John Miller - Smoke and Mirrors

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.

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.

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.