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.”

“So were you.”

“Yes.”

Raley hoped the camera was capturing the remorse evident in Fordyce’s face and voice. His shoulders no longer seemed so wide, his posture not so proud. He was staring at his hands as they rested on his desk. Was he having a Pontius Pilate moment, staring at the guilty stains on his hands, which only he could see?

Raley didn’t let himself be moved by the man’s penitent demeanor. “It felt out of whack, it had a snag, but you didn’t look too hard to find out why, did you?”

“No.” Slowly, Fordyce raised his head and looked directly into the camera. “I didn’t look too hard because the case involved policemen, decorated heroes of the police force, and I was about to announce my candidacy for the office of attorney general. An AG depends on the solid support of law enforcement agencies. I didn’t want to alienate peace officers statewide by suggesting that a few were involved in a cover-up and very possibly murder.”

Raley realized he was holding his breath. He glanced at Britt. She still held the camcorder steady on Fordyce, but she looked over at Raley to see if he realized the significance of the startling, self-indicting statement they’d just recorded.

She seized on it, asking, “What happened in the interrogation room with Cleveland Jones?”

Her voice, her demeanor, were gentle, nonthreatening, nonjudgmental, suggesting that she and the AG were the only ones present and that she had an earnest and unselfish interest in his cathartic admission.

So it came as a mild surprise to Raley when Fordyce said, “I don’t know, Britt.” He addressed her through the camera lens. “I shirked my duty on the Suzi Monroe matter because it was expedient. It was a self-serving evasion of responsibility that cost Mr. Gannon here dearly. I’m sorry for that. If I could, I would give him back those years of disgrace he’s unjustly suffered, but I can’t.

“But I don’t know what happened in that interrogation room. Or how Cleveland Jones died, or who started the fire.” When he saw that Raley was about to speak, he held up his hand, forestalling him. “You don’t have to take my word for it. It’s fact. You can check it out.”

“Tell us,” Britt said.

“I left my office in the courthouse a little before six o’clock, bound for the police station.”

“Why were you going to the police station that late in the day?”

“To pick up some new evidence on a case that was coming up for trial. I was to meet the investigating officer at the reception desk. I was just about to enter the building when the fire alarm sounded. I rushed inside. There are survivors, people who were in the lobby at the time, who can support this.

“At first, we thought it was a false alarm. In that old building, something was always malfunctioning. Several people cracked jokes about it. Someone asked if it was a fire drill.”

He paused, staring into space, as though re-creating that scene in his mind. “But almost immediately we smelled smoke and realized it was the real thing. I hustled people out through the main entrance and then ran along the corridors on the ground floor, shouting at people in the various offices to exit as quickly as possible.” He paused again, shrugged. “You know the rest.”

Britt said, “You’re being modest. You went up the stairwell and began escorting people out from upper floors.”

He nodded.

“So you truly were a hero,” she said.