Sandra Brown - Smoke Screen

“I don’t want to guess, George.”

“She’s been doing them for a long time, that’s how. Technically, she was a virgin until she was twelve, but long before that, she and Les-”

Involuntarily Raley recoiled.

“Surprise!” George exclaimed. Then it seemed his entire face collapsed and was held on to his skull only by the loose skin. “I was sorta surprised myself, finding out that Miranda was daddy’s girl in every sense of the word. That little gold charm I liked so well? He’s the one who suggested it.”

Raley swallowed his revulsion. “She was a child, a victim. Why didn’t she tell someone?”

“Victim?” George said, scoffing. “No, Gannon, no. She liked it. She loved it.”

“What about Mrs. Conway?”

“Probably suspected,” George said with a negligent shrug. “How could she not? But one day when Miranda was about fourteen, her mother caught them in flagrante delicto. And not the missionary position. That night Mrs. Conway washed down a bottle of pills with a bottle of vodka and half of another. It was ruled an accidental overdose.”

He finished the whiskey in his glass and poured more. “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I haven’t left Miranda.” Raley had been wondering that. He’d also been wondering if Britt had played the video for Candy yet and if police officers were being dispatched to arrest George. As disgusting as the conversation was, if he could keep him talking long enough…

“I’ve threatened to pack up and leave dozens of times, but she knew I never would. For one thing, I liked the money and the sex and the whole package that came with marrying Miranda Conway. But the big, major, number one reason I couldn’t leave her was that she knew I was no hero. She knew about Cleveland Jones and how he died and how the fire started.”

Raley’s heart gave a little bump. “How did she know?”

“This…” George started laughing again. “You’re going to like this, Gannon. I told her. I admitted it in what you might call a moment of weakness. Well, my brain was weak. My dick was a Louisville Slugger. See, we were playing a sex game. Leather restraints. Massage oil. Blindfold. It became kind of a truth-or-dare thing. We’d swap our deepest, darkest secrets, she said.”

He leaned forward and whispered. “You ever had a candle pushed up your ass while your dick is being sucked?” He sat back and grinned drunkenly. “She wouldn’t let me come until she had the whole story. Kept teasing and teasing, and, well, the truth spilled out along with my seed. To borrow an Old Testament phrase.

“Anyway, after, when she removed my blindfold, I reminded her that it was her turn, truth or dare. Then she smiled this gloating smile I’ll never forget and told me who’d taught her this naughty little trick with the candle. She said, ‘It’s one of Daddy’s favorite things we do.’”

Suddenly tears filled his eyes and ran down his bloated cheeks. “I wish she would have just castrated me then and there. Because she and Les have been sawing away at my balls every day since, stripping me of my manhood a little bit at a time. They know their secret is safe with me so long as mine is safe with them.”

He considered the bourbon in his glass but pushed it away without drinking any more. Instead, he hefted the pistol in his hand as though trying to guess its weight. “I’ve been waiting on you, but you’re earlier than I expected. I figured I would beat you to the punch, save you the trouble.”

“Save me the trouble?” Raley asked.

“You know about Pat Junior, right? Being a homo?”

Raley nodded.

“Now you talk about a sorry excuse for a man,” George said. “Cruel irony that all this started with that sniveling little faggot. And Cleveland Jones?” He made a sound of disgust. “He needed killing if anybody ever did. Lawless, cocky son of a bitch. Thought he was above the law. Had a real contempt for authority. Smart guy. Tough customer. You know the type.

“Pat was mortified about his son being gay and all, but this Jones character had almost killed him. Pat insisted on getting a confession out of Jones and putting him away for years, someplace he’d do hard time, where he’d be raped a coupla times a day. Punishment fitting the crime, see?

“In hindsight, we should’ve just popped him where we found him, let it be blamed on gangbangers. But no, we stayed within the law. To that point anyway. We hauled him to the station, then took him to a room where nobody could see in and started working him over. The four of us told him he wasn’t getting out of there until he’d signed a confession, and we didn’t care how long it took. In fact, we hoped it would take a nice, long time.”

Raley said, “He didn’t have skull fractures when you arrested him, did he?”

George wiped his wet cheeks and gave Raley a look that said the question wasn’t even worth answering, but Raley had asked it mostly for the benefit of the camera.

“Who actually dealt the deathblow, George?”

More tears streamed from his bloodshot eyes. “Hard to say. Pat maybe. Jay got in a few good belts, but he wasn’t that strong. Might have been me. We were taking turns. Jones was on the floor, and I think it was Jay who first noticed that he was no longer moving. Jay called the rest of us off. He felt for a pulse.” George ran his arm under his nose, mopping up the mucus dripping from it with his sleeve. “Jones was dead.”

He lapsed into silence, so Raley prompted him. “Then what happened?”

“What the fuck you think? We freaked, especially Pat, because we’d just killed a man, all on account of his queer son.”

Raley nodded down at the lighter on the desk. “You started the fire with his lighter.”

“I was the one who’d emptied his pockets when we checked him in. I kept the lighter. Don’t know why. Maybe to bring home and show Miranda, thinking she’d get a kick out of it. I don’t remember. Anyway I had it, and it came in handy.”

“You wanted it to look like Jones had just enough life in him to start the fire before he died.”

“That was the basic plan. We were all panicking, yelling at each other, cussing, trying to sort it out. As I said, freaking out. Jay, of course, kept the coolest head. He said we’d tell everybody that we’d noticed his head wounds but thought they were superficial. That it wasn’t until later, after we were pressuring him with questions, that he started acting weird and we realized he was out of his head.

“The rest of us agreed it sounded like a plan. Jay said to light the stuff in the trash can, so it would look like Jones had gone crazy. I set fire to some paper. We left the room, thinking the fire would soon burn itself out. A minute maybe. We counted on the smoke alarm going off, then rushing in and pretending to be shocked to find Jones dead. But the fire…” He dropped his chin on his chest, mumbling, “You know the rest.”

Raley could barely contain himself. The camcorder had just recorded George’s confession, although George seemed unaware of it, or indifferent to it. Keeping his voice low, Raley asked, “Why did you keep the lighter?”

The man shook his large head mournfully. “Like when priests flog themselves? The lighter is like a whip. I take it out every now and then to remind myself of what I did.”

He was quiet for a moment, and Raley counted the seconds. How long before the police would arrive? Britt would have told Candy about the night at Jay’s house, the attempt on her life, the man this morning who obviously had shot Fordyce after they fled.

Fordyce.

Something niggled Raley’s brain, but he didn’t have time to address it before George continued.

“We were trying to act normal, waiting for the smoke alarm. But all of a sudden the fucking wall of that room was on fire, burning from the inside out. Then we really panicked. We didn’t bother with Jones. We knew he was already dead. We started trying to get all the other people into the stairwell and out of the building. In all the confusion, with the smoke, nobody could see anything. No one could locate the keys to the holding cell.” His chin began to tremble, and a sob shook his large body. “I can still hear those men trapped in the cell screaming.”