The Winner (21 page)

T
he small private jet landed at the airstrip at Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport and taxied to a halt. It was nearly ten o’clock at night and the airport had pretty much shut down for the day. The Gulfstream V was the day’s last incoming flight in fact. The limousine was waiting on the tarmac. Three people quickly exited the plane and climbed into the limo, which immediately drove off and a few minutes later was heading south on Route 29.

Inside the limo, the woman took off her glasses and laid her arm across the young girl’s shoulder. Then LuAnn Tyler slumped back against the seat and took a deep breath. Home. Finally, they were back in the United States. All the years of planning had finally been executed. She had thought about little else for some time now. She glanced over at the man who sat in the rear-facing seat. His eyes stared straight ahead, his thick fingers drummed a somber rhythm across the car’s window. Charlie looked concerned, and he was concerned, but he still managed a smile, a reassuring grin. If nothing else he had always been reassuring for her over the last ten years.

He put his hands in his lap and cocked his head at her. “You scared?” he asked.

LuAnn nodded and then looked down at ten-year-old Lisa, who had immediately slumped over her mother’s lap and fallen into an exhausted sleep. The trip had been a long and tedious one.

“How about you?” she asked back.

He shrugged his thick shoulders. “We prepared as well as we could, we understand the risks. Now we just live with it.” He smiled again, this time more broadly. “We’ll be okay.”

She smiled back at him, her eyes deep and heavy. They had been through a lot over the last decade. If she never climbed aboard another airplane, never passed through another Customs post, never again wondered what country she was in, what language she should be trying to muddle through, it would be perfectly fine with her. The longest trip she wanted to take for the rest of her life was strolling down to the mailbox to pick up her mail, or driving down to the mall to go shopping. God, if it could only be that easy. She winced slightly and rubbed in a distracted fashion at her temples.

Charlie quickly picked up on this. Over the years he had acquired a heightened sensitivity to the subtle tracks of her emotions. He scrutinized Lisa for a long moment to make sure she was indeed sleeping. Satisfied, he undid his seat belt, sat down next to LuAnn, and spoke in soft tones.

“He doesn’t know we’ve come back. Jackson doesn’t know.”

She whispered back to him. “We don’t know that, Charlie. We can’t be sure. My God, I don’t know what’s scaring me the most: the police or him. No, that’s a lie. I know, it’s him. I’d take the police over him any day. He told me never to come back here. Never. Now I am back. We all are.”

Charlie laid his hand on top of hers and spoke as calmly as he could. “If he knew, do you think he’d have let us get this far? We took about as circuitous a route as anybody could take. Five plane changes, a train trip, four countries, we zigzagged halfway across the world to get here. He doesn’t know. And you know what, even if he does he’s not going to care. It’s been ten years. The deal’s expired. Why should he care now?”

“Why should he do any of the things he’s done? You tell me. He does them because he wants to.”

Charlie sighed, undid his jacket button, and lay back against the seat.

LuAnn turned to him and gently rubbed his shoulder. “We’re back. You’re right, we made the decision and now we’re going to live with it. It’s not like I’m going to announce to the whole world that I’m around again. We’re going to live a nice, quiet life.”

“In considerable luxury. You saw the photos of the house.”

LuAnn nodded. “It looks beautiful.”

“An old estate. About ten thousand square feet. Been on the market for a long time, but with an asking price of six million bucks, can’t say I’m surprised. Let me tell you, we got a deal at three point five mil. But then I drive a hard bargain. Although, of course, we dumped another million into renovation. About fourteen months’ worth, but we had the time, right?”

“And secluded?”

“Very. Almost three hundred acres, plus or minus as they say. About a hundred of those acres are open, ‘gently rolling land.’ That description was in the brochure. Growing up in New York, I never saw so much green grass. Beautiful Piedmont, Virginia, or so the realtor kept telling me on all those trips I took over here to scout for homes. And it was the prettiest home I saw. True it took a lot of work to get it in shape, but I got some good people, architects and what-not representing our interests. It’s got a truckload of outbuildings, caretaker’s house, three-stall horse barn, a couple of cottages, all vacant by the way; I don’t see us taking in renters. Anyway, all those big estates have that stuff. It’s got a pool. Lisa will love that. Plenty of room for a tennis court. The works. But then there’s dense forest all around. Look at it as a hardwood moat. And I’ve already started shopping around for a firm to construct a security fence and gate around the property line fronting the road. Probably should have already gotten that done.”

“Like you didn’t have enough to do. You do too much as it is.”

“I don’t mind. I kind of like it.”

“And my name’s not on the ownership papers?”

“Catherine Savage appears nowhere. We used a straw man for the contract and closing. Deed was transferred into the name of the corporation I had set up. That’s untraceable back to you.”

“I wish I could have changed my name again, just in case he’s on the lookout for it.”

“That would’ve been nice except the cover story he built for you, the same one we used to appease the IRS, has you as Catherine Savage. It’s complicated enough without adding another layer to it. Geez, the death certificate we had made up for your ‘late’ husband was hell to get.”

“I know.” She sighed heavily.

He glanced over at her. “Charlottesville, Virginia, home to lots of rich and famous, I hear. Is that why you picked it? Private, you can live like a hermit, and nobody’ll care?”

“That was one of two reasons.”

“And the other?”

“My mother was born here,” LuAnn said, her voice dropping a notch as she delicately traced the hem of her skirt. “She was happy here, at least she told me she was. And she wasn’t rich either.” She fell silent, her eyes staring off. She jolted back and looked at Charlie, her face reddening slightly. “Maybe some of that happiness will rub off on us, what do you think?”

“I think so long as I’m with you and this little one,” he said, gently stroking Lisa’s cheek, “I’m a happy man.”

“She’s all enrolled in the private school?”

Charlie nodded. “St. Anne’s-Belfield. Pretty exclusive, low student-to-teacher ratio. But, hell, Lisa’s educational qualifications are outstanding. She speaks multiple languages, been all over the world. Already done things most adults will never do their whole life.”

“I don’t know, maybe I should have hired a private tutor.”

“Come on, LuAnn, she’s been doing that ever since she could walk. She needs to be around other kids. It’ll be good for her. It’ll be good for you too. You know what they say about time away.”

She suddenly smiled at him slyly. “Are you feeling claustrophobic with us, Charlie?”

“You bet I am. I’m gonna start staying out late. Might even take up some hobbies like golf or something.” He grinned at LuAnn to show her he was only joking.

“It’s been a good ten years, hasn’t it?” Her voice was touched with anxiety.

“Wouldn’t trade ’em for anything,” he said.

Let’s hope the next ten are just as good,
LuAnn said to herself. She laid her head against his shoulder. When she had stared out at the New York skyline all those years ago, she had been brimming with excitement, with the potential of all the good she could do with the money. She had promised herself that she would and she had fulfilled that promise. Personally, however, those wonderful dreams had not been met. The last ten years had only been good to her if you defined good as constantly on the move, fearful of discovery, having pangs of guilt every time she bought something because of how she had come by the money. She had always heard that the incredibly rich were never really happy, for a variety of reasons. Growing up in poverty LuAnn had never believed that, she simply took it to be a ruse of the wealthy. Now, she knew it to be true, at least in her own case.

As the limo drove on, she closed her eyes and tried to rest. She would need it. Her “second” new life was about to commence.

T
homas Donovan sat staring at his computer screen in the frenetic news room of the
Washington Tribune.
Journalistic awards from a number of distinguished organizations dotted the walls and shelves of his cluttered cubicle, including a Pulitzer he had won before he was thirty. Donovan was now in his early fifties but still possessed the drive and fervor of his youth. Like most investigative journalists, he could dish out a strong dose of cynicism about the workings of the real world, if only because he had seen the worst of it. What he was working on now was a story the substance of which disgusted him.

He was glancing at some of his notes when a shadow fell across his desk.

“Mr. Donovan?”

Donovan looked up into the face of a young kid from the mail room.

“Yeah?”

“This just came in for you. I think it’s some research you had requested.”

Donovan thanked him and took the packet. He dug into it with obvious zeal.

The lottery story he was working on had so much potential. He had already done a great deal of research. The national lottery took in billions of dollars each year in profits and the amount was growing at more than twenty percent a year. The government paid out about half its revenue in prize money, about ten percent to vendors and other operating costs, and kept forty percent as profit, a margin most companies would kill for. Surveys and scholars had argued for years about whether the lottery amounted to a regressive tax with the poor the chief loser. The government maintained that, demographically, the poor didn’t spend a disproportionate share of their income on the game. Such arguments didn’t sit well with Donovan. He knew for a fact that millions of the people who played the game were borderline poverty-level, squandering Social Security money, food stamps, and anything else they could get their hands on to purchase the chance at the easy life, even though the odds were so astronomically high as to be farcical. And the government advertisements were highly misleading when it came to detailing precisely what those odds were. But that wasn’t all. Donovan had turned up an astonishing seventy-five percent bankruptcy rate per year for the winners. Nine out of every twelve winners each year subsequently had declared bankruptcy. His angle had to do with financial management companies and other scheming, sophisticated types getting hold of these poor people and basically ripping them off. Charities calling up and hounding them relentlessly. Purveyors of every type of sybaritic gratification selling them just about anything they didn’t need, calling their wares “must-have” status items for the nouveaux riches and charging a thousand percent markup for their troubles. It didn’t stop there. The sudden wealth had destroyed families and lifetime friendships as greed supplanted all rational emotions.

And the government was just as much to blame, Donovan felt, for these financial crashes. About twelve years ago they had bestowed the initial prize in one lump sum and given it tax-deferred status for one year to attract more and more players. The advertisements had played up this fact dramatically, touting the winnings as “tax-free” in the large print and counting on the “fine print” to inform the public that the amounts were actually tax-deferred and only for one year. Previously, the winnings had been paid out over time and taxes taken out automatically. Now the winners were on their own as far as structuring the payment of taxes went. Some, Donovan had learned, thought they owed no tax at all and went out and spent the money freely. All the earnings on that principal were subject to numerous taxes as well, and hefty ones. The Feds just hung the winners out there with a pat on the back and a big check. And when the winners weren’t astute enough to set up sophisticated accounting and financial systems, the tax boys would come after them and take every last dime they had, under the guise of penalties and interest and what-not, and leave them poorer than when they started out.

It was a game designed for the ultimate destruction of the winner and it was done under the veil of the government’s doing good for its people. It was the devil’s game and our own government was doing it to us, Donovan was firmly convinced. And the government did it for one reason and one reason only: money. Just like everybody else. He had watched other papers give the problem lip service. And whenever a real attack or exposé was formed in the news media, government lottery officials quickly squelched it with oceans of statistics showing how much good the lottery monies were doing. The public thought the money was earmarked for education, highway maintenance, and the like, but a large part of it went into the general purpose funds and ended up in some very interesting places, far away from buying school books and filling potholes. Lottery officials received fat paychecks and fatter bonuses. Politicians who supported the lottery saw large funds flow to their states. All of it stunk and Donovan felt it was high time the truth came out. His pen would defend the less fortunate, just as it had over his entire career. If he did nothing else, Donovan would at least shame the government into reconsidering the morals of this gargantuan revenue source. It might not change anything, but he was going to give it his best.

He refocused on the packet of documents. He had tested his theory on the bankruptcy rate going back five years. The documents he was holding took those results back another seven years. As he paged through year after year of lottery winners, the results were almost identical, the ratio staying at virtually nine out of twelve a year declaring personal bankruptcy. Absolutely astonishing. He happily thumbed through the pages. His instincts had been dead-on. It was no fluke.