Death by Equine by Annette Dashofy (booksvooks txt) 📕

couldn’t be. Jessie shuffled the papers and located a set of radiographs. The old film kind. She didn’t have a light box in her home office and had to settle for holding the films up to her reading lamp. Hardly ideal conditions for reading x-rays.

Something about the pictures triggered her internal alarm.

The radiographs she’d taken of Blue were on the computer back at the clinic. She had, however, backed them up online. She swiveled her chair to face her laptop and tapped the mousepad. As the screen came to life, another flash of lightning lit up the room at the same time a crash of thunder rattled the windows. Peanut whined and cowered under her feet. The tabby bolted from the room.

And the house fell into darkness.

Jessie stared at the computer—the only light source remaining. She glanced at her router. The green lights that usually twinkled across its surface were now black. So much for accessing her files from her online backup service.

She fumbled for the old x-ray and found it. Then she gazed at the light show outside her window. Storm or not, she knew what she had to do.

ON AN ORDINARY NIGHT, Riverview’s final race went off just before eleven. The parking lot would be vacant by eleven thirty. But the storm must’ve caused a delay. The parking lot didn’t empty out until close to one.

Jessie left her truck at the darkened amusement park, adjacent to Riverview. She skimmed the edge of the miniature golf course and stepped over the rickety wood fence separating the two properties. She may have been banned from the track, but if she bypassed the guard shack at the stable gate and avoided the front side security guys, who would know? Dressed entirely in black, she skirted the dirt track’s white outside rail.

The wind was picking up again, scattering dust and debris. Lightning flickered in the clouds overhead. Mother Nature wasn’t done with her pyrotechnics.

Jessie had spent enough time around the backside to know the strengths and weaknesses of the security measures. An eight-foot Cyclone fence encircled the barn area with the electronically operated arms at the stable entrance. Guards kept a close eye on the padlocked gate next to the rec hall and another that horses and riders passed through on their way between the track and the barns. There were two additional pedestrian gates near the maintenance buildings that security almost always overlooked. Jessie hoped tonight wasn’t an exception.

As she neared the empty grandstand, she took a furtive look around. Seeing none of Riverview’s rent-a-cops, she darted toward the backside. With the brown envelope containing Mexicali Blue’s x-rays tucked under one arm, she hurried along the Cyclone fence to the first pedestrian gate, hoping to find it unlatched. No such luck.

She took another cautious check of her surroundings and hurried past the maintenance buildings to the second gate.

It was locked too. If only she’d thought of a Plan B.

She curled her fingers around the vertical pipes that made up the gate and gave it a frustrated shake. To her surprise, the padlock hit the pavement with a metallic clank. She snatched it and looked around, afraid she’d drawn unwanted attention. All she saw was the flicker of lightning.

Jessie opened the gate wide enough to squeeze through and let it drift shut. She hooked the padlock on the wire fencing next to the opening. Now she simply had to work her way across the backside to the clinic without being seen.

Thunder rumbled to the west. Dawn-to-dusk lights illuminated the backside in patches, leaving long shadows in their wake. Jessie clung to the dark sides of the stables. The soft rumble of a car engine forced her into one of the covered gaps between barns until track security’s battered Chevy Cavalier rolled past.

The clinic loomed ahead. Jessie’s heart pounded in her ears. Walk, she reminded herself. Running would attract attention, especially with the stable gate’s guard shack nearby. Better to keep her head down and her pace casual.

She hesitated at the corner of the clinic. The front door was closed. Besides being very much in sight of the guard on duty, she thought of the racket opening it would make. With a slight adjustment in her original plan, she picked her way along the side of the building to the back entrance.

That door was closed too. Remnants of yellow tape fluttered. Jessie grabbed the handle and heaved. With a moan, the door opened.

Jessie paused to allow her eyes to adjust to the dark. A flash of lightning cast an eerie gray burst through the windows, illuminating the cavernous spa and emphasizing the liquid black pit that took up a good third of it. Then it was dark again, and she had to rely on her memory to pick her way to the passage. She clung to the side well away from the pool. When she was almost halfway across, lightning again lit the room and revealed the maw of the hall. She scurried the rest of the way.

Groping the wall, she made her way along the dark passage to the office door. She dug her keys from her jeans’ pocket, fingered them until she found the right one, and probed until it slipped into the lock.

Force of habit drew her hand to the light switch, but she stopped in time. The nights spent sleeping in the office had given her a familiarity of the space even in the dark. She scooped up the laptop and headed to the exam area.

The light box cast a pale glow. Jessie snapped the two sheets of film into the clips at the top of it. She opened the laptop, logged in, and browsed through her files until she located what she was looking for. Then she stood back to study the shades of black, gray, and white.

The films on the light box showed a perfectly normal bone structure. The more recent digital pictures showed the thin line where a break had occurred. She was so