Magdalene

by Moriah Jovan

  “Later,” Sebastian grunted. “Put a tarp over it, then come eat dinner.”

  “Clarissa,” Trevor said and jerked his head toward the garage, “would you come help me?” She glared at him in suspicion. “Please?” he added, clearly wanting to make peace with his new stepsister. After another second, Clarissa nodded abruptly and followed him.

  Eilis helped me get bowls and spoons. I put the stock pot of noodles on a trivet right in the middle of the table—family, after all. The chicken casseroles were set on either side of the stockpot, as I’d made them mostly for Giselle and Eilis. We had green beans, beverages, fresh-baked bread, and butter on the table by the time Trevor and Clarissa finished their task.

  All twelve of us sat around the table, and Morgan said the blessing on the food.

  “Amen.”

  I looked at Nigel. “Well?”

  He nodded. “You were right. Greg Sitkaris is up to his eyeballs in insurance and securities fraud.”

  Sebastian scowled at Nigel. “What the fuck are you talking about, Tracey?”

  “Yes, I know, Taight, you’ve been looking for the past seven years.” He went on, holding up a hand to forestall whatever Sebastian was about to say. “You haven’t looked here.”

  “Statutes are almost out anyway,” Knox mumbled as he played with his utensils.

  “No, no. This is recent stuff. It’s just that he’s very good and very careful.”

  “Where were you looking?” he asked, stymied.

  “Vorcester & Minden,” I said.

  Sebastian stared at me in shock. “No shit?”

  “Nope.”

  Nigel said, “One of Cassie’s analysts found a pattern in the records, and one of my analysts found another, but we couldn’t do anything with it. Then,” he continued as he passed a dish to Gordon, “Cassie’s little church friend had a hunch with names to back it up. Cassie put two and two together and sent me on a quest. It was luck. No more, no less.”

  “Does it connect up to Jep Industries in any way?”

  “No, but we can get him on this, and then maybe he’ll cough up the J.I. information. It’ll take a while, a year, maybe more, for this to spin out. We have to wait and watch, but now that Cassie’s team and I know what we’re looking for, it’ll be easy.”

  Sebastian shook his head as he plopped food onto his plate. “Wish we’d had that before today. So whatever happened with Vorcester & Minden?”

  “I shut it down,” I said. “They were upside down on their annuities. The guy who called wanted a cash infusion and an investment manager.”

  Eilis snorted. “Oh, that’s rich.”

  “I laughed in his face and sent him packing. Then one of my analysts comes to me and points out that every single contract that Agent 4360923 wrote was bad. You know, you have a lot of hits and misses, but nobody comes up all winners or all losers. I thought Agent 4360923 was just a catchall for bad contracts, because there were a bunch of different names attached to that number. When my people couldn’t track down any of the Agents 4360923, I sent it over to Nigel.”

  “So I’m looking at this list of names for this agent,” Nigel continued. “Nothing’s gelling. One of my analysts walks in to ask me something— She happens to look down and sees this weird—very precise mathematical—pattern of letters in the names, with a high ratio of G’s and S’s.” He smirked. “It’s not every fund manager who has an ex-NSA cryptographer on staff.”

  Sebastian chuckled.

  “She read the code easily enough, but that still didn’t tell us who these people were. Now, I could buy that there’s a fake agent number to throw all your department’s bad contracts in. And I could buy that a whole department’s doing this. I could even buy that an entire department is colluding to defraud the company, which is what Cassie thought was happening with Vorcester & Minden. What I can’t buy is that an entire department that’s burying its bad contracts would all be able to use the same code without making an error.”

  “Well, sure,” Sebastian said. “You’d have one guy writing the code and making the master list of names.”

  “Not for four years,” Nigel returned. “Nobody would be able to keep a team like that together very long without infighting, sabotage—” He shrugged. “Plain ol’ mistakes, like somebody using a name out of order. No, this is flawless all the way through.”

  “Which means,” Knox rumbled, “that there’s only one thief, he’s using one agent number because he won’t get paid otherwise, but in case anybody looks at the contracts, it looks like a bunch of different people are writing them—and he can keep track of his contracts at a glance.”

  “Right,” Nigel said. “We knew this, but we still couldn’t figure out who he was.”

  “Until,” I said, “I really looked at the list of names my friend gave me.”

  “And they,” Nigel said, “all match up to the contracts Agent 4360923 wrote.”

  “Explaining the high ratio of G’s and S’s,” Knox concluded.

  “But how would you do that?” Sebastian asked Knox. “You run the numbers, you see agent number whatever with a bunch of names attached to it, they’re all bad contracts, and you know you’ve got a problem.”

  “A lot of older companies like that run two, three accounting programs, maybe even one for each department they have,” Knox replied. “Sometimes they have separate databases for commission payments and contract analysis. Usually, they’re on incompatible operating systems and have never been consolidated. So you’ve got your contract data on, say, XP, your accounting on an old Unix system in the basement. Maybe somebody else is on a Mac. The sales guys bring spreadsheets to sales meetings and talk names, who’s out in the field really cooking, whatever. Get rid of the bad performers, right? The payroll people don’t get invited to those meetings and even if they did, they only know agent number whatever. Ne’er the twain shall meet. Payroll doesn’t know shit about who’s who or what they’re doing; they only know to cut commission checks to agent number whatever. Sales knows it has a couple of bad contracts written by this guy or that guy, no big. Shit happens. You might never notice that all these guys have the same agent number because that’s not what you’re sorting for. Payroll will never have the opportunity to make the connection. And if you have a high turnover in the sales department, shit falls through the cracks because no one’s there long enough to start making connections.”

  “So Payroll’s already paid agent whatever his commissions,” Sebastian murmured.

  “Right. And the customer’s still paying, too, but they’re making the checks out to Agent 4360923, not feeling cheated, because it just looks like bad luck, but they still feel compelled to honor the contracts they signed.” Knox looked at Nigel. “Can you get me that stuff?”

  Nigel nodded. “As we speak, it’s all being scanned and uploaded to my servers. It’ll take a good week, but you are free to work on it from your end. For the moment, at least,” he continued, “we can connect him to the ones with the names Cassie’s friend gave us, and they’re the ones we can use to establish his pattern of fraud.”

  “If nothing else,” Knox said, “we can proceed with the assumption that he was defrauding Vorcester & Minden.”

  “I have my people on him,” I said, anger swelling up in me. “Every detail of that asshole’s life will be mine and I’m going to bury him the way I buried Rivington.”

  Gordon sighed. In sorrow or gratitude, I couldn’t tell.

  “The whole rabbit trail is freaky,” Justice mumbled.

  “Exactly,” Nigel said. “I couldn’t recreate it in a million years. One thing led to another that led to another, put it all together. We know he did it, but still can’t figure out how. Then two inconsequential details blow it open for us. We got him. It’s flimsy, but it’s there.” He paused. “I’m tempted to call it divine intervention, but that would be a crass thing to say under the circumstances.”

  Justice huffed, but she was the only one to do so and I looked at Sebastian to see
how he took this supernatural mumbo jumbo. He shocked me by not pointing or mocking. He raised a brow at me. “What, can’t a guy have a religion around here other than Mormon or Catholic Lite?”

  “You have one?”

  “Pagan.”

  I stared at him, speechless, but Nigel started to laugh.

  “So you think...?”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence, Cassie,” he said, completely sober. “I believe in a mated pair of deities and I don’t think they keep their noses out of our business. What I am not is a Christian.”

  “Clarify,” Nigel said, curious now.

  “Okay,” Sebastian returned as if rising to a challenge. “Christian myth posits that there is a creator deity. Made us all in his image. We’re his children. And he loves us. Sends us all out to learn and grow. He says, ‘Be good, kids!’ but isn’t really very specific on how to do that. Now we all know that the only way to learn is to fail. But then we do—fail—and he doesn’t like it. Can’t stand sin in his presence. Won’t let us back in the house. For anybody to go home to him after their turn on Earth is done, they have to be sinless. Think about it. That’s a helluva position to be in, isn’t it? So, okay, no problem. He’ll just send a half-man/half-god savior as a sacrifice for all mankind’s failures so he can have all his little kiddies back in the fold.” He looked at Nigel. “We clear on that?”

  “Right.”

  “I think that’s bullshit.” Sebastian pointed his fork at me. “Would you send your kids out into the world with no training, no guidance, no nothing, tell them to be perfect or they can’t come home again, and oh by the way, good luck with that because they have no way in hell of doing what you told them to do?”

  The clock in the kitchen ticked.

  “And then you provide a way for them to come home, but it means your oldest child has to submit to unimaginable suffering? Think about it: Every time you sin—which, by definition, is unavoidable—you are responsible for the torture and murder of an innocent man.”

  Both Knox and Giselle flinched.

  “The idea of a creator deity, who creates beings in his image and calls his children, who then turns around and becomes that much of a sociopathic asshole, is not my idea of a loving parent. I’ll say this for Mormon doctrine,” Taight continued blithely between bites. “There is no hell, per se. The goal is proactive—to become a god. It’s not reactive, which is to escape a burning lake of fire, like the rest of Christianity. So no, you probably won’t be qualified to become a god, but no matter what you do, you’ll end up with a decent eternity.”

  I looked around the table to see if any of Sebastian’s family would counter this in some way. Giselle sighed.

  “This is a perennial discussion,” she murmured. “He doesn’t believe that ultimate justice for what we do here can truly be served by one pure blood sacrifice, that everybody should atone for his own sins. I—” She cocked her head toward Knox and patted Morgan’s arm. “—we. We do. Christ’s atonement satisfies justice and grants us mercy at the same time.”

  “How?” Nigel asked.

  Giselle started to explain, but Morgan cut her off. “I’m not interested in getting into this tonight.”

  There was an awkward silence as each faction struggled to cool off a bit. Clearly the topic was a bone of contention in the family, and I marveled at this crack in the Dunhams’ philosophical unity.

  “I started thinking about this on my mission,” Sebastian said when Nigel cleared his throat and gestured for him to continue. “About how I create art. I wasn’t born being able to paint Wild, Wild West or Rape of a Virgin or Goddess and Her Lover or Morning in Bed, or any of the other pieces that hang in museums. Yeah, I had talent, but it took years of training under dozens of masters and years more of perfecting technique. But then I got good, more confident in my skill and vision.

  “So at that level of skill, I wondered how much I’d have to hate a piece I’d created to just toss it. Or let somebody else fix it for me. I couldn’t reconcile it. Did that mean that the god I worshipped hated some of us and loved others of us, even though he created us all? Did he like having his work fixed by somebody else? Or were we just practice? Prototypes? I have thrown out practice pieces. I have had my work fixed by my instructors. Maybe I can accept that we’re prototypes, practice, for a being who’s learning how to be a god.”

  I looked down at my wedding ring, the color wash around it, orange, as always, but iridescent if I turned it just right and a rich matte if I turned it another way. It looked almost like metallic paint, but it was the metal itself, precisely, nanoscopically chiseled for that effect. Sebastian had created this and I couldn’t fathom how long it must have taken him to do it, how many practice pieces he must have done.

  He nodded as if he knew the direction of my thoughts, then continued. “I’ve been pagan a long time and never really thought past my art, but then I had kids. And I look at our kids—my oldest, Alex, he’s a firecracker—and I think, ‘Eilis and I made that,’ because, you know, it took both of us working together. Here’re these little beasts whose bodies function the same way ours do and who look an awful lot like us— So they’re in our image. But they’re not practice, like the hundreds of castings we did for your ring. They can’t be.

  “We’d have to really hate our kids—what we made—to set up such a catch-22 straight out of the gate and if we did that, then why have ’em to begin with? Are they just toys we brought into the world to amuse ourselves?

  “Or—Better!—dogs. Breed ’em, starve ’em, poke at ’em, get ’em riled up, and set ’em loose on each other for our own personal entertainment? And then require your most beloved child to endure an agonizing death to redeem them? From what? Our condemnation when they act like the fighting dogs we’ve trained them to be? Would you worship Michael Vick?”

  “Oh, no,” Gordon breathed.

  “That’s what I thought, too. I’m not going to worship some sadistic motherfucker like that. I worship a pair of creator deities who love what they created, set us here to learn, give us as much guidance and help as they think wise, will welcome us back when we’re done here no matter what we learned or didn’t, then judge us according to our deeds and mete out justice and/or mercy accordingly. No sacrifice necessary and no hoops to jump through.

  “Jesus Christ? Prophet, philosopher, wise man. Just like Mohammed, Buddha, and the Dalai Lama.” He shot a glare at his cousins. “Not a blood sacrifice.” Then he cocked an eyebrow at me. “And if you’ve never heard of Jesus because you live in some third-world backwater, you’re not going to go to a burning lake of fire for a circumstance of your birth.”

  I blinked.

  “Oh, it’s all bullshit,” Justice muttered. “I hate it when they do this.”

  Sebastian snorted. “And Little Miss Atheist over there can’t stomach Rand. She’s as fucked up as is the rest of us are.”

  “It gives her and Knox an excuse to argue when they don’t have anything else to fight about,” Eilis murmured, shooting an affectionate smile at Justice. “Point and counterpoint. Mutual mental masturbation leading straight to the bedroom, and even better if they’ve gone at it across the internet all day.”

  Justice laughed, and it even pulled a chuckle out of Knox.

  I sent Clarissa and Trevor out to get liquor, as I’d drunk my only bottle of wine Tuesday night waiting for state troopers to come to the door and tell me Mitch had crashed his car.

  “So how’s the little chef?” I asked once they returned. “Vanessa. And that stud of a politician of hers? They’ve dropped off the tabloids’ radar.”

  “Oh!” Eilis said, suddenly animated. “OKH Enterprises is about to become the full owner of a five-star resort with a PGA-rated golf course.”

  I stared at her. “What?”

  “Vanessa,” Knox rumbled, “has chosen love over her career.”

  “Ah, but so has Eric,” Justice said smugly. “We’re about to play a very dirty trick on them.”

  “Shee
r genius, sweetheart,” Knox murmured as he leaned in to kiss Justice.

  Nigel, Gordon, and Clarissa were completely lost at this turn in the conversation. While Knox told us the tale of his star-crossed wards, we sat around the table drinking wine and eating Whittaker House pastries. Hilliard was a good storyteller, and kept us rapt for the better part of two hours as he spoke.

  “That’s sweet,” Clarissa sighed when he finished.

  “It’s so O. Henry,” Gordon said with a laugh.

  I looked at Justice. “You’re taking Eric’s place, then? The new county prosecutor?”

  She nodded.

  “How old are you?” Clarissa asked abruptly, bringing the goodwill of the conversation to a halt.

  “Twenty-eight,” Justice said kindly.

  “Oh.”

  I looked at Clarissa. I knew what she was thinking. This young woman, not even thirty and only three years older than she, would be the head law enforcement officer of an entire county while Clarissa had never had a job.

  Apparently, Knox understood, too. “Clarissa,” he murmured, “the nice thing about UMKC is that half the people there are older than you. It’s not a party school.”

  “I graduated from law school when I was thirty-seven,” Giselle added.

  “But as Giselle can tell you,” Knox continued, “I’m a lot harder on people I care about than I am on anybody else.”

  Clarissa stared at him, gulped, then blinked rapidly to get rid of the sudden sparkle in her eyes that this man she’d worshipped from afar for so long had said he cared about her.

  “Actually,” Giselle said, “he’s an asshole, so fair warning.”

  We spent most of the evening talking, laughing.

  Forgetting.

  Getting to know each other the way I’d wanted to, with good food and good wine and good conversation.

  But as the evening went on, I enjoyed myself less and less, sitting there at the table alone, surrounded by everyone but my love. I ached with missing him. Granted, he was only upstairs, but I wanted him here, with me, with our families, participating actively in our good time.

  I stood during a lull in the conversation. “I’m going to bed,” I said abruptly, unable to partake any longer while Mitch slept. “You all know where your suites are.”