Explosive - Page 92

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?”

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