Smoke

Thirty-Three

They 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.”