Christina continued to call plaintively from her time-out on the stairs to the second floor, "Mommy, I'm sorry" and each time Helena responded, "I know you're sorry, pumpkin, but you're still in time-out." Sometimes a burst of sobs punctuated a plea and sometimes Christina said, even more piteously if that were possible, "My-ka, please tell Mommy I'm sorry," which earned her only another maternal admonishment, on the order of "Don't drag My-ka into this." Myka had thought she was inured to the pleading and weeping that followed when a child was punished; she had endured a four-year-old's temper tantrums and the time-outs that were applied as a corrective before. She had spent more than one holiday listening to her nephew beg for an end to his isolation only to watch him end up in another time-out a short time later. But with Christina it was different, harder, it taking little more than the sight of her scraping her hair from her tear-stained cheeks to have Myka sending her own pleading looks in Helena's direction.
"It kills you, doesn't it?" Helena murmured in amusement. "I should've guessed that you'd be a soft touch."
They were sitting in the living room, waiting for the last minute of Christina's time-out to end. It was passing much more slowly than the previous three. The low point had come when Christina had pressed her face against the balusters, like a prisoner at the bars of his cell, and both Helena and Myka had had to turn their faces away to hide their smiles. Jemma had purchased a plastic wading pool for Christina, convinced that the water was still too cool to be taking her to a beach. To Myka it had seemed quaintly out of place in an area where nearly every home had a swimming pool; it was as if her gray-collar childhood had been transplanted to the Hamptons, or what qualified as next door to the Hamptons, but Helena hadn't argued, filling the pool with water from the backyard hose and then tempering it with hot water drawn from a bathtub faucet until the temperature was sufficiently tepid to suit Jemma. Christina had jumped in and out, sometimes sitting down in the pool and dunking her dolls beneath the water's surface and claiming that they were diving in the ocean. When her splashing became less accidental and more intentional, Helena had warned her to be good, but Christina had offered only a sly smile and, as Helena leaned closer, scooped up a handful of water and flung it at her. Her face dripping, Helena had picked her daughter up and carried her into the house, speaking sternly to her all the while. Christina has recognized the seriousness of her error only when Helena had deposited her on the stairs, and then the sobbing had started.
Myka checked her watch, and Helena, relenting, said, "Time-out is over, pumpkin." As Christina, tears forgotten, ran down the stairs, Myka gestured in the direction of the porch. "I'll go take care of the pool unless . . . ."
Helena mouthed 'No' as Christina crawled into her lap, and as she stroked her daughter's hair, she rested her head against the back of her chair and looked up at Myka. "Thank you."
With more difficulty than a simple "Thank you" should have engendered, Myka willed herself to look away; shutting her ears to Christina's happy chatter about a game, apparently called Dolls, that she wanted to play with Mommy and My-ka, Myka returned to the backyard to empty the wading pool. She lifted the pool, tilting it until the water began to lap over the edge. A puddle formed and grew larger, slowly shrinking as it began to seep into the ground. The past couple of weeks had been quiet, which made her restless. There had been no developments in the insurance fraud case; they continued to surveil DeWitt, but as they had discovered nothing suspicious in his activities, Pete was cutting back on how frequently they shadowed him. Helena's monitoring of social media had turned up nothing more interesting than the fact that a few of the jewelry theft victims - and Barrington Academy alums - were planning to participate in a charity 10K event. Since Barrington was one of the sponsors, the coincidence of their participating in the same event seemed sufficiently plausible that Pete had been unenthusiastic about Myka's suggestion that she sign up. The registration fee was expensive, and it would have to come out of the team's operating budget, but, with no signs of progress in the case, he ultimately hadn't objected to her going. Myka's presence, particularly if DeWitt attended the event as well, might be tipping their hand, but, Myka had argued, they needed to do something. So what if they were poking at a hornets' nest? Pete had laughed at that, albeit grimly, and he reminded her that the agency would be more concerned if the hornets scattered than if they stung her.
If they were waiting for Bryce DeWitt to show them that he was more devious than a bachelor with a taste for high-end sports cars would suggest, they were waiting for Nate Burdette to give them any sign that Helena had dangled the Bowdoin haul - symbolized by the forged Study in Gray No. 5 - in front of him. When Myka finally shared with Pete and Sam Helena's plan for luring Burdette, which hadn't happened until Helena finished doctoring her Phillips, they hadn't tried to scuttle it, but Sam had worried aloud about it being enough to convince Burdette that Helena could give him the rest of the works, and that was assuming he hadn't already pressured or bribed one of Gentleman Jim's co-conspirators into disclosing their location. Well aware of the irony of her words, Myka had spread her hands, saying, "We're going to have to trust her on this." She suspected that Helena had already arranged to deliver the painting to Burdette, not trusting that the FBI or Justice wouldn't try to interfere and offer up both her and the painting with all the subtlety of an exterminator setting out poison-laced nibbles for a mouse. She had explicitly told Helena to let her know when she planned to make contact, but Helena first looked at her incredulously and then followed it up with the observation, dripping with acid, that "it would hardly look like I was trying to get one over on the FBI if I were to tell one of its agents that I was in communication with Nate Burdette." Myka had glared at her, muttering crossly "You know what I mean," but hadn't pushed her about it since. As she shook the wading pool to rid it of any remaining water, she thought that it was probably past time to be asking Helena for an update.
Their own relationship over the past couple of weeks had been more . . . cordial, for lack of a better term, and Myka was reluctant to disturb the odd truce they appeared to have called after their second visit to the warehouse when Helena had fabricated Study in Gray No. 5. With the exception of an occasional gibe that one of them would direct at the other, as reflexively as one cat might hiss at another sharing the same small living space, they could almost be described as getting along. Furthering the cause, Jemma had been more circumspect the past two Sundays, neither wistfully reminiscing about them à la The Way We Were nor trying to divine what Myka might still feel for her daughter. Nevertheless, this also made it the second consecutive Sunday that Jemma had absented herself for the majority of Helena's visit. The previous Sunday she had said she wanted to use the time to run errands that would be made more difficult if she had to take Christina with her. This Sunday she had set up a late lunch date with a friend. Both were reasonable excuses, but Myka couldn't shake the feeling that Jemma was hoping to come home and find the two of them groping each other like adolescents. The thought amused her as much as it appalled her, but she couldn't deny that the memory of that winter afternoon lingered with her, when they had made love on the sofa in Helena's studio, falling off it more than once in their enthusiasm.
That the memory could so easily distract her she found annoying; the occasions when it surfaced she found puzzling. She didn't recall the smoothness of the sofa's leather under her back or the warm rasp of Helena's breathing next to her ear late in the evening or in lulls during meetings or as she pounded the hell out of a treadmill. Seeing Helena lazily smile at something that amused her or gather her hair to sweep it back over her shoulder didn't summon that afternoon either. If she had woken in the middle of the night with her hand between her legs reliving in a dream how Helena had left no part of her unclaimed, she would have understood why. She would have hated the fact that a nine-year-old memory, and that memory in particular, still had the power to make her come, but she would have understood. She had had sex with the unlikeliest of partners in the most familiar of places; that was how dreams operated. But she thought of the studio at the oddest of moments, when a song sheared the air before the volume was turned down or when sunlight, fanning across skyscrapers, reflected so brightly off the glass that it seemed to have been bent back on itself. A sudden, intense eruption, whether it was of sound or light or Helena into the center of her life, it was the same. She had gone to Helena's studio one Saturday afternoon, wearing her snow sneakers and a stretched-out pullover, no more expecting to have sex with her than she had expected the train she took to get there to derail or the building to collapse before she could ring the bell. Yet it had happened, over and over again that afternoon, that evening, and the following day. When she had dragged herself home Sunday evening, so sore she could hardly walk, her skin red and scratched and smelling of sex even after a shower and a (shared) bubble bath, she still couldn't quite believe that it had happened.
It seemed impossible that something like that afternoon could erupt into her life again, but she had thought the same thing nine years ago, and she had been wrong. The sense that the quiet between them could be disturbed and the fear that she might be the one to do it had had her taking a rare Friday afternoon break - if you couldn't be seen slacking off late on a Friday afternoon, when could you? - to venture onto the floor below. The team that investigated securities fraud didn't share the cube farm with them and the other white collar crime teams; instead they shared space with the agents assigned to organized crime. Maybe it was a coincidence that their cubes were larger, but hierarchy was always well defined, if not respected, and Myka suspected that the larger cubes weren't the only marks of favor that the securities team enjoyed. When she stopped at the largest of the larger cubes, however, Jonah Kim didn't appear to be aware of any special privileges that he and his team had been awarded. His desk looked like the contents of his wastebasket had been dumped on it, filled with candy and gum wrappers and empty cans of Mountain Dew and Red Bull. Jonah looked as if he had been caught in the shower when the wastebasket was dumped; potato chip crumbs filled the creases in his slacks and melted chocolate dotted his dress shirt. Rubbing a chin that hadn't seen a razor in a few days, he apologized for the mess and waved Myka to a chair.
"Breakfast of champions," he said tiredly, "lunch of titans, dinner of conquerors." He swept the litter off his desk into a wastebasket already full. "What can I do for you?"
Myka was pretty sure there was no white to his eyes since all she could see was red, the crisscrossing lines of blood vessels a travel map of exhaustion. Rising from the chair, she said, "You look like you're swamped. I'll come back when it's less crazy for you."
"It's not getting any less crazy 'cause I don't see myself getting out of here until midnight. So distract me, please."
"You were the lead agent on the fraud case that put Helena Wells in prison. I've read what we have on it, what I have access to, anyway, and I still don't understand how she became involved." Myka tried to find a comfortable position against the unaccomodating chair back, which felt as though plywood had been used for padding. Jonah might have the bigger cube, but his chairs were no better than hers.
"Me neither." He idly scratched his head, leaving a clump of hair sticking up. Myka might have said something except for the fact that the clump of hair joined others that had probably been the result of the same disarraying force. If the top of his head was a field, it was covered with tiny black haystacks. "To be honest, I think she must have done someone a huge solid because there was nothing about the scam that suggested a professional was behind it." Grunting, he bent over to pick up a stray gum wrapper from the floor. "I take that back. The software was pretty slick. Whoever did that part knew what they were doing."
In the case summary, Jonah had described the fraud as a Ponzi scheme. Based on the size of their investments, investors were offered tiers of services and products. The premium tier had included tax and estate planning services in addition to investment advice provided by Advantage Finance's "world-renowned . . . industry-leading . . award-winning experts." Pulling his own copy of the case file from a desk drawer, Jonah snorted at the hyperbole. "Nowhere in the literature do they indicate who these 'experts' are. And look at the '24/7 investment advice - no matter where in the world you are.' What are they, an investment firm or a customer call center?" He dug in the same desk drawer, ultimately passing to Myka a brochure describing Advantage's offerings. "My eleven-year-old could do a better job of the design and layout."
That was a harsher assessment than Myka would give it, but the stock photos of smiling models in business suits or cardigans and casual slacks, representing Advantage's financial experts and satisfied clients respectively, could have as easily been part of the promotional materials for a law firm, real estate agency, or senior living center. The graphics were just as generic, and Myka spotted a couple of typos, "planing" for "planning" and "portfollio" for "portfolio." For a firm that touted the expertise of its analysts, an expertise that guaranteed above-peer yields, Myka would have expected a better edited and more sophisticated-looking brochure. She wouldn't have been surprised to find something like this stuck in the corner of her mailbox, among all the other cheaply produced mass advertisements. Handing it back to Jonah, she said, "It's amateurish, but some people would have focused only on the promise of 'above-peer yields.'"
He threw the brochure back into the drawer. "Where we went for our introductory meeting?" He shook his head in disbelief. "The only good thing I can say about it was that at least it wasn't in a motel room, which I was kind of expecting by then. It turned out to be a dingy suite in a rundown office park. The receptionist was playing solitaire on a 1990s desktop when we came in, and she didn't know which room to take us to." He described the furnishings in the conference room in which he and his partner waited for an Advantage vice president as "provided by IKEA . . . maybe cheaper than that, maybe Target." The vice president was Helena, and Jonah had had no problem recognizing her "because there's not an agent in this place who doesn't have her burned into his mind as 'what not to do when you're looking for outside help.'"
She had called herself Stephanie, and Jonah chuckled, recalling her dead-on Jersey accent. But she had seemed off, like the rest of the set-up. He didn't want to say that she looked like she had just rolled out of bed because she was wearing a pantsuit that probably cost more than the suite rented for and she had put on make-up, but there were bags under her eyes and she seemed distracted. "I didn't realize it at the time, but she looked like my wife and I did when our kids were little. Sleep-deprived, kind of out of it." She had stumbled through the presentation, calling the reports by the wrong names when she was demonstrating Advantage's "unparalleled financial reporting system" and appearing mystified by the screen progression on her laptop, unsure why clicking on a link in the bond yields report would take her to a graph displaying the stock prices of companies that had recently completed IPOs. "She wasn't familiar with the reports or the software that generated them. Emily and I kept looking at each other like 'Why is she here?'" He fingered the edge of the file folder, lifting the cover and then letting it drop, as if something about its contents still disturbed him. "I had this weird thought, 'She doesn't want to run this con,' and it wouldn't leave me." Stephanie/Helena hadn't wanted to take their check, encouraging them to think over what they had seen thus far of Advantage before making a decision to invest. She praised Advantage's competitors and emphasized that Advantage wanted to ensure its clients believed that Advantage's investment strategies were a perfect match for their financial goals. "It was as though she was trying to tell us that the company was a giant hoax without really saying it."
Slumping in his chair with a sigh and mournfully eyeing the empty soft drink cans in the wastebasket, Jonah said he had wanted to walk out then, no money exchanging hands, no arrests made. He and his partner, in deciding to present themselves as a husband and wife open to a certain amount of financial risk-taking, had mutually agreed that he should be the insistent one, the one ready to throw caution to the winds, while Emily would be the cautious, conservative one, worried that her husband would invest everything they had saved into Advantage's higher-risk investment products. When he began to nod his head at Helena's advice to sleep on it, however, Emily . . . . "Emily acted like she was possessed, practically cramming our check down Helena's throat and saying that we had made up our minds and where did we sign. I honestly think that if Helena hadn't been so exhausted she would have caught on to what was happening, but she just started mechanically doing stuff, finding contracts, having us sign them, and then it was all over, and Emily had the cuffs on her."
Jonah put his file in the drawer and softly shut it. "She sat there, looking at the handcuffs." Helena hadn't said anything, except to plead with them not to arrest the receptionist, who was from a temp agency and had nothing to do with Advantage Financial. He and Emily had brought in the receptionist as well but let her go when it became clear that she was as clueless about the true purpose of the company as Helena had said she was. Helena had refused to answer any questions until her attorney was present, and the attorney "hardly let her answer anything we asked her." Jonah and Emily hadn't let her silence deter them, pressing her for the names of her partners in the scam, but they weren't successful at wheedling or coercing them from her. Given how quickly she had managed to leave the country after the Marston Gallery heist, a judge refused her attorney's request for bail, and Jonah had been sure that alone would make Helena start volunteering information, having discovered in the course of the investigation that she had a toddler daughter currently in the care of her grandmother. Yet Helena had been proof even against the prolonged separation from her daughter. Hoping victims of Advantage Financial would come forward, Jonah and his team had reviewed the company's client list only to realize that Advantage had no clients to speak of. While he and Emily hadn't been the only prospective investors, the company's founders, who seemed to be limited to Helena at this point, hadn't done much in the way of marketing its services or identifying the type of people they wanted to target. Like so much else about Advantage, the absence of a well-defined plan to lure customers in seemed yet another indication that "we were dealing with novices or some of the stupidest criminals in the country," Jonah said.
"This sounds so small-time," Myka said, frowning. "How did you even hear about it?"
"An anonymous tip," Jonah said. "We had always tagged the caller as a partner who felt he had been screwed over, but we'd assumed the operation was actually operating, that he had a reason to believe he had been screwed over."
"It was a man who gave you the tip?" Myka reviewed in her mind the men who might have known of Helena's latest venture and had the motivation to turn her in. It wasn't hard to start listing names.
"Or a woman with a really bad cold," Jonah joked. The gust of his laugh died away, and he passed his hand over his hair. "She never cracked, and we knew it ate at her, being away from her kid. The guards would bring her in for another interrogation session, and we could tell she hadn't slept, and her face was puffy, like she had been crying for hours. We weren't above tormenting her about the kid, how her daughter was missing her, how she was looking at enough prison time that her daughter would be a mother by the time she got out, and though she came close to breaking, she just never quite did." He looked more than a little mournfully at Myka. "Maybe her attorney was feeding her all this bullshit about how the fact that she didn't have a criminal record and that Advantage hadn't really fleeced anybody would get her a light sentence. Maybe she thought whoever she was protecting would come forward. But they didn't, and everyone in the courtroom, including the judge, knew what she had gotten away with in Houston. The judge gave her the maximum and said she wished she could give her more." Another humorless laugh escaped him. "The only one who looked worse than Helena Wells when she heard the sentence was this red-headed girl who had been there every fucking day."
"Claudia Donovan," Myka volunteered softly. She almost lost her balance as she got up from the chair, and Jonah held out a hand to steady her. Her legs and back ached; she hadn't realized how tensely she had been holding herself as Jonah had talked. On the one hand, it made sense now, Helena's involvement in the securities fraud, if she wanted to view it as a self-sacrifice. On the other hand, viewing it as a self-sacrifice made it all the more incomprehensible. Helena could play the martyr but she would never choose to be a martyr. Even if it had all been one royal screw-up, Helena getting involved only because she had been assured there would be no consequences, it still didn't explain why she hadn't offered up the Donovans and whoever else had been involved for a reduced sentence. Recognizing that Jonah's attention had strayed to a corner of his desk where case folders were stacked on top of each other, Myka hastily thanked him for his time. She knew what it was like to be buried in several ongoing investigations, all requiring analysis and write-ups. It was good to surface for a few minutes and think about something else, but eventually the weight of the work began to pull you back down.
Since Friday she had found herself returning again and again to what Jonah had told her, trying to fill in the gaps (who had left the anonymous tip, why Helena had decided, obviously at the last minute, to step in for someone else) and failing each time to create a narrative of the misadventure that was both coherent and true to what Myka knew of Helena's character. While Helena might have been willing to risk a lot for Claudia, she wouldn't have risked Christina. Carting the wading pool into the garage, Myka toyed with the idea of asking Helena about Advantage Financial - and this was only the hundredth time since Friday that she had considered just putting it to Helena, bluntly and honestly, to see what she would get in return - and dismissed it. It didn't matter whether Helena was capable of telling the truth, Myka knew she wasn't ready to hear it, not from her.
She knew that Helena's claim that the past eight years had been a wasteland was dramatic overstatement, just as she knew Helena's reaching out to press a hand between her breasts had been a ploy meant as much to unnerve her as to punctuate eight years of loneliness. It had been theater that moment between them in the warehouse, but she wanted to believe, too much, that it hadn't been all theater. So she would continue to turn the securities fraud over and over, seeking the hidden latch that would unlock it and reveal how it had worked because it couldn't have been what it seemed in Jonah's recounting, a screw-up, an ugly collision of Claudia's inexperience and Helena's belated, and misguided, attempt to protect her. No more than Helena's silence could be attributable to an overconfidence that she would escape punishment this time too. There must have been more at work because otherwise she would start hearing the truth in what Helena said, seeing the longing behind her self-protective anger and sarcasm, understanding that what had happened eight years ago had been another screw-up, having as much of the accidental and unintended as the calculating and designed -
"We thought you might have fallen into the wading pool," Helena said, peering at her through the gloom of the garage, Christina holding onto her hand.
Myka tipped the pool against the wall, judging that Jemma should have more than enough space to clear it when she returned. "Would you have thrown me a life preserver?" She ruffled Christina's hair, avoiding Helena's eyes.
"Yes," Christina said, enthusiastically nodding her head in affirmation. "I would've gave you a 'server, Myka."
"Do you even know what one is?" Myka asked indulgently
"No," Christina said, giggling.
"Remember, she throws like a girl. It probably wouldn't have reached you." There was laughter in Helena's voice, but even in the garage's dimness, Myka could tell that Helena was anxiously squinting at her, unsure whether the question had been tease or jab. Myka wasn't sure herself. She followed them back into the house, ready to be distracted by a game of Dolls. Later, as Helena and Christina went through their protracted good-byes, this being a good Sunday for Christina as she chirruped "Good-bye, Mommy" and held her face up for kisses (on other Sundays, she would cry and huddle in a corner of the sofa), Myka's thoughts drifted back to Helena's role in the Advantage Financial scam and forward to how she might already be in collusion with Nate Burdette. If Helena had already delivered the Phillips to Burdette, there was little she could do about it now, but she wouldn't let Helena control the situation. She would insist on being part of any future communications that Helena had with him.
Feeling a tug on her pant leg, Myka looked down at Christina, who was looking at her expectantly. She had started this last Sunday; apparently no longer content with a wave and a smile, Christina demanded that Myka give her a kiss too. Myka bent down and kissed her on the cheek. "Be good for your nonni, and I'll see you next Sunday, okay?"
Another series of enthusiastic nods and then Christina was running across the living room to join Jemma in the kitchen. Helena's gaze followed her daughter, and her wistfulness was undisguised. Myka touched her arm. "Let me buy you a burger, I want to talk about Burdette," she said quietly.
Within walking distance of her apartment building, there was a bar that enjoyed a steady flow of business on Sunday evenings, mainly because it was unrepentantly old school, no craft beers, no reimagined comfort foods. If you were happy with Michelob on draft and a plain hamburger, it was the place for you, and although Myka wasn't a frequent patron, she had visited it enough that the regulars no longer took notice of her. Their indifference would assuage Helena's worries about Burdette having ears everywhere, and the two of them could talk about him freely. Helena had looked up curiously through the windshield at the apartment building above when Myka had keyed in the code to the underground garage. Pointing at the windows, she had asked which apartment was hers, but Myka hadn't answered. She had taken them up in the elevator only as far as the lobby; this was her space, and while Helena's presence was everywhere else, in the office, in the off-time on Sundays that she had never used as off-time, in her thoughts, she would enforce this boundary.
Once in the bar, Helena had looked askance at the no-nonsense interior, the walls' stark painted plaster that lacked sports memorabilia or movie posters, the tables empty of all but salt and pepper shakers and squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard, displaying no advertisements for drink specials, no wine lists. Sliding down a bench seat that was proudly leatherette instead of leather, she murmured, "I'll try not to let this go to my head." A man as simply outfitted, in a gray t-shirt and black jeans, came out from behind the bar to take their drink orders and give them a one-page menu. Helena turned the menu over to the blank back and laughed; it carried, light and amused as if they were really on a date, but none of the drinkers or Yankees fans catching the game on the flat screens - the bar's one concession to the contemporary - turned to look at them. Flicking a sardonic glance at the glass of ice water in front of Myka, Helena said, "Isn't that enough to get you kicked out of here?" She took a sip of her Guinness and held her glass up in a victory salute. "Here I am pulling you from the fire again."
"Only when you're not pushing me into it." As Helena let her eyelids sweep down in what might have been rueful acknowledgment, Myka reminded her, "I have to drive you home."
"You don't have to. You don't live far away. You can always let me stay over in the guest bedroom . . . or the side of the bed that the Neanderthal occupies, if it's free." Her eyes were opening slowly, slyly, and Myka used their waiter's reappearance at their booth as an excuse not to answer. He carried no order pad, only jerking his head at their unsurprising request for two burgers and announcing in response to Helena's question that cheese was two dollars extra and limited to American and cheddar. "I'm surprised that the buns aren't extra," she grumbled as he walked away.
"If you want them buttered and toasted, it's 50 cents extra," Myka said.
Helena rolled her eyes. "Let me call him back," she said sarcastically, "and order the works, or would I be busting the agency's budget?"
"I'm paying for it, Helena, so if you want your buns buttered, go for it." Myka grinned.
"If this had been a date, I would've been asking you to butter them." Helena tried to say it playfully, but her voice trailed off and she wagged her head back and forth. "But it's not, is it? You want to know if the painting's been delivered to Nate. Yes, it has, and if that's all you brought me here to find out, you can take me home sans burger." Not only had her playfulness dimmed, but she seemed suddenly weary as well, her mouth pulling down at the corners and her hand raking through her hair. "He may not bite at the apple. If he does . . . ." She let her voice trail off again. "Your Neanderthal better know what he's doing because there are no second chances with Nate, no time for second thoughts, really. Either this trap works, or I'm dead."
Myka studied the compressing line of Helena's mouth, the dark stare she was giving the Guinness. It was a convincing portrait of anxiety, much like her declaration and her quiet urging that "it doesn't have to be like it is now between us" in the warehouse had seemed sincere . . . more than sincere, but Helena wouldn't leave herself with only two options. "Or you direct the FBI and the Justice to an empty storage unit while Burdette makes off with the Bowdoin paintings. Meanwhile he's spirited you, Christina, and Jemma out of the country."
"If I had wanted to sell myself to Nate, I could have done that while I was still in prison. It's not as simple as exchanging the paintings for my freedom. I would still owe him, I would always owe him." A woman, also dressed in what was the bar's uniform, apparently, a gray t-shirt and black jeans, set their plates in front of them and, with the taciturn efficiency of her co-worker, refilled Myka's glass and unsmilingly squeezed into the "Another Guinness?" that she directed at Helena, the "Anything else I get you?," "Enjoy your meal," "Just let me know if you need something" that wait staff in other places would have delivered in precisely timed intervals. The second Guinness duly deposited on the table, Helena revolved the glass between her fingertips before picking up her first, unfinished Guinness and draining it.
"Charlie was never able to cut ties with him. He and Nate had been friends since they were children, and the bond went deeper with Charlie than family." She removed the bun, looked at the patty, and put the bun back on it. "And why wouldn't it, given our family?" She pushed the plate aside. "Charlie went to prison for him, more than once. But the last time, he said something that got back to Nate that Nate didn't like. Not too long afterward, the guards found Charlie in his cell. Nate always has the last word, even if he's not part of the conversation. So your Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Martino," her tone was no less biting now that she called him by name, "he didn't tell me anything I hadn't already heard, but the photo of Charlie's body . . . I hadn't seen it," she finished softly. Glancing at Myka's plate and the bottle of mustard that she held over her hamburger, Helena sighed. "Sorry, I don't mean to ruin your appetite, but you need to understand that I won't be jetting off into the sunset with Nate, not unless I want a chain around my neck and, strangely enough, I prefer the ankle monitor to being kept by him."
Myka didn't immediately respond, squeezing an S stripe of mustard on her hamburger. "If you're not playing us for fools, you shouldn't mind my becoming part of the sting." As Helena's eyes widened, she said, "If you meet with Burdette, I want to be there." She bit into the burger and chewed a bite, not certain whether she was successfully giving off an unconcerned air or resembling a cow doggedly working over her cud.
"I was expecting a wire, and though neither the FBI's level of technology nor its ability to anticipate inspire me with confidence, including you as a partner would be disastrous." Helena leaned into the table, and Myka almost expected to feel Helena's finger poking her in the center of her forehead, as her mother would do when she thought Myka needed some sense drilled into her. "I thought I was being clear about how dangerous Nate is. He killed Charlie over an insult, or what he thought was an insult, and Charlie was like a brother to him." She paused. "Until Nate decided they weren't brothers. I can't do what I need to do with you there, Myka."
"You stole art worth millions of dollars by lying to my face every day," Myka said it steadily, neutrally, because it was a fact, after all. She smiled wryly, her eyes never leaving Helena's. "I have faith in you."
"I'm not the same woman I was then. I have you to thank for that." Her wryness matched Myka's.
They continued to look at each other, not defiantly, more, Myka decided, like they were trying to take each other's measure, to determine just how stubborn the other one was going to be. "You'd better eat it." She gestured to Helena's hamburger. "It's getting cold."
"Colder." Helena eyed her warily as she nibbled a kettle chip from her plate. "You always went all out. Burgers, hot dogs, pizza. Going out to dinner with you was the equivalent of buying a bottle of wine from a bargain bin. Anything more than $20 was a rip-off." But her tone bordered on the affectionate, and she compliantly picked up her knife and fork and began to saw through her sandwich.
"You'll tell him the truth," Myka said, as if in between her chiding of Helena to eat her burger and Helena's tentatively edging her mouth around the end of one of the halves, Helena had agreed to her plan. "You've been coerced into luring into him into a trap. I'll be there to confirm your story."
"You're going to play the corrupt agent, demanding a cut for your so-called assistance?" Helena said disbelievingly. "If he has a spy at the FBI or Justice, he'll know just how unlikely that is." She took a long swallow of her Guinness. "I'm already light-headed, and I still think your idea is shit. You won't be convincing, I'll be nervous, and Nate will kill us both." Growing more strident, she said, "I'm not joking."
Myka had forgotten how, when Helena was under stress, her eyes, large and unblinking and apprehensive, no longer seemed to cant over her cheekbones, instead leveling over them like a banner headline, YOU'LL RUIN EVERYTHING, WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO CHRISTINA. But she had thought this through . . . somewhat. On the drive back, as Helena had rested her head against the side window and worried her thumbnail between her teeth, her usual posture and her usual tic when they had to leave Christina, Myka remembered what Helena had told her years ago about running scams. "The facts don't have to make sense so long as the emotions do. If people believe your emotions are honest, they'll want to believe whatever you tell them." Myka figured she had only one believable story to spin to Burdette about why she was with Helena, but at least with it she would have precious few problems generating emotion. "He'll also know my history, in particular my history with you."
Helena was neither enlightened nor reassured. "He might find it titillating - Nate always liked that I liked women - but since we're not involved now, I don't see how it helps us."
"It helps us if he believes I'm in on the double-cross because I'll get you back," Myka said quietly, "because we'll be the ones jetting off together into the sunset."
Helena's laugh sounded suspiciously like a wheeze, and her eyes remained wide, the apprehension turned into shock. "You're doing it for love?"
"Obsession would answer better for the fact that we aren't lovers, that no one's seen us kissing in the ladies room or making out on the table in the conference room . . . that I'm with Sam." She was blushing; she could feel the heat crawling up her face.
For once, Helena didn't take the moment as an opportunity to mock her, dropping her head and rubbing the back of her neck. "It might work," she said to her plate. Slowly lifting her head, she continued musingly, "The hostility, the unhappiness, that is, if you're hellbent on making yourself a part of this. Even the distrust wouldn't seem out of place." She picked up the half of the burger she had started on. "Don't make a final decision, not yet. He's not going to be in a hurry to contact me, he won't want to let on how badly he still wants the Bowdoin paintings, if he still wants them." Myka recognized that Helena's glance at her over her burger was meant to underscore the possibility that he wouldn't want them. "You have time for second thoughts."
There seemed nothing more to talk about, although Myka didn't like the silence that fell between them. She had set up the dinner, such as it was, as a working dinner, and now that she had made it plain that she would be a part of any future dealings with Burdette and fulfilled the purpose of having the dinner in the first place, it had been reduced to mere eating. Helena mechanically finished one half of the burger and then concentrated on the kettle chips. Myka, growingly increasingly frustrated that she was frustrated at the turn the dinner had taken, grumped her way through the rest of her burger and heard herself speaking as soon as she had swallowed the last bite. "Do you remember when we watched Double Indemnity?" She didn't want to do this, recall with Helena how things had once been between them. It was dangerous. She continued to feel unsettled from remembering her first visit to Helena's studio - and knowing that Helena had been remembering it too. Those memories still had power, and she feared that talking about them would only draw her further into them. Yet she couldn't stand the silence.
Helena, who had been tapping her lips with a kettle chip, her gaze focused on the unadorned wall above their booth, let the chip drop to the table. "Are you asking me because you want the opportunity to tell me that I'm the one who's a 'little more rotten?' Or because you're warning me that you're going to shoot me if things take a bad turn with Nate?"
"Nothing like that," Myka said, feeling awkward. "The movie just came to mind." In her sparsely furnished loft, Helena had allowed for a TV, and they had watched the movie late one night, Helena never having seen it before. Settling in next to her on the sofa, Helena had sighed that Jemma had never willingly turned on a program that was about fraud, so Double Indemnity, The Lady Eve, The Sting, you name it, she probably hadn't seen it. Myka had seen Double Indemnity many times, so mainly she had watched Helena, laughing to herself as Helena had sympathized with Phyllis taking on the "burden" of seducing Neff - "Couldn't they have found someone sexier than Fred MacMurray?" - and then stroking her hair as Helena had fought sleep to stay awake until the movie ended. It had seemed comical and endearing then, Helena's grumbling about the burden of seduction, but not so much now. Myka liked to think she was more Barton Keyes than Walter Neff, but really that had been Pete's role, not hers. He had always been more suspicious of Helena, but they were partners, and he had trusted her judgment.
"You were going to let me sleep on the sofa," Helena said, startling her. She was drinking the last of her Guinness, and as she looked at Myka over the top of her glass, Myka couldn't convince herself that the look was hostile or resentful. "I wasn't going to have that."
"You did have a nice bed," Myka conceded, pretending to misunderstand, "much more comfortable than your sofa."
"All the nicer with you in it. I wasn't going to trade that in for the sofa." But Helena didn't say any more than that, didn't try to tease her into remembering what had happened when she had finally come to bed, didn't repeat the lines from the movie they had mangled in murmurs to each other as they had languidly removed the clothing between them, "'There's a speed limit in this bed, Helena," "Yes, love, and I believe I'm driving well below it. I don't want to miss any of the scenery." It didn't matter that Helena hadn't chosen to string out the reminiscence because she was replaying every moment of it, anyway.
The check paid, the other patrons showing no greater interest in their departure than in their arrival, Myka and Helena began walking back to Myka's apartment building, Helena's walk a little looser, a little more uncoordinated than usual. That was why Myka was closer to her, hand hovering between them, ready to put it to her back to steady her, if need be. Only if there was need. An inverted cup above them, the sky was pinking around its rim as the sun inexorably descended, and Myka thought she would need to call in, inform the staff monitoring Helena's movements that Helena was with her and would be getting home past her 8:00 p.m. curfew.
Couples with strollers and couples with dogs were on the sidewalks; this was a twenty-something's and early-thirty-something's neighborhood, and though she was only a few years older than the couple passing them on their left, baby in a stroller and a black Lab on a leash, Myka felt she was too old for where she was living. She and Sam had bought a condo in the area after their marriage, and it had seemed a right fit at the time; they hadn't ruled out the idea of children, just postponed it. After the divorce, she hadn't wanted to spend the time looking for a brand-new neighborhood, where, among the many detractions, was the fact that she would have to make the effort of learning where everything was, so she had taken one of the few available apartments still available for rent in the area. If she craned her head a certain way as she looked out her bedroom window, she could see a corner of the building in which she and Sam had bought their condo. It was familiar, it was safe, and tonight as she walked with the gently swaying Helena, she realized that she was tired of it.
"Did Mr. Martino tell you what happened to some of Charlie's friends, the ones who listened to him vent about Nate, probably laughed at his jokes about Nate's habits?" Helena had put her own hand out, on Myka's wrist, and Myka stopped. They were only a block or two from her apartment building, which bordered a stretch that was more gradually being reclaimed from the shabby businesses that continued to inhabit it; the numbers of young couples out with their babies and dogs, consequently, were down.
"A week after Charlie was found in his cell, the guards found one of his friends in the laundry room. His head was in the washing machine, his body in the dryer. A few days later, another friend was found in the prison kitchen. He had been laid on a counter, the knife still in his gut. A friend who had been smart enough to walk away when Charlie started to complain about Nate was the one who used his phone card to tell me. He said he was calling to warn me, but I think he was hoping that I might have enough influence to get Nate to stop. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it would bother Nate less to kill me than it had to kill Charlie, but as far as I know Nate never went after him." In the twilight, in the shadows that were beginning to emerge from between the buildings, Helena's expression looked especially somber. "I don't want you with me when I see Nate, if I see Nate, because I'm plotting to betray the FBI. I don't want you with me because I can't protect you, Myka. You may think that's rich coming from me after what I've done, but I can't be with him and talk about the Bowdoin paintings as if I can lead him to them at any time, thinking, no, knowing that if you say the wrong word or look at him in a way that he thinks is off, he'll kill you." Her laugh was shaky. "Of course he'll kill me too, but after he kills you. He'll want to drag it out with me because I'm yet another Wells who tried to screw him over."
Helena's hand was becoming a claw on her wrist, the nails digging into her skin. "Like I said, I have faith in you." Myka didn't need to pry Helena's hand from her arm; Helena let it go, turning to walk ahead of her.
Myka followed her, unsure whether Helena would continue to try to argue her out of the plan. As they neared the doors to the lobby, Helena said, not looking back at her, "If you're going to pretend that you still want into my pants, then I ought to have seen the inside of your apartment, don't you think?"
So much for drawing lines in the sand, Myka reflected, as she and Helena went up in the elevator, to the tenth floor, instead of down to the garage. With a fatalism that made nerves an irrelevance, Myka ushered Helena into her apartment, indifferent to Helena's impassive survey of the kitchen, dining area (big enough to comfortably hold a table for four, but no more), and living room with its patio door access to an equally unimpressive balcony view of . . . more buildings. Helena wandered down the hallway that led from the living room, glancing into the spare bedroom that held a self-assembled desk (although Myka worked mainly in the living room) and daybed and the guest bathroom (the one decorative touch being the matching towels and bath mat), before stepping into the master bedroom. Myka didn't follow her, taking a bottle of apple juice from her refrigerator and uncapping it. Let Helena smirk and sneer as she would.
But on her return to the living room, Helena offered nothing cattier than "You have big feet, but the size 13s in the bedroom are the Neanderthal's, I assume?" Myka suppressed a flicker of irritation, not at the remark but at Sam's forgetting to take his gym shoes with him. She didn't mind the few personal items in the bathroom, but the clothing? It seemed every time that he stayed over he left a tie or belt, something, behind; she knew it wasn't intentional, but it felt territorial all the same. It wasn't much, this apartment, and she certainly hadn't done much to it, but it wasn't yet theirs, likely wouldn't be because if she somehow came out on the other side of this assignment unscathed, she was leaving, she decided. The FBI, the city, Sam. The vague discontent and the sporadic consideration she gave to what a new location and a new job might do for her had hardened into resolve. Grinning a little at herself, she silently amended, not resolve, not quite, but she was getting closer to taking the leap.
Helena had taken a seat on the sofa, crossing her legs and regarding her speculatively, as if something about her and her apartment didn't match. "Did you and the Neanderthal live here when you were married?"
Myka shook her head as she drank the apple juice. "I moved here after the divorce." She nodded toward her refrigerator. "Do you want anything?"
"Just your bathroom before we leave. I can't hold my liquor like I used to," Helena said, directing her mockery at herself. She glanced at the sofa, the coffee table, the small flat screen, the armchair. "This doesn't look any homier than your old place. Did you buy a few knick knacks and set them out in whatever cave you shared with him?"
Myka shrugged. "I don't remember. I'm not one for decorating." She put the empty bottle in a recycling container. "I'll call in, so no alarms are raised, but I need to get you back to Mrs. Frederic's." She had dropped her bag just inside the door but stopped mid-stride when she heard Helena's next question.
"Who wanted the divorce?"
The easy answer was Sam. He was the one who had broached the subject, who had pursued it until Myka had agreed. It was certainly the safest answer to give Helena. "He did," she said briefly, resuming her path to the door and groping in her bag for the phone.
"Why?" Helena still had her legs casually crossed, but she seemed to be leaning forward.
"We're both in law enforcement, Helena. We never saw each other." She had the phone in hand, but Helena was shaking her head.
"You made time for me, you would've made time for him." Her eyes narrowed. "Granted, he probably would have eaten more than his share of take-out, but you would have come home. Late, but not so late that you wouldn't have had time for a conversation or to watch the news together. Tell me why."
What did it matter? If Helena's fears were accurate, she was going to fuck things up yet again and get them both killed. "He said I wasn't emotionally there, that I wasn't capable of giving him as much as he wanted." She hadn't tried to argue with him because he had been right. Their getting married in Reno had been more lark than commitment, and Myka had discovered soon afterward that her new status had worked no miracles; the gratitude and simple affection and relief, yes, relief that someone had saved her from her loneliness, her sense of isolation, hadn't been transmuted into something stronger. She counseled herself to be patient, and Sam, too, had appeared to think that time would be the curative that his presence alone wasn't, until he had decided midway through third year together that he had given her more than enough time, and he was tired of waiting. Without ever consciously admitting it, she had come to the same conclusion, letting her work days grow longer and spending the better part of their weekends at the office.
"Maybe you have it to give, but he's not the right one to receive it." Helena held a palm out to Myka. "I'm not going to make this about us. I remember how you talked about him before we became involved. You were what he turned to when he didn't have something more important to do. Did he change that much once you were married? Is he different now?"
Several rejoinders jostled for prominence, but Myka said none of them. Scrolling through her contacts for the oncall IT staff, she said, "You're not someone I'd take relationship advice from. Why don't you go pee while I make my call?"
She finished the call before Helena came out of the bathroom. Sure, Sam had a bit of swagger to him, liked to see himself as the hero. He had enjoyed coming to her rescue after the debacle in Houston, but it didn't take away from the fact that he spent more nights than he'd had to on her sagging sofa, made her breakfast after what must've been sleepless nights on that sofa. If he had puffed himself up the tiniest bit at her expense, what of it? It was nothing, nothing, compared to what Helena had taken from her.
Myka didn't relax the scowl when Helena rejoined her. "I obviously overstepped." And then, with a roguish, unapologetic smile, Helena let her fingers lightly touch Myka's hair, grazing her cheek as they brushed through the strands. "You have deserved far better lovers, Myka, than the ones you've taken. Have you ever wondered why you settled for me or for the Neanderthal?"
Myka jerked her head away but she had waited too long. She had enjoyed the warmth of Helena's fingers against her skin. "If it makes you feel any better, I've pretty much made up my mind to take a vow of celibacy."
"I think you'll find it tiresome. I know I have." Helena stepped away, sweeping her hand toward the door. "Time to go back to my lonely bed, is it?"
The drive to Mrs. Frederic's seemed shorter, and maybe it was, driving from her apartment rather than the agency's office. It wasn't a silent drive, as the one from the island had been. Helena was a few hours removed from having left Christina, and she was marginally closer, at least, to seeing her again than when they had pulled out of the driveway. Christina was the topic of their conversation, and Helena suggested they try the wading pool again next Sunday, if it were warm enough. Myka heard herself agreeing as if she actually had a say in what Christina did, and she heard the irony in her laughter if Helena didn't. When she came to a stop in front of the fire hydrant - it was the only open spot - Helena asked her if she would walk with her to the door, saying "You bought me dinner. Do the gentlemanly thing." She did, not because she was a gentleman but because she recognized that Helena wanted to talk to her outside the car, suspecting in her unrelenting paranoia that it too might be bugged.
Helena waited for her on the walk, tilting her head back to look at the sky. Myka expected another plea to change her mind about meeting with Burdette. The intensity with which those dark eyes fixed on her, the stars forgotten, seemed to herald more dire warnings. "I don't deserve you. I didn't then, and I don't now, although I'm a better person, I think, than was I then. But if I thought you were serious about chucking it all," her voice grew unsteady, "if I thought you were serious, I would claw my father from his grave and ask that son of a bitch where he buried the Bowdoin paintings -"
Myka put her fingertips to Helena's lips to shush her. She didn't second-guess her own gentleness. Helena laughed softly, sadly against Myka's hand, moving it up and along her cheek, and Myka let herself cup Helena's jaw. "I didn't think so," she said after a moment. She stepped back, bringing her hands up to clutch Myka's hand before releasing it. Walking backward, she said, "You really are going to be the death of me, Myka Bering."
Myka remained on the walk until she saw a light go on in the third floor of the house. Then she went back to her car and bent herself over the steering wheel until she felt her forehead press against it.
Pete flung himself into her cube's visitor chair. Myka wondered how exhausted she looked. Helena was going to be gone for the next few days, an art restoration project for a Charleston museum, and they had spent the night before saying good-bye over and over and over again. Two months since that first time in her studio, and they hadn't spent more than a couple of nights apart. They tried to be professional when they were in the office, but Myka was sure that Pete had figured it out. There weren't any rules forbidding her to be involved with a consultant, but she knew it wouldn't look good, especially given Helena's family history, so she hadn't shared the news of their relationship with him.
"Foxy Lady conveniently gone on a business trip, huh?" Pete was brushing donuts crumbs from his shirt onto the carpet. "Just when Bates was going to press her on going after one of Gentleman Jim's middlemen."
"She didn't make up the trip, Pete," Myka said, smothering a yawn and reaching for her nearly empty container of coffee. She'd need to hit up the vending machine again. Either that, or take the elevator down to the coffee shop on the first floor.
"Oh, I'm sure," he said unconvinced.
"Last week she helped us get the guys behind the credit card scam, remember?" Among their cases had been an online site thieves had been using to solicit victims' credit card information. Passing themselves off as an Internet security firm, they had promised to protect people's credit card information, monitoring unauthorized activity, for a small fee, smaller, certainly, than what creditable online security firms were requiring. Instead of monitoring unauthorized activity, the thieves had created it and then called their victims requesting more money to stop it. Helena had brought in Joshua Donovan, whose help she had solicited previously, and, once again, he displayed skills in following cyber trails that excelled those of the FBI's tech staff.
"Yeah, by bringing in that dweeby dude who treats us like idiots. Joshua . . . Joshua." He snapped his fingers until Myka had said with exasperation, "Donovan. Don't act like you can't remember him." Pete jerked his head in acknowledgment. "I don't want to remember him. He gives me the creeps," he fake shuddered. "I've never seen our guys gut web sites as fast as he can. He always knows exactly what to look for. Doesn't that strike you as a little strange?"
Myka gave him a withering look. "He might not have a record, but he's no angel. Helena never promised that he's as pure as the driven snow."
"You give a lot of weight to what she says, more than you used to." He lowered his voice. "Okay, so she's the best 'shag' ever," he gave her a silly grin, "but, Mykes, you gotta try for some professional distance."
"Helena's probably done some things she's not proud of, but she's not her father," Myka stubbornly insisted.
"What I'm afraid of is that she's worse." At Myka's sour expression, he held his hands up in surrender. "I get it, you're in love or lust or something. For what it's worth, she seems to be just as ga-ga about you, but I've had this feeling about her, and it's not a good one . . . ."
She would remember what she said next for a very long time. "She wouldn't hurt me like that." It wasn't what she had meant to say. She had meant to say something more professional sounding, at the very least more adult sounding, feeling that she had just defended Helena with all the impassioned whininess of a sixteen-year-old.
"She might not mean to, but she's too slippery, too shifty, too something. I can't explain it, but I can feel it. Don't give her your heart on a platter just yet, okay?"
His warning had come too late, of course. If Pete knew that she was planning to directly interact with Nate, he would do more than warn her. He had the power now to reassign her, and he probably would. Putting herself in Burdette's sights wasn't part of the deal. Helena was to lay the groundwork for the con, and then the agents on the organized crime team would be the ones to sweep in and arrest Burdette. But she didn't care how risky, how stupid risky, she was being by inserting herself into the con. She couldn't let Helena betray her again.
Pete wouldn't be surprised by her plan. He knew how much she dreaded being burned again, by the same woman again. But he would be even less surprised that a part of her wanted to do nothing more than chuck it all and jet off with Helena and Christina and Jemma into the sunset.