Lisa Unger - Smoke

“I guess it’s possible,” he said grudgingly. “Unlikely, Jez. But possible.”

She sat back, relieved. That was all she needed: independent confirmation that her thoughts weren’t totally insane.

Lydia sat, fidgety and anxious, in the passenger seat of the Rover. They should have flown. But between Jeff’s ever increasing phobia of flying and Dax’s need to travel with a small armory, Lydia was outvoted. If they took turns and didn’t stop except for gas and snacks, they could make it in seventeen hours. A big waste of time they didn’t have. The sky was dusty pink and gray with the setting sun and a light rain fell. Lydia watched as the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler approached in the oncoming lane and then whipped past them in a wet, noisy blur. She shuddered at its speed and size, imagining vividly that it jackknifed and the Rover went crashing into its body, squealing tires, then metal on metal, killing all three of them instantly.

“Whatever the deal was,” said Dax, “seems to me like Tim Samuels got the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

Lydia shook her head. “I didn’t figure him for a suicide. He seemed too narcissistic.”

In her experience people like Tim Samuels thought too much of themselves to ever put an end to their own lives. It didn’t rest well with her that she was so wrong about him.

“Is it possible someone else shot him in the head?” asked Jeffrey from behind her, reading her mind.

Dax shook his head. “No one left or entered his place while we were there. And you say no one left or entered while you and Jeff watched. Unless someone came and went and we missed it, which I doubt, there was no one else there to do the job.”

“Or unless there was someone in the house already,” suggested Lydia.

“We saw the flash in the upstairs window and were in the house in less than five minutes. If there had been someone else in the house, we’d have seen him leave.”

“They could have come from the water,” suggested Lydia, thinking of the beach behind the house.

“We’d have heard the boat or seen the lights. Besides, the water was really rough. Too rough for a small craft.”

“How did you get into the house?” asked Jeffrey.

“Through the front door. We were going to break it down but it wasn’t locked.”

“That seems weird. Who leaves their door unlocked?”

“Lots of people,” said Dax. “Look, if you’re planning on offing yourself why would you bother locking the door? What exactly at that point would you worry about protecting?”

“It’s a habit,” said Jeffrey. “You do it without thinking.”

“They live out in the middle of nowhere,” suggested Lydia. “Maybe it was his habit not to lock the door.”

“Don’t you remember seeing an alarm system in that house?” asked Jeffrey. “If I recall it was pretty high end. Not the kind of thing you would invest in if you were going to leave your doors unlocked.” He always got very worked up about people who were careless about their personal security. Maybe it was their work, or the fact that they’d had to be so vigilant about their own personal security for so long.

“Maybe he was expecting someone,” she said.

No one said anything for a minute, each lost in their thoughts about Tim Samuels.

“He was smart,” said Dax finally. “He put the gun to his temple and fired. Most people think they should put it in their mouth. But you can really fuck yourself up like that. Make yourself a total vegetable. His face was okay, good enough for an open casket, but he was seriously dead.”

“Where was he?” Lydia asked.

“It looked like a girl’s bedroom. Must have been Lily’s childhood room, lots of dolls and gymnastics trophies, pretty pale pink carpet and window seat looking out over the ocean.”

Dax told Lydia and Jeffrey how he’d found Samuels slumped in the bed. The gun had fallen to the floor. It seemed that he’d positioned himself so that the blood and brain matter would splatter on a blank wall beside the bed. But maybe that hadn’t been his intent. Maybe he’d just wanted to be in Lily’s room when he ended his life, not caring what kind of damage his exit would do to it.

Lydia shook her head. There was something about that detail she didn’t like. Something about it seemed wrong. Thinking about his wife, she wondered what it would be like to know your husband had killed himself in your missing daughter’s bedroom.

“You sure it was him?” asked Lydia.

“Who else would it be?”

“You’ve never seen Tim Samuels before. How do you know it was him?”

He took his eyes off the road and gave her a look.

“What am I… an amateur? I checked. There were some pictures on the shelf in Lily’s room. Him teaching her how to ride a bike, him at her graduation. It was him. Trust me.”

They were all quiet for a second, as if out of respect. Each of them was thinking about Tim Samuels and his final moments.

“So what kind of deal would involve him killing himself?” asked Lydia.

“A really shitty one,” said Dax.

“I mean, how could he be sure the other party was living up to his side of the bargain?” said Lydia.

“And if you were going to kill yourself, why would you bother to make a deal at all, in the same way that you wouldn’t bother to lock the door,” said Jeffrey.

“Unless the deal was his life for Lily’s,” suggested Lydia. “He could die knowing that she’d be safe.”

“But he couldn’t know that,” said Jeffrey. “He would only have the word of a psychopath, assuming that he made the deal with Rhames.”

Lydia sighed. “Maybe it was literally the last thing he could do. All of his other resources had been exhausted. Nothing else he could do would save her. He told us Rhames wanted him to surrender. Isn’t suicide the ultimate surrender?”

Dax laughed without mirth. “No,” he said gravely. “Suicide is the ultimate fuck-you. It’s the ultimate act of control, of total selfishness. It tells everyone that you make the decisions about your life, no one else.” He said it with conviction, as if he’d given it a lot of thought. A lot of thought. He went on, “You’re a soldier and you get captured by the enemy? If you surrender , you’ve failed. If you kill yourself, you’ve robbed them of their control over you.”

“What are you saying then?”

“I’m saying what if Tim Samuels broke the deal he made with Rhames or whoever? What if his suicide wasn’t the deal at all but his way of taking back control of his life, even if only to end it.”

It made a sick kind of sense to Lydia. She rubbed the fatigue from her eyes.

“So if he broke the deal with Rhames, then what happens to Lily?” she asked.

Dax stared at the road, his jaw tense. He didn’t answer. Jeffrey caught her eyes in the rearview mirror and she turned to look at him. He reached for her shoulder.

A heavy rain started then and Lydia settled into her seat. They still had ten hours of driving ahead of them before they got to Florida, her least favorite place in the world. Or one of them anyway.

The bodies of Rosario Mendez and her unborn son were spotted floating in the East River by a tour helicopter pilot. The Coast Guard and NYPD responded immediately and within an hour had retrieved the bodies from the frigid gray waters. It was grim work, unclear whether Rosario had given birth to her son prior to her death, or whether the gases of her decomposing body had expelled the fetus. The umbilical cord was intact.

The wind seemed to have a personal problem with Jesamyn as she stood beside Evelyn on the pier near the medical examiner’s van. With the sun low in the sky and a damp rain to make things worse, the cold pulled at the bottom of her coat, snuck in through her cuffs, under her collar. She wrapped her arms around herself and watched as the Coast Guard officers lifted the bodies with as much care as the rocking waves would allow. Jesamyn turned away, walked back toward the FDR, and watched as the cars raced past. Some guy from the ME’s office she’d never met before leaned against the back of the van smoking a cigarette like he was waiting for a bus. She nodded at him.