were working on the issue together. The year before I met Eric-July 12, 1999, the rider that had been in Mfume killed my partner. It made it look like an accident, but I knew.
"I went to New York. That was where the rider was. I started looking around. Eric's name kept coming up. Everyone knew him, or knew about him. He was some sort of fixer. The guy you went to when you didn't have anywhere else to go. I made him for a bagman. The public face of something bigger. I was wrong about that. Anyway.
"I found him in a bar on the Upper West Side. He had an apartment, and he was doing business out of it. I tried to lean on him. I don't know exactly what I said. I think I gave him some crap about not having a business license or something," Karen said, and she smiled. "He didn't buy it. I'd meant to go in and roust him, break some heads, find out who his boss was, and if there was any connection to the rider. Instead, we wound up drinking whiskey and... and I told him everything. He had a way of listening that made you say things you didn't mean to."
"And he helped you?" I asked.
"He did," Karen said, but her expression was bleak. "We didn't catch the rider, but we cast it out of the body it had taken over. Broke its power a little. Weakened it. Afterward, I was sick for almost a month. It hadn't been... it wasn't easy. He let me stay at his apartment. He made me bathe once or twice a week. He kept me eating food."
"He guided you back," Chogyi Jake said. Karen considered for a moment, then nodded.
"He was with me through my breakdown," she said.
"Were you lovers?" I asked.
"Only a couple times toward the end," Karen said. Her voice had taken on a low, throaty amusement. "I wouldn't have been much fun in the sack right at the beginning. But no, we weren't serious about each other. We were just a man and a woman in close proximity for a few weeks. And neither of us had anyone. That's all."
"What was his price?"
"Twenty thousand dollars, and five favors to be named later," she said. "He called in three of the favors. Before I left the bureau, he had me expunge some information from a guy's police record. Then after I left, he needed someone to be a lookout on a job he was doing in Seattle, so I went out and helped with that. The last time I heard from him, he needed me to keep a baby at my apartment for a couple weeks in March of '03."
"A baby?" Aubrey asked.
"Yeah. Little boy," Karen said. "Looked Indian. Subcontinent Indian, I mean. I called him Raja, but I don't know what his real name was. Eric dropped him off, then came and got him again. I didn't ask what it was about."
"March of 2003," Ex said. "I remember that. He said he had to go take care of his mother for a few weeks. In Kentucky."
"Well, he spent at least some of that time with an eight-month-old in Boston," Karen said.
"And Grandma Heller died when I was twelve," I said.
"That was the thing with Eric," Karen said. "I knew a lot of things about him, but I was never sure any of them were true. Maybe he'd been in the military, maybe that was just a story. Maybe he'd gone to Juilliard. Maybe not. He had this way of suggesting things without ever exactly saying them. And then sometimes he was just joking. Or he was protecting me from something."
The muted trumpet rose like a child wailing for her mother and went silent. Karen's structural half-smile softened.
"I'm not helping, am I?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "It seems like everyone knew a different version of him. I just wish..."
That he'd told me what he was, and what I was going to become. That he'd taught me. That he'd trusted me.
The Eric Heller I'd known had been the benign uncle, hated by my uber-Christian parents. When I'd gone on the queen mother of all teenage rebellious benders at sixteen and woken up with an honest-to-God lost weekend and a tattoo on the small of my back, Eric had been the guy to cover for me. When my father had informed the family that Eric was an abomination before God, I'd thought it meant