"I didn't say that."
"This is all because of that Russian whore-"
"Watch it, Van Zandt," I said, giving him a little temper back. "I happen to be fond of Irina."
He huffed and looked away. "Are you lovers?"
"No. Is that your attempt to offend me? Accuse me of being a lesbian?"
He made a kind of shrugging motion with his mouth.
"That's pathetic," I said. "I'll bet you say every woman who won't fuck you is a lesbian."
A hint of red came into his face, but he said nothing. The conversation was not going his way. Again.
"Not that it's any of your business," I informed him as the girl and the pony concluded their round and the spectators applauded, "but as it happens, I am happily heterosexual."
"I don't think happily."
"Why? Because I haven't had the pleasure of your company in my bed?"
"Because you never smile, Elle Stevens," he said. "I think you are not happy in your life."
"I'm not happy with you trying to get inside my head-or my pants."
"You have no sense of purpose," he announced. He was thinking he was back in control of the situation, that I would listen to him the way too many weak, lonely women listened to him. "You need to have a goal. Something to strive for. You are a person who likes a challenge and you don't have one."
"I wouldn't say that," I muttered. "Just having a conversation with you is a challenge."
He forced a laugh.
"You have a nerve, making presumptions about me," I said calmly. "You don't know a thing about me, really."
"I am a very good judge of people," he said. "I am a long time in the business of assessing people, knowing what they need."
"Maybe I should set solving Jill's murder as my goal," I said, turning the tables around on him again. "Or solving the disappearance of the other girl. I can start by interviewing you. When was the last time you saw Erin Seabright alive?"
"I was more thinking you need a horse to ride," he said, unamused.
"Come on, Z., play along," I needled. "You might start me on the path to a career. Did you hear her say she was going to quit, or is that just D.J.'s story? Inquiring minds want to know."
"You are giving me a headache."
"Maybe she was kidnapped," I said, pretending excitement, watching him carefully. "Maybe she's being held as a sex slave. What do you think of that?"
Van Zandt stared at me, his expression blank. I would have paid a fortune to know where his mind was at that moment. What was he imagining? Was he thinking about Erin, hidden away somewhere for his own perverse pleasure before he cashed in? Was he remembering Sasha Kulak? Was he considering me as his next victim?
His cell phone rang. He answered it and started conversing in fluent French. I sucked on my milk shake and eavesdropped.
Europeans generally make the correct assumption that Americans can barely speak their own language, let alone anyone else's. It never occurred to Van Zandt that I had an expensive education and a talent for languages. From listening to his side of the conversation, I gleaned that Van Zandt was cheating someone in a deal and was pissed off that they weren't being entirely cooperative pigeons. He told the person on the other end of the call to cancel the horse's transportation to the States. That would teach them they couldn't fuck with V.
The conversation segued then into arrangements for several horses being flown to Florida from Brussels via New York, and two others being sent on the return flight to Brussels.
The horse business is big business in Europe. As a teenager I had once flown back home from Germany with a new horse, traveling in a cargo plane with twenty-one horses being shipped to new owners in the States. Flights like that one land every week.
Van Zandt ended the conversation and put the phone back in his pocket. "My shipping agent, Phillipe," he said. "He is a stinking crook."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because it's true. He is always wanting me to send things to him from the States. Pack it in with horse equipment and ship it with the horses. I do it all the time," he confessed blithely. "No one ever checks the trunks."
"And you're angry because he's cheating customs?"
"Don't be stupid. Who pays customs? Fools. I am angry because he never wants to pay me. Five hundred dollars' worth of Ralph Lauren towels, for which he still owes me. How can you trust a person like that?"
I didn't know what to say to that. I might have been standing with a serial sex offender, a kidnapper, a killer, and his biggest concern was getting stiffed for five hundred bucks of smuggled towels.
I disentangled myself from him when another dealer came by and they started talking business. I slipped away with a little wave and a promise that I was off in search of the meaning of my life.
A sociopath's stock-in-trade is his ability to read normal humans in order to see their vulnerabilities and take advantage of them. Many a corporate CEO hit the Fortune Five Hundred on those skills, many a con man lined his pockets. Many a serial killer found his victims…
Van Zandt wasn't smart, but he was cunning. It was with that cunning he had lured Irina's friend to Belgium to work for him. I wondered how he might have used that instinct on Erin, on Jill. I didn't like the way he had turned it on me when he'd said he didn't believe I was happy. I was supposed to be the carefree dilettante to him. I didn't like to think he could see anything else. I didn't like to think anyone could see inside me, because I was embarrassed by what little there was to see.
He was wrong about one thing, though. I had a goal. And if I found him in my crossshairs on my way to that goal, I was going to be all too happy to take him down.
I made my way back to Jade's barn on foot. Yellow tape blocked off the stalls from either end of the aisle. Despite the warning printed on the tape, Trey Hughes had crossed the line and was sitting in a chair with his feet up on a tack trunk, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
He squinted and grinned. "I know you!"
"Not really," I reminded him. "Are you part of the crime scene?"
"Honey, I'm a one-man walking crime scene. What's going on around here? It's like a goddam morgue."
"Yes, well, that would be because of the murder."
"But that was days ago," he said.
"What was days ago?"
His thoughts were tripping over each other in his beer-soaked brain. "I think I missed something."
"I think I missed something if there was a murder here days ago. Who are you talking about? Erin?"
"Erin's dead?"
I ducked under the tape and took a seat across from him. "Who's on first?"
"What?"
"What's on second."
"I dunno."
"Third base."
Hughes threw his head back and laughed. "God, I must be drunk."
"How could you tell?" I asked dryly.
"You're a quick study. Ellie, right?"
"Close enough."
He took a drag on his cigarette and flicked a chunk of ash onto the ground. I'm sure it never entered his head that he might start a fire in a tent full of horses. "So, who died?" he asked.
"Jill."
He sat up at that, sobering as much as he probably could. "You're joking, right?"
"No. She's dead."
"What'd she die of? Meanness or ugliness?"
"You're a kind soul."
"Shit. You never had to be around her. Is she really dead?"
"Someone murdered her. Her body was found this morning over by barn forty."
"Jesus H.," he muttered, running the hand with the cigarette in it back through his hair. Despite his comments, he looked upset.