Mr. Martin didn’t have a ready response, but he also wasn’t budging.
“Never mind,” he said quickly. “I just got the information I needed from another route.”
He turned his attention back to his computer and pulled up another number, this time for a Quick rental location in midtown. A woman with a heavy Bronx accent answered after six rings. He could almost picture her chomping on the gum in her mouth.
Once again, he said he was an FBI agent with a VIN he needed to track down.
“Um, my manager’s not here right now.” He could hear someone yelling in the background about a car blocking the garage entrance. “Hey, you! Yeah, girl in the Mazda. Can you back it up just like three feet so this guy can get out and stop yelling at the both of us? Thanks, hon! Sorry, so, yeah, my manager’s out. Can you call back? I think you’re supposed go through corporate or something.”
“This is an urgent matter in a federal criminal investigation.”
The line meant absolutely nothing, of course, but Hank had been amazed over the years at its effectiveness. At heart, people were wired to comply with authority.
“Federal?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s urgent. My guess is, if I call corporate, they’ll have me hammer out a subpoena. Not a problem, of course, but it’s a delay. All I need is a name.” He heard another urgent voice in the background, and added in the kicker. “We have reason to believe that, in addition to the crimes we are investigating, whoever rented that car has switched the license plates on it, which could be an indication that he’s planning to use the car as an instrumentality of criminal activity. I’m sure Quick wouldn’t want one of its cars to be the next suspicious vehicle abandoned in Times Square. If you want verification that I’m at the FBI, I can give you the number of my office down here at Federal Plaza, and you can give me a call back.”
The voice in the background got louder. Something like, If you’d ever get off that phone.
“Okay, give me that VIN again?”
He recited the numbers.
“Well, this is funny. The computer says it’s no longer in our inventory.”
“Why would that be? Do you sell cars out of your fleet?”
“Oh. Wait. This is a gray BMW 335i sedan? Says it was last checked in at a garage on Fourteenth Street.”
“That means something?”
“Oh, hell. I remember this. Some fool at that garage let some lady just run off with the keys.”
“It was stolen?”
“Oh, hell yeah. Must have been around a month ago. Now, you’re calling the central location, where every car on this lot’s a QuickCar, and I work directly for the company. But we keep our cars at garages all over the city, just a few cars here and there scattered at private lots for customer convenience. Not everyone’s gonna pay the same kind of attention to the cars, you know what I’m saying?”
“So one of the private garage attendants let his guard down?”
“Let his something down. All he could say afterward was that some pretty lady was asking questions about how the QuickCar rentals worked. He left to dig out a buried car for a resident. Next thing he knew, she was gone, and so was the Beemer.”
“He said it was a woman by herself?”
“Yeah. A white girl. A pretty white girl with long red hair.”
Chapter Nineteen
Even with his eyes closed, Morhart would have known his location simply from the squeaks and boings echoing down the hallway. The squeaks of rubber and the boings of leather against maple. Nothing sounded quite like an indoor basketball court. This particular court, down this particular hallway, was familiar territory to Morhart, but Linwood High School felt so much smaller than it had when he graduated sixteen years earlier.
Lingering inside the double doors to check out the team’s practice, he recognized Dan Hunter right away from his Facebook photos. The players were in uniform, sprinting from half court to baseline, tagging the floor with their fingertips at each end. Hunter kept up okay step for step, but by the time the team was ten laps in, he lagged half a court back from the pack and would have eventually gotten lapped if the coach hadn’t blown the whistle. Next were rapid layups. The students fell into line, a few paces between them, each galloping toward the basket for a one-handed reach. This time Hunter wasn’t the worst, but he was no Air Jordan, apparently both slower and more prone to gravity than the average team member.
But then came the outside shots. Twelve boys formed an arc around the three-point line, hurling ball after ball after ball. Some throws ricocheted hard off the backboard. Some barely skimmed the metal rim. The coach shook his head as the number of airballs multiplied. But one kid was swooshing balls through the net, seven out of ten. Dan Hunter could shoot.
The shrillness of the whistle halted the cacophony of bouncing leather and squeaking rubber. Morhart stepped onto the court and raised a friendly wave. “Coach, you got a second?”
Not much older than Morhart himself, David DeCicco had started at Linwood High long after Morhart’s own years here, but he’d gotten to know the man two years earlier when Linwood’s starting center broke the wrist of a girl who dared to break up with him the day before prom. A lot of coaches would have been tempted to protect one of their best players, but DeCicco had walked into the station on his own to report that he’d once seen the player grab his girlfriend’s arm when she tried to walk away from him at a postgame party. Morhart had felt the man’s guilt for having looked the other way at the time. He heard later from the girl’s parents that the coach kicked the kid off the team and brought in a guidance counselor to talk to the other boys about teenage dating violence.
“Water break, guys, but no wandering off.” DeCicco shook Morhart’s hand. “Any chance you just had a sudden urge to watch a basketball practice, Detective?”
“Something like that. What can you tell me about Dan Hunter?”
“Aw, Jesus. Hunter? He’s the only man I got who can shoot from the outside. What the hell did he go and do?”
Morhart raised his palm. “Nothing like that, Coach. I’m talking to anyone who might have some insight into that missing girl, Becca Stevenson.”
DeCicco made the same tsk sound Morhart was already accustomed to hearing after every mention of Becca’s name.
“I wouldn’t have thought Hunter would even know that girl.”
“Why do you say that?”
He squinted. “You know how kids are. Cliques. Popularity contests. The social hierarchies, if you will. Hunter’s a jock. My thirteen-year-old daughter tells me he’s a cutey patootie. Her words, not mine. He’s into, you know, cheerleaders and pep squad girls with perky smiles and, well, perky everything, not that I try to notice. A girl like Becca—”
He cut himself off, but Morhart urged him to complete the thought. DeCicco glanced around and lowered his voice. “I’ll be blunt. She’s an odd bird. Had her in American History last year. I’m sure she’s a decent kid, but there’s something that’s, I don’t know, just off. Sullen. Dark. Probably very insecure. Something almost broken about her, but, you know, no big behavioral problems, no signs of abuse, no obvious indications of drug use. Not positive enough to really be engaged in school, but not quite bad off enough to be one of the problem children.”
“Invisible.”
“Exactly. One of those invisible kids. Look, I know the reality about a lot of my guys. For most of them, these will be the heydays. They’ll wind up going to JuCo at best, and they’ll never leave this town. But at least they’ll have their years in this building, with the cheering in the stadium and the letter jackets and the pretty girls to look back on as some moment in their lives when they were something. The kids my guys pick on? They’ll wind up inventing the next electric car or something. They’ll date supermodels and buy Italian villas or whatever, and will look back on this place as a joke. But then there are kids like Becca. These sad kids who don’t have much happiness now and give you the feeling they’ll never have anything in the fu
ture.”
“That’s fucking depressing.”
“Needless to say, I’m a little more encouraging to my players. Save the armchair psychology for the grown-ups.”
“And what would the shrink have to say about Dan Hunter if it turns out he was spending time with the Stevenson girl?”
He waited a full five seconds before answering. “He’s not a bad kid, but he’s not inherently good either. His ethics are, how can I put this? Situational.”
Hunter sported the shaggy hair that young kids seemed to favor these days, resorting to a series of lopsided head spasms to flip his long bangs out of his eyes. He swept the back of his hand across his face to wipe away some of the sweat.
“Coach said you wanted to see me?”
If Morhart’s introduction as a member of the police department made Hunter nervous, he didn’t show it.
“You might have heard that Becca Stevenson never came home Sunday night.”
“Yeah, I heard. Where is she?”
The kid asked the question as if Morhart would know. As if Morhart had come here to inform this kid personally what had become of Becca Stevenson. He had no idea what to make of it. Maybe the kid had been close to Becca, thinking about her, expecting to hear news. Or maybe he was just thick in the brain. He looked thick.
“Well, that’s sort of why I’m here, Dan. Talking to Becca’s friends. Trying to get some ideas about where she might have gone to.”
He offered no response, only nodded in a slow way that warned Morhart not to attribute too much wiliness to this one.
“So would you say you were one of Becca’s friends?”
Hunter shrugged. “My friends are guys, you know?”
“Did you know her?”
Another shrug. “I sort of know everyone at the school, you know?”
“Ever go out with her?”
“Go out?”
“Date. Hook up. Fuck?”
The obscenity shook the kid out of his supercool frat-boy daze. “No, nothing like that.”
“But something. Maybe a little road trip into Manhattan?”
“Yeah, okay, but that was a while ago. We were sort of talking and stuff last month, but it didn’t work out.”
“You need to start using complete sentences, son.”
“And with all due respect, sir, you need to stop calling me son. I mean, sorry, I know you’ve got your job and all, but just because I made the mistake of giving some screwed-up chick like Becca a chance doesn’t mean I deserve the third degree.”
Morhart could see what the coach had meant about the kid’s situational disposition.
“I do have a job, Dan. And it requires that I walk into a circumstance I know nothing about and make some quick decisions about where best to focus my time. And right now my focus is on you, and the more attitude you show toward me, the more likely it’s going to stay there and intensify like a white-hot laser beam. Now, with all due respect as you called it, please start telling me about your relationship to Becca Stevenson—who, if I must remind you, is missing and could very well be in jeopardy if not worse.”
“There’s not much to tell. She’s kind of weird, but I’ve always known she had a crush on me or whatever. I was getting sick of the usual girlfriend bullshit and thought I’d try something new. We started talking or whatever, and, yeah, we went into Manhattan a couple times. It was fun. She was, like, different or whatever. But I don’t know, it just didn’t work out. It was no big deal.”
“Why didn’t it work out?”
“It just didn’t, I don’t know. We were too different.”
“Who’s Ashleigh Reynolds?”
Hunter shook his head in frustration. “That’s what this is about? Yeah, so Ashleigh and I are what you’d call on-and-off. Needless to say, we were off when I was having conversations with Becca, and Ashleigh wasn’t having any of it. She was talking smack about Becca.”
“Like calling her a slut on your Facebook page?”
He looked at the floor. “Yeah. That was about the worst of it, really. Most of it was catty comments to her stupid girlfriends, but it was too much drama, so, whatever: that was that. No more Becca, and me and on-and-off Ashleigh are back on.”
“No more Becca, huh?”
“Jeez, man, not like that.”
“Where were you on Sunday night?”
“Come on, man. You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Then humor me. Decent-looking guy like you, lots of friends—I can’t imagine you spend too much time alone.”
“I was on the court kicking Jefferson High’s ass. You can check with the coach if you want.”
“And after the game?”
“You gonna bust me if it involves some underage drinking?”
“Not exactly my priority right now, kid.”
He paused, then smiled. “In that case, I was ripping some mighty beautiful keg stands in Jay Lindon’s basement. His parents are out of town. The whole team was there.”
Both components of the alibi would be easy to confirm—or break, as the case might be.
“Look, check me out all you want. I have no idea where Becca is, but—and I feel bad saying this—she was seriously screwed up, okay? Why do you think the school doesn’t have banners all over the building or a twenty-four/seven candlelight vigil on the front lawn? Everyone assumes she ran away. She’s long gone, and the sad thing is, no one really cares.”
According to her two-month-old driver’s license, Ashleigh Reynolds lived at an address in one of the more upscale neighborhoods of Dover, meaning new brick instead of linoleum siding, a smooth unmarred concrete driveway instead of oil-stained blacktop, and perfectly manicured yards. He used the shiny brass knocker on the magenta-painted door. A man in a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up but his tie still knotted, answered.
“Mr. Reynolds?”
The man greeted him with the friendly smile of a salesman, but his squint made clear he expected an introduction, which Morhart provided. “I was hoping to talk to your daughter, Ashleigh, about a girl from her school who’s been reported missing. Becca Stevenson?”
“Sure, we heard about that. Sad thing. I swear, my wife’s about to drive our daughter crazy watching out for her now.”
“So is your daughter here?” The echoes of a Taylor Swift song from inside the house suggested so.
“She’s working on her homework right now.”
“It’ll just be a few minutes, sir. I’m talking to everyone at the school trying to find some kind of lead. The poor girl’s mother is beside herself.”
Reynolds looked up the stairway behind him toward the sounds of the music. “Ashleigh’s mom and I already talked with our daughter about that issue, trying to see if maybe she could offer anything helpful. She didn’t know the girl, and obviously has no idea where she might have gone, or we would have called you right away.”
“So if she’d confirm that for me—”
“We don’t want her involved in this. Ashleigh and her friends are pretty scared wondering what might have become of that girl and whether they might be next. I heard her up pacing the house last night. She couldn’t sleep because she’d had a dream about being kidnapped. Talking to a police officer will only get her thoughts back into those dark places, and for what? She doesn’t know anything. I hope you’ll understand, Detective.”
Morhart blinked at the magenta door with the brass knocker, closed before he could respond.
By the time Morhart returned to the precinct, Dan Hunter had removed his Facebook tags from the New York photos, erasing any public evidence of the popular jock’s short-term involvement with the weird girl named Becca Stevenson.
Chapter Twenty
Alice was bundled in Jeff’s white terry bathrobe, her hair still damp from the shower. She turned sideways on the black leather couch to facilitate the shoulder rub Jeff had started. Somewhere along the road, she had forgotten all the simple ways he had of comforting her.
When the police were finally finished aski
ng questions, all she could think of as a next step was to take a shower. To wash away the blood from her skin and clothing. To rinse off the smell of death. When she, Lily, and Jeff all crawled into the back of a cab, Lily had given the driver Alice’s address, but it was Alice who changed the directive. For reasons she could not explain, she did not want to be in her apartment, not even in the company of her two closest friends.
Maybe she just yearned for the sterility of Jeff’s ultramodern apartment. The white walls. White floors. High-gloss white cabinets. Sleek leather furniture. Steel accents. No clutter. No dust. No blood. Lightness and order compared to her shabby chic chaos.
But maybe it was more than just an aesthetic preference. Drew had been impossible to find yesterday, and then sounded panicked last night. He wouldn’t talk on the phone. He had asked to meet her—in person, and first thing in the morning. And now someone had killed him. Two gunshots to the chest, is what she overheard one of the policemen say. What if she had arrived at the gallery earlier? What if whoever killed Drew saw dropping in on her as part of finishing the job?
“I feel so awful about you both taking care of me. Don’t you need to get back to work?”
“My deposition was set over until next week. Had the whole day clear anyway.”
The question had been aimed primarily at Lily. Travel magazines weren’t exactly rolling in profits in this economy, and the Gorilla was not the kind of boss who took a missed day in stride. “Don’t worry about me. I told the Gorilla my sister was in the hospital.”
“You don’t have a sister.”
“Yeah, but the Gorilla doesn’t know that. Just got to remember to add that little factoid to the work persona. Now, what’s the appropriate period of mourning before we just throw down and get this woman skunk drunk?”
Lily was making herself at home in Jeff’s kitchen, foraging through the bar cabinet and pulling out whatever bottles of booze looked interesting.
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