Sandra Brown - Smoke Screen

“Because he knew it was my head that would be chopped off. Not his. His timing was no accident, either. No doubt he wanted to get in your pants as soon as possible-”

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.