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.
31
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.
32
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.
“Was Styer following Leigh or Beals? Is that how he spotted Leigh? Maybe the killer, your Styer maybe, got the tag number on the Gardners’ truck or something and that was why he targeted them. Jesus, what the hell is this about?” Brad said, shaking his head as if to clear it.
“It was definitely a leer from Styer,” Winter said. “Only he knows what this is all about. He’s screwing with my head. But he’s also giving us something to work with.”
“Knowing it would confuse you? Us?”
“It’s just part of the game,” Winter said, sighing.
“Which part?” Brad asked.
“His favorite part. The smoke and mirrors.”
33
After viewing enough of the other DVDs to make sure they were worthless to their immediate investigation, Brad had returned to his office to count the cash they’d found in Beals’s safe.
They hadn’t found anything in Beals’s house to explain the money in his wall safe. His computer, located in a drawer in the bedroom, contained nothing out of the ordinary. There were no password-protected files. They had his financial information and bank records, and copies of his IRS filings for the past five years. The computer tech said that Beals visited sites for dating, several for gun lovers and shooting aficionados, several militia groups in the western United States, and hard-core bondage pornography.
Styer had somehow known enough about Beals to cast him as the perfect patsy. Had they met on a web site? Maybe Styer hoped they would search through the computer to find all his posts and responses, but they had neither the time nor the manpower to do that yet. And Winter doubted they could spot Styer in them. It was certain that Styer had removed any evidence of his connection to Beals when he left the rifle and the DVD he’d made. And while the fingerprint evidence wouldn’t be processed for a few hours, Winter knew Styer wouldn’t have left any. The techs had said that all of the prints looked, at first viewing, to belong to Jack Beals.
The one shot of the Gardners was all the footage there was of the family. After going over the videos that Beals had made, the only differences between them seemed to be the subjects leaving the Roundtable. Winter figured he had been selecting robbery victims, but who he had actually robbed, if he had done so, was not going to be easy to pick out. Brad would have to send fliers to sheriffs’ and police departments asking for possible victims of strong-arm robberies who had gambled at the Roundtable.
It was after seven when the doorbell rang and Brad went to the door. While Ruger barked from the backyard, Winter could hear Brad’s voice but not the person he was talking to. He heard Brad say, “Come in.” Seconds later,
