Smoke & Mirrors (7 page)

19

TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD JACK BEALS, A SECURITY
officer for the Roundtable, had tailed the kid in the yellow V-neck sweater straight to the Gold Key Motel, a few miles from the casino. The gambler’s name was David Scotoni, a single twenty-three-year-old resident of Reno, Nevada, whose ID checked out as legit. Turned out that the reason a man who lived in a town filled with casinos would fly across the country to gamble was predictable—he was known in Reno as a card counter.

Counting cards wasn’t illegal, but it gave the player an unfair advantage and was grounds for a casino to invite you to leave and put your mug in the black book system shared by casinos across the country. Scotoni had cashed out his chips to the tune of thirty-five thousand. That was about to be collected and returned to the casino.

Beals waited to call Albert White until Scotoni had gone into his room on the second level.

“Target is in a motel room on the second floor of the Gold Key,” Beals told him. “Easy access. I’ll come by tonight and deliver it.”

White said, “He cashed out for over thirty-five, and he’s won in other places. The thirty-five comes back here. The other we cut up as usual.”

“Your wish is my command,” Beals said, before hanging up.
Whatever he’s taken from the others. Not bad money for a day’s work.

He screwed the silencer on the .380. The professional from the outside who Jack had been helping to get the lay of the land, the guy whose name was or wasn’t Pablo, had given it to him. Nice fellow, some kind of top-dollar hit man always measuring the world and the people around him like a film director looking for the perfect shot. After putting on a pair of tight leather gloves, Beals climbed from his 1999 Trail Blazer and made sure nobody was watching as he moved up the stairs to Scotoni’s room. Stopping outside the door, he took out his badge case and knocked hard on the door three times. A TV set went off and a voice asked tentatively, “Who’s there?”

When the young cheater looked out through the peephole, Beals held up a gold five-star badge for the kid to see. “Sheriff’s department, Mr. Scotoni,” he said. “Open the door, please.”

“What’s the problem, Officer?” the kid asked without opening the door. Beals felt anger rise from within, his heart beating like a bass drum.

“I’d prefer not to discuss it from out here, sir. We’ve had a complaint.” Beals looked both ways and down at the parking lot. The lot was graveyard still.

When the kid cracked open the door, Beals shouldered it, propelling Scotoni deep into the room. From the floor, a naked Scotoni looked up at the silenced weapon. The towel he’d been wrapped in was beneath him, and when Scotoni reached to gather it back up, Beals put a boot on it. He heard the sound of water running in the bathtub and he had an idea. He’d been thinking the kid would commit suicide by cutting his wrists, but this was even better. Motioning to the bathroom with the gun’s barrel, he said, “Dave. You need to take that bath.”

20

AFTER FOLLOWING JACK BEALS FROM THE CASINO
to a motel where Beals seemed to have some business with the man he himself was following, Paulus Styer turned to look into the rear of the van at the tarp under which lay the bound and drugged Gardner girl.

He turned his attention to the Gold Key—one of several old motels that had been hastily thrown up on a stretch of highway near the original casinos. When larger and finer casinos were built miles away, with newer and fancier motels to accompany them, the Gold Key and its neighbors had been abandoned by the better-heeled clientele, and now subsisted on dregs and scraps from their poorer replacements.

The Gold Key was a long two-story box, whose rooms faced a parking lot on either side. To access the second and third floors, patrons took one of several stairways or the elevator that was located behind the lobby. Time and lack of maintenance had turned the Gold Key into a place where the clientele, even on days when it wasn’t bone-chillingly cold, wouldn’t pay close attention to the comings and goings of strangers. And most of the clients would be sleeping in after a long night of losing money or turning tricks.

Styer waited until Jack had sneaked up the stairs and shouldered his way inside a room on the second floor. Then he spoke.

“Cynthia dear?”

She was still out.

Styer pocketed his lock-picking tools and patted the survival knife at his side. Then, after checking for witnesses, he climbed from the van, locked it, and walked swiftly but casually toward the stairs.

21

WHEN LEIGH GARDNER WALKED INTO BRAD
Barnett’s office, the sheriff had just returned from making arrangements for a deputy to deliver the toothpick evidence to the ProCell facility in Nashville via a chartered twin-engine airplane.

“Okay,” she said. “What’s so all-fired important?”

“Sit down, Leigh,” Brad said.

She sat, arms crossed.

“We don’t think Sherry was the target,” he told her.

“Oh, really. So you believe it was a hunting accident now? I shouldn’t be surprised you’ve changed your mind already. Keeping your crime numbers stacked for a reelection bid?”

“No, it definitely wasn’t an accident. I’ll let Winter explain the thinking behind it.”

Leigh turned in her chair to face Winter. “Okay, Mr. Massey, if Sherry wasn’t the intended victim, who the hell was?” she asked.

“I think you were,” Winter told her.

“Why would anybody want to shoot at me?”

Winter began, “It makes less sense that anyone who could make that shot would target a babysitter out in the middle of nowhere.”

“So you’re not pursuing Alphonse Jefferson?”

“We’ve ruled him out,” Brad told her.

Leigh frowned at Brad. “How do you imagine anybody could confuse me—a forty-year-old blonde—with a nineteen-year-old black girl?”

Winter said, “I was looking at the crime-scene pictures and something hit me. At a thousand yards in that early light, a dark-skinned babysitter wearing a hooded car coat and gloves, moving from the house to the garage, would look like a white woman doing the same thing. You’re a farmer and I suspect you keep farming hours. If the shooter didn’t know you were out of town, and was there to kill you, he might easily assume a woman close to your build heading out to the garage at daybreak would be you.”

“Why me?”

“Financial gain, so whoever gains if you were killed is a suspect. Since your kids didn’t have it done, we can move to the next most-likely suspect.”

“Like who?” she asked. “Nobody would gain anything by my death,” Leigh said. Her eyes flickered with some inner thought, some recognition perhaps, but passed quickly. She shrugged. “No. Despite the size of my operation, I am not a wealthy woman. Maybe you should look at the agricultural conglomerates. They’re the
only
people who’d profit from my death, since my children would have to sell the place to pay the inheritance taxes.”

“What about Jacob?” Brad asked.

She laughed. “Please. If I died, he’d starve to death. He lives with his mother in a two-bedroom apartment in Memphis.”

“Brad has to take a serious look at your ex-husband,” Winter said.

Leigh stared at Winter for a few long seconds, her expression impossible to read. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she scoffed. “Alphonse Jefferson is your killer. If that’s all?”

“I don’t think—” Brad started.

“That’s the trouble, you don’t think. Anybody wants to shoot me, I’ll be the one working my ass off. Good-bye, boys. Six Oaks won’t run itself.”

Leigh strode out the door without looking back.

“If she was the target, she probably still is,” Winter said. “When the shooter finds out he missed her, he might try again. She needs protection.”

“Forget it,” Brad said. “She’s in denial and as stubborn as a mule. But I’ll put a car out at the place, double the patrols on the roads out that way.”

Winter said, “I think she already suspected Sherry wasn’t the target before she came in here. I think she isn’t completely certain that her ex isn’t responsible.”

Brad said, “I can tell you from long experience with Leigh that she isn’t going to do anything she doesn’t want to do.”

“How long ago was it that you two dated?” Winter asked.

Brad’s startled look confirmed what Winter had suspected since he first saw Brad and Leigh Gardner interact at Six Oaks.

Bettye stuck her head into the office. “Sheriff, just got a call. There’s been a homicide at the Gold Key.”

22

THE PARKING LOT AT THE GOLD KEY MOTEL WAS
alive with flashing blue lights and several deputies stood on the balcony outside a room with the door open. Traffic on the highway was backed up as people rubbernecked to see what the excitement was about. Here and there, guests gathered in tight clumps.

Winter and Brad took the wide stairs two at a time. The deputies parted to allow Brad and Winter to enter the room. A man’s body was sprawled on the floor, a pool of blood under his head, his throat laid open. A second man wearing a V-neck sweater and khakis sat on the edge of the bed, his hands resting in his lap. A deputy in his fifties stood passively with his back to the bureau as Brad and Winter entered.

“What happened here, Roy?” Brad asked the deputy, who handed him a Nevada driver’s license with a picture of the young man who sat watching them silently.

“Roy Bishop, this is Winter Massey. He’s giving me a hand with the Adams homicide. Roy here is my chief deputy.” The chief deputy looked at Winter for a second and nodded.

“Beals?” Brad asked, moving to look at the dead man’s familiar features.

“Sure is. Mr. Scotoni here says somebody else came in and killed Beals, who happened to be in the process of drowning him in the tub. Scotoni called nine-one-one, we didn’t touch anything.”

Scotoni’s hair had dried into a grand mess, and his hands were shaking.

Winter looked down at the corpse wearing a flight jacket and winced as he spotted a red toothpick tucked behind the dead man’s ear. Brad’s eyes followed his.

“Okay, Mr. Scotoni, I need to know exactly what happened,” Brad said, sitting on the chair so their eyes were even.

“I was running a hot bath. That guy there came to the door, said he was a deputy sheriff, and showed me his badge. When I opened the door he knocked me down. He had a gun with a silencer on it. He said he was going to take the money I’d won from the casinos.”

“He was alone when he came in?”

“Yeah. He was enjoying himself. He was definitely going to kill me. He made me get into the tub and hit me on the back of my head and started holding me underwater. I couldn’t really fight back and I was…I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

“I didn’t see a gun,” the deputy said. “I looked under the bed and everywhere else I could without touching anything.”

“The other guy must have taken it,” Scotoni said. “The one who saved my ass.”

“What did this other guy look like?” Brad asked.

“I didn’t actually see him. Like I said, that dead guy hit me in the back of my head,” he said, turning and pointing at the back of his head. “He had me underwater and I saw the shape of a man in dark clothes come in. He pulled that guy in here and by the time I got out of the tub and came in, the guy that killed him was already gone, so I called nine-one-one.”

Winter looked at Brad and nodded slowly.

“Can I get the hell out of here?” Scotoni asked.

“You can leave the room,” Brad told him. “You’ll have to give a statement at the station.”

“Can I take my stuff?”

“We’ll release it after we’ve cleared the scene,” Bishop said.

“What about just the money I won?”

“Where is it?” Brad asked.

“In that middle drawer. He never got around to it.”

Brad opened the dresser drawer and handed a paper bag heavy with banded stacks of currency to Scotoni.

“Where did you win this?”

“Gold Strike, Horse Shoe, Regency, and the Roundtable.”

“Which was the last place?”

“I only played the Roundtable today. The others were over the last two days.”

“With all the casinos in Reno and Vegas, why’d you come here?”

“I wanted to see Graceland,” Scotoni said, too quickly.

“You an Elvis fan?” Brad asked.

“Sure.”

“Young and skinny or old and fat?”

“Sorry?”

“‘Hound Dog’ or ‘Burning Love’ Elvis-era music?” Brad went on.

“‘Burning Love,’” Scotoni said. “I like that one.”

“That’s old fat Elvis,” Brad mused. “Deputy Bishop will take you to the hospital to get you checked out. You’ll need another room.”

“Does it have to be at this motel?”

“No. Just make sure we know where you are. Don’t leave town unless you clear it with me. And if I were you, I’d take that bag to the bank and get a cashier’s check,” Brad suggested.

“Why? I didn’t do anything.”

“Large sums of cash can attract attention. I don’t want to see you where Beals is,” Brad told him firmly. “We’ll have someone watch over you until you get to the bank.”

“Why?”

“Just in case this dead fellow had friends he was going to share your winnings with. We want you to leave our county a winner,” Brad said. “And it would be best all the way around if you didn’t ever come back here.”

“You don’t have to sweat that one,” the young man said.

23

AFTER BRAD CLEARED THE ROOM, WINTER SAID,
“Close-up skills. These doors lock when they close. Scotoni said Beals closed it when he came in. The guy who came in picked the lock.”

“Maybe Beals left it cracked open so a partner could come in behind him,” Brad suggested.

“I doubt that. The guy cut Beals’s throat. Then he left the toothpick, took the gun, and slipped off without looking for the cash, because either he didn’t know about it, or it wasn’t part of his plan. He knew Scotoni would call the cops.”

“Maybe the toothpick was Beals’s,” Brad said.

“I think the guy who killed him left it to make an obvious connection between Beals and Sherry Adams.” Winter was convinced that Styer had done this and he could read the message loud and clear:
We’ll always have New Orleans.

“Why did the killer want Beals found fast? Usually it’s the opposite.”

“The killer knew I’d come here, and he wanted to make the connection obvious to me.”

“I wish he’d just leave notes,” Brad said. “His address and phone number.”

“You knew this Beals guy. How?” Winter asked.

“He was a deputy who went to work for the Roundtable casino after I won the election. Most people in the department seemed glad he was gone.”

“Why?”

“He was the kind of smartass who sets people against each other for his own entertainment. He made inappropriate comments to female deputies. There were lots of complaints about him. After the election, he told me a casino had offered him a better job and I told him to take the offer. Truth was, I didn’t want troublemakers around undermining me.”

“Maybe the casino sent Beals to get the money back,” Winter suggested.

“Maybe Beals targeted the kid because he won and took it in cash. No legit casino would send Beals here to get their money back. Winners draw in losers. If someone cheats, they call us to arrest them. They ask counters to leave.”

“But it’s possible that someone at the casino did send him after Scotoni to teach him a lesson.”

“Casinos don’t operate that way because it would result in the loss of their gaming license and criminal charges. There’s too much at stake. Losing future millions over some chump change is stupid.”

“It isn’t chump change to a guy like Beals,” Winter said.

Brad slipped on surgical gloves, knelt, and gently rolled Beals’s body sideways. He retrieved a leather badge case from the corpse’s back pocket and flipped it open to reveal a Tunica County deputy sheriff badge and the ID. “Bastard kept his star.” Beals’s coat pockets yielded a large folding knife, a loaded .380 magazine, a cell phone, and three red toothpicks.

“We can see who he’s been talking to,” Brad said. He looked at the numbers Beals had called. “Last call was made about an hour ago. Just a number, no name listed.”

“My question is, if this is Styer’s work, how did he pick Beals out, and why Beals?” Winter said, realizing too late that he’d slipped up. “I wonder if my guy has a connection to the Roundtable or to Beals personally.”

“Styer is your guy’s name?”

“Yes, that’s his name. Let’s keep it to ourselves.”

Winter figured that the casino was the direction Styer wanted him to head in. For the present, like it or not, all he could do was dance to the psychopath’s tune.