Fidelity (3 page)

4

K
AY HAD
not seen Christopher in nearly a year and had only spoken to him a handful of times in the interim, the phone buzzing while she was fast asleep, looking over at the alarm clock groggily and seeing the little red LED lights blinking 3:37 or 2:18 or 4:25, sighing miserably and picking up anyway. The voice at the other end of the line slurred or talking much too quickly, despondent or upbeat depending upon the moment's drug of choice, begging apology for past failures or full of enthusiasm over some new plan that would never come to fruition. He had not visited since she'd moved to Baltimore. Kay had no idea how he got her address.

And yet, when she saw Christopher sitting on the stoop of her house in Fells Point, a small, quaint, lively neighborhood a few blocks from the water, Kay felt no hint of surprise. Because that was the way it always was with Christopher. He had a strange way of showing up when you least expected him. He was wearing a beat-up pair of jeans and a gray hoodie. He stretched himself up from his seat, smiled and waved her forward with his fingertips. “Hey there, little sister.”

And just like that, every other time was forgotten, because there is such a thing as family, thank God, and Kay didn't have enough left anymore to pick and choose. Embracing him, she
was saddened but not quite shocked at how thin he had gotten—she could feel his shoulder blades through his T-shirt. “Brother.”

“This is a nice place you got here,” he said. “Got an extra bedroom?”

“There are three things to love about Baltimore,” Kay told him. “Seafood, the Ravens, and for the cost of a one-bedroom in the East Village you can pay off the mortgage on a mansion.”

“I hate the Ravens,” Christopher said.

“There's probably a bridge somewhere you can sleep beneath,” Kay said, but then she unlocked the door and waved him inside.

“You eat yet?” Christopher asked.

Kay had not given any thought to dinner. It had not been that kind of day. She had given a lot of thought to drinking, however; had planned on walking down to her neighborhood bar and seeing if the day's sorrows couldn't be drowned in a few cans of Natty Boh. But as a rule she did not drink with Christopher, not since they'd been kids cribbing beer from the local bodega with fake IDs, not since it had become clear that her brother was not a casual drinker any more than he was a social imbiber of cocaine. “Not yet,” she said.

“Perfect: me neither. I'll whip something up.”

“I don't have much,” she was saying, but he had already dropped his faded duffel bag in the living room and found his way into the kitchen.

Kay couldn't really cook. Kay couldn't really draw, Kay couldn't really sing. Kay wasn't much good at making small talk or at winning over new friends, at flirting with her preferred sex, at living enthusiastically in the moment. Fate had given these qualities to Christopher in abundance, however, by that curious process by which two siblings, formed from the same strands of genetic material, arrive in the world separate and distinct and
somehow seemingly entirely alien creatures. He buzzed about in her cabinets for a while, came out with a frozen chicken and a selection of condiments accumulating dust in her refrigerator and was well on his way towards whipping up a feast by the time Kay had finished changing her clothes.

She took the opportunity to inspect him silently for a moment and did not like what she saw. He'd been beautiful back in the day, dark and sharp and always smiling, the first person you looked at when you walked into the room. How many girlfriends of hers back in high school had blushed and giggled and asked if he ever asked about them, Kay doing her best to explain that her brother was a person best stayed away from as one stays away from a bonfire or a sharp knife or a pool of furious piranha. Fifteen years of hard living had worn half a lifetime into his face. He was thin all over, the skin hung loose off his face and his eyes weren't bright like they had been.

But, watching him cook, she could almost see the years slough off him. Kay remembered her eleventh birthday, the first without their parents, a fourteen-year-old Christopher trying his hand at a strawberry shortcake, nearly burning their house down in the process but still, so lively and jubilant that she had all but forgotten her troubles. He had always done his best to look out for her, Kay thought. At some point he had just stopped being very good at it.

They made a point of not talking about anything serious. Nothing about her work, nor whatever he was doing in lieu of it. Nothing about their family or their past. Just superficial nonsense: if she was seeing anyone (no), if he was seeing anyone (lots of people), if they'd seen any good movies lately, the usual pop culture nonsense. He put the finishing touches on the chicken, spread it on two plates and gave Kay one of them. Then he tore
a corner off Kay's roll of paper towels, tore that corner into two halves, gave one to Kay. “The very lap of luxury,” he said.

“Lots of white cloth napkins in your flat?”

“I'm between flats at the moment,” Christopher explained, “though when last I had them Jeeves made sure the napkins were exclusively silk.”

Kay laughed.

“I'm sorry I forgot your birthday,” he said after a couple of bites.

Kay shrugged. It was something that she had long gotten used to. Christopher did not show up to things: dinners and graduations, court dates and appointments with parole officers. At a certain point you make a decision to keep loving a person in spite of themselves, regardless of what they do to you, or you remove them from your life completely. And Kay wasn't a cut-and-run type, not when it came to family. Not when it came to anything, really. “Don't worry about it.”

“Can I hold your gun?” he asked, joking. Maybe joking: you could never tell entirely with Christopher.

“You're lucky I let you use my kitchen knife.”

“You think I don't know how to fire a pistol, little sister?”

Kay did not like to think about everything that her brother knew how to do. Much of it was unsavory and most of it was unwise. “You can't hold my gun,” Kay affirmed. “You been to see Uncle Luis lately?”

“It's been a while since I ran into the Don,” he admitted, making a face and using their childhood name for Luis. They'd always had a difficult relationship, Christopher and Uncle Luis, at least since Luis and his wife had taken them both in as children. Mostly Kay chalked this up to the fact that Christopher had a difficult relationship with everyone he knew who wasn't a
stone-cold junkie; that his erratic and often outright foul behavior was enough to isolate anyone who wasn't a blood relative. Mostly. “I bumped into Aunt Justyna last month. She seemed well.” Then, switching topics abruptly: “How was your day?”

“I let the biggest drug dealer in East Baltimore escape a trap we'd built for him,” Kay said bluntly. “Real scumbag. Killed two kids in a drive-by a few months back. He had a back exit rigged up in his stash house and I let him walk right past me. Even called me ‘ma'am,' ” she recalled. “In some dive bar near the office, at this very moment, a half dozen of my colleagues are talking trash about the Ivy League princess that's been foisted on them.”

“So, run-of-the-mill, then?”

Kay chuckled. There was a lot to say against Christopher, but the fact that he could always make her laugh made up for a lot of it.

“Don't worry yourself too terribly, little sister,” Christopher said. “Remember, I've got three whole years on you, and with those years has come wisdom. These little problems—work, men, money, credit scores, having allowed a modern-day Al Capone to escape the clutches of justice—in time, what do they all really amount to?”

“Your devil-may-care attitude was more amusing back when we were children.”

“But I still act like a child in most ways, so I think it counts.”

Kay laughed again.

“They'd be proud of you,” Christopher said, turning serious all of a sudden and resting his hand on top of hers.

“They” were Paul and Anne Malloy, beloved father and mother of two, resting silently amidst a patch of grass in Green-Wood Cemetery, four hours north in Brooklyn.

“Thanks,” Kay said.

“I'm proud of you too,” Christopher said.

Kay smiled but didn't say anything, enjoying the moment, knowing it wouldn't last much longer.

“Kay,” he said, tightening his grip, “I need to borrow some money.”

She sighed but did not withdraw her hand. “How much?”

5

T
HE NEXT
week was not one that Kay would remember with much fondness, with evil eyes rolled at her in the break room, hushed voices talking her down. All except Torres's. Torres did his talking to her face, which was a nice change and one of the things she liked about him.

“See, we're supposed to catch the bad guys,” he'd explained to her the next morning. “Not let them get away.”

“Thank you.”

“Didn't they get around to teaching you that at Princeton?”

“I majored in psychology.”

“I'd think they'd have at least mentioned it at Quantico.”

“I may have skipped that day.”

“Well,” he said, laughing, “now you know.”

If Kay had not been the hardest-working Agent in the Baltimore Field Office before the situation with Williams—and she probably had been—she sure as hell was now. That evening with Christopher was the last time she allowed herself to wallow. Williams had slipped the bait; that meant they needed to set another trap. Kay redoubled her efforts, spent early mornings drinking bad coffee alone in the office, early mornings and long afternoons and late evenings, going back through the records, trying to find a way to trace where Williams had holed himself up.

She came home after one of these long days and found the house dark and Christopher gone; spent a few minutes looking around for a note that she knew she wouldn't find. Then she ordered a pizza from down the block and sat in front of the stack of papers she had brought home with her. Things were how they were. It was cold in February, hot in August, her brother could not be relied upon. Made as much sense getting upset about the third as it did the first two.

One of the countless falsehoods imbibed by any consumer of modern media is that investigative work is exciting, that it consists of very handsome people in dim rooms yelling at one another, or even handsomer people in front of futuristic-­looking computers saying “Enhance, enhance, enhance,” and then magically they find the secret clue that blows a case wide open. Even after two years in the FBI, Kay still sometimes found herself thinking this way, especially midway through a long afternoon staring at old leads. Of course it was all nonsense: investigating was like building a brick wall—first a row of stone, then a slab of mortar, repeat, repeat, repeat. You pulled the pictures together, you identified the subjects. Then you went after them, and this was, somehow, even less pleasant than finding them. Endless hours in her car, drinking coffee that had been nasty when it was warm and outright vile after an hour sitting in the cup; coughing on Torres's endless chain of cigarettes, inhaling enough secondhand smoke to choke a camel.

Better than being on the other side of it, especially those last few weeks in February, which would go down as some of the bloodiest in Baltimore history. No small feat in a city that averaged well over three hundred homicides per year, ten times the murder rate of New York for a city a twentieth the size, comparable to Mosul in Iraq, though a few graves safer than South Africa's Johannesburg. Williams had gone to ground, dis
appeared amongst the endless blocks of boarded-up row houses, the all-purpose convenience stores selling rat-eaten cereal and loose cigarettes, the basketball courts with their busted rims, the project housing pointing towards a kinder or more naïve age. Disappeared so far as the FBI was concerned, although any number of corpses could attest to his continued existence: former lieutenants found rotting in Dumpsters or just left cold in the passenger seats of their Escalades. It had become a race against time for all of them: Would Williams manage to kill enough of his former organization to make any case against him untenable? Or could they find someone who would roll on him first?

On a bleak and unfriendly winter morning, with little else to do, Kay was once again searching through old files about Williams, everything that had ever been collected on the budding criminal mastermind since he was still a youth. There wasn't much to go on. Other than a few cases as a juvenile—all sealed—there was almost nothing about Williams in the years before he had come onto the FBI's radar.

Almost nothing, but not quite. “The last time Williams got picked up he had just turned eighteen, fighting outside a club, some kind of minor beef. Judge let him go in the custody of his grandmother. Might be worth checking on her.”

“Might be, if we had any idea who she was,” Torres remarked. “Come on, Ivy, you've been doing this long enough to know that ‘grandma' doesn't mean grandma, it means any woman older than forty who's looking after kids rather than hanging out in clubs. Could have been an aunt, or a second cousin, or who the hell knows what. Both of Williams's biological grandmothers are dead, and whoever that woman was, we have no idea who she is, much less where she used to live.”

Kay grumbled quietly and went back to her files: on Williams and on his organization and on all the other players within it,
his top people and the many bottom-feeders subsisting beneath them. The silence dragged on. Outside, it had begun to rain.

“What about this guy: Ricky Thomas, two tiers down from Williams, not quite a lieutenant but he went to the same high school? And there's an outstanding warrant for failure to appear at his arraignment on local charges.”

“Thomas?” Special Agent Chapman looked up from his desk and shrugged. It was obvious to Kay that he had no idea who Ricky Thomas was, equally so that he didn't want to admit it. “What about him?”

“Why hasn't anyone gone and knocked on his door since Williams slipped into the wind?” Kay asked.

“Since he
slippe
d
?” Chapman said, drawing attention to Kay's moment of incompetence in hopes of covering up his own. “I guess we've been pretty busy since Williams
slipped
into the wind, Ivy. I guess we haven't had time to take a shot at every Baltimore corner boy with two vials of crack in his pocket.”

It was not the first insult Kay had ignored, and she very much doubted it would be the last. “I've got a few minutes,” she said simply, taking her service weapon out of her desk and slipping it into its holster. “Torres? You coming?”

“What the hell,” he said, standing and pulling on his coat. “But you're springing for a Reuben at Attman's on the way back.”