“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
The 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.