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looked constipated. He appeared to be the kind of timid defender who actually helped prosecutors get convictions.
    She, on the other hand, was confidence personified. Of course, she was adroit at playing to a camera. Cobb had experience with that himself. She knew how to evoke a self-serving emotion from her audience. He could relate to that, too.
    The press conference ended with her saying that she wanted to learn the cause of Jay Burgess’s death. She said it with enough conviction that, despite his skeptical nature, Cobb Fordyce believed her.
    He was about to switch off the TV when the local news station went live with a follow-up story. The Charleston PD public information officer had been asked if Britt Shelley was under arrest. “Absolutely not,” he replied. “Up to this point, there’s been no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
    Standard-issue statement, Cobb thought.
    “Jay Burgess died in his sleep. That’s all we know at this time.”
    Cobb doubted that. That wasn’t all they knew. They had something. Maybe nothing more than a hunch. But something had spooked Britt Shelley, or she wouldn’t have made a preemptive strike by calling the press conference to claim friendship with Jay Burgess and express her deep regret over his untimely death—in effect to profess her innocence.
    The CPD were fools for letting her get the jump on them. They should have kept her under wraps, or issued a gag order. That was a giant blunder on their part, letting her use her media advantage to state her defense before it even became a criminal case.
    Again he was about to switch off the set when a local reporter was shown standing outside the state capitol. If Cobb looked out his office window, he’d probably see the news vans parked along the boulevard.
    This was exactly what he’d dreaded and had hoped to avoid.
    “We’ve tried to contact Attorney General Cobb Fordyce this afternoon for a statement on the unexplained death of Jay Burgess, but Mr. Fordyce was unavailable for comment. As many of you may recall, Fordyce and Burgess were two of the four men who valiantly saved lives, at tremendous risk to their own, during the Charleston police station fire five years ago.”
    Cut to file footage of the building in full blaze, surrounded by fire trucks spraying water on an inferno that had burned out of control. Then, appearing on the screen was a photo of himself, Jay Burgess, Patrick Wickham, and George McGowan, oxygen masks strapped over their smoke-stained faces, their clothing charred, hair singed, heads bowed, and shoulders slumped in abject fatigue.
    That picture had made the front page of The New York Times in addition to every newspaper in the South. National magazines had printed it with stories that extolled their bravery. The photographer had been nominated for a Pulitzer.
    “Attorney General Fordyce was working for the Charleston County DA’s office at that time,” the reporter explained when they came back to him on camera. “The other three men were police officers. Jay Burgess is the second hero of that day to die. Patrick Wickham, tragically, was killed in the line of duty barely a year following the fire.
    “Yesterday, I spoke with George McGowan, now a businessman in Charleston. I asked him to comment on his fellow hero’s death. He declined to appear on camera but told me that Jay Burgess was the best friend a man could ever hope to have and that he will be missed by everyone who knew him.”
    The reporter then pitched it back to the anchors in the studio, who commented on the poignant and dramatic elements of the story. The segment ended on the legendary photograph, the studio camera going in for a close-up on Jay Burgess’s face, where there was a reflection of the flames in his eyes and tear tracks in the soot and smoke stains on his cheeks.
    Cobb clicked the remote, and the image blinked out. He loathed that damn photograph. Because of the boost it had given his career, people expected a framed copy