Authors: Alafair Burke
Long Gone (20 page)
“T
his might have been a bad idea.”
Alice was staring at a piece of foie gras on toast with some kind of jelly, the type of sweet and savory treat she would usually try to devour in one gob. When she had called Jeff, he had been on his way out of the office to grab a bite to eat. He had persuaded her to join him at the bar of her favorite restaurant, Eleven Madison Park. Now that she was here, she couldn’t muster an appetite.
“You need to eat something. And if the food here isn’t good enough for you, well, you really have lost your mind.”
She forced herself to take a bite, hating the fact that Jeff was going to pay a fortune for food that she was in no position to enjoy. “Thanks, Jeff. For this. For making time for me.”
“Making
time
for you? What are you talking about? You’re one of my best friends, and you’re going through hell. I’ll do anything for you, Al. I’ve always been willing to do anything for you.”
Friends.
She wondered if the word choice was his way of clarifying what had been, for her at least, an ambiguous period in their long relationship. He had been dating a woman—Ramona was her name. She was only now turning thirty. Alice had even suspected that Ramona moved in for a while, during that period when Jeff rarely called, and then only from his cell. Six months must have passed at one point without any communication, and she had wondered if, at last, they were finished.
But then when the shit hit the fan with her father, he was back. It started with a call to check how she was faring. Then the meetings for drinks and meals and matinee movies picked up pace. There were those late-night phone calls when mutual, but not necessarily synchronized, bouts of insomnia set in.
Hey. Are you up? I can’t sleep.
Not one, but two drunken sleepovers: the first accompanied by awkward apologies and a kiss on her forehead, but the most recent followed by a continuation of what had begun the night earlier.
And then he’d gone to Seattle for a week to visit his brother. And then she’d opened the gallery.
Friends
, he said. That’s apparently all they were. And he’d been willing to do anything for her—except examine the possibility that there might be a life without children but with his best friend.
She pushed the thoughts away, knowing they were planted by her father’s words. All she needed right now was a friend.
“Your father says the photo’s legit, huh?”
“I don’t understand the technicalities of it, but apparently he knows some high-speed visual effects guys who can examine a photograph for inconsistencies—like a shadow that falls the wrong direction given the light, or problems with respective sizing of different people in the image. The picture’s not great quality, but I guess nothing jumped out as phony.”
“But it could still be doctored.”
“Possibly, if someone did a good job. Or they found a woman who looked an awful lot like me.”
“Because you know for certain it’s not you, right?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He flashed that disarming smile that always managed to check any anger brewing in her. “I know. I’m an asshole. Just making sure there were no intoxicated evenings with that handsome boss of yours. Maybe something you didn’t even remember?”
“Absolutely not. You, my sir, are the only man I’ve drunkenly stumbled into bed with lately.”
The woman at the next table coughed loudly.
“Very subtle,” Jeff whispered. “Wait until she hears us talking about dead bodies and right-wing conspiracies.”
“My father can be paranoid, but as they say—”
“Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.”
“So do you think the amorphous
they
are out to get my father?” Her father’s theory sounded crazy, but it would explain the bizarre timing of George Hardy’s protesters outside the gallery just before Campbell’s murder.
“Crazier things have happened. You had wondered why they targeted you for this job. If the entire point was to make your father look bad, taking advantage of you—and the fact that you needed a job—would be a vehicle to get to him.”
“And yet?”
“That’s a pretty complicated way of dragging you and your father through the mud. Someone had to set up a bank account, forge a driver’s license with your picture under Drew Campbell’s name, enlist Campbell to recruit you, create Hans Schuler’s artwork and Web site, rent the gallery space, pay for the furniture, pay for the space—”
“I get the picture.”
“I know this isn’t exactly my expertise, but I represented some pretty amoral corporations when I was at the firm, and now I’m handling some criminal cases. In my experience? There are cheap ways to get revenge. Violence. Lies. Threats. That stuff doesn’t cost a cent. People who spend money do it to earn money.”
“Okay, so maybe you and my father are both right. What if there’s a dual motive—some financial gain, but then leaving me and my father holding the bag was the icing on the cake?”
“How would that fit in with George Hardy?”
“Is it that hard to believe that the pastor at some fly-by-night, crazy church would be involved in illicit activity? I think I’ve read that story before, Reverend Ted. So what kind of operation could they be running?”
“All kinds of nefarious activities require a cover story. They could have been using the gallery to launder money. Or smuggle drugs. Or smuggle people.”
“But we didn’t really have any cargo. All we had coming in and out of there were Schuler’s prints.”
“Which you sold a lot of, right?”
“More than a hundred.”
“Which is what? Like, seventy grand? By an unknown artist who in hindsight appears to be nonexistent?”
“And almost all the orders came in online. I got people into the door based on hype, but I had a hard time selling anything in person. All that money was from the Web.”
“So where’d the money go?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t have access to whatever account it went to, but if the police are still talking to me, my guess is the account is either untraceable or yet another thing that somehow traces back to me or my dad.”
“Okay, so where did all the money come from? Why was the show so successful?”
“At the time, I wanted to believe it was because of my viral marketing prowess.”
“And now?”
“I feel like an idiot. They weren’t smuggling anything. The gallery wasn’t a cover at all. They were selling the pictures. That’s where the money to cover the operation came from.”
“So how did they generate demand? Why would all those people pay seven hundred dollars for pictures that aren’t worth anything?”
“Shit, we have to go.”
He was throwing cash on the table before she had a chance to explain.
“It wasn’t just the prints that I’d mail to the customers.”
He obviously didn’t remember.
“The thumb drives, Jeff. Remember? Every customer received a little stick of data about Hans Schuler. And whoever cleared out the gallery only left two things behind for the cops: Drew Campbell’s body and a bag of those thumb drives. Whatever’s on there, the police have already found.”
“Do you still have any?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got to look.”
“That night I went to the gallery before you opened—you showed me the whole setup on your laptop and then slipped the thumb drive in your pocket when you were done. I remember.”
They ran all the way to her apartment, where she found the pair of Hudson bootcuts she had not worn since she had first shown him the so-called Han Schuler exhibit. The thumb drive was still in the front pocket.
“I can’t believe I didn’t see through this bullshit.”
She had viewed all of these files before: images of Schuler’s art, an interactive game where users could cut and paste portions of the images to create their own virtual mosaics, and a program that created desktop background images from Schuler’s work, complete with trite sayings about inner reflection and mainstream radicalism.
“And yet more than a hundred people were willing to pay seven hundred bucks for this crap.”
“What are we missing?”
“Try downloading all the desktop backgrounds, and see if something happens.”
“Like what?”
“Obviously I don’t know, but there’s got to be something there.”
She downloaded all four alternatives, but other than the changes to the background of her laptop desktop, nothing seemed to happen.
“Maybe it’s embedded somewhere.” She began clicking her mouse across the various images. On the photograph called
Fluids
, the centerpiece of Schuler’s SELF series, she clicked on what was supposedly the artist’s lips, the saliva extending from his mouth, the bite marks in his wrist. Nothing.
She moved on to
Wince
, a similarly themed close-up of the artist biting his lower lip.
Her clicking became more random and desperate as she moved on to
First
, the photograph that had created such an uproar after George Hardy and his protesters arrived outside the gallery. It was a collage of cutouts from the image of a body that was obviously not Schuler’s. Pale, smooth skin. Thin hips. A chest just starting to develop above still-bony ribs. She moved her mouse over a dilated pupil and clicked.
The full-screen image of
First
started to fly away like shards of broken glass. The screen went black.
Enter password.
They tried Schuler. Hans. Hans Schuler. Highline. Self.
Then she typed the name of the photograph that had created this passageway: F-I-R-S-T.
A list of files appeared on the screen, each named with a seven-digit number. She felt her eyes moving involuntarily from the images as she flipped through them. If there was any ambiguity about the age of the woman in the
First
photograph, there was none in these. Several of the images seemed to be of an older girl, maybe a young teenager. Her face had been cropped from the pictures. The photos seemed from another era for reasons Alice couldn’t immediately identify. And slightly muddled, as if they had been scanned from physical photographs. She quickened the pace of her clicking, not wanting to see the details. There was a man in some of the photos, also faceless.
The pictures of the older girl were spliced in among other, higher-resolution photographs of children, maybe six to eight years old. Both boys and girls. Alone. With adults. With each other.
She felt the few bites of food she’d allowed herself at dinner working their way up her esophagus. Jeff placed a palm on the small of her back. She closed her laptop, harder than necessary, and heard her voice waver when she finally spoke.
“What am I going to do?”
“G
ood to see you again, Morhart.”
Willie Danes gave Morhart a hearty handshake and extended a half-eaten bag of Cheetos in his direction like they were old friends. Morhart didn’t doubt that he had earned some brownie points with these NYPD guys by tipping them off to Becca Stevenson’s connection to their case, but he also suspected that he had top-down bureaucracy to thank for his presence today in the Thirteenth Precinct. He hadn’t voted for Mayor Kyle Jenson since the mayor cut the town’s community policing program seven years earlier, but the man enjoyed a natural ability to charm. He’d called the chief for an update on the Stevenson investigation. When he found out the road had led to a gallery in New York City, he had called Danes’s deputy inspector personally. Now the NYPD and the Dover Police Department had an “understanding” that their investigators would fully share information in their separate but overlapping cases.
Morhart believed he had already delivered his half of the quid pro quo with Becca’s fingerprint match. Because of him, Danes and his partner, John Shannon, knew that a missing fifteen-year-old girl had previously entered the gallery where their victim was killed. They knew that the girl’s father—the one who had only recently appeared in her life—had just happened to protest that very gallery the day before the body was found.
Now he was about to see the NYPD’s cards. He stepped carefully around piles of documents and disheveled boxes to take a seat in the overpacked interrogation room. He did his best to ignore the sounds of the creaking door as a young, unintroduced Asian guy walked in and out the room while Danes spoke.
“My partner couldn’t be here,” Danes explained. “He’s down reviewing the final results of the ME’s report. You ready to share the sandbox?”
“Did the ME find anything interesting?” It seemed to Morhart that medical examiners often confirmed what was obvious from the initial crime scene. A victim filled with bullets usually had died of gunshot wounds.
“Not much. We already had a short window on time of death, since the body was fresh. Two shots from a .38. Chest and stomach. He did find postmortem bruising on the genitals.” Danes’s bag of Cheetos shifted protectively in front of his torso, and Morhart felt his own knees clench together involuntarily.
“So whoever killed him really hated him.”
“Or she was making sure he wasn’t faking it.” Morhart noticed the use of the feminine pronoun. “Maybe she’ll eventually tell us. Anyway, from what we hear, if anyone deserved a kick in the balls even after death, it was Larson.”
Danes recited the background information they had collected so far on their victim, Travis Larson. A string of insignificant sales jobs through his late twenties, and then no lawful employment since. No family. An apartment filled with stolen mail, skillfully faked IDs, forged checks, and pilfered credit card solicitations. An FBI agent who claimed that his sister was just one of many women Larson had deceived and sponged from over the years.
“From what we can tell, he started looking for a way to move his criminal activity indoors since that FBI agent called him out on the cougar-swindling last year. Our techno-geeks found evidence on the gallery computer of downloading and producing child pornography starting about five months ago.” He removed a data stick from the pocket of his short-sleeved dress shirt and tossed it to Morhart. Morhart dusted off the bright orange crumbs. /
SELF.
“As you may know, the feds have gotten aggressive in their enforcement against smut on the Net. If they think someone’s peddling child porn online, they do an instant download, and voilà, they shut the site down. One step removed, the dirtbags might require a mail order, but again—the feds place an order, then verify the contents of the product and track down the origin of the package to make the bust.”
Morhart had no personal involvement in those types of investigations, but he did his best to keep up with the times by reading law enforcement Web sites. “As much as technology has helped the bad guys, it’s helped us to track them down.”
“Exactly. So it’s no surprise that someone might try to use a high-tech way to attract customers and build demand, but a low-tech method of delivery to evade detection.”
“That’s where this comes in?” Morhart asked, holding up the data stick.
“Any customer who placed an order through the Highline Gallery received one of these. On the surface, it’s filled with a bunch of bullshit. But find the embedded link, and enter the requisite password, and some seriously perverted shit awaits. Our computer nerds tracked down messages going back six weeks on some of these chester chat boards, alerting them to the pictures they could buy through the Highline.”
“And no one monitoring these sites picked up on it?”
“I’ve seen some shit the past two days that makes me want to stab my eyes out. The truth is, this stuff’s like catching fish in a barrel for the feds. They chase down the easy prey—the guys with instant downloads, file exchanges, and mail-order operations. Someone who posts a link to a gallery with the promise of hot young things and a password to come later? Tracking that down takes one or two or three steps more than the easy cases, so no one follows up. It’s actually pretty clever.”
“So they line up their customers through these message boards, then when the gallery opens, they accept orders and ship the data sticks. Where’d the money go?”
“An offshore account. Totally untraceable.”
“Where do George Hardy and Becca Stevenson fit in?”
Danes placed his hands on his hips and hung his head before looking at Morhart. “I wish we had better news for you, guy. We don’t know.”
Morhart intertwined his fingers behind his head and looked up at the ceiling.
“You’ve got nothing connecting Larson to Becca?”
“Just her prints on the gallery’s bathroom doorknob. No e-mails. No phone calls. And I’m telling you, none of these pictures we found were of your girl.”
“Fuck.”
“Best we can figure, maybe Larson was grooming Becca to pose for him or maybe worse. Something went down in the operation and got Larson killed. It could have scared her off as well.”
They both knew Danes’s theory was complete speculation.
“A second ago, you said something about
she.
That
she
might have kicked Larson postmortem to make sure he was dead. You’ve got a suspect?”
Danes pointed to a five-by-seven photograph pinned to a rolling bulletin board behind him. “Her name’s Alice Humphrey. She was the ‘manager’ of the gallery.” He used air quotes to emphasize his skepticism. “According to her, she doesn’t know shit about anything, but we’ve got pictures of her with Larson and evidence tying her to an alias used to start both the gallery and its bank account. As far as we can tell, she had something to prove to her BFD father. She persuaded him to start the gallery, but then hooked up with Larson and his smut to make sure she turned a profit.”
Morhart looked at Alice Humphrey’s photograph. He recognized it from one of the articles he’d read about George Hardy’s protests at the gallery. Rare was the woman who victimized a child for her own pleasure, but even out in the sticks, he’d learned that people would do anything for money.
“Who’s the big-fucking-deal father?”
“Frank Humphrey.”
“The director?”
“Yep. And quite the lothario, if you read the tabloids. You’d have to ask Freud whether that has anything to do with his daughter’s venture into child porn. All we know is that she apparently had a falling-out with him some time last year. Maybe this was her way of starting over, separate from her family.”
“And you think Alice Humphrey killed Travis Larson?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time a woman killed a lover. Or who knows? Maybe he double-crossed her. Love and money are powerful motivators. Hopefully we’ll nail down the precise motive when we eventually get a confession. We can tie the gallery laptop to some of the messages that were posted in the chat rooms. We seized that laptop from her possession, but she can always say Larson posted the messages, not her. And even if we can nail her on the kiddie pictures, that’s not enough to carry through to murder. The truth is, we don’t have quite enough to hook her up on anything yet.”
Morhart heard the creak of the door once again. This time, the Asian guy popped only his head inside. “Good news, man. Those gloves from the garbage on Bank and Washington? CSU called. Positive for GSR.”
Morhart didn’t know the city well, but he recognized Bank and Washington as located somewhere downtown, in the unnumbered part of Manhattan, presumably near the gallery. Apparently the crime scene unit had discovered gunshot residue on a pair of gloves found near the crime scene.
Danes pumped his fist at what remained of his waistline. “All we got to do is connect our girl to these gloves, and we just might be in business.”