High in Trial (16 page)

“Two forty-six, apartment A.” I hesitated. “Probably best if you let me do the talking.
I mean, don’t mention the dogs.”

“Because you’re not really going to leave them with him.”

I slid a glance his way. Like I said, sometimes he saves me a lot of time explaining.
“I just want to talk to him. He probably knows by now he’s under investigation. If
he really values the dogs—and I know he does—he’ll have a plan for someone to take
care of them.”

We pulled into a parking space next to a dusty red SUV with a border collie sticker
in the rear window and a bumper sticker that read “Faster Than a Speeding Border Collie.”
I could see dog crates in the back. Miles left the windows cracked for the dogs, even
though the morning was still cool, and we got out of the car in front of Neil’s apartment
building. Cisco pressed his nose through the opening in the back window, looking offended
to be left behind, and I smiled at him. Then I said to Miles, “Hey.”

He glanced at me.

“Thanks for coming with me.”

He smiled then and dropped his hand to my shoulder. “You’re buying breakfast,” he
said.

We went up the walk and I pressed the buzzer to apartment A. While we waited for an
answer, I looked at Miles and said, “So what happened to wife number one?”

He shrugged. “She got tired of flirting. I got tired of fighting. We both moved on
to bigger and better things.”

I pushed the bell again. We waited.

Miles said, “Maybe he’s not here.”

I nodded toward the parking lot. “That has to be his car.”

He looked at me meaningfully. “Maybe the police got here before us.”

I frowned and punched the bell again. We waited.

Miles said, “You don’t think he did it, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“The dog, right?’

“Right. He knows how valuable she is. He trained her from a pup. He wouldn’t just
let her run loose like that.” I could see skepticism in his eyes, so I added, “You
have to know dog people.”

Miles knocked loudly on the door. “There aren’t too many lawyers who could win with
the you-have-to-know-dog-people defense, so I hope this guy has an alibi. And I hope
you have a backup plan, because it doesn’t look like he’s home.”

He started to turn away, but I held up a hand. “Wait. I think I hear someone inside.”
I knocked again. “Neil?” I called. “Neil, are you there? I want to talk to you about
Bryte and Flame.”

A chain rattled on the inside, there was some fumbling with the doorknob, and the
door swung open. Neil leaned against the doorframe, blinking at us slowly in the gentle
morning light, his pupils the size of dimes. His hair was crumpled and his complexion
pasty, and his right hand was wrapped in a heavy gauze bandage. I barely noticed any
of this, though. I was too busy staring at the blood spatters on his tee shirt.

~*~

FOURTEEN

Three hours, forty-six minutes before the shooting

N
eil said, “Who the hell are you?” His voice was thick and somewhat slurred, and he
swayed a little on his feet. I noticed for the first time that he was propped up by
a crutch and the right leg of his jeans was neatly split from thigh to ankle, revealing
a heavy white cast at the knee.

I said, completely disoriented, “Um… maybe we’ve come at a bad time…”

“I’m Miles Young and this is my friend Raine Stockton,” Miles said, speaking over
me. “We met yesterday at the dog trial, but you probably don’t remember. We’ll just
come in for a minute. Here, let me give you a hand there. Looks like you had a rough
night.”

Miles urged me forward with a firm hand on my back, and I couldn’t help staring at
him as I stepped over the threshold. Sometimes the guy can really surprise me.

All Miles murmured in response was, “We came this far. You weren’t really planning
to leave, were you?” Then he turned to Neil, assisting him with the crutch. “These
things can be tricky. There you go.”

We entered a living room that was dark and sparsely furnished: a couch, a flat screen,
a bean bag chair, and a small plastic, outdoor-type table that held a laptop, a stack
of
Clean Run
magazines, and some empty beer cans. It smelled, as most bachelor apartments do,
of dirty laundry and stale pizza. Neil, with Miles’s help, collapsed on the brown-striped
sofa, and I glanced around until I located the kitchen. I rinsed out a glass from
the pile of dishes in the sink, and filled it with water. I heard Neil saying, “Who
are you again? Damn painkillers.”

I brought him the water and sat gingerly on the far end of the couch, leaning forward
to remain in his line of sight. Miles sat on the arm of the sofa beside me. “What
happened to you?” I asked, and my concern was genuine. “Are you going to be okay?”

He focused on me with the effort of a swimmer pushing his way to the surface. “I know
you,” he said at last. “You’re the one who caught Bryte yesterday. I didn’t thank
you. I’m sorry. Yesterday… was a hell of a day.”

“That’s okay,” I assured him. “Is this…”—I gestured to his knee—“because of the fall
you took yesterday?”

He looked at me for a moment, slow to comprehend, and then gave a short bark of laughter.
“In a way.” He took a thirsty gulp of the water. “Look, I just spent twelve hours
in the emergency room. I already told the police everything I know. You said something
about my dogs. Are they okay?” A sudden alarm brought cognizance to his eyes, and
he pushed himself forward, wincing at the pain. “He didn’t try to hurt them, did he?
She didn’t let him get to them?”

I said quickly, “Flame and Bryte are fine.” He sank back against the sofa, and I added,
“Who? Who would try to hurt them?’

“The same guy that did this to me.” He closed his eyes. “Big fellow, blond hair, gray
shirt. I told the police. God, my head is spinning. I can’t keep them here. He might
come back. I’ve got to talk to Marcie.”

I glanced at Miles. Sometimes I can read his mind, too. I let him say it. “So the
police have already been here…”

He dragged a hand over his face, as though trying to reestablish circulation. “Yeah.
Last night. Yesterday. Some time, I don’t know. I told them I’d never seen the guy
before. I opened the door and he pushed his way in here, swinging a lead pipe. Broke
my hand, then my knee. Then he said something like, ‘That ought to do it,’ and walked
out of here as calm as you please while I lay there screaming on the floor. Son of
a bitch.”

“What about Bryte?” I said. “You said you were taking her home with you yesterday.
Was she still here?”

He shook his head and fumbled for the water glass. “I never got her out of the fairgrounds.
Marcie promised we’d work out a deal after the trial. I guess…” He took another gulp
of water. “This is it.”

I looked at Miles in confusion. He gave me a silent shrug.

I said, “What time was all this?”

“I don’t know. Four o’clock, maybe. It was almost dark by the time the ambulance got
here. I kept passing out trying to get to the phone.”

I was really hurting for the poor guy, but Miles was more practical. “And you just
got out of the hospital this morning?”

He nodded and took another drink of water. “They wanted to keep me a few days, but
I don’t have insurance, and…” He shrugged. “The dog training business doesn’t exactly
make you rich.”

“Tell me about it,” I murmured sympathetically.

“That’s why I couldn’t really blame Marcie for what she did.” He went on, talking
now almost as though to himself. “But to borrow money from people like that… Her problem
is that just because she’s got a law degree, she thinks she knows everything. The
main thing she knows is how to wiggle in and out of the law without getting caught,
if you ask me. I always knew there was something a little off about the way she did
business and who she did it with, but I never thought she’d risk the dogs.” His voice
fell a bit. “I don’t think she meant to, not really. That doesn’t make it right, what
she did, but even she has limits. She couldn’t have known it would come to this.”

I was completely lost, but Miles seemed relatively unsurprised. “So Marcie got in
over her head, borrowed money from these, er, business associates…”

“She helped them put together some kind of deal. They said if she ever needed a favor…
She said she didn’t know it would get so complicated, but how stupid could she be?
She knew what kind of animals they were.”

“And you think that’s somehow related to what happened to you last night?”

“Think?” He gave a dry snort of disgust. “I know. She as much as told me so yesterday.
These dudes are into some seriously sleazy stuff. Video gambling, prostitution, loan
sharking, all kinds of racketeering… They killed one guy that tried to narc on them
over in Surreytown.”

I twisted around to stare at Miles. His face was unreadable. “So let me guess,” he
said. “They kept raising the interest, she couldn’t pay…”

“Nah, it wasn’t the money they wanted. It was the win. The dogs. I was the trainer.
She was in charge of everything else. She ran this game like a business. For her,
I guess it was. She said that’s the way to win. Maybe she was right.”

“So,” I said carefully, trying to understand, “these people, these bad people, they
wanted your winnings from the Standard Cup?”

“Not just that,” Miles answered for him, and Neil didn’t object. “They were manipulating
the odds on all the dogs, all the competitions. That’s the way racketeering works.”

“I didn’t know what she was into, just that nothing good was going to come of it for
me. We have a contract on Flame about sharing the profits, but not on Bryte. So I
figured if I blew the run with Flame, I’d be out of our agreement, and whatever I
won with Bryte would be mine. Like I said, I didn’t know what kind of people she was
mixed up with. She broke down and told me everything yesterday afternoon, and I was
furious, of course. I just wanted to take Bryte and get out of there, but I’d never
seen her so scared. After she almost lost Bryte, after you caught her, she begged
me to help her, to hang on for just a little while longer. She promised she had a
plan, and it would all be over in a matter of days if I’d just cooperate. We’d been
together for a long time. I didn’t know what else to do. I said I’d go through with
the rest of the trial and we’d figure something out. Guess somebody else figured something
out first.”

I felt as though I was on a speeding train, with pieces of the puzzle flashing past
like scraps of scenery through a window. “But,” I managed, “you left the dogs with
her. How could you do that?”

“The dogs are assets,” Miles assured me. “They wouldn’t hurt the dogs.”

It seemed to me that Neil had been an asset, too, but that hadn’t protected him. I
didn’t know what to think, much less say. It all sounded like something out of a B-grade
movie, and none of it made sense. None of it. Gangsters, loan sharks, thugs breaking
people’s kneecaps. Was he hallucinating? Was I? Was it all some kind of very bizarre
and not-at-all funny joke?

There was absolutely no sign of mirth on Neil’s slightly gray face, and when I glanced
at Miles, all I saw in his eyes was dark concern. One thing was certain. If Neil had
been in the emergency room all night, he could have had nothing to do with what happened
to Marcie. And if any part of what he said was true, the police were by now pursuing
a very different tac
k
indeed. While I was sure they would be around to talk to Neil again sometime today,
they clearly hadn’t been here since taking the report on Marcie’s assault. Neil didn’t
even know his former girlfriend was now lying on a slab in the morgue in what was
very likely the same hospital he’d just left.

I took a breath and said, “Listen, Neil, the reason we came here was to tell you
that… well, Marcie was in an accident last night.”

His eyes opened and he stared at me blearily. Comprehension was vague in his eyes,
if present at all. “Accident? Is she okay?”

Oh, I hated this. I shouldn’t have to do this. I didn’t want to do this. And for once
I felt nothing but profound gratitude that a man was there to step in for me and take
over.

“She’s dead,” Miles said gently. “I’m sorry.”

Neil swallowed hard, staring at him. “I don’t understand.”

I really, really didn’t see the point in going over the details. I could hardly stand
to think about them, and it wasn’t my place. I said, “The police are investigating.
I’m sure they’ll send somebody to talk to you.”

“Dead?” he repeated. His hand was shaking as he wiped it over his face, as though
trying to clear the fog that clouded his comprehension. “How can she be dead?”

I said, “I’m really so sorry. So sorry you have to hear it like this.” Miles placed
his hand briefly upon the small of my back in a bracing gesture. I took a breath and
plunged on. “What we’re trying to find out,” I said, “is who is responsible for taking
care of the dogs. Since you can’t,” I added quickly. “Aggie and Ginny from the agility
club said they’d drive them back home and keep them until… until someone can come
get them, but since you’re the co-owner, they need to know if you have another agreement.”