Funny. Before I had ever heard of Erin Seabright, I hadn't known how I would live with myself because Hector Ramirez had died as a consequence of my actions. The difference was that now it mattered to me.
Somewhere in all this, hope had snuck in the back door. If it had come knocking, I would have turned it away as quickly as I would turn away a door-to-door missionary. No, thanks. I don't want what you're selling.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings without the words
And never stops-at all
Emily Dickinson
I didn't want to have hope for myself. I wanted to simply exist.
Existence is uncomplicated. One foot in front of the other. Eat, sleep, function. Living, truly living, with all the emotion and risk that entails, is hard work. Every risk presents the possibility of both success and failure. Every emotion has a counterbalance. Fear cannot exist without hope, nor hope without fear. I wanted neither. I had both.
The horizon turned pink as I stared out the window, and a white egret flew along that pink strip between the darkness and the earth. Before I could take it for a sign of something, I went to my bedroom and changed into riding clothes.
No deputies had come knocking on my door in the dead of night to question me about my jacket and the break-in at Lorinda Carlton's/Tomas Van Zandt's town house. My question was: if the deputies didn't have my jacket, who did? Had the dog dragged it back to Lorinda Carlton? His trophy for his efforts. Had Carlton or Van Zandt followed my trail and found it? If ultimately Van Zandt had possession of the prescription with my name on it, what would happen?
Uncertainty is always the hell of undercover work. I had built a house of cards, presenting myself as one thing to one group of people and something else to another group. I didn't regret the decision to do that. I knew the risks. The trick was getting the payoff before I was found out and the cards came tumbling down. But I felt no nearer to getting Erin Seabright back, and if I lost my cover with the horse people, then I was well and truly out of it, and I would have failed Molly.
I fed the horses and wondered if I should call Landry or wait to see if he would come to me. I wanted to know how Van Zandt's interview had gone, and whether or not the autopsy had been performed on Jill Morone. What made me think he would tell me any of that after what he had done the night before, I didn't know.
I stood in front of Feliki's stall as she finished her breakfast. The mare was small in stature and had a rather large, unfeminine head, but she had a heart and an ego as big as an elephant's, and attitude to spare. She regularly trounced fancier horses in the showring, and if she had been able to, I had no doubt she would have given her rivals the finger as she came out of the ring.
She pinned her ears and glared at me and shook her head as if to say, what are you looking at?
A chuckle bubbled out of me, a pleasant surprise in the midst of too much unpleasantness. I dug a peppermint out of my pocket. Her ears went up at the crackling of the wrapper and she put her head over the door, wearing her prettiest expression.
"Some tough cookie, you are," I said. She picked the treat delicately from my palm and crunched on it. I scratched her under her jaw and she melted.
"Yeah," I murmured, as she nuzzled, looking for another treat. "You remind me of me. Only I don't have anybody giving me anything but grief."
The sound of tires on the driveway drew my attention out the door. A silver Grand Am pulled in at the end of the barn.
"Case in point," I said to the mare. She looked at Landry's car, ears pricked. Like all alpha mares, Feliki was ever on the alert for intruders and danger. She spun around in her stall, squealed and kicked the wall.
I didn't go out to meet Landry. He could damn well come to me. Instead, I went to D'Artagnon, took him out of his stall, and led him to a grooming bay. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Landry approach. He was dressed for work. The morning breeze flipped his red tie over his shoulder.
"You're up bright and early for someone who was out prowling last night," he said.
"I don't know what you're talking about." I chose a brush from the cabinet and started a cursory grooming job that would have made Irina scowl at me and mutter in Russian if it had not been her day off.
Landry leaned sideways against a pillar, his hands in his pockets. "You don't know anything about a B amp;E at the town house of Lorinda Carlton-the town house where Tomas Van Zandt is living?"
"Nope. What about it?"
"We got a nine-one-one call last night claiming there was a piece of evidence there that would lock Van Zandt into the murder of Jill Morone."
"Terrific. Did you find it?"
"No."
My heart sank. There was only one piece of news that would have been worse, and that would have been that they had found Erin's body. I hoped to God that wasn't the next thing coming.
"You weren't there," Landry said.
"I told you I was going to bed with a book."
"You told me you were getting in the tub with a book," he corrected me. "That's not an answer."
"You didn't ask a question. You made a statement."
"Were you at that town house last night?"
"Do you have reason to believe I was? Do you have my fingerprints? Something that fell out of my pocket? Video surveillance tapes? A witness?" I held my breath, not sure which answer I feared most.
"Breaking and entering is against the law."
"You know, I kind of remember that from when I was on the job. And there was evidence of forcible entry at this town house?"
He didn't look amused by the clever repartee. "Van Zandt made it back to his place before I could get the warrant. If that shirt was there, he got rid of it."
"What shirt is that?"
"Goddammit, Estes."
He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me around, startling D'Artagnon. The big gelding scrambled and pulled back against the cross-ties, jumped ahead, then sat back and reared.
I hit Landry hard in the chest with the heel of my hand. It was like punching a cinder block. "Watch what you're doing, for Christ's sake!" I hissed at him.
He let me go and backed away, more leery of the horse than of me. I went to the horse to calm him. D'Artagnon looked at Landry, uncertain that calming down was the wisest choice. He would have sooner run away.
"I've had zero sleep," Landry said in lieu of an apology. "I'm not in the mood for word games. You haven't been properly Mirandized. Nothing you say can be used against you. Neither Van Zandt or that goofy woman wants to pursue the matter anyway, because, as I'm sure you know, nothing was stolen. I want to know what you saw."
"If he got rid of it, it doesn't matter. Anyway, I have to think you had an accurate description of whatever it was or you wouldn't have gotten the warrant. Or did he give you grounds during your interview? In which case you should have been smart enough to hold him while you got the warrant and executed the search."
"There was no interview. He called a lawyer."
"Who?"
"Bert Shapiro."
Amazing. Bert Shapiro was on a par with my father in terms of high-profile clients. I wondered which of Van Zandt's grateful pigeons was footing that bill.
"That's unfortunate," I said. And doubly so for me. Shapiro had known me all my life. If Van Zandt showed him that prescription slip, I was cooked. "Too bad you didn't wait until the autopsy was done to pull him in. You might have had something to rattle his cage with before he used the L word."
I struck a nerve with that. I could see it in the way his jaw muscles flexed.
"Was there anything in the autopsy?" I asked.
"If there was, I wouldn't be standing here. I'd be in the box busting that asshole's chops, lawyer or no lawyer."