Long Gone

by Alafair Burke

“I hate to think this, Alice, but I had this nauseous feeling from the minute I heard about your employer’s murder at the gallery. No, even before then, when those protesters showed up at your door. I had this horrible pain in my heart—this feeling of portent—but I didn’t want you to think I was undermining your accomplishment. I didn’t want to take something that was for you and make it about me. I wanted to believe that this new job was exactly what you believed it to be—”

  “Just say it.”

  “From the second that fascist preacher appeared outside the gallery with his brainwashed followers, I had a feeling that something horrible was happening. I never thought it was a coincidence that you landed this golden opportunity just to have some right-wing nuts drag your name through the mud—and in the process, let the media take a few more shots at the old man while they were at it.”

  “You think George Hardy’s behind this? What would he get out of it?”

  “These fellows thrive off of the culture wars. They have evil in their hearts, they preach hate in the name of Christ, and they have been coming after me for forty years. They already branded me an adulterer—”

  “Come on, Papa.” They both knew he had himself to blame for that.

  “I’m not making excuses, but I am pointing out that they fanned the media flames. Arthur even dug up proof that a couple of these guys paid women from my past to come forward with their stories.”

  “Hardy’s outfit seems pretty small-time. I mean, how would they even have the resources to pull something like this off?”

  “Oh, don’t you kid yourself, baby girl. Those guys pretend to be grassroots movements, tiny sects acting independent of one another. But they are organized. And they collaborate. And they have tremendous financial backing. Men with money fund their efforts. And these are not men of God. They manipulate religiosity for political, and ultimately financial, gain. If they can tie my name to child pornography, they can slap my face on every one of their fund-raising letters. And they can use guilt by association to campaign against every candidate and every cause your mother and I have ever given a cent to. When Hardy showed up at your door, I should have told you to walk out, right then and there.”

  “So if Hardy and his church are behind this, who was the man who hired me? And why is he dead?”

  He shrugged. “He could be anyone. One of Hardy’s followers who wasn’t playing along anymore. Or someone they hired. You said he wanted to meet you at the gallery that morning. Maybe he was going to tell you the truth.”

  “A sudden change of heart?”

  “Or he realized that the daughter of Frank Humphrey might be in a better position to help him than some loser like George Hardy and the whackjobs who carry his coat. I know I don’t have all the answers, Alice, but you have to trust me on this one: I did not have anything to do with this. And no matter what happens, we are apparently in this together now. My special effects guys tell me that photograph you gave me wasn’t Photoshopped. Whoever’s behind this went to the trouble of lining up not only the man who hired you, but whatever woman is in that picture. I’m canceling my trip.”

  “Dad, you don’t know a girl called Becca Stevenson, do you?”

  “No. Who’s that?”

  “Some girl missing from her home in New Jersey. The police asked me about her, but I have no idea why.”

  “We definitely need to get Art in on this. You need a lawyer.”

  When Alice returned to her own apartment two hours later, she saw a green Toyota Camry around the corner on St. Mark’s. The driver appeared to be checking out the posted hours for parking. She could not tell if it was the same man she’d seen fiddling with the stereo in a green Camry on Second Avenue when she’d gone on her Starbucks run that morning. She made a mental note of the license plate number and was still repeating the pattern to herself when she flipped the bolt on her apartment door and fastened the security chain.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “This 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 neede
d 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?”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Good 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.
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br />   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.”