Beals waited to call Albert White until Scotoni had gone into his room on the second level.
“Target is in a motel room on the second floor of the Gold Key,” Beals told him. “Easy access. I’ll come by tonight and deliver it.”
White said, “He cashed out for over thirty-five, and he’s won in other places. The thirty-five comes back here. The other we cut up as usual.”
“Your wish is my command,” Beals said, before hanging up.
He screwed the silencer on the.380. The professional from the outside who Jack had been helping to get the lay of the land, the guy whose name was or wasn’t Pablo, had given it to him. Nice fellow, some kind of top-dollar hit man always measuring the world and the people around him like a film director looking for the perfect shot. After putting on a pair of tight leather gloves, Beals climbed from his 1999 Trail Blazer and made sure nobody was watching as he moved up the stairs to Scotoni’s room. Stopping outside the door, he took out his badge case and knocked hard on the door three times. A TV set went off and a voice asked tentatively, “Who’s there?”
When the young cheater looked out through the peephole, Beals held up a gold five-star badge for the kid to see. “Sheriff’s department, Mr. Scotoni,” he said. “Open the door, please.”
“What’s the problem, Officer?” the kid asked without opening the door. Beals felt anger rise from within, his heart beating like a bass drum.
“I’d prefer not to discuss it from out here, sir. We’ve had a complaint.” Beals looked both ways and down at the parking lot. The lot was graveyard still.
When the kid cracked open the door, Beals shouldered it, propelling Scotoni deep into the room. From the floor, a naked Scotoni looked up at the silenced weapon. The towel he’d been wrapped in was beneath him, and when Scotoni reached to gather it back up, Beals put a boot on it. He heard the sound of water running in the bathtub and he had an idea. He’d been thinking the kid would commit suicide by cutting his wrists, but this was even better. Motioning to the bathroom with the gun’s barrel, he said, “Dave. You need to take that bath.”
20
After following Jack Beals from the casino to a motel where Beals seemed to have some business with the man he himself was following, Paulus Styer turned to look into the rear of the van at the tarp under which lay the bound and drugged Gardner girl.
He turned his attention to the Gold Key-one of several old motels that had been hastily thrown up on a stretch of highway near the original casinos. When larger and finer casinos were built miles away, with newer and fancier motels to accompany them, the Gold Key and its neighbors had been abandoned by the better-heeled clientele, and now subsisted on dregs and scraps from their poorer replacements.
The Gold Key was a long two-story box, whose rooms faced a parking lot on either side. To access the second and third floors, patrons took one of several stairways or the elevator that was located behind the lobby. Time and lack of maintenance had turned the Gold Key into a place where the clientele, even on days when it wasn’t bone-chillingly cold, wouldn’t pay close attention to the comings and goings of strangers. And most of the clients would be sleeping in after a long night of losing money or turning tricks.
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.
21
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
“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.”
