Long Gone

by Alafair Burke

  “You take care of yourself, all right?” He patted her head, as he had since she was a child. “And tell Ben I said hello. My secretary says he stopped by yesterday, but I missed him.”

  “He came to your office?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Is there something wrong?”

  He still had not returned her many messages, but her brother had somehow found time to drop by Art’s. It hardly seemed to matter now how he had known about their father’s company—he always had found his identity through Dad’s work more than she had—but she was still worried that he was using again. He had a way of avoiding her when that was the case.

  “No. Just haven’t seen him for a while, is all. Should I take that thumb drive home with me, or do you need it here?”

  “Better let me hang on to it for now. The harder we make it for them to connect you to those pictures, the better.”

  The unspoken implication was obvious. Despite his reassurances, Art was already thinking forward to a day when the police would show up at her door, arrest warrant in hand.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “Holy shit, you actually picked up your phone.”

  After a mere two rings, Ben finally demonstrated signs of life and answered his cell.

  “Sorry. It’s been a little busy.”

  “The sound business is en fuego, huh?”

  Ben’s work in sound engineering was not exactly nine-to-five employment, but she was pretty sure that he’d experienced longer dry spells between gigs than she had suffered after the museum layoff, and yet he never referred to himself as unemployed.

  “Just a lot of stuff going on, that’s all.”

  She held her free ear shut with her index finger, struggling to hear over the traffic outside Cronin’s building. Ben’s voice sounded flat. In someone else, she might attribute the tone to worry or distraction. In her brother, three or four controlled substances came to mind.

  “I’m worried about you, Ben.”

  “Isn’t that always the case with the Humphreys? Everyone worries about Ben. Everyone assumes the worst.”

  “You did just get arrested last week.”

  “Jesus Christ. I told you, it was a little weed. I’m fine.”

  Whenever she was tempted to write her brother off as a total fuckup, she forced herself to remember that, although siblings, they really did not have the same parents. Ben was close to five years older than she. Their father had stopped drinking when she was eleven, but Ben was already in high school by then. He remembered more. And their parents had always expected less of him as a result.

  “Art said you stopped by his office yesterday. What’s that about?”

  “He’s our godfather. Do we need a reason to see each other?”

  “I’m starting to wish you hadn’t picked up the phone. Did I do something wrong?”

  “No. Look, I’m sorry. I wanted to talk to him. That’s all.”

  “Was it about ITH?”

  Ben was silent.

  “When I was at your apartment, you said that ITH was incorporated a long time ago, but I never told you about the incorporation. And I didn’t know about Dad’s connection until Jeff dug up those documents with the state. But you knew, Ben. If you knew something about that company, you should have told me.”

  “I thought I remembered hearing Art and Dad talk about ITH when I was in high school. I dropped by Art’s office yesterday to see if he could shed some light on who might’ve used the name to start the gallery. That’s all.”

  “When you were at my apartment, you told me you’d never heard of the company.”

  “I didn’t think I had. Then after I left, it sort of rang a bell. Are we done with the cross-examination?”

  “I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of a nightmare, and I can’t wake up. I already talked to Dad and Art about it, but when I brought ITH up with you, I sensed you were holding something back. And, frankly, Ben, you’re not always a hundred percent honest when you’re using.”

  “You know what, perfect little sister? I was trying to help you out by going to Art. I was making sure that he and Dad weren’t the ones being selective with their information. But fuck it. Just go to hell.”

  By the time Ben hung up on her (and refused to answer her four consecutive redials) she was already a third of the way home from midtown. Despite the cold, she continued on foot toward her apartment.

  She told herself she needed the forty-five-minute walk as exercise, but she knew precisely why she’d opted for foot travel over subway: the squandering of time. Forty-five minutes of her boots against concrete meant forty-five fewer minutes in her apartment, struggling futilely to read a book or watch a television show without thinking about Highline Gallery, Drew Campbell, or those horrible photographs. The walk gave her one less hour in the day to tie her head into knots about the trail of evidence that even she had to admit led directly to her. The walk allowed her to believe that the argument with Ben had been just another sibling tiff, and that she and her brother would be patched back to normal by nightfall.

  She felt herself slow her pace as she passed Tenth Street, only two blocks from her apartment building. She usually ran past the corner on Twelfth because of all the construction noise from the new condo development that would seemingly never be completed, but today she managed to tune out the eardrum-shattering sounds of the jackhammers.

  Even though she wasn’t hungry, she stopped at the counter in Veselka for pierogies to go. She savored the warm pillows of dough-wrapped potato while standing, chewing slowly, buying more time.

  She had finally resigned herself to a fate of sitting in her apartment, accompanied only by her worries, when she saw the green Camry roll through the intersection at St. Mark’s. She caught the last three digits of the license plate. They matched the car she’d spotted twice the day before. She tried to remember now if she had seen the Camry while she’d been walking south on Second Avenue. Had the man been following her? Or was the Camry simply a car from the neighborhood that she’d never had reason to notice?

  She pulled her phone from her pocket and started to dial 911, but then remembered Cronin’s warnings. She dialed his number instead. His secretary cheerfully reported Mr. Cronin was unavailable but that she was happy to take a message.

  She understood Cronin’s point about strategy, but the third Camry sighting in two days raised concerns that went beyond her legal situation. Someone had killed the man she’d known as Drew Campbell. She still did not know his true name, but she had seen his body and felt the stickiness of his blood on the floor.

  She dialed 911.

  “So ... I’m sorry, miss, but you say you do know the man was following you, or you don’t?”

  The uniformed officer was polite, but she could tell from the way he smiled reassuringly at gawking passersby that she sounded like a woman who was one missed med away from screaming at the pigeons about an impending alien takeover. She tried to explain once again that she had seen the Camry twice yesterday and again today but did not know who was driving it.

  “And what makes you think the man is, um, stalking you or whatever? Did he make threats toward you? Or try to follow you into your building? Or act inappropriately in some manner?”

  She was tempted to say all of the above just to appear less insane. “No. It’s just—I know it sounds crazy, but I’m a witness in a homicide investigation. I—I discovered a man’s body four days ago and they haven’t found the person who did it. So when I saw the same car three times in twenty-four hours—”

  The officer was nodding quickly. She couldn’t tell if that was a sign he believed her or was buying time before calling the nice men with a spacious van and butterfly nets. “Well, the car doesn’t appear to be here any longer. You say you’ve got the license plate number. What I’d suggest is that I forward my report to the detectives in charge of that pending homicide. They can decide the best strategy going forward. Run the plate. See how this guy fits in, if at all.”

>   “Can’t you just run it now? Maybe we’ll find out the guy lives around the corner, and it’s all just a misunderstanding.”

  “Or maybe I’ll wind up stepping on the toes of your homicide investigators and messing something up big-time. I don’t think either one of us wants that, right?”

  Not to mention that forwarding the report would be less work for you.

  “You know, I shouldn’t have even called. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “So now you’re saying you don’t want to file a report?”

  “I let my imagination get away with me.”

  “No offense, lady, but I don’t want to learn next week that my failure to write down this license plate fucked up some shield’s murder case. You know the name of the detectives involved, or do I need to look it up?”

  Her cell phone rang. She recognized the prefix of the incoming number as Arthur Cronin’s law firm. He was not going to like this one bit.

  Hank Beckman finally made it through the knot of standstill traffic snarled at the intersection of Bowery and Canal Street. That neighborhood always brought a smile to his face. The coexistence of Chinatown dim sum restaurants, the remains of Little Italy, and emerging hipster boutiques and bars was at once bizarre and happy.

  He’d been raised in Montana. After getting his undergrad degree and a CPA with the help of Uncle Sam, he’d completed the requisite years in the army and then put in for the bureau. New agents don’t have the luxury of choosing their cities of service, but he’d assumed that the demand for a spot like Montana or Idaho—working bank robberies and gun cases—would be low.

  But then thanks to Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, and a little flick called A River Runs Through It, suddenly every man with a midlife crisis and a fishing rod wanted to move to the northwest corner of the country. Small populations, combined with low crime rates, meant tiny field offices with few agents. Hank wound up with a job in the bureau, but an assignment in the Big Apple.

  He’d planned on getting out as fast as he could, but he’d become accustomed to it faster than he’d anticipated. He bought the apartment near Prospect Park. The city wasn’t an easy place to make friends, but Hank never really needed anyone’s company. For a while, he felt like he was friends with some of Jen’s crowd, but when she moved out, he didn’t feel comfortable staying in touch. Then after her husband’s plane crash, Ellen found herself a forty-year-old widow in Montana, living alone on a ranch. She said the sound of a new life in New York wasn’t so bad. Two years later, she had the Upper East Side apartment with a view of the park from a terrace. Then within a year, she had met and was quickly engaged to Randall Updike, or at least that was the name he’d been using at the time.

  Sometimes Hank wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t run that background check on “Randall.” Ellen would have inevitably lost the bulk of her money to Larson, he suspected. She would presumably have still been saddled with the clinical depression and untreated alcoholism that had led to her death. But maybe he would have noticed his sister’s problems. If the man she loved had conned her out of her last dime, Hank would have known to watch out for her. He would have recognized the depth of the attack on her. But as it was, at the time, he had been arrogant enough to think that she should have been grateful to her little brother for saving her.

  Now, as he made his way back to Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge, he was fairly certain that Alice Humphrey had spotted him but had not managed to follow him from the East Village. He was also fairly certain that Alice Humphrey—with her practical shoes and clumsy gait, a bit like a general stomping his way through a field—was not the same woman he had seen cruising in stiletto heels toward Travis Larson’s apartment. He was profoundly less certain, however, about what to do with that puzzling piece of information.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Alice rose from damp moss beneath a towering mulberry tree, trying to shake the dirt from her ruffled skirt. She heard footsteps approaching.

  “She went that way!”

  It was a man’s voice. Somehow she knew he was looking for her, and that she did not want to be found. She ran through the woods in red patent saddle shoes, watching the ground beneath her, aiming for flat patches of soil between rocks and entangled roots. She saw a spot of light up ahead in the clearing.

  When she emerged from the trees, she recognized the backyard of her family’s home in Bedford. The landscaped grass. Two hammocks beneath the willow tree. The swimming pool they rarely used.

  She slid open the glass door on the deck and stepped inside the house. She felt taller now. Her saddle shoes and ruffled skirt had been replaced by her current-day blue jeans and all-weather boots.

  “Mom? Papa? Ben?”

  The kitchen was as she remembered it from her childhood: walnut cabinets, burgundy wallpaper, brass fixtures. She turned the corner expecting to find the living room, but instead she was on the set of Life with Dad. It was the pilot episode. She saw a younger version of herself on the sofa in a three-sided living room. The saddle shoes and ruffles were back.

  The man who played her father delivered the setup line: “Don’t look at me. My idea of the four food groups are spaghetti, ice cream, beef jerky, and beer.” The set fell silent. “Your line, Alice.”

  She wanted to whisper to her younger self: That’s what you get when your mom is a dad.

  Then the line was delivered. A studio audience she couldn’t see laughed, as required. Even at ten years old, she had known the line wasn’t funny. She had known the laughter was feigned.

  She heard the back door slide open behind her and moved farther into the house for a place to hide. She ran up the stairs, into her father’s study, and slipped behind the steel gray brocade curtains. She peeked out at the decor that had caused such a ruckus between her parents. It’s my office, Rose. It is my one private space. Why can’t I keep it the way I like it? For Christ’s sake, it looks like a French whorehouse vomited on a Duran Duran video. Her mother had insisted that her father get rid of the outdated wood paneling and shag carpet, replacing it with a black, white, and red color palette, glass and steel furniture, and Patrick Nagel paintings that would appear dated within a couple of years.

  For some reason, Alice could not stop staring at the room. The black-and-white-striped wallpaper that her father had called schizophrenia-inducing. The sofa in the center of the room, whose red velvet grain she had run her fingers across so deliberately that day the police had come asking questions about Ben’s keg party.

  Something about that room felt so familiar. She’d known it in her childhood, of course. Standing there behind the curtains, she could even smell the remnants of her father’s herbal cigarettes—the ones he’d turned to for years until he’d weaned himself for good when Alice was in college. But something about the room felt more current. She didn’t want to stop looking at it. She wanted to stay there and remember.

  But she heard the footsteps and accompanying voices headed her way. Their steps were deliberate now. In sync with one another. Step. Step. Step. Step. She heard a bell that rang with each approaching stride. Step/ring. Step/ring. The door opened, and she tried to make herself smaller behind her father’s curtains. She took a deep breath and found comfort in the smell of her father’s exhaled smoke.

  The footsteps stopped, but the chime of the bells continued and became more aggressive and shrill. No longer a ring, but a buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

  Her eyes darted open to blackness, near total but for the digital display of her bedside clock and a sliver of light penetrating the crack in her curtains. She heard an urgent buzzing from her security system. Some gin-brined idiot on St. Mark’s was leaning on the outside doorbell again, one of the many downsides to living in the middle of Manhattan’s go-to neighborhood for early-twenty-something binge drinking.

  She closed her eyes again and willed the noise to stop. It did not.

  The parquet floor felt cold beneath her bare feet as she padded to the front door and held down the i
ntercom button. “You’re leaning on a stranger’s doorbell, asshole. Go. Home.”

  She prepared herself for one of the usual retorts. “Bitch” was most common. Occasionally she got an actual apology. More than a few times she’d been invited to join the drunk for one last round. But tonight’s visitor was not the usual fare.

  “It’s Jeff. Let me up.”

  She had just managed to tie her robe by the time he burst through the door she had left cracked open. She smelled alcohol as he slipped past her.

  “It’s almost one in the morning.”

  “I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “It’s sleeping time.” After one too many failed calls to Ben, she had decided that an Ambien sounded pretty good. Off went the ringer on her home phone, and off went the cell. She noticed the message light blinking on her answering machine on the kitchen counter. “What’s going on?”

  “Have you heard anything further from the police?”

  “No. I was following your advice not to talk to them anymore, and they haven’t tried to contact me anyway.” She had half expected another visit from the detectives after she filed the report about the green Toyota, but the rest of the day had been uneventful.

  “I hate to tell you this, but I think things are about to get worse.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Your gloves. Please tell me you have those gloves you love so much. The ones with the fur inside of them that you pretend is fake.”

  “Faux faux fur?”

  “Yes. Please tell me you have those. Physically. In your possession.”

  “No. They went missing last week. I bought another pair but the fur’s not the same—”

  “The police have them, Alice. Or I assume they do. They showed me a picture of those gloves inside a plastic bag and asked me if you owned a pair like that.”