She had gotten home late from seeing Helena and, in a rare moment of weakness for her, Myka had slapped her alarm off when it buzzed at 5 a.m., rolling over and dozing for another 45 minutes. As a result, she skipped her morning workout (another rarity) and when she braved the morning commute, she didn't turn on the car radio. She was having enough trouble focusing as it was; she didn't need to add to her distraction. That was the reason that Helena's cryptic text, I never trust the answer to my prayers, which Myka saw when she stopped in the coffee shop before she took the elevator to the office, was her first intimation that the other shoe had dropped on the Winslows. It wasn't any shoe; it was a combat boot. The top headline in the morning's Times had to do with a fresh crisis in the Middle East, but Myka didn't have to scroll down very far before she saw it, the story about Ben Winslow's arrest and the history of how Winslow money and Winslow influence had protected him in the past. The sources were unnamed, but their claims of favors performed in the hopes of cushier jobs, of debts being mysteriously wiped out, of sick family members miraculously granted appointments with top specialists or included in clinical trials were consistent with what Tori had told her. Unsurprisingly the Winslows had refused to comment.
Myka clicked out of the Times app and brought up a mapping app in the elevator. She wanted to know the best way to get to the Church of St. Mary from Serenity Bay before she picked up Henry Gryzbowksi. She didn't need an old man yelling into her ear that she was going in the wrong direction. As soon as she passed through the office's security, she clicked the map on again, studying it and holding her coffee with her other hand as she went to her cube. Late for her was still an hour early for most of her co-workers; she didn't have to look up, she wasn't going to walk into anyone. The map that showed her the shortest route to the church also identified various places of interest, shops, restaurants, and, toward an outer corner of the map, the Bowdoin Museum. Although the network of streets between the museum and the church looked daunting, Myka calculated that it was a 15-minute walk between them. After setting down her coffee and tossing her shoulder bag into the visitor's chair, she sat down heavily in her desk chair, her eyes running over and over the streets.
The museum had been conceived as an aspirational opportunity for working class families. Admittance had been free, and classes had been offered at night on art appreciation and, for the more practically minded, drawing and draftsmanship. Responses from families preferring to be assisted by better pay and fewer hours, greater access to medical care and cheaper housing were unsurprisingly mixed, which had come as a surprise to the Bowdoin family. Surely the beauty that they were so generously sharing deserved a more grateful reception, and the family members had discussed moving to the museum to a different city. Bowdoin factories were in Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, yet the museum had stayed where it was, its fortunes waxing and waning with those of the neighborhood. By the time Jim Wells became an altar boy at the Church of St. Mary, decades of airborne pollutants had begun eroding the museum's crisp lines and delicate filigree, and the grounds' carefully tended gardens had lost their full-time gardener. A part-time handyman with a lawnmower and pruning shears was deemed expert enough by the museum's trustees. The last of the Bowdoin family, an unmarried daughter in her 70s, was reluctant to part with the remaining items in the collection and was threatening to reclaim art that her parents had left to the museum. Modernization of production and distribution channels had left the Bowdoins' factories far behind, and just as the family and its wealth had shrunk, so had the neighborhood, the descendants of those working class families for whom the museum had been established had moved out of the city and out of the state, chasing the jobs that had moved to the South and the Southwest. By the time Jim Wells had become Gentleman Jim, Alma Bowdoin was long dead, and the museum was selling off its art, piece by piece, to keep itself afloat. Security had become lax, malfunctioning alarm systems were allowed to erratically shriek, driving visitors from galleries, and the number of guards had been drastically reduced. Teenagers could spray paint obscenities on the walls with impunity, and men drunkenly shambling across the grounds late at night would spray the spray paint with urine. The Bowdoin Museum had acquired the nickname the "Be Done" Museum, and activists urging the borough to revitalize the neighborhood lobbied for the rest of the art to be sold and the trustees to use the money to build job centers, clinics, playgrounds, anything that, unlike a painting, people could actually use.
Myka had read this history in Jim Wells's file, but she hadn't realized, not completely, that he had grown up only blocks away from the museum. He must have visited it as a child on school field trips and, later, as a teenager dreaming that he would become the next Van Gogh or Picasso. He would have known that museum like he knew his school, his church, his boyhood hangouts. It would have lingered in the back of his mind as he grew up and left the neighborhood, entered and dropped out of art school, started forging paintings because it was easier to copy than create. When he went back on visits, more because he was looking to assemble a crew than for sentimental reasons, he would have seen how rundown the museum had become, the multiplying weaknesses in maintenance and security. He had had years, maybe decades, to plan his escape route and identify the place, or places, when he would hide the art until it was safe to retrieve it. There was no place he knew like the old neighborhood . . . .
The sound of crunching snapped Myka's concentration. She swiveled her chair around to find Pete standing in the entrance to her cube. He was shaking a sleeve of Corn Nuts into his mouth. Her stomach gurgled discontentedly, her morning coffee feeling 100 times more acidic than it normally did. He was indestructible. When the world finally went up in a mushroom cloud, there would be Pete Lattimer, eyeing the empty grocery aisles and their racks of irradiated snack food, wondering how he had gotten so lucky.
He crumpled the empty sleeve and tried for a tricky three-pointer into her wastebasket. It bounced off the edge and fell to the floor. With the side of her foot, Myka nudged it past the wastebasket, into the gloomy depths under the workstation. "You saw the news about the Winslows," he said through a mouthful of Corn Nuts. "Do I need to worry that she and her merry band of outlaws were the ones who hacked police departments and the DA's office?"
Myka shook her head. "Word from the DA's office is that it was an inside job. A lot of cops and prosecutors don't like the Winslows. When a kid went to the hospital this time, enough was enough."
Pete ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth, his cheeks bulging as he industriously rooted out Corn Nuts fragments. Myka almost expected him to raise his hand to his mouth and start licking it, like a cat washing its paw after a feed. "I hope you're right. We'll end up investigating this, and I don't want any ugly surprises. If you start thinking she was involved, you come to me first. You don't go to her."
Myka met his glare. "She wouldn't do anything that would cost her Christina." At least she could be confident about that.
"You've tried that one out on me before. Maybe the risk of losing her daughter to the Winslows is worth it."
"No, it's not," Helena said coolly, refusing to let Pete's spread-legged stance deter her from entering Myka's cube. In deference to the morning's chill, she wore a cashmere v-neck over a spread-collar silk shirt, and in an unusual departure she had put on the glasses that Myka had only ever seen in a case gathering dust on the nightstand. She looked professorial in a bewitching way that Myka never would have thought to describe her own professors, but the glasses couldn't hide red-rimmed and tired eyes. Something had kept her sleepless long after Myka had left for the night, maybe Nate's unnerving call, maybe the consequences of the disclosures about the Winslows' years-long bribery and coercion of police and prosecutors, maybe anxiety and remorse about another betrayal of her special agent lover. Myka immediately squelched that last thought.
"I'm sure Mark Winslow has called on every favor owed to him to sweep this back under the rug, and once all the notoriety fades, he'll be all the more determined to take Christina from me. I don't have the weapons necessary to take him on, and God knows you won't support me," Helena said with withering scorn to Pete.
"That's right," Pete said, completely wither-proof. "One lie, one sorry-assed scam, even if it's only to get an extra candy bar from the vending machine, and you're out of here."
"At least my scam would work," Helena retorted. "All your hip bumps against the glass do is make the primitive software go offline. You're no more a competent thief than you are –"
Myka hastily stood up and reached for her shoulder bag. "I hate to leave just when it's getting fun, but I have an appointment."
"Take her with you," Pete growled as he left her cube.
Helena looked quizzically at Myka. "Why don't you take me with you? Unlike the administrative overhead in this office," she jerked her head at Pete's retreating back, "I might even be helpful."
"It's not much of a lead," Myka said, feeling more evasive than she knew she actually sounded. "Maybe if it pans out . . . ."
Helena's smile was mocking. "Our lord and master still persists in believing that I know where the Bowdoin art is? Has he impressed upon you the need to drive slowly and make sure that I'm following you? If only Bryce DeWitt knew how busy you've been trying to make something real out of the story he's told you."
"I can't imagine Bryce's ego would let him expect anything less," Myka said dryly.
Helena's expression grew serious. "I'd rather it was something like that than you flying off to confront the Winslows -"
"It's exactly something like that," Myka said, noting how Helena's hand trembled as she raised it to lift her glasses to rub her eyes. Her voice softening, she said, "I'm just going to listen to an old man tell me childhood stories about your father." Trying to elicit another smile, even a mocking one, she added, "If you want to join in the reminiscing, you can come along."
Helena stopped rubbing her eyes to make a face. "I had a father who never tired of telling stories about himself, thanks. So you've found one of the 'boys of St. Mary' still alive and willing to talk to you?"
"So far he's not had anything to tell me that I couldn't find in your father's file, but it looks like I'm following up on DeWitt's information and, yes, that makes Pete happy."
"I shake in my boots when he's unhappy." Helena paused. "Who's this childhood friend? Or are you supposed to let me follow you and find out for myself? If you tell me now, I can just cut to the chase, you know, and confirm whether he's the one I'm colluding with."
"Henry Gryzbowski. He's the 'boy' who stayed in the neighborhood after your father and the others had left."
"Name doesn't ring a bell. Ted's the only boyhood friend I remember – and not fondly." She stepped closer, and Myka felt the warmth of her look as a caress. "Did I give you the response you hoped for? Another tiny foothold in your scaling of the mountain of mistrust I left behind? A far more formidable Mount St. Helena than the real one, I suppose." Her mouth quirked.
"It's Mount St. Helens, Helena," Myka couldn't help correcting.
"I'm terrible with American geography," Helena said archly, "and, of course, I'm an egotist."
"Your 'namesake' is a volcano. It might surprise you to hear that I'll take my chances with you."
Myka remembered to call Hank before she left for Serenity Bay to pick him up. She didn't want to show up in the middle of his physical therapy or witness the nurses giving him a vitals check. She also preferred not having to walk in while he was engaged in a post-breakfast argument about politics or the pennant race with other Serenity Bay residents. Unlike Steve, Hank wouldn't be able to sling himself into the passenger seat, but she wanted him dressed, fed, and with his walker primed. The staff person who answered the phone reassured her with the brisk cheerfulness of a first grade teacher comforting a parent about her child's first field trip that Hank had had a good night's sleep, was eager to visit his friends, and would be waiting for her when she arrived.
He was waiting in the foyer, and she smelled a hint of aftershave, Old Spice or Brut, the inexpensive kind found in a drugstore, the kind her mother would buy for her and Tracy to give to their father on Father's Day. Hank's shirt looked newish, and as he bent over his walker to follow her, Myka thought it was something that her training hadn't prepared her for, the boredom and dulling sense of routine, yes, but not this, the unironic juxtaposition of the mundane and (potentially) criminal. People looking at them might think she was a daughter dutifully taking her father on an outing, but it was possible, albeit unlikely, that she would be sharing her car with the one person still living who knew where the Bowdoin art was hidden. He could be gloating over that secret right now, though he seemed more concerned with how she was stowing his walker in the backseat. "Careful," he admonished her, "don't just toss it in there. I've got it adjusted just the way I like it." She was living the juxtaposition daily, keenly aware of how much she loved Helena and yet never failing to mark every one of her tiny pauses and hesitations, thinking that this might be the moment Helena revealed a glimpse of the confidence game she had been playing from the moment they had sat across each other in the prison interview room.
As they neared the church, Hank became vocal about the streets she ought to take, claiming, 'Trust me, I know my way around here." She humored him, although this was the rare case when the Google Map directions would have gotten them there faster. He pointed at spots of interest, or what would have been of greater interest to her if the diners and movie theaters, the schools and storefront businesses where he and Jim and the rest of their friends had spent their childhood still existed, but they were fast food and multi-purpose office buildings now. The only traces of what this area had once been like more than 60 years ago were in the old-fashioned neon sign over an entrance or the remnant of a painted advertisement on a wall for beer. When she turned onto the street St. Mary faced, Henry directed her to drive past the church and make another turn at the next block. She had time for only a glance at the church as they passed it, registering the gothic arch over the main doors and the stained glass window set in the center of it. The arch was so large that it gave the illusion that it might tip the church over at any minute and it all but swallowed a view of the modest bell tower. "Hasn't rung in years," Hank said sadly. "We don't have the money, and if we did, there isn't probably anyone around who would know how to fix it." Myka turned into a narrow driveway leading to a small parking lot behind the church, not big enough to hold the cars of parishioners attending Mass but big enough for staff. She parked the car between a Toyota with a cross hanging down from the rear view mirror and a battered mini-van with overlapping bumping stickers announcing that the owners were the proud supporters of Holy Academy's basketball team, its football team, its soccer team, and its math team. The math team bumper sticker was less prominently placed than the others. Myka could sympathize with that less-loved child.
There was a wheelchair ramp up to the main doors, and Hank methodically ascended it, pushing his walker forward and then leaning his weight on it as he crept up to meet it, his left leg dragging. Myka sprinted up the steps to the doors, holding one open for him. The vestibule was dim, but Hank moved through it with confidence. He said over his shoulder to her, "Twenty-five cent tour, right?" As they entered the nave, he gestured toward a couple of curtained stalls to their left. "That's where I confessed to Father Agnello that I helped Jim rob the museum." He grinned at his joke, and Myka flashed him an annoyed look. He shuffled down the center aisle, aimlessly pointing and saying, "There's where we buried the loot," "Here's where I gave Jim a blood oath of secrecy," and indulging in other childish digs, offered snickeringly under his breath, that reminded Myka that no matter how old a man was, a nine-year-old boy wasn't far from the surface. When they stopped in front of the steps to the altar, he pointed to an aisle on their left, off the far ends of the pews. "You follow that to a door, and through it are the church offices and the stairs to the cellar." He redirected his finger to wag it at her in caution. "It's a cellar, not a basement rec room. It's big enough to house the furnace and a few odds and ends and that's it." He tipped his head back to look up at the ceiling. "Not much above it, just a little attic crawl space." Hank concluded his summary of the church's layout by pointing at the aisle on their right. "Go through the door at that end, and you're at our combination social room and dining hall. There's a kitchen at the back of it. Pretty good Thanksgiving dinner that's put on here. Used to be a lot of wedding receptions here, too, but not fancy enough now for most folks." He swung his walker to the left. "Might as well introduce you to the ladies in the office. They know everything about this place that's worth knowing, and Marilyn's been here since the '80s. Maybe she knows where Jim hid the paintings."
Marilyn was probably the church secretary to whom she had introduced herself as Ted Bonaventura's niece, Myka thought glumly. A woman who knew everything worth knowing in her 30-plus-years with the church wouldn't likely forget much. Most people didn't enjoy the prospect of answering questions from an FBI agent, and they were even more resistant if they felt that the agent had lied to them on a previous occasion. It was unlikely that Marilyn or her co-worker knew anything helpful about Jim Wells, but in the event that one of them had a morsel of useful information, Myka could only hope that her phone call of a couple of days ago had been completely unmemorable.
Seeing that Hank had picked up his pace, the herky-jerky movement of the walker becoming more pronounced, Myka recognized that her chances of saving this visit to St. Mary from being nothing more than a goodwill gesture were fast shrinking. Cringing inwardly at the necessity, she asked, "Last night you spoke about Helena Wells as if she were a complete stranger, but it's hard for me to believe that you never met her. She was her father's right arm in a lot of his scams over the years. Some of us believe she might even have helped him with Bowdoin."
"I've been giving you a hard time, I admit it, but I haven't lied to you. Jim and I were friends when we were kids, but once we were grown and out of school, we didn't hang out together much." Hank compressed his lips, his expression the one Myka had seen her elementary school teachers adopt toward the students who were particularly resistant to learning the lesson, a kind of obstinate patience that promised long-division would be learned before the end of the day or that would be all that was taught, the next day and the next and the next, until the kids could do it in their sleep. "He was going places the rest of us weren't. He had talent, we could all see that, the way he could draw. He got to go to a fancy art school he was so good, while the rest of us were going to be carrying our lunch pails and punching in at 8:00 a.m. sharp for the rest of our lives." His voice became softer, his tone resigned, as if he were coming to terms with an unpleasant truth long lived with. "The only thing we resented him for was throwing it all away. He had a chance to be different than us, better than us, and he turned out to be the same as the grifters and hustlers on the street corners, only better dressed."
"You still haven't told me, yes or no, whether you met Helena Wells," Myka gently persisted. "Don't make me think you're stalling because I know you don't have problems with your memory."
"You didn't see me this morning trying to find the TV remote," Hank countered. "I've never met Helena. Jim had her enrolled in an art school from practically the moment she arrived in the States, and like I keep telling you, he never made it back here unless he wanted something. He talked about her, sure, and she was definitely the golden child in his eyes, not Charlie. Now him I knew. He wasn't a bad kid, not to start out with, but Jim never wanted to be saddled with responsibilities, and kids were responsibilities. Mainly Charlie's mom raised him. Jim swooped in when he thought Charlie could be useful, but Charlie wasn't special, not like Helena. The things he could do any punk with two fists and half a brain cell could do. He thought the tougher and rougher he could be, the more he thought Jim would respect him. That's when he got involved with some really bad people."
"Like Nate Burdette?"
"Hush," Hank said wryly. "You're not safe, even in here, when you mention his name. Any Burdette, for that matter. They're all rotten to the bone. Nate's dad, grandpa, uncles, cousins. Charlie acted tough, but he wasn't, not inside. I hear Nate's all smooth and polite now that he's richer than Midas, but he'll gut you as soon as look at you." He hesitated. "I told Jim . . . ." His voice trailed off, and he batted at the air impatiently. "Let's get going. They've got coffee and pastries in the office, and I can do with a bite and a sit down."
Myka didn't move. "What did you tell Jim, Hank?"
"Will you leave me alone if I tell you? I told him once that he ought to treat Charlie better, help him out, give him a new start because Charlie wasn't cut out to run with the likes of Nate Burdette. And Jim, he just says, 'If Charlie can't run with the pack, he deserves to be meat.' Coldest thing I ever heard him say."
She had stewed the entire day over what to wear. If she went casual, Jemma could think that she didn't appreciate the significance of the occasion. Meeting the parents, a parent, still meant something, and Myka wanted to make sure that her appearance showed it. She wasn't just another of Helena's short-lived "fancies," the term Jemma used, according to Helena, to describe all of her daughter's relationships to date. If she went formal, however, maybe Jemma would think she was cold and remote, hardly the kind of girlfriend a mother would want for her child. Helena had been sneaking glances at her throughout the day, amused, slightly mocking, and, if anyone were to catch the fleeting expression on Helena's face, loving. Myka was worried that she wasn't more worried by how Helena looked at her. There was no policy against dating a consultant, but she suspected there would be reservations about her dating this consultant, with her thinly veiled disdain for the agency's bureaucracy and her uncomfortably close connection to a conman who hadn't been out of the FBI's sights since the Bowdoin theft. After nearly a year of working with her – and some impressive arrests that had resulted from her help – Pete still didn't trust Helena, and though Myka knew that he knew they were involved, neither of them broached the subject. So she and Helena pretended that they were merely colleagues – albeit friendly ones – at work, and spoke their greater truth to each other in glances, the incidental brushing of their hands, and, a few times when they knew they were alone in the restroom, hurried kisses.
It was a stringent diet, and though Myka accepted the discipline, even enjoyed it because that was who she was, she burned. Sometimes it wasn't until late that she returned to Helena's loft, a case keeping her in the office long after everyone else had gone home, yet she would no sooner arrive than she was taking Helena's clothes off, dizzy with hunger and fatigue but driven even more by a need to get as close to Helena as she physically could. Helena would laugh, fending her off with a sandwich or something equally as quick to make, teasing Myka that she needed her strength, but she was eager too. With an archness that was betrayed by the catch in her voice as Myka made love to her, Helena would claim that if she had known that such a do-gooder, Agent Straight Arrow, could harbor this kind of passion, she would have seduced her much earlier. Myka could feel in how they moved together and heard in Helena's cries that she was more than another fancy.
She couldn't be cold or remote, not when she was near Helena. She could risk overdressing for the dinner. Yet for all the stewing and discarding of imagined outfits, when it came time to leave for Jemma's apartment, Myka still wore her dark gray suit jacket and pants, the suit that Helena complained leached all the color out of her. Meetings had run late, and she and Helena hadn't had time to change. She threw her jacket on the backseat and folded back the cuffs of her pale pink shirt before they walked the few blocks from their parking spot to Jemma's apartment building. Dressy but with casual flair, Myka reassured herself as a raw mid-March wind sliced through her shirt.
Jemma's apartment was warm and Jemma warmer. When Myka extended her hand, Jemma clasped it between hers. "I've been waiting for this moment for a long time," she said, with an affectionately exasperated look at her daughter.
"This is the first time since I was a teen in school that I brought someone home to meet my mum," Helena said, the dryness of her tone taking on a sharper edge when she said "mum." She had given Jemma the most distant of one-armed hugs before stepping past her and introducing Myka.
Jemma registered the emphasis with little more than an extra blink, releasing Myka's hand. "It's true, but when I first heard your name, oh, several months ago now, I knew you were different."
"But we weren't dating then," Myka blushingly protested. "I'm not sure we even liked each other very much."
Jemma dismissively shook her head. "What you thought about her mattered. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times that's happened." She shepherded Myka into a cozily furnished living room. Helena had already claimed an armchair, her wry smile telling Myka that she was in for the maternal second degree. Myka squared her shoulders. She was an old hand at interrogations. This cheery British mother with her unHelena-like blue eyes and blond bob was unlikely to get the best of her. She would learn more about Jemma – and Helena – than Jemma would learn about her. Jemma relaxed into the back of the sofa and encouraged Myka to do the same. "I know that you're from Colorado, that you have a law degree, that my daughter stole you away from a boyfriend who didn't deserve you . . . ."
Myka had never talked so much about herself in her life, but Jemma was a relentless, if charming, inquisitor. It was worse than the psychological screening she had had to go through to get into the FBI. At least during that interview she felt she had acquitted herself well, showing, and taking pride in the showing, that she was bright, driven, and committed to the belief that a career in law enforcement and responding to a higher calling were one and the same. Jemma, however, wasn't interested in what Myka had achieved and what she still aspired to do. Jemma wanted to know what she felt, what she liked, what she dreamed about. Yet Myka never sensed that Jemma was storing her halting admissions as ammunition for an argument to her daughter that she should look higher than a junior FBI agent. Quite the opposite, Jemma would take an embarrassed confession – that Myka had watched old episodes of Wonder Woman when she was a child or that she had dreamed of becoming an Olympic fencer – and comment approvingly on it to Helena, usually in reference to the failings of one of Helena's previous lovers.
"I used to think Nigel's sole ideal in life was to have his bum wear a hole in my furniture," Jemma grumbled.
"Nigel was attractive because he asked for so little. Telly, a recliner. No matter how long I was gone, when I came back, he was in the same place."
"If that's all you wanted, a houseplant would have been cheaper," Jemma sniffed. "Couldn't have a cuppa or a biscuit for myself but he was right there." She slid an appraising eye over Myka. "You challenge my daughter."
"I do? Myka laughed. "Is that a good thing?"
"Trust me, love. It is." Jemma's smile wavered. Then she firmed it and announced, "I better check on dinner. I've probably let the roast cook too long."
Helena watched her mother busy herself in the kitchen. "Jemma thinks you go to sleep every night asking yourself how you can be a better person tomorrow than you were today."
"Doesn't everyone?"
"No," Helena said softly, "everyone doesn't." She got up from her chair and reached for Myka's hand. "Let's set the table and show her that I can be a good daughter."
As Hank had promised, there were pastries in the office, and if she wanted coffee, there was a Keurig on top of a two-drawer file cabinet. Hank settled into a lightly padded chair against a wall, his walker rolled to the side. He stretched his legs, accepted a paper plate loaded with mini muffins and an apple Danish from Marilyn, and sighed with contentment. Myka did want coffee, and within a few minutes the Keurig burped to a finish as it filled a mug that displayed a fairy tale grandmother and the boast that "Grandmas give the best hugs." Marilyn handed the mug to Myka, who occupied the chair in front of the other assistant's desk. She appreciatively smiled up at Marilyn and waved off the offer of powdered creamer. For a vending machine habitué, she couldn't claim high standards, but she would let the strongest brewed coffee open a hole in her stomach lining before she stooped to using powered creamer. There was nothing pinched or unforgiving in the smile Marilyn gave her in return, even though she remembered well a woman calling about Hank – "Charming the ladies like always," she said fondly to Hank in his chair – and thought it strange that the woman said she was Ted Bonaventura's niece. Marilyn shook her head and shuddered. "One of my aunties used to date him, before he went to prison, you know, and he was not a nice man. I'm sorry to say it, Hank, because I know you were friends with him, but it's true." She gave Myka an appraising look. "I can see you as a librarian or a scientist holed up in a lab more than an FBI agent, but it's easier to believe that than believe you're Ted's niece. There's nothing Bonaventura-ish about you."
Myka thought she was better off not inquiring too deeply about that, especially as Hank let out a guffaw and said, "Not in the least." He said through a mouthful of Danish, "She's here to find out where we helped Jim hide the paintings." When Marilyn turned a blank face to him, he helpfully elaborated, "The museum that was broken into 20, 25 years ago. You gotta remember all the hullabaloo."
"Oh, ohhhhh, that," Marilyn said in dramatic recognition. She sat down behind her desk, peeling off the wrapper of a mini muffin. "There were police crawling around here like ants, asking questions, poking their noses into everything, because the museum's so close by. They wanted to know if we'd seen anything suspicious, but back then, you always saw something suspicious going on around here." She paused, then said earnestly, "Rudy Giuliani may be a little nutty these days, but he cleaned up the city. You gotta give him that. Neighborhood's a lot better now than it was then." She chewed the muffin, her expression thoughtful. "Why are you back here now? I haven't thought about those stolen paintings in years."
Hank pointed at Marilyn and then pointed back at himself. "Like I said, she thinks we're all in cahoots. You, me, Jim Wells, Ted, probably Father Agnello, and maybe Heather." He pointed at the other desk. "She would have been in kindergarten, but it doesn't matter to these special agents. We helped Jim hide the paintings."
Myka frowned at him and sought refuge from Marilyn's incredulous cries in the collection of novelty pens that Heather had on her desk. Heather was tending to a sick child at home, Marilyn had informed them, and Myka was beginning to envy her. Attending to a fretful four-year-old really wasn't any worse than attending to a fretful 75-year-old, plus the four-year-old would nap. Hank looked all too alert. She picked up a pen that was red and rubbery and smelled of strawberry. It reminded her of Twizzlers. She dropped it, however, when Marilyn conceded, "Well, he did tell me the fathers were sitting on a fortune if only they had the eyes to see it."
The clattering of the pen was lost in the explosion of Marilyn's and Hank's giggles, and Myka thought gloomily that she had just become the world's most overtrained babysitter. Hank glanced at her, and his giggling slowed. "Sorry, it's kind of an inside joke. You probably didn't see them when we came in 'cause they're kind of tucked away, but, gosh," he turned to Marilyn for confirmation, "it's been at least 70-80 years or more that the church has had them, right?" At her solemn nod, he said, "Some grand ol' dame, probably one of the few with money who ever attended St. Mary's, she was an amateur painter. Painted the disciples, the popes, the saints, the Crucifixion. When she died, she left her money and the paintings to the church. One of the fathers who was more kind-hearted than the others had them put up. They're awful. Even I know that, and I'm no judge of paintings."
Marilyn completed another solemn nod of her head, whether solely in agreement that the paintings were awful or because she also believed that Hank was no judge of art wasn't clear. "They were all going to be taken down at one point, but by then people had become fond of them. We were sort of known for them. Was it Father Wilson?" This time she looked for confirmation from Hank. "Father Wilson arrived at a compromise. We'd move as many as we could to the community room. The rest would be kept in one of the storerooms, except for the paintings high up on the walls in the vestibule." Marilyn pointed up in emphasis. "No one wanted to break their neck t remove them."
"Even as a kid, Jim promised that he could make them look better. Too bad he never did touch them up, we might've gotten some real money out of them." Hank shrugged, clearly signaling that it was one more of Gentleman Jim's broken promises.
Maybe this was how it happened for them, artists. Images, bits and pieces of information, assumptions, hunches, floating for years unconnected, and then suddenly, magically coalescing. Myka was no artist. She wasn't creative or spontaneous, but she felt that what she saw then was something akin to an artist's flash of insight. She didn't see water lilies or bridges; she saw a map, better than the one she Googled in the morning, which had shown her only the physical proximity of the church and the museum. This one showed her Jim Wells's plans to save the disaster his daring theft of works from the Bowdoin had become. The art he had stolen was virtually worthless because of a single bad decision, which had ended a security guard's life. He couldn't try to sell the art, not right away. He had to hide it until the furor quieted down, in a place, of course, no one would think to look.
"The community room, did you say?" Myka pushed back the chair, leaving the mug of half-finished coffee on Heather's desk. "Might as well go see them for myself. That way I can tell my boss I found some art, right?" She picked up the pen and put it on the desk next to the mug. Her fingers weren't even trembling. "How do I get there from here?"
Getting there from here was a matter of turning left out of the office and following the hallway until it met with another that led to the right. Restrooms and a water fountain were on one side and doors that looked like they hadn't been opened in years on the other. She wondered if one of them was to the room in which the other paintings had been stored. The hallway intersected with the other main trunk leading from the nave, and across from her, its double doors open and locked in place, as if she had been expected, was the community room. It was surprisingly capacious, and although the tile flooring was worn, it was scrupulously clean. Folded-down banquet tables and chairs were stacked against a wall. As long as the weddings weren't too large, receptions could easily be held here. At the opposite end of the room were doors to the kitchen. To one side was a half-wall topped by a counter that offered a view of commercial-sized ovens and refrigerators. At either side of the counter were coffee urns. On a Sunday morning, people would gather here after Mass and catch up on each other's news, drinking coffee and letting their eyes drift over the paintings without really seeing them. Myka saw them. There were at least 30, of varying sizes, and she wasn't sure which were the disciples and which were the saints; all the figures wore robes and had halos over their heads. It didn't matter, after all, that she couldn't tell Matthew or Luke from St. Francis of Assisi. What mattered was what Matthew and St. Francis were hiding.
Hoping she wasn't making enough noise to attract attention, Myka pulled out the nearest of the banquet tables, snapping its legs into place and grunting a little as she heaved it up. The squealing as she dragged it close to the wall was loud. She stopped to see if anyone would come to investigate, but no one did. She climbed onto the top of the table, making a graceful living picture she was sure, but she didn't stop to check the entrance. If a religious studies class or committee was going to come in and set up for a luncheon, she would have some explaining to do. Even more were they to witness what she did next, which was to remove one of the paintings from the wall, not the one within the easiest reach but one hung a little higher. The saint (or disciple) stared at her with sorrowful eyes. Myka turned the painting over. It was heavier than she had anticipated. If she were wrong, she would see only the back of the canvas. If she were right . . . . The attack of nerves that hadn't hit her in the office was hitting her. The painting was beginning to wobble her hands were shaking so hard. She took a couple of deep breaths to steady herself and focused on the back of the painting. There was a square of canvas pressed into the frame. The fit was tight, which suggested that it had been carefully measured. Myka, her hands now steady, gently tugged at a corner of the canvas. When she saw the paper behind it, she carefully placed the painting on the table. Hopping to the floor, she began easing the rest of the canvas away from the frame.
How kind of Gentleman Jim to position it so that the drawing of two girls in the corps de ballet, one adjusting her slipper, the other retying her hair ribbon, was facing her. He hadn't possessed much in the way of compassion or loyalty or truthfulness, but he hadn't been without a sense of humor, choosing a saint with a mournful expression to front a Bowdoin Degas. This was not a figure who could be elevated by thoughts of dancing. It was just as likely, however, that Jim Wells had picked this painting because it was approximately the same size of the drawing. He wouldn't have had the luxury of indulging in a private joke. He had had too many works to hide. Most people when they thought about the Bowdoin heist, if they thought much about it these days, imagined thieves lugging out paintings the size of 90-inch flat screens. Yet a good number of what Jim and his confederates had stolen were drawings, some no bigger than a page from a sketchbook because they had been drawn in a sketchbook, oftentimes as an exploratory sketch for a painting. Of the 17 works that had been stolen, more than a third of them were drawings, by Degas, Cezanne, Monet. She knew because she had read the case file over and over, saw that damn Degas drawing at least 17 times, more like 47.
The first time Jim had sought refuge in the church, it might have been to escape the surveillance and interrogation, but that old promise of making the paintings better must have come back to him. The minute the idea came to him he would have been busy discovering the church's every weakness, the doors that weren't locked, the windows that didn't fully shut, and how better to do that than in the company of the church's janitor?
Despite Hank's claims that he knew Jim for what he was, Myka didn't doubt that Hank had turned his back at some critical moment or carelessly left his keys in view. A man who couldn't be all bad – as Hank had described his old friend – couldn't be bad all the time. It would be safe to leave him alone for a visit to the men's room, a quick trip to the coffee pot, half-an-hour spent fixing a light on the fritz. What was Jim going to do, drink the communion wine, like he had wanted to do as a boy? So Hank had left him, seemingly napping in a pew or chatting up the secretaries, visibly grateful for the refuge. There would be no way to guess, particularly if you didn't want to believe the worst of someone, that he was plotting how to transfer 17 works of art from one hiding place to another. It would have taken Jim time to select the paintings and patience to fit them in already occupied frames. Not to mention opportunity. Had he done it in the dead of night or had he had the balls to slip into the church on a quiet afternoon and secret a painting in the confidence that since he hadn't been found out yet, he wouldn't be now? There had been a slight resistance to the canvas that Myka had removed. Jim might have sparingly applied some adhesive to ensure that it stayed in place. Whether it had taken days or weeks, once the works were hidden, Jim had need of neither Hank nor the church, and he would have disappeared from Hank's life with no more warning than he had entered it. Someday he would return to reclaim his millions, but until the time that the Bowdoin theft became no more than a bad memory for the police and the FBI, he would ply his schemes elsewhere.
Finding a crinkled tube of Krazy Glue in the kitchen, Myka touched the tip a couple of times to the inside of the frame, careful not to get anything on the drawing and then worked the canvas back in. As long as she didn't think too hard about the possibility that she might ruin a multi-million dollar work of art, she was fine. This wasn't any different, she told herself, than her handling of various forgeries and fakes over the years. There had always been the possibility that the counterfeit diamond ring or fake first edition was the real thing, so she was always careful. She found it more anxiety-provoking to rehang the painting. She really needed a ladder to do it; she was practically having to stand on tip-toe on the banquet table, and it left her off-balance. She saw herself dropping the painting to the floor and the frame cracking. It would be impossible then to keep quiet about what she had found.
When she finally got the painting back on the wall, she wasn't satisfied that she had hung it straight, but she would take a page out of Gentleman Jim's book and assume that people would see only what they expected to see, what they saw day after day after day. She thought that the crookedness of the painting's position made the saint look less sorrowful than sly, looking aslant at a visitor rather than down on her, but she wasn't going to be quiet forever about what she had found. Before someone thought to ask about what had happened to Saint Mark or John or Christopher to make him look like he wanted to reveal a secret, she would have figured out what she wanted to do. Figuring it out didn't involve telling Pete, not yet. If Steve had come with her, he would have already been on his phone, filling Pete in on the biggest recovery that the FBI had had in years, possibly ever, because Steve believed in the power of justice. Justice always triumphed, it might emerge bloodied from the fight, but it triumphed.
Myka knew better. Sometimes justice was the 98-pound weakling. It didn't need only a cape and a capital J on its bodysuited chest, it needed a club, maybe brass knuckles. What she had discovered – it if truly was the motherlode of the stolen Bowdoin art and not a fluke, Jim having given up after hiding the one work and storing the rest of the art in a footlocker left in the bowels of the Port Authority – was power. It was her lightsaber, her Harry Potter wand. It was what she could carry with her into the snake pit, and it evened her odds against Nate Burdette . . . and, yes, Helena, if it came to that. She wasn't a mouse any longer, she was a mongoose. Myka laughed silently at the thought. "Mongoose" was nerdy. She had earned some swagger today. She was a snake-killer.