Hoofprints (Gail McCarthy series) (13 page)

"There's another thing, too." I met Lonny's eyes. "This may sound corny, but I don't think the Walker guy did it. Call it instinct or whatever you want, but I think he was just startled when I answered that door instead of Cindy, and he ran because he didn't know me. I don't believe he had any idea they'd been murdered."

"Why does the sheriff's department suspect him, then?"

"I'm not really sure." It struck me that Jeri Ward had been deliberately evasive on the subject of the Walker. "At any rate, I'm uncomfortable with the idea that I'm the one who cast all this suspicion on him."

We were silent for a minute and I knew he was thinking of Sara. Sara, his estranged wife, for whom he had done everything he could think of to make it right-and it had still come out wrong. Sara was the biggest thorn in our otherwise-satisfying relationship. Lonny couldn't make up his mind to divorce her, thus ridding himself of half his assets, which included this house and his business, and I couldn't seem to really adjust to the notion that he was still legally married.

Sara herself seemed reasonably indifferent to the whole issue; I'd never met her, but apparently she lived with a doctor somewhere in Santa Cruz, accepted a monthly payment from Lonny, and seemed uninterested in changing the status quo. All in all it was a bearable, if not ideal, situation, but Lonny and I still had occasional brawls over it, whether fueled by his guilt or my jealousy I wasn't sure.

Tugging my mind firmly away from the subject of Sara, I asked Lonny, "Did you know Ed and Cindy Whitney at all?"

"I don't think so. The names don't ring a bell. I take it they were horse people."

"Sort of. Cindy was. Ed was rich. That was his be-all and end-all in life, as far as I could tell. To be frank, I didn't like him."

"Did you like her?"

"Yes. Mostly. She was a friendly, happy, talkative person, and she really loved her horse. I liked the horse, too; that helped. The one thing I had a problem with was her being with him, if you see what I mean. He didn't treat her very respectfully, and I have a hard time with women who let their men push them around."

"I know you do." I kissed him lightly on the cheek. "I'm not sure why you turned out so well, but you're a distinct improvement on most of your sex."

He smiled at that. "In some ways, maybe. Not in others."

I kissed him again, knowing what he was thinking. "It's not a beauty contest, you know."

"Good thing." After that things proceeded in stages, very satisfactorily,to the bedroom. Several hours later I was lying on my side, dozing, Lonny's arm around me.

Lonny's big pinkish beige cat, Sam, was hunkered down on the pillow next to me, staring deeply into my eyes and purring like a diesel engine. Ever once in awhile he'd reach out and touch my face with his paw, very gently.

"Go away, Sam," I told him. He squinted his amber-orange eyes shut in a smile and purred louder.

I sighed. My clothes were scattered around the room and my hair was a tousled mess. I didn't feel up to re-preparing myself for dinner out, but I was starving.

"Okay." I climbed out of bed somewhat reluctantly, driven by my stomach. Eyeing my sweater and pearls, I asked Lonny, "Mind if I borrow one of your old shirts?"

"Don't worry about it," I laughed. "You can clean up in the morning. You just lie there and relax while I slave away."

I padded into the kitchen barefoot, wearing an ancient pink oxford-cloth shirt of Lonny's over my stretch pants, thinking that if I were pregnant, I'd fit the old male chauvinist description of the perfect woman to a T. Funny thing was, I didn't care. Being barefoot and in the kitchen felt pretty good. I wasn't so sure about pregnant.

We had chicken curry and chardonnay-an excellent curry, if I say so myself. The kitchen looked like a war zone and Lonny's shirt had yellow blotches down the front, but what the hell.

As we rolled back into bed together, to sleep this time, I wondered drowsily if maybe pregnant would be okay-with this man, anyway.

ELEVEN

My first call the next morning was down by the ocean-a Shetland pony with a severe colic. The pony was only a little bigger than a St. Bernard dog and as appealing as a stuffed animal--chocolate brown, with a fluffy cream-colored mane and tail. He was a mess right now, though, covered with dirt from constant rolling.

This was a bad sign. Horses with colic want to lie down and roll to ease the pain in their bellies. The trouble is that frantic rolling can cause the intestines to flip over and form a twist, like a hose with a kink. Nothing can get past the twist, and without an operation to remove it, the horse will inevitably die. Colic is relatively common in horses and by far the most frequent cause of death.

I checked the pony carefully. His pulse rate was up and there weren't any gut sounds. Not good. I took a sample of fluid from his abdominal cavity and found it was clear and pale, a sign that his gut hadn't ruptured yet. I couldn't tell if he had a twist or not, couldn't feel any major impaction.

The woman who owned him stood holding him patiently, her face tired and concerned. A small girl half-hid behind her, watching the pony anxiously. Head down, eyelids drooping, the little animal shivered in the cold, wet morning air. The painkilling shot I had given him had taken away his acute distress, but he was still miserable.

I studied his owner. She was a stranger to me, but judging by her appearance and the fairly run-down corral where she kept the pony, I didn't think she had a lot of money. The few questions she'd asked me earlier had revealed she wasn't very knowledgeable about horses. I began a slow, careful explanation of what colic was and the risks involved. "If he has a twist," I finished up, "the only way to save him will be to operate on him, and that means you'll have to haul him to the veterinary surgery center near Sacramento and be willing to spend at least twenty-five hundred dollars. That's what it will cost just to have them operate, even if they can't save him."

The woman shook her head. "I don't have that kind of money." Her eyes fixed on mine, as if asking for forgiveness. "I want to do the right thing for him, but I can't afford that."

"I know. I understand your position. This pony may not have a twist, so we'll give him painkillers and I'll put some oil and fluids in him and come back later this afternoon to see how he is. It's possible he'll get better on his own. If he doesn't, and it looks like he does have a surgical problem, we can talk then about whether to put him down."

The woman looked at the pony sadly. "Poor little guy. He's a great kid's pony. I wish I did have the money to spend on him."

Rubbing the pony's forehead gently, I told the woman to blanket him if she could and not to let him roll, then promised I'd be back that afternoon to check on him.

I got in my truck, hoping the pony would be lucky and make it, but unsure what his chances were. As I pulled onto East Cliff Drive, the sight of a slim sailboat breasting the choppy gray water of the yacht harbor channel caught my eye. The harbor. Bret had said the Walker lived near the harbor. I had an hour before I was due at my next call; it ought to be enough.

The first pay phone I saw was right down by the water, next to the loading dock. I fed it a quarter, breathing in the salt air and the wet wood and varnish smell of the boats. The fog was cold and damp around me, bellied down on the coast for another morning. Gray ocean, gray sky. My finger hovered over the phone buttons.

Terry something, Bret had said, a board-and-care down by the harbor. It wasn't much to go on, but it would have to do. I called the Mental Health Unit at Dominican, the local hospital, and asked for the names and phone numbers of any board-and-care facilities for schizophrenic patients down by the harbor. They gave me two. The first one, called Start, was it.

When I asked to speak to Terry, the female voice on the other end of the line said cautiously, "Is this the sheriff's department?"

"No, I'm a friend." I hesitated, wondering what to say. "Maybe it would be best if I came by." I got directions from the woman, who sounded distinctly reserved about my visit. She probably thought I was a reporter.

I drove the few blocks to 6380 Murray, an older two-story house behind a vine-covered wall, and parked the truck at the curb, cracking the windows for the dog and locking the doors. Though with Blue in the truck, locking it up probably wasn't necessary. Old he might be, but Blue still guarded the truck zealously-one of the ways his ornery, stubborn cow-dog personality came in handy.

Looking around curiously, I approached the Start house. The wooden gate in the wall was unlatched and I pushed it open and crossed a ragged, unwatered lawn to knock at the peeling front door of a turn-of-the-century Victorian. The building was painted white with dark green trim; that was the original intent, anyway; at this point the paint was mostly a memory.

The door was opened by a woman in her fifties with light brown frizzy hair and no makeup, wearing a long, swirling Guatemalan skirt and a matching embroidered blouse, her woolly sock-clad feet stuck into Birkenstock sandals. The sixties look. Still alive and well in Santa Cruz in the nineties, thanks largely to the influence of the university, UC Santa Cruz-one of the most liberally oriented campuses in California.

This woman did not have the glazed, inhaled-too-much-pot-lately expression many of the sixties types did, though. Her brown eyes were aggressive, intelligent, and not particularly friendly, and I sensed she was the voice on the phone and had quickly identified me as her caller.

"Yes?" she said inquiringly.

"I just called you, asking for Terry." I paused, still unsure what to say.

The woman waited, watched me, said nothing. When in doubt, try the truth. "My name is Gail McCarthy; I'm the vet who found Ed and Cindy Whitney's bodies and saw Terry in the garage. I'd like to talk to him."

"Why?"

I locked eyes with the lady. "Because I don't think he did it. I need to ask him some questions."

The woman raised a hand to push her fuzzy hair farther off her brow, and her manner softened a touch. "Terry's in pretty bad shape." She studied me a little more and then held the door open. "Why don't you come into my office for a minute."

I followed her down a dark hall, got a glimpse of a worn but comfortable-looking room with four people in it watching a TV, and was ushered into a small room with a window facing the fog-shrouded yacht harbor. I could just see the spiky rows of masts, black scarecrows in the gray, but I imagined it would be a cheerful view in the sunshine.

Three file cabinets, a desk, and three chairs crammed all the available space in the room. My escort shut the door, squeezed past a file cabinet, and sat down at her desk. "I'm Glenda Thorne," she said. "My husband and I run this place. Have a seat."

I chose a chair and edged into it. Glenda Thorne stared at me thoughtfully. "Is there any particular reason why you feel that Terry is innocent?"

"Instinct, I guess. And it would help if I could get the answer to a question."

"You'd better try your question on me. I don't think you'll get any answers out of Terry." Her manner was blunt, but despite, or perhaps because of it, I had the notion I could trust her.

"I need to know where Terry was the night before last, between ten and midnight," I said, with a directness to match her own.

"You mean the night of the murders? I've already gone over that with the sheriff's department. Over and over it." She rolled her eyes. "I don't know where he was. We don't keep our clients locked up. Terry went out that evening-he often does-and I don't know when he came back. He's always very quiet."

"Not that night. The next night. The night after the bodies were found."

"The next night." Her eyes opened wide and then narrowed, but she answered readily enough. "I do know that, yes. He was here."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. The sheriff's picked him up and questioned him that day. Apparently they recognized him from your description. Ralph, my husband, and I were called down to be questioned and to take Terry home. He, Terry, was a mess. He realized they thought he had something to do with these murders, and he was completely terrified. Since we brought him home, he hasn't left his room. He lies on the bed or sits in the chair and talks to himself. We checked on him two or three times that night, because we were worried about him."

"Well, it wasn't Terry." She said it decisively and gave me an angry look. "He didn't shoot those other people, either, no matter what anybody says. Do you know anything about schizophrenia?"

I shook my head. "No."

"Schizophrenics," she went on, "Terry in particular, hear voices in their minds, voices that sound as real to them as external voices such as yours and mine. These internal voices sometimes, in fact often, convey messages of warning. In the past, Terry's voices have told him that such and such a person was a 'bad man' and that he should defend himself from him. He's been arrested a few times for striking out at people. The sheriff's department is referring to that as a record of violent assault."