Explosive

by BETH KERY

  Sherm laughed. “No, they aren’t married, but Nicasio would be lucky to get Sophie. She’s a gem, that girl. Daisy and I look forward to every summer when she comes to Haven Lake.”

  “Haven Lake? Is that far from here?”

  “Barely ten miles. You could make it there and back while your aunt took a nap. Do you want directions?”

  “That’d be very kind of you.”

  “No problem,” Sherm assured, glad to do something pleasant for Thomas when he’d done so much for Daisy and him recently. The man didn’t write down the directions, but Sherm got the impression he wouldn’t forget as he listened soberly and nodded.

  When Sherm finished, a thought struck him and he tapped his forehead in irritation at himself. “Forget my own head if it wasn’t attached. Bit out of it, I guess—worried about Daisy,” Sherm mumbled under his breath as he dug in his pant pocket and withdrew the BlackBerry. “Would you return Thomas’s phone to him when you see him? I forgot to give it to him; even been using it to talk to my daughter and tell her about her mother and all. Damndest thing. If it weren’t for this phone, my wife might be a lot worse off. You know all that flooding we’ve had?”

  Thomas’s friend nodded once, eyeing the BlackBerry.

  “Well our phone lines went down. It about gave me a heart attack when my wife started having chest pains yesterday, and I was surrounded by floodwaters with no working phone. But Thomas had left this on the counter,” Sherm explained, holding up the BlackBerry. “But it didn’t work either.”

  Sherm saw a gray eyebrow arch up behind the man’s sunglasses. Strange . . . when his hair was so pitch black.

  “No battery in it. But the thing of it was ...” Sherm continued, warming up to the topic. He’d been too preoccupied with Daisy to have told anyone yet, and it really was a good story. “ . . . I’d been with Thomas in his car that evening—he pulled me out of a ditch, bless the boy. He’d been using a flashlight, and when he put it back in the glove box, I saw the phone battery inside of it.”

  “Nicasio had taken the battery out of his phone?”

  Sherm nodded and threw up his hands in a “hell if I know why” gesture.

  The man’s grin widened as he backed away. “Knowing Nicasio, he was probably trying to avoid some clinging woman.”

  Sherm laughed amiably and waved when the man turned away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Thomas walked through the dim hallway, knowing Sophie was in the kitchen because he could hear the faucet running. The woman was probably making them a gourmet lunch, he thought with a mixture of amazement and amusement. He couldn’t convince her to stay on the dock with him in the sunshine and make out until they both got so hot they’d have to rush up to the bedroom to cool off. She’d just laughed and slapped away the hand that had been caressing her breast beneath her bikini top.

  “I’m hungry,” she’d protested.

  “You’re always hungry,” he’d mumbled as he ran his lips over the delicious upper swell of her right breast.

  “Well you’re always horny, so that makes us even,” she’d replied briskly.

  The smile that had curved his mouth at the memory faded when he saw Sophie standing stock-still at the sink and staring out the window.

  “Sophie?”

  She jumped and turned around, sloshing soapy water out of the overfilling pan she’d been washing.

  “Thomas. You scared me.”

  He grinned bemusedly. “What were you staring at?”

  “Nothing,” she said quickly when he crossed the kitchen to glance curiously out the window. “I mean . . . there was a deer out there. At the edge of the woods on the right-hand side of the driveway.”

  “Well, it’s gone now.” He turned toward her. “What are you making for lunch?”

  Thomas thought the odd moment had passed when Sophie answered lightly, but he began to wonder when she seemed distracted as they ate the delicious lunch she’d made of a walnut and pear salad and hot rolls.

  “I think I’ll go and stretch my legs,” she said from behind him as he knelt in front of a cabinet, putting away a pan in a lower cupboard.

  “The paths in the woods will be a muddy mess,” Thomas commented as he lifted several pans and slid the larger one beneath them.

  “I know. I’ll be careful,” she said, giving him a bright smile when he glanced over his shoulder.

  He watched her from his kneeling position in front of the cabinet as she went out the back door, his brow furrowed in puzzlement.

  When she reached the end of her driveway, Sophie paused on the lake road and glanced anxiously from right to left. Sophie’s house lay at the end of an extension of the lake road. The blacktopped road ceased in a crudely shaped, forest-lined cul de sac. She glanced warily back toward her house. The thick foliage on either side of the road obscured the view.

  She walked over to the man who had just stepped out of the woods lining the dead-end road.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked Fisk in a pressured whisper. She’d been shocked into immobility when she’d seen the young agent signaling to her from her driveway earlier, his motions conveying both a beckoning gesture and a plea for secrecy. Gone was Fisk’s dark, sober suit. Instead, he wore a pair of jeans, a green T-shirt, and very muddy hiking boots.

  “Is Nicasio in the house?” he asked in a low voice.

  Sophie studied him searchingly, finding that she trusted his face this time as much as she had on their previous meeting.

  “How did you find me?” she asked, ignoring his question.

  “I was eventually able to trace you to your parents. It wasn’t that hard after that, to locate any property listed under your father’s stage name in the near vicinity. I checked airline passenger lists, so I knew you and Nicasio hadn’t flown anywhere. I figured you had to be within driving distance. I would have found you sooner if the damn interstate hadn’t been shut down. I need to talk to Nicasio. It’s extremely important.”

  “You can’t,” she said so starkly that he gave her an astonished look.

  “I need him, Dr. Gable. And he needs me. He needs protection. Have you heard what happened to Bernard Cokey?”

  “I know. I know. But you don’t understand—” Sophie broke off, glancing around the vicinity nervously.

  “I think I understand more than you might think. Is Nicasio still . . . out of it?”

  She shook her head in rising agitation.

  “He’s experiencing a trauma reaction,” she said, the truth spilling out of her in a pressured rush. It wasn’t as if Fisk hadn’t already suspected the truth, after all. He’d known something was amiss with Thomas after that meeting in his office last week. “I don’t know if it was caused by a concussion or from a psychological trauma, or both, but he doesn’t remember a short period of his life.”

  She gave Fisk a pleading look.

  “Forcing a person to confront memories before they’re sufficiently ready to face them can cause even more damage. You have to trust me on this, Agent Fisk. His memories will come back, probably anytime now, any day . . . any hour. Cases like these are more common than people might think. Someone is in a car accident, and thinks they can’t recall the incident because they bumped their head, but the memory returns after they’re able to psychologically deal with the memory, or someone sees a random violent act and becomes amnesic for the actual event. Thomas’s trauma must have been a doozy, though,” she hissed, “because he’s suffering a localized amnesia for about an eighteen-hour period, as best as I can figure.”

  Agent Fisk just stared at her for a moment.

  “Jesus, amnesia?” he blurted out. “I thought he wasn’t talking openly to me in front of Larue because I’d warned him about possible security breaches in the Bureau. I knew he seemed agitated and out of it, but I didn’t expect this.”

  “His agitation and localized amnesia are both symptoms of PTSD. I spoke with a psychologist friend about it. In some cases of severe traumatic stress, the person blocks out th
e central trauma entirely.”

  Something shifted in Fisk’s expression. “Holy . . . He doesn’t remember talking to me at all, does he?”

  Sophie’s heartbeat began to throb loudly in her ears.

  “He remembers talking to you and that other agent in his office,” she said slowly, her voice sounding raspy and thin with the background cacophony of the crickets and tree frogs chirping in the nearby woods. “He’s amnesic for the period before that, I think. Eighteen hours or so . . . maybe less—”

  “How do you know, Dr. Gable? How do you know he lost his memory? He can’t tell you, can he?” Fisk interrupted.

  She met his stare levelly. She thought of that passionate, life-altering night they’d made love and the fact that Thomas seemed completely unaware it’d ever happened.

  “I just know,” she said firmly, holding Fisk’s stare.

  She paused when she saw the agent briefly close his eyes at hearing the conviction in her tone.

  “Last Thursday afternoon? Did this missing eighteen hours happen last Thursday?” Fisk asked her more insistently when she didn’t immediately answer.

  “Yes.”

  “He doesn’t remember what he told me last Thursday? Any of it?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t think so. Although lately . . . I’ve wondered if things are slowly starting to come back to him . . . Shadows of the truth, if not the thing itself. He’s not defending his father as stringently as he used to. And I see the doubt in his eyes at times.”

  “Defending him? Joseph Carlisle?”

  “When he first came here, he wouldn’t hear a word against Carlisle,” she murmured. She straightened and met Fisk’s stare. “Agent Fisk . . . that star witness that you have that gave you inside information on Joseph Carlisle?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Thomas, isn’t it?”

  Fisk hesitated for a split second before he nodded once.

  He placed his hand on her shoulder comfortingly when a spasm of emotion shook her.

  “Was what he told me trustworthy, given his condition?” Fisk asked, obviously alarmed at the thought.

  Sophie inhaled shakily, bringing herself under control. She’d suspected the truth. But she now knew firsthand suspicion and the truth were two entirely different things.

  She glanced grimly back at the driveway.

  “You can trust whatever Thomas revealed to you. He told you nothing but the absolute truth,” Sophie said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because only the truth could have had this much of an explosive impact on him,” she whispered.

  The first thing Sophie did when she returned to the house was turn up the air-conditioning. All the extra moisture and the hot sun were making for humidity you could slice it was so thick.

  Or perhaps she was just sweating following her conversation with Agent Fisk. Fisk had promised not to confront Thomas for now, saying he would stay in the background and watch over the house.

  “You’re going to have to try to get through to him,” Fisk’s voice resounded through her brain. “If anyone can break things to him gently, it’s probably you. His testimony is crucial to stopping a cancerous, powerful organization, not to mention putting away a very bad man.”

  “His father,” Sophie had whispered, her tone thick with dread.

  Fisk’s mouth had tightened. “Thomas Nicasio may be in denial at the moment, but I can assure you, Dr. Gable, that inside, where it counts, he despises the sound of Joseph Carlisle’s name.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked sharply.

  Fisk had frowned as if unsure whether he should say more, but something had decided him. “We’ve had some leaks at the FBI in regard to our investigations into the Outfit; enough breaches in security that my superior has funneled a lot of high-level information exclusively to me. Last Thursday afternoon, when Nicasio called headquarters from a pay phone, saying he needed to talk to the person responsible for the investigation, my boss had the call sent to me.

  “We’ve been building a fairly convincing case against Joseph Carlisle and several of his top lieutenants, mostly based on illegal accounting practices, tax fraud, and gambling. Frankly, we wanted more, though. With the right lawyers and legal abracadabra, Carlisle might have gotten off with a slap on the wrist. Best case scenario was that we put away Carlisle, the Outfit would put another guy in his place, and the mob would continue on its merry way. But what Nicasio told me during that phone call convinced me without a doubt that we could put Joseph Carlisle behind bars for good and slice out the legs of the Chicago mob on a permanent basis as well. Nicasio was obviously pressured and agitated, but he was also entirely convincing.”

  Sophie’s anxiety had ratcheted up a few notches when the agent paused.

  “What is it?” Sophie had prompted uneasily.

  “One of the things he told me,” Fisk had continued in a hushed voice, “was that Thomas had discovered that afternoon that Joseph Carlisle—his adoptive father—had ordered the execution of James Nicasio when Thomas was just a kid. Apparently, James had noticed some irregularity in his trucking invoices. Carlisle Transportation was racking up the miles on James Nicasio’s runs, beefing up the charges on certain customers’ deliveries. It’s just one of the ways that Carlisle launders money. Those customers were in on a scheme to hide profits from illegal operations. I guess James Nicasio poked around after that, and noticed similar altered bookkeeping on some of his buddies’ invoices, so he knew it wasn’t just isolated to his truck. The books were being cooked on a company-wide level. Nicasio confronted Carlisle. He refused to back down when Carlisle ordered him to keep silent about it.

  “When Thomas called me last Thursday,” Fisk continued, “he said he was in possession of a recording made by his brother, Rick Carlisle, of Bernard Cokey describing how he’d overheard Carlisle give orders to a hood named Newt Garnier to execute James Nicasio. Apparently when the hit happened, Marion Nicasio threw herself in front of her husband when Garnier broke into the house that night. So Garnier shot her as well.”

  As she stood in her living room, Sophie re-experienced the flash of horror that had jolted through her when Fisk had said those words just minutes ago. The effect on Thomas when he had made the same discovery was infinitely more damaging. The man he’d considered his father had murdered his real parents, and then taken Thomas into his home.

  Could there be any worse knowledge than learning you’d not only lived with the devil for most of your childhood, but called him Father? Carlisle had robbed Thomas of his parents, his brother, and his nephew. But Sophie suspected she knew what had been the very first blow, what had psychologically sent Thomas into a posttraumatic tailspin following all his recent horrific losses.

  That sick fuck had made Thomas love him.

  She thought of how wounded he’d been that night she’d found him standing on her dock. That wound still existed, despite Thomas’s frantic attempts at ignoring it.

  Sophie rushed over to the picture window, searching the dock and lake desperately.

  “Thomas?” she called out shrilly when she saw no sign of him.

  She started to race down the hallway, thinking she must have missed him in the yard, when she saw him walking toward her.

  “What . . . what are you doing?” she asked in confusion when she noticed that he wore the pants to his suit and the same bloody dress shirt he’d worn when he came to Haven Lake with her so many nights ago. She stepped back when she took in the expression on his face and the hard, dangerous glitter in his green eyes.

  “Are you finished having your talk with Agent Fisk?”

  Air popped out of her lungs as though she’d been punched. It had been the last thing she’d expected him to say.

  “I ... I—”

  “Come on, Sophie,” he prodded. His quiet voice struck her as being bizarrely at odds with his damp brow and tense posture. “If you’re going to make a habit of lying, you’ll have to get better at thinking on your feet.”
<
br />   “I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t been lying.”

  “You’ve been conspiring,” he spat, the biting force of his accusation startling her more than his volume. “You’ve been talking to that man—” He waved wildly toward the driveway. “—behind my back. That’s why you asked me here, isn’t it?” he demanded as he came toward her slowly. Sophie shook her head as she stepped away from him. “You wanted me to open up to you. Maybe give you some incriminating evidence about my father that would bolster the FBI’s investigation?”

  “No. No, Thomas. That’s not true,” she murmured. Her hip hit the kitchen counter, halting her. Thomas kept coming, his presence as dark and intimidating as it might be to stand in the path of an oncoming cyclone. Sweat beaded on his brow and glazed his face.

  “I wondered why you insisted on me being here,” he said in a hollow voice. “I even suspected you of talking to the Feds about what you’d learned from Dr. Lancaster. Still ...” His slashing smile struck Sophie as alarming. “You can be very convincing, Sophie. I have to give credit where it’s due. Those big eyes and soft touches. You’re one hell of an actress.” He shook his head, his fixed smile remaining eerily intact. His bark of laughter made her jump like gunfire had gone off.

  “I even believed it when you told me you were falling in love with me. I even believed that.”

  “You should have believed it. It’s the truth,” she whispered through numb lips. He stepped toward her, until his thighs and pelvis made contact with her body. She felt the heat pouring off him. Her gaze up at him entreated him . . . begged him to remember.

  She went very still when he leaned down over her and placed his large, opened hand on her collarbone, thumb and forefinger pressing to her neck.

  “It’s a lie,” he hissed softly. “Everything is a fucking lie.”

  “No. Not everything.” Her lips moved to say more, but the wildness in his eyes, the reality of his lancing pain, froze her vocal cords.

  “You’re the FBI’s informant,” he grated out.