“If we had anything solid to go on,” Damon said emphatically, “we’d have issued a bulletin on Mortvedt from minute one. I guarantee you that.”
Doyle took a deep breath. He felt as tired and frustrated as he’d ever had in his life. “How do you see all this?” he asked. “You’ve got to believe-I mean, it has to be obvious-that Aldous nearly paid with his life for finding somebody in that barn that shouldn’t have been there. Who do you think it was, if it wasn’t Mortvedt?”
Karen glanced at Damon before replying. “It could well have been Mortvedt. It probably was. And if it was, he might have had a motive for attacking Aldous besides just the fact that Aldous accidentally discovered him in the Willowdale barn.
“Mortvedt may well have suspected Aldous of knowing something he wasn’t supposed to know. Something having to do with another horse there, not one of the devalued stallions.”
Doyle said sharply, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Let me tell you about a man named Lucas Collier,” Karen said.
Chapter 25
Lucas Collier was a fifty-seven-year-old white male native of nearby Woodford County who had bounced around the Blue Grass horse industry scene for most of his working life.
“High school dropout…married and divorced twice, total of four children…series of menial jobs on Kentucky horse farms, including cutting grass, repairing sheds, painting fences, et cetera,” Karen said. “No hands-on experience with horses-evidently nobody trusted Lucas’ brain power to do that kind of work. I doubt Lucas has got many more IQ points than he has teeth. And he’s in short supply in the tooth department,” she said.
Collier’s previous record was a series of small-time crimes, Karen continued, “mainly bar fights, one breaking and entering that was dismissed, a couple of DUIs, one that stuck.” He most recently had come to the attention of local law enforcement when a field behind the falling-down farmhouse he’d inherited from his father proved to be the site of a thriving marijuana crop.
Collier was “very, very anxious to avoid a prison sentence,” Karen said, “so he tried to deal. He volunteered information regarding a theft he’d engaged in four years ago. It involved a horse, and what he believes was a valuable one. According to records, the theft Collier described coincides time-wise with the theft of a famous mare named Donna Diane. Collier played a minor role in this, but he was there when the horse was taken and he described the other men involved.”
Doyle said, “I don’t get what you’re getting at here. What’s the connection?”
Damon reached over to a stack of papers on the table and extracted a folder that he handed to Doyle. “This is Lucas Collier’s confession. It’s long and rambling, so you can skip over a lot of it. I’ve tagged with a blue marker the parts that are of interest to us.”
According to Collier, he’d been approached one night in a rural beer bar by a man who identified himself only as Jud. Collier had been asked if he was familiar with the physical layout at Sheridan Brothers’ Farm. “Hell yes,” Lucas had answered, “I worked there about three years. What do you need to know?”
What the man named Jud wanted to know was the location of the broodmare fields, the rotation schedule for the horses that was used by the Sheridan Brothers’ farm manager, and the location of the roads that ran through the property. Jud spent several hours over the next two nights interviewing Collier and making notes. After giving him some instructions, Jud said he would contact Collier in a week or so. He paid Collier $1,000 “in cash money” for the information and said that a similar payment was possible for future services.
As Doyle read further, he learned how the men-there were three of them-had stolen this horse. First they ascertained which field held the valuable mare Donna Diane. For three straight nights, the smallest of the three spent an hour or so at the pasture fence, feeding Donna Diane and her companion gelding sweet alfalfa from a plastic bag. Sheridan Brothers’ Farm, like most breeding farms, employed only a few night watchmen who made occasional rounds of the property. The watchmen were easy to spot as they checked on the sixteen- to twenty-member groups of mares in each pasture.
Collier told the interrogators he had parked his pickup at the intersection of two farm roads about a half-mile from where Jud and the little man had left their car. Collier was instructed to flash his lights and drive off immediately if he spotted any vehicle or anyone approaching, but he never was required to do that.
Doyle looked up from his reading. He shook his head. “Can you imagine having millions of dollars’ worth of horses being guarded by five-dollar-an-hour night shift guys? Man, these farm owners down here are a trusting lot. Or stupid. Or cheap.”
“Not anymore,” Damon replied. “After the Donna Diane disappearance all the farms beefed up their security systems.”
“Was there a reward for her?”
“Only a million dollars,” Karen said. “But they never found out what happened to her.”
On the third night, Lucas Collier’s confession continued, when Donna Diane had again enthusiastically come to the fence, eager for company and food, Jud quickly and quietly sawed off three boards where they joined the fence post. He swung them outward, creating a gap. The little man, who had slipped a lead rope on Donna Diane, silently led her through the opening.
“I was too far away to see exactly how they done it,” Collier said, “but that was what Jud told me they was going to do. Jud, he took those board ends and tied them back onto the fence post with rope. They wouldn’t hold against any pressure, but there wasn’t any of that. And from where I stood, the fence looked okay, like there was nothing wrong with it.”
The mare nickered anxiously as the little man led Donna Diane carefully down the embankment to the one-horse trailer attached to Collier’s pickup truck. Since he was known in the area, the idea was, Lucas said, that “anybody seeing me hauling a trailer wouldn’t be much suspicious. I guess that was why they needed me. Course, I was a pretty good lookout, too,” he added.
As soon as the mare was in the trailer, Collier said, the little man “stuck her with a needle,” which he assumed contained a tranquilizer.
Then, Collier said, the men drove cautiously down the dark country backroads in their two-vehicle procession. They went just a few miles, he estimated, before they pulled off the asphalt and up a narrow dirt road leading onto a property Collier had never seen.
Jud motioned for Collier to get out of his truck. Jud and the little man then unhooked the trailer from Collier’s pickup and sent him on his way, another $1,000 in his jacket pocket.
“I don’t know what they done with the trailer,” Collier said. “I asked the little fella where we were when Jud gave me my money. But he never said. He just give me this real hard look, so I didn’t ask him nothing else. I just took my money and got out of there.”
But, Collier said, about a year and a half later he was hired on a short-time basis to work cutting back undergrowth on an off-the-road piece of property. The road leading to the work site looked “mighty familiar,” Collier said, and he eventually became convinced that this was where he and Jud and the little man had parted company.
“I found out it was land owned by that Mr. Rexroth, the Willowdale fella,” Lucas Collier said.
Doyle closed the folder and looked at the two agents across from him at the table.
“We had Lucas Collier going over mug shots last night,” Karen said. “He didn’t come across the man called Jud. But he absolutely, positively ID’d the ‘little man’ as Ronald Mortvedt. He said that was a face he could never forget.”
Damon leaned forward, arms on the table. “Do you see it now, Jack? We’ve got Mortvedt, the horse killer, tied to Rexroth, the collector of insurance premiums on murdered horses.