Sandra Brown - Smoke Screen

“From a presidential appointment to this,” she murmured.

“I’m sorry it turned out this way for you, Candy.”

She came back around to him, her expression scornful. “Not really.”

“Yes, really. I am sorry. About all of it, starting with Pat Junior being assaulted in the park, the victim of a hate crime.”

The clap of rotors alerted them to the helicopter’s approach. She looked out across the rooftops, spotted the chopper coming in low, spotted other SWAT officers taking position on neighboring rooftops.

She turned back to Raley just as he froze in place. Using her distraction to his advantage, he’d taken baby steps toward her and was now only six feet away, almost, but not quite, within arm’s reach.

“I can’t escape, can I, Raley?”

He shook his head and dared to take another step. “No, but you don’t have to die.”

“No, see, I do. Everything I’ve worked for is gone. So what’s the point?”

And with that, she leaned backward.

Raley lunged. The humerus of his left arm snapped when he landed hard on the edge of the roof. The pain caused him to cry out. Or was it a cry of joy, because with his right hand, he was able to catch Candy’s left hand. Ignoring the pain in his arm, he held on. He looked over the edge and saw her kicking thin air, kicking the brick wall, trying to wrest her hand free.

“Let me go, Raley,” she shouted up at him. “For godsake, let me go.”

The SWAT officers moved to either side of him. One dropped his rifle and extended his hand toward Candy’s arm. But she was out of his reach. It was up to Raley to hold on. The cuts on her hand had made it slippery with blood, nearly impossible to hold on to, and yet he maintained his grip.

“Raley, please,” she groaned as she doubled her efforts to pull free.

Blood-slicked skin slipped a fraction of an inch against his palm. His shoulder socket burned with the effort of holding her. His left arm was useless, the pain searing in its intensity. But he gritted his teeth and held on.

“Let go!” she screamed. “I ruined your life, you fool!”

In that instant, he couldn’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t open his hand.

Their eyes connected. In hers he saw the hopelessness he’d experienced when his life was shattered by her treachery. Driven by single-minded ambition, she had destroyed his life and, for a time, robbed him of all hope.

He held her gaze, staring straight into her eyes as he felt her hand slipping, slipping, slipping, out of his grasp.

Special Agent Miller of the FBI said, “It think that’s it.” He silently consulted his partner, Special Agent Steiner, who gave a nod of agreement.

Miller, a.k.a. Butch, switched off the camcorder. “Thank you, Mr. Gannon. I appreciate your willingness to do this tonight. It could have waited until tomorrow.”

“I wanted to get it over with,” Raley said.

“Gentlemen?” Miller turned to Detectives Clark and Javier, who’d been invited to sit in on Raley’s deposition. Between them they hadn’t said a dozen words throughout the whole proceeding.

Clark asked, “When do we get a copy of the video?”

“First thing tomorrow,” Miller replied.

Javier stood and, without a word, headed for the door. Clark gave them all a curt nod, then followed his partner out.

“Assholes,” Raley said under his breath.

“They get perturbed whenever we horn in on their case,” Miller said, seemingly unfazed by the detectives’ sullen rudeness.

Raley wondered what the two federal agents would think of the nicknames he’d given them. Oddly, each name fit the man-at least as the pair had been portrayed in the movie. Of the two, Miller was more easygoing. Steiner was more sinister. His eyes were sharp and seemed to miss nothing. On appearance alone, he could easily have been mistaken for a hit man.

Steiner had been studying Raley closely for the last several minutes. Now he said, “You don’t look so good.”

Raley knew that to be true. They were sequestered in a small room in the FBI office on Meeting Street, just blocks from where the dramatic events of the afternoon had taken place.

Before the lengthy interview began, he’d caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window. His skin looked pasty. His left arm was in a cast and supported by a sling, his palms were abraded from when he’d landed on the roof, and there were several cuts on his face and arms from broken window glass. George McGowan had given him a black eye that was swollen and tender.

He didn’t even resemble the man he’d been a week ago, but not all the changes were the results of today’s physical ordeals. They also went beyond shaving his beard and trimming his hair. The real change was internal. It had to do with finally settling the matter of all that had happened five years ago. And a lot to do with Britt, who was sitting beside him, close, attentive to his weakening condition, attentive to everything.

“Are you holding up all right?” she asked now, her concern showing.

“Yeah.” He squeezed her hand, which he’d been holding throughout the deposition. For almost three hours he’d talked into the camcorder, telling the FBI agents and the two Charleston PD detectives the whole story, repeating what he’d babbled in a verbal shorthand on the race from George McGowan’s estate.

There in George’s study, it had taken him several seconds to assimilate that the two men whom he’d mistaken for assassins were actually federal agents. He’d dropped George’s pistol as instructed, but he’d made certain they understood, in a very short amount of time, that Candy Mellors was the instigator of several murders-which he was surprised to learn they had already deduced-and that Britt’s life was in imminent danger.

Reacting swiftly, Steiner had offered to wait for other officers to come and take George into custody. Meanwhile Miller had sped toward downtown and, along the way, notified the police of the crisis situation and coordinated an operation to end it, they hoped without casualties.

Raley had insisted on going with Miller and said he would only follow in his own car if the agent refused to take him along. Miller had conceded. It was during that drive-which had seemed agonizingly long-that Raley had told him a sketchy version of everything George had confessed.

Over the last one hundred eighty minutes, he’d given a more detailed account, providing answers to the agents’ many questions. Miller had another, which he asked now. “How did you and Ms. Shelley join forces?”

“I kidnapped her.”

Miller and Steiner glanced at each other with raised eyebrows. “Care to expand on that, Ms. Shelley?” Steiner asked.

“Is it relevant?”

“You tell me,” the agent replied. “Is it?”

“No.”

The two agents looked at each other again. Steiner raised his shoulder in a shrug. Since Raley and Britt were sitting shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, Raley doubted the agents would arrest him for committing that federal offense.

“I have a question for you,” Raley said. He was ready to get out of here. His arm was throbbing, his eye was making his whole head hurt, he badly needed another pain pill, but he didn’t want this meeting to conclude until the agents had all their answers, and he had his. He didn’t want to wake up tomorrow morning dreading another go-round of Q and A.

“How did the FBI get in on this?”

Miller explained. “Routine investigations are conducted when a judge is nominated for the federal district court. Cassandra Mellors’s judicial record is commendable, noteworthy even, which is why she was nominated in the first place. No one expected to find anything out of whack.

“But one of our sharper data analysts brought to our attention that her name was tangentially linked to the investigation of one Suzi Monroe’s death. From that we learned about the fire, the heroes of it, and-oops-the arson investigator’s connection to the girl’s lethal overdose. We learned that, a year after the fire, one of those same heroes was fatally shot in an alley, which remained an unsolved murder.