The Second Lie (6 page)

A never-ending cycle. As exemplified by the stalks of corn whizzing past in my peripheral vision.

I liked the never-ending part; it defied death.

I half chuckled--the half that could spare the air. Leave it up to me to turn a recreational skate and a few stalks of corn into a philosophical life lesson.

But it wasn't the lesson I was seeking that night, and I just kept "skating on my problems," as I referred to my habit of meditating on anything that was bothering me while I skated. Heck, who was I kidding? I skated on
everything
. From what my new office couch should look like to the fact that my household was ruled by a four-pound very spoiled toy poodle.

Whenever something puzzled me, stumped me, caused any kind of doubt within me, I "skated on it."

Sometimes I just "skated on it" for confirmation. Or for the courage to actually do whatever I was pondering.

That was tonight. I knew what I should do. I just needed the courage to do it. So much was at risk. A child's life.

Skating took away the fear. And any other distractions that clogged my thoughts. And...I could see that I had no time to lose.

My brake pushed against the black asphalt and, with knees bent, I took the stop like a pro, turned and traversed the two miles back to my car quickly enough to win a speed-skating race. I didn't even bother to wipe off the sweat sliding beneath the back of my sleeveless T-shirt before I was on my phone.

Sam picked up on the first ring. "Sam?" I asked, though I recognized her voice.

"Yeah?" My high school buddy sounded hesitant. Like I was a doctor bearing bad news.

Probably because she'd been a recent--mostly uncooperative--sort of patient. If you could call a friend seeking an M.D. referral for sleeping pills a patient.

"How are you?" I asked, because I cared. And to bug her, too. Maybe if I bugged her enough, she'd unload on me. It would be in anger, but I wasn't picky. Anger would open the door I needed to get inside and help her.

As a general rule, carefully directed anger could be a positive thing.

And if Sam got mad, she'd get over it.

"I'm fine."

"Sleeping?" Another thing I knew about Sam--she might lie to herself on occasion, but she wouldn't lie to me.

"Some."

"Better than you were?" I grabbed a pen out of the cup holder beside me and tapped the leather steering wheel of my spiffy new blue Dodge Nitro. I'd drive home, but it'd be kinda hard to push the gas with an in-line skate on my foot. I chewed the end of the pen instead.

"Not noticeably."

"I wish you'd come talk to me."

"I wish you'd give me a referral for sleeping pills."

"Uh-uh." Sam needed to deal with the demons keeping her up at night, not numb them.

"I'll probably be glad you said that at some point."

"Probably."

"Right now it kind of pisses me off. I mean, what are friends for?"

I was sitting in my SUV with the door open in a deserted parking lot on a country road--something Sam wouldn't approve of if she knew. "To have your back," I said, dragging my heavy feet, still in skates, inside and locking the door.

Sam's silence was compliance enough for me.

"I called to ask a favor," I said then, back to tapping my pen instead of chewing it. Sam and I had known each other since grade school. And we'd played basketball together for a year during high school before I quit to be a receptionist at the local assisted-living facility. (We'd called it an old folks' home back then.) Sam had spent more time hanging out at the police station and with her farmer friend, Kyle Evans, than with any of the other kids from school. But we'd stayed friends.

I'd always liked her. More importantly, I trusted her. Implicitly.

"What's up?"

"I've got a client who might be in trouble." At least, I hoped I still had a client. Maggie Winston had stood me up that day--for the second time, which was why I was calling Sam. I was worried I'd lost Maggie.

I filled Sam in on the original call I'd received from Lori Winston and my first visit with Maggie. "I've seen her once since then," I added. "She stopped by my office without an appointment, and after I assured her that our conversations were completely confidential, she asked me some questions that left little doubt that she's interested in an older man. From what she said, I'm pretty sure she found him on the Internet."

"Do you think she's met him in person?"

"Yes."

"How sure are you of that?"

"Ninety-five percent. I know she met a man on the Internet. I know she's seen him in person, though it sounds like, as yet, there's been no physical interaction. I'm not even sure they spoke when she saw him. I know she's interested in an older man. She hasn't admitted that the man she met on the Internet and the one she has a crush on are the same person. Maybe the guy she's interested in is an unsuspecting teacher at school and the Internet thing is unrelated. At this point, I'm certain enough that something's going on to be worried. But I have no proof. That's why I'm calling you."

"Do you have the guy's name?"

"Nope."

"How about an age?"

"I think he must be past thirty." Maggie had mentioned a friend whose father was killed in Kuwait. Which meant the friend had to be a lot older than Maggie.

"You aren't giving me much to go on here."

"I know."

"Maggie Winston, you said her name was?"

"Yeah. Can you just keep an eye on her for me?"

"I'll see what I can find out."

Dropping the pen back into the cup holder, I unlocked the car door and climbed out. "Thanks, Sam."

"Yeah. You owe me."

"I know." I owed me, too. Another couple miles of skating. I was two short of my usual six.

"So how about that sleeping-pill referral?"

"Nope." If Sam really wanted a sleep aid, she could get it from her M.D. We both knew that.

"You suck at paying your debts...." Sam rang off before I could encourage her to stop by my office for a chat. Dropping my cell onto the seat, I locked the car and pushed off.

Sam was a great woman. Honest. Hardworking. Sincere. Maybe I'd stop by her place over the weekend. It would piss her off, but if I could break through that shell she'd been throwing up at me since I'd come back to town after college, all certified and capable of seeing through her, if I could help her fight the inner demons that drove her, she'd probably get over it.

Yeah--I bent my knees to take a bump in the path--if I could squeeze it in, I'd stop by Sam's on Saturday. If I was lucky, she'd have some of her brother's samples to share....

5

S
am had never studied finance. Had never been the least bit curious about what in the heck the Dow Jones industrial average really was. A cop's family was never going to be rich. Never going to need to know a whole lot about investments or savings or capital gains. So maybe the state's financial crisis, which filtered down to Fort County and the sheriff's department, had come as more of a surprise to her than some. Maybe others had been more mentally prepared for the cutbacks that made it tough for cops to do their jobs when crime was at an all-time high.

Hell, they were living in a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. Ohio was a manufacturing and farming state. Pretty much every major company in nearby Dayton had either closed or moved out of state over the past couple of years, leaving desperation and deprivation in their wake.

Pretty towns that had provided suburban neighborhoods for workers from the six GM-related plants in the city were now boarded up, paint peeling from the picturesque houses and foreclosure signs in the windows. Where flowers had once lined the streets, there were now weeds. Tall weeds, with hairlike follicles and no community money to mow them down.

Sam had patrolled these streets and seen the changes. And along with the disappearing jobs, the growing desperation, they'd seen a huge hike in crime. In the current economy, there was less money to pay for law enforcement, and fewer officers to contain the growing desperation. And desperate people did desperate things. Sam didn't need to be good at math to know that the odds were stacked against law-enforcement agencies.

Still, there was a good side. There always was if you looked hard enough. Sam had learned that a long time ago. About the time her father had been killed while attempting to apprehend a man he thought was a pedophile attacking a child. One positive thing was that he'd died not knowing he'd attacked a father in the middle of some good-natured roughhousing with his child.

And the positive spin on their current economic down-swing was that Sam got a car to herself--when gas money was available. There weren't enough deputies left on staff for them to partner up anymore.

Which meant that she didn't have anyone watching over her every minute of the day.

And that was one reason why no one, including Kelly Chapman and Kyle, knew she'd been driving by the west-side trailer park several times a day for the past week--on duty and off. Listening to hunches was a lot easier if she didn't have to answer any questions.

School was due to start just after Labor Day--only six days away. If Maggie Winston was up to something, chances were good that summer's end would escalate her activities.

So far, Sam hadn't seen so much as a shoe print....

There she was.

The girl looked a lot older than the photo Sam had been carrying around with her for a week, clipped out of Chandler's 2009 junior high yearbook. But it was definitely Maggie.

Wearing denim shorts and a green short-sleeved shirt, her oddly highlighted hair down around her shoulders, and her feet in green flip-flops that matched her shirt, Maggie looked like any of a hundred teenagers out on Chandler's streets that day.

Sam slowed the white Mustang that was pretty much a member of her family. Pappy, her grandfather, had helped her rebuild the classic car ten years ago and it had never let her down.

The girl looked neither left nor right as she stepped down from the trailer she shared with her mother on the edge of the run-down park. Weeds and trash covered the common ground around the mobile homes.

The place was nothing like the flower-lined streets that surrounded Sam's double-wide model on the other side of town--a mere three miles away.

The only thing of beauty Sam could see here was the young woman striding with purpose toward the exit on the other side of the park. Rounding a corner, Sam was able to keep Maggie in sight mostly because of the lack of trees between them. She turned again, in time to see Maggie climb into the front passenger seat of a nondescript American-made two-door maroon sedan--2006, if Sam had her windshield moldings right.

Ohio license plate, DSL T77. Sam committed it to memory. One of these days she'd keep paper and pen handy to write things down. Maybe.

When she got old and lost her ability to remember everything she saw.

She wondered if Maggie knew the bottom of her shirt was stuck in the waistband at the back of her shorts.

Keeping a reasonable distance, Sam followed the car. A female was driving. Blonde. And young, based on the glimpse Sam caught of her in her side-view mirror.

Out on the state highway that connected Chandler to several other small towns in Fort County before eventually leading to the big kahuna--Dayton--she was able to stay two cars behind the girls without any effort. Off duty until noon, she was in jeans and an oxford shirt and blended in with the rest of the world just fine as she tooled along under the speed limit.

If the girls were on their way to an adult rendezvous with some lecherous creep, they didn't appear to be in any hurry to get there.

"Probably just on their way to the mall," Sam muttered to the Mustang. And she could be at a desk at the station getting caught up on paperwork, which was what she'd planned to do with her Tuesday morning off.

And then she saw the sedan signal a turn. Mechanic Street. She knew the road. She knew all the roads in the county, but this particular street was more familiar than some.

She'd seen it written on a blood-spattered scrap of paper that was in the bag of things picked up off the floor of the Holmes family living room the night Mr. Holmes had shot his wife and then blown his own brains out.

One-oh-nine Mechanic Street. She'd investigated the place. The home was vacant, bank owned and for sale. She'd figured maybe Holmes, who'd had his accounts and mortgage at the same bank, had known the Morrises, the people who'd lived there. She'd tried to find them herself, but so far no luck.

The family had left no forwarding address and hadn't bought another home, or registered for public utilities, like electricity and phone.

Mechanic Street was a dead end. Fifteen homes, a couple of dogs, mown lawns, landscape lighting, that kind of thing.

If Sam followed the girls down the street, her Mustang wouldn't go unnoticed.

"This is where we part," she told the car as she pulled into a convenience store on the corner. "Back in a minute." Climbing out, she locked the door, rubbing her waist with the back of her forearm as she did so. Feeling for the gun tucked into her waistband.

Check and double-check. Always. Pappy had been firm on that one. So firm that he'd once grounded her for a week because she'd forgotten her house key and had been sitting outside on their porch on Main Street, waiting for him and Mom and Pierce to get home from Dayton.

It had been broad daylight, and people they knew were out and about. Facts that she'd pointed out to him. Facts that had fallen on deaf ears.

When it came to personal safety, check and double-check. She'd never forgotten again.

Crossing behind the store, Sam cut through a field of weeds that had once been a strawberry patch--and a dog run when a breeder had owned the property--to the back side of Mechanic. The yards were well maintained with swimming pools and trampolines.

One, about halfway down, had a big new barn set at the far end of the lot. Sam scrambled through a wall of six-foot-tall shrubbery, catching her bun, and crouched behind the barn, peering out around the side.