The Second Lie (2 page)

"Yeah. She said, 'It's obvious.'" More of the mocking tone. "And there's no guy in high school who's gonna be talking that way. Not puttin' thoughts like that into her head."

I wasn't as sure of that.

"Then last week I found a condom in her purse," Lori Winston continued. "She said they gave 'em away free at school last year and she keeps it for safety purposes. 'Like what?' I asked. Like if she gets raped, she's going to pull it out?"

"Do you think she's sexually active?"

"God, I hope not. She's only fourteen and I know that's not the way to go. I've told her. Over and over. And used to be she listened. But I don't know about her anymore. That's why I'm calling you. Other than this, Mags is the greatest kid ever."

"Has she ever had a boyfriend, that you know of?"

"No. She's always said boys are dumb. Now she's saying boys aren't worth talkin' to till they're grown-up and past some hormone something-or-other--and that's what scares me the most. She's dressing different. Paying more attention to her looks. When I ask her if she's seein' someone, she says, 'Course not.' But I don't believe her. There's a man in my daughter's life. A man. Not a boy. A mother knows these things."

I wished I could believe the woman was wrong. But at this point, I couldn't disagree with her that a liaison with an older man was possible.

"Has she ever been in trouble with the police?" I thought of my high school friend, Samantha Jones, who was now a Fort County deputy. She might know if Maggie Winston was hanging out with a bad crowd.

"Of course not. Like I said, she's a good girl, Dr. Chapman. She's never given me a bit of worry until now, except for maybe that she's too sweet. People use her, always asking for help and she never says no. She'd be real easy for some guy to take advantage of, if you know what I mean."

"I'll be happy to see her if you think she'll talk to me."

"She will if I tell her to. When?"

"Any day this week. I can stay late if I need to."

We set a time for the next afternoon. And I hung up. A psychologist's life is often difficult, but never more so than when you're dealing with a child.

The man inside the elegant whitewashed home was armed and dangerous. He'd already killed his wife. Samantha had been the one to find her body on the back porch. The dead woman still had a cell phone clutched in her hand, her call to 9-1-1 showing on the screen.

Now, crouched against the cement foundation, Sam held her department-issue cell phone to her ear while three other deputies surrounded the house. They'd secured the area. And called for the county's hostage team, such as it was. But out here, what they had was pretty much what they had. Ben Chase and Todd Williams had a little more training than the rest of them; that was it.

And Williams, the dickhead, was on his honeymoon. Who'd have thought her old partner would've gone and got married right when she needed him most?

"Answer, dammit," she whispered through gritted teeth, listening to the monotony of ringing that she'd been hearing on and off for the past five minutes.

"Hello."

She almost dropped her phone. "Mr. Holmes?"

"Get them guys outta my yard or I'll blow my head off."

"We're here to help you, Mr. Holmes. We've seen your wife. She's hurt. We have to get her to a hospital." Was lying to a hostage against the rules? Samantha couldn't remember. "We need you to put down your gun and come out, and we'll do everything we can to help you."

It was so dark out here, she couldn't be sure if there was some animal moving in the brush--a cat, maybe--or if she was just seeing shadows.

"You got money to pay my mortgage?" Holmes shouted in her ear, following the question with obscenities. "You gonna get my truck back for me?"

"There are programs to help you with all that, Mr. Holmes. But we can't do anything if you stay inside with that gun."

"You can't do anything, anyway." The man's voice had dropped so low she could hardly hear him. "I killed my wife. You think I don't know that? I killed her."

When she heard the distinctive and unmistakable sound of a .410, followed by breaking glass falling on pavement, she prayed that her fellow officers hadn't been anywhere within range.

"Mr. Holmes? Are you okay? Mr. Holmes!"

"I told you to get those guys outta here."

"Mr. Holmes." Samantha put every bit of nurturing she could find into those two words. "Please put the gun down
now,
so we can help you."

Another shot sounded, and Samantha didn't need a phone to her ear to know the man had just blown off his own head.

Kyle Evans liked the country.

Sitting outside at night, unwinding from a long day of farming, communing with the stars and the air that told him what the next day would bring, was heaven compared to living in a city where he'd be surrounded by people even if he lived alone.

Not that he lived alone. Or had ever lived in a city. Or even a small town.

No, Kyle was a farm boy from his head to his toes. Chandler, with all its busybodies and people milling around, the traffic, the fast-food places--that were now staying open twenty-four hours, for godsake--tore at his nerves.

Late on the first Monday night in August he was sitting out back, a few cold beers for company. He sat in a pine rocker he'd built himself across from the other pine rocker he'd built himself, under the hundred-year-old maple tree. His grandpa had set him in the lower branches of that tree before he could walk.

He'd been climbing it by the time he was four. Shimmying up it, hugging the bark so tight with his arms and knees that he'd damned near skinned them. But a few scrapes and bark burns were worth the view from the top. He could see the entire farm from there. Could see his daddy fifty acres away, if there were no leaves on the trees and his old man was on the big tractor.

He could see the cows in the farthest pasture.

He'd once saved a foal from up in that tree. He'd seen a fox coming over the hill toward the horse pasture and had hollered for his grandpa, who took Kyle and the .22 out in the truck, shooting the fox from thirty yards away, right before it lit into the new foal.

The carcass had hung in his father's office until after Kyle graduated from high school. It was in the barn someplace now.

He'd downed his second beer, was considering whether to go into the house for a third or just call it a night, when he saw lights in his drive. Since it was a long drive, he had plenty of notice when someone came to visit. At night, anyway.

His decision made because he recognized his visitor, Kyle went in for the beer. He took a moment to make sure his grandfather was still tucked into bed, asleep, which was how the confused ninety-two-year-old spent most of his time. Then he brought out the rest of the six-pack. There was only one person who'd have the audacity to interrupt his peace this late at night.

And only one person who drove up the gravel drive like a bat out of hell. An officer of the law ought to know better.

It's private property--I'm allowed to drive fast,
Sam always said when he bothered to call her on it.

One look at her face tonight as she stepped out of her reconditioned '77 Mustang, and Kyle knew he wasn't going to call her on anything.

Normally he hated the sight of her in the manly beige slacks, shirt and tie that made up her Fort County deputy uniform.

Not because of the manliness, but because of what they represented. The job. The danger. Her obsession.

Tonight, he hardly noticed her apparel.

Beer first and then talk, he'd learned when she had that wild look in those familiar blue eyes. The look that asked him if she was insane. Or the world was.

The look that told him she'd been seeing something really ugly while he was staring at the stars.

She grabbed the beer he handed her and sat down without a hello. Lying back in the handmade pine chair she used so much he thought of it as hers, she downed half the beer.

"How's Grandpa?" she finally asked.

"Better today. The swelling in his legs went down and he made it to the table for all three meals. Bitched at me for burning the toast, too." He grinned.

"Did he know who you were?"

"I'm not sure. I was either me or my dad. He knew he was with family. I'm good with that." It was when the grandfather he'd grown up with as a second parent thought Kyle was a stranger that he struggled.

"Where's Zodiac?"

"In the barn. Lillie's ready to foal." And the German shepherd would alert him if there was a problem that required his attention before morning.

"You need to hire yourself a hand."

He held up the two he had, beer bottle included. "I've got all I need."

"Your father had two men, plus you and your grandpa, helping him."

"He had twice the land to work and the money to pay wages. I've got help coming for harvest. I can do the rest myself."

"You think you're gonna break even this year?"

"Maybe."

By next year, his time would be up. Either the experimental crop paid off or he had to find Grandpa and himself a new place to live.

Which would kill the ailing old man who'd never lived anywhere but this farm.

Kyle wasn't kidding himself. It would probably kill him, too.

He had one more year before the bank called his loan. One year to get his ass out of the hole he'd dug himself.

"You gonna tell me what happened tonight?"

"I was talking to a guy on the phone when he blew his brains out."

"Jesus, Sam, what happened?" In Fort County? Where cops were called when mothers and daughters had spats. Kyle studied her expression, or as much as he could see in the darkness. "Why'd he do that?"

"Guess it was something I said."

2

S
amantha debriefed with Kyle as best she could. She'd already written her report at the sheriff's office. There'd be a more formal conference with her superior in the morning, but that was mere procedure.

And if she had serious trouble coping, she could always call Kelly Chapman. It wouldn't be the first time.

Tonight, though, she needed the friend who knew her better than anyone. She needed Kyle.

"We found about an ounce of meth, spilling out of the bag, on his coffee table. There was a pipe on the nightstand in the bedroom. And a needle in the trash..."

Samantha took a long sip of beer, savoring the familiarity of the experience, the "country backyard barbecue everything's going to be okay" taste. She didn't see anything in the darkness around her, though she knew the shapes of Kyle's barn, a tractor, his truck.

"The place was torn up, shattered glass on a wedding photo. Looked like he'd been throwing furniture. Nice stuff."

Kyle hooked his foot beneath hers.

"His wife had a single bullet through her chest. She was about our age. Wearing a white blouse and jeans. Cute. I heard her call come through on the radio. I was only ten minutes away. She was already dead when I got there."

"Were you first on the scene?"

A dangerous position to be in. And she knew what would follow her admission--a lecture from Kyle.

"I'm telling the story here." She needed him on her side. "One of the rooms had bunk beds," she continued. "There were two young sons. They were spending the night with their grandfather."

The bottle felt good against her lips. She wanted to keep it there, keep sucking down the comforting taste of beer.

"Better slow down, girl. At the rate you're going, the evening will be over in less than ten minutes. Hardly worth the drive out."

According to her most recent alcohol-blood-level test--a self-requirement, not a departmental one--two was her legal limit.

Giving him a belligerent look, Samantha sipped again. "I'm telling you, Kyle, we've become infested with this crap. Meth is everywhere. Destroying us. It's all I'm seeing anymore."

"It's all you're seeing because of the line of work you're in." Kyle had never hidden his aversion to her career.

Nor had he stopped trying to convince her that his strongly held opinion on the matter was the right one.

"Don't start on me," she warned him.

"Now might be an appropriate time to take a good hard look at yourself." Opening another beer, he tossed the cap toward the cardboard six-pack container--scoring a clean shot. "I might be dense or backward or something, but last I checked, happiness didn't look anything like you."

"I love my job."

"That's why you're up late on a Monday night, drowning your brain so you don't have to think about your day on the job?"

If he wasn't her best friend, she would have left.

"Like
your
work doesn't ever cause you stress?" He was the one who worried every day that he might lose his precious farm. "And it's not just because of the line of work I'm in," she added, skipping back to his earlier comment. "Meth use has become an epidemic. And not only with losers, either. This guy tonight--his neighbors say that up until six months ago he was an engineer at Samson pulling in a six-figure income." Samson was an aerospace plant forty miles from Chandler. "His father-in-law thinks he started using last summer. That's when his behavior changed, at any rate."

Kyle's silence usually meant she had his attention.

"I was talking to Danielle from Child Services yesterday, and she said that almost three-quarters of their cases have to do with meth in some way. Three-quarters of their cases, Kyle. Do you know many children that involves? It's scary."

"We live in a scary world, honey. Or most of you do. Look around you." He indicated the yard where they sat. "There's fresh air to breathe. Peace and quiet and stars in the sky. Maybe, after tonight's violence, you can appreciate life out here a little more."

"What I'm seeing in Fort County..." she began, ignoring his all-too-predictable comment. "I think it's worse than a lot of the rest of the country. Maybe not out West where the Mexican drug influence is so prevalent, but for this part of the country, we're way above statistics. Even our own. Meth use is up over one hundred percent from last year at this time."