Free Dark Horse by Tami Hoag Page A

were so slow, her brain might have been in another time zone. I could see her every thought move sluggishly through her mind as she tried to decide on an answer. She dragged the brush along the horse’s shoulder. The horse pinned its ears and rolled an eye at her.
    “She doesn’t work here anymore.”
    “I know. Paris told me. Do you know where she went? A friend of mine wanted to hire her.”
    Jill shrugged, eyes sliding away. “I dunno. Paris said she went to Ocala.”
    “You guys weren’t friends, I guess. I mean, you don’t seem to know very much.”
    “I know she wasn’t a very good groom.” The pot calling the kettle.
    “And I can assume you are?” I said. “Are you interested in moving?”
    She looked pleased with herself, like she had a naughty little secret. “Oh, no. Mr. Jade treats me
very
well.”
    Mr. Jade probably barely knew her name—unless she was his latest alibi, which I doubted. Men like Don Jade went for girls who were pretty and useful. Jill Morone was neither.
    “Good for you,” I said. “I hope you still have a job to keep after that business with Stellar.”
    “That wasn’t my fault.”
    “A horse dies like that. Suspicious circumstances. Owners get nervous, start making phone calls to other trainers . . . Business can go downhill fast.”
    “It was an accident.”
    I shrugged. “Did you see it happen?”
    “No. I found him, though,” she admitted with a strange spark of pride in her beady little eyes. The chance celebrity. She could be on the fringe of a dark spotlight for a week and a half. “He was just laying there with his legs straight out,” she said. “And his eyes were open. I thought he was just being lazy, so I slapped him on the butt to make him get up. Turned out he was dead.”
    “God. Awful.” I looked down the row of Jade’s stalls—a dozen or more—each of them hung with a box fan outside the bars of the stall fronts. “I’m surprised you still have the fans up, considering.”
    She shrugged again and swiped the brush over the gray a couple more strokes. “It’s hot. What else should we do?”
    The horse waited for her to drift back a step, then whipped her with his tail. She hit him in the ribs with the brush.
    “I wouldn’t want to be the person who was careless enough to let that electrical cord hang into Stellar’s stall,” I said. “That groom would never work in this business again. I’d see to that if I had anything to do with it.”
    The little eyes went mean again in the doughy face. “I didn’t take care of him. Erin did. See what kind of groom she was? If I was Mr. Jade, I would have killed her.”
    Maybe he had, I thought as I walked away from the tent.
    I spotted Paris Montgomery some distance away in a schooling ring, golden ponytail bobbing, sunglasses shading her eyes as she guided her mount over a set of jumps. Poetry in motion. Don Jade stood on the sidelines, filming her with a camcorder, as a tall, skinny, red-haired, red-faced man spoke at him, gesturing angrily. He looked like a giant, irate Howdy Doody. I approached the ring a short way down the fence from the two men, my attention seemingly directed at the horses going around.
    “If there’s so much as a hint of something rotten in those test results, Jade, you’ll face charges,” the red-faced man said loudly, either not caring or else craving the attention of everyone in the vicinity. “This won’t just be about whether or not General Fidelity pays out. You’ve gotten away with this crap for too long as it is. It’s time someone put a stop to it.”
    Jade said absolutely nothing, nothing in anger, nothing in his own defense. He didn’t even pause in his filmmaking. He was a compact man with the rope-muscled forearms of a professional rider. His profile looked like something that should have been embossed on a Roman coin. He might have been thirty-five or he might have been fifty, and people would probably still be saying that about him when he was