Smoke & Mirrors (33 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN RAMSEY MILLER’s career has included stints as a visual artist, advertising copy writer, and journalist. He is the author of the nationally bestselling
The Last Family, Too Far Gone,
and three other Winter Massey thrillers:
Inside Out, Upside Down,
and
Side by Side,
and is at work on his next book.

A native son of Mississippi, he now lives in North Carolina with his wife, and writes full-time.

If you enjoyed John Ramsey Miller’s exciting
new crime novel, Smoke & Mirrors, you
won’t want to miss any of his
bestselling thrillers.

Look for them at your favorite booksellers.
And read on for an exciting early look at the
next electrifying stand-alone thriller,

THE LAST DAY

coming soon from Dell Books.

The First Day

OUTSIDE CONCORD, NORTH CAROLINA THE THIRD SUNDAY IN AUGUST

1

SITTING CROSS-LEGGED ON THE COOL CLAY FLOOR,
the watcher used the tip of his knife to carve another letter into the wall of his hide. After he inspected the letter—an O—he ran the sharpening stone against the edge, holstered the knife, and set it down gently by his side.

The midday Sunday sun cooked the still, warm air outside the hole. He looked out at the rear of a modern house through a four-inch-tall opening where the trap door was propped up. The large windows reminded him of watching fish in an aquarium. The house’s two occupants—a man and his wife—moved from room to room like slow-swimming trout. Rarely were the residents together for more than a few minutes. Their conversations were short ones, and the obvious emotional distance between the husband and his wife gave the watcher great pleasure.

The sound of a motor’s purr caught the man’s attention, and he looked up in time to see the doctor’s Lexus coming around the house as the garage door opened. He felt a rapidly growing sense of arousal as he watched the SUV roll slowly into its bay, the door sliding back into place. The woman was not perfect but nevertheless a beautiful and desirable creature.

The watcher switched off the iPod, opened his rucksack, drew out a jar, and held it so the sunlight illuminated the six large dark-shelled beetles he’d found under a rotten log that morning on his way to the hide. The bugs seemed content, creeping like tanks over the bottom of the jar he had brought to urinate into while he was in the hide. The man knew from experience that the insects would walk around in circles, try to scale the walls, and climb over one another for the rest of their lives, constantly looking for a way out. He knew a great deal about captive behavior. While it was true that the bugs were docile, he had experience with many other creatures whose demeanor seemed fixed…until outside forces intervened.

Taking out a drinking straw, the man opened the jar and set the lid aside. He used the end of the straw to jab at the insects, prodding each once or twice before going to the next. After a few seconds, a steady hissing sound, like a leaking tire, erupted from the jar’s inhabitants. He smiled, knowing that before long the beetles would attack one another and begin using their powerful jaws to dismantle their mates, leaving a heap of severed legs in the jar’s bottom. His grin widened as he likened the interior of the house on the next rise to the bottle of hissing insects.

2

DR. NATASHA MCCARTY EXAMINED THE ABDOMEN OF
a four-year-old named Josh Wasserman whose appendix had ruptured early the previous evening. As usual, she’d done a first-class job on both the removal of the defective body part and the even spacing of the sutures. A bright bouquet of tulips stood centered in the window, and Mr. and Mrs. Wasserman sat quietly in chairs on the other side of the bed where the small child lay. Mrs. Wasserman, a small, round-faced woman who appeared to be about eight months pregnant, stared at the child as though he might vanish should she look away.

“How are you feeling this morning?” Natasha asked the bright-eyed boy as she checked the chart hanging at the foot of his bed. His color was good, his vitals strong, and if she hadn’t performed the operation herself, she wouldn’t know he’d been at death’s door less than twelve hours earlier. Children were amazingly resilient.

“My stomach hurts,” he replied sullenly.

Natasha watched as the small face twisted in on itself and tears streamed down his cheeks. She set the chart down, put her hand under his chin, and sat on his bed.

“You’re going to be fine very soon,” she told him tenderly.

“You’ve been such a good boy,” his mother added with forced cheer.

“He’s worried that his soccer career is over,” his father said.

“That’s not a problem, Josh. You’ll be back running around and playing ball in a couple of weeks like this never happened.” She handed him a tissue from the bedside table and waited until he wiped the tears away.

“Can I have it?” Josh asked.

“Have what?” Natasha asked.

“The palendix,” he said. “In a jar. So I can have it to keep.”

“I’m sorry, Josh,” Natasha said. “We didn’t keep it.”

“What did you do with it?” he asked, curious.

“We incinerated it.”

A look of confusion grew on his face. “What?”

“We didn’t know you wanted it. When we remove things from people, we are required by law to burn them in a furnace.”

“You
cremated
my palendix?”

Natasha smiled. “Yes.”

“We cremated Buster,” Josh said. “In a hot, hot fire.”

“Buster was our Labrador,” Mr. Wasserman explained.

“Mr. Murphy runned over Buster in a car,” Josh said.

“Ran over,” Mrs. Wasserman corrected.

“He ran over him. I wanted a new dog, but I’m getting a new sister instead. I wanted to bury him, but Daddy said our yard was too little. Our yard is all brown and crunchy because the police won’t let us put any water on it.”

“It’s very dry where I live, too,” Natasha said.

“Where do you live?” Josh asked.

“I live way out in the country, north of here,” she replied.

“Do you have a dog?”

“We don’t have any pets. But we do have deer, squirrels, raccoons, and possums, and lots of birds.”

“You live on a farm and you don’t got pigs and cows?”

“We don’t live on a farm. We live in the woods.”

“Do you live with your daddy and mommy?”

“My mommy and daddy live in Seattle, Washington. That’s a long way from here. I live with my husband.” Natasha braced herself for the next question.

“Do you have any little boys and girls?”

“No,” Natasha said, smiling.

“Kids like to live in the woods. You and your husband don’t have to live alone, you know.”

“Josh,” Mr. Wasserman said, “you shouldn’t pry into Dr. McCarty’s personal life.”

“Well…she could,” he whined nonsensically.

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Josh,” Natasha said, rubbing his head.

“When can I go home?”

“In a few days,” she said.

Natasha was near the nurses’ station, dictating her notes for transcription, when she saw Dan Wheat in the hallway. One of her partners, Dan had the bedside manner of a mortician. She didn’t know why he’d gone into pediatric medicine, since he seemed to view children as troublesome monkeys. He was rail-thin with a roving eye and a legendary bag of tired pickup lines. Natasha had once overheard one of his young patients tell him he had stinky breath. Dan immediately ordered a spinal tap for the offender before he went off in search of mints.

“Natasha,” he said, waving her down. “You see my new wheels?”

“No.”

“I broke down and treated myself to a top-of-the line Benz SL550 two-seat convertible in jet-black. It’s a bitch to keep clean, so I run it wide open to blow the dust off. Claire is making me buy her a new car as an act of revenge because I won’t let her drive the Benz, so I was thinking maybe a simple Lexus SUV like yours so she can haul the kids around in fair style. You buy it, or do you lease?”

“Ward bought it for me.”

Daniel barely paused for breath.

“Oh, did Edgar talk to you about my little brother? The boy’s got hands like mine, and he aced medical school. We should get him here before he gets an offer he can’t refuse in some major city far, far away.”

“I didn’t know we needed a sixth partner,” Natasha said.

Natasha had met Dan’s younger brother. If such a thing were possible, William Wheat was half as impressive as his older brother. He was short and stocky, and his half-open eyes made him look like he was in the process of passing out. Natasha hadn’t wanted Dan brought on board, but she hadn’t opposed her partners. He was typical of what was coming out of medical schools: very intelligent, aggressive, competitive, and greedy. He saw each patient as a business opportunity, and his billings were off the chart because he ordered every test the insurance company would pay for.

“Perhaps we should discuss this at the next partner’s meeting,” she said noncommittally. “I hate to break this off, but I haven’t slept in two days.”

“Does Ward get fed up with your hours? It drives Claire crazy that I’m always working.”

“Ward doesn’t complain.”

“Well, keep William in mind. We’re getting busy as hell, and it would help you and Ward to spend some more time together.”

After she’d finished in the hospital, Natasha got into her Lexus SUV and headed home. Although it was just after ten A.M., she hadn’t been able to fall asleep after the Wasserman surgery, which had finished around ten-thirty the previous evening.

Twenty minutes later Natasha was turning into her driveway. Ward’s eight acres had been a wedding present from his father. He and Natasha had selected a ridge, cleared the trees from it, and built a four-thousand-square-foot, split-level modern house. Other than their driveway and the mailbox, there was no sign at all that a house sat back in the woods. The asphalt driveway wound through the trees and curved in front of the house. The home’s facade of raw textured concrete and floor-to-ceiling windows had been built with its back facing an elevated ridge.

Natasha used the remote to open her bay in the three-car garage and pulled in. She went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of pinot grigio, and carried the bottle into the den. She put the bottle on the Noguchi coffee table, took a long swallow from the glass, went into the bedroom, and took a long, hot shower. After slipping into a robe, she got a blister pack of Ambien and went back to the den.

She stood at the couch and stared out at the grounds, feeling again the unease she’d become all too familiar with. Her eyes caught a motion in the shadows and she searched the treeline for the source of the movement. A chill ran up her spine as her discomfort grew. A wild animal, or perhaps someone’s house cat foraging for field mice. Of course, with the new subdivision up the road, it was possible that kids were playing in the woods. They’d seen evidence of people having been in the woods over the past two years—soda bottles and candy wrappers—but had never caught anyone close to the house. Ward had the standard posted signs on the property line, but such signs were only suggestions to all but the reputable.

Since the house faced north and the rear overlooked a wall of large trees on the top of the slope, there had been no need for curtains to block the sun or to give the McCartys privacy. For the past weeks, though, she’d been toying with the idea of having blinds installed. She had even gotten an estimate, which had been staggering since the entire forty-five-foot wall was comprised of four-by-eight double panes of thick glass.

Natasha reclined on the couch and chased an Ambien with a quarter glass of the chilled wine.

3

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

THE HOTEL SHUTTLE DEPOSITED WARD MCCARTY AT
the airport to catch his flight home after three days of crowds, bulging tote bags, crowded sales booths, and insincere smiles. He hated trade shows, but had to attend them in order to keep up with new suppliers, new materials, gimmicks, manufacturers, and his competition.

After standing in a long line, Ward showed his North Carolina driver’s license and ticket to the female guard; slipped off his shoes, belt, cell phone, and watch; and put them all in a plastic tray. He felt naked in his stockinged feet, and he hated holding up his loose khakis with one hand so the cuffs didn’t drag.

At the other end of the conveyor belt, a burly guard with a buzz cut opened his briefcase and had Ward turn on his laptop to make sure it wasn’t actually a clever computer bomb. Ward looked over to see an elderly woman standing calmly while a guard ran a wand up and down over her stooped body. Satisfied, Ward’s guard lifted out a bubble-wrapped envelope from the briefcase and slipped out a small blue die-cast race car. As he studied the five-inch-long toy, his eyes grew noticeably larger.

“Man,” he said, “a 1969 Petty Roadrunner die-cast in near mint. You are one lucky devil. That was a one-year deal, that car.” He looked at the underside. “Aw, it’s not marked on the bottom. It’s a damned nice counterfeit. Isn’t that illegal?”

“It’s a prototype. It was never produced. One of a kind.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, where’d you get it?” He placed it back into the envelope.

“It’s been in my family for a very long time,” Ward said, which was true. The little model car had been in his family several years longer than he’d been on earth.

“Have a good day, sir,” the guard told him, as he put the padded envelope into Ward’s briefcase beside his computer and closed it.

Ward reached his assigned concourse through a maze of temporary signs, sheetrock dust, scaffolding, plastic sheeting, and constructive pandemonium.

At his gate Ward spent the time waiting for his flight by staring at an open novel he’d bought before leaving Charlotte, trying to absorb the words and make sense of the sentences. When he traveled with paperback novels, he always tore out the chapters as he finished them and threw the pages away, which served to both mark his place and make his load lighter. After he finished the chapter he was working on, he ripped the pages out and put them on the seat beside him, then slowly realized that he had no idea what the discarded chapter’s author had tried to convey.

Ward was bothered by the lack of clocks at the gate, which meant that passengers had to have watches, or cell phones, in order to know how long they had until their planes boarded. Of all of the things he didn’t like about Las Vegas—and there was nothing he did like—he most disliked the city’s denial that time passed there. Sitting in a leather chair with his carry-on bag and briefcase at his feet, he looked out through the windows at the Strip—the city’s main street, filled with the best known casinos—easy to spot from the monstrous glass pyramid and the giant sphinx with its lion ass backed up to it.