"How do you know that?"
"Because in the photograph I have of Erin, she's wearing the blouse Jill Morone died in. That's why it looked like Erin had moved out-Jill stole everything."
I led D'Artagnon out of the barn to the mounting block, leaving Landry to see himself out. From the corner of my eye, I could see him just standing there with his hands on his hips, looking at me. Behind him, the door to the lounge opened and Irina emerged in ice blue silk pajamas, coffee mug in hand. She gave Landry a scathing look as she glided past on her way to the stairs to her apartment. He didn't notice.
I got on my horse and we walked away to the arena. I don't know how long Landry stayed. As I took up the reins, I cleared the detritus of our encounter from my mind. I breathed in the scent of the horse, felt the sun warm my skin, listened to the jazz guitar of Marc Antoine coming over the arena speakers. I was there to cleanse myself, to center my being, to feel the comfort of familiar muscles working and the trickle of sweat between my shoulder blades. If I hadn't earned a moment of peace, I was going to take one anyway.
By the time I had finished, Landry was gone. Someone else had come to call.
Tomas Van Zandt.
29
So she was the dead person they found at the show grounds?"
Landry looked sideways at the old lady. She was wearing pink tights, an off-the-shoulder sweater, and furry bedroom slippers. She held a hugely fat orange cat in her arms. The cat looked like it would bite.
"I really can't say, ma'am," Landry said, looking around the tiny apartment. The place was a dump. And filthy. And it looked like it had been tossed. "Has anyone been in here since Friday evening?"
"No. No one. I've been here the whole time. And my friend Sid has been staying," she confided with a coy blush. "Since I found out the other one disappeared, I figure a girl can't be too careful."
Landry motioned to the room at large. "Why does it look this way?"
"Because she's a little pig, that's why! Not that I would speak ill of the dead, but…" Eva Rosen looked at the nicotine-stained ceiling to see if God was watching her. "She was mean too. I know she tried to kick my Cecil."
"Your what?"
"Cecil!" She hefted the cat. It growled.
Landry moved to pick through a pile of clothes left on the unmade bed. Many items that looked too small for Jill Morone. Many items with price tags still attached.
"I think she stole," Eva said. "So how did she die?"
"I'm not at liberty to comment on that."
"But someone murdered her, right? They said on the news."
"Did they?"
"Was it a sex crime?" Clearly, she was hoping it was. People were amazing.
"Do you know if she had a boyfriend?" Landry asked.
"This one?" She made a face. "No. The other one."
"Erin Seabright."
"Like I told your little friend in the other room. Thad Something."
"Chad?" Landry said, moving on to a coffee table littered with candy wrappers and an overflowing ashtray. "Chad Seabright?"
Eva was horror-stricken. "They had the same last name? They were married?"
"No, ma'am." He picked through a stack of magazines. People, Playgirl, Hustler. Jesus.
"Oy vey. Under my own roof!"
"Did you ever see anyone coming in and out?" Landry asked. "Friends? Their boss?"
"The boss."
"Don Jade?"
"I don't know him. Paris," she said. "Blond, pretty, a very nice girl. She always takes time to chat. Always asks after my babies."
"Babies?"
"Cecil and Beanie. She was the one who paid the rent-Paris. Such a nice girl."
"When was she last here?"
"Not lately. She's very busy, you know. She rides those horses. Zoom! Over the fences." She swung the fat cat in her arms as if she meant to toss him. The cat flattened its ears and made a sound in its throat like a siren.
Landry went to the nightstand beside the bed and opened the drawer.
Bingo.
He took a pen from his pocket and gingerly moved aside a hot-pink vibrator, then lifted out his prize. Photographs. Photographs of Don Jade sitting astride a black horse with a winner's ribbon around its neck. Pictures of him jumping another horse over a huge fence. A photo of him standing beside a girl whose face had been scratched out of the picture.
Landry turned the photograph over and looked at the back. The first half of the inscription had been scratched over with a pen that had been pressed so hard it had carved a groove into the paper, but so carelessly it could still be read.
To Erin.
Love, Don.
30
He must be rounder, softer in the downward transitions."
Van Zandt had parked along the road-a dark blue Chevy, not the Mercedes-and stood leaning on the fence, watching me. My stomach flipped at the sight of him. I had hoped to next see him-if not on the news, being taken into custody by the authorities-at the equestrian center in a throng of humanity.
He climbed carefully over the board fence and came toward the ring, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses, his expression flat and calm. I thought he still looked ill, and wondered if it was killing that upset his system, or the danger of being caught. Or perhaps it was the idea of having a loose end dangling. Me.
I glanced at the parking area adjacent to the barn. Irina's car was gone. She had left while I'd been engrossed in my ride.
I hadn't seen any sign of Sean. If he had returned home from his night out, he was sleeping late.
"You must be looser in your back so that the horse may be looser in his back," Van Zandt said.
I wondered if he knew, and knew in a fatalistic corner of my soul that he did. The possibilities ticked through my mind as they had every hour since my blunder at the town house: He had found the prescription and recognized my name from Sidelines, or Lorinda Carlton had recognized the name. The magazine might have been in the town house somewhere. They might have looked at the photograph together. Van Zandt might have recognized the horse, or my profile, or put the puzzle pieces together from the mention of Sean's farm. He might have found the jacket and the prescription, assumed Elena Estes was a cop conducting a search while he'd been in the interview room with Landry; called his attorney and asked to have the name checked out. Shapiro would have recognized my name.
It didn't matter how he might have found me out. What mattered was what he was going to do about it. If he knew I had been in his home Saturday night, then he knew I had seen the bloody shirt. I wished now I had kept the thing and damned the admissibility consequences. At least he would be in jail for the moment, and I would not be alone with a man I believed to be a murderer.
"Try again," he said. "Pick up the canter."
"We were just finishing for the day."
"Americans," he said with disdain, standing at the edge of the ring with his hands on his hips. "He is hardly warm. The work is only just beginning. Pick up the canter."
My natural inclination was to defy him, but staying aboard the horse seemed preferable to a level playing field where he had six inches and sixty pounds on me. At least until I could get a better read on him and what he may or may not know, it seemed best to humor him.
"On the twenty-meter circle," Van Zandt instructed.
I put the horse on a circle twenty meters in diameter, tried to breathe and focus, though my hands were so tight on the reins, I thought I could feel my pulse in them. I closed my eyes for two strides, exhaling and sinking into the saddle.
"Relax your hands. Why are you so tense, Elle?" he asked in a silky voice that made a chill go down my back. "The horse can sense this. It makes him also tense. More seat, less hand."
I made an attempt to react accordingly.
"What brings you out so early?"
"Aren't you happy to see me?" he asked.
"I would have been happy to see you at dinner last night. You stood me up. That doesn't win you any points with me."