Smoke Screen (18 page)

“I’m not on an interstate. I’m in the boondocks, and the roads aren’t great. Do you know where Ye…Ye…”

“Yemassee?”

“Yes, this says I’ll go through there.”

“What says?”

“Long story. From there I take…uh, River Road to Highway Seventeen.”

“Okay, okay, get here as soon as you can. I’ll go to your house and wait for you there. When you arrive, do not say a word unless you’ve cleared it with me. Do you understand, Ms. Shelley? Not a single word.”

“I understand, but I have a lot to tell. Primarily, that Jay’s murder is linked to the fire.”

“The fire?”

“The police station fire five years ago.”

“He was one of the heroes. Everybody knows that.”

“Yes, but there’s much more to it. Jay was—”

The call ended abruptly.

Johnson looked at Smith, who shrugged and said, “Sounds like her cell went dead.”

They heard Alexander redial twice, but both calls went automatically to voice mail. With a muttered “Damn,” he hung up.

Smith reached for his cell and punched in a number that no one knew except him and Johnson. As soon as it was answered he said, “Her lawyer just called her. We’ve got a recording.”

Without further ado, Johnson started playing back the recording.

Their employer listened to it straight through, then when it ended, said, “She remembers that Jay told her something about the fire. Her memory wasn’t totally wiped clean.”

A bit defensively, Smith said, “Sometimes the amnesia is temporary. Each person reacts differently to the drug.”

“In hindsight, I should have had you kill her, too. You could have made it appear like a murder-suicide. But it’s too late for seconding-guessing, isn’t it? However…”

Apparently their boss’s mental gears were cranking.

“She ran, and that’s actually to our advantage. It makes her appear criminal, capable of killing her ex-lover. Also desperate and liable to say just about anything to save her own skin. If she starts casting aspersions on Jay Burgess and his heroism, who will listen? Or, better yet…”

Johnson and Smith could see it coming: Better yet was that Britt Shelley never have an opportunity to say anything to anyone, sparing their retainer more worry and trouble.

They left the hand of gin rummy unfinished, happy to have something more stimulating to do.

Raley noticed that his truck was almost out of gas. It would be an annoyance to stop and fill up but even more of an inconvenience for the tank to run dry between here and his cabin.

He wheeled into the first service station he came to, got out, and walked up to a small structure to prepay. The cashier conducted the transaction through a window with metal bars. Signs were posted saying that security cameras were in place, but Raley seriously doubted that. One thing he didn’t doubt was that a loaded shotgun was underneath the counter, out of sight but handy.

He returned to the pump and fit the nozzle into his gas tank. As he did so, he noticed Britt’s windbreaker lying in the bed of his pickup, where she’d angrily pitched it. Seeing it gave him a twinge of remorse, although it shouldn’t have. Admittedly, he’d acted like a bastard most of the time they’d been together, but she deserved no better from him.

As soon as she got back to Charleston, she would be in the limelight, and that was where she thrived, wasn’t it? Perhaps not immediately, but soon enough, she would be cleared of all suspicion regarding Jay’s murder. She would have her career-making story. He had filled in the critical elements that had been missing from it, and had added a touch of melodrama as well. So while she might not feel too kindly toward him at this moment, she would soon be thanking him.

As the tank continued to fill, he gazed in the direction of the city. He was homesick for it, for movie theaters, for restaurants that served shrimp and grits and crab cakes, for ball games, for long Sunday jogs along the harbor.

Mostly, though, he missed his work, which he’d loved.

Maybe he’d loved it even more than he’d loved Hallie. That was a tough confession, but in all honesty, he regretted being robbed of his career more than he regretted losing her.

He’d come to realize that, if she had loved him as much as she claimed, she wouldn’t have doubted him. Once he’d admitted to responding to Suzi Monroe’s initial flirtation, Hallie should have accepted as absolute truth everything else he told her, just as his parents had. She should have believed him without hesitation or qualification.

But she hadn’t. If she had, she wouldn’t have let him go so easily. And if he’d loved her as much as he’d thought he did, he wouldn’t have retreated, leaving her free for Jay to grab.

You’re a coward.

He could see where Britt might think him a coward. But it wasn’t courage he’d lacked, it was backup. A smart man didn’t barge ahead, slinging accusations against people in authority, unless he had proof. If you didn’t have solid proof, the next best thing was a witness who could corroborate your allegations.

Now, after waiting for five long years, he finally had one.

To Britt it might appear that he had armed her, then sent her to the front to fight his battle for him, not knowing that he planned to wage his own war from behind the lines. That was the only way this conflict could be won, because at this point he wasn’t even sure which of the two surviving heroes had conspired to have Jay killed.

Both McGowan and Fordyce had been in on the plot to stop his arson investigation. Had one acted singly to have Jay silenced, or were they in cahoots? One thing was certain: Neither was the hero he pretended to be.

Raley would happily let Britt receive all the credit for exposing them, their deceit, and their crimes. All he wanted was exoneration. He wanted his life back.

Of course, he didn’t delude himself. It wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. Each of these men had much to lose, and neither would go down without a struggle. Each also had the resources to fight long and fight dirty.

Whoever was responsible for Jay’s murder was accustomed to subterfuge, and was good at it. He must have been keeping a close eye on Jay, afraid that, in light of his recent diagnosis, he might feel compelled to confess before dying. Britt had said that Jay called her earlier that same day to make their date. Which meant a plan to kill him and leave her the only viable suspect had been quickly plotted and implemented. One or the pair of them had moved with swiftness and surety.

As soon as Britt began raising questions about the fire, the so-called heroes of it would come under scrutiny by the public as well as by the police. One or both would begin to squirm, and Raley planned to be watching to see who squirmed the most, who was the most desperate to defend himself against nasty allegations, and who was most willing to give up the answers that Raley didn’t yet have about the fire.

He intended to get them. He’d thought of little else these past five years. Now, because of Jay’s death and Britt’s involvement, he could finish the job without the fear of being disbelieved or discredited. He supposed he had Jay to thank for that.

That was all he had to thank Jay for. Jay, Pat Wickham, Cobb Fordyce, and George McGowan. The first two were out of it. The other two were about to experience the kind of public scourging Raley had received.

They would become the focus of local media. Britt would see to that. Everything they said and did would be reported. The louder they protested, the more pressure she would apply. She would be in her element.

The gas nozzle shut off. Raley replaced it on the pump and screwed the cap back onto his tank. He waved a thanks to the watchful, taciturn man in the barred window. Then, lifting the windbreaker out of the bed of the pickup, he took it into the cab with him and tossed it on the passenger seat along with his chambray shirt.

He pulled away from the station, but as he was about to turn onto the road that would take him home, he braked instead and let the engine idle while he wiped beads of sweat off his forehead and stared at the windbreaker. It didn’t smell like hound dog. He’d only told her one had slept on it to rile her. It smelled like her.

She would probably be arrested and booked for Jay’s murder immediately. But it wouldn’t be long before she would play the card he’d given her. When she did, she’d make instant enemies of two powerful men.

She would be all right, though. Neither Fordyce nor McGowan was crazy enough to hurt her, not while she was standing in the glare of television lights and the attention of every person in South Carolina was on her. Her celebrity would protect her. Besides, she would be in police custody.

But, God, that woman was reckless when it came to getting a good story. In her determination to nail it, would she throw caution to the wind, lose all perspective and good common sense?

Looking back in the direction from which he’d come, he wondered if he’d been clear on the directions he’d given her. Had he told her not to turn left until she crossed the double railroad tracks? If she turned left after crossing only the single track, she could drive for miles before realizing her mistake.

Hell, had he made that clear? When writing down the directions this morning, he’d been distracted by thoughts of her sleeping in his bed, curled up on her side, knees pulled to her chest, so the directions might not have been as detailed as they should have been.

He shot a glance down at the windbreaker, then with a heartfelt expletive, turned the pickup onto the narrow road in the direction from which he’d come and practically stood on the accelerator.

“Damn him!”

Her cell phone had been in her possession all along.

Fifteen minutes after her phone battery ran out, abruptly ending her conversation with Bill Alexander, she was still seething. She’d discovered her ringing cell phone in a zippered compartment of her handbag that she never used. Gullibly, she’d believed Raley Gannon when he’d told her he left her phone behind.

She wondered how many other fibs he’d told her, how many half-truths.

If they came so easily to him, and he was able to tell them so convincingly, could she believe his story about Suzi Monroe’s death? He’d heard her say during her press conference that she’d been given a date rape drug that had wiped clean her memory of her night with Jay. Was it even remotely possible that Raley had concocted a similar scenario for his own vindication?

A tale like that would also implicate Jay Burgess in all sorts of misdeeds, and it was clear that Raley bore a grudge toward his former best friend. In one fell swoop, he could clear himself and destroy Jay Burgess’s heroic legacy.

Was she being taken in?

If so, Raley was a great liar, because she believed everything he’d told her. She also gave credence to his story because he had withheld some of it. Based on experience, she knew that people with the most valuable information were often the ones most reluctant to impart it. He knew more about the fire, its origin, or
something
that he was withholding.

Sooner or later, he would have to give up everything he knew or speculated, because she had no intention of letting him sulk out there in the woods while she took on the CPD, Fordyce, and McGowan all by herself.

After she shared the story with Detectives Clark and Javier, someone would be dispatched to find Raley Gannon and bring him in for serious questioning. The fire chief would be clamoring to talk to him, too. Raley would be forced to divulge what he knew, and Britt Shelley would be on the scene to cover the story as it unfolded.

Jay had promised her a groundbreaking story, and he’d been true to his word. It troubled her, though, that the charmer she’d known and the deceiver Raley had described were the same man. If everything Raley had told her was the truth, and she believed it was, then Jay had sacrificed a girl’s life, his lifelong friendship with Raley, and even his own honor as a police officer. He’d forfeited all that to protect whatever it was that Raley had been about to discover, something so terrible that Jay felt he must confess it in order to die in peace.

Unfortunately, his killer hadn’t allowed him to unburden his conscience.

Britt was so deep in thought, she didn’t realize she was lost until her headlights shone on the city limits sign of a wide-spot-in-the-road town she’d never heard of that wasn’t in Raley’s directions. Pulling onto the shoulder, she consulted his handwritten notes.

“Double
railroad tracks?” The railroad tracks where she’d taken a left turn were fifteen miles behind her. “Would have been nice if you’d emphasized that, Gannon,” she muttered as she made a U-turn. Of course he
had
written “double railroad tracks,” she just hadn’t read the directions carefully enough. But still…This had cost her a lot of time. Bill Alexander would be having a fit.

Her windshield was spattered with dead bugs. Twice she’d caught the glowing topaz eyes of deer in her headlights. Fortunately they’d stayed in the underbrush at the side of the road and hadn’t dashed out in front of her car. But she’d slowed down anyway.

The backtracking cost her almost half an hour. As her car bumped over the all-important double railroad tracks, she cursed Raley Gannon once again and made the correct turn.

“Go a quarter mile, then watch for a sharp right,” she read aloud from the paper she now held against the steering wheel in her line of sight to avoid making another mistake. “Okeydokey. Here we are,” she said as she found the turn.

The road was dark. The branches of trees on both sides spanned it to form a canopy. It meandered through the woods, crossing swampy areas and creeks, tributaries of the major rivers, she supposed. She really should explore this area of wild beauty. She would do that.

If she didn’t go to prison, she thought grimly.

Yes, definitely. Getting back to nature would be on her things-to-do list. But she wouldn’t venture into this low country wilderness without a guide. Not without someone who knew their way around.