Chapter 5

The morning ran on without them. That was the thing about sale week - the horses didn't know anything had happened. Buyers still had appointments. The wash rack still had a line. At nine forty, two of Sonny's clients walked the row again, slower this time, stopping at Lot 122's stall and looking at the colt with new interest.

Hollis worked. That was what he knew how to do. He filled the water buckets, spread fresh straw, picked out the colt's feet, ran a rag down its neck where the dust had settled. He answered questions when buyers asked them - yes, he's an easy foaler's colt, yes, he eats, yes, he's been handled every day since he stood up.

But the aisle had a new sound in it. Whispering, and it wasn't all friendly.

At ten fifteen, Hollis came out of the feed room and heard two grooms talking by the tack stall. One of them, a young man named Jared who had been at Willow Bend eight months, was saying it loud enough to be overheard on purpose.

"I'm not saying he did it. I'm saying it looks bad. Why's an old man got another horse's tag in his coat?"

"Because Coyle put it there," the other one said.

"Sure. But why him? Why'd Coyle pick him?"

Hollis stood in the doorway with a bucket in his hand and let it land. That was the real question, and he'd been turning it over since seven o'clock. Devin Coyle had been manager at Willow Bend for six years. He had never once spoken to Hollis except to give an order. He had no reason to hate him. He had no reason to notice him at all.

Unless Hollis had seen something.

He set the bucket down and walked back to Barn A, to the stall where Kestrel's Last had colicked three weeks ago, and stood at the door of it. The mare was out in the paddock now, grazing, fine. He looked at the stall card in its slot, and then he looked at the tag board at the end of the aisle, where every yearling's halter tag had hung on a hook for three weeks before the sale, waiting to be put on.

There were two empty hooks. One for 122, which was on the colt. One for 114, which was in an evidence bag in a deputy's cruiser.

Hollis stood there a while. He wasn't a paperwork man. He'd never signed a consignment sheet in his life. But he could count, and he could remember, and he remembered something now that he hadn't thought about in three weeks: on the morning the tags went on, he had come in from the foaling barn at six and found Coyle alone in this aisle at the tag board, and Coyle had looked up at him like a man caught at something and then laughed and said, "Early worm, Hollis."

Hollis had thought nothing of it. He'd gone to bed.

Now he stood in front of the board and thought about it hard, and he understood that whatever Coyle had been doing at that board three weeks ago, Hollis had walked in on it. And that was why, this morning, Coyle had needed a thief - a specific thief, one who could be discredited with a tag in his pocket, and who could not afford a lawyer.

"Hollis."

He turned. Alma stood at the end of the aisle with the binder under her arm.

"Come sit down," she said. "I need to show you something."