A/N: Think of this as part one of a two-part, um, chapter. I don't leave flashbacks hanging, so there's more of it to come, for better or worse.
It wasn't a cramped, sterile-looking room with a nondescript institutional table and plastic chairs. That wasn't how they did things, and even if it were, the suite didn't have a room like that. This wasn't an interrogation; it was a conversation, with any luck, a negotiation in which they would be able to come to terms with the Jeffrieses about their involvement in the insurance fraud -
"Alleged fraud," Ted Roget, their attorney, interrupted. "Alleged fraud," he repeated. He rocked back in the swivel chair with the leather-like upholstery and bestowed on them a confident smile. Chris and Laura were on either side of him, and, notwithstanding the fact that they weren't smiling, they didn't look any the less confident.
Pete was wearing a smile of his own, tight and impatient. "There's nothing 'alleged' about it," he said.
They were in Pete's office, seated around the conference table. There was no room connected to his office in which he could stand behind a panel of one-way glass and observe the proceedings. However, he didn't routinely participate in such "conversations," only when he thought his authority might lend a greater - and needed - weight to his agents' implicit (or explicit) threats of arrest, costly trials, punishing fines, and imprisonment. They were in need of so much more than Pete's higher salary grade and longer title, Myka thought. She had expected to see an attorney much like the one who accompanied the Jeffrieses, male, middle-aged, in a bespoke suit of a conservative color. She was surprised only that Chris and Laura hadn't arrived with a battery of them. It suggested that while they were sufficiently nervous about what the FBI might have on them to agree to answer questions, they weren't worried enough to bring in an entire law firm.
A tray with tumblers and a carafe of water had been set in the middle of the table, and the introductions had been polite. If there had been handshakes and a PowerPoint presentation Myka might have been fooled into believing it was a business meeting. The Jeffrieses' impassive expressions hadn't slipped the slightest bit when Myka and Steve were introduced as the lead agents on the case, but their eyes had narrowed simultaneously when Helena had stepped forward at Pete's "and our special consultant, Helena Wells" and they had seen her ankle monitor.
"You might say I'm a subject matter expert when it comes to fraud," she had explained, and Myka, though able to see only Helena's profile, had no doubt about how she appeared to Chris and Laura, mocking and predatory, her eyes almost shuttered closed and her lips breaking in a red slice of a smile over her teeth, as if she were already enjoying the meal she would make of them.
Seemingly laughing to herself at all of them (leaving Myka to wonder whether this was simply more theater on her part), Helena had poured water and distributed glasses to those who wanted it, and then Pete had summarized the thefts that had first brought Chris and Laura and other Barrington Academy alumni to the agency's attention, emphasizing that it was the one commonality that all the victims shared. "Strange that it should be so," he said, "since thefts like this are usually more random or, if they do happen to share certain things in common, it's not that the victims have gone to the same school. It suggested to us that the thieves had a special interest in Barrington, possibly were former students." Myka, sitting next to him, had observed the small twitches of his head, left, center, right, as he stared at the Jeffrieses and their attorney in turn. "Then the amount of time that elapsed between the reports of the thefts, not days, not a week or two, but several weeks, even months. The first theft I can understand, maybe even the second, but the others? Why wasn't there more suspicion? Why weren't you all checking your jewels after the parties and the get-togethers? It appeared to us that some of the victims might be deliberately staggering the reports and the claims they submitted to their insurers, and it began to smell like fraud."
"Regardless of what it might have 'smelled' like to you," Roget had said, "the thefts were genuine and the relationships between some of the victims purely coincidental."
"We have reason to think otherwise and view your clients as knowing participants in both the thefts and the fraud -"
That was when Roget had interrupted to insist that the fraud was "alleged" and hearing Pete's testy reply, the attorney, still casually leaning back in his chair, said quietly, "You can't prove it. If you could, we wouldn't be here. I'm a little disappointed, Mr. Lattimer, that this is the best your agency can do, especially since Agent Bering and your," he paused and then said with unmistakable sarcasm, "consultant, Ms. Wells, spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to inveigle themselves into the lives of my clients and their friends."
Myka felt an unwelcome wave of heat roll up through the open collar of her shirt and the fabric begin to stick in patches to her chest. To add to the humiliation of the morning, she was now being taken to task by their suspects' lawyer. Then she heard Helena's voice, slyly needling, "It was working, wasn't it?" She shot a challenging look at Laura. "As recently as this past Thursday, I received an invitation for the three of us to join Charlotte and Alex at their 'cottage' in Maine this summer."
"You weren't fooling me," Laura said flatly.
"Oh, no? You seemed a little . . . upset . . . that Agent Bering and Bryce were developing a bit of a flirtation." Helena smiled into her water tumbler as she lifted it to her lips.
"Because I sensed she was playing him," Laura said, an equally triumphant smile beginning to flicker at the corners of her mouth.
Helena skeptically arched an eyebrow. "And that's why, of course, you warned Bryce that she wasn't, we weren't what we seemed to be." She set her glass down. "You didn't do that, did you? Instead you pouted and you hung onto his arm and you gave Agent Bering enough cutting glances that she would have bled to death had they been knives. You acted like a jealous girlfriend, not someone who suspected that she and her friends had welcomed vipers among them." Laura flushed as Helena directed a sardonic look at Chris. "Has she always been this protective of him?"
"Don't answer that," their attorney interjected, "she's just leading you." Shifting forward in his chair, he offered Helena his own predatory smile. "You must not have a single thing to hang your theory on if all you can do is taunt my clients. Either show us what you have or we're walking out of here and I'll have the careers of every agent in here by the end of the day." He aggressively leaned across the table toward Helena. "As for you, I'll have whatever suspended sentence or early parole you've managed to wangle revoked, and you'll find yourself back in your jail cell so fast your head'll spin."
He turned his head to direct a hard stare at Myka. "If I can get you on an entrapment charge, you'll join your partner here in her cell."
She tried to stare back just as hard at him and not allow her eyes to slew to the side to catch a glimpse of Helena's expression. The threat to bring her up on charges was so much bluster, but he probably could get her fired. Disgraced yet free - of her more or less moribund ambitions, of the agency, of the desolation of the past eight years of her life - she thought she could live with that. Disgraced yet free, she could end up on a beach somewhere, building a sand castle with Christina while Helena lay under an umbrella in a skimpy and bold-colored bikini, maybe scarlet, maybe electric blue. Hand in hand, she and Helena could leave this conference room right now . . .
Bates had assigned her and Helena to the case, a painting recently donated to a private university that had been determined to be a forgery. She had just returned from a two-week assignment to the Miami field office to assist in a counterfeit visa investigation, and she wasn't expecting to be reassigned so soon. Usually Bates allowed them a few days to catch up on paperwork when then had been offsite, and she would have welcomed the rest after a solid stretch of 14- and 16-hour days but begging off an assignment because of exhaustion, or any reason, was a quick way to sideline yourself. Giving 110% wouldn't guarantee you a promotion but giving only 100% could put a promotion out of reach. So there was that and Bates's "You two seem to work well together" delivered with an enigmatic smile. Myka didn't like any of Bates's smiles; they were all on the smug side, but she especially didn't like that one. It was the kind of smile that suggested not only had he caught you with your hands down the pants of a fellow agent in your cubicle after hours but he had stepped out of your line of sight to watch. Not that she had done anything like that, but the smile had her thinking back to her recent weekend with Helena in the Berkshires. It had been completely innocent, and not just because she had been laid up with a sprained ankle, but his smile gave all of it an illicit cast, especially the sight of Helena getting up in the morning wearing only a camisole and panties. She began to sweat under her suit, but she could no more push back against that smile than she could against the assignment.
The university was upstate, a four and a half-hour drive northwest of the city. After informing her of the assignment, Bates added, "Hope you didn't unpack" and punctuated it with a different smarmy smile, one that suggested, without the licentiousness of the smile preceding it, that he was enjoying the thought of her having to paw through her travel bag for clean underwear. Myka supposed she should be grateful he was taking pleasure only in her discomfort, but the gratitude disappeared when, conferring with Helena on travel plans, she learned that a 4:00 p.m. meeting had been scheduled for them with the university's president and counsel. Dressed as usual in an outfit that deliberately failed to harmonize, the dark gray of her suit coat and lighter gray of her skirt awkwardly contrasting with the burnt orange blouse, Helena wore the mismatch with a casual disregard for how people, including Myka, subtly eyed it. She displayed a similar disregard for their new assignment, taking greater interest in inventorying Myka's face, saying softly, "You look exhausted. Are you sure you're up for this? I can talk to Bates." Ordinarily Myka would have bridled at the question and been quick to claim that she could handle anything Bates chose to throw at her, but the sympathy in Helena's voice, the concern in her eyes, was a different reminder of their weekend in the Berkshires and the unfussy care that Helena had demonstrated, embodying the nurse Myka hadn't known until then that she had fantasized looking after her: lovely, unruffled, and thoroughly in charge.
". . . the Cadet Scholarship Fund. When did you set it up?" Helena was focused on Chris Jeffries.
Ted Roget sighed plaintively. "What does that have to do with anything? If you don't provide us with something substantive -"
Helena crisply cut him off without looking away from Chris. "Mr. Roget, is it? Mr. Roget, I'm getting to the show part of the show and tell, but first I need Mr. Jeffries to tell me or, rather, confirm a few facts."
The attorney slapped his hands on the table and demanded of Pete, "Why are you letting a con artist direct this interview? It does nothing to convince me that you know what the hell you're doing. If she doesn't -"
"I trust my con artist more than I do yours." Pete smiled grimly at Chris and Laura. "There are many things I wouldn't trust Helena with, the keys to my car, my credit cards, the nuclear football, but she's never wrong when it comes to cons." He slid his chair back from the table as if he were preparing to stand up and end the meeting. "You can advise your clients to leave, but the minute the door shuts behind them, I'll have agents on the way to Mr. Jeffries's office, their home," his smile turned derisive, "their second and third homes. You make the choice."
It was rare, admittedly, those occasions when Myka was reminded that Pete was an adult, but this was one of them. He was in command, and, though Myka knew he would confess at some point, regardless of how this interview ended, that he was practically peeing his pants at this moment, foreseeing the Jeffrieses and his pension walking out the door, he was confident. He was even winking at Helena. "You want to talk about the scholarship fund?" Chris said suddenly, motioning to their attorney to keep silent. "It was something Bryce suggested to me and Alex four or five years ago. He had been a scholarship student and he wanted to ensure that deserving kids, no matter their family situation, could always afford to go to Barrington."
Helena nodded in understanding and, adopting a tone to match, agreeable, sympathetic to his point of view, she began to fill in the details. "The Cadet Scholarship Fund because that's the name of the lacrosse team all of you played on, right? The team Bryce captained?" Chris's head bobbed in unison with hers while the attorney again sighed, very loudly. "He wanted just you and Alex as the other decision-makers to start with," Helena paused, "because you're his best friends. You could always add other former Cadets as the fund grew." Another nod from Chris. "But you never have - brought in any of your former alums or teammates, that is. You'll take their money, but only you and Alex and Bryce decide where it goes."
"It's still a small fund," Chris said, his voice cooling, the muscles around his mouth beginning to set and tighten.
"Your donors don't have that impression." In contrast, Helena's mouth was relaxing, curving up. Myka almost expected to see her run her tongue along her lips in contemplation of which part of Chris she wanted to sink her teeth into first.
Helena had driven, her foot pressing firmly on the accelerator, and they had arrived with ten minutes to spare for their 4:00 with the president, the university's counsel, and an unexpected attendee, the professor from the art department who had first raised the question of whether the Merrick donated to the university was genuine. Myka had tried to recall en route the details from the very slim case file that she had skimmed in the office, but she knew she had nodded off more than once. Her usual inoculation against fatigue, multiple cups of Starbucks's coffee of the day, had been no defense against an 8:30 p.m. flight from Miami to LaGuardia the night before and an alarm set for 5:00 a.m. Sipping the ice water the president's assistant had provided them and wishing it were Starbucks, Myka asked the president to explain how the university had become the beneficiary of a painting that, if genuine, would be valued at a million dollars or more.
"Lawrence Vanderwaal was a graduate and, later, a trustee of the university. He had always been a generous contributor and was intending to make a large endowment, whether of cash or another asset. That it was going to be the Merrick was something of a surprise to us." The president was a tall, rawboned man, with the build and sun-damaged skin of a farmer rather than a former dean. "Larry had inherited the Merrick from an aunt, never married, who had been fond of him, and since he had provided for his children and grandchildren by other means, he thought giving us the Merrick was better than giving us cash since we could, as he said, 'watch it appreciate in value like stock.'"
"He had had the painting's authenticity confirmed, I assume," Helena said, looking more at ease in her stodgy leather chair than the others in theirs.
"God, yes," the president exhaled with an unlikely, almost yipping laugh, as though being able to respond confidently and affirmatively to a question had become a pleasant surprise. "He had been raised on family lore that it was a Merrick, but he was too canny to take stories for proof when he came into possession of it. He had an expert take a look at it, and the expert concluded that it was a Merrick."
With a slight, unreadable smile, Helena said, "I've heard that early Merricks, such as this one, are difficult to accurately attribute. His style changed remarkably over the years, and at one point, he maintained that he had burned everything he had painted before the age of 25." The smile broadened into amusement. "Obviously not every painting, because some of his earliest works remain, but it does make for a challenge, verifying a Merrick."
Myka sipped more ice water unable to quiet the sneaking, and irritating, suspicion that there was no crime here. During the drive, Helena had given her a rundown of the difficulties associated with the works of Edgar Merrick. In the mid-nineteenth century, a student of various schools devoted to the American pastoral, he had become by the end of his life something of a maverick, abandoning the farmlands and orchards of upstate New York as his subject for dissolving, almost abstract seascapes that were supposedly inspired by long sojourns among the Caribbean islands. Helena had sniffed and shaken her head as she explained, displaying the esteem in which she held him, but she had conceded that his paintings, especially his earliest ones, were in high demand, if only because there were so few. How many times had Myka read of a Rubens or a Titian or some other masterwork identified instead as the work of a school, a pre-modern approximation of mass production? A wealthy merchant wants a still life, a church the painting of St. John the Baptist, and a nobleman a portrait of his favorite horse. How else could one artist satisfy three or five or ten impatient clients? Or in Merrick's case, how else would buyers eager to acquire a rare early work otherwise acquire one than to seize upon an expert's opinion, always potentially fallible in the end, that a painting in a very similar style was "unquestionably" a Merrick? A regrettable, and costly, mistake for the university but an innocent one. There was even a remote chance that they could drive back to the city tonight and close out the case with a few follow-up calls or emails.
"Exactly," Professor Hobart agreed. "It's why I advised President Nolan to have the painting reexamined. Better, more advanced techniques for confirming the authenticity of an artist's work have been developed since Larry Vanderwaal relied on my predecessor's opinion. Professor Friedlander was a Merrick expert and widely recognized as such, but let's use 21st century means." He was good-looking in the same studiedly careless manner as Helena, shaggy blond hair casually flicked away from his face, a faint trace of stubble along his jawline. He had been not-so-surreptitiously sending appreciative glances at Helena since they had entered the room, and Myka, without questioning why she had so immediately made up her mind, already disliked him.
Helena nodded, but the unreadable smile hadn't disappeared, which suggested that she acknowledged his point but hadn't yet accepted it as her own. "May I take a look at it?" Her nodding turned into a self-deprecating shake. "Not now, of course, but perhaps some time tomorrow?"
For the first time, Professor Hobart's glance was less than admiring. "Not to sound belittling of your skills, but the determination has been made." He turned to President Nolan. '"It's not an authentic Merrick; I thought everyone was in agreement on that, and our calling in the FBI, a decision I was not in favor of, by the way, was solely to satisfy the board of trustees that the Vanderwaal family didn't intend to mislead the university or profit from any apparent deception."
Helena gestured toward the university's counsel who had yet to say a word. "If you don't mind, professor, since we were contacted by Mr. Stoddard, I'd prefer to hear it from him. Do you have an objection to my taking a look at the painting?"
Mr. Stoddard glared at Professor Hobart before he spoke to Helena. "Not at all. We removed it from the collection currently on display, but Rosemary Hastings, President Nolan's assistant, can provide you access to it. Just give her a call and let her know what time you want to see it."
Helena's smile lost its enigmatic quality and brightened with approval as she directed its power, which was no small thing, Myka had to admit, on Mr. Stoddard. "What happens to the painting now? Does the university have any interest in keeping it?"
President Nolan coughed uneasily. "We've come to a tentative agreement with the Vanderwaals that we'll return the painting to them for a cash payment of its current appraised value, which is somewhere in the market of a hundred thousand dollars."
"Considerably less than a Merrick," Helena said quietly and looked at Myka, her eyes as unreadable as her smile had been moments before. . . .
"We have evidence that since the fund was started, you've received donations totaling over a million dollars, yet it's unclear where, precisely, that money has gone. Based on Barrington's past and current tuition, the fund could have underwritten the attendance of several students, but we've identified only a few." Helena sounded authoritative, but Myka knew the pitiful amount of information supporting that claim. The Cadet Scholarship Fund was a nonprofit, required to supply financial information only to the extent that verification of its tax-exempt status was required. They had had no financial statements to work with, only the information that could be gleaned from public sources or social media networks: press releases here and there, information on Barrington's web site, postings from donors referring to contributions of a few thousand dollars, or several, to "Bryce's charity." Her tone no less accusatory, Helena added, "And from the students your fund has helped, we've heard numerous complaints that what they were promised in terms of the fund's financial assistance rarely materialized." "Heard" was an exaggeration since they hadn't had the time to actually interview the scholarship students and their families. Claudia had managed to ferret out several irate complaints from parents on Facebook, blogs, and various financial aid-related sites that the fund had ended up paying only a quarter, and generally even less, of their children's tuition.
Roget made another show of impatience, fiddling with what looked like diamond-studded gold cufflinks. "A certain portion of the monies raised go toward administrative expenses, and the fund has never promised that it would be the sole or majority source of a Barrington student's financial aid."
"Actually there's nothing on Barrington's site that says the Cadet Scholarship Fund will pay only a portion of a student's tuition," Helena swiftly countered. "In fact the language suggests the opposite. 'Students who are recipients of the Cadet Scholarship Fund can enjoy the benefits of a premier education without the worry that their families can't afford it,'" she quoted from memory.
"That's not our fault," Chris spoke over his attorney's "We'll have the school amend that language immediately." Roget gave Chris a stern look before continuing, "I can assure you that prospective Barrington students and their parents are informed that the scholarships will not fully cover the cost of tuition. I can also tell you that only the Hiram Walker Scholarship Fund -"
"Covers 100% of Barrington's tuition," Helena interrupted. "Yes, and Mr. DeWitt was awarded one of those scholarships. Strange isn't it, that his scholarship fund won't do the same?" That had been a nugget that Claudia, again, had been able to find in a cached page that, inexplicably since there was no obvious connection to Barrington, listed past recipients of the scholarship between 1950 and 2000.
Eating McDonald's sandwiches and fries in Helena's hotel room (across the hall from hers) wasn't a meal that Myka had expected or wanted. She would have settled for a coffee and a banana if they could have been back on the road to the city, but they had no sooner left the university's administration building than Helena had been on the phone, not to Pete or Bates, but Joshua Donovan, asking him to find as much information as he could on the Vanderwaals; the history of Edgar Merrick and Dorchester, New York, which was home to the Vanderwaals and the university; Bellamy Consulting, the firm that had most recently analyzed the Vanderwaal Merrick; and, surprisingly, Adam Hobart. At Myka's puzzled expression, Helena had said only, "Just a hunch."
Myka didn't question her about contacting Joshua Donovan, but she noted it as something she would mention to Bates. Donovan had known ties to Gentleman Jim Wells, which, Myka reminded herself, was true of Helena too. Helena had acknowledged that she might have unwittingly participated in some of her father's scams, one of the reasons for her reaching out to the FBI in the first place. It was possible, although unlikely, that Donovan's assistance would be motivated by a similar guilt. Helena was cramming the cardboard container that had held her chicken nuggets into the sack when she said, 'I know I should've gone through the proper channels, but Joshua's better - and faster - than anyone I've ever met, except, possibly, his baby sister." She laughed. "She's already a terror, and she's barely 13." Her phone rang and grinning like the ring alone proved her point, she answered without bothering to say hello. "Tell me what you have. I'm under something of a deadline." She paused, listening to what Donovan was saying. "You know that I'm not at liberty to say." She fell silent again, except for a choked laugh at a joke that Donovan must have made. At the FBI's expense, Myka thought sourly. Helena placed her phone on the table and pressed the speaker button. As Donovan's voice, methodical, disquietingly inflectionless, carried into the room, Helena opened her laptop and punched a key to wake it. "Go ahead but speak slowly," she snickered and then said, "even more slowly than you normally do. I'm taking notes."
Helena was chuckling, wagging her head in mock admiration. "For the longest time, we thought that the con was limited to the insurance fraud, but some of the purchases the three of you made, DeWitt's sports car, your investment in the development at Hilton Head, Alex and Charlotte's Maine 'cottage,' which, I didn't know until Charlotte sent me pictures, is a sprawling home on 20 acres of pristine land, those were all made within the past four or five years, and they're far more expensive than what you could have afforded with proceeds from the insurance companies, especially if you had to split it with the other 'victims.'" She held up her hand as Roget began to protest. "I know, I know, you're going to say your clients are wealthy individuals, but we're aware that Chris and Alex have experienced some, let's call them 'financial setbacks,' and as for Bryce, that car of his is beyond what a mere Barrington employee can afford." She focused more intently on Chris, saying quietly, intimately, "Even if you sold the jewels, as we assume you did, the money you received wouldn't have been enough. But then we looked more closely at the interviews, and it became clear that the parties and charity events during which these so-called thefts occurred, more than a few were to raise money for the Cadet Scholarship Fund. The thefts were just a fillip; the true adrenaline rush was the scholarship con."
"Coincidental," Roget said dismissively. He made an ostentatious show of looking at his watch, which, though not studded with diamonds, glinted expensively. "In order to make this meeting, Mr. Jeffries had to push back meetings with his clients and Mrs. Jeffries withdrew from hosting a charity brunch. You've cost them, personally and philanthropically, more money in this half-hour than any one of you will see in a year, and all you've provided them with are ridiculous and unfounded accusations." He pushed his chair away from the table. "Chris, Laura, let's go."
Myka felt her chest become slick with sweat once more, as if her sweat glands had responded to the bonfire in which her job and what was left of her reputation were about to be incinerated by dousing her in a fine mist of perspiration. Then Helena's voice, no less confident despite Roget's termination of the meeting, rose above the small noises of their leavetaking. "I was getting to the good part, about how Bryce has been bilking you and Alex, Chris, just like the three of you have been bilking your friends for years. Before you go, would you mind answering one more question?" Laura blanched and Myka's stomach shrank in apprehension of the gut-punch that Helena might be planning to deliver. Asking Chris if he knew that his wife had been sleeping with his best friend was the cheap shot that might keep the Jeffrieses in the room, but it would also be the admission that they had virtually nothing on them. "When did Bryce suggest that he should be the managing member, or maybe it was the general partner, of your little enterprise? My guess is that it was at the beginning. He was anxious, wasn't he, to spare you the tediousness of the paperwork, everything that had to be done to make the Cadet Scholarship Fund look legitimate. All he asked was that you and Alex sign whatever he gave you. Did you even bother to look at what you were signing, Chris?"
She had asked two questions, but Chris wasn't counting. He moved indecisively, uncertain whether to continue following his wife and their attorney or to sit down at the table. Helena's voice, knowing and tinged with the contempt of a master for a novice, harried him. "You've always let Bryce call the shots. It started at Barrington, didn't it? He sold papers, the answers to exams, but that was just the proverbial thumb in the school's eye. The faculty were idiots, and if he hadn't given Alex - it was Alex, wasn't it? - what he sold to the others, Alex wouldn't have graduated. Not the brightest of bulbs, poor Alex." Helena sighed in exaggerated commiseration. "But Bryce's schemes expanded to include fellow students as victims. Selling tickets to concerts that were always mysteriously cancelled at the last minute? Offering to fix the parking tickets, the citations for disturbing the peace that the local police issued or, rather, the men Bryce hired to wear uniforms and badges that would look legitimate to drunken teenagers?" Helena looked up at him and drawled, "Am I close?" Chris didn't answer, but he seemed to shrink within a suit even more expensive than his attorney's. "He said that you were different, you and Alex, true friends. He told you everything, and he shared everything. He always insisted that you take your share, although he did all the work." She paused again. "Sound familiar? He's been grooming you and Alex since you were at Barrington and, finally, you're going to pay off for him. Shall I show you how?"
There was nothing to support what she had just said. They knew nothing of what DeWitt had done at Barrington except captain the lacrosse team and ingratiate himself with students whose wealth he could only envy. Helena was running a con before their eyes, fabricating a parallel reality that would convince her marks, if she were successful, it was more real than the one they knew. What she was doing now, explaining the shell companies that DeWitt had established as shadowy parents of the fund and which existed only to siphon off the donations into other entities, even shadowier offspring, that was all invention too. They had no substantial proof, only instances of LLCs and LLPs vaguely linked to DeWitt's name, references to incorporation papers that they had had no time to request, let alone review. Yesterday afternoon, smirking at the irony of the words, she had said, "Believe me. I know this is how he's doing it, or pretty damn close to it." Steve had rubbed his face, eyes bleary from staring at his laptop screen, and turned to Myka, who having just come downstairs from inventing another escapade for the bald princess at Christina's insistence, was only with difficulty separating unicorns and magic spells from the equally fabulous content of their claims against DeWitt. "I don't have to prove it, any of it. I need only to convince Chris and Laura that I'm right, which is something else entirely. It won't matter if I get some of the facts wrong if they believe I know." Helena's eyes were as exhausted-looking as Steve's, but they had gazed steadily at her.
That had always been one of Helena's best tricks, Myka conceded, as she listened to Helena describe how Bryce had relied on his friends' trust in him to sign the documents that would give him control over the bank accounts that held the fund's money and control over the disposition of the fund itself. She always seemed to know what you thought you had hidden from everyone else . . . .
In a mere hour or two, Donovan had amassed a fair amount of information. Helena had been mainly silently as she typed, only asking for clarification or requesting that he "ferret out a little more, darling." As Myka listened to Donovan's drone, she tried to pay attention, but the significance of Lawrence Vanderwaal's late second marriage, the importance of Bellamy Consulting's recent start in the business of art appraisals and verifications, and the relevance of the fact that Hobart had resigned from a college under a cloud ("banging students was the rumor," Donovan had laconically said), escaped her. The call over, Helena closed her laptop and gave her a strangely tender look. "Trust me, there's something here. I just need a little time to tease it out. I think you'll see it too once you've had some rest. It's no sin to admit that you're exhausted, Myka." Literally too tired to move, Myka heard her say in a tone both indulgent and commanding, "Go, sleep. Or am I going to have to help you into bed like I did in that inn?"
"It was a bed and breakfast," Myka corrected her in a voice slurred with fatigue.
She didn't remember much after that. She wanted to believe she had made it across the hall and into her room under her own power, but she couldn't shake the memory of bedsheets being turned down for her and a voice suspiciously like Helena's whispering "Good night" next to her ear. The possibility that Helena had helped her into bed grew when Myka, after looking for the old Rocky Mountain National Park sweatshirt that she wore during her morning runs and taking a couple of loops through Dorchester's small downtown without it, stopped at a diner for coffee only to see Helena, as she chatted with some of the other patrons, pushing up its sleeves. It was too big for her, and sweatshirts didn't seem her style anyway, but Myka had to admit that she looked cute in it, her hair loosely tied back and the deep green of the sweatshirt complementing the dramatic contrast of black hair and the palest of pale complexions. Helena didn't look much older than the students who attended the university, which Myka assumed was part of her plan. Farmer-style breakfasts at 6:30 in the morning weren't Helena's style either, but if her hope was to plumb the locals' knowledge of the Vanderwaals and Edgar Merrick, this was a place to start. Myka asked for her coffee and, on impulse, a danish to go (if Helena could do the practically unthinkable and wear a sweatshirt, she could indulge in a pastry) and returned to the hotel.
Their only appointment for the day was an appointment to view the painting at 11:00. Myka planned to use the time before they had to leave to electronically catch up on some of her paperwork and to tackle the equally tedious chore of explaining to Bates why they would be extending their stay a day or two more. She was in the middle of rewriting a section in her summary of a digital piracy case she and Pete had worked on (she had worked - Pete had been occupied playing the pirated video games - "We gotta check the product, Mykes") when Helena knocked at the door. Dressed in a pantsuit so conservative ("dull" was the word that popped into Myka's mind) that she might have been mistaken for an agent, Helena cheerfully announced, "Come along, we need to go to the courthouse to request a copy of Lawrence Vanderwaals's will."
The memory of her in the sweatshirt lingered, and Helena looked bright and excited and . . . eminently kissable. The impulse shocked Myka but not as much as it once would have -
Helena was describing clinically, dispassionately how DeWitt had managed, through a series of shell companies that he would have set up without Chris's or Alex's knowledge, to skim a healthy percentage of the funds their unsuspecting donors had contributed. "He's conned people whom you've never met for gifts to the fund and those gifts have gone straight into his companies, not whatever your little LLP or LLC is called, which Bryce led you to think is the sole clearinghouse for the cash you've scammed. He has accounts in the Caymans, in the Bahamas that are his alone -"
Helena hadn't stopped talking but Myka had lost track of the words. She was talking faster than she normally would, speeding through the surmises and assumptions that they had strung together yesterday afternoon and evening, trying to make them sound like facts, hoping to persuade Chris and Laura with the force of her argument rather than its logic. Everything was moving faster in the room, the tic in Pete's cheek, the ray of sunlight across the conference table, yet when she allowed herself to sidle a glance at Helena, she saw Helena in all her guises, each blurring into the other like images caught when a camera's shutter speed was slowed. The last she saw was the Helena who had stood outside her hotel room in Dorchester, saving her from another catastrophic mistake.
"She makes it sound bloodless," Myka heard herself interrupting, claiming her right to speak because this was her area of expertise, "but it's not. Mr. Roget has told you that you can't be touched, and that may be true, maybe we can't touch you. But Bryce has already taken from you what you can't replace. Whether it's today or tomorrow or next year, there will come a time when you'll never sleep easy again, when you'll ache and know you can't make it go away. Helena can't tell you about what it's going to feel like then because she's never felt it, Mr. Roget can't either." She stopped, conscious of how silent the room had become, except for her voice, as clinical and dispassionate as Helena's. "You'll never again know what it's like to trust someone. You'll never trust yourself. You'll look in the mirror and your reflection won't ever quite look right; you won't be someone else, but you won't be what you were either. You'll realize that you're not as smart as you thought you were, not as good, not as strong." Chris had become paler, and the willed dismissiveness of Laura's expression seemed to be fading, but she knew they weren't yet convinced that they needed to give Bryce up. So much for baring her soul, Myka thought.
Suddenly Laura said, "I want to talk to you and her," she pointed at Helena, "alone."
"Laura," Roget cautioned, "I don't think that's wise. At least let me be present."
She shook her head. "Alone."
They found an empty conference room. Or, rather, it was empty once Helena directed an imperious look at the two junior agents who were using it to have an early lunch. They stuffed their containers and sandwich bags of chopped salad and sliced hard-boiled eggs into their soft-sided mini-coolers and scurried out as Laura paced the length of the room. She swept her hand through her hair, which, Myka noticed for the first time, looked a little less glossy than normal, as though she had missed a step in her undoubtedly expensive hair care routine this morning. Maybe there was reason to hope.
Coming to a stop in front of them, Laura jerked her thumb at Helena but didn't look at her, keeping her eyes fixed on Myka. "She's the one, isn't she? The con who screwed you over."
What was the purpose of denying it, Myka asked herself. What was one more humiliation for her or the agency? Wearily, reluctantly she nodded, but Laura had half-turned away, the confirmation an addendum to a conclusion she had already drawn. "You were talking about being gutted but she," another flick of her thumb at Helena, "she was the one who looked as though she'd had a knife stuck in her." She resumed her pacing only to stare them, with wonder rather than accusation, trying to understand how and why they were standing beside each other now, Helena with a temporary access badge clipped to a pocket of her suit jacket. With barely a blink, as if she were simply reordering what she saw into a composition that didn't defy logic, Laura's eyes cleared, and she said, "I went to see Bryce later, after the race. I was planning to tell him that we were going to be taken in for questioning or worse." She half-sat, half-leaned against the table. Her confusion had returned, but Myka realized that Laura wasn't looking at them so much as through them, recalling what had happened with DeWitt. "He was on the phone, so I went into his bedroom." Her smile was wincing. "The normal progression for us."
Suddenly she pushed herself away from the table and went to stand in front of the windows, her back to them. Today she had worn a white pantsuit - Myka was used to seeing her in running pants and tank tops - and the combination of unblemished white with the burnished gold of her hair, it struck her as it had when she had seen Charlotte McCrossan walking with Helena at the Barrington 10K that these weren't women so much as jewels, gold, diamond, silver, with the world serving as their setting. Feeling her chest beginning to slicken with perspiration again, she wondered what Laura was going to tell them that would scuttle their case for good. Jesus Christ, was she going to reveal something that actually cleared him? Something she couldn't disclose in front of her husband but something she would be willing to tell them privately? Then why hadn't she tried to contact them earlier? As her anxieties increased, Myka could barely hear Laura over the condemnations, all, strangely, in Warren Bering's voice, which began to fill her mind. "I don't snoop. I don't look under his bed for panties, and I don't search his bathroom for strange tubes of mascara and lipstick." Laura turned around and tried to stare them down with a look that was both beleaguered and defiant. "I know there are other women, I've always known that, but it's one of those things that he and I never talked about, like we don't talk about Chris and what this would do to him if he knew." As is if seeking to repair the damage she had already done to its groomed layers, Laura sent a hand through her hair, further disarraying it, and Myka detected a glint of gray in its manufactured blondness. "But I snooped then. I found a passport buried in one of his nightstand drawers. It had his picture but a different name, and I remembered what you had said," defiance had all but surrendered to worry as she glanced at Myka, "about traveling light. He could roll out of bed, grab the passport from his nightstand, and leave. I suppose he has more passports and credit cards, too, hidden away somewhere and all with different names." This time her gaze landed uncertainly on Helena.
"Some of the names will be real and tied to bank accounts that are real - yours, Meredith's, Alex's." Helena made a wry mouth at Myka. "I suspect even Mrs. Carmichael might be in line to fund his decamping to the tropics or wherever it is he plans to reinvent himself."
"You didn't take Myka's money," Laura said almost accusingly, and Myka felt an impulse to laugh at the idea that, by seeming to depart from the script and not rob her blind, Helena had fallen short in Laura Jeffries's estimation of her as a criminal.
"I could say that she didn't have enough to make it worth the effort," Helena said sardonically, "but no con gives up the money at hand unless he has a larger prize in mind. My goal was to sow discord and confusion and stealing from her would have, unfortunately from my point of view, only clarified things at an inopportune time."
"You still managed to stiff me for the trip to St. Thomas." Myka had said it with amusement, and she saw Helena's eyes widen in surprise at the lightness of her tone.
"I have no doubt you'll make me pay for it, one way or another," Helena replied smoothly, but her expression was one of wariness and caution before she moved away to join Laura at the window. "What do you want me to tell you, Laura? That there's an innocent explanation for why he has a passport in another name?" The words sounded more challenging than the voice in which she said them. It held a sympathy that Myka couldn't help but believe was real.
"There's nothing that was ever innocent between me and Bryce," Laura said quietly. Her eyes flickered once more to Myka. "You said that I didn't like him at first, and you were right about that, too. I didn't go to Barrington, I went to a private girls' school." She lifted a shoulder. "There were more of them back then, and I didn't want any boys as a distraction. I was a very serious girl." She hesitated. "What appealed to me about Chris was that he was serious, too. We were young and ambitious with the grandest of plans. I didn't meet Bryce until just before we were married. He took nothing seriously, and I didn't like how he dominated Chris." She laughed, a thread of old anger hardening it. "Chris was on his way to becoming an executive officer in a Wall Street firm, and Bryce, he had just left as the development officer of some tiny little college in Pennsylvania. Chris was already making four or five times what Bryce was, but all Bryce had to do was snap his fingers and Chris would say 'How high?' Of course I resented him, and a few years after Chris and I married, I tore into him one afternoon for the way he was treating my husband." She cocked her head and her eyes sharpened, boring into Myka's. "The one thing you were wrong about? He didn't charm me. We were arguing, and we were alone - Chris was still at work and our oldest was a having a play date with his grandparents - and suddenly we were on the sofa fucking each other into tomorrow." She turned back to the window. "I couldn't get enough of him after that, and it's been like that ever since."
Myka remembered Helena's studio and their sliding against the wall as she tried to bury her hand in Helena's wetness. Helena had been keening into her ear, urging her to move faster and she had had to practically prop Helena onto her hip, arm supporting her back, to get any leverage. It had been awkward and clumsy and that Helena had come at all had had more to do with the frenzy of their coupling than with any expertise or coordination that she had demonstrated. Yet even then she had known that this encounter was different from any she had experienced before, that if they never touched each other again, she would still feel this crude, graceless joining as one of the most memorable moments of her life. She didn't have to imagine herself in a sumptuously furnished living room and discover that an argument was turning into something else, no less heated, something that would act as a dividing line between all that had happened before and all that would happen after, she had been there.
"You're still bound to him, yet you're turning him over to us," she said softly. "Why?"
Laura kept her back turned to her. "That first time, after he left, I felt so guilty, so ashamed that I went to bed and pretended that I was sick. Chris had to make dinner for himself and Kyle and clean up afterwards. He slept in one of the other bedrooms that night because he didn't want to disturb me. For the first few weeks, I was a crying mess. I'd go see Bryce and then I would come home and play the perfect wife. The guilt diminished over time but it's never entirely disappeared, and sometimes . . . sometimes, especially when Chris tells me how much he loves me," she limply fluttered her hand, as if, over the intervening years, her guilt had sapped her strength, "I could cut my throat."
She stepped back and held out her arms, helplessly, toward Helena. "I wasn't going to say anything about him until I heard her" she tilted her head toward Myka, "talk about what you had done to her, and I saw your face. If she'd asked you, you would've gone down on your knees and begged forgiveness, you were that sorry. Bryce has never looked sorry, not once. Not for all the times he screwed me and then acted as though Chris was as close to him as a brother, not for all the times some other woman has been in his bed. He's never been sorry for anything."
Myka didn't trust herself to look at Helena. She didn't let her gaze waver from Laura. "Are you sure that Chris will cooperate with us?"
A weary nod. "He loves me. All I have to do is say it's time."
Just as she couldn't let herself look at Helena, Myka couldn't let herself suck down all the air in the room and exhale it in one gigantic sigh of relief. As calmly and steadily as she could, she said, "It's time to end it, Laura, so let's go back and have you and Chris tell us everything from the very beginning."