A/N: There's a fair amount of bad language because this is another stressful day for Myka. Even though this is a chapter, it's really just the first part of a larger installment that tries to finish off a few things before introducing new complications, including, yes, although not in this chapter or the next, the super villain.
It was another atrocious entry fee to sign up for the Lynley School's 10K, but Myka, her eyes sliding away from Pete's no matter how hard she tried to fix them on his, had told him to look on the bright side, they weren't having to pay for Helena as well this time. There is no bright side to her, he had responded, more grimly than jokingly, only darkness. Myka had offered him a twist of her lips that might have been a grimace or a particularly rueful smile. She wasn't sure how she felt anymore about Helena or the wisecracks Pete and the other agents continued to make about her. Not that she was Helena's champion, far from it. But the only thing that had stopped her from letting their quiet holding of each other on Helena's bed become something that wasn't quiet and something more than holding had been Helena herself. It had seemed simply another lapse, another chink in that wall of law enforcement rectitude that she had imagined she and Sam were presenting to Helena when they had visited her in prison. Sam had been the first one to weaken the wall when he had used Helena's child to coerce her cooperation in going after Burdette, yet it hadn't crumbled. Not then and not later, as the wall, or Myka's vision of it, became less a wall that was impenetrable, indestructible, and more a wall that didn't act as much of a wall at all, which allowed in virtually everything it was supposed to keep out. A paper screen in a Japanese home, on one side of which she was Helena's overpaid babysitter on Sunday afternoons and, on the other, Helena's wife and Christina's (other) mother. She could see the shadows of what could have been dancing across the paper, but the sides remained separate.
She couldn't cling to that illusion any longer. Helena, by saying she wanted her back, had kicked away the screen. She had divined that it was what Myka had wanted to hear - not that it had been some great feat of intuition – and on some level, Myka knew, whether Helena was being sincere didn't matter to her. She had wanted to hear the words so badly for so long that once they were said she couldn't bear to examine how true they were. Now Myka almost wished that Helena hadn't let her come-and-go virtuousness come and drive them from the bed because, if nothing else, the pleasure would have justified the guilt. As it was, since that Saturday, Myka had barely been able to look at Pete, let alone look him in the eye, and her relationship with Sam was faring no better. She had been avoiding his texts and calls, and the one night he had come to her apartment, so late that she was guaranteed to be home, she had taken him to bed with a ferocity meant to keep her guilt at bay but which she had let him mistake for passion. He was still marveling at the scratch marks a week later, as his latest text had made embarrassingly clear.
Oddly enough, the only time her guilt didn't leave her tongue-tied or cause her to stare at the floor when she was forced to speak was when she was with Helena. It wasn't that she had gone over to the dark side of the Force, as Pete would put it, it was that, for the first time since Helena had been released from prison, Myka felt there was something honest in their interactions. If she allowed herself to believe that Helena still wanted her, she would have to allow for the possibility that there was truth in the other things that Helena had told her. While what was true might be nothing more than that elemental attraction between them, which, like a cockroach it seemed, would live on after every other feeling they had for one another died off, that truth, that fact steadied her, a little bit. It was like being able to touch the bottom of a pool on tiptoe; it didn't mean you couldn't drown, but you could maintain the illusion that the water wasn't closing over your head.
Which perhaps answered why she was tolerating Helena's coaching her about her strategy for tomorrow morning's encounter with Bryce DeWitt. Helena was telling her that she needed to let DeWitt make a move but not until she knew Laura Jeffries would witness it. A difficult task to accomplish, Helena conceded, since DeWitt would try to ensure that Laura was nowhere near, so Myka needed to see to it that Laura was even more motivated not to let him out of her sight. "She's our leverage. We break her, we break her husband, we get DeWitt."
"What do you want me to do? Tell her that I intend to screw her boyfriend as soon as we cross the finish line?" Myka was shredding one of the paper napkins that had been shoved inside the sack with their sandwiches and piling the shreds on Helena's dining table.
"I should hope you would be more subtle than that," Helena said, but the sharpness of her tone was undercut by her pushing another napkin across the table for Myka to shred. "I also hope you're going to properly dispose of that mess instead of leaving it for me to clean up."
Myka didn't answer. This was the fourth or fifth time - she was beginning to lose count - she had ended up at Helena's apartment since that Saturday. Sometimes she arrived with food, sometimes Helena heated something up, a frozen Stouffer's entree or one of Mrs. Frederic's ready-to-eat meals, which, Helena claimed, she continued to supply her with, free of charge, on a regular basis. ("I think she missed having someone to cook for," Helena had said, closing her eyes in pleasure after taking a Tupperware container labeled "Penne with Homemade Pesto" from the refrigerator.) Neither one of them had remarked yet on the frequency with which Myka was stopping by, ostensibly to discuss the cases they were working on, although she was staying long after any work-related discussion had ended. Neither one of them had mentioned the fact that, if it wasn't so late that Helena would have already called to talk to Christina about her day and to wish her goodnight, she would call while Myka was with her and then put Christina on speaker phone so Christina could chatter to them both. It wasn't always clear to Myka afterward what she and Helena had talked about when they weren't arguing over cases or teasing Christina; they weren't reminiscing about moments they had shared when they were together - their avoidance of that subject was total and mutual - but they also weren't engaging in stilted conversations about politics or the books they had been reading. Myka realized that she had come to know more about Helena in the space of four or five evenings than in all the months she had lived in Helena's loft.
Her stories weren't all about Jim Wells and their contentious relationship; some were about Charlie, whom she didn't get to know until she returned to the States when she was 18, and others were about scraping by with her mother, in one down-at-the-heels rental after another in the poorer Inner London boroughs. "She was just a girl when she met Jim and not much more than a girl when she had me. She had no skills, no education, nothing to fall back on once they split up. Her family disowned her when she took up with him. When he was flush, he would drop some money on me, that is, when he remembered he had a daughter. She thought they were married and then found out he was still married to his first wife. She'll never admit it to anyone, though. She has her pride, my mum, she maintains to this day that I'm not a bastard." Helena laughed at herself derisively. "Not by birth anyway. Can't say what she'll fess up to about me in other contexts."
As Myka listened, she sometimes glimpsed the little girl who had loved dolphins, the woman who had tended to her sprained ankle and given her the bed and slept on the loveseat in the Berkshires. She wondered if Helena gave any thought to whom she might have become had her father not seen . . . and warped . . . her talent. She had had a name as a restorer and, to a lesser degree, as an artist of original works; she could have given her energy to either pursuit. Or she could have taught in an art school. Shredding the napkin Helena had given her, Myka imagined her sitting at a table very much like this one helping a daughter very much like Christina color a picture in a coloring book. Helena's spouse, shadowy and genderless, was in the background. That could have been her life.
But it wasn't. Helena had called herself, all Wellses, alley cats. You didn't take in an alley cat because it would behave or curl up on your lap at night. You didn't take it in because you expected an equal exchange, food for love. You would end up more devoted to the cat than the cat was to you, but it wasn't an entirely one-sided relationship. As long as you kept your eyes on its claws and accepted that its needs would always come first, you could live with an alley cat. Myka mused that maybe she was learning to live with her alley cat. Maybe she valued the intermittent pleasure of Helena's company more than Sam, more than the agency itself. Scorpion, snake, alley cat, these weren't creatures you cuddled close, but then neither was Warren Bering, at least not as he had been. She had learned from him first, not Helena, that love carried a sharp sting. Nothing made her more impatient or regret any the less the blunting of that corrosive tongue than her father's hesitant "I love you" right before he handed the phone back to her mother.
Recent mellowing notwithstanding, however, Myka was going to take only so much lecturing from Helena on how to run a con, even as feeble a one as they were attempting to run on DeWitt. "Laura's seen him flirt with other women, and I'm sure she knows, regardless of whether she's willing to admit it, that he does more than flirt. Why do you think seeing him with me will make her roll on him? We have to come up with something else."
Helena threw her hands up in the air. "I would love it if we had something else, but you won't let me do anything that might actually work, even if it is illegal, and we have nothing more suspicious than the fact that the potential perpetrators and the victims attended the same school." As the hands came down, she swept one through her hair in frustration. "You're not some 24-year-old Barrington alumna at a charity event. You're her, you're a wife, a mother. Didn't you say she told you that she had first found DeWitt pushy? Until he seduced her, she probably had had no idea she was searching for a distraction. Watching him move in on you, she's seeing it for what it is, what he is. No great love affair, just a manipulator playing a game." She took a deep breath. "Don't get impatient and try to hurry the process along. That's the worst thing you can do. Your only responsibility is to make sure she's where she needs to be to watch her snake go after another mouse."
"I'm really tired of being a mouse."
Helena laughed again, affectionately. "You'd make a worse snake."
She would make a horrible snake, she didn't disagree; it was why she was assenting to DeWitt's suggestion that they have lunch, just the two of them, in one of his favorite cafés on the Island, assenting without saying yes, without smiling or flirting, assenting despite the fact that she drifted a few inches away every time he drew closer, that she only shrugged when he asked her if she had been to the café, that she had said with utter indifference, "Helena might have been," when he exclaimed in disbelief, "You and your wife live on the Island, you can't tell me you haven't been there at least once." Assenting because for all her shows of reluctance and disinterest, she hadn't left him standing alone in another excessively manicured green space wearing his baggy running shorts and a worn but close-fitting Barrington tee. She hadn't said no, and that was all the encouragement he had needed. Her reluctance was even more on display today because she was trying to spot where Laura was without alerting him; she would try to sneak a glance over his shoulder when they relaxed eye contact, sorting out the constantly changing groups of people behind that bulge of muscle so perfectly emphasized by his t-shirt. Laura should be one of those people, anxious to know where he was and which woman he was chatting up.
"Are we going, Myka? I can drive us over there and drive us back here, if you'd like." He was smiling, but it wasn't the wide, easy "Ask me anything about Barrington" grin she was accustomed to seeing. It looked pinched and annoyed, and she could all too readily believe that the voice that went with it would be on the verge of snarling, but not with her, not yet. He hadn't won yet.
"Aren't we going to wait for Laura?" She asked it with as much interest as she had received his invitation.
"I don't see a need. Do you?"
"No." She finally smiled at him in return, a lazy, knowing smile that suggested, just possibly, that her indifference and hesitancy were feigned. It wasn't a smile in her repertoire, it was a variation of one of Helena's, the smile that started at the center of her lips and then seductively moved out to the corners. Let me share a secret with you.
Helena had texted her not long before the race started, just as Myka had been about to bind her phone to her arm. 'I've got your back. Trust me.' Those were words to live by. Myka had snorted and attempted not to think too hard about what Helena might be up to, tucking the phone behind her arm band and putting in her ear plugs. But now that she was about to leave with DeWitt without any assurance that Laura would know where to find them, checking in with Helena - checking in with Christina would be what she would tell DeWitt - might be prudent. Helena would have an idea about how to salvage this latest effort to ensnare DeWitt, not necessarily a good idea, but, Myka acknowledged, it would give her something to work with. As long as it wasn't "Go home with him if he asks you. I'll send Laura to his bedroom with a camera."
Myka's phone buzzed, and she hurriedly ripped it from her arm. Helena must have been anticipating her call. She stared dumbly at the number. Parker. She heard herself saying to DeWitt in a voice so blandly casual she couldn't quite believe it was hers, "Call from home. They must want to know how I finished." A quick smile in apology, which wasn't so difficult to do after that miraculous lead-in by her voice, and then she was strolling a few steps away, catching the call before it went to voicemail. There it was again, that calmness, this time with the faintest hint of surprise, exactly the tone someone would adopt when her spouse was calling her at a moderately inconvenient time. How the hell was she doing this? "Hi. What's going on?"
Parker sputtered for a second or two, caught off-guard by the familiarity of her tone, eventually blurting out, "Is she with you, Helena I mean? Her monitor's gone off. You've been letting me know when you're planning to take her out of range. I've been calling her, but she won't answer."
I've got your back. Trust me. Myka lifted her face to the sun. This Saturday had been so much nicer than the Saturday of the Barrington run. That one had turned gloomy and rainy, and Helena had curled up on her bed in the equal gloom of her bedroom, and they had talked about her betrayal, what it had done to the both of them. And hadn't she been gratified to hear that Helena had suffered too? She opened her eyes. DeWitt was looking at her, not with concern but with that earnestly attentive regard that preceded concern; he would be ready to give her all the concern and all the offers of help she could handle. Like Helena, he had been trained well. "I'm going to have to postpone our lunch. Something's come up at home." God, she sounded so good to herself, composed and ready to handle any home emergency, a blocked toilet, a child running a temperature. If only Pete could listen in, he had always feared that she would collapse, but she wasn't collapsing, because she had known this was going to happen, Helena running off at the first opportunity.
It lacked finesse, Myka thought. There seemed something rushed and clumsy about it. On the other hand, Helena had admitted that she was rusty. And, of course, there was Christina now, it was hard to disappear quietly, smoothly, efficiently when you had to take a four-year-old into account. Myka was walking backward, putting more distance between her and DeWitt, but doing it slowly, as though there wasn't a con artist, another one, who was mocking her once again. "Some other time, okay?" She gave him another smile, a sketch of a wave, and DeWitt responded by raising his shoulders under that chest-hugging tee. Was he reassuring her that it was no big deal, that he wasn't giving up the chase, or was he sloughing her off, letting her know that he had spent all the time and energy he was going to spend on her?
She didn't care. She wouldn't have a job after today. Pete probably wouldn't either. The only thing his bosses would remember was that he was the one who had assigned her, not that they had pushed him to do it. Who better to monitor Helena Wells than the woman she had betrayed? She couldn't be burned a second time.
Parker had never stopped talking. She cut into his worrying that he would be blamed, his vaguely petulant-sounding claims that he had called her as soon as he knew, his defensive comments that it wasn't his fault if she didn't answer the first time. "When and where, Parker? And why am I hearing this now from you? Why didn't I receive an alert?" She still sounded composed but harder, as if her composure were being thinned into an edge. "When did you find out about this? Where was she then? Where is she now?"
"Um, ten minutes ago. That's when I knew she was outside the boundary. But where? To be honest, we've been having some problems with the tracking software. It's probably also why you and Steve weren't automatically notified. All I can tell you is the general direction she's headed in, I can't pinpoint her location. She's actually headed east, toward Long Island. That's why I thought she might be with you and that you had forgotten to let anyone know."
LaGuardia. JFK. Problems with the tracking software. "Has IT run any system checks recently?" At Parker's scoffing, she added sharply, "I don't mean the run of the mill, automatic checks. The other ones, Parker, when you're trying to discover whether we've been hacked."
"What? Myka, c'mon, Claudia Donovan's not good enough to get through our firewalls."
"Maybe not. But Joshua Donovan is. Run those checks now." Panic began to infuse Parker's voice. He started firing questions at her as the clicking on his keyboard increased. Should he call Pete about Helena's disappearance? Should he have Steve join her on the Island? "No, just run the checks. We don't know for certain that Helena's gone, maybe her monitor's malfunctioned. There could be an innocent explanation. Let's collect the evidence first."
Still so calm, so rational. Jesus Christ, Parker, you moron, of course she's gone. Helena has fucking left the building. But Myka didn't say, didn't scream any of it. Instead she curtly told him to call her back as soon as he could tell her anything. There was no innocent explanation because that presumed Helena was innocent, and she had stopped being innocent the day Jim Wells had taken away everything he had ever given her. Myka had simply wanted to buy herself some time to think, although there wasn't a thought in her mind to which she could cling. Forcing the phone back under her arm band, she blindly struck out across the perfect lawn toward the perfect parking lot and once beyond that, she would head to the shaded street, not close, where her less-than-perfect car, the mid-sized, economy class sedan Helena had derided, was parked.
Passing groups of runners, some still wearing their bib numbers, Myka remembered how Christina had turned up to her a face streaked with smears of chocolate ice cream and how Christina's mother, grousing about the price of the ice cream that decorated her daughter's face, had nonetheless allowed a smile, ever so slightly smug, to play on her lips. Helena had known how the picture of the family they were presenting, no matter that it was completely fabricated, would work on her. Myka saw now that all her fretting about their performance had had nothing to do with their success or failure in convincing DeWitt and his friends and everything to do with her fear that she would be the one seduced.
Ahead of her were two women having the kind of desultory conversation that always had as its exit line that children or husband or friends were waiting. Laura's friend must have had the royal flush of exit lines, husband and children, because Myka heard Laura say with the sweetness that only insincerity could command, "Say hi to Adam and the kids for me," before turning and seeing Myka in her path. Something that looked suspiciously like sulkiness hardened her smile and threatened to curdle the sweetness. "I thought you would still be with Bryce." A noticeably whiny concession to the likelihood that she was (temporarily) losing DeWitt to the charms of another - after all, she had been relegated to chatting with an acquaintance instead of hanging on to the arm of her lover - Laura was making it clear that she would be damned if she was going to be a good sport about it.
Myka knew she should send her to DeWitt. Deprived of the prey he had had within his sights, he would be looking for reassurance of his powers, and Laura's jealousy would be more balm than irritant today. Yet she found herself guiding Laura away, toward a corner of the grounds partially screened from view by a few overgroomed trees. "We need to talk about Bryce." Her hand was insistent on Laura's back, and Myka thinned her lips and set her jaw in Law Enforcement Grim; it wasn't hard given the disaster this day was turning out to be. When Laura twisted her head around to protest, she opened her mouth only to close it, and with an abbreviated toss, as if she were signaling to Myka that she could make a fuss if she really wanted to, she twisted her head back to its former direction - straight ahead, toward the trees.
Myka wasn't entirely sure what she was going to say and Laura could reject whatever it was she did say, but without Helena, their plan to worm their way into DeWitt's inner circle wasn't going to work. At least her escape put an end to the ridiculous playacting, the fake Facebook postings, the borrowing of Irene Frederic's car, the charade that she and Helena and Christina were a family. They would catch DeWitt and his confederates the old-fashioned way, trolling available public records, enduring stakeouts, collecting and piecing together evidence until they had enough to support a request for a search warrant, a wiretap. It was what she had wanted from the beginning, good, solid detection, and it's what the team - without her - would go back to, so there was no reason to be pulling Laura away to some relatively private area of Lynley's grounds. There was no reason to be making a further mess of this case, of her career than what Helena's flight had made of it. Stop it, stop it, she shouted at herself, yet she couldn't stop walking and she wouldn't let go of Laura's arm.
She was sitting across from the Marstons again. The room was frigid, but she was sweating. They, of course, were not. They weren't subjecting themselves to another round of questioning so much as they were humoring her. Sitting across the table from them, close enough to pick out the weave of the material in David's suit, she was still too far away from them to touch them. David's smile never left his face, and Hilary, she actually had been swiveling in her chair, as if she were a child waiting for this b-o-o-o-r-i-n-g grown-up to let her go. Myka slowed, her hand dropping from Laura's back. Hilary's arrogance hadn't been without foundation; she hadn't been able to touch them, not because of their skillfulness in defrauding their parents but because of Helena's. Helena had understood that to protect herself she had first to protect the Marstons. She might be a snake, but they were lions. She hadn't made them the fall guy in the event that the FBI were cleverer than she had expected. They could no more arrest the Marstons than they could arrest her.
Was DeWitt being as careful? So far he had been, but his sleeping with his best friend's wife was a risk as was his willingness to flirt with other women in Laura's presence. It wasn't boldness or recklessness that was driving him; he simply didn't care. If he had to end the scam and flee, he wouldn't be taking the Jeffries or the McCrossans or any of the others in their circle with him. Myka felt her Law Enforcement Grim become Law Enforcement Uncertain as she began to worry her bottom lip. Maybe Laura had convinced herself that DeWitt was her true love, that he would save her even if he let the rest of their friends go to jail. Myka more violently chewed her lip. It all depended on whether Laura was a mouse hidden under a lion's skin or a lion through and through.
When Laura stopped and faced her with a huff of impatience, Myka had planted her hands on her hips to stop them from trembling. Her voice, however, was steady, and it was flat with authority, the flatness that announced there was no crack, no gap, no space through which its target could escape. It had everything covered. "We've been putting together a case against Bryce, and we're ready to take him in. Did he approach your husband with his plan to defraud the insurance companies, or did he work on Chris through you? It's one thing to cheat on your husband. It's another to persuade him to commit a crime."
Indignation, disbelief, and fear struggled for dominance over Laura's features before they gave way to a dour satisfaction that had her pursing her lips and wagging her head in a kind of self-rebuke. "I knew there was something off about the two of you, but I couldn't put my finger on it."
Myka had the wild impulse to ask her what had been "off" about her and Helena. Had they been too affectionate (hardly) or not affectionate enough (more likely)? It could have been something more basic, a whiff of the must from her father's bookstore, with its shelves full of never-to-be-sold books, still clinging to her after all these years. In an unguarded moment, Helena's accent might have slipped, and Laura had heard the sound of cheap bedsits instead of old money and country estates. Maybe Christina had failed to impress, her inability to give piano recitals or speak in paragraphs at the age of four revealing that she wasn't a future candidate for Barrington or Lynley. At the possibility that Helena's performance hadn't been sufficiently seamless or that Christina had seemed merely ordinary, Myka felt almost defensive, as if she might burst out with a ringing endorsement of Helena's con artist prowess or stoutly maintain that she would be just as happy if Christina became an elementary school teacher instead of a CEO. It was madness to feel that she needed to protect them. Probably at this very moment, Helena, Jemma, and Christina were in a car with Nate Burdette racing to his private plane, Helena trying to work her ankle monitor off her leg while Jemma inspected their new, authentic-looking passports. But knowing something like that very scenario was unfolding didn't make the protectiveness go away.
With another wag of her head that had artfully groomed strands of blond hair shimmying over her shoulders, Laura said, "If you really had him, you wouldn't be here, you know, certainly not sweating through a 10K."
Apparently Law Enforcement Grim hadn't scared her enough, and Laura was calling her bluff. Myka wondered if her mother would let her move into the two-bedroom crackerbox her parents had bought after they sold the bookstore. After her mother sold it, rather. Her father's impatience had been defanged by Alzheimer's, but the inability to concentrate that had replaced it was no greater help in closing a sale than growling at the real estate agent would have been. Maybe letting her move back in would be more appealing if she offered to look after her father, assume the caregiver role that had fallen to Tracy; she would have to fill her days with something. Myka brought her attention back to Laura and why she had dragged her behind the thin border of trees. "Either way you lose him. If you tell him that the feds are on to him, he's going to disappear - without you. If we can't bring him in, you still lose him." Laura was listening, although she had crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her head at a skeptical angle. "He doesn't love you, but it's not because he's looking for someone better. He can't love. It's all a game to him, a power play. I bet when you met him you looked at him the way you're looking at me now, and he couldn't stand it. Think back. The ones in your little group who seemed the least won over, he worked the hardest to charm them, didn't he? Remember why you didn't like him and ask yourself what changed."
Unfolding her arms, Laura adopted an expression that could be called pitying . . . or contemptuous. "I don't have any illusions about Bryce. What should I call you? Officer Bering? Agent Bering? I have no illusions about him, Agent Bering," she repeated. She turned to scan the grounds behind her. "I'm sure he's taking this opportunity with neither one of us around to flirt with a pretty girl." She had said it casually, but she twitched her shoulders as if the acknowledgment's sting were sharper than she had expected.
"If you can accept that he's just using you, then you're a stronger person than I was," Myka said softly. "When he leaves, he'll do it quickly, Laura, and he'll make sure he does it when it's the last thing that you expected him to do. He'll leave you and Chris, Alex and Charlotte, Meredith, all of you to answer for everything he's done." She looked absently at the ground, her foot sweeping across the grass like a metronome, setting a rhythm for her thoughts to follow. "She had a year lease on her loft and her studio; eight months were left on both when she took off. The landlords came after me, but my name wasn't on the leases. I never had to pay them a cent, but they were tenacious. She left behind everything, her car, her furniture, her clothes, things we had bought together, things she'd said she couldn't live without. We'd been planning to take a trip to the Caribbean. She had known she'd be leaving long before we would take that trip, but she encouraged me to make the hotel reservations and buy the plane tickets." Myka looked up from the arc of grass she had bent first one way and then the other and searched Laura's face. She wasn't sure what she was hoping for, not sympathy, not that at all, but she knew she shouldn't be expecting recognition or a dawning awareness either. Yet Laura hadn't left her talking to herself behind the trees, and that was something. "She didn't con me out of money or con me into committing a crime. She had needed a cover, and I was it." Not exactly true but close enough. "What Bryce had you do for him, it's bad, Laura, and he knows it. He'll take advantage of it. He's going to leave behind not only his job and his town home and all that's in it, but everything that can connect you and Chris and anyone else to the fraud."
Myka smiled, but she didn't mean for it to be a comforting one. Had she liked Laura better, she might have felt sorry for what she was going to say next. "We'll look for him, but those kinds of searches take money and time and a lot agents. You'll be right here, you and Chris and everyone else he'll have managed to implicate before he leaves. You're not going anywhere. You have expensive homes, expensive kids, companies to run and charities to support. You can't leave at a moment's notice." She leaned in, eyes boring unblinkingly into Laura's. "Ever wonder why the most expensive thing Bryce has is a fast car? I used to wonder why my girlfriend never really furnished her loft." Myka paused. "I learned." She said it with a finality that she hoped Laura wouldn't question because she had nothing more. She knew that what little the team had put together, the minor inroads she and Helena had made into the circle of DeWitt's friends she had just ruined. Her weapons of last resort had been bluster and her own hard luck story. Myka had never thought she would arrive at a place where her father and Helena would meet, where the berating and threats of the one would commingle with the emotional manipulation of the other, yet here she was combining the two who had shaped her. "We're going to take someone down for this. Don't make us come after you because we can't get him."
"Is she why you became an agent, Myka? Is this all payback for her hurting you?" Myka wanted to wince at the sarcasm, but she fought to keep her expression neutral, no matter that she could hear the roar of the fire destroying their case. Telling Laura that she had already been an agent when Helena conned her probably wouldn't help her credibility or the agency's.
"No." She needed to get moving again and attend to her other, bigger disaster. Laura, too, was getting restless, her movements multiplying; her fingers were going to her hair, her glances were flicking around their visitor-less corner of the grounds; she was about to leave her in search of DeWitt. "I don't work white collar crimes because I get a thrill out of capturing predators. I do it because I don't like a con artist's vision of the world. They see only winners and losers, grifters and their marks." I want a world in which I'm not a snake or a mouse but a dolphin. She almost laughed at the absurdity of the thought, but it rung strangely true. "This isn't about the world I see, it's about Bryce's, and in his you're a predator or you're prey. You have 48 hours to choose which you're going to be. Then we're coming after all of you."
Helena had been throwing up in the mornings. At first she hadn't noticed because it wasn't uncommon for Helena to get up in the middle of the night or right before dawn and pad around the loft eating saltines or sketching an image that had visited her in her dreams. Better she did that than adjust her pillow a million times or flop first on her right side and then on her left, right side, left side, right side, endlessly. Myka hadn't minded it when Helena would expend some of her nighttime restlessness whispering in her ear "I love you," but she hadn't done that in a while, and Myka hadn't seen as many saltine crumbs on the floor lately. What she heard now was the dull thump of the toilet seat hitting the tank and Helena retching.
Myka searched for her phone under the bed, Helena not believing in nightstands or alarm clocks to put on nightstands she didn't have. Her phone glowed 5:45 a.m. She wouldn't have gotten up that much later anyway. The bathroom door opened, and Helena peered at her through the gloom. "I'm sorry if I woke you up."
"It doesn't hurt to go in early. I've got stacks of case files to work through." Myka shivered in her pajamas and reached for the robe that was draped across the end of the bed. The loft was always cool, regardless of the season or time of day. Her toes were curling in shock from contact with the floor, and she extended a foot underneath the bed in search of her slippers. "Maybe you ought to see a doctor," she suggested gently. "Unless you're afraid to tell me that you're knocked up." She giggled a little as she said it.
She thought she could see Helena's eyes bulge and a moment later came a vehement "God, no, it's not that." Her voice softening, Helena said, "Just nerves. It's a big restoration project I'm starting. So many things could go wrong with it." The quick slap of feet on wood and then Helena's arms were around her, one icy sole seeking warmth from the top of Myka's foot. "It'll be two weeks initially, and if the first part goes well, the time frame could be much, much longer." She tucked her head into Myka's neck; her nose was cold but her breath was warm. "How will I survive without you?" She had said it jokingly, but Myka heard a plaintive note.
"I don't know," she said, stroking Helena's back. "But after it's over, we're going to St. Thomas. Hotel, flights, I've got it all done, and once we're there, you can start making it up to me."
"Yes," Helena murmured, pressing herself against Myka in an invitation to be held more tightly. "I'll make everything up to you then."
Only after dint of much scanning and comparing of interiors (amazing what cluttered people's dashboards) could Myka pick out her car among the other nondescript mid-range sedans parked along the street. Either the Lynley 10K had attracted a fair number of participants who were in search of race events or else the rich really were misers. She didn't realize until she removed her phone from the band that she had turned it off. She didn't especially want to turn it back on, but she needed to check in with Parker and find out what he had discovered. As the number of missed calls began to multiply on the screen, she saw that very few were from Parker, in fact, only one, the most recent. The other numbers, which were all the same, she didn't recognize. Apparently the caller had tried to reach her several times before leaving a voicemail and then had continued to call. She pressed the voicemail button, dreading whose voice it might be. Parker might have calmed down and realized what shit sge had been talking and gone over her head. This wouldn't be Pete, but maybe Pete's boss.
At first Myka heard only background noise, children crying and what sounded like the buzz of voices over intercoms or some kind of public address system. Then she heard Helena, her voice strained and halting with the effort to sound composed. "I know I've gone AWOL, but Christina's been in an accident, and I'm at the hospital." Helena's voice became muffled. "What's the name of the hospital, Mum?" A sudden blare as it regained volume. "EverCare or something like that." A brief laugh devoid of humor. "Not all that far from the Lynley School, strangely. I would've called sooner, but my phone died, and Irene forgot hers in the hurry to get me here . . . I'm talking to you on Jemma's phone, but it probably won't last much longer either. Christina's . . . she's okay for now, I think. The doctors will tell us more . . . I'll call you later. I just wanted to let you know . . . 'cause you're thinking the worst. But it's not true. I wouldn't do that again . . . ." Her voice trailed off and the call ended.
Mechanically Myka listened to the voicemail that Parker had left her. "I don't know how she reached me, but that Mrs. Frederic that Helena lives with? She called to let me know there was some emergency, something to do with Helena's kid and they just took off for the hospital without letting anybody know. I don't know what you're going to do about it, but I'm going to shut off all the alarms, so to speak."
She was going to sag against her car in relief, but it actually wasn't her car whose hood she was about to sit on. Her car was another two cars down. She stumbled towards it, pressing Parker's number. Helena hadn't burned her, but she had managed to send the insurance fraud case up in smoke at just the thought of it. For one second, however, she could pretend to be a competent agent. "Parker?"
"Hey, Myka, did you get my message? She's not on the loose." Parker was eating, potato chips or something that crunched. He stress ate, she demolished her cases.
"Did you finish that check to see if we had been hacked?"
"No, there's no need -"
"Finish it, and keep doing it every fucking day until I tell you to stop."
"Myka." She imagined a cloud of potato chip crumbs hanging in the air after his aggrieved exhalation. "There are automatic scans all the time. The kind of check you want me to do is labor intensive and it takes time away from other things. Really, we don't -"
"Do it. If you want to make an issue out of it, bring it up with Pete. And the tracking software glitch? Get it fixed." She rubbed her hand over her face. "Sorry, I know I'm sounding like a bitch, but we were lucky this time. She'll remember this, Parker. She won't think of it now but she will later, and she'll wonder why there weren't agents intercepting her in the parking lot." She held up her hand, knowing he couldn't see it. "Yeah, I know, I was the one who told you not to call anybody else. So the next time something seems off, always call Pete or Steve in addition to me."
"I get it." He didn't sound annoyed or defensive; instead, he sounded . . . sympathetic. "Don't beat yourself up over this, Myka. We'll do better."
Christ, that was even worse. She did not need an IT jockey, even an extremely bright IT jockey, feeling sorry for her. She threw her phone onto the passenger seat and sat in her car for a few minutes before starting it. She should call Pete; better yet, she should drive to his tract home in the New Jersey suburbs and talk to him face to face. He needed to know about Helena, and he sure as hell needed to know what she had done to the investigation of DeWitt. Before she did that, however, she needed to go home and shower.
It was what the old Myka would have done. Not the Myka she had been before ending up on Helena's bed, holding her, but an even older Myka. The Myka who existed before Helena Wells entered her life because there had never been a time since then when Helena hadn't trumped the agent in her. Never a time when she wouldn't trump the agent. She didn't need to look for directions on her phone; she had passed signs for the hospital on the way to Lynley. Maybe she could make a career out of that memory of hers. She would surrender her badge, get the hell out of Dodge, and make a new life for herself in some New England hamlet. She would put that memory to use in a library, buy a cat, live alone. When she died, she would be that "crazy old library lady" to the kids, to their parents, just another elderly woman of limited means and a corresponding frugality. By the time she was riding the elevator to the children's wing of the hospital, she had already decorated her modest one-bedroom apartment in this imaginary hamlet and named her cat. Nigel.
The apartment dissolved and Nigel faded away when she saw Christina looking especially small in her hospital bed. A gauze pad covered the skin above her right eyebrow and her right arm was in a sling. She brightened upon seeing Myka. "Hi, Myka-Myka. Did you come to see my hurts? My arm hurt really bad but it's better now." She sounded disappointed at the development, as if on the hurts scale she had lost a position or two.
Helena, who had been sitting at the side of the bed, whirled around and leapt from her chair. She stood tensely for a second and then she covered the room in two, almost running, strides and wrapped herself around Myka. Myka held her, whispering the jumble of sounds and nonwords she might have whispered to Christina. She stroked Helena's back in the old way, the way she used to do when she hoped to relax her, and said over Helena's shoulder, "Sure did, and I want to hear how brave you were, too."
"I was very brave," Christina said after due consideration. "Nonni and Mommy said I was." She paused, digging her left fist into her eye and letting out a huge yawn. "Mommy said we were going to have a sleepover here tonight, her and Nonni and me. Are you going to stay here with us?"
"There's no place I'd rather be."