Smoke & Mirrors

by John Ramsey Miller

  “This will all work out,” Pierce said.

  “I hope so,” Kurt said. “Steffan, you will handle it. Use that man…Tug, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Tug Murphy.”

  “Where did you get this Murphy?”

  “He came to me highly recommended by friends of mine in Boston. He can be absolutely trusted.”

  Finch nodded. “I checked him out. He has a solid background with the Irish mob. Follows orders and knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

  “What does Albert White know?”

  “A little. I asked him for someone we could trust totally for a special job, and he recommended Beals immediately. He said he had used him for delicate matters in the past. Beals was an ex–deputy sheriff. Local, but he had a history with White. Beals’s father was a contractor for the Dixie mob.”

  “What does White know about our prior discussions?” Kurt asked.

  “As far as he knows, I am acting alone, doing what I think needs to be done for the project,” Pierce said.

  “Where do you stand at this moment with Mrs. Gardner?”

  Pierce said, “I have a two-and-a-half-million-dollar offer before her. I am hoping she accepts it. That would make the other thing unnecessary and expedite groundbreaking. The sheriff and Massey are snooping around, and Massey threatened me, but there is no proof of anything they can use against us. They won’t keep her from selling. In fact, it would be best to openly buy from her since they are nosing around.”

  “I agree,” Kurt said, inhaling smoke from his cigarette. “We negotiate. But if we don’t succeed in negotiating by Sunday, we go with the relatives. If we get behind schedule on the project, it will cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. You should remember that you talked me into this investment. You made me assurances on start and completion dates, and I have based everything on your timetable.”

  “Which was given to me by the construction companies, based on other things.”

  “I don’t care about their dates or contingencies or problems. You gave me dates. You made the decision on how to handle the Gardner situation, and I said okay, do it. I am in this here and now because of you. If we succeed, you will be running the finest resort in this country. On the other hand, people who fail me, do so only once.”

  Mulvane wanted to scream. He looked at his image in the mirror and saw that he was smiling like an idiot. How it was that a man so close to ruin could be smiling was something he couldn’t fathom. But try as he might, he couldn’t change his expression.

  77

  WINTER HAD JUST HUNG UP HIS PHONE WHEN BRAD came into the Gardners’ kitchen. “We’ve got a body.”

  Winter jumped into the car as Brad was starting the engine. He reversed fast, spun the wheel, jammed the vehicle into drive, and punched down on the accelerator. “I think it may be the missing cutout. Chief of police called me a few minutes ago from the scene. Couple of kids found a dead man in a house being renovated near my place.”

  Winter said, “The more pandemonium Styer creates, the better it suits him.”

  The house was three blocks from Brad’s home, which would have made bringing the cutout to it a simple matter for Styer. Police cars, a sheriff’s department cruiser and an EMS bus were parked outside, and the neighboring properties held a growing audience of townspeople.

  Two teenage boys sat on the front steps with William Barnett’s friend Woody Seiders. One of them, a redhead, looked at Winter and Brad with unfocused blue eyes. His thin trembling fingers clenched around his knees like roots.

  “Hello,” Woody said. “Your father’s inside playing coroner.”

  “Alan?” Brad said. “Are you all right, son?”

  The redhead tried to smile.

  “Sheriff Barnett. It’s really horrible,” the dark-haired boy said. “There’s a dead guy in the bathtub.”

  “You found him, Buddy?” Brad asked.

  “I didn’t look in,” Buddy said. “Alan opened the bathroom door, started screaming, and we both ran like hell. He said the guy was all cut up. I’m glad I didn’t look.”

  “Whose house is this?” Brad asked.

  “My dad’s,” Alan said softly. “We’re fixing it up to rent.”

  Brad patted the boy’s back sympathetically, then led Winter through the front door into a room crowded with uniformed cops, Roy Bishop, and several EMS personnel. Winter smiled when he saw Dr. Barnett come into the living room from down the hallway. “Hey, Bradley, Deputy Massey,” he said.

  “Daddy, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m filling in because Phil had to take a body to Jackson.”

  “Where’s Chief Boddington?”

  “He’s back there making calls. You should see this.” He crooked his finger and Winter and Brad followed him to the closed door.

  Speaking in a low voice, Dr. Barnett said, “Before you go in there, I want to tell you I haven’t seen anything like this since medical school. Brad, the man in that bathroom suffered. Someone skinned him alive, and used bleach as he went. He finally died from blood loss when the killer cut his femoral artery.”

  “Any red toothpicks?” Winter asked, knowing there would be.

  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 fu
neral.”

  78

  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.

  79

  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.

  80

  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.

  Pierce was passing the craps pit when he spotted the familiar face of pig farmer Jason Parr standing near the table. He had the unfocused look of a man who had just lost his last nickel. Pierce felt a warm glow, assuming the casino had acquired a sizable chunk of Parr’s assets. He always marveled at how people never seemed to understand that gambling, aside from the occasional hit here and there, was financially suicidal.

  “Mr. Parr,” Pierce said as he approached, his face a blank canvas. “How is everything?”

  “Gotta say, this week I’ve been on my backside more than a two-dollar whore in a lumber camp on payday,” Parr said with a weak grin.

  “And are you up or down?”

  “Well, I lost my lucky charm, so I stopped to catch my breath. At present I’m up one fifty. I’m thinking about quitting, and calling it a trip. Get back to my wife and the other pigs tomorrow afternoon.”

  Pierce laughed, despite the fact that chuckling at this yokel’s pathetic joke was the last thing he wanted to be doing. “One hundred and fifty dollars is hardly going to cover your gas back, Jason. We will fill your tank for you, of course.”

  “I figure I’m down a half million over the past ten years. That, my old son, is a lot of bacon up the chimney. Right this minute, I’m standing here thinking my gambling days are over for a while.”

  “Quitting while you are ahead is very smart, Jason. As your friend, I suggest you take your winnings and go home. You should have a check cut.”

  “Well, that would be fine, but I kind of like having the green in hand when I get home. Gets me a little piece of the pie,” he said, elbowing Pierce in the arm. “My fifth wife won’t do no work to speak of, and she ain’t usually big on getting in the bed except at night to sleep. But if I cover the danged sheets an inch deep in hundreds, you can’t keep her out of it.”

  Pierce looked with disgust at Parr’s expansive stomach and his pendulous breasts. It made him want to go straight to the fitness center and spend the rest of the day in the sauna.

  81

  ALEXA WAS IN THE GUEST BATHROOM WASHING HER face when her cell phone rang. She went into the bedroom, took it out of her purse, and saw on the readout that it was Assistant FBI Director Hayden Hatcher.

  “Keen,” she answered.

  “Hatcher here,” Hayden Hatcher said. “I went by your office yesterday afternoon and found out that you were on personal leave until next week.”

  “That’s right, sir. I’m taking care of a few personal matters.”

  “Might I ask where you are?”

  “Tunica, Mississippi.” Alexa was certain he had known where she was before he asked, and she knew he had the means to easily discover that she’d flown to Memphis the day before.

  “Is there anything about your trip that might be of interest to us?” he asked.

  Alexa was not going to lie to a superior officer. “There have been two additional murders in Tunica that may be connected to a piece of land a casino wants for an expanded operation. The sheriff is presently investigating. It is possible that the
family who owns the land where the first murder took place, as well as the land the casino needs, may be in continuing danger. I’m here merely to give moral support to the family. That’s all I know at the present.”

  Hatcher asked, “Would that casino be the Roundtable?”

  “Yes, sir, it would.”

  “Do you suspect anyone associated with that casino or RRI of being involved in any of the three murders?”

  “There’s no direct evidence, just circumstances that point in that direction. It appears as though the local casino manager might be involved.”

  “So he is probably acting on his own volition. The owner of RRI, Kurt Klein, is an influential individual. Are you familiar with his name?”

  “I am.”

  “According to our information, Mr. Klein is in Tunica, staying at the Roundtable casino. This is very delicate, Alexa. Kurt Klein is a good friend of our state department. The Klein family, and their friends, are very influential and are often quite helpful to our interests around the world.”

  “There is no evidence that Klein is involved, or knows anything about what has been going on here.”

  “If any Federal statutes have been violated by people working for the casino, it will have to be handled very carefully. Would you be more comfortable if I sent some agents to protect the Gardner family?”

  “No, sir. I don’t believe that is necessary at the present.” Alexa knew that she had not mentioned the Gardners by name. “It seems unlikely this man would dare harm them, since Winter Massey told him he suspected him of involvement.”

  “I know this is not an official FBI matter at the present, but I expect you to keep me posted on this, Agent Keen. I cannot overstress the fact that you are not, under any circumstances, to take any unauthorized action against or involving Mr. Klein. Is that perfectly clear?”