A helpful secretary at the church informed Myka that Hank Gryzbowski was, indeed, alive and . . . . doing much better, praise God. Trying not to imagine catheters and IVs snaking from him and a ventilator hissing in the background, Myka hesitantly asked after his health. She could almost see the secretary sympathetically wagging her head as she explained that Hank was recovering from a stroke at a nursing home, not far from the church or his eldest daughter. Myka was assured that he would welcome visitors, especially family members of his childhood friends. She must know the old stories by heart having heard them from her Uncle Ted. Myka murmured noncommittally. She had been tempted to say that she was Jim Wells's niece, but she was more than a little apprehensive about what she might hear in response. What a funny coincidence! His daughter called about Hank, too. Maybe you two can visit him together. He would love that. After ending the call, Myka called the nursing home to confirm visiting hours. She decided that she would drop by in the evening, not long before visiting hours were over. Grizzle might not be at his most alert in the evenings, but her visit would be less likely to be noticed, or so she hoped.
She hadn't realized how lost in thought she had been until the slap of a bag of Twizzlers landing on her desk had her all but jumping out of her chair. "Easy there," Steve said, resting a foot on the floor as he half-perched, half-sat on the edge of the desktop. "They scanned the Twizzlers when I came in this morning; they're not a weapon." He shook his head in disbelief. "I can't believe those things are edible. Maybe they are weapons."
He was awkwardly propping himself on her desk, his face split with a smile as guileless and untroubled as a child's. Agent Sunshine. He was, except that Myka had seen him smile that smile just before he arrested a suspect or confirmed that immunity wasn't on the table. So maybe not guileless, maybe confident instead, secure in who he was and what he did. Steve Jinks didn't walk lines, parse shades of truth – "Thanks," she said, interrupting her train of associations, all too well aware of the dark, definitely not sunshiny, places it was taking her. Today was a good day, she had found another boy of the "boys of St. Mary's," and just possibly it might mean something.
"Pete said DeWitt's trying to sell us on the story that he knows were the Bowdoin art is hidden."
"You think I'm on a treasure hunt," Myka said teasingly.
"What boy doesn't love them?" Steve spread his arms wide in amazement that anyone wouldn't want to be on a treasure hunt. "My part in the DeWitt investigation is winding down. It's a lot of forensic accounting now, and that's not my forte. I'm looking for my next assignment. Plus, I kind of miss my partner. We've got this running act, she brings the intensity, and I bring the charm. Charm isn't half as effective, or fun, without intensity."
"I think an insult's hidden in there somewhere," Myka reached for the Twizzlers, "but I'm going to let it go because, in addition to being intense, I'm also magnanimous." She had missed him too, only now recognizing how much. She suspected that his sudden appearance in her cube was likely Pete's or Leena's way of checking up on her, but if sending Steve to ride shotgun was the extent of the monitoring, she wouldn't buck it. Not yet. "According to DeWitt, a crony of Jim Wells told him the location." At Steve's skeptical expression, she quirked her mouth in agreement and peeled away one of the Twizzlers. "I may have found another crony of Wells who can tell us whether we should believe it." That wasn't quite the truth about why she wanted to talk to Henry Gryzbowski, but it was close enough. The possibility that Grizzle might have knowledge about Jim Wells or his activities that hadn't been previously investigated, it was too tantalizing for her not to pursue. Maybe she was on a treasure hunt.
"If you have nothing better to do tonight, I was planning to make a call on a Henry Gryzbowski, currently residing at Serenity Bay Nursing Home."
"Interrogating an old man in a nursing home, shouting into his hearing aid," Steve theatrically rubbed his chin, "it's an offer too good to refuse. Count me in."
Myka chewed her Twizzler as she stared at the spot on the desk that Steve had just vacated. There was nothing like a bureaucracy for giving birth or, at least, support to paranoid imaginings and conspiracy theories. Already she was wondering if Pete had filled him in on the not-so-secret arrangement between Helena, Justice, and the FBI to bring in Burdette. This was in addition to her earlier suspicion that Steve's dropping by was really a checking up on her. She could further inflame her fears by trying to anticipate what he would say or do if they found out that Helena had visited Henry Gryzbowski. She was due to leave in 20 minutes to meet Claudia and her friend at Mrs. Frederic's. Was she going to peer into her rearview mirror to see if he was tailing her? Yes, Steve, on top of everything else, I'm trying to figure out a way to blackmail the Winslow family into giving up their custody fight. There were snakes and mice – and the crazed FBI agent who wanted to carve out a refuge from the contest between them for herself, Helena, and Christina.
Since Pete's promotion, she had been partnered with several agents. Some had obviously been temporary, on loan from various field offices and areas in her own office, but others . . . Myka wasn't sure she was back in the agency's good graces – she probably would never be forgiven, not completely – but she hadn't been shuttled to the worst of the worst, the worst units, the worst assignments, not for a while, and other agents were being tasked to help her. Perhaps in that line of assistant and deputy directors, the end of its arc in the FBI's Washington D.C. head office forever out of reach and almost out of view from where she stood now, someone had said that enough was enough, put her back to work, real work, goddammit, and find her a partner. It hadn't happened like that at all, she was sure; it was far more likely the result of a chronic shortage of experienced staff and too much work to manage. She was a damaged agent but an agent.
When she entered the cube farm aisle in which her cube was located, she saw him, blond, medium height, medium build, wearing a serviceable suit in a serviceable navy blue. Except for their hair color, she and the stranger waiting nervously for her outside her cube might have been hatched from the same pod, standard agency. He came toward her to greet her, hand outstretched. "Steve Jinks. This has to be one of the best days of my life. A shipwreck, sunken treasure, pirates – Treasure Island was one of my favorite books as a kid."
Myka shook his hand firmly, but her answering smile was small. She edged past him into her cube and motioned him to the other chair. Only then did she see the very large coffee on her desk. "Did Pete tell you that the easiest way to win me over is by feeding my coffee addiction?" She reflexively glanced at the picture of Sam, tucked into a corner. He looked sunburned but otherwise aglow with health – she had turned the picture so that he was beaming at the file cabinet. She told herself it was because she would feel guilty mainlining caffeine and vending machine snacks, when she remembered to eat at all, in front of a shot of him from their Caribbean vacation. That was what she told herself. She knew it wasn't the only reason she had set the picture in the corner.
"Something like that," Steve said diplomatically.
She took the lid off the cup and inhaled the scent, smoky and rich. It was almost enough to make her regret puncturing his Treasure Island balloon. "Pete's filled you in, right? The 'sunken treasure' is faked underwater shots of a bunch of junk, and the only pirates are the two guys who dreamed up this con."
"I know," Steve said, smile undimmed. "I was ready to get my Jim Hawkins on and check out what lunacy they had put together to sucker people in. But this is just lazy." If anything, his grin grew even wider. "That's why I'm really going to enjoy nailing these cheap bastards to the wall."
This time when Irene came to the door to let Myka in, she was accompanied by an assistant. "My-Ka!" Christina cried, dusted from head to foot in flour. Her mouth and cheeks were smeared with chocolate, and when she took Myka's hand, Myka felt little balls of cookie dough adhere to her fingers. "I've been helping 'Rene. She says I'm her 'suitcheck.'"
"And a very able sous chef she is," Irene said over her shoulder as she led them toward the kitchen. "Don't frown, Agent Bering. Claudia and her friend Fargo are here, too."
"How did you end up babysitting Christina?"
"Jemma had to rush into the city to discuss an 'unexpected development' in the Winslows' suit." Myka could have sworn that Mrs. Frederic's glasses were glinting even though the hallway was no less dark than usual. "Her attorney didn't want to discuss it over the phone, and Jemma needed to find a sitter on the spot." She paused then added slyly, "Children don't find me an ogre, despite what some adults might believe."
Myka blushed and hoped the hallway was dim enough to hide it. Entering the brightness of the kitchen, which was redolent with the smell of freshly baked cookies, she thought the difference between it and the gloom of the hallway captured Irene Frederic perfectly. One side of her homey, grandmotherly, a bestower of encouragement and treats, the other side at home in the shadows, remote and watchful, a bestower of cryptic observations. Myka was never sure which one she would encounter, and Irene, she suspected, enjoyed playing on her uncertainty. Claudia and a man were bellied up to the island, glasses of milk in front of them, comparing notes on the cookies they were eating.
Claudia held up a half-eaten cookie covered with a purple frosting so dark that it could be mistaken for black. "Genius, Mrs. F. Your grandson's going to love these. How did you get it so grapey?" Her eyes slid to Myka. "No superhero cookies for you. Maybe Mrs. F. can create a . . .um . . .Elmer Fudd." She shook her head. "No, no, the ridiculous dude with the mustaches. He was a sheriff or something."
"Yosemite Sam," her friend helpfully supplied.
"How about a Yosemite Sam for our government agent here, Mrs. F?" Claudia said, using the back of her hand to wipe her mouth.
Myka picked Christina up and deposited her into a chair at the island, cleaning her hands and mouth with a dish towel as Christina gabbled, sometimes through the towel, of growing up and becoming a ballerina "suitcheck" or a doctor "suitcheck." "We've already had a discussion about what cookie best suits her," Mrs. Frederic said, observing Myka's cleaning up of Christina. Their eyes met and Myka saw in Irene's what she might take for approval if this were another woman. "I may start on a Greek gods series because you, Claudia, would be Hermes, a perfect mischief-maker."
Myka put down the towel, becoming an attentive audience to Christina's flexing her of her arm and her bragging that she was a superhero because "the doctor told me my 'llolarbone was as 'good as gold.'"
"Collarbone," Claudia's friend helpfully corrected.
Myka and Christina glared at him, and Claudia interjected soothingly, "You're better than a superhero, Christina, you're a superstar." Her tone becoming drier, she said softly, "You've got a very powerful man fighting to imprint you with the family brand. I know adults who would bare their ass for that."
Christina's pique at the interruptions turned into pure confusion. Myka tousled her hair. "She's just saying that a lot of people love you."
"That's right," Mrs. Frederic agreed, putting a mug of coffee in front of Myka and a saucer with a ginger cookie on it. "I can get you a Black Panther or an Incredible Hulk cookie, if you'd like." She nodded at the pile of cookie crumbs dotted with green frosting on a napkin that Claudia's friend was beginning to worry, "but I think you'll do fine with the powers you already have."
An hour later as Fargo made yet another decisive claim about Winslow's perfidy only to undercut it by saying, "This is based on information I'm not at liberty to share with you" or "My sources don't like crypto-fascist institutions like the FBI," Myka was grudgingly willing to agree with Claudia. When it came to getting Fargo to disclose any proof for his claims, she was about as effective as Yosemite Sam. However, it didn't stop her from muttering to Claudia when Fargo left them to use the bathroom, "This isn't what you promised me."
"I didn't promise you anything," Claudia retorted. "I don't owe you, I owe Helena. Besides, you make him nervous, and Fargo's never at his best when he's nervous." She was eating what Myka calculated was her 14th Black Panther cookie, and that was since Fargo had started his wary, halting presentation. Grape frosting rimmed her mouth, and Myka could have been convinced she was sitting next to a four-year-old, a really surly one. "It's why he's peeing so much. When he gets nervous, so does his bladder."
"I don't care what companies he's hacked," Myka said wearily. Fargo was so distrustful of her that he took his laptop with him to the bathroom.
Claudia managed to look both boastful and secretive. "Um . . . hacking's the least of it. Let's just say that he's very passionate about his causes."
"Christ, he's not tried to do something to the Winslows, has he?" Myka stared into her coffee, not wanting to see confirmation in Claudia's face. She hadn't had anywhere near 14 cookies, but she was working on her fourth cup of coffee.
Claudia wisely didn't answer the question. Myka hadn't been so foolish as to hope for an airtight case to take to Justice, but she needed something tangible to support Fargo's claims that Mark Winslow had been profiting for decades from real estate deals that had, at best, tiptoed around laws and, at worst, broken them. Not only had he been enabling powerful businessmen to dispossess the poor and vulnerable of their homes in order to acquire the properties at below-market prices, he had also been profiting from the sale of his in-laws' toxic properties to real estate developers. It was rank in all senses of the word. She would want to deliver up Mark Winslow even if he weren't trying to take Christina away from her mother. Maybe she should take a new tack with Fargo, and instead of asking him to show her proof, thereby confirming his suspicions that she and, by extension, the FBI would use his work for their own purposes, she could ask him what he planned to do with all the information he had gathered.
Asked the question, he blinked at her several times, which was the human equivalent, she decided, of the nose-twitching of small, habitually apprehensive mammals, which was a fairly accurate description of Fargo. "Once I've fleshed out the timeline and put together the complete hierarchy of his LLCs," his blinking stopped long enough for him to try to fix Myka with an offended look, "I'll start posting teasers on my website and inserting them into my blogs." He grinned at Claudia. "Whet my fans' appetite for the full story." When Claudia glanced uncertainly at Myka, he added hastily, "After a careful vetting process, I'll negotiate publication rights with media outlets."
Myka wondered how many would pass Fargo's vetting process. Trying to keep her tone neutral, she asked, "How many readers will this reach, Fargo? Best guess."
"I have thousands who follow my blog and who visit my website," he said icily.
"I think I can guess your feelings about the mainstream news sites, but what about some of the more reliable alternative ones?"
"She means, like, BuzzFeed," Claudia said derisively, but it was accompanied by another uncertain look at Myka.
"Or the HuffPost," Fargo giggled. He sobered and drew his laptop so close to him that he was practically hugging it. "No matter how progressive they think they are, mainstream media ultimately promote corporate interests. They can't help it, they're corporations themselves. Their CEOs and directors rub shoulders with the CEOs and directors of the multinationals that run what we laughingly call the government of the United States. There's no governing, just profiteering."
Myka let the silence build as she tried to think of another approach. It was hard to shut out fantasies of showing up with a team at his home and confiscating everything in it, assuming that they could find his home. Fargo probably changed his address every few weeks, trying to avoid the ability of the government, through the Postal Service and, likely, the IRS, to find him. "However many crimes Winslow may have committed, statutes of limitations have expired, and he may no longer be criminally liable. There may be enough evidence to sue him in civil court, but you'll need someone with the legal expertise to sort it out. Law firms won't be lining up at your door. Despite what you see on TV, cases like this take years to prepare, and time, to attorneys, is always money. You need friends with contacts, with influence to get a firm to look at your information." Myka stopped trying to sound reasonable, her voice becoming harder. "If you start posting this information with no plan or legal team to defend you, Winslow and his attorneys will tear you apart. The sad fact is, you can't speak to power without the power to make yourself heard." She drew a breath before continuing in a softer tone. "I know people who could work with you, and I can arrange for you to meet with them, but I don't have years to let justice take its course, and my fight is not bringing unrestrained capitalism to heel. I need to stop a man from taking a daughter away from her mother. "Will you help me?" More nose-twitching ensued from Fargo, and given the slower flexing of his nostrils, Myka took it as a sign that he was thinking over her offer and not preparing to bolt. Aware that she might succeed only in confirming his predisposition not to help her, she couldn't stop herself from adding, "I'm not asking for your whole trove, just one undeniable instance. I want to make Winslow worried about what else is out there that he could be imprisoned for."
"Do it, Fargo," Claudia urged him. "'I'm-So-Righteous' here is all but saying she's going to blackmail Winslow. Then you can turn her in to her bosses." As Myka glared at her, she shrugged as if to say, 'Why shouldn't I get something out this?'
"I'll think about it. Give me the names of your contacts. I'll need to check them out first."
"Nope. No names, no interceding on your behalf. Nothing unless you give me something in return."
The eyes behind the tiny rectangular lenses gleamed with predatory anticipation. "I think I'm the one in the position to dictate terms, not you."
"I am," Mrs. Frederic announced. She entered the kitchen with Christina trailing behind her. When Fargo had launched into the history of his research into the nexus of Mark Winslow's political and financial activities, Christina had grown bored, kicking at the legs of her chair and improvising a song that had as its lyrics, "I don't want to play, funny little hamster. Go away, go away." She had accompanied her song with abbreviated sweeps of her hands, as if she were trying to brush the hamster off the island. That the sweeping was in Fargo's direction might have been the uncoordinated movements of a four-year-old, but Christina, to Myka's mind, had never seemed more like Helena than she had in that moment. Mrs. Frederic, her expression perfectly impassive, had lifted Christina from her chair and carried her away. During a subsequent Fargo pee break, Myka had looked for Christina in the living room and found her on the rug playing Go Fish with Mrs. Frederic, who displayed a talent for the theater Myka had never seen before, putting the back of her hand to her forehead and sighing in resignation at every "Go fish, 'Rene!" that Christina yelled.
"I don't like it when a mother is separated from her child because an old powerful white man gets to decide that she's unfit. I don't like it when old powerful white men profit off the people they've disadvantaged." Mrs. Frederic lifted the coffee carafe and sniffed at its lid. She shook her head and walked the carafe over to the sink. "Yet I've lived long enough to know that if Mark Winslow is going to be brought to justice, it's because those 'corporate interests,' Fargo, no longer think it's worth their while to protect him. To convince of them that, you'll need to get the mainstream institutions on your side." Myka sadly watched her pour the coffee into the sink. "If you don't take Agent Bering up on her offer, you'll put my husband's papers, every one of them, back into their boxes, and if I see or hear that you've used the information from them in your blog or on your website without my permission . . . . " Mrs. Frederic didn't need to make the threat explicit – Fargo was gulping and nodding in obedience.
But he still didn't commit beyond trying to say loftily, "I'll give it my impartial consideration." The quaver in his voice undercut the loftiness; he was obviously unnerved by Mrs. Frederic's grim promise. Dropping his laptop in a worn canvas satchel, he flew from the kitchen but not before grabbing a handful of Captain America cookies, the red, white, and blue frosted shields resembling campaign buttons. Claudia wasn't far behind him.
Myka should have gone back to the office. Instead she sat on the sofa in Mrs. Frederic's living room watching Christina nap in the opposite corner, curled up under a hand-knit blanket. The stitching was perfect – another one of Mrs. Frederic's talents, apparently. She had promised Fargo contacts, and she went through her mental Rolodex of them. While she thought that her contacts in the DA's office and Justice would be leery of a case in which some, perhaps a major, portion of the evidence came from tainted sources, they would give it a look at her urging. Well, a few of them might, even one or two in Justice, the ones who had remained her friends after the divorce. She also could beg a favor or two from her friends in law school who had gone into corporate law. Most of them weren't litigators, but they could judge whether Fargo had amassed enough material to make a civil case worthwhile, in other words profitable. She hadn't exaggerated about her contacts at the Times. There were always reasons for providing the media information about an investigation, and she had done so more than once as an "anonymous source." Of course she was risking the not-inconsiderable value of her network on the unverified assurances of a friend of Claudia Donovan that he had the goods on Mark Winslow. She had let him stonewall her for the better part of an afternoon with his nose-twitching and demurring that he couldn't trust his information to a representative of "a corporatized legal system in league with institutionalized fascism."
The doorbell rang, and Mrs. Frederic called from the kitchen, "Would you get that please? I'm in the middle of washing up."
Myka glanced at Christina, who hadn't stirred. She rarely talked about her grandfather. It was hard to imagine that Mark Winslow was the type of grandfather who uncomplainingly got on his hands and knees to play Zoo Animals – unlike Jemma, who variously took on the roles of zebra, hippopotamus, grizzly bear, and giraffe opposite Christina's tiger. It was hard to imagine Mark Winslow getting on his hands and knees, period. It was all too easy to imagine him sitting in his Senate office barking instructions to his team of attorneys. She went to the door, feeling not unlike the teenaged Myka who had moped to the front of the store to attend to a customer when her father was busy in the back. The determination to achieve the success that had eluded Warren Bering alternated hourly with the conviction that she would never leave Colorado Springs or the bookstore. Finding a copy of a long out-of-print detective novel had seemed too daunting, a challenge she was certain to fail. Twenty years later she was visited with the sense that she was overmatched. If she had horribly misjudged her ability to confront the Winslows, it wasn't only Jemma, Helena and Christina she would be letting down but Mrs. Frederic too, and that, oddly, didn't bother her any the less. When she opened the door, Jemma was all but vibrating with suppressed excitement. Her demure skirt and blazer, her conservative gray-blond bob, and the friendly blue directness of her gaze argued that she should be the mother of an especially effective fundraiser for the local Republican party. Yet the tension that seemed about to propel her into the house wasn't unlike how Helena would gather herself before attacking a blank canvas or springing upon the piece of evidence that explained a fraud.
"I've been thinking about you," Jemma said. "The whole horrible subway ride here, I've been asking myself 'What would Myka do with this?'"
"Do with what?" Myka said as Jemma tiptoed to the sofa to smile down on her sleeping granddaughter.
"Our attorney has seemed, let's say, less than enthusiastic about our chances against Ben and his father, but today he was positively giddy." She set her handbag on an end table but didn't sit on the wing chair beside it. Instead she folded her hands and held her arms tight to her abdomen, as if she were preparing herself to launch into a speech that she had been silently rehearsing on the subway. Myka was reminded of Fargo's hugging of his laptop. Jemma had information so valuable she could hardly bear to part with it but not because she was fearful, as Fargo was, that someone would claim possession of it. She was afraid that, once shared, it would lose its value, be perceived only as an irrelevant fact, a disclosure that meant nothing. She feared that Myka would look at it with her FBI eyes and evaluate it with her FBI experience and find it wanting. Myka understood that fear; she wouldn't assume that the attorney's giddiness meant anything positive for the Wells family. The only luck to visit them recently had been bad luck.
"They haven't withdrawn their suit, but they're not ready to move further on it 'at this time.'" Jemma finished sarcastically. "I asked him what they meant by that, and he said he had tried to press their attorneys for an explanation, but all he could get out of them was that the Winslows needed to focus on a 'personal matter.'" Jemma's face tightened and her eyes began to squeeze shut, as if a burst of sunshine had filled the room, and Myka realized that Jemma was readying herself to be disappointed, to be told by an experienced law enforcement agent who had seen hundreds of "promising developments" never turn into something solid that the distraction absorbing the Winslows' attention was only temporary and that this change of fortune for her family augured worse because the Winslows, when they were free to focus on the suit again, would be unrelenting.
Myka opened her mouth, but Jemma held up a warning hand. "Before you say anything, you need to know that all I'm going to tell Helena is that there's been another delay. With all the resources she has at her disposal at the FBI . . . I don't want her to get into trouble. This is her chance to wipe the slate clean, as much as she can. But the Winslows' attempt to take Christina away from her permanently, it's shaken her badly, and I don't trust what she'll do." She gave Myka a long, un-Jemma-like stare, one so coolly measuring that Myka thought Mrs. Frederic must have been giving her lessons on how best to unnerve an FBI agent with just a look. "I trust what you can do. You can find out what's going on with the Winslows and what it means for us without raising the suspicions that Helena would. Once you do, we'll know what to tell Helena." She bent in front of Christina's sleeping form and brushed a lock of hair from her. "This one, she's brought her mother and me closer when I thought nothing could. Sometimes I even believe Helena looks at me with love in her eyes rather than resentment. I won't give that up to Mark Winslow, so you'd best get digging."
Myka sat in her car, which wasn't parked far from Jemma and Christina's house. She had driven them home after Jemma woke Christina from her nap, all three of them sent off with Ziploc bags of cookies. Myka's was filled with ginger cookies and Heavenly Helenas. Sometimes Mrs. Frederic was as subtle as a hint of smoke or mist in the air, and at other times, she was as subtle as a lightning bolt. Myka had dropped Jemma and Christina off, turning down the invitation to come in, and then driven until she found a secluded street close to the ocean, pulling over to the curb in a shaded spot. She had opened the driver's side window to let the briny smell, sharpened by an autumn breeze, wash through the interior. She was chilled now and she raised the window but didn't close it completely. A mountain girl, she was still enthralled with the sounds and smells of the ocean after more than ten years in the city. She knew someone she could contact about the Winslows, a walking and talking storehouse of knowledge about the intersection of New York politics and sketchy business dealings. Victoria LaGrange might not have risen as high in the DA's office as her law school pedigree and early successes would have warranted, but her familiarity with the doings of the rich and powerful, especially the ones they didn't want known, could have earned her virtually any job she wanted, DA, mayor, governor, had she been willing to trade those secrets for influence. Instead, she had compiled them, waiting for the right combination of malfeasance and greed or the one jaw-dropping instance of corruption that would give her a case strong enough to pursue against interests who, more likely than not, had had a role in the election of her boss.
Myka hadn't talked to Tori in more than a year, and there were reasons for it that had nothing do with the fact that the touchpoints of their work, local and federal investigations supporting and sometimes combating the other, hadn't touched. She didn't have Tori in her contacts list on her phone; a year ago, being able to call her with a single press of her thumb or a "Call Tori" would have been too much of a temptation, but Tori's private number came to her easily. It didn't ring long. Tori rarely gave out her private number, and she would have recognized the number of her caller. Curiosity alone would prompt her to answer.
"I thought we had an agreement," Tori said, mock disapproval failing to blunt the hesitation in her greeting. "It was better for us if we didn't keep in contact."
Myka visualized Tori in her cramped office, the desk all but dwarfing it. There was room for a bookshelf to hold the bound volumes of law books and a visitor's chair. One personal item would be visible, a picture of her and her dog, which, once upon a time would have included a husband, but Tori had decided to keep the dog instead of the husband. "This is important."
"It wouldn't have anything to do with Helena Wells, would it? It's hard for the feds to whisk an inmate out of a prison in our backyard without word getting out . . . filtering down even to the likes of me."
Myka muffled a derisive snort. Even to the likes of her, hell, Tori had probably been the first to know. "I've heard rumors about the Winslows," she said, turning the question aside, "and I thought you might know something you could share."
Tori took her time responding. "Why are you interested? Is this something off the books?"
It wasn't that hard to come up with an answer. She and Tori had always been honest with each other, even when the truth hadn't shown them in the best light. Their tacit understanding was that they would tell the truth to each other and then not discuss it again. "Because Ben Winslow is the father of her daughter."
There was another long silence before Tori said, "I'm surprised we've been able to keep it quiet this long. Somebody's going to splash it all over the Internet." Myka could almost see Tori rubbing her forehead, more from nervous habit than exhaustion, although that would be part of it too. "Ben was arrested over the weekend. The police had gotten a call about an out-of-control party, and he was there, punching the daylights out of an artist who had pulled his work from a showing that Ben had set up for him. So you have public disturbance, assault, and, par for the course for Ben, possession of illegal substances. Ordinarily that would be a minor event in the lives of the Winslows, but the police also found a number of minors there. Actors, models, it's unclear whether they were invited or if they had crashed the party, but one had overdosed in a bathroom. It looks like she's going to make it, but her parents are threatening lawsuits." Tori let out a long breath. "One of the really interesting things about the whole mess is that the families of the teens seem to have received information about Ben Winslow's record and how those arrests and charges were handled, or not handled. This part isn't 100% confirmed, in part because our tech support can't determine whether there was a breach, but I've heard enough to believe there's truth to the suspicion that some very confidential and unflattering information about this office and its treatment of the Winslows has been released." Her voice dropped lower. "It's a powder keg here, and supposedly Mark Winslow left in the middle of a Senate hearing to fly back to do damage control for the family."
It would be easy to let herself be overwhelmed by the news and what it might mean for Helena and Christina, but Myka focused on what Tori hadn't yet said. "You've suggested there were at least a couple of really interesting things, and you've mentioned only one."
Tori's small laugh was more sigh than laugh. "It took time to collect the information on how many times charges weren't filed against Ben or arrests mysteriously deleted from the system, and for the information to be targeted so precisely and sent so quickly suggests there was orchestration, a lot of it. The party, who attended, even the call to 911, it smacks of a set-up. But this is me speculating, what isn't speculation is the fact that the pleasure palace where the party was going on, a penthouse apartment that occupies an entire floor, it's in an apartment building owned by Nate Burdette." The noise that Tori made now was unmistakably a sigh. "The DA's office has a history with the Wells family, too, you know."
Myka liked this restaurant. It was open all hours, served good food, and was easy to get to from the office. It was also close to where Tori lived, which meant she probably wouldn't be frequenting it anymore. At least it was mutual, this . . . whatever it was. Not a break-up, because that would have required them to admit that they had been in a relationship, or the beginning stages of one, but maybe it could be called a 'restructuring,' since they had to be able to continue working together when the need arose. They had started out as friends, having had their investigations intersect enough over the years to develop a professional connection into something resembling a friendship. In addition to their commitment to the law, they shared tastes in books, workout regimens, and in eating and sleeping according to no fixed schedule. However, what truly drew them together was the experience of having been betrayed. Tori's had been more professional than personal; a cop on the take had framed the defendant in one of her more highly publicized cases, which she hadn't discovered until late into the trial. The mistake had all but scuttled her career and, as collateral damage, had ended her marriage. Or, as Tori sardonically put it, "My depression gave my husband 'permission' to cheat on me.'' Myka had found someone who wasn't urging her to get over it, leave it in the past, learn from it, or move on. "The next time I hear 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger,'" Tori growled, "I'm going to say, 'Yeah, but killing the son of a bitch who did this to me would make me feel better."
Maybe there had always been a latent attraction, because a few months after her divorce from Sam, Myka had gone home with her. It was nice to experience an afterglow, to feel that more had happened in the bed than finding a temporary relief from loneliness. She never stayed the night, but she had been tempted enough to consider it. Tori may have been tempted enough to ask, which likely explained why they had each arrived at the conclusion that the parameters of their friendship needed to be reset.
"It would be too easy with you," Tori apologetically explained. "I'd start wanting and expecting things from you, and I'm not ready for that, um, complexity."
"Be honest," Myka chided her, trying to twirl threads of angel hair pasta into a tight bundle on her fork. "You're not ready to be disappointed. I'd let you down, somehow, someway. Just ask Sam."
Tori watched her efforts with amusement. "You're not ready to trust," she said quietly.
"I trusted Sam," Myka protested, reacting to the sting of Tori's words. "I trusted that he wouldn't hurt me, and he didn't. I was the issue."
"It's easy to pretend you trust somebody when, like an iceberg, 90% of you is hidden. You can't trust unless you're willing to risk being burned." Tori paused to tuck a strand of hair back into her fraying chignon, delaying what Myka knew would make all the teasing about not being able to make a relationship work painfully real. "I'm willing to wait, I'm willing to accept less from you than I would from anybody else, but you have to convince me that the rest of you is going to come to the surface. If we're going to be a disaster, like most couples I know," Tori said with a rueful chuckle, "then I have to see what it is we'll be running our personal Titanic into."
The angel hair had unspooled from her fork, and Myka put the fork down. She wasn't all that hungry, anyway, having raided a vending machine for dinner before Tori called. "There's nothing I'm hiding, there's nothing to bring to the surface. You're right, I didn't trust Sam. I don't trust. You can't trust if you don't have anything left to give."
It had sounded melodramatic and self-pitying even then, but she had believed it, if only because it was safer to believe it, and Tori must have too since their dinner ended not long after, and they had gone in opposite directions after their stilted good-byes. Myka had had to stop believing it because Helena had left something behind, damaged, almost unrecognizable, but clearly not beyond resuscitating because she loved the woman, always had. And if Helena, in her desperation, had reached out to Nate, bargained with him to hurt the Winslows or, if Sam's darkest fears were true, had prevailed upon him to play one more trick in the long con they were running, then Myka knew she was about to be burned again.