Chapter Nine
1
Kazmaroff picked up his notebook and stared at his handwriting on the page. He glanced at the clock in the squad room. It was a little after ten p.m. Jack should be back from the morgue any minute.
He put his hand on the telephone, debating about whether or not to call and cancel his late date or try to make it.
Burton had been controlled and cold when he arrived at the murder scene.
So what else is new?
But he’d been somewhat vacuous at the same time. After Jack had ID’d the body and questioned the police agent, Kazmaroff had had to remind him where he’d parked his car when it was time to follow the body down to the morgue. He’d actually found himself feeling something--what? sympathy?--for the old bastard.
Suddenly, the door to the squad room swung open and Burton walked in. He looked at Kazmaroff as if he didn’t recognize him.
“You still here? Thought you had plans tonight.”
Had he mentioned his date? He must have.
“You okay?” Kazmaroff hadn’t intended to say it, surprised himself when it came out of his mouth.
Burton seemed to tense up but his reply was noncombative enough.
“Like you said, it sucks.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“Anything else come in?” Jack remained standing, as if he intended to leave quickly.
Kazmaroff stood up and snapped off his light.
“The copywriter at Jilly’s agency called.”
“Kathy Sue.”
“Yeah, she accused Robert Shue of killing Jilly. Said she found the murder weapon in his car.”
“You check it out?”
“As we speak. We can talk to her tomorrow. She’ll keep.”
Burton cleared his throat. Kazmaroff suddenly found himself intensely uncomfortable in the squad room. He began to envision himself out the door, down the stairs, and racing toward his patiently-waiting date in his car.
“Anything on tonight’s murder?” The words were mumbled.
“No, man. We got the tip. Male voice, about where to find her. The coroner says she was...” Kazmaroff hesitated.
“It’s okay,” Burton said, smiling woodenly. “They told me the important bits. Strangled, but not to death. Finished off with a heavy blunt object.”
“Yeah, well, that’s about all I know.”
“She was supposed to meet me at the barn tonight.”
Kazmaroff nodded. He hadn’t known. He wasn’t surprised.
“Doc says she was killed sometime yesterday,” Dave said.
“I couldn’t reach her yesterday,” Jack said.
No one could’ve.
“I’m taking off now,” Dave said.
“Yeah, me, too. I’ll walk out with you.” Burton snapped off the overhead light. The two walked silently to the parking lot and parted without another word.
2
The next morning they questioned Kathy Sue at her apartment.
“I told you it wasn’t me,” she said as she let them in. “You saw the stuff in his trunk? I’m not surprised he killed her. They were having an affair, you know.”
Burton and Kazmaroff moved into the living room but didn’t sit.
“We’re checking it out, Miss Rappaport,” Kazmaroff said.
“The map? Did you see the map? And the muddy boots?”
“Who’s in the kitchen?” Burton asked, still standing.
Kathy Sue snatched up a pack of cigarettes from the coffee table.
“Well, this should end it, right? Have you arrested him?” She asked.
Burton moved to the kitchen and motioned for Ned to join them in the living room.
“I was just bringing coffee, officers,” Ned said, carrying a tray of steaming mugs in his hands. Burton thought the man looked edgy. Hard to tell the reason for it. He and Kazmaroff just naturally made people nervous.
“We’ve got a few more questions,” Kazmaroff said, peering out of the living room window.
“Questions?” Kathy Sue smoked and looked from detective to detective. “You’ve got your man--”
“We have another murder, Miss Rappaport,” Burton said, tightly, “that we believe is connected to the first, and for whom Mr. Shue has an alibi.”
“I don’t believe it!” Kathy Sue looked bewildered.
“Where were you yesterday afternoon from one to six p.m.?” Kazmaroff studied his notebook as he spoke.
Kathy Sue looked helplessly at her fiancé.
“In a client meeting,” she said, finally. “Downtown.” She stubbed out her cigarette in disgust. “Shue was in it, too. Is that his alibi? Me?”
“You and the nine other people in the meeting,” Burton said. “We’d like to ask your fiancé a few questions.”
Kathy Sue snapped her head up.
“What for? About me?”
“With you or without you,” Kazmaroff said, his impatience beginning to show. He got eye contact with Ned. “It’s your call.”
Ned set his coffee mug down and picked up Kathy Sue’s hand.
“Babe?” he said. “Let me have a minute with the detectives. Nothing’s going to happen,” he said, waving away the beginning of her objections. “You go on upstairs and finish getting ready and I’ll see them out. You’re a bundle of nerves, sweetheart.
“Here, take your ciggies...” He handed her the pack of cigarettes and pulled her to her feet. “Go on, honey. Let Ned handle it, okay?”
Kathy Sue gave the policemen one last, distrustful look and began to walk out of the room.
“I don’t care where the bastard was yesterday afternoon,” she said. “I know he killed Jilly. I know he did.”
The men in the living room waited while she climbed the stairs. Burton remained standing. Kazmaroff sat and took a sip from one of the coffee mugs.
“Hey, this is good,” he said.
“Colombian roast,” Ned said. “I grind it myself.”
“How long were you sleeping with Jilly?” Dave asked.
Ned didn’t answer. He picked up his own coffee mug but didn’t drink. The silence grew among them.
Finally:
“It was just the one time,” he said, staring into his coffee.
“Does your fiancé know?”
“I confessed everything.”
“I thought Jilly Travers was such a nasty slime-bag?”
Ned shook his head.
“She was.” He looked at Kazmaroff as if expecting more sympathy from his direction. “She was also very seductive.”
“She seduced you?”
“I take full responsibility for my behavior,” Ned said firmly. “Kathy Sue has forgiven me and it’s in the past.”
“How recently in the past is it, Mr. Potzak?” Burton spoke quietly.
“Months ago,” Ned said. “Maybe five months ago.”
Kazmaroff stood up.
“And your own where-abouts yesterday?”
Ned licked his lips.
“I was at work,” he said.
The detectives moved to the front door.
“Then you don’t have anything to worry about,” Burton said.
3
Burton got into the passenger side of the car, surprising Kazmaroff. He buckled himself in and stared straight ahead through the windshield.
“What do you think?” Kazmaroff asked as he started the car up.
Burton shrugged. They drove in silence for a few miles.
“Check out his alibi.”
“Obviously.”
“I’m going back to the barn.”
Kazmaroff frowned.
“What for?”
“I’m going to retrace the route of the ride that the three women took when Jilly disappeared.”
“We did that, man.”
“Not from horseback.”
“You’re going to...?” Kazmaroff accelerated on the entrance ramp to Georgia 400. “You want company?”
Burton turned and looked at his partner.
“You ever been on a horse?”
“Everyone’s been on a horse.”
“Not these kind of horses. They’re not as understanding as the rent-a-ponies at the amusement parks. I’d end up carting you back in a make-shift stretcher.”
“It’s nice to know I wouldn’t be left on the trail.”
Burton looked at Kazmaroff.
Is something happening here? Dave was behaving a lot less obnoxiously these days.
The thought sort of made him nauseated.
“Just drop me at my place,” Jack said. “I need to pick up a few things.”
“We’ve never talked about...you know...Tess.”
“What’s there to say?”
“Well, for one, like, why was she killed? Who did it? How is it connected to Jilly’s murder?”
“It’s connected.”
“I think so, too,” Kazmaroff said. “If the same person killed Tess that killed Jilly, then maybe Jilly was killed for a totally different reason than just being the biggest bitch on earth.”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“So, who did they know in common? And what were they into?”
“I think the key is the horses,” Burton said.
“But that just doesn’t make sense,” Dave said. “How could a horse--unless it was a triple million dollar stud or something--be the cause of two violent murders?”
“Don’t forget Margo,” Jack said. “She was nearly killed herself. All three attacks are connected to the barn.”
“Maybe we should get her some protection.”
“That’s a good idea. Do it, will you? This is my exit.” Burton pointed to the exit ramp.
“What about Shue? We did find lots of interesting evidence that he’d been to Bon Chance.”
“Dave, he was screwing Jilly; naturally he’d been at Bon Chance. On the basis of the evidence we found in his trunk, we’d have to suspect any one of forty boarders at the barn. We didn’t find a murder weapon, did we?”
“You know we didn’t.”
“We need to have Travers picked up,” Burton said.
Kazmaroff picked up his cell phone and tossed it into Burton’s lap.
“Police harassment or a warrant this time?” he asked.
Burton picked up the phone, trying to decide how he felt about how it got there, and finally punched in the number for HQ.
“We don’t have to decide right away,” he said.
4
He hadn’t slept the night before.
Dana had called from Florida and seemed surprised to find him there. The conversation had been brief and, although pleasant, unpleasurable for both of them. She would stay in Florida through Thanksgiving.
Jack tossed his Dockers onto the bed and pulled on the jeans he usually wore to work in the yard. November had finally shown itself with a bite in the air this morning that hadn’t dissolved as the day continued. He pulled on a clean sweatshirt and made himself a pot of coffee.
Outside on the back deck, he stood drinking the coffee, observing the birds in his back yard. He watched the nuthatches bob along the ground, looking for something to peck at, and heard the big old pileated woodpecker drill into the far side of the dead sourwood tree at the middle of his yard. He watched the tree closely to catch a glimpse of the showy woodpecker.
She must have seen something, he thought. She must have seen the murderer when she went back to the clearing. He took a long, scalding sip of his coffee.
And possibly the murder itself.
The woodpecker peeked from around the tree looking like a segment from a Woody Woodpecker cartoon. He disappeared again and began his rat-a-tat-tatting noise even more loudly.
If she was killed because she saw Jilly’s killer, then she kept quiet about it because she knew Jilly’s killer. For some reason, she hadn’t felt endangered by him. Burton forced an image of Travers to mind. It just seemed so unlikely to him that that wimp could have killed two women with his bare hands.
A rose-breasted grosbeak performed a touch-and-go on the chain-link fence Burton shared with his neighbor, then disappeared into the tree branches.
If she wasn’t killed because of something she knew or saw, then the second murder could only mean one thing:
They had a serial killer on their hands.
Burton tossed the dregs of his coffee into a bush below his deck and put the mug down on the old, splintered picnic table on the deck. He waited for the woodpecker to reveal itself again. The bird was still thumping wildly away; the sound seeming to reverberate in the morning air, like a mini-construction crew at work in the back yard.
This was no serial killer. Her murder was a clean-up murder. A messy detail tidied up from the first murder. She had seen too much; and now she would never be able to speak too much. The pileated woodpecker flapped noisily away, and Burton watched him settle onto the roof of his neighbor’s split-level. The jack hammering began again.
Was it only Monday when he had seen the sandhill cranes? When he had pointed out their lovely flight to Tess?
Tess.
The name came to him in a slow, snaking rhythm of pain and hunger. He sat down hard on the edge of one of the picnic table benches with the sheer force of it.
My God, how could I have lost you?
Jack covered his face with his hands.
5
Portia loaded her brush with ochre and touched it delicately to a piece of paper towel to disperse some of the color. She studied the sky on her paper, waiting for the azure-blue to dry just a bit more before adding the yellow. Too much too soon would spoil it all. Finally, she added the brush stroke of dull yellow and watched the colors mingle and meld in the winter sky. She snatched up a clean brush and held it, poised, over the paper in case corrections were needed. But no, the colors were getting along just fine. A smile came to her lips as she watched her painting.
“Ms. Stephens?”
Portia held her smile and looked up. Her maid stood in the doorway to the sun room, a load of pressed shirts in her arms.
“Yes, Juanita?”
“There’s a policeman to see you.”
6
Margo hung up the phone. She looked around her office, her eyes resting on the group photograph, picking out Tess from the crowd. She stared at it for a few seconds, then hoisted herself to her feet and hobbled to the door.
“Jessie?” she called.
“Yes ma’am?” The reply was cheery, nearby.
“Stop calling me that, you little shit, and go get Best-Boy tacked up. Western saddle, long stirrups. He’s going for a ride.”
7
An hour later, Jack stood in the darkened, late- afternoon barn. The sun filtered in through the wooden slats overhead, making brief oblongs of bright light dance and jiggle on the sawdust floor. The mourning doves cooed and waddled the ground outside.
He walked down the center aisle of stalls until he came to the stall of Tess’s appaloosa. He paused, noticing the plaque that read “Wizard. T. Andersen.” The horse moved from the back of his stall and jutted his face out over the gate. Jack put his hand up and instantly the horse nuzzled it, nickering softly.
“He’ll miss her, too,” Margo said as she walked down the aisle behind her. “I saw you drive up. Just takes me awhile to do the meet-and-greet these days.”
“You needn’t have bothered,” Jack said, without turning around.
“He’s a real sweetie,” Margo said, patting the appaloosa’s neck. “One of the best in the barn. You could ride him, if you’d rather.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He’s real gentle--”
“Is Best-Boy ready?” Jack turned away from the stall and faced Margo.
“Yeah, sure. He’s up at the upper barn.”
“Look,” Jack said, running his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I know you loved her. I’m sorry...”
“It’s okay,” Margo said. “You loved her, too.”
For a moment, the two stood in the quiet barn, listening to the sounds of the sparrows in the rafters and the mice in the tack trunks.
“Come on,” Jack said, finally, walking away. “Let’s do it.”
8
Jessie stood quietly, holding the mammoth horse’s reins in one fist, watching Margo and Burton approach.
“Okay, boy,” she said quietly to the horse. “Just a little bit longer now.” She nodded to the pair as they got closer.
“Hey, Detective,” she said. “He’s all ready for you.”
“Thanks, Jessie,” Jack said, eyeing the huge animal.
“Bill said a part of the fence is down along the western pasture,” she said to Margo.
“Bill?” Jack patted Best-Boy’s neck and checked the girth to make sure it was tight. The horse seemed wired. Very alert and energetic. Burton hoped he could handle him after all.
“Bill Lint,” Margo said, patting the horse’s rump. “He’s an idiot but helpful. He’s the groundsman for the polo field,” she added.
“Yeah, and he stinks, too,” Jessie giggled. “He eats garlic all the time and you can smell him over the dung and the horses from about a mile away.”
“Anyway,” Margo said to Burton. “Just be mindful that there’s a gap there, and take it slowly. There’s some spots on the trail that take concentration.”
“Tess said she and Portia and Jilly took the whole ride at a trot,” he said.
“I’m sure she did,” Margo said, shaking her head. “Told you that. Anyway, who knows? Maybe they did. Jilly and Tess are...were great riders, and Portia has no sense. Maybe they did. Just watch what you’re doing.”
“And this baby, here, doesn’t like water,” Jessie added. “You’ll need to push him over the creek.”
Burton imagined himself, on the ground -- hands on the monster’s large rump -- pushing him across a creek bed.
As if reading his mind, Margo leaned forward and pulled out a small crop from Best-Boy’s saddle.
“Just give him a couple taps with his behind the girth.” She placed her hand on the animal’s lower flank. “And let him feel your heels at the same time. He’ll cross the water. No problem.”
“Why the Western saddle?” Jack asked.
“Safer. You don’t mind? It won’t affect the ride or what you see along the way.”
Jack gathered the horse’s reins in one hand, positioned his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle.
“Once you get past the first fork after the polo field, just follow the trail,” Margo said. “You’ll be fine.”
Jack touched his hand to an imaginary cap in salute, and turned the horse away from them.
“He’ll be fine,” Margo repeated as she watched him go.
Jessie turned and gave her an odd look.
9
Burton walked Best-Boy out the open gate to the pasture and slowly, down the fence line of the pasture. He felt his legs alongside the huge animal’s sides and tried to relax, blowing air out through his mouth. Best-Boy felt bouncy and energetic under him, and Burton found himself wondering when he had last been exercised. Maybe Margo was right and Wizard had been the more sensible choice? He gripped the reins tightly, then reminded himself to relax. Maybe Dancer?
Before long, the pasture brought him to the choice of two paths and he turned down the one to his right. Immediately the trail began to narrow, with foliage and bushes crowding in closer.
Burton urged Best-Boy down the narrow trail, cringing in spite of himself at the leering branches of the bordering poplars and sycamores. They raked his jacket and jeans as he passed.
Had the three women really chosen this path for a pleasure ride? It looked, if not impassable, at the very least, unpleasant. Further to his right, the trail plunged down into an ugly ravine of rocks and trail garbage--trash bags, a discarded washing machine, and a few soft drink cups, their straws still jutting out of the lids like tiny exclamation points. He kept his eyes directed between his horse's ears, afraid to influence the beast's sense of balance by leaning over. A misplaced foot in this shiny mud would bring them both down the twenty foot drop. An image of the two thousand-pound animal landing on him came unhappily to mind.
It was annoying to Burton, rather than reassuring, that his horse seemed unaware that this trail was something less comfortable or safe than any other. Best-Boy responded to Burton's riding commands--a light thigh squeeze, a tentative touch of heel to flank--with begrudging but resigned obedience. Nonetheless, the detective felt grateful for the security of the big western saddle. It straddled the Clydesdale’s back like an awkward yet comfy easy chair.
The limbs of the shrubs and saplings reached out from both sides of the trail, at varying heights, to inhibit his progress. As he trudged through the congestion of limbs, Burton gripped the reins tightly in one hand and pushed the more aggressive branches back with the other.
Suddenly, the tunnel of branches ended and he came upon the bank of a small, muddy creek, which separated him from a glowing opening of sunlight and space: the clearing where the murder had occurred. The gelding shook his head and slowed to a stop as Burton sank his spine stiffly into the saddle.
He thought of the nerve-wracking trail he'd just escaped. He had walked it at a slow gait. Tess and Portia had reported that they and Travers had taken it at a brisk trot. After the argument, the two had left a furious and unrepentant Jilly to return to the stable. One by one--first Portia and then Tess--they had retraced their steps back to the home barn. An hour later, Best-boy had returned, riderless, to the barn.
Jack squeezed with his thighs, pushing the horse forward into the water. He forced himself to stay relaxed. Best-Boy picked his way daintily across the little stream without any hesitation. He seemed eager to reach the other side, however, and scrambled up the small, sloping far bank, surprising Jack and nearly unseating him. They left the creek behind and stepped into the clearing.
He had been here many times before, of course, but had never seen it from this height. He walked its perimeter on Best-Boy, looking through the trees. He spotted a bald eagle and moments later, an indigo bunting. He didn’t bother studying the ground--so far below him. It had been thoroughly searched and examined by his men.
He sat in the middle of the clearing, recreating the murder in his mind, trying to fix where Jilly and Tess had stood arguing on horseback. As the afternoon waned, so did the warmth from the sun. He pulled his blue-jean jacket close around his throat and pointed the horse back to the creek.
A feeling began to niggle in the back of his mind when he turned Best-Boy around for the return trip to the barn. He let the feeling alone, neither shaking it away or attempting to drag it front and center. It would explain itself in due course. Instead, he turned around in the saddle and imagined, yet again, Jilly and Best-Boy standing in the clearing next to Zanzibar and Portia, Wizard and Tess. Jilly would’ve been higher than the other two, of course. Himself, he felt agitated, yet relieved, after the harrowing pleasure trail, but the three experienced riders would be feeling...what? Exhilarated? Bored? Nothing?
They were arguing among themselves, he reminded himself. Or at least Jilly and Tess were. He developed a picture of Portia sitting primly on her gelding, staring happily at the Georgia pines rimming the clearing while her companions exchanged insults.
Tess...
Burton felt his stomach clench. He saw her in his mind’s eye, her golden hair streaming out from under her black velvet rider’s hat. Another part of him, the Detective, knew she would’ve had it pinned up or tied back, but he insisted on the other image. He saw her face frowning at Jilly while she kept Wizard on a short rein, perhaps prancing in agitation around Best-Boy while the two riders argued.
Doesn’t her own murder absolve her? he found himself wondering.
She couldn’t have done it. She fought with Jilly, yes. She lied to me out of fear and insecurity. But then someone killed her...the same someone who...
Burton shook his head in an attempt to banish the thoughts. It was no good. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He wasn’t trying to learn something new here. He was trying to set up evidence for a theory he already believed, a theory he had to believe. If Tess knew something...knew the murderer... and hadn’t told Burton...
This was stupid, he thought, struggling to push down the emotions that seemed determined to bring him weeping to his knees.
Why didn’t you talk to me, Tess? Why didn’t you tell me what you saw? I would’ve saved you. Why didn’t you trust me?
He pushed thoughts of her away, and instead concentrated on the feeling of the sun on his shirt back, the cold breeze playing with his hair. He tried to feel how the three women must have felt that afternoon. To have made that treacherous thirty-minute, conversation-inhibiting, trail ride---single file, butt to nose--only to arrive at a nonpicturesque clearing that they must have seen many times before, and then to argue bitterly among themselves.
A faint scent of rotting earth wafted across the breeze. From where he sat, towering above the bushes and clumps of trampled grass, he could easily see the beginning of the trail that marked the circular route back to the barn. It seemed less traveled--if that was possible--than the one he had taken to arrive at the clearing. Although it was a more logical trail for the three to have returned to the barn by, both Tess and Portia had insisted that they hadn’t taken it, but had turned back and followed the trail they’d come by. Now, faced with the prospect of returning to the barn by the way he’d come, Burton again experienced the niggling in his mind. This time it rushed to the forefront in a dramatic display of instinct.
The women hadn’t returned to the barn the way they said they had.
He suddenly knew this as clearly as if he’d just watched a videotape of them entering the mouth of the circular trail.
It wasn’t a logical or natural option, to return via the way he’d come. It was an ugly trail and--if the map they’d been given earlier was correct-- was a less direct way back to the barn. Burton moved toward the new trail.
Why had he and Kazmaroff simply accepted their word that they hadn’t taken this trail? Because it looked, at first glance, to be impassable or difficult? He twisted in the saddle and looked at the opening of the trail he’d just ridden on. It flowed into the clearing with few trees or branches flanking its sides, giving the impression that the whole of the trail was like that, open and spacious, green and pretty. Burton knew differently.
He turned back to the new trail. Perhaps this was just as deceiving in looks, he thought. He gave Best-Boy a squeeze with his knees and the horse entered the trail without hesitation. Narrow at first, the trail soon widened comfortably. There was room now for a canter or even a gallop if one had a little riding skill, Burton thought.
He re-ran his memory tapes to find the reason the women gave for not taking this trail. He put Best-Boy into a trot and rode the bounces and jolts comfortably in the big saddle, without bothering to try to post. The trail widened further and the red clay and grass soon turned into hard-packed dirt. Burton slowed when he saw tire marks join the trail.
Of course! This is where the groundskeeper lives, Lint. Burton rode further down the trail until it emptied into another clearing, much smaller this time. Parked under the pine and spruce trees was a dilapidated, but clearly inhabited trailer.
Burton stopped his horse.
And we dismissed this bit of information as being unimportant.
Why? he wondered as he dismounted. First, because Lint had an alibi, provided by Margo who swore she was in conference with the man during the time of the murder. And, second, because his footprint hadn’t matched the one they’d found at the murder scene.
Burton kept his horse’s reins tightly in one hand as he approached the trailer. So Lint had been eliminated as a suspect, and the two women believed because, after all, they were women and their expressing distaste at having to ride near where an odious old retard lived seemed perfectly legitimate to a couple of male chauvinist dunderheads like him and Kaz.
Yet Burton knew, without doubt, that this was the way Portia and Tess had come.
He tied Best-Boy’s reins to a bush, ignoring Margo’s earlier warning that these horses were not Western ponies and the rules of Bonanza did not apply. He crept silently up to the trailer.
As he neared, he could hear muffled voices rising and falling naturally in conversation. He peered through the dirty window of the trailer and immediately saw Bill Lint, his back to Burton, working at a small hot plate. The man was short and stocky. His shoulders seemed muscular through his thin plaid shirt as he stirred a frying pan on the coil. Quickly, Burton looked around the trailer interior for Lint’s companion. She sat quietly on the couch, across from the window. Burton caught his breath. Not only was the woman completely naked, she was staring directly at him. One hand supported her head in a casual display of insouciance -- a head covered in long blonde hair and coated in large, brown splotches of dried blood. She didn’t move, her long eyelashes didn’t blink or flutter.
Lint continued to converse brightly as he cooked. Burton stood up slowly from his crouching position and stared in horror and mounting nausea at the woman seated on the couch.
It was Jilly.