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campaign manager.”
    Having dealt with Davies on behalf of
several corporate clients, JD wouldn’t put much of anything past the cagey
political puppeteer. He didn’t have that much better an opinion of Lanie’s
estranged husband, but he doubted that Winstead possessed the cunning to
manipulate even a young, inexperienced girl the way it was beginning to look as
if Lanie had been set up.
    She looked up at him, then focused her gaze
on the empty fireplace. “For a long time the guys sat there watching rain pour
down and turn the blaze we’d escaped into smoking embers. Then they started to
look at me as though I were a skittish bull and they were planning to ride me
at the rodeo. It scared me when Bert started commenting about how I didn’t look
much like a hooker with my makeup all washed off. He scared me when he said
something about Wayne’s halfwit boyfriend having caused the trouble.
    “I’ll never forget the look on Bert’s face
when Wayne pointed out to him that they had at least one witness to whatever
had gone on down at the club. I must have shrunk away from them as I tried to
figure how I could get out of the truck, but then Bert told me to calm down and
that he had a plan for all of us to come out of this on top.”
    JD wanted to find Davies and the senator
and tear them limb from limb for what they’d done to Lanie. Never mind that
she’d been stripping for a living. Never mind that she’d apparently intended to
move on to prostitution that fateful night.
    He slid his fingers through the dark silk
of her hair, tilting her head so he could meet her frightened gaze. “You were
just twenty years old and desperate. You have nothing to feel guilty about. Now
Davies and the senator, that’s another story. One thing that puzzles me,
though, is why Winstead, if he’s gay, had a boyfriend who was trying to buy the
services of a female prostitute?”
    Lanie shook her head. “Apparently the dead
guy and Wayne had been lovers for a long time, but the lover—a man named Barry
Sumner—had a habit of luring and killing female hookers. From what they said
that night, I assume that when Barry was about to be arrested several years
earlier, Bert placed him in a private, long-term mental hospital in California.
He stayed there, locked away from temptation, until his psychiatrists decided
he was cured and let him out. Barry came back to Hillsborough County and took
up with Wayne again. According to Wayne, he followed Barry to the club and went
upstairs to be certain that Barry wouldn’t kill again.”
    “So who killed Barry? And who set the club
on fire?” JD wouldn’t put it past Davies to commit murder. About the senator,
he wasn’t so sure.
    “I don’t know who killed Barry. Wayne swore
he hadn’t touched Barry, that he was already dead at the time he went into the
room. I thought Bert had set the club on fire until I read later that the fire
had started in bags of fertilizer the owner had stored in an unused dressing
room. The fire marshal ruled that the fire was caused by spontaneous
combustion.”
    That fire seemed mighty convenient to JD,
but then he was neither a firefighter nor a detective. “Tell me about this pact
you made that’s kept you a virtual prisoner for the last eight years.”
    “The way Bert explained, it was simple
enough. I’d marry Wayne and pretend to be the devoted wife so his potential
constituents wouldn’t have reason to question his sexual preferences, and in
return Wayne would take care of me financially and pay for the rest of my
education. He could have his affairs and so could I, as long as we made sure to
be discreet about it. None of us would ever mention what had happened at the
club.
    “At the time I thought I’d made the best
choice possible. Sure, I didn’t think very highly of either man—especially
Bert. I knew I wouldn’t have to spend much time around him, though. As for
Wayne, he was no great human being either, but he had dragged me out of
the club