“Then what happened?” Kerney asked.
“Mary Beth took on the characteristics of a hysterical, wronged woman. She tried every ploy to get Jack back, including stalking him for a time.”
“Did she make any threats?”
“Not that I know of.”
“How was the situation resolved?”
“When Jack rejected her advances, she mutilated herself with a knife by cutting her arms and then called for an ambulance to take her to the hospital. The doctors diagnosed her as a borderline personality. Jack paid for her medical care, sorted out her disability benefits, and got her into a group home for mentally ill adults. She met another patient there and fell in love with him. They’ve been living together ever since they moved out of the group home.”
“How do you know all this?” Kerney asked.
“Partially from Jack, but Mary Beth’s lover is my new gardener. I’ve only employed him for a couple of months. His name is Kurt Larsen. He’s much older than Mary Beth and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“Where can I find Mary Beth?”
“They live in an apartment complex run by a mental health clinic.”
“I know the place,” Kerney said.
“I’m sure you do.”
“Tell me about Larsen.”
“Kurt is quiet but pleasant, except when something triggers his war experiences. Then he becomes agitated, out of sorts, and drinks heavily. When he comes to work sullen and hungover I always know that he’s had one of his episodes. He’s a Vietnam veteran, an ex-Marine.”
“You’ve been very helpful, Fletcher,” Kerney said as he went to the sink and rinsed out his coffee cup.
“I’d like to say it’s always a pleasure to assist the police,” Fletcher replied with a rueful smile. “But this is so very sad. I must do something to help Norman get through this.”
Kerney nodded in agreement. “I may need to talk to you about this again.”
“Of course, as you wish. But you can’t just jump up and leave until you agree to bring your lovely wife here for dinner. I think it would be best to do it before the baby arrives and you both become totally preoccupied with the exhausting tasks of parenthood. Are you free Friday night?”
“That should work,” Kerney said.
“You must promise not to be called away on some pressing police matter.”
“I’m on vacation.”
Fletcher raised an eyebrow. “Really? One would hardly know it.”
Kerney laughed. “No police business, I promise.”
“Perfect. I’ll pull out my cookbooks and start menu planning. We’ll have a grand feast.”
“As always,” Kerney said.
“Neither Mary Beth nor Kurt strikes me as a killer,” Fletcher said.
“Killers come in all flavors,” Kerney said, as he patted Fletcher on the shoulder and left to the soft sounds of Beethoven.
In his unit, he got on the horn to Sal Molina and gave him the rundown on Mary Beth Patterson and Kurt Larsen.
“Well, at least now we’ve got something to follow-up on,” Molina said.
“No luck at the crime scene?” Kerney asked.
“Not so far,” Sal replied.
Kerney arrived home to find Sara waiting expectantly for him. Their first day of vacation together was to have started with a visit to the construction site of their new house. Up to now, Sara had only seen the photographs Kerney had mailed to her. Last night she’d been excited and eager to see it firsthand. But their early-morning spat had left Sara less than enthusiastic. She nodded curtly when he asked if she was ready to go, walked quickly to his pickup truck, sat looking straight ahead, and said nothing as he wheeled out of the driveway. Feeling guilty about the squabble, Kerney matched Sara’s silence with his own.
Halfway through the drive, Sara looked at her hands, twisted her wedding ring with her thumb, and asked about the homicide.
Kerney gave her a brief summary. “It could be a tough one to solve,” he said in conclusion.
“You were so long getting back, I thought you had abandoned our plans for the morning,” Sara said.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Kerney replied. “I stopped by to talk to Fletcher. He had some interesting information about Jack Potter that might prove helpful.”
“You could’ve sent a detective to meet with Fletcher,” she said flatly, her eyes still fixed on the road ahead.
“Yes, but I wanted to cool down a bit,” Kerney said. “Besides, seeing Fletcher got us a dinner invitation at his house for Friday night.”
“If we’re talking to each other by then, I suppose we should go.”
“Aren’t we talking now?”
Sara squinted against the sunlight and lowered the visor. “Not really.”
They left the highway and drove the ranch road to the cutoff that took them through a pasture on their new property and up toward a long ridgeline. Kerney had spent several weekends improving the road with a borrowed grader, spreading and packing vast amounts of gravel to make it usable year-round. No longer rutted, narrow, and rocky, it climbed gently to a large sheltered bowl below the crest, where several low courses of new adobe walls stood on the recently poured concrete pad.
Sara made no comment about the road, nor about the red prefabricated galvanized steel horse barn that had been erected a good half a mile from the house. She was out of the truck and moving toward their contractor, Bobby Trujillo, before Kerney set the parking brake and killed the engine.
Trujillo met Sara halfway across the open field. Together they walked around the outside perimeter of the partially raised adobe walls, inspecting the work in progress. Kerney decided to let them go on without him and took a hike in the direction of the horse barn to check on Soldier, the mustang he’d trained as a cutting horse.
Soldier had been pastured at Dale Jennings’s ranch down on the Tularosa for the past several years. Two weekends ago, after the barn and corral were completed, Dale, his boyhood chum and lifelong friend, had brought Soldier up by trailer along with his own mount. The two men camped out on the property overnight and covered all of Kerney’s two sections-twelve hundred and eighty acres-by horseback the following day.
It had been Kerney’s best weekend away from the job in several months. Dale had left shaking his head in wonder and amusement at the beauty of the land and its magnificent views of the distant mountains, the size of the house Kerney was building, and the fact that his old buddy had put up a six-stall barn that for now would serve one lonely animal.
The corral gate was closed and the stall door was open, but Soldier wasn’t inside the arena or under the covered shelter that ran the length of the barn. Inside the corral, Kerney inspected the water trough and freestanding hay rack he’d filled yesterday before leaving to pick up Sara at the airport. Both looked untouched. He glanced into the empty stall, which he’d purposely left open to give Soldier access to the corral. The interior gate to the center aisle was closed and latched.
Kerney stood in the corral and did a three-sixty looking for his horse. He was nowhere in sight. Kerney doubted Soldier could have gotten out without assistance. He’d carefully padlocked all the other exterior doors to keep rodents and other small animals from gaining access.
He walked around the barn. Except for Soldier’s stall it was secure. He unlocked the barn doors, pushed one back, and saw Soldier lying on the concrete pad that ran the length of the center aisle. He stepped in and inspected the animal. Soldier had been shot three times in the stomach and left to die. In his death throes, he’d kicked and dented the steel wall with his forelegs. Blood from the wounds had stained the concrete and soaked into the dirt floor in front of a stall door.
Because he was starting out with just one animal, Kerney had jokingly named the spread the One Horse Ranch. Now it wasn’t even that anymore. He bent down and stroked Soldier’s head. He’d been a fine horse, a smart horse. Who would do such a thing? And why?