“The sheriff was just here,” Tug said. “He met with Albert.”
“Yes?” Pierce felt a pang of anticipation in his chest. “What was it about?”
“It was about Jack Beals.”
“Yes,” Pierce said, closing his eyes. “What about Beals?”
“He got clipped.”
“Clipped.” A white-hot poker in the eye would have hurt less than those words.
“The sheriff told Albert that Beals was drowning that blackjack-cheating kid out at the Gold Key and somebody killed him while he was doing it. Cut his throat. They’re thinking our security tapes might show Beals scoping him out or somebody watching the kid who was working with Beals.”
“You know what this means?” Pierce asked, without waiting for an answer. “Police involvement at the worst possible time.”
“What do you want to do?”
“This requires more careful consideration than I can give it at the moment.” He shifted uneasily in his chair, tapping a pencil on the desk.
“Barnett thinks the guy who killed him was probably working some strong-arm robbery angle with Beals. Albert told the sheriff he’d check but Beals wasn’t here after his shift, which he said was till noon today. He’ll rig Beals’s time sheets.”
“No. Sheriff Barnett is out of his element, but he isn’t stupid or lazy. What happens when he interviews the staff? Who knows how many people saw Beals here after noon? Tell Albert to leave the time sheets as they are and say he only thought Beals was on till noon. Albert’s got too many people to know who’s where and when. I need to know who the cheater’s backup was and we need to get to them before the sheriff does. Tell Albert to get on it and brief me before he tells the sheriff anything. Maybe I should put the attorneys between Albert and the sheriff. No big deal. We have plenty of friends who can smooth ruffled feathers.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“Tug, the time for mistakes is over. From here out let’s take the word ‘fail’ out of our collective vocabularies.”
Pierce sat back and closed his eyes again. The situation with the Gardners had to be resolved before Kurt Klein arrived. Unless it was handled, Pierce Mulvane would lose everything he had worked so hard for.
He had assumed the professional hired to handle things would do so. Pierce told himself that if he had made a mistake, it had been in trusting Kurt Klein’s guy, this mysterious Pablo. Klein had no right to blame Pierce if that Pablo creep had gone crazy and shot some kid. But he knew Klein would never accept the blame for anything that went wrong, even if it was completely his fault. No telling what exorbitant rate this Pablo was getting, and from what Pierce could tell, he was making it up as he went along. Killing babysitters and people on the wrong side, for Christ’s sake.
He hadn’t expected Pablo would bring the authorities charging into the casino. What he’d expected was a tragic and senseless accident, and a trio of freshly dug graves in the Gardner family plot. Maybe that was still Klein’s plan. Maybe the rest was just misdirection.
Pierce made it to the bathroom, knelt at the toilet, and tried to talk himself out of throwing up, like a sick child would. But his reasoning failed.
27
Jack Beals’s house was two miles from the city limits, a small brick ranch house set in a circle of leafless oaks surrounded by soybean fields. The place had a narrow gravel driveway and a neatly kept yard. Winter and Brad climbed out of the Tundra to a stiff northern wind that caused Winter to button his wool jacket against the chill and pull down the bill of his ball cap. The two men slipped on surgical gloves as they approached the front of the house.
The exterior windows were fitted with formidable burglar bars, and the front door was a steel security model painted stone gray.
“Looks like Beals was paranoid,” Brad said, taking an envelope out of his pocket. Opening it, he poured into his hand the ring of keys they’d found in Beals’s pocket.
Two dead bolts later, Brad pushed open the front door and they stepped into Jack Beals’s living room. Blackout shades made the house as dark as a cave, so using the light from the open front door, Brad found and flipped on the lights.
The living room furniture was spare, but tasteful and expensive. A sleek leather couch and matching side chairs faced each other over a maple coffee table set on a real zebra-skin rug. The light fixture was a sphere crafted of wide ribbons of bird’s-eye veneer shaved so thin they were translucent. Two oversized abstract paintings hung on the walls and a freestanding bar near the door to the kitchen was topped with an ice bucket, a pitcher, and several bottles of liquor.
A plasma TV had been positioned on a sleek credenza, which Winter opened. It contained a video/DVD player and stereo setup that shared a pair of surround-sound speakers with the TV. Winter opened the drawers and thumbed through stacks of movies on DVD.
The master bedroom revealed a bed on a platform of polished wood, a large bamboo rug, two matching chests of drawers, and another abstract painting on the wall over the bed. “Not set up for spend-the-night guests either,” Winter waxed.
The door to the walk-in closet was open, with the clothes neatly ordered on shelves or hung precisely on rods. A camera case sat on the floor. Inside the case Winter found a video camera.
The bathroom was spotless.
A steel security door with a dead bolt indicated that the room down the hall was probably not a guest room. One of the keys opened it, and Winter found the light switch beside the door. A row of fluorescent fixtures illuminated the room like high noon in Miami. The windows were plated in sheet metal, the floor covered with heavy canvas painted battleship gray.
This room was about as different from those in the rest of the house as a pig and a parrot. In a cabinet, behind sliding sheets of Lexan, a dozen pistols hung by their trigger guards on pegs. Some, like a SIG P-210 and a beautifully engraved Colt National Match 1911 with a four-digit serial number, were expensive. Three tactical shotguns fitted with high-intensity flashlights formed a row on one side. There were two AR-15s, one with a scope.
A pair of electronic earphones hung on another peg.
Two reloading presses were mounted on a sturdy table. Stacked red plastic bins at the rear of the table held cartridge brass in various calibers, bullets, powders, and primers. Hard long gun cases stood together under the table along with three pairs of hunting boots. Targets pinned to the walls held groups of interlocking holes from handgun practice.
An aluminum rifle case leaned against the wall. Winter put it on a table and opened it to find a tactical rifle with a camouflage composite stock and a very substantial scope.
Brad lifted the gun to read the markings on the barrel.
“Dakota T-76 Longbow in.338 Lapua Magnum,” Brad said. He opened the bolt and sniffed the chamber. He smiled. “It’s been fired recently. I think we might not be dealing with your Styer after all.”
Winter felt momentary relief that Beals might have fired the round that took Sherry Adams’s life. But the feeling didn’t last but a moment. “Even without my business card, it doesn’t wash. He was a very neat young man,” Winter said as he took the weapon and looked it over. “Why would he put this one away without cleaning it?”
“It’s an expensive rifle,” Brad said. “Five to eight grand. Maybe more. The optics could run four or five.”
“But there’s nothing here that shows he was the kind of marksman who could make a thousand-yard shot. This is the only real sniper rifle he had, and there are no rifle targets here. And,” Winter said, “he wouldn’t have left the brass behind. Aside from a ballistics match, he was a reloader and a neat freak. Doesn’t fit.”
Winter opened a side compartment in the gun case, where he found a dozen clove-scented red toothpicks. There were also four loaded rounds and leather shooting gloves.
“So, it still might not be your Styer,” Brad insisted, his eyes widening. “Looks like the toothpicks and the gun belong to Beals. He could have intended to leave the toothpick we found behind his ear o
n Scotoni’s corpse.”
“This is a setup,” Winter said firmly.
“You think Styer set Beals up? Think he knew Beals well enough to know about this room? Came here and planted the weapon after he killed him? Happened to have had a key to the house and this room?”
“Maybe or maybe not. I could get past the locks in a couple of minutes.”
“You said Styer always works up close.”
“Only with his primary targets, and I’m sure he was trained in long-range marksmanship,” Winter said as he studied the handgun targets pinned on the walls. He noticed by the holes in the corners that one of them had been unpinned and pinned numerous times, and the others hadn’t. He moved closer and pulled out the pushpins holding the top of the target, letting it fall so it was held to the wall by only the bottom pins. It revealed a metal front to a safe imbedded between the studs.
“Check the keys,” Winter said. “There should be one that fits this.”
One key slid into the lock and turned easily. Winter opened the door and took a deep breath.
“Christ,” Brad said. “We need one of those bill-counting machines.”
A dozen DVD cases sat on top of several neat stacks of currency. Each was carefully labeled with a date.
“Looks like we need some boxes,” Winter said.
28
After leaving the majority of the evidence they’d gathered from Jack Beals’s house in the sheriff’s vault, the two tired men picked up fast food hamburgers and went to Brad’s house to eat and get Winter settled. Winter had checked out the DVDs so he could watch them away from the prying eyes of the other deputies. Where Styer was involved, the less that people knew, the better.
Brad lived in a two-story brick house on a tree-lined street near downtown with a muscular-and suspicious-Labrador and pit bull mix named Ruger. Brad showed Winter to a guest bedroom on the second floor. A few minutes later, the two men were sitting downstairs in Brad’s den wolfing down the hamburgers they’d brought home. Ruger sat beside Brad’s recliner, his dark eyes glued to the new guy seated in the recliner opposite his master.
“Ruger’s a handsome dog,” Winter said. “Bet he keeps strangers out.”
“He’s actually a she,” Brad said. “She’s just big boned. Aren’t you, baby?”
Despite Brad’s continuing admonitions, Ruger growled at their guest from time to time. Deer heads mounted on the walls stared out through glassy eyes and stuffed ducks on plaques flew imaginary circles around the furniture. Framed family pictures included one of a younger Brad Barnett in Marine fatigues. In the snapshot, he was holding a scoped rifle in the crook of his arm.
“I guess you’re wondering what the friction between me and Leigh is about?”
“None of my business,” Winter said. “But she does remind me of this girl I knew in grade school. Alice Murphy went out of her way to make my life hell. Whenever she saw me, she’d either stick out her tongue, rub my hair the wrong way, or pinch me. At a class reunion years later she told me she’d had a horrible crush on me in the third grade, and when I ignored her, she gave me a hard time to get my attention. Didn’t seem like that to me at the time, of course. I mean, she terrorized me.”
Brad smiled. “I went with Leigh from the sixth grade through high school,” he said. “She was something back then. A finer, better looking, and sweeter girl never drew a breath. All the way up until I joined the Marines. I wasn’t ready to go to college, and she was, and there was no war on then.
“Leigh’s mother died from a heart attack a few weeks after I entered boot camp. No warning. She just closed her eyes while sitting in her chair watching some TV sitcom. Leigh and her father didn’t even notice until the show was over. They thought she’d fallen asleep. That’s the way to go out.”
“I like to imagine I could die in my sleep,” Winter said.
“During my four years in the corps, we drifted apart. Each time I came home, our thing was more strained and since we weren’t together like before, our differences were more obvious to us. And I picked up drinking in the corps out of boredom. Leigh rarely drank and she had no patience for a drunk. We didn’t fit the way we had before and I wasn’t the same person I was when I left. She couldn’t cope. In my defense, I was a cocky jerk with a beer in one hand and a large chip on my shoulder. I was TPP positive then.”
“TPP?”
“Tested pumpkin positive. Means if you’d shined a light in my ear my face would have lit up like a jack-o-lantern.”
Winter laughed, and Ruger growled at him for it.
“When I got back we had one last weekend in a Memphis motel to try and rekindle something. Playing couple was great at first, but we ended up fighting, said terrible things to each other. She left, and I got drunk. I met a woman in a club and she came back to the motel with me. Nothing happened-at least I don’t think it did-because I passed out in a state of undress. Leigh had a change of heart, drove back, and the gal opened the room door wearing her panties and bra. I was out in bed, and Leigh didn’t ever want to speak to me again, and so for a long time, she didn’t.”
“Man, oh man,” Winter said, shaking his head slowly, picturing Leigh standing there looking at the unsteady and scantily clad woman at the door, not to mention a naked Brad passed out across the mattress. “I can imagine that might’ve been hard to explain away.”
“Before I got out, she ran off and married Jacob Gardner, one of those handsome guys who says all the right things to everybody, but once the newness wears off you can see he’s an egotistical, insincere rooster. His family had an old name and not much money left, though nobody knew it until everything collapsed after he married Leigh. He’s the kind of guy who always has a new set of best friends, and he climbs socially, or he did as long as there were fresh rungs available. She got pregnant, they got married, and she played mother hen and ran the place with her father while old Jake played golf and dabbled in dabbling.”
“You never tried to patch it up after Memphis?”
“The ice never thawed and I went to Ole Miss. Once Leigh decides something, that’s it in stone. My father’s reputation here gave me an initial edge with voters because he brought about half the population of Tunica County into the world. All I need to stay in office is to have his patients vote for me.” Brad smiled and patted his dog. “I expect the people around here vote for him, not me. I’m trying to change that.”
They talked on, about their friends in common, their law enforcement experiences, farming, and county politics. Winter told Brad about how he’d met Faith Ann and explained how she had become like a daughter to him and Sean. After that, he excused himself and called Sean’s cell phone.
“Hey, cowboy,” Sean answered. “Where you staying?”
“Call me Deputy Massey…again. I’m staying with my new boss, the sheriff. Where are you guys?”
“Have you leveled with him about Styer?”
“I haven’t decided how much to tell him. I think I’ll wait for the DNA comparison.”
“Tell him, Winter. Don’t let him be vulnerable because he doesn’t know what he’s dealing with.”
“Maybe it’s time.”
“Yeah. Just in case, he should know. Faith Ann wants to visit Graceland, so I thought we’d stay a couple of days.”
“I’d rather y’all would go on home. I’d feel…”
“I thought we’d eat at that rib place you told me about.”
“Rendezvous. Yeah. It’s close to the Peabody.”
“Any objections to our staying over? He won’t bother us. Besides, he’s there, right?”
“You’re right, Sean. But I’ll be worried and if I’m worried…”
“Okay. We’ll leave tomorrow morning at eight,” Sean said. She was the strongest woman Winter had ever known, but she also knew when to give in. It was one of the things he loved most about her.
“Styer won’t go after you guys at home.”
Winter spoke briefly and wistfully to Rush, Faith Ann, and Olivia bef
ore he hung up and returned to the den.
“I think it’s time you knew who I think we’re probably dealing with,” Winter said quietly. “How much do you know about me, what I’ve been involved with in the past?”
Brad fed Ruger what was left of his burger as he spoke. “I’ve heard some things. The Tampa courtroom shootings. I know there was some kind of big incident outside New Orleans a few years back with Sam Manelli’s gang, and another one there a little over two years ago. And I know there was an incident in South Carolina involving the trial of Colonel Bryce, some rogue military intelligence officers, and the kidnapping of a judge’s daughter and her child.”
Winter nodded and said, “Brad, what I am going to tell you has to remain between the two of us. If you tell anybody I told you what I’m going to tell you, I’ll deny it.”
“I’m listening.”
“Styer is a professional assassin from the Eastern Bloc who used to trade in seemingly impossible-to-kill targets, first for the KGB’s elite Special Situations Unit, and after the wall came down, for a private murder-for-hire organization. When I sent your toothpick to the lab, I also sent them Styer’s DNA. I got it from a scented toothpick he left in a rental car in New Orleans. I’m having that sample compared to your toothpick, and if it matches, we’re going from bad to worse real fast. I’ve gotten what little I know about this guy from people who know things I don’t. They talked to me because they hoped I might somehow lead them to him.”
Brad crossed his legs at the ankles.
“Paulus Styer was born in East Germany and sent to the Soviet Union where he was groomed to be a weapon of selective destruction. He became a world-class professional assassin-a human chameleon who vanished two years ago after failing to kill me.”
“You were his target?”
“He was told I was his target. The CIA used a hit on me to get Styer in the field so they could take him out when he made his move on me. They underestimated Styer and sent a single professional to kill him, but Styer found out the hit was a ploy and escaped. Faith Ann’s uncle, my friend Hank Trammel, is a cripple, and his wife, Millie, was killed. Faith Ann saw Styer run them over with an SUV merely to manipulate me into a death game. He has a compulsion to show his victims, just before he kills them, how amazingly talented he is. I guess since he can’t show the world his genius, he plays to an audience of two-himself and his target.”
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