The memories of that winter touched me now in an especially vulnerable place. I couldn't remember the last time I had felt important. I could hardly remember the last time I had wanted to. But I could remember very clearly riding beside Dr. Dean in the enormous Lincoln Town Car he had tricked out as a rolling vet clinic.
Perhaps it was that memory that made me pick up my car keys and go.
The prime property Dr. Dean owned was populated by hunter/jumper people in one large barn and by dressage people in the other. The offices, Dr. Dean's personal stable, and the café were all located in a building between the two large barns.
The café was a simple open-air affair with a tiki bar. Dr. Dean sat at the centermost table in a carved wooden chair, an old king on his throne, drinking something with a paper umbrella in it.
I felt light-headed as I walked toward him, partly afraid to see him-or rather, for him to see me-and partly afraid people would come out of the woodwork to stare at me and ask me if I was really a private investigator. But the café was empty other than Dean Soren and the woman behind the counter. No one ran over from the barns to gawk.
Dr. Dean rose from his chair, his piercing eyes on me like a pair of lasers. He was a tall, straight man with a full head of white hair and a long face carved with lines. He had to be eighty, but he still looked fierce and strong.
"What the hell's wrong with you?" he said by way of a greeting. "Are you in chemotherapy? Is that what happened to your hair?"
"Good to see you, too, Dr. Dean," I said, shaking his hand.
He looked over at the woman behind the counter. "Marion! Make this girl a cheeseburger! She looks like hell!"
Marion, unfazed, went to work.
"What are you riding these days?" Dr. Dean asked.
I took a seat-a cheap folding chair that seemed too low and made me feel like a child. Or maybe that was just Dean Soren's effect on me. "I'm riding a couple of Sean's."
"You don't look strong enough to ride a pony."
"I'm fine."
"No, you're not," he pronounced. "Who is Sean using for a vet now?"
"Paul Geller."
"He's an idiot."
"He's not you, Dr. Dean," I said diplomatically.
"He told Margo Whitaker her mare needs 'sound therapy.' She's got headphones on the poor horse two hours a day, playing the sounds of nature."
"Gives Margo something to do."
"The horse needs not to have Margo hovering around. That's what the horse needs," he growled. He sipped his umbrella drink and stared at me.
"I haven't seen you in a long time, Elena," he said. "It's good you're back. You need to be with the horses. They ground you. A person always knows exactly where they stand with horses. Life makes more sense."
"Yes," I said, nervous under his scrutiny, afraid he would want to talk about my career and what had happened. But he let it go. Instead, he quizzed me about Sean's horses, and we reminisced about horses Sean and I had ridden in years past. Marion brought my cheeseburger and I dutifully ate.
When I had finished, he said, "You said on the phone you had a question."
"Do you know anything about Don Jade?" I asked bluntly.
His eyes narrowed. "Why would you want to know about him?"
"A friend of a friend has gotten mixed up with him. It sounded a little sketchy to me."
His thick white brows bobbed. He looked over toward the jumper barn. There were a couple of riders out on the jump field taking their mounts over colorful fences. From a distance they looked as graceful and light as deer bounding through a meadow. The athleticism of an animal is a pure and simple thing. Complicated by human emotions, needs, greed, there is little pure or simple about the sport we bring the horses into.
"Well," he said. "Don has always made a pretty picture with some ragged edges."
"What does that mean?"
"Let's take a walk," he suggested.
I suspected he didn't want anyone showing up to eavesdrop. I followed him out the back of the café to a row of small paddocks, three of them occupied by horses.
"My projects," Dr. Dean explained. "Two mystery lamenesses and one with a bad case of stomach ulcers."
He leaned against the fence and looked at them, horses he had probably saved from the knackers. He probably had half a dozen more stashed around the place.
"They give us all they can," he said. "They do their best to make sense out of what we ask them to do-demand they do. All they want in return is to be cared for properly and kindly. Imagine if people were like that."
"Imagine," I echoed, but I couldn't imagine. I had been a cop a dozen years. The nature of the job and the people and things it had exposed me to had burned away any idealism I might ever have had. The story Dean Soren told me about Don Jade only confirmed my low opinion of the human race.
Over the last two decades, Jade's name had twice been connected to schemes to defraud insurance companies. The scam was to kill an expensive show horse that hadn't lived up to potential, then have the owner file a claim saying the animal had died of natural causes and collect a six-figure payout.
It was an old hustle that had come into the spotlight of the national media in the eighties, when a number of prominent people in the show-jumping world had been caught at it. Several had ended up in prison for a number of years, among them an internationally well-known trainer, and an owner who was heir to an enormous cellular phone fortune. Being rich has never stopped anyone from being greedy.
Jade had lurked in the shadows of scandal back then, when he had been an assistant trainer at one of the barns that had lost horses to mysterious causes. He had never been charged with any crime or directly connected to a death. After the scandal broke, Jade had left that employer and spent a few years in France, training and competing on the European show circuit.
Eventually the furor over the horse killings died down, and Don Jade came back to the States and found a couple of wealthy clients to serve as cornerstones for his own business.
It might seem inconceivable that a man with Jade's reputation could continue on in the profession, but there are always new owners who don't know about a trainer's history, and there are always people who won't believe what they don't want to believe. And there are always people who just plain don't care. There are always people willing to look the other way if they think they stand to gain money or fame. Consequently, Don Jade's stable attracted clients, many of whom paid him handsomely to campaign their horses in Florida at the Winter Equestrian Festival.
In the late nineties, one of those horses was a jumper called Titan.
Titan was a talented horse with an unfortunately mercurial temperament. A horse that cost his owner a lot of money and always seemed to sabotage his own efforts to earn his keep. He earned a reputation as a rogue and a head case. Despite his abilities, his market value plummeted. Meanwhile, Titan's owner, Warren Calvin, a Wall Street trader, had lost a fortune in the stock market. And suddenly one day Titan was dead, and Calvin filed a $250,000 claim with his insurance company.
The official story pieced together by Jade and his head groom was that sometime during the night Titan had become spooked, had gone wild in his stall, breaking a foreleg, and had died of shock and blood loss. However, a former Jade employee had told a different tale, claiming Titan's death had not been an accident, that Jade had had the animal suffocated, and that the horse had broken his leg in a panic as he was being asphyxiated.
It was an ugly story. The insurance company had immediately ordered a necropsy, and Warren Calvin had come under the scrutiny of a New York State prosecutor. Calvin withdrew the claim and the investigation was dropped. No fraud, no crime. The necropsy was never performed. Warren Calvin got out of the horse business.
Don Jade weathered the rumors and speculation and went on about his business. He'd had a convenient alibi for the night in question: a girl named Allison, who worked for him and claimed to have been in bed with him at the time of Titan's death. Jade admitted to the affair, lost his marriage, but kept on training horses. Old clients either believed him or left him, and new pigeons came to roost, unaware.