It was now nine o’clock, Monday morning, June 28. Fair carried a banker’s box filled with printout sheets to Deputy Cynthia Cooper and Sheriff Rick Shaw.
“Can you condense this?” Rick lifted the white lid off the box.
“More or less.” The tall veterinarian appreciated how well organized and sparse the county sheriff’s headquarters were. Rick ran a tight ship.
“Fair, sit down. Can I get you coffee or a Coke or anything? A doughnut. Rick’s big on Krispy Kremes.”
Fair waved off Cooper’s offer. “Caffeine to the max. I stayed up until four-thirty this morning.”
“It must be good.” Rick smiled as he dropped into his chair, which he pulled out to face Fair.
“I think it is. I wanted to see if there was consistency in the offspring of Ziggy Flame. The Jockey Club has his records concerning registered breedings. His first year he was bred to fifteen mares. This only counts horses registered with the Jockey Club; remember, no records for the others unless Mary Pat left them.”
“She did.” Cooper told him. “That’s in the notebook we found in Barry Monteith’s effects.”
“May I see them later? It’d be good if I could take them home.”
“We can do that.” Rick nodded, thankful that Fair, a specialist in equine reproduction, wanted to study the notebooks.
“Ziggy’s second year he bred twenty-two mares, and the last year he bred thirty-one. Those are pretty good numbers for a stallion in central Virginia. Ten or fifteen would have been more usual. Granted, Mary Pat had fabulous connections, one being Paul Mellon, one of the best breeders America has seen. So she had a wider cast to her net than most people starting out with an unproven stallion but one who had a good racing career.”
“What were you looking for?” Rick’s eyebrows knitted together.
“Sorry, I got off the point, didn’t I?”
“That’s all right.”
“I was looking for color. Ziggy was a flaming chestnut, hence his name. Color in horses is complicated. But I was looking for percentages. You see, a chestnut stallion bred to a chestnut mare means one hundred percent of the offspring will be chestnut. So all of Ziggy’s offspring bred to chestnut mares must be chestnut. On the cover letter there, I’ve broken down the colors of his offspring according to the color of the mare he bred.”
“Great.” Cooper smiled.
“Okay, I’m a little dense here. All I know about horses is they eat while I sleep. Why is this important?” Rick reached for his cigarette pack.
“This is why.” Fair handed him the stats for Ziggy Dark Star, Flame’s full brother, a bay—which is a dark brown horse with a black mane and tail—born in 1967. Ziggy Dark Star’s lip tattoo started with a W. “This horse, a full brother to Flame, was a bay. But look at the number of chestnut offspring each time Dark Star was bred to a chestnut mare.”
“Same percent as Ziggy Flame,” Rick read the cover letter.
“Yes.” Fair was jubilant. “If he were bay, there would be more color variation in the offspring.”
“And you’re sure a bay stallion wouldn’t produce this same percent of chestnut fillies and colts?” Cooper was fascinated.
“That’s why I’ve brought you the box. There’s the printout of every mare bred to Ziggy Flame and Ziggy Dark Star. Her age, her breeding, her color, the color of her offspring, her own breeding, the color of her progenitors. And everything is broken down in the cover letter, but all the research is in that box.”
Rick handed the cover letter to Cooper, who scanned it. “Fair, what you’re telling me is that Ziggy Dark Star is, or I should say was because he died in 1999 at the ripe old age of thirty-two—”
Fair interrupted. “Thirty-three. The papers for Ziggy Dark Star say he was born in 1967, but Flame was born in 1966. He was thirty-three.”
“Ziggy Dark Star was Ziggy Flame!” Cooper couldn’t believe it.
“Wait a minute. How could the owner . . . uh”—Rick grabbed the paper back from Cooper—“Marshall Kressenberg . . . turn a chestnut horse into a bay?”
“By getting up in the middle of the night and periodically dying the horse.” Fair crossed his heavily muscled arms over his broad chest. Working with animals weighing over a thousand pounds made the strong vet even stronger.
“That’s fantastic.” Rick shook his head.
“For seventy-five thousand a pop, you could do it. You would happily do it. That stallion was covering thirty-five to forty-five mares a year in his prime. Do the math. But also in the box are a few articles about Marshall that I thought might convince you.”
Cooper reached down and pulled out copies of articles appearing in The Blood-Horse and Thoroughbred Times, the grand publications of the thoroughbred industry. “There are a lot of them.”
“All of them mention how fanatical Marshall was in his care of the stallion. How only he would handle him and so on. I expect he used dye. But I’m telling you, I stake my reputation on it, Ziggy Dark Star was Ziggy Flame. Apart from color, consider the lip tattoo. The Jockey Club in 1945 began requiring all racehorses to be tattooed on the inner lip. So the first letter in 1945 was A, followed by a series of numbers. Every twenty-six years the letters repeat. The letter for 1966—Ziggy Flame’s birth—was V. The letter of Ziggy Dark Star, supposedly born in 1967, was W. That would be so easy, changing V to W.”
For a moment all three sat and stared at one another, then Rick struck a match on his thumb, lighting up his unfiltered Camel. “Wonder how close Jerome came to knowing this? He read Mary Pat’s notes, which might have gotten him to thinking about more than rabies. My guess is he was pretty close to figuring out that this murder, Barry’s murder, had something to do with money, real money, and breeding.”
“I don’t know if he approached it from the color standpoint, but he knew enough, he was getting hot. In a million years I would have never credited Jerome Stoltfus with that kind of”—Fair didn’t want to be unkind, so he didn’t say “intelligence”—“research ability.”
Cooper, mind in high gear, rubbed her forehead with her finger. “Barry? Does Carmen know? She’s kept a tight lip, which is highly unusual for her.”
Fair’s eyebrows turned upward. “I thought Carmen had disappeared, sort of.”
“Sort of.” Rick’s tone of voice indicated no more information would be forthcoming on that subject.
Fair, uncharacteristically, pushed. “Is she all right?”
Rick, voice low, said, “I can’t talk to you about Carmen, but she’s healthy and she’s safe.”
“Okay.” Fair sheepishly grinned. “She’s such a character, you know, I really don’t want harm to come to her.”
“If she’d pick her boyfriends with a little more care, I don’t think it will,” Cooper deadpanned.
“Makes me wonder if that notebook is all Mary Pat left. What if there was something . . . incriminating—to the killer, I mean,” Rick changed the subject.
“What’s staggering about this is the profit. The horse was an active breeder almost up until the end. Take an average of forty mares a year and seventy-five thousand dollars a pop, and you come out with seventy-five million dollars over Ziggy’s breeding career. And what did it cost to keep him in high style? For his twenty-five years in Maryland, let’s say that Marshall Kressenberg spared no expense. Obviously, the last years would be more expensive. Let’s say he averaged twenty thousand a year keeping Ziggy in the pink and a few thousand a year in glossy ads in the thoroughbred publications. Marshall, at best, spent about five hundred thousand dollars on the stallion over a twenty-five-year period. Think of the phenomenal profit. Seventy-five million! I’d say that’s a major motive for murder.” Fair’s deep voice rose upward.