Long Gone

by Alafair Burke

“Not sure it’s good, but I do have some information to heap on to the pile. You said your father—or ITH—settled a lawsuit with a woman named Julie Kinley?”

  She nodded. “She accused him of stealing the story idea for my dad’s first big film, In the Heavens. Art Cronin already checked her out, though. She died last year.”

  “Well, you know that police report Robert Atkinson was so eager to get his hands on? According to him, the complainant would have been one Julie Christie Kinley.”

  “Julie Christie?”

  “Weird, huh? I guess her mother named her after the actress. Atkinson told the records clerk that the woman actually went by the name Christie, but her real name was Julie. That’s what the settlement papers said, right? Julie Kinley?”

  “Yeah.” As her voice echoed in her own ears, it sounded vacant.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s something about that name: Christie Kinley.”

  “It almost rhymes.”

  “I think that’s why I remember it. I have no idea what this means, but I remember a girl named Christie Kinley who lived somewhere around Bedford. But she couldn’t have been the woman who accused my father of plagiarism.”

  “How come?”

  “Because she was just a kid. She was somewhere in between me and my brother. In fact, I’m pretty sure she came to our house a couple of times. She wouldn’t have even been born when In the Heavens was made. Atkinson told the police that she was the one who filed the report?”

  “Yes, Julie Christie Kinley. I assumed it was the same Julie Kinley who entered the settlement with ITH. I figured she’d gone to the police with her claims. People do that all the time, mixing up civil and criminal complaints. According to Atkinson, she would have filed the report in April 1985. April 18, to be precise.”

  “He knew the exact date?

  “Not quite. The complaint had something to do with the night of April 18, which supposedly was a Friday, but the actual report could have been made any time during that weekend.”

  In April of 1985, Alice would have been in the sixth grade. Ben would have just turned sixteen. In fact, his birthday would have fallen precisely one week before the eighteenth, on April 11. And she knew without question that one week after his sixteenth birthday, on a Friday night, Ben hosted one hell of a keg party on the Bedford property, rowdy enough to lead two police officers to her family’s home on Sunday afternoon.

  Threads of information were beginning to weave together. She hadn’t wanted to see the connections, but could not continue to deny the only explanation that made any sense.

  “Did the records clerk say anything else about Atkinson?”

  “Yeah. He was hurling accusations that someone with the police department had destroyed the report he was looking for. He said the tramp and the cops got paid off, and all he got was sandbagged.”

  “That he was sandbagged?”

  “Fucking sandbagged, was I believe the exact quote.”

  “I think I know what that police report was all about. And if I’m right, that settlement with ITH had absolutely nothing to do with a stolen screenplay.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  “Don’t you need a search warrant or something?”

  “The man lived alone, and now he’s dead. Guess the super figured no one’s left behind to yell at him for letting an FBI agent inside.”

  Hank used the superintendent’s key to open the door to Robert Atkinson’s Gramercy Park apartment.

  “Either this guy’s a worse housekeeper than I am, or I’d say that whoever removed those keys from his ignition has already been here.”

  Kitchen drawers were open. Sofa cushions overturned. Even the edges of the living room rug had been flipped.

  “Maybe a little of both.” Alice ran her fingertip across the dust accumulated on a student-sized desk in Atkinson’s front alcove. She pointed at a dust-free rectangle about the size of a laptop. The power cord was still connected to the wall.

  “So much for finding a computer with all of our answers written up in an easy-to-follow tabloid story.”

  “You’ve been pretty quiet since we left Bedford.”

  “So have you. Given what this day’s been like, I figured you might want to be alone with your thoughts. You don’t know me from Adam, after all.”

  “I know you’re an FBI agent. I know that probably means you have a theory—something to connect Julie Christie Kinley’s police report, her settlement with ITH, and those photographs I found on that thumb drive.”

  “Anything I have to say would be conjecture at this point.”

  “But isn’t that what investigators do? Conjure up possible explanations and then look for confirming or disconfirming evidence?”

  “You said in Bedford that you thought you knew what the police report might have been about.”

  She sat on Robert Atkinson’s faux leather desk chair. “The night of April 18, 1985, was precisely one week after my brother’s sixteenth birthday. Our house there’s on five acres of land. He used to get his friends together at the back edge of the property. At the time, it seemed like they were partying like rock stars, but it was probably pretty typical high school fare. My parents were sort of don’t ask, don’t tell about the entire thing. On that particular night, the party got so out of control, some girl got sent away to boarding school because of it. The police came to our house the following Sunday asking all kinds of questions about who’d been there and what happened.”

  She knew that Hank’s silence was probably an interrogation technique he had learned in the FBI, but she didn’t care. She continued with her story.

  “They asked me where my father was during the party. I remember because I was so afraid he was going to get in trouble for something Ben had done—like trying to hold the parents responsible for underage drinking or something. I told the police that my dad had been in our screening room with me. He’d gotten an advance copy of Goonies. Mom had gone to bed early. Their friend, Arthur, was staying for the weekend, but Goonies wasn’t exactly his bag, so he went out to the guest cottage. This was before my father stopped drinking. The truth was that he was pounding scotch after scotch after scotch. I tried to rouse him when I turned in, but he was totally passed out. I never actually saw him go to bed. I could still hear Ben’s friends partying when I fell asleep.”

  Hank was silent again, but for some reason, this time she needed to be prodded.

  “I notice you mentioned Christie Kinley, the ITH settlement agreement, and the thumb drive all together. Maybe part of you has decided that those pieces of information are all related to that weekend at your house in Bedford?”

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “I’m asking you to say out loud what it is that you believe now, Alice.”

  “I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to believe it.”

  “It’s just the two of us here. It’s like you said—investigators look for confirming or disconfirming evidence. We’ll investigate. Together. I’ll help you. And if we disconfirm whatever possibility you’re thinking about in your head right now, no one else has to know it was ever on the table.”

  She looked at her feet as she spoke. “I think my father had sex with Christie Kinley the night of my brother’s party. I think he took pictures of them together in his study. I think she filed a police report, but that somehow my father made the case go away, paying her a settlement, using ITH for cover. And I think all these years later, someone’s still very pissed off at my father, and at me for unwittingly providing him an alibi. They made money through the gallery by selling child pornography on those thumb drives, then framed me for the entire enterprise.”

  She felt like she’d just released a hundred pounds of poison into the air, but Hank seemed completely impassive. “Okay, so let’s start looking for evidence that cuts one way or another on that. Atkinson told the records clerk up at the police department in Bedford that he had been sandbagged. Maybe he was on to the story back
when it happened, but got shut down.”

  No shock or judgment or drama. He had allowed her to voice what she’d been thinking without having to hear someone else express how horrific the idea was.

  “Where do we search, given that someone else already got to Atkinson, his car, and this apartment?”

  “Whoever rifled through this place did it in a hurry. They probably assumed that his briefcase and the computer covered what was there to find. But if Atkinson really was playing his cards close to his vest, he might have taken extra precautions. Let’s see if the FBI hasn’t taught me a thing or two about where people stash the good stuff.”

  Hank knew he wasn’t the best investigator in the country. He was behind the curve on the technological advances that increasingly drove cutting-edge law enforcement strategies. And he didn’t have those hyper-honed intuitions some investigators had about human motivations and desires. But he was good with witnesses. He knew how to handle himself in interrogations and interviews. And he was proud of himself for waiting on Alice Humphrey to articulate her suspicions about Christie Kinley, her father, those photographs, and the settlement agreement. If he had been the one to say it first, he just might have lost her.

  He allowed her to help with the search, knowing that her forays into the apartment closets and under Atkinson’s sofa and bed would get them nowhere. In many ways, this investigation really was hers. She was the one with her freedom on the line. She was the one who knew her father and the history that was indisputably tangled up with Travis Larson and the scam he was running at Highline Gallery. He was just there to supply the expertise.

  So, in light of that expertise, he left the drawer-digging and cabinet-foraging to her while he looked. Really looked. He wasn’t sure yet what he was searching for, but he’d know it once he saw it. A loose floorboard. An old coffee can in the freezer, despite a fresh bag of beans on the kitchen countertop. A slightly crooked painting that might be covering a vault in the wall. Whoever was here before them had already rummaged through the obvious places. He was looking for something so ordinary as to be misleading.

  Atkinson’s apartment was small, so the options were limited. He’d already checked the oven, the freezer, and the inside of the bread machine inexplicably stored in the front closet, probably a remnant from a past relationship like the waffle maker Jen had purchased for him just a few months before moving out of their place.

  And then he saw it. On the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf next to the desk, Atkinson had crammed books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs. From what Hank could tell from the media setup in the living room, Atkinson had been a tech guy: plasma screen TV, sound system, Blu-ray, TiVo, the works. There was no ancient VCR in sight. But next to the desk, in the pile of chaos that had been pulled from the bookshelf, was an unmarked plastic videocassette case.

  He pulled it open, and a tightly rolled bundle of papers fell out. Alice rushed over from the sofa, where she had been searching in the cracks beneath the cushions. He forced himself to hand her the documents. She deserved to see them first. If she didn’t want to look, she could always decline. Instead, she took a seat on the hardwood floor and spread the papers out before her.

  Alice felt sick. Literally sick. Not literally the way people nowadays said literally when they in fact meant figuratively—as in, “my head literally exploded.” Alice felt actually sick. She took a deep breath and swallowed the bile she felt forming in her esophagus.

  She could not stop reading the tiny sidebar column on the yellowed page of newsprint from the May 2, 1985, edition of the National Star, byline Robert Atkinson:

  GUESS THE CELEBRITY

  What A-lister (as in Academy Award winner) is at the center of a criminal sex investigation? That the cad is married to a beloved celeb is the tamest aspect of this emerging scandal. Sources tell us a fourteen-year-old girl claims this director sweet-talked her into his home and then forced himself on her. Charges have not yet been filed, but we anticipate that this scumbag will soon feel like he’s in hell.

  Inside the same rolled tube of documents they had found another sheet torn from the National Star, this one of May 9, 1985, retracting the earlier tidbit:

  Last week, we printed a “blind item” suggesting that an Academy Award–winning director was being investigated on sex-related criminal charges. We did not name the individual in question at the time because the story did not yet meet our rigorous standards for publication. Unfortunately, the source upon which we relied for the anonymous “blind item” was misinformed, as were we. Readers should not attempt to surmise the identity of the story’s subject, since the original story was not based on truth or fact. We apologize for our mistake.

  “I’d say on the spectrum of confirming or disconfirming evidence, we’ve pretty much confirmed it.”

  “Or disconfirmed,” Hank said, “if you believe the retraction.”

  “Of course I don’t believe the retraction. The National Star was ahead of its time. You see these blind items all the time. They don’t name the person so they can’t get sued by a celebrity willing to spend millions of dollars on attorneys’ fees. But my father has worked with an actor who sues tabloids for retractions every single time one of them publishes an article hinting he’s gay. Well, guess what? The guy is for all practical purposes married to another supposedly straight actor. It’s just like Atkinson said. The girl got paid off in a settlement. My dad must have bribed the cops to make the police report go away. And he probably threatened to sue the National Star once all Atkinson’s so-called evidence had been wiped away.”

  “So that’s why he said he got sandbagged. Maybe he finally figured out that his original story was actually true and was trying to get himself paid, too. Your father had all those tabloid stories come out last year. That could have been the trigger for Atkinson to start digging back into that night in Bedford again.”

  “That explains why he was calling me and my brother—to see what we remembered about that weekend.”

  Her father and Art’s cover story that Kinley was a former employee was a classic move on their part: treat her like a child, while they pulled secret strings in an attempt to help her. They probably figured Arthur would come up with a solution without having to tell anyone about that night in Bedford. But she was the one who had been sucked into the Highline Gallery mess. She was the one who had found that man’s body. And she was the one being investigated by the police. She had a right to know everything.

  “Was Christie Kinley at your brother’s party that night?”

  She shook her head. “I was inside the whole time. But obviously Ben would know.”

  “We really need to find your brother.”

  Hank had been able to nudge her toward a vocalization of her worst fears, but this time she rambled out loud about Ben’s various acquaintances without reaching the logical inference he’d been suggesting. He decided to give her one more push.

  “How harmful would it be to your father if Atkinson had dredged up those old allegations?”

  “To be accused of—that?” He’d been careful so far not to use the word rape, and she stopped before saying it herself. “Obviously that would destroy him.”

  Now he allowed the silence to fill Robert Atkinson’s apartment again, waiting for her to draw her own conclusions.

  “If you think my father had something to do with Atkinson’s car accident, you’re out of your mind. When all those women were coming out of the woodwork last year, he was totally unfazed. At worst, he might do damage control and pay Atkinson off, like he did with Christie Kinley, but he’d never resort to violence. Absolutely not. It’s unimaginable. I would bet my life on that.”

  “So then who goes to the trouble of setting you up using pictures of your father and Christie Kinley, only to decide they don’t want Atkinson’s story out there in the public domain?”

  “It has to be someone who’s still angry about what happened that night in Bedford. It’s like they’re killing three birds with one stone. They get
the money from selling the thumb drives. They fuck with me for creating an alibi for my father. And presumably they bring my father down in the process once the police figure out those pictures are of him—if they haven’t already.”

  If he was willing to shift his focus from her father, what she was saying made sense. “Maybe whoever did this wanted to get back at you and your father, but without dragging Christie Kinley’s name into it. If Atkinson had broken the story, Kinley’s name would have been thrown into the mix. People then start saying she’s a liar. Or that she was the seductress. And she’s dead, so she can’t even defend herself.”

  “Except what if she’s not dead?”

  “You told me she died last year.”

  “I told you that because Arthur Cronin tried tracking her down and only found a death certificate. But if Travis Larson can run around New York telling realtors and gallery owners his name is Steven Henning, and telling me his name is Drew Campbell, maybe he was working with a woman who decided she no longer wanted to be Julie Christie Kinley. Do you know how to find out if someone faked her death?”

  “We’d need to track down someone who actually saw Christie Kinley’s body.” He pulled out his BlackBerry and started entering information with both thumbs. “Okay, I’ve got an obituary here from the Lakeville Journal last March. ‘Julie Christie Kinley died peacefully in her family home in Falls Village.’”

  Alice recognized the town name. “She must have left Westchester and moved to Connecticut at some point.”

  She had been fighting breast cancer since her diagnosis last summer. She was preceded in death by her mother, Gloria Barnes Kinley, and survived by her sister, Mia Louise Andrews. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that contributions be sent to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

  “If she died in her family home, I guess we should start there.” He looked at his watch. “By the time we get to Connecticut, it will be a little late to be knocking on strangers’ doors to ask about a dead woman. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”