THIRTEEN

As Lane stepped out of the building the ICU was in, he was so distracted that he forgot he had left the Phantom all the way across the complex in the emergency department’s parking lot. It wasn’t until he had hunt-and-pecked for a good ten minutes in the Sanford Street surface lot that he realized, Shit.

Heading down the sidewalk in the heat, he tried to remember on what side he’d left the Rolls—

A shrill honk spun him around—and he jumped back onto the curb just as a Volvo screeched to a halt.

Oh, right, he thought. Green meant go for oncoming traffic.

Something he might have noted if he’d been paying attention at all.

When the coast was clear, he tried it again with the whole off-the-curb-and-cross thing, and resolved to focus better. Yeah . . . nope. All he could think of was Lizzie, and he ducked his hand into his jacket for his cell phone. When he got the thing out, he frowned at the missed call and voicemail notification on the screen. It was from a number he didn’t recognize, one with an out-of-state area code.

After he tried Lizzie and she didn’t pick up, he left her a message that he was coming home. And then he hit back whoever it had been. . . .

“Hello?”

The voice that answered was female, and accented with all kinds of South, and Lane realized he should have just listened to the damn message first. Then again, at least that particular space-shot move didn’t leave him almost eating the grille of a Swedish tank.

“I believe you called my number and left a message?” He didn’t give his name. If this was a wrong number, there was no reason to ID himself. “About a half hour ago?”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Baldwine. Thank you for callin’ me back. And I don’t want to bother you none, but you did tell me t’ call you if I needed help.”

“I’m sorry, who is this?”

“Shelby Landis. At the Red and Black, if you remember?”

Lane stopped again, his hand tightening on his phone. “Yes, I remember you. But of course. Is everything okay out there?”

There was a pause. “I really need to talk to you. Somewhere private. It’s about Edward.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “I’m happy to come see you, but can you give me an idea what this is about?”

“I gotta show you something. Now.”

“All right, I’ll come to you. Are you at the farm?”

“Yessir. I’ll be mucking stalls at Barn B for the next hour.”

“I’m downtown and it’s going to take me some time. Don’t leave until I get there.”

“I live over the barn. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

Lane set off at a jog, even though the late-afternoon sun was scorching and the humidity was just short of a rain forest. By the time he got to the Phantom, he had sweated out his shirt—even though he’d removed his jacket a hundred yards into his run—and he cranked the AC as soon as he turned on the ignition.

The ride out to the Red & Black took almost forty-five minutes thanks to a gas tanker having jackknifed on the Patterson Parkway and then three tractors on the rural roads clogging things up. Finally, he was able to take a right between the two stone columns and start up the hill toward the matching red and black barns.

On either side of the winding drive, five-rail fences that were painted brown intersected rolling fields, the grass of which was, according to popular belief, tinted blue thanks to the limestone content in the soil. Beautiful thoroughbreds in browns and blacks lifted elegant heads in inquiry as he passed them by, a couple of the horses taking such an interest in him that they galloped along with the Rolls-Royce, manes flowing, tails pricked high.

At the top of the rise, the asphalt turned to pea-stone gravel and he slowed, not wanting to kick up rocks. There were a number of barns and outbuildings, as well as the caretaker’s cottage, and everything had a gracious air of well-tended age to it, a reminder that Kentucky horse racing was a fierce, but old-fashioned and gentlemanly, pursuit.

Or at least it had been in Lane’s grandfather’s time. And the Bradford family was known for valuing and upholding the traditions of the past.

Lane parked in front of the middle of the three barns, and as he got out, he smelled freshly cut grass and wet paint. Sure enough, as he approached the open bay, he caught sight of a mower churning in the pasture closest to him and there was a caution tape around the jams he walked through, a fresh coat of red glistening on the trim.

Inside, the air was cool and he had to blink as his eyes adjusted. Several of the mares, whose heads were outside of their stalls, whinnied at his arrival, and that got the attention of the others until a chorus line of peaked ears and nodding muzzles and stamping hooves announced his presence.

“Shelby?” he called out, as he walked down the broad aisle.

He knew better than to try to pet anyone without a proper introduction—and the wisdom of this became evident as he came up to an enormous black horse who was the only one in the collection of maybe thirty with the upper portion of his door closed. And what do you know, the bastard flashed his teeth through the bars, and not in a hi-how-ya way.

More in like a hi-how-’bout-I-eat-your-head fashion.

And what do you know, the fact that the great beast had his forehead bandaged seemed appropriate. Made you kind of wonder what the other horse looked like after that bar fight.

“I thank you for comin’.”

Lane turned around and thought, Ah, right. The little blond stable hand with the fresh face and the old eyes, who had stood off in the corner of the cottage as Edward had made his confession to the police. She had seemed remote then. Now, her eyes were direct—

The horse with the bad attitude kicked his stall so hard, Lane jumped and had to check that he hadn’t been caught by a hoof that had come through the door.

“Neb, don’tcha be rude.” The woman, who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall in her barn boots, shot a glare big as a cannonball at the stallion. “Come away from him, Mr. Baldwine. He’s cranky.”

“Cranky? He’s like Hannibal Lecter with hooves.”

“Do ya mind comin’ up to the apartment?”

“Not at all. Long as he doesn’t come up the stairs with us.”

Lane followed her into a tack room and then ascended in her wake a set of steps to the second floor—where the temperature was three hundred degrees hotter.

“I’m over here.” The woman opened a door and stood to the side. “This is where I stay.”

As he went in, he noted that she didn’t call the place her home. Then again, it was little more than a storage room with a galley kitchen, the open space cooled by a window unit that hummed in the key of B flat. The sofa and chair didn’t match and the two area rugs had nothing in common with each other—or those ragtag pieces of furniture. But it was neat and it was clean, and this woman with her blue jeans and her T-shirt had the same kind of quiet, hard-won dignity that Gary McAdams did.

“So what about my brother?” Lane asked.

“Can I get you some sweet tea?”

As Lane nodded, he was embarrassed that he hadn’t allowed her to make the offer to him before he got down to business. After all, Southern hospitality wasn’t owned by the rich.

“Yes, please. It’s hot out.”

The glasses were mismatched, too, one blue and opaque, the other a frosted orange with writing on it. But the tea was this side of heaven, as cool as the ice cubes that floated in it, as sweet as a breeze on the back of a hot neck.

“This is wonderful,” he said as he waited to see if she would sit down. When she did, he followed suit in the chair across from her. “I’ma need a refill.”

“I went to see your brother at the jail last night.”

Thank God she was finally talking. “You did—how? Wait, Ramsey?”

“Yessir. Your brother . . .”

He waited for her to continue. And waited.

What, Lane wanted to scream. My brother . . . what!

“I don’t think he killed your pappy, sir.”

Through a sudden roar in his skull, Lane struggled to keep his voice calm. “What makes you say that?”

“See, Edward lied to the police. He hurt his ankle right in front of me.”