Forged (Gail McCarthy Mystery) (14 page)

"Where was I?" Confused for a second, I rubbed my forehead. "I guess I was stitching up a horse for Tracy Lawrence? Why?" I asked, as premonition dawned.

"Tracy Lawrence was murdered last night. Shot through the head. Sometime during that window."

"My God." I sat down abruptly at my desk. I was aware that the detective was watching me narrowly, I knew that I was no doubt a suspect, but I didn't really care. "I should have made her leave," I said slowly. "I should have. Was it Sam?"

"Sam Lawrence has not been arrested," the detective said formally, as he got out a notepad and pen.

I had lost all desire to protect Sam, or anyone else for that matter. All I wanted was that the killing stop.

"Tracy told Sam she was leaving him for Dominic. Last Friday, the day Dominic was killed. Ever since then, they were at each other's throats, or that's what it looked like to me. Tracy admitted that she was somewhat afraid of Sam. I tried to get her to leave, even tried to get her to come home with me. She wouldn't. Poor Tracy."

"Why didn't you come forward with this information?"

"I meant to," I said miserably. "I meant to. I thought I might see you when I got home, you had said you might come by, but by the time I finally did get home, you'd already left. And Tracy ..." I swallowed. "I didn't leave her place until after eight. She must have been killed right after I went."

The detective said nothing, merely nodded in an encouraging way.

"Sam wasn't home then. I remember noticing that his truck wasn't there."

"Did you see anyone?"

"No," I said. "But it was dark. There were trucks and horse trailers parked here and there in the barnyard, but I didn't see any people. That's not saying much, though. A dozen people could have been hiding there and I never would have spotted anyone." I shivered. Had Tracy's killer been lurking in that barnyard as I drove out?

"Where did you go after you left Tracy Lawrence?"

I recounted my visit to Sandy McQuire and my arrival home at ten-thirty.

"And after that you stayed home?”

"That's right." No more calls, thank God.

Detective Johnson looked down at his notes and then up into my eyes. "I'll need to ask you to come down to the office with me and make a statement."

I sighed. "I'm not surprised. I seem to have been Johnny-on-the-spot at two murders in a row." Two almost certainly connected murders, I added to myself. I just hoped that the detective would hit on some connection besides me. "Just let me tell the office staff that I'm leaving."

Ten minutes later I was seated on the passenger side of the dark green sheriff's sedan as Detective Johnson drove us downtown. I'd canceled all my calls for the day, having no idea how long this would take.

Several hours, it turned out. Once we were seated in a bare little interview room and the tape recorder had been flipped on, the detective took me through my call to Tracy Lawrence step by slow step. Next we went through my earlier call out to Redwood Ranch, and finally we recapped my discovery of Dominic Castillo in the hay barn. All in excruciating detail. It was noon by the time we were done.

Exhausted and depressed, I arrived back at the clinic in no mood to do any work. I didn't even walk into the office. Instead I hitched my truck to the spare horse trailer we kept for emergencies, gave Mr. Twister a little IV painkiller to make the trip easier for him, and loaded him up. As I expected, he hobbled gamely into the trailer on three legs and looked at me calmly.

I petted his forehead as I tied him in the front of the trailer. "I'm taking you home, fella," I said. "To a nice place. You'll like it there."

And he seemed to. There were the usual long, rolling snorts as he greeted the other horses, the pinned ears and the sudden squeals. All routine. Each horse asserting his claim to dominance.

I put Twister in the small pen I'd made for him and promised him that once he healed up, he'd have a big corral like the others. Then I sat down on a hay bale and watched the horses for a while.

It was so soothing, like wind in the trees, or light on water. The animals pricked their ears, stared with curiosity, ambled from here to there, switched their tails, rolled in the dust, and all in all behaved like horses do. I watched them as though I couldn't get enough, like a thirsty man drinking cold water. Or a poison victim swallowing the antidote.

I watched the way the muscles moved under the shiny hair coats, the way manes and tails lifted in the breeze, the particular cadence of a relaxed walk. I especially watched the calm, interested, aware eyes, the lively and yet docile expressions. I watched until all four horses had assumed classic resting poses under the oak trees, heads a little low, one hind leg cocked. At that point I climbed off my bale and walked up the drive.

Letting Roey out of her pen, I took a tour of the garden. So much to see, and all of it a welcome contrast to the sterile gray precincts of the sheriff's office.

Every day a new rose was in bloom. Today it was the aptly named Reve d'Or-Dream of Gold-twining through the posts of the porch and proffering butter yellow blossoms to mingle with the lavender wisteria.

And then there was the magnificently huge salvia bush called Tequila, spangled all over with firecracker red flowers. Not to mention its smaller relative, Maraschino, with blooms of exactly that hue. Pale pink jasmine and lavender heliotrope wreathed the railing of the stairway and filled the porch with their scent. An especially beloved rose draped itself alongside the chair where I usually sat; Etoile de Holland offered huge, voluptuously scented flowers-rich dark red in color, silken, full and elegant in form, always a comforting presence.

I sat in my chair and inhaled the sweet damask perfume of the rose, Roey at my feet. A hummingbird whirred through the air to perch on a branch beside me. As I quieted myself to observe, I could see tiny gray bushtits fluttering in the oak tree nearby, could hear and see a chickadee chirping as he tugged a bit of fluff free from a manzanita bush, watched a red house finch warble his song from the peak of the porch roof.

Sun shone, a little breeze flickered through the leaves. Slowly, slowly the heavy, leaden weight began to lift. Things were as they were. I couldn't change them. Tracy was dead, but Nature still sang its endless lively song. Someday I would be dead, too, but the song would go on.

As I watched, the quail clucked uneasily; my chickens squawked a warning. In another second, a bobcat stepped from the nearby brush and paused to look around. I drew in my breath and glanced down at the dog. Roey's nose was on her paws; her eyes were closed. She hadn't a clue the bobcat was there.

A young bobcat, I thought. Much smaller than some I'd seen previously, he was only a little bigger than a domestic cat, though considerably taller in the rear-end. His short, smooth coat was golden brown, cougar color, and he had some white fur on his belly. His ears were distinctively pointed, like a lynx's, and his stubby tail twitched.

To my surprise, my flock of chickens, having spotted the bobcat, too, not only burst into louder squawks but also charged in the direction of the predator. Led by Jack, the senior rooster, the army of chickens ran screeching and flapping toward the cat.

Holding perfectly still, I waited. The bobcat stared at his potential attackers in the detached way of his kind; I fully expected him to select a victim from the herd and grab it. However, perhaps because he was young or caught by surprise, he turned tail. First walking, then trotting, he retreated from the noisy chicken attack and vanished up the hill into the brush.

I grinned. It was amazing, the things I saw out here. The animal world, like the plant world, was infinitely surprising, constantly fascinating. I could spend several lifetimes just sitting on my porch without getting bored.

Imagine seeing the chickens chase a bobcat. Of course, I reminded myself, I'd occasionally seen quail chase my domestic cats in defense of their chicks. And like the bobcat, the cats had run. The ways of Nature were mysterious and wonderful.

Looking out over the garden, I let my mind open up, allowed myself to think about things I'd been pushing away all day. What strange pattern had I been drawn into with Dominic's murder? In what sense was Nature operating here? Was I an accidental element or a pivotal point?

I had no idea why I was involved or if I really was involved at all. The whole mystery surrounding Dominic seemed to have nothing to do with me, and yet here I was virtually present at two murders, which apparently centered on Dominic Castillo. What could it possibly mean?

Like chickens chasing a bobcat, the events were inexplicable, almost unbelievable, and yet they had happened. Even if my presence was strictly a coincidence, I was, in some sense, involved. I sat in my familiar chair, on my pleasant porch, my dog at my feet, and cast my mind back on all my past interactions with Dominic. What was I missing? Nothing, absolutely nothing, came to mind. And yet the notion that I had twice coincidentally stumbled upon murders that were connected seemed equally unbelievable.

Unless ... I sat up straight. Unless the fact that the first murder had happened in my barn was indeed chance, but my appearance at the scene of the second was not. I had been called out to Redwood Ranch, after all. To stitch up that odd cut. A cut-I took a deep breath-that looked as it if had been made with a knife. What if, in fact, it had been?

Slowly I settled back down in my chair. Gazing out over my garden and the horse corrals, I rested my eyes on the ridge to the east. A spring wind tossed the blue-green eucalyptus tree crowns so that they sparkled in the sunshine. I breathed. And I thought.

I was still sitting there thinking when Blue drove in. Roey trotted down to greet Freckles and I stood up. Stiffly, very stiffly. How long had I been sitting here, I wondered. At least a couple of hours.

Walking down the hill, I helped Blue feed the animals and filled him in on the day's sad events. We stood for a while, side by side, admiring Twister while he ate. I told Blue about my ruminations on the porch.

"And," I finished up, "I have an idea. It's not much of an idea, but it's the best I can come up with."

"What's that?" Blue asked.

"I think I was set up to be a suspect at that second murder. I think someone slashed that palomino horse's throat so that Tracy would call me out.

"Poor Tracy. My God. But Blue, I've gone over it a million times in my head, and I don't know what I could have done differently. I did try to help her," I said.

"It is very sad." Blue put his arm around my shoulders. "And I believe that you did what you could do. We can't force other people, no matter how much we want to, you know. She had to make her own choice."

"I know," I said softly.

"Do you think Sam killed her?"

"I wonder. It occurred to me that if Sam killed Dominic here at my barn, he had to have some way of finding out that Dominic was out here. The easiest way would have been to call Barbara and ask her. She would have known where Dominic was. I thought I might ask Barbara if Sam called with a question like that."

Blue said nothing, just watched me steadily.

"And," I went on, "if that's the case, and if Sam did plan on killing Tracy, then maybe he cut that horse's throat just as he left the ranch, knowing that Tracy would find it that way when she fed and that she would call me out. He must have guessed he'd be the number-one suspect if Tracy was murdered; maybe he just wanted to create another possibility."

"It makes a kind of sense," Blue said. "If anything about this whole deal makes sense. Are you going to share this with your friend the detective?"

Bending over, I picked up a stalk of hay and twirled it between my fingers.

"Yes," I said finally, "you're right. That's what I'll do. I'll tell Detective Johnson what I just told you and leave him to it. He can call Barbara. That's his job, not mine. I might have done some good if I'd told him about Sam and Tracy earlier, but I didn't. This time I will." Slipping my arm through Blue's, I added, "I'll call the detective first thing in the morning, I promise. And now, maybe, just maybe, you'll make me a margarita."

"Will do, Stormy."

And we walked up the hill together.

FIFTEEN

The next day Barbara King disappeared. The first I knew of it was when Detective Johnson pulled in my driveway at seven o'clock that evening, preceded by a crescendo of barking from Roey and Freckles. I was sacked out on the couch, feet up on a stool, praying for an emergency-free evening; Blue was sauteing chicken thighs with olive oil, onions, lemon juice, and capers. The smell was intoxicating, mingling with the spring air drifting through the open windows.