The place was vaguely shabby and smelled of stale dog. The carpet had been white once. So had the fake leather sofas that were now cracked and dingy. Van Zandt needed to get a wealthier client to put him up free of charge. He probably had Sean in mind for that. He was probably already scheming to get the guest house next season.
I passed through the galley kitchen, doing a cursory check of drawers and cupboards. Nothing but the usual assortment of mismatched utensils, cereal boxes, and laundry soap. He liked Heineken beer and orange juice with extra pulp. There were no amputated body parts in the refrigerator or freezer. A small load of laundry lay clean, dry, and wrinkled in the dryer. Slacks, socks, and underwear. As if he had undressed and thrown everything into the washing machine together. Except that there was no shirt. I wondered why.
The living room offered nothing of interest. A collection of videos in the TV cabinet. Science fiction and romances. Lorinda Carlton's, I assumed. I couldn't picture Van Zandt sitting through Titanic, weeping as Leonardo DiCaprio went under for the third time. There was no sign of the video camera he had brought to Sean's.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms were located-one small and decorated with dog toys, one a master with cheesy laminated furnishings. This room smelled of Van Zandt's cologne. The bed was made, his clothes were put away neatly in the closet and in the drawers. He might have made some woman a good husband if not for those unfortunate sociopathic and misogynistic tendencies.
The video camera was in the closet, sitting on the floor beside a row of shoes. I opened the leather case and looked through the tapes, all of them labeled with the names of sale horses. Van Zandt would tape the horses, then copy the tapes (judiciously edited to show only the best traits of each horse) for prospective buyers to preview. I popped one of the VHSC cassette tapes into the camera, rewound it, and hit the play button. A gray horse appeared on the viewing screen, going over a series of jumps. Good form. The tape fuzzed out, then refocused, and a chestnut came into view. I hit the stop button and swapped tapes. More of the same. Van Zandt managed to get not only film of the horse in question, but also a smiling shot of some sweet young thing attached to the horse in some way or another. Rider or groom or owner. Cause for an eye roll, not alarm.
On the third tape I found Paris Montgomery astride a black gelding with a white star on his forehead. Stellar.
It broke my heart to watch him perform. He was a handsome animal with a mischievous sparkle in his eye and a habit of flipping his tail up like a flag as he jumped. He went to the fences with enthusiasm, but there wasn't a lot of spring in his jump and he didn't always get his hind legs out of the way in time to miss brushing the top rail of the fence. But I could see the will in him, the heart Dr. Dean had spoken of. When Stellar knocked a rail he pinned his ears and shook his head as he landed, as if angry with himself for not doing better. He had a lot of "try," as horse people say, but it took more than try to win at the elite level or be sold at an elite price.
Behind the camera, Van Zandt clearly became bored with the horse. There were far too many close-ups of Paris and her model's smile. I wondered just how close they were, whether or not Paris Montgomery drew the same line I did when it came to getting what she wanted from a man.
Then came one long shot of a girl holding Stellar by the reins, posing the riderless animal for a side view. Erin Seabright in a skin-fitting T-shirt and a pair of shorts that showed off slender, tan legs. Just as she got the horse positioned to best show him off, he butted her with his head and sent her staggering backwards, laughing. Pretty girl, pretty smile. She took hold of the horse's head and planted a kiss on his nose.
The tough, mouthy, bad girl. Not in this scene. I could see Erin's connection to the horse. I could see it in the way she spoke to him, the way she touched him, the way her hand lingered on his neck as she moved him. Knowing her family situation, it wasn't hard to imagine Erin felt closer to the horses she cared for than she did to most of the Seabright household. The horses didn't judge her, didn't criticize her, didn't let her down. The horses didn't know or care if she had broken rules. They only knew whether or not she was kind and patient, whether or not she brought them treats and knew where they liked to be scratched.
I knew these things about Erin Seabright because I had been Erin Seabright a lifetime ago. The girl who didn't fit the family mold, didn't want to live up to family expectations; the girl who chose acquaintances based on their objectionable qualities. Her only true friends lived in the stables.
The tape revealed more to me about Erin than it did about Van Zandt. I rewound it and watched Erin's part again, hoping I would have the opportunity to see her smile like that in person, though I knew even if I could get her out of this mess, it could be a very long time before she felt like smiling.
I swapped the tape for another and zoomed fast-forward through three more horses, then Sean and Tino popped up, and I let the tape play. The pair made a lovely picture as they moved around the arena. Sean was an excellent rider, strong, elegant, quiet and centered in his body. The brown gelding was lean and leggy and had a stylish way of going. The camera followed as they moved laterally across the ring toward the gazebo, diagonal pairs of legs crossing with the grace of a ballet dancer, the horse's body curving like a bow around Sean's leg. And then they went out of the frame.
The camera lingered on the gazebo, zooming in on Irina. She stared out of the picture with an expression of cold hatred, brought her cigarette to her lips, and blew the smoke right at the glass eye. It didn't seem to unnerve her that Van Zandt was watching her. It made my skin crawl. I wanted to go to Irina's apartment and lecture her on locking her door at night.
Elena Estes, Mother Hen.
I put the camera back where I had found it and went back into the bedroom, to the TV stand that housed another television and VCR. And a collection of porn. Multiple girls with one guy. Multiple guys with one girl. Lesbian sex. Lots of lesbian sex. Gay men. Some of the movies looked like they might have been violent, most didn't.
An equal opportunity perv, our Mr. Van Zandt.
I searched the drawers of the dresser and nightstands. I looked under the bed and found dust bunnies and some petrified dog turds. Van Zandt's patron needed a new cleaning person.
I found no tapes related to Erin's kidnapping. I knew the kidnapper had to have them. The tape that had been sent to the Seabrights was a full-sized VHS tape. Most modern camcorders were either digital or recorded on eight millimeter or a small VHSC cassette like the ones in the closet. The tape would then have been copied via VCR onto the larger tape. The kidnapper had also had access to more sophisticated audio equipment than any I had seen in the town house. The voice on the tape had been mechanically altered. If Van Zandt was involved in the kidnapping, he had the tapes and recording equipment stashed elsewhere.
Disappointed, I turned out the lights and went back downstairs. My internal clock was telling me it was time to go. I had lingered too long over the videotapes of the horses. I knew Landry would try to keep Van Zandt in the interview room as long as he could, but there was always the possibility Van Zandt would just get up and leave. He wasn't under arrest-that I knew of. He didn't even think the laws of the United States should apply to him.
I looked at the front door, but didn't move toward it. The idea of striking out had never appealed to me. I wanted to find something more incriminating than a porn habit, something-anything-that, even if it didn't tie him directly to the murder or the kidnapping, could at least be used as leverage against him in a future interview.
I went through the kitchen and let myself into a garage just large enough for one car and some storage lockers along one wall. The locker doors had padlocks on them. I didn't have the time to pop them. On top of the lockers were precarious piles of junk: a Styrofoam cooler, pool toys, cases of Diet Rite soda, a twelve-roll package of cheap toilet paper. In other words: nothing.