Long Gone

by Alafair Burke

  She sighed dramatically, as if to acknowledge that this time, she was truly coming clean. “I had no idea about Frank Humphrey’s involvement, or even about Christie getting pregnant, until after Christie passed away. I was helping Mia clean out the house to get it ready for sale, and that’s when we found all the papers.”

  “What papers?”

  “Everything. Gloria—that’s Christie and Mia’s mom, or I guess only Christie’s mom—anyway, Gloria must have kept a file of everything, just in case. The photographs from that night. A copy of the police report Christie filed the day after the party. The settlement agreement. Mia’s birth records. The formal adoption by Gloria. We were in absolute shock.”

  “And a couple of months later, you just happen to meet Frank Humphrey’s daughter and become one of her closest friends? It sounds to me like you and Mia spent those months planning your revenge.”

  “It wasn’t like that. Yes, I’d say we were both pretty angry. I mean, here’s this grown man who fucking raped a fourteen-year-old girl and got off scot-free.”

  “It was your friend and her mom who decided to settle.”

  “Christie’s mother was hardly a stable parent, and Christie would have known how badly her mother needed that money. And I’m sure Frank Humphrey’s lawyer threatened to make those photographs public and to argue that Christie had been asking for it. So, yeah, she settled for the money, but it doesn’t make what Frank Humphrey did right.”

  Alice hated that she found herself agreeing with her friend. She wanted so badly to believe there was an explanation for what Lily had done to her.

  “Mia and I were both following Humphrey’s sex scandals really closely—like maybe these tabloid stories were karma biting him in the ass. And one night when I was surfing the news about him, I Googled the daughter who had given him an alibi.”

  Even though the conversation in the room was being piped in through speakers, Alice leaned closer to the glass, as if proximity might help her understand.

  “I found her Facebook page. It was so weird to think that this woman whose paths had crossed with Christie’s so long ago was living just a few blocks from me. Her profile mentioned which gym she went to, so, yeah, I was curious. I wanted to know whether Frank Humphrey’s family had any idea what kind of man he is. But then, you know what? Alice was just a regular person. And she wasn’t exactly giving her father a free pass. I liked her. And she became my friend.”

  Alice wondered if Lily knew she was listening.

  “You mentioned that you saw the settlement agreement.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you would have seen that the agreement was between Christie and a company called ITH.”

  “Yes.” Alice suspected that search teams at Mia’s apartment would soon find that old file of documents, and Lily’s fingerprints would be on them.

  Alice saw a flicker behind Lily’s eyes as she realized the mistake she had made. Lily had been sitting right next to Alice when she had given Detective Shannon a copy of her pay stub with the ITH company name on it. They had talked about that name several times afterward. She had to have made the connection.

  “I went to Mia the next day and confronted her.” Alice felt a scream building in her chest. This woman had played her from the very beginning, and now she was doing the same with Shannon. “She told me what she had done. Travis had a plan to sell porn without going through the Internet. I didn’t understand why that would be profitable—”

  “Because it was child porn, Miss Harper. Your favorite little sister was peddling child porn with her boyfriend.”

  Lily swallowed. “I had no idea, obviously. Mia made it sound like sex tapes or something. Travis had this plan, and she knew from me that Alice was in the art world and needed a job. She saw an opportunity to set Alice up as the fall guy. The money from the sales all got wired overseas. They’d run the scam for a while, then pull the plug and leave her high and dry.”

  “Did she tell you she killed Travis Larson?”

  She nodded. “The protesters outside the gallery had him spooked. Alice was demanding to speak to the gallery owner. The press was trying to find the supposed artist. It would only be a matter of time before someone figured out what was embedded in those thumb drives. Travis was supposed to call Alice and calm her down, but Mia heard him tell Alice to meet the next morning at the gallery. She went there and confronted him. He was planning to double-cross her. He was going to blame everything on Mia and then try to cozy up to Alice in the hopes of getting into her family money.”

  Alice felt Hank’s eyes on her. The plan Lily described sounded right up Travis Larson’s alley.

  “You told me you didn’t know Mia had a gun.”

  “I meant that I didn’t know at first. She told me all this after the fact.”

  “And from then on you decided you’d help frame Alice Humphrey.”

  “No, I did not. I was trying to figure out how to help her without turning in Mia.”

  “You ratted Alice out when we asked you about those gloves we found near the murder scene. Then you told her to run, pretty much guaranteeing her conviction.”

  “I assumed her father would hire a bunch of lawyers to get her out of it. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. I know it sounds weird, but I do care about her. She’s my friend. But Mia—Mia was ... troubled. Seriously troubled, okay? But she was like family. I didn’t know what to do. You have to believe me.”

  The tears that were beginning to fall seemed real, but Alice had one question for her friend that Shannon had not yet raised.

  “Can I talk to Detective Shannon?” she asked.

  Arthur Cronin was the kind of lawyer who had no qualms about tapping on the interrogation room glass. Shannon looked annoyed but stepped out of the room.

  “I’m sorry, Detective, but she’s lying.”

  “I know that. She’s admitting only as much as she has to and disputing everything else.”

  “She wants you to believe that Mia did all of this on her own, and she only helped her after the fact. Mia Andrews wore my gloves and then left them near the crime scene with gunshot residue on them. But how did Mia get my gloves in the first place?”

  When Shannon returned to the interrogation room to ask that very question, Lily Harper stopped crying and asked for a lawyer.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Two Weeks Later

  “I’d have to say this has been a much more pleasant visit than the last couple of times you popped in on me.”

  Alice poured coffee for Detectives John Shannon and Willie Danes, as if they were two old pals in her living room rather than the two men who had tried to put her behind bars for the rest of her life.

  “Your hair’s back to red,” Danes observed, gesturing awkwardly to her head.

  “Yeah, the bottled version for now. The red roots were poking through. I looked like Pepé Le Pew on acid.”

  “Again, we just really want to apologize, both officially on behalf of the NYPD, but also for ourselves. We realize in retrospect that you were trying to work with us. We were too convinced of what we thought was the truth to hear you out.”

  They had already given her a layperson’s debriefing of the case. Mia Andrews’s neighbors could place Travis Larson at Mia’s apartment as early as eight months ago. That photograph of her kissing Larson—planted on “Drew Campbell’s” fake Facebook profile for police to find—had looked candid but was one of sixty similarly staged images found in Mia’s digital camera. Activity on Mia’s home computer proved that the artwork supposedly by Hans Schuler was her own. She had also been the one to join a members-only message board catering to “specialty erotica,” advertising the Schuler exhibit at Highline Gallery and promising “secret bonus photographs with no traceable downloads” for those who followed the posted instructions. The .38 she used to deliver a fatal shot to her head was the same weapon used to kill Travis Larson. Robert Atkinson’s briefcase and laptop were also found in her apartment.


  “Will you ever know for certain whether she killed my brother?”

  Danes frowned. “We’re sorry, Alice. Nothing in her apartment ties her to Ben. We did, however, find recent calls from your brother to a suspected dealer. We spoke to that individual, and he indicated that your brother had started using again. What happens sometimes is, if a person who had been using drugs stops—as your brother did—his tolerance goes down. If he slips and uses the same amount, what used to be an acceptable quantity is just too much.”

  “I see.”

  “I mean, it’s possible she somehow mixed his stash with something purer. Or maybe she got there after the fact and rifled through the apartment, as you suspected someone had.”

  Or it was possible her brother was a junkie who had let the multimillion-dollar loft her parents had purchased for him go to shit before sticking a needle in his arm one last time.

  “It’s okay, Detective. I understand.”

  Arthur had advised her what to expect. This home visit was part of the department’s overall damage-control strategy. The city’s attorneys had probably counseled them to win her over in an attempt to forestall a lawsuit.

  As far as she was concerned, however, there was only one thing she wanted from them.

  “Why hasn’t Lily Harper been arrested?”

  Danes looked at Shannon, who decided to do the talking on that one.

  “The statements she made before lawyering up have actually panned out. If in fact she did not know about Mia’s involvement with your job at the gallery until after Larson was murdered, then she’s not an accessory.”

  “She led you to believe I was a murderer.”

  “And unfortunately the law does not impose a duty upon people to come forward to us with the truth. Even if she knew Mia was responsible, she doesn’t have to report her. The only affirmative statement she ever made to us was when we asked her to identify your gloves. She told us they were yours, which was, in fact, a truthful statement. Letting you hang in the wind makes her a shitty person, but not an accomplice.”

  Arthur had already tried to explain that aspect of the law to her.

  “But how else could Mia have gotten my gloves? Lily must have given them to her, which proves she knew what Mia was up to.”

  The detectives exchanged glances again.

  “Will you please stop staring at each other and just talk to me like a normal person? I’m not going to sue you, but I want you to be honest with me. I deserve that. At the very least, I deserve absolute honesty.”

  “You’re right,” Shannon said. “I’m sorry. Lily’s attorney has an explanation for the gloves. You remember how you thought Larson first found you at that art showing because you had it posted on your Facebook page?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, the following night, you posted something about a killer pizza at a place called Otto?”

  She remembered. “Clams. It was a clam pizza.”

  “Did you happen to check your coat?” She nodded. “Lily’s lawyer pointed out that Mia could have worn her matching blue coat to Otto and pulled some stunt at the coat check about the gloves.”

  “Or, more likely, Lily knows I always check my coat because the bar gets so crowded, and she’s had two weeks to think up a story.”

  “You wanted honesty, Alice, and I’m giving it to you straight. No bullshit. You’ve got a valid point about those gloves, but we’re never going to know for sure. And no prosecutor’s going to try Lily based only on our speculation about those gloves.”

  “So Lily walks?”

  “We’re pushing the DA to charge her with obstruction. We’d argue that her linking you to the gloves, knowing full well you were innocent, essentially obligated her to tell us the whole truth. She also counseled you to run, which we might be able to bootstrap into something.”

  “You don’t sound optimistic.”

  “It’s up to the DA. Even if we can convince him to file, she probably won’t do time. And she’ll haul out the sad story about her dead friend and her secret daughter and all of that in the process.”

  “At least there’s some good news,” Danes said, searching for a change in subject. “You probably heard that your father’s in the clear.”

  Even though Alice’s arrest warrant was promptly withdrawn, the affidavit filed in its support had been leaked to the media. An enterprising reporter at the National Enquirer had unearthed the old blind item by Robert Atkinson. It had taken the churning wheel of Internet news only three days to declare Academy Award–winning director Frank Humphrey a child rapist.

  When the district attorney’s office asked her father for a DNA sample, Arthur wanted to fight it. The statute of limitations on anything that had happened in 1985 had long passed. The government was just doing the tabloid media’s bidding, Arthur argued. But for the first time in a long while, her father had done the right thing. He had made the decision with only one interest in mind—the truth.

  “So does anyone even know who Mia’s father actually was?”

  The funny thing about the truth was its constant ability to surprise. Even though her father had been resigned to accept the fact that he had fathered the illegitimate child of a barely teenage girl in 1985, Frank Humphrey’s DNA did not, in fact, match Mia Andrews’s. Christie Kinley may have believed that her pregnancy resulted from that night in her father’s office, but she’d been mistaken.

  Danes shook his head. “Could be anyone in Westchester County, from what we hear.”

  “And how are you holding up?” she asked. She had been through hell, but Willie Danes was the one who’d been shot at.

  “I’m back on the job, as you can see. The guy from New Jersey and I were both cleared in our involvement. It shouldn’t have happened that way. If I’d been treating your information more seriously, we could have gotten her out alive.”

  “Well, it sounds like she was the one who decided how it would end. Your bullets didn’t kill her.” Ballistics tests had proven that Mia Andrews’s own gun had delivered the fatal shot to her face.

  “I suppose there’s that. The irony is that she could’ve just run down the fire escape when we knocked. She must’ve assumed we’d brought the cavalry.”

  “The bigger mystery is what Becca Stevenson’s fingerprints were doing in that gallery bathroom,” Shannon said. “We haven’t found a single piece of evidence to tie Mia to Becca, but, as of three days ago, the NYPD officially declared us uninvolved in her disappearance. The investigation is back in Jersey. Anyhoo, got any other questions we can answer?”

  They placed their coffee cups on the table in synchronicity, and she could tell they were eager to put this case in their rearview mirror.

  “Not right now, detectives, but I will certainly call you if I need anything. And I do appreciate your coming here.”

  They apologized once again as they made their way out the door.

  She would have thought that the news about Lily not being charged would be the sour note ringing in her head after the detectives’ departure. Instead, she kept hearing Danes’s voice: Your father’s in the clear.

  Alice had been at her parents’ apartment when Arthur had called them with the news. Her mother had actually let out a little yelp, as if the fact that her husband hadn’t actually impregnated his rape victim was something to celebrate. At least her father had the decency to be somber.

  On the same day he had agreed to the blood test, her father had paid her an unannounced visit to confess everything he remembered about April 18, 1985—which was very little. Mom had gone to bed early, annoyed at how much he’d been drinking at dinner. Alice broke in to point out the irony of that detail, given how their lives had played out in the intervening quarter century, but it was clear her father did not want to be interrupted.

  He knew Ben and his friends were drinking out back, but the boy’s sixteenth birthday had been the previous weekend, and it seemed like harmless high school mischief. Arthur called it quits shortly after dinner himself. Alice had
been begging to watch the screening copy of Goonies he had scored from Warner Brothers, so the two of them had moved into the theater. His rendition was just as Alice remembered the night.

  As her father slowly recited his version of the evening, she realized that he had somehow convinced himself that his baby girl had forgotten his pre-sobriety days. “I was upset with your mother, even though she had a point about the drinking. But knowing she was right, and knowing she had locked herself away in our room because of it, only made me want to drink more. To this day, I can’t tell you what that damn Goonies movie is even about, I was so inebriated. I passed out. And don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the first time. But I actually blacked out. I woke up in the morning on the floor of the theater, and I couldn’t remember a thing. When I saw Arthur later, he made some remark about the girl being too young even for me, and I didn’t even know what he was talking about. He told me he walked out of the guest cottage to smoke a cigar and saw me talking to one of the girls from Ben’s party. Obviously, his comment was just a joke. As you know by now, Alice—and this isn’t easy for me to talk about with you—but, as you know, I have not always been faithful, not even close. And Arthur knew that. But he was only kidding. Of course I would never even think of striking something up with a girl of that age.”

  She had wanted to yell at him. But you did, Dad. And it’s not “striking something up” when the girl is fourteen years old. But she said nothing and allowed him to continue his monologue.

  “And then the police came on Sunday and told me a girl from the party was claiming I raped her. She said I took pictures during the act. I went into my office, and my camera was gone. The girl said she grabbed it when she ran away. I didn’t know what to say. I knew that if I told them I was too drunk to remember where I had been all night, they would take me away. That’s when I found you in your room. I brought you into my office to talk to them because I knew you would tell them we were watching a movie. I knew it would be just enough of an alibi to keep them from arresting me. I called Arthur right away, and we wound up reaching a settlement with the girl and her family.”