Smoke and Mirrors

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.”