"I thought you were a real couple," Mrs. Carmichael said sadly, not looking at Myka and Helena but at the agents who were taking pictures from the walls, files from the desk and file cabinets, even the yellowed newspaper articles and memorabilia from the display cases. It was an acquisition of evidence, both so unrelenting and rapacious that it unsettled Myka to watch it, all the more so since she had been on both sides of it, the agent methodically gathering items and the suspect wondering how something so mundane as a dry cleaning ticket could be used against her. She felt sorry for Mrs. Carmichael, whose hands were nearly tearing at the double loop of pearls that accessorized her headmaster's wife's navy blue dress, and even sorrier anticipating the fallout for Barrington that was yet to come. Barrington wasn't her favorite place; she had no tolerance for the sanctuaries of the rich and privileged, but the children of the rich and privileged who attended the school were just that, children, and their teachers – if they weren't in need of a pay check, they wouldn't be here. All those nice cars in the parking lot were probably purchased on installment plans.
"Unfortunately, we can't always be as forthcoming as we'd like to be during an investigation," she said, hoping it would answer all the questions that Mrs. Carmichael would inevitably ask. Did he really do all those things I heard about on the news? Was it happening right here, all the time? How could we not know? Are you sure that this isn't a horrible mistake? Myka knew that her response wouldn't answer any of those questions; it was just agency-speak and pretty crappy agency-speak at that.
"It wasn't all lies," Helena volunteered brusquely, and Myka shot her a warning glance. "My daughter is real, and someday I'll be looking for a secondary school for her."
"Likely not Barrington," Mrs. Carmichael said in resignation. "We'll be lucky if it survives this," she whispered to herself.
Helena was walking toward the opposite wall, attention fixed on a picture that hadn't yet been taken down. Today she was wearing faded jeans and a spread-collar shirt, sleeves rolled above her elbows. She had worn much the same the day before when they had been going through the boxes of evidence agents had brought from DeWitt's house and car and the homes and offices of Chris Jeffries and Alex McCrossan. It was a departure from the business suits and dress pants she had been wearing, but sorting through personal belongings could be a surprisingly messy (and disgusting) business. Myka wouldn't have thought much about it, except for the fact that Helena also was wearing no make-up, and her fingernails were ragged; she was chewing them, an old habit she rarely indulged in. Helena might dress down, but she never willingly went out in public without her imperfections mitigated. They had spent no time together outside work since Tuesday evening when Helena had returned to Mrs. Frederic's alone. She hadn't invited Myka to come by that night nor the next, and she had limited their conversations to the investigation.
Myka wasn't pushing her. She didn't know where they were going either, but she thought they might not feel quite so lost if they could share how uncertain and, yes, ambivalent they were about what they had started just a few nights ago. It wasn't a mistake, at least not yet; she felt better about herself, about life in general, than she had in years, since the day she had entered Helena's darkened loft and realized that Helena was never coming back. But there was a lot to figure out, including what Helena might still be hiding from her.
"Are you going to need to talk to me again?" Mrs. Carmichael had stopped worrying her pearls and was, instead, casting anxious sideways looks at the doorway. "I spoke with Agent Jinks for over an hour this morning."
"It depends on what we find here." Myka scrubbed at her forehead with the back of her thumb. "I'm sorry I can't be more definite."
Mrs. Carmichael quirked her mouth in what might have been resignation or disappointment. "I'll be in my office if you need me." She moved a few steps away only to stop. "I know I shouldn't care, but is he all right, Bryce, I mean? He brought me some sort of little present almost every day. It's hard to believe . . . . "
Involuntarily Myka looked at Helena. "It might have been genuine, it might have been an attempt to win you over and make you less likely to question his behavior. It was probably both. Don't try to decide which it was, it'll drive you crazy." Probably the truth if you were dealing with a con who hadn't completely forsaken her humanity, but Bryce wasn't Helena. Bryce was Jim Wells. He had been arrested while she napped with Christina Monday afternoon, and he had still been in interrogation when she and Helena had provided a bedside production of the newest installment of The Bald Princess that evening. A judge had denied his attorney's application for bail the following morning, when Myka was drinking a bottomless cup of coffee and wondering how painful it would be to tape her eyelids open because it was the only way she would stay awake. Helena displayed more energy since, as she said with a mocking smile, "evil never slept," but her quip had carried an edge, and she hadn't been able to meet Myka's eyes for long.
DeWitt had yet to say anything of importance, refusing to answer questions unless his attorney was present, and, when the attorney was present, refusing to answer questions on his attorney's advice. The evidence they had collected so far had been of little help, although DeWitt's computer and cell phone were still being analyzed. The multiple passports that Laura had reported seeing were missing from his home; the only one agents had found was the one in DeWitt's name. It wasn't proof that he had been getting ready to flee. There had been no packed suitcases at the door and, to their knowledge, no large withdrawals from his accounts, but Myka was sure Laura had given herself away, a failure to smile at one of his jokes, a sudden quietness. Something had tipped DeWitt off, and she was positive that the more they reviewed the evidence they had – and the more information they collected – the clearer it would become that he had been preparing his exit. Helena had her own hunches; it was why they were "overseeing" the search of his office at Barrington, although the team they were working with was experienced and Steve was there to give them direction. Helena thought the keys they needed to unlock DeWitt would be here, "where he got his start, fleecing and manipulating his friends, where his heart beats, Myka, to the extent he has one."
Tucking her hands under her blazer to slide them into her pants pockets – unlike Helena, she couldn't let her moods drive her wardrobe choices – Myka joined her at the wall. The photo Helena was looking at so intently was the one she had noticed on their first visit to this room, which seemed much longer ago than it had been in reality. "There has to be more to it than the bogus Cadet Scholarship." Helena seemed to be staring down the teenaged Bryce DeWitt. "He would've wanted to gut this place. Siphoning money from the fund hurt the contributing alumni, the prospective students, but not the school."
"I'm not sure I agree. The school's reputation is going to take a hard hit from this."
Helena didn't turn her attention away from the picture, but she tipped her head in consideration of Myka's point. Then she smiled tightly, fiercely, knowingly at the photo. "My father was kicked out of art school. Do your files on him tell you that? He much preferred holding court in a pub and losing money to bookies than attending classes or being diligent about his art. At the end of the school year, the school typically displayed the work of its best students in an exhibit open to the public. If he hadn't been expelled, his paintings would have been the star of the show, so he said. The night before the exhibit opened, however, vandals broke into the gallery and trashed the place. They took paintings from the wall and stomped on them, swung hammers at the sculptures. No one was ever arrested, but my father liked to brag it about it later, about how he and some chums jimmied the locks – these weren't masterworks, not yet, just the offerings of a handful of students, so the security was lax – and got his 'own' back." She tapped the glass with the nail of a reddened and sore-looking finger. "He didn't know whether he loved or hated the school more, he couldn't tell the difference. That's DeWitt."
Myka nodded, sensing that anything more responsive – or verbal – would provoke a negative reaction. Her eyes flicking over Myka's shoulder to the desk at the end of the room, Helena said, "I'm going to talk to your colleagues over there and see what they've found. It could be in plain sight and they'd overlook it, they don't understand how he works."
Myka watched her charge over to the agents, who were skimming through the file folders stacked on the desktop. Helena's suspicions to the contrary, the agency did have information about Jim Wells's attendance at one of the premier art and design schools in Britain. He hadn't been kicked out for bad behavior; he hadn't been permitted to reenroll because he had lacked the money for the school's tuition. Maybe he had gambled the tuition money away or maybe poor performance had cost him a scholarship, but he hadn't been dismissed for bad behavior. The school had reported a break-in, but it was before Helena's father would have been old enough to apply for admittance, and there had been no vandalizing of student artwork, just the stealing of petty cash. Other than being piss-poor fathers, she had never seen much similarity between Jim Wells and Warren Bering, but there was something so unflagging about the former's self-aggrandizement that it reminded her of how her father would let no mistake go unmentioned. If she had been distracted enough to misfile McKinnon as MacKinnon or to short the cash drawer by a dime, her father would unfailingly broadcast it at the dinner table, night after night after night, always finding some way to work it into a conversation.
She glanced up at the picture. Had she seen something predatory in his smile before? Today the smile was only jubilant. The team had won a championship, and he was the captain. She wanted to believe, even if the innocence of the smile had lasted for just the moment that it had taken the photographer to capture it, that all the scheming Bryce DeWitt had had in mind was how to smuggle the celebratory beer keg into his room. The thud of boxes being stacked caused her to look behind her. Agents were loading boxes on hand trolleys; the search was winding down, and she was no longer needed. She and Helena had never been needed for the search or for the interviews, which Steve and another agent were conducting. Pete had begrudgingly assented to Helena's request that she and Myka be allowed to go out to Barrington with the rest of the team; he had much preferred that they remain in the office and refocus on Nate Burdette. "That's why we let her out to play," he had hissed in Myka's ear before waving them out of his office.
Steve ducked his head through the doorway and motioned to Myka. She met him in the hallway. "The top brass here isn't too anxious to meet with us, but we did line up some times for tomorrow morning. Otherwise we've pretty much gone through the list of people he most closely worked with. We can get the rest this afternoon or tomorrow." He paused before adding, "You and Helena don't have to hang out here any longer. We've got it covered."
"She thinks we do." Steve didn't roll his eyes or make a sour mouth as Pete would have done (as Pete, in fact, did hours earlier when Helena had made her request). He regarded her in a manner Myka might have called serene except that serenity was never part of an investigation, although if anyone could examine the wreckage a criminal like DeWitt left behind him without it putting his faith in the basic goodness of humanity into question it was Steve. "She thinks he ran more cons here than the scholarship fraud he cooked up with Jeffries and McCrossan."
"Wouldn't surprise me, but that's not her worry anymore. Pete's made it clear that he wants you and Helena to move on to other cases. We've got enough to put DeWitt away until he's an old man. What we're doing now, it's just grunt work, Mykes, you know that. If he was into anything else, we'll find it." He looked around her, as if he wanted to peer into DeWitt's office. "Not that I'm being critical, but she's, um, less put-together than normal. What's going on with her?" He met her gaze, and Myka felt a surge of heat flush through her. "What's going on with the two of you?" She desperately wanted to undo another button of her blouse or take off her jacket, which seemed to be trapping and intensifying her body heat. It wouldn't be any more of a giveaway than what she said next. He always knew when she was lying. He appeared to have come to the same conclusion because he spoke before she did. "I guess it's too late to warn you about sticking your tongue down her throat." She tried to keep her expression impassive. "Is she worth your career?"
"You should have asked me that ten years ago," Myka said.
Helena didn't object when Myka told her they were going to return to the office ahead of the others. She had been leafing through some old correspondence, idly tracing the bold B, D, and W of DeWitt's signature, but she put the letters back in the folder and followed Myka to the car without asking why they were leaving now or volunteering whether she had found anything in support of her belief that the fraud ran deeper. Like the sullen teen she had suddenly become, Helena slouched against the seat and slipped on sunglasses; if there had been a door to slam other than the car door, Myka would have been feeling the rattle in her bones. Knowing it was the wrong approach to take and the wrong thing to say, Myka couldn't help herself. "Pete's going to start pressing us on Burdette now. You haven't been holding out on me, have you?" God, she would make such a lousy mother.
"It's definitely a 'he'll call us,' and he hasn't called us." Even though Myka couldn't see Helena's eyes through her sunglasses, the lenses were plenty accusatory. "We should enjoy this time while we have it. When he does contact me, he won't be patient. He'll want the location of the Bowdoin haul. We can't hesitate." Her smile bared her teeth. "Do you know where my father hid the artwork?"
"Do you?" Myka flashed back, just as pointedly. Relenting, she said, "We don't have to know where it is. Our job is to make him believe that we know where it is. All we need is for you to lure him to us."
"It won't be that easy, Myka," Helena said sadly. She rested her head against the passenger side window, seeking sleep or whatever form of escape she could. Myka eased the car to a stop, the gridlock into the city fully operative this early in the afternoon. Miles of hoods and roofs glinting in the sun, forming a vast metallic carapace, as if the greatest threat to the city wasn't climate change or terrorists or its own politicians, but an enormous beetle descending on it from the freeway. "I forgot how absolutely miserable happiness could make me," Helena grumbled into the silence.
"You're happy?" Myka didn't try to hide the disbelieving note.
"I was part of a family, a real family, for 24 precious hours. I had my daughter and the woman I love with me, I was in my own home, I had a mother who was actually beaming at me, and I had had sex for the first time in over five years. I was ecstatic," Helena concluded, sounding more beleaguered than euphoric. "Only then to remember that my daughter's father is probably conspiring with his attorneys to take her away from me forever, that I'm not free to live in my home, that the woman I love is also my jailer, and that having taken one bloody criminal off the streets is not enough, I have to go up against the most ruthless man I've had the misfortune to meet. Which reminds me that I should check my phone to see if Ben has arrived with a phalanx of law enforcement to forcibly remove Christina from her home." With a huff, she fumbled for her phone.
If she hadn't thought she might let the car roll into the bumper of the car in front of her, Myka would have started pounding her forehead on the steering wheel. Instead, she started to laugh, quietly at first and then her laughter grew louder, partly from relief, partly from exasperation. "It's not funny," Helena complained. "Ben might be a joke, but his father the senator is no laughing matter. Ben's told Jemma that he's not taking Christina this week, he says it's so she can better heal, but he's planning something, I'm sure of it. You saw the way he was at the hospital. He's not the kind of man who takes 'No' easily, and if he can't do something about it, his father will." Helena tugged her sunglasses down and eyed Myka over the top of them. "But that's not what you're finding funny, is it? You thought I was, what, feeling caught? Wanting out but not sure how to say it? Or were you wondering what con of mine our being intimate put into jeopardy?" She pushed her sunglasses back up and stared resolutely at the windshield. "The trust won't come immediately," she said as if she were lecturing herself, "for either of us."
Myka had imagined that they would drive or, rather, inch the rest of the way into the city in silence, because Helena's observation hadn't opened a chasm between them as much as it had illuminated the one that was already there. Then Helena smiled at something on her phone and, as they had come to another literal halt, she turned the screen so that Myka could see it. On it was a picture of Christina holding up a drawing she had made for "Mommy and MyKaa with Love, Christina." The drawing itself was indecipherable, a sun and some four-legged creatures that Myka guessed were puppies but the words were legible. The letters were obviously drawn by a child, their shapes betraying both force and uncertainty, the purple crayon equally a spike and a paintbrush. Christina, writing left-handed, must have labored over them. "Tell her I love it," Myka said, and Helena swiftly, abruptly, leaned over to kiss her cheek. As Helena typed back a response, Myka imagined Parker and his cohorts in IT scrolling through endless "Mommy loves you," "Mommy misses her pwecious little girl," and "Mommy sends her baby girl XXXXs and OOOOs" in the log of Helena's texts, damning only in the sense that Helena wasn't afraid to text in baby talk. Yes, there was a chasm, but Christina served as a bridge over it.
In her cubicle hours later, Myka replayed in her mind Helena's worries about Ben Winslow. She had the files on Nate Burdette spread out in front of her, but as gruesome as the pictures and accounts were of his activities, especially his retaliations for real or perceived betrayals, it was Christina's father who seemed the greatest obstacle at the moment. She remembered very clearly their confrontation outside Christina's hospital room. While Winslow's attorney would have counseled him against acting any more rashly than he already had (having shown up at the hospital high and full of threats against his daughter's mother and granddaughter his first mistake), Helena wasn't paranoid to fear Ben and his father. They disliked Christina's current custody arrangement and had been jockeying to change it; Myka knew that her all but throwing Ben out of the hospital would only stoke the Winslows' outrage.
As a practical matter, they (meaning the agency and Justice) couldn't afford to have Helena distracted by a custody battle. They needed to have her fully committed to bringing in Burdette. Myka involuntarily looked down at the pictures loosely fanned on her desk. She and Helena would have only one shot at him; he wouldn't allow them a second. Myka could always argue to Pete and, if necessary, to Sam that someone with pull at the agency or Justice should talk to Senator Winslow and convince him that trying to change the custody arrangement wasn't in anyone's best interest, including his, but that plan could backfire. Instead of being persuaded, the senator could be intrigued by the interest federal law enforcement was showing in the custody of his granddaughter, and Myka was certain there was much about the Burdette investigation that neither Pete's bosses nor Sam's wanted to come to light. Nothing like a Congressional committee to make even Justice and the FBI tread very, very carefully. Besides, it was Justice that had put the bug in Ben Winslow's ear that Christina might be his; Sam and his superiors had wanted leverage over Helena to get her to agree to bring Burdette in and setting up a potential custody battle with the Winslows had been the way they chose to do it. Conceivably they could view a more determined effort by the senator's lawyers to get Ben full custody as an even better prod to Helena.
Myka groaned and rested her forehead on the photos and file documents. She felt fingers knead the muscles in her neck, but by the time she had righted herself in her chair, Helena was standing in the entry space of her cubicle. "Leena has finished picking my brain about DeWitt, and I need something to clear my head. If I go down to the coffee shop, can I bring you back something?" Myka suppressed a wry smile. Helena was supposed to concentrate on Burdette unless Leena asked her to concentrate on something else. What Leena wanted carried more weight in the office and among the more senior management than Pete's hisses and growls. Although her next words were directed at Myka, Helena's eyes were fixed on the files. "But if you've lost your appetite after having seen some of Nate's handiwork . . . "
"Making sure I know what we're getting into."
Helena's smile was faint. "It's good to prepare, as long as you understand he'll find a way to surprise us." She briefly closed her eyes, but because she was remembering something about Burdette or trying to chase a memory of him away, Myka didn't know, and she didn't ask. "How long do you think you'll stay tonight?"
Myka shrugged; trying to lighten the mood, she said, "It depends on what you bring me from the coffee shop."
"If you can make do with a coffee, I'll treat you to dinner at chez Wells."
"What are you serving, grilled cheese or frozen pizza?"
"I'm thinking of expanding my repertoire," Helens said loftily, "and experimenting with a stir fry." Crossing her arms over her chest, she said, "I can read a cookbook. In fact, it was what I had to resort to if I wanted to read when I was in prison."
Myka responded with mock sternness, "Playing the world's tiniest violin about your brief stay in prison will not guarantee you a pity pass for your cooking." She drew out the pause for an extra beat or two.
"Eight o'clock."
"Seven-thirty," Helena countered. "It will be edible. Trust me."
Those two words continued to hang in the air. Myka was still hearing them when Helena returned with a coffee for her, and even later, as Helena passed her cube on her way out of the office and leaned over the top of a panel to whisper "7:30," Myka almost believed she whispered "Trust me" as well. And Myka did trust her, the Helena who proudly showed off her daughter's artistic endeavors, the Helena who had straddled her in bed only a few nights before and brought her alive as no one else could do, and, oddly enough, this new Helena, who was promising to cook a meal from scratch. She even trusted the Helena who had said she was sorry. She trusted the Helenas she could see; it was the ones she couldn't who were the problem. There were Helenas, she knew, Helena never intended her to see.
Straightening the Burdette files, Myka locked them in a drawer. Agencies that trafficked in secrets and confidential information tended to be riddled by gossip, but there was no sense in leaving out files that would only confirm what she suspected had become an open secret, that Helena Wells hadn't been freed from her cage to assist on cases like the one involving Bryce DeWitt; she had been released to hunt down larger prey. Secrets and confidential information. It wasn't just the agency that trafficked in them. How many times had Ben Winslow been found in possession of a controlled substance or driving under the influence and how many times had the charges been dropped or an arrest never made in the first place?
She had contacts, some she could even call friends, in the city's police departments and DA's office. Some of those relationships had grown spontaneously while others she had had to cultivate. She could probably find out just how much pressure the senator had brought to bear to extricate his son from his bad decisions, but she would burn up nearly every favor she was owed in the process. And if she tried to use the information into coercing the senator, she would lose every connection she had. That didn't bother her as much as the fear that it wouldn't work. If she were going to misuse her position – because Myka Bering, private citizen, didn't have the power to threaten anyone – she wanted to make sure that throwing the rest of her career away ended in a positive result. Without the agency's backing, she had nowhere to go with stories of the senator's undue influence, except to news outlets, and whether public shame would motivate the senator was unclear. No one expected the rich and privileged to behave well; thus, no one was surprised when they didn't. All she would have would be one more sorry history of one more spoiled white man who evaded the punishment meted out to others who were poorer and whose skin was darker. The senator would laugh her out of his office, and then he would have her fired. She would have to find something else.
It was a minute or two shy of 7:30 when she rang the doorbell for the upper apartment of the Frederic house. Fixing a smile on her face that belied her mood, she found it turning genuine when Helena opened the door, sporting a soy-sauce-stained shirt and accompanied by a distinct smell of burned oil, burned things period. "Does the battle hang in the balance?" she teased as Helena waved her in.
"Not any longer," Helena said ruefully, "I had to call in for reinforcements."
Which turned out to be Mrs. Frederic. She was at the stove, wielding a spatula in a skillet with flair. All the windows had been thrown open, but the burned smell was pervasive and something blackened and misshapen was in the sink. Myka also didn't miss the kitchen fire extinguisher on the counter. "Take a seat, Agent Bering, dinner will ready in just a few minutes. Helena, will you check on the rice cooker?"
Myka pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, amused to see Helena obediently lifting the lid and tentative poking at the rice with a wooden spoon. With an efficiency that could have been that of a mother and grandmother who had presided over decades of meals but which seemed to speak to something more fundamental about her, Mrs. Frederic emptied the contents of the skillet in a bowl and grabbed a fistful of silverware from a drawer on her way to the table. Helena followed more carefully with a bowl of rice, and she had barely set it on the table before Mrs. Frederic was back with plates and napkins. "Just the drinks," she said to Helena, and Helena, as obediently as before, filled three glasses from a pitcher of ice water.
"Beer or wine, Agent Bering?" Mrs. Frederic was untying her apron, which had no stains. The sleeves of her silk blouse were spotless.
No, no relaxing or dulling her senses around this woman. Mrs. Frederic might not be dangerous, but she wasn't harmless, Myka was sure of it. "Water's fine, thanks."
Mrs. Frederic joined them for dinner, which, Helena joked, is "further proof, Myka, that dinner at chez Wells is safe." Dinner wasn't only safe, it was good. Very good. As they ate, Helena related the disaster of her first attempt at the meal, which involved smoking oil, an accidental spill of hot water, a dish towel, and, ultimately, the fire extinguisher. Mrs. Frederic downplayed her role, commenting wryly that when her youngest was still at home, she had often come to his rescue. "Once we got the fire put out, the windows open, and a new skillet on the stove, it was a cruise to the finish."
"Only that," Myka dryly said as Helena laughed.
"Thankfully, Irene had some leftover chicken and vegetables to spare, which explains the zucchini and green beans instead of water chestnuts and snow peas. And, obviously, she took over at the controls."
"You made the effort. That means something."
Mrs. Frederic looked from one to the other and unsuccessfully hid her smile behind the glass she raised to her lips. Conversation turned from Helena's almost-failed dinner to safer topics, the weather and some local initiatives in which Mrs. Frederic was involved. "The problem with being a community organizer is that you can't really remove yourself from a community. I can't help but get involved," she said. Reminiscing about the local politics of 30 years ago and more, she chuckled, "From a distance, it can almost seem quaint, the chicanery and graft and corruption we had to deal with. People moved from their homes, their neighborhoods, because a developer wanted to build more expensive homes on the property or turn it into something that was revenue-producing. They didn't have to break laws, although some did. The smarter ones knew that you got the politicians to change them for you." The meal was over, but they remained at the table. Helena having brought out another pitcher, this one of iced tea, and a plate of homemade cookies, also courtesy of Mrs. Frederic. "Most of them are retired now, like me, their careers behind them, but the younger ones, why, they're in the state assembly. A few are even in Congress." She carefully broke an oatmeal raisin cookie in half. "Some of them may have truly forgotten how they treated the most vulnerable of their constituents, but others, they remember. They may act like they don't, but they do. Unfortunately, there aren't too many of us around anymore who know enough to remind them." She lifted her eyes from the cookie and gazed deep into Myka's.
Helena was clearing plates from the table. It was hard for Myka to tell how much she had been listening to Mrs. Frederic, and Helena, turning away from the table with her hands full of dishes, had missed the older woman's look, but Myka knew exactly what the look meant. Mrs. Frederic had information, or thought she did, but when Myka glanced back at her, she was eating her cookie, and the only thing her eyes were communicating was a mild admiration for her own baking skills. She left after her offer to help clean up was gently but firmly turned down and Helena had flung an unburned dish towel at Myka.
It took more time to clean the stove than the dishes. The stovetop was coated with oil and soy sauce, and Myka applied a scrubber sponge to it, attacking the spills, some burned onto the metal, with greater vigor whenever she recalled the intensity of Mrs. Frederic's look at her. Did she expect her to sic the FBI after some state assemblyman finishing out his last term before he retired? He might have committed any number of illegalities in ensuring that developers acquired the properties they wanted at the prices they were willing to pay, but unless he committed a murder in association with them, he was beyond the reach of the law. Surely she knew that. Helena tapped her on her shoulder. "You've got it looking better than when I moved in. Why don't you sit down?" Her expression was more serious than her suggestion warranted. She drew in a long breath. "I have something to give you."
"It's not a present, is it?" Myka felt the stir fry, which had been resting lightly, easily on her stomach, engage in a series of flips. She also, just as suddenly, was far more interested in Mrs. Frederic's information. Perhaps she should go downstairs and have a good long talk with her.
"No." Helena was shaking her head. "But it's not what you think." She blew out a long breath. "Well, maybe it is, but it's also more than what you think."
Myka went back to her chair at the kitchen table, counseling herself that, regardless of how dismaying Helena's revelations might be, this time around she was voluntarily admitting . . . this, whatever it was . . . rather than, as she had done eight years ago, letting her flight from the country speak for her. Yet a small voice that sounded annoyingly like Pete was whispering in Myka's ear that Helena had "volunteered" before, offering her services to the FBI. That time she had been in the midst of planning a multi-million dollar art heist. Her desire to be more honest now – maybe she was trying to build trust between them and maybe, just maybe, she was confessing a venial sin to hide a mortal one.
Pete placed a cup of coffee of her desk. It smelled rich and earthy, and Myka's nose twitched. Most importantly, it smelled of caffeine. As she reached for it, Pete moved the cup away, precious, precious coffee splashing over the side. "Nuh-unh," he said, parking his butt between her arm and the coffee. "I know the late nights you keep. I know they're even later these days because you're making our Mata Hari scream in ecstasy. You're gonna get your coffee, but you have to listen to me."
"I can listen and drink at the same time," Myka protested, trying to reach around him for the cup.
He batted her hand away. "Look, we're brothers-in-arm. Sister and brother arm in arm?" His face knotted in doubt as he tried to work out the analogy. "Anyway, we've got each other's back, okay? I'm not going to rat you out to Bates, but you need to keep your head screwed on about Helena. She gives me the shivers and not in a good way."
"You keep saying that we can't trust her, but you can't prove to me why we can't." Myka's head was beginning to throb. Helena had been out of town on a consultation for the better part of the week, and last night . . . . They had had four nights of not being together to make up for. She needed that coffee.
"You ever wonder if all these trips she takes are really on the up and up? Like maybe she's going to Vegas and gambling our petty cash instead of consulting on The Last Supper or whatever?" He scooted his butt in a half-turn to better face her and Myka had visions coffee flying all over her desk. She was so desperate she might actually lap it up.
"No. She has an identity, a life, other than being Jim Wells's daughter. She has a solid resumé, Pete, of authenticating art works and restoring them. She doesn't need to do this, working with us. She wants to do it."
"Yeah, it's a nice-looking resumé and the references Bates said he called seemed genuine." He rolled his shoulders as if his suit jacket no longer fit him. "But she looks shifty. Hot but shifty. I wouldn't let her look at a priceless painting. I'd be afraid she'd steal it. And as for her working with us 'cause she feels bad that her dad's a deadbeat. Can you think of a better way to pull off a con than to work with the people who're supposed to stop them? What if she's playing us, Mykes?"
"She's not."
"How do you know?"
Because of how she cries out when she comes, as though I'm taking something from her that she doesn't want to give up. She wants the intimacy and she resists it at the same time. The secret that sometimes lurks in her smile? It's gone when we're together like that. There are no secrets between us then. But all she said to Pete was, "I just know."
He relented and handed her the coffee. "I checked up on this last trip of hers."
"And you found out that she was in Los Angeles just like she said she would be. She was working with the Getty." She took off the lid and grinned evilly at him over the rim. "Want to see the pictures?"
"This time, this time, she was telling the truth. But what about next time?"
Helena placed a device that resembled an old-style pager or travel alarm clock and probably had been one or the other in its former life. Now it was . . . . Myka looked at her expectantly. "It's supposed to continue sending GPS information once the ankle monitor is removed." She pulled a chair closer to Myka and slumped into it. "An unbroken transmission of data designed to fool –"
"Agent Fuck-face," Myka wryly interrupted. She ran her thumb over the device, which needed only to be outfitted with a few knobs and dials to be considered steampunk, like something a smart-alecky character on a cable sci-fi show might invent.
"More, and I quote, that 'dickless wonder in the Fucking Bureau of Idiots' IT department,'" Helena said, the skin at the corner of her eyes crinkling with anxiety or humor or both. "Don't go after Claudia, Myka. I'm giving this to you so you know that I'm not going to leave, not this time. I meant what I said when you thought I had run off with Christina, I won't hurt you like that again."
Yet you asked Claudia to come up with something to neutralize the monitor. Or, if she volunteered, you didn't talk her out of it. Helena could have had the device for weeks or month or mere hours. Although she wasn't smiling, wasn't holding a secret behind the curve of her lips, Helena, Myka concluded, was the puzzle she would never solve, more unknowable now than she had been across the conference table in the prison. Yes, she knew one Helena, maybe several, but there were dozens more she didn't know, including the Helena who had given her the device, not because she wanted her trust but because she had figured out an even better method of escaping the monitor. Confess the venial sin to hide the one that would blow the confessional apart.
"Hey," Helena's fingers, strangely cold in the warmth of the apartment, were tipping Myka's chin, drawing her closer. Helena's eyes, no longer narrowed, were growing larger, as if she were seeing something that alarmed her. "That," she pointed at the device, "that happened not long after I was released into your custody. I was angry and scared, and I wasn't sure if I knew who you were anymore. I haven't tried to use it, ever." She exhaled an uncertain laugh. "A smarter person would've thrown it away, but I need you to see that I can rise above my worst impulses. You make me rise above them."
"Please don't tell me I'm the wind beneath your wings," Myka said dryly, but there was no corresponding smile in her eyes. "I can't come in here one day and see a butter knife, a bar of soap, and the monitor that you've managed to pry off."
"You won't. I'm not that patient," Helena said, bending Myka's head down and kissing the top of it.
You can be. You were with Marston. She pulled away from Helena to pick up the device. "Claudia could be in some serious trouble with this."
"Only if you decide to pursue it." Helena took the device from Myka and slid it to the opposite end of the table. She stood and led Myka into the living room, toward the swaybacked sofa. They fell into a corner of it, and Helena drew Myka onto her lap. "It's my turn to take care of you." She nuzzled Myka's neck and untucked her blouse from her suit pants, spreading her fingers across Myka's abdomen and pressing them into the muscle but not moving them farther down. "You have no idea how many times I dreamed of doing this. It's how I lulled myself to sleep at nights in my cell, reconstructing you like a puzzle, every freckle, every scar. Claudia would go crazy in prison. She can't be still, and though she acts tough, it's an act. A thin shell covering a soft center."
Myka stretched out her legs, relaxing into Helena's lap. "Is that why you pretended you were behind Advantage Financial, because Claudia can't hack prison?"
"I love her, but I wasn't planning to go to prison for her. I thought I would send off on their merry way whoever was stupid enough to want to park their money with Advantage. Claudia and I would have a good laugh about it, and I'd tell her, sternly, never to run another con."
"Only it didn't work out that way."
"It didn't work out that way." Helena's fingers moved to Myka's hair, playing with the strands. "That was the first time I had been arrested, and I honestly believed I would walk away with a fine and community service. But it wasn't the police or state regulators who came to Advantage, it was the FBI, and they remembered Marston." Her fingers stilled. "So did I."
Myka closed her eyes. She was more comfortable than she thought she would be, lying across Helena's lap, and Helena's stroking of her hair was surprisingly soothing. Either her lotus-eating skills had vastly improved, or Helena had had a lot of practice comforting a small child. Probably the latter, there wasn't much sitting on or lying across laps in the Bering house, not with a marginally profitable bookstore to keep open. "Ssshhhhh . . . just relax," Helena said softly. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm right where I want to be."
Myka couldn't recall how she had learned of Helena's arrest, whether she had glanced at, then glanced away from, an article in a newspaper or the whispers in the office had grown loud enough for her to stop pretending that she didn't hear them. She had moved in, lived in, the equivalent of a dead zone for years, a testament to the voraciousness of the predator that had once occupied it, and nothing about that predator, what had become of her, whether she was sorry or indifferent about what she had done, could hurt Myka any longer. Only vaguely aware of the arrest and even less aware of the course of the trial, she had been in Colorado Springs when Helena was sentenced, and she had deleted the email from Pete with its string of exclamation marks as soon as she read it. It was lunch time, and she needed to make her father his tuna fish sandwich and answer his repeated questions about what day it was and where "someone" had hidden the remote.
"Did you spare her because Claudia reminds you of you?" No poorly hidden resentment that she hadn't been spared, no derisive inflection suggesting that only narcissism could have motivated Helena because guilt and empathy never had, Myka was, simply, asking. The answer wouldn't surprise her, whatever it was, because thinking the worst for as long as she had tended to exhaust the number of possibilities.
"For a time I thought so. In different ways, we were both raised by wolves. She was raised by Joshua after their parents died, and he has no interest in children. He has no interest in most human beings," Helena said witheringly, "but he resented my interest in her, especially after I broke down over the Marston heist. He was afraid she would end up soft and weak, like me." Helena's fingers left Myka's hair to trace her eyebrows and the line of her nose. "I believe to this day that he was the one who gave the FBI the tip about Advantage. He was going to teach Claudia a lesson."
When Myka no longer felt Helena's touch, she looked up at her, and the darkness of Helena's eyes, which Myka had thought she would never be able to penetrate to its end because, like the universe Myka sometimes fancied Helena's eyes mirrored, Helena was always speeding away from her, suddenly seemed to envelope her. "In the end, I think I wanted to spare her because she reminds me of you." Myka started to lift her head up in surprise or objection, she wasn't sure which, but Helena only laughed affectionately. "Advantage wasn't her idea, it was Todd's, and like him, it wasn't clever or attractive or designed to succeed. But she loves him, far more than he deserves, and dimwit though he is, he knows she's the best thing he'll ever have happen to him. She's his saving grace, as you were mine. I didn't want Advantage to take her down because I didn't want to see her start to hate him and to hate herself for having loved him."
Maybe it had been all of that. Or none of it. Helena had made choices, anticipated outcomes that hadn't happened, just as she had. Although Helena had been sent to a prison far harsher and for a sentence far longer than the crime merited - for most in law enforcement, not harsh enough and not long enough for all the crimes she had committed - Myka hadn't viewed it as justice prevailing. There was no jail time for her, not even the loss of her job for her stupidity, her common-sense-defying trust in Helena Wells. So she had continued to punish herself because there was no Warren Bering in the FBI or at Justice, no one to visit her cube every day and tell her what a disgrace she was. She had stayed when others in her situation would have left to seek redemption elsewhere. Yet the result of the guilt and the anger, the shame and the self-delusion, and the million other half-recognized feelings that neither of them could master was this, their being together, one's head in the other's lap. If some cosmic force were to gather up their lives and throw them like dice, Myka couldn't imagine now that it would turn out any differently; they would still end up here, together, one's head in the other's lap.
When she left, she was still muzzy with sleep and her legs were stiff. They had fallen asleep together on the sofa, and Helena, rather than encouraging her to stay, had pushed her to the door. "Not that we're fooling anybody, if they care to look, but we need to keep up a pretense. I don't want your bosses to use any excuse to separate us."
So Myka had stumbled to the head of the stairs unprotestingly, too tired to sort out whether Helena's cautiousness was justified, self-protective, or suspicious. She hadn't been too tired, however, to forget to take Claudia Donovan's monitor-thwarting device with her. It weighed down the pocket of her blazer and thumped against the wooden railing of the stairs. She was unsurprised to see Mrs. Frederic at the foot of them. She was still dressed in her slacks and silk blouse, though Myka wasn't sure but what there weren't slippers on her feet. "I was hoping to catch you before you left," Mrs. Frederic said.
Myka thought back to their conversation at dinner. "You know whatever laws were broken back then are going to remain broken. There's nothing we can do about dirty politicians who booted people out of their homes or bent rules for real estate developers 30 years ago. Not unless you have proof that they're still doing it." She repressed the desire to fluff her hair and straighten her jacket. What was it about this woman that made her feel like she was 17 years old? Never mind the fact that the 17-year-old Myka Bering hadn't had a single date, let alone entertained anyone in the bedroom she shared with Tracy.
"Oh, I know that," Mrs. Frederic said. "But, thankfully, there are other courts and other ways to be found guilty." She stepped closer to Myka, who, despite being a couple of inches taller, always felt the shorter in Mrs. Frederic's presence. "How well versed are you in Winslow family history, Agent Bering? Do you know that 30 years ago Mark Winslow, Christina's grandfather, was on the city's council, poised to run for Congress? You can never have too much money or too many friends, not if you want to win. What he couldn't do for his 'friends' on the council, he did behind the scenes, working with borough presidents and their boards. If a developer wanted a property that was currently a halfway house, Mark Winslow was the one who brandished a handful of citations that got it shut down and the property put on the market. If a developer wanted to build a multi-family unit on top of an area known to hold hazardous waste, Mark Winslow was the one who obtained an official report that declared the property met all environmental regulations then muscled the proposal through."
"And you know all this because?"
"Because I was at the public meetings and hearings, I was the one who scrambled to find the residents of the halfway home a new place to live and smelled the fumes in that brand-new apartment building. I was there, Agent Bering, I saw, I witnessed." Mrs. Frederic's face looked as imperturbable as ever in the dim light, but her voice had risen. Slightly.
"It's still not proof," Myka said gently.
"I guess I was lucky to be married to an attorney then because I have boxes of Lawrence's old files. A lot of the cases he took never went to trial, but what he found, what people said in depositions, it's all still there." Her eyes looked past Myka, up the stairs. "You're going to tell me that you don't have the time to look through my husband's papers, but I know someone who does. Someone who knows how that information can be most effectively . . . disseminated." She tapped the pocket holding Claudia's device. "Helena didn't need to tell me how Ben Winslow behaved at the hospital, I knew his father." Mrs. Frederic tapped the device harder. "She has a good heart, and she'll work with you, Agent Bering, if you approach her the right way."
Myka wryly reflected that Mrs. Frederic could be equally referring to Helena or Claudia. "How do you know her?"
"Claudia helps out at one of the charities I'm still involved with. She works with troubled youth." As Myka's eyebrows spiked, Mrs. Frederic chuckled. "You should know better than anyone that people are rarely what they seem. There's always some side to them, some aspect that you can't see."
Yes, and that was the problem.