Sandra Brown - Smoke Screen

Fordyce’s eyes shifted over to Britt. “She’s charged with Burgess’s murder.”

“So arrest her,” Raley said. “We’ll wait while you read her her rights, and then when the police get here to take her into custody, they may be interested to hear what you were doing at the police station the very day it became a tinderbox and seven people died.

“Oh, and we’ll gladly surrender this video recording so they can see for themselves the nervous perspiration that broke out on your lying face at the mention of that incident. Good morning, Mrs. Fordyce. Forgive the intrusion.”

The attorney general spun around to find that his wife had come to see who had interrupted their breakfast. Raley recognized her from Jay’s funeral. She was a pretty, ladylike woman. Even at this early morning hour, she was in full makeup, dressed casually but well. She had a small purse hanging from her shoulder and a set of car keys in her hand.

Apprehensively she regarded the trio at her front door. “Cobb? Is everything okay?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“The boys are due at baseball practice. Should I-”

“Yes. Go. Take them. Everything’s fine.”

Apparently she never questioned her husband, even when there was a fugitive from justice on her threshold. There was only the slightest hesitation before she turned and went back to the part of the house from which she’d come.

Fordyce faced Raley and Britt again. During that brief exchange with his wife, he’d regained his composure. Being a natural politician, he was ready to compromise. “I’ll talk to you, but not here. Not now. You were supposed to be at my office at eleven. I agreed to that. As far as I’m concerned, you’re trespassing.”

“Good try, but no dice,” Raley said. “We talk here.”

“My family-”

“They’re on their way to baseball practice. Even if they weren’t, we don’t mean any harm to your family. Where would you like to talk?”

“I won’t talk to a man with a weapon.” He said it without fear, levelly, firmly.

Figuring this probably wasn’t a point the AG was willing to concede, Raley said, “If you agree to talk, I’ll surrender the pistol.”

“And no camera.”

“The camera stays on,” Britt said. “This recording may be the only possible means I have of exonerating myself.”

Fordyce mulled that over for several seconds, then said tersely, “Fine.” He turned and motioned for them to follow.

The room to which he led them off the central foyer was a well-furnished and tastefully decorated home study, more for show than for actual work, Raley guessed. Fordyce moved behind his desk and sat down. “The pistol, Mr. Gannon.”

Raley pulled it from his waistband and laid it on a square end table in the corner, within his reach but out of that of the attorney general. Then he sat down in a chair facing the desk. Britt took the matching chair. He noticed her fingers adjusting the focus on the camera.

Fordyce motioned toward the files Raley held. “What is all that?”

“The findings of my and Teddy Brunner’s arson investigation. They’re incomplete insofar as the seven casualties are concerned. I wasn’t allowed to finish my investigation into the cause of Cleveland Jones’s death. Brunner settled for the PD’s explanation.”

Fordyce stared at the file folders still crudely held together by a thick rubber band, then looked at Raley. “Do you refute that Cleveland Jones started the fire?”

“He was dead before the fire started.”

Fordyce leaned back in his desk chair and folded his hands together beneath his chin. He may have been about to pray; he may have felt the need to. “What do you base that assertion on, Mr. Gannon?”

Raley talked for the next fifteen minutes uninterrupted. He showed Fordyce the copy of Cleveland Jones’s autopsy report. “It was never ascertained how he got those skull fractures, but is it reasonable that head wounds severe enough to kill him would go unnoticed by the officers who arrested him? I don’t think so. I was assigned to investigate, but I got nowhere.”

He explained the police department’s evasiveness. “I was stonewalled at every turn. At first I thought, Okay, they’ve had a fire that destroyed their headquarters and everything in it. They can’t help but be a little scatterbrained and unorganized. Cut them some slack. On the other hand, there was a dead man who had died while in police custody, and not from smoke or burns. So I persisted.” He paused to take a breath. “Before I could get any satisfactory answers, I was invited to a party at my friend Jay’s house.”

Not even his politician’s poker face could completely conceal Fordyce’s slight grimace at the mention of that. Raley guessed that the AG needed nothing to jog his memory of the incident, but he iterated the facts anyway for the benefit of the video camera.

He ended by saying, “No one-no one but you and the investigating detectives-ever heard my claim that I’d suffered a complete memory loss due to my unwitting ingestion of a drug. I was advised by my good friend Jay to keep that aspect of the story quiet. He said it would only make things look worse for me if I breathed a word about being drugged. People would think I’d been snorting coke along with Suzi Monroe.

“But when I heard Ms. Shelley say she suspected she’d been given a date rape drug that had wiped clean her memory of the night Jay was murdered, I knew we were victims of the same cover-up. And the motive-criminal lawyers like you are sticklers for motivation, right?-the motive of the perpetrators was to keep secret the facts of what happened to Cleveland Jones and who the actual arsonist was.”

“Jay was going to tell me the night he died,” Britt interjected. “If he did, I can’t remember it. But I’m certain it was his need to unburden his conscience that got him killed.”

Looking squarely at the attorney general, Raley said, “When Suzi Monroe died, you wanted me to take the fall for it. No doubt I would have, if not for Cassandra Mellors’s intervention.”

Fordyce frowned sourly. “Seems she’s still your champion. Does she know any of this about Cleveland Jones?”

“I shared my suspicion, yes.”

Fordyce dragged his hands down his face. After a moment, he lowered his hands and, looking like a man making a last-ditch effort to save himself, said, “If this is about payback, Mr. Gannon, please keep in mind that I didn’t indict you. I spared you prosecution.”

“Correct. But you might just as well have branded me guilty. I lost my job. I lost five fucking years of my life because you and the others set me up with Suzi Monroe and then saw to it that she snorted enough cocaine to kill her.”

Britt nudged his knee with hers, reminding him of the camera, and his promise to keep his temper under control. Nothing would be served if this came out looking like a personal vendetta. They were seeking justice, not revenge.

Fordyce glanced at the camera, then addressed Raley. “I’ll admit that it never felt right to me, that girl’s death. It bothered me that she died in Jay Burgess’s apartment, a policeman’s apartment. When Candy brought you to my office, and you told me that your defense was a short-term memory loss, my suspicion was further aroused.”

“Suspicion?”

“Suspicion that something was out of whack. You were as clean-cut as they come. You were engaged to be married. Not that a diamond ring prevents people from cheating, but you didn’t share your friend Jay’s reputation for promiscuity. You had no history of drug use, your record was spotless, you were the fire department’s rising star.”

He held up his index finger. “But the real snag in my mind was that you were investigating the fire, and the detectives assigned to the Suzi Monroe case were the heroes of that fire.”