Sarah Armstrong - 02 - Blood Lines (15 page)

“Something’s not right,” I said.

“Doc’s on his way,” Mom said, warily looking over Emma Lou.

“I’m going to keep walking her. You talk to her, Maggie,” I said. “Keep it calm.”

Maggie nodded, swallowed hard, and then said, “It’s okay, Emma Lou. It’s all going to be okay. You and your baby will be just fine.”

We stayed like this, pacing the yard, comforting the horse, until Doc’s pickup pulled in. “Give her to me, Sarah,” he instructed. “I need light.”

Relieved, I handed over the lead. We followed as he walked the horse to the shed. After examining her, he said, “She hasn’t dilated. Contractions, but unproductive.”

“Is the foal okay?” I asked.

“As far as I can tell,” he said. “Let’s leave the mare alone and see what she does.”

Doc slipped off the gear and stepped back. Emma Lou grunted once, twice, and then lowered her bulging body onto the thick blanket of straw. One, two, three contractions, then they subsided. As each wave hit, the mare instinctively panted.

Maggie’s arms tight around my waist, we watched, waiting. Soon the edge of the milky placenta could be seen, and then delicate front hooves, followed by spindly front legs. We held our breath as Doc coaxed the foal out with a firm yet gentle tug. Once he’d freed it from the placenta, the fragile, all-black creature lay on the straw, alarmingly limp.

“Is it all right?” Maggie whispered. “It’s not breathing.”

“Shush,” Mom scolded. “Maggie, let Doc do his work.”

Absolute quiet. So quiet I heard the beating of my own heart.

Finally, the soft rustle of the foal’s breath ruffling straw. I smiled at Maggie, and she and Mom laughed, the first crisis past. All the while, Emma Lou lay on her side panting, as if recovering from a long run.

“Isn’t the foal beautiful, Mom?” Maggie asked. “She’s so tiny.”

“Not a she a
he,
Maggie,” Doc said, down on his knees, inspecting the newborn. “You know, he looks all right, skinny but all right.”

“A colt?” Maggie said with wonder.

“So, he’s healthy?” I asked.

“I can’t say for sure, Sarah,” Doc cautioned. “We won’t know for a while yet.”

The colt was more delicate than any I’d ever seen. So thin, its legs appeared little more than bone, too lean to support even its meager weight. Yet, Emma Lou stood and nuzzled him, and the foal stirred. The newborn pulled his head up and gazed at his mother, then about the shed, inspecting the disheveled crew gathered to welcome him into the world.

“That’s good that he’s popped his head up, Mom,” Maggie said. “Isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said. Yet weak, the tiny horse quickly lay back down. Emma Lou prodded again at her tiny offspring, alternately nudging it with her nose and licking it. But the foal lay still. “Do you have a name for him?” I asked Maggie.

She’d picked Glory for a filly but never announced a colt’s name. Faced with the task, Maggie stared down at the little creature. Breathing softly, he looked like a preemie, with a silky, thin, and short coat, his ears floppy. A funny little animal, but a precious one.

“Give him a courageous name, Maggie,” Mom said. “One that sounds like a survivor, because that’s what he needs to be.”

Maggie nodded. Emma Lou pushed against the colt’s head, still resting on the straw, urging it up, as Doc grabbed a towel. “Get the wheelbarrow, Nora,” he ordered as he worked the towel over the creature’s thin frame. “I don’t want him suckling off the mare until we’re sure she’s kicked the infection. We need to move him.”

Mom did as instructed, but as we lowered the colt into the
wheelbarrow, Emma Lou let loose an insistent whinny. That was her colt, she seemed to say. Where were we taking it?

“Let’s put him in a stall and bring the heat lamp,” Doc ordered, covering the little guy with a clean beach towel. “Put it on low. Just enough to warm him.”

As Mom and Doc wheeled the colt away, Emma Lou’s dark eyes flared and she reared up and snorted.

“It’s all right,” Maggie cried out. “Warrior will be okay. I’ll watch him for you.”

“Warrior?” I repeated.

“Like Gram said, Mom, something brave.”

I reached the stable with a baby bottle of defrosted and warmed first milk, high in antibodies, that Doc had supplied, just as the little guy raised his head, peering about his new quarters. I gave the bottle to Maggie, and she cautiously put the nipple near his mouth. Disinterested, Warrior turned his head to look at us.

“Brush the nipple over his lips, Maggie,” I suggested. “Let him smell the milk.”

She did, but nothing. The colt made no attempt to latch on. At least ten pounds below a healthy foal, our new charge didn’t appear to have the desire to feed. Doc shook his head.

“What’s next?” I asked.

“We wait and watch,” he said. “The colt should stand soon and eat. If not . . .”

Doc didn’t finish the sentence, and none of us asked him to. Maggie, Mom, and Doc stayed with the colt, while I returned to Emma Lou. I thought about how empty she must feel, after giving birth and watching as her firstborn was whisked away. I sat on a chair, right outside the shed door, where she could see me, and before long fell asleep. When I awoke, the sun wasn’t yet up and Maggie peered at me. She had tears in her eyes.

“Oh, no, Magpie,” I said. “Is it Warrior?”

She nodded, and I thought the worst, but she said, “He’s standing, Mom, and feeding, and Doc says he’s small, but he thinks he’ll be all right.”

A
t the ranch the following morning, Maggie slept in. There wasn’t any talk of school. She was too exhausted. Considering how the previous night could have turned out, all was relatively well. Tired and fidgety, Emma Lou paced in the shed, no doubt missing her colt. Meanwhile Warrior hungrily slurped a full bottle of milk. The colt’s vital signs, at least so far, were promising.

As I drove into Houston, David called from his office at the Federal Building, to update me on his efforts on the Collins stalking case, following up on leads generated by the subpoenaed Internet records. He offered no more hope than the day before. Each lead the FBI traced brought them to yet another Internet resender, a Web site set up to process and forward e-mails. Each new resender had to be served with a separate subpoena, and each resulting lead took David and his computer forensic team to yet another shadowy link in a long chain. Argus had done his homework. He knew how to use the Internet to hide his identity, and he hadn’t made any rookie mistakes to help us find him.

David said he’d keep following the trail, and report in later that day.

The tape on Billie Cox’s office door appeared undisturbed when I arrived midmorning with a signed subpoena and a two-man crime-scene team. A full week after her death, we now knew she’d been murdered, and I had a couple of potential motives: one, love gone wrong; the other, a complicated oil well scam. Which, if either, would lead to the murderer? I didn’t have a clue.

My best shot at moving the murder case forward was finding evidence in either Cox’s office or home. Gilberto Torres, our office’s resident computer geek, went right for Cox’s desk. There was no plan to examine Cox’s computer on-site. Everything we collected would be taken to the lab adjacent to our offices. He got busy unhooking the printer and the keyboard from the desktop computer. “Make sure you bag and fingerprint the keyboard. And take everything, including the printer,” I told him. “We’ll want to verify that the suicide note was printed here.”

Torres nodded. Then, something else occurred to me. “While you’re checking that computer out, try to figure out how it turns itself on,” I said.

“Turns itself on?” Torres repeated, giving me a questioning look.

“Yeah,” I said. “It has a habit of doing that.”

“Oh, okay,” Torres said, looking just a little doubtful. “We’ll take a look, Lieutenant.”

Meanwhile crime-scene specialist, Kerry Adkins, an angular woman with dark brown skin and a shaggy wig that sat just the slightest bit off-center, giving her an unbalanced look, photographed, bagged, and collected anything that looked vaguely like evidence. She and I searched Cox’s desk, hoping for something important I’d missed the day before. I instructed Adkins to watch for anything associated with the Stanhope Field, along with calendars or business di
aries, anything that would document Cox’s schedule. She had to be meeting with the mystery man sometime, and she might have included something, anything on her schedule to point us in a direction.

In the back of my mind, I mulled over what if any involvement her brother-in-law, Grant Roberts, had in the murder. Early that morning, the subpoenaed information had come in from the real estate lockbox company, showing that his computerized key wasn’t used the entire day of Billie’s death. As soon as I finished executing the warrants at Cox’s office and house, I planned to drop in for a follow-up with Faith’s husband. I was curious to find out how he’d maintain his alibi, that he’d previewed houses up for sale all that afternoon, when he didn’t access a single key to get inside one.

“Over here, Lieutenant,” Adkins called out. A meticulous woman with a reputation for being as tenacious about gathering evidence as a squirrel stockpiling for winter, she held a black loose-leaf binder in her hands.

“Copies of Cox’s expense reports,” she said.

“Log them in. They’re going with us,” I said. While Adkins worked on the desk and Torres boxed up the computer, I inspected the credenza behind the desk, pulling out books, a few office supplies, and a pair of worn running shoes. I held them up, looked at the soles, and saw dirt wedged into the tread.

“Bag these, too,” I instructed Adkins. “Get the dirt analyzed.”

Two hours later, we left Cox’s office with seven brown paper bags and six boxes full of potential evidence. On our way to Cox’s River Oaks mansion, I called and checked on Maggie and the horses. Mom said all three were resting well. At least for now, everything at home was under control.

Figuring it had already been a week and not wanting to get the entire neighborhood gossiping, I hadn’t sealed Cox’s house with crime-scene tape the night before. If anyone was going to clean up
evidence, they’d already had plenty of time. Instead I called Faith that morning and asked her to meet us there with the keys. When I rang the doorbell, she answered.

“This is the search warrant I told you about,” I said, handing it to her.

“Lieutenant, you didn’t have to do that,” she protested. “I would have let you in. I want you to find Billie’s killer.”

“I know,” I said, not mentioning I was less sure of her husband’s motives. “This is just easier, since we were already getting one for her office.”

Faith nodded, and we walked inside the house.

“I want you to show us Billie’s bedroom,” I said. “Where she died.”

We followed Faith across the white marble floor and up a winding staircase with an ornate metal banister to the second floor, where we took a walkway that overlooked the two-story entry on one side and the living room on the other. When the passageway split off, Faith turned to the left and took us to the first door, then removed a key from her pocket and unlocked the door.

“You’ve had the bedroom locked?” I asked. “How long?”

“Since the evening Billie died,” she answered. “I didn’t know why I wanted everyone to stay out, but maybe I knew even then that she’d been murdered and there could be evidence.”

“So no one has been in there?”

“Not that I know of. Not since the paramedics and police left,” she said. “I have the only key.”

“Thank you,” I said. “This will help.”

After putting on shoe protectors, a cotton mask, and latex gloves, Adkins went in, while we waited in the hallway. She had the video camera, and she made her way around the room slowly, recording everything as she found it, zeroing in on anything that on first blush smacked of being potential evidence. The floor was a
dark oak with Persian rugs scattered about, so there was no thick pile and nothing visible that resembled a footprint. Still, she videotaped the floor, using oblique lighting, a flashlight held at an angle. She found no footprints.

That done, Adkins videotaped the dressers and an antique ar-moire, with a big-screen television hidden inside, even the tissue box next to Billie’s bed. When she’d finished videotaping, she shot digital stills of the room. Lastly, she focused on the bed, still covered by the tapestry bedspread, speckled with blood. Facing the bed, the headboard to the right bore a fanlike pattern of high-velocity blood spatter and brain matter, caused by pressure from the gun’s explosion forcing gas through the wound track. After sitting for a week, the spatter had aged brown, barely visible on the dark wood. When Adkins finished, she searched the perimeter of the bed. After a few moments, she motioned toward me.

“Take a look at this, Lieutenant,” she said.

Similarly suited up, I walked in. Adkins had sprayed the floor a foot from the left side of the bed, about three feet from where the body lay, with a colorless liquid, Fluorescein, a chemical that detects latent bloodstains. We put on orange goggles, and Adkins set up the ALS, the alternative light source, a device in a square aluminum box, the size of a DVD player, with a 400-watt, high-intensity bulb at the end of a long flexible wand. She then set the meter on the ALS, turned on the light, and pointed the ALS at a small Oriental rug, all in shades of beige.

“Notice anything?” she asked.

With the goggles on, it didn’t take long before I saw a bright yellowish-orange glow on the rug. But not on all of it. One section appeared clean. “You found a void?”

“Yup. Nothing in this section right here. Someone was standing there, I bet,” she said, aiming the flashlight at the point closest to the bed frame.

“Make sure you photograph that before we move anything,” I said. Thinking about Cox’s body at the morgue, I added. “The entry wound was on the victim’s right side. That’s the angle.”

Adkins nodded, and I walked back out to the hallway, careful where I stepped. Fifteen minutes later, she’d bagged the rug and marked off a section of floorboards without spatter. Later, we’d send someone in to cut that area out of the floor. “Okay, you can come in now,” she called out.