sidelines,
a locally based, biweekly magazine for the horse industry:
GROOM WANTED
.
Life is strange. I don’t want to believe anything is preordained. To believe that, one would have to accept the existence of a viciously cruel higher power in order to explain things like child abuse and rapists and AIDS and good men being shot dead in the line of duty. But the occasional twist of fate always makes me wonder.
The phone number in the ad belonged to Sean Avadon. I’d known Sean a hundred years ago in my riding days, when I was a spoiled, sulky, Palm Beach teenager and he was a spoiled, outrageous twenty-something spending his trust fund on horses and mad flings with pretty young men from Sweden and Germany. We had been friends, Sean always telling me I needed him to be my surrogate sense of humor and fashion.
Our families lived a couple of mansions down from one another on the Lake Worth side of the narrow island, Sean’s father a real estate magnate, mine an attorney to the wealthiest crooks in south Florida. The slumlord and the shyster, each of them sire to ungrateful offspring. Sean and I had bonded in parental disdain and our love for horses. Wild child times two.
All that had seemed so long ago as to be a dream I could barely remember. So much had happened since. I had left Palm Beach, left that world. I had metaphorically lived and died in another life. Then I answered that ad:
GROOM WANTED
.
I didn’t get the job. As bad a shape as I was in, even I could see the pity in his eyes when we met for drinks at The Players. I was a dark shadow of the girl Sean had known twenty years past, so pathetic I didn’t have the pride to fake mental health. I guess that might have been rock bottom. I might have gone home that night to the apartment I was renting and tried to find that boning knife.
Instead, Sean took me in like a stray cat—a recurring theme in my life. He put me in his guest house and asked that I work a couple of his horses for the winter season. He claimed he needed the help. His ex-trainer/ex-lover had run off to Holland with his groom and left him in the lurch. He made it sound like he was giving me a job. What he was giving me was a stay of execution.
Three months had passed. I was still fantasizing about suicide, and every evening I took a bottle of Vicodin out of my nightstand, emptied out the pills, and looked at them and counted them and thought how one pill would ease the physical pain that had been with me every day since “the incident,” as my attorney called it. (How sterile and neat that sounded. A small segment of unpleasantness that could be snipped from the fabric of life and isolated. How in contrast to my memories.) One pill could ease the pain. Thirty could end it. I had a stockpile of three hundred and sixty pills.
Every evening I looked at those pills, then put them back in the bottle and put the bottle away. I had never taken one. My evening ritual.
My daily ritual for the past three months was the routine of Sean’s barn and time spent with his horses. I found both rituals comforting, but for very different reasons. The pills were a connection to death, and every night I didn’t take them was a victory. The horses were a connection to life, and every hour spent with them was a reprieve.
Early on in my life I came to the conclusion that my spirituality was something uniquely and privately my own, something I could find only deep within a small quiet space in the very center of my being. Some people find that place through meditation or yoga or prayer. I find that place within me when I am on a horse. My Zen religion: the equestrian art of dressage.
Dressage is a discipline born on the battlefield in ancient times. Warhorses were trained in precision movements to aid their masters in battle, not only to evade enemies, but to attack them. Over the centuries the training went from the battlefield to the showring, and dressage evolved into something like equine ballet.
To the untrained eye it appears graceful and elegant and effortless. A skilled rider seems to be so quiet, so motionless as to virtually blend into the background. In reality, the sport is physically and mentally demanding on both horse and rider. Complex and complicated. The rider must be attuned to the horse’s every footfall, to the balance of every inch of the horse’s body. The slightest shift of the rider’s weight, the smallest movement of a hand, the lightest tensing of a calf muscle will affect the quality of the performance. Focus must be absolute. Everything else becomes insignificant.
Riding was my refuge as a teenager, when I felt I had little control over any other aspect of my life. It was my stress release when I had a career. It had become my salvation when I had nothing else. On the back of a horse I felt whole, complete, connected to that vital place in the very center of me that had otherwise closed itself off, and the chaos within me found balance.
D’Artagnon and I moved across the sand arena through the last wisps of the morning ground fog, the horse’s muscles bulging and rolling, his hooves striking the ground in perfect metronome rhythm. I massaged the left rein, sat into his back, tightened my calves around him. The energy moved from his hindquarters, over his back; his neck rounded and his knees came up into the stylized, slow-motion trot called
passage
. He seemed almost to float beneath me, to bounce like a huge, soft ball. I felt he might take wing if only I knew the one secret word to whisper to him.
We halted in the center of the ring at the place known as X. In that moment I felt joy and peace.
I dropped the reins on his neck and patted him. He lowered his head and started to walk forward, then stopped and came to attention.
A girl sat on the white board fence that ran along the road. She watched me with a sense of expectation about her. Even though I hadn’t noticed her, I could tell she’d been there, waiting. I judged her to be about twelve. Her hair was long and brown, perfectly straight, and neatly held back from her face with a barrette on each side. She wore little round black-rimmed glasses that made her look very serious. I rode toward her with a vague feeling of apprehension that made no sense at the time.
“Can I help you?” I asked. D’Ar blew through his nostrils at her, ready to bolt and save us from the intruder. I should have let him.
“I’m here to see Ms. Estes,” she said properly, as if she’d come on business.
“Elena Estes?”
“Yes.”
“And you are . . . ?”
“Molly Seabright.”
“Well, Molly Seabright, Ms. Estes isn’t here at the moment.”
“
You’re
Ms. Estes,” she declared. “I recognize your horse. His name is D’Artagnon, like in the
Three Musketeers
.” She narrowed her eyes. “You cut your hair.” Disapproval.
“Do I know you?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know me?” I asked, the apprehension rising up like bile through my chest to the base of my throat. Maybe she was a relative of Hector Ramirez, come to tell me she hated me. Maybe she’d been sent as a decoy by an older relative who would now pop out of nowhere to shoot me or scream at me or throw acid in my face.
“From
Sidelines,
” she said.
I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a play. Molly Seabright took pity on me and carefully climbed down from the fence. She was slightly built and dressed neatly in sensible dark slacks and a little blue T-shirt with a small daisy chain embroidered around the throat. She came up along D’Artagnon’s shoulder and carefully held the magazine out to me, folded open to an interior page.