Chapter Seven

Immunity

In the days that followed Larssen's arrest, Peter poured himself into digging up as much information as possible about Vincent Adler. He'd heard plenty about the man, of course. Around the time Peter had been busy tracking down Nora the first time, Adler had disappeared without a trace when his billion dollar Ponzi scheme came to a head, making off with the life savings of countless people. He'd never been caught, and had yet to show up on any radar as far as Peter could tell.

As he flipped through file after file that had been compiled following the man's disappearance, Peter found an unexpectedly familiar face standing along side Adler in a photo and wondered how it had never been brought to his attention before. Nora, several years younger but unmistakable, stood behind him in a navy blue dress. It wasn't as if she was just a passerby in the background, someone in the wrong place at the wrong time – even that would have been too big a coincidence for Peter to swallow. No, she was standing right behind him, among his inner circle that Peter had seen in countless other photos already.

Things were falling into place. Adler hired Larssen, so clearly there must have been some connection to Adler and the music box, to Adler and Kyle. But it was the connection to Nora herself that Peter had been really looking for. It was as if the photo was a puzzle piece that had been knocked to the floor, kicked under the couch, rendering the puzzle incomplete until Peter finally managed to find it.

He glanced down toward the bullpen, where Nora sat at her desk. He had to talk to her. Not in the Bureau, of course. It would have to wait until they were off the clock, alone and in private.

He showed up at her apartment well after dark that night, beer and wine in brown paper bag. Nora opened the door quickly after he knocked, and he brushed past her without being invited in. She was dressed down in a pair of jeans and a tank top that was smudged with paint, old and new, hair pulled up in a messy bun. Her hands, too, were a mess of blues and greens, and the air was thick with the smell of paint. He quickly saw the culprit; an easel with a work in progress was set up where the lighting was best for painting.

"Peter," she muttered as he pushed past.

"Hey."

The door closed behind him with a sharp thud. "It's late," she huffed pointedly as he studied her painting.

"Yeah." He leaned in for a closer look, ignoring the glare she was giving him from across the room. "That's not supposed to be one of Monet's lost frames?" Clearly, if she was trying to forge a painting, she would have hidden it before letting him in.

"No, just trying to clear my head."

"Good. About that." He pulled the photo out of his jacket pocket. "Vincent Adler. Seven years ago, he ran a huge Ponzi scheme and disappeared with a billion dollars." She stared at the photo, eyes wide as if she was looking at the ghost of someone who'd died long ago. "You knew him?"

She nodded slowly, swallowing hard. "He's the man who made me who I am today."

Why was that not surprising? He tucked the photo away. "He's rained hell down on both our lives." He fixed her with a pointed look. "You knew," he accused. "You knew and you didn't say anything?"

"I just figured it out myself, okay?" she snapped, and something in her tone told Peter she wasn't lying. "I'm trying to reconcile the Adler I knew with the man responsible for…"

"For Kyle? For Mozzie?"

"Yeah."

"So let's get him." He moved to sit his bag down on the table. "Come on. Start talking," he ordered, pulling his beer out and sitting it down.

"Yeah, I'm not much of a beer drinker," she reminded him, as if that would get her out of spilling the beans.

"I know," he dismissed, whipping out a bottle of wine. "That's why I brought you this."

"Oh," she muttered as she took it, not looking very enthused. "I don't recognize the bottle."

"That's because it cost as much as the beer."

"Wow, I don't even need a corkscrew."

"Nope." He pulled out a bottle of his beer and put the rest in the refrigerator before grabbing a wine glass out of the cabinet for Nora. "Okay. How do you know Adler?"

"It's a long story," she deflected.

"If we're gonna catch this guy," he told her evenly, filling her glass, "just like I caught you, I need to know everything."

"There's too much to tell."

He sighed heavily, meeting her eyes. She was reluctant, he knew, ever unwilling to admit to even the slightest thing Peter might be able to use against her. He'd expected that, been prepared for it. "You're gonna plead the Fifth?"

She shrugged. "A few secrets are good, Peter." She raised her glass in front of her, scrunching her nose as she examined it. "Keeps the mystery alive."

"I get it. The story includes some stuff about crimes I don't know about." She flashed a smirk. "Yeah. No. You're not holding back on me." Her face fell as she realized how gravely serious he was, how she wasn't going to get out of it by being evasive. "We've got all night. I'll make you a deal." He pulled out his badge and sat it on the table in front of her. "Full immunity for anything you say from this moment until the sun rises over that balcony."

She stared at him, incredulous. "Full immunity?"

"Did you kill anybody?"

"No."

"Then full immunity." He picked up his beer, offering it up as a toast to seal their deal. Cautiously optimistic, Nora picked up her glass of cheap wine and clinked it against his bottle, each of them taking a drink. Which she seemed to quickly regret as her nose scrunched again at the taste of the wine.

"Alright," she sighed, "let's start with this." She crossed over to the counter, pulling open a drawer and taking something out. "Mozzie decoded the music box." And he was just now hearing about it? "It's an equation. This is what it built."

He studied the geometrical shape built of colorful bendy straws taped to a plastic tray. "It's a fractal," he realized. It was interesting, but he didn't see how it related to Adler.

"Very good," she allowed, seeming to forget that he was no slouch when it came to math, how once upon a time, he'd almost gone into accounting. "I've seen one like it before."

"Where?"

"In Vincent Adler's office when I worked for him."

"How did you meet him?"

She sat slowly, running a hand through her hair for a moment. "If you wanna know about Adler, we gotta start with Mozzie."

Of course. "Why am I not surprised?" Peter huffed.

"It was eight years ago," she explained. "I was new to the city, didn't know the East Village from the West." She took a deep breath and a sip of wine before launching into her story.

Eight Years Ago

Nora's stomach rumbled with hunger as she walked through the crowded summer streets of a city she was only just starting to get her bearings in. She hadn't eaten since that morning, just a questionable microwave breakfast burrito from the convenience store, and she debated whether to find something a little better for lunch. Rent would be due soon, and there was only so many times flirting with the skeevy landlord would get her out of paying it on time before she was evicted, and she definitely wasn't going to sink low enough to go further than flirting, no matter how desperate she got.

A crowd drew her attention as she meandered through a sunny park. "Alright," a man called brightly at the center of the crowd, "follow the lady." He had a shoddy table set up and seemed to be running some kind of card game scam. A man in a truly awful blond toupee, a goatee, and a pair of thick rimmed glasses stood opposite of him, staring intently at three cards as the man shuffled them around the table. "All you gotta do is follow the lady. I'm mixing fast, but if your eyes are faster, you win. Simple as that."

"Lady's in the middle," the man with the toupee said with confidence as Nora stopped to watch, curious. The stakes looked high, a crinkled hundred sitting next to the cards.

The dealer flipped the middle card, and sure enough, the queen made her appearance. "Woo, got good peepers, pal." The man in the toupee grinned. "Wanna double up, buddy?"

"Sure, toss them." More money was tossed down on the table, and the dealer started shuffling the cards around once more.

"You think you can follow them, but I'm saying that you can't," the dealer taunted as the man concentrated. "It's all a game of you versus me." Nora, very interested to see what was going to happen, edged closer, coming to a stop to look over the man's shoulder. "Alright, here we go. Here we go. Where is she? Where is she? Watch her, she's a sneaky lady, but I think she likes you."

"She's on the right," the man announced with the same confidence as before.

And oh, oh so wrong. The dealer was good, she had to give him that. "She's back in the middle," Nora told the man.

"Are you crazy?" the man huffed. "She's definitely on the right."

"Hey, it's his money, kid," the dealer snapped, knowing Nora was right. "Let the boys, play, okay?" A chorus of 'ooh's rang through the crowd.

The man flipped the card on the right, revealing not the queen, but the ten of spades. "Aw, she's sneaking around on you, boss," the dealer taunted, flipping over the middle card to show that Nora was, in fact, correct, before he collected his winnings.

"Lucky guess," the man ground out when he caught sight of Nora's smug look. "If you're so good at this, why don't you put your own money down?" Ah, so that's what it was. He lost on purpose, bait for some sucker who thought they could do better to step up and put their money down to show the loser how it was done.

It was a horrible idea. She had rent to pay, after all. Betting on a rigged card game would be a stupid risk, and since the dealer knew she could spot his shit, he would make sure to amp up the difficulty… Unless she could rig it back into her favor.

"Either bet or walk away, honey." The crowd urged her on, and how could she back down from a challenge? "What'chu got?"

With a smirk, she pulled a threadbare wallet from her pocket, full of bills generously donated by some random business man she'd passed a couple days before. "Alright." She tossed a Grant down on the table.

"Fifty?" the man scoffed. "Come on, really take this guy."

The dealer eyed her expectantly. "Time to put up or shut up, baby girl." She stared back blankly. "It's up to you."

Not breaking eye contact, she emptied the wallet. "Alright. Let's go five hundred." That certainly wiped the smug look off his face as he stared down in mute disbelief.

"Now we're talking," the man praised.

The dealer recovered himself, though still looked pretty baffled. "Alright, looks like I hooked myself a whale here." He tossed down five hundred bucks of his own. She drowned out the murmurs of the crowd as he started dealing the cards again. "Lookie, lookie, hey, diddle, diddle. Queen is in the middle. Follow her fast, follow her slow. My hands are fast, your eyes are slow. You see her? Huh? You see her? Pick that little lady and you win, sweetheart. All you gotta do is show me the smile on the lady's face and you walk away with it all." The cards fell still and she pointed out the one on the left. "Ah! You sure?"

"Yeah, she's sure," the man answered for her, overeager.

"I'm sure." She snatched up the card before the man could and flipped it over, revealing a pretty little red queen. Clearly, not what the man was expecting, judging by the look on his face. The crowd erupted in a cheer as she scooped up her winnings.

"Fun game, man," she told him, stuffing the wad of bills hastily into her pocket. "Thank you. You toss the broads really well." She made her retreat as innocuously as possible, hoping to be well clear of them before they noticed her deceit.

Nora was flying high as she headed back to her apartment. A simple sleight of hand had turned five hundred dollars into a thousand, and she no longer had to decide between rent and dinner for a little while. She was just counting out her newfound fortune, ready to tuck it into a hollowed out old book, when there was a knock on the door.

She froze. No one ever visited her. She had no family, no friends, no job. She kept her nose clean and stayed out of trouble that could put her on the police's radar. Had the dealer followed her? Was he coming to shake her down for his money back?

Swallowing hard, she tucked the money in the book and crossed over to the door. Leaving the chain latched, she pulled the door open, not even bothering to check the peep hole. If someone really wanted to, they could cover it or stand off to the side.

In a surprising turn of events, it wasn't the dealer or the police, but the man with the horrible toupee who peered in at her. "I'm the guy from the park," he offered, as if she might have forgotten. She shut the door in his face. Undeterred, he knocked again. "I'm not here to give you hospital time, kid."

She wasn't really all that concerned about it, honestly. "Good," she called back, "'cause I'm not giving you your money back."

"Aw, keep it." She stared at the door, confused. If he didn't want his money back, why had he followed her home?

And maybe it was stupid and reckless and an obvious ploy that she was falling for, but Nora was intrigued. So she opened the door. "What's your angle?" she demanded.

"Look, I've been running Find the Lady for years, and even I didn't catch that swap."

"Uh-huh," she muttered, not entirely convinced. She peeked past him down the hallway. "Where's your partner?"

"I left him."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "I need an upgrade." And he thought Nora was that upgrade? Against her better judgment, Nora let him in.

(Peter laughed as he listened to the story. "Mozzie had a goatee?" he cut in.

"Well, only to distract from the toupee," she snickered. Peter laughed along as he imagined it, and not for the first time, Nora wished she had photographic proof of that point in Mozzie's life. "Anyway, we talked. Moz told me about his Detroit days. He'd been running street cons since he was a kid."

"Mm," Peter mused. "Notice my lack of surprise." Technically, his deal only covered Nora with immunity, but he would let Mozzie's crimes slide if they came up, as long as he got the information about Adler he wanted. Speaking of. "What does any of this have to do with Adler?"

"Well, he's the reason Mozzie found me.")

It was with some hesitance that Nora showed him the bonds. She liked to consider herself a pretty good judge of character, and he seemed to be honest and forthcoming enough, for a con man. And if things went south, she was confidant in her ability to get out of dodge at a moment's notice.

"These forgeries are exquisite," he gushed, examining them closely.

"Who says it's a forgery?" she evaded, even as she beamed from his compliment.

He rolled his eyes. "Uh, given your living conditions, I do." Which, fair enough. He returned his attention to the bonds. "How did you match the tricolor seal?"

"Just eyeballed it," she admitted, not trying to brag, even if that was how it sounded.

"By eye?" he repeated, incredulous.

"Mm-hmm."

"Huh," he chuckled, sitting down. "You are very talented, kid. With you as my partner, we could move way beyond the street hustle."

Nora had always considered herself the type who worked alone, but the prospect of working with someone who could hustle with the best of them, who had more experience than she could hope to get on her own, she was definitely open to the suggestion. She sat down across from him. "What did you have in mind?"

"A long con. Which, if executed properly, would enable us to purchase and retire on neighboring, temperate zone islands in a mere six months." It sounded way too good to be true, which usually meant it was, but Nora kinda lived in the zone of pushing boundaries and seeing what she could get away with.

"I just got to the city," she reminded him, "and I'm too young to retire."

He stared at her like she had two heads. "I'm talking about summiting the Everest of swindles."

He dreamed big, that was for sure, and she could certainly respect that. "Who's the mark?" With a smile like he'd won, Mozzie leaned back and told he everything she needed to know.

"Vincent Adler," Peter recapped, leaning forward. Nora was a master class in storytelling, if nothing else. She nodded, taking a small sip of her wine, seeming to have come to sort of tolerance for the stuff even if it wasn't up to her standards. "Now this is getting good." And the story had only just started.