High Stakes Read online

  High Stakes

  A Jack Doyle Mystery

  John McEvoy

  http://joehoy.com/clients/johnmcevoybooks/

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2014 by John McEvoy

  First E-book Edition 2014

  ISBN: 9781464202773 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

  [email protected]

  Contents

  High Stakes

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Epilogue

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  Like all the others before,

  this is dedicated to my family.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to faithful sources of encouragement Frier C. McCollister, Kirk Borland, the Tilton family, Joe Hoy, and Gwen Macsai; to William M. Sheridan and Eoin Purcell for valuable advice; and to editor Barbara Peters and the dedicated staff at Poisoned Pen Press for their continued expertise.

  Epigraph

  “I have an agreement with Father Time.

  I don’t mess with him, and he don’t mess with me.”

  —Bernard Hopkins, age 49,

  world light-heavyweight boxing champion

  “Life’s not the breaths you take but the moments

  that take your breath away.”

  —George Strait

  “Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.”

  —Phillip Larkin

  Chapter One

  The March half-moon played hide-and-seek behind a screen of huge clouds that scudded across the midnight sky. After moving silently up the concrete walkway to the Large Animal Barn at Croft College, she bent down a few feet behind the dark blue campus police car and peered through its rear window. A young officer was in the driver’s seat, hat tilted over his eyes and his earplugs in as he dozed to the low volume country western song twanging out of his iPad mini.

  At the back entrance to the long, white barn she crouched at the door, quickly used her tension wrench and steel pick on the simple lock, and slid inside the long, dimly lit, one-story wooden building. The corridor ran between stalls housing a couple of Black Angus heifers and a Holstein cow. She softly walked forward. Her masked face momentarily split in a smile as she inhaled the familiar smell of hay and horse.

  The lock had been easier to pick than Secretariat in a Fantasy League Race. That was a relief, she thought, as she brushed a trickle of sweat from her forehead, took a deep breath. No noise from the wide metal door either opening or closing, very little from the dark bay mare looking out from her stall at the north end of the barn. So far, so good. The inquisitive mare twitched her ears in a tentative greeting as the dark-clad figure slowly approached. She watched the visitor with luminous brown eyes above her long face with its large crooked white star. Her racetrack days, when regular attention was paid her by attentive humans, were long behind her.

  As her soft muzzle was being stroked, the mare heard a gentle voice saying, “You’ve been probed, prodded, perhaps bred to a lesser representative of your species. You are not an object of well-earned affection, but of experimentation. No more, babe, no more.”

  The needle sank deep into the broad bay neck delivering the large dose of phenobarbital. The mare twisted her head away but quickly stopped as the drug took effect. With a shudder, she collapsed on the stall’s floor.

  The woman put the needle and syringe into her right jacket pocket. From the left one, she took out a printed card and quickly entered the stall. She placed the white placard on the dead horse’s neck. In large dark letters, it read:

  NO MORE EXPLOITATION OF

  THIS ONE OF GOD’S CREATURES

  It was the second time she had left such a message. After a final pat on the mare’s neck, the woman exited the stall and moved rapidly, silently, to the south barn door and slipped out into the dark night. The heifers and the Holstein swiveled their heads to watch her go.

  Chapter Two

  Jack Doyle slid into the driver’s seat of his gray Accord, feeling, as his good friend Moe Kellman would put it, “top notch.” He turned on his windshield wipers as he pulled out of the Fit City Health Club parking lot in Chicago’s Loop and drove up Dearborn Street. Not even this wet, chilly, dreary, unpleasant early spring morning could dim his mood as he looked forward to his breakfast meeting at Petros’ Restaurant, two blocks from his north side condo.

  He had joined Kellman, Chicago’s reputed furrier-to-the-Mob, at Fit City at six thirty for their regular workout in the small boxing room with its ring, light and heavy bags, free weights, and space for jumping rope. The two had met and bonded there several years before, both eschewing the other exercise areas of what they considered this yuppie-infested club. Their friendship during the previous two years had featured ownership of a talented colt named Plotkin. This fifty thousand-dollar purchase had woun
d up winning more than three hundred thousand dollars on the track and was now churning out more profits for the pair. Plotkin was serving his first season as a popular young stallion, with a stud fee of ten thousand dollars, and a book of fifty mares he would be bred to this spring.

  For Doyle, these workouts gave him a chance to replicate old moves he’d employed as an amateur boxer twenty-five years earlier when, at age eighteen, he’d won a Golden Gloves title at one hundred sixty pounds. The diminutive, seventy-something Kellman, as a boy growing up on Chicago’s tough West Side, had fared well in many a fracas. His brief amateur career as a lightweight boxer had been aborted by service with the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War.

  After Doyle’s first set of seventy-five push-ups and then three minutes of rapid jump-roping, and Kellman’s fifty sit-ups and push-ups, they both paused and the little man said, “What do you hear from the breeding farm? How’s Plotkin doing?”

  Doyle took a towel to his head of sandy-colored hair now darkened with sweat. “I called the farm manager, nice guy named Paul Mann, yesterday afternoon. He said Plotkin has ‘serviced’ eighteen mares so far. That’s what they call it in their business, ‘serviced.’ He’s got another thirty-two scheduled in the next few weeks. If a mare doesn’t get pregnant on the first try, she gets another attempt free of charge. So far, that hasn’t been necessary, Mann told me.”

  “Great news,” Moe said, picking up his jump rope and placing it on the bench beside him.

  “Absolutely. I went out to the farm, Hill and Dale, one morning last week. Watched Plotkin being bred to a couple of mares. I must say that our stud approached his assignment with considerable enthusiasm. Probably has a libido much like that of his younger owner, if I may say so myself.”

  “You just did,” Moe laughed.

  “Mann at Hill and Dale gave me a little tutorial on breeding horses and famous breeders. One of the latter group, he said, was an Italian named Federico Tesio. He bred a bunch of good runners. According to Mann, Tesio’s famous quote about his success was that he had ‘learned to listen to the stars and talk to the horses.’”

  Moe reached for a towel and began drying himself off. “Yeah? Well, I remember reading somewhere that breeding thoroughbreds is like playing chess with nature.”

  As he pulled on his gloves before heading for the heavy bag, Doyle noticed Moe taking a pair of cross-trainers out of his gym bag and pulling the crumpled paper from within them.

  “New kicks today, Moesy?”

  “Right.” Kellman held one of the shoes up to his face. “Which is the best smell in the world? Newly mown grass? The inside of a new car? Or brand new shoes?”

  Doyle grinned. “I’d vote for the smell of a new woman.”

  “Good luck to you there,” Kellman replied before they began their forty-five minute workout routines.

  ***

  Doyle’s decision to make this post-workout breakfast appointment resulted from a phone call he’d received the previous evening. Picking up his cell at the programmed sound of the first bars of jazz standard “Take the A Train,” Doyle heard a gruff voice he recognized say, “This is Damon Tirabassi. I presume you haven’t forgotten me, Jack.”

  “I’ve tried mightily,” Doyle said, “but to no avail. What’s on your bureaucratic mind? I guess it’s not worth asking how you got my unlisted cell number.” Doyle had first met Tirabassi and his FBI agent partner, Karen Engel, six years earlier when he had aided them in bringing to justice a sadistic media tycoon who was killing his own thoroughbred stallions for their insurance values.

  “Don’t bother about how we got your phone number. I’m calling because we could use your help, Jack. Karen and I want to meet with you.”

  “Help for what? Don’t tell me that stallion killer wangled an early parole.”

  Tirabassi said, “No, no. What we’re dealing with now is another horse killer, or horse killers.”

  “You’re jivin’ me!”

  “If only,” Tirabassi said. “How about meeting at that greasy spoon in your neighborhood that you like? Tomorrow at nine?”

  “Agreed. Breakfast will be on you.”

  Chapter Three

  Doyle slid the Accord into his slot in the basement garage of his condo building, locked it, and briskly walked the four blocks to Petros’ Restaurant, determined, as usual, to be on time. The FBI agents always were.

  Petros’, which Doyle had frequented for several years, was one of the numerous Greek-owned Chicago restaurants that provided decent food at reasonable prices. Owner Petros, a voluble immigrant from an Athens slum, had long been under the impression that he looked very much like the late Telly Savalas and loved to be referred to by the actor’s first name. Doyle never obliged him.

  “Mornin’, Smelly,” Doyle said as he walked past the cash register Petros was manning. Petros, using a wet thumb as he counted a wad of paper currency, looked up and barked, “Have a seat, Jeck. We’ll start your breakfast. Raw bacon, eggs under hard, hash blacks, and burnt toast, eh?” He smiled widely under his bushy mustache.

  Doyle paused. “Are you using growth hormone salve on that item under your big ugly nose? That ’stache looks like it could strain stew, much less soup. And, yeah, give me the usual,” Doyle said, walking to the back booth of the long room. He saw Karen Engel smile at him before she took a bite of toasted bagel. Her colleague, Damon Tirabassi, put down his coffee cup and nodded. “Thanks for coming, Jack,” Karen said.

  Doyle looked at her appreciatively. “You never change, Karen,” he said to this tall, attractive woman who, now in her late thirties, retained the fresh look and athletic physique of the varsity volleyball captain she had been at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Damon,” Jack added, “you’re starting to show a little wear and tear, if I do say so.”

  The middle-aged Tirabassi’s once-black head of hair had noticeably grayed as it simultaneously thinned. His bright white shirt showed the start of a midriff bulge over his belt. He winced as Doyle continued, “Hey, no offense, Damon. You know my middle name is candor.”

  “I thought it was Smartass,” Tirabassi growled.

  “Is that Bureauspeak now?” Doyle asked. “Let’s get down to business here, folks. What’s this about more horse killings”?

  Tirabassi took the lead after reaching into his suit coat pocket for a well-worn notebook. “March eighteenth this year was the second one we’ve been assigned to investigate. The first was in February at the University of Racine veterinary school in southeastern Wisconsin. The recent one was at another Midwest vet school, this one at Croft College in south central Illinois. A twelve-year-old thoroughbred mare found dead in its stall. An autopsy…”

  “You mean necropsy,” Karen politely interjected. “That’s an autopsy for horses.”

  “Yes, the necropsy determined the Croft College cause of death was a massive dose of phenobarbitol. Same as with the first one at Racine.”

  Doyle leaned forward. “What the hell? Why would somebody knock off an old mare living at a college?”

  Karen opened her briefcase and extracted a five-by-eight note card. She waited until waitress Darla refilled Doyle’s coffee cup before handing it across the table. In large, bold face, printed letters, it read:

  NO MORE EXPLOITATION FOR

  THIS ONE OF GOD’S CREATURES

  “This was it? No signature? Nobody taking credit? Not some religious nut?” Doyle said.

  “Look at the back of the card,” Damon said. “We don’t have any idea what it means. Could be from some deranged horse-hater. Or somebody who doesn’t like horses used for testing. You know, a so-called ethical humanist. Or humane ethicist. Whatever.”

  Doyle saw one line of type:

  RIP FROM ALWD

  “Rest in peace from who? What’s ALWD?”

  “It is some previously little-known, evidently very radical imitator of People f
or the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA for short. That organization, a self-described ‘animal rights advocate,’ claims to have more than three million members and supporters around the world. ALWD stands for Animal Life With Dignity.

  “All we know about this outfit,” Tirabassi continued, “are the cards, identical to this one, that were attached to the two horses that were killed this way. We questioned the national president of this ALWD, a man named Randolph Stumph. Lives in Urbana, Illinois. He wouldn’t say how many people belonged to ALWD. And he swears he knows nothing about any horse killings. All Stumph would tell us is that ALWD ‘campaigns vigorously for the abolition of all animal experiments.’”

  Doyle signaled Darla for a coffee refill. “I’m not sure I understand why these horses were sent to college.”

  Karen said, “Racine and Croft both have research centers dealing with horses. They study breeding, reproduction, parasite problems, foal diseases, all kinds of equine issues. Parasites have become a particular concern recently, they tell us. So, people at these vet schools work to develop preventive measures. Like vaccines to combat infectious diseases. Or new diagnostic tests.”

  “Retired horses,” Damon said, “are donated to the vet schools for these research purposes. The donors are assured their horses will get absolutely top, humane, painless care. But I guess these ALWD kooks don’t believe that to be the case.”

  “How was anybody able to get to these horses to kill them?”

  “Jack, university or college vet school barns have not been on high security alert. Until now,” Damon said. “Whoever, if it is just one person, got into the University of Racine building by opening a side window and climbing through. This last one, down at Croft College, entrance was gained by picking the lock on the front door. With, evidently, a so-called security guard snoozing in his car only a few yards away,” Damon said disgustedly. “Both of these killings came late at night or in early morning, and the horses killed were retired thoroughbred runners. ALWD’s Stumph explained that it was ‘perhaps some overzealous activist.’ How I hate that word! Along with gadfly, which also means loudmouth,” Damon added.