John Miller - Smoke and Mirrors

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.

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.”

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.