One Hoof In The Grave [Carriage Driving 02] (13 page)

“So you inherit the farm?”

“Of course I do. Unless Daddy changed his will recently, Sarah Beth gets a bunch of cash, and probably the condo in Atlanta. Maybe even the house on Jekyll Island. But the farm was always going to come to me.”

So she thought she knew the provisions of her father’s will when Sarah Beth swore
she
didn’t. Geoff made a mental note to check with that lawyer quickly.

Stan said he’d heard that at the show Raleigh threatened to disinherit Dawn. Maybe he was always threatening, but never made good on his threat. If she thought that this time he was serious, however, she might have wanted him dead before he could do it. She was her father’s daughter. She’d fight for what she wanted.

Without evidence of anyone besides Raleigh in the dressage arena before Merry, he and Stan Nordstrom had been working under the assumption that Raleigh had been driving his horses alone.

Merry had told him that putting to a four-in-hand of high-strung warmbloods wasn’t easy.

Raleigh could have done it, but so could Dawn and a number of other people. What if Raleigh hadn’t been the one to harness the horses and put them to the carriage? What if someone else had been driving them? If Raleigh had seen his carriage and team loom up out of the fog, with Dawn or someone else on the reins, he’d have hot-footed it across the arena to find out what the hell was going on.

Maybe two people were involved in the murder—one to decoy Raleigh with his own carriage, one to waylay him at the edge of the woods and kill him. Armando’s alibi had better be solid.

Merry said the fog dampened sound. Even if Raleigh had shouted, the sound might have been swallowed up, or simply ignored.

Could Dawn have done the job alone? If she’d taken his team without permission, Raleigh might have dragged her off the box in a rage. He was big and tough, but even big men overbalance. She might have tripped him so that he fell face forward. If she had the stake ready and waiting, she could have driven it into his brain before he’d had time to react.

He wished Arnie at the Atlanta medical examiners’ office would finish the autopsy. Even with a high profile case, the results might not be in for days, possibly a week. Tox screen and DNA results would take longer.

If Raleigh had been drugged, or if there’d been blunt force trauma, he’d have been easier to get down on the ground. The ME hadn’t noted bruising on the skull in his initial exam, but if the skin wasn’t broken, and there was no blood, he wouldn’t necessarily have seen anything at the scene. The bruises wouldn’t show up on the skull until he’d removed the skin.

“Agent Wheeler?”

He looked up, realized he’d let his mind wander. “Sorry. I’m told you assist in your father’s development company.”

She snorted like an annoyed mare. “Assist, my ass. I have a Wharton MBA, and I’ve been going to the office with my daddy since I could walk. I don’t
assist
. I
run
the business, and I plan to continue running it.”

“I thought you were going to run
this
place.”

“That too. Most of the time I can work from here. When necessary, I drive to Atlanta. One thing my daddy could do was pick staff. My barn manager Martin Brock handles the day-to-day operations, oversees the staff, and has for fifteen years. Daddy fired him at least once a week, but knew he couldn’t get along without him. They go way back.”

Changing tack, hoping to catch her off guard, he asked, “Why do you think your father was such a bastard?”

“I beg your pardon? Is that a proper question?”

“Everyone I’ve met says he was an SOB, including you. Has he always been like that? Must have made for an interesting childhood.”

She sank back, put her booted feet onto the coffee table—a polished slab of old-growth walnut tree—and thought for a minute. “People who knew him when he was just starting out say he was always tough and willing to do anything to get what he wanted, but he wasn’t mean, not the way he got later. We used to have good times, family times. Then when I was eight, momma got breast cancer. She was dead in six months. I don’t think Daddy ever got over it.”

“He loved her?”

“Yeah. I think he maybe actually did.” She waved a hand. “I don’t know if he’d have kept on loving her if she’d lived. It’s easy to love a memory, but nobody ever measured up to her. He was too damn mad at her for dying to grieve for her, so he nailed every female who’d lie still long enough. Trying to replace her, I guess. My first unofficial stepmother lasted less than six months.”

“Where is she now?”

“In Hawaii on a sugar plantation with a richer man than Daddy and three kids. Daddy didn’t legally remarry until Sarah Beth.”

“Why did he marry
her
?”

Dawn laughed. “Have you
looked
at her? She’s sweet and smart and good-natured, and until he got ahold of her, she was happy. That’s another thing, he liked to go for women who were happy, at least on the outside. Women in good marriages or relationships. Then he’d love ‘em and leave ‘em as miserable as possible. That was my daddy. Good ole Giles.”

“You have excellent insights,” Geoff said.

“My MBA is in finance. I had a double major at Emory. Business admin. and psychology. Four point oh in both, by the way. I hoped I could figure out my life and fix it, then make my own fortune. So far it hasn’t happened, but I’m working on it with Armando.”

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Brock. Do you know where I could find him?”

“Sure. He’s in the carriage barn.” She stood. “Far end of the stable. Trust me, if Brock wanted to kill Daddy, he’d have done it years ago.”

Martin Brock was tall, thin,
and looked as though he worked out. He had a shock of gray hair, weathered tan skin, and the easy grace of a cowboy. Geoff guessed he had to beat women off with a stick.

“Mr. Brock,” Geoff called. He extended his hand as he walked to meet the man. “I’m Geoff Wheeler of the GBI. Can we speak? I have a few questions about Mr. Raleigh’s murder.”

“Can’t it wait? I’m busy. I got axles to repack.”

Geoff raised an eyebrow and gave a pointed glance at the two men kneeling on a plastic tarp beside the front wheel of a marathon cart. “I imagine they can do without your supervision for a couple of minutes,” he said.

“Oh, hell, come on.” He strode off through a door in the back wall. Inside was a small office, not as big nor as plush as the office where he’d found Dawn, but strictly utilitarian with file cabinets, a big laptop, printer, and combination fax. Except for driving bits hung from hooks on the walls, there was nothing horsey about the room.

Brock sat behind his desk in an office chair that looked as though it had given up stuffing to the local mouse population. Geoff took the hard chair on the other side.

“Ask away, but make it quick. I don’t know a damn thing about Giles’s murder. Makes my life a damn sight more complicated.”

“How so?”

“Dawn and I respect one another, but we’re not exactly bosom buddies. If that Armando guy decides to take over running the place, I could be out of a job. And that includes the guesthouse I live in. Jobs like this don’t come easy. So, if you’re looking for motive, I don’t have one.”

The man was tense, as if waiting for a blow to fall. And there was fear behind his eyes. What was he afraid of? Losing his job and his guest house? Or going to prison for murder?

“Miss Raleigh says her father fired you regularly. Several people heard you arguing on Saturday at the marathon.”

Brock pushed his gray hair back with gnarled fingers. Geoff had noticed that most horse people, including Merry, had at least a couple of twisted fingers that had been broken and healed crooked.

His heavy hair fell back across Brock’s forehead. “You must ‘a heard we fought all the time. Whenever he was pissed at something—which was pretty much all the time—he took it out on the closest person. That was usually me. We both learned over the years to ignore him.”

“We?”

“Him and me. After he cooled down, we never mentioned the fight again.”

“Ah. So things were fine between you?”

“As fine as usual. He was in a good mood Saturday night.”

“I heard he fought with Dawn at the marathon.”

Brock shrugged. “That was nothing. Thing is, except for that, he was real cheerful. Now,
that
was scary.”

“Any idea why?”

Brock shook his head. “Must have screwed somebody over. That generally made him happy.”

“How hard is it to harness the four-in-hand alone?”

Brock blinked at the change of subject, but after a moment’s thought, he said, “Not hard. Complicated, maybe, but whatever Raleigh was
personally
, he could handle a horse.”

“How would you go about it?”

Brock tipped back in his chair and templed his hands over his flat belly. “Lemme see. We were using the stalls at the end of the stable farthest from the house. Nobody close to us. That’s the way he liked it. Nobody had any reason to go down there. We laid everything out and prepared the carriage on Saturday, so it was standing ready for the horses to be put to.”

“Also at the far end?”

Brock nodded. “If I was gonna do it alone, I’d fasten the harness on the horses in their stalls.”

“Dangerous?”

“Not if you know what you’re doing and don’t leave harness loose to be stepped on. Then you lead the horses out one by one—wheelers first—that’s the pair closest to the carriage—and put them to. Cross tie them so they don’t go wandering off while you put the leaders to, attach the traces, pole chains, coupling chain and reins. Usually you have somebody heading them to keep them from moving off, but those horses are trained to stand on command like all good carriage horses. He’d unclip them from the crossties, gather the reins, settle himself in the driving seat and tell them to walk off.”

“How long would it take?”

Brock shrugged his shoulders. “Half, three-quarters of an hour, if none of the horses was feeling uppity. It was barely dawn and kind of foggy even in the aisle outside the stalls, but you could see all the hooks and buckles all right up close.”

“So it was feasible that he was alone, that nobody saw what he’d done.”

“Uh-huh. Though Lord only knows why he would ‘a done it. Makes no sense whatsoever in my book.”

“Could he have been meeting somebody?”

Another shrug. “Maybe. He used that carriage to impress folks. New woman he wanted to lay, banker he wanted to screw out of a line of credit below prime, somebody looking to buy a horse or the whole team—who knows? I sure don’t.”

“Was the team for sale?”

Brock snorted. “All horses are for sale all the time for the right price, but he hadn’t said anything and he loved those ole boys much as he loved anything.”

“Would he be likely to impress a woman at six-thirty in the morning in the fog?”

“Good a time as any. Not easy to get it on in the front seat of a carriage, but, take it from me…” Brock tossed him a grin. “It can be done.”

“You know anybody with a new grudge against Raleigh? Anyone looking for revenge for a horse or business deal that had gone sour?”

“About business, I don’t know. That’s Dawn’s area. Haven’t sold any horses lately. Most people know enough to have any horse they plan to buy well vetted, X-rays and all.”

“Any particular vet?”