The Given

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Recalling how lightly Grif slept, Kit was careful to make little noise as she tiptoed down the hall and then the stairwell, rounding the corner into the cozy living room only to confront a single table lamp glowing in the dark. She made out the figure curled in the armchair, and smiled wryly.

“Somehow I knew you’d be up,” she told Marin, taking a seat across from her.

“Funny, I was just going to say the same of you,” Marin answered, and motioned to the coffee table where a second glass of wine was already poured and waiting. Kit smiled as she took it, and felt steadied despite Justin’s threatening call. Her aunt and she might not be on the best of terms, but there was comfort still in being known.

“Where’s Amelia?” she asked, curling her feet up beneath her.

“She went home.”

“Because of us?” The apology was in Kit’s voice.

“No.” Marin smiled. “She has to work tomorrow.”

Kit was again struck by how little she knew of her aunt’s personal life. It thawed some of the anger she’d built up toward Marin these past many months. Her aunt had just been trying to protect her, and Kit may have done exactly the same thing in her place. Still, it was precisely because Marin did know Kit so well that she should have told her what she’d known.

She shouldn’t have had to learn of it from a demon.

Marin Wilson lied to you.

Kit shuddered at the memory. Like their lofty brethren, demons could slip into the mortal world using the bodies of the very young or old, the weak or infirm. Marin had been in a drug-induced coma when this particular member of the Fallen had entered her body and rifled through her memories.

Kit sipped her wine, using the liquid strength to draw herself back to the present. Focusing on the past would do nothing for her. “What does Amelia do?”

“She’s an ER doctor.”

“So she’s a workaholic like you,” Kit said, nodding her head.

“She’s worse,” admitted Marin, but the censure was muted.

“Is that even possible?” Kit teased, pleased that her aunt had found happiness, that she wasn’t alone.

Not like Kit.

The realization lanced through her, and Kit took a long pull at her wineglass.

“You might be surprised at what’s possible, Kit,” Marin said, watching her closely.

Kit snorted as she thought of the angelic human upstairs. “Try me.”

Marin looked down, her hands knotting. “For one, I’ve come to realize lately that there’s more to life than just chasing down the next story. Such as creating stories, and a life, of your own.”

“I could have told you that,” Kit said softly.

“I think you tried,” Marin said, looking back up. Her chin wobbled. “I’m sorry, Kit. For hiding things from you, for trying to protect you from the truth. It’s just, after your breakdown, after you were institutionalized—”

“I don’t want to talk about that.” She wasn’t that person anymore. She didn’t even know who that was, which was comforting. You could actually become someone else in the same lifetime. Maybe it meant she wouldn’t always be a silly mortal yearning for a brooding angel she could never have.

Marin held up a hand to let Kit know that wasn’t her point, and that she agreed. “I simply didn’t feel like I could risk it after you were released.”

“But I put myself back together.” And she’d do so again. She was doing it again. Proof? She wasn’t up there banging down Grif’s door.

“You did, didn’t you?” Marin’s gaze went distant as she remembered for herself, and after another moment she shook her head. “I’ve seen a lot of things in my day, but I swear, that was the gutsiest thing I ever did see. Yet somehow it made me want to protect you all the more. And then you started in with the rockabilly phase—”

“It’s not a—”

“I know, it’s a lifestyle. It’s a way of life. And it’s your armor.”

Kit jerked, but realized it was true. A coat of arms comprising crinoline and cat’s-eye glasses. Half-moon manicures to paint over her vulnerabilities. Fears reined in by the discipline required of heels, in the exactness of a pencil skirt. Why hadn’t she realized it before?

“I didn’t understand that at first,” Marin said, talking faster, like she’d opened a spout and now couldn’t turn it off. “But honestly, Kit, you’re as tough a woman as I’ve ever seen. Tougher than me.” She glanced down again, and swallowed hard. “Tough like your mom.”

And the spout turned off. The relationship between Kit’s mother—the flighty and aristocratic Shirley Wilson Craig—and Kit’s aunt—the plain and steadfast younger sibling, Marin—was a rarely broached subject between them . . . and never initiated by Marin. But the hour was late—or early now—and they were drinking alone in the moonbeams. Besides, Marin seemed different, more open and vulnerable. Perhaps Kit wouldn’t have recognized it without the distance of the past few months wedged between them, but she saw it now, like clouds parting to reveal the face of the moon.

“Do you know she used to lock me out of the house?” Marin said suddenly.

Kit knew Marin and her mother hadn’t been bosom friends. She was starting to understand that the woman she loved then, and in memory, was not the only Shirley Craig that there was. That her mother, though fiercely loving and always supportive of Kit, had also been a bit of a bully. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, it was in retaliation for always getting As. For being better in track. For, I don’t know, breathing.” Leaning forward, Marin over-poured another glass of wine, though she didn’t drink it. “She stole my first boyfriend just to prove she could. Not that I was really that into him.”

They both chuckled, but Marin’s smile fell almost immediately. “Sisters are weird that way. They can be each other’s biggest champions while still being each other’s biggest adversaries.” She shuddered, evidently remembering a different slight at the hands of her older sister, then shook her head clear of it. “She loomed over me like a giant shadow. I felt lesser, judged. I was nothing like her, and she let me know it.”

“I’m sorry,” Kit said. It wasn’t at all the way she remembered her mother, but who could ever truly know another person? Last summer she’d actually been inside of Grif’s thoughts—again, because of that malevolent demon—and she still didn’t know the whole of him.

“I just want you to know that though I never had a child of my own, never intended to—”

“Until I was thrust upon you.”

“No.” Marin put her hand out, spine straightening. “No, you were a gift. One I never dared dream for myself. I felt this huge responsibility to care for you. You were all I had left, and vice versa, but in addition to grief, there was guilt. Because I had you and I knew she wouldn’t have wanted me to. I hadn’t earned you. You were hers.”

Kit had no idea what to say to that.

“I did what I thought best by you, and have ever since. But I complicated it,” Marin said, and Kit knew this was her way of apologizing.

Again, a memory shared by that demon seized her, though this one was Marin’s. In it, her aunt was secreting away a file from a room Kit recognized, her father’s study as it’d looked fourteen years earlier. And afterward? Marin had gently stroked Kit’s forehead as she slept, and said, “It’s for your own good.”

And that was why her father’s murder, always suspicious, was now a cold case.

Kit glanced away. She loved Marin, she missed her, and even understood her . . . but she couldn’t quite forgive her. Not yet. So instead of simply accepting the apology, she said, “It’s not too late, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“To come clean. To tell me the truth about my dad’s death.” Kit bit her lip. “And about the folder he sent you the day he died.”

Marin froze. “How do you know about that?”

A little demon told me.

“I think the real question is, after everything you just said, why aren’t you telling me about it now?”

Marin remained quiet.

“Let me make this a little easier on you,” Kit finally said, folding her hands together. “I know that my father sent you something, and I believe that something was the reason he was killed.”

It was the secret she’d been keeping from Grif, a nugget of information that she was hoarding for herself until she knew what to do about it . . . if anything at all.

“Now,” Kit said. “We can keep going down this path we’ve been on, with you professing to be sorry about the very thing you continue to do”—lie—“or you can tell me right now. What was in that folder?”

“Nothing.”

Kit shook her head. “I went back into the family archives and looked, Marin. I knew you wouldn’t leave something so important undocumented. You annotated it. You cross-fucking-referenced it. There was something in that folder that made you suspect my dad’s murder was more than a routine line-of-duty death.”

Marin’s chin lifted. “And it looks like I was right to hide it, wasn’t I?”

“Did it have anything to do with Barbara DiMartino?”

“You tell me.”

Kit stood, amazed. “Why are you stonewalling me on this?”

“Because in addition to putting up with your mother’s shit, I swore to her that I’d keep you safe.” Marin’s softness had disappeared and now she only glared. “And I’m keeping that promise, Kit. Even if it means protecting you from yourself.”

“He was murdered right after he left Sal DiMartino’s house,” Kit said, glaring back. “Did you really think I wasn’t going to put it together? That I wouldn’t find out?”

Marin just shook her head. “Some things are best left buried.”

“Like the DiMartinos? Like their feud with the Salernos?”

Like mysteries that spanned fifty whole years?

Marin just sat on her sofa, looking suddenly small . . . but resolute. She wasn’t going to speak.

Kit whirled away so fast she felt dizzy. “Fine. I’ll figure it out myself. I’ll also be out of your hair”—unspoken was, out of your life—“first thing in the morning.”

“Leave it alone, Kit,” Marin called from behind her.

“Oh, Marin.” Kit just shook her head, pausing with one hand on the doorjamb. “It’s like you don’t even know me at all.”

Grif moved in and out of his dreams like a fish swimming from light into shadows. Therefore his sleep was similarly clouded, and he woke late with a dry mouth and a pulsing behind his eyes. Already dressed, he headed downstairs to remedy both, and found Marin and Kit seated across from each other at the long dining-room table. Marin’s laptop was open between them, but the wedge of space that separated the women was made greater by their matching postures—stiff and straight, legs crossed so their bodies formed a V. Neither woman looked up as Grif headed to the kitchen, where he found Zicaro nibbling toast and perusing a stack of printouts over the top of his bifocals.

“It feels good to be on the beat again!” Zicaro said, voice too loud.

Grif motioned for Zicaro to turn up his hearing aid, then looked at him as he poured some coffee. “They put you to work?”

Zicaro nodded, and Grif’s gut automatically clenched. His inclination was to tuck people away somewhere safe while he pounded the pavement and did the heavy lifting. But Zicaro was nearly shaking with excitement as he showed Grif a printout of the Paris casino floor. Grif began to shake, too, when the old-timer went on to tell him about Kit’s midnight call and the threat to Marin’s life.

He hid his frown behind his mug. There was a time when Kit wouldn’t have hesitated to come to him first with a problem, even in the middle of the night. He knew he no longer had a right to expect it, yet he still wished she had, and not merely out of pride. Grif was already running out of time. It was now Monday, the original day on which Kit was scheduled to die, and though he believed his actions the previous day had altered that fate, he wasn’t taking any chances.

Besides, he hadn’t forgotten about Donel’s prophecy.

Lifting his large mug of coffee, he rejoined the women in the dining room.

“How did you first find out about Sunset?” Marin asked, without preamble and without looking up, as Grif pulled out a chair.

“I found it,” boasted Zicaro, rolling in, toast balanced on his knees.

Grif helped him to the table and settled his papers before him, but pointed out, “No, you didn’t. You just happened to be living there when Justin Allen and company took over.” He turned back to Marin. “Why? What’d you find?”

“Wait till you see,” Kit said, finally looking up. She was already made up for the day, face powdered, eyes lined, dark hair pinned in front, the back tucked inside a crimson snood. He knew she always kept a change of clothes in the car, so didn’t wonder at that, but what had his breath catching in his chest was the excitement that brimmed beneath all that gloss.

Eyes shining, she motioned him over, her mouth curling up at one corner, a nearly forgotten look. It slid into his heart like a splinter, and he tried to forget it again as he sauntered over to stand behind her. She was just excited; the look wasn’t meant for him.

“Amelia shot these over a couple of hours ago. It’s only the contents of one flash drive so far, but it’s enough.”

“For what?”

Marin tapped the screen with her pencil. “To suss out the scam. Here’s the gist: the caregivers and therapists working at the Sunset Retirement Community are legit, but the management and the administrative staff? Not.” She looked up at Zicaro.

He nodded. “No one has been there longer than a year.”

“And the resident list has changed as well. Only those with health issues so debilitating that they overwhelm family members are admitted. More than that, most have no immediate family at all.”

“No one to advocate for them,” said Kit softly.

“The stated goal is to provide every resident with a gentle and dignified end to their life once it’s acknowledged that the end is, indeed, near. But there are various levels of ‘care’ going on at Sunset, with the most intensive care given to the terminal cases.”

“Not those with a chance of recovery?”

Marin shook her head. “I’ve begun a preliminary comparison between Sunset and Blue Diamond Medical, its biggest competitor in town, and the discrepancy in recovery rates is startling.”

“So more people are dying at Sunset?”

“No. I mean, that would be a big ol’ red flag, wouldn’t it? But they’re not getting better, either. In fact, they never leave. Instead, their lives are extended.”

“And so are their illnesses.” Kit reached over and shifted Marin’s laptop around so that both Grif and Zicaro could see the screen.

“The residents are given one of three grades upon admission to Sunset.”

“Like in school?” Grif said.

Kit inclined her head. “An A means they’ll likely regain their independence. B means they’re still in control of bodily functions and mobility.”

“And a C?”

Kit shook her head. “That’s the thing. There is no C. There’s only a steep drop to F. End of life. The mission is to get patients in the A group back on their feet, and a handful of those actually do leave full-time care. But look at what happens to the Bs and Fs at Sunset. It’s a slow decline into F status, but it happens down to the last person.”

Grif crossed his arms. “What about their families?”

“Notified, but look, if a family member was having trouble taking care of their elderly loved one before, they’ll naturally find any new complications impossible.”

Grif frowned at the screen. “So what happens to the Fs?”

“Here’s a report given to the family of a resident just last summer.” Marin pushed it his way, and he slid it across the table so Zicaro could see as well. “The chart is marked ‘terminal’ at the top, yet you can see from the files that efforts to sustain and extend his life go far beyond that expressed on the admission forms.”

“So it’s an insurance scam,” Zicaro guessed.

“No,” Marin said, turning the screen back to face her. “The claims are never filed.”

Grif shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

Kit leaned back in her chair and jerked her chin. “Turn the page.”

Zicaro did it for him. Shifting the stack around, he flipped it open. After a moment he said, “These numbers. They look like . . . what? Bank accounts?”

“Trust accounts,” Kit corrected excitedly. “Trusts that management takes over shortly after each patient arrives. All monies are kept in a single account. They don’t ask the families for the numbers directly, but they don’t have to when the cost of care is withdrawn automatically each month. Social Security goes through those accounts, military retirement pay, Medicare, Medicaid . . . the wealthier patients even have wills and deeds attached . . . but the most telling are these.”

She leaned across the table, sending a rose scent wafting Grif’s way. He refocused as she pointed to a row of cells. “Credit card numbers. I don’t know if you knew this, but most elderly people have stupendous credit.”

“Not me,” Zicaro said, and they all looked at him. He shrugged. “I’m really bad at being elderly.”

“So’s he,” Kit quipped, pointing at Grif. “Anyway, we’ve only begun searching these files but it looks like all of these cards are maxed out, but only after the limits were raised.”

“Again and again,” Marin added. “Minimum payments are made to the cardholder accounts, though not from the individual’s bank account.”

No, thought Grif, catching on now. Some eagle-eyed family member might be keeping tabs on that.

“They all come from a central account at Sunset,” Kit explained. “Meanwhile, other credit card accounts continue to be opened under the patient’s name, which is strange as most people living at an assisted-care facility don’t get out much.”

“What about TV and telephone pitches?”

“Calls are monitored,” Marin said. “I checked. Solicitors don’t get through.”

“There’s online shopping now,” Grif pointed out, nodding at Marin’s computer.

Kit said, “Not for people who have trouble even seeing the screen.”

“Not,” clarified Zicaro, “for people whose hands shake too much to navigate the keys.”

He cleared his throat, like his toast had suddenly gone dry in his throat.

“And not for people,” Marin said, swinging the laptop back around, “who are kept so drugged up that they don’t even know their own name.”

“Jesus.” Grif rubbed his eyes, and thought about all the blinds that could be put in place to hide income and expenses over time. How a family’s desperation could be used against them. How someone could be systematically stripped of their material worth without even knowing it.

“No family has ever challenged the creditors?”

“You mean the grief-stricken families? The ones who couldn’t even change a bedpan?” Marin looked at Grif. “Tell me this, how much do you know about your financial situation right now?”

“I know I have enough money to get through the day,” he said, and Kit snorted.

“I check my statements every month,” Zicaro said proudly. “I get yearly credit reports.”

Marin lifted her eyebrows. “Really? So you have the contact information for every credit card you’ve ever opened? Every bank account? The passwords for each of them?”

Marin shook her head when Zicaro said nothing. “And what if you had children? Would they be able to locate them if something happened to you? Because I’ve dealt with a loved one’s personal effects and I can tell you it would take months and months of searching and discarding and fighting through red tape to figure out what’s going on here. Most people don’t have the resources or time for it. It’s hard enough for them to arrange for the casket and pack up the house for Goodwill. Forget proof of wrongdoing on the part of a caregiver.”

“But we’ve got proof,” Grif said, nodding at the computer.

Marin’s eyes gleamed now. “Oh, we’ve got enough to bury everyone involved.”

“No wonder they want to blow up your house,” Zicaro said, returning to his toast.

To her credit, Marin didn’t blink. “No wonder they want to meet with you this afternoon.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Zicaro. “We’re meeting at a casino in the middle of the Strip. What could go wrong?”

On what was supposed to be the last day of Kit’s life? Grif looked at Kit, who was biting her lip, noticing his concern. What, indeed?

“I’d like to ask you to stay here at Marin’s this afternoon,” Grif said to Kit. He knew better than to demand it. “Uncle Al and I can see to the business at the casino.”

He was praying that they wouldn’t have to fight about it for long. He couldn’t explain in front of Zicaro and Marin why it was important, but she’d want to know. She always did. So even Grif was surprised when she only nodded. “I think that’s best.”

“You do?” Marin asked.

“You do?” said Zicaro, also goggling.

“You do?” Grif said.

“Sure,” Kit said, blinking back at them all. “Divide and conquer, right? You guys can go compare the size of your flash drives with the bad guys, but there’s a ton of information that still needs to be combed through.” She glanced at Marin, her look growing pointed. “I can’t do it all myself.”

Marin’s jaw clenched as she shoved back from the table. “I have to get ready for work.”

She strode from the room without another word, obviously upset, though Grif didn’t know why. He was just relieved that Kit would remain out of danger. “So you’ll let me handle this part?”

“Us,” Zicaro corrected.

“Happy to,” Kit said, and rose as well, heading to the kitchen with her coffee cup, gone before Grif could even frown, much less question why.