“We’ve been following Lily’s steps, assuming that she was following Mickey,” he said.
“Right. An assumption that Grimm more or less confirmed.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure we can trust Grimm. He just wanted someone in here to find those weapons and give him a reason to come in guns blazing. Maybe he talked to Lily, maybe he didn’t. Anyway, stay with me.”
“Sorry.”
“We assumed that Mickey, prone to depression anyway, was an easy target for the people looking to put a hurting on Tim Samuels.”
“Right.”
“But what if Mickey didn’t get sucked in? What if he walked in?”
She thought about it a second. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to help his stepfather?”
“But they didn’t get along. Why would he go out of his way to help him?”
“It doesn’t matter whether you get along or not-family is family. He loved Lily. He loved his mother. That was reason enough to help his stepfather.”
“Okay,” said Lydia. “But because he was prone to depression, they got to him?”
“Tim Samuels had a strong enough sense of self to break away from The New Day when he realized they were rotten.”
“But maybe Mickey didn’t?”
“Right,” said Jeffrey.
“But wouldn’t Tim Samuels have told us that? There was no way Mickey could know about his issues with The New Day unless Tim told him.”
She felt him shift in the darkness. “He’d probably feel pretty guilty about it. Maybe he didn’t want us to see him as responsible for Mickey’s death.”
Lydia was quiet for a second, turning the scenario around in her mind. “Okay. What if that’s the case? Mickey left his job on Wall Street and moved up there, hooked up with his dad’s ex-girlfriend and tried to infiltrate. He couldn’t take the mind-control techniques of The New Day; they caused him to snap and he killed himself. What difference does it make? He’s still dead and Lily was still trying to find out what happened to him when she disappeared.”
“Right, but the whole basic assumption shifts,” said Jeff.
“Huh? I’m not following.”
“Well, Samuels made it sound like The New Day was systematically stalking his children in order to force him to surrender, tugging at the strings of his life to see which one he couldn’t bear to lose.”
“Which one would cause him to say ‘Uncle.’ ”
“But what if, actually, it was Mickey and then Lily stalking The New Day?”
“Not doing such a great job of it, but giving it the old college try.”
“But if they were chasing The New Day and not the other way around…”
“Then The New Day wasn’t targeting Tim Samuels?” she said. “But what about the IRS and the murdered lawyer?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeffrey.
“He lost his children, his wife left him, and he had a meeting looming with the IRS, which could result in his losing everything and possibly doing time. Somebody was messing with his life.”
“Yeah,” said Jeffrey. “Just maybe not The New Day.”
“But what about the ‘deal’ with Rhames? What about his name in the guest book?”
“I was thinking about that. Did he ever say the deal was with Rhames, exactly?”
“Yes,” said Lydia emphatically. “I think so. I’m not sure.”
“We made a lot of assumptions,” said Jeffrey.
Lydia was silent as she tried to recast her thinking, see it in this new way. She had trouble getting her head around it. She’d cast Trevor Rhames and The New Day as the monsters and everyone else as their victims. It was hard to imagine another scenario.
“Remember what Dax said about suicide being the ultimate fuck-you?” said Jeffrey after a moment.
“Yeah. I’m not so sure about that,” she answered.
“Me neither. But in this case, Samuels implied that all his assets were in jeopardy because of the IRS investigation. He stood to lose everything. But say he had a big life insurance policy and on his death, a settlement would be paid to whomever the beneficiaries were. He was still worth something.”
Lydia thought about it. She saw where he was going suddenly. “Unless he killed himself.”
“Most policies have a suicide clause,” said Jeffrey.
“If he killed himself, no life insurance. If the IRS took everything else, he’d be leaving nothing behind for anyone.”
“That is the ultimate.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“So whoever is the beneficiary of that policy gets the big middle finger.”
They were quiet again and the darkness seemed to swell around them. The buzz was deafening and Lydia’s agitation at being trapped was starting to feel like something living in her chest. Her hands were tingling to get on a keyboard or a telephone pad to start finding answers to all her new questions.
“We’re not in much of a position to figure out who that beneficiary might be,” she said.
“No,” said Jeffrey, squeezing her shoulder. “We’re not.”
She took a deep breath and leaned her head against the cold concrete wall.
“So, as long as we’re questioning our assumptions,” she said after a minute, “what about Mickey?”
Jeffrey exhaled sharply and shifted back farther toward the wall, straightened out his legs.
“I guess I’ve been operating under the belief that he killed himself, maybe due to the maneuverings of The New Day in addition to the fact that he was depressed, feeling bad about the breakup and the failed business. Lily was grief-stricken, trying to hold onto her brother by proving that he didn’t end his own life. Maybe in tangling with The New Day, making serious accusations, threatening an exposé of the organization, she got in over her head. If she was good at what she did, she probably found out everything that Detective Stenopolis told you about Rusty Klautz and the others. She was a threat to The New Day, at least an inconvenience. She thought she was protecting herself by involving the FBI, not realizing that they were just using her and wouldn’t be any help in a jam.”
“How does that all change if Mickey didn’t kill himself, if Lily was right and he was actually murdered?”
She could hear him breathing. “I’m not sure,” he said finally.
“What if she found proof that Mickey didn’t commit suicide?” She heard Lily’s voice again. “I’m out of my league. Big-time.”
“Then it would mean that whoever was threatened by that proof is a likely suspect in her disappearance.”
“Right, so it would mean that there was another motivator in getting rid of Lily, not just another blow to Samuels.”
They both knew there was a big piece missing, a hole that ran through their investigation which had been there all along. They had just been too blinded by their assumptions to realize it.
“You know what else is bothering me?” said Lydia.
“What’s that?”
“Michele LaForge.”
“How she seduced both father and son?”
“That was okay when we were assuming that The New Day was trying to take Tim Samuels’ life apart. She seduced Tim as Marilyn and Mickey as Mariah, a siren luring them onto the rocks of The New Day.”
“Very poetic.”
“Thank you. But if we’re thinking that Mickey and Lily were going after The New Day and not the other way around, where does Michele LaForge come into all of this?”
Jeffrey was quiet. She felt rather than saw him lift his head and sniff the air.
“What?” she said.
“Do you smell something?” he asked, standing up and pulling her to her feet.
She took some air in through her nose. She did smell something. Smoke.
She put her hand against the metal door and drew it back quickly. It was burning hot. She backed away from the door, wrapping her arms around herself.