Something Most Deadly Read online

  Jane pulled into a fetal position against the front wall of the box to avoid four powerful hooves launching Mike’s thousand-pound body out the door. He galloped down the cement aisle, turning into the east wing and on into the indoor arena—a big surprise for the carpenters. The construction din ceased immediately; replaced by screams and shouts. Jane struggled to her feet and staggered out the door, covered in shavings and holding her left arm, the shoulder joint throbbing with pain. She saw Sam running towards her.

  “What happened? Did you scream? Who let that horse go...?”

  “Sam! Michael’s Folly,” she gasped, “...in General’s stall!”

  “How in hell did he get in there?”

  “I don’t know!”

  After Dylan lured the crazed horse into the nearest empty stall, Sam raced Jane to the local hospital emergency room, against her wishes, in the battered pick-up.

  “I don’t have any insurance Sam.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They bill you and let you make payments. Insurance at your age is useless anyway unless you had a catastrophic illness. Fee-for-service gets you better care for stuff like this.”

  “Fee for what..?” she questioned, holding her arm gingerly.

  “Fee for service. They fix, you pay. Cut out the middlemen.”

  “Insurance is no good? When did that happen?”

  He sighed as he weaved the truck through traffic. “Oh, don’t get me started on insurance goons, Medicare or bad hospitals,” he ranted as he sped on. “Don’t get me up on my soapbox.” He looked at her. “You don’t always get value for your money—I’d rather self pay. I have a savings account just for medical expenses, or I’d take a loan out if necessary...although now I’ve heard that some hospitals are trying to make up for red ink by charging the uninsured triple the price they do for the insured. Especially if you have a house they can grab. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m a little soured on hospital management and insurance after what I went through with my father...”

  She watched him driving. “What happened to your father?”

  Sam’s face looked grim as he wheeled the truck around a corner. “If you’re elderly and desperately sick like my father was, and require intensive care, you’re really in big trouble. Those intensive care units are costly to run with all their expensive equipment and skilled personnel, and hospitals balk at the cost, especially for those over sixty-five and on Medicare without some kind of private add-on—they know the government is stingy with reimbursement. Government insurance is the worst, but Managed care organizations are sucking the life out of hospitals. So if you’re exasperatingly sick, or especially if you’re too old, some hospitals are quick to ship you off to what they euphemistically refer to as ‘rehab’. It’s an insult to genuine rehabilitation centers—none of them would take a critically ill patient. You can’t do rehabilitation work with someone hooked up to machines and IVs, or being fed through a tube. Critical care is not rehab.”

  Jane was astounded. She looked at a blue HOSPITAL sign passing by on a telephone pole. “I can’t believe this!”

  “Believe it—what they did to my father was ghoulish and inhumane. As I said, some hospitals cleverly “redirect” you to the waiting-to-die warehouse with some kind of fake title like rehab—giving it a positive spin. What it really is, is hell on earth, especially for the elderly. It’s usually situated well away from the main hospital to prevent these drags on the pocketbook from using hospital resources and personnel. They zipped my father right into one behind my back.—told me my very sick, elderly father was in ‘rehab’. What a joke! And now things are only going to get worse.”

  “This is astounding...”

  Sam nodded. “Picture miles of corridors with patients lined up in rooms where they see more cleaning staff than medical personnel. And these places are big on promoting from within—yesterday’s cafeteria worker or janitor is today’s fake RN. Scrubs and a name tag and we buy it—the public is gullible, and some hospitals count on it. Every so often a specialist drops in, pencils in his fee, and takes off. Quite a sham set-up, the old and infirm trapped in cold, endless corridors with a small, overworked ‘staff’.”

  “Sam, that’s truly frightening. What happened to your father?”

  “He died, of course. They withheld expensive, critical care—so he died without cutting into the hospital’s profit margin.”

  “God, Sam—I’m so sorry, that’s terrible!”

  They rode some distance in silence, and then Jane said, “I hope Madeline’s hospital isn’t like that.”

  “Some hospitals are a cut above the rest. It’s a crapshoot. Somebody needs to fix the system without throwing it all over to the government. Government bureaucrats are not your buddies.”

  Jane watched the road for a few minutes. Sam pulled into EMERGENCY PARKING and they both exited the truck from the driver’s side and approached the hospital. “You can usually still get good care from an emergency room—one of the few places left, I think, to find hardworking, dedicated people. Although it probably won’t take long for that to be wrecked.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go in here now.”

  “You’ll be fine,” he said, as they entered automated glass doors. “You’re young, easy to fix—their favorite type of patient, one who won’t endanger the profit margin and spook the sharp-pencil guys. As long as you pay your bill. I always paid my bill—broken arms, legs, whatever.”

  Jane nodded nervously as they sat and waited at a long, divided counter to fill out paperwork.

  “I wish we’d checked on General,” Jane said to Sam. “Where do you think he is?”

  “In Mike’s stall.”

  “You think so?”

  “No doubt,” Sam replied. “Some clever son-of-a-gun set a booby trap for you.”

  After finishing with paperwork, and then a forty-five minute stint in the waiting room, Jane was finally escorted to a curtained cubicle, and sat on a gurney, idly swinging her long riding boots, while Sam took a nearby chair. Sam was hoping otherwise, but the same staff that handled his other two emergencies was still on the daytime shift.

  “Another victim? Can we have a picture of this horse,” a young man in green scrubs asked, “so we can hang it up and put a circle with a bar through it?” His eyes were popping at the sight of Jane’s breeches and boots.

  “And three notches,” joked a woman in a colored smock, plastic name-tag and rubbery shoes. She was taking Jane’s blood pressure on the good arm, and took no notice of the strange outfit. At her age she’d seen every kind of sports outfit draped on the tables, and knew that people dressed in all manner of costumes before proceeding to wreck themselves.

  “Four,” Sam corrected. “You haven’t seen my pickup truck!”

  They laughed, and Jane squinted to read name tags: RN, PHYSICIAN-ASSISTANT—so far none of them said CAFETERIA or JANITOR.

  Sam left the emergency room, walked outside and fished Detective Westerlund’s card out of his wallet, using his cell phone to call him. Westerlund answered immediately. Since he was cruising on the highway not far from the hospital, he reached them in fifteen minutes.

  Jane still sat on the gurney, with her left arm in a blue and white nylon sling and an icepack on her shoulder. The curtain was open, and Sam and the detective were conversing with her attending P.A.

  “So, no broken bones Doc?” Sam asked.

  “X-rays show no broken bones—just bruised ligaments. A little ice, a little rest and a little ibuprofen and she’ll be fine.”

  “It’s a wonder she’s alive,” the detective commented. “I’ve met the beast that attacked her.”

  The Physician’s Assistant nodded his head. “He has quite a record with this hospital. I thought it was about time the police took notice of this maniac horse. He’s almost as lethal as a handgun.”

  “Sure thing, Doc.” The detective’s tone was dismissive, and the PA took the hint and left. Westerlund stood in front of Jane with his hands in his pants pocket, disrupting
the fine lines of the off-the-rack polyester suit coat. For once, the tie hung straight. The same skinny gray and tan tie. “If I hadn’t seen that horse in action,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t have answered Sam’s call. I’d have thought you two were being silly. The Doc’s right, that animal is a lethal weapon. Lethal being the key word.” He looked at Jane for a moment. “So…” he asked, rocking back and forth on his feet, “you didn’t know you were entering the killer horse’s stall?”

  “Had no idea Mike was in General’s stall. I would never have charged right in and slapped that monster on the rump. Given a choice, I’d never even enter his stall.”

  “I see.” He turned to Sam. “So the horse was in the wrong stall?”

  “Yes, and I noticed the bulb in General’s stall was unscrewed, making it harder to see the horse. Each horse is a big bay thoroughbred—hard to tell them apart at a glance. Harder still, to tell at a glance, which one has scrambled eggs for brains.”

  “The unscrewed lightbulb thing again—can I hope that no one has touched it?” Westerlund did a significant eyebrow raise.

  “We’ve learned our lesson. No one will touch the lightbulb.”

  “Ahhh,” Westerlund nodded as if they were good schoolchildren. Then he said: “So this was definitely a planned event—which, without a little luck and quick thinking, would have seriously injured or killed Miss Husted.”

  “Took a lot of effort, planning and risk,” Sam agreed.

  Jane recalled in her mind Madeline’s words about the next trap being planned—the next nasty surprise as we speak, and it made her heart pound anxiously. Madeline hadn’t been far off—the plan must have been hatched the minute Michael’s Folly arrived at the barn and someone noticed the potential for murder-by-proxy.

  “Of course, I have no doubt,” the detective speculated, breaking into her thoughts, “that no one will have any idea when the horse was moved, and that’s what’s important. It doesn’t matter where people were when you were attacked, but it does matter where they were when the horse was moved.”

  “Michael’s Folly was in his correct stall at seven this morning,” Jane informed him.

  “Are you sure it was Michael’s...whatever..?”

  “Folly. Yes I’m sure. He had his nose through the bars, trying to see if his grain was coming, and I remember thinking how much he resembled General, except for the white snip on his nose. General just has a white dot on his forehead.”

  “And someone else noticed the same thing. What time were you attacked?”

  “I went to what was supposed to be General’s stall at eleven this morning.”

  “Okay, so that’s four hours,” Westerlund recited. “Four hours for someone to move him. Maybe we can narrow the time frame down a little more. Find out the latest time old Mike was seen in his correct stall…”

  But back on the estate, the detective was frustrated in his attempt to build a narrow window of opportunity. People had passed Mike’s stall off and on all morning, but none of them could say for sure which horse was actually in it, so it was difficult to assess when he was moved.

  “It looks like,” Westerlund said as he stood in Sam’s office in his usual spot—leaning against the old file cabinet with the notebook flipped open, “that most of the players were on the field today, so we can’t even eliminate anyone. With the exception of Lucinda Whitbeck, who is in New Jersey.” Westy tapped the notebook with his pencil. Then he set down the pencil and reached for a Coors mug of black coffee on top of the cabinet.

  Jane was ensconced in Old Ugly with her sling resting on a throw-pillow in her lap, her boots up on the coffee table, and a glass Patriots mug of tea in her good hand. Sam was drinking his own coffee in his favorite Moose Drool mug, his cowboy boots propped up on the office desk. Westy studied Jane for a moment as she swirled her tea. He took another swallow of coffee, set it back on the file cabinet and thumbed through his notebook. “The Whitbecks,” he began reading from it, “were back and forth between the house and barn office all morning, Mr. Flint and Lars were giving lessons and schooling horses in the outdoor paddocks most of the morning, and Mr. O’Malley has been fixing the tower clock and installing outdoor speakers up there for your horseshow...when’s that, sometime this month?

  “Yup,” Sam confirmed, “in about two weeks.”

  “Let’s see...Dylan Ripley was busy cleaning stalls—and he was the one who captured the idiot horse in the indoor ring. Wonder he wasn’t killed.” Westerlund looked up from his notebook at Sam. “Aren’t you worried about keeping a dangerous animal like that around the barn?”

  Sam dropped his boots and leaned forward. “Very worried. I’ve been trying to get rid of him since the day I stupidly delivered him here. Cecily has promised me that she’s found a home for him—but the people are vacationing in Europe and supposedly can’t take him until they return.”

  “Someone actually wants that horse?” The detective asked.

  “Believe it or not. According to Cecily, they like his pedigreed bloodlines and think he can still be trained to run. Fools. The horse is a stone-cold killer. If it were up to me, he would just have a name change.”

  “A name change?” The detective looked perplexed.

  “Alpo.”

  “Ah. No danger to us if he’s in a can.”

  Jane moaned and shook her head. “Please, let’s not even talk about that...”

  “Sorry...but I’m afraid Mike was born to be dogfood.”

  There was a tap on the repaired windowpane of Sam’s door, and the detective let Dylan in. He was wearing a gray tee shirt with the silhouette of a black dog on it this day, and sprays of keys were clanking and clinking on his low waist as usual.

  “Hey—how’s the arm?” he asked Jane.

  “Throbbing. But at least there’s no broken bones. Thank God Steve couldn’t shoe him.”

  Dylan shook his head and raked light brown hair off his face.

  The detective approached him. “I’m told that you’re one of the few people that can move the horse and live?”

  “Would’ve been, if only I’d kept my big mouth shut. I probably bragged to everyone in the barn who would listen how easy it is to move him, as long as you carry grain and don’t lay a hand on his halter.”

  “Someone listened,” Jane mused.

  “I’m really sorry. I was hoping to keep anyone else from getting hurt, and instead I almost get you killed.”

  “It’s all right Dylan,” she said. “This was done deliberately by someone who meant me harm; you are not to blame.”

  “I thought I might come to see you show this weekend,” Madeline told Jane over the phone that night. “Hello...are you there? What’s wrong?”

  “Well, my shoulder is a little sore. I’m not sure I’ll be showing after all.” Jane filled Madeline in on the details, and they got into a fairly heated argument.

  “Jane, you have to get away from that place, before you end up dead! I don’t know how else to put it.”

  “If I leave here, I might as well be dead. This place is my whole life.”

  “I’m coming to take you to lunch tomorrow. We have to talk.”

  “I don’t want to give in to whoever is trying to drive me away!” Jane stated, as she and Madeline sipped Red Rock Margaritas and munched on a loaf of fresh baked bread at the Longhorn Steak House in Raynham. They sat in a cozy padded booth next to the bar, surrounded by steer heads and authentic cowboy memorabilia. Western art hung over the bar next to TV sets.

  Madeline set her glass down hard on the table, nearly spilling her Margarita. She glanced pointedly at Jane’s injured shoulder in its sling. “Are they trying to drive you away, or just—oops—accidentally on purpose kill you?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane answered, toying with a little straw. “Seems like this psycho would settle for either one.”

  Madeline’s eyes snapped up to meet Jane’s.

  “What?” Jane questioned the sharp look.

  “You know that I consider m
yself a scientist as well as a practitioner, and I did most of my postgraduate theory and research training in criminology. I’m very heavily involved in researching forensic criminal psychology...”

  “Well, yes I know, you’ve always had a lot of interest in that area—integrating psychology and crime. Why?”

  “I study the primary psychopath in particular. In fact, I did my master’s thesis on that subject.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that...so you study psychos!”

  “Yes, and I’m afraid you’ve hit the nail on the head. I think you really are dealing with a full-blown criminal psychopath.”

  “What? No way. I was exaggerating when I said psycho. There’s no one on the estate like that—no raging psychotics.”

  “Is that your professional opinion?”

  “Wouldn’t I know one if I met one? Wouldn’t they be drooling and slobbering and dragging knuckles?” Jane asked as she toyed with a stack of colorful cardboard coasters.

  “Hardly. I’ll have to have you read one of my textbooks, The Mask of Sanity, by Hervey Cleckley,” Madeline stated.

  “Missed that one. Has it made the New York best-seller list?”

  Madeline ignored the sarcasm. “A really aggressive homicidal psychopath is a very hard creature to detect, under normal circumstances. Psychopathy has been aptly described in the textbooks as insanity without any of the signs or features of mental illness. Your average criminal psychopath—or sociopath as some call them—is usually highly intelligent and loaded with superficial charm. They make all the appropriate noises and reactions, and sound quite normal; but as the textbooks say, they know the words but not the music.”

  Jane and Madeline went silent as the waitress delivered a “Texas Tonion”, and they delved into the battered onion petals and hot, spicy dip. As they munched away on their tasty treat, Madeline resumed: “Genuine psychopaths are incapable of true feelings. They are impulsive, egocentric, have a total lack of conscience and tend to be obsessive about personal grooming. They’re also extremely manipulative and controlling. A puppetmaster. The puppetmaster likes the world to move along to suit himself, while he simultaneously sounds like the most charming, caring person in the world.”