“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Molly Brown.”

“You don’t sound as if you’re from around here,” I said.

“Born and raised in South Florida.”

“So was I. Miami,” I said.

“Now that’s so far south it’s South America.”

12

A BEAGLE HAD trotted in and was snuffling around the hay-strewn floor, going after hoof shavings. Molly Brown daintily perched her other hind leg on the hoof stand as if about to be treated to a manicure in a salon.

“Hughey,” I said, “there are circumstances about this fire that raise many, many questions. There’s a body, yet no one was supposed to have been inside Sparkes’s house. The woman who died is my responsibility, and I want to do absolutely everything I can to find out why she was there and why she didn’t get out when the fire started. You may have been the last person to visit the farm before the fire, and I’m asking you to search your memory and see if there’s anything—absolutely anything—that might have struck you as unusual that day.”

“Right,” Marino said. “For example, did it appear that Sparkes might have been having a private, personal conversation on the phone? You get any idea that he might have been expecting company? You ever heard him mention the name Claire Rawley?”

Dorr got up and patted the mare on her rump again, while my instincts kept me far out of the reach of her powerful hind legs. The beagle bayed at me as if suddenly I were a complete stranger.

“Come here, little fella.”

I bent down and held out my hand.

“Dr. Scarpetta, I can tell you trust Molly Brown, and she can tell. As for you”—he nodded at Marino—“you’re scared of ’em, and they can sense that. Just letting you know.”

Dorr walked off, and we followed him. Marino clung to the wall as he walked behind a horse that was at least fourteen hands high. The farrier went around a corner to where his truck was parked. It was a red pickup, customized with a forge in back that burned propane gas. He turned a knob and a blue flame popped up.

“Since her feet aren’t so great, I have to draw clips on shoes to make them fit. Kind of like orthotics for humans,” he commented, gripping an aluminum shoe in tongs and holding it in the fire.

“I give it a count of fifty unless the forge’s warmed up,” he went on as I smelled heating metal. “Otherwise I go to thirty. There’s no color change in aluminum, so I just warm it a bit to make it malleable.”