Long Gone Read online

  “The police obviously think I was the one who set up the gallery. And if I lied to them, and I was the one who found that man’s body, I can only imagine what they must be thinking. I’m really scared, Papa. I’m scared they’re going to arrest me with who-knows-what kind of evidence someone has cooked up. And I’m scared that whoever killed that man might come after me. But then if I leave town to protect myself, they’ll think that’s a sign of guilt. And I’m—I’m terrified that someone has done this to me. I just don’t understand it.” She wiped away a tear. “See? This is why I wasn’t showing you that shock and fear you were looking for. It’s all I can do to hold myself together.”

  “These police officers are probably bureaucrats who would love to make their careers by hanging this on an attractive, wealthy woman with a famous last name. They can’t possible believe—”

  “Papa, the contract was under what they think is my alias, with my photograph. They have a picture of me kissing a guy I swore was only my employer. What they’re thinking is so damn believable that sometimes I wonder if I’m the one going crazy.”

  “Well, this may not be something you thought I could help with, but you know I will insist. Do not talk to them any more without a lawyer.”

  “Jeff said the same thing, but I think that makes me look even guiltier.”

  “You went to Jeff with something like this? No, you need someone good. Let me call Arthur. He was trying cases when Jeff was in diapers.”

  “Jeff graduated top ten percent from law school. He has his own firm. He’s perfectly capable of protecting me from a police interrogation.” And Arthur was with you on a few of those mile-high-club adventures on your private jet, she wanted to say. He knew all about your dalliances, and yet continued to be a friend and confidant to your wife and children. He continued to let my mother host his frequent weekends to the guest cottage in Bedford that he jokingly called his country home. Yeah, I’m going to trust Arthur Cronin.

  “It’s not about book smarts. It’s about stature. Did you read Outliers?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, Malcolm talks about something called ‘practical intelligence.’” Since her father had struck up a friendship a few years earlier with the author Malcolm Gladwell, he had taken to frequently quoting his friend, and always by first name. “It’s about the ability to read a situation. To know what to say and how and when to say it. Arthur Cronin went to some crap school in Florida, but he made a name for himself based on his work. Jeff? Jeff is a simple little boy who cares so much about his bourgeois, two-kids-and-a-picket-fence, brainwashed, cookie-cutter lifestyle that he hurt a bright, talented, and thoughtful woman. He hurt you, Alice. I remember you calling us in Bedford that night. We could hardly understand you, you were so distraught. We got in the car and drove to the city to make sure you wouldn’t hurt yourself. Our beautiful baby girl. We were that worried about you. And that little asshole Jeff Wilkerson is the one who put you in that state.”

  “That was a long time ago, Papa.”

  It had been nearly three years since Jeff suddenly announced they had no future. He wanted children. She had learned during her first marriage that she could not carry any. That fact had never been a secret from Jeff, but one night during dessert at Babbo, he came to (or at least vocalized) the conclusion that a future with biological children meant more to him than a future with her. He tried to blame the disclosure’s poor timing on the wine, but he could not retract the sentiment.

  “It’s not as if anything has changed with him. He shows up, and then he’s gone again. He’s in your life, then he’s out. I hate to say this, but the man uses you, Alice, and it breaks my heart to see it.”

  “I guess you know about using women.”

  She regretted the words immediately and knew there was no way she could ever explain to her father why she had hurled them. Her father had always given her unconditional praise, however undeserved. When she was still acting, he would tell her she was absolute perfection, conveying more expression in a single glance than most girls her age could manage in a five-minute monologue. Anyone who criticized her was written off as a hack, too jealous or untalented to fathom the enormity of the career she would ultimately have.

  He had only the best intentions. He had wanted a daughter who believed in herself absolutely and without reservation. But, at least for Alice, to be told that she was perfect when she knew otherwise only invited her to form—and then internalize—the obvious counterarguments. I’m not perfect. I’m not better than the other girls in class. I’m not pretty. I’m not talented.

  Even now, as her father insisted the police must be idiots, she could only see how rational their suspicions of her actually were.

  And now her father was also telling her that she was too good for someone like Jeff. Jeff, who had always been honest with her about wanting to father children. Who was still trying to find a place in his life for her despite that desire. Who had dropped everything when she had needed him at the gallery. Who, once he eventually did get married and have his children, would never do what her father had been doing—and denying—all these years.

  “There is something you can help me with, Papa.”

  When he said nothing, she was thankful he’d accepted the change in subject.

  “This is the photograph the police have of me and the man I knew as Drew Campbell.” She handed him the copy the detectives had left with her. “It’s either someone who looks a lot like me, or it’s been Photoshopped, or both. Can you tell whether it’s been doctored?”

  Although her father had become famous as a director, he was also considered one of the best cinematographers and photographers in the world.

  “Looking at it right now, it is hard to say offhand. I see no obvious mistakes. No missing earlobes,” he said with a smile. “Seems consistent in perspective and shadow. I can take a closer look at it if you leave it here. Maybe I can let one of the visual effects people have at it, if that’s all right with you?”

  She thanked her father for his help before she left, and for the first time in what had been a very long year, she meant it.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  It had been five days since Becca Stevenson had disappeared, and Morhart could already feel the case losing momentum. He’d handled missing-kid reports before, but he’d always had a resolution within a day or so. With one exception, the kids had turned up, after either running away or a simple misunderstanding about so-and-so’s slumber party. He didn’t like thinking about the one exception, a stepmother who had faked an abduction with her lover in an attempt to extract ransom from her husband. The boy’s body had been found in the Jersey City Reservoir.

  Morhart may not have juggled one of these prolonged searches before, but he’d seen some of them unfold in the news. Some kids got the full treatment—the high-profile Amber Alerts, front-page headlines, and around-the-clock cable news updates. Others got one paragraph in the back pages, and then just disappeared—both in life and from the media. Anyone willing to be honest about our lingering unconscious biases could recognize the role that race played in those distinctions. Morhart couldn’t recall a single case where the media took up the cause of a victim of color. But he had a relatively attractive white girl at stake, and he needed her face in the newspapers and on television if he had any hope of generating new leads.

  The problem, he suspected, was the narrative. Not a cheerleader. Not an honor student. A messed-up girl with a single mother who didn’t even notice her kid was missing until morning because she was busy getting nailed by her new boyfriend. Those reporters were assuming what everyone else was—that Becca had simply run away. Morhart found himself thinking the same thing, but it didn’t change the fact that he wanted a resolution. He wanted to know where Becca was and why. He wanted to know if she was still alive. He wanted to keep his promise to a mother who struck him as a better woman than she was believing herself to be right now.

  Five days had passed, and he felt like he wa
s swimming in Jell-O. The bullying Becca had been experiencing at school. The secret cell phone. The recent reappearance of her father. Those illicit photographs. He could not help thinking there had to be a connection between the fact that Becca had taken a nude picture of herself and her father’s subsequent allegations against an art exhibit featuring controversial photography.

  He walked into the precinct to find Nancy bent over his desk, scribbling a note, her left hand still resting on his telephone. He could smell her powdery perfume ten feet away.

  “I’ve told you a hundred times, Nancy, just let the calls go to voice mail.” On calls about his cases, he preferred to hear the callers’ demeanor and exact words himself. Not to mention that Nancy had a habit of switching digits around when distracted.

  “Your phone rings so darn loud, I can’t help it sometimes. Here you go.”

  He looked down at her bubbly, cursive letters. “Det. John Shannon, Homicide, NYPD,” followed by a phone number.

  “He said it was about Becca Stevenson.”

  “So, we compared those pictures you sent over to the images we have of the so-called artwork that was up at our gallery.”

  Morhart felt like the tide was finally breaking. The images would match. Shannon was about to confirm that Becca was the girl depicted in those photographs. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. A connection between her and the gallery would be a step toward a resolution, but he suspected it would not be a happy one in light of the murder that had occurred there.

  “No match.”

  Morhart found himself relieved. He wanted Becca to be safe even more than he wanted answers. “Are you sure? You said your pictures didn’t have any faces in them.”

  “The ones on display in the museum—or the gallery, I guess—just showed little snippets of bare skin, but we’ve actually found some other photographs that are of more interest to us.”

  “What other pictures?”

  “Stuff that wouldn’t be on display anywhere.”

  “Are these minors? Is it child pornography?”

  “Christ, Morhart. You’re worse than my partner. Can you let me get a word in, here? We’ve got a bunch of pictures, and trust me, none of them matches. Your girl was a little, um, softer than the girls in these pictures. But it doesn’t matter, okay? You were right. There’s a connection.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The fingerprints. We had them run the latents picked up from the gallery against the prints you pulled from your vic’s bedroom. We found a right index and ring finger match on the bathroom doorknob.”

  “She was there.”

  “Correct. Becca Stevenson was inside the Highline Gallery.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “Now we’re at the height of our practice. Trikonasana, triangle pose.”

  Alice tried to keep her mouth shut, concentrating on the deep nasal breaths that were supposed to help her control her heart rate, release toxins, and center her thoughts on the present. She bent her right knee at a ninety-degree angle and spread her arms like an eagle, aiming her right fingers between her big and second toes and her left toward the sky. Her legs and arms quivered. She felt her heart racing. She did not, however, feel her past and future float away. She did not feel her worries leave her body.

  Instead, she felt the oppressive heat of the 105 degrees and 40 percent humidity and the sour taste of regret for believing that a Bikram yoga class could help her escape from her reality, even momentarily.

  She knew from experience that Otto, the teacher who’d affectionately been dubbed “the yoga nazi,” would not allow her to leave the room. This, after all, was the man who once asked a frazzled student to name a pose, only to say in response: “That’s right. Standing head-to-knee pose, not stand-in-my-front-row-and-check-out-your-hair-in-the-mirror pose.”

  Despite the quick, cold shower after class, she could still feel heat escaping her body when she returned home to find Willie Danes waiting for her. This time, he had not remained at the curb. He was fiddling with a BlackBerry just outside her apartment door.

  “Another workout, huh?”

  She immediately wondered whether all this exercise made her look guilty. She had found a body, after all. Her life had been turned upside down by information that didn’t add up. Exercise was a form of escape for her, but would a cop like Danes see the trivialities of her daily routine as a sign of callousness?

  “If you need something from me, Detective, you’re always welcome to call.”

  She had meant to sound helpful, but the words came across as prickly.

  “Didn’t want to inconvenience you, Miss Humphrey, but I do have a few more follow-up questions. Do you mind?”

  She heard her father’s voice: Do not talk to them any more without a lawyer. She remembered Jeff’s advice: Three simple words: I want counsel. She stood with her key in the door and prepared herself. Just tell him you don’t want to talk to him right now. Tell him you think it’s best if you have an attorney involved.

  But when she turned and looked him in the eye, she couldn’t do it. She knew any mention of a lawyer would immediately terminate the cordiality between them, however artificial it might be. They would officially be antagonists. It would be her versus the police. And they had power and information, and she did not. She knew she was innocent. She had nothing to hide. “Sure, Detective, come on in.”

  This time, she took a bar stool at her kitchen counter. No more sitting low in the corner with a cop staring down at her.

  “Have you ever heard of a girl called Becca Stevenson?”

  She shook her head. “Is she connected to the man I found in the gallery?”

  “She’s a fifteen-year-old girl from Dover, New Jersey. She’s been missing since Sunday night.”

  “Oh, sure. I saw something about that in the newspaper a couple of days ago.”

  “You don’t know her?” He handed her a photograph. She had dark eyes and a freckled nose. Her dark curls were blowing in the wind, but her pink cheeks looked like they’d be warm. She smiled as if she were trying to hide the tiny snaggletooth on the left side of her mouth.

  “Pretty girl. No, I don’t know anything about her. Why?”

  “We’ve had some leads come up, but I’m afraid I can’t discuss them.”

  Alice could see only one possible connection. “Wait. Do you think she’s the girl from Hans Schuler’s photographs?”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “So—”

  “I’m sorry I can’t share information with you, Miss Humphrey. But you said if we had any questions—”

  “Yes, of course. I understand.” She understood this was a one-way street.

  “So, just to be clear, you’ve never met or been in the same room or spoken to Becca Stevenson, the girl in this photograph?”

  She didn’t like the way he asked the question, as if he were nailing her down for the record. As if he were ready to prove she was a liar. But she knew the truth, and she knew how it would look if she tried to avoid answering. “That’s right.”

  “All right. Now I also wanted to talk to you about ITH, the company that was backing the gallery.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “You say you’ve never heard of the company before?”

  “That’s right.”

  They were back on familiar territory, but how many times were they going to ask her to repeat the same information?

  “Do you have any thoughts about what ITH might stand for?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve tried digging around online, but I never found anything.”

  “All right. And, just to be clear, you say you never met the man you knew as Drew Campbell before?”

  She tried to hide her frustration as she described, once again, the series of events that had led to her first meeting with Campbell, her meeting with him at the gallery space, her acceptance of the job, and eventually her discovery of the body. She realized she must have sounded remote as she walked him thro
ugh these facts, but she had recited them so many times that they hardly seemed real anymore.

  “And you’re sure your father didn’t have anything to do with the gallery?”

  “My father? Um, no, of course not. Why would you ask?”

  “Just looking at all the possibilities here. Your father is a man of means. He is part of the broader art world—”

  “So is, I don’t know—Brad Pitt, but I don’t think he had anything to do with Drew Campbell or the Highline Gallery.”

  “There’s no need to get testy.”

  She reminded herself why she had allowed him into her apartment in the first place. She was innocent. She was helpful. And she had nothing to hide. Innocent, helpful, forthcoming witnesses do not get angry.

  “I’m sorry, Detective. It’s just—well, it’s a long story, but I’ve gone to great lengths to be independent of my family. Part of me thinks I wouldn’t even be in this situation if I hadn’t gone to those lengths, so I apologize if this is a touchy subject. My father and I had a kind of falling-out last year. If you’ve looked him up on the gossip pages, you might be able to figure out why.”

  “I’m sorry, too, if I’m dredging up something for you.” They were both continuing their roles in this charade of civility. “But I have to ask: You spent nearly a year turning down your father’s offers of financial assistance, and then, lo and behold, a man you’ve never met before comes forward and offers you this golden opportunity to manage a gallery for a wealthy older man who would remain completely anonymous and allow you to call all the shots.”

  “I realize it sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but—”

  “It never dawned on you that the man cutting the checks might be your father?”

  She felt herself flinch at the suggestion and wondered whether that blink she felt internally had manifested itself for Danes to witness. “No,” she finally said. “It didn’t.”