Smoke Screen

CHAPTER 5

AT FIRST, THE BEARD THREW HER OFF. THEN, LOOKING PAST it, she recognized the face. Putting a name to it took a moment longer, but finally one emerged from distant memory. Gannon. Raley Gannon.

Identifying him didn’t allay her fear. In fact, when he extended his hand toward her, she recoiled, which caused him to frown. He hesitated as though waiting to see just how spooked she was, then reached around to the back of her head, untied the gag, and removed it.

She moistened her lips. Or tried. Her tongue and mouth were dry. When she tried to speak, her voice was a croak. “Have you lost your mind?”

Saying nothing, he turned his back on her. With his sneaker, he moved aside a small black duffel bag, which must have been what she’d heard drop after he carried her inside. Walking beneath the ceiling fan, he yanked on a string hanging from it. The motor hummed, the blades began to turn, stirring the warm air and cooling it slightly.

They were in what appeared to be a cabin with a living area and kitchen combined into one room. Britt assumed that the open interior doorway led to a bedroom, but it was dark beyond the door. The furniture was old and mismatched, but the place was clean and neat. All the windows were opened. Insects batted against the screens, trying to fly into the light. Beyond the screens, the darkness was absolute, impenetrable, unrelieved by moonlight or man-made lights that she could see.

She was still wearing the camisole and boxer shorts she had gone to bed in, but she also had on a nylon windbreaker that belonged to her. The last time she’d seen it, it had been hanging in her closet. He must have put it on her while she was unconscious.

He took a bottle of water from a vintage refrigerator, uncapped it, and drank thirstily, emptying the entire bottle, which he then tossed into the trash can beneath the sink.

He glanced at her, then got another bottle of water from the fridge and uncapped it as he walked across the room. The ceiling fan fluttered his hair, causing her to notice another distinctive change in his appearance. He used to wear his hair short, almost in a military cut. Now it fell an inch past his collar and over his ears to blend into the beard. She detected a few touches of gray among the wavy, dark strands.

He extended the water bottle toward her mouth.

“You’ll have to untie my hands.”

“Fat chance.”

“I can’t-”

“You thirsty or not?” He pressed the top of the plastic bottle against her lips. She took it, gulping until the water began flooding her mouth. She tilted her head back to signal she was finished.

He stopped pouring, but not soon enough. Water dribbled over her chin and onto her chest. Some trickled from the lip of the bottle and splashed onto her bare thigh. She looked down at the spot where several drops beaded on her skin. When she looked back up, she caught him staring at that spot, too. Then his eyes connected with hers.

He moved so quickly, she jumped. “Will you relax?” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You already have.”

He reached toward the back of her head again and dug his fingers into her hair, then tentatively moved them along her scalp until she winced. “You’ve got a goose egg.”

“What did you expect?”

“I expected you to have a goose egg. Because you didn’t do what I told you to do. If you’d been quiet and cooperative, I wouldn’t have had to clip you.”

She started to say that she would be sure to remember that the next time an intruder snatched her from her bed and carried her off in the middle of the night. But she held her tongue.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that Raley Gannon had kidnapped her two days after she woke up with Jay Burgess lying dead beside her. She didn’t know how the two events were connected, but she knew they must be, and all the implications were frightening.

He disappeared through the darkened doorway. A light came on in the adjacent room. She heard him rustling around, opening doors and closing them, and soon he returned with a bottle of pills. He shook out two tablets and extended them to her. “Take these.”

“What are they?”

“Ibuprofen.” He turned the bottle so she could read the label. “Generic.”

“I’m not taking them.”

“How come? Afraid that I switched them with a date rape drug?”

She looked up into his face, and it was remarkable how much he had aged since the last time she’d seen him. It was evidenced by more than just a few gray hairs. His skin was dark from sun exposure. His beard and mustache were as black as any pirate’s and concealed his lips, which she imagined were firmly set and slow to smile.

But what really added years were his eyes. Not only were there pronounced lines radiating from the corners of them but the irises themselves had become hard and cold, as if a pond that in summer was placid and green had now frozen over.

Or maybe they’d always been that way. After all, she’d seen him only a few times and from a distance as he’d dodged reporters. She’d really known him only as the blurred figure fleeing the video camera, as the subject of a hot news story.

If it was retribution he was after, she would just as soon get it over with. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Take a wild guess.”

“Jay Burgess.”

“Go to the head of the class.”

Jay’s death had prompted this…this whatever it was. Jay’s death had brought Raley Gannon out of obscurity. He had left Charleston five years ago, never to be heard of again. At least not by her.

Possibly he and Jay had stayed in touch. Jay had never mentioned him, though, and it had never occurred to her to ask him about Raley Gannon. As soon as he was no longer news, she’d forgotten about him.

He bounced the tablets in his palm. “It’s going to be a long, uncomfortable night for you. Take the pills.”

She hesitated only a second, then opened her mouth.

“No way in hell am I going to let you bite me. Stick out your tongue.”

She did. He set the tablets on her tongue, then pressed the water bottle against her lips again. He poured more slowly, she swallowed more easily, until she’d drained the bottle. He turned and walked into the kitchen to throw away the empty bottle.

“Did you…” She stumbled over the words, tried again. “Did you have anything to do with what happened to Jay and me night before last?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Did you?”

On his way back, he dragged a chair from the small dining table and placed it no more than two feet away from the one in which she was sitting. Straddling it backward, he folded his arms over the back of it. “You tell me.”

Britt Shelley, Miss Calm, Cool, and Collected when in front of a television camera, was remarkably composed facing her kidnapper, too. Oh, she was afraid, no doubt about that. But she was putting up a good front. He had to give her high marks for not going hysterical the moment she recognized him, which she’d done almost immediately. Although his appearance had changed, she’d placed him. His face anyway.

“Do you remember my name?”

She nodded.

“You should.”

It was she who had hammered the last nail into the coffin of his reputation. She’d sealed his fate but good. No telling how many other reputations she had demolished since then. Should he be flattered that she remembered him out of so many? Probably not. Maybe she never forgot the faces and names of the people she destroyed.

“I remember you, Mr. Gannon.”

“From five years ago. But your memory can’t account for hours of time night before last. Or so you say.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Sounds like an awfully convenient case of amnesia.”

He could see that she was plotting the best way to handle him. He could almost follow her thought processes as she considered one tactic and then discarded it in favor of another.

She said, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, if you’ll take the tape off my hands and feet.”

So, she’d decided to try to bargain. “No deal. Tell me what happened in Jay’s place that night.”

“If you’ll remove-”

“Tell me what happened in Jay’s place that night.”

“Don’t you think I wish I could?”

So much for her bargaining scheme. It gave way to shouting and frustration. Fear, maybe. He saw a tear pick up light in the corner of her eye, which left him unmoved. He’d been looking for it, expecting it.

“You could have saved yourself the dramatic kidnapping, Mr. Gannon. And the gasoline to and from Charleston, and the jail time you’re going to serve for this, because it’s going to yield nothing. I’m blank, completely blank on what happened after Jay and I got to his town house.”

She looked at him imploringly, tilting her head at an angle that looked defenseless, blinking until the tear slipped over her lower lid and rolled down her cheek. “Free my hands and feet. Please.”

Bargaining to frustration to tearful appeal in under sixty seconds. The lady had talent. “No.”

“I’ll tell you anything I can,” she said. “I promise. But I’m very uncomfortable. Please.”

“No.”

She nodded toward his open front door. “Where would I go? I don’t even know where I am.”

“Tell me what happened at Jay’s place.”

Her head dropped forward, sending a curtain of pale hair over each shoulder. She remained that way for several seconds, then raised her head and said emphatically, “I can’t remember.”

Defiance now. She must have read a how-to book. “Tell me what you do remember.”

For a full minute, maybe more, they stared across the narrow space separating them. In person, with her face clean and her hair loose, she looked younger than she did on TV. Smaller, too. Her eyes were blue, her gaze steady and guileless, which he knew she must use to her advantage in front of the camera as well as away from it.

The earnestness in her gaze didn’t work on him, though. He was immune. She must have sensed that, because she was the first to relent. She didn’t break their stare, but she took a swift little breath. “I arrived…No, let me back up. I went to The Wheelhouse at Jay’s invitation.”

She told him that Jay had called her earlier that day, inviting her to join him for a drink, saying he needed to talk to her about something. “He didn’t say what. Only that it was important.”

She spoke without emotion, almost by rote. He figured she’d been over this with the police a dozen times already.

“It wasn’t like he was asking me for a date,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him in months. Hadn’t talked to him on the telephone. This was the first contact we’d had in a long time. I said, ‘Sure, that would be great.’ He said seven o’clock. I arrived right on time.” She paused for a breath, then asked, “Have you ever been to The Wheelhouse?”

“This evening.”

“This evening? You stopped off for a drink before breaking into my house and kidnapping me? Although I suppose felony could be thirsty work.”

Ignoring that, he said, “The Wheelhouse didn’t open for business until after I’d left Charleston, so I’d never been there. I wanted to see the layout of the place.”

“What for?”

“Which table did you sit at?”

“Far corner.”

“Right-hand side as you enter? By the window?”

She shook her head. “Left-hand side.”

“Okay.”

While he was fixing that image in his head, she asked, “How did you know where I lived?”

“I followed you there.”

“Today?”

“Five years ago.”

He could tell that made her uneasy. She shifted slightly in her seat but didn’t comment.

“I knew you’d have an alarm system,” he went on. “I also knew that the back door going into the kitchen is probably the one you most frequently use and figured that it would have a delay on it. So I picked the lock.”

“You know how to pick locks?”

“The alarm started beeping. I counted on having at least a minute and a half before the actual alarm went off. Most people set the delay for even longer, but I figured I had at least ninety seconds to get you to punch in the code. I also figured that a single woman, living alone, would have a remote-control panel within reach of her bed.”

“How did you know I was single and living alone?”

“Jay never dated married women.”

She left that alone, saying instead, “Ninety seconds for you to find my bedroom and force me to turn off the alarm. That’s not much time. You were awfully sure of my compliance.”

“I counted on you being scared.”

“I was. Out of my wits.”

“So my hunch was right.”

“What if I hadn’t been scared?” she asked. “What if I’d had a gun at my bedside instead of a remote? I could have killed you.”

He glanced around his cabin for effect, then came back to her. “I don’t have anything to lose.”

That, too, made her uneasy. Her eyes drifted away, then back. “Can’t you please release my feet? Just my feet?”

He shook his head.

“They’re numb.”

“According to the newspaper,” he said, “The Wheelhouse was crowded that night.”

After a mutinous pause, which didn’t faze him, she continued, describing to him the usual happy-hour bar scene. “The place was packed, but I spotted Jay as soon as I came in. I went-”

“Wait. Were there people at the bar? That’s where I sat today. There are twenty or more barstools.”

“People were standing three deep behind the stools.”

“How many bartenders?”

“I didn’t count.”

“How many cocktail waitresses?”

“A few. Several. Four, five, half a dozen. I don’t know.”

“But all of them were busy.”

“Extremely. There was noisy chatter, loud music, people-”

“Did you ask a hostess if Jay was there yet?”

“There wasn’t anyone at the hostess stand. I told you I spotted him.”

“So you didn’t announce your arrival in any way?”

“No.”

“Did anyone approach you?”

“No.”

“Did you attract anyone’s notice?”

“No.”

He looked her straight in the eye, then deliberately dropped his gaze to her chest, and lower, to her bare thighs. He let his eyes linger there for a noticeable time before lifting them back to her face and silently communicating that he found it hard to believe no one had noticed her.

She squirmed under his gaze. “Look, I’ve been over this time and again with the police. Nothing unusual happened. Nothing.”

“You’re on TV every day. Nobody recognized you? You didn’t make eye contact with anyone besides Jay?”

She closed her eyes as though resetting the scene in her mind and trying to squeeze out a memory. “I think maybe…maybe…” She opened her eyes but made a small sound of frustration. “Possibly I made eye contact with a man at the bar, but I don’t know if I’m remembering or imagining.”

“Maybe when you’re not trying so hard it will come back to you.” He studied her for several moments, then said softly, “Unless this loss of memory thing is all a hoax and you remember everything.”

If her feet hadn’t been secured, he thought she would have launched herself out of the chair and straight at him. Her face was flushed with so much anger, he thought she might try to attack him in spite of being hobbled. “Why would I fabricate a memory loss, Mr. Gannon?”

“Well, one good reason would be that you woke up next to a dead guy, and you’re covering your ass.”

“Nothing I did caused Jay to die.”

“Let’s say the sex got rowdy or kinky.”

“Let’s not.”

“Before you knew it, your lover wasn’t moving. Or you had a lovers’ tiff that turned ugly.”

“We weren’t-”

“Maybe Jay went into cardiac arrest, which freaked you out, and you were useless to try and help him. Anything’s possible. You were both drunk on scotch-that was in the newspaper, too-maybe scotch isn’t your drink. It makes you wild, irrational, violent. You-”

“None of that happened!”

“How do you know if you can’t remember?”

“I would remember if I’d killed a man accidentally or otherwise.”

“Are you sure?”

The taunt only maddened her more. “I’ve had it with this. And with you. Get this tape off me!” she yelled.

“You can scream all you want, nobody is going to hear you, and you’ll only make that golden throat of yours hoarse. You wouldn’t want that to happen.”

Blue eyes blazed at him. “I’m going to see you in prison for this. I can’t wait to cover your trial. I’ll be there with a microphone and camera the day they lock you up.”

“Do you know how Jay died?”

“No!”

“Did you kill him?”

“No!”

“Did you fuck him?”