Ahuva Pretter has called twice since Sunday, with dogged determination, clearly unbothered by the crisis. Penina finally sighs and calls her back.

“There you are,” Ahuva says without preamble. “Exciting first date, right? More memorable than the first time around?”

“The first time around, we sat in a hotel lounge and people-watched. This date had a little more action, yes, but much less of a sense that I might survive the night. It was fifty-fifty, really.” She types a halfhearted Moish Garfinkel Bearwood into a database, most of her focus on Ahuva.

“Sounds like you liked him then and you like him now.” Penina can almost imagine Ahuva’s raised eyebrows, so why is this a question? “Any concerns?”

“More than I’d like,” Penina says truthfully. “But I would… I’m willing to go out again, if he is.”

Ahuva sounds thrilled, which adds  pressure to that decision. Penina doesn’t know if she really believes that Gabe will stay, that they can build something healthy. Who would Gabe be, if he were a husband and stepfather? Would he stay put, and would he resent her for it?

An absurd image comes to mind: Gabe, out in some distant landscape. Penina working in a little ramshackle cottage on her laptop, programming on the go. Daniel playing in the mud. It’s a ridiculous thought. Daniel needs stability, a city with a yeshivah and with access to his father. Penina is grounded, and if Gabe isn’t, then they need to talk about it.

But Ahuva insists that Gabe is committed. And Penina will have to take her word for it until she can talk to Gabe himself.

She returns to her searches. If Moish had sold back the stone, is there any evidence that he’d done the same with the machatzis hashekel? A machatzis hashekel is a measure of weight, not a specific coin, and there are plenty of coins from the Second Beis Hamikdash era. This coin was distinct because it dated back to the First.

Maybe Moish had sold it to someone who hadn’t dated it, who had assumed that it was from a later time. Maybe it’s already in someone’s collection, and they have no idea what they possess. Maybe, maybe….

But no matter how much she speculates and searches, she keeps finding herself back at the initial heist. The Israel Fair had been set up in New York City in 1994, a pop-up curiosity that arrived with fanfare. There had been various historical items, but the stars of the show were the three artifacts: the stone, the ring, and the coin.

They had vanished a week before the pop-up had been scheduled to close. One afternoon, they’d been in their alarmed cases, completely intact. That night, there had been an altercation, a police presence, and then three missing artifacts.

“Who ran security for it?” Penina murmurs at the screen, squinting through old articles. Most are more of the same text, but they’re difficult to read, faded scans or digitalized files that are missing words.

She reads them until the office is totally empty. All computers have been shut down or are in sleep mode, and even the cleaners have left the office, an eerie calm settling over the rooms. The babysitter confirms by text that she can stay late, and Penina skims more articles, stopping when she finally finds what she’s looking for in a half-digitalized article.

With lit — more information is forth — ll we know,” say — of Bearwood Protect — ices, who were contrac — guard the artifacts.

Bearwood Protection Services. Moish Garfinkel’s old workplace.

Of course.

The next thing she does might trigger a security breach somewhere in the NYPD database. She has no illusions that there are cybersecurity technicians there who are much better than she. But she’s getting closer, and she has to know. Her fingers fly over the keyboard, rooting out backdoors that she can exploit, chipping away at the security around their databases.

And then she’s in.

She doesn’t waste any time. Moish Garfinkel has one criminal charge, dated November 17, 1994. She knows that. She also knows that it’s listed as the day he’d died. The charge lapsed almost immediately — no one brings a dead man to court — but it means there should be a police report.

With a little more digging, she tracks it down, reads the information, and calls Rivi immediately.

“Someone tipped off the police.”

“What?” Rivi sounds alarmed. “About the ring?”

“No. Well, yes.” Penina scans the report again. “They got an anonymous tip on November 17, 1994, that someone was going to attempt a heist at the Israel Fair. Specifically, that Moish Garfinkel, a security guard there, was involved.”

“Oh.” Rivi breathes shallowly. “One second. I’m just getting off the train and into my car. You’re not still at work, are you?”

“Kind of. I didn’t think it was a good idea to break into the NYPD database during work hours,” Penina says sheepishly.

“Penina.”

“The police thought there was a partner. Someone who fingered Moish so they could take the artifacts and run. In the report, they talk about a confrontation. They say that Moish was killed in the skirmish that followed, though they never found his body. Another man escaped the scene.”

Penina doesn’t dare screenshot the information or take a photo of it. She writes it onto a Post-it. This one isn’t going on her desk. “And we know that Moish survived.”

“Avigdor Cohen was killed,” Rivi says grimly, catching on. “But Abba was the only one whose name they had. He knew he’d be on the run forever if he didn’t play it right. And there was Avigdor’s whole life, lying open in front of him. His father had passed away. His mother was in a nursing home with dementia. No wife, no kids, and his company had already gone under, right? It was so easy for Abba to slip into his identity. All he had to do was”—her voice is choked—“bury the body.”

“And he knew where to do that, too. The family mausoleum.” It’s slowly coming together. “He must have known that when he died, when he would be buried, you’d discover the truth.”

“Maybe it’s what he wanted. Or maybe he didn’t think it through. After all, he’d just lost a friend and gotten these three priceless, poisonous artifacts.” Rivi takes a jagged breath. “Did he… do you think he gave Avigdor a proper kevurah?”

It’s such an inane thing to ask in the wake of these revelations. But Penina says the only thing that she can. “I’m sure he did. He was his best friend. He must have meant something to him.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Rivi whispers. Her car turns off, the speakers disconnecting and reconnecting to her phone. “Why would Avigdor tip off the police?”

“I don’t think he did.” Moish and Avigdor were longtime partners in crime. Stealing a medal from Town Hall and replacing it with another was minute, but it strikes Penina as a test run. A childhood prank that had succeeded so well that it had spiraled into much bigger crimes with much bigger prizes.

“Do you think…?” Penina hesitates before she says it, before she opens a door that they won’t be able to close again. The intruder in the Cohen house. The man trailing Gabe. The gunshots in a safe area.

She doesn’t need to finish her sentence. Rivi is just as shaken, just as capable of putting it together. “There was a third partner,” she says, subdued. “They took three artifacts. One for each of them. But the third guy double-crossed them.”

“And after everything went wrong, Moish was left with all three artifacts and a new identity.” She remembers the note that Gabe had found. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID. Not the heist, not the theft, after all. I know that you sold the gemstone, that you had it in the first place. “Why would the third partner not track down Avigdor? It wasn’t like ‘Avigdor Cohen’ had gone into hiding.”

Rivi is quiet for a moment. “Unless he never knew about Avigdor in the first place. Abba was the one who was working security at the fair. He was the linchpin of the operation. Maybe he never mentioned to the third guy that he’d have an accomplice. Maybe he didn’t trust him.” She laughs wetly. “This is so ridiculous. Like a story of someone else’s life. My father was a master thief.”

“Your father was desperate,” Penina says gently. “I put together a timeline, remember? Gabe was born in April 1994. Your mother passed away a couple of months later. Suddenly, he was a single father with an infant and a toddler. And he had this new job that put him right near priceless artifacts, and if the right person had come in then to take advantage of his state…” She wonders about Avigdor, charismatic and wealthy and reckless. She wonders about the third partner.

“I’ve been desperate. Somehow, I never turned to grand larceny.” Rivi’s voice is strong again, prickly and bitter. “I won’t forgive him for taking a bad situation and making it worse. He destroyed his own life. And then he tried to destroy mine and Gabe’s, too.” She is kinder, calmer when she addresses Penina. “Thank you, Penina. I think those are all the facts, right? We finally have our answers.”

“Except where the coin is,” Penina points out, but Rivi is already saying goodbye, hanging up with firmness. “Except that third partner,” she says to the silence.

She clicks out of the database, still dissatisfied. Why now? The accomplice could have easily gone after Moish while he was alive, hidden away in that big, lonely house. When had the accomplice found out that Moish was Avigdor? Had he monitored the police investigation, or launched his own? It doesn’t quite add up.

The accomplice might have known Moish from Bearwood, but that narrows it down less than Penina wants. Bearwood has emptied out over the years, it’s an older community now and  removed from what it had once been. Housing prices had soared while the Jewish community had thrived there, and then the community itself had been priced out. Jews and non-Jews alike had moved to more affordable places near the city, places like Lenape Falls.

She breathes slowly, finding her center. And then, as though she is waking up very slowly, she thinks she hears an echo. Another person breathing, their cadence just slightly off from hers.

She shuts off her screen automatically and twists around. Cubicles high enough that she can’t see over them surround her, and she jerks around one corner rapidly. There’s no one there. Down another aisle. Nothing. But she can still hear the breathing, almost inaudible, and she chokes back a surge of fear.

Cubicle by cubicle, she darts in and finds quiet computers. Okay, she tells herself. You’re imagining things. She moves slowly, methodically, careful not to make too much noise. Her heart hammers in her chest, goosebumps breaking out on her arms, as she makes her way through the entire office complex.

The cubicle walls seem to taunt her, closing in around her like a blindfold, and she steps onto a coworker’s chair to try to peer over them, hopping up onto his desk to get a better view.

The office is empty. She can’t hear that breathing anymore. And maybe she was just imagining it, except for one terrifying fact.

Her screen — the one she’d just turned off — is back on, flickering in the dim light of the quiet office.

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 931)