Despite his grumbling that Helena's main priority was to bring in Burdette, Pete agreed to Lee and Jennifer's request to borrow her for their investigation into a massive fraud involving a jewelry wholesaler. Counterfeit designer watches and rings had been sold to retailers throughout the country, and Helena's knowledge of how such a large-scale scam could have been conducted so successfully was more valuable, as she was the first to admit, than her brainstorming with Myka on how else she might inveigle Burdette into a trap.
"Not that I don't find your surreptitious chewing on a Twizzler utterly charming," she said, dropping by Myka's cube on her to meet Lee and Jennifer for an interview with yet another victimized Manhattan jeweler, "but reviewing Nate's file for the 30th time is not how I operate."
"Then the laurels will be all mine when, on the 31st reading, I find the evidence that puts him away." Myka shut the desk drawer that held her stash of Twizzlers.
Helena looked pointedly at the drawer, but the amusement faded as she said quietly, "You don't know how much I wish it would work like that."
"I think I have a fair idea."
Yet Myka wasn't always at her desk reviewing files. Having a special assignment, especially one that was subject to increasing criticism, didn't provide much in the way of perks, but she enjoyed the ability to leave the office for hours at a time without having to account for how she was spending her time. She was spending it mainly in the dining room of Irene Frederic's home, going through her late husband's papers. They were filed in bankers boxes in neatly labeled hanging files. Personal files were sometimes intermixed with the business ones; given Lawrence Frederic's obvious meticulousness, Myka assumed that other hands had been responsible for the inclusion of folders stuffed with invoices for car repairs, dental work, and home maintenance in between the business ones. She set those aside. She wasn't here to build a psychological profile of him, although, as she paged through the files, she felt she had a sense of him. In one of the oldest files, Myka found yellowed law school transcripts and notes on his first cases as a self-employed attorney. Summaries of evictions and rental deposits retained by the landlords that had been motivated more by bigotry than profit. One, written in Mr. Frederic's painstakingly readable handwriting, concluded dispassionately, "The property manager's records show that an eviction notice was sent to Mrs. Elder, a black woman, after one late rent payment, while several white tenants had never received eviction notices despite having been late with their rent multiple times." There was no indication in the file whether Mr. Frederic had won his suit against the landlord, although a copy of the bill he had sent to Mrs. Elder hinted at a steep discounting of his fee.
She felt rather than saw Mrs. Frederic enter the dining room. A rustle of fabric, a hint of perfume, but more importantly, every one of Myka's nerve endings had begun vibrating with tension. Not alarm, she confirmed to herself, tension. Alarm would suggest that, on some level, she was afraid of Mrs. Frederic, a retiree, a grandmother. Silly, on the one hand, yet, on the other, one of the most hardened criminals she had ever encountered was a 75-year-old grandmother who was still running cons out of her room in the nursing home.
"You're very methodical, aren't you, Agent Bering? Begin at the beginning. However, I'm not sure that there's much that helpful in those files. He was renting out a back room in a secondhand furniture store when he started, and his clients sometimes had to pay him on the installment plan. I doubt you'll find anything about Mark Winslow."
It was offered gently, but it was criticism all the same. Myka looked up from the box and met Mrs. Frederic's eyes, skeptically narrowed behind half-moon glasses. "I've learned the hard way that crime can have a long history. It's easier to follow the breadcrumbs if you're not having to retrace your steps." Her smile as cool as her host's, she added, "Besides, it gives me a better understanding of your husband's character, how much weight I should put on the information in these files."
The smile dissolved into a surprised bark of laughter, but Mrs. Frederic was amused, not offended. "What's the opinion you've formed of him so far?"
"I've hardly gotten started, but he seems committed, diligent, and not one to let anger rule his actions."
Mrs. Frederic nodded. "Oh, he was angry, burned with it, but he said he best served his clients when he used it as fuel. He knew that to white judges and juries an impassioned black attorney was just an angry black man." She paused. "What else have you learned?"
"That you must have been a saint." There was no surprised bark of laughter from Mrs. Frederic this time, but there was a chuckle. "You had a husband who discounted his fees and allowed his clients to pay over time. Those must have been lean years."
"They were, especially after we started having children, but I believed in him and in the work we were doing. I would have gone on scrimping and patching things together, but Lawrence, he wanted so much more for the boys than he had had. He had gotten into college on a track and field scholarship, and he felt, wrongly I thought, that his professors never took him seriously because of it." She cast a glance at Myka's empty coffee cup. "I put a new brew on." When she looked at Myka again, there was no mistaking the sadness in her face. "He got on at a white shoe law firm looking for their token person of color. He worked twice as hard as the other attorneys but was last to be made partner. The work of his heart, he squeezed it in on weekends and vacations, until he could retire and return to it again full time."
"No trips to Hawaii or Greece?" Myka prodded gently.
"Three weeks in Hawaii as a retirement present and a few trips to the Caribbean, but Lawrence's heart finally gave out five years after he retired." Mrs. Frederic picked up Myka's cup to take it back with her into the kitchen. "The senior partners of the firm attended the funeral, and one of them told me that he always thought Lawrence had 'overworked' himself." She issued a disdainful huff. "The truth was that his heart had been broken too often."
Myka checked in on Claudia but not before she had finished her second cup of perfectly brewed coffee. She didn't bother to ask Mrs. Frederic her secret, despite the kitchen boasting nothing more sophisticated than a Mr. Coffee, because all Mrs. Frederic would give her would be a culinary cliché on the order of "Trial and error, Agent Bering, trial and error," which would be belied by the sardonic glint in her eyes.
Claudia was holed up in the study, two laptops, a portable printer, a glass of milk, and a sleeve of saltines vying for room on the desk. She looked up from one of the laptops to stare biliously at Myka. "You are the last thing that me and my queasy stomach need right now."
Myka unrepentantly said, "Bad case of morning sickness?"
"Considering that it's 2:30 in the afternoon, let's go with all-day sickness." Claudia's mouth drew down into a thin, irritable line as she suppressed a burp. "I wasn't having this problem until you took your jackboot and kicked my door in. I don't think my baby likes you either."
"The sooner you give me something interesting to pursue, the sooner I'll leave you alone." Myka moved a bankers box from a chair, brushed its seat, and set it in front of the desk. She sat down and clasped her hands on top of the desk and leaned forward. "If you don't want to see my face in your dreams tonight, show me what you've found."
Cramming a handful of saltines into her mouth, Claudia dropped her head below the desk and bobbed back up with a manila folder. "Knock yourself out," she said through a spray of crumbs.
Flipping through the contents, Myka rapidly concluded that the pages were from different files, some dating back to the late '70s and others to the mid-'80s, but none more recent than 1989. The references to Mark Winslow changed over the years, from Mr. Winslow to State Senator Winslow to Congressman Winslow. Helpfully highlighted were references to Arcadia LLC and, more frequently in newer documents, ARC LLC II, ARC LLC III, and ARC LLC IV-VI. Although Lawrence Frederic never explicitly stated that Winslow owned or was formally associated with the entities, the implication was clear. In 1978, Mr. Frederic, acting on behalf of tenants in neighboring SRO hotels in the Bronx, attempted to block their sale to a real estate development firm, Arcadia LLC. The notice and legal requirements that would have likely delayed the sale until additional review could be completed were magically waived by a borough official known to do business with Mark Winslow. That was only one example. As Myka skimmed the documents, Claudia's crunching of her saltines and slurping of her milk an unpleasant accompaniment, she realized that while the names of the properties and the LLCs changed over the years, the outcomes were almost always the same, low-income housing or real estate zoned for low income housing sold, often by ethically, if not legally, suspect maneuvers. The one person, other than Lawrence Frederic himself, who seemed always to have some connection to the transactions was Mark Winslow.
In some instances, his role seemed tangential or inconsequential at best, but in others, he seemed to be actively facilitating the sales. As a state senator, he sponsored or co-sponsored bills that would remove or reduce regulations governing real estate construction and development, and Mr. Frederic had identified, down the margins of each page in pen, the names of the government officials and businessmen with whom Winslow was known to have close relationships. It would have taken Mr. Frederic hours of research, reading society and business pages, subtly questioning acquaintances and associates to capture the networks in which Mark Winslow operated. As a professional, Myka admired the effort. As a woman who had lost a marriage to her own particular obsession – stubbornly pretending that she wasn't still obsessed with Helena Wells – she winced at the cost. By all appearances, the Frederics had had a loving marriage and a happy family, but Mrs. Frederic's words about her husband's heart being broken too many times rang in her ears.
Although she knew that her response, whether it was complimentary or dismissive, would have no effect on Claudia, Claudia's dislike of her seeming to have inextricably fused a generalized contempt for institutions with her loyalty to Helena, Myka couldn't help but start with something positive, as if Claudia were a newbie agent – or Christina. "This is a good start," she said as handed the folder back, "but it's not enough. It's supposition, not evidence. We're not going to scare Mark Winslow by bringing to light 40-year-old business deals, no matter how sketchy they were."
"Unlike you," Claudia sneered, the curl of her lip compromised by the milk mustache above it, "I'm not an idiot. I know we can't use it, but I know someone who might be able to." As Myka frowned, Claudia added impatiently, "He's not out for money, and he's not about drawing attention to himself. He's got integrity, and unlike the people you work for, he's interested in real justice."
"Which is?" Myka asked dryly.
"Making the fossil fuel and chemical corporations pay for the shitfest they've made of the world." Seeing that Myka was about to say something, Claudia cut her off. "Don't start waving your badge at me. This isn't your call. Mrs. F. already gave me permission to show this stuff to Fargo."
"What's the connection between your friend's 'environmental research,'" Myka gave her last two words an ironic emphasis, "and Winslow's habit of helping his cronies kick tenants to the curb."
"All those little ARC LLCs. There were more of them than you saw, and they developed real estate upstate and in Jersey and all sorts of places where these corporations dumped their toxic shit. The partners put houses on the sites, sold them to families, and promptly liquidated the LLCs so that when people started getting sick, there was no one to sue." Claudia paused and smiled smugly. "Do you know who Winslow's dearly departed first wife was?" Her index finger moved back and forth like a windshield wiper. "Nuh uh, not the trophy wife you're thinking of, the first wife, Christina's other grandma. She was the daughter of the Jersey version of the Dupont family. They manufactured industrial cleaners for cargo ships and containers. The waste that wasn't dumped in the ocean the family let the son-in-law and his business partners build houses on. Fargo's got, like, 10,000 dots, and he's been looking for the line that will connect them." A flush had built in Claudia's cheeks, and an adjective that Myka thought she would never use to describe her came to mind. Enthusiastic. Somewhere under the cynicism and self-interest and petty cruelty a small heart, which wasn't her baby's, beat. At least Myka was momentarily persuaded that it was possible. Then the enthusiasm gave way to gloating, and while Myka wasn't always put in mind of Joshua Donovan when she encountered his sister, the smirk and the Olympian self-regard it signaled were Joshua's. As if she were trying to underscore the resemblance, Claudia crowed, "Joshua says hacking should always be the last resort because people are their own worst enemy. They always leave shit behind them, thinking no one will ever use it against them. Winslow's no different. I think Mrs. F.'s husband has shown us where it began."
Having witnessed what he could do during the investigation in Dorchester, Myka was more receptive than Pete to Helena's suggestion that they get Joshua Donovan's help to break a counterfeit luxury goods ring. The three of them lobbying Bates to spend the money to hire Joshua would be more effective than Helena or Helena and her making the pitch. "He's good, Pete, better than anyone we have." It was late, long after everyone else, including Helena, had gone home for the night. Pete had tipped back the visitor's chair, balancing himself by propping his legs on a relatively bare spot on her workstation top. He was tearing open snack-sized packs of M&Ms left over from Halloween, the mother ship party-sized bag resting in his lap, and shaking the candies into his mouth. "Joshua can tell us who's running the site."
The site was a surprisingly professional-looking website that offered designer clothes and accessories at steeply discounted prices, which would have been a sterling example of the free market at work except for the fact that none of the items advertised on the site were actually designer. "Which means," Helena had said sardonically after clicking on several handbags and shoes for a closer inspection, "it's further proof, if we needed it, that a sucker's born every minute. The material, the stitching, the finish, horrendous." Calling the toll-free 800 number resulted in a recorded request to place an order through the website and trying to find out who had acquired the number only led to a company whose putative business number rang endlessly. It was as if were a cyberspace orphan. They had requested the payment history of the company from the main payments processors, but that information had led only to dubious overseas financial institutions that had no verifiable history of the company's owners. After coming up with several dead-ends, Myka wasn't too proud to admit that their team was stumped, and Helena had shrugged, volunteering the information that Joshua "might" be available, for a price.
Pete had resisted, suggesting instead that they work a few more leads. His mouth full of melted chocolate, he said to Myka, "For a fucking ransom, he can tell us what we can figure out on our own. I don't know what his bill was for Dorchester, but Bates about had a stroke."
"Bates is ready to have a stroke now, so what's the difference in the end?"
"The difference is that I don't trust Helena and her buddies any farther than I can throw them. Yeah, maybe we don't have Einsteins in IT, but I'm not worried that they're trying to hack into our files either."
"He'll be under the same agreements that Helena is, Pete."
"That gives me the warm fuzzies, Mykes."
In the end, he hadn't objected when Helena and Myka argued for paying a ransom to get Joshua as a consultant. When Bates asked him for his thoughts, Pete had weakly grinned and deflected the question, "You know thinking's not my strong suit." Helena had taken the nonanswer as a concession and turned away from him toward Bates, claiming with the indulgent little laugh that always made Bates' ears turn red and his hand shoot up to pat his thinning hair that "Joshua would do it just for the opportunity to say he'd worked with the FBI and," adding roguishly after a dramatic pause, "bested them." Bates's answering smile had curdled a little at that, but he had authorized Joshua to join the team as a consultant.
During the investigation in Dorchester, Myka had known Joshua only as a voice on the phone, quiet, thin, with an unsettling sly undertone, as if he were laughing at you under his breath and nastily at that. After meeting him in person, she wasn't any less convinced that he wasn't laughing at her, all of them, even Helena, under his breath. Unlike their own tech staff, he dressed in an approximation of a dress code, slacks, blazer, and a button-down shirt, but his survey, first, of the office suite, thenn the conference room into which he was ushered and, finally, the computer he was allowed to access was disdainful. His lips tugged up, not pleasantly, at the three-year-old laptop waiting for him. He had brought his own laptop, but it was immediately put into quarantine for an inspection by IT once he went through security. They had yet to give it back to him. Myka had been charged with observing his efforts to probe . Originally both she and Pete were to monitor him, but Pete had watched him go through security and shuddered in distaste. "That guy is bad news," he had murmured to Myka, his eyes on Helena who stood slightly apart from them, waiting for Joshua to exit the body scanner. "Don't ask me how, I just know that he is." After giving Joshua a quick handshake and a limp smile, Pete suddenly remembered he had a deadline to meet for a report and would Myka be a champ and excuse him?
Wasn't she always a champ? She had rolled her eyes, but she hadn't protested, and Pete had all but run from them, Joshua a walking site of infection, given Pete's speed. But she wasn't alone in the conference room with him, Helena had joined them, although Myka wasn't sure whether she was there in the self-appointed role of a cultural ambassador (unfathomable, maze-like cyber-underworld meet unfathomable, maze-like bureaucracy) or there because she didn't like the idea of someone so familiar with the Wells side of her life sitting next to an FBI agent. She was restless, shifting in her chair several times as Joshua inspected the laptop with an almost canine curiosity, his nose so close to the keyboard and ports at times that he could have been sniffing them. Myka might have thought Helena was bored except for the anxiously lingering looks, as if she were expecting to have to excuse some lapse of manners on Joshua's part. But after a last brush of his fingertips over the keyboard's surface, Joshua turned the laptop on, saying in a tone that was amused or condescending or both, "Doesn't appear to be jury-rigged, but I'm sure there's not a keystroke that's not being monitored somewhere." Lowering his voice to a stage-whisper, he said, "Maybe they'll learn something."
He quickly found the site and then spent an inordinate amount of time, Myka thought, investigating how the site worked. Perhaps what was getting under her skin was how silently he worked, barely seeming to breathe; even the clicking of the keys sounded quieter than usual. "Can I see what your IT staff found?" He smiled mockingly. "Not that I believe they found anything I haven't already discovered, but it never hurts to have your opinion confirmed." He tipped his head back and called to the ceiling, "Do you mind showing me what you found?"
Helena grimaced in irritation, but Myka passed him a folder with a redacted summary of IT's findings. He muffled a snort as he read it, saying finally, "Somebody pretty sophisticated set up this site, hmm? It's as if they knew they were going to be investigated." He closed the browser and shut the laptop. "I need my laptop. If there are concerns about my interfacing with your firewall, I'm just as happy to go down to the coffee shop in the lobby. In fact, it'll probably work better if I did."
Afterwards, even though she could never completely piece it together, she came to believe that he had smuggled a program through the FBI's firewall much earlier than that first day he visited the office. She believed it because she had ultimately concluded that the "someone pretty sophisticated" behind the TrendsetterToday site had been Joshua Donovan himself. On one of their first investigative forays into the site, the agency's IT team must have triggered a trap that allowed the program to pass through the firewall and bury itself so deep in the servers that it had gone undetected for months. In fact, the IT team never did find the program, only evidence that outside code had been introduced into their systems. Myka suspected that when Joshua "helped" them again, when he was used to root out the fake cybersecurity company, he managed to eliminate the program just as quietly – and brazenly – as he had introduced it.
It was a good con. There had been a warehouse to raid, boxes of counterfeit goods to take into possession, and criminals to arrest in connection with them. Bates had been suitably impressed by Joshua's ability, through a series of communications with the website's host about errors encountered during the ordering process, to implant software that unmasked every transmission. Eventually the IT team was able to narrow the source of the transmissions to a seedy area populated with pawn shops and check cashing offices. A CI had provided the information that identified the counterfeiters, and the agents had swooped in. The site had been dismantled, and other than some unhappy customers suddenly realizing they were in possession of fake Prada handbags and Louis Vuitton luggage, the investigation had had a successful outcome. Bates was happy, Pete and IT were happy that Joshua Donovan and his supercilious smile were no longer likely to be around, and Joshua Donovan had to be happy in whatever burrow he lived in, clutching to him his cash and his unchallenged belief in his superiority. Except that Helena looked more worried than happy for the next several days, and Myka couldn't rid herself of a faint queasiness.
She had wondered briefly if she might be pregnant, but she and Sam were very, very careful. Besides, things had started cooling off between them in a way that Myka couldn't quite explain, so her opportunities to have gotten pregnant during the TrendsetterToday investigation had been close to zero. No, she could pinpoint the queasiness to the day and almost to the time. That afternoon in the coffee shop with Joshua, drinking coffee and feeling more like a sheepdog than a guard dog as he sent message after message to the TrendsetterToday site complaining that his orders weren't going through, she had felt a sudden clenching of her stomach as he said conversationally, "You want to know how to turn someone's life upside down, Agent Bering?" He had assumed something relatively close to a genuine smile. "You need to let them believe they've beaten the odds. Just once. Then it's money you can take to the bank. Compound interest." He chuckled, amused with himself. "Maybe it's more money market account these days, but the theory still holds. You make the initial investment and then you watch it grow."
"Thanks for the finance lesson, but we don't have time to watch the interest accrue."
He waved his hand negligently. "Oh, don't worry. I've already infected their systems with very high-grade malware. They thought I was a silly old woman who couldn't navigate a website. Instead of asking themselves if even the silliest old woman would really be this slow on the uptake, they ignored the odds and along about the fourth or fifth email, zap it went."
"That's the moral – 'If it looks too good to be true, it is too good to be true?' I expected better." She tried to sneer, but it never did come naturally to her.
"There's more psychology to it than that, because the odds aren't the same for everyone. You've got to isolate the one thing that trumps a person's common sense, the thing they'll stake their whole life on. For example, your partner, Agent Lattimer. Do you know what he wants?"
"He wants to know the time for his next snack," Myka said impatiently.
Joshua shook his head. "You're not taking me seriously, but I'll give you this one for free. He wants your boss's job. He's ambitious."
"And you got that in what, a handshake and a hello?"
"Sometimes I get it in less. I have to. Tech?" Again the negligent sweep of his hand. "It's just a tool. You still have to figure out what people want." He smiled. It wasn't derisive or smug or condescending, it was feral, and it made Myka instinctively lean away from the table. "Do you know what Helena wants more than anything in this world, Agent Bering?" Transfixed, she could do nothing more than stare at him. "I didn't think so."
He had felt so sure of what he and Helena and Gentleman Jim were in the midst of pulling off that he had dared to warn her. Either that or he was seeking to confirm what he had learned about her that day, what she wanted more than anything in the world but didn't realize yet. Not consciously, anyway. But her gut had known it, known what she wanted and the danger it represented, and just like Pete's vibes, it had tried to warn her. What had she done? Took a few antacids and, for good measure, bought a pregnancy test on the way home. Once her pregnancy fears went away, so did her queasiness, and that odd little conversation with Joshua Donovan, like the code he had introduced into the FBI's systems, buried itself deep within her only to emerge with shattering insistence little more than a year later. And here it was popping up yet again. What did Helena want more than anything in the world? She had to believe for her own sanity that the answer had changed over time and that Helena no longer needed her father's approval.
But if the answer changed over time, then possibly Joshua Donovan no longer wanted to be the smartest person in the room, and she was counting on that still being the driving force behind everything he did. After returning from Mrs. Frederic's, she had brought up every file the FBI had on him, which weren't many. Joshua was smart, she had to give him that, and he had managed to keep a low profile despite the high profiles of the people he invariably worked for. A freelancer, he moved from criminal organization to criminal organization, from the Mob in its various ethnic guises to drug cartels. He had worked for Nate Burdette in the past, though nothing she saw indicated that he continued to work for him. Yet the spreadsheet Sam had shown her and the movement of assets it detailed, that could all be Joshua's handiwork –
"I can hear you thinking," Helena said, sliding her pantsuit-clad butt onto the top of Myka's workstation and letting her legs swing gently over its edge.
"It's late," Myka said, "for you. Seven o'clock. You don't want to break your curfew, and the subway isn't very dependable these days."
"Maybe I'm waiting for you to give me a lift." At Myka's sardonically raised eyebrow, Helena responded, "Isn't it about time for you and Agent Sunshine to toss my apartment again?" When the eyebrow didn't waver, Helena confessed, "I was caught up in going over the statements again. Something's off. I think somebody at the wholesaler is in on the fraud, but I don't know which one yet." She sighed and bent over to peer at Myka's notes. "Joshua? Why are you interested in him? Or does it have something to do with Claudia and why she's been over at Irene's so much lately?"
Myka stared at her unblinkingly. Helena sighed louder. "Okay, I'll keep acting as though I'm not supposed to notice why stacks of bankers boxes are in Irene's office, just like I'll keep pretending that your top-secret conversation with my favorite assistant U.S. attorney wasn't about me." Her theatrically exasperated air diminished, and she grew more subdued. "Joshua's like mercury or nitroglycerin, essential to get things done but an utter disaster if he's uncontained. He needed to know how fast you'd start to unwind things once we completed the Gallery job, so we set up TrendsetterToday. Remember that?" Myka nodded, not daring to interrupt. "Jim had worked with that crew. They were young, inexperienced, and greedy, perfect targets. Joshua promised them their business would skyrocket once the site got going. It worked. The website had the security of a nuclear weapons lab. Of course he was the only one who could bust it, so he got his first look at how you did things." Her mouth crimped in a wince. "That wasn't what alarmed him. It was me . . . and you. He warned Jim that I had feelings for you." She growled in remembered frustration. "It took me forever to convince Jim otherwise, but Joshua never bought it. He wanted to hurry me and the Marstons along because he sensed everything was going to spin out of control. He was right about that." Slipping off the workstation, she said, "He was the one who called the FBI in on Advantage Financial. I can never prove it, and he'll never admit it, but he resented that Claudia and I became close. After Marston . . . ." She hesitated. "I couldn't let Claudia become him or me. Obviously I wasn't all that successful in turning her away from a life of crime, but I did what I could, and Joshua, the vindictive little weasel, struck back."
"She loves Todd," Myka said softly.
"I'm sorry, what?" Helena had planted her hands on her hips. With the jacket flared out and the dark brows soaring down over her nose, she resembled a Marvel or DC superhero . . . who wore pantsuits and worked in an office. Who had also gone bad at some point and was looking for redemption.
"It's something he told me a long time ago. That you set up a con by figuring out what the victim wants most. Once you get her to make the first wrong move, she'll keep making them. He knew she loved Todd, and more importantly, he knew you loved her. Setting fire to Advantage Financial would burn one of you."
"Pure Jim Wells." Helena looked at her watch. "I'm going to run for one of those undependable trains."
"If you can give me ten minutes, I'll drive you home."
Helena grinned. "I'll fix you dinner."
"You mean you'll heat me dinner."
"You say tomato, I say tomahto.
"You actually do say tomahto."
"Superior British pronunciation." Helena gave Myka a speculative look. "I've heard that Joshua makes a living now playing the weasel. People hire him when they fear they're being screwed. He'll go through their systems to find out which of their most trusted lieutenants is robbing them blind."
"Perfect opportunity for him to rob them."
"I've thought so, but people underestimate him. They'll look at his shifty little face and listen to his shifty little voice and think 'weasel.' When he's really only –"
"Another snake," Myka finished.
She had had to beg Sam more than once for a copy, but by the end of the week, he had given in and sent her a copy of the spreadsheet he had shown her. Not an electronic one, because who knew what damage that could do to his career if his bosses discovered he had sent a "need-to-know-only" file to his ex-wife, even if she was FBI. He had shown up at her apartment with a scowl and a paper copy and the threat that she could blow the case if she didn't handle the information properly. He had spun away from the door without even so much as a longing look inside. She wasn't sure what she could do with the information; she didn't have any proof that Joshua was behind it. All she had were some missing assets, companies that Burdette had supposedly liquidated, and sketchy foreign financial institutions to work with. If Sam felt he couldn't use this information yet, for fear of drawing Burdette's attention or because the U.S. government had no leverage to use to force the financial institutions to cooperate, she wasn't sure what she could do, but she would figure something out. She had to.
Sunday, however, wasn't the day she had to come up with a plan. Sunday was the day that she and Helena and Christina popped popcorn and watched the old Disney classics, the ones she had grown up on, after Christina had wobbled up and down the sidewalk on her bike, the training wheels permitting her to list from side to side. Helena had watched her daughter between her fingers. Jemma was gone on an errand whose purpose she had described only vaguely; Helena had mouthed "A date" all the while Jemma was talking. During Cinderella, Helena explained that Jemma had met an him as they dove for the same acorn squash at the farmers' market. A widower summering on the Hamptons with his daughter and her children, his attractions were heightened by the fact that, as Helena wryly observed, "he won't be staying past Thanksgiving."
"Does your father cast that big of a shadow over her life?"
Helena's mouth drew up in a wince of unhappiness. "Her guilt does. I've told her that she's not responsible for my choices, but . . . ." Myka wondered if her expression was mirroring Helena's because Helena deliberately brightened and ruffled Christina's hair, saying, "One project at a time, right, pumpkin? We'll get our situation squared away first," she cast an admonitory glance at Myka, "and then we'll work on your nonni's."
"What's our 'tuation?" Christina looked up, her attention momentarily diverted from the transformation of Cinderella into a princess.
"Our 'situation' is making sure we drive Myka crazy every day. She'll wake up with us every morning and go to bed with us every night. Is that a situation you can accept?"
Christina nodded violently, her grin as wicked as any of her mother's. "Nonni says that's when you'll start having kittens. I want two, one orange and one black."
Christina was too preoccupied with the thought of kittens to indulge in a temper tantrum when it was time for Myka and Helena to go. Jemma had returned not long before, her cheeks charmingly pinked "with the fall breeze," she insisted, although Helena's snort begged to differ. Carefully tying an apron over a pair of slacks and a lilac sweater that were new to Myka, Jemma began to heat the water for Christina's macaroni and cheese supper. Jemma made two versions, one with only elbow macaroni and Velveeta for Christina and an adult version, made with different varieties of cheddar, bacon, and tomato. Myka looked longingly at the stovetop – and the glass of wine on the countertop next to it.
"Helena asked me if her father had ever talked about his childhood, his mates and such."
"I'm sorry," Myka said, unwillingly looking away from the wine to look at Jemma. "You said?"
"Jim's tall tales," Jemma said grimly. "If he had one story about his hard-luck family, he had a hundred. He was the only smart one, the only charming one of a rum lot, to hear him tell it. The sorry truth is, he was probably right." She sipped from her wineglass. As Christina stood on tiptoes to reach for it, crying "I want some grape juice, Nonni," Jemma said, "In a minute, pet," and held her glass higher out of reach. "I don't remember much of it anymore, but the name of one of his friends has stuck in my mind. Grizzle. I think I remember it because it's such an awful nickname. Who wants to be known as Grizzle?"
"I do, I do," Christina chirruped.
"You're a grizzly when you haven't had a nap," Helena said, leaving Myka in the foyer zipping up her jacket to open the refrigerator door and take out a bottle of grape juice. "A small glass, okay?"
"That's all I have, dear. Sorry I can't be of more use." Jemma raised her voice above the competing noises and offered Myka an apologetic shrug of her shoulders.
It wasn't the "boys of St. Mary's," but it was something she didn't have yesterday. It was a variation on what Myka told herself whenever some hoped-for piece of information didn't materialize. If not today, then maybe tomorrow. She didn't have what she wanted, but, in combination with other information, "Grizzle" might provide a new lead.
The grape juice drunk and another round of kisses from Christina, this time smelling of grape, pressed to cheeks and, in Myka's case, the shoulder of her jacket, the drive back to the city couldn't be put off any longer. Helena was silent, but her hand was warm on Myka's thigh as they joined the red stream of taillights headed east. It was dark by the time Myka double parked in front of Irene Frederic's brownstone, and Helena noisily exhaled her disappointment. "You're not coming up with me, are you? You're going to do something ridiculous like search all night on 'Grizzle.'" She hadn't removed her hand, and she worked her fingers between Myka's. "He probably doesn't exist, and if he does, it's under nothing approaching that name. Remember, we're Wellses, we're born to disappoint."
"If I believed that, I wouldn't be here with you now, like this." Myka lifted their interlocked hands.
"Then all I can say is that it must be due to the Pritchard half of me. Yeoman stock, sturdy Britons." Helena laughed lightly. "Somehow, though, they managed to produce the perfect English rose."
"Your mother's still a looker. You will be, too, when you're her age."
"Planning on sticking around that long, Bering?" The tone was amused, but Myka heard the hesitancy, the underlying vulnerability.
"Longer." She hoped that Helena heard the smile in her voice.
"Well, then," Helena said briskly, "we need to get cracking. Rescue my daughter from the Winslows, put Nate away for life, and, for good measure, recover the Bowdoin artworks."
That was all. Just those three little things, and she had gotten off to such a great start on all of them. If she were less tired, she would feel panicked at the impossibility of it all. Instead, because she was brutally tired, Myka yawned, leaning against the back of her desk chair, stretching her arms wide. She had dropped off Helena more than four hours ago. Dinner was a pad thai she had run out for about two hours into her search for the mysterious Grizzle, and mysterious he was. "Grizzle" wasn't a result in any of her searches of their available databases, and she had studied the Jim Wells file so often and for so long that she didn't need to skim it for references to Grizzle. It wasn't there. She had just finished re-reviewing their file on Ted Bonaventura. Nothing there either. If she grew desperate, she might have to talk to Bryce DeWitt. She was certain that he would be happy to tell who Grizzle was and how he had run into him one night when he was still an impressionable youth. . . .
Helena was right. Jim Wells was a fount of absolutely worthless knowledge. Like many of the cons whom Myka had encountered (and arrested), even when there was no utility to it, he lied, simply for the pleasure of lying. Grizzle didn't exist, had never existed; he was an amusement, a silly story made up to pluck a virginal English rose. One more search, just for the hell of it, on Google, and she would shut down her computer for the night and go home to catch a few hours of sleep. But because she couldn't do anything mindlessly, she added "St. Mary" to "Grizzle." The first page of search results yielded nothing, and the second didn't either. Her finger clicked on the third page automatically; it had been her intention to close the browser. Midway down the third page, she found it. Not Grizzle, it had flummoxed Google's algorithms as it had flummoxed everything else. Maybe it had been the combination of St. Mary and "gr"; she would never know, and she didn't care. Because for once in his life, Jim Wells hadn't lied. Three years ago, Henry Gryzbowski had celebrated 60 years as the head of maintenance at the Church of St. Mary. He was the right age, and the Church of St. Mary was the right Catholic church in the right neighborhood. A tiny borough weekly had added it as an item, likely at the behest of one of Gryzbowski's children or a co-worker, and here it was, still floating in cyberspace three years later. He could have died or succumbed to dementia or, on a happier note, relocated to a tropical paradise and left no forwarding address.
But Myka would try something new for her, she would accept this as the gift it was and trust that Henry Gryzbowski was alive and well and still living in the city.