John Miller - Smoke and Mirrors

Dr. Barnett nodded. “Stuck in his right eye. I left it there. You want to look in there, Winter?”

“No.”

A thin man dressed in a blue uniform came out of a bedroom, snapping his cell phone closed.

“Bradley,” he said, grimacing. “You see the shit in there?”

“Nope,” Brad said. “No reason unless you want me to.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m wondering if the bastard that did this might be the same asshole that killed Jack Beals. Or the dead guy might be the one who killed Beals and somebody’s paid him back. I’m wondering if that fellow who was in that motel room might know who did it. Hell, maybe he did it. Was both knife work, wasn’t it?”

“Cut throat. He’s gone back home to Nevada. A couple hours ago one of my guys put him on a plane. He’s been under surveillance by my people since we found Beals,” Brad said. “He didn’t see who killed Beals. He didn’t do it.”

“Doc, could this have been done before Beals died? Maybe Beals did this one too?”

“No,” Dr. Barnett said. “This one was killed a few hours ago.”

“I’m wondering if all these murders are part of some kind of organized crime war that’s spilled out down here. I’m calling in the MBI to deal with this. I sure as hell don’t have this kind of shit going on around here very often, so I need some help.”

“I think that’s a smart move,” Brad said.

“The dead guy have identification?” Winter asked.

“A wallet. I bagged it,” Boddington said, studying Winter for the first time.

“Massey,” Winter said.

“He’s my newest deputy,” Brad told the chief.

Boddington nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

“Once you run the ID, maybe you’ll get a hit and some answers,” Winter said.

“Call me if I can help,” Brad said.

As they were getting into Brad’s truck, he asked, “Styer does this kind of shit all the time? Goes from one gruesome murder to the next like a wild dog?”

Winter nodded. “It’s all he knows. He’ll stop as soon as he’s dead.”

“We have to put an end to this. Good Christ. He’s killed five people in three days.”

“That’s easier said than done,” Winter said. “The cutouts are the best hope to nail him, but so far they can’t get close to him without dying.”

“Maybe you should get in touch with them. They have to want him stopped worse than we do. Especially now.”

“They want him, but to get him they might sacrifice us.”

“What do we do next?”

“Put some pressure on Kurt Klein.”

“What kind of pressure?”

Winter looked at his watch. “The legally binding, wrath of God kind. And we are going to pull the trigger right after Sherry Adams’s funeral.”

The Advent Church of The Holy Spirit was an old structure made from ancient brick with a galvanized steeple perched on its sagging roof like a dunce cap. Sunlight poured in through colored plastic replicas of stained-glass windows. Threadbare carpet ran between the worn pine pews, and water-stained ceilings peaked fifteen feet above the center aisle. A huge cross, made from six-by-six beams, was suspended above a simple plywood pulpit by plastic-coated steel cables. Mourners stood two deep against the plaster walls.

Winter and Alexa stood in the rear.

Leigh, Estelle, and Hampton sat just behind the Adams family as one person after another spoke, extolling Sherry Adams’s attributes. It was a dignified affair, with only muted crying supplying background static for the service. The minister spoke with raw emotion in his voice about God’s mysterious selection of his angels from the earth’s best and brightest.

Leigh’s makeup covered her bruise, but the swollen and split lip was apparent underneath her bright red lipstick. As the choir sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and six pallbearers rolled the bronze casket’s gurney to the back of the church, Winter stood in the yard and caught a glimpse of Alphonse Jefferson standing on the corner wearing a lime green suit, a matching fedora held to his chest as a show of respect.

Since word travels at the speed of light in small communities, people attending Sherry’s funeral were aware that Jacob Gardner had died in a car accident, and most of them took a few seconds to offer Leigh their condolences. Winter doubted that any of them would miss Leigh’s ex, but they obviously felt genuine grief for Leigh and her children. It was apparent that despite her no-nonsense exterior, the people there knew Mrs. Gardner had a good heart.

Leigh told the people who asked after Cynthia that her daughter was too distressed to leave the house.

After a lot of discussion, Alexa and Winter had convinced Leigh that the odds were Cynthia would not be harmed for two reasons: the purpose for having her as a captive was over, and killing her was not a priority for Styer. In a couple of hours, Mulvane’s best interests would be in freeing her.

Paulus Styer had figured correctly that during the Adams funeral, the Gardner home would be lightly guarded, if at all. He had come in on turn roads from a county road and parked two miles away, and he hadn’t seen one patrol car during his trip out from the casino. Like worker bees, they had followed the queen, leaving the hive unguarded. Carrying a knapsack, Paulus made his way from the thin tree line that ran like a fence east and west of the house, across two hundred yards of cotton stalks.

At the back of the house, he paused only long enough to pick the dead bolt. The grandfather clock in the hallway filled the house’s silence with its metallic ticks.

He found the door leading to the basement and crept downstairs, carrying the rucksack in his right hand. After surveying the moldy basement, used to house the heating and air-conditioning systems and littered with stored boxes, old bicycles, and other junk, he made his way to the oil tank that fed the furnace. He found a small box labeled X-MAS and dumped the contents into a larger box. As he knelt behind the heater, it suddenly came noisily to life, the fan sounding like a jet revving for takeoff.

He carefully wedged the box containing the device into the cobwebby space between the brick wall and the unit. Smiling, he removed a cell phone from the satchel and put it in his pocket. When the time was right, he would press the send button on the phone, which was programmed to dial up another unit that would set off the detonator. The amount of Semtex inside the package would reduce the Gardner home to a smoking crater. Hello. Good-bye.

He looked at his watch, imagined the funeral party at the graveyard, and stood. He decided to take a quick tour of the interior to familiarize himself with the layout. Just in case things didn’t work out as he planned, he would be very open to alternative endings for Massey and the others.

He thought about looking around for another vial of insulin for Cynthia, but decided she had about enough to get through the rest of her life.

Pierce Mulvane made his early afternoon inspection trek through the casino as usual, but for once what was happening in the casino held little interest for him. Tug had been busy over the past days taking care of business, so he had been around less and less as things needed his specialized attention. Pierce stayed in close telephone contact, believing that Tug, more than Albert White, was the person he could most fully trust. Tug was Irish, and Mulvane’s cousin, a gangster with a large hard-core crew, had vouched for Murphy.

Pierce was confident again that Klein’s displeasure at the setback was temporary. Pierce had put the Roundtable in the black a full year ahead of the most liberal projections, and it was more profitable, based on percentage of return on dollars invested, than any casino RRI operated. He was certain that Kurt would remember the pluses, and after the land was secured, everything would be as it was before.