Smoke & Mirrors (2 page)

2

SITTING IN A DEER STAND FOURTEEN FEET IN THE
air, Winter Massey looked at Faith Ann Porter, a tall, skinny, fair-skinned thirteen-year-old with large blue eyes and reddish blonde hair.

Two high-powered rifles leaned against the rail in front of them.

As the sun rose, the woods surrounding the field came slowly into focus. The field, planted with rye, clover, and alfalfa, formed a natural basin bordered by two ridges that ran east to west. At one edge of the field, a line of tall bamboo created a natural wall.

Faith Ann smiled excitedly at Winter, her cold-reddened face surrounded by a camouflage fleece hood. Far to the north, another hunter’s gunshot pealed like dull thunder. The shot was followed a few seconds later by another.

To his right, Winter spotted four deer moving cautiously down the slope among the trees. He placed a hand on Faith Ann’s narrow shoulder and silently pointed to the animals. Nodding solemnly, she slowly lifted her rifle and, using the still to steady the weapon, looked through the scope at the animals. Using his binoculars, Winter watched a large buck trotting after the does, head up, ears flickering, nose sampling the air, steam issuing from his nostrils. Winter’s heart quickened as he studied the antlers and counted the points.

“Is he a shooter?” she asked in a whisper.

“Eight-point,” Winter said. “Take your time and pick your shot when he’s between trees. Make sure of your sight picture, and—”

“I know. Squeeze, don’t jerk.”

Faith Ann put her cheek against the stock and her eye behind the scope. She flicked off the safety, keeping her finger out of the trigger guard as Winter had taught her.

The buck stopped fifty yards away, broadside to the stand. Faith Ann, doing as Winter had instructed her, used this opportunity to fix the crosshairs of her scope on the area just behind his shoulder, where the heart and the lungs were nestled.

Winter watched Faith Ann release her safety as a rustling sounded across the field. He turned to see a second buck breaking from the wall of bamboo. The huge deer’s coat was dark, almost black, and the golden antlers growing from his skull looked like tree limbs glued onto his head, held up by a swollen neck.

“Hold your shot,” Winter whispered. “Safety back on.”

“Don’t shoot?” she asked.

“Very slowly, look out in the field to your left.”

Faith Ann turned her head and exhaled when she saw the animal.

Like a stallion, the buck trotted straight into the middle of the field toward the nervous group of does standing at the edge.

Faith Ann moved with deliberate slowness, careful not to make any noise or movements the deer might spot. A rutting buck would be less wary than usual, but anything out of the ordinary would spook him.

Winter held his breath and placed a hand on his rifle. If Faith Ann missed or couldn’t bring herself to shoot—which happened even to seasoned hunters faced with such a trophy—he could make the shot for her. If she missed, he would have a second or two before the animal bolted, and he would fire before it took off.

Winter had never witnessed bucks in combat, but he knew that was exactly what was unfolding before them. Winter counted the points on the rack of the larger deer. Twelve points with such elegant symmetry was a rarity.

The eight-point marched into the green field, placing himself between the does and the mature interloper. Like gladiators, they circled each other slowly, heads low. The larger buck had perhaps three years and forty pounds on the eight-point, whose antlers were half as massive. The older deer’s muscles were better defined, his neck twice as thick, and his muzzle turning gray. It was like a hound facing off with a mastiff.

The more experienced animal charged and although the eight tried to sidestep at the last moment, the larger deer hit him in the shoulder with his broad chest, knocking him off balance and skidding him sideways into the soft ground. The eight-point spun, lowered his head, and struck the larger animal head-on, locking antlers. With muscles tensed, they twisted their horns like wrestlers for advantage. The harsh clicking of antlers went on for a long minute until the smaller buck lost his footing and tumbled to the ground, expelling his breath in a hiss.

The bigger buck backed up and lowered his head. As he tensed for the rush, the other deer quickly made it to his feet and shook his head.

Lurching, the eight rushed the twelve. The sound of their antlers colliding was like a gunshot. The twelve’s weight sent the eight reeling, and he whirled and lowered his head again, but the larger buck raked a blow down his length that opened the hide on his back leg like a razor. The smaller deer was breathing hard as his grizzled elder circled him carefully, seeking a vulnerable spot to ram.

Winter was watching the battle with such intensity that the unexpected clap of gun thunder raised him off the bench.

3

A DULL BOOM IN THE DISTANCE BROUGHT SEAN
Massey to full consciousness. It took her a second to orient herself to her surroundings, enough to realize the sound was actually a rifle report. Morning light gave the closed curtains inside the motor home a warm yellow glow. She yawned and looked at the splayed toddler sleeping peacefully on her back beside her. Winter and Faith Ann had managed to get up and get out of the thirty-two-foot-long motor home before dawn without waking her.

She slipped out of bed and dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans, and ankle-high muck boots. Closing the bedroom door behind her, she looked out into the galley where Rush Massey, her fourteen-year-old stepson, sat at the table, dressed warmly for the day ahead. He had his fingertips on the page of an open book, the paper blank but for the raised dots of Braille. He tilted his head as his bright blue eyes seemed to focus on Sean.

From under the table, Nemo, Rush’s Rhodesian ridgeback Seeing Eye dog lying with his chin on his forepaws, turned his eyes on Sean and wagged his heavy tail.

“Morning, Sean,” Rush said cheerfully. “You hear that shot?”

“I sure did.”

“I bet you a dollar it was Daddy’s ought-six. I bet Faith Ann couldn’t shoot one,” Rush said. “I bet Daddy had to do it.”

“You think that was them shooting?” Sean asked, taking a box of cereal off the counter and filling a bowl. “There are a lot of hunters around here.”

“I know it was. The direction was right and the loudness too.”

“And you think Faith Ann doesn’t have what it takes?”

“She
is
a girl,” he replied. “No offense. Girls don’t shoot like men and they don’t kill either.”

Sean smiled.
If you only knew.
“None taken. You want breakfast?”

“I ate right after they left,” he said. “I washed my bowl. I know it was them since the stand is east of here and about four hundred yards away.” He pointed over his shoulder. “It was definitely from that direction. We’re parked on a northeast by southwest bias.”

Sean put her hand on Rush’s head as she passed by to sit down across from him.

“You want a cup of coffee?” Rush asked.

“Would love one, you dear boy,” she said, pouring milk into the bowl.

Rush rose, opened the cabinet, got a cup, and, using his finger to gauge the level of the rising hot coffee, filled it to an inch from the lip. After replacing the pot, he set the cup on the table before Sean and took his seat across from her. She looked into his eyes. If she hadn’t known the orbs were painted acrylic, she would have sworn he was studying her.

Rush had lost his eyes in the plane crash that had killed his mother, Eleanor, a flight instructor who was giving her young son lessons when a Beechcraft Baron entered the landing pattern from above and behind the two-seater Cessna and swatted the smaller plane out of the sky. A seasoned pilot, Eleanor had somehow managed to retain enough control so that—even though the small plane, whose back was broken by the collision, fell to earth from an altitude of five hundred feet—she had crash-landed with enough forward speed that Rush wasn’t killed. A section of the shattered windshield cut just deep enough into his skull to destroy both of his eyes without damaging his brain. Eleanor wasn’t as lucky. Her brain stem had been functional enough to let doctors put her body on life support until Winter, then a deputy U.S. marshal, arrived to hold her just before the machine was switched off. As per her wishes, the doctors had managed to harvest most of her organs, and Sean had seen the collection of letters written by grateful recipients.

Eleanor’s heart had gone into an eighteen-year-old girl. Her liver had been sectioned to save two recipients, both middle-aged men, and her undamaged kidney had been implanted in a woman.

Sean finished her cereal and set down the bowl for Nemo, who rose and lapped the milk slowly. She gazed out the window beside her at the opening in the trees where the logging road entered the woods.

The land was owned by Billy Lyons, a high school friend of Winter’s. He was a lawyer who had missed the hunt because he was in the middle of a trial in Memphis. Winter’s other regular hunting buddy, Larry Ward, friend since middle school, was the chief financial officer for a large securities firm and had pressing obligations that kept him in London. Sean and Winter had decided to make it a family event and rented the motor home to add a degree of comfort not afforded by the one-room, wood-frame shack the men usually shared. The cabin was fine for a group of men, but between the wood-burning stove, mattresses that looked like they’d been salvaged from the side of the road, and an outhouse fifty feet from the back door, it didn’t rise to the level of comfort Sean thought Faith Ann deserved. And Olivia Moment Massey, their child, was at the stage where she walked where she chose to go, wanted to do everything herself, and, when frustrated, was vocal at a disturbing volume. Enough said.

Nemo went to the door and stared at it, whining once—his signal for wanting to be let outdoors.

Sean looked out the window and saw something orange moving up the road through the woods. She smiled when she realized that it was Faith Ann wearing a Day-Glo vest. She was alone and without her backpack or her gun. As Sean stared at the approaching child, she saw crimson lines on her cheek, like war paint made in what appeared to be blood. And she was crying.

Sean ran from the motor home and met Faith Ann before she reached the parking area near the skinning shed.

As Sean approached, Faith Ann tilted her head and stopped short.

“He’s dead!” Faith Ann yelled.

4

PUTTING ON HIS COAT, RUSH RACED OUT, FOLLOWING
Sean and Nemo, his head tilted upward, listening.

“What’s the deal?” he asked.

“He’s dead,” Faith Ann said in a strained, trembling voice.

“Who’s dead?” Rush asked her.

“Rudolph,” Faith Ann said, sniffing a little but smiling proudly. “A mean old twelve-pointer.”

“No shit!?” Rush blurted.

“Rush Massey!” Sean exclaimed. “Watch your language.”

“A deer has a name?” Rush asked. “Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s at the food plot,” Faith Ann said. “I came back to get the pull-cart thingie to bring Rudolph back here to be skinned out.”

“How’d you get the blood on your face?” Sean asked her.

“Your husband did it,” Faith Ann said, now exasperated. “First blood. It’s this thing you do.”

“When you kill your first buck you have to get his blood put on you,” Rush explained. “It’s a hunting ritual. Sometimes, depending on local customs, you might even have to take a bite of the heart and swallow it.”

“Euuuuuwww! I most certainly will not eat any deer heart!” Faith Ann exclaimed.

“I should hope not,” Sean said.

“You really killed a deer?” Rush said. “I bet you freaked when you did it.”

“It wasn’t too bad,” Faith Ann said. “A clean kill isn’t gross. They get hit by cars, brought down by wild dogs, starve, all kinds of ways to die that are worse.”

“I know all that. I can’t believe you really killed a deer,” Rush said, smiling. “Was it cool?”

“It was totally necessary,” Faith Ann said. “You see, Rudolph was attacking a smaller deer to take his does away from him after he found them. Rudolph hurt the little deer’s leg and was fixing to kill him. You could just tell. So I just did what had to be done.”

“You killed a deer in deer-defense?” Rush said, laughing. “That’s got to be the most ridiculous reason for killing a deer in history.”

“You didn’t see it,” Faith Ann said defensively. “He was really big and mean as a snake. The littler deer was brave, but he was going to lose, and they fight to the death, you know,” she said importantly.

“Deer don’t fight to the death. Only people do that. Are you sure my daddy didn’t shoot it?” Rush said. “I bet he did.”

“Of course I shot it. He dropped where he stood like he was poleaxed.”

“I bet you don’t even know what a poleax is,” Rush said.

“Duh, it’s an axe on a pole,” Faith Ann said.

Sean said, “You need me to help you take the cart back?”

“Go back inside. I’ll help her,” Rush said. “Olivia’s awake. I’d rather eat a deer’s heart than deal with her.”

Faith Ann went to the skinning shed and opened the doors to the storage room. Inside, among the organized clutter, was a two-wheeled cart. She wrestled it out and righted it, opening it to lower the wheels.

Rush lay down in the sling, facing the sky. “Wake me up when we get there,” he said.

Laughing, Faith Ann began pulling Rush toward the plot. Nemo ran ten feet ahead of the kids, the ridge of hair on his back standing like a Mohawk.

5

FAITH ANN’S DEER HUNG BY HIS SPREAD BACK LEGS
in the open-air shed beside the RV. After Winter had skinned the animal, put the meat in the chiller, and placed the caped head on the concrete floor, Rush suddenly turned. “Somebody’s coming,” he said. “They took the chain off the gate.”

The north gate to the property was seventy-five yards away down a gravel road that curved through the woods. After a few seconds Winter heard a vehicle approaching. He reflexively touched the handgun at his side. Since the front gate was kept locked, whoever was coming in either had a key or knew where the spare key to the padlock was hidden. Billy Lyons had said he wasn’t coming down, nor were they expecting any of the other men that sometimes hunted on the four hundred acres. He put the wide-bladed skinning knife down and peeled off the surgical gloves he wore to keep his hands blood-free.

The truck was a silver-gray extended cab Toyota Tundra with large tires and a five-pointed star on the front license plate. The driver cut the motor and climbed out of the cab. There was something familiar about the tall man who walked over to the shed. He wore a short coat that broke above his sidearm, a Colt Python. The letters
TCS
were emblazoned on the brown baseball cap he wore.

“Hello,” the man called out as he approached the shed.

An alert Nemo growled and looked up at Winter.

“It’s okay, Nemo,” Winter said.

“Hello, Winter,” the stranger said. “You must be Rush and Faith Ann.”

“Who are you?” Faith Ann asked as the tall man came into the shed.

“I’m Brad Barnett,” he said. “I’m the sheriff in Tunica County.”

“Brad Barnett,” Winter said, shaking the sheriff’s proffered hand. “Billy’s buddy from Ole Miss. I thought you looked familiar. Been a long time.” Barnett was six one or so, forty pounds heavier than he had been the last time Winter had seen him, but he looked as fit and quick as he had years before. He had a pleasant, boyish face and an easy smile, his brown eyes radiated intelligence.

“Twenty years, give or take,” Brad said. “Who killed the monster?” he asked, bending down and turning the heavy antlers on the animal’s head for a better look.

“I killed him,” Faith Ann said proudly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a nicer buck taken in these parts,” Brad said.

“It was her first one too,” Rush said, smiling. “She killed it in deer-defense.”

“Deer-defense?” Brad asked.

“He was beating up this other buck,” the boy said. “Faith Ann decided the fight wasn’t fair, so she rang the bell.”

“You wanting to hunt?” Massey said.

“I wish I had time.”

Nemo sniffed at Brad’s leg, wagging his tail. The sheriff reached down, let the dog sniff the back of his hand, then rubbed the animal behind his ears.

“You smell my dog, Ruger? Last time I saw you, Winter, was homecoming weekend my junior year,” Brad said. “You stayed with Billy. He set you up with a blind date he ended up marrying.”

“Yeah.” Winter smiled. “And Ole Miss lost that game.”

“I believe so.”

Winter saw Brad’s eyes go to his handgun, a custom-made stainless .45 automatic with stag grips.

“Nice-looking piece,” Brad said. “Wilson or Kimber?”

“Neither.” Massey took out the .45, ejected the loaded magazine into his hand, pocketed it, ejected the shell from its chamber, let the hammer down gently, and handed the weapon over to Brad. “Custom gun maker named Kase Reeder made it.”

“Beauty,” Brad said, turning the gun to read what was inscribed on the weapon. “Flagstaff, Arizona. I’m not familiar with his work.”

“It was a gift from my wife, Sean,” Winter said. “Faith Ann’s great uncle read about it in a handgun magazine. When Sean asked him what she could get me for my last birthday, he called Reeder and he made it for me. First .45 I’ve ever carried, but it’s the most accurate gun I’ve ever owned.”

Brad whistled and handed the Reeder Rekon Kommander back to Massey, who reloaded it and slipped it back into its holster, snapping the thumb brake closed.

“Billy told me you were the sheriff in Tunica now,” Winter said.

“He told me you’re off the job,” Brad said. “Something about working for a big security company.”

“I’m just a consultant on protection programs for their corporate clients.”

“Who’s mounting the head for you?” Brad asked.

“Calvin Patton,” Winter said. “He’s at his shop now. That’s why I’m hurrying.”

“Patton’s about the best there is around here,” Brad said. He looked at Faith Ann. “You know what kind of mount you want?”

“A left-hand sneak mount,” she said. “I’m going to put it over our fireplace.”

“Good choice,” Brad said.

“Faith Ann always knows what she wants,” Winter said.

“That way he’ll always look like he’s smelling that other buck’s heated-up does just around the corner in the kitchen,” Rush said.

“What brings you way down here?” Winter asked Brad.

“Well, fact is, Billy told me you were out here. I called him to find out where you were.”

Winter was perplexed. “Why are you looking for me?”

“Well, your name came up and I wondered, if you had some time, maybe you could take a couple of hours and visit Tunica County,” Brad said. “I tried to call the number he gave me but there was no answer.”

“I don’t have my cell on.”

“I hate to interrupt your hunt, but I sure could use your help.”

The motor home door opened and Sean came out carrying Olivia on her hip. She strode over and stood beside Winter.

“My wife, Sean,” Winter said. “Sean, this is Tunica County sheriff Brad Barnett. He’s an old friend of Billy’s. We spent a wild homecoming weekend together at Ole Miss some years back.”

Sean’s smile was warm and her eyes sparkled with interest and kindness. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said. “This is Olivia, our daughter. She’s two and very shy.”

As if on command, Olivia hid her face in Sean’s down vest, then peeked at Brad and smiled.

“Cooww go moo,” she said, pointing at the deer.

“Cow,” Rush said, laughing.

“What’s going on in Tunica County?” Winter asked.

“I’d like to have your input on a case I have.”

“What kind of case?” Winter asked.

“Homicide,” Brad replied.

Sean Massey’s smile remained in place, but her eyes changed.

“Cool,” Rush said.

“I was a deputy U.S. marshal,” Winter said. “If you need my opinion on how to locate a fugitive, or how to best serve a warrant, I’m your man. Other than that…” He shrugged.

“I understand all that. Just a quick look. Three hours, tops.”

“I wouldn’t be any help with it,” Winter said.

“This one looks like a professional killing. It’s the first one like it I’ve run across, and I think I’m in over my head.”

“The Mississippi Bureau investigators are your best bet,” Winter said.

“I have a nineteen-year-old victim who was shot from almost half a mile away with a high-powered rifle. It will be treated as an accidental shooting because it’s hunting season. Other than a polished casing, I’ve got nothing but some boot prints and tire treads. She’s a local girl who finished high school last year. She was a young black girl from a good, hard-working family.”

“Maybe she was a target of opportunity.”

“It’s possible, but the place I’m talking about isn’t one anybody would just happen upon.”

Sean Massey was silent, thinking. “Rush, Faith Ann,” she said. “Come in and wash your hands. Lunch is ready. Sheriff Barnett, will you join us?”

“I’d love to, but I’m sort of in a hurry.”

Winter watched the family until the door closed, then turned his now-serious eyes on Brad. “What’s the real deal here, Brad?” Winter said. “I know my reputation better than anybody. You have a killing with a rifle, and I’m close by hunting with a rifle? I haven’t left this land in two days. And half the people on earth can shoot a rifle better than I do.”

“Well, I don’t think you were involved, but somebody wanted me to,” Brad said, reaching into his pocket and taking out a plastic bag containing a business card. Winter took it and did a double take as he recognized the card.

It read
WINTER JAMES MASSEY, DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL
. It was definitely his, with the Charlotte, North Carolina, address and phone numbers.

“That was left at the scene where the shooter set up. Best I can come up with is that he wanted me to think you were there. Anybody else might have believed that was the case, but I know better.”

Winter had a hard time forming his thoughts, his eyes locked on the card.

“I can make time,” Winter said firmly, handing back the card. Somebody was calling him out.