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.