Smoke (43 page)

“You’re a tough bitch, Detective Breslow.”

She smiled. “If I’d known he was such a bad shot, I wouldn’t have been so scared.”

“Bad shot?”

“Yeah, he fired at you and missed. You’re like the proverbial side of the barn.”

He coughed a little. “Who said he missed?”

“Oh, shit,” she said, leaning over the seat. “You’re shot?”

He nodded. “I was coming home to die like a wounded old grizzly,” he said with a smile. “But it was too crowded at my place. I thought I’d do it in the back of your car.”

“How bad is it?” she said, unzipping his jacket and seeing that the tee-shirt beneath was red with his blood.

“Not that bad, I don’t think. I think it went straight through.”

She looked at him more closely; he was fading, his lids lowering over eyes that seemed to be having trouble focusing. There was so much blood, she couldn’t see where the wound was. She saw that the waistband of his jeans was black with his blood. She quashed the rise of panic down hard. No time for that.

“Mateo Stenopolis,” she said loudly, pulling on his legs to get him to slide all the way down. She didn’t want him falling over during the mad dash she was about to make for the nearest hospital. “You stay with me.”

He looked at her and nodded weakly.

“Don’t make me pull out the kung fu,” she said when he said nothing. He raised his hands in a gesture of mock surrender, then winced at the movement.

“Jez,” he said, as she turned and threw the car into drive, roared onto the highway. “Just be careful.”

“Careful of what?” she said, pushing her foot heavily on the gas. “You worried about my driving?”

“The other one. You only got one of those guys. I think they travel in pairs.”

She thought of her vacant-eyed leather-clad assailant and wasn’t thrilled that he had a partner. Then she saw a pair of headlights behind her, square and bearing down quickly.

“Mount,” she said.

He didn’t answer and she looked up in her rearview mirror, saw
only darkness in the backseat and the hot, high beams of the white van on her tail.

L
ily felt like she could crumble to dust in Lydia’s arms, she was so fragile. She clung to Lydia like she was a buoy in the violent water of Lily’s life.

“Lily, my God,” she said. Agent Hunt stood behind them.

“This is the girl you were looking for?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. He nodded his acknowledgment and may have even smiled a little.

“She came wandering out of the New Day Farms about an hour before you. She’s been talking about an Agent Grimm, too. For someone who doesn’t exist, he sure does get around.”

Lily was shivering in her arms and Lydia held onto her tight as the girl began to sob.

“Please,” she said, appealing to the youthful humanity she saw in him. “Let me take her back to our hotel. I’ll tell you anything you want to know, just let me get her comfortable and safe.”

An hour later, Lydia, Jeffrey, and Lily were back in the hotel room with an escort waiting outside their door and Agent Hunt sitting at the table. Dax had not been released and no one would discuss his situation with either of them; Lydia was concerned … for a lot of reasons. She wasn’t sure how he had found them and led them out, or what would happen to him now. But she knew he could take care of himself; she’d worry about him after they’d talked to Lily, made sure she was safe from The New Day and returned her to her mother where she belonged.

“I did what you taught me to do. Only it worked a little too well,” she said with a slight laugh. She sat across from Agent Hunt, accepting a bottle of water from the minibar but nothing more.

Everything about her was changed. Where she’d been bright and exuberant, she was quiet and careful. Lily had always been the kind of girl who got excited by things, spoke quickly, moved her hands wildly, laughed easily. This girl was pale and thin as a slip of paper, speaking through lips that were cracked with dehydration, eyes that were dull
and filled with grief. Her cloud of silky black curls that had always bounced around her face was gone; only the slightest stubble of her hair remained. She kept bringing a shaking hand up to it, feeling its texture. Lydia wanted to take her home so that she could be tucked in to bed and fed soup until she was feeling better. It was painful to watch her.

“So after your brother’s funeral you went up to Riverdale,” Lydia said. “To try to get into his head.”

She nodded. Swallowing the water seemed to cause her pain and Lydia remembered what Jeffrey had told her about the tubes he’d seen in the throats of New Day guests.

“I had the keys to his apartment. It didn’t take me long to figure out what he had been trying to do.”

“Did you know about the problems your stepfather was having with The New Day?” asked Jeffrey. Lydia glanced at him, realizing that Lily probably didn’t know Tim Samuels was dead. She figured that this wasn’t the right time and they weren’t the right people to tell her.

She shook her head. “No. I knew he and my mother were having problems. I suspected an affair, some asinine midlife crisis. But I didn’t know anything about The New Day.”

“Until?”

“Until after my brother’s alleged suicide.”

Lydia noticed Lily’s use of the word
alleged
, as if she still didn’t believe her brother had killed himself.

“So Mickey went there to try to help your stepfather?”

She shook her head slowly, like she still couldn’t believe it. “That’s the way it looked to me; like he’d gone up there for the express purpose of infiltrating The New Day, maybe hoping to expose them or find evidence that could get them to release their grip on Tim.”

“What did you find in your brother’s apartment that made you think that?” asked Jeffrey. His tone was kind and warm, but there was a slight wrinkle in his brow that Lydia recognized as the expression of his natural skepticism. She was with him; something felt off.

“When we were kids, Mickey lived in his imagination, you know? He had a rough time of it after our father’s death. I was too young, really, to feel the impact the way he did. It altered him.” She paused, and turned the bottle of water on the table, inspected it with intensity, as if
the movie of her childhood were playing out on the sweating plastic. “It was like he was always looking for something to fill the empty space our father left.”

The words hit Lydia hard, reminded her of her own childhood after her mother died. Her lonely hours filled with books and the stories she wrote. Even before her mother died her mind had worked that way; but afterward she practically disappeared into the mysteries she was forever trying to solve.

“He was different from other kids. He wore this loneliness, this sadness like a cape that somehow set him apart from everyone else, made him seem freakish and strange. So he was a target for bullies, he was awkward and never seemed to fit in anywhere. So he wrote. Notebook after notebook. Journals, poetry, short stories. He exorcised all his demons there. He cut the fabric on the bottom of his box spring and slipped them up inside there.”

“That’s where you found his journals in Riverdale?”

She nodded. “It was his current obsession, The New Day. But it was always something. He was always pouring himself heart and soul into something, trying to lose himself, trying to find himself. I’m not sure which.”

“And you always followed,” said Lydia, remembering the conversation when she’d told her as much.

“All my life I felt like I was chasing him up this path, and he was always just about to turn that one corner after which I’d never be able to find him again.”

Rivers of tears fell from both her eyes and met at her chin, dripped onto the ATF sweatshirt Agent Hunt had given her. Lydia wanted to comfort her but wasn’t sure how; she kept her distance.

“Your brother and your stepdad didn’t always get along. Did it seem weird to you that Mickey would shift off his life to help him?” said Jeffrey.

“They didn’t always get along, that’s true. But Tim raised us both, you know. They had a relationship, even if it wasn’t always an easy one.” She sighed and rolled her head from side to side as if to release tension residing there. “But you’re right. I don’t really know why he did it. My suspicion is that he just
thought
he was helping Tim. That there was
something about the message of The New Day that resonated with him and he was just using Tim’s problems as an excuse.”

She put an elbow on the table and leaned her head on her hand. Lydia noticed how frail and small her arms looked.

“So much made sense to me after I found his journals. He’d been so strange since the move, so distant, so wrapped up in Mariah. I just thought he was getting himself into another obsessive relationship that was going to end in disaster. Reading his journals I could see clearly how he lost his perspective, his advantage. He went in thinking he had the upper hand and they went to work on him.”

“Maybe The New Day knew who he was all along,” said Lydia.

“It’s possible, I guess. They knew everything about my stepfather.”

“How did your brother get involved with Mariah?”

“He met her at one of The New Day meetings. It was right at the point where his journal entries started to shift. He started out with nothing but disdain for them and slowly began to express a kind of grudging admiration.”

“He didn’t connect that Mariah was Marilyn.”

She shook her head. “No. He never made that connection that I know of. We’d never met her while my father was dating her. So he would have had no way of knowing what she looked like. Maybe Tim never even told him about her. I only learned that they were the same person after Mickey died. When I found the journals, I confronted Tim. He admitted to me that he’d confided in Mickey but claimed he had no idea what Mickey was planning.”

“At that point, Lily, why didn’t you take what you knew to the police?” asked Jeffrey.

She looked at him. “My stepfather. He has made some terrible mistakes that he thought were dead and buried. Trevor Rhames knew those secrets, threatened to expose him.”

Lydia shook her head. “What could be so bad that he would sacrifice his children to escape it?” It was the second time she’d asked that question in forty-eight hours.

Lily turned her eyes to Lydia. “I really don’t know. But he said it involved my mother and that she would be hurt by the exposure, as well.”

“You weren’t curious to know what they might be, these secrets?” asked Lydia, knowing the heart of a journalist too well to let that slide.

“I pressed him, believe me. I did some digging on my own. The best I can figure is that it has something to do with Body Armor and possibly his military career before he married my mother.”

She saw Jeff shift in his seat and Agent Hunt scribble in his book. She thought of the Privatized Military Companies Grimm talked about, she thought about the weapons, the pink diamond they’d found. Everything vague, their connections as delicate and translucent as a spider’s silk.

“So you decided to follow Mickey’s plan and get yourself into The New Day?” said Lydia.

Lily looked at her; there was a flash of something in the young woman’s eyes. That fire they both had to
know
, no matter the cost.

“I wanted to free my stepfather from their grasp. I wanted to prove that they killed my brother. I wanted to expose them. I thought I was stronger than Mickey. That I had a more evolved sense of myself, too much so to fall prey to their brainwashing.”

“But?”

“But their program is amazingly strong,” she said with a long exhale. “I didn’t
know
how tentative a hold we have on reality, how under the right conditions we lose ourselves and our ideas of right and wrong like a cheap pair of sunglasses. They take you away from everything that defines you, family, friends, your profession, your privacy. And then they create a new world for you. It’s wild. I thought I could resist.”

“And you did,” said Lydia.

She laughed sadly. “Just barely. I took some precautions; I used my connections at the paper to get in touch with the FBI. I called around and got a lot of sidestepping, no one knew anything about The New Day, no one was available to speak to me, until finally Grimm contacted me. You met him?”

Lydia nodded.

“Grimm wanted The New Day but couldn’t pursue them for political reasons … or that’s what he told me. The deal was: I infiltrated, got all the info I needed to do a ripping exposé and gave him the juice he
needed to bust them. In exchange, I kept in contact with him and if I didn’t report he was supposed to come in after me.”

“How did you keep in contact?”

“However I could. I wasn’t a prisoner, ostensibly. I could come and go as I pleased. I called a couple times from my own cell phone, from pay phones at coffee shops. Emailed from an Internet café. I just didn’t count on the drugs and then the cleansing.” She gave a visible shudder and then drank from the water bottle. The very act of talking seemed to drain her.

“I went to a Monday night meeting and I stayed. It was only a matter of days before I turned my money over to them. I figured I should go along with it, just to be convincing. Eventually, keeping in touch with Grimm started to seem like a smaller and smaller priority. By the time they started pushing the ‘cleansing’ on me, it seemed like a promotion, some kind of honor.”

She paused here and looked at the floor. Then out the window into the blackness. They all stayed silent, waiting for her to go on.

“It was Halloween night. I was supposed to begin my cleansing the next day. They claim to wash you of all the negative thoughts and energies and messages that you accumulate throughout your life. When you’re done, you’re this new creature filled with light and positive thoughts, free of pain and addictions, able to go on to achieve everything the Universe intended for you. I was so happy, nearly euphoric. I just had the slightest memory, the tiniest nagging thought that maybe this wasn’t the right thing, that it wasn’t why I’d come.

“Then the weirdest thing happened. A car drove past on the road that ran outside my dorm room. The windows were open and the radio blaring. It was a song from the eighties, ‘Shout’ by Tears for Fears. And all of a sudden I was a kid again, walking through the hallways of my high school, the speckled linoleum floors and olive green lockers, the fluorescent lights, the smell from the chemistry lab, and that song playing on a tiny pink Sanyo boom box.”