"After what?" he asked pointedly.
"After coffee," I said. "I draw the line at prostituting myself. Glad you have such a high opinion of me, though."
"I'm glad you have a line," he muttered.
He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, dialed a number, and stood staring at me while he waited for someone to pick up on the other end. I knew what he was doing. A part of me wanted to ask him not to, despite what I'd said earlier. But I wouldn't allow it. I had come as close to begging as I was going to.
"Weiss. Landry. Van Zandt is at The Players. Pick him up."
Never taking his eyes off me, he put the phone back in his pocket. "Thanks for the tip."
I wanted to tell him to go to hell, but I didn't trust my voice. It felt like I had a hard, hot rock stuck in my throat. I much preferred feeling nothing, caring about nothing but getting from one day to the next-and not caring very much about that. If you have no expectations, no purpose, no goal, you can't be disappointed, you can't feel hurt.
Landry turned and walked out, taking the information I'd given him, taking my plans for the evening with him, taking my hope to make a break in the case. I felt like a fool. I thought he had come to me to include me, but all he had wanted was to absolve his conscience. The case was his case. He owned it.
"Thanks for the tip."
I paced the house, trying to shove back the emotions crowding in on me. I needed to do something. I needed a new plan. I wasn't going to sit home with all these feelings to contemplate, and I didn't have a good book to take to the bathtub.
An idea began to take shape in my mind. Before it was more than an embryo, I had changed clothes and was out the door.
My life would have been easier if I had gone to Barnes amp; Noble.
25
Lorinda Carlton's Wellington address was a town house on Sag Harbor Court. Unless Van Zandt made a revelation during his interview with Landry, there was not probable cause for a warrant to search the premises. But if Van Zandt had been involved in Erin's kidnapping or Jill's murder, and had kept a souvenir, there was a good chance he would get rid of it as soon as he came back to the town house.
I parked in a visitor's slot at the end of the block of buildings where Carlton's unit was located. Half the places on the block had lights on, but there was no activity going on outdoors. No friendly neighbors sitting on their front stoop, watching Saturday night go by.
Because of the nature of Wellington and the winter show season, rentals experience a big turnover of tenants every year. While some of the horse people own homes, many find themselves in a different apartment every winter. The nature of horse people being what it is, the accommodations for their horses are arranged first, accommodations for themselves often wait until the last minute. The town house and apartment complexes consequently do not have a strong feeling of community.
Carlton's unit was on the far end of the dead-end street and completely dark. I peered in the sidelight at the front door, looking for a security system panel. If there was one, it was located out of my limited range of sight. If there was an alarm and I tripped it, I was in a bad position to get back to my car. I would have to find a way to make my escape through or over the tall hedge that ran along the end of the complex, hoping that no one would see me, then double back around later to get my car.
With that much of a plan in mind, I slipped a couple of picks out of my coat pocket and went to work on the front door lock. Any casual passerby would be far less suspicious of someone unlocking a front door than trying to sneak in the back. I could always shrug and say I'd lost my key, make up a story about how I was in for the weekend to see my friend Van Zandt, who had rudely forgotten about me.
I held my breath as I worked the picks in the lock. Lock picking is not a skill taught at the police academy. I learned it from a groom when I was eleven years old. Bobby Bennet had spent many years working the south Florida racetracks until an unfortunate misunderstanding about a burglary had landed him in prison for three to five. He claimed to have mended his wicked ways after he got out, but he had retained his old skills and passed them on to me because I was a pest and he got a kick out of me.
I thanked God for Bobby Bennet as the lock's tumblers fell into place. My heart was still thumping as I opened the door and went inside. Many security systems allow entry with a key, but then require the proper code to be entered on the keypad within a minute or two or the alarm sounds both within the house and with whatever agency the system is connected to, whether it be a private security company or the Sheriff's Office.
I found the system control panel on the wall adjacent to the hinged side of the door. A small green light declared the system unarmed.
Relieved, I moved on about my business. I flipped on a table lamp in the living room. Any neighbors bothering to notice the lights on would simply assume the person in the town house was the person who was supposed to be in the town house, because what thief would turn the lights on?
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.