A/N: As long as this chapter is, I still didn't get to what I had thought I would. While I'm itching to crank out the next chapter so I can get to that point, I'm not sure I'm up to the madness of doing two chapters at once, one for Burned and one for Journey's End, which is the next up. As for the MacGyverish/Holmesian bit at the end, where Helena does the impossible with the equivalent of a can opener and a shoelace, well, it's a fanfic . . . .
She was chasing Christina around the yard, pretending to strangle on her breath and, with theatrical gestures that came straight from her high school drama class, grabbing at her chest as if her heart was about to fly from it. Christina was shrieking with laughter, trying to run even faster, and when, with a groan, Myka collapsed onto the grass, Christina hopped ahead a few feet, shouting, "I won, Mommy, I won." Helena, sitting on one of the steps of the back porch, clapped enthusiastically and praised her daughter's efforts.
Rolling onto her back, Myka squinted against the brightness of the sun but enjoyed the contrast between the coolness of the ground under her and the warmth stealing through the front of her shirt. Running a few short circuits around the yard hadn't winded her by any means, but only an hour into the four-hour visit, she was more tired than she liked to admit. She wasn't unfamiliar with the energy of little kids; she had had her five-year-old nephew taking her on endless toboggan runs over Christmas, but she hadn't been coming off three, no, four nights of surveillance before having to run after him. Christina was approaching her curiously. "Get up, My-ka," she said, half in command, half in concern.
"In a minute. My-ka is resting." Myka smiled at her. She had gotten in the habit around Christina of stressing the second syllable of her name. It sounded a little bit like a bird call when the emphasis fell on the "ka," which was better than the bark or gunshot her name could sound like when someone was yelling it.
Christina looked from her to Helena, unsure whether playtime was over. "Go get a ball, pumpkin, and we'll play catch," Helena said, her tone becoming sardonic, "while Agent Bering catches her breath."
As Christina dithered between the whiffle balls, tennis balls, and larger balls that lay like eggs in the yard, running from one to the next, Helena left the porch to sit next to Myka, her legs extended, hands planted at her sides. She seemed to be inspecting how expertly she had painted her toenails, which sported a fuchsia-colored polish that matched her blouse, but she asked Myka quietly, "Nothing of interest last night either?"
"No." Myka was surprised, and grateful, that Helena hadn't led off with a sarcastic comment about "the Neanderthal" having "tired her out" the night before. She was also struck, and less than grateful for the noticing of it, by how the sunlight intensified the blackness of Helena's hair. It was only the richer and darker for the light, and Myka imagined that if she passed her hand through the strands it would come away covered in ink. "When we took over, Lee and Jennifer said DeWitt had only left once, to work out at his gym and then go to the grocery store. He didn't go out again. Steve and I called it a night around 11:30."
"Baby, just bring one of the tennis balls here," Helena called to Christina, who had collected an armful of balls. "She's starting to act like you," she grumbled at Myka. "Did I not say a ball? And there she is gathering every one we have."
"Yep. Dedicated to the job." Without thinking about it, Myka grinned up at her. The exasperation in Helena's face subtly altered, her brows crinkling together in puzzlement at the same time that her gaze became more intent. She shifted, beginning to lower her head, and Myka's heart started to beat faster. Then the phone clipped to her jeans buzzed, and she thumbed the screen as she awkwardly maneuvered to her knees, leaning away from Helena.
"You said you needed to talk to me," Bobby Olson's voice was sharp with annoyance. "So here I am."
Myka lurched to her feet, walking to a corner of the yard free, relatively speaking, of Christina's toys. "Not over the phone. We want to meet with you." She pictured Bobby frowning, dirty fingers scratching at his patchy beard or his greasy hair, and shuddered.
"You're not good for business," he complained. "Besides, I'm not too happy with you. Some of your friends tried to jam me up, that's never been part of my deal with you guys."
"First, there's no 'deal.'" Second, your beef is with the other agents. I don't give a fuck what they did." Myka had hardened her voice. Bobby in a good mood was never a pleasure to work with; a Bobby angry because an agent had gotten impatient with him and threatened to haul him in for one of his petty scams was that much worse. It explained why he had been ignoring her messages, but trying to reassure him or reason with him wasn't the solution, she had learned; it made him only the more contemptuous. Being profane and scathing worked as well as anything else. The lack of sympathy seemed to realign the parameters of his relationship with the agency. It was like restarting a computer when the operating system became momentarily scrambled.
"What do you have to meet with me about?" Somewhere in that growl was a concession to the necessity of dealing with her.
"You'll find out when we meet. Tomorrow. At eleven, the usual place." Her tone invited no negotiation of the time or place, but Myka knew he spent most of the morning checking with his "suppliers" about various goods, some stolen, some counterfeit, needing buyers. There was no sense in further annoying him by disrupting his schedule more than she felt was necessary to enforce who was boss.
"You could at least buy me lunch."
"Give me a break. You stink so bad you make me want to throw up my morning coffee. Like I'm going to sit down and eat lunch with you."
He laughed. "I said buy me lunch. I'm not asking you to eat it with me. You're a cheap-ass bitch, Bering." She had coddled him back into a good mood apparently. That had been an almost affectionate good-bye from him.
She watched as Helena threw the tennis ball in a high arc that ended well short of Christina, who, with an endearing lack of coordination, tried to grab the ball as it bounced on the ground in front of her but ended up clapping air instead. "You throw like a girl," Myka said.
"I am a girl," Helena retorted. With only a slight maliciousness, she added, "There was a time when you liked that about me."
"I'm a girl, I'm a girl," Christina parroted. She fixed her fingers around the tennis ball and attempted to throw it toward her mother, but it popped out from her hand and landed behind her. She turned to frown at the ball, and Myka picked it up and held it out to her.
"Here," she said, squatting next to her. "You want to hold it like this." She positioned Christina's fingers on the ball. "Then you want to draw back your arm like this." Myka gently moved Christina's arm backward. "That's it, bend your arm. You need to get it behind your ear." As Christina complied, she gave Myka such a sober look, waiting for further instruction, that Myka had to bite back a smile. Just as gravely, she said, "Now bring that arm forward, like it's an arrow pointing at a target, and let it fly." Christina lost her grasp on the ball again, but Myka caught it from her fingertips and pushed or slapped it, more than she truly threw it, in Helena's direction. It didn't go far, but Christina was impressed with her throw, and she jumped up and down as Helena retrieved the ball. Helena smiled and said, "Aces, pumpkin," but her eyes, as they met Myka's, slid away and, while she continued to smile brightly at her daughter, Myka felt vaguely embarrassed, as though she had infringed on some mother-child preserve. Warren Bering wouldn't have been pleased with her either; he would have let the ball drop to the ground and then hectored Christina for being unable to hold onto it. If he had held true to form, he would have had her throw the ball several times, her attempts punctuated by his "You're not trying hard enough" and "I know you can do better" topped off by his ultimate in parental encouragement, "Goddammit, we're going to stay out here until you get it right."
Helena tossed the tennis ball aside. "Shall we have a snack? Nonni's been waiting and waiting for us, don't you think?" Christina vigorously nodded and ran to grab her mother's outstretched hand. As was becoming more frequent with her, Christina held out her other hand to Myka, and as Myka took it, she slowed her stride to keep pace with them.
"Not that I'm in favor of your Neanderthal reproducing himself," Helena said lightly, again not quite looking at Myka, "but he could do far, far worse than choosing you as a mother. You'd be good at it."
"I've risen to an acceptable level of incompetence just being an aunt," Myka said. "I don't see any reason to strive for more. Besides, the world has seen enough of the patented Bering parenting skills."
Helena looked as if she wanted to argue the point, but then she bent down to Christina and said, "Let's see if we can beat Myka to the porch."
Christina giggled agreement and released Myka's hand. Her legs churned industriously, but her steps were too short to take her very far, and Myka wondered if all four-year-olds ran like cartoon characters, all flailing limbs and dust clouds, but getting nowhere fast. Helena had only to skip a length or two to catch up with her, but she pumped her arms and yelled, "Pour it on, sweetheart, she's right behind us." Christina looked over her shoulder at Myka but only the rate of her giggles increased.
"You run like girls," Myka said, jogging around them and taking the porch steps in one leap.
She held the door open for them, and Christina ran to where Jemma was stretched out in her armchair, feet propped on her ottoman, flipping through a magazine. Despite drawing in great gulps of air as she spoke, Christina was dismayingly easy to understand. "Myka's going to be a mommy." She tugged at the hem of Jemma's blouse to ensure that her grandmother was paying attention to her. "Myka and Mommy are going to have a baby." At that, Jemma put her magazine down and arched an eyebrow at Helena and Myka as Christina grandly promised, "They're going to bring it here, and I'll get to play with it."
"Are they now?" Jemma rose, smiling at Myka's frantic waving of her hands in a cancelling motion. She crooked a finger at Christina, who obediently trailed her into the kitchen and pulled herself onto a stool at the breakfast bar.
"No, no, that's not going to happen," Myka said, nervously laughing. "No babies, certainly not ones that Helena and I would have together." She looked to Helena for help, but Helena had joined her mother and daughter in the kitchen and was taking a gallon of milk from the refrigerator, the corners of her mouth curving in something suspiciously like a smirk.
"Peanut butter or Nutella, poppet?" Jemma set out both on the breakfast bar as well as a box of graham crackers. "This new baby, do you want it to be orange or black?"
Christina tilted her head in consideration. "Nutella. And orange." Myka's eyes widened and she slid onto a stool next to Christina, who whispered behind her hand as if she were sharing a secret, "What are you going to have on your cracker, Myka-Myka?"
"She wants an orange baby?" Myka stared in confusion at Jemma.
Jemma worked a cracker from its sleeve and slathered Nutella on it. She gave it to Christina and then she took another cracker and another knife and covered it with both peanut butter and Nutella. "You're too thin," she said as she handed it to Myka. "So is she." Jemma flicked a glance at Helena, who was pouring milk into four glasses, one of which was half the size of the other three. Helena only shrugged at her mother's words. "Last week, Christina wanted Helena to give birth to a litter of kittens, three orange and three black. I think the line between kittens and babies is a blurry one for her still."
Helena carried over two of the glasses and inspected Christina's hand as she crammed more of the cracker into her mouth. "Let's get those hands clean, pumpkin." Christina climbed down from the stool and followed her to the sink. Helena turned on the faucet and lifted Christina so that she could hold her hands under the water. Raising her voice in order to be heard above Christina's noisy splashing, Helena said, "Not that there aren't advantages to having kittens instead of babies. They clean themselves, they're housebroken faster, they're already learning how to find their own food, and in under a year, I can send them out to live on their own."
Jemma dug out a spoon from a drawer and dipped it into the Nutella. "When Helena wasn't much older than Christina, she went through a similar stage. But it wasn't ponies or unicorns like other girls, not even kittens. She was going to grow up and marry a dolphin and have dolphin babies. I'd never heard of such a thing." Myka nearly choked on her cracker, but Jemma didn't seem to notice, musingly nibbling the spoon. "She seemed to think the North Sea was full of them."
Holding onto Christina's raised arms as she monster-walked back to her stool, Helena leaned into Myka and said, "You thought I'd made that up about dolphins the other day, didn't you?" Giving her daughter a pat on the butt as she scooted onto the seat, Helena said wryly to Jemma, "Whether my future children will have fins or fur remains to be seen, but I fear that Myka's future children will have a belligerent disposition, protruding brow and prognathous jaw."
"She's much too nice and attractive for that," Jemma said dismissively, but her gaze sharpened as she continued to look at Helena. "Oh, I understand now, Myka's seeing someone, is she? A caveman in your opinion." She glared at her daughter before patting Myka's hand. "Good for you, pet." Bringing over the remaining glasses of milk from the counter, she said admonishingly to Helena, who was settling on the stool on the other side of Christina. "You can make all the sour faces you want about it, but you were the one who made such a mess of things years ago. If you hadn't, Christina probably would have a sibling or two. Maybe one with Myka's curls." She found a fresh spoon and ran it around the inside of the Nutella jar, glancing at Myka. "I've always loved your hair, dear."
Myka was studiously mortaring another graham cracker with peanut butter. She didn't know what she found more unsettling, Jemma's conjuring up of an alternative present, in which Christina was hers as well as Helena's, or her matter-of-fact summarizing of what had prevented that alternative present from becoming her present, their present, as a "mess." Something that you cleaned up or stepped over, not something you lingered next to, stared at, unable to move away from it. As she looked up and met Helena's eyes with their usual mixture of curiosity, apprehension, and not a little resentment, she wondered how easily Helena had put her "mess" behind her. But it wasn't just one mess, perhaps not even the most significant one in her mind. There was the securities fraud that she had so uncharacteristically bungled, the mess that had put her in prison, taking her away from her daughter.
It was useless trying to guess what Helena might regret about the Marston Gallery theft, and Jemma was right to emphasize how long ago it had happened. Too long ago for regret to make a difference for them now. Myka heard herself abruptly say, "The call earlier, we have an appointment at 11:00 tomorrow. In Hoboken." And if "Hoboken" couldn't ground her in the present, the real present with its smelly confidential informants and the grimy chop shops in which she met them, what would?
Later, much later in the afternoon, after Christina had persuaded them to go back outside for a game of hide and seek, and after a session of finger painting that ended with her presenting her mother, grandmother, and Myka with Christina Wells (or was it Winslow now?) originals, and after she had started yawning and Helena had taken her to her bedroom for a nap, Myka was sitting in the living room with Jemma, slouched in the armchair opposite her, scrolling through maps of Hoboken on her phone while Jemma read a paperback romance with a particularly lurid cover. She was trying to determine the quickest route from the office to Bobby's cousin's Full Service Auto Repair (yeah, right), quickest depending on the season, the time of day, and the amount of road construction. She had managed to worm from Helena the location of the place, still unnamed, still undescribed, that they would be visiting after they met with Bobby, so at least she had been able to have Parker reset the software for Helena's ankle monitor. No alarms should go off when they crossed the amorphous boundary between New York and New Jersey.
Other than knowing that the place was in a cluster of warehouses not far from the waterfront, Myka wasn't sure what it was that Helena was taking them to. There were a number of businesses using that address, mainly light industry, a bottler and a manufacturer of specialty cleaning products among them. It wasn't all that far from where they were meeting Bobby; if they could take to the rooftops, it would take no more than ten minutes to get there, but factor in street traffic, and they could easily triple the time.
"Hmm?" She was marginally aware that Jemma had asked her something, but it was relaxing, figuring out which streets to take, like solving a maze. If you followed the right series of streets, you made it to the center. It was a puzzle, not a mess. It wasn't a four-year-old bubbling over with enthusiasm about the babies you were going to have with her mother. It didn't matter that the difference between kittens and babies was unclear in Christina's mind, it wasn't unclear in her own mind. The rest of the afternoon, Myka had felt that alternate reality press against this one, as though nothing stronger than a screen or curtain separated them, and she half-expected to be pulled through it, chair and all, never to return. One wrong move, one moment of inattention, and she would disappear.
So, cautiously, carefully, because she had been inattentive, Myka said, "I'm sorry, Jemma, you were saying?"
"I was asking you how awkward this is for you, personally. It's not just what Christina said earlier, I've wondered before." Jemma had put her book down, but her eyes strayed to its cover, which depicted a muscle-bound pirate burying his face between his captive's breasts. "This man you're involved with . . . is it serious?"
Torn between wanting to be honest with Jemma, because she needed to feel that there was someone in this household, besides Christina, with whom she could interact without having to be on guard, and knowing that she couldn't, because Jemma wasn't a neutral party, Myka said, "We haven't had that conversation yet." With a smile to soften the fact that she was cutting off further questions, Myka looked down at her phone.
"Maybe you should have the conversation sometime soon because he should know that you're still half in love with my daughter."
There had been only gentleness in Jemma's voice, which, somehow, had made the hearing of what she said that much worse. Trying not to grip the phone as if it were a life preserver, Myka said, with a laugh that she hoped didn't sound too affected, "If it's only half, then there's half of me that's not."
"I was being kind, love." Myka raised her eyes, having no idea what face she was showing to Jemma. She was angry, although she didn't know if she was angrier with Jemma for bringing up something that didn't matter, didn't have any relevance anymore, or with herself for sufficiently betraying her unhappiness with this assignment - and that's all it was - to allow Jemma to read into it what she wanted. But if Jemma saw the anger, it didn't bother her. "The only thing that's holding her back is what's left of her pride. Christina may be shaky on the mechanics of baby-making, but she can read the feelings, and she's only four."
Jemma wasn't a neutral party, but it wouldn't be giving away something she shouldn't to be honest with her in this instance. "There's been too much, Jemma, for there ever to be . . . ."
"That's what your head's telling you." Jemma looked at her with more sympathy than Myka could bear. "Most girls, they gradually grow out of their fascination with ponies and unicorns. Part of growing up, I guess, realizing that your future is with the two-legged variety. Jim, when he visited, which wasn't often, generally when he was feeling the heat in the States, he brought her all sorts of dolphin-themed gifts. He brought her paints, too, and sketch pads because he had figured out how good she was, even with her being just a little thing." Jemma smiled, but Myka sensed the memories weren't pleasant ones. "She wanted to paint dolphins, of course, but he was ambitious for her, wanting her to do more than paint animals. I should have known then what he was molding her to do, but he was taking an interest in her, and I didn't have the heart to interfere. One day he took her to a museum, she must have been about nine or ten, and he tried to have her copy a painting, but she had wanted him to take her to the seashore instead. They must have had quite a dust-up because she was in tears when they came back, so I took her shopping with me. Wasn't much of a treat to go up and down aisles with her mother, but at least I wasn't making her copy a painting. When we got home, everything he had ever given her, it was gone, toys, paints, books, dresses, all of it. And he didn't come back for three years."
Myka rubbed her face. "He was a prick and he treated her badly, I get that, but it doesn't excuse -"
Jemma's laugh was rueful. "Not an excuse. She always knew what she was doing. But you need to understand what a hold he had on her, especially when he acted as if she meant nothing to him. She wrote him every night for months, begging him to come back and promising that she would be 'good.' I opened every damn envelope she left for me to mail to him, and God help me, I did end up mailing them, because, in spite of everything, he was her father. And she never talked about dolphins, never painted another one again. I know she hurt you, probably in ways I don't want to know about. All she had was a father who taught her that love was another form of manipulation." The smile on her face twisted painfully. "And a mother who let him. There's a reason, love, that she hasn't called me Mum since she was a little girl."
Myka felt an unwelcome but familiar throbbing in her head. It wasn't just Helena, it was her family. She went to the kitchen and found a clean glass. "Do you have any aspirin or Advil or something?"
"In that narrow little cupboard by the sink." Jemma rose as well, and as Myka shook out and then washed down more ibuprofen than she knew she should be taking, Jemma took out a box of tea bags. "Tea?" She rattled the box. "I know I can use some."
Myka shook her head. "It's almost five."
"I didn't mean to upset you. I'm not trying to plead her case . . . yes, yes, I am trying to plead her case because she won't do it for herself." When Jemma stood on tip-toe to reach for a mug, Myka automatically brought it down for her. Looking down into eyes that were as blue and clear as Helena's were dark and unreadable, Myka could only helplessly roll her shoulders. Her words seeming to beat in time with the pulsing ache in Myka's head, Jemma said, "These past Sundays, they've not been many, but the three of you, you're already forming a unit. You can sense that, can't you? You were good for her, Myka. Why wouldn't I want that for her again?"
"Steve will be out here next Sunday," Myka said woodenly. She put her glass in the sink and returned to the living room to pick up her phone . . . and Christina's finger-painted portrait of her, intermixed smears of brown and orange representing her hair and a yellow blob resting on a waveringly curved line that represented her shoulder. It might have been the sun or a bird, but was instead, as Christina helpfully explained, a tennis ball. She folded it and tucked it into a back pocket. Helena was coming down the stairs, her face still soft and slack with the remains of the nap she had taken.
"What's this about Agent Jinks?" Helena looked from Myka to her mother.
"Steve will be the one to pick you up next Sunday," Myka said curtly, deleting the maps of Hoboken. Who was she to think she could navigate anything successfully? Like hell she had reached the center of the maze, she was just bumbling down a dead-end, lost and clueless as always when she was with Helena.
"Ah, I had been wondering when the excitement of playing hide-and-seek and coloring would be too much for you," Helena said. She had stopped looking at Myka and was turning over a stuffed animal she had picked up from the floor. As she continued to turn the toy over and over, the sleepiness disappeared from her face and the set to her jaw became stiff. "While I don't want a revolving door of agents for her, the last thing I want is for Christina to become too attached to you." Sarcasm had turned into anger, raw and cutting.
"It's my fault, pet," Jemma said apologetically, leaning against the side of the breakfast bar. "I talk too much."
Helena bent to place the toy on an end table. Myka couldn't see her face for the sweep of her hair. "No, you were right. I made the mess, and this is what happens when you wait eight years to clean it up."
She was on time for meetings, usually early, except when it came to meeting Bobby Olson. She wanted to be late enough to press home who was calling the shots but not so late that he gave up on waiting for her. She didn't want to have go through the process of setting up a meeting with him all over again. So at ten minutes past, she and Helena opened the door to the office of Full Service Auto Repair. The service bay doors were never open; there were never any cars during business hours. There weren't any mechanics either, unless Bobby counted as one. He listed it as his occupation, but Myka suspected he didn't know the workings of a car any better than she did. The only time there were lights on and people moving around was at night when Bobby's cousin and his crew would gut the cars that were driven into the bays for parts.
Bobby's cousin was behind the counter in the office, which held no chairs, no tables, no magazines, no self-service coffee stations. His name was Pete, but because she didn't want this "Pete" contaminating the "Pete" who was her former partner, her boss, her friend, Myka didn't think of him, didn't refer to him by name. He was "You" if she had to speak to him; otherwise he was "Bobby's cousin." He was on the phone when she and Helena entered the room but immediately ended the call, bellowing through a closed door, "Bobby, she's here." Although he hadn't shaved in days and wore grease-stained coveralls that smelled pungently of various engine fluids, he was impeccable in comparison to Bobby.
Bobby came out of the private office and leaned over the counter, a nearly visible cloud of old sweat and body oils and . . . pizza cheese? . . . rising from a t-shirt that might once have been pale blue but was now a medium gray. He dismissed Myka with a slow blink, but he looked harder and longer at Helena, not in the practically lip-smacking way his cousin had - and was still doing from the doorway into the garage - but as if he was trying to recall the last place he had seen her. Helena stared at him impassively; although Myka had put on one of her most conservative business suits, so dark and plainly styled that it practically shouted "law enforcement agent," Helena was wearing boot-cut skinny jeans and a long-sleeved knit top, its unbuttoned placket generously exposing the swell of her breasts. To his credit, Bobby wasn't trying to recall where he had last seen those breasts, his eyes steadfastly staying on her face.
Finally he looked away from her and back to Myka. "What is it that you think I can help you with?"
This was going to be the tough part. She had to make it sound convincing that she would turn to him for information on stolen jewels. "Something that you think might be a little out of your territory, but we've heard there might be somebody looking to unload some jewels around here, jewels that might need a little recutting to sell."
"And you think I would know that because?" Bobby said sarcastically.
"Because they don't want to be caught trying to sell them in their backyard, because I know you know about shit that you don't personally, um, handle." Holding her breath, Myka aggressively leaned over the counter, trying not to see the blackheads in his pores, the flaking skin at his hairline, and when he smiled, exhaling a breath, just a breath, infused with the odors of rotting teeth and last night's three-meat pizza, she tried not to gag.
"You're wasting my time. They sound like amateurs, but if they were, you'd have caught them already, so you wouldn't need to be talking to me. So, why are you here fucking with me?" Bobby's eyes narrowed in suspicion.
"Because we heard they were trying to sell them to Ezra," Helena interjected.
Myka stilled, trying desperately not to turn and look at her. Where the hell had she come up with that? Ezra . . .Ezra . . . Ezra. Myka frantically tried to remember old cases that she and Helena had worked on. There had been one . . . not about jewels, about a silver tea set that a con had been trying to sell to a museum, claiming it had been one that George and Martha Washington had owned. Helena had spent several minutes scrutinizing it, particularly its marks, before declaring it a fake. She had pointed the team to Ezra Rainey, who owned a small retail jewelry store in Hoboken but made his living by recutting and resetting stolen jewelry. He would also turn his hand at forging heirlooms, most often for her father. In the end, Ezra had managed to avoid being arrested - which, in retrospect, was suspicious in and of itself - but the con was still serving a fairly hefty prison sentence. The last Myka had heard, however, was that Ezra had moved to Florida . . . for his health.
"Ezra's been out of the game for years, he got religion, you might say," Bobby answered, suspicions unallayed.
"I heard that he still comes up to visit his grandchildren. One of them has a heart defect, and conditions like that are expensive, even if you have good insurance." Helena had said it so smoothly that Myka couldn't tell whether she was lying.
Apparently Bobby couldn't either. "I wouldn't know about that," he said. Glancing at Myka, he repeated, "I don't know about any stolen jewelry either. Unless you've got something real for me, leave me the fuck alone."
Myka touched Helena's arm and nodded toward the door. As they were turning, Bobby suddenly said, "You're Jim Wells' daughter. You look just like him."
Helena turned back, her expression wary. "How did you know my father?" The implication was plain, she didn't even have to make the gesture of disdainfully looking around the room. In the food chain of organized crime, Bobby Olson was plankton, while Jim Wells had been a shark.
"You thought I saw his picture in a paper or something? Too small-time to lick the boots of your old man?" Bobby grinned unpleasantly at her, and, for a moment, Myka thought he was wearing a mouthguard, the kind athletes wore in contact sports to protect their teeth, until she realized it was simply film, so thick it had practically become gel. "Might surprise you to know that Nate Burdette had him running errands. He was no better than me, honey. He was hawking all kinds of penny-ante shit down here."
"He ran Nate," Helena said coldly. "Not the other way around."
"May have been like that in the beginning. But word was he owed Nate money, and Nate got his jollies snapping his fingers at your dad. He didn't need the money." Bobby paused, his grin retreating, and his gaze growing both shrewder and more fearful. Swiveling his head back toward Myka, he demanded, "Is that why you're here? You want me to give you something on Burdette? You're looking to bring him down?" The snarl curling his lips would have been more threatening had he more teeth to bare. "I don't want nothing to do with that. He's a mean fucker, and I'd deliver you to him before I'd ever give him up to you. Get the hell out of here, now." He looked toward his cousin, who had stepped closer to the counter, reaching for something underneath it.
Myka swept her suit jacket away from her holster. She had never had a meeting go this badly with him. "No need to get worked up, Bobby. We're going." She pulled at Helena's sleeve until Helena reluctantly began to walk backward from the counter. Opening the door, Myka waited for Helena to step into the parking lot, keeping her eyes hard and steady on Bobby and his cousin, and then let it close behind them.
She didn't run to the car, but she wasted no time getting into it. As soon as Helena closed her door, Myka was already pulling away from the garage. As the car bumped out of the lot, which hadn't been re-asphalted in a decade or two, Myka said grimly, "That went well. I thought I was going to have to shoot Bobby, and that would have made Pete very, very unhappy with me."
Helena was looking out the passenger window. "That's what Nate does to people, Myka. He scares little worms like that so badly they almost do something stupid."
"Or into doing whatever he tells them. How did Jim Wells come to such a pass, Helena, that he was working for his former protégé?"
Myka was concentrating on the traffic and the road, both of which were horrible. She couldn't spare a glance at Helena, but from the corner of her eye, she could tell that Helena was still staring out the window. The question hung in the air between them.
Helena never did answer it. Not when Myka double-parked to run into a corner mart to buy a couple of sandwiches and bottles of water and asked her brusquely "Turkey or ham?," not when they were stopped for ten minutes as they waited for a dump truck loaded with broken pavement to execute an excruciatingly slow three-point turn, not when they parked in a narrow slot abutting a warehouse that appeared all but abandoned, except for the small sign posted in a first floor window that announced "Photocopier Repair." An adjacent warehouse looked no more prosperous.
Helena said, "Follow me." Which, other than "ham," were the only words she had said since Myka asked her the question about her father. So Myka followed her, trying to imprint the sagging privacy fence and the crumbling brick on her mind. She would come here again, without Helena. Expecting the interior of the warehouse to be as deserted as its exterior promised, she was surprised to see men with pallet jacks moving pallets loaded with boxes from one side of the warehouse to the other. The floor wasn't crowded with containers, but it had enough to keep the men busy. Myka didn't spot any photocopiers, and she doubted that was what was in the boxes and crates, but in this instance she thought it better not to ask too many questions, at least there was a pretense being made that a legitimate business was operating on the premises. None of the men were stopping and pointing at the two of them in alarm or, worse, reaching for guns.
In fact, they seemed to pay them little attention, and no one questioned where they were going as Helena wove around pallets, headed toward an office off to the side. She knocked on the door, and when a male voice shouted something unintelligible, she opened it. Behind a battered desk that had a very new-looking laptop on it, a man spun his chair back to greet her, a white eyebrow arched over a dark, querying eye. The resemblance was faint, more in the color of the eyes and their angled cast over his cheekbones, but he was related to Helena. An uncle, perhaps. He looked to be in his late sixties or early seventies, a younger brother of Jim Wells, although Myka could remember only a sister being mentioned in the files, long dead.
"I'll be upstairs, John."
"You don't need to account to me for anything." He had barely looked in Myka's direction, but she had the feeling he knew exactly what, if not who, she was.
That was the extent of their exchange, and Myka found it impossible to determine if theirs was a relationship founded on their speaking to each other every day or once every ten years. Helena didn't walk much farther past the office before she stopped and pressed a button set into a panel. After a groan and a rattle, two doors opened vertically and Helena waved to Myka to enter the freight elevator. "It sounds like it's going to collapse, but it's safe, I assure you."
When the doors wheezed shut, Myka shot her a dubious look. "Where are we, Helena?"
"My cousin's warehouse. Actually he's my father's cousin, which would make him, what, my second cousin? My cousin-once-removed?" The smile was verging on being playful, but Myka didn't smile back. Cousins. There always seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of them in crime families.
The elevator opened onto a narrow floor, which extended no more than a few feet on either side before being walled off. In front of them were double doors with an electronic lock set next to the frame. Helena quickly typed a series of numbers on the keypad and then pulled down on a door handle. Her smile had disappeared, and her eyes looked larger than normal. "You always wanted to know my secrets. This is one of them."
A bank of lights flickered on overhead and, at first, Myka thought Helena was playing a joke on her because she saw nothing except the concrete floor, veined with cracks, and the opposite wall of painted brick, then she saw the easels and the tables in the shadows, and as she continued to survey the room, she saw canvas upon canvas stacked against an interior wall. The room stretched the width of the warehouse, and it took her longer to arrive at the canvases than she had expected. She noted the industrial-sized fans set into the exterior wall, although she couldn't feel - or smell - any air from the outside flowing into the room. Below the fans were windows, almost completely covered by blackout cloth. She pivoted, in search of Helena, and spied her, perching herself on one of the tables. "The studio where the magic happened," she said. The words were flippant, but her tone wasn't.
Helena's voice was just as flat. "Not a studio, a factory, and I assure you there was no magic created here."
Crouching in front of the canvases, Myka felt oddly squeamish about touching them. She had known what Helena was, who she was for years, but she hadn't actually seen the evidence of her forgeries, touched them, flipped through them as though they were so many record albums. She wanted to run back to that rattling freight elevator and take it down to the first floor, jumping from it before the doors fully opened, intent only on getting out of the warehouse as fast as she could. She would blot out every detail that she had tried to commit to memory because she wouldn't be coming back. Ever. Instead she shushed that Myka, the one who always asked her whether it was duty that she was so eager to submit to or punishment, and lifted the first painting. Soon she didn't bother picking them up, most being unfinished, partial portraits of ballet dancers, sunflowers, mothers with children, fishermen on a sea. Other canvases were blank, while yet others, though blank, were stained and streaked with chemicals. Myka ended up examining those the longest, eventually concluding that they were canvases that had been put through some sort of artificial aging process, with less than successful results. When she stood up and stepped away from the canvases, her muscles were stiff and her back ached, and she didn't know how much time had passed.
"How long has it been since you used this room?"
Helena was still sitting on the table, gently swinging her legs, and while Myka hadn't looked over her shoulder to see what Helena was doing as she was going through the canvases, she had felt Helena's eyes on her, as if Helena knew the canvases in order and was crossing each one off in her mind as Myka moved on to the next. "Not since before Christina was born."
Myka switched her attention to the next stack; facing out was a nearly complete abstract painting that looked familiar, with its piled-on irregular shapes in reds, purples, and browns, receding into the background like a mountain range. The brushwork was thick, almost as if the paint had been applied with a trowel. "Is this a real Jim Wells or one of yours?"
Myka heard the steady click-click of boots on the floor, which stopped only when Helena came to stand next to her. She crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her head as she looked at the painting. "Both. Jim never stopped painting, but most of his later work wasn't very good. He knew it; that's why he never attempted to do anything with it. He'd just store the canvases somewhere and try to forget about them. When he died, interest in him as a painter revived a little, and I couldn't pass up an opportunity like that, now could I? Take something and improve upon it. Must be the overachiever in me." Both the look and the smile Helena gave her were mocking. "Jim would have expected no less. He would have returned from the dead if he could have to tell me which ones would be the best to, ah, 'touch up.' There were buyers eager to be fleeced, although the auction houses and galleries were leery. I have no idea why, a forger representing the estate of a con artist. Doesn't that happen all the time?" The smile became brittle. "The Winslow Gallery decided to give a showing of them, if only because Ben Winslow had a drug problem I was willing to help hide and support."
"Nothing like extortion and abetting an addiction to bring out the gratitude in someone. Kind of explains his attitude toward you now," Myka said, feeling a surge of revulsion. It was one thing to deceive someone, it was another to take advantage of his addiction. But didn't deception require an addiction, an obsession, a weakness? The mark was blind to something in herself that was all too visible to the con, and if the mark didn't have an obvious weakness, the con had to create it. Who was she to think she had been any better or stronger than Ben Winslow when the facts indicated the opposite? She didn't take drugs, didn't drink to excess, wasn't promiscuous, but she had craved for someone to recognize all that goodness, all that hard-won inner strength. Her virtue or, rather, her pride in her virtue had been her weakness and Helena's weapon. She had been so mesmerized by the mirror Helena had held up to her that she hadn't been able to look away from it to see what Helena was actually doing.
"Snakes and mice, Myka. He was the mouse, and I was the snake. Now Ben's a snake, and I'm your mouse. Does it make you feel better? Are the scales of justice righted?" Helena hugged herself tighter. Then she unfolded her arms and with a swift, savage kick, she drove her boot into the painting and walked away.
Myka decided to wait out the fit of temper. If Helena was being pricked by something resembling a conscience, so much the better. Giving herself a shake, plucking and tugging at her top though it was too body-hugging to need readjusting, Helena said, taking refuge in sarcasm once more, "Other than setting myself up to be the object of your contempt, I did have a purpose for bringing you here." Sweeping her hair over her shoulder, she headed toward a sheet-draped object at a distance from the other canvases. "I should have taken better care of these, but I thought I was never going to need them. The scam well had run dry." She pulled the sheet from what was another stack of canvases and searched through them until she found the one she was seeking, a smaller canvas than the rest, consisting of horizontal bars of deepening shades of gray with faint, spidery lines of lighter gray crosshatching them.
"It's a Phillips," Myka said. Her mouth tightened. "Or a faux Phillips."
"It's genuine." Helena casually waved toward the remaining canvases. "They're all originals, ones Jim got as gifts - or payments - when he was a young artist knocking about with other young artists. You'd recognize a few, but most . . . . " She studied the painting more intently. "Most died young and unknown. Except for Martin Phillips. The story goes that Phillips sold my father this painting for ten dollars, enough to keep him supplied with bourbon for a few days. It was the original Study in Gray No. 5, or so Jim claimed. Phillips tried to buy it back from him, and when he couldn't, he repainted it from memory."
"The Bowdoin," Myka said softly. "The Study in Gray No. 5 was among the paintings stolen from the Bowdoin."
Helena very carefully placed the painting back on the floor. "And people think Jim Wells didn't have a sentimental streak," she said. "More likely a jealous one. Poor old Martin had drunk himself to death decades ago, and Jim couldn't let go of the resentment that a Phillips was worth more than a Wells. I found this in a storage unit, where Jim kept a lot of things he didn't want to remember he still had."
"You're going to give it to Burdette as proof that you know where the rest of the works are." Myka ran her hand through her hair. "That's your bait."
"It's all I have, Myka. Nate knows what was taken from the Bowdoin, and with a little work, I can make this look like No. 5. It is No. 5, or a version of it. An afternoon's work is probably all it will take." Her voice took on an edge. "I don't have the time to whip out a fake Homer or Sargent. Your Neanderthal has impressed upon me the need to bring Nate to him quickly."
Myka began to work her fingers more vigorously through her hair. "And Burdette is going to trust the authenticity of a painting that you bring him? He's going to laugh you out the door or kill you, depending on his mood."
"Trust me? Of course not," Helena scoffed. "But I won't deny that I've made some repairs, which means I'll have to beat this up a little bit first and blame it on the idiots my father hired to help with the heist. Nate won't have any difficulty with that part of it; I'm sure he thinks to this day he could have done a better job of the Bowdoin. Any expert he consults will tell him that it's a Phillips and from the right period. He won't be entirely convinced that it's No. 5, but he won't be able to find anyone who can tell him that it's not. This should work, unless my father told Nate that he bought what was supposed to be No. 5 for a song, in which case we're screwed. And then Nate will kill me." The wryness didn't diminish the confidence of her smile, that smile, the one that suggested they shared a secret. The smile deepened, her bottom lip dipping lower, implying that this secret was the best yet, eclipsing any other, and Myka, despite the injunction in her head not to, smiled back, surrendering to the power of the promise, though she knew it was empty, that they were in this together.
Exiting the museum, Helena closed her eyes, inhaling so loudly that Myka could hear her. The air smelled of exhaust and incipient rain, which didn't make Myka want to suck in a lungful, but she understood that it took the place of Helena thumping her chest or dancing in the end zone. It was the "victory" inhalation of a job well done, a difficult task completed, and the smile Helena wore, spreading out from the center of her lips like ripples on the surface of a pond, washed lightly against Myka, and while she knew it was silly to imagine a smile lapping over her like water, she enjoyed the momentary dizziness, the feeling of being swept just the slightest bit off-balance.
The Boston office had called Thursday morning, specifically requesting Helena's help, and Myka had been surprised and a little envious that only a few months after joining the team, Helena was so well known, and regarded, outside it. The original plan had called for Pete to take the late afternoon flight to Boston with them, but once he learned the potential counterfeit was an eighteenth century silver tea service purportedly owned by George Washington, his enthusiasm had waned and he volunteered instead to complete the several weeks' worth of paperwork - related to the cases that Helena had helped them to close - that had accumulated in his and Myka's desks. So Friday morning she and Helena and the Boston office's one all-purpose fraud investigator traveled to a pristinely restored early nineteenth century home near Harvard's campus, which had been converted to a museum specializing in Revolutionary War- and Federalist-era collections.
The curator had taken them to a workroom behind the exhibit area on the first floor where the tea set, consisting of a teapot, sugar bowl, cream pot, and tray, had been placed on a table. As Helena examined the teapot and the tray, turning the one over and lifting the other one up to check their marks, the curator nervously explained that the seller had been able to provide documentation from respectable appraisers attesting to the set's age and silver content as well as other records establishing a provenance confirming that the Washingtons had owned the set. "Did you verify with the appraisers that they had looked at the set? You confirmed the authenticity of whatever papers the seller had proving that that the Washingtons owned the set?" Helena had picked up the cream pot and was running her finger around its rim.
Bridling, the curator said that he had e-mailed the appraisers questions about the set, and they had responded, which was confirmation enough surely? As for the provenance, the museum owned letters of Martha Washington and it had hired a handwriting expert to confirm that various household documents that the seller had in his possession, which described the set, when and where the Washingtons had bought it, the dent in the sugar bowl from its having been dropped by a clumsy maid, were by Mrs. Washington's hand as well.
Helena nodded. Then she pointed to the marks on the bottom of the tray, the maker's mark, the mark of the city in which the set had been produced. They were worn, the letters and designs barely distinct, the silver almost as weathered and scratched as the silver on the face of the tray. "The marks are accurate, but they're counterfeit themselves; they're probably hiding the original ones, which would tell us the set wasn't made in the eighteenth century. It was made a century or more later, if I had to guess. Not all the wear and tear you see is manufactured. As for the e-mails you received from the appraisers, call them and ask them if they've had problems with the integrity of their networks, because if they're as reputable as you say they are, they didn't send them. Ask them to provide you copies of the appraisals; if they did them, they should have them in their files." She put the tray down and the teapot back on it. "As for the household records, I bet that a few months ago you had a frequent visitor who was very interested in anything having to do with Martha Washington. He or she probably posed as a graduate student or a faculty member, asking to look at any written materials that you could provide for viewing." Helena frowned. "It was an elaborate con and a good one. One that would have taken money to set up. Too much . . . ." She raised a skeptical eyebrow at the set.
Myka spoke up for the first time. "The seller told you that he had other items, right? The tea set was just to get a foot in the door."
The curator looked away from them in embarrassment. "He did mention an escritoire that had been in the President's House in Philadelphia. He said that he had already received a number of offers, but -"
"He was willing to give you an opportunity to bid." Helena and Myka shared a triumphant look.
The rest of the morning they had spent questioning the appraisers over the phone or Myka had while Helena compared the seller's Martha Washington documents with the Martha Washington letters in the museum's collections. The Boston agent meanwhile had called Bates requesting that agents be sent to a jewelry store in Hoboken to question Ezra Rainey. Helena had hedged her conclusion that Rainey was the tea set's counterfeiter with a series of atypical disclaimers about how frauds involving precious metals weren't her specialty and how there might be others, conveniently unnamed, who might be as or even more likely culprits than Rainey, admitting to Myka with a shy smile that was also something of an anomaly that she had always liked Ezra and hoped he wasn't involved or, if he was, that he could avoid being arrested. Her smile turned roguish after she made her confession, and she had said impishly, "I suppose I shouldn't be saying something like that to you, but aren't you secretly glad sometimes that the criminals escape? How else can you improve unless you learn from your mistakes? And who's a better teacher than a con who's outsmarted you?"
"It's not a game, Helena. People have been hurt. The curator could lose his job, maybe the director too." The director, when they had spoken to her, was unwilling to disclose how much money the museum had lost, but the dark circles under her eyes and the empty coffee cups on her desk attested to sleepless nights.
"True, not a game per se, but it is a contest. There are no second place finishes. If you win, you eat, if you lose, you're eaten." The impishness threatened to turn sour before Helena said softly, "Of all the carnivores I've met, Ezra is one of the kindest. At least he'll give you a running start before he tries to take you down. What drives him isn't the money, but the challenge. It's a heady feeling, knowing you've fooled the best in their field."
"Speaking from experience?" Myka asked equally as softly.
"It wouldn't be wise for me to say, would it?"
Myka could better appreciate the truth of Helena's metaphor now as her dizziness receded and she felt her stomach begin to roll in discontent. "Lunch?" The Boston agent had returned to the downtown office to coordinate the next steps in the investigation, and the museum director and the curator, the last time Myka had seen them, were on a conference call trying to placate the chairman of the board; not having liked the acquisition in the first place, the chairman had been the one to make the call to the FBI. Good luck, Myka thought, in trying to get the board to lend a sympathetic ear.
"You mean a sandwich split on the cab ride to the airport," Helena said with little enthusiasm as she descended the steps to the sidewalk.
"As long as we made it a quick lunch, we could -"
"There's nothing more to be done here," Helena interrupted. "We assisted the Boston office, and now they're back in charge. The trained monkey who passes as your partner is doing all the paperwork I'm sure you think you need to rush back to. It's a glorious autumn day, or will be," she amended, glancing up at the clouds portending rain, "once the skies clear. You should call that boyfriend of yours and have him fly up; you could drive to the Berkshires or Vermont and take in the fall colors."
Myka shifted her feet uncertainly. Spontaneity made her nervous. But the idea of a country inn, if not the mad dash to get there and back, was appealing. She had more vacation than she would ever use, but all she had was the suit she was wearing and an extra pair of panties. Not traipsing-through-forests clothing. Why was she giving this any consideration? Sam wouldn't be interested in straying too far from his cases; in the hour or two of free time he would allow himself this weekend, he would spend it in front of one of the pennant races on TV, a beer in hand. Her presence would be optional.
"We're not that kind of couple. We're not a couple, not really . . . ." Myka didn't know why she had said that. Helena hadn't been asking for an explanation of her love life, suggesting a weekend getaway because, well, who wouldn't have, with an open Friday afternoon stretching before her? But she wasn't like Helena, the idea hadn't even occurred to her. Myka had thought stealing an hour for lunch at a café before grabbing the next flight back was sinful enough. Not that Helena's idea of down time would include a fall drive among New England hardwoods - too bourgeois, too middle class, too Myka.
"You deserve better," Helena said, walking out to the middle of the street and looking in the direction of Harvard Square. "You think one might peel away from the pack in search of a fare," she grumbled.
"Do you have plans this weekend?" Myka was amazed that she sounded so casual because she had had no idea that she would spontaneously issue an invitation. It was an invitation she had offered, right? Because she was pretty sure that she had only planned to tell Helena, first, to get out of the middle of the street and, second, that they could call a cab. She had the numbers saved in her phone.
Helena made no move to get out of the street, wagging her head before flashing a smile so open in its delight that Myka felt it rock her, just as Helena's secretive one had minutes before. Maybe all of Helena's smiles rocked her, which would be a disturbing development. . . .
"Nothing that I can't postpone until next weekend."
By the time they had eaten lunch and rented a car, half of Boston was driving to the western end of the state, so it was long after dark before they found a bed and breakfast that had a vacant room. They collapsed on the double bed, too exhausted to unpack. It didn't matter; they didn't have pajamas or sleep shirts or nightgowns to change into. When Myka woke up early the next morning, still in her shirt and suit pants, she realized that Helena must have gotten up in the middle of the night and undressed down to her camisole and panties, because the hip only a few inches from her hand was smooth and bare, except for the thin band of bikini underwear. She heard a mutter and then Helena's breath resumed its even in and out. Myka snuggled her head deeper into her pillow, allowing the rhythm of Helena's breathing to lull her back to sleep.