The Second Lie (34 page)

"Not...going...jail..."

And that was when Sam registered the apparatus surrounding them. The elaborate kitchen she'd burst into. Professional-size stoves. Freezers. Countertops filled with tubing and beakers and thermometers. A state-of-the-art science lab.

And she knew she could stop looking for her methamphetamine superlab. She was kneeling in it.

Chuck's sudden grin was off, lopsided. "Nice...shot," he said.

"Chuck. Damn you! You were behind this? It was you?"

And when he just kept grinning at her as blood spurted out of his mouth and dripped down his chin, she cried, "The kids. The deaths. How
could
you?"

"Would...'ve liked...to...fuck...you."

They were the last words the man said.

31

S
irens wailed. Lights flashed. Uniformed bodies burst into the room in some weird kind of organized havoc. Staccato questions and orders flew about the tall old cavernous building in as few words as possible. Everyone moved quickly with clearly understood tasks.

A couple of paramedics hurried toward Kyle. He'd never seen them before and wondered, briefly, if they were from Chandler, or if other squads had been summoned.

"We got two dead!" a female voice called urgently just as the big strapping man in front of Kyle said, "Sir, are you okay, sir?"

"I'm fine."

"You're bleeding. Let's take a look at that." It was his female partner. With gentle pressure against Kyle's shoulder she pushed him onto a stool that had somehow appeared behind him.

Kyle didn't much care what they did to him as long as he could keep his eye on Sam.

While the woman dabbed wetly at the wound on his neck, then placed a wad of gauze over it, he listened to the cacophony of voices echoing off the high ceiling of the barn, trying to sort out Sam's voice. Trying to hear what she was saying to the sheriff, Ben Chase and Todd Williams.

"Would you mind rolling up your sleeve?" the male paramedic asked. Kyle complied.

"Do you hurt anywhere other than your throat?" the woman asked.

"No. I'm fine. Really."

One officer was dead. Shot by another. There'd be an investigation. An inquiry. From the compassion on the faces of the officers circling Sam, carefully shielding her from the rest of the activity in the room, Kyle figured she'd have their complete support in the coming weeks.

"You're lucky the blade missed your artery," the woman said, applying a slightly painful pressure as she secured a bandage over the right side of his neck. "But you're going to need stitches."

Each grabbing one of his arms, the paramedics pulled him to a standing position. "Can you walk?"

"Of course."

"Then let's get you out of here and to the hospital."

They led him slowly, carefully maneuvering around what seemed like scores of people. Someone was drawing a chalk line around Chuck.

"Wait." Kyle stopped them as they neared Sam. Pulling free, he pushed his way to her side.

"You okay?"

"Yeah." Her eyes were haunted, though, when she gazed up at him.

"You going back to the station?" She'd have to give a report at the very least.

She nodded. "What about you? Are you okay?" She stared at his neck. "Oh, God, Kyle, you could have been killed."

"I know." And she could have been, too. That really scared the shit out of him.

He'd come so close to losing her. To...

"I..."

And then the paramedics broke through, ordering him to the hospital--and to the station afterward. He told Sam he would see her there.

Sam rode back to the station in her Mustang. She let Todd drive. Just this once. And she put up with everyone's pandering for the first half hour or so when they got there.

She told them what she knew. And said she had to get back to work. Had to tie up the pieces. With Chuck gone, she was the only one left on the case.

Going through Chuck's files could wait until morning. But his things had to be secured. His daughter removed from his house and arrangements made to return her to her mother. His house had to be taped off as a crime scene until the police could go through it.

She had some calls to make, at the very least.

Had to stay busy. To think.

Not feel.

The lab was already being dismantled. Crews would be at it all night and into the next day until everything was disposed of or destroyed.

"You should call your mom, and Pierce," Todd said, standing there with Ben and the sheriff, looking at her as if they half expected her to fall apart on them any moment.

"Not now," she said. "Not yet." And she glared at each one of them in turn. "I want every one of you to promise me that you will not call my brother."

They nodded.

"We're keeping this out of the news, right? At least until morning?"

The sheriff nodded. That was one benefit to small-town living. There wasn't a lot of media, and what there was usually cooperated with the law.

"Is Lori Winston here yet?" They'd sent a deputy for the woman at Sam's request.

"Yes. She's in the holding cell."

Sam looked up at her boss. "Do I have your permission, sir, to question her?"

He stepped back.

"Be my guest." But he didn't look pleased.

Sam understood. He'd have felt a lot better if she'd just gone on home and let him handle everything.

Especially now that he knew she'd engaged in a one-woman undercover act.

She'd be hearing about that one.

Sam wasn't around when Kyle was dropped off at the station by the police officer who'd accompanied him to the hospital. His neck stung a bit, but not badly, and he was impatient to be finished with protocol and get to Sam.

Alone.

James and Millie were with Grandpa for the night. And for as long as he needed them.

Ben and Todd, the two deputies he knew best, next to Chuck Sewell, took him to a conference room and offered him coffee. Hot chocolate. Anything out of the machine.

They asked if he was up to answering questions.

"I'm fine," he said, for what felt like the fiftieth time that hour. He figured he must look like hell.

Todd flipped on a recorder, and Ben, sitting beside him at the table, said, "We need you to tell us whatever you can remember about the evening."

Sure he could tell them. In detail.

"Take your time, Kyle."

He'd been in Yale's makeshift lodgings. Had been thinking about helping Sam...

"Whenever you're ready."

Kyle nodded. He was ready.

He'd seen that trapdoor out back. The glint...

"We can do this later, man...."

No. He couldn't leave. He had to see it through. To find what Sam needed.
He stashed the can in the back of his truck and...

"What's this about? Why am I here?" Lori Winston looked more irritated than scared. Which bothered the hell out of Sam.

"That's what you're going to tell me," she said, gritting her teeth in an attempt to stay calm as she circled behind the seated woman, ending up facing her across the table set in the middle of an open cell at the front of the jail.

"How can I tell you anything? I don't even know why I'm here. You can't do this, you know. I know my rights. You can't just barge into my trailer at nine o'clock at night and haul me down here and--"

"Shut. Up."

Lori's belligerent expression didn't fade, but her words did.

Sam went to work, relying completely on a combination of instinct and information she'd received from Kelly over the past weeks.

"Your daughter was screwed in a tent by a grown man this past weekend, Lori," Sam blurted derisively. And then she twisted a little deeper. "She says they used protection, but who knows if they really did?"

Tight-lipped, the woman didn't move.

"Maggie said the man was a little older than you. Think about it. A man that age, with his experience, pulling down your daughter's pants. Pulling down his own, and sticking that--"

"Stop!" Lori's chin trembled. Her lips trembled. "Stop!" she screamed again, her hands over her ears as she shook her head back and forth. She started to cry, to whimper. "Noooooo," she said, chin to her chest. "Oh, God, noooo. Please noooo. Not my baby. Not my..."

The woman's suffering was obvious. Sam almost had sympathy for her. On another day she might have.

Or not. She pulled the woman's hands away from her ears and held on to them.

"Tell me who he is, Lori."

"I don't know," the woman said, tears flooding her eyes, flowing down her face. "If I'd known who he was, I'd have stopped him long before now. Chuck wouldn't help me. He just kept telling me I was imagining things. That he was certain no one involved was on to Maggie or would hurt her in any way. Even after I told him about finding the condom. He just laughed at me. That's why I sent her to that shrink. That Kelly Chapman woman. I wanted her to use whatever hypnosis or brainwashing tricks she had to get Maggie to tell her who the guy was."

Chuck.

As in Sewell.

Lori did not yet know that the man was dead. But she was rolling on him.

"You know who he is, Lori."

"I don't. I swear to God, I don't. But when I find out I'm going to kill him. I will rip out his balls and cram them down his throat and leave him there to suffocate on his own sex...."

If Sam hadn't been a cop, she might have agreed with the woman.

"He's someone involved in the local drug cartel," Sam said. "He knew that Glenna Reynolds had been killed just hours after the murder."

"But...that doesn't make sense. Chuck was the only one involved. He swore. And Chuck would not sleep with Maggie. I know he wouldn't. And there's no way Maggie would have slept with him. She can't stand the guy."

"But you slept with him, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"What do you know about a vacant house on Mechanic Street?" She was playing a hunch.

"Chuck got access through the city. He used it sometimes, to meet people."

"He sold drugs from there."

"Yeah."

Didn't really matter now, but she'd had to know.

"You ever hear anyone call Chuck Mac?"

"Mac? No, I've never heard of any Mac."

"So, assuming you're telling the truth, there's someone else involved. Someone besides Chuck. Someone older."

"Yes, but I don't know who he is."

"Then help me find him," Sam said.

"How?"

"Tell me about the drugs."

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

Some time later Sam sat across from Lori Winston, watching while the woman wrote down everything she'd confessed and then signed her name.

Sam had to hand it to the woman. She'd just sacrificed her life to help find the man who'd so grossly hurt her daughter.

Of course, that was after selling her only child to a dirty cop to be set up on a paper route to deliver several packages a month filled with methamphetamine to two middlemen who distributed all over Ohio.

And once, to meet a man on a side street and drop a package in his car.

He was in the old processing plant, perched on a stool that had been shoved behind his knees, the blade of a very sharp knife against his throat. Any time Kyle moved, either because he was bumped, or because he breathed too heavily, the blade pierced a little more, went in a little farther.

And he was looking at what he assumed was Sam's superlab. She'd been right all along.

It didn't surprise him as much as he'd have liked it to. "Come on, Chuck," Kyle said. "You aren't going to kill me. We both know that." He looked straight in the other man's eyes. In plain clothes Chuck looked small. Skinny. Nothing like the man Kyle had always taken him to be.

Not even the gun he held in Kyle's direction intimidated him.

"You're kidding, right?" blurted the young fool at Kyle's side, the one who'd gotten the better of him up at the house. "He killed a fuckin' sixteen-year-old girl in jail, man. He ain't gonna think twice about offin' you. You're just some country hick farmer pokin' around in business that ain't yours."

Yale, who'd confirmed his identity for Kyle on the painful walk over from the house, had already told him that he'd seen Kyle search his place. He'd seen him open the trapdoor and had headed up to the house to wait for him.

He'd also bragged about the chemicals he'd convinced Bob to take from Kyle's place one day when Kyle had been at a co-op meeting. They'd been low on supplies and had a large shipment due. Bob, who'd been privy to the information about Kyle's experimental crop, had known the chemicals were there. He'd also known he'd be the only one who could get by Zodiac without having to hurt the dog.

"You killed that girl?" Kyle asked Chuck, having trouble believing that one. Even with the deputy pointing a gun at him.

"That girl had a name," Chuck said. "It's Glenna. And yes, I killed her. I had to shut the bitch up. She was blubbering. Screaming at me to do something right there in the jail cell. Hollering about the fact that I'd said I'd protect her..."

"So this is the lab Sam was talking about, huh?" Kyle looked around, thinking of Sam. Of her theories and ideas. Her energy and dedication. Her love. He was waiting for a moment when one or the other of his captors was distracted and he could go after him. Or at least die trying.

Odd how in that, a life-and-death moment, everything seemed so clear. And he felt so...calm.

"It was all you, Chuck? Bob? Holmes? Seventy-five percent of Child Protective Services cases..."

"Hell, no, man. It ain't all him. It's bigger 'n that. It's--"

Chuck's gun fired. Ricocheting off the floor about two feet from Kyle's right. He had no idea where it landed.

"Shut the hell up, punk." Chuck's voice was deadly.

"I'd do it if I were you, kid," Kyle said. "He'd kill a sixteen-year-old, he sure isn't going to hesitate to off you." His palms started to sweat. Probably because his heart was pounding.