Chapter 3

"Move your arm," Alma said.

"Get a warrant."

"Devin, this is a horse, not a house. I have the owner's standing authorization to verify identification on any animal on this farm, and you know it. It's in your own consignment contract."

"I don't care what's in the contract -"

"Then I'll call Addie."

That stopped him. Everyone in the aisle saw it stop him. Adelaide Marchetti owned Willow Bend and had owned it since her father died in 2011, and she had never once, in fourteen years, sided with Devin Coyle in a public argument. Coyle's arm came down.

Alma stepped into the stall.

Hollis moved aside just enough to give her room and kept his hand on the colt's shoulder. He knew this horse. Lot 122, a bay colt by a stallion named Quiet Harbor out of a mare called Sabella's Run. Foaled in April, two nights of hard labor, Hollis on his knees in the straw with the mare's head in his lap while Alma worked. The colt had come out long-legged and dark and had stood up in nineteen minutes, and Hollis had been the first thing it saw.

Alma ran the scanner slowly down the left side of the colt's neck, from the crest to the shoulder. She did it the way she did everything, unhurried, one hand flat on the animal so it knew where she was.

The scanner beeped twice.

A green light came up on the little screen.

Nobody in the aisle moved. It was a small sound, a plastic sound, the kind of thing that happens in barns a hundred times a week, but it landed in that silence like a hammer on a nail. Coyle's shouting had stopped mid-word and his mouth was still open.

Alma looked at the screen. She looked at it for a long time.

"Read it," Sonny said.

Alma turned the scanner so the screen faced the rail. Then she picked up the binder and pulled a printout from a plastic sleeve - the mare's record, the microchip registry page for Sabella's Run, foaling date, breeding dates, attendant of record.

"Lot 122," she said, loud enough for the back of the aisle. "Microchip matches the registry. Bay colt, foaled April eleventh, out of Sabella's Run by Quiet Harbor."

The woman with the sale book closed it.

"And the attendant of record on the foaling," Alma said, "is Hollis Renn."

The aisle did not cheer. It did something more useful. It turned.

Forty faces swung toward Devin Coyle at once, and Hollis watched the man's neck go red above his collar. Coyle laughed, a short ugly sound, and jabbed his finger at the tag still in his hand.

"That doesn't prove anything. That tag was in his pocket. He could've been planning to swap them tonight, after inspection, before the sale -"

"Then whose tag is it?" Alma said.

"It's Lot 114's tag."

"Whose lot is 114?"

Coyle opened his mouth. Closed it.

Alma reached past him, picked up the top sheet from the consignment stack on the folding table, and held it up beside the tag in his hand. She didn't say a word. She just held them, one in each hand, so the whole row could see.

Two lot numbers, side by side, printed in the same font, on the same morning.

Hollis saw it before anyone said it. The tag in Coyle's fingers was numbered 114. The consignment sheet in Alma's hand, the one Coyle himself had typed and signed three weeks ago, listed Lot 114 as a chestnut filly in Barn C.

Not this colt. Not this barn. Not even this color.

Coyle's hand stopped in the air.

"That's your sheet," Alma said quietly. "Your signature at the bottom."

Somebody at the rail said, "Oh."

And that was when Hollis heard the sound he'd been dreading all morning - not shouting, not the scanner. A vehicle on the gravel drive, coming up slow, the way cruisers came.