Smoke & Mirrors (10 page)

29

AFTER BEING KEPT BLINDFOLDED, GAGGED, AND
tied up on the mattress in the back of her abductor’s van for what seemed like hours, Cynthia Gardner found her self fully awake and completely alone.

The guy had to be some kind of serial killer or rapist or something.

Although she couldn’t see anything, she knew that he had taken her back to the equipment shed. When he jerked the tarp off her body, she smelled the diesel and the cool earth floor of the barn.

“We’re going to be here for a while. I’ll let you eat and use the portable toilet, but remember my warning. You’ll be spending the night here. You have any problem with that?”

Cynthia shook her head. As soon as her mother figured out she wasn’t at her grandmother’s she would be FTFT—freaking the fuck totally. But if he had let her live this long, she hoped the bastard was going to ransom her, and her mother would pay, and maybe he’d let her go home. She couldn’t believe Jack would get her kidnapped, but he was certainly a man who liked money. It worried her, though, that the man hadn’t bothered to hide his face from her. That could mean he was going to kill her, but it might also mean he was from out of the area and figured she couldn’t identify him because they wouldn’t catch him. Jack was smart and he probably didn’t figure she’d know he was involved. He would probably think she was that dumb, the smug bastard.

She wondered if the man was serious about killing her if she tried to escape. Probably not, but doing what he said made sense. No sense pushing him.

He untied her hands and feet and led her to the toilet. She reached up to free the gag and he slapped her so hard she almost fell. Stunned, tears blurred her vision.

“Nothing you have to say is of any interest to me,” he told her sternly. “Do your business.”

Nodding, she turned with her back to the seat and looked pointedly at him, waiting for him to close the door, but he just held it open and stared back at her. Her bladder was bursting, so she bit her lip, looked at the floor, and slowly undid her jeans.

After she finished, he led her back to the van and retied her. She felt a sharp pain in the back of her arm and realized, when he pulled back, that he was holding a syringe. She protested in a low growl, but the sensation of floating in space killed the sound. She closed her eyes. Oblivion seemed like a good idea.

30

AFTER MEETING WITH THE SHERIFF AND HIS DEPUTY,
Albert White spent several hours guzzling coffee while reviewing the camera captures of David Scotoni seated at the blackjack table, and that of the surrounding tables. Nothing he saw indicated that Scotoni was being monitored by anybody who might be the mysterious Pablo. Of course, he erased the eight-minute section of the tape that slowed Mulvane watching Scotoni from every camera that had recorded it.

Albert figured Pablo killed Beals, probably because Jack was nosy, or knew something that the guy thought threatened his future. Professionals hate curiosity—and witnesses. And they could be paranoid.

Several of the cameras covering the parking area caught Scotoni coming from his rental car and returning to it seven hours later. Albert erased the images of Beals following Scotoni to his car, getting into his Blazer, and trailing Scotoni. No cars seemed to have followed Beals from the lot. With selective edits he could leave footage of Scotoni leaving without a tail. He would have given the sheriff the footage of Beals, which could only make the case against Beals stronger—but Mulvane had decided he would tell the sheriff that Beals had indeed been in the casino while Scotoni was gambling—and had left an hour before the young cheater did, even if it gave Barnett a reason to dig deeper. That was better than being caught in a lie. But Albert wasn’t going to give Barnett the keys to his own cell if he could help it.

Legally speaking, whatever Beals had told the kid was hearsay, and what could they prove? Barnett was just a small town sheriff, and he had a department packed with dim bulbs, drinking coffee and making their assholes’ wages aside from what they could make on the sly. Without Beals to testify about Albert’s partnership in picking off a lucky shit-heel here and there, this would probably go away. Anyway, Albert knew that nothing connected the two of them to each other.

Sheriff Barnett had less in common with his two more immediate predecessors than a rooster had with a python. Barnett never came into any of the casinos unless an investigation led him there, and he had enough of his own money to make him risky to try to bribe. Plus he was a straight arrow.

White had never before seen the new deputy who accompanied the sheriff. There was something about the name, Massey, that seemed vaguely familiar, and he had been trying to make the connection by not trying hard to do so. A psychologist once told him that thinking on anything too hard often drove the information deeper into the recesses of your mind.

He made a still print of the deputy, wrote
Massey?
on the bottom border, and filed it in the cabinet. The casino kept files on any and all politicians and law enforcement officers they came in contact with. He could make inquiries later.

What made Albert White so valuable to the casino was his commitment to protect the casino’s profits to the best of his ability. He knew how to keep his mouth shut and he made sure he had the
right
people on his staff. Albert collected intelligence, fed it into the computers for cross-referencing and storage, and evaluated it for threats. After many years in law enforcement, he had discovered that the real secret of being successful lay in knowing not just what criminals were thinking, but how law enforcement officers thought and acted. It was all about staying on top of things, and following your instincts. For now, at least, this was familiar territory.

31

WINTER HAD BEEN UP SINCE FOUR THAT MORNING,
so after eating he had gone upstairs for a shower and a few hours of shuteye. Lying in Brad Barnett’s guest bed, staring up into the darkness, he realized that despite his burning desire to pay the monster back for what he had done to Millie and Hank Trammel, the last person on earth he wanted to come face-to-face with was Paulus Styer. Styer was more single-purpose machine than human being, and he killed with less thought than a smoker gave to crushing out a cigarette.

There was no doubt in his mind that Leigh Gardner had been the sniper’s target. But why would Styer be targeting a lady farmer in Mississippi? Could Styer be so desperate for work that he would take on what had to be a low-paying assignment?

Winter closed his eyes and yawned. If Styer had left the toothpick and the card, he had fired the rifle, because according to everything Winter had learned about him, he killed alone. He didn’t share the thing that made him tick—his ego wouldn’t allow it.

The targets had something in common, and he had to figure out their connection. Later. Now, he would sleep.

32

FRIDAY

AT FIVE A.M., A STEAMING MUG OF COFFEE BESIDE
him, Winter sat at the kitchen table and picked up the stack of Beals’s DVDs he’d taken from the wall safe. Each of the jewel cases was labeled with a date, spanning the past two and a half years. Brad had placed a small TV set with a DVD player built into it on the table, and Winter opened the tray to feed it the first DVD. Brad had spent two hours at his office to tie up loose ends, since he knew his day would be taken up with the homicides.

For an hour Winter watched a series of sometimes shaky videos of people taken from inside a car, or through windows, exteriors and interiors of houses, close-ups of furniture in various anonymous rooms.

He looked beside him at the stack of DVDs waiting to be viewed and frowned. He decided to start with the tapes dated from the past few months and work his way to the present. After all, if any of this was going to be helpful—like spotting a partner, or if by some miracle Beals had photographed Styer and had been killed for that—it would probably have been filmed recently.

Flipping over the stack, Winter opened the last DVD Beals had made and inserted the disk dated six weeks earlier. After he watched it, he called Brad into the kitchen.

Ten minutes later, Winter and Brad stared at the screen. On it, a white pickup truck pulled up and parked in a nondescript lot. The doors opened and Leigh and Hamp Gardner got out as the camera zoomed to follow them into a grocery store. Hamp said something to Leigh and she laughed and popped him on the shoulder.

“Jesus Christ,” Brad said. “Beals was following them.”

“So I thought.”

As Winter spoke, the camera held its focus on the doors and Jack Beals exited the store carrying two plastic bags of groceries in one hand, reading a gun magazine as he walked to his Blazer. Winter didn’t think Beals was aware that he was being filmed—or that he knew he had walked past the Gardners.

“Wait a minute. If it isn’t Beals taking the shots, he did have a partner,” Brad said excitedly.

“Nope,” Winter said. “Nothing to say so on the DVDs. I’d bet Jack took the others, but I think Styer shot this one.”

The camera stayed on the Blazer until Beals drove away. On the dashboard the camera operator had placed a postcard with the image facing out.

“What’s that on the card?” Brad asked.

“A ferry,” Winter said.

“The Mississippi River,” Brad said. “That’s the New Orleans skyline.”

Winter nodded. “Canal Street Ferry. It’s a card from Styer to me. The ferry has meaning for him and me.”

Brad said, “Maybe it’s someone else who’s been in New Orleans. After Katrina, this place was thick with refugees. Some stayed. Some of them were very bad people.”

The rearview had been turned away in order not to capture the shooter’s reflection. They watched as the photographer trailed Beals home, took a long shot of Beals’s house as he drove slowly by. There followed a few seconds of close-ups of Beals’s front door, and then five minutes of the interior of Beals’s home, including the gunroom.

“Was Styer following Leigh or Beals? Is that how he spotted Leigh? Maybe the killer, your Styer maybe, got the tag number on the Gardners’ truck or something and that was why he targeted them. Jesus, what the hell is this about?” Brad said, shaking his head as if to clear it.

“It was definitely a leer from Styer,” Winter said. “Only he knows what this is all about. He’s screwing with my head. But he’s also giving us something to work with.”

“Knowing it would confuse you? Us?”

“It’s just part of the game,” Winter said, sighing.

“Which part?” Brad asked.

“His favorite part. The smoke and mirrors.”

33

AFTER VIEWING ENOUGH OF THE OTHER DVDS TO
make sure they were worthless to their immediate investigation, Brad had returned to his office to count the cash they’d found in Beals’s safe.

They hadn’t found anything in Beals’s house to explain the money in his wall safe. His computer, located in a drawer in the bedroom, contained nothing out of the ordinary. There were no password-protected files. They had his financial information and bank records, and copies of his IRS filings for the past five years. The computer tech said that Beals visited sites for dating, several for gun lovers and shooting aficionados, several militia groups in the western United States, and hard-core bondage pornography.

Styer had somehow known enough about Beals to cast him as the perfect patsy. Had they met on a web site? Maybe Styer hoped they would search through the computer to find all his posts and responses, but they had neither the time nor the manpower to do that yet. And Winter doubted they could spot Styer in them. It was certain that Styer had removed any evidence of his connection to Beals when he left the rifle and the DVD he’d made. And while the fingerprint evidence wouldn’t be processed for a few hours, Winter knew Styer wouldn’t have left any. The techs had said that all of the prints looked, at first viewing, to belong to Jack Beals.

The one shot of the Gardners was all the footage there was of the family. After going over the videos that Beals had made, the only differences between them seemed to be the subjects leaving the Roundtable. Winter figured he had been selecting robbery victims, but who he had actually robbed, if he had done so, was not going to be easy to pick out. Brad would have to send fliers to sheriffs’ and police departments asking for possible victims of strong-arm robberies who had gambled at the Roundtable.

It was after seven when the doorbell rang and Brad went to the door. While Ruger barked from the backyard, Winter could hear Brad’s voice but not the person he was talking to. He heard Brad say, “Come in.” Seconds later, Brad came into the kitchen and said, “Winter, this FBI agent says she knows you.”

When Alexa Keen entered, Winter grinned, jumped up, and embraced her. “What are you doing here?”

“Would you believe me if I said I was just in the neighborhood?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“I knew you’d tell me not to,” she said.

While Winter shook his head, his cell rang. He opened the phone and saw ProCell Labs on the ID.

“Massey,” he answered.
Talk about timing.

“Mr. Massey, John Jolly at ProCell. I just finished those prelims. Now, once again, the test is not yet proven so it isn’t acceptable for legal purposes.”

“I don’t care about that. Do
you
think it’s accurate?”

“So far accuracy of the results is moving in the right direction, but in lay terms it’s because we’re doing a fast cook, forcing things. Not square pegs in round holes, exactly…We have it down to about a twenty percent negative error read after the other testing is completed for comparison accuracy, and I’d say we’re closing the gap.”

“What do they say?”

“Your sample matches the one Sheriff Barnett sent.”

“So it’s eighty percent.”

“No. There is no difference between the two. I’d say it is one hundred percent.”

Winter hung up, and looked from Brad to Alexa. “That was ProCell. It’s a match.”

He noticed that Alexa was staring at him. Knowing her as he did, it was obvious that she was pissed off.

“So,” she said. “It’s Paulus Styer?”

“Yes,” Winter admitted.

“That’s interesting,” she said simply. “Do go on.”

“Styer shot Sherry Adams, and he killed a man named Jack Beals,” Winter said.

Winter shrugged and felt his face flushing like a kid caught shoplifting candy. “I should have told you.”

“Yes, you should have.” Alexa put her hand on Winter’s forearm. “Well, now we know for sure what we’re up against.”

The call wouldn’t change anything. Maybe having Alexa there would help, if only because she fully understood Styer’s game.

Winter and Brad filled Alexa in on the investigation while the trio had a breakfast of cold cereal. When the front doorbell rang, Brad answered it and returned with Leigh Gardner.

“Just coffee for me, Brad. And thank you for asking,” she said, taking a seat at the table across from Winter.

“Morning, Ms. Gardner,” Winter said.

“Call me Leigh and I’ll call you Winter.”

She smiled at Alexa and offered her hand.

“This is Alexa Keen,” Winter said. “She’s an old friend of mine. She’s also an FBI agent.”

Leigh raised her eyebrows. “The FBI is interested in Sherry Adams’s murder?”

“No. I’m strictly here as a friend of Winter’s and to help if I can,” Alexa said. “Unofficially.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever met an FBI agent before. Nice to meet you. Do I call you Agent Keen?”

“I answer to Alexa.”

“Coffee,” Brad said, placing a cup before Leigh.

She frowned, lifted the mug, and sipped gingerly. “Not bad brew, Brad. For a man.” Her fingers were shaking as she set the cup down.

“I’m glad you think I can do
something,
” Brad said. “Is everything all right?”

“Well, Sherry is dead, so no.”

“Sorry,” Brad said, nodding.

Leigh looked down and back up at Brad. “That and Cyn didn’t come home last night. I’m sure she’s fine. This isn’t unusual for my daughter. She does as she pleases. She went to Memphis yesterday and I wanted to go along. I should have insisted, but I had a lot on my mind. I got a text message from her late last night saying she’d run into a friend from school. She was supposed to be staying at her grandmother’s, but I just got Adelle’s machine. I’ve been trying to call her this morning and she sent a text, she always does when she knows I’m angry. It said, ‘Get over it. GOD!’ She’s fine…” Her words trailed off.

Brad patted her shoulder but she drew back. “Can I do anything?”

“No. She’ll come home dragging her tail and I’ll yell at her. She’s just like her father in some ways.”

Winter saw the look of concern on Alexa’s face.

“This thing with Sherry. It’s got all of us crazy. It’s Cyn’s way of trying to hold on to normalcy and dealing with grief. Except for my father, nobody close to her has ever died,” Leigh went on.

“I can start running her down,” Brad said. “Get the Memphis PD to locate her.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll deal with it,” Leigh said, straightening. “You know as well as I do that this is just like her. There’s something I wanted to tell you.”

Brad nodded.

She picked up her coffee but didn’t drink from the cup. “I’ve been thinking about what you said about me being the target, and all I could think of is that if I had been killed, my children would not be able to continue my operation. And since their father has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that he couldn’t boil water in hell on their behalf, they would have to sell the land to ensure their futures. Jacob would not receive anything if I died, and I can’t imagine he could have hired a professional killer.”

“Okay,” Brad said. “But he would be their guardian.”

“I have made arrangements for my attorney to handle my estate, and to handle my children’s financial interests if I die.”

“Jacob would fight that, and he is their father,” Brad said.

“This is very personal,” she said crisply, finally taking a sip. “If Jacob fights my will, my attorney has certain papers that prove he is as crooked as a wisteria trunk.” She patted the side of her cheek and frowned.

“That’s fairly common knowledge,” Brad said.

“Anyway, although I certainly don’t believe Jacob hired a hit man, I may have some idea why someone shot Sherry. A few years ago I once again paid off a collection of Jacob’s debts, and I made him sign over some land he inherited from his father. I paid him three times what it was worth because it was the only collateral he had. Six hundred and thirty-six acres of bottomland that isn’t good for a damn thing except duck hunting, which is what Jacob’s father and then Jacob used it for. I made him a loan secured with that property and when he didn’t repay me or make any attempt to do so, I foreclosed on it, figuring I’d leave it to the children, since it was the only way to ensure he would leave any legacy, even if I paid for it.”

She took another sip of her coffee. “A few months ago Jacob mentioned that he wanted to buy it back from me. I told him to go piss up a pole. Since then, he has become more and more insistent, whining that it was his sole inheritance from his father, and he wanted it back. His father actually left him a small fortune that he went through in a matter of months. When I pressed him, he said he wanted to duck hunt on it and I said he could shoot ducks there until there wasn’t one left on the face of the earth, but I’d never sell it to him under any circumstances.”

“You don’t think it’s sentimental?” Winter asked.

“Jacob is as sentimental as a hungry possum. I told him that he’d had ample opportunity to pay me off, and didn’t, and if his children wanted to sell it to him after I was gone, fine. But I said as long as I had air in my lungs, I was keeping it.”

“And he dropped it?” Brad asked.

“No. He didn’t. Last night he told me that some corporation was interested in buying it for four hundred thousand with a plan to turn it into a duck-hunting club along with the land around it, saying I could use the profit to make things right with Sherry’s family.”

“So,” Winter said, “do you think it’s possible Jacob hired someone to kill you?”

A look of concern crossed her features. “It’s more likely the potential buyer would. Mr. Massey, did you know Tunica before the gambling joints came here?”

“I know it was the poorest county in the state.”

“It’s the richest now,” Brad added.

Leigh continued, “Which made it the poorest county in the country. You know what’s happened around here since those casinos came in? We’ve gotten the absolute dregs of humanity, political corruption, crooked cops and highway patrolmen. The last sheriff and deputies were caught protecting drug dealers—and there’s been all sorts of rumors about people not getting the money they won and being threatened by employees of the casinos when they made waves. In exchange we get cheap license plates, new schools, low taxes, paved roads, and a fancy golf course for visitors. It’s been a deal with the devil.”

“Do you think mobsters are interested in your land?” Winter asked.

“That land is worth zip.”

“Is it near the other casinos?” Winter asked.

“Not at all,” she said. “Way south of them. The
improvements
they’ve made for the casinos have caused even more flooding down there than there was before. But Jacob Gardner would sell the gold out of our children’s teeth and blow the money before their gums quit bleeding.”

“I’ll check it out,” Brad said. “Where is Jacob now?”

“He stayed at my house last night. He’ll sleep until sometime this afternoon.”

“More coffee, Leigh?” Brad asked.

“Can’t do it. I have to stay busy, and I’ve got plenty of work to do.” Leigh stood and started for the front of the house. “By the way, some press people have been on the road this morning filming the house. And one of your prowl cars is obviously tailing me.”

Brad shook his head. “I meant to tell you. We thought it was a good idea to have deputies watching you and the kids until we get this solved. I’m sorry for any inconvenience, but it’s something Winter and I felt was necessary.”

“You decided to have me followed without telling me,” Leigh said, frowning.

“You can’t be too careful. I think it’s absolutely necessary, since we have no idea who we’re dealing with,” Alexa lied.

“Then you can tell them to follow closer, because I’m afraid if they miss a light and run through it someone might be killed,” Leigh said.

“Not much I can do about the press,” Brad said. “As long as they don’t trespass.”

“‘Not much I can do’ seems to be your mantra,” she said. “Finish your Wheaties. I’ll show myself out.”

After Leigh left, Brad said, “Cyn’s always doing this.”

“But with everything that’s happened…” Alexa said.

“Cyn is…well, she more or less has to be the center of attention,” Brad said. “I’ll put through a description of her car, and make sure the Memphis police get it. Leigh is right. She’s done this ‘meeting a friend’ thing since she was fifteen or so.”

Winter could see that Brad was troubled, and offered the only reassurance he could think of. “Well, she did send that text message, at least.”