She kept the smile on her face, refusing to give him the satisfaction – and potential leverage – of seeing just how surprised she was. Myka had expected him to tell her that he had proof of Helena's involvement in any number of scams that she and her fellow agents were too witless to recognize. It wouldn't have come entirely out of left field if he had said he could prove Helena's involvement in the Marston Gallery heist. Over the years, Helena and the Marston Gallery had become as paired, at least in certain circles, as Gentleman Jim and Bowdoin. But to spring the Bowdoin theft on her . . . .

"You would've been a teenager at the time, Bryce. Am I to believe selling a few fake concert tickets to your Barrington classmates vaulted you into the higher echelons? That Gentleman Jim would've said to his co-conspirators, 'Let's hear what Bryce thinks?'"

"You can waste your time jeering at me or we can start the negotiations," Bryce said, leaning back in his chair. The chair's resistance made it an unusually awkward movement, especially for DeWitt, who had a knack for conveying a permanent sense of ease, but he persisted in slinging his arm over the back of it. "I've got nothing to do this morning except wait for lunch."

"Like I said, Bryce, you were a teenager. Before we start negotiating, you're going to have to give me something to make me believe this is worth listening to."

He nodded his head in a mockery of concession. "I can see your point. You were probably in middle school back then, and your only thought was 'When is that cute boy across the aisle going to see past my glasses and braces?' My guess is that he never did." He arched an eyebrow, inviting her confirmation. Myka noncommittally lifted a shoulder. Yes, she had worn glasses in middle school, but the braces she hadn't gotten until she let the student dentists at UC work on her crooked teeth for a vastly reduced rate. Having good eyesight was a necessity in a bookstore, straight teeth were not. "While you had your nose stuck in a book, I was planning. I wanted to get ahead. I wanted to be rich, like my friends were. I admired people who could think big, even if they broke the law."

"You wanted to be another Gentleman Jim?"

"Oh, no, I didn't want to be a conman or thief like Jim Wells," DeWitt said, eyes wide in feigned innocence, "but you can't say he didn't think big with Bowdoin. I read everything I could get my hands on about the heist." He issued a sigh that was long and mocking. "When I was still a kid, just out of Barrington, short on money and listening to tall tales in bars for the price of a beer, I sat down next to Ted Bonaventura one night. I didn't recognize his name at first, but he was in talkative mood and he was willing to spot me a beer. Ring a bell, Myka?"

Ted Bonaventura had been a known associate of Jim Wells, a con and forger whom Wells had used on occasion to pass phony notes payable and invoices. Their relationship stretched back to their childhoods, when they had grown up in the same down-at-the-heel Brooklyn neighborhood, living in the same apartment building. Agents working the Bowdoin theft had thought it possible, although not especially likely, that Bonaventura had been one of the small crew that Wells had assembled for the heist. His talents didn't lend themselves to stealing art, but he did have the advantage of having been a loyal friend since elementary school. DeWitt had chosen well. There weren't too many of Gentleman Jim's cronies who were still alive and sufficiently lucid to contradict his account. Certainly not Bonaventura himself, who had died of cirrhosis less than ten years after the theft. "A doorbell," Myka said dismissively, holding her thumb and forefinger a millimeter apart. "You're going to have to give me more before I hear church bells, Bryce."

He lifted his shoulders as fractionally. "We talk. Actually he tells me stories, and I pretend to listen. He keeps saying 'Jim did this' and 'Jim did that,' and I finally realize he's talking about Jim Wells, and this is Ted Bonaventura I'm sitting next to. I start asking him about Bowdoin, and he shuts up. I lay off the questions, and he goes back to telling me stories. Eventually he asks me if I'll do him a favor. He took some shoes and purses off a friend, excess merchandise, but he wants someone to hold them for him while he makes sure they're legit. He's law-abiding now, doesn't want to get into trouble. He's reformed, right? I didn't think there was any real risk. He was being cautious, which," DeWitt shifted on the chair and raised his arms up and out in a "Who, me?" gesture, "is understandable."

"Except that Ted didn't come back before the police found you with counterfeit merchandise, and you had no idea." Myka leaned farther over the table, hardening the tone of her voice. "I've heard this story too many times before, so get to the point."

"The point is that I was wrongly imprisoned for a couple of years," DeWitt said, blinding her with those white, white teeth bared in an aggressive smile, "but since that's not what interests you, let me tell you what will. While I was there, Ted Bonaventura was sent up on an unrelated charge, and we got reacquainted again. He was nicer to me this time, maybe because I was in a position to do him some favors. An old man like that, he's a target, and he knew it. One night when he was drunk on something that looked like antifreeze and probably was, he told me about the Bowdoin job. I don't think he meant to, but he was drunk and the next day he had no memory of what he said." DeWitt paused, trying to gauge the effect of his story on her. "I suppose you're wondering why I didn't make off with the Van Goghs and Monets when I had a chance. First of all, Jim Wells was still around, and I didn't want to run afoul of him and, second," he wagged his head sorrowfully, "I wasn't cut out for a life of crime. The money would've been nice, but not the constant looking over my shoulder."

"If you're so law-abiding, why wait until now to divulge the location?"

"I've never pretended I'm a saint, Myka. I'll admit I've cut a few corners here and there." He paused again, and she waited for him to devise another lie or another exaggeration, but when he met her eyes, she sensed that he was telling her what, for him, was the truth. "The most important thing I ever learned at Barrington was that the real reason the rich are different? They put a price on everything. Everything. There are no giveaways. So, I'm not going to give this away. You want to know where the Bowdoin art is? You'll have to pay for it."

To her surprise, Pete didn't laugh off DeWitt's demand. He tilted his chair as far back as it would go without tipping over and crossed his ankles on the desk. Myka had an up-close and personal view of his gray dress socks and something matted and stuck to the left side of his shoe that might have been squashed raisins or . . . worse. Myka looked away. At least it didn't smell. "Of course, he's blowing smoke. If he knew where the stash was, there's no way he would've sat on it all this time. But there might be some truth in all his bullshit that we can use." The chair creaked ominously as he responded to Myka's scowl by lunging against the back of the chair in exaggerated surprise. "Yes, it's possible," he said dryly. "DeWitt might be helpful in spite of himself. So check it out. See if he might've known this Bongiorno guy."

"DeWitt's smart enough not to make up a story out of whole cloth," Myka patiently tried to explain. "I'm sure we'll find confirmation that when DeWitt was in prison, Bonaventura was there for a period of time, too. But that's all we'll be able to confirm, Pete. We'll never know for certain whether they knew each other or crossed paths."

He glared at her. "I used to work the same cases as you, with you, remember? I know how a con spins a web, but I want you to dig a little bit into this story of his. I don't care what he thinks he's going to get, he's not going anywhere. He can tell us he knows what happened to D.B. Cooper. He's still gonna grow old in jail." He suddenly leaned forward, and Myka feared that he would rocket over the desk, but he planted his hands on the desk blotter like it was a speed bump. "I've given you," he jerked his head at the door to his office, which was closed, but he lowered his voice to a hiss, "and her a lot of rope to bring in Burdette. I haven't asked a lot of questions, I haven't snooped. I've been patient because I figured it would take awhile for her to lure him in, even with the promise of all that stolen art." He shook his head in disbelief and said contemptuously, "With the exception of Sam, those guys at Justice thought it would be like West Side Story, Helena and Burdette two lovestruck kids who should be enemies planning to run off together. The DOJ just needed to wait until they made a break for the airport. But Burdette doesn't have a romantic bone in his body, let alone a heart. I'm not sure Foxy Mama does either, but whatever she has that she calls a heart is yours." He held up his hand, palm out. "Don't say anything about her, Mykes. About why you're happier than you've been in years, about nine, if I was counting. You try to act as if she's about ready to plunge a knife in your back, but I know better, I know you." She hadn't opened her mouth as much as it had dropped open in astonishment since she had never heard him speak for so long so coherently, but he read it as a sign that she was going to interrupt. "'Cause if you say something, then I've probably got to do something and what I most want is for this thing to be over. It'd be nice if we still had all our body parts, too, at the end of it. If you and Helena want to ride off into the sunset once it's over, that's your business. I think it'd be a big mistake, but it's yours to make." He looked at her, with the same affectionate, sorrowful half-smile he had given her through all the months of suspicion, investigation, and interrogation she had endured after Marston, as if he feared a stronger expression of his love or his pity would break her. "She only ever had two plays with him, the way I figured it. I was kind of surprised she went with Bowdoin. The kid seemed a surer way of getting Burdette's attention. Was it possible that Christina was Burdette's and not Winslow's?"

He pushed away from his desk to open a bottom drawer and take out a bag of miniature candy bars. "They've got the Halloween candy out already." He spilled the candy bars onto the desktop. "Dig in, if you dare, or take some with you for Christina." He opened a mini Snickers. "I had the DNA test run again. We're a bureaucracy, so we're always misplacing and losing things, right? Well, let's just say there were some, uh, samples from Winslow and Christina that had been misplaced. I know how crafty our Mata Hari can be. Maybe she had been able to rig the test that Justice ran. Maybe her daughter was really Burdette's, and now she had discovered how that fact could work for her and not against her."

"He murdered her father," Myka reminded him.

"Which I bet she didn't think was any great loss, and it was before Burdette took out her brother, when she still might have let herself get carried away for old time's sake. But it looks like Chandler Bing really is Christina's father, which left her with one play."

Myka didn't immediately get the point of the Friends reference, but to give Pete his due, when she thought about it, it wasn't such a bad analogy. Ben Winslow had the same WASPy looks, the same whininess, the same prep school air of entitlement. Pete said chidingly, "I've learned to put nothing past her. I thought you had too."

Myka irritably rolled her shoulders and, to stop herself from saying something that she would regret and that Pete wouldn't want to hear, she stuffed a mini Mounds bar into her mouth. Unfortunately, Pete had no reservations about trying to talk around half-masticated nougat. "Whatever she's told you about the Bowdoin heist, you have to know that it's not the whole truth. She's holding something back. Yeah, yeah, she hated her father, he treated her like shit, she's glad he dead, but she was just as much a Wells as he was. And to that family, anyone who wasn't a Wells was a mark." He noisily swallowed the nougat and hunted for another mini candy bar. "Do you really believe she doesn't know where her father stashed the art? Tell her what DeWitt said, tell her I told you to look into it. Let's see what she does."

Then Myka said precisely the thing that eating the Mounds bar was supposed to prevent her from saying. The coconut slid down her throat too easily. She should have chosen something with nuts or caramel, or both, that would have gummed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. "How can you trust that I'll tell you how she reacts?"

"Maybe I'm having you shadowed," he countered. But he couldn't keep the "I'm your boss and I'm a hardass" expression from slipping. His face wasn't made for grimness. In fact, he snorted so hard he exhaled a fragment of peanut. "Like I have the manpower or the budget to do that, anyway. I trust you, Mykes, because you always do the right thing." He showed her his palm again to quiet her, wagging the index finger of his other hand for good measure. "Just let me finish and then you can leave, without saying a word, okay?" He gave her another finger-wag. "You don't always do the wisest things, but you do the right thing when it counts."

She could agree with about not always doing the smartest thing, and dumb, in her case, was usually spelled with six letters starting with H. Yet as she turned down the aisle in the cube farm, heading toward the cube that was Helena's, she was smiling in anticipation. It had been little more than 12 hours since she had last seen Helena, but Myka had missed her. Catching sight of her impatiently waiting in the standard-issue desk chair, Myka's smile grew wider. She wasn't ready to admit it to Helena, she could barely admit to herself, but the sight of Helena's scowling face, the black brows arrowing down like a pair of fighter jets, and the crossed legs with the stationary foot tapping the floor in agitation sent a rare burst of joy through her. Myka stopped in front of her, and Helena looked up. The scowl vanished, the foot quit tapping, and the eyes lingered appreciatively on Myka's upswept hair. Less ordered than it had been earlier in the morning, her hair had nonetheless managed to retain most of the integrity of the chignon, and Myka knew that Helena had a weakness for the half mistress of the manor, half harlot stage of an updo.

"I would've gotten you a coffee, but I wasn't sure when you'd be done with Wile E."

Myka almost stretched out her hand to touch the curve of Helena's cheek but remembered where they . . . she was (Helena wouldn't have cared) just in time. She tilted her head in the direction of the suite's entrance. "Why don't we go down to the coffee shop so you can buy me one?"

"Capital idea." Helena put down her phone. "This has nothing good to tell me." Quietly she said, "The Winslows' attorneys have called Jemma's to inform us that they're now petitioning the court to have my parental rights permanently revoked. Full custody's not enough anymore." The fury wasn't in her voice; it was in her eyes. "They will never cut me out of my daughter's life."

Myka remembered the boxes of her husband's records that Irene Frederic said were still in her house. The need to have someone go through them had just become more urgent. She had begun her day with Bryce DeWitt, she might as well end it with Claudia Donovan. "Have Jemma tell her attorney that Christina is countersuing. She's filing for a new daddy."

The fury dissipated and Helena's look grew tender. "I suppose she has a someone in mind?"

"She might."

Helena laughed lightly under her breath. "I hear it's quite a rigorous examination that she requires candidates to pass. Are you sure you're up for the challenge?"

"I'm betting that her mother might give me the answers." Myka tugged on Helena's suit jacket. "C'mon. I'm dying for a cup."

The usual lines in the shop had been reduced to a few customers seeking a mid-morning reinfusion of caffeine. Although Myka passed on the suggestion of a coffee confection, wrinkling her nose at the suggestion of whipped cream, she agreed to share a slab of a dessert bread with Helena. She had already betrayed her scruples with the Mounds bar, she could slide no faster to the depths of hell by having a few bites of densely chocolate bread. It was easier to believe that her life hung on whether or not she ate a few extra carbohydrates than on the risk she was taking in trusting the woman standing next to her.

It was too cool to sit in the courtyard, but it was where they instinctively gravitated. The coffee cup warmed Myka's hands, and when the sun occasionally broke through the clouds, she turned her face up to it. Helena was sitting close to her, a little too close for agency protocol, but no one was out there to observe them. She displayed no surprise at DeWitt's offer, commenting, "An obvious ploy, given who I am." She sipped her tea, making her usual face. Helena always claimed that the aesthetics of a paper container alone ruined a good cup of tea. "I assume that's why you were cloistered with your nominal superior for so long. You did remind him that Bryce DeWitt is a con artist and that the FBI has no need to cut a deal with him?" At Myka's hesitation, Helena almost spat a mouthful of tea back into her cup. She swallowed and said, "So what did DeWitt say about me that has our illustrious leader so alarmed?"

"He didn't say anything about you. I think Pete's just frustrated with –"

"Our, or should I say, my lack of progress? I've been 'paroled' for all this time and have little to show for it, at least when it comes to taking down Nate." Helena stared down into her tea. "I don't think it worked, the Phillips I gave him. Even for someone who likes to toy with his victims, he's taken too long." A sudden breeze stirred her hair, and among the strands, Myka could pick out a few gray ones. She did not point them out. "Maybe your ill-smelling informant was right, and toward the end of his life, Jim was Nate's lackey. Maybe Nate already knows where the Bowdoin works are, in which case this whole thing has been a cock-up from the start." Helena swiftly shot her a look. "Except for you. You're what redeems this misadventure."

"It's not over yet, Helena. Nate wouldn't have left art that valuable in a crate in a warehouse or wherever your father hid it. He would've moved the works through private sales, and we would've gotten wind of it. Bowdoin's too famous for there not to be whispers."

"Maybe he's had a secret art room built in his penthouse, and he goes in there every night to exult over his treasures," Helena said wryly.

"Would you sit on that much money?"

"You have a point." Helena put her cup down and pulled her jacket tighter across her chest. "So maybe my father did succeed in taking the secret of the location with him. However, despite my wild promise that one night to dig him up from the grave, I don't think exhuming him will help us." Her eyes, when she turned them to Myka's, were beseeching. "What does Pete want me to do? I think we're seeing the extent of my influence with Nate, which is nil. As much as I hate to admit it, I'm open to suggestions. Even his."

"That we've hit a wall with Burdette isn't what Pete's afraid of –"

In literally a blink, Helena's eyes went from wide and beseeching to narrowed and suspicious. "He's afraid that I'm conspiring with Nate –"

"Or others."

"Or others to steal the Bowdoin art from under the FBI's collective noses." She rescued her cup of tea and took a long drink from it, making a face only at the end. "It's not an unfair conclusion to draw," she admitted. Then her tone grew heavy with irony. "If I were the Helena Wells of eight years ago, I might even agree with him, but I'm not. I don't have the resources, by which I mean the people and the money to pay the people. They're not the kind who operate on the honor system." She searched Myka's face for a response, nodding slightly at what she saw. "Let me put it in a way that you'll find easier to believe. Word got out after Marston that I couldn't finish the job. Of course, my father helped to spread the word, but in his eyes, I'd lost my nerve. A con who loses her nerve, she might as well put a sign around her neck that says Eat Me. She's prey." Helena sighed. "There's no one I'd trust to help me pull it off who would trust that I could follow through." She flirtatiously batted her eyes at Myka. "Unless you're willing to join the dark side of the Force."

Myka laughed, relieved that whatever Helena thought she had seen in her face, she had responded to it quietly, not defensively, feeling secure in their relationship enough to tease her. Was she still skeptical of Helena's claim that she wasn't the woman she had been eight years ago? A little, maybe. Helena may have lost some of her confidence, but she wasn't prey. She was a survivor. Marston might have been a qualified success, but she hadn't been so distraught that she had waited in Houston for the FBI to arrest her, and while her half-quixotic, half-penitential impulse to save Claudia had landed her in prison, she had found her get-out-of-jail card. If there were a way to deliver Burdette to the FBI and abscond with the Bowdoin art, Helena the survivor might have the upper hand over Helena the lover.

As if she had known exactly where Myka's thoughts had gone, Helena said, "Am I capable of lying to you? Of course. Would I? Yes." She scooted closer to Myka and took Myka's face between her hands. "I will do anything to protect my daughter, even if it means lying to you. Second only to her safety is yours, and I will lie and steal and cheat to protect you."

Helena's hands were cold, but they warmed against her skin and Myka didn't pull them away. Protocol and discretion could take a breath for moment; technically, they weren't on agency property. "You take care of Christina, and I'll take care of myself."

"No, that's not how it works now, love." Helena scooted back, nearly knocking over her cup of tea. "To keep on task, why don't I let you finish your story? The fairy tale about how DeWitt discovered what's eluded everyone all these years."

"He said that Ted Bonaventura told him." Myka paused, waiting for Helena's reaction. It wasn't long in coming, a grimace far more convincing than any Pete could summon, but Helena said nothing, only motioning for her to continue. "According to DeWitt, Bonaventura burned him on a deal that sent him to prison. When Bonaventura was sent there a year or so later, he tried to make amends by telling him where your father hid the art."

"Where do I start?" Helena said contemptuously. "There are so many things about what he told you that aren't true. Ted didn't help with the Bowdoin heist –"

"How can you be so sure?" Myka swiftly asked.

"You think I was there? I was at design school, exactly where Jim wanted me. But I knew Ted, and I knew what he did for Jim. He was muscle when Jim felt he needed protection, and he handled scams that didn't require any finesse. Jim didn't need him for Bowdoin, wouldn't have wanted him for Bowdoin." At Myka's skeptical look, she said, with a sigh of exasperation, "Jim wouldn't have told him the location of the art, either. They had known each other since they were boys, but Jim wouldn't have confided anything important in him. Jim would say that when they were altar boys at St. Mary's that while he was trying to figure out how to steal the money from the collection basket, Ted was trying to get into the communion wine. Jim never would have trusted him with his biggest secret." She took her cup and held out a hand for Myka's. "It's time to go in." Myka didn't stir from the bench. "Ted and Jim were alike in one respect. They never believed in being sorry. If Ted got the better of DeWitt, he wouldn't have wasted time on pity. Pity's for suckers."

Myka drank the rest of the coffee in her cup; cold, it tasted like ashes on her tongue. "I'll stay out here a while longer."

Helena started walking back toward the courtyard doors. "Toward the end of his life, Ted got religion. He started attending mass, gave away most of what he had to the Church. He might not have felt sorry for others, but he apparently started feeling sorry for himself." She stopped and turned around. "I suppose our J. Edgar Hoover thinks this news is going to rattle me, that I'll run to the lair where the Bowdoin works are just to make sure that they're still there. Is he hoping you'll find me digging up the backyard behind the house with a shovel?"

"No wonder you've refused to put a pool in. Here you practically live in the Hamptons, and all Christina has is a plastic wading pool," Myka said teasingly.

"I don't practically live in the Hamptons. I live in an upper flat that was last updated about the time my father broke into the Bowdoin," Helena said sardonically. An eyebrow arching in self-mockery, she added, "All in all, I would've been better off if I'd been staying in that flat 20 years ago. I don't think Jim would've missed me much. He would have found an artist in a garret somewhere, someone who wasn't sullen and resentful and, more importantly, someone who couldn't claim him as her father."

"Our paths probably wouldn't have crossed," Myka said quietly, "so I wouldn't have been better off."

Helena stared at her in disbelief. "How can you say that? If it weren't for me, you'd be on the fast track to becoming director. I'm grateful that you're giving me a second chance, Myka, but . . . ." She didn't finish, shaking her head.

"I had eight years without you. Life was saner, but I wasn't happier. Believe it or not, I've learned that things don't always have to make sense to be true."

Their gazes held until Helena looked away. "Stop by later. It doesn't matter what time it is. I'll be waiting for you," she said roughly.

Myka watched her walk into the building. Helena didn't make sense. More accurately, the resumption of their relationship didn't make sense, but it was true, it was right. Maybe because it had never actually ended. Sometimes a separation, even one that was bitter and years long, was no more than a pause between the notes of a song known only to the two of you.

She didn't have to grow used to the fact that her father wouldn't remember to speak to her when she called. Before he developed Alzheimer's, he had usually let her mother do the talking for the both of them, interjecting only when he felt something important might not get said, like "You ruined your life" or "You threw everything away for what? Love?" or "You were always a disappointment." The only difference now was that her father would fret about who was on the phone, sounding no less querulous. "Who're you talking to, Jeannie? Whatever they're trying to sell us, we don't want it." Informed that it was Myka who was calling, her father would quiet only to repeat his questions a few minutes later. "Who're you talking to, Jeannie? What do they want?"

It was easiest to talk to her mother on a Sunday morning. Their family had never been churchgoers, her father dismissing all religion with a condemnatory "Bunk!" and her mother seeming never to miss her own middle-class, middle of the road Methodism. For as long as Myka could remember, her mother had spent Sunday mornings doing the crossword puzzle in the Sunday paper and drinking coffee. Sunday afternoons had been like weekday afternoons, devoted to the bookstore, and even after the bookstore was sold, her mother filled them with chores, most of which she did by herself since Warren's ability to help was limited. Sunday nights were no better for calling, her mother reserved them for watching 60 Minutes and, afterwards, whatever was on PBS. Myka interrupted her mother's TV schedule at her peril, so Sunday mornings, any time between 8 and 11 Mountain, were the sweet spot.

Yet it wasn't her mother greeting her by asking "What's a four-letter word for 'a baby's veil,' Myka?" Instead, it was her father, sounding startled rather than suspicious, which was how Myka remembered him answering their home phone when she was growing up. He had never sounded much different answering the phone in the bookstore, responding as though the potential customer asking him if he had a first edition of The Catcher in the Rye was asking for his political affiliation. It was a miracle the bookstore stayed open as long as it had.

"Tracy?"

"It's Myka, Dad."

There was a long pause, which had her wondering if he had forgotten that he had another daughter. Dementia could have an upside for him that way, she thought ruefully. "Your mother's not here. She had to go . . . she had to go to the store, I think." Gaining in confidence, he said, "We're out of milk. That's why she's not here. She forgot to buy more of it at the store the other day." He chuckled. "Maybe I'll have to start giving her a list just like she gives me."

Myka debated whether she should tell him she would call back later, but he seemed to be in a good mood and not especially eager to end the call. Maybe this man who was and wasn't her father was lonely, and regardless of whether he really understood that she wasn't Tracy, she was still his daughter. The worst that could happen would be that he would turn into the old Warren Bering and start to harangue her, and if he remained half-convinced she was Tracy, all the better. She asked tentatively, "How have you been doing?"

Later she couldn't recall how they had been talking when he said it. They or, more truthfully, he had been reminiscing about some event involving a puppy when she was a child. She wasn't sure that it had ever happened; she didn't remember bringing a puppy home and pleading with her parents to let her keep it. She didn't remember repeating "But it's free, Dad" over and over, in the obvious hope that her father, always alert to a bargain, couldn't turn down this one. Her father claimed that she had already named it, Midnight because its fur was black, and he even more improbably claimed that he was considering letting her keep it until it suddenly peed on the bookstore floor. "That was it for Midnight. I made you take him back. I drove you back to the house you said you got it from, and there in the garage was the kennel full of puppies with the "Free" sign taped to it. Your mom said I should've gone up to the door with you, that it was too hard on you to give the puppy back to its owners all by yourself, but I waited in the car. I guess I thought the lesson would sink in better if you had to tell the owners you'd made a mistake taking the puppy before you checked with your parents." He was silent for a long pause, and Myka heard the unmistakable sounds of snuffling. "When you got back in the car, there wasn't a tear on your face but you were pale and you were shaking. You didn't speak to me for days. I'm so sorry, Myka." He started crying in earnest. "I was so proud of you girls, especially you, Myka, but I was afraid that if I gave an inch, you two would start expecting life to give you everything you wanted, and it doesn't, you know. Life isn't fair, and you have to be strong to take the punches it throws at you, but I was too rough on you. I'm so sorry."

Myka couldn't ever remember her father crying, and rather than his tears and his sniffles and his "sorry's," she would have welcomed one of his harangues. As it was, she heard herself saying awkwardly, "Don't cry, Dad. It was a long time ago, and I've forgotten it." Because it never happened, she added silently. She realized that if she were a better daughter, she would tell him she forgave him. But Warren Bering had raised the daughter he deserved, not the one he might have hoped for, and she couldn't make herself say the words. She couldn't forgive him for a cruelty he hadn't committed when there were so many real ones that he had. So she kept saying "Dad, don't cry" and trying to change the subject until she heard her mother's voice in the background. Then Jeannie was on the line, directing Myka's father to put away the groceries ("There's some of those jellied candies you like, Warren, as well as more lunchmeat and bread") and brushing aside Myka's apologies. "He gets weepy sometimes about nothing at all, and the best way to deal with him is to get him talking about baseball. His favorite players when he was young, who won the Series in 1966, that sort of thing. It wasn't you, Myka."

You might think you had given up on someone you loved, chosen not to forgive him for the pain he had caused, but you couldn't undo how he had shaped you, changed you. For better or worse, that kind of love made you, bone-deep because it would be like sucking out your own marrow to rid yourself of it; you weren't you without it. Take away Warren, and she wasn't Myka. (Tear out Helena, which she had tried to do, and she was still Myka, but she hadn't liked her very much.) Take away Gentleman Jim, and Helena wasn't Helena. If Jim had reached out to her, Helena would have listened, impatiently, disbelievingly maybe, but she would have listened. She wouldn't have been able to help herself. Just like she had listened to Warren, because at least he was apologizing for something. The question was, had Helena's father reached out to her about Bowdoin?

Myka got up stiffly from the bench. She could tell Pete what Helena had said about her father's relationship with Ted Bonaventura, but she doubted that it would change his mind about the wisdom of pursuing any claim by Bryce DeWitt. For Pete, the value of DeWitt's story was the potential it had for putting pressure on Helena. If the smallest possibility existed that Bonaventura had known the location of the missing art and, intentionally or not, revealed it to DeWitt, Pete would want it pursued. The sooner she got back to her desk, the sooner she could get bogged down in an effort to verify what had been structured to frustrate – but not completely defy - verification. She would make sure she saw Helena before she went home for the evening, but it would be late. Probably very late.

One of the "facts" in DeWitt's story that she felt reasonably sure she could confirm was whether he and Bonaventura had been in the same prison at the same time. However, confirming it could take time as they were only now building the history of his activities, legal and illegal, since he had been a student at Barrington, and they had already uncovered several aliases. There could be arrest records under all of them. As it happened, it took her most of the day to sort through the information they had compiled on him to date and discover an arrest record that seemed to correspond best with the timeline he had provided her. Past arrests had resulted in no more than a few months of jail time, and, not infrequently, charges had been dropped as witnesses disappeared or their stories changed. As DeWitt had grown older, he had become more practiced, better able to complete his scams without major mistakes. There were no arrests after DeWitt had turned 25 (or 26 or 27 or 28, depending on the birthdate), not even a DUI. The arrest record Myka found involved the sale of counterfeit merchandise, and DeWitt, at the age of 20, had been sentenced to a short term at a Pennsylvania prison. During the 18 months DeWitt served, Bonaventura had been sentenced to the same prison, staying little more than a month before being transferred to another facility in Indiana.

Myka frowned at the information on her computer screen. It was possible that DeWitt and Bonaventura had met, maybe not likely but possible. Some time spent on the phone with an agent in the Philadelphia field office she had consulted with on past cases resulted in her getting the name of a "friendly contact" at the state prison in which DeWitt had served time. "It must've been small potatoes for us to let the state prosecute him," the agent had mused. "Maybe if we had taken a harder look at him then, we could've stopped DeWitt before he really got started. Eh, well, what's done is done. If anyone can put those two together, it's Leonard. He's been there forever. I probably shouldn't say it like this, but he knows where the bodies are buried."

She had the name, Leonard Dwyer, and a phone number. It was past six and he had probably left for the day, but she made the call on the off chance that the man who knew where the bodies were buried might stick around to ensure no one tried to disturb the graves. Twenty minutes later, Myka still wasn't sure she knew his position at the prison or what had prompted him to stay on the line even after he complained that it wasn't his job to remember every inmate over the past 35 years, but he had provided her with enough information to believe that DeWitt and Bonaventura had encountered each other in prison, perhaps more than once. Leonard had remembered DeWitt with no difficulty, calling him a "predatory little snake." DeWitt had been young but surprising able to command prisoners twice his age and, on the surface, twice as dangerous. "Looked like a 12-year-old but carried a lot of clout," Leonard growled. Much of his influence derived from the scams he had been able to set up with the prison staff, falsifying orders and selling the "surplus" to outside buyers. "He bought protection, otherwise a skinny kid like him would've been meat. We would've been scraping him off the floor every day. The scams he ran let him put a crew together and then he made money off the crew. Word was that if you didn't want trouble, you paid him a fee."

"So what's the connection to Bonaventura?" Myka asked, not having a hard time seeing a young Bryce DeWitt dominating seemingly more powerful individuals. He had simply replicated Barrington inside prison, trading in rich, rudderless classmates whom he could manipulate for prison muscle whom he could boss around.

"Bonaventura came in for a three-year stint about the last month or so of DeWitt's sentence. Never saw them together, but the scuttlebutt was that DeWitt was behind what happened to him. Guards found Ted in the pantry one night. He'd been late returning to his cell, and there he was on the pantry floor, beaten, cut, burned with cigarettes. He was still in the infirmary when DeWitt was released. No one could tie DeWitt to it, but a few of his crew were seen with Bonaventura that evening." A chair distantly creaked, and Myka pictured an older man sitting in an old-fashioned roll-back chair, the receiver of a rotary phone in his hand and a clock with a cracked glass face hanging on the wall in front of him. The only thing absent from the scene was James Cagney as a smart-aleck trustee sweeping the floor in his prison white and black. "Some of us knew who Bonaventura was and thought ol' Gentleman Jim might have had someone rough him up just to make sure he didn't spill anything he knew about that art museum robbery, the Benton or whatever it was called."

Bowdoin, Myka correctly him silently. There had been a slight, very slight note of doubt in his tone, and she pressed him gently on it. "You didn't think Jim Wells was behind it."

"Nah. Whoever hurt him meant to really hurt him. Not give him a warning. Besides, one of the doctors told me that when Bonaventura was still out of it, loaded up on painkillers, he kept mumbling about how the 'boys of St. Mary' or 'Jim' would protect him. Somebody must've been looking out for him because he got transferred to a cushier place, for a prison, not too long afterward. Or maybe the warden thought we didn't need anymore bad press and decided to send Bonaventura away before we ended up with another dead prisoner." Myka bit her tongue and chose not to press him on that. He stopped, putting an end point to the conversation. Just as Myka was about to thank for his time and end the call, he said, "I'm not asking you to tell me why you're calling about some old business, but if it has to do with DeWitt, I'd be careful. Always kept his hands clean, even got out early for good behavior, but he's a bad'un. Let him sink his fangs into you, and you're done for."

Myka stood and stretched. DeWitt might have been behind the attack on Bonaventura, but it wasn't because he wanted to know where the Bowdoin art had been hidden. Bonaventura had double-crossed him on a scam. The double-cross would have been reason enough in DeWitt's mind for payback – when he was too young still to know that there were less obvious and even crueler ways to assert that he was the alpha male of the pack. Laura Jeffries was one such way, and, despite Laura's claims to the contrary, Myka wondered whether Chris hadn't suspected the truth all along. DeWitt would have needled him, dug at him, not missed an opportunity to slyly prod him, all to determine just how subordinate Chris was. How many times had DeWitt emphasized her name, given Chris a crooked, knowing smile when she entered the room? How many times had Chris burned but remained unable to challenge his friend?

More interestingly, she had heard the phrase "boys of St. Mary" said twice today. Jim Wells, Ted Bonaventura, and who else? If she hadn't known what sort of men they were, she might have thought they were part of a casting call for an old Our Gang episode. It was probably nothing, just a tag by which a few childhood friends, further knitted together by their criminal activities, labeled themselves, but she tucked it away for further thought. It was after seven now, and Myka turned off her computer. Pete would be intrigued by what she had learned, and he would likely send her back to DeWitt. She would pretend to negotiate with him, DeWitt would pretend that he had more to reveal, and time would be wasted. If DeWitt really did have knowledge of the works' location, he wouldn't be offering it to the FBI. He would have disappeared long ago with his black-market millions, and that might not have been such a bad thing. Chris and Laura, Alex and Charlotte, and their friends might have been spared. Barrington wouldn't be fighting to salvage its reputation after the scandal of the bogus scholarships, and Mrs. Carmichael could be looking forward to a happy retirement. Myka wasn't beyond a moment of pity for the golden ones. As it turned out, they were mice, just like her. Then she put thoughts of them away, too. Pete and DeWitt were for tomorrow. Helena was waiting for her. There was just one more thing she had to do.