Dark Horse (A Jim Knighthorse Novel) Read online

  “As far as I knew, he was wildly popular among his fellow class mates.”

  “Amanda was in the school band?”

  She paused, then shrugged. “I do not know. Maybe.”

  “I was told she quit. Any reason why?”

  “Refer to my prior comment.”

  I didn’t like the answer. Mrs. Williams probably had access to Amanda’s file, and certainly would have read it since the murder. Band membership would have been in the official records.

  “And Knighthorse,” she said, “I am definitely not the kind of principal you wish you had in high school. Students are never, ever pleased to be sitting where you are now.”

  I smiled. “I’m not a student. And it’s not a bad view from here, Mrs. Williams.”

  Most women would have blushed. She did not.

  I left her office.

  10.

  The campus was sprawling and clean. The hallways were lined with yellow lockers. Most sported combination locks, although a few were padded with locks of considerable fortitude. These were blocks of titanium padlock perfection that were engineered to protect far more important things than school books and pencils.

  My footsteps echoed along the now-empty hallway. Just a half hour earlier it had been filled to overflowing with students. Within these hallowed lockered halls, plans for parties had been made, drug deals had gone down, students had been harassed, asses pinched and thoughts of teenage suicide pondered.

  In the police report, Derrick claimed to have been working out at the school gym at the time of the murder. He had no alibi. His football coach often left him alone with the keys, trusting Derrick. It was against school rules, but Derrick had proven himself to be reliable, and after all he was the star athlete. The coach probably loved him like a son.

  The coach was the last to see Derrick. That had been at 5:45 p.m. on the evening of the murder. The coroner’s report placed the time of murder at 7:00 p.m. According to the arrest report, the detectives figured Derrick left the school weight room shortly after the coach had left and proceeded to ambush the girlfriend he loved and slaughtered her in front of her home. His vehicle had no trace of her blood. There were no wounds on Derrick’s hands or arms. Other than the murder weapon found in his backseat there was nothing to link him to the murder.

  The murder weapon was enough.

  Had he not blundered and forgotten about the murder weapon, Derrick would have pulled off one amazingly clean murder. I’ve now had a chance to see the crime scene photos. The murder was definitely not clean.

  Derrick, of course, claimed he was at the school weight room until 7:30 p.m. that night, like he was every night. A routine that anyone could have caught onto and used against him.

  No one believed Derrick’s story. Except his defense attorney Charlie Brown, although he was being paid handsomely to believe his story.

  And me. But I was not being handsomely paid. I hate it when that happens.

  I moved beyond the hallway, beyond the brick walled central quad, beyond what was probably the school cafeteria, beyond the gym, and toward the athletic department.

  It was spring, and so there was no football to be practiced, which was why Derrick had been lifting weights after school, rather than working out with his team. Instead, it was baseball and track season. Beyond a chain-linked fence I could see a varsity baseball game getting under way. Parents and some students filled the small bleachers. To the north of the baseball field was a track field, and it was a beehive of activity. I watched a young girl sprint for about thirty yards and leap through the air, landing gracelessly in a cloud of dirt. She dusted herself off, and then headed back for another leap.

  I followed a paved pathway, bigger than a sidewalk, but not big enough to be called a road. The pathway skirted the softball field and headed toward a group of buildings lined with doors. One of the doors was open, and inside I could see shining new gym equipment.

  My old high school did not have shining new gym equipment. It had well-used and badly damaged gym equipment. In fact, we just had free weights and a few squat racks, come to think of it.

  But it had been enough, if used correctly and religiously. Both of which I had done.

  I stepped into the doorway and peaked in, almost expecting to see a membership desk. What a spread. Gleaming chrome equipment covered the entire room. Mirrors were everywhere. Techno rock pumped through loud speakers situated in every corner. Boys and a handful of girls were in there, all taking their workouts very seriously. I was completely ignored. In fact, there seemed to be a melancholy mood to the place, despite the rhythmic pounding of the dance music.

  I spied some offices in the back and headed that way, passing two kids lifting an impressive amount on the bench. I calculated the weight. They were benching almost three hundred pounds.

  Not bad for a kid.

  I came to the first office and knew I had hit the jackpot. The sign on the closed door said Coach.

  Only the egocentricity of a football coach, in an entire department of other coaches, went by Coach alone.

  I knocked on the closed door. Doing so, the door creaked open, and immediately I sensed something wrong. Very wrong.

  Coach was a big man, and from what I could tell he had taken a bullet to the side of the head. Blood and brain matter sprayed the east side of his office. A revolver was still in his hands. The blood had not congealed, and was dripping steadily from the wound in his open head. His eyes were wide with the shock and horror of what he had done to himself.

  Music thumped loudly into the office.

  No one had even heard the shot.

  11.

  Sanchez and I were working out at a 24 Hour Fitness in Huntington Beach. It was mid-day, and the gym was quiet. I had worked up a hell of a sweat, and was dripping all over the place. Sanchez didn’t sweat; at least not like a real man. And I let him know it again.

  “I save the sweating for the bedroom,” he said, finishing off his third and final set of military presses. “Women like that.”

  “You married your high school sweetheart. You don’t know shit about what women want.”

  “Fine,” he said, wiping down the machine. “Danielle likes it when I sweat. Shows her I take my lovemaking seriously. Besides, Danielle is a lot of woman.”

  “Yes,” I said, “she is.”

  We moved over to the incline presses. Together we added weight until we ran out of plates.

  “Place is going to hell,” said Sanchez, looking around, then swiping two forty-fives from another bench.

  “Yes, but it’s cheap. And apparently open twenty-four hours.”

  “You sound like a goddamn commercial.” He handed me one of the plates and we pushed each into place. The bar looked very unstable and heavily overloaded. “We’re attracting attention again.”

  I had eased down onto the incline bench. In the mirror I could see that two or three young guys, including some gym trainers, were now watching us. I ignored them. So did Sanchez, who spotted me by standing on a steel platform. The forty-five pound bar was sagging. Weight clanked as I went through my twelve reps. I focused on the Chargers training camp, which was coming up soon. This motivated me, pushed me to lift more and work harder. I focused on looking good for Cindy. This motivated me as well. Only on the last rep did Sanchez lend some help. Then he guided the barbell into place.

  “Didn’t need your help on the twelfth,” I said.

  “Sure you didn’t,” he said.

  A voice said: “Hey, man, how much weight is that?”

  We both turned. He was a surfer. Bleached hair and some minor muscle tone. He had a piercing in his nose, and some idiotic Chinese pictographs up and down his arm.

  “You too stupid to do the math?” asked Sanchez. He turned to me. “Kids nowadays.”

  “Kids nowadays,” I added sagely.

  The surfer looked at the weight we were hefting and decided that he would not take offense. He left. Good decision.

  Sanchez did his twelve
reps, and to be a dick I helped him with the last two. After two more sets each, we sat down on opposing benches and sipped from our water bottles.

  “He leave a suicide note?” asked Sanchez.

  “Nothing,” I said. “But he had been fired earlier that day.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “He’d been taking a lot of shit about leaving Derrick alone on the night of the murder.”

  “Hell of a thing to be fired over.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Papers say he was a hell of a coach,” said Sanchez.

  “Three CIF championships.”

  “Why do you think he popped himself?”

  “Hard to say,” I said. “Detective Hanson tells me the man was divorced earlier in the year. They say divorced men are the highest risk for suicide.”

  “Thank you for that useless bit of fucking trivia.”

  I ignored him, and continued.

  “Add to that your best athlete being accused of a heinous murder, and compound it with losing your job....”

  I shrugged again.

  “You shrug a lot for a detective,” said Sanchez.

  “I know. It’s part of the job description.”

  We moved over to the squat rack. We slammed on as many forty-fives as we could find, then some thirty-fives.

  “You know,” said Sanchez, “people here think we’re freaks. Maybe we should go to a real gym.”

  “I like it here,” I said, hunkering down under the bar and placing my feet exactly the width of my shoulders. “Besides, it’s open twenty-four hours.”

  Sanchez shook his head.

  12.

  He was watching me knowingly with those nondescript eyes. Nondescript only in color, that is. Everything else about them was, well, very non-nondescript.

  He knows what you’re thinking.

  The words flashed across my mind, along with the popular Christmas tune, and a chill went through me.

  I was having another Big Mac. Or three. He was drinking another coffee. Lukewarm and black. Just like I like my women. Kidding.

  “So have you told anyone about me?” he asked.

  “That I speak to God in a McDonald’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone I know. Hell, even people I don’t know. In fact, I just told the sixteen-year-old gal working behind the counter that I was meeting with God in a few minutes and could she hurry.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “Said she was going to call the cops.”

  Jack shook his head and sipped some more of his coffee. I noticed he still had the same streaks of dirt along his forehead.

  “So your answer is no,” he said.

  “Of course it’s no, and if you were God you would know that.”

  He said nothing; I said nothing. A very old man had sat in a booth next to us. The old man smiled at Jack, and Jack smiled back. The man leaned over and spoke to us.

  “I’m coming home soon,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Jack. “You are.”

  “I’m ready,” said the old man, and sat back in his seat and proceeded to consume a gooey cinnamon roll.

  “What was that about?” I asked Jack, not bothering to lower my voice. Hell, the man was as old as the hills, no way he could overhear us.

  “He’s going to die tonight,” said Jack, rather nonchalantly, I thought.

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “his heart could only take so many cinnamon rolls.”

  Jack looked at me and sipped his coffee carefully, cradling the paper cup in both hands. He said nothing.

  “Why do you drink with both hands?” I finally asked.

  “I enjoy the feel of the warm cup.”

  “And why do you look at me so closely?”

  “I enjoy soaking in the details of a moment.”

  We had gone over this before.

  “Live in the moment,” I repeated. “And all that other bullshit.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And all that other bullshit.”

  “There is no past and there is no future,” I continued, on a holy roll.

  “Exactly.”

  “Only the moment,” I said.

  “You’re getting it, Jim. Good.”

  “No, I’m not, actually. You see, Jack, I know for a fact that there is a past because a young girl got slaughtered outside her house. In the past.”

  “You have taken a personal interest in the case, I see.”

  “And now someone has killed themselves. A coach at the same high school—but, of course, you know all of this.”

  Jack sat unmovingly, watching me closely.

  “I saw his brains on the wall and I saw the hole in his head,” I continued. “Damn straight this case has gotten personal.”

  We were silent. I could hear myself breathing, my breath running ragged in my throat. I had gotten worked up.

  “You know, it’s damn hard having a conversation with someone who claims to know everything,” I said, concluding.

  “I never claimed to know everything. You assume I know everything.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, fuck me. There you go.”

  “But you’re forgetting something,” said Jack patiently. He was always patient, whoever the hell he was.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Yes,” he said, telling me anyway. “You, too, know everything.”

  We had gone over this before, dozens of times.

  “The answers are always within you,” he said.

  “Would have been nice to know during algebra tests.”

  “You knew the answers then, just as you know them now.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He smiled serenely.

  “If you say so,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said, “So how is it that I know everything, when, in fact, I don’t feel like I know shit?”

  “First of all, you know everything because you are a part of me,” he said.

  “Part of a bum?”

  “Sure,” he said. “We are all one. You, me and everyone you see.”

  “So I know the answers because you know the answers,” I said.

  “Something like that,” he said. “Mostly, you know the answers because the answers have already been revealed to you. Would you like an example?”

  “Please.”

  “What’s the Atomic symbol for gold?”

  “Wait, I know this one.” I rubbed my head. “Fuck. I don’t remember. Wait, I’ll take a stab at it: G-O?”

  “No, it’s A-U.”

  “At least I was close.”

  “What’s the Atomic symbol for gold?” he asked again.

  “A-U,” I said without thinking. “Wait, I only know that because you just told me.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, I didn’t know a few seconds ago.”

  “Are you living now, or are you living a few seconds ago?”

  “I’m living now, of course, but if I didn’t have you here to give me the answer—and by the way, I’m not convinced A-U is the right answer—I still wouldn’t know the answer.”

  “Shall we try another example?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “but this time don’t give me the freakin’ answer.”

  “What’s the Atomic symbol for Mercury?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “None?”

  “Nope. M-E?”

  “No.”

  “See, told you I didn’t know the answer.”

  “You were right,” he said. “And I was wrong, apparently.”

  “Fuck. I’m going to go look it up tonight on the internet, aren’t I?”

  He shrugged.

  “And then when I do, I’ll have the answer.”

  He took a sip from his coffee.

  “But I still don’t have the answer now, but I will soon,” I said.

  He yawned a little.

  “And since time doesn’t exist, that means I alw
ays had the answer.”

  He shrugged again and drank the rest of his coffee.

  “I’m still not buying any of this shit,” I said.

  13.

  According to homicide investigators, Amanda Peterson had been returning home from a high school party on the night of her murder.

  Returning home at 7:30 p.m.

  Isn’t that about the time most parties get started? Perhaps she was going home to fetch something she had forgotten. Perhaps not. Either way, I sniffed a clue here.

  Thanks to Mrs. Williams, vice principal extraordinaire, I now had a small list of Amanda Peterson’s known friends from high school. To help facilitate my investigation, Mrs. Williams gave me the home addresses to the three names on the list. I thought that was a hell of a nice gesture on her part, and reminded myself to repay her with one of my most winning smiles.

  The first house on the list was a massive colonial with a pitched roof, numerous gables and a wide portico. I pulled into the wrap-around driveway.

  The doorbell was answered by a cute teenage girl wearing matching sweatshirt and sweatpants that said UCLA. A girl after my own heart. She was blond, pretty, and quite small, no more than five foot two. Her big blue eyes were filled with intelligence.

  “Can I speak with Rebecca Garner?” I asked.

  “You got her.”

  “My name’s Jim Knighthorse and I’m a private investigator.”

  She smiled broadly, and her eyes widened with pleasure. I turned around to see who the hell she was smiling at. Turns out it was me.

  “A real private investigator,” she said, clapping.

  “In the flesh.”

  She turned somber on a dime. “You’re here about Amanda.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Williams called and asked if it was okay to give out our address. So I knew you’d be coming by.”

  “Are your parents home?”

  “No, I’m alone, so maybe we should talk out here.” She stepped through the doorway and shut the door behind her. “My parents said it would be okay for me to talk to you.”

  She led me to a wooden rocking bench facing the street. Rebecca, utilizing the full use of the bench, rocked us back and forth. A minute later, I was feeling seasick. I stopped the rocking.