“Nothing we can do to change anything now.” Again Will could almost hear Murphy’s shrug.
Will did not speak for a moment. He couldn’t. Traffic whizzed past on the four-lane highway not far from where he stood. A couple of rubes in overalls came out of the 7-Eleven and climbed into a beat-up pickup, revving the engine loudly as they drove off. A vapor trail of malodorous exhaust wafted toward Will’s nostrils. He leaned back, out of its way.
Overhead, the sky was a gorgeous cerulean blue with fluffy white clouds floating across it. Unseasonably warm air caressed his face. In downtown Chicago toward the middle of October it would have been twenty degrees cooler, the air crisp like it was supposed to be in autumn. The streets would have been crowded with people bustling about real business. Wind would have whistled through the canyons created by the skyscrapers …
“Etheline, don’t forget my cigarettes! You hear?” A fat woman in an idling Chevy shouted the admonition at her equally large teenage daughter, who was walking into the convenience store and who answered her with a dismissive wave. In Chicago, nobody smoked anymore. Here, the damned state motto might as well have been Tobacco is a vegetable. Half the population lit up. God, he wished he were back in civilization again! His idea of hell was to be stuck here for the rest of his life.
“You sure it was suicide?” he asked Murphy desperately.
“The News at Noon said the gun was found inside the car with Lawrence’s fingerprints all over it. No one was with him. What else could it be?”
What else indeed? Just because Lawrence’s death was awfully convenient for the men he was ratting on didn’t mean it was murder. But still … “You copy down the license numbers of the cars in the lot?”
“No.” Murphy sounded surprised. “Should I have? I didn’t think about that, with it being a suicide and all.”
You didn’t think, period, Will growled, but he didn’t say it aloud.
“You recover the money?” Murphy asked.
“Yeah.” Deep in thought, Will responded with scarcely more than a grunt.
“Uh, Will …” There was a pause.
“What?” That pause caught Will’s attention. He could feel more bad news heading his way.
“The girl’s name is Ballard, not Butler. Molly Ballard. I guess I read it wrong.” Murphy sounded sheepish.
“Thanks for telling me.” Will’s voice was dry. With Murphy, he was becoming inured to screwups. At least the girl had been telling the truth when she had insisted she wasn’t Miss Butler. Will grimaced as he remembered. He hated being made to look a fool. Thinking that, he had an abrupt vision of himself lying flat on his back on her porch.
In the looking-foolish sweepstakes, getting his suspect’s name wrong paled in comparison.
“You got the money back, so I guess it didn’t matter,” Murphy said hopefully.
Will lifted the receiver from his ear and contemplated it for an instant. Then he replaced it and said carefully, “No, I guess when you look at it that way it didn’t.”
“You want me to make some calls and try to get the coroner’s report on Lawrence, or anything?”
“No,” Will said, feeling a sensation close to panic at the idea of Murphy’s doing anything more. “Stay put. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Without giving Murphy a chance to reply, he hung up.
As he started back to his car, Will discovered to his disgust that there was gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe. A big, fat, grimy pink globe, with long, slimy strings stretching from his expensive leather sole to the remnants of the goo left on the asphalt. He wasn’t even surprised. Just about all the locals who didn’t smoke chewed gum, and spat it out wherever it suited them.
This day had gone wrong right from the beginning, from the moment the girl made off with the bag of cash that was to provide their filmed evidence of Don Simpson receiving a payoff. From there, though Will wouldn’t have believed it possible, events had spiraled rapidly downhill. And now he had gum on his shoe.
As the saying goes, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.
Or as Will more succinctly expressed it to himself, sometimes life sucks.
He scraped the gum off onto the raised edge of the sidewalk as well as he could, walked to the nondescript, company-sanctioned white Ford Taurus that in his mind stood out like a sore thumb precisely because it was so bland, and headed toward Lexington, some ten miles away.
A sudden craving for a glass of cold milk, a bagel, and a copy of the Chicago Tribune hit him. Since he’d given up caffeine in deference to the ulcer that intermittently plagued him, fifteen minutes with milk, a bagel, and the paper had become his method of choice for handling stress.
It beat pounding on walls.
These people had never even heard of bagels. When he had tried to order one, in a variety of local delis and restaurants, what he got most often was a blank stare. His favorite response came from the clown who told him to check in the pet shop up the street. Bagels, beagles, get it, ha-ha.
The locals sure had a great sense of humor. He’d better be careful or he’d die laughing.
He had been in the sticks just a little over a week, and he could already feel his blood pressure shooting through the roof. Big-city life was in his genes, he’d decided days ago. “Fresh” country air—actually it was ripe with more than a hint of manure—nauseated him. Give him a couple of lungfuls of smog anytime.
It was bad enough that he was suffering so on behalf of a two-bit horse race-fixing ring that nobody would have given a damn about if Senator Charles Paxton, D-Ky., and his buddies hadn’t lost a bundle at the local track last spring, but it was much worse that the investigation now seemed to be thoroughly blown. If he couldn’t salvage something from the wreckage, he was going to have a black mark on his record. His career would be damaged, and all over a nothing case that wasn’t even important enough to merit an “official” investigation. He and Murphy were checking out the scam strictly as a favor to the senator. Nobody but Dave Hallum knew they were there.
Driving toward Lexington, Will turned the case over in his mind, desperately looking for a fresh angle from which to approach it. The facts were these: Senator Paxton, quite rightly as it turned out, had suspected that something was rotten in Thoroughbredland when he kept losing where he usually won. He had asked George Rees, Hallum’s boss at the Bureau and Paxton’s close friend, to check it out. Rees had in turn passed the ball to Hallum, who had, with malice in his heart and a wicked grin, lobbed it to Will, who’d been on his shit list at the time because of the splintered cabin cruiser.
When Will had protested that agents from the field office in Louisville were the ones to handle the case, he was informed that he was mistaken: Everybody knew everybody else down there, including the local FBI agents. Under those circumstances it would be almost impossible to keep secret an investigation involving the region’s most famous horse-breeding operations.
What was needed was an outsider—namely, Will. He would be assisted by John Murphy, a recent transferee to the Chicago office from West Virginia, where he’d spent the past fifteen years coasting by on the occasional marijuana bust, from what Will could gather.
Will hadn’t liked the assignment, or his new partner, but that was life with the Bureau. Accompanied by Murphy, he’d flown down, set up shop in the nearest Executive Suites hotel, and promised himself he would have the whole mess sorted out by the time Keeneland’s three-week racing season ended on October 29.
He would have made his self-imposed deadline too. It hadn’t required a lot of brains to focus on the track’s recent consistent winners as the preliminary targets of his investigation. A little electronic surveillance, a little sifting through trash at Keeneland and various stables associated with it, and he had a rough idea of what was going on, along with a quintet of suspects. What he lacked was proof, as well as some way of busting all five and making the charges stick.
The background checks he did on the targets yielded
pay dirt: One of his prime suspects, Howard Lawrence, was sleeping with an underage girl. That was all the leverage he needed. He visited Lawrence, terrifying him with the specter of being charged with statutory rape and transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes (the idiot had taken the girl with him on a jaunt to Nashville a month previously). He then revived him with the possibility of avoiding that fate and being financially well rewarded for his cooperation in an ongoing investigation, and promised him both protection from reprisals by his fellow conspirators and immunity from prosecution for his part in the scheme. Lawrence was intelligent enough to recognize that under the circumstances his choices were limited. He spilled everything he knew, and agreed to help set the others up.
The scheme was strictly penny-ante stuff, designed not to make anybody rich but just to supplement the salaries of those involved. Its mechanics were simple: Four local horse trainers—Lawrence, Don Simpson of Wyland Farm, Tim Harden of Greenglow Stables, and Jason Breen of Sweet Meadow Stud—had formed an unholy alliance with identifier Bernie Caudill, whose job it was to match the lip tattoo identifying each racehorse with the Thoroughbred’s registration papers. This was the process by which bettors were assured that the horse that was supposed to run in a particular race was the horse that actually ran. The trainers were using “ringers,” substituting Thoroughbreds that outclassed the competition and running them at long odds intended for the lesser horses supposedly entered in the race. The horsemen then bet heavily on their animals, won big, and split the profits.
Leaving everybody happy. Except Senator Paxton, who took losing personally.
Will winced as he pictured himself calling Hallum and telling him that the investigation initiated by George Rees as a personal favor to his friend the senator had been derailed because the witness they were supposed to be both watching and protecting had committed suicide. He would look bad. Hallum would look bad. George Rees would look bad. And that wasn’t good. He’d be on Hallum’s shit list for the next twenty years.
Hallum’s paybacks were notorious. Knowing how much Will hated the sticks, Hallum would probably assign him to Podunk permanently. He’d be stuck in this endless Green Acres rerun until retirement.
He had to come up with some way of salvaging the situation. But what?
Suddenly the very pretty face and form of Miss Molly Butler—uh, Ballard—popped into his mind.
She was an insider. And, as long as he had the tape of her little venture into grand theft in his possession, she was his. Signed, sealed, delivered.
The question was, how best to use her?
6
Molly and her family were in the middle of supper when someone knocked on the door. Four of the Ballards looked up immediately. The fifth, seventeen-year-old Ashley, her nose in a book as usual, had a slower response time. But when Pork Chop erupted from beneath the table with a scrabble of toenails and a frenzy of yelps, Ashley surfaced as well, glancing around inquiringly at her siblings before looking toward the door.
“I’ll get it.” Mike scrambled up from his place at the table, abandoning his meal without a visible sign of regret. Hamburger Helper for the third time in a week made him want to puke, as he had informed the whole family when they sat down. Thin as a bone and, at fourteen, already taller than Molly, Mike wore the ubiquitous teenage uniform of jeans, sneakers, and an open flannel shirt over a white T-shirt. His shoulder-length hair was pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, and a small gold hoop pierced one ear.
Molly wasn’t wild about his hairstyle or his earring, but if she had learned one thing in the course of parenting this group, it was don’t sweat the small stuff. Shoplifting was worth fighting about; earrings weren’t.
“You can’t do anything or go anywhere until you do your homework,” Molly warned him, assuming, as did Mike, that the visitor would be one of the teenager’s many friends.
“I already told you, I did it at school.”
“Yeah, right,” eleven-year-old Sam snorted. He echoed Molly’s sentiments exactly. Mike was bad about homework, and getting worse. Molly had tried nagging, bribery, and threats without much success. Mike just didn’t care about school right now. Though she was trying hard, Molly couldn’t figure out quite what to do about it.
“I did my homework right after I got home from school. So did Sam,” Susan said virtuously. Molly smiled at Susan with affection. Mike shot her a dirty look.
The twins looked a great deal alike. Both were fine-boned, pale-skinned children with the large, densely lashed brown eyes that all five of the Ballard siblings had inherited from their mother. Unlike Molly herself and Mike, both of whom also had their mother’s luxuriant coffee-brown hair, the twins had silky blond hair, which on Sam was cut to just above his ears and on Susan reached her shoulders. They looked delicate, which they weren’t, and angelic, which they weren’t either.
What Ballard was? Molly asked herself dryly just as Mike opened the door. Well, maybe Ashley qualified.
“Hi,” said the visitor from the other side of the screen door, which Molly had managed to shimmy closed but had not yet had the time or money to fix. The porch was dark, and with the still-intact upper mesh panel obscuring the caller’s features it was impossible to ascertain anything other than that he was an adult male. “Is your sister home?”
“Which one?” Mike’s back stiffened. His surprise and suspicion were clear: It was unusual to have a strange man come by the house in the evening, especially asking for one of his sisters. In an impatient aside to the barking dog pushing against his legs, he added, “Shut up, Pork Chop.”
Pork Chop, of course, continued to bark—but he was wagging his tail. Whoever was at the door was clearly known to him. The animal stuck his nose through the hole in the bottom screen, sniffing a pair of dark dress trousers. A tan, long-fingered hand complete with white cuff and a glimpse of gold-rimmed wristwatch came into view, patting the dog on the head.
“Molly,” said the owner of that hand.
The four Ballards remaining at the table ceased all activity, their eyes now riveted on the door. The three younger ones knew that if a stranger was at the house asking for Molly, one of the Ballards was probably in trouble. Molly, having recognized with a flash of fear the trousers, the hand, and the voice, knew just which Ballard that was.
“Yes, I’m here,” she croaked, getting to her feet and moving toward the door as fast as her weakening knees would allow. Whatever the FBI man had to say to her, she did not want to hear it in front of the kids.
Though she had a pretty good idea. He must have discovered that missing twenty.
Oh, God, did that mean that she was going to be arrested after all?
Her siblings stared at her. Mike even shifted his protective position at the door to watch her approach.
“Move, Pork Chop,” Molly said to the enormous animal, whose wriggling body stood between her and the door. Pork Chop obligingly stepped right through the hole he had created in the lower mesh panel to wait with his new friend on the porch. Brushing past Mike, consciously avoiding looking at him, Molly jiggled the latch and pushed open the screen door.
The door immediately sagged downward, but she managed to get it open by gripping the handle and lifting, holding the dipping front corner inches above the uneven porch floorboards.
“Hi,” said the FBI man when they were face-to-face at last. “Did you forget our date?”
The light from the kitchen spilled over him. Bright blue eyes gleamed a warning at her. Surprise rendered Molly momentarily mute. What on earth was he talking about? She met his gaze with trepidation. He smiled at her, a quick stretching of his lips that brought no corresponding warmth to his eyes. He wanted something, that much was clear, but she didn’t think he was here to arrest her. If he was, he wouldn’t be spouting that nonsense about a date.
“Hi,” she managed, hideously conscious of Mike beside her and the others at the table listening to every word. “I—guess I must have.”
&nbs
p; Seeing her difficulty with the door, he reached out to grasp the frame, relieving her of its weight. Molly let go of the handle, sank back on her heels, and wrapped her arms around her, never glancing away from his face.
“Not meaning to stand me up, are you?” His tone was light, teasing almost, but his eyes were not. They were narrowed with purpose, a purpose that Molly dared not ignore.
“No, of course not,” she said. “Let me just …” She glanced sideways at Mike, who was staring at their visitor. It was an effort even to think, so nervous was she. But she clearly couldn’t just walk out the door without saying anything to her family.
“Go do whatever you need to do.” The FBI man sounded indulgent, although she knew the affability he projected was a sham. “I’ll wait.”
With that he moved forward, crowding into her space until she was forced to step back from the threshold, admitting him to the house. Mike stepped back, too, looking from Molly to their guest with a frown. The FBI man closed the screen door carefully behind him. Pork Chop wriggled through the hole in the screen to stand next to him, tail wagging.
Dead silence hung in the air.
The FBI man shot Molly a glance that was at definite odds with the smile on his face, recalling her to a sense of their audience. She realized that she had been staring at him, probably with horror, ever since he had walked through the door. She only hoped that her family had been themselves so busy ogling him that they had not noticed her expression.
“This—this is my brother Mike,” she said hurriedly, then panicked as she realized that she could not recall the FBI man’s name.
Seeming to sense her dilemma, he stepped in, holding out his hand to the teenager.
“Will Lyman,” he said, shaking Mike’s hand while Molly breathed an inward sigh of relief. If he was her “date,” she would know his name at the very least.
“This is Ashley, and Susan, and Sam.” Molly gestured to the trio at the table.
“Hi.” He nodded at them as they echoed his greeting. All three were as wide-eyed as if he were an alien, Molly saw with rising hysteria, while Mike still frowned as he looked their guest up and down, his arms crossed over his chest for all the world as if he were a suspicious father giving his daughter’s date the once-over.
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