Long Gone

Chapter Twenty-Three

Y ou’ve heard what they say about pictures and a thousand words.

Alice took another sip of her water, but immediately wondered if the movement seemed suspicious, an obvious attempt to appear calm. I’m hot because I took a seventy-five-minute spinning class, she wanted to yell. I’m sweaty because we ended with a long climb, then I sprinted home from the gym. And I just walked into this overheated apartment from the bitter cold. I’m hot and sweaty and more than a little stinky, but not because of your being here or your questions or this ridiculous photograph of me supposedly kissing Drew Campbell.

But she could not say anything. Instead she stared at the picture. It was not the best quality. It looked like a blowup from a digital version. But the man certainly appeared to be Drew Campbell. And the woman? It was hard to make out her face in profile, but the black sunglasses pushing back her red hair looked like hers. That blue coat with the upturned collar was exactly like hers. The profile followed the same contours. Jesus, it looked like her, certainly enough that she had no doubt about why they had come to her apartment to ask her to reexplain everything she had already said to them yesterday.

And now that she’d conveyed it all once again, they apparently weren’t asking any more questions. Not explicitly. Shannon had simply glided the photograph onto the tabletop, accompanied by a single sentence.

You’ve heard what they say about pictures and a thousand words.

The detectives’ silence following that single sentence had somehow made her apartment louder. The clicking furnace. The upstairs neighbor’s plumbing. The usual horns on Second Avenue below. The rattle of an accelerating bus. A distant siren growing louder, then fading once again.

She found herself wishing Lily were still here, but Alice had been the one to insist that she return to her own routine lest she face her boss’s wrath. Lily would have some pithy comment to break through the awkward silence. With humor and fortitude, she would somehow persuade these police officers that, despite every appearance in this photograph, Alice Humphrey was someone they should believe.

But Lily wasn’t there to speak for her. And someone in this room had to start speaking before the sounds in Alice’s own head caused her to scream something she’d regret.

“I don’t understand.” That’s it, Alice? Minutes of stunned silence, and that’s what you come up with? She tried again. “If you think I’ve been lying to you, or hiding something from you, I swear to you, I have not. That’s not me in that picture. It can’t be. Who gave you that? It has to be doctored. I never, ever, ever kissed Drew Campbell.”

The two detectives exchanged the kind of look that suggested an inside joke.

“Well,” Shannon said with a patient smile, “did you ever kiss the man in this picture? The man whose body we carried out of your gallery yesterday?”

Your gallery.

“I don’t understand,” she said before realizing she’d repeated herself. “I just told you, I never kissed him. I only met him a few weeks ago. He hired me. That’s all.”

“That’s not what you told us. You said you never kissed Drew Campbell. We’re just trying to verify that you’re saying you never kissed the man in this picture, despite what this picture suggests.”

“I assume the man in that picture is Drew Campbell, and, no, there was nothing romantic between us.”

“Did you ever know him by another name? Something other than Drew Campbell?”

“No, of course not. I would have told you.”

“And how about yourself? Have you ever used any name other than Alice Humphrey?”

“Me? No. Never.”

“Well, do you have any thoughts on why there would be a photograph of Mr. Campbell kissing a woman who seems to share a very close resemblance to you? If I’m not mistaken, Miss Humphrey, that’s the very coat you had on yesterday at the gallery.”

“I know. I find it very confusing. Maybe I reminded him of his girlfriend? That might be why he offered me the job in the first place. That’s all I can think of. But I know that’s not me in this picture. It can’t be.”

“And, just to be clear, you didn’t have anything to do with clearing out the contents of your gallery.”

Just to be clear? She knew the worst thing she could do right now was show anger. Friendly, polite, deferential. That’s what she needed to be. “No. The place was closed up when I got there.”

“But not really closed. The gate was open, I believe you said? Door unlocked?”

She nodded. That was obviously what she’d said, both yesterday and today. “By closed up, I meant that the gallery had been cleaned out.”

“Miss Humphrey, is that your computer?” Shannon asked the question, but both of the detectives were eyeing the slim gray laptop that was open on her kitchen table. Her old dinosaur was closed on top of a bookcase in the living room, growing dusty since she’d starting carting around the newer one.

“Um, I guess not anymore. Drew gave it to me for the gallery. And for me to work from home. It served double duty, I guess you’d say.”

“So that laptop there’s the only computer you had in use at the gallery?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And when we asked you yesterday, and today, whether you knew the whereabouts of any of the property from the gallery, you didn’t think to mention the fact that you had the gallery’s computer in your personal possession?”

“No, I didn’t even think about the computer until you asked about it just now. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize-I mean, you’re welcome to have it. It’s not even mine, and I have no idea how to even give it back, or whom I’d give it to.”

“ITH. Right?” The H sounded like an A coming around Danes’s toothpick.

She sighed. “Whatever that is.”

They exchanged another one of those insider looks before Shannon picked up the computer.

“So just to be clear”-he liked that phrase-“you’re consenting to our seizure of this computer for purposes of our investigation and consenting to a search of all of its contents: files, search histories, cookies, what not. Those techno-geeks will give it the full once-over. You’re all right with that?”

Friendly, polite, deferential. Nothing to hide. “Of course,” she said with a nod. “I’m feeling a little gross from the gym, if you know what I mean. Maybe I can take a quick shower?” She fanned her shirt from her body and was momentarily relieved when the detectives returned her smile.

“No problem.” Once again, Shannon did the speaking, but both men stepped from their chairs. “You do what you need to do. We’ll have a look-see on this,” he said, holding up the laptop. “Maybe Drew had some earlier activity on it that might come in handy. And, Alice, I’m going to leave that copy of the picture right there for you to ponder. Give us a call if you have any additional thoughts about it.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“L ady, first you want me to go to Jersey. Now you tell me you don’t even have an address? Let me guess: you’re also paying with a credit card, right?” The cabdriver could read Alice’s response on her face in the rearview mirror. “Ah, Jesus. I read you all wrong. Would’ve been better off picking up that crazy-looking woman wrapped in all the scarves.”

“Just drive. I’ll tell you how to get there once we’re on the other side of the tunnel. And I’ll make it up to you on the tip.”

“If you say so.”

The round-trip fare to Hoboken would run into triple digits, plunked onto a credit card that had been hovering at maximum for the better part of a year, but she had no choice. She’d gone to sleep last night planning to follow Lily’s advice. You’re no longer involved. Consider yourself lucky you don’t know more. But the unannounced house call from the detectives had changed all that.

As the cab emerged from the tunnel, she tried to recall the views she’d taken in from the passenger seat of Drew’s BMW three weeks earlier. A right turn next to the construction site. Then another right where the road came to a tee. A left to cross the overpass. Straight until downtown, then another left.

“I’m pretty sure this is the street. It should be up here on the right. There’s a fire hydrant out front.”

“That’s very specific, ma’am.”

“No, wait, this is it. I remember passing that bar on the corner.”

“Crabby Dick’s? You needed to see that sign to remember a bar called Crabby Dick’s? Are you kidding me?”

“Just pull over, okay?”

“Wait-the fare. You owe me fifty-seven bucks. Plus that tip you mentioned.”

“Look, I have a credit card, okay?” She even pulled it from her wallet as proof. “Just wait for me a few minutes.”

“Jesus, lady.”

“I can’t exactly hail a cab from here. Just run the meter, all right?”

She left him grousing in the front seat with no option but to wait, pulled next to the same parking hydrant where she’d bided her time while Drew Campbell had obtained the paperwork to rent the Highline Gallery space. A bell chimed politely as she walked into the converted town house. Alice recognized the spiky-haired Amazon working two carrels behind the waif of a receptionist at the front desk.

“Good afternoon. I was wondering if I could speak to the woman over there, with the short black hair?”

“And your name?”

“Alice Humphrey. She doesn’t know me, but it’s about a retail space on Washington Street, in Manhattan in the Meatpacking District?”

She watched as the receptionist conferred with the agent, and then returned to the front counter. “I’m sorry, but she tells me that space is unavailable.”

“I know that. I need to talk to her about the lease.” She called out directly to the other woman. “I manage the business that moved into that space. I need to know what name the lease is under.”

The agent barely glanced in Alice’s direction, but did make her way to a wall of file cabinets to retrieve a manila folder. She flipped through its contents as she walked to the front of the office. Alice stepped to the side to make room for the departing receptionist.

“Coffee run, Michelle. Can you watch the front for a sec?”

Michelle with the punky hairdo nodded absentmindedly.

“Now, if you’re the manager, shouldn’t you already know whose name’s on the lease?”

“It’s probably either ITH Corporation or Drew Campbell.”

“Well, okay then. There you go. Drew Campbell.” She looked directly at Alice for the first time. “Is this a joke or something?”

“No, I just-”

“I mean, you’re the woman who was starting a gallery, right?”

“Well, managing it, yes.”

“So, okay, why would you have any doubts about your name being on the lease?”

“Me? My name’s not on the lease.”

“Drew Campbell.”

“Right. I was hoping he gave you an address I could get?”

“Is this Who’s on First or something? I’m pretty sure you know the contact information on the lease. Just like you knew the name.”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

“Well, I wouldn’t normally recite the contents of a lease to someone who walked in off the street, but, sure, I’ll play along. The address is one-seven-two Second Avenue, New York.” She rattled off a Manhattan phone number.

Alice felt a fog building around her. “No. That’s my address. My phone number.”

“Not to be rude, but, no duh. Seriously, I’ve got other work to do-”

“No, wait. Please. I don’t understand. Drew Campbell gave you my address to put on the lease?”

“Of course. You are Drew Campbell, aren’t you?”

“No. My name is Alice Humphrey. Drew Campbell is the man I was with. He signed the lease with you.”

“My notes here say his name is Steve Henning. He said he was helping his girlfriend look for a gallery space, and I suggested the Washington property. When he was finally ready to sign the lease, I told him you needed to be the one to come in. But when he got here, he said you were absolutely at death’s door with the flu and didn’t want to infect anyone. Didn’t you see me looking at you through the window?”

“Well, yeah-”

Alice heard the polite chime of the front door behind her. Stepped aside again to make room for the hundred-pound receptionist and her newly acquired cup of coffee.

“So your boyfriend assured me he was taking the lease out to the car for you to sign. He even gave me a copy of your license.”

She flipped the manila envelope around to show a photocopy of what appeared to be a New York State driver’s license. She recognized the photo. It was cropped from a larger shot taken at a friend’s wedding the previous year. Ben had been cut out, and it had been Photoshopped against a standard background in DMV gray. Her face, her address. Drew Campbell’s name.

She replayed her previous visit to this location in her mind. Drew had taken the paperwork, removed a pen from his pocket, and then gestured toward the car. The agent had looked right at her. The reason he’d offered for signing outside had played right into Alice’s stereotypes of a woman who looked like this one: Creepy in there. I felt like a field mouse dropped into the middle of an anaconda tank.

“This license is a fake. I am not Drew Campbell. Drew Campbell is the man who came here to the rent the gallery.”

The coffee-sipping receptionist’s eyes grew wide at the sharpness of Alice’s response before holding up a hesitant hand like an intruding schoolgirl.

“I’m not sure if this matters, but I copied that entire file yesterday for the New York City police department.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“W hat do you mean, she had a cell phone?”

Morhart had known the conversation would be a difficult one, but Joann Stevenson was having a harder time with the news than even he had anticipated. She was only a year older than he was, but, man, what a different kind of life she’d led. He’d never been married. Never even lived with a woman, not formally. And here was this person-pretty much the same age as him, who’d made her daughter the center of her world for as long as she could remember-learning that her baby girl had already reached the age of keeping secrets from her.

“Sophie says Becca got the phone two months ago.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Sophie assumed you knew.”

“No, I mean, Becca. Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

“Well, that’s one of the questions I’m trying to answer.”

“She’s been begging for a phone since eighth grade. Come to think of it, she hasn’t mentioned it of late. How’d she even pay for it? And don’t kids need a parent or something to sign a contract? I just don’t understand this.”

Morhart prided himself on the quality of his witness interviews, but this woman had a way of wresting a conversation from him.

“Joann, that’s what I’m trying to explain right now. The number Becca was using comes back to a prepaid cell phone. Do you know what that is?”

Joann shook her head.

“There’s no billing plan or credit cards or contracts necessary. Just any form of payment for prepaid minutes. The phone Becca had was purchased two months ago, with cash, at a Sears in Lynchburg, Virginia.”

“Lynchburg? I’ve never heard of that. Becca certainly wasn’t there.”

“That’s what I figured. Now maybe she bought it from someone else, but that’s going to be real hard to track. Our best shot is to look at the call histories.”

Joann’s face brightened. “Of course. This is great. Can you do that thing I’ve read about where you track the phone’s signal, like a GPS?”

“Unfortunately, Becca hasn’t used her phone since Sunday. Now, wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” he said when her expression fell. “She might have turned it off to save the battery. Or she could have lost it. What I want to focus on are the calls she made prior to Sunday night. Not too many, really. Mostly she was using it to text with friends. I guess kids prefer that nowadays. But she did have several calls to a number I’ve tracked to a church based out of Oklahoma. The Redemption of Christ Church? That ring a bell?”

“No. Becca isn’t religious. Like, not at all. Sort of antireligion, if anything.”

“No recent curiosity about it? Or some change in her demeanor to suggest a conversion of some sort?”

“Well, you know she’d been having a rough patch over the last year or so, and she did seem to have turned that around. But I chalked it up to the usual ups and downs of teenage life. She had some new friends at school, that sort of thing, but a sudden embrace of Jesus? I don’t think so. Becca thought Lady Gaga was too mainstream. Does that sound like your redemption church?”

He gave her a smile. It was the first time he’d heard her allow herself some humor. “Definitely not. Don’t worry. I’ll be contacting them about the phone calls, but wanted to get the lay of the land from you first.”

“I appreciate that.”

“There’s something else about the phone, Joann. And this is undoubtedly going to be hard for you to hear. But Becca was involved in some flirtatious texting activity with one of the boys at school.” He broke the news to her. The texts. The nude photo. The retaliation from Ashleigh. All of it.

Joann wiped a tear from her cheek. “I’m sorry. Just the thought of her going through all that alone. I forgot how horrible teenagers can be, you know? It’s like you don’t want to believe your own child could be subjected to that abuse, so you repress the pain they can cause. These bullies, could they have done something to Becca?”

“I’ve accounted for both Dan and Ashleigh’s whereabouts that entire day, so, no, I don’t believe they’re directly responsible for her being missing right now. But to be honest, Miss Stevenson, it does raise the question of whether Becca may have left for a while to remove herself from the situation at school.” He held up a palm. “I’m just raising the possibility, because I know you want me to be honest with you. But I made you a promise that I would not stop looking for Becca, no matter what. And I plan to keep that promise, so please don’t make me feel like I can’t discuss what I need to discuss in order to do that.”

She took a deep breath and pursed her lips. “All right. So you’re saying maybe the problems at school just got to be too much?”

“You’ve always said that Becca leaving on her own was the best-case scenario, right? So, in a way, these problems at school might be seen as good news from that perspective. It at least gives her a reason for going.”

“Other than me. Sorry,” she said, obviously regretting the impulsive comment. “It’s stupid, but I keep wondering, What if she ran away because I had someone in our house that night? Maybe she came home from Sophie’s and realized Mark was here. That never should’ve happened, and I didn’t even have the guts to talk to her about it first. Maybe she wanted to teach me a lesson-”

“Stop. That’s not right.”

“I just can’t get the thought out of my head. Mark… well, he wouldn’t even hear me out on it. I think this has all been too much for him. If I could just let Becca know that he’s gone. He won’t be back here again. Maybe then she’d come home.”

“Just stop, Joann. You’re wrong on that, okay? You’ve got to trust me, but you’re wrong.”

“How do you know?”

He sighed as his own words about honesty rang in his ears. “I asked Sophie how your daughter felt about Mark. You’ve got to understand, in a situation like that, any man who’s close to the family-”

“I’ve got it.”

“In any event, Sophie told me Becca was happy for you.”

“But, still, the shock of finding him here. At night.”

“I don’t think it would have been a shock, okay? I think Sophie’s exact words were, ‘Becca was psyched that her mom was finally getting laid.’ Sorry. Oh, God, awkward.” She was smiling again, and her cheeks had flushed from something other than sobbing. “So, all righty then, I’m going to find out who at Redemption of Christ Church has been calling Becca.”

“You’ll be able to do that? Churches aren’t private from the law or something?”

“This isn’t the Vatican we’re talking about here. Seems like a pretty small organization. Figured I’d start with the pastor himself. Hopefully George Hardy’s a good enough Christian to help us out.”

“George Hardy?”

“Yeah, looks like he started the church himself. A real Bible Belter, from what I read online.”

“Detective, I’m not sure what this means, but I know a man named George Hardy. Or at least I used to.” The color that had been in her cheeks had been replaced by sheets of white. “George Hardy is Becca’s father.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

H ank Beckman was only forty-eight years old, but there were days when he felt old as dirt. The creeping reminders of the ever-present passage of time certainly didn’t help: that little potbelly that materialized a few years back without any explanation, each move of the pin to a lighter notch on the weight machines at the gym, the pain he’d developed in his side last week when he’d bent over for the newspaper a bit too early in the morning.

But not all indications of age were physiological. He’d joined the bureau when he was twenty-nine years old, meaning he’d be eligible for retirement at fifty. In many professions, a man of his age might be hitting his stride. But law enforcement was a young man’s-no, it was a young person’s game. It shouldn’t be. Hank knew more about people-their desires, their instincts, their weaknesses, their motivation-than he could have ever begun to understand as a rookie. But these days, it seemed half their cases came down to bank records, cell phone towers, and computer cookies instead of a deftly handled interrogation. He’d done his best to keep up with advances in investigative techniques, but sometimes it was easier to hand off the actual mechanics of the keyboard work to an intern.

Today’s work, however, could not be delegated. He had lost Travis Larson. He needed to find him.

Hank had last seen the man yesterday morning, parking the stolen BMW on Washington Street. After work, he’d picked up a Subway sandwich to go and headed directly to the Newark apartment complex. No lights on at home. No BMW in the lot. He’d stayed on the place until finally risking a walk up to the man’s landing. The Subway buy-one-get-one coupon he slipped halfway under the front door had still been there this morning and remained there again when he’d found time between field interviews for a drop-by.

No Larson. No BMW.

If Larson wasn’t home, Hank would start from his last known location. He had pulled up Google Maps on his computer, then zoomed in to the few blocks that divided the West Village from the Meatpacking District. From there, he dragged the orange figure of a man onto the map to see the location from street-level photographic view. He remembered the twenty-year-old intern who had shown him how to do it: “See? He looks like the little guy on a bathroom door.” Like she was teaching a computer class at the senior citizens’ center.

He dragged the cartoon man up Washington Street. It seemed that every other click, he did something wrong, shifting out of street-level view, or zooming in to a close-up of broken concrete. He started to get a hang of the movement, taking a virtual stroll past Perry, past West Eleventh, past Bank, until he found the BMW’s parking spot. He rotated the view to home in on the side of the street where Larson had disappeared. He saw two empty storefronts and a laundromat called Happy Suds.

Problem was, the images on Google Maps could be several years old. He was pretty sure the shoe store he’d seen on that street yesterday morning occupied the same space as Happy Suds in this picture. He called information for the number at Happy Suds, but there was no such listing. No surprise. Retail turnover in that neighborhood was faster than the $20 tricks that used to be turned under the Highline before the gentrification. Yet another business owned by one hardworking person to service the needs of other hardworking people, probably closed to make room for a shop hawking thousand-dollar handbags.

He needed another strategy.

He “walked” his little orange bathroom guy down Washington, jotting down the street addresses that appeared at the top of the screen as he passed each of the three storefronts that lined the portion of the street where he’d last spotted Larson. Then he Googled each address to determine the current occupant of the space, wondering whether Larson might have reason to go there early in the morning. The Happy Suds address came back to the designer shoe boutique. He tried not to think about the half a paycheck he’d blown on a pair of those shoes for Jen’s birthday. Three weeks later, she had moved out. He skipped the second address, which he recalled as being papered over, and moved on to the third address. It currently belonged to Pete’s Flowers.

He knew no more than he had yesterday.

He went ahead and entered the address of the abandoned storefront in the middle. It pulled up mentions of two different businesses: a frame shop and a gallery.

He searched for the name of the frame shop and learned that it had moved three months earlier to Chelsea.

And then he typed the gallery name: Highline Gallery.

Interesting. Larson was a man who lied for money. Art held far more promise in that arena than either flowers or high heels.

Even as he hit the enter key, he recalled a headline he’d seen tucked into the back pages of today’s paper. By the time the search results appeared on his screen, he remembered the story of a body found at a gallery that had just opened two days earlier.

He double-clicked on the first news story. Highline Gallery. Plagued by trouble since its initially successful opening. Protesters alleging child pornography. Body of an unidentified male adult found yesterday morning. The contents of the gallery missing. Windows papered over. Gallery manager no stranger to either the limelight or controversy. Former child actress. Daughter of womanizing director Frank Humphrey.

He pulled up a photograph of Alice Humphrey. Red hair. Good-looking. He could picture her with big sunglasses and hot shoes, just like the woman he’d seen enter Larson’s apartment. How had the QuickCar employee described the woman who cruised away in the BMW? “A pretty white girl with long red hair.”

Shit. Hank’s little hobby wasn’t going to remain secret much longer.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

T he city of New York claims more than eight million residents. It is the financial and media capital of the world. Photographs of its iconic skyline are recognizable by children raised in villages on the other side of the globe. And most of the majesty-the power, the deals, the fame-unfolds on the tiny little island of Manhattan. About thirteen miles or so long, north to south. Only 2.3 miles wide at the fattest part of the island.

One might think that a person who had spent nearly her entire life on that tiny little island would have long ago memorized its every last square inch. Certainly Alice had noticed in Missouri that her ex-husband’s hospital colleagues-the ones who’d been born and bred in St. Louis-could rattle off directions to any spot in the region, even the outskirts. But New York was different. In New York, where people walked to their local grocer and newspaper stand, neighborhoods still meant something. To a resident of Chinatown, the Upper East Side might as well be Rhode Island.

Alice had lived in the East Village since graduate school. Her apartment was less than two miles from Centre Street, but she could count the number of times she’d been down here in those eight-plus years on three fingers: once for jury duty, once to accompany her father to a radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show, and once for that ill-fated karaoke party on her thirty-third birthday.

Now, though, she knew she needed legal advice.

“Here we are. Eighty-six Chambers. See how easy it is for the nice taxicab driver when you know the address?”

Alice was tempted to stiff the driver for the snarky remark, but kept her promise, tacking a 25 percent tip onto her credit card tab before dashing through the bitter cold wind to the lobby of Jeff’s building. She hollered at the sight of the closing elevator doors. “Can you hold that?”

Apparently not. She managed to nudge one knee in front of the sensors, absorbing a hard blow before the doors bounced back open. The messenger inside, clad in cycling gear and tattoos, didn’t even bother to look sheepish. As they ticked past the fourth floor, he threw her a glare and she realized she was clicking her nails loudly against the wall behind her.

Too fucking bad, dude.

“Wait. Drew told the property management company that you’re Drew Campbell and you were the one starting the gallery?”

Every square inch of Jeff’s desk had been blanketed by papers and open books when she’d arrived unannounced at his office, but Jeff somehow managed to appear as if he had time only for her.

“Yes. And the police must be buying it. They came to my apartment today and were asking me all these questions. Had I ever used an alias. Whether I ever knew Drew by another name. The cop told me yesterday that they didn’t find Drew’s wallet or anything else with his body. They must not have been able to confirm his identity, so now I’m wondering whether anything the man ever said to me was true. Basically, I have no fucking clue who he actually was, but now the police seem to think that I was the one who started the gallery, and I did it using a fake name.”

“How could they possibly believe that? It’s crazy.”

“Any crazier than a complete stranger offering me a dream job with a rich, anonymous boss?”

“Sounds like it was a con. Maybe he was planning to ask you for money to keep the place afloat but got himself killed before the ask.”

“The ask, huh?”

“The grift. The pigeon drop. The swindle. The scam. I’ve got the lingo, babe.”

“Campbell played me like a fiddle. Coming across as an art expert. Being all self-deprecating about his work, saying his client was one of his dad’s old friends. He even threw in a martini-drinking mother for good measure, the ultimate bonding experience.”

“Let me call these detectives and try to get a read on the situation. Maybe we can get them to see this in another light.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.” She pulled the print out of the digital photo from her purse and unfolded it on his desk.

“Is that-”

“No. It’s not me. He must have found a shot of someone who looked like me and then Photoshopped it onto a picture of him kissing someone else.”

Jeff squinted as if sheer will might bring focus to the grainy picture. “I don’t know, Al. That’s some damn good Photoshopping.”

“He was also pretty good with fake IDs. He gave the property management company a supposed copy of my driver’s license. Looked like the real thing except for the name Drew Campbell.”

“Did you give him a copy of your driver’s license when he hired you? Maybe he just scanned it and changed the name.”

“No, it wasn’t my driver’s license photo. It was cropped from a picture of Ben and me at Christina Marcum’s wedding last summer.”

The bride had been a childhood friend of theirs. Jeff didn’t know her personally but had attended the wedding as Alice’s plus-one, back when they were officially “on.” Alice wasn’t particularly close to Christina, but she loved that photograph of her and her brother.

“Maybe Drew-or whoever he was-hacked your computer?”

“Well, that’s what I was wondering too. But then I remembered something. May I?” She moved to his side of the desk and pulled out the keyboard tray. “Christina’s sister’s the one who took the picture. I only saw it because she posted it on Facebook.”

Alice pulled up her own Facebook profile and clicked on “Photos.”

“See? There it is.” The picture had a clear, straightforward angle of Alice’s face, perfect for clipping as a head shot.

“Is your profile set to private?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Can anyone in the world see it, or do people have to be your friend first?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

He reached for the mouse and gave it a few clicks. “Your entire profile is public, so Drew definitely could have gotten the driver’s license picture here.” He pulled up her Wall posts, showing the messages Alice and her friends had posted to one another over the past few weeks. “Alice, this is insane to have this public. Anyone, anywhere, can read all of this.”

“Who cares? ‘Happy Birthday. Have a good day.’ It’s all a bunch of nonsense. You mean to tell me I should have anticipated that some guy using a fake name would con me into taking a fake job and then use pictures off my Facebook profile to set me up?”

“It’s not just nonsense, Alice. Look, two days ago you posted ‘Wafels & Dinges.’ To you, that’s a bunch of nonsense, but it’s also an announcement to everyone in the world you’re at the Wafels & Dinges truck.”

“I posted it after I was back at the gallery.”

“Okay? Well, how about this one? ‘Fantastic opening at the gallery. Off to celebrate at Gramercy Tavern. Fifteen minutes until martini time.’”

“Please don’t criticize me right now. Wait. Oh, no.”

“What?”

She didn’t pause to ask permission before taking the mouse from him and scrolling farther down her page. She clicked the Older Posts button at the bottom of her wall. “No, no, no, no. I was just assuming that this was all bad luck. That Drew was running a scam and decided that an out-of-work art history major was a pretty good mark. But look: the morning before the gallery opening where I met Drew? Look at my post.”

Phillip Lipton exhibit tonight at Susan Kellermann Gallery. Most underrated artist of late 20th Century.

“You think Drew went there that night looking specifically for you?”

“Can you honestly tell me that I should have any idea what to think right now?”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I t had been four weeks since Alice’s last visit to the Susan Kellermann Gallery. This time, she headed directly to her destination. She no longer had the luxury of a woman who could pause to admire a building’s architectural details.

A man in white painter coveralls carried a ladder into the gallery, followed by an identically clad man hauling a bucket of paint and two rollers. She caught the door for their convenience, then began to step inside behind them.

“Yoo-hoo. Hello there. I’m sorry, but we’re closed. Come back Tuesday night. We’re getting a Jeremy West exhibit ready now. Great stuff.”

From the neck up, the woman at the back of the gallery resembled the gallery owner Alice had seen a handful of times: same tight black bun, same gaunt pale face, same burgundy-stained lips. But today Susan Kellermann wore a black T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and clogs. The dichotomy between her head and body brought to mind Mr. Potato Head.

“I need to ask you a question about the Phillip Lipton opening.”

“I’m afraid I don’t represent Phillip any longer. I think he’s a free agent now, if you want to try to contact him directly.”

“I’m not buying art. I’m looking for one of your customers.”

Kellermann’s attention had turned to a five-foot-diameter ball of twine being manhandled by two of her workers. “Careful. There’s nothing holding that together but a few drops of epoxy. About six inches more in this direction.”

“Please, Miss Kellermann. It’s very important.”

She peered at Alice as if she were a black speck tainting a perfectly tidy white wall, but then something in Alice’s face got her attention. “Pull one string loose, and the two of you will roll that thing all the way back down to Dumbo yourselves, where I’ll allow West to wrap you inside it as performance art. Got it?”

“Ah, yes, that handsome devil from opening night. Rough around the edges, but very charming. Agreed to purchase Carnival One for a client.”

“He hired me for a gallery job, but now it looks like the entire thing was a con.” She didn’t mention the nagging fact that the man was dead. Hopefully Kellermann hadn’t heard enough about yesterday’s murder at a new downtown gallery to start making connections. “I need to track him down. Do you have his payment information? Maybe the address where the canvas was delivered?”

“If only I did. I’m afraid all I have is a name, a disconnected phone number, and one very pissed-off nonagenarian.”

“I take it the sale didn’t go through?”

“I wouldn’t usually mark a piece as sold without a deposit, but he was very persuasive. He said he was acquiring the canvas for a client. Usually, dealers pay up front and then I take the art back as a return if the client isn’t satisfied with the selection. Steven, however-”

“He told you his name was Steven?”

“Yes. Steven Henning.” It was the same name Drew had used with the property management agent in Hoboken. “He told me he was certain the client would defer to his selection but was absolutely headstrong against letting Steven pay for a piece without his first viewing it in person. Supposedly Steven was going to bring the client in the following day but wasn’t willing to risk the piece being sold in the interim, or the client would have his head for needlessly dragging him around the city. And it was all very mysterious: a wealthy man, a serious collector, like someone whose name I’d recognize if only Steven trusted me enough to share it. He made it sound like he was between a rock and a hard place with a very difficult client.”

The story sounded familiar. It was the same shtick he’d handed to Alice.

“Frankly,” Kellermann continued, “having spent several weeks trying to appease Phillip Lipton, I suppose I empathized a bit too much. The art market’s in the crapper right now, so sometimes you’ve got to bend over backward to make the sale. And, what can I say, I have a weakness for a man who looks like George Clooney.”

“But he didn’t return the following day with the mysterious, wealthy client.”

“Oh, no, he most certainly did not. When he hadn’t appeared by late afternoon, I called the number he’d given me. It was a takeout falafel stand, as far as I could make out through the broken English. No art dealers on premises,” she added with a wry smile. “Unfortunately, our talented Mr. Lipton was not particularly understanding. All artists have unrealistic expectations, but I think Phillip really expected this show to be a comeback that would set the art world afire. He was shocked we didn’t sell out at the opening. I, on the other hand, was happy to have sold two pieces in this market, but when I had to notify Phillip that the Carnival One sale had fallen through, he was apoplectic. That wife of his only encourages him. Consider me one more art dealer in that very talented but absolutely insane man’s long path of self-destruction. I have Steven Henning to thank for that. I suppose from that look on your face that I wasn’t the only one to fall for him, hook, line, and sinker?”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

O nly forty miles of road separated Dover, New Jersey, from New York City, but Morhart’s lifetime trips into the city probably still numbered in the single digits. He liked Central Park. The pizza. The lights at Christmas at Rockefeller Center. But, boy, you sure did pay a big price for those experiences. Simply put, this place had too much stuff in too small a space for his tastes. In Dover, you get outside of town and can look at miles of green hills and blue sky. He appreciated the open space. In New York, a person wasn’t in control of his own movement. Cars crept inch by inch around double-parked trucks. Pedestrians gazing up at skyscrapers and down at cell phones collided into each other like bumper cars. The ability to move was what made Morhart feel free.

Now he was one of thousands of other drivers fighting to squeeze through the light at Broadway and Houston. How-stin, they called it, just inviting out-of-towners to make the obvious mispronunciation so they could whisper about stupid tourists. He was tempted to trigger his dash lights to cut through traffic but didn’t want to find himself at odds with the infamously territorial NYPD.

When he heard a voice blasting from a bullhorn, he felt some of the stress leave his hands, still tight on the steering wheel. He couldn’t spot the protesters yet, but they were here.

He had found a 900 number for the Redemption of Christ Church online. The call cost his department a buck, but the prerecorded message had given him a line on George Hardy’s current location: “We came to New York City to tackle the belly of temptation and sin. We started with peddlers of smut and the pornographers of children. Yesterday, we learned that the establishment in question had closed, proving we are on the side of righteousness. Today we will continue our work here in the name of our savior. The slope of sexuality created for our children is a slippery one, and the slide can sometimes begin with the so-called clothing that treats our young girls like objects of sexuality instead of vessels of Christ. We will converge upon Little Angels, a store that markets to our children clothing more suited for street corners than schools, at three p.m. If you are with us-even if you have not met us-if you love your daughters, and follow the word of our one savior, Jesus Christ, please join with us. We will expose Little Angels for the damage its business causes to the lives of young women. And we will continue to spread our message that each Christian is called and chosen in God to be a priest unto God, and to give of his time, strength, and material possessions to the service of the Lord. To donate to this cause, please…”

Morhart did not make a donation, but did jot down the address of the church’s protest du jour.

He recognized the man with the bullhorn as Hardy himself from photographs on the Internet. Based on the patches of clothing barely covering the mannequins in the front window of Little Angels, Morhart had to admit the man had a point. A flash of his badge was enough for Hardy to hand his amplifier to one of his followers.

“Someone from your precinct’s already been around here with some ground rules. We’re following them to the letter, Officer.”

“This isn’t about your protests, Reverend.”

“Is this about the pornographer found dead in that smut palace over yonder? The Meatpacking District, they call it? Might as well call it the fudge-packing district, you ask me. I done already talked to some of yours about that one, too.”

“This is about something else entirely.”

“Well, my word, son. How many of this city’s problems can y’all lay at our feet? Don’t you have about eight million other folks to talk to?”

“I need to talk to you about Becca Stevenson.”

A darkness fell across Hardy’s face. The exaggerated folksiness was gone from his voice when he finally spoke. “Now is that right?”

“Are you really going to force me to play this game, Reverend? I know Becca was your daughter. I know you gave her a cell phone. And I know you established contact with her behind her mother’s back and against her mother’s wishes.”

“Her mother had no business denying a man the right to father his own blood. Her mother had no right to give that girl her own last name, like some bastard child. Her mother-her mother’s a harlot and a liar.”

Joann had already filled Morhart in on the background. When she was twenty-one years old, a few years out of high school in Oklahoma, she had gotten pregnant by an out-of-work married man who started out as a daytime drinking buddy at the local watering hole and had become her lover. Would he offer to leave the wife he’d never managed to impregnate? Offer to pay child support in exchange for her silence? When she told Hardy about the pregnancy, she hadn’t known what to expect.

What she never anticipated, though, was the man’s anger. No, not mere anger. As Joann had conveyed it to him-all these years later-Morhart could tell that she had been exposed to the humiliating scorn and hatred of the first man whom she had trusted and loved. Meeting that man now, Morhart could imagine the words Hardy would have used. Seductress. Beguiler. Trouble. Couldn’t keep your legs shut even with a married man. How do I even know it’s mine with a loose woman like you?

The anger in Hardy’s whisper was fierce. “She told me she killed it. Is there anything worse than that?”

Rather than forever entangle her and her daughter’s lives with Hardy, Joann had tried to create a new life on her own. She saw Hardy one last time before leaving Oklahoma. She told him she had terminated the pregnancy. She said she would no longer continue her relationship with the still-married Hardy. She moved north to Jersey and enrolled in classes at the technical college while working full-time. She assumed that Hardy would go on with his life, with the same enabling wife, the same bar stool, and a new woman to keep him company.

But apparently that hadn’t happened.

“Linda and I were almost fifty when I knew Joann.”

“Joann was young enough to be your daughter.”

“I wasn’t the same man then. I changed. Linda never could give me a child. She blamed it on me. Said I wasn’t good at much of anything, not even spreading my seed. I finally told her I knew she was the one who was barren. I knew I was capable of fathering a child. But that, that woman-I know, I wasn’t kind to her when she came to me with news of the baby. But she killed our child. Murdered it. Or so I thought. I couldn’t get past that. And Linda couldn’t get past the infidelities I eventually confessed once I turned to Jesus Christ for forgiveness.”

Morhart didn’t want to hear Hardy’s self-serving account of the distant past. He didn’t want to understand his side of an ancient story.

“How did you find out about Becca?”

“I went looking for Joann. I wanted her to know that her decision ultimately led me to a path of salvation and redemption. I wanted her to know the love and strength and spiritual maturity that can be found only through the one true God who has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

“So you tracked her down.”

“Nineteen ninety-nine for a person search on the Internet with a full name and date of birth. Joann’s birthday was Saint Patrick’s Day. Easy to remember. Turns out she had a baby girl about six and a half months after she left Oklahoma. I didn’t go to college, but I’m smart enough to add two and two.”

“Why didn’t you go to Joann and ask to have a relationship with your daughter?”

“After what she done, would you ask? Would you beg to enjoy what was yours by both man’s and God’s law? If so, I feel sorry for you as a man.”

“So, what? You just showed up one day and surprised a fifteen-year-old girl? ‘Hi, dear. Daddy’s here’?”

“I e-mailed her, actually. She could have gone to her mother if she’d wanted, of course. Instead, she asked to meet me.”

“I’m sure you tried your best not to disparage the choices her mother made as a younger woman.”

“I laid out the truth. That I was told she was dead. That I was denied any choice for myself about a relationship with her. That her mother lied to both of us. Her mother told her I was a loser and a flake who didn’t want anything to do with either of them.”

Was it a lie if it had been the truth fifteen years earlier? Joann was so proud of what she thought was her close relationship with her daughter. Not just mother and daughter, she had told him: Best friends. Morhart could only imagine the pain Becca would have experienced learning, from the undoubtedly harsh words of this man, that her mother and friend had denied her the full story about her very existence.

“You’re telling me all of this about yourself, sir, but I can’t help but notice you haven’t asked yet why I’m asking so many questions about your daughter.”

“I don’t figure it’s my place to question the authority of a police officer.”

“I didn’t invite you to challenge my authority. I’d think that a father who cared enough about his daughter to track her down halfway across the country might be alarmed when a police officer came around asking questions about her.”

“‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in and adhere to and trust in and rely on God; believe in and adhere to and trust in and rely also on Me.’ John 14:1.”

“What exactly do you mean to say to me, sir?”

Hardy smiled at him as if he were a patient man waiting for a child to tie a shoe. “I no longer try to anticipate obstacles.”

“When was the last time you spoke to Becca?”

“I’m not entirely certain.”

“Take a guess.”

“Maybe a week ago?”

“You met with her?”

“I spoke with her.”

“You suddenly seem very careful about your words, sir. Did you speak with her face-to-face? On the phone? E-mail?”

“By phone.”

“The phone you gave her so Joann wouldn’t know you had forged a relationship with her daughter?”

“Our daughter. That’s right.”

“I assume you’re aware that your daughter has been reported missing.”

Morhart saw the man’s eyes shift up, then left to right, as if he were reading to himself mentally. “I saw the story in the newspaper yesterday.”

“And you didn’t think your recent reemergence was sufficiently relevant to warrant a phone call to the police?”

“I have been in contact with Becca for two months, so your attribution of cause and effect does not strike me as particularly rational. I have been worried about Becca, certainly. I have called her number to no avail. And I have not stopped praying for her. But, no, I did not see how a phone call to the police could help the situation. It would only ensure that her mother would prevent Becca from contacting me once she returns.”

“You sound confident that she’ll return.”

“‘Cast your burden on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never allow the consistently righteous to be moved.’ Psalm 55: 22.”

“And what would the Lord say about the fact that a man was murdered yesterday at a place of business you just happened to be protesting?”

“The police have already questioned me about that. I assured them that my people and I were uninvolved. On the other hand, ‘A man who stiffens his neck after many rebukes will suddenly be destroyed-without remedy.’ Proverbs 29:1.”

“So the man deserved it, is what you’re saying?”

There was that patient smile again.

“One more question before you go back to saving the world, Reverend. Those city police who talked to you about the murder-did you happen to tell them your daughter was missing?”

“I surely don’t see the connection, Detective.”

Back in his truck, Morhart cranked the heater before dialing the NYPD, asking to speak to the detective assigned to the homicide at the Highline Gallery the previous morning. Life definitely was different in the big city. Turns out the case was assigned to two detectives: John Shannon and Willie Danes, out of the Thirteenth Precinct.

“You spent the afternoon with the reverend, huh? He quote you any scripture?”

Willie Danes was a big man with big hands, a big head, and a roll of neck fat above his collar. He was eyeing the half-eaten pastrami sandwich on his desktop, so Morhart knew he should make his visit short.

“I got more preaching on a SoHo sidewalk today than I’ve had the last three Christmases put together.” He reminded Danes again why he had called. “I don’t want to step on any toes, but it seems like when one man’s name comes up in two different criminal investigations, we ought to at least exchange information.”

“Makes sense to me. We looked at Hardy right away. Trouble is, we got a street-level security camera showing Hardy walking into the rathole he’s staying at in Chinatown around ten o’clock Wednesday night and not coming out again until nine the next morning. The ME says our vic died around six or seven a.m. Hardy’s in the clear.”

“I keep coming back to the fact that we’ve got one guy linking my missing girl to your dead body, both events going down within a few days of each other.”

“Some people have shitty luck.”

“I read that Hardy’s church was protesting the gallery over some naked pictures?”

“The stuff seemed pretty tame by today’s standards, but yeah, there was some S &M imagery, things a guy like Hardy would find offensive. It wouldn’t have been much of a story, except Hardy’s people claimed underage models were used in the photographs. A claim like that should have been easy for the gallery to clear up, but all they offered was radio silence. All of a sudden, Hardy’s got a media hit on his hands, then we’ve got a dead body.”

“What age kids?”

“Can’t say for sure it was a kid at all, but postpuberty for sure. The artist’s Web site has been pulled down. Tell you the truth, we can’t even confirm the artist ever existed. Why?”

“Becca, my missing girl? She was getting hassled by some of the popular kids at school recently about some naked pictures of herself.”

“Sexting, huh? I tell you, as the father of two girls, that shit makes me wish I’d had sons. So you’re telling me that your case and my case not only have George Hardy connecting them, but now we’ve got this photograph angle, as well?”

“Plus my understanding is that Hardy didn’t mention having a missing daughter when you all reached out to him about this murder. I mean, your newly found daughter suddenly disappears, wouldn’t you be talking about that to any cop you could? I’m telling you, Hardy was holding something back from me. I hope you trust me on that.”

Danes didn’t know him from a hole in the ground, so Morhart knew he was being summed up when Danes held his gaze. “Fuck. You got some fingerprints from this girl of yours?”

“Becca Stevenson. I sure do.”

“All right. Send ’em to me. We’ll check ’em against the ones we pulled from the gallery. Better send those pictures you were talking about, too. We’ll see if they match up with our so-called art.”

Morhart left the Thirteenth Precinct knowing that his trip into the city hadn’t been wasted.

Ten minutes after Jason Morhart emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, Detective Willie Danes’s phone rang. He swallowed the final bite of his pastrami sandwich before answering. The caller’s name wasn’t familiar, but his voice brightened when she said she was getting back to him from the secretary of state’s office about the incorporation research he had asked for.

“Yes, that’s right. On ITH. The stock is held by a trust, but I was hoping to find a name associated with the original incorporation in 1985.”

“I should probably file a worker’s comp claim for all the dust I inhaled, but I did find the original incorporation papers. I’m afraid all I’ve got for you is the name of the lawyer acting as counsel: Arthur Cronin.”

After thanking the woman profusely, Danes searched online for the law office of Arthur Cronin and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the man was still in practice after all these years. He lifted the receiver to dial, already anticipating the upcoming conversation. Attorney-client privilege. Lawyer’s work product. No information without a subpoena. Whoever had created this company only to turn over its stocks to an untraceable trust did not want to be found.

Still, he was prepared to go through the necessary motions. But another look at the head shot on the law firm’s Web site made him pause after entering only the area code. Arthur Cronin. Something about that name. Something about the face.

He typed “Arthur Cronin” into his search engine and hit enter. Six screens into the search results, he located the article he’d seen just the previous day on this same screen when he’d been gathering background information on Alice Humphrey. It was a puff piece from three years earlier, touting the successful premiere of her father’s film-his last big one, before the commercial flop about the war in Afghanistan. Before the sex scandals. In the photograph accompanying the article, the beaming director was surrounded by four people: his wife, Rose; his son, Ben; his daughter, Alice; and his lifelong friend Arthur Cronin.

Chapter Thirty

“F uck, I feel guilty. I sat here and bitched for fifteen minutes about my craptacular day at work with the Gorilla breathing down my neck. Meanwhile, you’ve spent your entire day in the middle of the Twilight Zone.”

Lily had kicked off her high-heeled shoes and was bent over her legs extended on the sofa, stretching out her hamstrings.

“I don’t know what to do. Jeff told me not to talk to the police anymore without a lawyer, but doesn’t that just make me look guilty?”

“What do I know? Everything I know about law I learned from television.”

“Well, on TV, the cops immediately suspect anyone who lawyers up. But anyone who talks always winds up digging themselves a bigger hole. It’s like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

“I’m still not sure I have my head wrapped around all this. So you think the entire gallery story was a lie?”

“That’s what it looks like. The very first night I met Drew, he supposedly bought a painting for the same mystery client who was opening the gallery, but he used a fake name and never completed the sale. He told the property management company I was Drew Campbell.”

“And what’s ITH?”

“The name of the corporation my supposed boss was using to fund the gallery. Jeff said he’d try digging up some information through state records. The worst part is, I don’t think my involvement was random. Drew faked the purchase of the painting before he even spoke to me, meaning he was already looking to set up this con. Well, what are the odds he just happens to meet someone desperate for a job in the art world?”

“You think he went there specifically to find you.”

“That’s the only way it makes sense. I had posted my plans to go to the exhibition on Facebook. It would have been easy to find me there. He makes sure I see him negotiating the purchase of a canvas, so I’m more likely to buy his crazy story about the anonymous gallery owner.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I don’t know. I can’t find any information about the supposed company behind the gallery. The Hans Schuler Web site has been pulled down. Now I’m not even sure who Drew Campbell really was. He told the property management company and the woman at the gallery where we first met that his name was Steven Henning. I called information, and there’s like seventy listings.”

“Oh, come on, woman. We can do better than that. Hand me your laptop.”

Lily flipped open the screen and typed “Steven Henning” into Google.

“I already tried that, Lily. There’s an accountant and a DJ and some guy who runs a lobster restaurant. I didn’t get anywhere with it.”

“Did you try Facebook? If he was following your profile, maybe he’s on there, too.”

Alice immediately felt stupid for not thinking of the possibility herself.

“Eighty-six results,” she said, watching over Lily’s shoulder.

“And that’s not even counting the Steves. Hold on.” She clicked on a button that read Filter By, then typed “New York” into the Location box.

“How are you so good at this?”

“I’ve cyberstalked every man I’ve met for the past seven years. Shit.” The screen showed no Steven Hennings in New York City.

“Is there some way to try the entire New York area? Jersey? Connecticut?”

“I don’t think so. We’ll just have to check all of them.”

They were about halfway through the search results when Alice’s phone rang. She let it go to her answering machine. “Miss Humphrey. This is Robert Atkinson. I’m a journalist with Empire Media.”

“Oooh, you’re famous,” Lily teased.

“Shhh-” Alice remembered the name of the media outlet. Atkinson had been one of the reporters who had called the gallery the day George Hardy and his Redemption of Christ protesters had shown up in front of the gallery.

“I’d like to talk to you when you have a moment.”

“Maybe I should call him.”

“Are you out of your mind? Didn’t Jeff tell you to keep your pretty mouth shut?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to get my side of the story out there.”

“Except you might piss those cops off even more, and then you’ll be locked into anything that’s in print. Jesus, woman, maybe you do need to watch more TV. Do not call that guy.” Alice didn’t protest when Lily walked to the kitchen and hit the delete button on her answering machine. “There.”

They finished culling through the profiles, searching for a picture resembling Drew Campbell, but it was a waste of time.

“The guy is dead, and I find myself hating him and wanting to kill him myself, and I don’t even know who the fuck he was.” She was screaming by the time she completed the sentence. “Why would someone do this to me? I’m scared, Lily. I’m scared of the police. I’m scared for my life. I’m scared of things I can’t even imagine.”

Alice had never broken down like this in front of Lily, and she could tell her friend did not know how to respond. Lily patted her on the leg before saying they couldn’t give up. “We’re just getting started. We’re two smart, capable, and stubborn women. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

Alice wiped away her tears with the back of her hand and tried to regain control over her breathing as Lily turned her attention back to the laptop. She typed in “Drew Campbell” and hit enter. More than five hundred results. Alice felt herself succumbing to sobs again until Lily narrowed the results to New York City, and a manageable list of profiles appeared.

Her eyes surveyed the pictures, searching for the man who had charmed her. The man whose body she had found just yesterday morning.

But she didn’t see the face of that man on the screen. It was another picture that caught her attention. A photograph of a woman. A face that could not have been more familiar.

She felt Lily’s hand pushing back her own, as if to protect a curious child from a hot stove, but Alice reached the computer and clicked on the name next to the photograph: Drew Campbell.

A page of basic biographical information appeared. Sex: Female. City: New York, New York. Education: Haverford College for undergrad, MFA from NYU. Employer: Highline Gallery.

The profile picture was the same photograph she’d been handed earlier that morning by the property management agent in Hoboken. The photo of Alice at Christina Marcum’s wedding. The picture that had been used to create a fake ID under the name Drew Campbell.

She felt her hand quiver involuntarily as she clicked on the tab marked “Photos.”

The page was filled with photographs from her own life. Times with Jeff. With Ben. With her best girlfriends, Danielle, Anne-Lise, and Maggie. In Paris and Rome when she could afford those kinds of trips. But in every picture, the other people depicted had been cropped out-except in one photograph, which, although familiar, was not from her own life.

It was the photograph the police had sprung on her just that morning-a picture of some other red-haired, Alice-looking woman kissing the man she had known as Drew Campbell. She had known that kiss would destroy everything. It was a kiss she’d never even had.

She’d asked the detectives where they’d found that photograph, and now she knew. The police had discovered this Web site. They also had copies of the lease for the gallery. They believed she had been living as Drew Campbell.

Which would mean she had been lying to them about everything.

Chapter Thirty-One

H ank Beckman felt like a dying man who had planned his own funeral. Much as a man sent to hospice for his last few months could anticipate the fallout of his eventual demise, he had known that the death of Travis Larson-and his firsthand surveillance of Larson’s final days-would bring certain unavoidable consequences.

To manage those consequences, Hank needed to maneuver around three unalterable truths. The first of those truths? He would share his knowledge with the New York Police Department. That decision was beyond choice. He was not the kind of man who would place his own stature before the investigation of a murder-even if the vic was a scumbag like Larson, and even if the disclosure cost him his pension.

The second truth was that the world of law enforcement was a sprawling and inefficient bureaucracy when one needed it to be streamlined, and yet remarkably insular and incestuous when one might prefer the impersonal. Once he came forward to the NYPD, word of his extracurricular surveillance activities would migrate back to the bureau like a freshly hatched salmon to sea.

The third truth was that Hank was a man who took lumps when they were due. No weaseling, no matter the costs.

Add up one, two, and three, and Hank’s decision was preordained. He waited patiently for his SAC to finish up his face time with the field office’s Citizens’ Academy. Like most special agents in charge, Tom Overton enjoyed the mythology of the bureau. John Dillinger. Baby Face Nelson. Ma Barker. Taking on the Gambino crime family and Sonny Barger’s Hell’s Angels under RICO. Newly expanded powers under the Patriot Act. In some circles, a bureau man was thought to be a stuffed suit with a stick up his ass, but the novice writers, true-crime junkies, and curious retirees who filled out the Citizens’ Academy arrived at the field office with eager questions and appreciative eyes and ears. Overton returned to his office with a skip in his step and a smile on his face.

Until he spotted Hank waiting for him.

Hank got directly to the point. He knew he was supposed to leave Larson alone. It had been two months since he’d been reprimanded for his communication with the man who had “taken up” with his sister, as Overton worded it at the time. Two months since he’d been told he was lucky Larson hadn’t sued both him and the bureau for false accusations and harassment. Two months since Overton himself persuaded Larson not to file charges after Hank had thrown the first punch.

“I didn’t keep my word, sir. I’ll hand you my resignation today if that’s what you want, but what matters is that I step up to the NYPD with what I have.”

“Not this again, Beckman. The guy’s a low-level con man, I grant you that. But it’s only because of your sister that you want the bureau-”

“It’s nothing like that this time, Tom.” Beckman’s use of Overton’s first name might have been a first between the two men. “Larson’s dead. And I was watching him not long before he got popped.”

Overton stared at him for a full thirty seconds before speaking. “Should I even ask whether you had something to do with this? Do we need to get you representation?”

If Hank had more sense, he probably would get himself a lawyer. Instead, he assured Overton he had nothing more to hide but would need to take the rest of the day as personal time so he could pay a visit to the detectives handling Larson’s murder investigation.

Police precincts have a rhythm and a grit and a smell that mark them as a unique culture, so different from the sterile bureau field offices that could be mistaken for any office park in the country. Hank had worked enough joint task force operations to read the energy of an NYPD precinct. The second he stepped inside the homicide squad, he knew a case was hot. Detectives out of their desks. Moving a little more quickly than usual. Sheets of paper changing hands. And when the civilian aide at the front desk pointed him to an interrogation room down the hall, he knew the bustling was related to the Travis Larson case.

The detectives handling the case had covered every inch of a rolling whiteboard with scrawled notations in four different colors of ink. The small table in the center of the room was layered with documents and photographs. Piles of paper were beginning to accumulate on the floor.

An attractive blonde passed him in the narrow hallway. He was embarrassed when she caught his gaze moving to the detective shield hanging from a chain inside her tailored shirt. He was relieved when she threw him an amused smile instead of a faceful of the coffee she held in one hand.

“Let me guess: Feds?”

“Bureau.”

“For Shannon and Danes?”

“That’s what I’m told.”

“Oh, yeah. They’re gonna love that.”

Hank suspected the detectives actually would love what he had to say. He understood the whole local-versus-feds tension. Truth be told, he wasn’t certain he was always on the right side of it. Cops worked more cases in less time and with fewer resources. When the feds showed up, it was usually to cherry-pick the high-profile slam-dunks. But this time, a federal enforcement officer was walking into their yard with his tail between his legs. They’d love it, all right.

All it took was an introduction for the toothpick chewer to shepherd him out of view of the war room. “Let’s have a word next door. You’ll be more comfortable.”

The man introduced himself as Willie Danes. Hank didn’t bother holding anything back.

“I doubt the details matter, but I have what you might call a grudge against Travis Larson. I’ve been keeping an eye on him here and there ever since, and thought I should let you know in case anything I saw might be helpful to your investigation.”

“Travis Larson, huh?”

“My understanding is you’re one of the lead detectives. The body you caught at that gallery on Washington Street?”

“Sure. Travis Larson.”

“I take it you didn’t have an ID yet?”

“I didn’t-”

“Look, man. I’m not sweating you. The guy was good at running a scam. He dated my sister for five months under a fake name, and she wasn’t a stupid woman. Was he using a false identity?”

Danes’s gaze moved to the hallway as if he was considering running the conversation past a partner, but something in Hank’s face must have told him that for once a federal agent had come here with no agenda. “We had zero ID. No wallet. Cell phone came back to a throwaway. Even his prints were a dead end. You’re telling me this guy’s never been popped?”

“I hooked him up for an attempted fraud on my sister. Unfortunately, that decision happened to occur immediately after he said some choice words about her, and then I punched him in the side of the head.”

“Jesus. Remind me not to fuck over your sister.”

“Ellen’s dead. She ran her car into the side of a triple-trailer on what was supposed to be her wedding day.”

“Then I’d say Larson was lucky you only punched him in the head.”

“That’s not how his lawyer saw it. Or the bureau. He threatened to press charges. Started the paperwork for a civil suit. He got an apology, and all record of the arrest was purged, including his booking photo and prints. That’s why you didn’t get a match.”

“You’ve got an address on him?”

Hank handed him his business card from his lapel pocket, Larson’s address already printed on the backside. He also handed him six typewritten pages of notes summarizing his recent surveillance. It wasn’t until he watched Danes flip through the pages that he fully realized the drive-bys were really over now. No more staring at the ceiling at night, wondering whether Larson was courting another well-to-do woman. Whether he was enjoying his life. Whether he ever paused to remember Ellen.

Hank was grateful for his death.

“You saw him in the gray BMW, huh?”

“Stolen from QuickCar last month. It’s all there.”

“That, we knew. Found it three blocks south of the gallery, unlocked, keys in the ignition. Someone wanted it stolen.”

“Last I saw it, Larson had parked directly across the street from the gallery. And he locked it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I had to use a slim jim to break into it.”

Danes chuckled, then started from the top, asking first about Hank’s general knowledge of Travis Larson, then building a timeline based on his recent surveillance.

“You said you saw the redhead at Larson’s home?”

“That’s right. She either took the train or lives nearby, because she arrived on foot.”

“Hold on a second.” When Danes returned, he handed Hank a cup of coffee. Hank drank it even though it was bitter. Danes slipped two photographs onto the table. “Is that the lady?”

It wasn’t the way they’d handle an ID at the bureau. Always better to use a six-pack. Multiple choices to make sure the witness isn’t just rubber-stamping. One at a time was preferable to all at once. Hank took a moment to consider the images. The first was the kind of blurry that came with resizing low-resolution digital images. It looked like Larson kissing the woman he’d seen at the Newark apartment complex. Same orangey blond hair. Even the same piercing blue coat. The second photograph was a clearer shot of the woman’s face. He recognized the photograph as one he had seen online of the gallery manager. Frank Humphrey’s daughter. What was her name? Alice.

“Yeah, that’s her.”

“Did you ever see Larson with anyone else? Maybe a younger girl? High school age?”

Hank shook his head.

“How about religious involvement? Any church groups or the like?”

“If Travis Larson was going to church, it would be to steal from the collection plate. Why do you ask?”

“Just some angles we’re working. I think we’ve got what we need from you for now. Thanks for coming forward. I hope you’re not in too deep a hole with the bureau.”

“You sure that’s it? Because, trust me, I probably know more about Travis Larson than his own mother, if he even has one. He’s the kind of guy who’s forging checks while peddling fake concert tickets and smurfing Sudafed for meth dealers, all while he’s looking for a woman to pay his bills. I wouldn’t be surprised if a hundred people out there wanted him dead.”

Still, Danes did not voice the obvious follow-up.

Hank felt uneasy as he followed Danes down the hallway, past the interrogation room lined with evidence pertaining to Larson’s murder. Hank had come here expecting a different kind of conversation. By his own statements, he had placed himself on the street outside that gallery immediately before Larson’s death. By his own statements, he had a motive to kill the man. By his own statements, he had stalked him for the last week. He had served himself up as a suspect on a silver platter, and Danes hadn’t taken even a single nibble.

Danes struck him as a good man. He was probably a well-intentioned cop. But Hank had seen this before. Those detectives had not even identified their victim until he did it for them, and yet they had already made up their minds about who killed him. They didn’t want to know anything different at this point. They’d slot the rest of the evidence where they could to fit the story they had already written.

He threw his half-full cup of coffee in the garbage on the way out.

Chapter Thirty-Two

T here was a time when the Upper East Side was Alice’s front and back yard. The townhouse on Seventy-second Street. Shopping on Madison Avenue. Burgers at P.J. Clarke’s. Saturday-morning tea with her mother in the trustees’ dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In retrospect, she realized how odd it was that her lefty lib parents opted for a neighborhood where residents were occasionally wistful for the other side of the park’s devil-may-care stance on blue jeans. But the Upper East Side was home to almost all the exclusive girls’ schools, and her mother had always valued Alice’s convenience over Ben’s. Her father had never seen this part of the city as his home, but he would have deferred to her mother, since he basically lived at their country home in Bedford when he wasn’t in L.A. or away on location.

Today, though, he had come into the city especially to see Alice, and he had insisted that she make herself available. She rang the doorbell and then followed the assistant she remembered as Mabel into the front parlor. Mabel was fiftyish and professional, and she looked like a Mabel. She’d appeared in place of the younger, more attractive assistant last year, just after the big blowup. The woman who’d looked like a younger Rose Sampson was out, and Mabel was in.

“Sort of silly to ring the doorbell at your own childhood home, isn’t it?” Her father wore a bulky gray cardigan. She smelled fresh cedar and soap when he leaned in to kiss her cheek.

“It’s a bit presumptuous for a grown woman to walk into her parents’ house without knocking.”

“Touché. I don’t have to tell you to take a seat, do I?”

She took her usual place on a mid-century recliner and waved off Mabel’s gesture toward an aperitif from the bar cart. She knew she had been summoned here for a reason, so wasted no time laying out the abbreviated version of the still-unfathomable events that had landed her and her former employer on the crime pages of the Daily News: “Murder on the Highline.”

“You say this like it’s nothing, Alice. As if this were yet another little cycle in your life-getting married, that move to St. Louis, returning home, the MFA, finding a dead body at what turned out to be a nonexistent job. Where is the shock? Where is the fear?”

“You have no right to tell me how to act. I am not one of your starlets for you to direct. Trust me, I feel fear and shock and terror and fury. I feel it so much that I’m numb.”

“Yet you still can’t call us for help. I practically had to beg you to come here and tell me what is happening. You want to punish me so badly that you’ll punish yourself in the process.”

“If I thought you could help, I would have asked you. This isn’t late rent or a job interview. Money or a phone call isn’t going to make this go away.”

“So you think that’s the only way I know how to help? By handing you money or throwing Hollywood names around?”

“No, Papa, that’s not what I meant. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“We always worry about you, baby girl.”

He had called her that as long as she could remember. There had been times as a teenager when the sound of it made her cringe, but she had to admit she liked hearing the term of endearment now. She liked being here in this familiar room. In this particular chair. She wanted to close her eyes and believe her father could make everything all right.

“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

I t 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 was 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

“N ow 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 through 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.”

“ITH. Didn’t your father win an Academy Award for a film called In the Heavens?”

These questions were taking them into subject areas she never imagined. She knew Danes was wrong. Her father wouldn’t start a business and hire a man to draw her into it, just to force his help upon her. Would he? And even if he would, how did that explain Drew’s death? Or these questions about a missing girl in Jersey?

“I’m sorry, Detective. I don’t think I can help you any more.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I don’t want to talk to you any more outside the presence of counsel.” She pictured Jeff, and then heard her father’s voice once again. It’s not about book smarts. It’s about stature. It’s about the ability to read a situation. To know what to say and how and when to say it. “My lawyer’s name is Arthur Cronin. Please call him if you need to discuss anything further with me.”

“Cronin, huh? That’s with a C, right?”

She had already thrown back two fingers of scotch when the phone rang. She let it go to her machine. “Miss Humphrey. It’s Robert Atkinson again, with Empire Media? I’d really like to talk to you-”

She picked up the phone and screamed over the screech of her machine. “Please stop calling me. I don’t want to talk to you. If you call my home again, I’ll seek a restraining order.”

She slammed the phone back onto the cradle as her cell phone began to chime. She was tempted to hurl it across the apartment, but checked the screen to see it was Jeff.

“Hi.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I finally filled my dad in on everything, then went to Bikram. I’m a little wiped out, is all.” She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone yet about Danes’s theory of her father’s involvement.

“I did some digging around with the corporate filings for ITH. I still don’t have an actual person who’s pulling the strings, but I did manage to get the name of the attorney who handled the incorporation.”

“That’s good, right?” She felt the panic beginning to subside. ITH could mean anything. Her father had made seventeen films in his career. The matchup of the letters was just a coincidence.

“Hopefully. The papers were filed in 1985, which I guess would make sense if this is an older guy who’s been using this corporation for other projects over the years. I thought I’d give the lawyer a call and see if I can get some basic information as a professional courtesy. His name’s Arthur Cronin. His office was closed for the day, but I’ll give him a ring first thing in the morning.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

A lice tried to make herself small inside the tiny alcove at the entrance of her brother’s apartment building. In that day’s street-shopping session with Lily, she’d finally replaced her missing gloves. She’d even purchased a fake fur hat while she was at it, but no amount of bundling was sufficient to protect her from the Icelandic winds pouring up Mott.

Unlike her rental in the East Village, Ben’s Nolita apartment was a condo, purchased in her parents’ names at the top of the market about five years earlier. It had eleven-foot ceilings and thirteen hundred unencumbered, lofted square feet. He paid utilities and maintenance. Supposedly.

She pressed her index finger against the buzzer for the fifth floor, this time holding it down for a complete four seconds before breaking into a staccato rhythm of “ah, ah, ah, ah, staying alive, staying alive.”

A pack of four girls stumbling up the street in platform wedges and miniskirts barely attempted to mask their giggles. “Sometimes he’s just not that into you,” one of them said, giggling, after they had passed.

“Gross! He’s my idiot brother, not that it’s your business. And put some frickin’ clothes on. It’s fifteen degrees out. You look ridiculous.”

More giggles. Jesus, she was turning into one of those crazy old New York women who yell at strangers on the street. She leaned on Ben’s buzzer again until she heard his voice over the intercom.

“I told you, just a second, okay? I was in the shower.”

She had tried calling her father as soon as Jeff had dropped the bombshell about Arthur Cronin filing the incorporation papers for ITH. Jeff wasn’t familiar with the attorney’s name, but Alice certainly was. The phone at her parents’ townhouse rang for two straight minutes without an answer, and her father’s cell went directly to voice mail. When she tried the house in Bedford, her mother said her father had flown to Miami to scout locations for his next film.

Alice got the impression that her mother still didn’t know about Drew Campbell’s murder or its aftermath. She had never followed current events that were not related to culture or entertainment, and apparently her husband hadn’t felt the need to fill her in on her daughter’s current crisis. Alice had said nothing to change the situation, simply asking her mother whether she knew about a corporation her father might have used called ITH. Her mother did not, but said she would try to ask her father about it.

In the meantime, Alice had questions for Ben.

She gave a perfunctory tap before opening his unlocked door. She found him in the living room fully clothed. His hair was dry. The apartment was not particularly tidy. He had some reason for keeping her waiting in the cold. She looked into his face, searching for signs of drug use, but she’d never been good at detecting such things. Or maybe he’d always been good at hiding them.

“I need to ask you something, Ben, and I need you to be totally honest with me. Do you know anything about ITH Corporation? Specifically, I mean any connection between it and Dad.” She told him what she had learned from Jeff about Arthur Cronin being the attorney who filed the initial documents for incorporation. “The police must also know about Art’s involvement, because they were asking me whether Dad might be connected to the gallery.”

Ben shook his head. “I told you, Alice, I don’t know anything about it.”

“But you acted weird the other night when I mentioned the company, and now it turns out Art was involved.”

“I wasn’t acting weird. God, not this again. What would Dad have to do with that gallery anyway?”

“I have no idea. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’m starting to wonder whether there’s anything our father isn’t capable of.”

“Jesus, Alice. It’s been a year. Mom’s not going anywhere. She seems fine with him. You’ve got to start forgiving him, too. Lighten up.”

“I thought you said my independence was contagious. You didn’t even call them when you got busted, and now you’re defending them?”

“I didn’t call them because I don’t want them to freak out and worry.”

She plopped herself down on his oversize sectional sofa and threw her feet onto the ottoman. “It doesn’t piss you off that he spent all those years telling us to ignore tabloid lies? It was all true, Ben. All those years. All those women. It’s embarrassing.”

“Of course I’m pissed. And, yeah, that’s part of why I’m not really down with them right now either. But with me, it’s temporary. So the man’s not perfect. He loves Mom. He loves us. He’s just-you know, he’s fucked up and has his baggage, like everyone else. Did it ever dawn on you that maybe he and Mom had an understanding?”

“Oh, gross.”

“Don’t be so provincial, as they’d likely say. They’ve always been a little weird.”

They both knew that her parents’ nontraditional approach to marriage had rubbed off more on Ben than on her. She’d been so eager to have a stable, regular marriage that she had dashed down the aisle with someone who proved to be entirely wrong for her. Ben, on the other hand, had been engaged twice to two wonderful women, who both eventually left when they realized he would never be able to live his life around anyone but himself.

“I’m sorry. I’m not ready to forgive him.”

“Will you ever be?”

“I don’t know. Why are we talking about this?”

“Sorry. I guess I want to see things back to normal with you guys. You’ve always been able to be my sister, even when I was sticking anything I could find in my arm. I wish you’d show the same tolerance with Dad.”

“I can tell you one thing: if it turns out he had anything to do with this gallery and kept it from me, even after all that has happened, I’m done with him. I will never talk to him again.”

“Well, hopefully that won’t be the case, then.”

She pushed her fingers through her hair. “Fuck, if the police know about Arthur they might try to ask Dad about ITH. I can only imagine how that conversation will go. Remember that time the police came to our house after that belated birthday party you decided to throw for yourself?”

“I’m surprised you remember that.”

How could she forget the one time police officers had been called to their home?

It was a Sunday afternoon. Before the drive back into the city, she had been finishing a project for her sixth-grade civics class-a five-minute oral autobiography delivered in the role of the first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. Her father had knocked on her bedroom door. Two police officers in uniforms stood behind him. She remembered her father looking nervous, but in retrospect, she had probably projected her own reaction onto him. Apologetic for disturbing her, he made a point of telling the officers they were disrupting his daughter’s schoolwork.

She remembered feeling small as she followed them to her father’s private study. She remembered running her fingers across the nap of his new red velvet sofa-push it one way and it’s shiny, then the other way for dull.

“Alice, these policemen have some questions about a gathering your brother had Friday night? Remember we were watching your movie until midnight? They just need to ask you about that.”

Ben had a way of telling his parents he was “inviting a few friends over,” only to wind up hosting a kegger in the backyard. This particular night was precisely one week after Ben’s sixteenth birthday. Ben had wanted to celebrate the actual date with his school friends in Manhattan, but that didn’t stop him from taking a second bite of the apple in Bedford a week later. By then, Ben was nearly an adult in her parents’ eyes. They thought of themselves as too freewheeling to interfere.

The party had proven to be a doozie. Ben would tell her later that one girl got so drunk her parents sent her away to an all-girls boarding school.

It seemed like the police officers’ questions went on forever. How many people were at the party? Could she name any of them? Did she hear or see anything unusual? Where were her parents? She ran her fingers back and forth over that red velvet-shiny then dull, shiny then dull.

She remembered wanting to protect her parents. She remembered hating her brother for putting them in a position of having to answer questions from police officers. She remembered wishing that her father’s friend, Arthur, was still there, but he had already left for the city.

Were her parents going to have to go away with these men because of Ben and his stupid underage drinking parties? All she could do was tell the truth: her mother had gone to bed early, and her father hadn’t paid the party any mind. He’d been in their screening room with her, watching an advance copy of The Goonies. He hadn’t really been watching it, of course. He’d been sneaking glimpses at scripts in the dim glow of a flashlight until he had a few too many scotches and fell asleep, but she didn’t see any point in adding that detail.

Her parents were the kind of people who dined with liberal senators and raised funds for elected officials, but who held in contempt the people who actually carried out the work of government. People like her parents saw police as security guards for people with “those kinds” of problems. She remembered that day because it was the day she learned that police officers-whom children naturally saw as helpers and heroes-were, to men like her father, unfit to intrude upon the private affairs of a family like theirs, unqualified to disrupt even a sixth-grade homework assignment. She would witness that attitude in her father several more times over the next fifteen-plus years, every time Ben had one of his scrapes with the law. He’d rail against the war on drugs. He’d demonize the nation’s irrational emphasis upon retribution over rehabilitation. But he’d never blame Ben for blowing so many second chances.

She didn’t want to think about how her father would respond if Willie Danes and John Shannon showed up at his doorstep unannounced, as they had with her.

Ben walked her to the door and gave her an awkward hug. “Try not to get ahead of yourself on this ITH stuff. Arthur represents thousands of clients at that huge firm, and that was like twenty-something years ago anyway. It’s probably just a coincidence. Hang tight, and I’m sure the police will figure this out.”

As she made her way to the 6 train, she passed the location of what used to be her favorite bar, Double Happiness. It seemed like only yesterday that she and her girlfriends were downing ginger martinis in the basement-level hangout-getting ejected once when her friend Danielle broke not one, but two, cocktail glasses-but she realized it had been closed now for almost five years. Terrific. First she was yelling at the group of hot party girls on the street. Now she was pining for the better-than-today places that used to be. Why didn’t she go ahead and adopt a dozen cats to seal her grumpy-lady fate?

She was just about to swipe her MetroCard through the turnstile when something about her conversation with Ben began to nag at her. The man behind her rammed into her when she failed to follow the usual rhythm of the subway system.

“Sorry.”

“You going or what, lady?”

She stepped out of his way, not wanting to board the train until she figured out what was bothering her. Something related to what Ben said about Cronin. What was it that he had said? That Art had a lot of clients, and it was a long time ago.

But she had never said anything to Ben about ITH being incorporated twenty-five years earlier. She nearly slipped on ice patches three different times as she ran back to his apartment. Despite five minutes of buzzing, no one answered.

Chapter Thirty-Six

H ank Beckman popped his third Advil in as many hours. He felt his eyes beginning to cross from the strain of reading entries on bank statements and deposit slips.

“Okay, Mrs. Ross. If we’ve identified every transaction at issue”-he punched a series of numbers into the calculator-“it looks like you transferred a total of $410,525.62 to Coulton since 2007. You withdrew only $35,000, leaving you with a loss of $375,525.62. Our charges against Coulton will reflect as much, and you might be needed to testify about the transactions and your communications with Coulton should the case proceed to trial.”

“What about the money? When will I get the money back?” Marlene Ross was a well-maintained woman with smooth skin and immobile hair. Had it not been for access to her official date of birth, he would have placed her a decade younger than her sixty-six years. She had tastefully applied whatever fragrance had created the subtle sweetness he smelled whenever she leaned toward him.

The U.S. Attorney was on the verge of indicting Richard Coulton in what would have been the office’s largest Ponzi scheme if Bernie Madoff had not blown that record out of the water a couple years back. “We’ll go after his assets, but there’s no guarantee, of course, of obtaining a complete recovery. The very nature of a Ponzi scheme is that Coulton used the money you gave him to cover promises he made to clients he enlisted years earlier.”

“So are you telling me that if you had just minded your own business and left him to his own devices, he would have received investment money from some other person in order to pay me back? He promised me a thirty percent return.”

The newspapers made it sound like the swindlers who engaged in pyramid schemes were taking food from the mouths of gullible investors, but Hank had found it difficult to sympathize with some of the entitled people who were supposedly Coulton’s victims.

He walked Mrs. Ross from the conference room. As she passed him, he noticed the ease with which she walked to the elevator in her six-inch heels, the designer red soles unscratched despite her claims that Coulton had left her “with nothing.”

Back at his desk, he Googled “Highline Gallery,” “Travis Larson,” and “Alice Humphrey,” as he had been doing obsessively since he divulged everything he knew to NYPD detective Willie Danes. No new information. He had seen the boxes of documents in the war room at the precinct. He had felt the energy and momentum of that investigation.

The police had a theory. He was certain of it. They had a suspect, that much had been obvious from their conversation. But three days had passed without an arrest. Probably some prosecutor had concluded that they lacked sufficient evidence for a trial, so now they were in that familiar holding pattern. He’d heard all the metaphors before: getting their ducks in a row; holding their cards close; letting the suspect wiggle free like a fish, careful not to try to grab it too early. Waiting for the media frenzy to die down. Waiting for another piece of the puzzle to fall into place. Waiting for the suspect to make a mistake. Waiting. Waiting.

He couldn’t wait any longer. For seven months, since Ellen died, he had thought about Travis Larson every single day. Now the man was dead, and Hank-for reasons he could not identify-felt like he had seen something that would somehow prove relevant. He hated being locked on the outside, left scouring the Internet for clues like one of those housebound true-crime crazies who routinely called the bureau with so-called tips gleaned from online surfing.

He kept recalling moments from the last days of Larson’s life, replaying mental videotapes from his periods of surveillance, wondering if he had overlooked the significance of something he had witnessed.

He also had an uneasy feeling about the identification process Danes had used to get him to name Alice Humphrey as the redhead he’d seen at Larson’s apartment. Last year, a federal court had released a man named Anthony James Adams after DNA evidence cleared him of raping a nurse working the night shift at St. Vincent’s Hospital thirteen years earlier. Hank had been the FBI agent in charge. He’d shown the victim a six-pack of photos, and after a minute of careful study, she’d identified Adams as the perpetrator. It would be more than another decade before a different man, Teddy Jackson, would tell his cellmate that he raped a nurse at a New York City hospital in 1997 and got away with it when another man took the rap. More sophisticated DNA analysis, unavailable during the original investigation, led to Adams’s release.

Hank never wanted to be part of a wrongful conviction. He still woke up some nights thinking about Anthony James, and wondering what kind of life he might have had if things had been different. Hank liked to think that he had at least learned something from the experience. What he learned was that human memory was fragile. An expert in eyewitness testimony had explained to him why the nurse had erred in her identification: when Hank handed her a single piece of paper depicting the faces of six men, she had asked herself which of the six men looked the most like her attacker. Poor Anthony James looked more like Teddy Jackson than the others. From that day forward, the nurse simply continued to identify him-not because she remembered him from the attack, but because she remembered him as the man she had already picked out of the six-pack. The expert had shown him videotapes of subjects in her laboratory who, after choosing the wrong suspect in a lineup, would continue to identify that person even when given a choice between him and the actual perpetrator.

Hank prided himself on his ability to pull up images from his past as clearly as if he were examining a color photograph, but he realized that the clarity of an image and its accuracy were two different things.

When Willie Danes asked him about the woman he’d seen at Larson’s apartment, he had handed him two photographs: one of a redhead kissing Larson, and one Hank knew to be Alice Humphrey. Hank realized now that he had simply assumed that the same woman was in both photographs. And the two images looked enough like each other and enough like the woman at Larson’s apartment that he had made the ID. But if the identification process had been perfect-if Hank had not already seen photographs of Alice Humphrey on the Internet, and if Danes had shown Hank a series of photographs of red-haired women to examine sequentially-would he have picked out Alice Humphrey as the woman from Larson’s apartment? He could never be absolutely certain, but he found himself doubting his own memory.

And that’s why he kept searching for news updates. He wanted to know the police had more evidence pointing to Alice Humphrey’s involvement in Larson’s death. He wanted to be certain he had gotten it right when he’d made the ID.

For what had to be the fifteenth time in the last three days, he entered her name in Google Images. He was trying to be certain she was the same woman from the apartment complex, but he knew he’d seen so many pictures of her by now that he had simply cut and pasted her face on those remembered images that he kept replaying in his mind’s eye.

If only he could see her in person, watch her walk down Larson’s street in that bright blue coat and sexy shoes. Watch her arms barely move as she took the stairs. See the tilt of her head when she looked into a man’s face. Maybe if he were in the same room with her, he would know.

And then he realized he might be able to get a moving image of her, right here from his cubicle.

He opened YouTube on his computer and searched for Alice Humphrey. Nothing. Searched for Highline Gallery. Nothing. Then he searched for Frank Humphrey.

He found thousands of results. Many of them were illegally uploaded-iconic scenes from his copyrighted films. There were also reels from Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight, and TMZ about the many mistresses who had stepped forward last year, one at a time in a slow, painful drip of tawdriness. There was the director’s exclusive sit-down interview with Katie Couric. Hank usually tried to block out celebrity gossip, but even he had been exposed to some of the ubiquitous sound bites: I understand other people with more traditional lifestyles may not understand; This is a private matter between Rose and me; None of this affects my work as an artist; I want to be evaluated based on my filmmaking. The interview was labeled a “trainwreck”-a patronizing non-apology from an arrogant old man.

Hank clicked through the videos, searching for images of Humphrey with his family, until he finally found a screen capture of Humphrey, hand in hand with his daughter. It was footage of him leaving the premiere of The Burn Wall, his last film before the scandal. By all accounts, it was a good movie, but a commercial flop due to the public’s lack of interest in the story of a soldier serving in Afghanistan.

Alice’s eyes darted around the glare of the flashbulbs while her father delivered the obligatory words of gratitude toward his actors and producers. As they left the red carpet, Alice looked down at her feet, delivering one awkward wave to the crowd before stepping into an awaiting limousine.

He rewound the reel, examining the woman’s face, trying to re-create the appearance of the woman he’d seen with Larson. Her hair was pulled into a low ponytail at the nape of her neck, but a woman’s hairstyle could change twenty times in two years. She appeared to be about the same height and weight. The woman with Larson had struck him as younger, but he had seen her from a distance, and those big sunglasses and bangs over her eyebrows would have covered the small lines on her forehead and around her eyes, the only betrayals of Alice Humphrey’s age.

He rewound the clip again, knowing that something about the video was bothering him.

It wasn’t her face. It was the walk. Just like Mrs. Ross gliding into the elevator, every person had a distinctive gait. When Alice Humphrey followed her father on the red carpet, she looked down at her feet, watching each placement of her feet onto the ground. Her shoes had heels, but they were three inches max-modest as far as those things went for women these days. The way she stepped-flat-footed, cautious, in tiny baby steps-reminded him of Ellen practicing in her first pair of Manolo Blahniks, or whatever those things were called.

This was not the walk of the woman outside Larson’s apartment. What had initially caught his attention had been that walk-that catlike prance up the street, eyes ahead, back straight, chest forward, nearly marching in those black stiletto pumps. It had been nearly two years since that film premiere. Maybe practice had made perfect for the once hesitant Miss Humphrey.

But maybe not.

He picked up the phone and asked for Detective Willie Danes.

“I hate to bother you, Detective, but I may have been a little too quick to call the ID on Alice Humphrey.” He explained the discrepancy between the woman he’d seen and the videotape of Humphrey on YouTube.

“You’re saying you saw Travis Larson with a knockout beauty of a redhead at his apartment, wearing a stunning peacock blue coat. And then his body gets found by, lo and behold, a knockout beauty of a redhead in the very same peacock blue coat, but it’s not the same woman? And you’re basing this on a pair of shoes the girl wore two years ago?”

“I’m not saying it’s a different woman. All I’m saying is I can’t be a hundred percent sure that it’s the same woman. Not based on what I saw.”

“Well, it’s a good thing the NYPD doesn’t operate on the same definition of a hundred percent as the FBI.”

It wasn’t the first time Hank had been ribbed by a local cop about the federal government having the luxury of demanding more evidence, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Can you just be sure and check out Humphrey’s shoes? It’s not every woman out there who can pull off the monsters Larson’s girl was wearing.”

“Do I look like Prince Charming? Chasing down Cinderella with the glass slipper? Tell you what, Beckman: we don’t even need your ID at this point, so don’t worry your head about it, all right?”

“Well, you can’t have that much. I see you haven’t made an arrest yet.”

“I don’t know you, Beckman, so I don’t know how to say this to you, but your sister’s dead. You couldn’t save her, and the asshole you blamed for that is dead now, too. See a shrink or find something else to obsess about. I don’t really care, but your involvement in this case is over.”

The click on the other end of the line was like a punch in the throat.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I t was Alice’s second trip to the Upper East Side, and the weekend wasn’t even over. This time her mother answered the door herself, greeting her with a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Hey, Mom. I thought you were in Bedford.”

“Well, I was, but Arthur has a table tonight at some fund-raiser for one civil right or another. I thought it would be a good excuse to put on a fancy gown and eat dessert.”

“Dad’s going with you?” She had called in advance to make sure he had returned from yesterday’s location-scouting trip to Miami.

“I’m afraid not. He’s packing a bag now to head out to Los Angeles. I told Arthur I’d be representing the family tonight. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve already had a little martini to get me started. Would you like one?”

“No, thanks.” Based on her mother’s tolerance and extraordinary chipperness, Alice suspected she’d had more than one warm-up drink. She’d always found it strange that her mother continued an open affair with alcohol despite her husband’s decision twenty-five years earlier to go dry, but there was no shortage of things she did not understand about her parents’ marriage.

“How are things at the gallery?” Her mother looked at her watch. “Shouldn’t you be there?”

“It’s taken care of for now.”

She felt guilty for not telling her what was happening, but Alice’s mother had spent her entire life sending out signals that she did not want to be troubled by disturbing news. Maybe in a different marriage, with different hardships, she would have developed into a more complex woman. Certainly the promising actress who had won an Academy Award for her depiction of a promiscuous young widow had shown early signs of emotional depth. But at some point in her life, Rose Sampson Humphrey had accepted a permanent role as happy Hollywood wife, standing quietly and supportively by her talented husband and perfect children, always grateful for the family’s good fortune.

Even when Ben was turning into a full-out junkie, she’d allow herself to be convinced that he was plagued by migraines, anxiety disorders, chronic fatigue, any explanation for his weight loss, erratic behavior, and sickly pallor. Rose Sampson was not, as she liked to say, in the stress business.

“All right. It’s nice to know I’ve got one child I don’t need to worry about for the time being.”

“Ben?”

“He didn’t show up for your opening last week. He told me he’d come up to the country for the weekend, but-well, he’s probably busy. Have you seen him?”

“I was at his apartment last night.” She’d been trying him all morning, but her calls were still going directly to voice mail.

“Did he seem okay? Everything’s all right?”

“I only saw him for a few minutes, but, yeah-he was-he was Ben.” Go ahead, Mom. Ask the follow-up question. Push me for more information. Because you know. You know, Mom. You know he’s still got a problem, the way you know you smell like vodka and have glassy eyes at eleven in the morning.

“Well, that’s good to hear. To what do I owe this pleasure, by the way?”

“I need to talk to Dad about something.”

“That’s even nicer to hear. Maybe the two of you will be back to normal soon.” Her chipper smile fell when Alice didn’t respond. “Don’t be so hard on your father, Alice. There are very few people in this world who have the power to hurt that man, and you’re one of them. I haven’t been a perfect wife, if that makes a difference.”

She didn’t want to hear her mother make excuses for his affairs. She didn’t care about his sins as a father or a husband anymore. She just needed answers.

“Mom, you don’t know anything about Dad somehow backing the gallery, do you?”

Her lips formed a small O. “Sweetie, I know your father gave you a hard time about wanting to do things on your own, but really-I think you’re letting your imagination get the better of you.”

“Did you have a chance to ask him about the ITH Corporation?”

She was here to ask her father about the company directly, but it wouldn’t hurt to know what he might have said to her mother.

Her mother snapped her fingers and pointed at her. “That’s right. You asked about that. I did not have a chance to ask your father about it. You know how hard he is to reach when he’s on the road. But I did have some extra time on my hands up in that empty house in Bedford waiting for your brother to show up, so I did some digging in your father’s old files.”

She made her way to the coat closet near the front door and pulled out a canvas tote bag. “I found this.”

Alice removed a file folder from the bag and flipped through its pages. She was no lawyer, but she could tell the document was an agreement between ITH Corporation and someone named Julie Kinley. ITH agreed to place all of its existing assets into a trust for the benefit of Julie Kinley. In exchange, Kinley agreed to release all potential legal claims against ITH and its agents, officers, and employees, both in their official and personal capacities. Alice wasn’t entirely clear about that part, but she assumed it was a settlement agreement of some kind. The final paragraph of the document was a clause requiring confidentiality from both Kinley and ITH about the agreement.

“Is that what you were looking for?”

“I think so. Thanks. Do you know what ITH was for?”

“Your father has created a few different corporations over the years, hon. You know, for the film funding and what not. What’s this all about?”

“Nothing, Mom. I’ll talk to him about it. Have fun at your event tonight.”

By the time Alice was halfway up the stairs, her mother was already at the bar cart, pouring herself another martini.

“Your mother went through my study? I don’t know how many times I’ve asked her-”

“You were in Miami, and I needed to know about this company.”

He shook his head with confusion. “You’re telling me that this gallery was started under the name ITH?”

How many times would she need to go over this? “It was incorporated in 1985, and Arthur Cronin filed the paperwork with the state. Now it turns out you had this settlement agreement in your office. I assume that means you’re behind ITH. I need to know whether you were also behind the gallery.”

Most of the time when Alice looked at her parents, she saw them as they had always appeared to her-beautiful, strong, a little exotic. But every once in a while, she saw them through a neutral observer’s eyes-not as they once were, but as they currently existed. A little thinner. A little paler. Their noses and ears a bit larger. Older. Her father was seventy-eight years old, and right now his face showed every day of it.

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’ve been trying to tell you that. But I can’t dig myself out of this unless you tell me everything. ITH is your company, isn’t it?”

“It was a d-b-a I formed to film In the Heavens.”

She knew that d-b-a stood for doing-business-as. It was a moniker used for small businesses that were not technically formed as corporations. “You didn’t incorporate?”

“I had no idea what I was doing back then. I was a kid with a script, some friends, and a fantasy. The next thing you know, your mother and I are both winning Academy Awards. I kept the money associated with In the Heavens in an account I had opened under the d-b-a.”

“But then you incorporated in 1985? That was fifteen years later.”

“Sixteen, actually.”

“And now someone has used that company name to open the Highline Gallery.”

He placed his head in his hands before looking up to answer. “There was a lawsuit that needed to be settled. I still had money under the ITH name. Arthur structured the settlement so that the plaintiff accepted the assets that were already with ITH. He incorporated and then created a trust. By that time, I was a millionaire fifty times over. Arthur had probably incorporated me fifteen times since then for various projects. It’s all about limiting liability and taxes and whatnot. But I haven’t used that corporate name for years. And I certainly didn’t start that gallery.”

Her father had confirmed her suspicions about ITH, but she was no closer to the truth about the gallery’s origins.

“Who is Julie Kinley?” She gestured to the settlement papers that were now resting on the desk in his home office.

“A wannabe screenwriter who claimed that I stole the idea for In the Heavens.” The movie that garnered his first and her mother’s only Oscar statues still remained his career-defining film. About a socially proper woman whose sexuality is awakened after the death of her husband, the film was labeled obscenity at the time by three attorneys general.

“You were accused of plagiarism?” Her father had long been known as a sharp-tongued, hot-tempered, arguably sexist man who didn’t suffer fools, but she’d never detected any doubt in artistic circles about his intellectual integrity.

“Anyone who’s had any kind of success in Hollywood gets accused with every project. Leeches slither from beneath every rock searching for publicity or an easy settlement. Kinley was a former employee and made the allegations long after the fact. They were bogus, of course, but I had enough money by then to settle. Art said it was better than taking the public relations hit. We structured the settlement using ITH, but I really haven’t thought of it for more than two decades.”

“I already knew that someone did this to set me up. Now they use the name of a company you started when I was twelve years old? This is obviously personal.”

“Maybe this isn’t just about you. I’m the one behind the corporate name.”

“Someone wanted to set us both up?”

“I hate to think this, Alice, but I had this nauseous feeling from the minute I heard about your employer’s murder at the gallery. No, even before then, when those protesters showed up at your door. I had this horrible pain in my heart-this feeling of portent-but I didn’t want you to think I was undermining your accomplishment. I didn’t want to take something that was for you and make it about me. I wanted to believe that this new job was exactly what you believed it to be-”

“Just say it.”

“From the second that fascist preacher appeared outside the gallery with his brainwashed followers, I had a feeling that something horrible was happening. I never thought it was a coincidence that you landed this golden opportunity just to have some right-wing nuts drag your name through the mud-and in the process, let the media take a few more shots at the old man while they were at it.”

“You think George Hardy’s behind this? What would he get out of it?”

“These fellows thrive off of the culture wars. They have evil in their hearts, they preach hate in the name of Christ, and they have been coming after me for forty years. They already branded me an adulterer-”

“Come on, Papa.” They both knew he had himself to blame for that.

“I’m not making excuses, but I am pointing out that they fanned the media flames. Arthur even dug up proof that a couple of these guys paid women from my past to come forward with their stories.”

“Hardy’s outfit seems pretty small-time. I mean, how would they even have the resources to pull something like this off?”

“Oh, don’t you kid yourself, baby girl. Those guys pretend to be grassroots movements, tiny sects acting independent of one another. But they are organized. And they collaborate. And they have tremendous financial backing. Men with money fund their efforts. And these are not men of God. They manipulate religiosity for political, and ultimately financial, gain. If they can tie my name to child pornography, they can slap my face on every one of their fund-raising letters. And they can use guilt by association to campaign against every candidate and every cause your mother and I have ever given a cent to. When Hardy showed up at your door, I should have told you to walk out, right then and there.”

“So if Hardy and his church are behind this, who was the man who hired me? And why is he dead?”

He shrugged. “He could be anyone. One of Hardy’s followers who wasn’t playing along anymore. Or someone they hired. You said he wanted to meet you at the gallery that morning. Maybe he was going to tell you the truth.”

“A sudden change of heart?”

“Or he realized that the daughter of Frank Humphrey might be in a better position to help him than some loser like George Hardy and the whackjobs who carry his coat. I know I don’t have all the answers, Alice, but you have to trust me on this one: I did not have anything to do with this. And no matter what happens, we are apparently in this together now. My special effects guys tell me that photograph you gave me wasn’t Photoshopped. Whoever’s behind this went to the trouble of lining up not only the man who hired you, but whatever woman is in that picture. I’m canceling my trip.”

“Dad, you don’t know a girl called Becca Stevenson, do you?”

“No. Who’s that?”

“Some girl missing from her home in New Jersey. The police asked me about her, but I have no idea why.”

“We definitely need to get Art in on this. You need a lawyer.”

When Alice returned to her own apartment two hours later, she saw a green Toyota Camry around the corner on St. Mark’s. The driver appeared to be checking out the posted hours for parking. She could not tell if it was the same man she’d seen fiddling with the stereo in a green Camry on Second Avenue when she’d gone on her Starbucks run that morning. She made a mental note of the license plate number and was still repeating the pattern to herself when she flipped the bolt on her apartment door and fastened the security chain.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“T his might have been a bad idea.”

Alice was staring at a piece of foie gras on toast with some kind of jelly, the type of sweet and savory treat she would usually try to devour in one gob. When she had called Jeff, he had been on his way out of the office to grab a bite to eat. He had persuaded her to join him at the bar of her favorite restaurant, Eleven Madison Park. Now that she was here, she couldn’t muster an appetite.

“You need to eat something. And if the food here isn’t good enough for you, well, you really have lost your mind.”

She forced herself to take a bite, hating the fact that Jeff was going to pay a fortune for food that she was in no position to enjoy. “Thanks, Jeff. For this. For making time for me.”

“Making time for you? What are you talking about? You’re one of my best friends, and you’re going through hell. I’ll do anything for you, Al. I’ve always been willing to do anything for you.”

Friends. She wondered if the word choice was his way of clarifying what had been, for her at least, an ambiguous period in their long relationship. He had been dating a woman-Ramona was her name. She was only now turning thirty. Alice had even suspected that Ramona moved in for a while, during that period when Jeff rarely called, and then only from his cell. Six months must have passed at one point without any communication, and she had wondered if, at last, they were finished.

But then when the shit hit the fan with her father, he was back. It started with a call to check how she was faring. Then the meetings for drinks and meals and matinee movies picked up pace. There were those late-night phone calls when mutual, but not necessarily synchronized, bouts of insomnia set in. Hey. Are you up? I can’t sleep. Not one, but two drunken sleepovers: the first accompanied by awkward apologies and a kiss on her forehead, but the most recent followed by a continuation of what had begun the night earlier.

And then he’d gone to Seattle for a week to visit his brother. And then she’d opened the gallery.

Friends, he said. That’s apparently all they were. And he’d been willing to do anything for her-except examine the possibility that there might be a life without children but with his best friend.

She pushed the thoughts away, knowing they were planted by her father’s words. All she needed right now was a friend.

“Your father says the photo’s legit, huh?”

“I don’t understand the technicalities of it, but apparently he knows some high-speed visual effects guys who can examine a photograph for inconsistencies-like a shadow that falls the wrong direction given the light, or problems with respective sizing of different people in the image. The picture’s not great quality, but I guess nothing jumped out as phony.”

“But it could still be doctored.”

“Possibly, if someone did a good job. Or they found a woman who looked an awful lot like me.”

“Because you know for certain it’s not you, right?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He flashed that disarming smile that always managed to check any anger brewing in her. “I know. I’m an asshole. Just making sure there were no intoxicated evenings with that handsome boss of yours. Maybe something you didn’t even remember?”

“Absolutely not. You, my sir, are the only man I’ve drunkenly stumbled into bed with lately.”

The woman at the next table coughed loudly.

“Very subtle,” Jeff whispered. “Wait until she hears us talking about dead bodies and right-wing conspiracies.”

“My father can be paranoid, but as they say-”

“Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.”

“So do you think the amorphous they are out to get my father?” Her father’s theory sounded crazy, but it would explain the bizarre timing of George Hardy’s protesters outside the gallery just before Campbell’s murder.

“Crazier things have happened. You had wondered why they targeted you for this job. If the entire point was to make your father look bad, taking advantage of you-and the fact that you needed a job-would be a vehicle to get to him.”

“And yet?”

“That’s a pretty complicated way of dragging you and your father through the mud. Someone had to set up a bank account, forge a driver’s license with your picture under Drew Campbell’s name, enlist Campbell to recruit you, create Hans Schuler’s artwork and Web site, rent the gallery space, pay for the furniture, pay for the space-”

“I get the picture.”

“I know this isn’t exactly my expertise, but I represented some pretty amoral corporations when I was at the firm, and now I’m handling some criminal cases. In my experience? There are cheap ways to get revenge. Violence. Lies. Threats. That stuff doesn’t cost a cent. People who spend money do it to earn money.”

“Okay, so maybe you and my father are both right. What if there’s a dual motive-some financial gain, but then leaving me and my father holding the bag was the icing on the cake?”

“How would that fit in with George Hardy?”

“Is it that hard to believe that the pastor at some fly-by-night, crazy church would be involved in illicit activity? I think I’ve read that story before, Reverend Ted. So what kind of operation could they be running?”

“All kinds of nefarious activities require a cover story. They could have been using the gallery to launder money. Or smuggle drugs. Or smuggle people.”

“But we didn’t really have any cargo. All we had coming in and out of there were Schuler’s prints.”

“Which you sold a lot of, right?”

“More than a hundred.”

“Which is what? Like, seventy grand? By an unknown artist who in hindsight appears to be nonexistent?”

“And almost all the orders came in online. I got people into the door based on hype, but I had a hard time selling anything in person. All that money was from the Web.”

“So where’d the money go?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t have access to whatever account it went to, but if the police are still talking to me, my guess is the account is either untraceable or yet another thing that somehow traces back to me or my dad.”

“Okay, so where did all the money come from? Why was the show so successful?”

“At the time, I wanted to believe it was because of my viral marketing prowess.”

“And now?”

“I feel like an idiot. They weren’t smuggling anything. The gallery wasn’t a cover at all. They were selling the pictures. That’s where the money to cover the operation came from.”

“So how did they generate demand? Why would all those people pay seven hundred dollars for pictures that aren’t worth anything?”

“Shit, we have to go.”

He was throwing cash on the table before she had a chance to explain.

“It wasn’t just the prints that I’d mail to the customers.”

He obviously didn’t remember.

“The thumb drives, Jeff. Remember? Every customer received a little stick of data about Hans Schuler. And whoever cleared out the gallery only left two things behind for the cops: Drew Campbell’s body and a bag of those thumb drives. Whatever’s on there, the police have already found.”

“Do you still have any?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to look.”

“That night I went to the gallery before you opened-you showed me the whole setup on your laptop and then slipped the thumb drive in your pocket when you were done. I remember.”

They ran all the way to her apartment, where she found the pair of Hudson bootcuts she had not worn since she had first shown him the so-called Han Schuler exhibit. The thumb drive was still in the front pocket.

“I can’t believe I didn’t see through this bullshit.”

She had viewed all of these files before: images of Schuler’s art, an interactive game where users could cut and paste portions of the images to create their own virtual mosaics, and a program that created desktop background images from Schuler’s work, complete with trite sayings about inner reflection and mainstream radicalism.

“And yet more than a hundred people were willing to pay seven hundred bucks for this crap.”

“What are we missing?”

“Try downloading all the desktop backgrounds, and see if something happens.”

“Like what?”

“Obviously I don’t know, but there’s got to be something there.”

She downloaded all four alternatives, but other than the changes to the background of her laptop desktop, nothing seemed to happen.

“Maybe it’s embedded somewhere.” She began clicking her mouse across the various images. On the photograph called Fluids, the centerpiece of Schuler’s SELF series, she clicked on what was supposedly the artist’s lips, the saliva extending from his mouth, the bite marks in his wrist. Nothing.

She moved on to Wince, a similarly themed close-up of the artist biting his lower lip.

Her clicking became more random and desperate as she moved on to First, the photograph that had created such an uproar after George Hardy and his protesters arrived outside the gallery. It was a collage of cutouts from the image of a body that was obviously not Schuler’s. Pale, smooth skin. Thin hips. A chest just starting to develop above still-bony ribs. She moved her mouse over a dilated pupil and clicked.

The full-screen image of First started to fly away like shards of broken glass. The screen went black.

Enter password.

They tried Schuler. Hans. Hans Schuler. Highline. Self.

Then she typed the name of the photograph that had created this passageway: F-I-R-S-T.

A list of files appeared on the screen, each named with a seven-digit number. She felt her eyes moving involuntarily from the images as she flipped through them. If there was any ambiguity about the age of the woman in the First photograph, there was none in these. Several of the images seemed to be of an older girl, maybe a young teenager. Her face had been cropped from the pictures. The photos seemed from another era for reasons Alice couldn’t immediately identify. And slightly muddled, as if they had been scanned from physical photographs. She quickened the pace of her clicking, not wanting to see the details. There was a man in some of the photos, also faceless.

The pictures of the older girl were spliced in among other, higher-resolution photographs of children, maybe six to eight years old. Both boys and girls. Alone. With adults. With each other.

She felt the few bites of food she’d allowed herself at dinner working their way up her esophagus. Jeff placed a palm on the small of her back. She closed her laptop, harder than necessary, and heard her voice waver when she finally spoke.

“What am I going to do?”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“G ood to see you again, Morhart.”

Willie Danes gave Morhart a hearty handshake and extended a half-eaten bag of Cheetos in his direction like they were old friends. Morhart didn’t doubt that he had earned some brownie points with these NYPD guys by tipping them off to Becca Stevenson’s connection to their case, but he also suspected that he had top-down bureaucracy to thank for his presence today in the Thirteenth Precinct. He hadn’t voted for Mayor Kyle Jenson since the mayor cut the town’s community policing program seven years earlier, but the man enjoyed a natural ability to charm. He’d called the chief for an update on the Stevenson investigation. When he found out the road had led to a gallery in New York City, he had called Danes’s deputy inspector personally. Now the NYPD and the Dover Police Department had an “understanding” that their investigators would fully share information in their separate but overlapping cases.

Morhart believed he had already delivered his half of the quid pro quo with Becca’s fingerprint match. Because of him, Danes and his partner, John Shannon, knew that a missing fifteen-year-old girl had previously entered the gallery where their victim was killed. They knew that the girl’s father-the one who had only recently appeared in her life-had just happened to protest that very gallery the day before the body was found.

Now he was about to see the NYPD’s cards. He stepped carefully around piles of documents and disheveled boxes to take a seat in the overpacked interrogation room. He did his best to ignore the sounds of the creaking door as a young, unintroduced Asian guy walked in and out the room while Danes spoke.

“My partner couldn’t be here,” Danes explained. “He’s down reviewing the final results of the ME’s report. You ready to share the sandbox?”

“Did the ME find anything interesting?” It seemed to Morhart that medical examiners often confirmed what was obvious from the initial crime scene. A victim filled with bullets usually had died of gunshot wounds.

“Not much. We already had a short window on time of death, since the body was fresh. Two shots from a.38. Chest and stomach. He did find postmortem bruising on the genitals.” Danes’s bag of Cheetos shifted protectively in front of his torso, and Morhart felt his own knees clench together involuntarily.

“So whoever killed him really hated him.”

“Or she was making sure he wasn’t faking it.” Morhart noticed the use of the feminine pronoun. “Maybe she’ll eventually tell us. Anyway, from what we hear, if anyone deserved a kick in the balls even after death, it was Larson.”

Danes recited the background information they had collected so far on their victim, Travis Larson. A string of insignificant sales jobs through his late twenties, and then no lawful employment since. No family. An apartment filled with stolen mail, skillfully faked IDs, forged checks, and pilfered credit card solicitations. An FBI agent who claimed that his sister was just one of many women Larson had deceived and sponged from over the years.

“From what we can tell, he started looking for a way to move his criminal activity indoors since that FBI agent called him out on the cougar-swindling last year. Our techno-geeks found evidence on the gallery computer of downloading and producing child pornography starting about five months ago.” He removed a data stick from the pocket of his short-sleeved dress shirt and tossed it to Morhart. Morhart dusted off the bright orange crumbs. /SELF. “As you may know, the feds have gotten aggressive in their enforcement against smut on the Net. If they think someone’s peddling child porn online, they do an instant download, and voilà, they shut the site down. One step removed, the dirtbags might require a mail order, but again-the feds place an order, then verify the contents of the product and track down the origin of the package to make the bust.”

Morhart had no personal involvement in those types of investigations, but he did his best to keep up with the times by reading law enforcement Web sites. “As much as technology has helped the bad guys, it’s helped us to track them down.”

“Exactly. So it’s no surprise that someone might try to use a high-tech way to attract customers and build demand, but a low-tech method of delivery to evade detection.”

“That’s where this comes in?” Morhart asked, holding up the data stick.

“Any customer who placed an order through the Highline Gallery received one of these. On the surface, it’s filled with a bunch of bullshit. But find the embedded link, and enter the requisite password, and some seriously perverted shit awaits. Our computer nerds tracked down messages going back six weeks on some of these chester chat boards, alerting them to the pictures they could buy through the Highline.”

“And no one monitoring these sites picked up on it?”

“I’ve seen some shit the past two days that makes me want to stab my eyes out. The truth is, this stuff’s like catching fish in a barrel for the feds. They chase down the easy prey-the guys with instant downloads, file exchanges, and mail-order operations. Someone who posts a link to a gallery with the promise of hot young things and a password to come later? Tracking that down takes one or two or three steps more than the easy cases, so no one follows up. It’s actually pretty clever.”

“So they line up their customers through these message boards, then when the gallery opens, they accept orders and ship the data sticks. Where’d the money go?”

“An offshore account. Totally untraceable.”

“Where do George Hardy and Becca Stevenson fit in?”

Danes placed his hands on his hips and hung his head before looking at Morhart. “I wish we had better news for you, guy. We don’t know.”

Morhart intertwined his fingers behind his head and looked up at the ceiling.

“You’ve got nothing connecting Larson to Becca?”

“Just her prints on the gallery’s bathroom doorknob. No e-mails. No phone calls. And I’m telling you, none of these pictures we found were of your girl.”

“Fuck.”

“Best we can figure, maybe Larson was grooming Becca to pose for him or maybe worse. Something went down in the operation and got Larson killed. It could have scared her off as well.”

They both knew Danes’s theory was complete speculation.

“A second ago, you said something about she. That she might have kicked Larson postmortem to make sure he was dead. You’ve got a suspect?”

Danes pointed to a five-by-seven photograph pinned to a rolling bulletin board behind him. “Her name’s Alice Humphrey. She was the ‘manager’ of the gallery.” He used air quotes to emphasize his skepticism. “According to her, she doesn’t know shit about anything, but we’ve got pictures of her with Larson and evidence tying her to an alias used to start both the gallery and its bank account. As far as we can tell, she had something to prove to her BFD father. She persuaded him to start the gallery, but then hooked up with Larson and his smut to make sure she turned a profit.”

Morhart looked at Alice Humphrey’s photograph. He recognized it from one of the articles he’d read about George Hardy’s protests at the gallery. Rare was the woman who victimized a child for her own pleasure, but even out in the sticks, he’d learned that people would do anything for money.

“Who’s the big-fucking-deal father?”

“Frank Humphrey.”

“The director?”

“Yep. And quite the lothario, if you read the tabloids. You’d have to ask Freud whether that has anything to do with his daughter’s venture into child porn. All we know is that she apparently had a falling-out with him some time last year. Maybe this was her way of starting over, separate from her family.”

“And you think Alice Humphrey killed Travis Larson?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time a woman killed a lover. Or who knows? Maybe he double-crossed her. Love and money are powerful motivators. Hopefully we’ll nail down the precise motive when we eventually get a confession. We can tie the gallery laptop to some of the messages that were posted in the chat rooms. We seized that laptop from her possession, but she can always say Larson posted the messages, not her. And even if we can nail her on the kiddie pictures, that’s not enough to carry through to murder. The truth is, we don’t have quite enough to hook her up on anything yet.”

Morhart heard the creak of the door once again. This time, the Asian guy popped only his head inside. “Good news, man. Those gloves from the garbage on Bank and Washington? CSU called. Positive for GSR.”

Morhart didn’t know the city well, but he recognized Bank and Washington as located somewhere downtown, in the unnumbered part of Manhattan, presumably near the gallery. Apparently the crime scene unit had discovered gunshot residue on a pair of gloves found near the crime scene.

Danes pumped his fist at what remained of his waistline. “All we got to do is connect our girl to these gloves, and we just might be in business.”

Chapter Forty

E ven in better days, Alice felt an intense irritation navigating the crowded sidewalks of midtown Manhattan. Cookie-cutter clones in dark suits. Street vendors pushing roasted peanuts and $3 belts. Meandering tourists staring up at the skyline, blissfully unaware of their shopping bags smacking other pedestrians in the thighs. Teenagers in flip-flops snapping cell-phone photos while they juggled two-quart buckets of soft drinks from fast food restaurants. It was just… too much.

“Smile, girl. Don’t matter if it’s ten degrees out. Every day can be beautiful.” The man with the broad grin wheeled a hand truck filled with bottled water down the loading ramp of a delivery truck double-parked on Fifty-fourth Street. When he hit street level, he reached for the volume knob of an old boom-box CD player resting on the truck floor. “Summertime” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and Will Smith when he used to be called the Fresh Prince thumped over the sounds of midday traffic.

She flashed him a thumbs-up as she hurried to the entrance of the office building towering over them. She signed in with the front guard and posed for a digital camera before receiving a guest pass to proceed to the forty-third floor.

Her father was already waiting in Arthur Cronin’s office, sipping from a glass of water with lemon as he sat cross-legged on the cherry-colored leather sofa. Art sat perpendicular to him in a coordinating wing chair in stocking feet. It would have come as no surprise to anyone seeing these two men for the first time that they had known each other nearly fifty years.

“There she is, right on time, the beautiful female half of the next generation of Humphreys.” Art rose to greet her with a solid bear hug, then clasped her shoulders. “How is my fabulous goddaughter holding up? Huh?”

“I’ve got to admit, I found myself eyeing my passport this morning, wondering about the most livable country in the world without an extradition agreement with America.”

“This is why artists aren’t lawyers. Your imagination is getting away from you. Something is amuck here, no question, but these things have a way of getting worked out. You’ll see.”

She looked at her father and could tell he was working hard to appear untroubled. He was a brilliant filmmaker, but he was no actor. He rested his glass on the coffee table in front of him and used his hands on his thighs as assistance to stand. “All right. I’ve got a meeting with a certain hard-to-land octo-mom of an actress. I don’t want to keep her waiting. She might get bored and adopt another baby.”

“Dad, I thought we were meeting with Art together.” When she had called him about the images she found on the Hans Schuler thumb drive, he had persuaded her it was time to get a lawyer involved, starting first with Arthur.

“Sorry, baby girl. This casting is a major get, and it was the only time she could meet me. I told Art what I know. You’re in good hands now.” He blew her a kiss with all ten fingers, then closed the door behind him.

“Don’t be upset with him, Alice. I was actually the one who thought it might be best to meet with each of you separately.”

He’d obviously notified only her father of the change in plans.

“I brought the thumb drive.”

She hadn’t looked at the pictures since that first manic perusal the previous night. Once she walked him through the process of pulling up the screen with the portal, clicking on the girl’s pupil, and then entering the password, she made a point to check out the corner-office views. A couple clicks of Art’s mouse were followed by wincing sounds. She tried not to remember.

As he browsed through the images hidden on the thumb drive, she moved her attention to a different collection of photographs, the framed ones clustered on top of his mahogany file cabinet. Art shaking hands with Hillary Clinton. Art accepting an award from the ACLU. A younger Art on a boat with her father. An even younger Art and a little gap-toothed Opie Taylor lookalike, huddled in the stands with hot dogs and matching Yankees caps.

“Who’s the cutie at the Yankees game?”

“I’m sorry?” He rose from his desk and waved her back to the sitting area. “That’s my nephew, Brandon. Little runt’s already out of business school, if you can believe it.”

She knew Art had a sister who was married, but she’d never met any of his family. She had always gotten the impression that Art considered himself more of an honorary Humphrey.

“Let’s get down to brass tacks. The detectives who questioned you did not ask you anything about these pictures?”

“No, but they asked me about the missing girl from Jersey. Do you think the older girl in those photographs might be her?”

“I have no idea, but if they know about these pictures, that could certainly be a reason they’re inquiring. Of course, why in the world they’ve imagined any connection between you and that girl is one of a number of unknowns we’re dealing with right now.”

“They also asked me about Dad. And about ITH. They obviously tracked down the same records my friend Jeff got from the state. Someone used the ITH name to open the gallery, and they know that’s one of my father’s corporate entities. They must think I was the one pulling the strings. The pictures on that thumb drive prove I’ve been telling the truth. Whoever opened the gallery did it to sell those pictures, and used me as the cover.”

Art steepled his fingers toward her. “So what is it that your instincts are telling you to do right now, Alice?”

It was funny to see Art here, in this cigar-and-brandy-styled office, wearing a thousand-dollar suit, talking to her the way a grown-up lawyer would speak to a grown-up client. She had known him her entire life. She could still distinctively remember concluding that he was the wisest person on earth after he taught her not to pull her arms through her coat sleeves until she’d first put on her mittens, protecting even her wrists from the cold.

She’d seen him in less noble moments as well, slurring his speech on their living room sofa as he and her parents debated politics, films, literature, life, until three in the morning up in Bedford. Art had been a dirty old man even when he was young. The eternal flirt, always happy in the company of whatever eye candy happened to be at his hip for the weekend. She’d realized early on that Art’s friendship with her father no doubt assisted his ability to land that steady stream of short-term, high-caliber escorts (not a euphemism in this context), but what she had once seen as an amusing penchant for bachelorhood bore a new level of creepiness now that she realized her father apparently shared it.

“My instincts? I really wasn’t kidding about the running-away thing. An island and a margarita the size of my head are sounding pretty damn good right now.”

“Too early to start talking about going fugitive.”

She smiled but then realized he was not. “You’re kidding, right?”

He shrugged. “I can’t joke about these things. What do you think I say to a client who has a private jet, a passport, and enough money in an offshore account to live the rest of his days, when he’s looking at a twenty-year sentence because the SEC suddenly decides corporations should be honest about the value of their own stock? Those conversations get a little dicey-not just on the ethical issues but, you know, whether or not someone’s really prepared to walk away from their home, family, reputation, and country. But look, none of this applies to you. You haven’t been arrested, and they obviously don’t have enough evidence to make an arrest, so we have some time.”

Yet, she wanted to add. None of this applies to me… yet.

“Well, if I’m not-what did you call it? going fugitive-then my instinct was for us to put together everything we have to explain how someone’s framing me, and maybe you could present it to the police. Convince them to take a closer look at George Hardy, or try to find out who was really behind the gallery.”

He pointed to her like she’d just answered a trivia question correctly. “See? That’s why people hire lawyers, Alice. Good, law-abiding, honest people like yourself are predisposed to trust the police. You’ve been told all your life that you have nothing to fear in the truth. Nearly every client I have who winds up in tension with the government wants to do the same thing. But my job is to force you not to follow your instincts.”

“But I’m actually innocent.”

“That and an apple might get you an apple. These guys who’ve been questioning you hear the same thing from every lying, guilty dirtbag they encounter. I’m innocent. I didn’t do it. If you’d just listen to me. All that does is inoculate them. They’re trained not to believe you. They will twist anything you say to inculpate you further. And if you do happen to say anything that casts doubt on your guilt, they’ll make it their number-one objective to go out there to rebut it. Trust me on this: you do not help yourself by talking to them.”

“But shouldn’t we at least tell them about these pictures on the thumb drive? What if it has something to do with that missing girl, and they don’t know?”

“It’s not your job to help them find that girl. And don’t take this personally, if you and that dumbass of an ex-boyfriend of yours could figure out these thumb drives, I’m pretty sure the NYPD already knows about the pictures.”

It was no surprise that Art shared her father’s opinion of Jeff.

“So what do I do? My father thinks George Hardy and his church have something to do with all this. Seems hard to believe a church would be involved in child pornography, but I guess any nut can start himself a religion these days. From what I could tell on the Web, Redemption of Christ is just Hardy and a bunch of wackos willing to follow him around the country. I don’t even think they have an actual building.”

“I’ll start pulling up research on them. See what we can find.”

“Maybe there’s someone involved in the church who had some connection to my father around the time ITH was formed.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because even if they thought he’d make a convenient political scapegoat, they’d still have to know about ITH to be able to use the company name.”

“We resolved the issue without litigation by making payments over time through a trust. It’s fairly standard.”

“Okay, but I’m still wondering what happened to the person who originally threatened the lawsuit. What was her name? Julie Kinley? I mean, she accused my dad of stealing her screenplay idea. Is it possible she’s still pissed off all these years later?”

“The allegation might seem scandalous, but it’s the kind of claim that gets thrown around all the time in the entertainment industry. As it happens, I did in fact follow up on this issue already. The former employee in question passed away last year.”

“Julie Kinley’s dead?”

He nodded. “I had a paralegal do a public records search so we could locate her. The road stopped at her death certificate. She died last March.”

“Damn. I got myself all worked into a frenzy, thinking we’d find out that she’d been following George Hardy around the country for his protests. Thought I’d sic the police on her instead.”

“Afraid not. A dead woman can’t exactly be trailing Hardy around on the protest circuit, can she?”

“Maybe someone else who was involved, who would know about ITH and my father’s connection to it? Maybe her lawyer or something?”

“Corporate names are easier to look up than you might think, but sure, I’ll think again about anyone else who was involved in that transaction and see if there’s any connection to this church. In the meantime, Alice, I know this cuts against every impulse of every fiber in your being, but your number-one job right now is to do nothing. Don’t talk to the police. Don’t talk to your friends, at least not about anything having to do with this investigation. Don’t try conducting your own investigation, because if they tap your phone or search your computer or have you followed, it might wind up looking like you have a personal involvement in this.”

“I do have a pretty damn personal involvement.”

“You haven’t been listening to me, Alice. The government will interpret your actions in the very worst light. They won’t think you’re snooping around trying to save your own hide. They’ll think you’re covering your tracks. You absolutely must trust me on this. I have an entire firm of lawyers and investigators here. I am good at what I do. And my phone can’t be tapped, and my computers can’t be searched. Try to go back to your life. See some shows. Try some new restaurants. You still want to work? You know my offer to help you out on that has always been open.”

She shook her head. The way she saw it, accepting help from Art was no different than taking it from her father. And yet here she was, receiving his legal counsel, arranged for by her father, when she clearly had no way of paying the astronomical fees someone like Arthur Cronin must charge for his services.

“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

“H oly 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

A lice 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 intercom 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.”

“You’re sure they’re mine?”

“I wasn’t until you just told me yours are missing. But, yeah, they’ve got that same pattern on them and everything.”

“Crocodile-embossed,” she muttered. “The police went to your apartment at one in the morning to ask you about my gloves?” She knew that what he was telling her was important, but she still felt groggy from sleep. She still pictured herself standing in her father’s office, staring at the gaudy wallpaper.

“He showed up at a bar, actually. He said his name was Danes?” She nodded. “I assume he followed me to try to catch me off guard. Nothing like having a cop show up at your table at Temple Bar.”

She knew the place. It had been one of their favorites when they first got together. It was the kind of place that people chose for dates.

“So did it work?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did Danes catch you off guard?”

“No. That’s why I’m here. I told them I’d had conversations with you in a legal capacity and therefore would not be discussing anything with them. But it’s not going to be that hard for them to prove those gloves are yours. And if they’re asking around about those gloves, it’s for a reason. They must have Drew’s blood on them or something.”

“You know what they say: ‘If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.’”

“What is wrong with you, Alice? This isn’t funny.”

“At this point, it’s actually pretty fucking hilarious. Of course they have my gloves. They were already missing by the time I found Drew’s body, but you know what? I’m sure you’re right. They’ve probably got Drew’s blood on them-plenty of his DNA, and my DNA, and every other piece of evidence you could possibly imagine. Because that’s how this is going to play out. Whoever did this to me, did it with absolute perfection. And I have no idea who did it. Or why. Or what any of it has to do with me.”

“You don’t have to go through this alone.” He placed his hand on her wrist, but she pulled away.

“Of course I’m alone. You’ve been a good friend, but you know, this isn’t happening to you. You’re at fucking Temple Bar drinking champagne with a date.”

He looked at the floor and swallowed.

“I’m sorry. I’m tired, and I’m scared, and I’m being a total bitch. Thanks for not digging my hole any deeper with the police.” She walked to the front door and opened it. He pushed it shut.

“I didn’t like being there with someone else.”

“Where?”

“At Temple Bar. She was the one who suggested it. I thought I could be there and not think about you. I was wrong.”

She felt a tear tickling her cheek, and didn’t know whether it was there because of the stress of her current predicament or the memory of what her life had once been-her life with Jeff and the one she’d thought they’d always have together. He stepped toward her and ran his fingers through her hair. Placed a palm against the nape of her neck. It felt so familiar. They’d done this hundreds of times before. This part had never been their problem. He would pull her face toward his. He would kiss her lips, gently at first and then not so gently. He would know exactly where to place his hands on her body. The exact moment to lead her to the bedroom.

And she let it all happen.

For the first time in a miserable week, Alice felt a smile on her face when she woke up. Jeff rustled the curtains trying to pull his clothes on in the dark.

“Love ’em and leave ’em, huh?”

“I’ve got a deposition in an hour. I was trying not to wake you.”

She felt warm beneath the comforter and pushed the covers down to her waistline. She looked up at him, squinting to protect herself from the sunlight penetrating the parted curtains.

“That is so unfair.”

“What? I’m just lying here.”

That was apparently all it took to persuade him to fall back into bed with her. A few seconds later, however, Jeff suddenly sat up in bed to face her.

“I feel like I need to apologize to you for this.”

“What are you talking about?” She tugged at his elbow, trying to nudge him back to horizontal.

“I feel like I took advantage of you when you’re probably in a fragile place.”

“Fragile? Did you really just call me fragile?”

“No, because I have absolutely no desire to have my ass kicked. But I did wake up wondering if last night-after everything that has been happening to you this week-was the best time for, you know, us.”

“I’m a grown-up, Jeff. I make my own decisions. And, in case you couldn’t tell, I was definitely a willing participant in last night’s activities.”

“I guess I’m just surprised that you’re willing to fall back into the same pattern that, at least at one point, made you so unhappy. I remember you telling me how unhappy you were, and that’s not what I want, Alice. It’s why I’ve tried-to the point of misery, even-to find another woman I can care about half as much as you.”

She pulled the covers back up to her shoulders. “Not the best time to talk to me about other women.”

“My point was that nothing ever works with anyone else, and it’s because you and I always fall back into the same patterns.”

“You really think it’s the same this time?”

“Isn’t it always with us? We’ve been doing this for years. And it never seems to be enough for one of us, so we call it quits. But then we see each other as friends, and it can never stay just-friends. And then we’re back to being us again.”

“It’s always been enough for me, Jeff. In light of what I’ve learned about my parents’ marriage in the past year, maybe I just wasn’t trained to dream of the traditional wedding package and the kids in the yard with a picket fence. We’ve always been good friends. And there’s always been love between us, no matter what phase of our continuing cycles we’re in. That’s enough for me. You’re the one who needs something I can’t give you, and I don’t want to keep you from having everything you want: a woman who can be mother to your children and a family you can take care of for life. I have never wanted to stand in the way of that.”

“Or maybe you were so convinced that I wanted all of that stuff that you pushed me away.” She saw his eyes move to the clock on the nightstand. “I hate that I have to leave right now.”

“We’ll talk after your deposition. And only if you think we need to talk. Really, Jeff, I woke up just now feeling happy, despite all that’s been heaped on me the past few days. You didn’t take advantage of me. And I don’t think there’s a problem here.”

“I’ll call you when I free up. I want to see you tonight, okay?”

“Of course.”

“And, just so you know? Right now? Looking at you and having been with you this week while all this hell has been breaking loose? I don’t know why I ever thought there was something else out there for me to find.”

Chapter Forty-Three

T he next time she opened her eyes, she felt groggy. She reached for the clock. It was almost noon. She didn’t know if it was the sleeping pill, the sex, or an intense disaffection for her current reality that kept her in bed, but she decided in that moment that if she could stay wrapped in those blankets, with her head on that pillow, for the remainder of her life, that would be her preference.

The sound of her apartment buzzer pulled her from the fantasy of an eternal bed rest.

“Hello?”

“Let me in. Hurry.”

She buzzed the security entrance and cracked open the apartment door, feeling a pang of guilt for being disappointed that it was Lily and not Jeff. She was scooping coffee grounds into a filter when she heard Lily’s footsteps coming hard and fast up the hallway stairs. She sprang into the apartment and bolted the door behind her.

“I’m getting a late start, but I’ll have coffee to offer in a sec. Don’t freak out, but last night-”

“Shit, Alice, I am so sorry. We’ve got to do something.”

She knew immediately, from one look at Lily’s panicked expression. With that one look, she realized how stupid she had been to allow a moment with Jeff to escalate into an escape from reality. Jeff had come to her apartment in the middle of the night for a reason, and it had nothing to do with lost memories at Temple Bar or the ease with which the two of them could lose themselves in each other. It’s not going to be that hard for them to prove those gloves are yours.

“The police questioned you, didn’t they?”

Lily nodded. She looked like she might cry. “Fuck, I’m so sorry. They came to my office. And I freaked. I just answered. I didn’t see how it could possibly matter. But then I realized: why the fuck would they be asking me about your gloves unless it mattered? And I tried calling you, but your phone’s off.” The words were spilling out of her. “And now they’re here.”

“What do you mean, they’re here?”

“You weren’t answering your phone, so I got down here as fast as I could to try to tell you. But there’s a bunch of police cars downstairs, Alice. I saw them watching me when I was at the door. They were getting out of their cars when I walked in. I think-Fuck, Alice, I think they’re here to arrest you.”

Alice would subsequently try to remember her immediate reaction, but memory is a funny thing. It’s as if those first forty-five seconds were forever lost. She knew she was muttering, “Oh my God,” more than could ever be helpful. She vaguely recalled looking down to see what she was wearing and wondering how quickly she could change into real clothes.

But whatever mess was unfolding in her mind was instantly clarified when Lily grabbed her by the shoulders. “Alice, you need to get out of here.”

She processed what Lily was telling her. Those gloves must have been the piece of rock-solid evidence they’d been waiting for, the thing that sealed those suspicions they’d formed about her on the first day. They were here to take her away. She heard Lily’s words again, this time louder. “Get out of here. They don’t know for sure you’re home. Go out the freight entrance.”

“I can’t. I mean, I should call my lawyer. It’s going to make me look guilty.”

“They’re not here yet. Just leave before they get here. There’s no law that says you have to be home. I’ll tell them a neighbor buzzed me in, and you weren’t actually here. Just go. Come on, get moving.”

Alice remembered what Cronin had said to her about clients who could make another life for themselves elsewhere. A passport, some money, and a private jet, he’d said. She had access to all of that. Her father could help her. If it really came to that. If it was necessary. But she wouldn’t have the option once they took her into custody.

She was moving faster than she could think. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a warm sweater. She grabbed her passport from her jewelry box. Pulled her gym bag, already stocked with basic necessities, from the front closet. Stuffed her laptop in her purse. She started to reach for her bright blue coat when she stopped herself, opting instead for the nondescript black trench she’d stopped wearing a couple of years ago.

“Are they in the building?” she asked, tugging on the coat.

“I don’t think so.” Lily cracked open the apartment door. “Okay, it’s safe. You need to hurry.”

She grabbed Lily and kissed her hard on the cheek before making her way to the freight elevator. As she slipped out of the delivery entrance at the back of the building on Ninth Street, she was aware of the sound of sirens in the distance. At least, she hoped they were in the distance.

And she wondered whether she would ever get her life back.

Part III

Memories

Chapter Forty-Four

J oann Stevenson hit the play button once again on her cell phone. She had heard this message so many times, her memory could pull up each syllable before it was spoken. She could hear the inflection of each word in her own mind. The pop of the p in the word person, followed by a slight giggle at the end of the sentence. She could almost picture a tiny bubble of spit form at the corner of her daughter’s lip before she licked it away during the pause.

Hi, Mom. It’s the daughter-type person. There was the giggle and the lip lick. I know you’ve got the late shift tonight, but I just wanted you to know I’m home and ordered a pizza with the money you left me, just like in your note. Me and Sebastian miss you. See you tomorrow.

The message was nearly a month old, but it was the only recording she had of Becca’s voice. Oh, she had a few old videos from when she was a kid. Reciting the preamble of the constitution for national civics day in the first grade. Getting tangled up on the words “domestic tranquility”: establish justice, insure domestic chance hillary. That truly painful solo from her otherwise adorable turn as the lion in Wizard of Oz. But the only sound she had of a more mature, teenage Becca was this twelve-second cell phone message.

Listening to her daughter’s voice made her feel less alone. When news had gotten out about Becca’s disappearance, she had been surrounded by well-wishers. She had felt cared for. Maybe even loved. But now Mark was gone. She didn’t blame him. It had been too early in a relationship to expect the man not to be rattled by the polygraph the police had asked for, not to mention her depression, anger, and utterly unpredictable fits of inconsolable tears.

The casseroles that had turned up on her porch with notes of kindness had tapered off. So had the phone calls from worried friends offering to search for Becca. Or to keep her company. Or anything else that she might find helpful. Now her boss was beginning to ask when she thought she might make it back to work.

She had never felt so alone. And so even though she had already memorized every word of this message, and the sound of each individual syllable, she hit play once again.

Morhart noticed that the gutters needed cleaning. It had stopped raining two hours earlier, but water was still dripping over the aluminum edge. Spikes of green had begun to sprout from the accumulated leaves.

He had stayed in Dover for a reason. After college, he could have moved down to the city. The economy was on fire back then. He could have gotten a job in the computer industry, or maybe even in finance. But he wanted to live in Dover. And even in good times, Dover didn’t have cutting-edge jobs. There were teachers, doctors, lawyers, the service industry, and government. He went with the police department.

He had no regrets, but sometimes he wondered whether Dover was still the place he had resolved never to leave. In the Dover of his memories, two or three of the neighborhood men would have quietly taken turns attending to the clogged gutters of a distracted single mother struggling to work full-time and raise a daughter. The idea that these gutters would be growing trees while Becca Stevenson was missing? Well, that wasn’t the way Morhart thought of the people in this community.

He was about to knock on the screen door when he caught a glimpse of her through the living room window. Joann Stevenson’s face was somehow young and old at the same time. Ageless, he supposed. Her forehead was unlined, but her cheeks were beginning to sag, and creases had formed around her mouth like parentheses. Her face was broad, her eyes wide-set. She was an attractive woman, but not what someone might call pretty. There was a stillness to her expression-to her entire body-that made him think she had lived a longer, fuller life than other women her age. There was a depth to her that resonated in her very energy.

He rapped his knuckles on the screen and felt guilty when she jumped, the cell phone in her hand tumbling to the coffee table. She looked terrified when she answered the door, the way she did each time he’d come here since their first meeting. She didn’t need to explain the expression on her face. She was a woman wondering if this was the day: Was this the cold, damp afternoon when a police officer would knock on her door and tell her that her daughter’s body had been located?

He raised his eyebrows just enough to signal that today was not the day.

She handled the update as he knew she would. He had not seen her shed another tear since she’d learned about Becca’s secret relationship with her biological father. He knew she wanted to cry. He could almost feel the emotion running through her body. He believed it was the reason why she sat with her knees pushed together and her elbows tucked into her waist, as if she could literally trap her feelings inside to maintain composure in front of a man who was still in every meaningful sense a stranger.

She nodded periodically, her lips pressed tightly, as he told her the news. The police in the city had made progress, but all of it was on their side of the investigation. He believed they might be announcing a murder suspect. They might even make an arrest. But so far they had been unable to determine why Becca’s fingerprints had been in that gallery.

“If they arrest someone for killing that man, could that help us find Becca?”

“That’s what I’m hoping, Joann.” According to his agreement with the NYPD, he could not disclose the details of the investigation, but he found himself wanting to tell Joann everything. “We’ve got to keep our fingers crossed that the arrest will put pressure on that person to open up to us about Becca. I’m really hoping that’s how it plays out.”

She nodded again.

“No one else seems to care she’s gone anymore.” There was no melodrama to her voice. It was almost as if she were talking to herself. Or maybe to little Sebastian, nuzzling his tiny dog face against the sofa cushions. “Everyone’s moving on.”

He found himself placing a hand in the middle of her back, then the other hand reaching for her knee. Just the outer edge. Nothing inappropriate, he would tell himself later.

“I’m not, Joann. I’m not going anywhere.”

He expected her to break down, but she only nodded, her lips pressed together once again.

Thirty-three miles away, in the Thirteenth Precinct of the NYPD, Detective John Shannon waved his partner, Willie Danes, over to his desk and pointed at the computer screen. “I was taking another look at Alice Humphrey’s Facebook page.”

“You better watch it. Folks around here might start wondering whether you’re developing a little crush on our former child starlet.”

“Who’s the one who found that profile she created under her alias?” It wasn’t until Shannon discovered the Facebook profile for “Drew Campbell” that they could corroborate the rental agent’s statement that a red-haired woman had been the one to sign the lease for the gallery under that name.

“The partner stumbles across one good find, and now I’m never going to hear the end of it.”

“I think I’ve got another find to add to the growing list. Cute picture of her and her brother, huh?”

Danes bent over to get a better look. “Yeah. Adorable.”

“Notice anything about the decor?”

The older brother, probably high school-aged, looked proud with his arm wrapped around his little sister. She was probably around twelve, still all arms and legs sticking out from her slender torso. They sat on a bright red sofa, a glass-topped chrome coffee table before them, black-and-white-striped wallpaper behind.

They had both seen that room before.

“What the-”

Chapter Forty-Five

A lice maintained a brisk but unexceptional pace down Second Avenue until she reached First Street, when she turned right and broke into a full sprint toward the 6 train at Bleecker. She scurried down the subway stairs and was about to swipe her MetroCard at the turnstile when she stopped herself. Could the police trace a MetroCard that had been purchased on an Amex? If they knew she was on the 6, couldn’t they contact the driver to stop the train? She’d be trapped.

She searched her wallet for cash to buy a new card, but found she was down to her last $14. She wouldn’t get far without more cash.

Ben’s apartment was only five blocks away. She poked her head out from the subway stairs, searching for signs of police, then made her way south on Mulberry, turning on Spring Street, and then south again on Mott. She rang the buzzer, tapping her forehead softly against the door as she prayed Ben would answer. Two more attempts at the buzzer. Nothing.

She was about to give up when a heavyset man emerged from the building, lugging two overstuffed Hefty bags of garbage. The top of his bald head was sweaty despite the cold. The key ring clipped to his belt loop was worthy of a prison warden.

“Are you the super?”

He nodded as he turned sideways to maneuver his stomach and the trash bags past her. Alice grabbed one of the sacks and helped drag it to the curb. “Thanks, lady, but condo only. No units on sale now.”

“My brother lives here. Ben Humphrey?” She fumbled through her wallet to pull out her driver’s license.

“Oh, yeah. From Life with Dad. I know all about his family. You’re all grown up now, but, yeah, I can still see that same face.”

“This is awful, but I managed to leave a file in my brother’s apartment that I desperately need for a meeting I have in, like, less than an hour. And of course, with my luck, Ben’s not home. Is there any way you can let me in?”

One of those people who paid cash for everything, her brother found the $400 cap on ATM withdrawals “miserly” and was in the habit of storing large amounts of cash in his dresser drawer. He jokingly called it his drug-dealer stash.

The super hesitated.

“It will take two seconds. You can even watch me go inside if you need to.” She flashed her warmest, most trustworthy smile. If she had to, she could sneak the money while pretending to look for her file.

“No problem. I know how much Mr. Humphrey loves his sister.” He was already flipping through the keys. They rode up to the fourth floor together. She could still hear the super breathing hard from the exertion of hauling the garbage bags. He slipped the key in the door, but the knob budged on its own. “What do you know? You didn’t even need me.”

“Ben?”

She knew her brother was in the habit of leaving the door unlocked when he was home, but she didn’t think he was stupid enough to do so when he was out.

The place was messier than it had been three nights earlier. The kitchen cabinets were open. A stack of entertainment magazines had slid from the coffee table onto the floor. Thebathroom door was ajar, and she could only imagine the filth to be found there. But she saw no obvious drugs or paraphernalia in view, and was relieved not to be confronted with undeniable proof that her brother was using again.

She walked directly to the dresser in the bedroom area of his loft and opened the top drawer. A pad of bills about an inch thick was tucked to the side of a row of neatly folded boxer briefs, one of the perks of sending laundry out for service. She shoved the wad of cash in her purse, not bothering to count. The police would know her brother lived nearby. The super would tell them she was here.

In her rush to walk away, she almost didn’t see his cell phone on the nightstand. They would be tracking hers, but probably not his. An extra phone could come in handy.

Where was he?

She looked out the window, hoping to see him strolling toward the building, cup of coffee or bagel bag in hand. She couldn’t wait here all day.

As she stepped away from the window, she caught a glimpse of the dusty framed photograph on the sill. It was one of her favorites as well-an eleven-year-old Alice decorating her napping teenage brother with a shaving cream beard while her conspiring father caught the footage. Her father might have hated his wife’s penchant for mid-1980s decor, but Ben had loved it, sneaking into his father’s office whenever possible to laze on the red sofa.

And then she realized why some of the photographs on the Hans Schuler thumb drives had struck her as dated. When she’d discovered those hidden images, her attention had been pulled to their most vile elements, and then immediately repelled. She had never focused on the background, but now she remembered. The pictures that had seemed scanned-the ones that appeared to be of a young girl and an older man-had contained images of steel gray brocade curtains, a red velvet sofa, and the black-and-white-striped wallpaper that her father had once called schizophrenia-inducing.

And now that she recalled the background of those horrible photographs, she understood her dream from the previous night. She had dreamed she was a child, standing in her father’s office and not wanting to leave, because some part of her subconscious had known. In her sleep, she had been on the verge of figuring it out.

The pictures of that young girl with the older man had been taken twenty-five years ago in her father’s office in Bedford.

Setting aside her guilt, she slipped Ben’s cell into her purse. She’d explain it all to him later.

She left her brother’s apartment in such a fog that she did not see the man step from the green Toyota and begin to follow her on foot.

Chapter Forty-Six

A s Alice watched clumps of hair fall from the scissor blades into the trash can, she tried to process the pieces of cognitive data that told her that the dark locks belonged to her. She had stopped herself before walking into Duane Reade. The chain drugstore would surely have security cameras stocked with tapes that could be handed over to the police department, revealing her purchases. Instead, she had opted for the smaller Ricky’s beauty supply shop, where she had paid cash for a pair of shears, a bottle of “Temptation” brown dye, and latex gloves to protect her finger tips.

Scoring an hour alone in the Union Square hotel room had turned out to be easier than she would have thought. Just last year, she had read a crime novel in which the seemingly indestructible hero had slipped a few bucks to a New York City bellhop in exchange for a night in an unrented hotel room. The agreement she’d struck had cost her more than a few bucks, and had secured her only an hour of solitude, but the transaction had been in cash and had cost her only $40 of the wad she’d grabbed from Ben’s dresser.

She bent over at the waist, blasting her hair with the hotel room’s dryer, then flipped up to check out her newly shorn coif. She had remembered to dab some of the dye on her eyebrows with a Q-tip, just like the hairdresser had that one time in high school when she had briefly decided to be a brunette.

When she was young, her mother had said she looked just like Little Orphan Annie, only prettier. Now her trademark long red hair with natural highlights had been replaced by an abrupt, black-no, “Temptation”-colored-chin-length bob. She used another minute of her room time to line her eyes with the ninety-nine-cent pencil she had also picked up at Ricky’s. She barely recognized the vamp gazing back at her from the mirror.

The tips of her hair were still damp against her jawline as she propped herself on the foot of the hotel bed, contemplating Ben’s cell phone. By now, he had probably figured out it was missing. From there, he would have checked his stash of cash in the dresser. She should try to get word to him that she’d been the culprit before he called police.

The detectives might be monitoring calls to her parents and closest friends, but maybe she could call one of Ben’s friends. As she scrolled through the list of Ben’s recent calls, she saw a name that felt familiar. Robert Atkinson.

Where had she heard that name? She tried to jog her memory of Ben’s acquaintances, but no one by that name came to mind. Then she remembered. The name had nothing to do with Ben at all. Robert Atkinson was the reporter who had been trying to call her all week. According to Ben’s phone, the two men had spoken to each other several times, enough for her brother to have added the reporter’s name to his phone directory.

She picked up the room phone and dialed 9 for an outside line, followed by Robert Atkinson’s telephone number.

“Empire Media.”

“I’m calling for Robert Atkinson.”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is, um, a source on one of his stories.” She wondered if the tidbits she had read in newspapers about journalists protecting the confidentiality of their sources was accurate.

“If you can tell me generally the story with which you were assisting, I can forward your call as appropriate?” The woman sounded young, perhaps in her early twenties, still at that period of life when every sentence seemed to end in a question mark, even when not asking a question.

“I’d rather speak to Mr. Atkinson personally.”

“You haven’t heard?”

“About what exactly?”

“Bob’s dead. He was killed in a car accident last night on I-684.”

Hank Beckman recognized the prefix of the 212 number on his cell phone screen as an incoming call from the NYPD.

“Beckman.” He plugged his free ear closed with his index finger in an attempt to block the sound of traffic on Park Avenue.

Detective John Shannon did not bother identifying himself. “We were copied on an incident report filed by a Miss Alice Humphrey. She claimed a man in a green Camry was following her. She wrote down the license plate.”

“Nothing illegal about driving around Manhattan.” Supposedly the bureau’s determination regarding his termination was still pending, but Hank could read the writing on the wall. He was for all practical purposes a free agent now.

“I hear your days at the bureau might be numbered. I don’t know what you have in mind, but don’t fuck this all up for both of us, Beckman.”

“I tried to tell you: Alice Humphrey is not the woman I saw with Larson. I’m sure of that. You think you can just gloss that over?”

“The mountain of evidence I’ve got against the recollection of a burnout like you? I’m not losing sleep.”

“Have you arrested her?”

“Not yet. We’ve got enough, though. The DA’s office is working on the warrants now. I mean it, Beckman: stay away from the girl.”

“Whatever you say, Shannon. You’re the man.”

He flipped the phone shut. A half hour on the corner was too much time in the damn cold. He was grateful for the burst of warm air when he opened the glass door of Union Bar. Ignoring the bartender’s frustrated glare when he ordered tea, he made himself comfortable at a table for two in the corner, right next to the window with an unobscured view of the Park Avenue hotel Alice Humphrey had entered thirty-two minutes earlier.

Alice felt herself lose track of time in the void of the silent phone line.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I just-um, I’m very sorry to hear about Mr. Atkinson’s accident. Do you know what happened?”

“The police are saying he ran off the road, like into a ravine or something? No one even saw it happen. Someone passed the accident scene this morning and called an ambulance, but it was way too late. They don’t know whether it was intentional or if he was drunk or if it was, like, I don’t know, road rage or something. I heard the editor say the police think there’s a possibility of foul play.”

It was a long-winded and manic way of saying she didn’t know anything yet.

“My name is Alice Humphrey. Mr. Atkinson had been trying for some time to reach me. I believe he was also speaking to my brother, Ben Humphrey. I was hoping to find out why he’d been calling me.”

“Bob has-had-a tendency to be, like, really private until he was ready to go to print with a story? If you ask me, the writers can be a little cutthroat with each other. I think they get paid based on what’s printed, maybe?”

“What is Empire Media? I’m not familiar with it.”

“Sure you are, you just don’t know it.” She spoke like someone looking forward to announcing a joke’s punch line.

“I don’t understand.”

“The National Star?”

“Ah.” Alice did indeed recognize the name of the notorious tabloid.

“Exactly. No surprise the writers like to say they’re from Empire Media instead. Sounds, you know, like, classier?”

“And you don’t know what Mr. Atkinson might have been working on that involved me or my brother? Maybe something involving a gallery called the Highline?”

“Sorry.”

“Or perhaps Frank Humphrey?”

“Nope. Oh, wait, you’re, like, with that Humphrey?”

“One big happy family,” she muttered. “Do you know if Mr. Atkinson might have left some notes in his office that might explain why he was calling me?”

“We don’t exactly give the writers offices, if you know what I mean? Bob usually worked at home. Here’s the thing.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You know how I said the police think there’s a possibility of foul play? Apparently the passenger side door was open on Bob’s car, and the keys were gone from the ignition. They also didn’t find any sign of his briefcase, even though he always carried it.”

“So the police think someone caused the accident to steal his keys and briefcase?”

“No, they said it’s more likely someone came across the scene and stole the stuff after the fact. Can you imagine? Who would do something like that? But the police did ask whether Bob might have been working on something that could have created enemies. That’s why the company had his cell phone calls forwarded here. His editor didn’t want to miss out if Bob was in the hunt. Pretty cold, huh?”

Alice was thinking the woman was not a very discreet receptionist when she was struck by the irony that of the two women on either end of this phone conversation, she was the one who’d been out of work for nearly a year.

“Is it possible the editor knows why Mr. Atkinson was calling me?”

“Oh, no. I heard him tell the police that Bob had been even more intense than usual lately, but he has no idea what Bob was up to. He was like an old dinosaur around here and sort of did his own thing. I’m supposed to get the name and number of anyone who calls for him. Alice Humphrey, you said? And what number can he call you back at?”

“I’m traveling now,” she lied, “so I’ll just have to try again later.”

“Okay, I’ll let him know.”

“Did Bob live upstate?” Maybe she could talk her way into the dead reporter’s house to look for any notes he might have left behind, if whoever stole his keys and briefcase hadn’t beaten her to it.

“I’m sorry?”

“You said that Mr. Atkinson’s car accident was on 684. Did he live upstate?”

“No, he lives by Gramercy Park. I’m pretty sure he was driving home from Bedford.”

“He had been spending time in Bedford?”

“Yeah. I overheard him on the phone a couple different times with the Bedford Police Department asking for some ancient police report. He said he was finally going to drive up there and find the damn thing himself. It’ll be so sad if that’s what ended up putting him on the road last night, you know?”

Hank was about to fetch some more warm water for his tea bag when he spotted the woman with short, chocolate-colored hair and heavily lined eyes emerging from the hotel. He was impressed by the transformation. The clothes were the same, but the long black coat and all-weather boots were practically a winter uniform for Manhattan’s women. From the neck up, she was unrecognizable. The strawberry tone of her skin looked paler against the near-black hair. The style of her hair and makeup was different, too. Younger. Stronger. Edgier.

In fact, her hasty makeover had been so effective that he might have missed her if he hadn’t spent so much time over the last two days thinking about the way she carried herself. The long red hair was gone, but that sheepish gait was unmistakable.

He left his empty paper cup on the table and headed south on Park Avenue, letting her maintain a half-block lead.

Chapter Forty-Seven

A lice caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the glass of the subway car’s window and was startled. Breathe, she told herself. You might feel like you are walking around Manhattan in a Halloween costume, but these people around you have no idea who you are or what you are supposed to look like.

She had paid $20 for a new MetroCard. She would pay cash again at Grand Central for a train ticket to Katonah, one town north of Bedford. She hadn’t figured out yet whether she would be brave enough to exit the train in the town where she had spent nearly every summer of her childhood. Surely the police would have someone watching her parents’ house. And the locals might recognize her, despite this ridiculous haircut. She had every reason to stay as far away from Bedford as possible. But somehow she knew that whatever secrets Robert Atkinson had been searching for in Bedford would provide the key to the locks she felt tightening around her.

The 6 train stopped at Twenty-third Street. It was still early in the afternoon, so foot traffic was light. The young couple across from her moved toward the exit, waiting for the doors to part. The man pushed a loose strand of his girlfriend’s hair behind her ear, and she smiled her thanks. Something about that simple act of thoughtfulness made Alice want to cry.

The couple stepped from the car, leaving her alone with the homeless man dozing in and out of sleep and a guy who seemed to think earbuds the size of pencil erasers could somehow shield the people around him from the rap music thumping from his iPod. The doors remained open, and Alice realized she was holding her breath again, waiting for the car to be sealed like a protective shell. She did not want to see a police officer step inside. And with both Drew Campbell and Robert Atkinson dead, she was beginning to wonder whether the police might be the least of her worries.

She allowed herself to exhale when the doors closed. She felt her core flex instinctively, muscle memory formed from years of subway transit, stabilizing her own body, preparing for the abrupt lurch of the train’s movement. But there was no movement. The car remained still. There were no sounds other than the tinny rhymes leaking from the iPod guy’s headphones and the quiet hum of the homeless man’s snore. She was holding her breath yet again, wishing she had waited at Union Square for an express train.

When the car finally jerked forward, her body was unprepared. She slid all the way into the empty seat beside her, and had never been so thankful for the unceremonious wobbling of a New York City subway ride.

Just as quickly as she had calmed herself, she felt the hot rush of unmitigated terror when the sliding door at the end of the train opened and a man who looked like the driver of the green Toyota stepped inside.

She rose from her seat and walked hurriedly toward the opposite end of the car. She could hear his footsteps behind her and wondered if either the homeless man or the iPod guy would help her if she screamed. She pulled at the exit door, realizing she had never tried to walk from car to car on the subway and had no idea how to operate the sliding door.

She felt the man’s hand on her shoulder. She turned and pressed herself against the door, trying to release herself from his grasp. She could still hear the homeless man’s purr and the iPod guy’s tunes.

“Help. Someone help?”

“Shh. Shh. It’s okay. Stop. Just stop.”

The man’s palms were raised as if he was the one being attacked, but his face was completely calm. Something about his whispered pleas for her to stop resisting was comforting. “My name is Hank Beckman, and I believe you’re innocent.”

“So you actually saw the woman who was kissing Drew Campbell in the photograph the police showed me?”

They had completed the 6 train leg of the trip and were continuing their conversation on a bench in Grand Central Terminal, each of them telling the other a one-sided view of the events of the last few days. They were strangers, but somehow the simple fact that this man was an FBI agent who believed she was telling the truth allowed her to share every detail within her knowledge.

“You mean Travis Larson. There is no Drew Campbell. But, yes, I believe that the woman I saw at Larson’s apartment was the same woman in that photograph. And I believe she was intentionally trying to look like you and had purchased the identical blue coat for exactly that purpose. The human mind is capable of greatness, but we have been trained to process information with efficiency, which can sometimes mean superficially. We grab on to salient identifiers, often at the expense of devoting attention to more nuanced details. It’s one of the reasons why cross-racial eyewitness identifications are less reliable. We see a person of a different race and give disproportionate weight to that one distinctive visual trait without really processing the individual’s true appearance.”

“So it’s not like this other woman is my identical twin?”

He shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong: she certainly did resemble you. You probably could see the similarity for yourself in that photograph. But she and Larson were taking advantage of the fact that your hair, if you don’t mind me saying, was the single characteristic that most people would identify first when looking at you. And I assume you bought that blue coat for a reason.”

“It never fails to get a compliment.”

“No surprise there. Your coloring-her coloring-with that bright blue? It’s a knockout combination. Any chance that coat’s a specialty item? We could start with that to track down your doppelganger.”

“Mass-produced in China and sold at department stores all over the country. Sorry.”

“You shouldn’t have cut it, you know.” He pointed to his head. “Your hair.”

“The last thing I’m worried about right now are my looks.”

“That’s not what I mean. If you hadn’t changed your hair, I’d be trying to talk you into going home. It looks really bad that you ran.”

“I panicked. They had my building surrounded. They were coming to get me. I pictured myself being carried away in handcuffs, and I just couldn’t sit there and let it happen.”

“They weren’t coming for you. Not yet, anyway. Shannon told me not an hour ago that they were still working on the warrant. It’s definitely in the pike.”

Lily must have seen a police car on the street outside her building and assumed they were there for her.

“If you go back now, though, they’ll see what you’ve done to your hair. Changing your appearance is quintessential evidence of consciousness of guilt. That, combined with lies they caught you in about your relationship with Larson? They may as well have a confession.”

“I never lied to them.”

“But they think you did. And that new haircut of yours makes their version all the more likely.”

“I think I liked you better when I thought you were trying to kill me.”

“I’m just telling you how it is. So tell me what you’re planning to do in Bedford.”

She had already purchased a ticket in cash. The train was due to leave in twelve minutes. “I’m going to find out why Robert Atkinson was tracking down a police report from there.”

“Why don’t you just call your brother and ask him what he knows about Atkinson?”

“Because I have no idea how to get hold of him. He’s cell-only, and I went and took his only phone.” She was also increasingly convinced that he’d been holding something back from her since the very beginning.

“So you’re going to march into a police station and tell them you’re Alice Humphrey?”

“No. I’m thinking I’ll say I’m a reporter following up on the story Atkinson was working on.”

“And what if someone there recognizes you? I assume Bedford’s a small place.”

“I don’t think I have any choice right now but to take a few calculated risks.”

He rose from the bench without speaking, reached into his coat pocket, and dangled a set of car keys. “That green Toyota that’s been tailing you should get us up to Bedford just fine. I’ll pull in front of the exit on Lexington in about twenty. Don’t go anywhere.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Let’s just say I might also be in need of a few calculated risks.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

J ust as Beckman had predicted, they pulled off 684 at the Bedford exit about an hour after crossing the Triborough Bridge. The plan was for him to go to the police station to ask questions about Robert Atkinson while she drove one town north to Katonah to avoid the chance of being recognized in Bedford.

“Here.” He handed her a cell phone. “I’ll call you when it’s time to pick me up.”

“Isn’t there some FBI rule that says you shouldn’t be handing over your phone to a wanted fugitive?”

“Probably, but I think we can agree I’ve officially left the reservation. That’s a disposable that can’t be traced to you, so let’s keep it that way. Absolutely no calls to anyone you know. The NYPD will be pulling their LUDs.”

She thought about Jeff and how badly she wanted to contact him. He was supposed to call her when his depositions were over, but she had turned off her phone so the police couldn’t track it. If he didn’t hear from her soon, he was going to think she was having regrets about last night.

“Their what?”

“Local usage details. Incoming and outgoing calls. Just don’t call anyone but me, all right? I got one for me, too. The number’s already in there as the last number dialed.”

She fiddled with the keys to be sure she could find the entry. A chirp escaped from his coat pocket. “See? We’re all set. Call me if there are any problems. Otherwise, you’ll be hearing from me when it’s time to pick me up. No speeding. Come to full stops. Don’t get pulled over. That’s how they caught Ted Bundy.”

“Great. Now I’m being compared to a serial killer.”

He rolled his eyes, and she smiled.

“You’ve told me everything you know? Absolutely everything?”

“Yes. Absolutely.” She could tell from the way he looked at her that, once again, he believed her. “Agent Beckman?”

“Call me Hank.”

“Thank you, Hank.”

He got out of the car two blocks from the police station, and she crawled across the console to take his place at the wheel, waving before taking the direct route back to the highway, as cautious as a first-time taker of the driving exam.

Hank had never had reason to step inside the police station in Lolo, Montana, where he was raised, but he imagined it would have looked something like the one in Bedford. With clean concrete steps and upgraded glass windows, the building was not actually old, but had been designed to appear old-fashioned. Small towns did not want to admit that they were home to criminal acts and those who committed them. If they had to have a police station, better it at least be quaint.

A gray-haired woman sat at the desk nearest to an unstaffed reception window at the building’s entrance. He tapped gently on the glass, and she let out a little yelp.

“Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to startle you there.”

“No worries. Guess I let myself get carried away on my Sudoku.” She made her way to the window, no doubt slowed by the fact that her chubby feet looked like two bratwurst forced into her hot pink pumps, color-coordinated to match her black-and-pink-flowered blouse. Up close, he could see that her reading glasses were bedazzled with rhinestones. The photo ID hanging from the New York Giants lanyard around her neck identified her as Gail Richards.

“I have an aunt who can plow through an entire Sudoku book in three hours straight, then still be searching for more. I tell her she needs to go to Sudoku rehab.”

“Oh, don’t I know it. What can I do you for today?”

He flashed his FBI identification. Before he could even get a word out, she was pointing to the back of the building. “Oh, I’ll show you to the detectives.”

“No, ma’am, this is more likely to be a matter for the folks who sit up here near the window. It’s my understanding that a journalist by the name of Robert Atkinson has been trying to obtain a copy of a police report from you all. I believe it may have been a report from some time ago?”

“Oh my, yes. That’s not a name I’ll soon forget. He must have called me six different times. First he thought I had the name wrong. Then he said I had the date wrong. Then he seemed to think I was some silly girl who didn’t know her way around our archive files, but I gave him some choice words on that one. Next thing I know, here he waltzes up to the window yesterday-right when I’m trying to close up for the night-claiming that someone’s on the take. Someone destroyed records. Acting like we’re Enron or something, standing around shredding documents just to keep them out of the hands of the important Mr. Atkinson.”

Hank could suddenly imagine perky Miss Gail with the bedazzled reading glasses tearing out a man’s throat if properly motivated.

“And what police report was he trying to obtain?”

“A nonexistent one, if you ask me.”

“And according to him?”

She sighed at the mere thought of having to remind herself of the inanity of his request. “At first, all he’d give me was a date. April 18, 1985. Well, it was either late at night on April 18 or sometime April 19 or maybe early in the morning on April 20, which would have been a Sunday. But it had something to do with something that happened on April 18. I told him that we might not be a hotbed of crime up here, but we’d have more than one incident report on a spring weekend, that’s for sure. I asked him for an address or a suspect or the nature of the crime, and he just wasn’t willing to budge. Believe it or not, that was probably his first three phone calls. Then he finally calls back and tells me, fine, the name of the complainant would have been Christie Kinley.”

Something about the name sounded familiar. He had taken in an ocean of information from Alice Humphrey in the last few hours, but he could hear her voice speaking a similar name during their manic exchange of data. Kinley. It was the last name that was familiar.

“Do you mean Julie Kinley?” He recalled Alice mentioning a plagiarism claim that ITH had settled with a woman named Julie Kinley. If the woman hadn’t passed away last year, she would have risen to the top of his list of suspects.

“I was about to say, legal name Julie Kinley, but she was known as Christie. Trust me, that was a name I took note of. I thought maybe Atkinson was playing a joke on me, but apparently the mother named her after the actress Julie Christie.”

“And you remember all this without notes.” He tried not to go too heavy on the marveling tone, but knew he needed to make up for trying to correct her about the complainant’s first name. “I’d like to have someone at the bureau with that kind of memory.”

“You darling man, I can’t even tell you what I had for breakfast this morning. This just goes to show you how that Atkinson fellow hounded me. But my job’s my job, so off I go to archives, digging through the paper files. Some people aren’t the best about their dates, you know. April gets in with August. May winds up before March. And I knew I’d never hear the end of it from this guy if I told him we didn’t have the report when in fact we actually did. So, let me tell you, I looked. Hard. And there were no reports filed by Julie or Christie or anyone else named Kinley any time in 1985, or even the spring of ’84 and ’86, which I checked just to be clear. I did not appreciate him suggesting that I hadn’t searched properly.”

“That’s where the choice words came in, huh?” He flashed a conspiratorial grin.

“Oh, don’t you know it. Choice indeed. So choice you could cut them with a knife and eat them with Heinz 57 sauce. Don’t tell the mayor, but I’m pretty sure I dropped some bombs you can’t say on the radio.”

“Sounds like Atkinson deserved it.” He felt bad dishing on the man under the circumstances.

“Once I told him-in fine detail-just how thorough my work had been, I thought we were over and done with. But sure enough, he showed up here yesterday asking to see the chief. Like the chief of police is just going to march to the front window because Gail says so.”

He shook his head at the insanity of the suggestion.

“Then he goes and accuses us of destroying documents.”

“Us?”

“Well, and that was the thing, right? He was so sure records had been destroyed, but he refused to say how he was so certain they had ever existed in the first place. I finally had to get a sergeant to deal with him, but you know I was listening in.”

Hank had no doubt at all.

“Sergeant Jenner’s sort of shining him on a bit, basically trying to get rid of the man. But then old Atkinson blurts out that he knows the police report was filed because he’d seen it before. So the sergeant asks the questions anyone with half a brain would ask. If you read the report, why can’t you tell us more about the nature of the crime or the name of the suspect or something to help us know what in the world you’re talking about?”

“And what did Atkinson have to say about that?”

“Absolutely nothing. He left in a huff, yelling to the sergeant that there’d been a payoff. That the girl got paid. The cops had gotten paid. And he’d gotten sandbagged.”

“Atkinson said that he had been sandbagged?”

“Yep. I remember his exact words. He said GD-it, but, you know, he actually said the GD part. He said, GD-it, that tramp got paid off. The cops got paid off. And all I got was f-in’ sandbagged. But instead of f-in’, it was-”

He nodded to make clear she didn’t have to fill in that particular blank.

“Did Mr. Atkinson do something wrong?”

“No, ma’am. Why do you ask?”

“You never said why you were here. I figured he was in trouble. I’d be happy if I never had to deal with him again, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t think you’ll be seeing him around here any time soon.”

Alice drove the route from Katonah south to Bedford just as cautiously as she had taken it northbound. Her new ally, Hank Beckman, took a spot in the passenger seat.

“So, bad news first: no police report.”

When her new disposable phone had rung, she’d allowed herself a brief moment of hope that he might declare their mission accomplished. But when he told her to meet him outside the Shell Station off the Old Post Road, she could tell from his briskness that there would be no easy answers.

“After this week, only a photograph of me on a police report with someone else’s name would count as bad news. Is there good news?”

“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

“D on’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.”

Alice knew they had reached the end of what could be accomplished today. They would have to start up again tomorrow in Falls Village. She could not recall another time in her life when she had absolutely nowhere to go.

“All right. You can use the bat phone to call me when it’s time to leave the city.”

“You can’t go back to your apartment tonight.”

“I know.”

“So where are you planning to stay?”

“I stopped trying to plan anything about fifteen hours ago. That sofa you’re on seems as good a place as any.”

She could tell he didn’t like the suggestion. She didn’t want him to suggest his own apartment. She wanted him to be precisely what he seemed, a man who believed that law enforcement should stand for truth, a man who was willing to help her because it was the right thing to do.

“How about we make the drive tonight to avoid the traffic. We’ll find a hotel up there to crash. Two rooms, of course.”

It was the perfect suggestion.

They were halfway to Connecticut on the Hutchinson River Parkway when they heard the announcement on 1010 News radio. An arrest warrant had been issued for Alice Humphrey, the daughter of Academy Award-winning director Frank Humphrey, for the murder of a former boyfriend and business associate. The facts of the case were still sealed, but according to an anonymous source, evidence submitted in support of the warrant included sexual photographs of Frank Humphrey with an allegedly underage girl. It was unclear how the photographs were related to the murder allegations against his daughter. The reporter promised more details as they rolled in.

They drove in silence to Falls Village. As she fell asleep in a lumpy bed in a roadside motel, she had never felt so alone.

Chapter Fifty

J oann Stevenson felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. In the days that had passed since she’d last seen her daughter, she had learned to protect herself as she listened to the television. Hearing Becca described as a missing teenager-with all of the accompanying speculation about the dark possibilities-was not easy. But even harder were the nights when the newscasters said nothing about Becca during those thirty-second commercial teasers, a reminder to Joann that her daughter’s disappearance was already turning into yesterday’s story, surpassed by the latest home invasion or commercial fire.

What she did not expect during a commercial break from Glee-the show Becca had turned her on to-was the announcement that an arrest warrant had been issued for the murder at the Highline Gallery, or that the suspect in question was a woman-a former child actress at that. Nor did she expect the scintillating teaser that the woman’s father and pornographic photographs of him with an underage girl might be involved.

She knew it was late, but called Jason Morhart anyway.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Joann?”

“That’s right. Joann Stevenson, the white-trash woman whose daughter went missing, and no one had the proper decency to call to say an arrest warrant was going out. I had to hear about it on the news.”

“It’s on the news?”

She heard a television come on in the background. “You didn’t know?”

“I knew an arrest might be coming soon. They’re still not sure of Becca’s connection to the gallery, Joann. Hopefully if they get this woman in custody, they can turn the pressure on for answers about Becca. Remember? We talked about this?”

“Did you know this movie director was involved?”

“He’s the suspect’s father. They’re looking for the woman who was running the gallery where Becca’s fingerprints were found.”

“But they’re saying the father took sexual photographs of an underage girl.”

“That part was on the news?” The detail must have proved too titillating not to leak.

“So you knew about the pictures? I thought the picture of Becca was one she’d taken to send to that boy, Dan Hunter.”

“The gallery was selling pornographic photographs-the picture that Becca sent to Dan was definitely not one of them. I’m sorry, but it was a detail I couldn’t share with you.”

“I mean, a man like Frank Humphrey must have access to all kinds of film distribution networks. He could peddle that smut all over the world.”

“I can assure you, Joann, that the detectives in the city are absolutely positive that Becca was not one of the kids depicted in those photographs. And I promise you-I swear on my life-that I had no idea that they suspected this woman’s father of being involved.”

“I can’t believe no one even called to tell me the arrest warrant was really happening. Jason, I heard about it on the news.” She didn’t like the shrill tone of her voice.

“They didn’t call me either. I would’ve told you. I would have driven over there myself to let you know in person to expect the announcement. I’m so sorry, Joann.”

“Is it too late?”

“You know you can call me anytime you need me. That’s why I wanted you to have this number.”

“No, I mean is it too late for you to come over here? To talk to me.”

Jason knew it was probably a mistake, but he pulled on his coat and climbed into his truck.

Chapter Fifty-One

T he home in which Christie Kinley had supposedly passed away was a large yellow colonial with a wraparound porch and French doors. Alice guessed the lot was about three acres. She wondered if her father’s money had paid for it.

The woman who answered the door was about her age. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail. She was wearing running clothes and had her car keys in hand. “Let’s go, Jenny. We’re going to the gym. Little Kyle’s going to be in the playroom, too. It’ll be fun. Sorry about that,” she said, lowering her voice to a conversational tone. “Getting a four-year-old in the car is a twenty-minute production.”

Alice let Hank do the talking, since he was the one with a badge. He explained that they were looking for background information about the previous homeowner, Julie Kinley. They believed she still went by her middle name, Christie.

“She passed away last year. We bought the house in the summer and only dealt with the real estate agent. I’ve got a forwarding address for her mail, though. It goes to her sister, I believe?” She reached for the black metal mailbox affixed to the front porch and slipped out one of the envelopes awaiting pickup. “This looked like junk mail from her gym, but I forward everything just in case. You can take it if you want.”

Alice saw a handwritten Brooklyn address on the envelope before Hank slipped it into his coat pocket.

“Do you happen to know the details of Ms. Kinley’s passing?” he asked.

“No, I think I’ve intentionally kept my ears closed to that kind of talk in the neighborhood. I don’t really want to know there was a dead person in my house. Silly, I suppose, but the house was all cleared out by the time we looked at it, and I like to pretend to think we were the first to ever live here. You might try Mrs. Withers next door. She’s lived here forever and is one of those neighbors who seems to know everything about everybody.”

Alice could tell that the woman didn’t consider that trait a good thing.

They could still hear the mom yelling at Jenny to “hurry it up” as they made their way to the next-door neighbor’s house.

Mrs. Withers was exactly what a nosy neighbor should be-a little plump with curly white hair, a kitchen that smelled like bread, and an ability to whip up mugs of hot cocoa, with marshmallows no less, for strangers who showed up without notice. She also liked to talk. A lot. And quickly.

“I always felt sorry for Christie. The cancer was like the icing on the cake, confirmation of that queasy feeling I had since I first met her as a teenager. It’s like some people are just born with bad karma. I always hoped that something would turn for that girl. When Gloria died -”

“That was Christie’s mother?” Alice was delighted at the woman’s loquaciousness, but found it difficult to get a word in edgewise.

“If you could call her a mother. She was always flitting around, chasing after this man or the next. That’s how she managed to have two daughters without ever having a man involved in any way except the bedroom, if she even bothered going to a bed. She was a groupie back in the sixties, you know.”

Alice and Hank both muttered the requisite “No, we didn’t,” but Mrs. Withers had plowed on without them.

“Oh, she would talk about those days like she was Neil Armstrong, walking on the moon. She bedded Mick Jagger once, according to her. By the time she moved here, Christie was fourteen years old and already headed to rehab, but Gloria was still at it. She’d go down to the city and try to pick up these has-been actors at their old hangouts. She was one of those gals who thought a woman’s only value was to land a man. She wanted those girls of hers to be famous, but never taught them a single talent or skill. In Gloria’s delusional mind, they’d get by on their looks. But then Gloria had her stroke about eight or nine years ago, and Christie moved back into the house to take care of Mia.”

“Mia is Christie’s sister?” Alice remembered mention of a surviving sister in Christie’s obituary.

“Yep, and Gloria screwed her up at least as much as she did Christie. When Christie moved back here, I thought maybe this would be her chance to have a better life, without Gloria hounding her about getting a husband locked down. It seemed like she might have gotten her head on a little straighter, but then she got the news about the cancer. Poor thing was too far gone by the time they caught it. ”

She finally paused, taking a sip of her cocoa as if they had been having an idle conversation about the relative merits of powder or liquid dish detergent.

Alice didn’t know how to ask the woman whether she was absolutely certain Christie had really died.

“I imagine that’s a difficult end to one’s life,” she finally said.

“Oh, it was horrible. You know, when Gloria went, it was from a stroke out in the yard shoveling snow. She just fell down and died. But we all had to watch Christie go. She got so thin because she couldn’t keep any food down.”

Alice looked at Hank, who also seemed disappointed. The deterioration this woman was describing did not seem like something that could be feigned.

“I think Christie knew when it was finally time for her to go. She rounded up a group of people at the house so she could be surrounded by friendly faces. She told us to make it a potluck so she could watch us eat.” She smiled at the memory. “Then when she was feeling tired, she called her best friend and her sister into her room to hold her hands while she fell asleep. She never woke up.”

“So you were actually there at the house when she passed?”

“Yes. I like to think it’s because Christie knew I always hoped for something better for her.”

“You mentioned that Christie moved back into the house to take care of her sister. May I ask if there’s something wrong with Mia?” Maybe she would know who might still hold a grudge about what happened to her sister as a teenager.

“Well, it depends by what you mean by something wrong, I suppose. Supposedly she’s a very talented photographer, but as my granddaughter sometimes says, there’s a screw loose in there. There’s a darkness to her. Very negative energy. Why do you ask?”

“It just seems a little old to be living with her mother.” Even eight or nine years ago, when Gloria died, the daughters would have been around thirty years old.

“Oh, Mia’s a youngster. She only needed Christie to stay with her at the house for a few years, and then she moved down to the city, so Christie had the house on her own. You know, when Gloria moved in next door, she was just pregnant with little Mia. Christie was already messed up, so I thought maybe Gloria wanted a second chance. But then she goes and makes all the same mistakes with Mia, starting with that name. Mia Farrow and Louise Fletcher. I mean, naming your daughter after the crazy nurse in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Talk about cuckoo. Mia Louise Andrews. The dad was never in the picture, but I assumed that Andrews was the father’s name. Then Gloria told me years later after a few margaritas on July 4 that she just made up the baby’s last name. Maybe it was for Julie Andrews? Who could really know with that woman.”

“So, I’m sorry-Mia was born when?” The story was building in Alice’s head faster than she could process it.

“Well, let’s see… Gloria wasn’t even showing yet when she moved here in, it must have been 1985. The beginning of the summer. Early June, I think. She’d been having all kinds of problems with Christie. I said before she sent her off to rehab, but it was technically boarding school. Again, who knows how Gloria paid for that either. I never saw a woman other than a prostitute who found a way to pay so many bills without doing any other work than on her back. Oh lord, did I just say that?”

Alice knew precisely how Gloria had paid her bills. She needed Mrs. Withers to get back on track.

“Christie was sent away to boarding school?” Alice remembered Ben telling her that a girl at his party had gotten so wasted that her parents had sent her away to an all-girls boarding school.

“Yep, for girls only. I thought it might do her some good to be away from her mother, but she only stayed a year. You know, I even joked with Gloria that first summer that with Christie going away to boarding school, and Gloria having a little baby at her age, people might get the wrong impression.”

Alice looked at Hank, who spoke for the first time since the cocoa had been poured. “You mean the neighbors might gossip that Gloria’s pregnancy was fake, and that the baby was actually Christie’s.”

“I know, I’m just awful. But I was only joking.”

Alice knew in her gut what the relationship was between Christie Kinley’s sister and all of the questions she had been carrying around the last week. But that didn’t stop her from asking the validating question.

“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Withers, what does Mia look like?”

“Well, she’s a lovely girl. It makes her penchant for these lowlife men all the more perplexing! She’d never bring home a nice guy like this one. But what does she look like? She’s slender, you know. Very fit. One of those girls who carries herself well. And she has the most amazing red hair. Delicate features. Sort of a honey-and-strawberries kind of complexion. You know what, dear? I know this will sound like babble from an old woman, but if I had to say, Mia looks a bit like you if it weren’t for that dark hair of yours.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

T hey were back at their motel outside White Plains, strategizing their next move.

“I know you’re the one who’s an FBI agent, but don’t we have enough evidence to go to Shannon and Danes? I ran from my apartment because I knew I was in over my head. But with what we know now? I’m willing to go back to the city. I’ll turn myself in if that’s what it takes to make them investigate Mia.”

“You can do that, but once you turn yourself in on the warrant, no one will be in a rush to exonerate you. You’ll probably get slapped with a no-bail hold on the murder charge. The police will have passed the case on to the DA’s office, so it will be clear as far as they’re concerned. And the prosecutors will keep setting over your trial date until a judge forces them to fish or cut bait. It would be better to get them to drop the charges up front.”

“You’re a federal agent. Can’t you just tell them what to do?”

He shook his head. “If only I could. Federal and state governments are separate sovereigns. Put it this way: the last time I talked to John Shannon, he basically called me a burnout and a loser. I can call them with this tip about Mia, but trust me: they’re not going to listen.”

“How can they ignore it? If we’re right, Mia Andrews is my half sister.” She cringed at the thought. “My guess is she had no idea that Christie was actually her mother, until Christie died. Maybe she found the settlement documents or something else that made her realize her sister was actually her biological mother. She has every reason to hate me and my father.”

“Mrs. Withers did say she had a weak spot for dirtbags, which pretty much sums up Travis Larson.”

“She has to be the woman kissing Larson in that picture. Plus she’s a photographer. That can’t be a coincidence. If she got part of the settlement money when her mother died, she might have been in a position to front the Highline Gallery operation. Like I said before: three birds, one stone. She makes money off the sale of the so-called artwork. She frames me. And she gets the pictures from my father’s office in front of the police without ever having to name her mother as the girl depicted in them.”

Hank had run Mia Andrews and learned that Mrs. Withers had not been exaggerating when she’d described the young woman as troubled. Two drug busts. A stop by police officers who suspected her of prostitution. The use of a false name and identification on the second drug arrest. According to Hank, she was precisely the kind of woman who might have crossed paths with Travis Larson.

“That’s one version of the facts. But John Shannon and Willie Danes have spent the last week convincing themselves that you killed Larson and were the mastermind behind those thumb drive sales from the gallery. To them? Mia’s existence will just be another motive for you to act out against your father and try to prove you could be independent. I’m sure the way they look at it, your slipping those pictures of your dad into those thumb drives was some Freudian act of revenge.”

“Even the suggestion that I would peddle obscenity involving my own father-”

“I hate to say it, Alice, but I’ve seen people do much sicker things. And so have Shannon and Danes. All I’m saying is that the NYPD isn’t necessarily going to shift their entire theory based on what we have so far. But that’s not an absolute deal breaker. We just need them to be sufficiently intrigued to follow up on it. To be open-minded. But if I’m the one to call them, it’s not going to happen.”

Alice found herself thinking about the words her father had used to persuade her to call Arthur Cronin for help. He had quoted Malcolm Gladwell-something about “practical intelligence,” “an ability to read a situation. To know what to say and how and when to say it.”

“I know we can’t call my friends, but what about my lawyer?”

“Is this your boyfriend, Jeff? I guarantee you they’re pulling his LUDs.”

She didn’t feel the need to articulate the complications that made the word boyfriend a poor descriptor. “No. I told Danes the last time he tried to interview me that Arthur Cronin was my lawyer.”

“They wouldn’t have the balls to monitor his phone.”

“Then that’s who I think we should call.”

“Alice. Where are you? I’ve been trying to cover for you with the police, but what the hell is going on?” Based on his secretary’s urgency in transferring the call, Alice could tell Art had been waiting to hear from her.

“My friend Lily warned me the police were coming. I just couldn’t let them take me. You know that I’m innocent.”

“You don’t look innocent to them right now. We need to negotiate your turning yourself in. Their case is probably shit.”

“How are Mom and Dad holding up?” She wished she could make herself not care about her father. He was the one who’d created this predicament. But even though she knew he was a cheat and a liar, she had to believe that he had beaten whatever part of him had been with Christie Kinley that night when he had finally stopped drinking.

“I’ve got a public relations firm putting together a damage-control campaign about these old photographs, but he’s more worried about you.”

She noticed he was not denying that the man in the pictures was her father.

“I know about Christie Kinley, Art. I know she wasn’t a former employee. That lawsuit had nothing to do with plagiarism.”

“I’m sorry, Alice. I was the one who told your father I could get this mess straightened out without having to rehash these ugly details.”

“A fourteen-year-old girl accused my father of raping her. It’s more than just an ugly detail.”

“It wasn’t rape. The girl was drunk. Your father even more so. She was enamored with your father’s celebrity. She set him up.”

“I don’t want to hear any of that right now.”

“We should have been up-front with you, but your father wants to rectify it. He was absolutely convinced that the church protesting the gallery was behind this. He has given me a full waiver to discuss these matters not only with you but with the police or anyone else, if doing so would finally get you out of this jam. He’s willing to let the chips fall as they may.”

“Did you two know that Christie Kinley had a child nine months after that night in Bedford?”

“What? Where did you hear that?”

“Did you know or not?”

“Of course not! That was never an issue in the settlement. No one ever made such an allegation.”

She explained the timing of Gloria’s supposed pregnancy while Christie was sent away to boarding school. “It would explain why a red-haired woman who looks like me was spotted with Travis Larson. Can you please call the detectives and convince them they need to talk to this woman? Her name is Mia Louise Andrews. If they can prove a connection between her and Larson, that should be enough to convince them I was set up.”

“The only thing those detectives want to hear from me right now is that I can bring you in on the warrant.”

“Tell them I’ll turn myself in if they interview Mia.”

“The NYPD doesn’t usually take well to blackmail.”

“With your talents, Art, I’m sure you can get them to see it as a fair compromise.”

“I suppose if they arrested you without following up on this angle, someone like me might use it to excoriate them in the media. A rush to judgment. Shoddy investigation tactics.”

“See? I knew you’d come up with something.”

“All right. Let me give these schmucks a call and see what I can do. Where do I call you back?”

She mouthed the request to Hank, who gave her approval to recite the number of her disposable cell.

“I’ll call you back in twenty.”

She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes before she’d know whether she was going to jail or-well, she didn’t know the alternative.

Twenty minutes came and went in silence. After thirty, she tried Art, and then continued dialing every five minutes.

When her cell rang shortly before the one-hour mark, she picked up immediately, continuing her ritualized pacing of the narrow path between the foot of the hotel bed and the fake mahogany television stand. Art’s voice sounded hoarse when he apologized for the delay.

“Jesus. I hope a screaming match wasn’t involved.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your voice sounds like you’ve been yelling.”

“No, but there’s something I need to tell you.”

“That does not sound good. The police wouldn’t listen about Mia? Hello?” She looked at the signal bars on her cell. The call hadn’t dropped. “Can you hear me? Art?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Seriously, you sound weird. If there’s bad news, go ahead and give it to me. I can take it.”

When he finally spoke, he was all business. “Okay, you need to pay very close attention. I want to talk to you first about where we stand with the police. And you have to promise me that you’re going to follow through on whatever course of action we decide is best, no matter what. Can you promise me that?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t-”

“So here’s the deal. I talked to Danes. He sounded put out. And very skeptical. But I got him to agree to a knock and talk with Mia Andrews-check her out, see what she might have to say about this matter.”

“Thank God-”

“Not so fast. It was obvious he’s only shining us on, which means he might believe any story this gal hands to him. It’s always possible she’s going to say something that actually hurts you.”

“I’m willing to take that risk.”

“Plus his agreement to check out Mia was conditional. He’ll only question her if I produce you on the warrant.”

“I don’t want to turn myself in on the warrant until after they see Mia. What if I turn myself in, and Mia’s off in Mexico with a fake name, never to be seen again?”

“Which leaves us in a standoff. Here’s what I was able to negotiate: you agree to return from wherever you’ve been hiding. Once we’re together in the city, Danes and his partner will reach out to Mia. Once the interview is over, he calls me, and I deliver you to them.”

“What if they can’t find Mia?”

“Then I made no promises. They’ll have to keep looking for you themselves. What do you think?”

“What other choice do I have?”

“I can get one of my own investigators on it. We could put together what would eventually be our defense case, and present it to the DA’s office to try to preempt an indictment. In the meantime, the longer you go without turning yourself in, the less likely it is they’ll be willing to help you out. And to be honest, police pressure can be a lot more effective in getting a response than a private investigator.”

“So basically I should turn myself in anyway, and if we go with Danes’s deal, the police will at least be the ones asking Mia questions?”

“That’s how I see it.”

“All right. Let’s do it.” She swallowed, realizing that tonight she would probably be sleeping in a jail cell. “What’s the next step?”

“Can you be in Williamsburg by six o’clock?”

That would give her nearly four hours.

“No problem.”

“I didn’t know how far away you were, so I asked for some time to make you available. Danes wants you near Mia’s house so you can turn yourself in as soon as the interview’s over.”

“That quickly, huh?”

“They’re worried you’ll renege. I’ll meet you down there. I think it’s good for us to be close by. Hopefully, something will come of their talks with Mia, in which case we might be able to help tie up some loose ends. I’m looking at a map now. There’s an intersection about a block from Mia’s address. Rutledge and Lee. I’ll meet you there a little before six. Now are you sure this is what you want to do?”

Of course it wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted her life back. She wanted anything else but her current circumstance. “Yes. I’m sure.”

“Okay, now remember that you promised not to change course, no matter what.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because your father called me. He begged me for your number so he could tell you himself, but I was worried he’d lead the police right to you.”

“You’re really scaring me. Are they okay?” Hank mouthed a silent What? from the threadbare chair in the corner of the hotel room.

“They’re fine, but it’s Ben. His sponsor hadn’t heard from him for a while and got worried enough to go by his apartment. He found Ben in the bathroom. There’s no easy way to say this. Your brother was using again. He overdosed.”

“Where is he? Did he go to the hospital? Is Down with him?” Despite Ben’s at least initially regular attendance at NA meetings, he’d never found anyone with whom he was as comfortable discussing his addiction as Down.

“It wasn’t just an OD. Ben’s dead. They think it happened sometime yesterday. Heroin. I’m so sorry.”

She remembered Ben’s unlocked apartment. The unoccupied loft. The cracked bathroom door that she had never opened. Her ugly rush to grab his money and cell phone. Maybe if she had nudged that door. She imagined rubber tubing around her brother’s bare arm, a syringe still hanging from his vein.

“Alice, I’m so, so sorry. You had a right to know immediately, but remember your promise. You need to focus on yourself right now-for the sake of your parents, if nothing else. They can’t lose both of you.”

From his choked-back sob, she knew he’d been holding himself together for her benefit, playing the role of the unflappable lawyer who was going to take care of everything. Practical intelligence, her father had called it.

She felt the phone slip from her hand before Hank grabbed her shoulders to break her fall.

Chapter Fifty-Three

I t was nearly four o’clock, and Jason was still pissed at those fat-slob NYPD-ers who had fucked him over. He also had a crick in his neck from spending the entire night tossing and turning on Joann Stevenson’s sofa, unsure whether the lack of sleep was from the fact that he hadn’t slept on a couch since college, or because he knew he had no business being on that particular one.

To top it off, Nancy had to go and say something about the fact that he looked exactly how he felt. “Holy moly, Jason. You’re much too young to have bags under your eyes the size of mine. You’ve got to take care of yourself, honey.”

“Just allergies, Nancy. Nothing to worry about.”

He’d been steaming all day, but decided he had to draw a line in the sand with those detectives in the city. Willie Danes picked up after two rings.

“Danes.”

“It’s Jason Morhart from Dover. My victim’s mom heard about your arrest warrant on the news last night.”

“Now if only we could find the defendant.”

He emphasized the last syllable to rhyme with ant, the way Jason noticed lawyers often did. He always thought it was a person’s way of trying to sound like an expert.

“You should have kept me in the loop, Danes. Our departments had an agreement. Full exchange of all information. And you never told me anything about that woman’s father being in some of those photographs. That’s got my victim’s mom all worked up about the pornography angle again. Her daughter being missing is bad enough. She doesn’t need to worry about naked pictures of her getting distributed all over the world.”

“Sounds like you’re the one who’s got yourself all worked up about the feelings of that girl’s mother, Morhart. This is a criminal investigation.”

“And it’s supposed to be a joint one. Forget about the girl’s family. I shouldn’t have heard about a major development from the television. Did you forget who it was who told you George Hardy is Becca’s father? Or who told you to look for Becca’s fingerprints in the first place?”

“A lot of good that’s done us. We’d actually have a pretty nice and neat case if we didn’t have to explain what the hell your girl’s prints are doing in that gallery.”

“Jesus, Danes. Listen to yourself. I’m sorry if the truth is interfering with the tidiness of your murder case.”

“Aw, crap. I’m being a jerk because I know we blew it. We got sucked into the momentum of things and were working overdrive on the arrest warrant. We didn’t think to call you. Sorry, man. Honestly, though, we got nothing but conjecture about Becca. Our best guess is that Larson was grooming her for the camera, but either something went wrong and she wound up getting hurt, or hopefully she got spooked and ran off. Once we get Humphrey in custody, maybe we’ll get a better read on the situation.”

“Any thoughts on when that might be?”

“With any luck, it’ll be tonight. Look, do you really want to be involved in this, even if it’s not taking us directly into Becca territory yet?”

“We did have a cooperation agreement.”

“I’ll tell you what. I worked out this cockamamie agreement with Humphrey’s lawyer for her to turn herself in, but first I promised to chase down some girl she thinks is her secret identical half sister or something.”

“Her what?”

“It’s nonsense, man, but that’s the way this girl’s been yanking our chain from the beginning. It’s a box I got to check off, though, and Shannon’s probably going to be tied up with the DA. We’re trying to figure out whether we have any charges against the father, and then we can use those as leverage with the daughter. Think you can meet me in Williamsburg by six o’clock? Take a run at this mystery witness with me? It’ll be a waste of time, but if you want to be in the loop, you and I will play Murtaugh and Riggs tonight.”

“Only if you’re the Mel Gibson one. Without the phone rage.”

“Deal.”

“Where’s Williamsburg?”

“In Brooklyn, man. That’s one of the five boroughs of New York City?”

Part IV

Mia

Chapter Fifty-Four

A lice’s disposable phone rang at 5:58 p.m. She recognized her surrogate uncle and now-attorney’s voice.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Outside a fruit market on Rutledge and Lee.”

“Are you holding up all right?”

“No, but I’m here.”

She had spent another two hours in the hotel room, overtaken by uncontrollable sobbing. Just when she thought she had no more left to give-the tears losing steam, her breathing returning to normal-she’d succumb beneath another oncoming wave.

It was Hank who had finally forced her into the car. He spoke more words during the drive to Brooklyn than he had since they’d met. He’d lost a sister. Her name was Ellen. He talked about her death and the way it tethered him to Travis Larson. About the phone call from the state police after Ellen’s accident. About how he had to hang up on the trooper before learning the location of her body so he could run to the bathroom to be sick.

And then he said he’d never gotten past the guilt. That the responsibility for someone else’s pain was a weight that could never be eased. You feel responsible for Ben, but your parents feel responsible for you. Don’t do this to them, Alice. Don’t give up on yourself. Don’t let them go to bed every night, knowing you’re either a fugitive or in prison, and feeling like it’s all their fault.

So just as she had promised Art she would, she had pulled herself together-for tonight. For now. Grieving the loss of her brother would have to come later. Hank had dropped her off at the intersection where she and Arthur had agreed to meet. There was no need to advertise to the NYPD that her plan had been assisted by an FBI agent. He promised he’d be circling in the neighborhood, waiting for her to call.

Art had apparently pulled himself together as well. “I got stuck in traffic trying to get out of Manhattan. I’m crossing the Williamsburg Bridge now. I don’t want to risk screwing anything up, so I’ll call Danes and let him know you’re in place standing by. I’ll be right there. If we’re lucky, Mia will either come clean or at least act hinky enough for Danes and Shannon to clue in that she’s behind this.”

As uncomfortable as she had been with the status quo, she felt sick knowing that something was going to change tonight. Either the police would see her in a new light, or she would officially become a criminal defendant. “How are my parents?”

“It was, well, I’ll go ahead and say it-it was a fucking hard day. But we’re going to try to have something resembling good news for the Humphrey family soon, okay? I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

She squared her shoulders and let the cold in, just like Ben had taught her when she was little.

Jason was growing frustrated with the snarl of one-way streets that threatened to take him farther and farther from the address where he was supposed to have met Willie Danes two minutes earlier at 5:55.

He finally gave up and pulled in front of a fire hydrant on the corner outside Mia Andrews’s building. If he got a ticket, he’d send it to the town to pay. Only one shoe had hit the asphalt before he heard a voice beckon from across the street.

“Dover can’t buy you an official ride, Morhart?” Willie Danes stepped from a white Crown Vic.

“I like my own car.”

“Whatever, man. Let’s do what we got to do.”

“So who’s this lady again?”

“You know those old sex pictures taken in Frank Humphrey’s house? The ones that got you all pissed off?”

Technically, the pictures were not the source of Jason’s aggrievement. It was the NYPD’s failure to tell him their significance. Whatever. He nodded.

“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

A lice 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

F or 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.”

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.”

“Her name was Christie, Papa. Christie Kinley, but her real name was Julie.”

“Alice, I know you’ve been angry at me for some time now, and I can only wonder whether you will ever forgive me after what happened to you because of my mistakes. But I am trying to make it right. That is why I’m doing this blood test. I don’t want to cover anything up anymore. You may not know this, but I never took another sip of alcohol once those officers knocked on our door. Not one sip. Because the fact that I could have done something like that-that I’ll never even know the depths to which I sunk that night-made me hate myself. And I never wanted to be whatever man I became that night, not ever again. But I realize now that I felt entitled all those years. Because I’d quit drinking-because I had put that night behind me-I felt entitled to indulge other vices. And I felt entitled because your mother and I-well, we have our issues. But I never realized that the way I’ve carried on all these years was not just a betrayal of your mother and our wedding vows-words we long ago wrote off as more aspirational than anything-but a betrayal of you and Ben, and of me as a man. And that’s what I came here to say. That I’m sorry. That to put my own baby girl in jeopardy is the worst crime a man could ever commit. And that, even though I’m getting to be an old man now, I plan on changing. For the better. So that you will let me be your father again. You’re all I have left now, Alice. I need to be your father again.”

She had cried. So had he. Ben was gone. She wasn’t. She had promised him that she would find a way to forgive him.

So she might be able to keep her promise, she had been avoiding all media coverage about the story. She did not need to see photographs of her father emblazoned with the words child rapist. Or of her mother: “What did she know?” Or even the one she had seen of her brother: “Did Daddy’s secrets cause him to OD?”

But now, sitting in her living room, flipping through her beloved Entertainment Weekly, she was unexpectedly confronted with a sidebar about the case. She checked the date on the cover. It was last week’s edition, before the DNA results came in.

RAPE, LOVE CHILD, OR BOTH?

Academy Award-winning director Frank Humphrey reportedly settled a lawsuit in 1985 arising from allegations that he raped a fourteen-year-old acquaintance of his children. Now sources report that Mia Andrews (below), who killed herself last week in a police standoff, may have been the daughter from that ill-fated night. Humphrey’s son, Ben, 41, died of a heroin overdose the day before the standoff.

She found herself staring at the photograph of Mia. She wasn’t her perfect doppelgänger, but there was undoubtedly a resemblance, enough so that even Alice had been certain that the grainy picture of Mia kissing Travis Larson was a doctored photo of Alice.

She opened her laptop and searched until she found a site that had published a photograph of Christie Kinley. She hadn’t realized it until now, but Christie looked like a younger version of her mother, like all those other women who had come forward last year to claim celebrity mistress status. Was the resemblance between Christie and Alice’s mother sufficient to explain the similarity between Mia and Alice?

Alice stared again at Mia’s photograph. No, Mia looked like her mother’s daughter, but she looked even more like Alice. And there was only one way that could be true.

She rifled through her purse until she found the business card that was first handed to her the day she discovered Travis Larson’s body. She had hoped she would never need to dial this number again. Detective Shannon answered. “Hi, Alice. I can’t imagine you missed us already.”

“No, but I’m afraid there still might be one loose end.”

Chapter Fifty-Eight

J ason Morhart managed to cram his truck into the hybrid-sized spot at the curb outside Bloomingdale’s.

It had been three days since the NYPD had broken the news. They had wrapped up their investigation and were about to tie the pretty little bow into a nice, neat package without any explanation for Becca Stevenson’s disappearance.

Sometimes investigations required you to look at a case through a different lens-to start over again with no assumptions and to rethink facts and events in a new light. Maybe if Willie Danes and John Shannon had done that when they first learned about Mia Andrews, the woman might still be alive, and Jason wouldn’t be waking up in cold sweats every night wondering whether he could have prevented the shooting in Williamsburg.

But now it was time for him to take a fresh look at Becca Stevenson’s disappearance. He realized now that he had stopped challenging himself for explanations the minute he’d learned about the fingerprint match in Highline Gallery. From that moment on, he’d been convinced that his case was inextricably entwined with the NYPD’s. He’d allowed himself to become complacent, waiting for them to arrest their suspect, who would in turn point him toward Becca.

But now the NYPD had all of its answers, and he was the one left with questions.

Where was Becca? How had her fingerprints wound up in Highline Gallery? And the question he kept coming back to, the one he knew had to be answered: How could it possibly be a coincidence that the Reverend George Hardy just happened to be protesting that very gallery?

He found Hardy and his protesters outside the Little Angels store where they’d last spoken.

“Back down here again, are you?”

“We get a big reaction down in SoHo. People don’t understand that yelling at us-calling us hate mongers and Jesus freaks-only makes us stronger. And only brings us more attention, which ultimately builds our flock. This spot here’s been good for us, yes it has.”

“I don’t know if you’ve been following that story about Highline Gallery.”

“A bunch of wicked sinners there. I knew it from the start.”

“Here’s the thing, Reverend. I suspect you love Becca.”

“I surely do. She’s my daughter. My blood.”

“And I think you’re worried about her. I also believe that you follow a higher law, something grander than man’s law. Finally, I believe-no, I am convinced-that your decision to picket the Highline Gallery is somehow related to the fact that your daughter’s fingerprints were found on the bathroom door of that building.”

“That’s a lot of beliefs you have there, sir.”

“When I put all of those beliefs together, Reverend, this is the conclusion I have to draw: you are privy to information that you still have not disclosed to the police. At the time you held it back, you did so with the firm conviction that somehow you were protecting Becca. But now all this time has passed, and no one has heard from your daughter. My guess is, you’re starting to wonder whether you did the right thing by her.”

The reverend was silent.

“The NYPD is shutting down its investigation. That leaves me and my Podunk department the last ones looking for Becca. And my best lead is still that dag-nab fingerprint, which brings me right back to the fact you were protesting that very same gallery. If there’s any more information to offer, sir, I’m telling you that now’s the time to divulge it.”

Hardy’s eyes moved between Jason and his fellow protesters. “It’s a bit nippy today. Maybe you know a place where we can get a cup of tea.”

The two of them had been Mutt and Jeff on the streets of SoHo, with Hardy dragging around his sign and megaphone, and Jason’s fanny pack broadcasting to all the world that he was either a cop or tourist. They did, however, manage to find a café with cups of tea. They were $6 cups of tea, but Jason could justify the expense if his instincts were right.

“You’re a smart man, Mr. Morhart, and I can tell that you care about the well-being of my daughter.”

“I do, sir. I want to find her and bring her home.”

“I will tell you everything I know, but I will not allow you to judge me. I know in my heart I was trying to do right by Becca.” He waited for Jason to protest, but hearing nothing, proceeded. “I was with Becca that night after she left her friend’s house. We had arranged to meet down the street. That’s what we had been doing. Mostly we would talk on the phone. And once she rode the train into the city-I believe she told her mother she was doing some kind of school activity-but I tried to drive out to Dover and catch a few minutes with her as I could. We’d leave Dover proper. See the parks in that area and whatnot.”

Jason wanted to grab the delicate tea cup from Hardy’s fingertips and smash it against his head, but he tried to remain expressionless.

“To understand what happened that night, you first have to know that the last time I had seen her was three weeks prior. That was the day she rode the train into the city. The plan had been for me to drive her back home after some sightseeing, but then she told me she was meeting some friends from school and asked me to drop her off downtown. I was uncomfortable dumping her in the middle of this hedonistic jungle, but she pointed out that if I waited for her friends to arrive, one of them might mention my existence to her mother. Frankly, I recognized that to be a bit of emotional blackmail, but I realized this was probably normal for a teenager, so I agreed.

“I am not, however, stupid. I cruised my car around the corner so I could make certain she was in the safety of a circle of suitable friends. Instead, I saw her talking to a man who was either locking or unlocking that gallery on Washington Street. A grown man. And rough looking.”

“Travis Larson.”

The reverend nodded. “Of course, I did not know his name at the time. Nor did I know the place was a gallery. It was empty. But I did see him open that door. And I did see my daughter walk into that building with him. She lied to me. My own daughter. She had me deliver her into the waiting hands of a grown man.”

“When was this?”

He doodled on the table, counting days backward. “Six Sundays ago.” Precisely three weeks before Becca disappeared. It was also the same date as the photographs Becca had posted on Facebook. Hardy concluded his daughter had lied, but she really had met her friends. Or at least, she had believed at the time they were her friends.

“Go on.”

“So when I saw her that last night, I asked her about it. Oh, boy, was she ever angry that I watched her.” Jason could tell from the man’s tone that he admired his daughter’s temper. “She swore up and down that she didn’t even know that man. That she had to go pee and saw the man there at the store and asked if she could use the bathroom. According to her, she was in and out of there in a few minutes.”

“That’s it? We’ve spent all these days trying to find a connection between Becca and that gallery, and all she did was use the bathroom?”

“Well, that’s what she would’ve had me believe.”

He wanted the man to get to his point, but the reverend was obviously used to a captive audience.

“We went to the Dairy Queen off Route 15, and when she went to the little girls’ room, I looked at her cell phone. Now, don’t go judging me. She was only a child, and I bought her that phone for the purpose of communicating with me. I felt I was in the right. But when I looked in that phone, I saw the filth she’d engaged in. The dirty talk. And not just talk, I saw that picture. I saw that picture… of my own daughter.”

Jason could tell where this story was headed. He wanted to jump into the narrative and stop it. He wanted to run inside that Dairy Queen and tell this man he was making a horrible mistake.

“What did you do?”

“I went to the car, and I waited for her. When she got in, I did what I thought a father should do. I told her she had sinned. That the Lord saw all. That peddlers of flesh would be judged both here and in the hereafter.”

Based on what Joann had told him about George Hardy’s reaction to her pregnancy, Jason could only imagine the insults this man must have hurled at Becca. A teenage girl who had always been described as fragile. Who had opened herself up sexually for the first time to a boy, only to have him turn her into a laughingstock. Who had recently learned that the mother she trusted had lied to her about the circumstances of her own birth. Who was only beginning to know the father she never realized she had, only to have him call her the ugly words Jason knew the man had used.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone this, George?”

The reverend’s eyes were puffy and rimmed with red, the result of sleepless nights, tears, and (Jason guessed) regular tips of alcohol. “Just wait for me to explain it my way, all right, son? A couple days went by, and I didn’t feel right about how we left it. I tried calling her, but she wasn’t getting back to me. I assumed she was mad.”

“You didn’t know she was missing?”

“Who was going to tell me? Certainly not that mother of hers. So I drove by that storefront again, thinking I might find that man. Confront him. Tell him to stay away from Becca. And by that time, it was no longer vacant. It had opened as what they were calling a gallery. I saw those pictures on display in there. A man biting himself. And you can’t tell me that one with the girl’s belly in it was of a full-grown woman.”

“You assumed the man you’d seen at the gallery had taken improper photographs of Becca.”

“Of course I did. I saw some with my own eyes. I thought about calling the police directly, but then I’d have to tell them Becca was in those nasty pictures.”

“You were worried about her reputation.”

“Among other things, yes, I was. So I did what my church does best. I brought attention to the issue.”

“By protesting.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You thought if the press made the artist prove the age of the models in those photographs, you’d get the artwork removed without having to drag your daughter’s name into the matter.”

“I’m not a total fool, you see? But now here’s the thing that’s important for you to understand. I still didn’t know Becca was missing on that day we were protesting. It wasn’t until the next day that I heard about Becca’s disappearance on the radio news.”

“That was the day Travis Larson was found dead at the gallery.”

“And I heard about that story, too. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“You didn’t say anything because you thought Becca might have been involved in Travis’s murder.”

“I saw her with the man. And the man was trouble. It stood to reason.”

“But now the NYPD knows who killed Larson, and Becca didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I’m aware of that, son. And that’s why I’ve told you everything I know.”

“On that last night with Becca, how did you leave things?”

Hardy was fiddling with the handle of his empty teacup. “Not well. She jumped out of the car. I didn’t stop her.”

“Where?”

Jason called his captain as soon as he was inside his truck. “I got a lead on Becca Stevenson. She was last seen distraught near the vicinity of the River Styx Road marina, over by Lake Hopatcong.”

“This is a solid tip?”

“Like a rock.”

“What was she doing way over by the lake?”

She’d been having ice cream with a man whose love she had wanted more than life itself. She’d been having ice cream with a man who dealt her fragile sense of self the final blow. “We need to get divers down into the water, sir.”

His next call was to Joann Stevenson. It would be the second hardest telephone call he would ever have to make. The hardest would come the following morning, when he had to tell her over the phone that her daughter’s body had been found, just to be sure she didn’t hear it first from someone else.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

“This is certainly a lovely treat.” Arthur Cronin was inspecting the pear-glazed pork loin the waitress had placed on the table. He waited while a second staff member poured a thin drizzle of sauce across the dish. “It’s not every day that one of my favorite people invites me to lunch. And with such panache.”

“Well, it’s not every day someone saves me from life in prison.”

“I never would have let that happen, sweetie, but in this instance, I’d have to say your friendly neighborhood FBI agent probably did more of the work than your Uncle Artie. Any chance of a love connection there?”

“He was just doing the right thing, Art.”

“But, let me guess, he’s called you a time or two to see how you’re holding up?”

She smiled.

“Aha! I knew it! What about that schlub of yours? Jeff from Indiana, isn’t it?”

“You know quite well that his name is Jeff Wilkerson.”

“How is Mr. Wilkerson dealing with your new FBI friend?”

“We’re not actually talking right now.”

“The on and off is off again, huh?” He was talking between bites now. She forced herself to take a bite of her pasta. If she didn’t eat, he might know something was wrong.

“Actually, Art, Jeff asked me to marry him.”

He dropped his fork to his plate. “Get out of town! Wilkie finally manned up, did he? Where’s the ring? Tell me the man bought you a ring!”

She whispered a shh. She had chosen this restaurant because she knew it would be empty, but even five tables away, a fellow diner could overhear raised voices.

“I politely declined.”

“You finally figured out you’re too good for him.”

“No, but it wasn’t right. It never will be.” She felt funny talking to Art about her love life, but she needed the conversation to seem natural.

“Still that thing about the kids?”

“I guess my father told you about it.”

He waved his hand with a pssh. “A long time ago, when you broke up for a while.”

When Jeff had proposed, she had almost accepted immediately. But she wanted to make sure he had really thought about the decision. She did not want their marriage to be an impulsive reaction to the events of the previous week. So she had stated her concerns. “But you so desperately want children.”

And he had answered, “I love you, Alice. I would sacrifice anything for you. Anything.”

Sacrifice. To be with her meant he would not have children of his own flesh and blood. And she knew Jeff. He would always see that as a sacrifice.

Those were details she would not share with Arthur. “It just wasn’t going to work out. We should have realized that a long time ago, but what can I say? We’re a couple of idiots. I’m fine now.”

She wasn’t fine. She had lost her brother. And her best friend, Jeff. And her fake friend, Lily. And now she was here.

“I’ve been thinking over everything that happened, Art, and there’s a couple points I keep coming back to.”

“What’s that?” He took another bite of pork.

“I know the DNA test said Dad wasn’t Mia’s father, but that doesn’t change the fact that she looked an awful lot like me.”

“There was a certain resemblance. Mostly just your hair color, though, right?”

“No. Our noses. And complexion. High foreheads.”

“Seems like an overstatement, but what are you getting at?”

“How is it possible that Christie Kinley believed my father was the father of her child, and the two of us look like each other but aren’t actually related?”

“I don’t know, but my head’s starting to hurt thinking about it. This is all over, Alice. Be thankful-”

“It hurt my head, too, Art. And that’s why I couldn’t let it go. You see, here’s what’s puzzling. Mia Andrews and I are related.”

“What are you talking about? We did the postmortem DNA tests.”

“Against my father, yes. But I contacted the NYPD. I had them test my DNA against Mia’s. We have genetic similarities consistent with being half sisters.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Wait-unless. Oh, my God. She was at the house during Ben’s party. Maybe she and Ben-”

“I thought of that, too. That’s why the NYPD compared Mia’s DNA against Ben’s. There was no match. Mia’s related to me, but not to Ben.”

“Obviously someone made a mistake. You’re not related to that woman.”

“Here’s the thing: Ben used to joke that I must be adopted, with my red hair. Mom always told me that she and Dad both had redheads back in the family tree somewhere. Recessive genes etcetera. But then I remembered that picture you have in your office, the one of your nephew at the Yankees game. He also had red hair and a sloped nose, sort of like mine. And yours.”

“Me? You think my nose is sloped?”

“Stop this, Art. It won’t be hard to get a sample of your DNA. I hear we leave it behind everywhere we go. I’ll have your DNA compared against mine. And Mia’s. The truth is going to come out. You were staying in the guest cottage that night in Bedford. My father didn’t remember what happened because nothing did happen. He really was blacked out in the theater all night. Christie Kinley’s mother had brainwashed her to adore celebrities. What happened? She was drunk and asked if you were Ben’s famous dad?”

Arthur slammed his fist against the table but then lowered his voice to deflect attention. “Alice, you’ve obviously gone through something terrible. But that does not justify these allegations.”

“My mother said she hadn’t been a perfect wife. She obviously did something that made her feel guilty enough to suffer through my father’s transgressions all these years. How long did the affair go on? Was it a long-term thing, or was I the result of a drunken one-night stand?”

“This is crazy.”

He rose to leave, but she played her trump card. “The New York State Patrol is pulling camera footage from 684 on the night of Robert Atkinson’s car accident. Once they find proof of your car tailing Atkinson’s, it’ll be over, Arthur. My guess is they’ll also find a fingerprint or two in Mia Andrews’s apartment.”

“Next you’ll be accusing me of being the second shooter in the Kennedy assassination.”

“My guess is you were already in Mia’s apartment when you called me to say you were running late to Williamsburg. You talked your way inside, probably armed, then found the gun she used to kill Larson. All you had to do was fire a couple shots when the police showed up, then finish her off with her own gun and plant it in her hand. Danes wondered why she hadn’t simply run down the fire escape. I didn’t realize there was one until he said that. You ran out and met me on the street as if you had no idea what had happened.”

“I love you. In fact, I love you as though you were my own daughter, but this is insane.”

“You’re a lawyer, Arthur. You know how this will play out. The DNA tests will be run. Video of your car near Atkinson’s will be found. And now that the police know what to look for, they will find evidence that you were inside Mia’s apartment. And even if only one of those things happens, you will not be able to lie, or lawyer, or pay your way out of it. What did you tell me about those clients of yours who go fugitive: Are you ready to walk away from your home, family, and reputation? Oh, yeah, that’s right-you pretty much don’t have any of those without the Humphreys, do you?”

“I’m leaving.”

“I can’t believe you would hurt Ben. He loved you.”

He breathed heavily, staring at her from across the table, then raised a single finger and pointed at her. “I did not harm your brother.”

“How about it, Godfather? Now that I know your secrets, will I be the next one they find dead in my bathroom?”

“Ben was using again. Ben was a spoiled junkie. And I would never, ever-no matter what-hurt you. I practically raised you.”

“Because I’m your daughter. I’m your flesh and blood.”

She could tell from his breathing that he was having a hard time maintaining his composure. He nodded, but she needed to hear him say it.

“Mia and I were a DNA match,” she continued. “I already know. I just want to hear it straight from you. That’s all I want, Art. And then if you want to make a run for it, I’m not going to stop you. But the truth will come out.”

When he finally spoke, he had regained the evenness of his breath. “I wanted Rose to leave him. When your mother found out she was pregnant, I mean. She said you could’ve been either of ours, but I knew how much he’d been gone. I could feel that you would be our child. And when you were born, oh, I was so certain. But Rose would never leave Frank. She worships your father. The artistry. The wit. The passion. She would taunt me with it when I pressed her too hard.”

“And that night with Christie Kinley?”

“That was not rape. And I had no idea that she was only fourteen.”

“You allowed my father to believe all these years that he was the one.”

“I also got the lawsuit settled with a confidentiality agreement. And, frankly, if it took a blacked-out night and a good scare to get your father to stop drinking, I might have done him a favor. Frank would’ve died by now at the rate he was going.”

She realized that the man could justify anything. “Please tell me the truth about Ben.”

“I swear to you, as God as my witness, I had nothing to do with that.”

“Did it ever dawn on you that what he learned from Robert Atkinson about our father was the breaking point for him? Maybe you were the one who put the needle in his arm, but indirectly.”

“I never meant to hurt either one of you.” He reached for his wallet, but she waved him off.

“My treat, remember? What are you going to do?”

He gave her a sad smile. “You know what? You would’ve made a good lawyer, Alice, because you’re right. I kept digging further and further, trying to bury the truth from twenty-five years ago, but I made too many mistakes. You got me. Maybe I’ll see you on the other side.”

He was surprisingly peaceful as he made his way to the exit, like a man who had already weighed his options and come to terms with his choice. But Alice would never learn what that decision might have been, because undercover police officers-dressed as waiters, busboys, and customers-swarmed Arthur Cronin before he could leave the restaurant.

Alice reached into her shirt and peeked at the microphone taped to her left breast. She could have sworn that Art threw her a wink as his handcuffs clicked shut.