The Winner (25 page)

Bordered by Nelson County on the southwest, Greene County to the north, and Fluvanna and Louisa counties on the east, Albemarle County, Virginia, was home to many wealthy people, some famous and some not. However, they all had one thing in common: They all craved privacy and were more than willing to pay for it. Thus, Riggs was not entirely surprised at the precautions being undertaken here. All the negotiations had been handled through a duly authorized intermediary. He reasoned that someone who could afford a fence such as this, and the cost was well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably had better things to do with his time than sit down and chat with a lowly general contractor.

Binoculars dangling around his neck, he dutifully trudged down the road until he found a narrow pathway into the woods. The two most difficult parts of the job were clear to him: getting the heavy equipment up here and having his men work in such cramped surroundings. Mixing concrete, punching postholes, laying out the frames, clearing land, and angling sections of a very heavy fence, all of that took space, ample space that they would not have here. He was very glad to have added a healthy premium to the job, plus a provision for a cost overrun for exactly those reasons. The owner, apparently, had not set a limit as to the price, because the representative had promptly agreed to the huge dollar amount Riggs had worked up. Not that he was complaining. This single job would guarantee his best year ever in business. And although he had only been on his own for three years, his operation had been growing steadily ever since the first day. He got to work.

The BMW pulled slowly out from the garage and headed down the drive. The road going down was lined on either side with four-board oak fencing painted a pristine white. Most of the cleared land was surrounded by the same style of fencing, the white lines making a stunning contrast to the green landscape. It was not quite seven in the morning and the stillness of the day remained unbroken. These early morning drives had become a soothing ritual for LuAnn. She glanced back at the house in her rearview mirror. Constructed of beautiful Pennsylvania stone and weathered brick with a row of new white columns bracketing a deep front porch, a slate roof, aged-looking copper gutters, and numerous French doors, the house was elegantly refined despite its imposing size.

As the car passed down the drive and out of sight of the house, LuAnn turned her eyes back to the road and suddenly took her foot off the gas and hit the brake. The man was waving at her, his arms crisscrossing themselves as he flagged her down. She inched forward and then stopped the car. He came up to the driver’s side window and motioned for her to open it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the black Honda parked on a grass strip bordering the road.

She eyed him with deep suspicion but hit the button and the window descended slightly. She kept one foot on the accelerator ready to mash it down if the situation called for it. His appearance was innocent enough: middle-aged and slight of build, with a beard laced around the edges with gray.

“Can I help you?” she asked, her eyes attempting to duck his gaze at the same time she tried her best to note any sudden movements on his part.

“I think I’m lost. Is this the old Brillstein Estate?” He pointed up the road toward where the house was.

LuAnn shook her head. “We just recently moved in, but that wasn’t the name of the owners before us. It’s called Wicken’s Hunt.”

“Huh, I could’ve sworn this was the right place.”

“Who were you looking for?”

The man leaned forward so that his face filled her window. “Maybe you know her. The name is LuAnn Tyler, from Georgia.”

LuAnn sucked in a mouthful of air so quickly she almost gagged. There was no hiding the astonishment on her face.

Thomas Donovan, his face full of satisfaction, leaned even closer, his lips right at her eye level. “LuAnn, I’d like to talk to you. It’s important and—”

She hit the accelerator and Donovan had to jump back to avoid having his feet crushed by the car tires.

“Hey!” he screamed after her. The car was almost out of sight. Donovan, his face ashen, ran to his car, started it up, and roared off down the road. “Christ!” he said to himself.

Donovan had tried directory assistance in Charlottesville, but they had no listing for Catherine Savage. He would have been shocked if they had. Someone on the run all these years didn’t ordinarily give out her phone number. He had decided, after much thought, that the direct approach would be, if not the best, at least the most productive. He had watched the house for the last week, noted her pattern of early morning drives, and chosen today to make contact. Despite being almost run over, he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had been right. Throwing the question at her out of the blue like that, he knew, was the only sure way to get the truth. And now he had it. Catherine Savage was LuAnn Tyler. Her looks had changed considerably from the video and photos he had seen from ten years ago. The changes were subtle, no one single alteration really dramatic, yet the cumulative effect had been marked. Except for the look on her face and her abrupt departure, Donovan wouldn’t have known it was her.

He now focused on the road ahead. He had just glimpsed the gray BMW. It was still far ahead, but on the curvy mountain road his smaller and more agile Honda was gaining. He didn’t like playing the daredevil role; he had disdained it in his younger days when covering dangerous events halfway around the world, and he disliked it even more now. However, he had to make her understand what he was trying to do. He had to make her listen. And he had to get his story. He hadn’t worked twenty-hour days the last several months tracking her down simply to watch her disappear again.

Matt Riggs stopped for a moment and again studied the terrain. The air was so clean and pure up here, the sky so blue, the peace and quiet so ethereal, he again marveled at why he had waited so long to chuck the big city, and come to calmer, if less exciting, parts. After years of being in the very center of millions of tense, increasingly aggressive people, he now found being able to feel like you were all alone in the world, for even a few minutes, was more soothing than he could have imagined. He was about to pull the property survey out of his jacket to study in more detail the dimensions of the property line when all thoughts of work amid the peaceful countryside abruptly disappeared from his mind.

He jerked his head around and whipped the binoculars up to his eyes to focus on what had suddenly destroyed the morning’s calm. He quickly located the origin of the explosion of sound. Through the trees he spied two cars hurtling down from the road where the country estate was situated, their respective engines at full throttle. The car in front was a big BMW sedan. The car behind it was a smaller vehicle. What the smaller car lacked in muscle power to the big Bimmer, it more than made up for in agility around the winding road. At the speeds the two were doing, Riggs thought it most likely they would both end up either wrapped around a tree or upside down in one of the steep ditches that bordered either side of the road.

The next two visuals he made through his binoculars made him turn and run as fast as he could back to his truck.

The look of raw fear on the woman’s face in the Bimmer, the way she looked behind to check her pursuer’s progress, and the grim countenance of the man apparently chasing her were all he needed to kick-start every instinct he had ever gained from his former life.

He gunned the engine, unsure exactly what his plan of action would be, not that he had much time to come up with one. He pulled onto the road, strapping his seat belt across him as he did so. He normally carried a shotgun in the truck to ward off snakes, but he had forgotten it this morning. He had some shovels and a crowbar in the truck bed, although he hoped it wasn’t going to come to that.

As he flew down the road, the two cars appeared in front of him on the main road. The Bimmer took the turn almost on two wheels before stabilizing, the other car right behind it. However, now on the straightaway, the three hundred plus horses of the BMW could be fully used, and the woman quickly opened a two-hundred-yard gap between herself and her pursuer, a gap that grew with every second. That wouldn’t last, Riggs knew, because a curve that would qualify for deadman’s status was fast approaching. He hoped to God the woman knew it; if she didn’t he would be watching the BMW turn into a fireball as it sailed off the road and crashed into an army of unyielding hardwoods. With that prospect nearly upon them, his plan finally came together. He punched the gas, the truck flew forward, and he gained on what he now saw was a black Honda. The man apparently had all of his attention focused on the BMW, because when Riggs passed him on the left, the man didn’t even look over. However, he took abrupt and angry notice when Riggs cut in front of him and immediately slowed down to twenty miles an hour. Up ahead, Riggs saw the woman glance back in her rearview mirror, her eyes riveted on Riggs and his fortuitous appearance on the scene as the truck and Honda fought a pitched battle for supremacy of the road. Riggs tried to motion to her to slow down, to make her understand what he was trying to do. Whether she got the message or not, he couldn’t tell. Like the coils of a sidewinder, the truck and the Honda swayed back and forth across the narrow roadway, coming dangerously close to the sheer drop on the right side. Once, the truck’s wheel partially skidded in the gravel shoulder and Riggs braced himself for the plunge over, before he barely managed to regain control. The driver of the Honda tried mightily to pass, leaning on the horn the whole time. But in his past career Riggs had done his share of dangerous, high-speed driving and he expertly matched the other man maneuver for maneuver. A minute later they rounded the almost
V
-shaped curve, a wall of sheer jutting rock on his left and an almost vertical drop to the right. Riggs anxiously looked down that steep slope for any sight of the Bimmer’s wreckage. He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw none. He looked up the once again straight road. He saw the glint of a bumper far up ahead and then the big sedan was completely out of sight. Admiration was his first thought. The woman hadn’t slowed down much, if any, coming around that curve. Even at twenty miles an hour Riggs hadn’t felt all that safe. Damn.

Riggs reached across to his glove box and pulled out his portable phone. He was just about to punch in 911 when the Honda now took the very aggressive tack of ramming his truck from behind. The phone flew out of his hand and smashed into several pieces against the dashboard. Riggs cursed, shook off the impact, clenched the wheel hard, shifted into low gear, and slowed down even more as the Honda repeatedly smashed into him. What he was hoping would happen eventually did, as the Honda’s front bumper and the truck’s heavy-duty rear one locked together. He could hear the gears grinding in the Honda as the driver tried to extricate his vehicle without success. Riggs peered into the rearview mirror and he saw the man’s hand slide over to his glove compartment. Riggs wasn’t going to wait around to see whether a weapon emerged from it or not. He jerked the truck to a stop, slammed the gear in reverse, and the two vehicles roared backward down the road. He watched with satisfaction as the man in the Honda jerked back upright and gripped the steering wheel in a panic. Riggs slowed as he came to the curve, cleared it and then shot forward again. As he came to a straightaway, he cut the wheel sharply to the left and slammed the Honda into the rocky side of the road. The force of that collision uncoupled the two vehicles. The driver appeared unhurt. Riggs slammed the truck into drive and quickly disappeared down the road in pursuit of the BMW. He continually looked back for several minutes but there was no sign of the Honda. Either it had been disabled upon impact, or the driver had decided not to pursue his reckless actions further.

The adrenaline continued to course through Riggs’s body for several minutes until it finally dissipated. Five years removed from the dangers of his former profession, Riggs was aware that this morning’s five-minute episode had reminded him vividly of how many close calls he had survived. He had neither expected nor ever wanted to rekindle that anxious feeling in the sleepy morning mists of central Virginia.

His damaged bumper clanking loudly, Riggs finally slowed down, as further pursuit of the BMW was hopeless. There were innumerable roads off the main track and the woman could have taken any one of them and be long gone by now. Riggs pulled off the road and stopped, plucked a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote the license plate numbers of the Honda and BMW down on the pad of paper he kept affixed to his dashboard. He ripped the paper off the pad and tucked it in his pocket. He had a pretty good idea who was in the Bimmer. Someone who lived in the big house. The same big house he had been hired to surround with a state-of-the-art security fence. Now the owner’s request started to make a whole lot more sense to Riggs. And the question he was most interested in now was why? He drove off, deep in thought, the morning’s peacefulness irretrievably shattered by the look of sheer terror on a woman’s face.

T
he BMW had indeed pulled off on a side road several miles away from where Riggs and the Honda had tangled. The driver’s side door was open, the motor running. Arms clutched tightly around her sides, LuAnn walked in tight, frenetic circles in the middle of the road, shooting frosty breaths skyward in her agitation. Anger, confusion, and frustration raced across her features. All traces of fear were gone, however. The present emotions were actually far more damaging to her. Fear almost always passed; these other mental battering rams did not retreat so easily. She had learned this over the years, and had even managed to cope with it as best as she could.

Now thirty years old, LuAnn Tyler still carried the impulsive energy and sleek animal movements of her youth. The years had grafted onto her a more complete, mature beauty. However, the basic elements of that beauty had been discernibly altered. Her body was leaner, the waist even tighter. The effect was to make her appear even taller than she already was. Her hair had grown out and now was far more blond than auburn, and cut in a sophisticated manner that highlighted her more defined facial features, including the minor nose job done for disguise rather than aesthetics. Her teeth were now perfect, having benefitted from years of expensive dentistry. There was, however, one imperfection.