Hot Blooded Murder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Epilogue

  Copyright 2016 by Jacqueline D’Acre

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  Hot Blooded Murder is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons and/or events is strictly coincidental. References to actual places and/or historic events are meant to enhance the story and provide a realistic setting for the novel.

  Requests for permission to quote from or make copies of any part of the work should be requested from:

  Jacqueline D’Acre

  norleans @tbaytel.net

  ISBN: 978-1-4835785-7-6

  Dedication

  In memory of my daughter

  Catherine Lehmberg

  who taught me the meaning of unconditional love.

  Quote:

  While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out. It is easier to get into the enemies toils than out again. –Aesop

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my sister Jane Cryderman Ely for her help in choosing a title. Also thanks to Mindy Tart and Rebekah Courtney for reading each chapter as I finished it. Thanks also go to my sister Jennifer Cryderman for bearing with me as I wrote. More thanks to my other sister Della Cryderman who aided in conformational description. I must also thank my wonderful LUNA group of writers: Sue Blott, Glenn Ponka, Jane Crossman, Nancy Bjorgo and Joan Baril for their scintillating insights and vociferous encouragement. Others who offered support include Lori Kauzlarick , Dorothy Irwin and my daughter Catherine Lehmberg…thanks to all.

  Chapter One

  May 21, 2005, 8:46 AM

  If you want to know anything about horses in the New Orleans area, Lila’s Creole Diner in St. Tremaine Parish is the place to go. I’m Bryn Wiley and I had a writing assignment about a local breeder of Morgan horses. On the way to her place I drove up Highway 38 and stopped at Lila’s.

  Inside, I walked past restaurant-style booths, tables and racks of groceries to the rear coolers. It was no surprise that words from horse people seated at the tables floated over boxes of Zatarain’s jambalaya mix to me: “…so that Morgan gal’s having some troubles…” came from a man’s high-pitched voice.

  The subject of my article. I paused in the act of grasping a Diet Coke from a cooler. Resisting my usual embarrassment about eavesdropping, I listened closely.

  “Yeah,” said another, deeper voice, “got twenty head or thereabouts. How’s she gonna feed ‘em all?”

  Embarrassment won. I grabbed the Coke and carried it to the counter at the front. As I paid, Lila, owner and Queen of the Horse Information Highway at this diner-convenience store-gas station, said, “Hey, girl, how’re you?”

  “Good, Lila. Business looks excellent today.”

  The place was noisy, the coffee smell rich and strong. I decided to dangle some bait. “I’m going over to visit Marcie Goodall. I’m doing a story on her breeding program.”

  Lila’s thick eyebrows shot upward, creating generous folds in her forehead. She rang up the register, made change, then leaned forward and whispered, “Tommy Grayson was in here earlier. Upset. Marcie Goodall owes a big bill over at his place, Grayson’s Feeds.”

  Poor Marcie. Once, long ago I’d faced similar problems. Tight money, many hungry horses, big unpaid feed bill.

  Besides having luxuriant eyebrows, Lila was short, stout and dark with a mole near her mouth that could be interpreted as a wart or a beauty mark. She put change in my hand and I shoved it into my faded jeans pocket.

  I said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Lila. It’s a tough spot for Tommy.”

  Lila looked over my shoulder at the crowd of horsepeople overflowing the tables and booths. Their workday finished at nine a.m., all the hundreds of stalls cleaned, all the dozens of thoroughbreds galloped and hosed down, now they laughed, talked, and ate Lila’s ham, biscuits, eggs and grits. The owners were overweight, the riders under. The fragrance of fresh fried fat was in the air, along with the chicory coffee. Sun poured through the big front windows.

  “Grayson’s holdin’ up her next feed delivery,” said Lila. I frowned. A serious difficulty for Marcie. And I selfishly worried–could this cancel my article? I lived frugally. I needed that check. I said ‘bye to Lila, and waved at Arthur Svenquist, a farrier and a friend. He sat squeezed between a huge owner and a diminutive exercise rider. Exercise riders often were jockeys who grew too tall to race, but still were small enough not to burden a fragile racehorse during its early training. I went outside and drove my bottle-green ‘92 Tempo to Morgan Oaks Farm, situated on Word of God Church Road within St. Tremaine Parish, where I lived, scant miles from New Orleans.

  Now I mounted the steps to the rear verandah of Marcie Goodall’s Gone-With-the-Wind house and saw the kitchen door was wide open. Immediately, I felt nervous.

  “Hey, Marcie, you home?” I called in a polite voice while wondering: Why was the door open?

  There was no response.

  “Hellooo.” Louder. “Anybody? It’s Bryndis–Bryn–Wiley. Remember me?” The house was three stories tall with many rooms. Maybe she needed time to get to the kitchen.

  I shifted from foot to foot and wiped sweat from my upper lip. TV weather reports called for more hurricanes and higher temperatures than 2004. That’d had
the hottest summer of my two decades in Louisiana, and it was supposed to get warmer. Global warming? Who knew! But in this premature heat, my SPF-45 sunscreen slid around on my redhead’s skin.

  I’d grown up in Canada, in a northern town called Thunder Bay, so this climate was a constant test. Here, I wore UV sunglasses over my green eyes, even during winter. And despite my years here, I still spoke Canadian, eh? Often Deep Southerners confused me with Yankees, which got me trouble. Beneath my façade of calm, I was getting impatient on the verandah of this ante-bellum house that belonged to a woman who bred Yankee horses: Morgans from Vermont.

  I tried to hook my hair behind my ears, but the left side was boy-short, so it couldn’t go behind my ear. The right side stayed put because it was jaw-length. Sometimes I thought my off-kilter hairstyle reflected my personality.

  Perhaps Marcie had dashed out to her stable? I was here only because an editor of the Morgan Horse of America magazine had phoned earlier. The editor had interrupted my mug of French Market coffee and my enlightenment-seeking from the Tao Te Ching. She needed me to fact-check an article I’d written last February about Marcie’s breeding program. Now I stood outside Marcie’s open kitchen door listening to a refrigerator hum. My curiosity grew, overtaking some of my earlier nervousness. I leaned in to look. I saw part of a kitchen table. Two cups and saucers, pink rosebuds on white china. Burnt coffee smell. And something rotten. I stepped in. Flies buzzed over a cantaloupe on a chopping block, halves fallen apart, chef’s knife beside it. The seeds, left in the fruit, sagged wetly sideways.

  Legal-sized documents, dense with words, were fanned over the table. I walked closer, twisted my head and saw a Xerox copy of a check for thirty-five thousand dollars, made out to Marcie Goodall. My heart thumped. She hadn’t sold her stallion, had she? Other documents looked like they might have come from the St. Tremaine Clerk of Court’s office and others carried the logo of an Anton Delon, Mortgage Broker.

  The burgeoning detective in me wanted to read them, but a building disquiet made me check out the kitchen. It was stark–old white metal cabinets like a World War II British hospital. But something in this room was off. A trembling in the air, like the fading echo of an old…scream?

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Marcie! Where are you?” I considered going deeper into the house, but my natural timidity and Canadian good manners, stopped me. I was a reporter and an amateur detective who hated to pry.

  The air conditioning wasn’t on. But the coffeemaker’s red light was, and the coffee a brown crust in the pot’s bottom. Without thinking, I flicked it off. Then I wondered: should I treat this as a crime scene? I unzipped the fanny pack I wore low, and I thought, rather sexily, on my hip: this being about the sexist thing I would allow on my person. I removed latex gloves and snapped them on. Was I overreacting? Since I’d stumbled into the solving of three murders over the past two years, I’d gotten in the habit of carrying the gloves.

  Everyone forgets to turn off coffeemakers. People rush out leaving doors open. Most likely this is not a crime scene.

  My God! I bolted from the kitchen, across the verandah and outside, down the broad steps. I skirted a pool. Spanish moss, drooping from an oak limb, slapped my face. I brushed it aside and kept on. Pea gravel crunched under my sneakers. At the barn entrance I stopped. Where’s the dog? There’d been a dog before. A Dalmatian.

  My white cotton top stuck to my sweating front in a V-shape. My arms dripped perspiration. I stepped into the stable. Whinnies erupted like car alarms. I yelled, “Hush!” The cries ceased. I walked down the shavings-covered aisle between stalls. Overhead fans cooled me. A reek of ammonia shouted that stall mucking had been overlooked. Why? Help didn’t show?

  I saw the mare and foal Marcie was so proud of in February. I’d paid Marcie my first visit then, to gather information for the story. The bay mare put her head over the stall door and nickered at me. An appeal for food. A smaller head stuck up and gazed at me with huge brown eyes. I looked into their stall–filthy. Feed, water buckets, empty. I wanted to water and feed every horse right now.

  “One minute, gang, “I called out. “First I have to find your mistress.” If she wasn’t in here, I’d start trekking the pastures. I heard a doleful whinny, a snort, and rustling from the far end. My chest tightened.

  My sneakers shushed through pine-scented shavings. A prickle ran over my damp skin when I stopped at the last stall. A brass plaque read: “Lightning Strikes Once.” Marcie’s stallion. I peered through the bars on the door. It was so dark inside, I couldn’t make out what, or who, was behind them. More shuffling. Had I seen a flash of white?

  “Marcie?” My throat was dry.

  My anxious breathing picked up another smell, different from decaying fruit or urine-soaked bedding. Like rotten eggs, but sweeter, with an undertone of blood. My abdomen lurched unpleasantly.

  “Marcie?” Dread beat up from my belly.

  “Marcie!”

  A husky ‘her, herr,’ came from the stall. Horse, not human.

  “Marcie, you in there?”

  All the horses listened with me. Well. I slid open the door, moved forward. Then halted, foot raised. If I set it down, I’d step on a body.

  Chapter Two

  May 21, 9:36 AM

  The smell. Rotten eggs but sweeter. I pinched my nostrils closed against the stench and cupped a palm over my mouth. A retch rose up but I choked it down. I peered into the darkness of the stall. The stallion’s zigzag blaze stood out: a silhouette of lightning. Plus, his coffee-black eyes showed the white of an anxious or angry horse. His muscles, under his mahogany-red coat, were pebbled with sweat and bunched as if to spring. At me? I tried to stifle my unease. After all, I was supposed to be a horse person and horse people as a group despise fear in horse or human. But I was scared all the time and now I knew it was Marcie’s body between the stallion and me.

  Outside light filtered into the barn. A breeze moved gray-bearded branches and fretfully shadowed the corpse in the straw. Holding my mouth with one hand and my shaky right hand outstretched to ward off the horse, I did a deep knee bend, wobbled and then got my balance. When I saw the horse wasn’t pouncing, I studied the remains of Marcie from my squatting position.

  Her face was hidden in a tangle of dark brown hair, now auburn with blood. Her hands were flung back, fists uncurled. Her soft arms bloody. I leaned closer and saw curved indentations in the flesh. My eyes moved to Marcie’s chest where her white shirt was wildly red as if tie-dyed by a maniac. Her right breast was exposed. Somehow it had escaped the carnage. It was pure white, a moon-shaped mound with a rose-brown nipple. Under the shirt her left heart-breast was pulped, again by the curious half-circle depressions. Her entire abdomen and her jeans-clad thighs also were covered with them. My eyes zoomed up and met the oily black eye of the stallion. The marks were shaped like horseshoes.

  Did he do this to Marcie? My hand went to my own breast. I felt like I was in danger–but then I often did, so I couldn’t always trust my own perceptions. I stared up at the horse. Despite his disheveled appearance, it was still obvious he was a classic hot-blooded Morgan beauty: slender head, large eyes, arched neck, abundant mane and forelock to the tip of his nose. He was descended from one New England stallion, Justin Morgan, but nevertheless also carried the “hot” blood of horses that evolved in hot climates–as opposed to cold blooded horses which evolved in northern climes and were heavy work horses. There are also warmbloods, but never mind that.

  He stood over Marcie and me, black tail tucked, rump touching the back wall. Occasionally he shifted, rustling straw, but mainly he held this position at a right angle to Marcie’s body. When I met his eye he dipped his head, knifed his nose down to the body, but stopped short of touching it. His muscles looked hard as sculpted rock tautly covered with satin. Abruptly he raised his head, eyes on me. I felt panic.

  Was Lightning Strikes Once a killer?

  I rose, hands up to ward off the horse and backed from the body, the horse and the st
all. In the aisle, I reached around my belt and unclipped my cell phone. I slammed the wooden stall door shut then punched out Sheriff MacWain’s direct line. Uninvited, and pretty much unwelcomed, I’d worked on three cases over the past couple of years. The Sheriff and I had developed a relationship of mutually melancholic tolerance. One ring.

  “MacWain.”

  “Sheriff? Bryn Wiley. I am out on Word of God Church Road at the Morgan Oaks Farm. Marcie Goodall’s place? Can you come out here–fast?” I heard his sigh and then his characteristic, “Yup. Okay, Bryndis.”

  “It’s…the worst. I’ll wait.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  Then we each clicked off.

  A white car lurched to a stop on the pea gravel outside the barn. Two cowboy hats were silhouetted inside the car. In unison, two men got out of the car, slammed two doors. A tall, handsome Asian, Deputy Sheriff Tuan Scott, attended the slight, fiftyish Sheriff, John MacWain. Scott was the youngest son of a Vietnam vet; one who’d successfully brought his Vietnamese wife back to America. He had the smooth fine features of his mother and the hulk of his father. Easily, he stood six-four, and dwarfed the five-seven–in his high-heeled cowboy boots–Sheriff. MacWain’s face was reddened from too many Southern sunburns, but the red made his blue eyes jolt from his face. Somehow these eyes made up for his small stature.

  I watched the mismatched duo approach. Foolishly, I speculated. When barefoot, was the Sheriff any taller than my own five four and a half? I brushed this inane thought away. They stopped in front of me.

  “Hey there, Bryn,” said MacWain, laconic. Tuan, towering behind the sheriff’s right shoulder, nodded at me, his black eyes alert.

  “Hi guys. She’s down there.” I pointed down the aisle and saw I was still wearing latex gloves. Embarrassed, I waggled my rubbery fingers. “Didn’t want to mess anything up.”

  MacWain sighed. His eyes acquired a weary look. Behind the Sheriff, Tuan winked conspiratorially at me.

  “Of course, Bryn. I suppose that’s a good move,” said the sheriff. “Now, Bryndis. Let me understand this. You found a body.”