Reining in Murder

Book 1: Carson Stables Mystery

by Leigh Hearon

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

When horse trainer Annie Carson rescues a beautiful thoroughbred from a roadside rollover, she knows the horse is lucky to be alive…unlike the driver. After rehabilitating the injured animal at her Carson Stables ranch, Annie delivers the horse to Hilda Colbert--the thoroughbred's neurotic and controlling owner--only to find she's been permanently put out to pasture. Two deaths in three days is unheard of in the small Olympic Peninsula county, and Annie decides to start sniffing around. She's confident she can track down a killer…but she may not know how ruthless this killer really is…

Release date: April 1, 2016

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

She awoke suddenly out of a troubled sleep. The silence within her small bedroom felt deafening.

From across the hall in the kitchen, the Seth Thomas clock bonged the quarter hour. Annie Carson looked up. It was 3:15, a time all smart horsewomen should be asleep.

The clock that marked each quarter hour in slow, sonorous tones was a comfort. The vibrate mode on her cell phone was nothing but an irritant.

“Hell’s bells.” Annie sighed and picked up the offending item. She glanced at the caller ID and swung her legs out of bed. She knew she was going to get dressed, and warmly, too.

“Top o’ the morning to you, Annie,” came the voice on the other end. “We’ve got a live one on Highway 3, Milepost 11. Near rollover with a horse trailer.”

Annie cringed. “How’s the horse, Dan?”

“Scared. But no broken bones or blood—I think. It’s a miracle, but he seems to have survived the crash. Can’t say the same for the driver.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can throw on some clothes.”

“Appreciate that.” Dan clicked off.

“And by the way,” Annie said to the dead connection, “it’s not the top o’ the morning. It’s the middle of the freakin’ night.”

Dan Stetson—aptly named, since his head was about as big as a ten-gallon hat—was the local sheriff in Suwana County. Annie was used to getting calls in the middle of the night from Dan, so it didn’t take her long to pull on her work clothes, fire up her F250 with the three-stall horse trailer attached, and gulp down a cup of reheated coffee while she waited for the rig to warm up. She nodded to Wolf, a mangy Blue Heeler who had thoughtfully placed himself in front of the kitchen door in case Annie forgot he existed. He trotted behind her into the frigid air and leapt, in a single graceful bound, onto the back of the truck and into his open crate.

It might have been late February, but on the Olympic Peninsula the thermometer still dropped into the twenties at night, so layering, the euphemistic word Northwesterners used to describe heaping on silk underwear, insulated jeans, and a trio of ratty old Scandinavian sweaters, was still the current fashion trend in the dead of night. Annie double-checked her brake lights on the trailer and glanced up at the gun rack behind her. There was her trusty Winchester .30-30, never used on a human—yet.

Annie eased out the clutch, turned on the defroster full blast, and drove slowly to her property gate. She gazed in her rearview mirror for a few brief seconds to imagine her small herd of horses asleep in their stalls. Only Trotter, the donkey, who usually had more sense than the rest of them, was jogging back and forth against the paddock line, plaintively braying his displeasure at her departure.

“Don’t worry, you old jackass,” she muttered. “I’ll be back in time to feed you.”

The metal farm gate, as usual, was gaping open at the top of her driveway, and Annie cursed herself for once more failing to secure her property before retiring. At forty-three, she wasn’t quite as spry as she’d been at thirty, capable of running an ax murderer off the farm if she’d ever encountered one. But after a lifetime of scrimping and careful saving, she just couldn’t convince herself to spend the money on an electric gate, which would have made life immeasurably easier and safer.

Milepost 11 on Highway 3 was only three miles away, but it took Annie a cautious five minutes to navigate it. Fog patches unexpectedly appeared before her, spreading a thick gray spell across the road. Just past Milepost 10, the eeriness vanished. The roadway ahead of her was lit up like the Fourth of July, the whirling strobes and headlights from half of the Sheriff’s Office patrol squad staked out in a semicircle in the middle of the highway. Glints of steel shimmered off the berm on the north side of the road. Even with all the traffic, Annie saw in an instant what had occurred.

A long double line of heavy skid marks swerved to the ditch off the right side of the road. At the end sat a Chevy Silverado, its rear end ridiculously suspended in midair. The vehicle apparently had caromed off the road, hit the steel-post fence beyond the ditch, and bounced back to rest. Meanwhile, the horse rig, a gooseneck two-horse slant load, was twisting perilously to the left, held up by only one wheel.

In the center of the semicircle of black-and-whites, Annie noticed an ambulance from the local medical clinic, its back doors ominously gaping open, waiting to receive the body. Two EMTs peered into the Silverado on the driver’s side, while another tried to wrench open the battered passenger door, which gave no signs of cooperating. No doubt they were figuring how best to extract the driver, Annie thought. Outside the action sat the prized fire truck from the volunteer unit in nearby Oyster Bay. The two local boys inside the cab looked transparently disappointed that their services would not be needed. Annie had encountered these boys before on similar calls, and unabashedly liked them for their willingness to come out in the dead of night to deal with misery and tragedy on the local highways and farms. She suspected they liked her, too, possibly for the same reasons. That, and the fact that Annie paid one of them handsomely twice a year to shear her sheep.

Annie brought her Ford and trailer to a crawl on the right shoulder of the road. Before she could turn off the engine, Dan Stetson was beside her window, gesturing her to crank it down. Dan looked distraught—not a good sign. He was also eager to talk.

“Don’t know what exactly happened here, Annie,” he said, slightly out of breath. “It’s the damnedest thing. Truck suddenly swerves off to the right, jackknifes, and the trailer almost overturns. Neighbors back there”—Dan pointed somewhere in the distance—“hear the sound of the truck’s crashing into their fence line and are on the phone pronto. We get out here, and there’s a horse—who seems to be okay,” Dan said in response to Annie’s panic-stricken look. “I got to tell you, Annie, our in-transit time was one of our personal best, but nothing could have saved this guy. We found him slumped dead over his air bag, which we assume inflated as soon as he hit the Truebloods’ fence posts.” Dan pointed in the direction of the truck. “Didn’t have a chance. Just glad we could save the nag.”

Annie’s eyes followed Dan’s outstretched hand.

“Let me park my rig and join you,” she said. Carefully noting where technicians had staked out the road, she eased her truck and trailer onto an unused portion of the shoulder. She could sense, rather than see, Wolf’s excitement from his vantage point in the truck bed.

“Okay, buddy. But don’t go messing up any of the accident scene.”

She unhooked the carrier, and Wolf obediently bounded out to join his mistress on the ground. They walked over to Dan, who now was scratching his considerable head.

“Interesting that the horse survived, but not the driver,” Dan continued. He looked at Annie, as if he expected her to give the definitive answer. Instead, she just stared back at him. The fact was she hadn’t the slightest idea why the accident had occurred, although she’d never give him the satisfaction of telling him so.

“Seat belt on?” was her only comment.

“Yup.”

“What about the horse?”

“He’s out of the trailer, and Tony’s handling him, just there, beyond the fence line.” Dan pointed again.

Annie inwardly sighed a breath of relief. If Deputy Tony Elizalde had control over the animal, all would be well. Tony had grown up with parents who worked at a local racetrack, and had it not been for a conscientious high-school counselor, chances are Tony would have entered the same trade—grooming, washing, and cleaning stalls. Instead, Tony went to college, took the test to become a deputy in the local county Sheriff’s Office, passed with flying colors, and now was one of the steadiest members of the police team. He also knew horses front ways, sideways, and backward. If the horse that had tumbled on its side was now in Tony’s care, Annie was content.

She glanced over to the left side of the road and saw Tony trying to calm a strikingly tall bay covered in sweat and skittishly dancing around him. Annie turned her mind to the more immediate problem.

“Who’s the owner?”

“Who do you think, Annie?” Dan replied. “You’re looking at $50,000 worth of horseflesh over there. Who in this godforsaken county can afford the care and feeding that nag requires?”

Annie’s shoulders slumped. Who indeed. Hilda Colbert, that’s who. Annie hated her. Well, to be honest, she didn’t hate her; she just hated the way she treated her horses. Hilda was a relative newcomer to the area, a California transplant who had made millions in the software industry and now fully indulged her passion for raising and riding hunter jumpers and thoroughbreds. Although Annie wasn’t sure it was a passion for horses or just a passion for control. She’d seen the way Hilda acted around her champion equines and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, the only thing pretty around Hilda was the state-of-the-art riding complex she’d constructed in the valley. It truly was a thing of beauty. But inside were housed eighteen neurotic, overwrought horses that didn’t know which command to follow any time Hilda was on one of their backs.

“I don’t suppose you’ve called her,” Annie said glumly.

Dan snorted. “Hell, no! I’m not waking up the queen. That’s your job.”

Annie sighed. “Who’s the deceased? One of Hilda’s underpaid minions?”

“Nope. A guy out of Wyoming. Professional hauler. Can’t understand why he swerved, though. You’d think he’d know better than to try to clear a deer.”

“So that’s what you think?” Annie asked. “Just one of your typical caught-in-the-headlight accidents?”

“Won’t know until the State Patrol gets here with the Total Station. But offhand, I can’t think of any other reason. It’s a straight stretch of road. Unless, of course, he had a heart attack or something.”

Annie squinted through the blazing circle of lights and silently agreed. There was no good reason for anyone to go off the road here. “Odor of intoxicants?” she asked.

“Nope. Unless you count the distinctive odor of Calvin Klein.”

Annie laughed. “Maybe he had a hot date with Hilda.”

“I hope not. I had to break the news to his wife just a few minutes ago. Doubt she would have been very happy to know hubby was on his way to a dalliance.”

Annie realized that to outsiders her banter might have been off-putting, but after working with Dan on a dozen or more accident scenes involving horses, she had picked up the gallows humor so often adopted by law enforcement as a way to cope with sudden death. But Dan’s remark brought her back to reality. A man had died, his wife was now a widow, and the valuable horse he’d been transporting needed comfort and a warm stable.

“Keep me posted, will you, Dan?”

“Will do.” Just then, Dan’s radio squawked, and she heard him revert to his professional parlance.

The thoroughbred was a magnificent creature—sixteen hands or more, Annie guessed, with classic bay markings. Annie walked over to Tony, who stood beside the shuddering horse, stroking its neck and whispering sweet nothings. At least the horse wasn’t moving its feet anymore. Annie extended her hand to the bay’s nose by way of introduction. The horse nuzzled back, licking the salt and dirt off her hand.

“Aren’t you a handsome fellow?” she whispered to him.

“He sure is,” said Deputy Elizalde. Tony clearly was in love. It would be hard not to fall in love with this horse; he had pedigree written all over him, and his elegance, despite his nervousness, permeated the air.

“Well, time to get him back in a trailer,” Annie said. “This could be tricky.” She reluctantly withdrew her now-very-clean hand and walked back to her truck, where Wolf jumped into the driver’s seat as soon as Annie cracked the door.

“You’re too young to drive,” Annie told him, and Wolf agreeably relinquished his spot for the passenger side.

Horses like terra firma, and convincing them to step onto a springy surface that moves can be a hard sell. This thoroughbred, Annie realized, probably had been loaded into a trailer dozens of times and was used to the experience. Nonetheless, it had just survived a terrifying encounter and emerged from a twisted crate of steel that must now be perceived as a claustrophobic nightmare. Horses remember through their senses, particularly visually, and Annie was afraid just the sight of her trailer would turn this proud animal into a quivering beast with one thought: to bolt, rear, strike out, and do anything but get back into the box that an hour ago had threatened its survival.

Annie backed up her trailer fifty feet away from the fence line. She made sure there was hay in the feeder and added a couple of carrots for good measure. With one eye on the bay at all times, she quietly swung open the hinges that unlocked the back doors.

Deputy Elizalde slowly slid his hand up the lead line and started the walk over. Annie watched the bay skitter its way through the blinking lights of the patrol vehicles, its eyes white with fright. Tony was doing a good job, Annie noticed—he had his hand solidly on the lead rope but wasn’t gripping it so tightly that the bay felt it had its head in a noose. In her sleep-deprived state, Annie lazily began to think that everything was actually going to go all right.

She was wrong.

A piercing whoop-whoop split the air. Even Annie jumped at the sound of the fire truck, which slowly followed the ambulance, bearing the body of the dead Wyoming hauler, through the slalom course of accident markers strewn on the road.

The bay took a flying leap into the air, snapping the lead line out of the deputy’s hands, and, riveting its body in straight alignment to the road, sped off at a full-flight gallop.

In the corner of her eye, Annie saw Tony sprawled on the ground, shaking his head. She didn’t think; she simply reacted. Racing to the center of the road, she spread her body as widely as she could and slowly started waving her outstretched arms up and down. The bay continued hell-bent toward her. Annie willed herself not to jump out of the way.

Ten feet before certain collision, the horse suddenly veered to the right. Annie’s heart sank but then lifted as she saw Tony beside her, mimicking her arm movements to keep the bay from getting by.

The bay reared within striking distance of both of them. It bolted to the left, but now Dan Stetson was on her other side, keeping the blockade intact.

The half-dozen remaining deputies seemed rooted to their spots, as they watched the bay twist, turn, rear, and buck, as it tried to find a safe passage away from its own private nightmare.

“Get your butts over here!” Dan yelled out to his mesmerized crew. “That damn Leif! He’s just got to play cowboy with that horn. I’d rip his brain out if he had one!”

By now, the line holding the horse in check was secure, but the human corral only made the bay more frenzied. Giving up on trying to find a loose link, the bay began to circle before them, going faster and faster so that even Annie, standing still, felt dizzy from the horse’s frantic exertion. The road was littered with flashlights, accident-scene tape, and other detritus from the site of the overturned trailer. The dangling lead rope from the horse’s halter snaked on the ground. Annie prayed that the horse wouldn’t stumble and fall, or worse, step on the halter and break its neck.

The horse was a blur as it hurtled past her, but as it swept to the other side of the circle, she saw, with alarm, that it was punctuating the air with short jabs from its hind hooves. This was not good. It was one thing to have a scared horse, but a scared and aggressive horse was a danger to everyone.

“Cover for me!” Annie shouted in Tony’s ear. Tony nodded, and took a step to his left to fill her place. On Tony’s right stood Deputy Williams, who immediately cinched up the line. Deputy Kim Williams was one of the few females and the only African-American officer on the force and worked out big-time. Annie felt an added sense of security knowing Kim was there as she walked into the center of the storm.

Once inside the circle of officers, Annie stood perfectly still, but even if she’d been doing jumping jacks, she doubted whether the horse would have noticed her presence as it whirled around her. She realized that the horse was in a zone all its own, one dominated by the right side of its brain, the side dedicated to survival instincts. Its ability to think, reason, and understand were gone. In its place was an animal instinct for just one thing: getting free, at any cost.

Annie remembered this as she forced herself to breathe in and out—long, slow breaths that belied how she felt. After counting to a hundred, she slowly turned her eyes toward the bay. Every time the horse passed by her, Annie focused on the same spot on the horse’s hindquarters. She did not move. No one in the outer circle said a word.

What seemed like a thousand laps later, the bay’s right ear made an infinitesimally small twitch toward her.

Annie immediately took a small step backward and cocked her head to the left. The bay wheeled around and came to a sliding stop. The change was so abrupt that everyone in the circle involuntarily took a step back.

Annie put up her hand to signal her need for silence. The bay remained still, shaking, his breathing heavy and ragged as sweat poured off his coat. Annie met his gaze for a good, long moment, then angled both her body and her outstretched arm to the left.

The bay half reared and lunged in the other direction, continuing its frantic race around the human fortress. Annie continued to stand motionless. This time, the cue that she was looking for took far less time. Again, the bay twitched its ear closest to her, and Annie responded with a quick cock of her head. The bay wheeled around and stood before her, as if waiting for its next instruction.

Once more, Annie stretched out her arm, which sent the animal back to circling inside the human wall. The bay was tiring, that much was obvious. But its desire to keep running seemed as strong as ever.

Again and again, Annie got the bay to stop, only to send him away. She realized that by now, most of the men keeping the bay hemmed in probably were wondering what the hell she thought she was doing.

Just trying to get through that magnificent, thick skull of his, she thought to herself.

The sixth time the bay stopped, he gave a big, shuddering sigh. Annie sighed back.

And then a miracle occurred. The bay took two tentative steps toward her.

Annie took two steps back.

Behind her, someone within the circle involuntarily groaned.

“Shut up, Jake,” Dan Stetson hissed through his teeth. “She knows what she’s doing.”

Bolstered by this unexpected praise, Annie wanted to flash her appreciation toward her friend but dared not take her eyes off the bay. She waited. And breathed.

The bay took two more steps toward her, this time, with less trepidation. Annie promptly took two steps back.

Now silence reigned all around them. Only the soft breeze in the overcast February early morning sky accompanied the strange dance between Annie and the bay.

The next time the bay took two steps forward, Annie stood still. She waited to make sure the bay wasn’t going to move, then slowly turned and began to walk away.

When she was within a few feet of the human circle, she stopped.

“Is he there, Dan?”

“Right behind you.”

“Then open up, boys, because we’re coming through.”

The deputies in front of her promptly stepped back, causing the rest of the circle to do the same.

Annie calmly walked through the eight-foot space now given to her. When she’d gone a good twelve feet beyond the crowd, she stopped again. The slow clip-clop of horseshoes followed in her wake. When she could feel the bay’s breath behind her, she slowly reached up and took the lead rope.

“Hello, beautiful,” she said.

She stroked his shiny, wet neck a few moments, then said in an even voice, “Get someone to drive my rig back, would you, Dan?”

Annie then took hold of the lead rope and started walking.

“You’re not going to walk that horse all the way back to your place, are you?” Dan sounded incredulous.

“Yup,” Annie replied. “See you later.”

The deputies watched Annie and the bay’s backs as she and the horse continued down the country highway, past Annie’s Ford, where Wolf stood up in the cab, dumbfounded that his mistress would leave without him, and into the fog.

“Oh, and wait about a half an hour, would you, Dan?” Annie’s voice floated back to them. “I’d hate to have to do this all over again.”

Overhead, a few light sprinkles began to fall. It was going to rain.

“Come on,” Annie said to the bay, as she zipped up her parka. “It’s time to get you home.”

Something was tickling her nose. Like a delicate feather, Annie thought drowsily, before she got the full onslaught of tuna breath. She opened her eyes and found herself under the calm and steady gaze of Max, whose white whiskers brushed against her face.

“What’s up, pussycat?” She clutched Max firmly to her chest. The black-and-white kitten melted in her arms and rewarded her with a deep, strong purr. Annie trained all her cats to be docile on command. Not exactly an easy task—in fact, starting a stallion was, in some ways, easier than getting a cat to snuggle at will. Smugness at her prowess as Cat Whisperer overtook Annie for one, small instant before she remembered the events of just a few hours before.

Tossing Max unceremoniously aside, Annie sat upright and looked at the bedside clock—9:00. Hell’s bells! Had she been asleep that long? She leapt out of bed, ripped off her sleeping sweats, and stepped into her Lees. The clothes she’d worn earlier still lay in a wet heap on the bathroom floor. The sprinkle that had started Annie and the bay on their long walk home had turned into a downpour within minutes.

The only good thing about the rain, Annie had thought sourly at the time, was that it at least cooled down the bay’s red-hot heat. The bay, in fact, seemed to like the spontaneous shower. Annie did not. It was pitch-black; dawn was still a good two hours away. The three-mile trudge home seemed endless. After telling the bay—whom, she noticed, was an exceptionally polite listener—her life story, Annie and the bay finally rounded the last bend, and her farmhouse was in sight.

So was her rig—Dan had taken the parallel road to her farm and neatly parked it in front of the stables. A light already was glowing from inside her kitchen, accompanied by Wolf’s insistent barking that told her his feelings: it was high time she’d come home. Annie wasn’t surprised Dan had managed to get Wolf inside the house; she kept a spare key in the most conspicuous place possible: under the doormat.

Annie had led the horse to one of her spare stalls, rubbed him down, applied Schreiner’s, her tried-and-true herbal horse tonic, to the few nicks she saw, and was pleased to see that her observations during the walk home seemed to be accurate—the bay had walked away from disaster with hardly a scratch. She was also pleased to see the bay obediently lower his head so that she could put on a cooling-down blanket. By then, the first glimmer of light had made its way to the stable windows, so Annie decided to give everyone an early breakfast, starting with Trotter. So amazed that Annie had fed him, the superior member of the equine family, first, he practically forgot to bray.

Finally, Annie allowed herself to trudge back to the farmhouse, soak in a hot tub with a cup of tea, and fall into bed.

Had it been a few hours earlier, the tea would have been scotch.

When Annie had acquired her farm, she’d built her stables within easy viewing distance from her bedroom window. She liked falling asleep watching the horses standing in the paddock adjoining the stalls, knowing they would soon be inside, crunching on their last bits of hay. She never locked the herd in their stalls at night; despite Trotter’s opinion of them, Annie knew her horses were smart enough to come in out of the rain should they so desire. By early morning, she knew she’d find them all in their stalls, anyway, for their requisite power nap. Annie envied her horses for a lot of reasons, but high among them was their ability to appear wide-awake and sassy every morning after only thirty minutes of REM sleep while properly lying down.

Now she saw all four of her horses and Trotter waiting impatiently at the paddock gate. Normally, Annie would have turned them out two hours before this.

Wading in fat wool socks to the kitchen door, she tugged on her muck boots and, with Wolf at her side, walked to the gate to let her horses out of captivity. Sam, her pinto, looked at her reproachfully as she came nearer.

“Oh, bite me. It’s not that late.”

Trotter brayed back. No interpretation needed. Oh yes, it IS.

Opening the gate to the first of two ten-acre pastures, Annie watched with pride, as she did every morning, at the five beautiful beasts that had entrusted her with their lives.

Bess, her ancient Morgan, was Annie’s first horse, and was now entering an elegant maturity that Annie hoped to match when she was the same age. She’d taken in Bess after a childhood friend, thrilled about her acceptance to an East Coast university but distraught at the prospect of selling her horse, had begged Annie to care for the animal until she returned. That was fifteen years ago. The friend had never come back to the Olympic Peninsula, but Annie hadn’t minded. She seldom rode Bess anymore, but when she did, Bess still had the heart, if not the stamina, of a yearling.

Sam, her pinto, was her working horse. With Annie on or off his back, the two of them had reached a level of equine-human telepathy that was uncanny.

She’d never forgotten the ad for Sam she’d found chalked on the Cenex board seven years before: “Free to good home: Gelded pinto, fifteen hands. If you don’t take him, the glue factory will.” Sam was eating her pasture grass by that evening. His previous owner had described Sam as aggressive and unpredictable. Annie was herding sheep with him within two months and loved him for his endearing and steadfast desire to perform for her.

Baby, her three-year-old saddlebred-in-training, had belonged to a local rancher, who thought she wasn’t “pretty enough to keep.” Annie thought the guy was nuts but refrained from saying so when she offered to “take the horse off his hands” for a few hundred dollars. Even her equine vet, Jessica Flynn, who wasn’t easy to impress, had agreed.

“That horse is just criminally cute,” Jessica had muttered the last time she’d administered vaccinations at the farm. The little horse knew her place in the herd—somewhere lower than Trotter—but she had plenty of spirit, and Annie was sure that she would be a superb trail horse in time.

And then there was Rover, so named because the quarter horse had an extraordinary mouth that could open a gate faster than a human. Usually, he went no farther than the nearest clump of fresh pasture grass, but it was a trait Annie wasn’t sure other horse owners would love as much as she did.

Annie had adopted Rover three years ago during one of her jobs as part of the Horse Rescue Brigade in Suwana County. She and Dan Stetson had started the brigade twenty years ago, after Dan came across a farm near Squill River with four of the most despondent, malnourished horses Annie had ever seen. She and Dan had rounded them up over the indignant protestations of the owner, who put down his shotgun only after Dan threatened to arrest him for obstructing the course of justice if he so much as made a move past his front porch.

Years later, Rover had been part of another herd she and Dan had rescued from a derelict owner. Annie had vowed that as God was her witness, Rover would never go hungry again—as long as he didn’t founder.

Trotter had been a gift from an old boyfriend. The boyfriend was long gone, but Annie was fully aware that she now had far more affection for the little burro than she’d ever mustered for the former beau.

Annie swung the paddock gate open, waited a moment to make sure all five pairs of eyes were on her, then nodded to let them know they were free to leave. It was a measure of respect Annie demanded from her herd. When she was eight, Annie had once opened the paddock gate for a friend’s pony, which nearly ran her over in his desire to get to his pasture. She had never let that happen again.

Unlike the others, the bay had spent the night in its stal. . .