Maggy's Child (43 page)

Before she could take any kind of action, the pistol came crashing down on her skull. Maggy cried out, saw stars, and instinctively thrust up a hand to ward off the next blow, which was as furious as the first.

“Prepare to die, bitch,” Lyle shrieked. The car careened toward the first turn in the driveway, and all at once Maggy guessed what he was going to do. There were police cars blocking the entrance to the estate—Maggy could see their flashing blue lights from there—so his only way out was death. And he meant to take her with him.

“No!” she screamed as he hit her again. She scrambled for the passenger door, meaning to throw herself from the car. Lyle grabbed the bottom of her sweatshirt, hauling her back beside him, his foot stomping down on the gas as the first, most treacherous bend hurtled toward them out of the night.

“Bye, my darling,” he crooned and struck her with the gun. Because of her struggles, the blow just glanced off her head instead of rendering her unconscious as she guessed it was meant to do.

She had only seconds left in which to act.

Terror lent her strength and cunning, and paradoxically banished the crippling sensation of fear. She leapt toward him, her nails raking his cheeks, her teeth clamping down over his nose. Lyle screamed, his hand jerking up to ward her off—and then Maggy made a flying dive toward the door.

Her fingers fumbled with the latch, the door swung open, and she launched herself out into the cold, wet night.

Hitting the grassy lawn beside the pavement was as shattering as being slammed into solid cement. Maggy rolled onto her back and lay motionless, the breath
knocked from her body, as misty drops of rain fell on her unprotected face.

Seconds later she heard a tremendous crash as the Rolls rammed through the century-old retaining wall. The stones were piled atop one another without mortar, and at the speed the Rolls was going there was no chance the wall could hold it back. Maggy glanced to the side in time to see the car plow through and keep going, its taillights tracing a crazy arc in the night sky as it disappeared over the edge.

What came next was almost an anticlimax: The only sound that heralded the car’s landing in the creek three hundred feet below was a muted splash.

“Magdalena! Oh, my God, Magdalena!” Feet pounded down the driveway. Nick was running, running furiously, toward where the Rolls had disappeared. Behind him, the other men were running, too, but Nick was outdistancing them all. The unadulterated fear that drove him was there in his voice as he called her name.

“Magdalena!”

Maggy took a deep, painful breath. “Over here,” she gasped, rolling to her stomach and trying, rather unsteadily, to get up on her hands and knees.

“Nick! I’m over here!”

This time he heard her. Maggy was sinking back onto her haunches when he slid to a stop beside her and hunkered down.

“Thank merciful Mary,” he breathed, touching her face with a hand that shook. “I thought you were gone.”

Then he pulled her into his arms. Maggy wrapped her own arms around his neck, and for a long moment they held each other tightly while the rain spilled over them and soaked the muddy grass in which they crouched and splattered against the driveway just beyond. After a while someone shouted Nick’s name, and he raised his head.

“I’m coming,” he yelled back, and stood up, lifting Maggy into his arms. Still shaken, she didn’t argue as he
walked back toward the house with her curled against his chest, past streams of running, shouting men and half a dozen cars that were apparently being moved so that their lights would be in a position to shine out over the place in the wall where the Rolls had gone through. It was a surreal scene of mass confusion. For Maggy, the only thing that was real and solid and safe in it was Nick.

T
hey did not find Lyle’s body. The creek was swollen from two weeks of never-ending rain, and the Rolls was completely submerged when the police got to it. The car’s roof and hood were crushed, all the windows including the windshield were shattered, and Lyle was not inside. According to the police, the force of the rushing current must have sucked his body from the car and sent it swirling into the river. It could be anywhere. One day, probably in the summer, it would surface. Floaters always did.

Given the length of that drop, and the condition of the car, they were as certain as it was possible to be without an actual corpse that Lyle was dead.

Privately, John Harden, the chief of police, who was also a longtime friend of the family, told her and Lucy and Ham that what had happened simplified matters considerably. The scandal that would have broken had Lyle not done what he did would have been immense.

The meeting, called at Harden’s instigation to explain what was happening, took place on the fourteenth floor of a thirty-story office building downtown, with big glass windows looking out over the city. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon of the day after Lyle’s death. Maggy stared out the window as she listened. All she could think of was how ironic it seemed that the sun was finally shining. After almost two weeks of rain, spring was bursting forth in all its splendor.

If Lyle had had his way, she would not have seen this gorgeous day. There was not a doubt in her mind that he had meant to take her with him last night.

Maggy shivered and concentrated on what Harden was saying.

“Seems Mr. Forrest ran one of the biggest marijuana growing operations in the country, believe it or not. We’re talking millions of dollars’ worth of pot a year. Our soil around here’s real good for it, you know, and Kentucky Bluegrass—that’s what they call the stuff grown in this state—is real popular everywhere right now. Mr. Forrest’s magazine apparently has been operating in the red for a long time, and when he inherited it he doesn’t seem to have had any other significant source of income. He did what I guess he felt he had to do to repair the family fortunes. You’re lucky the way he did it—it was pretty ingenious, I must say. All that marijuana—thousands of acres of it—was planted on National Forest land. Don’t look like the federal forfeiture law is gonna apply in this case.”

“Because the property was not bought with drug proceeds, and no drug transactions apparently took place on the premises, the deceased’s house and surrounding land is not at risk. However, we’re still looking into other areas. He had a lot of cash, a lot of investments, vehicles, art collections, jewelry. Some of them may indeed be subject to forfeiture. You’ll be notified.” The speaker was a clean-cut young man in an immaculate navy suit. Charles Adams was his name, and Chief Harden had introduced him as the DEA agent in charge of the investigation.

“With Mr. Forrest dead, and out of consideration for Mrs. Virginia Forrest’s fragile state of health, I think we’ll be able to keep it all pretty hush-hush. Isn’t that right, Mr. Adams?”

“It looks that way.” If Mr. Adams’s reply was slightly sour, Maggy was not left to wonder why for long. Link, unfamiliar in a suit and tie, pulled her into a cluttered
cubbyhole of an office on her way out of the building. Lucy was not speaking to her, and Maggy was finally able to be as cold as she wished to be to Ham, which made for an uneasy threesome when circumstances such as the police chief’s meeting forced them together. Lucy and Ham had gone on ahead, and consequently Maggy was alone when Link appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her arm.

“You hangin’ in there all right, baby girl?” Link asked as he shut the door behind them.

“Where’s Nick?” Maggy asked the question that had been driving her mad since the night before, when Nick had deposited her safely inside Windermere and disappeared into the rainy night to direct the search for Lyle.

Link shook his head. “Under strict orders to stay away from you, that’s where. He’s in deep doo-doo with the powers that be. They said he compromised the investigation by getting involved with the subject’s wife—that’s you. I warned him they’d think he was on a personal vendetta if he went after Forrest, and they do. They say it’s a good thing Forrest is dead, because Nicky’s behavior would weaken the case in court.”

“I can’t believe you two really work for the DEA.” Maggy sank down on an aluminum-armed chair and stared up at Link, who was perched on the corner of a black metal desk.

“Does seem kinda out of character, doesn’t it?” Link grinned. “But we’ve changed a lot. Nicky was a SEAL, you know.”

“A seal?”

“You know, a Navy SEAL. He joined the navy not too long after you ran off with Forrest, though whether he did it just to get away from it all or to make something of himself, I don’t know. Whatever, they knocked a lot of discipline into him, made him a SEAL. When he got out—they wanted him to reenlist but he wouldn’t—he
wasn’t a kid anymore: he’d grown up. He needed a civilian job, so he hired on as a cop in Cleveland.”

“A
cop
? Nick?” Maggy couldn’t have been more astonished if Link had said Nick had walked on the moon. Years ago, they had hated cops, all three of them, with the fierce animosity of dedicated young lawbreakers.

“Yeah, Nick.” Link chuckled. “He couldn’t hack it for long, though. He didn’t like arresting people. So he quit and used some money he had saved up to put a down payment on a nightclub that was on his beat. It was pretty run-down, with a rough clientele and on the verge of bankruptcy. Nicky thought he could turn it around.”

“Now that part he told me,” Maggy said dryly.

Link gave her a level look. “Yeah, well, you gotta understand that he couldn’t tell you the
truth
. It was bad enough that he was romancing you when we were going after your husband. But if he had told you about the investigation—or even that he was in the DEA—and you had spilled the beans, it could have really screwed things up, put some people’s lives in danger. We use a lot of snitches, you know. Informants.”

“I wouldn’t have told.” Maggy was indignant.

“I know you wouldn’t have, baby girl, and Nicky knew it too. But you might have acted different, or done or said something that would have put Forrest on his guard. It was too dicey. Nicky couldn’t have done it.”

“I understand.” If her admission was grudging, it was also the truth. She did understand, quite a few things. Nick’s promise that he would make everything all right for her, for one, and his obfuscation about how he earned a living. “So go on. What happened after Nick bought the nightclub?”

“He was just getting it back on its feet when some thugs started pushin’ him to launder drug money through it for them. You know Nicky, he don’t get pushed easily, and when he said no, things started to happen, like the place catching fire and a waiter getting beat up, things like
that. So he went to a cop he knew, and the cop brought in the DEA. The DEA asked Nicky if they could use his place to run a sting. He said yeah, they caught the crooks, and the whole scheme was so successful that they decided to pull it again, in another city. They asked Nicky to set it up for them, offered him a job that paid a lot more than his nightclub was making. So he took it, with conditions. That’s how he got me sprung—I was part of the deal he wangled with the DEA. We’ve stuck together ever since, been responsible for some really big busts. The DEA gets a lot of bang for its bucks, with us.” Link grinned. “So they put up with some shit. Usually from me, this time from Nicky.”

“What on earth made the DEA start looking into Lyle?”

Link looked suddenly serious. “That was Nicky’s doing. A couple of years ago, just about the time when he was getting it into his head to come back and see if he could start things up again with you, Nicky heard through the grapevine that there was a big marijuana operation going down in Kentucky. Guy running it was known in the business by the street name of Colonel Sanders. Our Colonel Sanders was supposed to be a rich son of a bitch, one of the country club set, a blueblood, in it for the fun of it ’cause he didn’t need the money. Nicky starts checkin’ into this rumor, and the name that comes back at him knocks him out: Lyle Forrest. He can’t hardly believe it, but he puts out the word on ol’ Lyle. There’s all kinds of loose talk about Forrest out there. Pretty soon we were pretty damn sure that Colonel Sanders was none other than our boy. Nicky was in hog heaven over it.” Link chuckled, saw that he had Maggy’s rapt attention, and continued. “So Nicky went to the big boys, told ’em what he had, and suggested we set something up in Louisville. They were pretty impressed with what we showed ’em and told us to go for it. What they didn’t know about
was Nicky’s personal stake in all this: You. Now that they do know, they don’t much like it.”

It took Maggy a moment to absorb all this. Then she asked, quietly, “Is he in a lot of trouble?”

Link made a face. “Enough. They’d probably fire him, but they need him to testify in a few other cases. Where his word isn’t
tainted.
” The mincing way Link said this last made it pretty obvious that he was quoting from a disliked superior.

“Is he still mad at me?” That question was even quieter than the one that preceded it.

Link looked at her, hard. “You’ll have to ask him that. All I know is, when we got back to the farm and found you gone, I thought he was gonna have a heart attack. That fella who feeds the cows—Clayton, Clopton, whatever—was there, and he said he saw one of them big, fancy Mercedes leavin’ as he drove up. We knew who it was, of course, and came after you lickety-split, calling in the cavalry on the way. The powers that be are mad about that, too. They like to have their raids planned out in advance. They say that if Nicky hadn’t gotten involved, if he had let someone else handle this deal from the beginning instead of using a government agency as a weapon of vengeance—I’m quoting there—then Forrest would have been brought to justice and everything would be a lot more clear-cut. I think they’re mad because they can’t seize Windermere. I have to hand it to your hubby, baby girl. He was smart enough not to conduct any kind of drug business on the estate. As far as we can tell, he didn’t even use the phone there to call his associates.”