Smoke Screen (13 page)

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.

S
ITTING ON THE TREE STUMP AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS,
Raley watched Delno take the dead rabbit and his trio of hounds and tromp off in the direction of his cabin. The dense foliage seemed to swallow him whole and left nothing to indicate his passage except a cantankerous, territorial blue jay.

Around Raley’s cabin, hardwoods fraternized with evergreens. In the spring, blooming trees and wild bushes created splashes of white and pastel. Even in the dead of winter, the palmettos and live oaks stayed green, giving the illusion of eternal summer.

The place could be really pretty, if one had a mind to spruce up the cabin, modernize the kitchen and bathroom, furnish it properly, add some amenities, some homeyness, some more sweet potato vines.

Impatient with himself, Raley pushed aside the daydream and the pleasing images it conjured.

He’d used his irritation with Delno as an excuse to get out of the cabin for a while. But even if Delno hadn’t interrupted, Raley would have fabricated a reason to go outside. He was used to living without air-conditioning. The summer heat and humidity no longer bothered him. Except today. Today the air within the four walls of the cabin had been stifling.

But the atmosphere couldn’t be blamed for his claustrophobia any more than Delno could. It was talking about the fire, and Suzi Monroe’s death, and all the crap that followed that had caused anger and resentment to build inside his chest until it became so constricted he could no longer breathe.

And then there was Britt Shelley.

He’d had to take a breather from her, too. When she’d asked what she could do to make up for all the ills she’d imposed on him, several possibilities had sprung immediately to mind. All of them tantalizing. All of them prohibited.

Last night, when he forced her to sleep beside him, he’d done it to make her uncertain and uncomfortable. Call it payback for all the grief she’d caused him.

But in all honesty, he’d also done it because he couldn’t resist lying down with a woman with whom he’d had a conversation—even a hostile one—that went beyond “How much?” or “I’ll be gone in the morning. This is just for tonight.” And usually he left long before morning.

Now, he thought sleeping beside Britt had probably been a gross strategic error. While the tactic had served its original purpose, it had also inflamed his imagination.

But skulking outside was taking a coward’s way out to avoid her, wasn’t it? He forced himself off the stump, across his yard, and up the steps. He went inside.

She was standing in the dead center of the room, arms at her sides, as though she’d been ordered to wait there for his return. She was backlighted by the western sun coming through the kitchen window. The ceiling fan caused strands of hair to lift and fall around her face in an airy dance.

She said, “It’s getting late. I should go back now.”

“Right.” He’d talked through all the morning hours and into the afternoon. Only now did he realize that most of the day was gone.

Self-consciously she tugged on the hem of the chambray shirt. It fell to midthigh on her. The sleeves had been rolled to her elbows. She’d buttoned all but the collar button. “I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed this. I couldn’t find my windbreaker.”

It was hotter inside than out, so she hadn’t put on his shirt because she’d caught a chill. More likely she’d finally realized how abbreviated her sleeping attire was. It wasn’t a slinky see-through negligee, all the critical parts were covered, but by lightweight fabric that clung and looked like it would dissolve if touched. Last night, he’d done the gentlemanly thing by putting the windbreaker on her before carrying her from her house.

“Your windbreaker is on the ground out by the truck,” he said. “I think one of the hounds used it for a pallet.”

“It’s okay.”

“Are you ready?”

She nodded.

“Need the bathroom before we head out?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll be right with you.”

In the bedroom, he changed out of yesterday’s shirt and put on a fresh one, realizing as he reached into his tiny closet that she must have recently rifled through it to get the shirt. He wondered why she’d chosen the chambray. It was old and soft from being washed so many times. Maybe it looked comfortable. Maybe she thought it would fit her better than the others. Maybe she thought the rest of his shirts were ugly.

He used the toilet, washed his hands, and was about to leave the bathroom when he decided to brush his teeth. He noted that the cap on the tube of toothpaste had been replaced since he’d used it that morning. Her doing, because he had a bad habit of leaving it uncapped.

She had cleaned her mouth, too. For some reason, knowing that stirred him.

He turned off the fan and locked the cabin door. She had already climbed into the cab of his truck by the time he got outside. He picked up her windbreaker, shook off the dirt before tossing it into the bed of the truck, then got in.

She’d found her purse on the floorboard. Taking a small hairbrush from it, she ran it through her hair, checked her reflection in the mirror of a compact, and sighed over what she saw. However, she didn’t bother to make repairs. After returning the compact and hairbrush to the handbag, she replaced it on the floorboard between her feet.

They rode in silence for as long as it took them to cover the four point seven miles to the main road. As he turned onto it, he said, “I’ll drop you at your car.”

She looked at her bare feet and pulled on the stringy hem of his shirt. “If I’m arrested before I get home, I’ll be taken to the police station like this.”

He glanced at her legs. “That would cause a sensation.”

“The last thing I want is to cause a sensation.”

“What? It’s not a ratings period?”

She shot him a dirty look. The snide remark had been as low as her sarcastic mention of a razor last night. But it got them safely off the subject of her shapely bare legs.

They rode in silence for another mile or so. When he finally looked over at her again, he saw that she’d laid her head back. Her eyes were closed. She was still except for her breathing. For a few seconds he watched the steady rise and fall of his old chambray shirt. It had never looked so good.

He cleared his throat. “There will be police officers staked out at your house. What are you going to tell them?”

“That I promise to go peacefully if they’ll let me change clothes.”

“I mean about why you weren’t at home when they came to arrest you.”

“I’m wondering that myself. Do I tell them I was kidnapped? Would they believe me?”

“Doubtful. Especially not after the date-rape-drug, memory-loss account of your night with Jay.”

“One story sounds as implausible as the other, doesn’t it?” Without moving her head, she opened her eyes and cut them toward him. “I don’t suppose you would come forward and admit that you’d taken me forcibly from my home in the middle of the night?”

He shook his head.

She closed her eyes again. “I didn’t think so, but thought I’d ask anyway.”

“I had my time in the spotlight. I didn’t like it. I’m working deep in the background now.”

“So I’ll have to face the music alone.”

“Just like I did.”

“Here we go again. Poor Raley.”

That sparked his temper. “I didn’t ask for your pity.”

She sat up straight and turned toward him. “Didn’t you?”

“No!”

“Well, you sure made certain I knew about everything you’d lost. Your reputation, your job, your—”

“My what? Finish.”

“Your fiancée.”

He fixed his eyes on the road ahead. “You’re just itching to know, aren’t you?”

“I asked Delno.”

“What he’d tell you?”

“He asked me what you’d told me about her, and when I said you hadn’t told me anything, he said it looked to him like you didn’t want me to know.” She waited; he remained stubbornly silent. “Why don’t you want me to know?”

“There’s nothing to know.”

“Bullshit.”

He gave a short laugh. “That’s a word your viewers have never heard from your sweet lips.”

“What happened with her, Raley?”

“God, don’t you ever give it a rest?”

“Not until I have the whole story. All I know is that her name was Hallie.”

“It still is.”

“Lovely woman. Smart, successful, pretty.”

“All of the above.”

“How long were you engaged?”

“A little over a year.”

“You planned to get married on April twelfth.”

“But we didn’t. End of story.” He almost expected another
bullshit,
but she didn’t respond right away. Although his eyes remained on the road, he could feel her staring at his profile.

After several moments, she said softly, “Raley, it was a lot for her, for any woman, to…”

“Forgive?”

“Absorb.
Before she could even begin to forgive you, she had to absorb the fact that you went without her to a party that promised to be wild. A recipe for trouble.”

“She urged me to go, remember? She was glad I was taking a break from the investigation.”

“She was terribly naïve.”

“Say again?”

Knowing he’d heard her, she said with asperity, “Either Hallie was naïve or you were incredibly trustworthy.”

“Maybe a bit of both.”

“Maybe. I only know I would never have said ‘excellent idea’ to my fiancé going without me to a party hosted by Jay Burgess.”

“That makes you possessive.”

“Sensible.”

“Jealous.”

“Let’s move past this, okay?”

“No, let’s stick with it. What are you like, Britt? In a relationship, I mean. Are you a clinger? Insecure and grasping? Or do you do your own thing and let the guy hang on until he gets tired and lets go?”

His attempt to redirect the conversation from his personal life to hers didn’t work. She asked, “What happened after Jay picked up Hallie at the airport?”

He rolled his shoulders as though trying to throw off a heavy mantle.

“It would help you to talk about it.”

He gave her a look. “No, it would help
you.”

“I deserve that, I guess. But this is off the record.”

“Why are you so curious? Voyeurism?”

“I
didn’t
deserve that.”

He looked at her again, then swore under his breath. “Okay. But you’re going to be disappointed. There was no big scene, no fireworks, nothing you can dramatize on TV.”

She just looked at him expectantly.

Where to start? Taking a breath, he began. “I was still at the police station when Jay got back. He’d taken Hallie directly to her place from the airport. He told me she was upset. Very. Then he patted me on the back. ‘But she’s strong. She’ll be okay.’

“Wickham and McGowan said they had nothing further at that time; I was free to go. I left the police station and went straight to Hallie’s condo. I rang the bell, but she didn’t answer. I used my key and went inside. She was curled up in the corner of the living room sofa, hugging a pillow to her chest, crying.”

He hesitated on the threshold, but when she didn’t scream for him to get out and leave her alone, he went in and gently closed the door. Mail that had been dropped through the slot in the door during her absence still lay scattered on the floor. He stepped over it. All the shades were drawn. She hadn’t turned on any lights, so the living room was dim.

They looked at each other across the space separating them, and his heart cracked in two when he saw the misery in her streaming eyes.

This was so different from the homecoming they’d planned. He projected onto his mind’s eyes a corny reunion, like a scene from a commercial or a romantic movie, where the background goes gauzy when the lovers make eye contact. They move toward each other with breathless anticipation, and when they meet, they share a protracted kiss. Or maybe they embrace and spin together, giddy and in love.

He and Hallie had had moments like that, where they’d laughed for no other reason than the pure joy of knowing that they’d found in each other the perfect partner, or quiet times when they exchanged a look and a smile, content in a cocoon of shared silence.

He wondered if it were possible for them ever to have moments like that again. God, he hoped so. Perhaps this experience would strengthen their relationship. But first they must survive it.

He walked to the sofa and sat down. He didn’t touch her, nor she him. She continued to sob quietly. He wanted to take her in his arms, tell her how sorry he was, how much he loved her, how everything was going to be all right. He would
make
it all right. But he allowed her to cry, hoping this was the first step in the healing and forgiving process.

Easily half an hour elapsed, although time had no relevance. He would have sat there forever, waiting for a signal from her that it was okay to speak. Finally, she blotted her eyes and wiped her nose and looked at him. In a gravelly voice she said, “Raley?”

The question mark placed at the end of his name conveyed her profound disbelief that they must even engage in this conversation. She was waiting for an explanation. He laid his arm along the back of the sofa and looked into her face. He said the only thing he could think to say, but it came from the bottom of his soul. “Hallie, I am sorry.”

Somehow, they came together then, clutching each other, crying together. It was the first time since waking up that morning that he’d been able to let go of his own emotions. He wept for the girl who had died, for the crisis his life was in, for the terrible heartache he was causing this woman he loved.

Finally, he pulled himself together, wiped his face, clasped her hand between his. “I’m going to tell you everything. Exactly as it happened. Then if you want to hit me, or order me to leave, or—”

“Just tell me, Raley.”

So he did. He didn’t spare a single detail, even when it was difficult to speak the self-incriminating words. She deserved the absolute truth.

“I should have excused myself the moment she approached me. I should have said no thanks to the drink and left as I’d planned to. I didn’t see her and think,
Hallie’s out of town. I’ll cheat. She’ll never know. Jay will keep my secret.
I swear to you, Hallie, it wasn’t like that. I have no excuse except that she was hot looking, and she was being friendly, and I guess I needed the flattery.”