Kit Ehrman - At Risk

I set the glass on the counter and walked around the loft. I paused at the north windows. The world was quiet and still, everything peaceful and safe. So, why didn't I feel safe? I got back in bed and thought about James Peters. Thought about the awful terror he must have felt before he died. Like Greg had said, no one deserved that.

After the schooling show, when I had checked the competitors' trailers and had almost gotten my teeth rearranged for it, I had called Detective Ralston and told him what I had in mind. We had agreed that preparations would take at least a week and a half. So it wasn't until a windy afternoon toward the end of March that I headed north to Westminster.

I pushed through the double glass doors of Maryland State Police Barracks "G" and signed in at the desk. The corporal handed me a pass that I pinned to my jacket, then I rode the elevator to the second floor. Each door down the brightly-lit hallway had an identifying sign protruding from the transom that reminded me of a miniature street sign. Interview One, Two, and Three, Storage, Records, Properties, Holding One and Two, and directly across the hall, C.I.U. From the spacing of the doorways, it looked like the Criminal Investigations Unit had been allotted a generous slice of floor space.

C.I.U. was stenciled across the pebbled glass in black rimmed with gold. I opened the door and stepped inside. Two rows of pale blue partitions formed a wide central aisle that stretched to the back wall. The room was freshly-painted in a creamy yellow, and the slate gray wall-to-wall was new. A strong odor of new carpet still hung in the air.

A heavyset black man with a pair of bifocals perched low on his nose glanced up when he heard the door swing shut behind me. He was leaning back in his chair with his ankles crossed on the edge of his desk, a handgun magazine propped on his belly. A glossy advertisement for a Sig Sauer P239 covered the back page. I told him who I was looking for, and he directed me to Ralston's cubicle.

Two other detectives were at their desks midway down the room, one on the phone, the other writing on a legal pad. Neither looked up as I walked past. Ralston's cubicle was the last one on the left, and he was on the phone. He motioned for me to join him. I sat in the chair alongside his desk and half listened to his end of the conversation.

"No. There's no way we won't get an indictment… Tuesday at the latest."

Ralston's desk looked spare and neat. He'd covered his blotter with Plexiglass, which he used to anchor lists of information, and he'd angled his computer monitor so that whoever sat in his visitor's chair couldn't see the screen. Above his desk, a calendar featured a glossy photo of a dirt bike jockey catching air as he flew over the edge of an embankment. The rider, dressed in neon yellow and lime green, stood out against a cloudless blue sky.

"Guerra won't play ball, but-" Ralston frowned and shook his head impatiently. "No. He can dick around all he wants, but we're running with it. We've got Menza locked in good and tight."

A collection of pens and pencils filled a navy blue mug with "The Man" printed in gold. The man himself looked professional in a crisp white shirt and paisley tie. The only thing that distinguished him from the rest of the business world was the gun strapped into a shoulder harness.

Except for the mug, and maybe the wall calendar, there was nothing of a personal nature in evidence. No family photographs, no trinkets, and I wondered if the separation of job and personal life extended to his home and thought it probably did.

"He doesn't have to like it, and there's no disputing the- Relax Martin. You'll see… Not this time."

Directly across from where I sat, a bank of windows stretched across the back wall. I glanced at my watch. Though it was only five-thirty, the glass behind the vertical blinds was dark. Heavy black clouds hung low in the sky, and gusts of wind whipped the top branches of a nearby tree. As I watched, the first drops of rain splattered across the glass.

Below the windows, conference tables had been shoved against the back wall and were loaded down with computer monitors, a printer, and stacks of binders and reference books. Cardboard boxes were jammed under the tables, and a collection of wall maps, white boards, and rolled up posters leaned against the wall in the corner.

"Yeah, Monday." Ralston hung up and filed the sheet of paper he'd been taking notes on into an open binder. "Thanks for coming in, Steve."

"No problem."

He wedged the binder in among the others that lined the right side of his desk. Each one had a card slipped into a slot on the spine with a name and date typed in bold black letters. Peters, James S. was third from the left. The binder he'd been working on had McCafferty, Margaret A. hand-printed in blue ink. The date was a week old.

Ralston stood and stretched. "Want some pizza? This is going to take a while."

"Sure."

He put in a call to the local pizzeria, then hefted a cardboard box off the floor. I followed him into interview room number two. Crumbs were scattered across the metal table. The room smelled like fried onions and pastrami.

"I haven't received a response from everyone, yet," Ralston said. "But we have more than enough to get started." He lifted a bulky manila envelope out of the box. "Start with this one while I get the MVA lists."

Ralston went back to his office as I emptied the contents of the first packet onto the table. Though I hadn't recognized the make and model of the trailer used in the theft, I'd been able to eliminate some trailers at the schooling show. With a little effort and attention to detail, I figured I could narrow down the field, even if I had to do it on paper. When I'd suggested this to Ralston, he had enthusiastically sent requests to every trailer manufacture in the country.

I scanned the pamphlets sent in by Equifleet Manufactures and saw they'd been more than happy to comply. Equifleet produced top-of-the-line horse trailers in fourteen different models, both bumper-pull and gooseneck, depending on trailer size and customer preference. Their best-selling model was a simple two-horse bumper-pull with a tapered tack room in the front. All of their trailers featured optional living quarters for the competitor who preferred to sleep on the show grounds. Currently, the largest trailer they manufactured was a popular four-horse slant load with an expanded camper section. No six-horse.

I flipped through their brochures and saw that they had switched to an aluminum shell a decade earlier. Though I hadn't thought about it at the time, the trailer I had been imprisoned in had definitely had a steel shell. That, in and of itself, wasn't significant. In the past, all but a few elite brands had used steel.

It wasn't until I opened an older Equifleet pamphlet that I spotted a trailer that was a possibility. As I studied the trailer's floor plan, memories of that night unexpectedly crowded my mind, and the walls in the small, windowless room seemed to close down on me. For the first time, I thought about James Peters being in there, too. In the dark, alone. Tied to one of the metal partitions. And I wondered what it had been like for him. Maybe he hadn't been able to untie his hands, or maybe he had been unconscious. Or it simply could have been that I was the lucky one. The one who had found the old bolt.

The hum of the ventilation system seemed to grow louder, but the room felt airless.

Ralston opened the door, dropped the MVA list and a notepad on the table, and paused before handing me a Coke. "What's up?"

I shook my head and looked back down at the brochure. "Nothing."

Ralston hitched his chair up to the table and grabbed another envelope out of the box. After a few seconds, I sensed that his attention was on me and not the packet in his hands. I looked up and saw that he was watching me, a slight frown on his face. When I leaned back in my chair and popped the tab on my Coke, Ralston opened his envelope and dumped the contents on the table.