Practice to Deceive

told her he was a horse owner/trainer and rancher from New Mexico, and that his name was Mark Allen. He said he had a ranch in Roswell called the Double Eagle.
    Later, Peggy was enthusiastic when she told Vickie Boyer about her passenger. She didn’t know much about horses or ranches, but she thought Mark Allen might have money. Big money. What he’d said had a kind of authenticity that she rarely encountered.
    And the man named Mark Allen had promised to ask for her the next time he came to Las Vegas.
    Vickie knew if Peggy ended up wanting this rancher, she could have him. She had yet to see any man who hadn’t fallen for her best friend’s guile. She was a virtual magnet for males from twenty to eighty.
    Peggy Sue asked Vickie to get on the Internet and search for any information she might find about Mark Allen. Although she didn’t really want to do that, Vickie complied and found out a lot that interested Peggy.
    Mark was from a family with money and his father, William Allen, had made a fortune as an executive in the oil fields of Alaska. In 2008, Senator Ted Stevens, a well-thought-of legend in that state, was tried for corruption involving favors from Allen, who had allegedly paid for renovations on one of Stevens’s homes.
    In the ensuing trial, Bill Allen testified for the prosecution, and the beloved senator was found guilty of seven counts of lying, a disaster for his political career. Days later, he lost his reelection bid to retain his senate office. One faction accused his prosecutors of knowingly letting one of their witnesses—Bill Allen—lie in his testimony. The fallout led to a major political scandal.
    Through it all, Bill Allen was most concerned about dragging his son, Mark, into the Stevens scandal—and Mark never was.
    Ted Stevens, whose career had been legendary only to be sullied by corruption charges, had his conviction thrown out in 2009 by a federal judge. It was too late. His political career was in ashes, and he was nearing seventy.
    Ex-Senator Stevens died tragically in Alaska in a float plane crash a year later in October 2010 as he and a group of friends headed for a fishing trip. Secretary of the Navy Sean O’Keefe and his nineteen-year-old son barely survived, as did the thirteen-year-old son of another plane-crash victim.
    * * *
    M ARK ALLEN HIMSELF DID indeed have money, more money than even Peggy Sue might have imagined. He did have a ranch, and he did own horses. He even owned some that might make a national name for themselves one day soon.
    Mark looked like a good ole cowboy, but he certainly wasn’t a show-off. Still, Peggy suspected he might actually be very wealthy. At fifty-two, he was more than a decade older than Peggy Sue. He wore well-polished boots, and either black or white ten-gallon hats, and he affected a grizzled look with a few days’ stubble of whiskers.
    He had a John Wayne persona and Peggy rapidly began to see him as a good candidate for the next jump in her life. Perhaps because he had never seen Peggy angry or unpleasant and because she was stunning, Mark Allen was soon “smitten” with her. She was in her “fiery red” stage, at the peak of her beauty.
    At first, when Mark came to Las Vegas, he asked if Peggy was available. Soon, he insisted on having her be his limo driver.
    “She caught my eye,” Allen said later. “She drove me and some friends a few times, and after that, I started calling the company and asking for Peggy. I paid a lot of bills for her before we even got married—credit cards and stuff like that. But, hell, I liked her. Then she started telling me how to take care of horses!”
    Even though it was obvious to him that Peggy knew very little about horses, Mark Allen took Peggy to visit his ranch. He didn’t need a horse expert; he needed her. Although the farmhouse there was just a three-bedroom, two-bath older ranch home all on one floor, the stables, other facilities for his horses, and the sprawling acres that surrounded it all were obviously extremely valuable.
    It was true that Peggy didn’t know very much about horses, but she recognized Mark’s stables were inhabited by fine equine specimens, and his trainers were top notch. Mark was particularly enthusiastic about a small chestnut gelding with a swirl of white on his forehead—Mine That Bird. He told Peggy Sue that he hoped to buy him. To look at him, Mine That Bird wasn’t particularly prepossessing, but Mark’s trainer, Chip Woolley, predicted great