Smoke Screen

CHAPTER 11

BUMBLEBEES WERE BUZZING AROUND THE BLOOMING JASMINE outside the kitchen window. When Raley stopped talking, Britt could hear them as well as she might have heard an airplane flying low above the roof. Their busy drone seemed that loud.

“When I first saw her there in the bed,” he said in a distant voice, “I realized the effect it would have on my life. It was like…like…” He searched for a simile. “Like when you see a Christmas ornament fall off the tree and shatter into a million splinters of glass?” Britt acknowledged the description with a nod.

“Well, an instant before it does, you know there’s nothing you can do to reverse the law of gravity or change the consequences of the inevitable. The damage will be done and it will be irreparable.

“When I saw her lying there dead, I knew this event would be like that to my life. I couldn’t halt the certain destruction. My life was about to shatter. Trying to put it back to the way it had been before would be hopeless.”

Britt covered her lips to keep them from trembling. She knew that feeling. “What you’re describing is exactly how I felt when I woke up and found Jay dead beside me.”

He studied her Coke can, watching a rivulet of condensation roll down its surface and puddle at the base. “To think I’d been sleeping there beside her most of the night, while she was dying.” He stopped and dropped his chin onto his chest, massaging his forehead. “I was all about saving people, for crissake.”

She almost reached across the table to touch his hand in consolation but caught herself before she did. “You weren’t sleeping, Raley. You were knocked out. And you didn’t kill her. You were innocent.”

He raised his head and looked at her with green eyes gone hard and cold again. “That’s not what you told your television audience.”

“I never said you were guilty of a crime.”

“Not in so many words, but that was the implication.”

“I’ve said I was sorry.”

“And I’ve said it’s a little late for apologies. What happened that morning ruined my life. It cost me everything. Everything,” he repeated, banging the table with his fist for emphasis and making the half-empty Coke can jump. “And your slanted reporting made certain I couldn’t salvage any of it.”

“So what do you want me to do?” She flung her arms out to her sides. “Beyond believing you and accepting what you’re telling me now as truth, what can I do to make it up to you?”

He became very still, and the look he gave her made her want to pull her windbreaker closed. But because she was no longer wearing it, all she could do was retract her arms, fold them over her chest, and endure the intensity of his gaze and what it suggested. Refusing to simper and look away, she stared back.

The legs of his chair made an irritating screech on the vinyl as he got up suddenly. He moved to the center of the room and yanked the string to turn on the ceiling fan. He returned to the kitchen but not to his chair at the table. He began to pace the narrow space between the counter and the table.

“Candy was right. My defense was thin. But I had a couple of things on the plus side. The head bartender, rented for the party, admitted that the margaritas had enough tequila in them to knock a mule on its ass as well as some Everclear just to give them an extra kick.

“And Suzi Monroe’s autopsy showed enough cocaine in her system to stop her heart. But, like you, Britt, by the time I was tested for cocaine, and any of the common date rape drugs, they had already left my system.”

“So you didn’t take Jay’s advice?”

“No, I did. When the urinalysis came back negative, it made his appeal even stronger. I’d been cleared of any drug usage. Better to keep it that way, he said.”

“What about Wickham and McGowan? They heard you say that you’d been drugged.”

“Jay told me not to worry about them. He said he’d taken care of it. I guess he did. They never brought it up again.”

“The DA never knew?”

“Oh, yeah. Candy believed me and decided Fordyce must know. She and I had a closed-door meeting with him.”

“Just the three of you?”

“And this lawyer I retained.”

“What was his name? Started with a B, didn’t it?”

“You don’t remember with good reason. I got him out of the phone book. Turns out he didn’t know his elbow from his asshole. Anyway, we met with Fordyce.”

“And?”

“He listened, but I got nowhere with him. The semen in the condoms was mine. From Fordyce’s viewpoint, it stood to reason that, if I’d had sex with Suzi Monroe, I could also have encouraged her to use the cocaine. Even though my urinalysis came back negative, that didn’t prove I hadn’t tried to get my date hopped up.”

“Fordyce said that?”

“Basically. He kept calling my memory loss an ‘alleged’ blackout. If he believed in it at all, he reasoned it was alcohol induced. Nevertheless, he promised to carefully consider the case from every angle, which is politician-speak for ‘get out of here and quit wasting my time.’

“Candy berated herself for misjudgment. She had thought my earnest testimony to Fordyce would help my position. When what it actually amounted to was a confession from me that I’d been out of my head that night and capable of doing just about anything.”

“During this time, you were furloughed from the fire department.”

“The chief had no choice, really.” He sat down at the table again. “I never blamed him. He was only doing what he thought was right for the department. I was embroiled in a scandal involving drunkenness, sex, and death by cocaine OD. Not a good image for a fireman.

“Brunner used the incident to get me taken off the investigation. He made noises about hating having to do it, but secretly I think he was glad for the excuse to be rid of me.

“But the chief didn’t fire me right away. He was waiting, just as I was, to see what Fordyce would do. Would I be charged with reckless endangerment, manslaughter, or let off the hook with nothing more than a stern reprimand and a warning to be more careful next time?”

He stopped there, and she knew what was coming next. “That’s when I came onto the scene,” she said softly. Although she knew it was useless, she tried again to defend herself. “It was a juicy story for all the reasons you just stated, Raley. One of the city’s finest caught in bed with a dead girl.”

“Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.”

“Absolutely. It was a plum that got dropped into my lap. I jumped at it.”

“You sure as hell did. I had cameras, microphones, and lights trained on me day and night. You even had your damn news vans parked outside-”

When he broke off, Britt finished the sentence for him. “Outside Hallie’s house.”

She hoped he would continue on that subject, but he didn’t. He flipped open the lid to the toothpick box, closed it, flipped it open again, then closed it with finality. She imagined he closed the subject of his fiancée just as purposefully.

He took up the story again. “I was put through extensive questioning, but in the end Fordyce didn’t have enough evidence for a criminal case, so I wasn’t indicted. On the record books, Suzi Monroe’s death went down as an accidental overdose.”

He met Britt’s gaze with angry eyes. “That probably would have been the end of it. I would never have got over it-never will-but at least if it had stopped there, the burden would have been mine alone to carry. It would have remained a private matter. But then you went on TV and made Suzi Monroe out as a victim.”

“She was.”

“She wasn’t my victim!” he said, digging his index finger into his chest. “She was a victim of the lifestyle she’d chosen. She was a chronic drug user. A party girl who swapped blow jobs for drugs. Jay had lined up dozens of her acquaintances who would corroborate that.”

He left his chair angrily, rounded it, and then braced his hands on the back of it, leaning forward as he continued to berate her. “But you didn’t show recent pictures of her wearing stiletto heels and skimpy tops with suggestive phrases spelled out in rhinestones. You showed your viewers high school graduation pictures of her.” His volume increased. “In her cap and gown. She looked like a cross between the girl next door and a Rhodes scholar.”

“I asked her mother for a photograph-”

“Her mother, who didn’t want her daughter to be remembered as a coked-out whore, who would much rather Suzi with an i be immortalized as the victim of a brute who got her drunk, fucked her, and then did nothing to stop her from overdosing on blow.”

Britt took the harsh criticism because it was warranted. Never in a million years would she admit to manipulating the story to that extent in order to impress her new employer and further her career. But in good conscience she couldn’t deny that her reporting had been biased, against Raley Gannon.

“I’ve said-”

“Spare me,” he said shortly.

He made a tight circle in the kitchen, holding his hair back off his face, a gesture that was now familiar to her. She’d seen him do it whenever he reached the limit of his frustration. It was his way of getting a grip on his temper. Whatever it took to do that she was grateful for. Angry, he frightened her.

He resumed his seat. “After Suzi was portrayed as a saint and I her despoiler, the chief had no choice but to fire me. Fordyce didn’t prosecute me for a crime, but he didn’t need to. I’d been tried and convicted by public opinion.” His eyes said, By you.

After a tense silence, she asked tentatively, “Is that when you moved out here?”

He gave a curt nod. “I rented the place for several months, then decided to buy it because I knew I’d never go back. For living a life that’s not worth shit, this is as good a place as any.”

“Where are we exactly?”

“Inland between Beaufort and Charleston.” He told her the general area, locating it for her by naming several towns.

“I never heard of them,” she said.

“That’s the point.”

“Does anyone…Do you see anyone?”

“Like who? My attorney? I paid his invoice, fired him, then never saw or heard from him again. All my friends who stuck by me?” He made a scornful sound.

“Parents?”

He looked pained and said softly, “They left Charleston, too.”

“Did they believe you?”

“Without question. I’m an only child. We’ve always had a close relationship. They would have stood by me, no matter what.”

“Would have?”

“Would have and did. But because they did, they became outcasts by association. Even their oldest friends started avoiding them. They got tired of being ostracized. Dad took early retirement from a medical supply company he helped build, and they moved to Augusta, where Mom has a sister. I hate like hell what they went through on account of me. I’ll never be able to make it up to them. Their whole lives had been spent in Charleston. They tell me they’ve made new friends, that they like it there, but…” He shrugged.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask about his fiancée, but instead she said, “How do you stand it? The isolation. Having no contact with anyone. Well, except for Delno. What do you do with your time?”

He stared at her for several moments. “I plot my revenge.” He spoke quietly, with menace, in a voice that raised gooseflesh on her arms.

She welcomed the noise from outside that signaled Delno’s return. As he stepped onto the porch, he hung a limp carcass on a hook attached to the overhang, told the hounds to lie down, pulled open the screen door, and poked his head inside. “Okay if I come in?”

“No,” Raley said.

Delno stepped inside anyway, rubbing his hands together. “Did I miss anything important?”

“Nothing you haven’t heard.”

His bare feet sounded like hooves on the vinyl when he reached the kitchen. “I’m hungry. You got anything to eat?” He checked the contents of the fridge and, with disappointment, said, “Lunch meat. You rather me fry up that rabbit?”

“I’d rather you go home, and take your stinking, flea-infested dogs with you.” Suddenly Raley got up from his chair and stalked out of the cabin.

Britt looked at Delno, who apparently had decided the lunch meat wasn’t such a bad choice after all. He folded several slices of pink processed meat into his mouth. It was such an unappetizing sight, she glanced at the screen door that had slammed shut behind Raley’s abrupt exit. “He’s still mad at me.”

“Ah, he’s just horny, is all.”

Her head came around quickly. “I beg your pardon?”

“Horny.” He closed the refrigerator door and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I seen it right off.” He dug into his ear with his little finger and extracted a wad of wax that he wiped on the bib of his overalls. “Can’t say as I’m surprised. The way you’ve been fannin’ around here in that getup.”

Attorney General Cobb Fordyce had a hard time keeping his mind on the heated discussion. The long, oval conference table had become a battlefield, opposing sides facing off across its polished surface like armies camped on either side of a DMZ. He held the neutral position at the head of the table.

Before the meeting commenced, he’d considered calling the parties involved and begging for a postponement. But it had been postponed once already. To ask for another delay would antagonize both sides. There would be speculation that his avoidance was politically motivated.

The issue was vitally important and polarizing. The legislators present were operating under a deadline. For those reasons, he’d let them assemble as scheduled even though his concentration was focused not on this topic but on another one.

After hearing the result of Jay Burgess’s autopsy this morning, that was all he could think about.

“Mr. Fordyce, the new bill on gun control needs your endorsement to get passed,” a constituent said when he could work the words in edgewise.

“It won’t matter whether you endorse it or not, Mr. Attorney General,” one of his opponents said with confidence, which to Fordyce seemed feigned. “As this bill now reads, this legislature will not vote it into law.”

“Then why are you trying so earnestly to persuade him not to endorse it?” one from the other side fired back.

Cobb stood up. “Gentlemen, let’s take a break before blood is shed over a gun-control bill. Wouldn’t that be ironic?” He flashed his vote-winning smile and received the expected chuckles. “Help yourselves to water, coffee. Those chocolate chip cookies are worth the calories. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He hoped none of them would follow him into the men’s restroom, and none did. He used the urinal, feeling obliged to after having interrupted the meeting under that pretext. At the washbasin, he held his hands under the cold-water tap, making certain that his starched cuffs, with the state seal cuff links, didn’t get wet.

So, he thought.

News that Jay Burgess had been murdered would blanket the state today. It would be blared from every newspaper headline and media broadcast. No one could avoid hearing about it, even if they wanted to.

When he’d arrived at his office this morning, his secretary had told him, with inappropriate excitement, that she’d heard it on CNN.

“You were mentioned, sir,” she’d said. “They showed that famous picture of the four of you with the fire blazing in the background.”

That fucking photograph. That fucking fire.

Since that day, there had been many times that Cobb wished he could roll back the clock, that he had an opportunity to opt against going to the meeting that had placed him at the police station that particular day at that particular time. On any other day, he would have been in his office at the courthouse, or on his way home. That day had been an exception, and he had rued it ever since.

But there had been just as many times-possibly even more-that he was grateful for the instant fame he’d received as a consequence of the fire. His political career would eventually have been launched, probably with success. But not with the velocity with which it had been. And he’d been awfully impatient to experience that soar to the AG’s office, hadn’t he?

He’d benefited from the fire, and consequently from the deaths of the seven people who’d perished in it. And, in the depths of his soul, where one must be brutally honest, he wasn’t all that sorry about it. What kind of man did that make him?

But thinking in those terms was an exercise in futility. Fate was fate, and there was no cheating it. When it was a person’s time to go, it was his time to go. He and his ambition were of infinitesimal significance when gauged against cosmic forces or, if one were religious, predestination.

That was what he told himself. That was the credo that allowed him to sleep nights. He’d made his peace with it. He could live with it, if everybody else could, if everybody else could just forget about the fire and move on.

It seemed, however, that it would never be extinguished. If Jay Burgess had gone out quietly, dying gracefully of cancer…

But, no, that wasn’t Jay’s style, was it?

Now an investigation was under way, the same excitement surrounding it as when Patrick Wickham was killed. Wickham’s assailant had never been identified, or caught. Eventually his murder ceased to be the lead story and then faded until it was no longer a story at all.

After honoring his fellow hero at his funeral, as was only proper, Cobb had let Wickham’s murder gradually fade from the voting public’s attention. As a candidate to become the chief law enforcement officer of the state, he could have spoon-fed the voters daily reminders of the policeman’s bloody slaying and used it to strengthen his campaign. He could have encouraged a full-fledged investigation until the cop killer was caught and brought to justice.

But he hadn’t. He couldn’t.

Staring at himself in the mirror above the basin where the cold water continued to splash over his hands, he saw reflected back at him a reasonably handsome face, graying temples, a physique kept trim with daily workouts. A face that bespoke clean living and integrity. Faithful husband, good father, churchgoer. That was what the public saw, too. A man who looked his role and inspired confidence in the judicial system, freedom and justice for all. But then people saw only what was exposed to them, didn’t they?

He doubted anyone hearing the circumstances surrounding Jay Burgess’s death would look beyond what appeared to be obvious: his philandering had caught up with him and he’d been smothered with his own pillow by a scorned woman.

Would anyone, he wondered, recall a man named Raley Gannon and the accusations made against him five years ago?

Avoiding his own eyes in the mirror, Attorney General Cobb Fordyce bent over the sink and splashed cold water onto his face.

Pat Wickham, Jr., worked up his courage and punched in the telephone number.

“ Conway Construction.”

“Is, uh, is George there?”

“I’m sorry. He’s out until later this afternoon.”

“Oh.” Pat’s forehead broke out in sweat. He blotted it with his folded pocket handkerchief.

“Is there a message I can give him?”

“Uh, no. I’ll try back later.”

Pat hung up quickly and peered over the wall of his cubicle, on the lookout for other officers, desk jockeys like him. His beat was a computer. He was a glorified file clerk. Guns scared him. Criminals revolted him. He carried a badge, but he wasn’t cut out to be a policeman. He’d never wanted to be, and he looked upon the next twenty-two years before he could retire as a sentence he must serve.

The coast being clear, Pat dialed a cell phone number. The phone rang three times before it was answered with a brusque hello.

“George? Pat Wickham.”

He could sense George McGowan’s displeasure, and for a moment he thought the other man would hang up on him. But then he grumbled, “Hold on.”

Pat heard a muffled conversation where George excused himself, followed by several seconds of silence while he sought privacy. Then, “How’d you get this number?”

“I’m a cop.”

A sound of derision, then, “I’m in the middle of an important meeting. My father-in-law is about to wrap up a contract to build the new athletic complex. You couldn’t have called at a worse time.”

“We need to talk about Jay.”

“Fuck we do,” George said under his breath.

“They know how he was murdered.”

“I heard.”

“That newswoman is saying she was given a date rape drug.”

“Heard that, too.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

Pat estimated that George McGowan outweighed him by seventy-five pounds. But at that moment, he wished for the physical strength to match his anger. He’d bash the other man’s beefy head into the wall for being so obtuse.

“Aren’t you worried?”

“Yeah, I’m worried. I had to play eighteen holes of golf and lose, then suffer through a two-hour lunch followed by a ninety-minute sales pitch. After all that, if this contract negotiation goes south, Les is going to blame me for interrupting his closing sales pitch to take this call.”

Pat saw through the other man’s bluster. George was just as concerned over their situation as he was. “Now Britt Shelley has gone missing.”

“Missing? What do you mean, missing?”

“Just what I said,” Pat replied irritably. “She wasn’t at home when Clark and Javier went to serve the warrant. She’s not at the TV station. She hasn’t been seen since yesterday afternoon. There’s an APB out on her car.”

George silently digested all that, then asked, “What do you expect me to do about it? Go beating the bushes looking for her?”

“What do you think it means, her vanishing like that?”

“How the hell should I know, Pat? First thing that springs to mind is that she didn’t want to be arrested.”

There was an implied duh at the end of that, which Pat ignored. “How much do you think Jay told her?”

In a different tone, one rife with uncertainty, George said, “I don’t know.”

The other man’s anxiety increased Pat’s own. “Oh, Jesus.”

“For crissake, will you get a grip? Don’t fall apart.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Nothing. We’re going to do nothing except act as though everything is normal. Do nothing, Pat, you understand me?”

Pat resented the other man’s bullying tone. Who did he think he was, talking down to him like that? He, who everybody knew was his father-in-law’s whipping boy. He, who had a wife with a leg problem-she couldn’t keep them closed.

George had been one of Pat Sr.’s best friends when they were fellow police officers. By extension, he became a family friend and was often a guest at their house for dinner. Pat could remember George socking him playfully on the arm, teasing him about girls, talking to him about baseball, and playing video games with him. He was loud and rambunctious and fun.

That was before he married Miranda Conway. Before he and Pat Sr. became heroes. Before the fire.

After that, they didn’t see much of George McGowan around the Wickham household.

“I gotta go now,” George said. “And don’t call me again. The less contact we have, the better. You got that?”

He hung up before Pat could counter. Pat’s palm was damp as he replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. He pretended to be studying the file on his computer screen in case another officer happened by.

The call to George hadn’t allayed his nervousness, as hoped, but escalated it. The big man’s bravado was phony. Pat would bet that if you scratched the surface of George McGowan’s brawny body, you’d find a coward as fearful as he was.

Like him, George was afraid that someone would trace Jay Burgess’s murder back to the police station fire. Would anyone make that connection? Was there any suspicion that the two events were related?

Was anyone watching him?

Pat Wickham, Jr., often wished he had eyes in the back of his head.

And not just at work.