Smoke Screen (16 page)

She angrily yanked her hand away from his arm.

“—but that wasn’t his primary reason for contacting you at that particular time. The scandal hadn’t yet produced the desired result. I was on suspension, but not fired. Hallie was upset and hurt, but accepting of my explanation. Our relationship still had a fighting chance of surviving. Cobb Fordyce was reluctant to charge me with a crime.

“If things had been left alone, I would soon have been able to salvage my reputation and start rebuilding my life. I’d be damaged, but not destroyed. But that wasn’t good enough,” he continued angrily. “I had to be
eradicated.
In order to do that, Jay had to go the distance and expose the ugly truth, even if it meant admitting to being a careless host.” He made a scoffing sound to underscore his sarcasm.

“I didn’t realize I was being manipulated,” she said.

“No, you just took his story and ran with it. Minutes of airtime were devoted to how drunk I was, how irresponsible I’d been not to realize that ‘my date’ was snorting huge quantities of cocaine in combination with drinking alcohol. And who was the supplier of the cocaine? You made sure to raise that question in the minds of your viewers, without flat-out accusing me of giving it to her.

“You interviewed people who were at the party and said they saw me leading her out to the pool. A lie, by the way. It was said we swam naked. Maybe we did. I didn’t remember. I think if I’d tried to swim, I would have drowned, but…”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t swear to anything. My defense was that my memory had been wiped clean by a substance secretly put into my drink. But Jay, my bosom buddy, had advised me not to use that defense because if I did I’d look like a drug user as well as a heavy drinker.”

“You could have called me, told me your side.”

He scoffed at that, too. “And of course you would have believed me.”

No, she wouldn’t have. She knew she wouldn’t have.

As though reading her mind, he laughed with scorn, but she refused to apologize again. She’d admitted that her reporting had been slanted. She’d said she was sorry; he had rejected her apology. Time to move on.

But before proceeding, she let a few moments pass to clear the air. Then she said, “Jay wanted to halt your investigation.”

He gave a curt nod. “He knew I’d trained as a cop first. I think he always resented that, but who knows. Maybe not. Anyway, I was getting close to discovering something he didn’t want discovered.”

“Like what? The cause of the fire?”

“I knew the cause. No question. Somebody set fire to papers in a trash can.”

“As simple as that?”

“No, not quite so simple.” He hesitated, as though he would go into more detail, then changed his mind. “My investigation was incomplete and inconclusive. At the time of Jay’s party, there were outstanding questions I never received answers for. After I was ousted, Brunner went with the explanation given him, made the official ruling. People accepted it and embraced the heroes.”

“The heroes.” She ticked them off her fingers. “Pat Wickham and George McGowan.”

“Who were the two hungover but Johnny-on-the-spot detectives called to investigate Suzi Monroe’s death.”

“Cobb Fordyce.”

“The DA, who didn’t press criminal charges but publicly commended the fire chief the day my dismissal from the department was announced.”

“And Jay.”

“Who was the best person I ever knew at covering his ass.”

The picture that began to form in her mind wasn’t very pretty. “Are you saying the four of them orchestrated the thing with Suzi, even going so far as to make sure she snorted a lethal amount of cocaine, in order to stop your investigation?”

“You’re the hotshot reporter, what do you say?”

“Are you disputing that they were heroes?”

“There’s no disputing that,” he said. “Hundreds of witnesses saw them carrying people from the burning building, reentering it several times to bring people out.”

“Then why were they threatened by your investigation? Why would they go to such lengths to stop it? They wouldn’t. Unless…”

When she didn’t speak for several seconds, he prodded her. “Unless?”

Her mind was now speeding along a track. “Unless your investigation was about to expose something that happened
before
the fire.”

He sat silently, giving her time to sort it out.

“That’s it, isn’t it? You were about to discover something that wouldn’t just take the glint off their heroism but cancel it.” Talking fast now, trying to keep up with her thoughts, she said, “That would make sense. They went to all that trouble, risked incriminating themselves in Suzi Monroe’s death, to keep you from finding out something very, very bad that only the four of them knew.”

“One for all, all for one,” he said bitterly.

“Jay was about to tell me their shared secret. That night at The Wheelhouse. Wasn’t he? He was about to unburden himself, for real this time.”

“Good guess,” he said, again with that bitter tone. “He’d been given only a few weeks to live. Before he met his Maker, he wanted to clear his conscience. And who better for him to tell? You, his personal herald, who’d done such a good job for him before. Although, this time, he probably would have made you promise to withhold the story until after he died.”

“So what was it?”

“What?”

“The
secret
? What had those four done, or not done, that they didn’t want exposed? You were on the brink of finding out, right? What was it? Do you know? What do you suspect?”

He merely stared back at her, saying nothing.

“Ra-ley?”
she exclaimed with exasperation. “What questions were you asking that were never answered? What was bothering you? Something about an arrest report, right? In your conversation with Jay, when he called you about the party, you told him you needed paperwork on one of the casualties, right? You were missing something. What was it? Where was your investigation going?”

He shook his head. “Un-huh.”

“Un-huh?”

“Un-huh. I’ve told you what you need to know, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I still don’t have all the answers myself, and I don’t want to hear myself quoted on the news tomorrow morning.”

“I won’t be on the news tomorrow. I’ll be in jail, defending myself against a murder charge.”

“Oh, I have every confidence in you, Miss Prime Time. You’ll find a way to get on camera with a microphone. Even from jail.”

“Insult aside, I wouldn’t quote you. If I was able to get before a camera, I’d say my information came from an unnamed source.”

“You won’t say anything, because I’m not telling you any more than I’ve already told. It’s all speculation anyway, and you should have corroboration. Isn’t that the golden rule of sound, reliable journalism? Always have the corroboration of at least two sources?”

She heard the taunt behind the words. “You’re still pissed at me,” she said accusingly. “That’s why you’re withholding information, isn’t it?”

“It’s as good a reason as any. Don’t forget your purse.” He opened the driver’s door and stepped out.

For several seconds she remained looking at the vacant space behind the steering wheel, then she picked up her handbag and clambered out. When she dropped to the ground, the soles of her feet were pricked by stalks of dry weeds.

She didn’t realize how dark it had become until she picked her way around the hood of the truck, trying to avoid stepping on anything hurtful. Raley had the beam of an industrial-strength flashlight aimed into the toolbox attached to the back of the cab and was digging through wrenches and pliers and such.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for your car keys. I dropped them in here last night.”

“Your behavior is childish. And criminal.”

“Criminal? How’s that?” Metal clattered against metal as he continued to search amid the tools.

“Jay was silenced, wasn’t he? Just like you were silenced five years ago. Someone drugged me, like they did you, then killed Jay, like they did Suzi, and left a scapegoat that can’t remember. That’s your theory.”

“Right.”

“Then by keeping what you know or suspect to yourself, you’re impeding the investigation into Jay’s murder. That’s obstruction of justice.”

“Wrong. I’ve assisted the investigation. Why do you think I kidnapped you? I did it so you could use what I’ve told you to steer Detectives Clark and Javier toward the surviving heroes, George McGowan and Cobb Fordyce. One of them snuffed Jay.”

“George McGowan is a former cop and Fordyce is the attorney general of the state.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy.”

“Those detectives won’t listen to anything bad about Jay. He’s their idol. Without proof, they’ll never believe that Jay was involved in a conspiracy and cover-up, especially not with those other two men.”

“That’ll be a tough sell all right, but I’m betting you can convince them.”

“You could help me convince them.”

“I could.”

“But you won’t.”

“No. I won’t.” When he pulled his hand from the toolbox, her key ring was dangling from his index finger. He extended it to her; she snatched the ring. He said, “I’d like my shirt back.”

She hesitated, then dropped her handbag to the ground, rapidly undid the shirt buttons, and shrugged the garment off. He took it from her and tossed it through the open driver’s door into the cab, then reached for her windbreaker in the bed of the truck and passed it to her. “You probably should sterilize that before you wear it again. Delno’s hounds—”

She yanked it from him and threw it back where it had been. “Raley!” Her voice cracked with impatience. “Why didn’t you expose Jay and the others five years ago?”

“It took me months to figure out that I’d been duped. I think I began to see the light about the time he started fucking my fiancée. Then when I thought it all through, what could I prove? Not a goddamn thing, and moments ago you yourself cited what a commodity proof is when it comes to a criminal investigation.

“My reputation and credibility had been shot to hell. Who would believe that I’d been drugged to produce a total memory loss? All Fordyce—the legal eagle of the bunch—had to say was that he’d already heard that lame defense and dismissed it out of hand. I had nothing to work with, Britt. And besides…”

“Besides, what?”

He gnawed the inside of his cheek, then said, “I didn’t want to believe my friend would do that to me. I’m still reluctant to believe it. In my gut, I knew it, but my mind wouldn’t accept it. And every once in a while, I would almost convince myself that I was delusional. I would try and talk myself into believing that bitterness and professional jealousy had caused me to turn heroes into monsters. For five years I’ve been second-guessing myself.” His eyes refocused on her face. “Then, yesterday morning, I saw your press conference. I knew I’d been right all along.”

“Absolutely,” she said vehemently. “What happened to me is confirmation of what happened to you. The similarity of our stories can’t be denied or ignored. We’ll go to the police together.”

“Sorry. You’re on your own.” He dug into his shirt pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and handed it to her.

“What’s this?”

“Directions home. It’s a little tricky driving these back roads after dark, but if you follow these directions you won’t get lost. Eventually you’ll get to Highway Seventeen. Hook a left. That’ll take you straight into Charleston. Drive carefully.” He turned away.

“You’re a coward.”

His right foot was already in the cab of the truck, but he turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. She almost withered in the heat of his fierce expression, but held her ground. “With very little resistance from you, Jay stole your reputation, your career, and Hallie. Why didn’t you fight for her at least? Maybe that’s what she wanted you to do. For that matter, when you were being bashed in the media, why didn’t you come to me and insist on being given equal time?

“Instead you slunk away into the woods, grew a beard, and became a hermit whose only confederate is an old man with fleas and body odor. True, you had no solid proof of what these men had done to you. But I think that’s a flimsy rationalization. Shutting yourself off from the rest of the world is hardly an act of courage, Fireman Gannon. It’s giving up. It’s surrender.

“I don’t think you spend your time out there in that remote cabin plotting your revenge. Not at all. I think you spend your time licking your wounds and feeling sorry for yourself. You’ll never be vindicated because you haven’t got the nerve to try. It’s safer to stay in your lair than it is to come out and fight for the justice you deserve.”

By the time she finished, she was breathing hard with righteous indignation. Raley hadn’t moved a muscle during the diatribe. Now he withdrew his foot from the truck’s cab and slowly advanced toward her. “You think you know me?”

She set her chin defiantly. “I think I’ve got you pegged perfectly. You say you want revenge on everyone who brought about your undeserved downfall. Well, this is your chance to get it.”

He narrowed his eyes and studied her for a moment. “You know, you’re right.” Moving suddenly, he placed his hands on her shoulders, backed her into the side of the pickup, and moved in close. “Your clever mouth helped bring about my
undeserved downfall.
” He fixed his gaze on her lips, which had parted in surprise when he grabbed her. She closed them now. He smiled, revealing teeth, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression.

“Believe me, Britt Shelley, star of Channel Seven live-coverage news, in the past twenty-four hours, I’ve fantasized taking liberties with your mouth, the way it took liberties with my life five years ago. Revenge? Oh yeah. I’ve thought of a dozen ways to hush you up, and all of them were dirty.”

He leaned in, pressing her between him and the side of the truck, his mouth coming within a hairbreadth of hers. “But I wouldn’t touch you. Never. Not because I’m too much of a coward, and not because it wouldn’t give me pleasure, but because I don’t like you. Mainly though…” He paused, the green eyes shifting back up to hers. “Mainly because Jay had you first.”