“I have testified in court,” I said, horrified. “I have perjured myself! I am a perjurer!”
“Don’t be silly.” Michaela’s brisk tone was like a dash of cold water in my eyes. Or acid. “Perjury is when you knowingly lie. You wouldn’t knowingly lie if someone stuck a gun in your ear.”
It was absurd, but that mollified me. “The training?”
“You needed training. Those of you who wanted to carry needed to learn, needed to get permits. Even those who didn’t needed the discipline. The training was so you would keep to the law—PI’s have to stay within the scope of the law as best they can. You’ve investigated. You’ve made arrests. You’ve testified in court.”
“The warrants?”
Michaela smiled, a thin, humorless smile. “Friendly judges. And some of us are cops. Or were cops. And we have friends.”
We work for different people, but we all share info. She had told me that in this very room, and I had thought nothing of it. Because I was a fool, and she was a liar.
“And you would be amazed at how liberal the laws for such things are in the great state of Minnesota. And some of you…” She hesitated, and I braced myself. What fresh hell was coming? “Your psychological quirks helped you keep the truth from yourself. Yourselves.”
“Do not put your deception on us!” I snapped.
“If you wanted to know the truth, you would have allowed yourself to see. He did.”
“Leave me—ow—out of this.”
“Your biggest lie yet.” I was so angry I could hardly see. “You tricked us, you lied, but it was on us because we were fool enough to believe you?” We were fool enough to believe her, Cadence whispered from deep inside our brain. “You sound like some of the people we have arrested … except we were not arresting them, not really!”
“What to say?” Michaela held up her hands, eerily reminding me again of our first meeting, when she made the same gesture with cuffed wrists. “I did trick you. I did lie.” I glared into her calm green eyes. What did I want to see? Remorse? Fear? Despair?
“So you— This entire time, you’ve been—” I turned to George. “Who did you say she was?”
“Ow! Arvin Sloane. Really, you guys? I’m banging my head on the counter and there’s just no concern?”
“I certainly am not Arvin Sloane! I’m Jack Bristow. I protect my children at all costs, in whatever way I must. Where do you think someone like Paul would have ended up if not for me and, later, BOFFO? What mischief do you think George would attempt if I were not watching over him? He’s unscrupulous, charming, conventionally handsome, and utterly amoral. Do you want him at large on the planet or in here with us?”
“Wow.” George seemed genuinely touched. “Ow.”
“Or you, Shiro? Any of the three of you? Adrienne has brought about millions in property damage. Millions, plural, long before we met. You have killed, and when I met you, you were creeping your way through the system as a freelance writer with no real income, no home of your own, and all the time terribly frightened you would be noticed, exposed. And Paul, my Paul … the real world devours people like him, and everyone in this room knows it.”
“But you use his software. He is your cash cow; he funds your big lie.”
“Of course. He asked me to. He’s signed over the management of all his financial affairs to me.” Her gaze softened as she looked over my shoulder to the doorway Paul had walked out of. “He’s my son, my own boy.”
“Ow!” George stood straight, rubbing his bright-red forehead. “Oh, come on! Give me a fucking break! What, this wasn’t soap opera-ey enough with Shiro shacking up with Aunt Jane and wanting to bone Max Gallo?”
“Sorry, what?”
“George, shut up.” I turned back to her. “Paul is your son? You adopted him?”
“Decades ago. He was alone, and I was alone, and never mind my husband. At first I pitied him, like you would a stray dog. Then I grew to respect him. Even as a small child, he had a formidable intellect, an exceptional way of seeing the world. And then when I saw the goodness behind the brilliance, I loved him as my very own boy, and so he is. And I needed a safe place where he could work and be himself, surrounded by people like him who would keep him safe, and his inventions would keep them safe, and around and around it was supposed to go except it’s done now. It’s all done now.”
And Michaela Nelson burst into furious tears.
chapter forty-six
“These switches are making me dizzy,” I muttered after Shiro again stepped back. I leaned forward and patted Michaela between the shoulder blades like she was a gassy baby. “There now, Michaela. Maybe it can be fixed. It’s not like you to give up. And to … um…” I realized that the real Michaela was a vastly more complex creature than the person I thought I knew. I had no idea what it was and wasn’t like her to do.
“I just wanted to help.” She cried on my shoulder, clutching me with startling strength. I could feel the fabric of my turtleneck twisting in her grip. “I should never have gone out into the world to try and find you. And when I did find you, I should have left you to your lives.”
Hmm. Yeah. Our lives. Shiro taking whatever newspaper assignment she could for shit money. Adrienne coming out to steal food more often than not, whether it was for us or to give to someone even hungrier. Nowhere to live, and too scared and ashamed to go back to the hospital. Knowing we were smart but not sure what we were supposed to do with being smart.
Being afraid all the time.
Yeah, what a deceitful bitch Michaela was to help us find a way out of that, to find that there were places we were welcome and skills we could use. I hoped Shiro would eventually be able to see it like that. To remember what it had been like, pre-fake BOFFO.
Because George was right; she collected mother figures. She had always looked at Michaela as more than a boss. But she hid that from herself with the same skill we used to turn away from BOFFO’s obvious absurdities.
“So what now?” George had finally stopped whapping his head against the counter. I wasn’t sure whether I was glad or sad. “We all pack up and leave? Can you give your fake employees fake letters of reference?”
“You’re not fake employees and I wasn’t a fake boss. I’m not a fake boss,” she said, jerking her face away from my shoulder. I noticed her switch from past tense to present. “We’re still here and there’s still work to do. HOAP won’t save us; I see that now. We’ll have to come up with something else.” She lunged for the fridge and yanked out a bag of carrots, then selected a new knife. “Right away.”
“Wait a minute. Those knives…” How had I never put this together before? This was something Shiro would also have noticed right away if she had allowed herself to. Was that long-ago medical research even real? Or was it all just a sieve for her to catch freaks in? “Those are Cutco knives!” I whirled on George. “Did you sell her these knives?”
“Sure. That’s how I met her. I was earning money for school and she was a customer. Bought the Ultimate set and the Signature set.” He paused. “Oh. Huh.”
“Yeah, ‘huh.’” Any more clues pointing to our ignorance and willful blindness would have given me a blinding migraine.
“Like I said,” Michaela said in a brisk Remember me? tone. “We’ll have to come up with something else.”
“We will?” George was giving me his Help me out! look, but I had no idea how to do that. “Right this second, or by the end of the week, or…”
She blew out her breath in a disgusted sigh. “A lot of this has been about how smart you all are and how you needed a proper channel for that intelligence. Well, think! You know what the situation is. We need at least five million to keep going through next year. If we can get some significant funds back into the system, we can work off the interest and buy ourselves some time. HOAP won’t work, but something else should. Something else will.”
Wow! My powers of comforting are even more impressive than Shiro hoped!
I wasn’t sure how to feel. Betrayed? Hopeful?
Pissed? Worried? A combo? Worry with a dash of betrayal and a side of hope?
“You two can stop judging me right this second,” Michaela snapped, misinterpreting our Nope, still no idea how to feel expressions. “Yes, I am an unscrupulous, disingenuous killer … and for years, all that stood between some of you and darkness or death or worse: institutionalization.” She had her priorities right, that was for sure … institutionalization was worse than darkness or death.
“Look, you can’t just—”
She picked up her carving knife and thwacked it into the cutting board, cutting George off as effectively as a slap. “I’m not done apologizing. Or fighting for you. Or asking for forgiveness or finding funds. I’ve got my work to do, and you have yours. You two, follow up with Emma Jan. And double-check the Sussudio files … make sure HOAP.2 didn’t plant anything in front of that killer. I don’t think those files have been contaminated, due to your admittedly brilliant leaps earlier. Figuring out his motivation was really quite clever. Paul gave you the nudge and you ran with it—the way it’s supposed to work. Still, you’d better double- and triple-check those files.”
We just stood and stared at her. I’d seen her go through more emotional shifts in one hour than I had in two years. And I was plenty intimidated by her. Was she the kind of mom who protected her young or ate them?
“Well?” Thwack! “Get to work!”
We scrambled out the door, the habit of obedience long ingrained. Then we just sort of stood there and looked at each other.
“God help me. God help me.” George was shaking so hard I helped him lean against the wall. “The lies, the betrayal. The suddenly revealed family secrets, the never-suspected depth of feeling! She loves us!”
Um, some of us. He was right, though. Yeah, she’d lied and tricked and deceived. And I was starting to thank God for it. I wasn’t sure I could keep working for her, but I wasn’t going to turn my back on her. At least not yet.
“I’ve never been so horny or terrified in my life. My life! My God, she was so MILF-y and hot and scary!”
“GILF-y,” I corrected. “She must be old enough for grandchildren.”
“Christ!” Then, unassisted by chemicals or a blow to the head, George Pinkman passed out cold. I tried in vain to keep his bulk from sliding off the wall but gave up at the last second so his limp weight wouldn’t drag me to the carpet, too.
Pam Weinberg, Michaela’s assistant, must have heard the thud, because she popped around the corner and stared at George’s unconscious form. “Ohmigod,” she breathed. “You finally did it, Shiro. You killed him.”
“It’s Cadence, and nuh-uh.”
“Oh.” She looked, and looked again. “Huh.” Resplendent in her usual uniform of flannel jammies and bunny slippers, she set down her files and bent over George. “What happened? Is he sick? Did you trank— No, you wouldn’t do that.”
You’d be surprised, honey! The week I/we were having, anything was possible. Now that I knew what I knew, I looked at seventeen-year-old Pam with fresh eyes. We didn’t know how she ended up in, as I’d put it a few weeks ago when I still swam the sea of ignorance, “the FBI’s very own cuckoo’s nest.” We knew her home sitch was terrible. We knew the foster system either didn’t notice she was in the BOFFO building at least a hundred hours a week (Pam liked sleeping in her office) or didn’t give a tin shit.
Pam almost never left the office. Which suited her fine … and us, too. She also typed 140 words a minute, never had to be told something twice, kept Michaela’s staggering schedule updated, knew who’d been naughty and who’d been nice, and needed only about four hours of sleep a night. In other words, she was the perfect palace guard. The fact that she wasn’t yet a legal adult was the least important thing about her.
What did Michaela save you from? I wondered. Where would you be if she hadn’t invited you into her lie?
“George? Hellooooo, Georgie! Wakey, wakey.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I advised. “You probably don’t want to touch him right now.”
Knowing his perv tendencies, she jerked her little hand back like he’d grown lava hot. “What should I do?”
“Maybe poke him with a stick? Find a bucket, fill it with coffee, throw it on him? Just don’t let your flesh touch his. Not right now. I’m doing you the favor of your life by giving you this advice.”
Pam narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re in a weirdly good mood.”
“Yep.”
“Does that mean Michaela’s mood is gonna improve? She’s been a real—” I shook my head. Michaela was still chopping away in her other office and had, as Emma Jan put it, “ears like an eagle.” Damn! That expensive kitchen makes a lot more sense now. “Oh.” Pam gulped. “Thanks.” She grabbed her files and scurried back down the hall and around the corner.
chapter forty-seven
“Wow.” George was looking around groggily. “I haven’t passed out cold like that since I was a little ki—for a long time.”
“Well, you were fabulously aroused.”
“I know! It’s no wonder I conked. All the blood from my head raced down to my dick, which is so huge it takes lots of filling up.”
“Oh, barf.” I was close to actually vomiting. It had been that kind of weekend.
“I’m lucky I didn’t stroke out.” He sounded absurdly proud of the fact.
“‘Lucky’ isn’t the word springing to mind.”
And by the way, George, how often did you pass out when you were a little kid? And why? And did you leave anyone alive in the scorched earth of your childhood?
Never mind. One thing at a time.
George rubbed his eyes and leaned back in the passenger seat. I could relate to his confusion. I’d lost time, too, and I wasn’t sure why. Not much—six minutes. But I had no idea what Shiro or Adrienne had done, or why they had snatched that precise block of minutes to do it.
I was just glad it wasn’t longer, because my partner and I had work, and our marching orders. I’d helped him walk to my car and we were off to the races again. I should have been exhausted, but I felt strangely energized. I hadn’t had such an exciting weekend since … well, the weekend we started at BOFFO, now that I thought about it. We’d been thrown together as partners, nailed a serial rapist, and finished the weekend bruised and wishing the other were dead. Ah, memories.
“So it wasn’t just the most intense erotic experience of my life when I was fully clothed?”
I had to laugh. We’d both sat through the same unbelievable meeting and come away with polar opposite impressions. I couldn’t recall being less aroused. Ever in my life. Nope. Not once.
“Thanks for the ride, especially if you’re bringing me to an ATM so you can give me loads of cash, but where are we going again?”
“Well, if you’ve recovered from your swoon—”
“Hey! I blacked out! That’s what studly manly guys do, right? Black out? Oh, and our official version of the story is that Shiro bushwhacked me in a moment of extreme sexual frustration.”
I said the only thing that could distract George Pinkman from the thought of a woman knocking him unconscious in a sexual frenzy. “I thought you’d want to go arrest Sussudio.”
He sat bolt upright so suddenly his seat belt locked. “What? Gaak!” He clawed at it and I resisted the urge to slam on the breaks and finish the throttle. “We’re going there? Who is it?”
The good news: before I’d gone on my Blizzard run, Emma Jan, George, Max, and I had made some real progress. The cross-matching had slammed to a temporary halt during the Ladies of the Black Crisis, but once Paul was lying down in a cool dark room with some top-flight sedation running through his veins, I picked it back up. Part of it was being able to look at everything with fresh eyes, but an even bigger part was Shiro never stopped thinking, no matter who was driving the bus.
I’m so quick to complain about the unpleasantness of being a multiple, it’s only fair to mention the great part. And one of the great parts was … well, you kno
w when you’re trying hard to think of something or remember a name or a song lyric? And after a bit you give up consciously trying to remember and think about other stuff? And the whole time you’re building a cabin or scrubbing a toilet or taking a nap, your subconscious has been chipping away and … ding! The next thing you know, the thing you tried to remember is right at the forefront of your brain, blinking and glowing like a Vegas hotel marquee.
That’s what being a multiple is like: while Shiro and I were switching seats in Michaela’s office, while Shiro was doing whatever-it-was for six minutes, we were all thinking.
And like that, I knew who it was.
“It’s boring,” I warned him. The thunderous realization of the villain’s identity or finding out the serial killer was someone you knew all along
(“The calls are coming from inside the house!”)
was almost always movie fiction.
“The same name popped up in Max’s T-group and Rita McNamm’s texts.”
“He didn’t delete her texts?” George asked, shocked. We’d seen our share of dumbass bad guys, but that was an admittedly extreme example.
“Nope. And Carrie Cyrus lived less than an hour from his house.”
“Oh.” George thought about it. “He’s retarded. Or he wants to be caught.”
“Don’t say ‘retarded,’” I scolded. “It’s not just mean, it’s inaccurate. And maybe, yes. About wanting to be caught, I mean. The thing is, nobody else’s name pops up three times. So if he’s not our guy, this—”
George was still flipping through paperwork. “Ian Zimmerman.”
“Right. If he’s not Sussudio, he might know him or her or them.”
George gave me a narrow glance, and I smiled. “Don’t worry. I’m not Shiro. Well, I am, because I think the walls are coming down, but I’m still mostly Cadence. Prob’ly.”
“Fine time for that to happen.”
“Sorry,” I said with genuine sympathy. George’s weekend hadn’t been any too fun, either.