I coulda been a contender. This office coulda been mine. Myka smiled to herself. Her Marlon Brando imitation was crap, but at least no one heard her. However, Steve chose that moment to look at her with his very clear, very blue eyes, and Myka felt the glance penetrate to the movie room in her mind in which, like Brando's Terry Molloy, she brooded over what might have been. Pete called the look "Blue Justice"; Steve's eyes deserved to be on a movie poster staring down a gangster or, more prosaically, surveying with pride the Assistant Special Agent in Charge's office. Yet those eyes were looking at her, the interrogative wrinkling of the brows above them marring the perfection of Blue Justice.
Naturally he would want to know why she and Pete had let two weeks go by without following up their conversation with Helena. "I'm meeting with her this afternoon. I'm hoping she'll have something for us. If nothing solid, then at least a clue, a suggestion, something we can work from our end." What she didn't tell Steve was how brusque and impatient Helena had sounded when she called, with a growl to her voice that reminded Myka of her father. Helena had offered no apology for the two-week silence, saying only that she normally took her lunch at one and could meet then. Pete had joked that they didn't to flip a coin to see which of them would be her lunch date, because his vibes were telling him Myka should be the one to go.
Myka usually trusted his vibes, but she wasn't convinced that they were particularly sensitive to the status of her love life. They appeared to be most active – and accurate – about the direction of investigations, leading Pete to recommend a course on the basis of "my gut says yes" or "my gut says no," and the nearest source of food. It was no coincidence that his vibes were strongest when a lead they were pursuing brought them within sight of a Taco Bell or McDonald's. A 1:00 meeting fell within Pete's lunch hour; no wonder his gut was urging him to stay in the office, close to his mini-cooler of triple-decker sandwiches, Doritos, and Mountain Dew, while she tried to persuade a resistant Helena Wells to work with them.
Pete turned to her, his mouth full of mini-muffins that Steve had brought to the office, courtesy of Liam. "What do you think?" he garbled.
Myka didn't normally let herself get distracted, but she was developing a bad habit of getting distracted when Helena Wells was the subject. They were meeting about her, and Myka still couldn't focus for thoughts of the dark eyes that, when they were unguarded, had a warmth to them that she wanted to wrap around her like a robe, but Helena's eyes were unguarded only when they were gazing at Christina. When they gazed at her, they seemed more discs than eyes, black, flat, and hard. The voice, too, was different when Helena was teasing her daughter, a world away from the caustic burn it could carry if she were responding to an agent's question. Through her fog, Myka was dimly aware that Steve had asked another question, and she had to clear her head of the hope that someday she might hear that voice soften and say her name like it wasn't something bad that had to be spit out. "Do I think she can be believed or do I think she can help us?" Myka hazarded. In her mind, they were two separate questions. Even if Helena were innocent of the accusations, it didn't mean that she would willing to help them, and if she were guilty, she might make of the FBI's otherwise unpleasant intrusion into her life an opportunity to direct its suspicion elsewhere.
"I think she can be believed," Myka said slowly, "but she'll be a reluctant partner at best. Working with us takes her back to when she and McKnight were being investigated." Without thinking she stole a mini-muffin from the paper plate that Pete was holding close to his chest. "When we showed up on Saturday, she was doing the laundry, and her daughter was playing in the living room, just normal weekend stuff, and when she saw us . . . she saw it all shattering. Normal's a gift to someone who's gone through what she has, and we took it away from her."
Pete gravely looked down at the plate and the gap left where Myka had taken the muffin. "My gut tells me Helena Wells isn't behind what's going on at Amundson Securities – and that it's missing a muffin," he finished darkly, mock glaring at Myka. "But my selfish partner is right, she'll be cooperative only when she has to be. She hates the FBI, and I'm pretty sure she Cloroxed the house after we left."
"Working with you two can't be worse than prison time." Steve pushed aside the Tupperware container in which only a few mini-muffins rolled around, their edges a little worried, as if Pete had already nibbled at them, to open the folder underneath. He meditatively tapped the photocopies of the emails that District Attorney Kosan had anonymously received. "Someone's going to some trouble to convince us that Helena Wells is up to her ex-boyfriend's tricks, and maybe our whistleblower is right." He gave an ironic nod to Pete. "Your gut," then he gave an identical nod to Myka, "and Norman Rockwell Saturday afternoons at home notwithstanding."
"Got it. Make sure we exercise some healthy skepticism." Myka hesitated. "The thing I keep tripping over isn't her, but him, Nolan Amundson. Why bring her all the way out here? He has offices on the East Coast, the West Coast, everywhere. She has no family, no friends, no support here. He's helping out the daughter of an old friend, but he couldn't have found a job for her in New York?"
"Maybe she wanted the hell out of New York. Maybe she wanted to go where no one knew her," Pete countered, slurping at a quart-sized travel mug filled with Mountain Dew. "Her brother practically disowned her, and her friends acted like they had never met her. She probably jumped at the chance for a fresh start."
"And this would be her destination of choice?" Myka said dryly. "I love it, it's my home, but the Frozen North isn't for everyone. But putting aside the question of why he brought her more than a thousand miles from her home, why Amundson Securities? His corporate headquarters is only a couple of blocks away, and he puts her, a woman connected to one of the biggest securities frauds we've ever seen, in his securities firm?"
"He may look like a kindly old man, the unofficial state grandpa, but he wasn't always like that." Irene was leaning against the doorframe, her skirt suit an autumn mélange of brown, deep red, and gold. The casual pose was deceptive; Myka had seen Irene perch on a desktop – her desktop – only to announce that they were going on a raid in the next five minutes. "When the Amundson empire hit hard times in the '70s, Nolan didn't scruple about the means he used to keep it solvent. He ousted his uncle, Magnus Amundson, who was CEO at the time, he slashed costs and closed factories, and he got involved in some questionable, but ultimately profitable, business ventures. We investigated him because there was evidence he was partnering with the Mob."
Pete stared at her incredulously. "Nolan Amundson? The Mob? Next you're gonna tell me he was the one behind Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance."
Irene disapprovingly clicked her tongue. "Rein in your imagination, Agent Lattimer. We couldn't prove anything, not definitively, but his CFO and the company's internal auditor went to prison for fraud, and a lot of us thought they took the fall for Nolan."
"Were you one of them?" Myka asked.
"I was too junior to have an opinion, at least one worth listening to," Irene said wryly, "but it was an invaluable experience. I learned that even the most upright businessmen will cut corners if they think they can get away with it and that people will stop at very little to avoid going to prison." She looked intently at Myka. "Nolan Amundson didn't give Helena Wells a job at his securities firm because he felt sorry for her. He thought there was something in it for him. You need to figure out it was." She paused before saying with emphasis, "Discreetly." Her glance flicked to Steve. "Call with the assistant director in my office in five."
Myka couldn't suppress the spurt of envy. In five, Steve would be in Irene's office talking with one of the Bureau's bigwigs. In five, she would be back at her desk, trying to call up old files on Nolan Amundson from the archives. Maybe this investigation would be her break, what would bump her up to an Assistant Special Agent in Charge like Steve, possibly a Special Agent in Charge of her own field office. She could hope, couldn't she? And work harder than hell to make it happen. No more being distracted by thoughts of Helena Wells's enigmatic dark eyes and melancholy air. Helena Wells was only a means to an end, she told herself firmly.
"Let's have another chat after you've met with Helena, Myka." Steve was about to put the lid over the Tupperware container when Pete reached into it to scoop up the remaining mini-muffins. "Liam thought he had made enough for the office," Steve said plaintively.
"Hey, I'm saving you the embarrassment of bringing home leftovers. Liam will know that his treats were appreciated."
Myka rolled her eyes. "Because if everyone else in the office saw them, they'd be making the sign of the cross and screaming 'God save us from the muffins!'"
"It's why I joined the FBI." Pete grinned unrepentantly. "I'm selfless like that."
Myka did, in fact, spend the rest of the morning trying to pull up the Bureau's old files on Nolan Amundson, and when that promised to take the rest of her life, digitization making files harder, paradoxically, to retrieve, as if there were still a fussy librarian whom she had to placate, she turned to other sources. It was slow work and necessarily partial, and she was readier for a break than she had anticipated when it was time to meet Helena. Amundson Securities was on the opposite side of the river that bisected the city's downtown, which sounded farther away than it actually was. She could take one of the streetcars that plied the downtown and save herself the aggravation of trying to find herself a parking spot. It was a warm day for late September, and she enjoyed the breeze through the streetcar's open windows, even though it smelled of asphalt and traffic and the unwashed-socks funkiness that seemed characteristic of all large cities. She didn't want to breathe it in too deeply, but at least the air had character, unlike the filtered air of the office.
This part of the downtown used to be lined with wharves back when the river had been the city's main commercial thoroughfare. Her great-great-grandfather Bering, after leaving Hamburg for the Great Plains, had gotten his start loading and unloading the barges that transported grain and flour south and delivered tobacco and cotton north. Barges were rarer these days, although if you hung over the railing of one of the bridges that spanned the river for long enough, you could usually spot one slowly negotiating a course upstream or downstream. Many of the warehouses had been torn down as shipping moved inland, from barges to fleets of trucks, and distribution centers the size of football stadiums ate up farmland south of the city. The old warehouses that had been spared, their preservation owed to their historical or architectural interest, had been converted into offices and lofts, and Amundson Securities rented space in one of them.
Helena, however, hadn't wanted to meet her at the firm, suggesting, instead, a Panera a few blocks away, and Myka caught only a glimpse of the warehouse in which Amundson Securities had its offices before the streetcar trundled through the intersection. She watched what would have been her stop disappear behind her, and she regretted missing an opportunity to see Helena's workplace as a visitor, a friend dropping in to pick her up. She might have sensed something of its dynamics in just those few minutes. Barging in with a badge and a subpoena fatally disrupted the meshing of personalities and processes that made each workplace unique and could help to explain why a fraud could go on so long without being detected or, conversely, why so many would conspire to hide it. What she knew of Amundson Securities would inevitably be distorted by what Helena chose to tell her, not from a desire to deceive necessarily, but because people instinctively edited what they experienced into a narrative that made sense to them. Yet because it was Helena who was acting as her eyes and ears, Myka knew she couldn't dismiss the possibility that Helena's account would be deliberately skewed. It would have been really nice if she could have shown up at the reception desk and been led to Helena's office or, better yet, had a finger pointed in the general direction and allowed to find her own way there.
The disappointment fled when she entered the Panera and saw Helena just inside the foyer, awkwardly stepping aside to let the serious customers get a better look at the menus overhead. She was wearing a skirt and short-sleeved top, standard office wear for this last gasp of summer weather, but the skirt hugged her butt and showed off shapely calves while the top, a deep rose, accentuated the contrast between her complexion, which seemed too fragile even for a September sun, and the glossy fall of dark hair. She was a walking or, in this case, standing Neapolitan, and Myka had always enjoyed taking a bite of chocolate ice cream while the spoonful of strawberry was still dissolving in her mouth. She shook her head. At best, Helena was an informant; at worst, she was the suspect they would eventually arrest. What she wasn't, at all, was material for fantasies.
The lukewarm smile of greeting that Helena gave her only seconded the self-admonition. As they joined the line at the counter, Helena asked quietly, "Are you open to getting our food to go and walking down to the river? A meeting ran late, and I've already spotted a co-worker at one of the tables."
Myka didn't think it was time yet for secret meetings in hotel parking lots or in unmarked cars, but it didn't hurt to be careful. "Sure. It's a nice day and there are plenty of benches near the river."
She tried to fill their walk back toward the river with small talk about Christina and whether she was enjoying the start of the schoolyear, not-to-miss autumn highlights, the weather, the sports teams. Helena's responses were brief, the shuttered look in her eyes telling Myka even more plainly than the coolness in her voice that she was here under duress and that Myka's attempts to engage her in casual conversation were doomed to fail. As Myka neared the end of her less than plentiful stock of conversation starters – Pete was so much better at this, she concluded for the hundredth time – she spied the back of an unoccupied bench and decided they could walk the short distance to it in silence.
"You're different than the other agents I've met," Helena said abruptly. "They always belonged to one of three groups, the agents who thought I was as guilty as hell, the agents who also thought I was as guilty as hell but hoped if they treated me like a human being I might roll over on Stuart, and the agents who were so busy collecting the evidence and nailing down the case they didn't see me at all, except as a piece of furniture they had to push aside. You don't hate me, and despite your clumsy efforts at chatting with me, I don't think you're trying to make me your friend."
Myka stopped. "You're not a piece of furniture that's in my way." She took a deeper breath than she had intended, uncertain about what it would suggest to Helena. "We need your help to figure out what's going on at Amundson Securities, but I'm not going to pretend that working together makes us friends or puts us on the same side. I hope it doesn't happen, but our partnership may not end happily."
"You may end up arresting me, after all?" Helena laughed humorlessly. "I appreciate the honesty." She tipped her head at the bench. "Shall we sit down?"
Myka ran her hand over the slats, dislodging twigs and leaves that had fallen from the shade trees nearby. Some of the leaves fluttering to the ground were yellow, and she realized with a sense of wistfulness that summer was over, and she had watched it pass through office windows. Helena had already sat down, taking her sandwich from her bag. She kept only half of it out, carefully rewrapping the remaining half and putting it back in the bag. Myka wondered if she were saving it for later in the day or tomorrow's lunch, and, remembering Helena's townhome and the laundry basket at the foot of the stairs, the signs that she and Pete had an interrupted an afternoon's chores, she wanted to ask Helena how often she let herself recall that she had once had household staff to wash her clothes and cook her meals.
"The reports that went out to the investors, they were altered," Helena flatly said.
Jaws beginning to work on her own sandwich, Myka stopped their motion, surprised, not by what Helena said, but by how she continued to be distracted, even though Helena was mere inches from her. She had hoped that her inability to focus during the morning meeting with Steve and Pete would be a one-time event once she saw Helena again. Nothing like a wary, suspicious, unwilling informant to send any daydreams about a "hot British mom" (Pete's words) flying. Yet Helena wasn't thinking about her lunch companion's wardrobe or wondering about that companion's previous life. She was ready to get this lunch over with, and the quickest way of doing it was giving the special agent next to her the information she wanted. Although the sun shone no less brightly, Myka was convinced a cloud had crossed it at the word "altered."
"I collect the data, I analyze it, and then I make it look pretty." Helena took a sip of her iced tea, her gaze directed at the river. They sat too far away to get a full view, but Myka could see the swirling current at the midpoint and the lazier eddies at the opposite bank. "I create interactive charts and graphs in bright colors, and," Helena said wryly, "summarize, in no more than two sentences, what the charts and graphs mean. 'Your EPS is twice what it was last month.'" She screwed her mouth into a falsely bright smile. The smile fading, she said, "I save the reports on a shared drive so the portfolio managers and financial planners can review them. They're supposed to ask me to make any changes, but they have the ability to make changes themselves, and sometimes they do. It's an unwritten rule, however, that they're not supposed to touch the data. They can change how much is displayed and how it looks, but that's all."
Myka nibbled at the one of the apple slices that she had virtuously selected as the side to her sandwich rather than chips or the ancient grains roll. "So a portfolio manager or financial planner changed the data in a report on the start-ups?"
"It wasn't blatant. In the most recent report, I had included information about a potential lawsuit against the biggest of the start-ups claiming patent infringement. While there's no impact on current performance, the potential adverse effect could be enormous. Even a settlement out of court could seriously affect the company's financials. You can't hide information like that from investors."
"But the firm did hide it because it wasn't in the final version of the report." Myka tried to keep her tone as neutral and bland as possible. "How does a report that goes through multiple reviews get altered like that without someone calling attention to it?"
"What you're really asking," Helena said bitterly, "is why I didn't call attention to it." She flashed Myka an angry look. "Because after the back-and-forth with the portfolio manager and the financial planners, there would be a consensus on the 'final' of any particular report, and it was my understanding that it was this version of the report that would be sent to the investors." She plunged her straw up and down to break up the ice in her cup. Myka thought it might be in lieu of stabbing her with it. "I never felt the need to ensure that another version of the report – one I didn't know about – wasn't being sent instead. But after you and your partner visited me, I realized that there was nothing other than basic honesty and integrity to keep a portfolio manager or planner from making alterations to a final report without telling me." There was a screech of plastic as she sent the straw with extra force through the lid. "I lived with Stuart McKnight. I should know better than to trust that the sun will come up in the morning. It's not as easy as you might think to get hold of that report, and you don't want to know how I did, but that's how I know the report was altered. The report sent to the investors in the start-ups didn't have the information about the lawsuit."
"Could it have been an error? Someone made a small change and inadvertently deleted other information?" Myka didn't believe it, having seen the effort to which the mysterious whistleblower had gone to ensure that Helena was implicated in the fraud, but she needed to have Helena explain how she knew that she had been targeted.
Helena turned her head away from her, but Myka detected the slight tremble in her voice. "The metadata says I was the last one to modify the report. That prompted me to search for others, and the ones sent to the investors over the past couple of months have all been altered, data added or changed to make the start-ups seem to be in better shape than they were. Not better by leaps and bounds but enough to convince investors to leave their money in the companies. Each report was last modified by me."
"You have copies of the reports as you last left them, so you were able to compare the two sets?"
"The final version," Helena caught herself, "what I thought was the final version is saved in the shared drive and it's deleted once the report is sent to the investors. The sent report is the final report. The only copies I have are working copies, and the data have all been written over." She didn't fully turn her head around to meet Myka's gaze. Their eyes only obliquely met before Helena directed hers down at the ground. "Your choices are few, Myka. You either believe there's a conspiracy to frame me – because portfolio managers don't have administrator rights to log onto the system as other users – or you believe that I'm lying. Given my history, if I were you, I know what I'd believe."
"You're ignoring several alternative theories – your evil twin, SPECTRE, the Borg," Myka said gravely.
Helena laughed; it was wobbly with tension, but it was still a laugh. "We might as well throw in amnesia and an alternate reality. Maybe Stuart teleported himself out of prison. . . ." Her laughter died. "That will never be funny – in any reality."
"I need to know who has administrative rights to the computers, when the reports were modified for the last time, the name of the portfolio manager for the start-ups." Myka fired off items in the hopes of getting Helena to concentrate on something concrete, something that she could do to feel in control. "I also need to know what other reports of yours might have been altered. The sooner you can get this information to me the better. No long radio silence. Can we meet again next week?"
Helena looked as if she might object but ended up listlessly shrugging her shoulders. "I'll do my best, but I have to be careful. I can't afford to raise suspicion."
"The problem is that you already have."
The walk back was silent but oddly more comfortable. The force field around Helena that Myka had kept bumping against on their walk to the river had weakened, if it hadn't been completely lowered. Maybe she had decided that the FBI wasn't her worst enemy. Myka would have preferred a partnership in which she wasn't seen as the least of all possible evils, but if Helena were never able to regard her and her job as anything other than threats to her happiness, then it would only be right that all that resentment and distaste should dim Helena's attractiveness. Myka should be able to sneak a look at that face and not feel a flicker of interest, yet she couldn't see the worry lines and the unsmiling set of Helena's mouth and not want to draw that face against her shoulder and whisper into that hair, smelling of sunshine and the sweetness of shampoo, that everything was going to be all right. She knew better, not only because it was Helena whom she wanted to comfort and reassure but because everything didn't always work out okay. Sometimes getting the real bad guy was a victory that didn't outweigh the pain, or the harm.
"Whose lunch did I inadvertently take? Whose coffee cup did I use without permission?" Helena demanded. "Despite my relationship with Stuart, I'm not a hateful person. Although if you talk to my ex, the one before Stuart, I suppose you'd get a different opinion." Myka waged a brief, intense, but ultimately successful battle not to ask about the ex. Helena's life before Stuart had revealed no brushes with the law, so there was no professional need to dig. She wasn't dating Helena, so there was no personal need either. No need period, yet after a darting, unfathomable look, Helena said, "Her name is Giselle, part-time model, full-time socialite."
Of course her former girlfriend was a model, and Myka suddenly felt very drab in her gray linen pantsuit. She had thought it summery and elegant when she had put it on this morning, now she looked like she was wearing a wrinkled, gray bedsheet. ". . . . When we lived together, Giselle was always complaining that I used her toothpaste, her body wash, her razor instead of my own. But hogging the toiletries doesn't justify setting me up for fraud." Her eyes were frozen wide with disbelief, and Myka understood that the mockery was Helena's means of distancing herself from the realization that the refuge she thought she had found had left her only the more exposed. "Was one of Stuart's relatives a victim of theirs? Do they think it's time I get what I deserve?"
"It may not be about hurting you but using you to hurt someone else," Myka said. They were nearing an intersection, on the other side of which and just a few buildings away was Amundson Securities.
"You mean the Amundsons." Helena paused. "Scott's a big proponent of renewable energy, but it's Nolan's friends and business associates who have the money to risk."
Myka was about to ask her if she knew of any co-workers who were upset with the Amundsons, angry that they had been passed over for promotions or raises, when she saw Helena's eyes widen again, this time in alarm. "Play along with me?" she heard Helena mutter, and Myka barely had time to nod before Helena was stepping in front of her, rising on the balls of her feet to take Myka's lips gently between hers. Stage kiss, Myka told herself, she's doing this because she wants to avoid someone . . . something, but the stern reminders had little effect. The kiss was all artifice, a diversion, but it felt strangely natural. She and Helena hadn't kissed before, but they might have, because she didn't feel the awkwardness and the self-consciousness that usually accompanied a first kiss. Maybe that was why as the kiss began to warm, ever so slightly, Myka's hand found its way to the small of Helena's back to press her closer. Helena didn't resist; her lips parted, and the kiss became more searching. For a moment, it could have been any sunny afternoon and Myka and her girlfriend spontaneously sharing a kiss.
Helena wasn't her girlfriend, and this kiss needed to stop. Now. But it wasn't one of those clean endings to a kiss, it was a dragged-out one, their lips inexplicably adhering, their hands, Myka's on Helena's back and Helena's on Myka's shoulders, slow to slip away. Helena exhaled a soft, wondering laugh, and Myka was sure that her eyes were glazed over. "Helena?" The man's voice held almost as much uncertainty as Helena's laugh.
The blunt but friendly features of Nate, Helena's friend from the fair, were screwing into an expression that was more pained than quizzical. "Nate," Helena said with a discomfort that didn't sound feigned.
"You flew out after the meeting before I had a chance to ask you if you want to grab some lunch together." He put his hands in the pockets of his khakis and rolled his shoulders forward, the concession of a man who realizes that the hopes prompting his invitation are destined to be disappointed.
"Myka called," Helena said, a blush climbing into her cheeks, and Myka recognized that kissing as they had been kissing at the last, in full view of passersby, anyone and everyone on the street, in fact, was not the kind of public display Helena felt comfortable making. Feeling her own cheeks warm as she recalled what Nate had witnessed, Myka acknowledged it wasn't something she typically did either, not even with Andi, who had a much higher tolerance for the theatrics of kissing. "She had a few minutes free . . . . " Helena's voice trailed off in embarrassment. "Nothing like finding a woman's child to sweep her off her feet. We just, ah, hit it off, and things have developed from there." She directed the violently pleading look of a trapped animal at Myka, and Myka smiled her best "I'm crazy about her" grin, which she hadn't whipped out since her first year with Andi, and clutched Helena's hand.
"That's great," Nate said weakly. He jerked his thumb vaguely toward a Starbucks and then it drifted toward a grocery mart and liquor store squeezed between two buildings advertising lofts for rent. Myka wasn't sure whether he intended to drown his sorrows in an Americano or a fifth of bourbon. "See you back at the office." He clumsily walked backward a few steps then spun away to charge up the street, away from them.
"I panicked," Helena said remorsefully. "I couldn't remember what he knew about you, if he knew you were FBI. I didn't want him to remember that, so I opted for a soul-crushing kiss." She bit her lip, and Myka couldn't repress the desire to take it between her own teeth; she knew for a fact now how soft it was. Soul-crushing might be how Nate experienced seeing the kiss, but she would never regard it so bleakly, even if Helena turned out to be a party to a fraud. It was nice to be reminded that there was life – and desire – after Andi. In a tone more resigned than remorseful, Helena added, "If I'm perfectly honest, I also kissed you because I wanted to squelch Nate's interest before things got awkward at work. He's never actually asked me out, but he's been hinting, and I didn't want to confront him. The last thing I want to do is attract any negative attention." She stopped herself mid-sigh. "Don't remind me, I'm all too aware that someone has put a target on my back."
"If it puts you at ease, Nate wouldn't remember from meeting me and Pete at the fair that we're agents. That conversation was over before he arrived, so if he suspects . . . ." Myka let the implication hang between them.
Helena emphatically shook her head. "Believe me, I haven't once mentioned you at work."
Just in case she had been tempted to read too much into the kiss . . . Myka put the distraction that was Helena aside and tried to concentrate on Nate. "Does he have the administrative rights to log onto the system as you?" She sidestepped a pug sniffing her ankles. The pug's owner tugged at the leash and sent Myka a reproving look for hogging the sidewalk. Myka pulled Helena aside.
She didn't notice, emphatically shaking her head again. "Yes, but no, no. He's a good man and a pathetically poor liar. I've seen him cover for some of the younger, less experienced tech staff when they've failed to fix a problem. He'll try to pass off a mistake as his to spare them a vice president's meltdown. He wouldn't set me up like that. He wouldn't set anyone up. He's not the type. He's not Stuart." Her eyes had become flat and hard and impossibly black, discs once more.
They're not born the "type." They have to grow into it, even Stuart. Myka knew the better course was not to contradict her. "That may be, but he has one motive I can think of. We still need to check him out. What's his last name?"
Helena rolled her eyes. "That's right, he's dying of unrequited love for me." She irritably passed her hand across her face. "It was a cheap trick, and I should have been honest with him instead." Myka regarded her steadily, without judgement, which seemed to rattle Helena the more. She burst out, "His last name is Phillips. Nathan Phillips. Do what you have to do."
The return bus ride smelled of exhaust, and Myka saw a line of thunderstorms on the horizon. Everything seemed a little dimmer, a little chintzier now, the investigation into Amundson Securities already feeling like it had lasted forever. She tugged at her hair, which felt tangled and windblown, and wondered self-consciously how it had appeared to Helena. Rather than heading for her own desk when she was back in the office, she headed for Pete's, feeling jumpy and hemmed in; if she stretched her arms out, she would be pressing against the suite's walls. Not literally, of course, but she didn't want to be boxed in or constrained, she wanted . . . she didn't know. She thought she might run up and down the aisles between the cubes yelling, like a kid or Pete might.
She found him eating. It was a rarity not to find him eating. He was working through a family-sized bag of Doritos, a travel mug of Coke or Mountain Dew as large as a gallon of milk serving as a paperweight and holding down a sheaf of paper. He wasn't technically her partner; the office was too small to justify any such permanent arrangement. She worked with all the agents on various assignments, but she didn't think it was her imagination that she and Pete were partnered with each other more frequently than they were partnered with other agents. Seven years they had worked together, and from day one, they had been brother and sister. It could have worked out differently between them, theoretically at least. Putting aside the dismal survival rates of a workplace romance, she and Pete would appear to be well matched. They shared certain core sensibilities – the necessity of both justice and compassion, the belief that there was a greater purpose than the pursuit of self-interest, and a wry appreciation of how often bureaucracies complicated something that should be simple. They rooted for the same teams (although, when it came to football, Pete retained his childhood affection for the Cleveland Browns) and they were dedicated in their different ways to keeping fit. His clowning around lowered her stress levels, and her level-headedness kept him from, as he put it, falling into a hole with a bottle at the bottom of it. She could even admit that he had a boyish appeal, while he had once grudgingly confessed that had they gone to the same high school, he probably would have asked her out. On paper, they were better suited for each other than either's former romantic partners, yet she couldn't imagine Pete spontaneously kissing her as Helena had, and they would have been making faces as soon as the kiss was over, as if they had just swallowed a mouthful of peas. There was the one who checked all the boxes, the perfect match, and then there was chemistry, and rarely was one found with the other, at least in her experience. Myka could all too easily imagine herself kissing Helena again; she would rather give herself a root canal than kiss Pete.
"Hey," he said, "how did it go?" He showed her his hands, palms out, fingers spread. "Why has no one ever thought to use Doritos instead of ink to fingerprint people?" Each of his fingertips was liberally coated with nacho cheese spice. "It's not any messier, plus you can lick your fingers clean." Observing him as he laved each finger clean like a cat, Myka concluded that there was nothing, up to and including the threat of death, that could make her kiss him. "Seriously, how did it go?" He hooked his foot around the leg of the other chair in his cube and dragged it out for her to sit in. "You look hyper, and you never look hyper. What'd she do to you, confess to everything, this crappy little scam at Amundson Securities and McKnight's fraud?"
Myka surprised herself by slumping into the chair with an appreciative grunt. She hadn't thought that the meeting with Helena, with its distinct ups and downs, would have taken that much out of her. "The opposite. She says someone's been altering her work, making it look like she falsified the condition of the start-ups."
"Who does she think is behind it?" Pete sucked on the straw of his travel mug. He stopped long enough to ineffectively smother a belch, then clamped his mouth around the straw.
"She doesn't know. Whoever it is has been careful." Pete's desk was cluttered with sports figure bobbleheads, dead travel mugs, Star Wars and Marvel action figures. It was a miracle he could do any work among them, but he did, claiming that Han Solo and Steph Curry were inspiring. "What she's said has been done to her work is consistent with the information sent to Kosan."
"Except for the fact that our anonymous friend claims that she did it," Pete supplied.
"Right, only that. A small thing," Myka said with a sardonically crooked smile. She gestured at the mess of lunch, toys, and papers on his desk. "What have you found out about the start-ups?"
"From their websites, little that's useful. Mainly a lot of hot air about how they're going to change our energy consumption patterns, reduce our carbon footprint, etcetera, etcetera." He turned to his desk and shuffled some of the paper. "On two of these LLCs, we've gotten a Dr. Mac Horner listed as a governor. Did some digging on him. He's got a Ph.D. from Stanford in chemical engineering. Pretty brainy, right? A lot of scientific knowhow. He's also been investigated by the SEC for securities fraud. We sniffed around, too, but nothing came of it. A few years ago, he set up a couple of companies that folded. One company was going to convert chemical waste water to drinking water through a 'revolutionary process,'" Pete said with heavy sarcasm. "The other company was selling some sort of filtration device that you could use to keep the air and water inside your house free of radiation if we got nuked." He laughed. "It was the size of a kitchen fire extinguisher. It's gonna save you from fallout, yeah."
"So he's a con. What's his connection to the Amundsons?"
"None that I can find. Maybe he got chased out by the other investors. But, but," Pete held up a finger and faced Myka, "the L.A. office sent someone out to check a wind farm owned by one of the LLCs. He saw only scrub grass and rock, which is not what the website shows. An agent from the Phoenix office went out to a solar farm. There were only a few of those solar panel thingys, and they were busted."
"If the start-ups were fraudulent from the start, it's unlikely Helena's part of it."
Pete cocked his head, his gaze knowing. "That's not the first conclusion I jumped to." Myka didn't look away, but she could feel warmth flood her chest and neck. "I was thinking Irene might have the right idea about ol' Nolan. Official state grandfather, my ass. More like official state grifter. Maybe he brought Helena in to be the fall guy. Maybe he brought her in to keep the con running longer."
"We don't know enough yet to be speculating like this. We don't know enough about the Amundsons, about their businesses, or how they became involved with these start-ups." Myka restlessly got up from the chair. "I've asked her to bring me something tangible."
"When do you meet with her again?"
"Soon, I hope. She feels exposed, but I tried to convince her that time's not on her side." Myka struck a casual pose, leaning against the end of the panel that marked the entrance to his cube. Pete's glance at her over the top of his travel mug told her she was anything but. "I have a cover story for meeting with her now. I'm her new girlfriend."
Pete almost perforated his lip on the straw. "Do I even want to know how this happened?" He sucked his Coke meditatively, then said, "Hell, yes." Lowering his voice, he suggested, "Maybe we should talk about this part outside the office. If you don't have plans tonight, we could order out for pizza, watch some Big Bang Theory episodes I DVR'd, talk about girl-lovin'."
As unappealing as all of it sounded, it was better than how she would be spending the evening. "Dinner with Mom and Dad, sorry."
"Whose pet did you run over to deserve that?"
"You like my mom," Myka pointed out.
"Your mom's great. It's your dad who gives me an ulcer." Pete rubbed his stomach protectively. The humor left his face, and he said quietly, "Really, we're going to need to talk about how you ended up with that cover story."
Most people would stare at their piles of work – whether they were represented by folder icons on a shared drive or literally teetered on the edge of a desktop was immaterial – and count how many hours they had left before they could push the piles aside and go home. Instead, Myka would check the time in the corner of her screen in the futile hope that she still had hours to go before she had to leave. Six o'clock was as late as she could push it, since it would take her a half-hour to 45 minutes to reach her parents' modest duplex, which meant her father would be eating dinner considerably later than he liked. He was never one to silently make a sacrifice, so she would hear sometime during the evening that he was very glad his eldest daughter could spare a few hours from her busy, busy schedule to share a late dinner with her parents. He chose to ignore the fact that she usually dropped by on the weekends, not for long but long enough to reassure herself that her mother wasn't going crazy having her husband underfoot. Myka would taste-test a new cookie recipe or confirm the list of dried fruit, nuts, candy chips, and other delectables that she and her mother would pick up at the grocery store for future batches of cookies. Going up and down the aisles wasn't a chore, it was a mini-vacation because they went without Myka's father.
Tonight her parents' kitchen smelled of meatloaf, and on the kitchen table that Myka remembered from the old apartment, crowded into a nook too small for it, there were three plates, with a baked potato wrapped in foil on each. Flanking the loaf pan holding the meatloaf were bowls of corn and green beans. This was definitely her father's kind of meal, meat, starch, and not a leafy green to be seen. As she pulled her chair out as far as it would go, which wasn't very far because of the wall just behind it, her father rubbed his hands in satisfaction. "The hours you keep, I bet you don't eat like this."
"You're right" she said, deadpan, "I don't often eat like this."
It had taken her several years, but Myka had finally broken her parents of asking her about work. There was little she could divulge, and her father no longer had a readymade target for his diatribes about the waste and ineffectiveness of government agencies. He had enormous pride in her being an agent but none in the FBI, which he believed spent millions of taxpayer dollars while letting criminals go free. She was sure he secretly envisioned her busting down doors and putting guns to people's heads, one part Eliot Ness to two parts Dirty Harry. She was a one-woman vigilante force, wearing all of the FBI's hardware but burdened by none of the laws that governed the FBI's actions. Instead of complaining about her employer, her father groused about politics, football, and arthritis, and when he was finished with those topics, he would open a well-worn paperback of Sudoku puzzles and work on them through dinner.
With little change, an older, less up-to-date kitchen and, in her case, braces on her teeth, Myka could be eating her meatloaf in the old apartment. It was the same down to the mismatched silverware and the ketchup glaze on the meatloaf. Her parents had sold the bookstore a few years ago. They had held out against the incursion of the chain bookstores, the recession, even Amazon, her father steadfastly maintaining that an independent bookseller was one of the last bastions of democracy, but they hadn't held out against an above-market price offered by a developer who wanted to turn the bookstore and its neighboring buildings into a mixed-use facility – condos on the upper stories, upscale shops on the main level. While she wouldn't have minded skewering her father on his sudden change of heart, she wouldn't hurt her mother. The bookstore had barely paid for itself during the good years, located on what was then a seedier side of the city's downtown. Jeannie Bering deserved a decent home and a nest egg as well as a chance to see if she could finally get her (very) modest cookie business off the ground. It was one thing for Myka's mother to help manage a cousin's storefront at the fair, it was another to take her two-weeks-every-summer experience at the Cookie Shack and turn it into a business.
Putting aside his puzzle, her father said, "Your mother and I keep waiting for you to bring someone with you to dinner. You're not still pining for Andi Martino, are you? You wait for her much longer, and you'll be too old to start a family with someone else."
That was still the same, too. There was always something she had done – or hadn't done – that her father saw fit to criticize. Almost thirty-five years of practice (she was sure she hadn't escaped his disappointment as a baby either) had taught her how to tune him out (sort of), but the comment about her pining for Andi rankled her more than his other gibes, maybe because she was a little worried herself, not that she wouldn't find someone else but that, down deep, she would regret the someone else wasn't Andi. She had been so head-over-heels for her, Myka sometimes feared she wouldn't feel as strongly for anyone else. But she had long since learned not to show her father her doubts, it wouldn't earn her any sympathy. "I've got plenty of time yet to start a family," she said coolly.
"Your father's trying to lead up to something . . . only not very well," her mother said, glaring at her husband. "A new accountant has joined Kevin's firm. Tracy's met her and thinks the two of you might hit it off. Your sister has the contact information, if you want to set up a coffee date." Her mother's look expressed all the hope that she had schooled out of her voice.
The last time Tracy had met someone who would be perfect for her, Myka had spent the date not-so-surreptitiously texting Pete to have him rescue her. She had been joined by her date in searching for an excuse to end a meeting that within five minutes had revealed how incompatible they were. Tracy had fixed her up with a divorced internist at the family clinic at which she worked as an insurance claims specialist. The internist was pleasant and pleasant-looking enough, but they had no sooner shaken hands when he announced, "I'm not really interested in a relationship right now," which made Myka wonder what Tracy had told him about her. She wasn't ready either, since Andi had left for Los Angeles only three months before, but she was willing to entertain the remote possibility that she might fall in love virtually at first sight – again. Until the internist opened his mouth and shriveled that tiny little possibility to a crisp. She had spent the rest of the evening in Pete's apartment, playing video games and eating pizza. Call of Duty and a family-sized meat lover's pizza – she wouldn't willingly admit it to him but she had enjoyed both.
Myka toyed with her slice of meatloaf, trying to cut away the ketchup glaze. It didn't do anything to get rid of the Velveeta that glued the hamburger and onions together. She would have to be careful, too much information and her father would be on the Internet doing his own background investigation, but it could spare her from her family's matchmaking, well, indefinitely. "I've just started seeing someone," she said, cautiously lifting her eyes to meet her parents'. If she couldn't look them in their eyes as she told them, they (meaning her father) wouldn't believe her. "It's early days, but I don't want to see anyone else; I want to see how this plays out."
Her father grunted, "Care to share a little about this Ms. or Mr. Wonderful?"
"If and when I have something I want to share, I'll let you know."
He made a sour face in response but didn't comment. He picked up his pencil and bent over his Sudoku puzzle. Myka's mother mouthed "Good luck" and pointed to the meatloaf, encouraging her to take more. Myka sighed and cut herself another slice. She wasn't sure why she hadn't simply told her mother she wasn't interested in being fixed up. Helena Wells walked around with a little rain cloud above her head, and her hasty fabrication of a relationship between the two of them could end up causing more problems than it was intended to solve. Giving the lie carrying power by using it to get out of a blind date . . . what had she been thinking of? The kiss, Myka admitted to herself. Hours had passed since her meeting with Helena, but her lips were still tingling from the kiss.
