‘A full load,’ he said. ‘Fifteen for me. There’s another truck behind me for another nine.’
All twenty-four horses.
Hayden Ryder’s whole barn of Thoroughbreds would have been shipped out of Churchill Downs 300 miles south to Chattanooga only three days before the planned FACSA raid.
Could that be a coincidence?
I didn’t like coincidences.
‘When were you booked for this trip?’ I asked the driver.
‘Yesterday,’ he said. ‘Rush job. I’ve had to postpone a trip down to Tampa to fit it in.’
‘Which racetrack are you taking the horses to?’
‘It’s not a racetrack — there’s no horseracing at all in Tennessee. They’re going to Jasper, west of Chattanooga. To a horse farm.’
No horseracing in Tennessee.
How convenient, I thought.
There would be no state racing commission to authorise any testing. And Jasper might be far enough away not to bother to send someone from Louisville.
‘Do you have a name?’ I asked the driver.
‘Elvis,’ he said.
I laughed.
‘It’s true. Elvis O’Mally. My dad came over to Tennessee from Ireland as a boy. He was a huge fan of the King.’
‘Well, Elvis,’ I said, ‘you wait here. I’ll try and find out when you can get the horses.’
I wandered a little away from his listening ears and called Tony on the non-smart phone.
‘I can’t talk,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m in a meeting with the mayor.’
‘Don’t hang up,’ I replied quickly. ‘Listen. Two horse trailers have arrived here to collect all Hayden Ryder’s horses and take them to Tennessee. The trailers left Chattanooga at five o’clock this morning. They were booked yesterday.’
I allowed time for the significance of the information to sink in.
‘And another thing,’ I said. ‘Norman knows.’
‘Knows what?’ Tony said.
‘He knows the real reason why I’m here. I had to tell him or I’d have been arrested.’
Or shot.
‘I’ll get back there as soon as I can,’ Tony said.
He hung up.
I walked back to Elvis the driver, who had climbed down from his cab.
‘You’ll have to wait,’ I said.
‘For how long?’
Good question.
Tony returned shortly after midday, by which time Elvis and his fellow Chattanooga Horse Transport driver had given up waiting.
‘It’s a damn shame,’ Elvis had said. ‘I should have been sunning myself on the beach in Tampa, not hanging around up here.’ He climbed up into his cab. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow morning for this lot.’
I doubted it.
I wasn’t certain what would happen now to the twenty-four horses still standing in the barn, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be going to Jasper, Tennessee.
It would be up to their owners to find them new trainers, either here at Churchill Downs or at another track.
Elvis was backing up his truck. I went over and banged on the driver’s door. He lowered the window.
‘What time yesterday did your trip to Tampa get postponed?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, uninterested. ‘Must have been in the morning. My boss told me when I got back to the depot around one.’
He turned his eighteen-wheeler around in a space I’d have had trouble turning a dinghy trailer. Then he drove off, followed by his mate.
I was still standing by the blue bus when Tony came over to me, with Norman Gibson in tow.
‘On the bus,’ Tony ordered.
The three of us climbed aboard.
Norman started to complain to Tony that he hadn’t been told the true purpose of my visit but Tony cut him off.
‘Tell Norman what you told me.’
‘Hayden Ryder’s horses were due to be removed from here today and taken to Tennessee.’
‘How do you know?’ Norman said.
I told him about Elvis and his Chattanooga Horse Transport van.
‘Is he still here?’ Norman looked out of the bus windows.
‘No. He’s gone. He’d run out of time to drive all the way home today. He told me he’d be back in the morning.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this while he was here?’ Norman was not best pleased.
‘I couldn’t get through the police line to find you,’ I replied in my defence. ‘But I do have the company’s phone number.’
I handed over a piece of paper. I’d copied it off the side of the truck.
Tony was more interested in the significance of Elvis being there in the first place.
‘It means that Hayden Ryder must have been aware of the raid by one o’clock yesterday at the latest.’
Norman nodded. ‘The stable dispensary has also been packed up in boxes ready to be shipped out.’
‘So who told Ryder?’ Tony said.
It was the all-important question.
Sadly, we could no longer ask the man himself for the answer.
10
There was a debriefing for the FACSA raid team at four o’clock that afternoon, back at the mess hall of the National Guard facility.
Most of them had spent some of the preceding eight hours being individually interviewed by detectives from the Louisville Police Department’s fatal-shooting investigation team.
‘It is perfectly routine,’ Tony told me on the phone when I called him well away from the others. ‘There’s a standard procedure for all officer-involved shootings. Such events bring intense media scrutiny and we have to guard against any damage to the agency’s reputation. Hence the local police conduct a detailed enquiry and interview everyone involved.’
‘I wasn’t interviewed,’ I said.
‘The fatal-shooting investigation team is only concerned with events up to the moment the shots were fired. You were not a witness to the actual shooting so I didn’t give them your name. I thought it was best to keep you out of it.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘Thanks. So what happens next?’
‘The evidence may have to be presented to a grand jury to confirm the killing was justified, although that’s most unlikely in this case.’
‘So you think the killing was justified?’ I asked.
‘Without a doubt,’ Tony said. ‘Ryder attacked a law-enforcement officer with a deadly weapon. That in itself is enough reason for him to be shot.’
‘But surely not ten times.’
‘It can often take more than one shot to bring down a suspect. Our agents are trained to fire multiple rounds in case some of them miss.’
‘I was told your agents are all hotshots,’ I said. ‘Surely they don’t miss.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Tony said. ‘They may be OK on the range but operational situations are very different. A Miami police survey showed that of thirteen hundred bullets fired at suspects, more than eleven hundred missed. And NYPD found barely a quarter fired from under six feet hit their target, with less than a fifth at ten feet.’
‘How many hit Hayden Ryder?’
‘I don’t know yet. The autopsy will tell us. The important thing is that at least one did, and that one was enough to disable him.’
It had done more than that, I thought.
I had spent the day trying to erase from my mind the grisly image of Ryder’s head completely torn apart by an expanding bullet.
I’d seen more than my fair share of killings during my time with the army in Afghanistan but nothing really prepares you for the sudden finality of violent death, the instant wiping out of an active, vivid and cognisant existence, to be replaced by… nothing. Nothing more than a useless rotting corpse.
‘What will you do now?’ Tony asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay on here for the Derby. I wouldn’t want to miss that, but I feel I’m approaching the problem from the wrong end.’