Sandra Brown: Smoke Screen

It was a good question, and she wished she had an answer for it. “I’m not sure. I don’t believe I remarked on it. I might have. He might have asked me if I was sick. Honestly, I don’t remember talking about anything. We walked to his town house and went inside.”

“Then what? What’s the first thing you did when you got inside?”

“I remember being embarrassed over my condition.”

“Over being drunk?”

“Or drugged,” she said with emphasis. “I remember making my way to the sofa.”

“So you knew where his sofa was?”

“No. I’d never been to that town house before. I saw the sofa and knew I needed to sit down.”

“Did you take your shoes off first?”

“No.”

“Your dress?”

“No.”

“Did you undress before or after Jay started pouring the scotch?”

“I didn’t undress.”

“So Jay undressed you.”

“No!”

Clark jumped on that. “How do you know if you can’t remember?”

Before she could respond, Javier said, “If you didn’t undress yourself, and Jay didn’t undress you, how come you woke up nude and in bed with him, which, by your own admission, you did? Want me to read back that part of the statement you gave us yesterday morning while they were taking Jay’s body to the morgue?”

“No, no! I remember what I said in my statement because it’s the truth. What I don’t remember is how we got undressed and into bed.”

“You don’t remember getting blitzed on scotch?”

“No.”

“Or taking off your clothes?”

“No.”

“Or having sex.”

“I don’t know that we did.”

Javier reached into the pocket of his sport jacket and removed a small plastic sandwich bag. Inside was the foil packet for a condom. It was empty. “We found this among the cushions of the sofa.”

Britt stared at it, searching her memory, coming up blank.

“Do you customarily carry a condom in your handbag, Ms. Shelley?”

Meeting his insinuating gaze, she replied coolly, “It must have been Jay’s. He could have used it anytime.”

Clark shook his head, looking almost rueful. “His maid had come that morning. She said she gave the place a thorough cleaning, even took the cushions off the sofa to vacuum underneath. She’d swear to it this wasn’t there then.”

Britt asked, “Did you find the condom itself?”

“No. It’s assumed Jay flushed it.”

“He could have used it earlier in the day. After the maid cleaned, but before meeting me.”

Clark shook his head. “Jay was here at headquarters all day. Didn’t even go out for lunch. He left at six. Hardly time for him to return home and have sex on his sofa with another woman, then get to The Wheelhouse and down several drinks before you joined him at seven.” He smirked and Javier chuckled, anticipating what his colleague was about to say. “Even Jay wasn’t that fast.”

GEORGE MCGOWAN OPENED HIS BEDROOM DOOR IN TIME to see his wife of four years, Miranda, slipping a terry-cloth robe over her nakedness. The young man in the room with her was zipping the cover around his portable massage table.

Unruffled by the unexpected appearance of her husband, she said, “Oh, darling, hi. I didn’t know you were home. Would you like Drake to stay? He just finished with me.” Her eyelids lowered drowsily. “He was particularly magic today.”

George felt his face grow hot. His fingers tightened around his glass of Bloody Mary. “No thanks.”

Drake hefted his table, essentially doing a biceps curl with it. “Wednesday, Mrs. McGowan?”

“Let’s make it ninety minutes instead of the usual sixty.”

He smiled suggestively. “I can extend it as long as you like.”

Drake’s double entendre wasn’t lost on George. Neither was the hot, musky smell of sex that permeated the room, or the rumpled satin sheets on the king-size bed. Drake hadn’t done his work on the massage table, and the sly look he shot George as he sidled past him on his way out said as much.

He should follow the smarmy bastard, break him over his knee, shatter the bones of his hands, ruin his face, and put him out of business. The oily, Mediterranean-looking prick was beefed up, but George could whip his ass. Maybe he’d gone a little soft around the middle, but he could still make this guy wish his ancestors had stayed in Sicily or wherever the hell they were from.

Instead, he soundly closed the bedroom door and turned to glare at his wife. The silent rebuke was wasted, however, because she didn’t see it. She had moved to her dressing table and was pulling a brush through her mane of auburn hair as she admired her reflection in the mirror.

She would dearly love for him to take issue with her screwing her masseur in their bedroom. So damned if he would give her that satisfaction. Besides, something else took priority.

“You need to see this.” He opened the doors of the tall armoire and turned on the television set inside. “Britt Shelley is about to conduct a press conference about her and Jay.”

“This should be interesting.”

“It is. She claims she was given a date rape drug.”

Miranda McGowan’s upraised arm was arrested in motion. She lowered it slowly. “By Jay?”

George shrugged and turned up the volume just as the local newswoman addressed a question about her relationship with the recently deceased Jay Burgess. “He and I were friends.”

“I’ll bet,” Miranda remarked as she moved from her dressing table to the end of the unmade bed and sat down.

“Shh!”

“Don’t shush me.”

“Will you just shut up and listen?”

George remained standing, the remote control in his hand, his attention riveted on the plasma screen and the close-up of Britt Shelley as she averred that she had no memory of the events immediately preceding Jay’s death. “I have a vague recollection of entering his town house with him. Nothing beyond that.”

“Are you accusing Jay Burgess of giving you the date rape drug?” a reporter asked.

“No. But I believe that someone did. My experience matches that of other women who have been given them.” George turned and looked at his wife. She shifted her gaze away from the TV and locked eyes with him, but neither said anything.

George turned back to the set in time to hear Britt Shelley’s lawyer reply to a question. The man held his fist to his mouth and cleared his throat. As a former policeman, George knew the gesture was a dead giveaway of uneasiness. The man was about to either hedge on something he was unsure of or blatantly lie.

“Ms. Shelley has submitted a urine specimen to be tested for these various substances. However, they disappear from the system relatively quickly. Depending on which drug Ms. Shelley was given, it’s possible that too much time has elapsed for it to be detected.”

A reporter in the front row said, “So you can’t prove that she was given one of these date rape drugs.”

“I can’t comment until I know the result of the urinalysis.”

“Regrettably, I did everything wrong,” Britt Shelley interjected, much to the consternation of her lawyer, who frowned at her.

He jumped in before she could say more. “Ms. Shelley didn’t at first realize that she’d been victimized. Had she, she wouldn’t have showered, wouldn’t have used the bathroom until after she’d submitted a specimen for testing.”

“In other words,” Miranda said, “she’s making claims she can’t prove.”

Without turning, George waved at her to be quiet.

“No, I don’t have any idea what caused Jay Burgess’s death,” Britt Shelley was saying in reply to another reporter’s question. “He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which he’d been told was terminal. It’s assumed his death is cancer related, but an autopsy will be conducted-”