Long Gone

by Alafair Burke

  “According to Alice Humphrey, the chick he was with was some girl at his son’s birthday party. This woman who lives here is that girl’s younger sister.” Jason tried to process the connections between the players. “But Alice wants us to believe that she’s not in fact the little sister. That she’s actually the girl’s daughter, which would make her Frank Humphrey’s daughter also, which would make her Alice Humphrey’s half sister. And supposedly that cluster fuck of a situation’s enough to give this girl a motive to set up Alice and her father.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “We go through the motions. I made a deal with Alice’s lawyer: we check out this Mia person, and Alice turns herself in. Pretty simple. I give it point-one percent odds that this girl is even relevant, and, if she is, I’d put it at ninety percent that she winds up helping us build our case against Alice.”

  “That’s a lot of math, Danes.”

  “Yeah, that was a little fucked up. My point is, don’t sweat it.” A jingle escaped from the phone clipped to Danes’s waistband. “Danes ... She’s nearby? You’re not going to fuck me on this, are you, Cronin? ... All right. I’ll call you when we’re done.” He returned the cell to its holder. “We’re all set. According to her lawyer, Alice Humphrey’s waiting in the neighborhood to turn herself in. Let’s see what this chick’s got to say.”

  It happened fast. Faster than anything Morhart had been trained for at the Town of Dover Police Department, or in college, or on the basketball team at Linwood High. It felt like he was watching a video game rather than living the intentionally simple life he had created.

  They had walked through the main entrance of the generic light brown brick apartment building. They took the two flights of stairs to unit #3B, Jason having to slow down for Danes to keep up. Danes was the one who knocked on Mia Andrews’s door. Four beats with no response.

  In retrospect, they had each waited to the left and right sides of the apartment door, respectively—not because they sensed any danger, but instinctively, the way you eventually learn not to stand too close to a top step. They were two cops paying an unannounced visit to a stranger. Without their brains even processing that simple fact, their bodies had known not to stand at the dead center of that door.

  If they had, two police departments might have had funerals on their hands.

  Four beats with no response. Then another knock, again from Danes. “Miss Andrews. The apartment downstairs is reporting a leak. We need to check the sink in your kitchen. Are you there?”

  Jason would remember later the way Danes looked at him from the opposite side of the doorway and winked—as if the building leak was such a clever cover story. When he replayed those seconds in his mind, Jason could almost imagine Danes’s winking eyelid returning to its place of rest, only to blink again when the first shot was fired.

  They both fell to the ground so quickly that Jason hit his head against Danes’s shoulder.

  Two more shots, right through the door frame. Pop, pop. Jason had never heard a gun fired other than during target practice or hunting. The sound reverberated against the walls and ceiling. He found himself covering his ears, as if the noise were their biggest threat.

  Danes was the one who returned fire first. Jason flinched as he heard more pops—these louder and closer—before realizing they were coming from Danes’s Glock. He removed his own .40 cal Beretta from its holster and started firing through the door. He had no idea where they were aiming, but they both unloaded their weapons as they scuttled crablike across the floor toward the staircase.

  He could hear his own heavy breaths blurring with Danes’s panting in the stairwell once their weapons were empty. Danes was yelling radio codes that Jason used in Dover only in theory. He could smell fear in their perspiration. And then the hallway fell silent except for the sound of a child crying somewhere on a floor above them.

  The first two pops could have been a car backfiring. Alice flinched at the noise, then forced herself to take a deep breath, realizing that her imagination was getting the best of her.

  But the first two pops were followed by an array of firecrackers in quick, chaotic succession. She heard a woman on the street scream. A teenager crossing the intersection in front of her ducked into the fruit market, pulling the screaming woman with him.

  But as other people ran for cover, Alice felt herself running into the street. They had driven past Mia’s building when Hank dropped her off. She knew where the woman lived. She was absolutely certain the shots were fired there. Her feet were moving faster than she could think.

  She heard brakes screeching next to her. Hank Beckman was jumping from his green Camry. “Alice! No!” But her feet were still moving. She was the one who had sent those police officers to the apartment. She had known going into it that Arthur had sold them on the idea by offering her up as the bait. Of course they had treated the entire enterprise as a joke. Of course they hadn’t exercised precautions. And she should have seen it coming.

  Hank reached for her arm and pulled her back toward his car. “Stop it, Alice. Just stop!”

  She heard a yell escape from her throat—a primal sound that she never would have recognized as her own voice. In that one, prolonged cry, she felt the pain of what was happening now—harm to the police officers whom she’d sent into that apartment, perhaps the loss of any chance to ever speak to the sole person who might exonerate her—and the pain of what had already come to pass—her brother’s death, the sight of Travis Larson’s bloodied corpse. All of it rose at once and rippled through her body, releasing itself through that horrible sound. She felt herself shivering against Hank Beckman.

  “Alice. Alice, is that you?” Beckman held her tightly against his chest, patting the back of her head, but someone else was calling her name now. She peered out across Hank’s shoulder and saw Arthur crossing the street, car keys in hand. “I almost didn’t recognize you with that hairdo. I saw a parking spot a couple blocks away and figured I better grab it. What is going on here?”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Alice tapped her nails against Hank Beckman’s steering wheel, trying not to think about the minutes that had passed since he’d instructed her to pull the car to the curb while he made his way into Mia’s building. Arthur started to ask another question from the passenger seat, but she shushed him, wanting to focus on the silence that existed beyond the sounds of her tapping fingernails and the car’s idling engine.

  Silence was a good thing, she kept reminding herself. Silence meant no more gunshots. Silence meant Hank was all right.

  Sirens broke through the hush that had fallen over the neighborhood since the gunfire. The sounds were muted at first, but grew louder, then stopped. Help had arrived. Whatever had unfolded at Mia’s address, backup officers would be there by now, along with ambulances for anyone who was injured. It was another half an hour before her cell phone rang. She nearly dropped it in her rush to answer.

  “Hank?”

  “Everyone’s fine.”

  “Really? Danes? Shannon?”

  “Danes came with cooperating law enforcement from New Jersey. They’re both absolutely fine. Not a scratch.”

  “But the gunfire—”

  “Mia popped off a few shots when they arrived. They both returned fire. When backup arrived, they entered the premises and found the subject on the floor, dead from what appears to be a single gunshot to the face.” Alice noticed that he had slipped into whatever sterile mode of speaking he had learned as an FBI agent. “It’s unclear whether the bullet came from law enforcement or was perhaps self-inflicted when she realized she couldn’t escape. The good news is, she was packing a .38.”

  She didn’t understand the significance.

  “That’s the same kind of gun used to kill Travis Larson. They’ll run the ballistics. This is the beginning of the end, Alice. This is a good thing.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Mia? Yeah, only for a second. Danes cleared me out pronto.”


  “What did she look like?”

  “You don’t want to know. Look: it’s too early to be definitive, but I’ve been doing this a long time. My instincts are telling me we were right. This all still needs to play out, but we were right. You’re going to be okay.”

  She felt herself start to cry and gave a reassuring nod to Arthur in the passenger seat. “So what do I do now? Do they still want me to turn myself in? I’m willing to. I’m ready to do it.”

  “No, but I think you need to come here. Danes found something he wants to show you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but he thinks you need to see it for yourself.”

  She and Arthur walked the quick block and a half to Mia’s apartment. Hank met them outside, ushering them past a perimeter that a uniformed officer was beginning to erect with yellow crime tape. They stopped at the landing outside the building entrance. Hank disappeared inside, then reemerged with Willie Danes. For the first time since that initial meeting when she’d found Travis Larson’s body at the gallery, he shook her hand.

  “Once we were clear, we did a sweep through the apartment to make sure there was no one on the premises. This happened to catch my eye.” Danes handed her a framed photograph. “It was on her dresser.”

  The woman at the center of the five-by-seven looked thin and pale, her hair like matted straw against her scalp. Five women surrounded her, trying their best to look celebratory. Two of them meant nothing in particular to Alice, but three were significant. One was sweet Mrs. Withers, looking very much the same as she had earlier this morning when she’d sunk those marshmallows in the hot chocolate. One was a relatively attractive younger woman—probably early twenties. She had long red hair with orange and blond streaks, and what Mrs. Withers had described as a honey-and-strawberries complexion. She looked like a younger version of Alice. The final woman had short, wispy white-blond hair and dark green eyes that penetrated the camera. Her long, lanky arms were wrapped around the frail-looking woman in the center and the redhead who was undoubtedly Mia Andrews.

  In retrospect, the fifth woman in the photograph had been there at every turn of the previous month. She had been the one to initially tell Alice that Drew Campbell was too good to be true, only to encourage her to meet him when he called. She had been the one to tell Alice not to dig too deeply into the background of Highline Gallery. She had been the one to dissuade her from calling Robert Atkinson while the reporter was still alive to tell his story. She had been the one to inform the police that Alice owned a pair of crocodile-embossed gloves lined with fur that might or might not be real mink. She had been the one to encourage Alice to run from the police.

  The final woman in the photograph—the one nestled closest to a cancer-ridden Christie Kinley as she hosted the final party of her life—was Lily Harper.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  For two hours, she and Arthur had waited in Arthur’s parked Lexus, intermittently running the engine for warmth, while Hank dashed back and forth between Mia’s apartment and the car, assuring them each time that Danes had “promised” they’d be ready for her soon. But “ready” no longer meant an expectation that she would be turning herself in to face charges of murdering her supposed coconspirator and lover, Travis Larson. Now Alice the former fugitive was their best hope of understanding why Mia Andrews had opened fire on two police officers when they knocked on her door.

  After two hours of waiting beyond the growing swarm of police cars, they finally received instructions to head up to the Thirteenth Precinct. Danes and the New Jersey officer who accompanied him would be required to follow protocol for an officer-involved shooting, but John Shannon would meet them there.

  Hank smiled when he delivered the news that a patrol car transport would not be necessary. She was free to ride with her attorney. Hank would drive his own car. If she still wanted him. As a translator of sorts. But only if she wanted him to go.

  It had taken nearly three hours for the three of them—Hank, Alice, and Arthur—to lay out everything she had learned about Christie Kinley, Mia Andrews, and Robert Atkinson: that night in Bedford, the settlement and confidentiality agreement, Mia’s birth while Christie was supposedly at boarding school, Atkinson’s attempts to locate the old police reports. And, finally, Lily Harper, whom she had met at the gym six months earlier.

  It was after midnight. Shannon had given her the option of going home for a few hours of sleep before resuming in the morning, but Alice had spent too many days without answers. If the NYPD had been slow to believe her in the beginning, the gunfire at Mia Andrews’s home had kicked them into Alice Humphrey–exoneration overdrive. She was afraid that if she fell asleep, she’d wake up to a new reality. And she wanted to think about something other than Ben overdosing in his bathroom.

  So now she, her lawyer, and her new friend, Hank, sat huddled around John Shannon’s desk as they watched two uniformed officers escort Lily Harper into an interrogation room. Her once-trusted eyes remained locked on Alice as she walked the gauntlet, but Alice could read no emotion in them.

  Once Lily was out of sight, Alice assumed her spot behind a one-way mirror, as Detective Shannon had instructed, ready to hear what her good friend had to say for herself.

  Some facts simply could not be denied. Yes, Lily conceded, she knew Christie Kinley. They’d grown up together in Mount Kisco. Raised by her widower father, Lily had spent more nights at the Kinley home than her own. Practically a sister to her, Christie had remained Lily’s closest friend until her death. And, yes, she had known and practically helped raise Christie’s younger sister, Mia, and had watched her grow up into a troubled and yet nevertheless loved young woman. Lily’s admission of these truths meant nothing to Alice. After all, Detective Shannon had already shown her the photograph they’d found in Mia’s apartment.

  But when it came to any involvement on Mia Andrews’s part in the bizarre events at the Highline Gallery, Lily feigned ignorance.

  “I’m very sorry, Detective, but if you could please slow down and show a little empathy here. Your officers just dragged me from my home with no explanation, and now you’ve told me that cops killed a girl who was practically my own baby sister.”

  Maybe Lily was the one who should have gone into acting.

  “For the record, your honorary baby sister fired on them first, and the preliminary report from the scene is that she shot herself when she realized she couldn’t escape. We are looking now for connections between Mia and Travis Larson, the man who used the name Drew Campbell when he hired Alice to work at the gallery. We will find those links, Lily. There’s no doubt about it. Her fingerprints at his place, or his at hers. Phone records. E-mails. It will happen. And once we have that evidence, do you really want to be nailed down on your story that you had absolutely no idea that Alice’s dream job had something to do with Mia and her scumbag boyfriend? If I were you, I’d start looking to help yourself.”

  “I never met Drew Campbell! I knew Mia was seeing a guy, but if it was the man who hired Alice, I certainly had no idea of that.”

  “Was Mia’s boyfriend named Travis Larson?”

  Someone who didn’t know Lily would have said she answered without hesitation. But Alice knew her. Or at least she thought she had. And she could tell Lily paused.

  “Yes, I met him. Once. Down in Williamsburg, for dinner.” Dinner meant potential witnesses. Some facts simply could not be denied. “But how was I supposed to know he was the same guy who hired Alice? Are you sure Mia was involved? I can’t even begin to wrap my head around this.”

  “Can you think of some other reason she might have opened fire on two police officers?”

  “I didn’t even know she owned a gun.”

  “Well, apparently she did, and it’s probably going to turn out to be the same weapon that killed her boyfriend. You deny knowing anything about the gallery setup, so let’s go back in time. What did you know about Christie Kinley’s settlement with Frank Humphrey?”

  �
��Nothing.”

  “This woman was one of your closest friends, and she never told you that Frank Humphrey raped her?”

  Lily was thinking again. Mentally lining all the ducks in a row. How much could she deny? “I knew something bad happened to her. I wasn’t at that party, or maybe it wouldn’t have happened. But she told me the next day she got so drunk she blacked out. But she could tell—you know, from pain down there—that something might have happened. Something sexual. And then when she opened her purse, she found a camera and remembered the guy taking pictures. She must have grabbed it afterward when she ran out.”

  “So you knew about the pictures all these years.”

  “But I never saw them. I knew she was planning to go to the AV room at school to develop them, to get evidence against the guy. But then when I talked to her the next week, she said she didn’t want to have to testify and all that stuff. She never told me who the guy was, but I just assumed it was one of the other kids at the party. A couple of months later, she said her mom was pissed at her for getting so drunk and was sending her away for a year.”

  “So you’re trying to tell me that you didn’t know Mia was Christie and Frank Humphrey’s daughter?”

  More thinking. More calculating.

  “Let me give you some advice, Lily. If you think there is even the slightest possibility that what you say here tonight is going to get you out of this jam, you are absolutely mistaken. Tonight is just the beginning. Whatever version of events you give us tonight, I am going to search high and low for evidence that’s either going to back that up or prove to me you’re a liar. I’ve got an officer outside your apartment right now, securing the premises until we get a warrant. We will search your computer. We’ll read every e-mail you ever exchanged with Mia. We’ll check your search history and see if you’ve been Googling Frank Humphrey in your spare time. Or if you checked out Alice before coincidentally befriending her at the gym. So I would choose your next words very carefully.”