Chapter 2

Alma didn't move. She stood there with her hand on the strap of her bag, waiting, the way a person waits for a dog to stop barking.

"You don't get to put a machine on my consignment," Coyle said. "I've got a sale in four hours. You are not turning my barn into a crime scene in front of buyers."

"It's already a crime scene," Alma said. "You called it one."

Behind her, boots sounded on the concrete. Sonny Delacroix came down the aisle with two of his buyers trailing him, a short man in a brown suit and a tall woman with a sale book already open. Sonny had trained horses for thirty years and had the flat, patient face of a man who had been lied to by better liars than Devin Coyle.

"Scan every yearling on the sheet," Sonny said.

Coyle turned on him. "Sonny, this is a farm matter."

"It's my order," Sonny said. "I've got three buyers here and a client flying in from Ocala. If there's any question about identity on this consignment, I want the whole row scanned. All of it. Right now, in front of everybody."

A murmur went down the rail. The woman with the sale book said something to the man beside her and he nodded. That was the thing about buyers - they didn't care about feelings. They cared about paper. If one lot was in question, every lot was in question, and a seven-figure morning could turn into a walk away.

Hollis stayed in the stall with his hand on the colt's shoulder. He could feel the animal's pulse under his palm, steady now, and he kept his own breathing matched to it. He had learned that trick at twenty-nine, with a red mare who wouldn't let the vet near her. You breathe for them. They follow.

Alma unzipped her bag. She took out a microchip scanner, gray and scuffed, the same one she'd carried for eleven years, and a thick three-ring binder with registry printouts in plastic sleeves. She set the binder on the edge of the folding table and opened it.

"Whose idea was the security log?" she asked, not looking up.

"Mine," Coyle said. "Night watch on sale week. Standard."

"Standard," Alma repeated. "And you pulled the badge number off it yourself this morning."

"Somebody had to."

Alma turned a page. Hollis watched her finger run down a column of names and dates. She stopped. She didn't say anything, but her jaw set the way it did when she found something in a blood panel she didn't like.

"Devin," she said. "When were these tags put on?"

"Three weeks ago. Same as every year."

"And who did the tagging?"

"I did. With the grooms."

"Which grooms?"

Coyle's eyes flicked to Hollis and away. "Him. He did the yearlings with me."

Hollis felt the colt lean a little harder against his chest. He hadn't been part of the tagging. He had been in Barn A with a mare named Kestrel's Last who had colicked on the fifteenth, up on her feet and off them for two days, and he had the vet invoices to prove it. But this wasn't the moment to say it. He had learned a long time ago that in an aisle full of buyers, the louder man wins the first ten minutes.

"Let's start with this one," Alma said, and stepped toward the stall.

Coyle's arm came up across the opening.