High in Trial (17 page)

He stared at me as though I
had
spoke
n
Greek. “Marcie’s dead?”

I dug into my jeans’ pocket, pulled out a couple of pick-up bags, a breath mint, the
crumpled remnants of a dog treat, and a wrinkled business card. I looked around until
I found a pen, consulted my phone for Aggie’s number, and wrote the information on
the back of my card. I handed the business card to Neil. “Aggie and Ginny from the
agility club,” I repeated. “You know them, right?”

He nodded.

“They’re going to take care of Bryte and Flame until you feel better.”

He stared at the card. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

I glanced up at Miles, and he simply nodded. We’d done all we could do.

“We’re leaving now,” I said, standing. “Don’t worry about the dogs.”

He didn’t look up from the card. “I was going to fix everything. It doesn’t make any
sense.”

Miles and I let ourselves out.

“That was rough,” Miles said quietly as we went down the walk.

I drew in a steadying breath. “Yeah.” Then I glanced at him. “You were pretty quick
to go through that door for someone who was just lecturing me about being reckless.”

“Oh, come on, the guy was on crutches. And covered with blood. There was no way I
was leaving without finding out how he got that way.”

He glanced at me with an expression that couldn’t be interpreted as anything but smug
as we reached the car. “And by the way, did you notice? I was right.”

“You weren’t right. It’s crazy. Everything he said was crazy.”

He opened the car door for me. Cisco sat up in the back seat, grinning to see us,
and the two border collies peeked over the barrier. “Where there’s money and sports,”
he said, “there’s corruption. It’s a rule.”

I sank into the seat and tugged on my seat belt. I waited until he was behind the
wheel to point out, “Well, even if it
is
true, it’s the Standard Cup that’s corrupted, not the AKC.”

He started the engine. “That makes a difference?”

I scowled and sank down into my seat. “You bet it does.”

I was lost in dark thought until he pulled into the parking lot of a pancake house.
By then it was almost lunchtime, and I walked the dogs along the grassy area of the
parking lot before we went inside. Miles ordered steak and eggs, and I ordered a grilled
cheese sandwich with three orders of steak and eggs to go, hold the salt, hold the
gravy, hold the hash browns.

Miles lifted an eyebrow at me. “Sirloin?”

I frowned at him. “The dogs have had a hard day.”

He shrugged. “You’re paying.”

I said, “It doesn’t make sense. Assuming, just assuming, there was some kind of mob
activity involved—”

He raised a cautionary finger. “Politically incorrect. They prefer ‘organized crime.’”

“Why break Neil’s knee?” I persisted, ignoring him. “He was the one who could’ve won
the Standard Cup for them. It makes no sense.”

“Unless you’re betting against him,” Miles pointed out.

The waitress brought coffee for him and orange juice for me. I stared at it, wondering
why I’d ordered it.

“Look, sweetie,” Miles explained, taking out his phone. “In the world of professional
sports gambling, there are two ways to win: bet on the winner or bet on the loser.
My guess is these guys, whoever they are, figured out Neil wasn’t going to play ball
a long time ago and put their money on his competitors. His only mistake was planning
to run the other dog—Bryte, is it?—for the win.”

I stared at him, jaw slackening. “How do you
know
these things?”

He didn’t even glance up from the message he was texting. “Remember I told you about
my dad, the town drunk? He also played the ponies, among other things. You pick it
up here and there.”

“Who are you texting?” I demanded in sudden alarm. “You can’t—”

He held up a hand for calm. “Mel. She sent a message earlier and I don’t want her
to worry. Smile, sweetheart.”

He pointed the phone at me and I quickly managed a smile and a wave as he snapped
the picture. He said, “Check your messages. She copied us both on a group photo in
front of the hotel.”

I found the photo and texted back a series of hearts and smiley faces. It was the
best I could do.

Miles tapped out a few more commands, scrolled a screen or two, and said, “Just like
I figured. Bail bonds and DUIs.”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to focus. This was an awful lot to take in for someone
who only had a couple hours’ sleep. “What?”

Miles pocketed his phone and explained. “Most people think all lawyers are automatically
rich, but lawyers are a dime a dozen these days, and unless you’re in a big city with
a big firm, it can be hard to make a living—particularly if you’re not very good at
it and you have expensive hobbies and high-class tastes. I don’t know if you noticed
that van she was driving, but it had to be forty, fifty grand.”

“Aggie said Marcie has a huge training facility and the property sounds gorgeous,”
I admitted. “She said their whole club has events there.”

“She has a storefront practice in a strip mall that advertises for credit score repair
and foreclosure protection, removing DUIs from your record, that kind of thing. Not
to say that can’t be a lucrative specialty, but it’s also the kind of business that’s
usually done on a cash basis, and where it can be a good idea to have some physical
backup when the usual methods of collection aren’t effective. So I’m guessing that’s
how she got involved with these guys and was ready to listen when they came to her
with an idea to increase her earnings. I mean, her dogs, with Neil handling them—think
of him as the jockey—had been winning for a few years, right? Don’t believe for one
minute that whatever racket they had going on doesn’t go back a decade or so, and
they’d been tracking the winners. They didn’t want her money. They never do. What
they wanted was her assets—the dogs, the handler, the ability to call the shots.”

My throat was dry. “But—that’s crazy. Why would anybody do that? An agility trial
is never a sure thing. A thousand things can distract a dog and change the outcome.
That’s what makes it a trial. You can’t call an agility trial any more than you can
call a—”

“Horse race?” he suggested, and I felt sick.

I grabbed the orange juice and took a swallow. “So what you’re saying is that this—this
mob person or persons—”

“Organized crime,” he corrected.

“Had big money on the outcome of the Standard Cup—”

“It doesn’t have to be just the Standard Cup,” he pointed out. “If I know the way
these things work, and I do, there has to be more than one commercially sponsored
contest, am I right?”

He was right. I tried to stop the big-screen unfurling before my eyes of the names
of pet supply companies and big-box pet stores that sponsored competitions. I cleared
my throat tightly. “Had big money on the Standard Cup,” I repeated, “but they were
betting
against
Neil and Flame. All was well until Neil hedged his bets, so to speak, with Bryte.”

Miles nodded soberly. “It’s never the horse,” he said. “It’s the jockey. Or, to be
precise, it’s the combination. They figured Neil for a no-show because of the palimony
thing with Marcie. They didn’t count on him going all out with his own dog. So, in
the end, they made sure he didn’t.”

Suddenly I was intensely homesick. All I
’d
ever wanted was a little playtime, a chance to get away, a respite from the challenges
of the past year. This was turning into a nightmare, and I wanted to go home. Things
were so much simpler in Hansonville. Miles must have seen it in my face because he
reached across the table and took my hand.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” he said.

I said forlornly, “I really kind of liked Marcie. She raised such great dogs.”

Our food arrived, and I asked the waitress to bring my take-out orders now so the
food would have a chance to cool before I gave it to the dogs. Miles dug into his
plate with gusto, and I picked apart my grilled cheese, nibbling on the French fries.

“What doesn’t make sense,” Miles said after a time, “is why they would go after Marcie.
Breaking Neil’s knee is one thing. It’s practical and efficient and it solves the
problem.”

I stared at him, the sandwich motionless a few inches from my mouth. “Who are you?”

He brushed the comment aside absently. “But what they did to Marcie… That’s not only
killing the golden goose. It’s sloppy.”

“She must have double-crossed them somehow.”

“I don’t see how. There wasn’t time.”

I took a bite of my sandwich, chewing thoughtfully, thinking back over the timeline
of events since the trial yesterday. I swallowed hard and reached for my orange juice.
I looked at Miles, and slowly it all came together.

“Oh my God, of course,” I said. I put my glass down with a thump. “I think I know
who did it.”

~*~

FIFTEEN

Two hours, ten minutes before the shooting

J
eremiah Allen Berman loved the twenty-first century. Everything was so easy these
days. He’d been out less than a month and already he’d met three different guys that
were living high, hardly lifting a finger. One of them was selling credit card numbers
he collected by pointing his cell phone at a gas pump—whoever would’ve thought of
a thing like that?—and another lifted complete IDs from hospital records. The third
fellow probably worked the hardest, but he was making a killing backing up his truck
beside an eighteen-wheeler in the freight yard, clipping the security cable, and off-loading
the contents. With a crew of six, he could be in and out in fifteen minutes and do
a half million dollars in merchandise a night. What a world they lived in. It was
just made for guys like Jeremiah Allen Berman.

The hard-asses in prison used to try to rag on him about vo-hab—
try
being the operative word because nobody lasted long on Berman’s bad side—but his
daddy didn’t raise no fool. Daddy used to say, “This world, she’s made for the thinking
man.” Then he’d spit a stream of tobacco juice and let out a screech of laughter that
could raise the hairs on a dead man’s balls and add, “A thinking man that knows how
to swing a two-by-four upside somebody’s head, am I right, boy?”

Jeremiah Berman slid onto the sticky barstool in front of a big-screen television
and grinned to himself. “You don’t know how right you were, Daddy,” he said. “You
just don’t know.”

He reached for his cell phone and swore when the movement reminded him of the pain
in his hand. The damn thing was already starting to swell up. He should have shot
that son of a bitch when he’d had the chance.

The bartender gave him an odd look. “Get you something?”

“Budweiser,” he grunted without looking up and carefully plucked out his cell phone
with the other hand.

He’d stolen the cell phone, along with a hundred ten dollars cash, from his fourteen-year-old
niece, who knew what he’d do to her if she told anybody. Not that she didn’t deserve
it, anyhow, prancing around the house all dressed up like a twenty-dollar whore on
New Year’s Eve. And what the hell was his brother thinking, giving her a cell phone
that cost more than one of them fancy new flat-screen TVs when he was always groaning
about how he could barely make the mortgage and drove a six-year-old pickup? Well,
he didn’t exactly drive it anymore, since Berman dumped it in the mall for a Honda
with a spare key hidden in the wheel well. But still, he deserved what he got. Just
how often had that son of a bitch come to see him when he was upstate, anyhow?

On the other hand, the M14 his brother kept locked away in a steel gun cabinet in
the basement was a pretty good consolation prize. He could let a lot slide for the
satisfaction of knowing that baby was going to be by his side if he needed it.

Nobody messed with Jeremiah Allen Berman. Hadn’t he just proven that? It had taken
twenty years, but he’d settled the score, fine and good.

The cash was almost gone, but it didn’t matter. He’d get more. Now that he’d taken
care of business, he had plenty of schemes. And none of them involved knocking over
gas stations for a handful of cash, either. He was smart, now. He was using his head.
And those tar-faces up at Marion who used to jeer at him about his computer classes
were laughing out the other side of their asses now.

There was a computer in every public library. Anybody could just walk in and connect
to the Internet. You could sit outside a coffee house or a book store or a hundred
other places and nobody would ever know who you were while you stalked them on Facebook,
stole their bank account numbers, ripped off their credit cards, sent them threatening
e-mails, and one day, maybe even showed up at their door. It was a world wide open.
And it was waiting for him.