Sam and Helena didn't have hackles to bristle when they saw each other, but Myka thought a soft growl might have escaped from Helena when they entered his office. He waved them toward chairs, eyeing Helena with distaste. He looked tired, and Myka spotted the gleam of a fresh coffee ring drying on a desk practically decorated with them. He rubbed his chin; the stubble wasn't an affectation. He hadn't shaved. But he hadn't loosened his tie and though he had folded his shirt sleeves up, they were neatly folded. Helena had likely gotten no more sleep than he had, maybe even less, but there was no droop to the eyelids that had been perfectly brushed with eye shadow, no uneven blending of foundation, blush, or lip gloss. She had spent a half-hour in a restroom off the cube farm before they had left for the courthouse, and her make-up was as flawlessly executed as if she were about to launch a con or plead her case before a family court judge. Given that it was Helena, Sam probably considered one to be no different than the other. Repressing the desire to fill the silence with small talk – and this meeting had all the awkwardness of an encounter between a former lover and the one who had replaced him – Myka waited for Helena to speak. It was a lot like running into your ex with your new girlfriend, except that hers had the power to throw Helena back into prison, which wasn't the outcome you would normally expect from running into an ex.
Helena tried out a smile, nervously discarded it, and tried out another one, more beseeching than the first. A smile in place, she said, with a gratitude that sounded more forced than sincere, "Thank you for meeting with us. I know this was short notice for you, but I'm in desperate straits. It's not enough any longer for Ben Winslow to get sole custody of our daughter. Now he and his father, the good senator, are petitioning a judge to vacate my parental rights." She leaned forward in the chair. "I'm hoping that you might be able to dissuade them." Her face flushed as she spoke – no make-up could disguise the reddening of those pale cheeks – and Myka winced inwardly at the humiliation she knew Helena must be feeling. She wanted to take Helena's almost certainly cold hand between hers; above that, she wanted to draw Helena's head to her shoulder and let Helena rub a flaming cheek against her suit jacket for comfort, but another glance at Sam's face, exhausted but obstinate, told her there would be little comfort found here.
"I'm sorry that your custody issues haven't been resolved, but there's nothing I can do." He spread his arms and shrugged, conveying complete helplessness.
Helena's smile crimped, and her voice took on a sarcastic edge. "I'm surprised and disappointed to hear that there's nothing you can do. That wasn't my impression when we met in the spring. You threatened that the full weight of the justice system would bear down on me unless I delivered Nate Burdette to you."
"Since you've failed to hold up your end of the bargain, you might consider we're being generous as it is by not throwing you back into your cell. We're all out of favors for you, Helena." Sam took a gulp of his coffee, less like a man happening upon water in the desert than one hoping he had found the magic elixir that would transport him – or them – somewhere else.
"First of all, it wasn't a bargain," Helena said, anger overtaking sarcasm, "because you performed a classic bait and switch. You led me to think that assisting the FBI was all I would have to do to be reunited with my daughter, and then bringing you Burdette became the only acceptable result. It didn't matter that my leverage over Nate is practically nonexistent or that, by going after him, I would be putting Jemma and Christina at risk. Second –"
Myka placed a hand on Helena's arm, to calm her rather than comfort her. "Sam, isn't there something someone can do behind the scenes to make the Winslows back off?" She knew what his answer would be, but letting Helena detail every one of her grievances about a "bargain" that had more coercion than cooperation to it wouldn't make him any less defensive.
"How does telling Mark Winslow that we thought we could use Helena to get to Burdette help us or her?" He demanded contemptuously. He half-rose from his chair to make it easier to lean over the desk. "Maybe it's escaped your attention that a lot of people in Washington don't view the FBI or the Department of Justice very favorably right now. If Winslow wanted to score some easy political points, all he would have to do is leak our 'arrangement' to the press and we'd look completely asinine. Plus," he hooked a thumb at Helena, "it would do exactly what she's so paranoid about, put her and her kid in Burdette's sights."
Determined to be the one in the room who wouldn't overreact when provoked, Myka said evenly, "I wasn't suggesting that anyone tell him what this arrangement is really about, only impress upon him how valuable she's been to us. There's been a lot of good press about our arrest of DeWitt."
"He can read the papers, Myka." Sam turned his head toward Helena and gave her a smile that was more a feral baring of his teeth. "Evidently he wasn't impressed. Why don't you work with your attorney," he said with heavy irony, "to make an argument about how you've reformed, what a law-abiding citizen you've become? And if you're really that desperate, fucking give us Burdette."
Helena's arm was so tensed Myka felt only the hard ridge of bone, and the blood that had rushed to Helena's cheeks drained away just as quickly, but Helena didn't lash out, saying only, "Thank you for making your position clear." She stood, giving Myka a meaningful look. "We should get back to the office. I have a meeting with Lee and Jennifer." She directed her next words to Sam. "Just a little fraud involving millions of dollars' worth of fake gemstones. It pales in comparison to Nate Burdette, obviously." Her sarcasm had lost its bite, however, and Myka hated the bleakness that settled over Helena's face.
If she were to dump the contents of Sam's coffee cup over his head, give him the finger, or stomp out of his office, Myka knew she would feel better for about a second before she realized that being impassioned on Helena's behalf would only hurt them. Instead she limited herself to glaring at Sam, but he was unfazed as he drank his coffee. She had no sooner pushed back her chair, however, than he said to her in a low voice, "I'd like you to stay if you can trust that she doesn't need an escort."
"Don't worry," Helena said bitterly, "I haven't slipped my leash . . . yet."
Once Helena left, Myka kept her voice even and quiet, but her eyes bored into Sam's. "You were pretty brutal. Regardless of what you think of her, she's a mother who's afraid she's going to lose her child."
He met her look with one so skeptical that she thought he might gut punch her by reminding her that she had never given him a chance to be a parent when they were married. Instead he said, "Is that what she has you believing now? That because she's a mom she's naturally become a better person? Nine years ago you believed she wouldn't con you because she loved you. Do you really think she'd hesitate to use her own kid to get what she wanted?" He started typing on his keyboard and swore at an impediment to his progress that he saw on his monitor. "I'm trying to . . . I'm going to show you something once I get it pulled up, if I get it pulled up," he finished grimly. "She's not a better person, Myka. She hasn't changed a goddamn bit."
It wasn't the gut punch she expected, but her gut tightened unpleasantly all the same. Sam's hostility seemed extreme, but there was a cause for it, or so he seemed intent on showing her. She hadn't gotten any calls from Parker in IT, which meant that Helena hadn't set off her monitor lately, although it was always possible that she had devised a means of tricking it that was more . . . discreet . . . than the bulky "monitor buster" that Claudia had come up with. Possible but not likely, Myka reassured herself, if only because Helena's attention had been absorbed by Christina's injury, the sudden necessity of bringing the DeWitt investigation to a close, and the escalation in her and Jemma's custody battle with the Winslows. And maybe, just maybe, because Helena had gotten caught up in her, in them, whatever "them" constituted at this point. There were more distractions now for Helena than there had been eight years ago, and con artists, despite the complex schemes they sometimes wove, liked to keep things simple. Get the mark hooked, get the money, get out.
Sam grunted with satisfaction. "Take a look at this." Myka came around his desk to stand behind him, feeling a bubble of anxiety rise in her chest. Notwithstanding all of the reasons that Helena wasn't running a long con on her, and they were reasons, damnit, not wishes, Myka knew that Sam had both history and a better argument on his side. Trying to look at the spreadsheet on the monitor as an agent might who wasn't overly invested in the felon to whom she had been assigned, a felon, moreover, that such an agent, one on top of her game, would never be sleeping with, Myka wondered how pale and sweaty she looked, because she could feel the perspiration beading between her breasts and her heart shuddering like an alarm clock gone crazy. The spreadsheet listed several suspected deliveries of illegal goods (weapons, drugs . . . people) by Burdette's organization to various customers – in addition to the usual assortment of mercenary and crime organizations, the customers included a few countries known to sponsor terrorism. Lovely company Burdette was keeping, and Sam believed Helena was involved in this.
"Although we've lost the agents who were embedded in Burdette's organization, we still get information from various sources. It's patchy, but it's the best accounting we have of his activities at the moment." Sam pointed at the spreadsheet columns, each in turn. "These are the deals we've been told about, this is the estimated street value, here are the buyers, this last one," he glanced up at Myka to confirm that she was paying attention, "this last one is when the deliveries were made . . . to the best of our knowledge."
She leaned in closer. Most of the entries had a date, month/year followed frequently by a string of question marks, but only the ones at the bottom of the list had comments. They indicated problems with the deliveries – weapons gone missing, heroin stolen en route, and similar failures. "Is someone trying to take him down?"
"Maybe." Sam closed the spreadsheet. "There's something else I want to show you." He opened a file that looked like the organization chart of a large, complex corporation. The lines of affiliation between the entities were maze-like, with no clear beginning or end, and Myka thought she might spend all day following them and still end up lost. "It's taken us a long time to put this together. We think these are the companies that Burdette either stashes his assets in or launders his money through or both."
Myka noticed that some of the lines were dotted. "What do the dotted lines mean? You're not sure they're his?"
"We're not sure that he owns any of them, but the ones with the dotted lines are the ones that are disappearing. Liquidation or termination papers are on file with state governments or, if they're offshore, the appropriate foreign government, but we don't know where the assets went." Sam rubbed his face then picked up his cup of coffee, wrinkling his nose. He always disliked drinking coffee after it had cooled, Myka remembered. "Houses, cars, jewelry. Who knows, maybe he was storing uranium or smallpox in them, but they're gone."
The spreadsheet with the blown deals, the organization chart with the disappearing subsidiaries. Sam didn't believe a rival was launching an attack against Burdette, he believed that Burdette was going to flee with all the "currency" (weapons, drugs, money, who knew what else) he would need for the rest of his life. He would reestablish himself in a country that didn't have an extradition agreement with the US, one in which the laws were few and their enforcement lax. He would put himself . . . and Helena . . . beyond their reach. "It's not what you think," she said, watching Sam appraise her over the rim of his cup as he reluctantly sipped his coffee.
"Tell me what I'm thinking." He had said it to her when they were working on cases together in happier times, when the challenge would have a flirtatious, loving lilt, not only because he knew that she knew what he was thinking, but also because he knew she agreed with it. There was no loving lilt now to his voice, no flirtation to the challenge. He didn't doubt that she knew what he was thinking, but he doubted that she agreed with the conclusion he had drawn. He wanted her to say it aloud, trusting that she would find it harder to deny if she was the one who said it.
So she told him what he was thinking, hoping, as she followed the trail he had prepared for her, that she wouldn't find his logic irresistible, not because it couldn't be true but because she had already considered the possibility and dismissed it. After all, she knew better than anyone what Helena was capable of doing; she had lived with the consequences. "You think Helena and Burdette have been playing a long con, her 'inexplicable' decision to take the fall for the Advantage Financial scam being the start of it. Not only was she not surprised by the verdict, she was counting on going to prison. A mother separated from her child, she's desperate to be reunited with her, and she's willing to do anything, even work with the FBI and Justice. We think we get someone who could deliver Burdette to us, while Burdette gets someone on the inside who'll tell him everything we have on him." The only reaction from Sam was the faintest hint of a smile, and Myka relentlessly pushed herself to continue, wondering just how long she had been thinking this, building a case against Helena at the same time she was letting herself fall in love with her. She sounded so calm, so rational, so . . . convincing. "Why is she doing it, working with the man who had her father and brother killed? Maybe she and Burdette are one of those inextricably twined, combustible couples, like Liz and Dick. They hate each other, but they can't get enough of each other. Or maybe it's Bowdoin. She knows where the art is hidden, but she's lacked the resources to take it without putting every law enforcement agency on the alert. It's a contract with Burdette, not a love affair. If she can find out what we have on him, he'll help her get the Bowdoin art out of the country." She paused before adding humorlessly, "Or she loves him and she wants the Bowdoin art her father stole. Using someone, loving someone, it's all the same to people like Helena, right?" She turned away from him and walked to the far wall, pretending to inspect the framed degrees from Columbia and Yale.
"Wow." He whistled appreciatively. "You went even further than I was thinking." She heard the squeak of his chair and the soft pad of his feet as he joined her. "Now you get why I'm not going to go to bat for her with my bosses and try to get them to put pressure on Winslow. It's not because I think she's a lowlife." His laugh was equally humorless. "Don't get me wrong, she's a lowlife, but my decisions in this office aren't personal."
"The more she feels squeezed, the more she'll want to wrap things up and the more she'll lean on Burdette." Myka stared at the ornate script of his law degree until the letters blurred into squiggly lines. She had a degree as fancy-looking at the bottom of a box in her bedroom closet. The law school that had awarded it to her wasn't as prestigious as Yale's, but it was a good school. Helena hadn't gone to law school. She had barely finished art school, but she was smart. She had managed to pull off her own art heist, and she was more than capable of pulling off a con like this. She had managed to carry on an affair with a Marston while seducing a naïve FBI agent; she could share a bed with Burdette if she had to.
"It's also true that it's a bad climate for Justice to be seen asking for favors." Sam's hand was outstretched and hovering near her, as if he were thinking he might touch her arm, confirm their seeming solidarity.
Myka stepped to the side, away from his hand. "The problem is, if I believe all that I said, I believe that people can't change."
"No," he countered, "not people, just Helena."
"You haven't seen her with Christina," Myka said, dismayed by the pleading note in her voice. "She's not that woman anymore."
"Her role model was Jim Wells. He didn't nurture his kids, he devoured them. You know that becoming a parent doesn't miraculously make someone a better person, Myka."
Helena had been with them for a little less than a month. Twenty-five days, if you were counting, which Myka was. Twenty-five days, and Helena had managed to all but close two of their open cases, one the theft of a Picasso from the Hampton home of a pharmaceutical company CEO, the other forged celebrity autographs sold online. She had gotten the soon-to-be ex-wife of the CEO to confess to stealing the Picasso by convincing her that her accomplice, an up-and-coming young art dealer who was also her lover, was planning to run off with the Picasso and her 19-year-old daughter. After a phone call and a visit to an "old family friend," a visit during which Myka and Pete remained in an unmarked agency sedan outside the gates of a crime boss's estate, she had been able to identify the forger and his middle man.
Looking at her in the cube across the aisle, Myka tried to console herself with the thought that she and Pete had been on the right track in both investigations. They knew the CEO's estranged wife had been involved in removing the Picasso from her former home just as the men whom Helena had fingered for the autograph forgeries were among the suspects that she and Pete had identified. Helena hadn't figured out anything they hadn't, she had had more . . . leverage. If FBI agents could count crime bosses among their closest friends, their success rate would go through the roof. However, when your leverage was limited to the threat of prison, which a crime boss's high-priced attorney would view (not incorrectly) as all smoke and no gun, or the dubious promise of immunity, which the same attorney would counsel his client not to take because if the FBI had more they wouldn't be offering immunity, your work needed to be very, very good, and very, very good work took time. Even Helena's win on the stolen Picasso hadn't resulted from any brilliant analysis. She knew the boyfriend art dealer socially, and she knew he had a history of playing up to, and sometimes actually romancing, the wives of his collectors, while seeing younger women on the side. When she joined Myka and Pete in another "interview" of the CEO's wife at her Lexington Avenue condo, she didn't miss the picture of the woman's daughter. Though the story of betrayal Helena subsequently spun wasn't true, it had confirmed the woman's fears, and she had been all too eager to place the lion's share of the blame on her lover.
"If you stare at me any harder, you'll burn holes through my blouse, and you can't afford to replace it," Helena said. She had the contents of a case file spread out over her workstation, and her head remained bent over the documents. Today she was wearing black, houndstooth slacks and a blazer with a black, gray, and white plaid design, the latter currently draped over the back of her chair. The plaid had a larger check than the houndstooth, and Myka was worried more about the eclipse-like effect of the outfit on her eyes than their ability to ignite Helena's blouse, which was the least objectionable item of clothing she had on, being a simple plum-colored silk blend. "Why this? Why now? What do you and your father talk about during Sunday dinner, which of his friends you're going to finger for us next?" They were questions Myka had been thinking about ever since Helena's consulting arrangement with the FBI had started, but she hadn't planned on asking them and certainly not blurting them out like this.
Helena didn't turn her chair around, but she cocked her head to give Myka a partly amused, partly skeptical look. "Sunday dinner . . . first, Jim would need to get up before 3:00 in the afternoon for that to happen, and then the cheap bastard would probably stick me with the bill." She added dryly, "Wellses don't cook." After a pause that had Myka thinking the conversation might be over, Helena said, "Second, my father has no friends. Friends, he would tell me, are only competitors who haven't yet knifed you in the back."
"Is that what this is?" Myka gestured toward the case file on Helena's workstation.
"My knifing him in the back? 'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child?'" Helena laughed, but her expression quickly sobered. "I'm no saint, Myka. I've done some dodgy things in my life, and I've been lucky. Not so much my brother Charlie, it occurred to me not too long ago that he's spent virtually a third of his life in prison, usually on account of one of our father's scams. Something would go wrong, and it was Charlie who'd be on the wrong end of it, never Jim." She turned her chair around, primly laying her hands flat on her legs. Her hair was drawn back into a ponytail, and the high angle of cheekbones and the black brushstroke of brows and eyelashes above them were all the more dramatic without the softening fall of hair. Helena Wells was a very striking-looking woman, and Myka wished that the observation hadn't come to her so easily. Helena might be on the right side of the law now, but she was still Jim Wells's daughter, and Myka didn't want anything to distract her from keeping that fact uppermost in her mind. "I can't say I'm doing this for Charlie because he may be one of the con artists I'll lead us to, but if he can see it . . . there is a way out of the life our father made for us." She finished with an intensity that Myka hadn't heard from her before, and, in spite of herself, she was touched by the sincerity in Helena's voice. "I suppose you and your father talked about everything under the sun at Sunday dinner. Are you following in his footsteps, Agent Bering, hoping to live up to Sheriff Bering or DA Bering?" And there was it again, the mockery, the derisive edge, and Myka felt thrust back into her cube although she had never left it.
Ordinarily she would respond to Helena's sarcasm with silence or a blunt redirection to the work at hand, and she was tempted to turn her back to Helena and continue typing up her notes. Instead, she mirrored Helena's cocking of her head and said as sardonically, "You mean by choosing a job that has a decent salary and great benefits, offers a chance for advancement, and helps keep this country and its citizens safe? No, Ms. Wells, I'm not following in my father's footsteps, I'm kicking him in the ass. As for Sunday dinners, they were always better when my father had nothing to say to me."
Helena's eyes widened in surprise. Before the silence grew too awkward, she dipped her head in a comradely nod. "Stranger things have happened, I suppose, than finding out we have something in common." She stood, moving her feet but not actually moving away from her chair. If Myka didn't know better, she would think Helena was feeling embarrassed . . . or shy. "I was going down to the coffee shop for a cup of tea. Would you like a coffee? My treat."
"A pity coffee? I really must have sounded pathetic."
Helena's smile was wide and warm and genuine. "How about a 'To hell with bad dads' coffee? Regular, cream, no sugar."
"Observant."
"My father did have a few good things to teach me. Always know who you're working with."
"Because you never know when they're going to knife you in the back," Myka said dryly.
"Precisely."
Myka tried to put her conversation with Sam out of her head instead of arguing with the image of him that was also in her head, exhausted, grim, intent on convincing her that Helena was deceiving her, all of them, once again. There were other explanations for the so-called mysterious activities within the Burdette organization – in fact, she had the same ticklish feeling she would get when something was just beyond her ability to recall it – but trying to out-argue Sam, her version of him anyway, would only result in her questioning her counter-narrative. She had eight years of experience of coming to the conclusion, over and over, that Helena had never told her the truth about anything. Though now she was willing to believe that Helena had been a victim, albeit a lesser one, of her own con, falling for the agent it had been her mission to deceive, she had had less than six months to get used to the new story she was telling herself.
The best way of shutting out Sam's insidious voice (or was it hers) was to task herself with reviewing a file. So she chose to reread the large one on Jim Wells as well as the slimmer one that was available on Ted Bonaventura. On the ever less-likely chance that Burdette would reach out to Helena about the Bowdoin art, they needed to know or at least have a plausible idea about where the works were hidden. She needed to know in the event that Sam and the part of her convinced that it was only a matter of when Helena betrayed her, not if, were right. She had read Jim Wells's file countless times, but she focused on the information, unsurprisingly sketchy, on his earlier years. No one had the time to write a biography, but perhaps there was a reference to the "boys of St. Mary's" or a close childhood friendship. It wasn't that she believed for a minute that some long-forgotten schoolfriend knew where the Bowdoin art was, but no one scouring Jim Wells's activities and associates for the past 20-odd years had unearthed a solid clue, and at least the "boys of St. Mary's" was something she hadn't come across before. The childhood marked by separation from one or both parents for long periods of time, the truancy, and the juvenile record, the only thing separating Gentleman Jim from other career criminals was his obvious talent as an artist. His father, Herbert (Bert), had been a petty thief; his World War II service mainly spent in jail for stealing Army supplies and selling them on the black market. Grandfather, father, the Wells family line hadn't given Helena much to work with. Myka could say the same about the Berings. Unlike her father who claimed to have been an Olympic-caliber skier but had precious little evidence to support it, her grandfather had played in the minor leagues and had been called up to pitch for the White Sox. One game, and he had lived off of it for decades as he has passed from job to job, ending up as a sanitation worker in Denver. Maybe she was more like her father and grandfather than she was willing to admit; instead of losing herself in dreams of becoming a professional athlete, she had lost herself in a romantic fantasy that had blinded her to her lover's scam.
"What malfeasance does your ex-husband believe I've committed?" Helena had taken a perch on the far corner of Myka's workstation, but despite the breeziness of her question and the casualness with which she was sitting on the workstation, there was worry in her eyes.
"He was frustrated and wanted an opportunity to vent, that's all," Myka said quietly.
"He didn't hesitate to call me out on my failure to give him Nate. He didn't send me away so he could vent about me in private." She shook her head and waved her hand at Myka irritably. "I don't mean to put you in a spot." Changing the subject, she said, "It's after 3:00 you know, did you have lunch?" She answered her own question. "Of course not. I only have a few minutes before I have to meet with Leena, or I would drag you to a sandwich shop. Promise me you'll eat something that you can't get out of a vending machine."
"I'll eat before I check in on you tonight." Myka was conscious of the flush building into her face. She sounded stilted to her own ears. She wondered how much of an open secret it was in the office that their was more than a working partnership.
Helena's smile was both knowing and a little sad. "If you could put off the 'check-in' until tomorrow night, I'd appreciate it. Tonight's a strategy session with Jemma and our attorney to come up with a plan to defeat the Winslows. Unfortunately, we don't have many weapons to stop them, and now, based on how this morning turned out, fewer than I had been hoping for."
Boxes of 30-year-old legal files and the reluctant assistance of a half-reformed hacker weren't likely to cheer Helena up, so Myka didn't find it difficult to keep silent about her Hail Mary of an attempt to prevent Ben and his father from taking Christina away permanently. "Who's watching Christina?"
"Now that her collarbone is practically healed, Ben's decided he wants to play nurse," Helena said sarcastically as she slipped off the corner of the workstation. "Make sure you eat, and I'll see you later." Her look was warmer than her words, and as her eyelashes fluttered down, Myka could almost feel it as a brush of lips against her cheek.
Although she had spent years filling her evenings with work and, as a nightcap of sorts, punishing workouts, Myka succumbed to restlessness as the office emptied out by six. Only a few weeks had elapsed since she and Helena had made love after eight years of separation; she should still be asking herself in a stunned voice how that could have happened instead of asking herself what she was going to do to make the evening go by faster. Yet it felt as natural now, seeing Helena at the end of her day, as it had the first time, and knowing that she wouldn't made the hours stretch endlessly. She left before seven, which was a rarity, and tacked on an extra half-hour to her normal hour workout, taking the rust off some self-defense moves with one of the trainers on the floor. Afterward, she picked up a stir-fry at a Chinese restaurant she hadn't been frequenting nearly as much since Helena had reappeared in her life. She thought she felt her phone vibrate, but she wasn't able to check it until she was in the elevator up to her apartment. There wasn't a voicemail, but she recognized the number as Parker's. Her knees went wobbly, but she forced herself to leave the elevator and walk to the end of the hall. Once inside her apartment, she dropped the stir-fry on the counter, no longer in a mood to eat it.
She was about to redial the number when the phone vibrated again. Parker. "What did she do this time?" Myka knew she sounded rattled, but she saw Sam's face triumphant and smug.
"She called me to let me know the monitor was going to go off because she's coming to see you, Myka. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wasn't going to wait. I'll have to write it up . . . ."
Relieved, apprehensive, and frustrated all in one, Myka said, "I know, Parker. I'll take care of it on my end." She flung open the refrigerator door and took out a beer. The good news was that Helena wasn't fleeing the country, with or without Nate; the bad news was that something had compelled her to set off her monitor again. She was on her second beer and still poking at her lukewarm stir-fry when her phone vibrated for a third time. Helena. She wanted to be buzzed up.
Helena looked more composed than she had in Christina's hospital room, but she was too pale and though she tried to joke that she would have arrived sooner had she taken one of the not-in-service subways that were the city's current commuting headache, there was no laughter reflected in her eyes. "The hearing's been rescheduled. It's been pushed out a couple of weeks because the good senator wants to be there, and apparently everyone, even the judge, revolves around him like the sun. I suppose I should be glad, because it gives us more time to prepare, yet . . . ." She trailed off, and Myka patted the cushion beside her but Helena continued to stand next to the breakfast bar, as if she might need to lean on it for support or use it to propel her back through the door and out into the night. She was in the room, she was talking, but the pent-up energy was palpable. Helena was trembling. She was probably one more misgiving away from kidnapping Christina and heading for the border, any border.
"He kept correcting me, the attorney. 'The judge won't make a decision on their petition for full custody until Jemma's fitness is assessed.' 'Even if he rules in favor of Ben, the revocation of your parental rights won't be something he rushes to judgement about.'" Helena perfectly captured the not-so-faint condescension Myka had heard in countless male attorneys talking to their female clients. She distractedly sent a hand through her hair. "Ben and his father . . . they must have hired an army of investigators. It's not just the broken collarbone. Every time Jemma was late getting her to preschool or picking her up, even the one morning she wasn't home when Ben tried to drop Christina off. He was more than an hour early and hadn't bothered to call her first. The wankers even interrogated Christina's preschool teachers. One of them remembers when they took the kids to the zoo that Christina asked where the jailbird exhibit was because her nonna told her the Wellses were jailbirds. My mother's going to look like a doddering old fool by the time the Winslows' attorneys are done, 83 instead of 63." Helena covered her face with her hands, groaning through her fingers, "No one can keep up with a four-year-old child. I can't keep up with her."
Myka got up from the sofa to gently stroke Helena's shoulders. She wasn't a hugger by nature, and Helena was holding herself so tightly she was practically thrumming, her body all but shouting "I'm trying to hold it together" and "I'm falling apart" simultaneously. "What do you need me to do?"
"Impregnating me wouldn't hurt." Myka's eyebrows climbed her forehead, and Helena traced the arch of one with a fingertip. "When our attorney isn't being patronizing, I'm convinced he wants to be on the Winslow team. While he's cautioning me not to despair, he's listing everything the Winslows have to offer that Jemma and I can't, chief among them being a baby brother or sister. He keeps harping on the Winslow family as though I'm shagging clients on the streetcorner and leaving Christina in the care of a senile housemaid." Her expression grew wistful. "Remember when I used to joke that by sheer effort alone, you'd manage to knock me up? I wish I could sweep into the courtroom with a train of little Mykas and Helenas behind me."
"What do you need me to do?" Myka repeated, her gaze as steady and supportive as she could make it.
"I need you to remember what you promised me, back when you still hated me. You promised me that you would keep Christina safe, that you'd watch over her." Myka recalled how nervous she had been, eight years, 80 years not long enough to get over everything Helena had done to her, good and bad. Then she entered the room and saw Helena on the other side of the table, older, but still Helena. It was easier to accept now that if Helena had asked her to slay dragons or pry Excalibur from its stone to protect her daughter, she would have said yes. She was helpless to do anything but love Christina because she had never stopped loving Christina's mother.
"I won't press you about what Sam had to tell you in private, because I suspect it was about me. I hope it was about me," Helena said, "because I don't want it to have been about you. If he thinks you've been compromised, that I've compromised you, if he threatened to have Pete remove you from the investigation . . . that can't happen, Myka." She shook her head, her mouth thinning in apprehension. "If my feeble attempt to lure Nate pays off, he'll bring me down with him, one way or another. If it doesn't pay off soon, the FBI and the Department of Justice aren't going to show me any mercy. I'll be sent back to prison. Either way, I lose Christina and the Winslows didn't have to lift a finger. You have to be here for her."
"I am," Myka said patiently, "that hasn't changed. It won't change."
"You don't understand . . . . What I'm trying to say is, this thing between us, us, it stops tonight if it's getting in the way of . . . she has to come first. Now do you understand?"
Helena's hands, cold, damp with worry, were clutching hers. The knuckles were white with the force of her grip, and the pain was all the more intense because Myka could see Helena's hands squeezing her fingers, but she didn't protest. She did understand. Helena, believing she was on the verge of losing her daughter, was seeing threats everywhere. Yet there was another way to understand Helena's rushing over, her declaration that they as a "they" were (maybe, possibly) over. It was theater, coolly calculated theater, with one end in mind, to rid her of any doubts that her private talk with Sam might have nourished.
She could picture his face, clean-shaven, middle-aged, unremarkable. The face of a high school math teacher, computer programmer, middle manager. In actuality, he was a con artist who had targeted vulnerable senior citizens in a telemarketing scam that pretended to sell burial plots and policies to cover funeral expenses. As part of her unending punishment for failing to prevent the Marston Gallery heist, Myka was on loan to any team needing an extra body. So rather than spending her days interviewing museum curators and private collectors off Central Park and in the Hamptons (though, to be honest, brushing the durable weave of her business suits against office or casual furniture that would cost her the down payment on a house or her annual salary didn't happen all that often), she busted minimum wage workers manning phones in half-empty strip malls. That morning the agents had been tipped off that they could find the owner of Rest Easy Services, Inc. visiting one of his offices in a strip mall outside Bayonne. They had found him haranguing an employee for ending a call with a 90-year-old woman without a sale. Jesus Christ, Myka heard him snarl, she's got one leg in the grave already. How hard can it be to ratchet up the costs and get her to thinking that her family will put her outside in a Hefty bag when she goes to glory?
She reminded me of my grandmom. I couldn't do it to her.
I know people who would slice you and dice you and put you in a Hefty bag for $20. How about that? Now get back to work and make me some sales.
The bravado hadn't lasted after they had arrested him. For a chance at a deal, he was more than willing to tell all and roll over on the funeral directors who were in league with him. He grew expansive, dwelling on details, and the other agents, bored or anxious to turn to other work, left her with him to wrap up the interrogation. She couldn't screw that up. None of them said it, but she could see it in their eyes. She never grew used to the wave of shame she felt when she saw that look. She waited for it to pass. Go on, she said.
Some were suspicious, he admitted. I always told my employees that if they heard 'Let me put my son on the line' or something like that to cut the call. But others, well, you can always find people who'll believe they can get something for nothing. A hundred bucks for a policy to cover thousands in funeral expenses? Another hundred for a nice burial plot? I mean, come on. They deserved to be swindled. A fool's still a fool, no matter how old he is. And that's just business, not the sweet part. The sweet part? When they'd get cold feet, start feeling they're being taken for a ride, I'd tell my folks to back off, encourage the old fools to think it over a bit, but lay it on thick how this is all for their benefit. Hell, when I made calls myself, I'd even warn them there were grifters out there who'd try to scam 'em like this. Then they would get all sorry and concerned they'd miss out on a great deal because you were being so nice to them, even warning them about the real criminals. They'd practically beg you for a policy and usually the most expensive one you had. You could stick on all these extras and they'd be giving you their credit card number, $400, $500 to charge on it.
He gave her a self-satisfied grin. I'm not saying it's better than sex, but having 'em say 'Give me that $1000 policy' after they were thinking you were just out to fleece them, it was a rush. That feeling, it was almost as good as getting the money. Almost.
Was that what Helena was feeling down deep? Her eyes might be starting to glisten with tears and her hands, with the thousands of pounds of pressure they were exerting, might leave Myka's a mangled mess, but was Helena sensing – and enjoying – victory? Like the old fools who ended up paying three times the price for a policy that didn't exist in the first place, Myka saw herself doubling down on her gamble on Helena's innocence, an innocence that had always been more wished for than real. Helena was the daughter and granddaughter of men who, as Sam had put it, devoured their own children. How could she possibly be different? Either Helena was genuinely concerned that she would lose her daughter or she was acting the distraught mother to convince Myka that the only thing on her mind was Christina's safety and happiness. A mother so frantic, so wild with despair couldn't be simultaneously planning to abscond with her daughter and several million dollars' worth of art.
But that was the old Myka thinking, the old Myka for whom people were good or evil, never a mix of the two. The new Myka, who was really only the old Myka grown older and, just maybe, a little bit wiser, knew it was rarely that simple. Helena was nearly maddened by the possibility that the Winslows and, if not them, then the FBI or Justice or even Burdette would take her daughter away from her but not so maddened that she couldn't use her fear to push and, yes, manipulate those nearest to her to do what they could to prevent it. Helena was less worried about the content of Sam's revelations – whatever she thought they might be – than their consequences for her ability to keep her daughter. Helena could love without losing sight of the fact that love was its own form of power.
Helena relaxed her hold but Myka didn't pull her hands back. Instead she left them, throbbing and probably bruised, hooked weakly by Helena's fingers. His name finally came to her, Ed Palmer. She had gone to his sentencing. She had gone to a lot of sentencings those first few years after Marston. She wasn't sure why. She knew it had to do with Helena, but whether it was because the con artist being sentenced was always Helena somewhere in the back of her mind or because she needed to see the sometimes grieving, sometimes vengeful faces of his victims who were also always Cecily and Big Daddy Marston in the same dark place in her mind, she couldn't, and didn't especially want to, figure out. Ed had grown heavier and older in the months that had passed since she had last seen him. His apology to the victims and their families had sounded stilted, but the glances he had given his own family, his wife and teenaged daughter, were unmistakably anguished. The plea deal had only reduced his sentence, not given him immunity, and the nice home in Bayonne, the his and hers BMWs, the daughter's private school education, all gone now. His wife and daughter were living with her parents. He loved his own family and yet had laughed at the memory of hurting another's.
Snakes and mice. If only the world could be so evenly divided. But what made it complicated was that someone could be a snake one day and a mouse the next, and what made it unbearable at times was that the person sleeping beside you was the snake . . . or she was the mouse you were going to eat. "Christina will come first, but not tonight. Tonight," Myka summoned a smile that she hoped was free of sadness, "tonight, we're going to be busy making babies."
She heard Helena shakily suck in a breath. She took a fistful (and it hurt to make her hand a fist) of the thin cotton sweater Helena was wearing and yanked it up. Helena's lips eagerly met hers, and Helena's arms went around her back, pressing her closer. The last time, the only time Helena had been in this apartment, her eyes had wandered over its meager furnishings, its absence of anything other than a faint, seemingly permanent aroma of takeout to indicate that someone occupied it. She had asked about the divorce, and Myka remembered telling her that Sam had wanted it, wanted it precisely because she had been too indifferent to suggest it herself. She ate here, worked here, slept here (mainly alone but sometimes not), but she had never lived here. She nipped at Helena's neck, unbuttoning and unzipping Helena's jeans. Helena was moaning into her mouth and parting her legs, inviting access. Myka pushed aside the panel of Helena's panties, biting Helena's neck harder than she had intended because Helena was already so wet.
They could take each other on the sofa, like they had in Helena's studio when they had first made love, but at least Helena's sofa had been long and deep and soft, unlike the on-clearance, plus-size loveseat Myka had gotten at an outlet store. Instead they stumbled, entwined, to the bedroom, stopping to allow Myka to stroke into her, Helena moaning and crying out but refusing to come. "Not with my pants around my ankles, love," she gasped. "I intend for my legs to be locked around your neck." Inside the doorway, Myka hesitated, unsure whether to leave the light on or off. The last person to have shared this bed with her was Sam, and Helena would know that.
Helena leaned across, fumbling for the switch. She turned around in Myka's arms to stare at the bed. It was a harmless-looking queen with a nice headboard. Myka approved her choice of bedframe every time she looked at the headboard. How else could you comfortably read late into the night? She thought Helena might ask her how many others had been in the bed besides Sam, to get a good count of the number of ghosts she would be battling. There were no ghosts, just a few equally lonely souls Myka had met, sometimes at the gym, sometimes during an investigation, sometimes in a restaurant's bar late at night. The encounters hadn't been especially awkward or dispiriting; they had been utilitarian. Sometimes you got tired of making yourself come and at least the face over yours wasn't hers.
Helena turned away from the bed. "It's nice, but we're going to make it even better." She unbuttoned Myka's shirt, unzipped and pulled down her jeans. Just the brush of Helena's fingers across her stomach had made Myka's nipples hard, and Helena bit and nibbled them through her sports bra. By the time they were naked and between sheets that, if wrinkled and creased, Myka was grateful to know were clean, they were both ready to come. When Sam was in the bed with her, she had been silent for the most part, focused on release, but she heard herself as she worked her way down Helena's body, murmuring, uttering her own small moans and sighs as Helena's cries became louder and more demanding. Then Helena's legs were around her, the monitor rubbing and nudging her skin as it tended to do, and Myka was half-supporting Helena's ass in the air as her fingers drove in. Helena became wetter, her muscles looser, and Myka stroked Helena's clit with her tongue, sensing that Helena was close. Then Helena stopped, her legs unlocked, and she bent forward, her hands grabbing at Myka's ass, pulling her up until Myka was having to hold onto the top of the headboard as Helena slipped down and latched her mouth onto her. It didn't take long; Helena was sucking everything out of her, and Myka's hips were thrashing to help her. She threw her head back and she wasn't sure what she said, it could have been things about Bowdoin and Marston, snakes and mice, people being good and bad both. Eventually she stopped but the tremors of her orgasm were still rippling through her, and Helena held her until they stopped, too.
Helena was smiling at her, a mixture of love and cockiness that Myka had seen more often when they were first together. It was silly to tell her that she had never come like that for anyone else, Helena already knew it. With an entirely different inflection than she had used before, she asked, "What do you need me to do?"
Helena laughed. "Nothing. Do you think I was strong enough to withstand that? However," her smile turned wicked, "I believe I'll be in working order again very soon." She circled one of Myka's nipples with a finger, teasing it to a peak. "And so will you, it appears."
"That's your power over me," Myka said.
"It works both ways. Don't ever forget that," Helena said it lightly, but she was no longer smiling.
Myka curved into Helena's body, pretending to doze until the arm that was draped over her hip began to move in circles across her stomach and Helena's hips began to press against her ass. She rolled Helena onto her stomach and reached between her cheeks to find her clit and the warm, wet opening of her vagina. Helena raised herself on her forearms to give Myka more room, her moans triggering pulses that traveled to Myka's own clit. The connection between them, their desire for each other, it had never died, just gone into hibernation for a while. It was as elemental as cons and marks, predators and prey. Myka didn't know how not to respond to it. It was stronger than anything she had felt in her life and hearing Helena call to her, her voice ragged but imperative as she demanded more, Myka could only say yes.