Riggs spread his hands wide. “So why? Why the lottery fix? Did you give him some of your winnings?”
“All of it.” Riggs looked blankly at her. LuAnn said, “He had control of the money for ten years; that period just ended. He invested the money and paid me some of the income from those investments.”
“He had a hundred million to invest. How much did you earn each year?”
“Around forty million on the initial principal. He also invested any amounts I didn’t spend. I earned tens of millions more on that each year.”
Riggs gaped at her. “That’s a forty percent return on your lottery money alone.”
“I know. And Jackson made a lot more than that, I’m certain. He wasn’t in this out of the goodness of his heart. It was a business transaction, plain and simple.”
“So if you made forty percent, he probably made at least that and maybe more. That’s a minimum of eighty percent return on your money. He could only have done that through illegal channels.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“And at the end of ten years?”
“I got the hundred million back.”
Riggs rubbed at his brow. “And if there were twelve of you at, say, an average of seventy million dollars each, this guy had almost one billion dollars to invest.”
“He’s got a lot more than that now, I’m sure.” She looked at him, saw the worry lines. “What, what are you thinking?”
He looked at her steadily. “Another thing that’s had the FBI’s dander up.” She looked puzzled. Riggs started to explain. “I know for a fact that for years now the FBI, Interpol, and a few other foreign law enforcement agencies have been aware of something: Tremendous amounts of money have been funneled into lots of activities across the globe, some legit, others not. At first the Feds thought it was drug cartel money, either from South America or Asia, partly to launder it. That didn’t turn out to be the case. They picked up threads here and there, but the leads always fizzled. Someone with that much money can cover himself really well. Maybe that someone is Jackson.” Riggs fell silent.
“You’re sure the Feds don’t know about the lottery?”
Riggs looked uneasy. “I can tell you, if they do, they didn’t learn it from me. But they do know of my inquiries about you. There was no getting around that.”
“And if they’ve figured it out for themselves? Then we have Jackson and the federal government coming for us. Right?”
Riggs looked away for a moment and then stared her directly in the eye. “Right.”
“And to tell you the truth, I’m not sure which one frightens me more.”
They looked at each other, similar thoughts running through their minds. Two people against all of this.
“I need to go now,” LuAnn said.
“Go where?”
“I’m pretty certain that Jackson’s been following my movements closely. He’ll know we’ve seen each other several times. He may know I’ve met with Donovan. If I don’t report back to him right away” — here she took a painful swallow — “well, it won’t be pretty.”
Riggs gripped her shoulders tightly. “LuAnn, this guy is a psycho, but he must be brilliant as well. That makes him even more dangerous. You walk in there, the guy gets the least bit suspicious...”
She gently rubbed his arms with her hands. “Well, I just have to make sure he doesn’t get suspicious.”
“How in the hell are you going to do that? He already must be. I say we bring in the troops, set the guy up and take him.”
“And me, what about me?”
Riggs stared at her. “I’m sure you could probably work a deal with the authorities,” he said lamely.
“And the folks down in Georgia? You heard Donovan, they want to lynch me.”
“The Feds could talk to them, they...” Riggs broke off as he realized absolutely none of what he was saying could be guaranteed.
“And maybe I work a deal with all of them. I give back the money. It might surprise you, but I really don’t care about that. And then maybe I get a sympathetic judge, or judges, and they give me a break. Cumulatively what could I be looking at? Twenty years?”
“Maybe not that much.”
“How much then?”
“I can’t tell you that. I don’t know.”
“I’d make a real sympathetic defendant, wouldn’t I? I can see the headlines now: Drug dealer-turned-murderess-turned-dream-stealer-turned-fugitive LuAnn Tyler living like a queen while people blow their Social Security checks on the lottery. Maybe they’d give me a prize instead of throwing away the key. What do you think?”
Riggs didn’t answer and he couldn’t manage to look at her either.
“And let’s say we set Jackson up. What if we miss and he gets away? Or what if we nail him? Do you think with all his money, all his power, he might beat the rap? Or maybe he just might pay someone to carry out his revenge for him. Given that, what do you think my life is worth? And my daughter’s life?”
Riggs did answer this time. “Nothing. Okay, I hear where you’re coming from. But listen, why can’t you report back to the guy over the phone? You don’t need to see him in person.”
LuAnn considered this for a minute. “I’ll try,” was all she could promise.
LuAnn stood up to her full height and gazed down at him. She looked twenty again, strong, rangy, confident. “Despite having zillions of dollars and traveling all over the world, I’m not the FBI. I’m still just a dumb girl from Georgia, but you might be a little surprised at what I can do when I set my mind to it.” Lisa’s face was conjured up in her thoughts. “And I’ve got a lot to lose. Too much.” Her eyes seemed to look right through his, seeing something far, far down the road. When she spoke, her voice carried the full measure of her deep Southern roots. “So I’m not going to lose.”
Chapter forty-four
George Masters stared down at the file intently. He was sitting in his office at the Hoover Building in Washington. Masters had been with the FBI for over twenty-five years. Ten of those years had been spent in the FBI’s New York office. And now Masters was staring down at a name that he had become intimately familiar with ten years ago: LuAnn Tyler. Masters had been part of the federal investigation of Tyler’s flight from the United States, and although the investigation had been officially closed years ago due to basic inertia, Masters had never lost interest mainly because none of it made sense. Things that didn’t make sense bothered the veteran FBI agent greatly. Even after transferring to Washington, he had kept the case in the back of his mind. Now there were recent events that had ignited that spark of interest into a full flame. Matthew Riggs had made inquiries about LuAnn Tyler. Riggs, Masters knew, was in Charlottesville, Virginia. Masters knew Riggs, or who Riggs used to be, very well. If someone like Riggs was interested in Tyler, so was Masters.
After failing to prevent LuAnn Tyler’s escape from New York, Masters and his team had spent considerable time trying to reconstruct the last several days leading up to her disappearance. He had figured that she would have either driven up from Georgia to New York or taken the train. She didn’t have a driver’s license or a car. The big convertible she had been spotted in had been found in front of the trailer, so she hadn’t used that vehicle. Masters had then focused on the trains. At the station in Atlanta, Masters had hit the jackpot. LuAnn Tyler had taken the Amtrak Crescent to New York City on the day the authorities believed the murders were committed. But that wasn’t all she had done. LuAnn had made a phone call from Otis Burns’s car phone. Burns was the other dead man in the trailer. The FBI had traced the phone call. The number was an eight hundred number, but it had already been disconnected. Investigations into who had leased the phone number had run into a complete dead-end. That had gotten Masters’s curiosity up even more.