Smoke (48 page)

“If you had to or thought you had to, yes,” she said to his back. “There are huge parts of your life we know nothing about.”

He nodded but kept his back to her. “And that’s probably not going to change. But I’m telling you the truth when I say that I don’t know anything about this situation.”

Lydia sighed and leaned back on the couch. She looked at the familiar form of their friend and thought he seemed like a stranger. She didn’t think he would lie to her but she realized she didn’t know for sure. And she wondered what that meant about their relationship. Can you trust someone who chooses what he reveals about himself? Can there be a true friendship with someone who hides huge parts of his life? Lydia didn’t know. She felt a strange sadness, an odd distance from him as he came to sit across from her on the low, stout cocktail table.

“What I can tell you is that no one talks about Sandline. Everything about them, including whatever you’ve done for them, is classified. You violate that agreement and they burn your life down—not just your life, but the life of anyone you’ve told.”

“If that’s true, then I don’t know where to go from here.”

He shook his head and looked at the floor. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“There’s only one place we can go, I think,” said Jeffrey.

“Grimm, right?” said Lydia, leaning forward looking at Dax. “How do we find him?”

Dax smiled. But the smile was cool and didn’t reach his eyes. “You’ll never see Grimm again.”

“There’s only one person who knows what links Rhames and Tim Samuels,” said Jeffrey, coming to sit beside her. “There’s only one person who might know the secret that would cause Mickey to turn against his stepfather like this, destroying his whole family in the process.”

Lydia rubbed the tension from her neck. “Monica Samuels,” she said. “She wouldn’t tell us before.”

“Let’s try again,” said Jeffrey.

Thirty-Three

T
hey found Monica Samuels at Lily’s apartment, looking pale and shaken.

“The police were just here,” she told them as she held the door open for them. “They say Mickey may be alive, that he tried to kill a police officer. Can that be true?”

She looked at them with wide eyes and her skin was gray and papery. She seemed fragile, barely solid, as though the news the police had brought her might carry her away like a tornado.

“Where’s Lily?” asked Lydia, looking around the small apartment.

“She left,” said Monica, looking at the door.

“To find Mickey?” asked Jeffrey.

“Mostly to get away from me, I think,” said Monica, sinking into the couch and curling her legs up beneath her.

“You fought?” asked Lydia sitting beside her. Jeffrey leaned against the granite countertop. Lydia released a breath when Monica didn’t answer.

“Let us help you,” Lydia said. “This has to end. Whatever you’re hiding has destroyed your life.”

Her face stayed blank, her eyes glazed over. “It’s too late, I think. The family is shattered, just like he wanted. Just like he’s wanted since he was a little boy.”

“Why would he want that?”

She rested her forehead in her bony, well-manicured hand. “Because he thinks we killed his father.”

“Simon Graves?”

Monica nodded. “They’re so alike, that same dark place inside
of them. They disappear in there. It swallows them … the anger, the sadness.”

Lydia didn’t say anything, waited for her to go on.

“Simon had Mickey with him that day when he walked in on Tim and me making love. We were at Tim’s house on the island, you’ve been there. Simon and Mickey came strolling in. We were by the fire.”

“They knew each other?”

“They were close friends,” she said, looking at Lydia. “And they worked together.”

“At Sandline,” said Lydia.

Monica startled, like the sound of the word frightened her. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “How do you know that? We’re
never
to talk about that.”

“So all of them, Rhames, Samuels, and Graves worked together?” Jeffrey said from the counter.

Monica gave the slightest nod. But that’s not what she wanted to talk about. There were other things she wanted to lay down before Lydia. “Mickey was too young to really understand what he was seeing. And because he was there, Simon just picked him up and left us without a word.” She laughed a little. “Part of me was glad he found us. All the lies and sneaking around were finished. I figured he’d leave me; we’d all pick up the pieces and move on. I could finally be free of that darkness that leaked out of him like a fog. It was killing me.”

“But he killed himself instead.”

“Several weeks later, yes,” she said, her hand flying to her mouth, the tears starting to fall.

“And Mickey blamed you and Tim.”

“At first, yes,” she said with a quick nod, wrapping her arms around herself.

“What changed?”

She seemed to shrink a little here, wanted to make herself as small as possible. “He was young, too young to really understand what he saw. Simon tried to spare Mickey by hiding his anger that day. But you can’t really hide things from children. ‘You made Daddy so sad and now he’s gone,’ he’d say to me afterward. ‘Why was he so sad?’ ”

She paused here, released a shuddering sigh. Then, “We couldn’t take it. We didn’t want Mickey growing up with that memory.”

“And you didn’t want him reminding you.”

She looked at Lydia and shook her head. “Over a period of months, we were able to convince Mickey that he hadn’t seen what he thought he saw, that it was a dream.”

Lydia shook her head, not understanding. “How?”

“Using the psych ops Samuels learned in the military?” asked Jeffrey.

She looked at him as if she had forgotten he was there. Then she nodded. “With the help of Trevor Rhames. It was his area of specialty, tampering with people’s minds, their memories, creating or erasing the events of their lives to comfort or torture them depending on his agenda. We thought we were helping him.

“But you can only calm the surface. The depths of him were teeming with these repressed memories. The depression that Lily never knew about, the medication, that’s why?” Lydia tried to keep the judgment out of her voice but she wasn’t sure she’d succeeded.

Monica shook her head. “He was prone to depression to begin with, just like his father.”

“But this didn’t help, tampering with his memories.”

She shook her head again, more slowly. “No. It didn’t help.”

“So Rhames and Tim Samuels were friends once,” said Jeffrey. “If he helped you to erase Mickey’s memory, there must have been a relationship. What happened?”

“I can’t talk about these things,” she whispered, pleading to Lydia with her eyes.

Lydia leaned into her. “It’s time. All of this—don’t you see that it’s toxic, it’s poisoning your life? There’s not much left to lose.”

Monica looked at Lydia and wrapped her arms tighter around herself. She shook her head and pulled her mouth into a straight line. Then she seemed to soften, to change her mind about something. When Monica spoke again it was little more than a whisper.

“They knew each other long before Sandline. This all happened before we even knew Sandline existed. But that’s all I can tell you.”

Lydia wanted to grab Monica Samuels and shake some sense into her but she was surprised by a voice behind them.

“Tell her, Mom. Tell her everything. She’s the only one we can trust now. Sandline’s gone; they don’t even exist anymore. It’s Rhames we have to worry about.”

Lydia turned to see Lily standing in the doorway. She wore jeans and leather boots, a long black coat. Without her hair, her face gaunt and still, she looked haunted. And Lydia guessed she was and would be—maybe forever.

Monica looked at her daughter with sad, frightened eyes. She seemed to steel herself.

“I don’t know if Tim would have called Rhames a friend, even then. They’d served together in the Marines. Tim consulted with him in the private sector over the years. They were colleagues, I suppose, more than anything. I guess Rhames might have thought they were friends. But I was always a little nervous around him and so was Tim. Rhames had tremendous skills in certain areas.”

“And you used those skills to erase Mickey’s memories,” said Jeffrey.

She nodded, her head hung.

“So at some point they went to work together at Sandline?” asked Lydia.

“Rhames went to work for Sandline. Tim only operated as a consultant. He had his own security firm by then, though it wasn’t called Body Armor yet. But he had a team of people who worked for him; sometimes the whole team would go to work for Sandline, but only on a job-by-job basis.”

“So what happened?” asked Lydia. “Why did Rhames grow to hate your husband so much?”

She sighed. “Rhames was reckless, dangerous. He was brilliant with the psych ops but on the field he was a kamikaze. During a Sandline op he made a tactical error and about ten men were killed. He led them into an ambush that most soldiers would have seen coming a mile away. That represents a big loss to a company like Sandline, loss of manpower, plus big payouts to the families.”

“So they wanted to get rid of him,” said Jeffrey.

Monica nodded.

“And they commissioned Tim Samuels to do that?” asked Jeffrey. “Because they were friends, because Rhames trusted him.”

Monica smiled sadly. “No.”

She sat up then, put her feet on the floor. She straightened her shoulders and seemed to come alive a bit. “Not Tim,” she said. “Me. I shot Trevor Rhames and thought I’d killed him. I emptied my gun into his chest and he fell three stories.”

“You worked for Sandline,” said Lydia, incredulous. The waif before her looked as if she could barely support her own body weight.

Monica nodded. “Not for Sandline, per se. I was one of the people on Tim’s team. I wasn’t always the emotional mess you see today.”

“No,” said Lily. “Once you were a killer just like my father.” The vitriol in her voice was palpable. Monica looked at her daughter with blank eyes.

“I was a
soldier
. I was one of three women; they needed us. We could go where men sometimes couldn’t. We aroused less suspicion. But you’re right, they chose me for the job because they knew Rhames trusted me.”

“And how did you feel about him? Killing a man who’d helped you in friendship.”

“I didn’t feel anything. We weren’t trained to feel; not in that context. It was a job and I completed it—or so I thought.”

“But part of you was glad, right?” asked Lily. “That the only person who wasn’t personally invested in keeping your secrets was dead?”

“No,” said Monica, shaking her head vigorously. “No. It never entered my mind.”

“Must be nice to operate without a conscience, Mom,” said Lily, keeping cold eyes on her mother. Monica just sat there, taking her hits. She deserved Lily’s anger and her judgment, and Monica knew it.

“Oh, and there’s more,” said Lily, moving into the room from the doorway where she’d been standing. “Did she get to the best part?”

Lydia shook her head. She wanted to reach for Lily but she was a bottle rocket, fuse sizzling; Lydia wasn’t sure when she was going to blow.

“Simon Graves was
not
my father; Tim Samuels was. But I was never allowed to know that because to reveal it would be to undermine
the memory altering they did on Mickey. So because of all their lies and all the black, terrible things they did, I never knew he was my father. Isn’t that sick?”

They were all silent for a second, the air electric with Lily’s rage.

“This is what happens to you when you fuck with Trevor Rhames,” said Monica, to no one in particular. “He cores you, destroys you from the inside out.”

Lily looked at her mother with undisguised hatred. “But he can only do that if there’s an empty space inside you, someplace dark where he can get his hooks in.”

Monica nodded, looked away from her daughter, to Lydia, and then into the space above her head. She leaned back into the couch. “I thought he was dead,” she said pointlessly.

Lily released a disgusted breath but didn’t say anything.

“So what kind of deal did Tim make with Rhames?” Lydia asked Monica.

“I really don’t know. He called me that night,” said Monica, tearing. “He told me that he’d made everything right and that Lily would be home soon. That was the last time I spoke to him.”

“I don’t think he made his deal with Rhames,” said Lily, leaning against the wall. She seemed cool, dispassionate suddenly, and Lydia thought she was in some kind of shock. “I think he made the deal with Mickey.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Lydia.

“Because it’s so perfect. It’s like poetic justice. My parents’ infidelity so wrecked Simon Graves that he ended his life; Mickey wanted Tim’s life to end the same way. It’s childish, like a child’s tantrum. Only this child is grown and gone mad, with the help of my parents and Trevor Rhames.”

They’d created a honeycomb of lies and deceptions, Tim and Monica Samuels, and tried to build their life upon it, thought Lydia. And all these years, Trevor Rhames had just been waiting to put his boot through it.

Thirty-Four

T
he water was painfully cold but she stood ankle deep in it, her jeans rolled up, her feet bare, and looked back at the house just as she’d done a hundred, a thousand times. The sea was moody gray with high, forceful waves and thick whitecaps; it just barely seemed to be containing its anger. Or maybe she was just projecting.

She tried to imagine other people living in that house, other people laughing, crying, fighting, putting their keys in the door and turning the lock to come home. She tried to imagine another little girl sleeping in her room, getting ready for her first day of school, her first slumber party, her prom. She’d always hoped to get married at this house. But she guessed it was a little dream to lose compared to everything else she’d lost. Her brother, her father, even her mother through her various betrayals now just seemed like a stranger to Lily, someone she could not understand and was not sure whether she could forgive.