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.
Chapter twenty-three
The 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.
She had not followed Jackson’s advice regarding the knife wound to her jaw. She had had it stitched, but let the scar remain. It wasn’t all that noticeable, but every time she looked in the mirror, it was a stark reminder of where she had come from, how she had gotten here. It was her most visible tie to the past, and not a pleasant one. That was the reason she would not cover it over with surgery. She wanted to be reminded of the unpleasantness, of the pain.
People she had grown up with would probably have recognized her; however, she never planned to see anyone like that here. She had resigned herself to wearing a big hat and sunglasses whenever she ventured out into public, which wasn’t very often. A lifetime of hiding from the world: that had come with her deal.
She went and sat back down on the front seat of the BMW, rubbing her hands back and forth across the padded steering wheel. She continually looked back down the road for any sign of her pursuer; however, the only sounds were her car’s engine and her own uneven breathing. Huddled in her leather jacket, she hitched up her jeans, swung her long legs inside the car, and closed the door and locked it.
She took off and for a few moments as she drove her thoughts centered on the man in the truck. He had obviously helped her. Was he just a good Samaritan who had happened along at the right time? Or was he something else, something more complex than that? She had lived with this paranoia for so long now that it was like an exterior coating of paint. All observations had to pass through its screening first, all conclusions were based in some way upon how she perceived the motivation of anyone colliding unexpectedly with her universe. It all came down to one grim fact: fear of discovery. She took one long, deep breath and wondered for the hundredth time if she had made a grievous mistake by returning to the United States.
Riggs drove his battered truck up the private road. He had kept a close eye out for the Honda on his return down the road, but the car and driver had not reappeared. Going up to the house, he figured, was the quickest way to find a telephone, and perhaps also seek an explanation of sorts for this morning’s events. Not that he deserved one, but his intervention had helped the woman and he felt that was worth something. In any event, he couldn’t exactly let it rest now. He was surprised that no one stopped him on the drive up. There was no private security, apparently. He had met with the owner’s representative in town; this was his first visit to the estate, which had been christened Wicken’s Hunt long ago. The home was one of the most beautiful in the area. It had been constructed in the early 1920s with craftsmanship that was simply nonexistent today. The Wall Street magnate who had had it built as a summer retreat had jumped off a New York skyscraper during the stock market crash of ’29. The home had passed through several hands, and had been on the market six years before being sold to the current owner. The place had required substantial renovation. Riggs had talked to some of the subcontractors employed to do that work. They had spoken with awe of the craftsmanship and beauty of the place.
Whatever moving trucks had hauled the owner’s possessions up the mountain road had apparently done so in the middle of the night, because Riggs could find no one who had seen them. No one had seen the owner, either. He had checked at the courthouse land records. The home was owned by a corporation that Riggs had never heard of. The usual channels of gossip had not yielded an answer to the mystery, although St. Anne’s-Belfield School had admitted a ten-year-old girl named Lisa Savage who had given Wicken’s Hunt as her home address. Riggs had heard that a tall young woman would occasionally drop off and pick up the child; although she had always worn sunglasses and a large hat. Most often picking up the little girl would be an elderly man who had been described to Riggs as built like a linebacker. A strange household. Riggs had several friends who worked at the school but none of them would talk about the young woman. If they knew her name, they wouldn’t say what it was.
When Riggs rounded a curve, the mansion suddenly appeared directly in front of him. His truck resembled a plain, squat tug bearing down on the QEII. The mansion stood three stories tall, with a double doorway spanning at least twenty feet.
He parked his truck in the wraparound drive that encircled a magnificent stone fountain that, on this cold morning, was not operating. The landscaping was as lush and as carefully planned as the house; and where annuals and even late-blooming perennials had died out, evergreens and other hardy foliage of all descriptions filled in the spaces.