It went as Laura said it would. When they entered Pete's office, she took her seat and, without looking at Ted Roget, said quietly to Chris, "I won't sacrifice our family for him." He bent his head, whether in agreement or resignation, Myka couldn't tell, before raising it, his expression unreadable. Speaking directly to Pete, he said, "We want full immunity." And then all hell broke loose. Not really, but Roget did leap from his chair, holding out his hand as if he expected a horde of FBI agents to descend upon his clients, although all Steve had done was to drop his mouth open in surprise while Myka was acting the impassive witness to the uproar. She had had enough of the golden ones. Rich criminals were no different, or worse, in the end, than criminals from lower tax brackets, they just got away with their crimes more often - to misquote Hemingway. The same would be true here, although Pete was violently shaking his head and stabbing at the keypad on his desk phone, asking for the attorneys to come to his office. She rocked her chair slightly, watching as Roget herded Chris and Laura into a corner of Pete's office, his hands on their backs and his mouth close to Chris's ear. This was what he was being paid for, after all, to develop a strategy, even if it had to be on the fly, which would result in his clients getting the maximum benefit from the very minimum of disclosures.
Helena had left the office, and though Myka knew that she was fleeing no farther than the restroom, she found her gaze returning again and again to the door. She was uneasy at Helena's absence, but she was more uneasy at the thought, unfounded though it was, that, having delivered DeWitt as she said she would, Helena was making a break for it - for real. She was grateful then to hear Steve's low-pitched "What did the two of you do to her?" as he wheeled his chair closer.
"I'm not sure," she said. "Probably nothing. I think Laura just got tired of the lies." Steve didn't look any the less skeptical at her explanation. "She's not a con at heart. She was in an untenable situation, and it was wearing her down."
A rap at the door, which didn't request admittance as much as it demanded entry, and then a couple of the staff attorneys, legal pads at the ready, came into the room. Myka had felt her heart lurch at the possibility that it might have been Helena returning from the restroom, or wherever she had gone. The attorneys gave Pete a questioning look, and he gestured at them to join him at his desk. It was uncannily like her high school cafeteria at lunch hour, Myka thought, a cluster of cool kids in one spot and another cluster in a different spot, and everyone else, too nerdy or forgettable or both, to gather at the fringes of either group, left to each eat her cheese sandwich and plow through another chapter of Anna Karenina.
Unlike the attorneys, Leena entered without knocking, entering the office as if it were hers and giving Pete such a cursory nod of acknowledgment that anyone who was a stranger to the hierarchy - and even those who weren't but who were aware of the reach of Leena's influence - would think it was her office. She sat down next to Myka and whispered, "Has each side done enough strutting yet?" She pointed to Roget and asked, "Foghorn Leghorn?"
Myka chuckled under her breath. "Ted Roget, attorney extraordinaire."
Somewhere in the midst of all the growls and glares and impatient gestures, overtures to a negotiation were being made. Roget had suddenly jutted his chin toward the FBI attorneys' camp, and while the pugnaciousness of it didn't suggest to Myka that he was willing to start bartering for the Jeffrieses' freedom, one of the FBI attorneys arched an eyebrow and began flapping his legal pad to signal that everyone still standing should sit down. As Myka cast one last look at the door before the draping of suit coats over chair backs and the clicking of a battery of pens announced that the negotiating - or horse trading - was under way, Leena leaned over her arm rest again and whispered, "Helena's sitting this one out. We don't need her for this."
"She always savors a kill," Myka wryly whispered back. "She'll regret not here being here." Then as she glanced at Laura's face, in which only her eyes were expressive, she regretted her words. She knew that anguish. Laura would find it razoring through her long after today, long after it should have stopped. First you were gutted by how much of a fool you had been, and then, as you were asking yourself how you could survive knowing it day after day after day, you were sliced through by the razor's other edge because knowing what a fool you had been only underscored what a fool you still you were, because all the love you harbored for him . . . or her . . . you continued to harbor. Long after you should have stopped.
Yet as Myka listened to Chris quietly describe the history of his, Alex McCrossan, and DeWitt's friendship, the anguish in Laura's eyes was replaced by something hotter and fiercer as they looked at each other, resentment. Already the realization that she and Chris were likely to become DeWitt's victims as well had faded, and Laura was focusing only on the disaster that the FBI had visited upon their lives; Myka, after receiving a scorching glare from her, suspected that she and Helena in particular were getting the lion's share of the blame. Full immunity from prosecution was unlikely, and although Laura might escape imprisonment, Chris probably wouldn't. The knowledge was in his inflectionless recounting of his and Alex's meeting DeWitt during their first year at Barrington, and as the three grew closer, he admitted, DeWitt began to enlist him and Alex in petty scams. They did it, Chris said tonelessly, "not because of the money, we had money, but because it was fun." Myka wasn't surprised by how much of it Helena had gotten right so far. She had always been able to sniff out the con when no one else could . . . .
They waited for the file clerk to retrieve Lawrence Vanderwaal's will, waited in her cubicle in thinly upholstered low-price-point office chairs. Normally it was a process that would take several days, so they had been told, but it was miraculously expedited once Myka displayed her credential. Helena had been plying the clerk with her most charming smile and admiring comments about the woman's grandchildren (if the family resemblance in the photos pinned to the panels could be trusted) but to little effect; once Myka had flipped open her leather holder, however, the woman's irritated explanation that "Processes have to be followed" trailed off, and she had murmured instead, "I'll see what I can do." She had showed them to the chairs in her cubicle, and here they still were, ten, no, closer to 20 minutes later. Myka restlessly crossed and uncrossed her legs and examined her fingernails while Helena had her head tipped against the panel behind their chairs, her eyes closed.
"Silently urging Bonnie to hurry won't make her hurry, you know."
"We have the appointment to see the fake Merrick in about half-an-hour." Myka amended, "No one's saying it's a fake, I guess, just incorrectly attributed. A mistaken Merrick."
"It won't take me long to find what I'm looking for in the will. And I'm reserving judgement about this so-called mistaken Merrick." She opened her eyes and pulled out the charming smile. It hadn't lost any wattage, and Myka couldn't help but smile in response. "You have to be patient to be a con artist, you know. It takes time to set up a good con; you have to tend it, give it space to grow."
"I'm sorry, there is no point of similarity between defrauding people and growing prize-winning roses."
Helena read the copy of the will on the way to the university, her features squeezing together in concentration, forming a dark line from forehead to chin, as she flipped back and forth between pages. Bonnie the file clerk had given them the photocopy with a suspicious squint Myka had always thought was a novelist's license in descriptions of small town encounters with strangers but realized, being on the end of one, was actually true. Though to be fair to Bonnie, having the FBI sitting in your cube was enough to justify a wary side eye or two. She had said with unmistakable emphasis, "We're not up to trouble here, as law-abiding as you'll find anywhere."
As Myka had tried out her own version of a charming smile, wanting nothing more than to ensure their easy exit, Helena had said dryly, "That inspires me with confidence."
Wondering what evidence of corruption and graft Helena had managed to uncover in the will, Myka joked on the way to the university, "Have you gotten to the section where he says 'And to my alma mater, I give one fraudulently attributed Merrick?"
Helena theatrically sighed. "Wouldn't it be nice if it were always that easy?" She looked down at the will in her lap. "I was hoping for just an unhappy beneficiary, and I think I've found her."
Myka turned into the visitor parking lot, and Helena said nothing more about what she had found in the will, her attention suddenly fixed on the top floor of the administration building. Automatically Myka looked up at it as well but saw nothing more than old-fashioned multi-paned windows whose frames needed repainting. Helena's lips had parted, and she was leaning forward in her seat, expectant and eager, the copy of Lawrence Vanderwaal's will falling unnoticed to the floor mat. Myka realized that what Helena was looking at was inside the building. She was already viewing the painting in her mind, examining the brush strokes, analyzing the composition of its paint, walking away from it only to turn and take it in again, as if she were trying to see it for the first time one more time. They hadn't worked on many cases involving paintings, a few clumsy forgeries and one or two that were much more competently executed. Myka had found Helena's reactions more interesting than the crimes themselves. While the artistry of the fraud could excite vivid displays of her admiration or, conversely, her contempt, it also elicited something deeper in her since Myka would often discover her in her office (one of the larger cubes in the cube farm) days later sketching on the legal pads that she should have been using to write up her case notes the figure or landscape that the forger had replicated, correcting the details that he had been too inept or too hurried to get right. Strangely charmed by her absorption in something so counterproductive to completing the case file, Myka would think that it was in these moments that Helena was at her happiest consulting with the agency, maybe the happiest, period.
"Let's go see this bruising loss to the university's endowments fund, shall we?" Helena said it with such anticipation that Myka had to firmly push aside the possibility that she was finding her a little too attractive a little too frequently.
When they entered the executive offices, which looked brighter and friendlier at 11:00 in the morning than at 4:00 in the afternoon, a woman rose from her desk outside the president's office to greet them. She looked at her watch and gave them the appreciative smile of someone whose main responsibility was maintaining her boss's schedule. "Eleven o'clock, spot on." Myka heard Helena's soft, strangled groan at such devotion to punctuality, but Rosemary Hastings was already too far ahead of them to have heard her. Ms. Hastings led them to a conference room between the president's office and another, smaller office that had to announce its importance, unlike the president's office, by a name plate identifying its occupant as the provost. In the conference room on a flimsy metal stand that had once held the oversized pads of paper for brainstorming sessions before white boards supplanted them was the Merrick. Or fake Merrick, depending on your point of view.
To Myka's untrained eyes, it looked like any number of nineteenth century landscapes, puffy clouds, puffy hills, puffy trees, all those gently rounded shapes vaguely breast-like. However, Helena was transfixed, eyes roving over the painting as if she were trying to fix its every feature in her memory. For a moment, Myka had the disturbing image of Helena looking at her the same way that she was looking at the painting, and the image became more disturbing as she imagined Helena's fingers following the path of her eyes.
" . . . if there's anything else," Ms. Hastings was saying.
"If you could provide me with copies of Professor Friedlander's and Bellamy Consulting's appraisals, that would be helpful," Helena didn't turn her head away from the painting.
Apparently Ms. Hastings was used to working with higher mortals and their moods. "Of course, I'll get them for you right away."
The only sounds that filled the room were the stentorian rumbling of the heating system, its laboring suggesting that it was only slightly more modern than the building it was housed in, and Helena's muttering, most of which was incomprehensible, with the exception of "Yes, I see that" and "There you go, Edgar" that didn't make her talking to a portrait seem crazy as much as it did maternal, as if she were gruffly admiring her child's efforts with a paintbrush.
Ms. Hastings returned with a sheaf of paper, which she silently placed on the conference table behind Helena, who registered her presence by a belated, grunted thanks. Detouring to ask Myka if she would like a cup of coffee or tea, Ms. Hastings cast a mournful look at the painting. "Mr. Vanderwaal would be rolling over in his grave if he knew what was happening to it. He thought he was giving the university one of his most prized possessions. There's a lot of history between the Vanderwaals and the university and a lot of history between the Merricks and the Vanderwaals. He thought by donating the painting he was, I don't know, closing the circle."
Myka would admit, reluctantly, that she didn't have Joshua Donovan's information-gathering skills, but she knew how to take advantage of an opportunity when it was offered to her. "A cup of coffee would be great and maybe a little of that Merrick-Vanderwaal history, if you're willing."
"Will we be disturbing her?" Ms. Hastings asked, rolling her eyes in Helena's direction.
"She no longer knows we're here," Myka said.
Only to be immediately contradicted by Helena, saying admonishingly, "Yes, she does, and she would like a cup of tea and some of that history as well." Backstepping toward the table she began paging through the copies of the appraisals as Ms. Hastings, with a glance at her watch to reassure herself that indulging in a few minutes of gossip wouldn't interfere with her schedule of keeping the president's schedule, left with a flourish of skirt, which hinted that underneath the sober dress suit beat the heart of a local historian or someone who, despite her adherence to schedules, appreciated a break from them.
The coffee was surprisingly good. "He's the president," Rosemary said, with a sigh that was supposed to say it all. Then, as if unsure that her sigh really had said it all, she added, "If he wants a gourmet mix, he gets one." They were on a first name basis now. Partly it was the coffee (the tea, unfortunately, was a Lipton teabag), and partly that it was hard to gossip, even if it were only about people long dead, when formality was the rule. As Helena glowered down into her cup, Rosemary told them that the painting had been a gift by Edgar Merrick to one Amelia Vanderwaal. "There have always been Merricks and Vanderwaals in this area, but Edgar Merrick had been away, attending an art school or apprenticing himself to a painter, until he came back one summer and saw Amelia. The families thought that Edgar was going to marry her, but he left at the end of the summer never to return. Mr. Vanderwaal said family legend had it that Edgar Merrick gave Amelia the painting as a consolation prize of sorts."
"Bit of a wanker, wasn't he?" Helena growled, reaching for one of the sandwich cookies that Rosemary had brought into the conference room with her. Her brows still sulkily lowered over her eyes as she bit into the cookie, Myka almost laughed at the contrast of the pouting child with the serious art appraiser Helena had been just a few minutes before.
"Well, Mr. Vanderwaal thought it was worse than that even. Amelia married another Vanderwaal, a distant cousin, just weeks later and had a baby boy barely six months into the marriage. That little boy was Mr. Vanderwaals's great-great grandfather and, possibly, Edgar Merrick's son."
Helena turned in her chair to look at the painting. "He gives her something that he believes is of greater value than what he would be to her as a husband, though I'm sure that was small comfort." She pushed her cup aside and took another cookie. "How seriously did Mr. Vanderwaal believe he was a descendant of Edgar Merrick? I can imagine that if you're Professor Friedlander and asked by a member of one of the founding families here, a trustee of the university no less, to appraise one of his paintings, a reputed Merrick . . . ."
Rosemary was amused, not offended. "I think Mr. Vanderwaal wanted to believe it, but there was no way to prove it. Scratch a Merrick and find a Vanderwaal and vice versa. There was so much intermarriage between the families that I'm sure a DNA test would have shown there was some relation but that it was Edgar Merrick?" She shrugged. "Professor Friedlander wouldn't have been influenced by any family stories or by Larry Vanderwaal. If you had known him, you'd realize the truth of what I'm saying. He was prickly at the best of times."
"From what I've read so far," Helena said musingly, "he thought there was a quality to the light in the painting that Merrick never stopped repeating. Even in his later work, it's still there, sunlight as filtered through haze or mist. He captures it in a manner . . . ." Her shrug, unlike Rosemary's, was more of an embarrassed hunching of her shoulders, a rare display of self-consciousness. "At any rate, Professor Friedlander thought that it alone powerfully argued for the painting to be called a Merrick."
"I wouldn't know about that," Rosemary said, "but Mr. Vanderwaal said the family believed it was a Merrick because if you look at it just right, you can see her name in it everywhere."
Helena exhaled loudly, derisively, her dismissal of the theory clear. "Ridiculous," she said for good measure.
"I didn't say it was true," Rosemary said, "only what the Vanderwaals think." A phone started ringing in the outer suite and she went to answer it with an apologetic "Duty is literally calling."
Helena returned to her reading of the appraisals, but Myka stared at the painting, her eyes tracing its rounded shapes, the bulbous tops of the trees, the undulating line of the hills in the background, and the gentle slopes of the hills in the foreground, creating and cradling the valley at the center of the canvas. She didn't spring from her chair, but the sudden motion startled Helena, who crossly gathered the pages of the appraisals closer to her. With her finger not quite touching the paint, Myka traced what had come to life for her in the landscape. Helena had put aside the appraisals to join her in front of the stand but only to issue another scornful huff. "You can't be taking that nonsense about her name being in the painting seriously."
"Not her full name, but a's and v's. Look at how plump those hills are, like small case a's resting on their backs. And that valley, I mean -"
"Next you'll be saying the hills look like breasts and we're supposed to take the valley as a vagina," Helena impatiently cut her off. "He may not be a giant among American painters but to think he was -"
"Young and painting this not for the future but for her. His version of a love letter? Just because he abandoned her, just because he was a wanker, as you called him, didn't mean he didn't love her."
"Only not wisely or well." Helena's expression was . . . baffled. Myka couldn't remember having baffled her before, and she wasn't sure if she was pleased or unsettled by the realization. The dark brows were perilously close to hovering over Helena's nose again. "You're not one to defend the scoundrels of the world, you know."
How many times had Amelia Vanderwaal wanted to throw the painting into the fire or take an axe to it? But she hadn't. Maybe she thought it was her child's birthright. Maybe she hadn't wanted to reduce what she and Merrick had been to each other, what any two people could be to each other, to victim and victimizer. Maybe she had thought it was pretty. "If I didn't believe that we were more than predator and prey, that life was more than a contest, I couldn't do this job for very long. We may not be able to change who we are, fundamentally, but we can always be more than we are, if just for a moment." Myka flushed as she said it. That was as much of a philosophy of life as she had ever articulated, and she had chosen to tell it to this woman, who, if she wasn't a scoundrel herself, had been raised by a family of them.
Helena's confusion deepened then disappeared, replaced by a smile, which, if not quite smug, suggested that she knew a secret you didn't. "If you weren't, fundamentally," she said with ironic emphasis, "a good person, Myka Bering, you would be a devastatingly successful con artist."
The drone of Chris Jeffries's voice bore unrelentingly through Myka's head. His eyes were glued to a spot on the conference table halfway between its edge and its center. His only movement was to occasionally sip from a glass of water as the agency's attorneys led him through what Myka could only numbly call - having listened to that drone for almost an hour - the daily log of his and DeWitt's friendship. Laura's stare, equally as fixed as her husband's, had turned glassy, the hostility long since faded into resignation, as if she had realized that making the right decision more often resulted in misery than joy. Roget also seemed to focus on something other than his client's confession, perhaps because Chris routinely ignored his whispered guidance and answered even the questions to which he had objected. Roget was taking notes, but only sporadically; most of the time, he was playing with his pen, which was slim, gold, and expensive. Although Helena might not be needed at this stage of the investigation, which Myka understood was the agency's way of limiting, where they could, Helena's access to information and to anything else she might later use for her own purposes, and not unjustified, Myka could admit, her uneasiness was beginning to edge into worry the longer Chris's interrogation went on and Helena was nowhere in sight.
" . . . it was Bryce's idea to steal the jewels." Chris's hand shot out for the glass of water. Everything had been DeWitt's idea so far, which, coming from other criminals, would be an attempt to deny responsibility, but in this particular situation was likely the truth. After his usual two sips and his automatic patting of his mouth with one of the cocktail napkins from the tray that held the carafe of water, Chris said, "Bryce described it as a prank. He'd slip up to the hosts' bedroom during a fundraiser, party, charity event or whatever it was and take what he could find. Alex and I thought he would give the stuff back."
Pete frowned. "That doesn't explain the insurance claims that you and Alex McCrossan made."
Chris reddened. "Those weren't pranks. We got the idea, Alex and I, from what Bryce had been doing. Bryce said he knew a fence that could sell the jewelry, and he explained how we could file the claim without raising suspicion." He slid a glance at his wife; Laura refused to meet it. "Laura had some jewelry she never wore, ugly but expensive stuff she inherited from her grandmother. I knew she'd wouldn't miss it for a while." Laura didn't fail to give him a disgusted look. She had been sleeping with Bryce all along, Myka thought, but she took exception to her husband stealing from her. "The other thefts," he revolved the glass between his hands, "I can't tell you whether the guys were working with Bryce or not. They might have been. We knew some of them from Barrington."
The agency's attorneys were restless. They didn't care about the thefts. "Tell us about the Cadet Scholarship Fund."
It all came together quickly after they left the executive offices and the mistaken Merrick, or so Myka would think in retrospect. But it hadn't been quite that immediate. First Helena had had to read through the Bellamy Consulting appraisal, multiple times. On her third rereading, which had happened in her hotel room where they convened to go over all the information they had managed to collect, Helena called Joshua Donovan. "Everything on Bellamy Consulting, every single job they've done, absolutely everything. And any connection between Alex Hobart and Lawrence Vanderwaal's youngest daughter, Katie." Joshua had protested, claiming, with no change in the volume or tenor of his voice, that he had competing responsibilities. Helena had told him brusquely, "Make this your first priority."
Myka, who had been reading through Lawrence Vanderwaal's will, warned her, "We'll have to justify to Bates any additional 'resources.'"
"He'll be glad to pay it," Helena said confidently.
"Bates is never glad about anything."
Helena grimaced. "The only person less deserving of a position of authority in that office than Bates is your partner." At Myka's firmly disapproving shake of her head, she said, "Someday, Myka, you'll be running the show, and both performance and morale will be the better for it." Since Helena's prediction only put into words a desire that had been steadily growing since she had finished training, Myka could do nothing more than shake her head again, this time in disbelief that was possibly less sincere than it should have been.
"Let's put together what we think is going on with the painting," she said with a business-like crispness that was attempting to compensate for the fantasy she had momentarily indulged in - of sitting behind the desk in Bates's office and working through assignments, Pete and the other agents exchanging jokes, at a respectful volume – and distance, about how tough the new boss was showing herself to be while Helena boldly perched on the end of the desk, daring Myka to give her her worst. The worst, the worst of assignments, a correction Myka sent flying after her fantasy. With a sidelong glance that suggested she knew exactly what had been going through Myka's mind, down to the too-short-to-be-professional skirt and stiletto heels in which Myka had clothed her, Helena began to describe the outline of their case.
Because that's what Helena believed they had, not a university counsel's overreaction to an appraisal he didn't like that devalued a gift by several hundred thousand dollars. In her view, Mr. Stoddard had tumbled to a con to steal a Merrick from the university. But it's not a Merrick, Myka had pointed out to her on their way back to the hotel. That's precisely what they want you and everyone else to think, Helena had said. Now as they sat around the table again, this time the remains of their lunch spread across it (Subway rather than McDonald's since it had been Myka's choice), Helena explained what had first roused her suspicions.
"Hobart's hair, its cultivated shagginess." She sniffed in disdain and broke off a piece of the chocolate chip cookie that Myka had virtuously refused to share, popping it into her mouth. At Myka's rolling of her eyes, she said, tucking the masticated bite of cookie into her cheek with a deftness that rivaled Pete's though she would have been loath to admit it, "Fine, but you have to admit his hair screams untrustworthiness." Sobering and swallowing the bite, she explained, "Friedlander was an acknowledged Merrick expert. Bellamy Consulting? I'd never heard of it, and this is a very small world of practitioners, Myka. If the university wanted a second opinion on the Merrick, why didn't it ask Marilyn Dixon at UCLA? She's written a lot on Merrick and his contemporaries. We don't have any proof yet that there's any 'untoward' relationship between Hobart and Bellamy, but it seems clear that he was involved in the decision to hire the company, and it's clear he didn't approve of Stoddard's bringing in of the FBI."
"He wouldn't be the first professor not to like the FBI," Myka mildly objected.
"I don't like the FBI," Helena grumbled. Idly breaking off more of the cookie, she said, "It's unlikely Hobart would be working alone. He would need someone at Bellamy Consulting, if the company itself isn't a front, and he would need someone here. Who would have the most to gain, potentially, if the university determined that its Merrick wasn't a Merrick?"
"A Vanderwaal," Myka answered.
"Exactly. So I went to the hotbed of gossip here, the Dorchester Café, this morning, hoping for some salacious tales about the Vanderwaal family." The smile she shone on Myka wasn't the one that had a secret at its center but one that was wide and unafraid to announce how pleased with herself she was. "Amazing how even people distrustful of 'foreigners' of any stripe become chatty if you play up to how smart they think they are." Myka thought, but didn't say, that Helena was a particularly lovely "foreigner." What man holding court in a corner booth wouldn't be flattered by having those dark eyes, enticingly canted over those diamond-sharp cheekbones, following his every gesture? Apparently no man had been immune to her charm, as several of the regulars had been eager to volunteer their opinions of the Vanderwaal family. While Lawrence Vanderwaal and his first wife were "stand-up people who gave back to Dorchester," their children and, in particular, his daughter Katie from an unfortunate second marriage with a much younger woman, were "spoiled brats who didn't know how good they had it." Whereas the older children had had the sense to save the worst of their bad behavior for places far away from Larry Vanderwaal's disapproving eyes, Katie was unembarrassed to be arrested time and again by the sheriff's office for driving under the influence, shoplifting, and possession of illegal substances, among other crimes. Eventually her father had banished her to California and a succession of rehab centers.
"Sometimes parents like to punish their children from beyond the grave. That's why I wanted to see Lawrence Vanderwaal's will. If he had cut any of his children out, they would have a motive to want to claw back an asset they believe should have been theirs."
Despite any disappointment he might have felt about how his children had turned out, Vanderwaal had divided the bulk of his fortune among them, that is, his four oldest. As for Katie, he had directed that the much slenderer share given to her be held in trust and its income distributed to her at the direction of the trustee, rebuking her for behaviors that "exhausted both my patience and what would have been your equal portion of my estate." Myka had read the words, thinking that if her father had had Lawrence Vanderwaal's money . . . he wouldn't have been Warren Bering. If it hadn't been for his bum knee, her father could have been an Olympic skier. If it hadn't been for his family, he could have been a famous novelist, novelist period. If it hadn't been for any number of things that weren't his fault or out of his control, he wouldn't have spent more than 20 years eking a living from a dilapidated bookstore. Sometimes it wasn't just about making the best of an opportunity, it was about creating one for yourself in the first place, a lesson that her father had never learned. But she had learned it, reading those Russian doorstoppers during lunch and working through trigonometry problems at night, and she had been awarded a full scholarship to the University of Colorado as a result. By pushing herself even harder, she had gotten a practically free ride to law school and then, by treating the application process for the FBI as a year-long exam, she had earned a slot in the agency's training program. No one understood better what a goad paternal disapproval could be. "I get her wanting to give her dad the finger, but there's no connection between Katie and Hobart."
"Or between Hobart and Bellamy Consulting. That's what I'm hoping Joshua will find." Helena blew out a long, frustrated breath. "Otherwise all we have is Bellamy's appraisal, which is riddled with factual errors and presents, overall, a less compelling argument that the Merrick isn't a Merrick, but I doubt that it will be enough to persuade a skittish administration not to sell the painting back to the family."
"What's Bellamy's argument for believing that the Merrick isn't a Merrick?"
"Supposedly they performed a chemical analysis of the paint and the canvas and determined that both are of a later date than when Merrick is thought to have finished the painting. Plus, an x-ray analysis shows that there's an underlying painting, a painting that's clearly not a Merrick, or so they claim." Helena crumbled more of her cookie. "Utter nonsense, but some people would find it persuasive. It's brimming with equations and copies of the x-rays showing the outlines of the earlier painting. There's nothing like a bit of conjured science to pull the wool over the eyes of the wisest of us," Helena finished dryly.
They both intently looked at Helena's phone, willing it to ring. "Joshua," Helena said to the air, "now would be a very good time to call."
Unfortunately it was Myka's phone that rang first. At first, she thought it was Bates wanting an update, but it was worse than that. A Wall Street titan had returned from a family vacation in New Zealand to discover that his private art collection had been stolen. "We need her," Bates growled, "and you," he added as if in afterthought. "You need to wrap up what you're doing in Dorchester and get back here asap." Myka's urging for more time, a day or two at most, earned her an irritable silence and Bates's icy "If you can't get the case closed tomorrow morning, you'll have to put it on hold until we get things in order here. The theft has priority."
The news of art worth millions of dollars having suddenly disappeared didn't excite Helena. "If this 'titan' is who I think it is, he's about to be investigated by the SEC for insider trading. The art isn't stolen. He's had it removed while he was out of the country so it can't be seized," she said sourly. She and Myka stared at each other. "If we have to leave now, Hobart will take this . . . reprieve . . . to press the university to go forward with the sale of the painting back to the Vanderwaals, in other words, back to Katie. And a few weeks from now, a month or two at most, she'll have a new appraisal done and what wasn't a Merrick will be a Merrick once more. She'll sell it and not only have a million dollars to play with, minus the cut to Hobart and his associates, of course, but she'll also have the satisfaction of having given the finger, as you said, to dear old Dad."
"Do you always know the ending in advance?" Myka couldn't resist poking at her a little, although she knew that Helena's prediction about the painting's future was probably accurate. She would reserve judgment, however, about the prediction concerning the whereabouts of the Wall Street titan's collection.
"Not always," Helena said, her eyes locked onto Myka's. "Sometimes someone surprises me."
The Cadet Scholarship Fund wasn't - it hadn't started out as a scam. Chris Jeffries had winced as he amended his words. They had been sincere in their desire to make Barrington's advantages more available, especially to students who possessed everything the school wanted, except money. Yes, Bryce had been the one to file all the necessary paperwork, but he had encouraged them to have their attorneys review it, make sure they were okay with it, Chris explained, his monotone sharpening into the complaint that Myka was used to hearing from criminals, the aggrieved whine that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, accused the agency of a miscarriage of justice. And yes, he and Alex had had their attorneys review it, and no one raised any issues, not about the fund and not about Bryce's greater administrative powers. The three of them had covered the minimal administrative fees because every dollar they collected was going toward funding scholarships. They met regularly to review applications, rank them, and, eventually, select the winners. Here Chris's complaint faltered and the whine of his self-righteousness wound down to a mutter; the monotone in which he had been delivering his confession resumed. Not long after the fund was established, maybe a year, maybe less, he and Alex had had a temporary but severe cash flow problem. Investments that had seemed sure bets, as sure, anyway, as betting on the financial markets could be, had gone south, and they were badly overextended. Bryce had suggested that they could temporarily borrow from the scholarship fund. With some accounting sleight of hand, they could move the money and, afterward, when they were in a better position, they could transfer money back into the fund. No one would be hurt, Bryce had assured them. They weren't actually taking money away from anyone, they were being more deliberative, yes, deliberative about the students who were going to receive the scholarships, and they would pay every penny back. Besides, their donors were getting their tax deductions for the gifts, so who was there to care?
As Chris continued, his voice becoming flatter with every dip the three of them made into the fund, Myka found that the only thing in the room she could focus on was the door and the fact that she didn't know where, on the other side of it, Helena was. Imagining her taking a letter opener from an agent's desk and prying open her ankle monitor and then sauntering out of the office made her smile slightly to herself, but it did nothing to combat her unease, which had been growing more urgent the longer she sat listening to a confession she had heard dozens of times before. Regardless of whether the cons had been large or small, they had always been reduced to this, someone in a chair trying to explain why he had done it, and she had always come to the same conclusion, which was that there could never be explanation enough. So when the explanation failed to justify the damage that the sullen or sobbing person in the chair had caused, what did she do? She kept taking notes, kept building her case because that was her job and her job was her all. Snakes ate mice, and she would keep documenting that simple unlovely truth until the agency pushed her into retirement. But not today.
As quietly as she could, she pushed back her chair and, giving the table a wide berth, walked to the door. No one looked up or away from Chris Jeffries except Pete, who grinned at her, having forgiven her for the disaster she had almost visited upon the team, and Laura Jeffries, who didn't grin at her and whose accusatory glare followed her out of the room. Laura would learn that the adage, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," was more wish fulfillment than truth. What doesn't kill you doesn't always make you stronger (or smarter or better); sometimes all you're left with is the numbed realization that what didn't kill you still came pretty damn close.
But that despairing reflection, which had come to her time and again over the past eight years, didn't feel right today. Perhaps Helena's saving of the case had affected her too, or maybe she was conceding that having been assigned as Helena's watchdog and enforcer rolled into one hadn't been the second worst experience of her life, at least not yet. Myka checked her cubicle, half-expecting to see Helena in her chair talking to Christina or Jemma, but it was empty. Operating on the same theory, she checked Steve's, and even Jennifer's and Lee's. She swept through the ladies room and peered into the conference rooms. She double checked her phone. There were no frantic messages or calls from Parker. While Helena might be stabbing at her ankle monitor with a purloined letter opener this very minute, she hadn't been so successful that she had raised any alarms. Yet acknowledging how unlikely it was that Helena had chosen to flee both the physical and legal shackles of the agency now, today, didn't stop Myka's shirt from sticking to her chest or her back from beading with sweat. She raced through the scanners at the entrance to the suite, heedless of the alarms and the startled exclamations behind her. Wildly waving her credential to excuse her rush, she plunged into the corridor outside the suite, intending to run down the escalator to see if Helena had stopped into the coffee shop for a cup of tea before she made her getaway, when she glanced at the bank of windows that formed the opposing wall. They looked onto the small, shared courtyard, and there at the very far end, which provided a view of only another office tower's bank of windows, stood Helena, her arms wrapped around her chest as if she were shivering from the cold, on a humid, 90 degree day.
Myka placed her hands on one of the doors set in the glass. She remembered hesitating like this before she had opened the door to Helena's loft the day after the Marston Gallery heist was discovered. It had been late, past midnight, because the office had been in an uproar, news of the heist consuming it, the Houston field office already reaching out to Bates, asking for Helena's expertise. She, Bates, Pete, everyone had left voice mails that Helena hadn't yet returned. Myka hadn't volunteered that she hadn't heard from Helena in over four days, because even though it was a poorly kept secret, her and Helena, Bates hadn't yet asked her if she knew where her girlfriend was. But he would tomorrow. She knew it, just as she had known before she put her key in the lock, flicked on the lights, saw that everything was where she had left it in the morning, that it was no coincidence, Helena's business trip and the Marston Gallery theft. She hesitated because she had known as soon as she crossed the threshold that what looked the same would never be the same again. She would be exchanging one world for another, and in this new world that Helena had created for her, she would never find her place.
She had the same feeling now as she had then, that once she opened the door and stepped into the courtyard, she would be entering yet another world, different from both the one that had existed before Helena's betrayal and the one that had come into being after it. She wouldn't find here the Helena she had loved and the Helena she had hated, they had their own realms to rule; this Helena was more human-sized and more uncertain than her predecessors, lost as she had been lost, burned as she had been burned. She didn't have to open the door, Myka counseled herself. She could return to the suite, apologize to the security staff, retake her seat, and simply wait for Helena to saunter in. Which Helena would, she wasn't running anywhere today. Myka didn't like the world she had (barely) inhabited the past eight years, but it was familiar and had little power to hurt her. Any world with a Helena in it who said she loved her was an intolerable risk.
She had clung to her job and she had hoped, for a time, that her marriage would settle her. But she hadn't protested when Sam divorced her and if she were honest, she would admit that her panic on Saturday and her near-panic today hadn't been about Helena fleeing the agency and an agreement she had never had any intention of honoring but about Helena leaving her behind. Again. Her tether was standing, no, pacing now in the courtyard, one arm, however, still listlessly curled around her waist and her shoulders slightly hunched, as if she were expecting a blast of glacial air to come roaring through the spaces between the office buildings.
Myka opened the door.