He had asked her to come home with him after the funeral to help with Grandpa.
So she had.
“Methamphetamine.” She braced herself for his verbal lashing, prepared to listen, then press on.
“What about it?”
That was it? All the flack she was going to get? She watched Kyle, trying to decipher his expression in the glow of the fire.
“I wonder if someone is setting you up.”
“For what?”
“Using you as a front for their operation.”
“Based on what?”
“Your chemicals are missing. You say you haven’t used them. But I have to assume someone has.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with a setup. I bought methane so I’d be the one using it. A thief wouldn’t figure he’d get caught. He had no idea you’d be researching my purchases or getting a warrant to search my place.”
“He might. Whoever stole that chemical could have set the fire to the waste dump, Kyle, because he knew you’d be the focus of the investigation.”
Although, truth be known, because of understaffing in the county, Kyle’s fire was not at the top of the list. Insurance wasn’t involved. Other than cleanup, there’d been no damage. The official report read that the fire was started by a match or cigarette thrown from a passing vehicle.
“A more likely possibility is that a thief didn’t set the fire,” Kyle said. He stared at the flames dancing a foot in front of them. “Maybe the methane evaporated because of a faulty valve. I used more ammonia for fertilizer than I realized. Made a mistake in the math. And the toxic waste was no more than someone looking for a free dump to avoid the forty-dollar-a-month pickup fee we have to pay out here in the county. Up until this year that field has been planted, so it wouldn’t make a good dump spot. But now it’s a bunch of clover on the side of a little-traveled country road.”
“Who’s had access to your barn in the past three months?” Sam asked.
“You just aren’t going to give up, are you?” Kyle’s tone held no accusation. Just resignation.
She liked the accusation better.
Maybe he was right. Maybe they were all right and she was losing perspective.
She had with David Abrams. And probably with Kyle, too—at least in thinking that he was involved with illegal meth production.
She was still no closer to finding Maggie’s phantom pedophile. Maybe he didn’t exist, either.
“Instead of spending so much of your time and energy looking for a lab that might not exist, why not try to find the dealer who killed Bob Branson? We know he’s out there somewhere.”
She could do as he asked. Give up.
Maybe she should.
And then she thought of Nicole. Of the disconnected phone number. The mysterious girl who’d met Nicole at her locker. And Maggie Winston talking to a man in the park and belonging to a tennis club with a drug-dealing player.
Mr. Holmes, who’d been an engineer with a six-figure income before he shot his brains out.
The sound of the gunfire reverberated once again in Sam’s mind. As it often did in the darkness.
The problem was bigger than just a drug dealer.
“Getting the dealer would be like putting a bandage on a wound that’s going to bleed out if it doesn’t get stitches. One that will get infected if it isn’t surgically closed up.”
He took a swig of beer.
“Humor me, Kyle. Tell me again who’s had access to your supply barn.”
“We’ve already been through all of this. Your brother. David Abrams. Dan.” The vet. Sam hadn’t looked at him, but she would. “The two guys who transported the feed corn from here to Bob’s.”
Pain and disbelief passed briefly across Kyle’s expression before he became expressionless once again.
“The older guy I hired to transport the hybrid.”
Bob Branson had been Kyle’s biggest champion on the project since he was in high school and first started talking about possibilities. Kyle’s father had thought his son was filled with pie-in-the-sky ideas, but not Bob. Sam could remember Kyle telling her how Bob had listened to him, asked questions and told him to keep working on his theory.
“James and Millie Turner. You. I carried Grandpa out to the barn when Lillie foaled. He sat there for an hour or so. And that’s about it.”
She’d already talked to James and Millie and had harassed David Abrams to the point of embarrassment. She wasn’t going down that road again. Pierce was obviously out. She’d check on the transport companies, but that didn’t seem likely.
Now that she knew the true state of Kyle’s finances, he had more motive than ever. Desperate people do desperate things. Facing the loss of his farm, of Grandpa’s home, Kyle could most definitely have become desperate. But she was around the farm too often. There was no stench. No signs whatsoever of a meth lab on any scale.
Sam sipped her beer, staring at the flames as though an answer awaited her there. If she wasn’t already crazed with obsession, the circles her mind was traveling in were going to send her over the edge.
“I’m sorry, Sam.”
“For what?”
“Not telling you about Sherry Mahon.”
“I know. I checked on her medical history,” she added. “There’s no record of any surgeries last year. And with the amount of time she spent incarcerated, there’d be a record of any medical procedures in her prison medical history.”
Kyle barely moved. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “After what you told me, I kind of suspected I’d been had.”
How could someone be so angry, so hurt and so filled with protectiveness at the same time? “I want to help you,” she said.
“I need you to trust me. And not just because of this whole meth craziness.” He glanced over at her, no life in his eyes. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too,” she told him.
But she couldn’t tell him that she trusted him. She was too consumed by the hurt of betrayal to know how she felt.
She didn’t leave, though.
And when Kyle reached for her hand, she gave it. When he leaned over and kissed her, she kissed him back.
She walked side by side with him into his bedroom and undressed of her own free will. Climbing into bed with him, Samantha loved him fiercely, taking him into her body again and again, as though somehow, in the ancient ritual, they could obliterate the wrongheaded choices that had brought them to this point.
She had an orgasm. More than one. And held on to Kyle while she took his release inside her.
And then she got up. Got dressed. And left.
23
Chandler, Ohio
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
I decided to walk to work that morning. The unusually blue skies and bright sunshine, together with a balmy seventy-degree temperature, helped convince me. October was looming, and with it would come falling leaves and chilly air that limited my time outdoors.
Besides, I needed a little time to relax. I’d been up and down all night. Camy, who normally never stirred, had barked three times—each time just as I was drifting off. I blamed her restlessness on my tossing and turning.
I had more than thirty active cases to deal with and I couldn’t get Maggie Winston out of my mind. I had such a strong feeling that the girl was in trouble but I couldn’t prove anything.
By all appearances she was a normal fourteen-year-old girl experiencing her first crush. Many youngsters subconsciously chose an older man to test their wings on. Mostly because he was safe. A sure bet that nothing would materialize beyond the fantasies in their minds.
But Lori Winston had been concerned enough about Maggie to risk opening their lives, and her daughter’s confidences, to me. Granted, the woman was panicked that Maggie would make the same mistake she had—limiting her choices, her life. Everyone had their hot spots. Maggie having sex was Lori’s.
So maybe I was just overreacting to the mother’s anxiety.
But w
hy was Lori so outraged by Sam watching her daughter? If Lori had nothing to hide, why would it matter?
Unless it was just the widespread perception of people with histories like hers that cops were the bad guys, out to get them.
Maybe Lori was afraid the police would discover she’d been tapping illegally into the local cable line.
But that didn’t give me the answers I needed about Maggie. Just who was this guy she’d met in the park on at least two different occasions?
If it was only two. And if they’d really met in the park…
Was Maggie lying to me?
I’d just turned on to Main Street when I heard the voices. One male. One female. They were coming from a doorway about a block away. I couldn’t make out the words, but the anger was clear. On both sides.
My office was around the next corner, so I slowed down, wanting to observe, make certain that no one needed assistance.
The man’s voice sounded, crisp. Curt. And then he stepped onto the sidewalk and walked away. That’s when I saw his uniform. The same as Sam’s. And recognized the walk, too.
Chuck Sewell.
The woman waited a bit, then left the open doorway and headed down the street. Lori Winston.
Maggie’s mom having a run-in with a cop?
I pulled my cell phone out of my bag.
“Hello?” Sam’s voice was groggy.
“Did I wake you?”
“Yeah. What time is it?”
“Almost eight.”
By now I was at my office, unlocking the door. Deb should have already been there. We had another full day.
“I didn’t get to bed until six,” Sam said. “What’s up?”
“I just saw Lori Winston having an altercation with Chuck Sewell. They were outside the pub. We need to know what he caught her doing. And why she was downtown, looking like last night’s clothes at eight in the morning on a school day.”
“Let me get the coffee on,” Sam said. I could hear her rummaging around in her kitchen. And waited for the electric grinder to sound while I turned on the lights in the suite. Got my soda from the fridge in the large closet that doubled as a kitchen.
I sat at my desk, grabbed a pencil and listened to a toilet flush.
“Okay,” she said a minute later. “I’ve had my first couple of gulps. I was going to call you, anyway,” she continued, sounding more alert. “I was up most of the night, going over things, and I think I’m on to something. Listen to this.”
I heard a bar stool scrape the floor, pictured her sitting at her counter. And figured it was loaded with the night’s work.
“I started out listing everything I know. I compared the list I have for Maggie with the things I know about the kids in the tennis club and the info on Shane and the high school meth bust, and the list with Nicole, and the Holmes case. I just kept making links and I know I’m on to something, Kel. I can feel it.”
“What are you thinking?”
“They’ve all got to be connected. Even the kids having paper routes. That could be a cover for running drugs. Ingenious really, to have kids delivering papers and drugs at the same time. In the tennis club there’s one kid per burg who has a paper route. They’ve got the entire tri-county area covered.”
Maggie into drugs?
Sam had mentioned the idea before. I just hadn’t given it an ounce of credibility.
If we were talking about Maggie’s mother…
But, like Sam, I was pretty sure something bad was going on with Maggie. And I’d rather it be drugs than sex. Drugs we could get rid of. Treat an addiction. Sex abuse would scar the girl forever.
My pencil bore new teeth marks but I didn’t taste lead.
“I’m figuring that the guy in the park—Maggie’s Mac—is their supplier.” Dickens’s Fagin. I’d hated the story the first time I’d read it. But the author had exposed the very real abuses in the society in which he lived.
The city’s street kids were being taken advantage of, even killed.
“You think all those kids playing tennis go to the park to get their drugs?” That didn’t make sense.
“Maybe Maggie lied to you about where she meets up with Mac. Maybe it’s at the tennis complex. Maybe that’s why they’re all playing tennis. It’s a meth distribution point.”
Maybe Sam needed to get a lot more sleep. I had to admit, there were coincidences I didn’t like, but her theory had a lot of holes. Like the fact that there were a lot of kids in the tennis club who didn’t have paper routes.
“I don’t know, Sam. You know a lot more about the drug world than I do, but I can’t imagine any dealer always delivering to the same place. Especially somewhere public like tennis courts that are frequented by the local police. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe not. And neither Maggie, or Shane, look anything like druggies. If they’re living in that world, they’d have had to deal with stuff that would have toughened them up. From what I’ve seen of Maggie there’s no sign of drug use. Her hair’s healthy and shiny. She’s got no meth mite marks on her arms or legs.”
“I agree. I’d bet my practice that she’s clean. There aren’t any physical signs of addiction. She’s thin, but not too thin. She looks me straight in the eye. Her gaze is clear. Except when she’s feeling defensive, she holds her hands in her lap. She gets good grades. Her attention span is good….”
When I heard myself going on so much, as though I had a personal stake in Maggie’s life, I stopped. Maggie was just a client.
But then, all my clients were very important to me. Maggie was just the one we were talking about.
“I need you to speak with her, Kel. Find out what’s going on.”
“In the first place, I’d have to see her to do that, and even then, I can’t guarantee she’ll tell me anything more. I’ve pushed as much as I can. In Maggie’s case, my job is to look out for her, period. Not solve a crime.” It felt good, too.
“If Maggie Winston is running drugs, having you in her corner couldn’t hurt.”
Sam knew how to play me. “I just don’t believe Maggie’s a part of that world.” I was worried about Maggie’s sex life and Sam was talking drugs.
“It all adds up, though, doesn’t it?”
“You’ve concocted a scenario that incorporates most of your evidence.”
“What have I left out?”
“Maggie’s mom, for one. Why was she just having a run-in with Chuck? You think she’s in on it, too? And that he interrupted something?”
“Could be,” Sam said slowly. “If he’d found something, he’d have arrested her, but she might have been waiting to make a deal and he just happened to be there. She could have mouthed off. He’d retaliated, told her to move on. She’d be pissed for missing her deal. Think about it. That would explain why she flipped out when she heard I was poking around.”
“Doesn’t make sense. I mean, I can believe she’d deal drugs, but there’s no way she’d involve Maggie in any of this. Whatever else I might say about that woman, she loves her kid. And why, if there was some drug scheme going on, would she have contacted me?”
Lori Winston would risk everything to prevent her daughter from having sex at fourteen and ruining the child’s life.
“And it still doesn’t tell us where the superlab is,” Sam said. “Or who’s behind it. It’s sure not located in that trailer Lori Winston owns. It’s way too small. And I’d have noticed traffic coming and going.”
“No, but I’m really wondering what Lori Winston’s up to,” I said, half thinking aloud.
“I’ll give Chuck a call just as soon as I down another cup of coffee.”
I hung up, frowning, and drew the shape of a tennis racket. Wrote Maggie’s name in the middle of it. And wondered how I was going to get that kid to tell me the truth.
Sam wanted to be off work at four on the dot Thursday to get out to the farm to see Kyle. He’d spent the past two days going over the Branson operations at Viola’s request. She wanted someone she trusted, som
eone besides her and her kids.
Sam might not completely trust Kyle. But she still loved him. And after the hours they’d spent together in his bed, she knew she needed to be a part of his life.
When her cell rang just after three on Thursday, she recognized MaryLee Hatch’s number.
“Jones,” she answered immediately.
“Nicole knows who the girl is,” MaryLee said. “Her picture’s in the paper today.”
Flipping off the screen she’d been perusing on the computer, Sam stood. “I’m on my way.”
“You’re sure that’s her?” Standing in full uniform in Nicole’s living room, Sam stared at the thirteen-year-old, and then back at the newspaper in her hand. “That’s the girl that met you at your locker and told you she had something you could take to help you do better in your studies. The one that told you when and where to meet Shane.”
“I’m positive. That’s her.”
Shit.
“I looked through all the yearbooks, just like you told me.” Fear laced Nicole’s voice. “I didn’t see her there. I swear.”
“You’re sure,” Sam said one more time.
“Yes.”
“‘Chandler High School senior wins scholarship to Ohio State,’” MaryLee read aloud. “And she’s dealing drugs? Wow. I guess she’s going to see how quickly she can lose a scholarship.”
Yeah, that wasn’t the half of it. Not only would Glenna Reynolds’s promising future take a severe U-turn, but things weren’t looking real good for Maggie Winston, either.
With a sincere thank-you to Nicole, Sam left the Hatch home, her cell phone already to her ear in a call to Chuck. The high school bust was his, too.
The next call would be to Kelly.
Sam was dreading that one.
Kyle had spent the past two days looking for Yale without anyone but Viola knowing. With her permission, and at her request, he spoke with everyone on the Branson farm. The three daughters. Their husbands. And the staff, from foremen to egg pickers. He wasn’t a cop. He was a concerned friend. As far as he could tell, no one had seen the blond ex-con.
Bob had to have gotten the meth from Yale. Nothing else made sense. The older man had trusted the kid. He’d allowed him to live in his home even after Yale had stolen from him.
The Second Lie Page 21