Tears squeezed out of her eyes and her face turned mottled red. It wasn't her fault she was fat. Her mother had let that happen when she was a kid. So she couldn't help it now that she ate the wrong things. And it wasn't her fault she didn't exercise. She was tired at the end of the day-never mind that bitch Paris was always accusing her of not working hard enough.
Why would she work any harder for Paris? Paris didn't give her any incentive to work hard, so if she wasn't getting as much done as Paris wanted, it was Paris's fault. And it wasn't her fault she didn't have nice clothes. She didn't get paid enough to buy nice things. She had to shoplift to get nice things. And she deserved them as much as anybody-more, really, considering people were so mean to her.
Well, she would show Paris Montgomery, she thought, digging through the pile of clothes tangled in the sheets of the unmade bed. She was going to take Paris Montgomery's place, just like she'd taken Erin's place.
Jill knew she could be just as good a rider as Paris if only someone would give her the chance. She had never had a good enough horse, that was all. Her father had bought her a crummy, cheap Appaloosa to ride. How was she supposed to get anywhere in the jumping world on that? She had once written a letter to her mother's brother to see if he wouldn't buy her a real horse. She couldn't see why he wouldn't. He was rich, after all. What was seventy or eighty thousand dollars to him? But she had never heard a thing from him. Cheap bastard.
She'd show him too. She'd show everybody. She was going to be rich, and she was going to ride the best horses and go to the Olympics. She had it all planned. All she needed was a break, and she knew right where she was going to get it.
She pulled a see-through white stretch lace blouse out of the pile of clothes Erin had left behind. Jill had claimed the stuff for herself. Why not? It wasn't even stealing if the other person just left it. She struggled into the top. Even with the stretch, the front gapped open between the buttons. She undid the top three, showing cleavage and black bra. That helped. And it was sexy. It was just the kind of thing Britney Spears wore all the time. That was why Erin had bought it. Erin always dressed that way: crop tops and hip huggers. And guys had always had their eyes on her-including Don.
Jill rummaged through another pile. She came up with a purple stretch miniskirt she'd stolen from Wal-Mart. It had been on clearance, anyway. The store wasn't out that much. She stepped into it and wriggled and pushed and pulled until she had it in place. She had a serious panty line from the too-small thong, but she figured that was a good thing. It was like advertising.
A pair of big hoop earrings and a necklace from the pile of jewelry that had belonged to Erin, and the bangle bracelets she'd lifted from Bloomingdale's, and she was set. She squeezed her feet into a pair of platform sandals, grabbed her purse, and left the apartment. She was going to show everybody, and she was going to start tonight.
L andry sat at his desk feeling like an asshole, scrolling through pages on the computer screen. Friday night, and this was what he had going on in his life.
It was Estes' fault, he thought, scowling. He had let that become his mantra for the day. Like a thorn, she'd gotten under his skin to irritate him. Because of her he was sitting at his desk reading old newspaper stories.
The squad room was mostly empty. A couple of the night-shift guys were doing paperwork. Landry's shift was long over, and the other four guys he worked with had gone home to girlfriends or wives and kids, or were sitting in the usual watering hole drinking and bitching, as cops are wont to do.
Landry sat at his desk trying to dig something up on the horse people. Neither Jade nor his assistant had a criminal record. The groom who was allegedly fucking Jade had been picked up a couple of times for shoplifting, and once on a DUI. She had struck him as trouble, and he'd been right about that. He didn't believe she'd been with Jade Thursday night, but she'd felt compelled to give the guy an alibi just the same. Landry had to wonder why.
Did the girl know Jade had been involved in letting Michael Berne's horses loose? Had she done the job herself, and by giving Jade an alibi, given herself one as well? Maybe Jade had put her up to it. He seemed too sharp to risk pulling a stunt like that himself. If the girl got caught, he could always deny knowledge of what she'd been up to. He could say it was a misguided attempt to gain his approval.
Michael Berne certainly believed Jade had been behind the incident. Landry had interviewed him in the afternoon, and he'd thought Berne was going to cry or choke as he blamed Don Jade for all the problems in his life. What had Paris Montgomery said? That Berne blamed Jade for everything except his own lack of talent. Berne seemed to think Jade was the Antichrist, responsible for all evil in the horse business.
Maybe he wasn't all wrong.
Estes had told Landry about Jade's past the first time she'd come in, the schemes to kill horses for the insurance money. No one had touched the guy for any of that. Jade had slipped out from under it all like a greased snake.
Insurance fraud, killing horses-what might Erin Seabright know about any of that, Landry wondered. And why wasn't she around to ask?
He had put a call in that afternoon to the Ocala authorities to see if they could locate the girl up there, and he had put out an alert for all law enforcement officers in Palm Beach County to be on the lookout for her car. She had probably split town for a new job or a new boyfriend, but in case she hadn't, it wouldn't hurt to cover the bases.
And if anyone asked him what the hell he was doing, he would say it was all Estes' fault, he thought irritably.
He sipped his coffee and glanced over his shoulder. The night guys were still into their paperwork. Landry tapped a couple of keys and brought up a newspaper account of the Golam brothers' bust, two years prior. He had read it earlier in the day, knew what was in it, knew exactly the paragraph his eyes would go to: the paragraph that described narcotics detective Elena Estes hanging on the door of Billy Golam's truck, then falling beneath it. She had been dragged fifty yards down Okeechobee Boulevard, and was hospitalized in critical condition at the time the story had been written.
He wondered what she must have gone through since that day, how many weeks, months she'd lain in a hospital bed. He wondered what had possessed her to jump on that truck and try to wrestle control of it from Billy Golam.
Narcs. Cowboys, every last one of them.
Two years had passed. He wondered what she'd been doing all that time, and why she'd come out of the shadows for this case. He wondered why her life was crossing paths with his.
He sure as hell didn't want the trouble that came with her. But there it was. He'd taken the bait. He was on the case now.
It was all Estes' fault.
J ill ran out the front door of The Players, huffing and hiccuping, fat tears spilling down her cheeks with a dirty stream of black mascara. She swiped the back of her hand under her running nose, then scraped a stringy strand of hair back out of her eyes.
The valets stood off to the side, staring at her, saying nothing. They didn't ask if they could get her car, because they knew by looking at her, she wouldn't have a car worth letting them park. They parked cars for beautiful people, rich people, thin people.
"What are you looking at?" Jill snapped. They looked at each other, smirking. "Fuck you!" she shouted and ran, crying, across the parking lot, falling off one platform sandal and turning her ankle. Stumbling, she dropped the beaded handbag she'd stolen at Neiman Marcus, and the contents spewed out of it across the pavement.