“Seriously, Lily. I don’t think I can do it.”
“I don’t want to make light of your boss being dead, but c’mon, Alice, you really didn’t even know the guy. He showed up at an art exhibit, offered you a job running a gallery with an anonymous owner, hooked you up with some weirdo artist you can’t even get a hold of—he was obviously doing something shady. Whatever it was caught up to him. And whatever it was, the police will eventually sort it all out. You’re no longer involved.”
“What do you mean, whatever he was up to? Obviously, whatever got him killed had something to do with the gallery. You saw the place. It was stripped bare. No signs of life.”
“Literally,” Lily said, inspecting the label on a bottle of neon blue liquor. “Sorry, too soon?”
“Look. Maybe we should talk about something else for a while.” Jeff had slipped off one of his loafers. “Or, better yet: Al, why don’t you try lying down for a while. You could use the rest. Sprawl out and watch some TV. Or take the bedroom.”
“Watch out, Alice. He’s just trying to get you back in the sack.”
“Jesus, Lily.”
“It’s fine,” Alice said, placing a hand on Jeff’s knee. “I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to talk about it.”
He was trying to protect her, but the truth was, Lily’s bluntness was what she needed right now. Jeff didn’t argue with her, but the shoulder rub came to an end. He was not one of Lily’s biggest fans, but his usual preference to avoid her company was not a priority today.
“If we’re going to talk about it, let’s really talk. Alice is right. We can’t ignore the fact that someone went to great lengths to empty out the gallery. The question is why.”
“No,” Lily said, finally opting for a bottle of Grey Goose vodka and tipping it over a glass of orange juice. “The question is why the two of you think we need to be the ones asking those kinds of questions. Unless I missed something, we’re not Shaggy, Velma, and Daphne squirreled up like meddling kids on the Mystery Machine van with Scooby-Doo. Alice is a witness to a crime—an after-the-fact witness at that. Nothing more. End of story. She should worry about her own problems and leave all this to the police.”
“It’s only natural that she’d worry about her own safety. And figuring out what might have happened to Campbell this morning—and why—is a first step to figuring out whether she’s in any danger.”
“And what if she does figure something out? Did it ever dawn on you that figuring out too much is precisely what could put her in danger?”
“Hello? The third-person she of this conversation is sitting right here.” Alice rose from the couch to accept the glass of spiked juice Lily extended in her direction.
“Good girl,” Lily said. “Take your medicine.”
The first sip burned. By the third, Alice wanted to retract the orange juice.
“There’s nothing dangerous about talking through the possibilities,” Alice said. Talking with them would keep her mind moving. Would keep her thoughts from carrying her back to the floor beside Drew’s body. Keep her imagination from conjuring flashes of her big brother in handcuffs. Keep her eyes away from the screen on her cell phone, still black despite multiple messages, begging Ben for a return call. Most of all, talking would help her feel—at least for a few brief moments, however manufactured—like she had retained some tiny portion of her agency in a world that had spiraled out of control. “So, let’s play the Mystery Machine. What are the possible scenarios that could have led to what I saw this morning?”
Lily let out an audible sigh, but saw that she was outvoted.
“One,” she said, extending her thumb, “theft. A large-scale jacking of the entire contents of the gallery, with Drew ending up the unlucky victim. The problems with that are: A—the art wasn’t worth much compared to an established gallery, and B—why not grab the art and run? Why clear out every last stapler and pencil?”
She added her index finger to the count. “Two: the religious nut jobs who were protesting yesterday. Maybe they decided to take matters into their own hands. They couldn’t track down the artist, but they could send a message by eviscerating the gallery this morning when someone showed up to open. But we’ve got a problem there, too. Even if they’re rabid enough to try to pull something like this off, why kill Drew? I mean, if they’re violent enough to shoot someone, why not just firebomb the place? A dead body in an empty gallery? Not exactly dramatic and protester-y, you know? And that, boys and girls, leaves us with option number three.” Out went a third finger.
“And you said this was none of our business,” Jeff said.
“I said I thought minding our own business was the best thing for Alice. And part of the reason I thought that—and still think that—is because I’ve been running through the options since she called me this morning, and only one of them makes any sense. Three,” she continued, “that lingering feeling you had that this job was too good to be true was right on the money. Campbell was up to no good. Maybe he double-crossed the owner. Or the artist. Or maybe the anonymous owner story was total bullshit from the very start. Maybe he was the one pulling the strings, using the gallery as a front to hide stolen money. Maybe the protesters brought a little bit too much attention to the place. He was trying to get rid of all evidence of the place when someone caught up to him. Or maybe whoever he crossed decided it was lights out for both Drew and his pet project.”
No one else in the room spoke. There was nothing to add. Lily was right. Three options: two highly improbable, and the third raising more questions than they could even begin to answer.
Lily added another shot of vodka to Alice’s glass. “I’ll help you out however you want, but if I were you? I’d consider yourself lucky you don’t know more about Drew Campbell and the Highline Gallery.”
Less than a mile away, in the homicide unit at the Thirteenth Precinct, NYPD Detective John Shannon told his partner, Willie Danes, they had a problem.
“I’m not finding a Drew Campbell who looks anything like our guy.”
“Wouldn’t be the first person to hide his bridge-and-tunnel status. Everyone who’s anyone’s got to live in the city these days.” Danes was chewing on a toothpick. Five years into the partnership, Danes knew Shannon hated the toothpick chewing. Five years into the partnership, the chewing of the toothpick was still a daily habit.
“Except I checked Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. No Drew or Andrew Campbells who resemble our vic. I’ve looked at so many DMV photos my eyes are blurring.” The cell phone numbers Alice Humphrey had given them for Drew Campbell and Hans Schuler had both come back to disposable phones that were untraceable. “What about the company on the paycheck?”
“ITH Corporation?”
“Yeah, that’s it. You getting anywhere?”
Danes swirled the toothpick around his tongue. “Depends whether up my own ass counts as somewhere. The company was incorporated twenty-five years ago, but I can’t figure out what the hell it does. State records show the stock is owned by a trust called ITH Trust, but trusts aren’t recorded, so there’s no way to know what it does or who it benefits. The registered agent is one of the big services, so that’s a dead end. I nearly had to give up a kidney to persuade a girl in the secretary of state’s office to try to dig out the incorporation paperwork for us. She said she’d try, but I’m not holding my breath after all these years.”
“You say the company was incorporated twenty-five years ago?”
“A little more. May of 1985 to be precise.”
“And how old do you think our vic could’ve been?” Shannon asked, holding up a crime scene photo of the body.
“Granted now, death has a tendency to age a person, but I’d say forty. Tops.”
“Bringing us back to the mysterious older owner whom the lovely Miss Humphrey says she never met.” Shannon tapped the ashen face in the photograph. “I put a rush on the fingerprints, but so far, this guy’s a ghost.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Morhart was at
Linwood High School for the second day in a row, feeling nearly like a regular when Coach DeCicco threw him a wave as Morhart passed the oblong window of his classroom door. A dimpled smile and a flash of his badge to the secretary posted outside the principal’s office earned him directions to the Algebra II class on Ashleigh Reynolds’s schedule. Only five minutes until classes changed, so he waited in the hallway for the bell.
Ashleigh sprung from the classroom clustered together with two other girls, the three of them chattering too furiously over each other to possibly be listening. One of them caught his eye and gave him a look he was uncomfortable receiving from a teenage girl.
“I need to have a word with Ashleigh, girls, if you don’t mind.”
They were still eyeballing him from their lockers like he was the head of the football team extending an invitation to prom, but he could tell from Ashleigh’s dark expression that she already knew who he was.
“My father told you I don’t know anything about that Becca girl.”
That Becca girl. Like Ashleigh couldn’t use her name. As if Becca weren’t human.
“I know what your father said, Ashleigh, but you’re a big girl. I wanted to hear what you had to say for yourself.” Morhart knew he’d be hearing later from an angry Mr. Reynolds, but the law didn’t allow a parent to invoke a child’s right to silence on her behalf. Ashleigh would have to do that on her own.
But she didn’t, just as Morhart had predicted.
“What do you want to know? It’s not like she’s my friend or anything.”
“No. But she’s Dan’s friend. Or at least she was.”
She hugged her books closer to her chest. “I don’t know much about that. We took a break. He was just trying to make me jealous.”
“Based on the comment you posted on Facebook, I’d say it worked.”
Her gaze moved in the direction of her girlfriends. He wanted to smack the relishing smirk off her face but instead took a step to his left to block the line of sight.
“Look. Maybe I was a little harsh. But I knew me and Dan would get back together. The last thing I need is for people thinking we’re somehow the same.”
“And what’s so wrong with being the same as Becca Stevenson?”
She shook her head as if he’d asked how to boil water. “She’s, I don’t know— She stares at Dan all the time but then kind of acts like she’s better than everyone, like too good to go to games or parties. She’s just weird. And then out of nowhere she’s posting pictures of her little road trip with Dan on Facebook, like we’re going to accept her all of the sudden.”
“You called her a slut for posting a picture on a Web site?”
“That wasn’t the picture I was talking about.”
He could tell she regretted the words the instant they left her mouth.
“What picture?”
He watched her gaze move once again, but this time to a chubby girl peering out from behind her locker door.
“What picture are you referring to, Ashleigh?”
“Why don’t you go ask Becca? Oh, yeah, that’s right. She’s a head case who ran away to get the whole school’s attention. My father told you not to talk to me, Detective. I better go to class now.”
The bell rang as a classroom door closed behind Ashleigh, but the girl tucked behind her locker door remained.
“How you doing, Sophie?”
Sophie Ferrin was by all accounts Becca’s best friend. Morhart had already interviewed her for more than an hour when he’d first caught Becca’s case.
“You were talking to Ashleigh Reynolds.”
“I’m aware of that. I saw you watching us. You knew about this Dan Hunter situation?”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“About Dan and Ashleigh? There’s nothing to say. They were pretty awful to her, but Becca was totally over it.”
“What do you mean by awful?”
“At first it was just Ashleigh and her stupid friends. They heard about Dan and Becca hanging out and started saying she was a slut and that Dan was only hooking up with her because she was willing to do all kinds of freaky stuff Ashleigh would never do.”
“Was that true?”
She shrugged. “I assume not.”
“But you don’t know?”
“Becca was pretty into Dan. I gave her hell about it. I feel so horrible now.” She sniffed back a sob.
“You said at first it was Ashleigh and her friends spreading rumors. Then what happened?”
“I’m not sure on all the details. I thought Dan actually liked Becca, but Ashleigh was just relentless. I think she wore him down, and the only way he could make things right with her was to bring down Becca. He arranged to meet Becca down at Hudson Park, you know, it’s where we hang out.” Morhart nodded. As a cop, he’d broken up more than a few fights and drinking parties at the park over the years. “When Becca met him there, he was with Ashleigh and all their friends. He said something like, ‘You haven’t figured this out yet? This whole thing with you and me has been a joke.’”
He wanted to believe that kids hadn’t been so cruel when he was the one meeting his friends at Hudson Park, but maybe that was how he preferred to remember the past. “Why didn’t you tell any of this to me or Mrs. Stevenson?”
“Honestly? Because around here, what Becca went through wasn’t even that bad. Last year, Luke Green pretended to ask some nobody girl to homecoming. She was waiting on her porch in her new dress and up-do when that whole clique cruised by in their limo jeering at her. Supposedly one of them beaned her from the sunroof with a half-eaten Big Mac. They’re assholes, and they’re brutal, but they’re pretty much a way of life at Linwood.”
“Ashleigh called Becca a slut after she posted a photograph taken in the city on Facebook. When I asked her about it today, she said that wasn’t the picture she was talking about. Do you know anything about that?”
“Jesus, I knew this was going to get out.”
“This is not a time for keeping secrets, Sophie. Becca’s mom believes in you. She nearly fell to her knees in her living room begging me to search my hardest for her girl. And she swore up and down that she knew something untoward has happened to her daughter, because she’s relying on your word. She says she knows you in your heart and that you would not hold back on her. Not now. Not under these circumstances.”
Her eyes scanned the empty hallways for potential eavesdroppers. “Dan had a nude picture of Becca. One of Ashleigh’s stupid friends borrowed his phone and saw it. She forwarded it to Ashleigh, and that’s when they really started to pile on. Not that many people know about the picture. Becca was worried they’d forward it all over the school, but Ashleigh must have her reasons for holding on to it. Knowing her, she was going to torment Becca down the road with it. So, Joann said that? That she knew me in my heart and that I wouldn’t keep anything from her?”
He nodded. “Said something about you being almost like a second daughter. Why didn’t you tell her, Sophie?”
“Because when Becca comes home, I don’t want her to be in trouble, either with Joann or around here.”
“I notice you say when Becca comes home.”
“It’s just a feeling I have.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know whether to be scared for Becca or pissed off at her. One minute my mind is racing through all the horrible things that might have happened to her, and the next, I remember how adamant she was about walking home that night. I remember how secretive she’d been with me lately. At first I assumed it was because she knew I thought Dan Hunter was a total tool, but then even after they broke up and everything went down with Ashleigh and her friends, she still had all these mystery plans. She’d get all evasive about it. Said she liked having something that was ‘just hers.’ That’s what she called it. I guess that need for her to have something special is what led her to send that stupid picture to Dan. So, yeah, I’ve kind of wondered if her insistence on walki
ng home that night might have been for a reason. Not to mention, no one’s saying a bad word about her at Linwood now. Sort of an added bonus.”
“Would she really put you through this? And her mother?”
“I don’t know. I really hope not, but then that would mean something bad has happened. And so, yeah, I convince myself there’s a side of Becca that might crave this kind of attention. I feel awful saying that about my best friend. Please tell me you won’t stop looking for her. You told me not to hold back, so please don’t punish Becca and Joann for it. Even if this is Becca acting out, she needs to be found. For her own good.”
He nodded. “I already promised her mother.”
Sophie was spinning her padlock closed when he turned back for a final question.
“You said Becca sent that picture to Dan? He didn’t take it with his phone?”
“No. Becca took it with her phone and sent it to him.”
“Her mom told me Becca doesn’t have a cell phone.”
“Sure she does. She got it a couple of months ago. I’ve called her, like, a thousand times, but it goes straight to voice mail. You mean Joann didn’t know?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Alice was in her bed, thinking about friendship.
People go through life accumulating and occasionally discarding relationships, casually using the word friend to describe the human beings who flutter in and out of their daily worlds. But not everyone who can be counted on as good company at a new restaurant or an afternoon matinee or even a late-night visit to the emergency room can truly be called a friend. Only a true friend would have done for Alice what Lily Harper and Jeff Wilkerson had done for her today.
From the second they had heard about Drew, they had dropped everything. Lily, who had the Gorilla watching her every move at the office. Jeff, who was struggling to keep his practice afloat since he’d left that miserable firm only to learn that the economy had tanked months before the public realized. Despite their own responsibilities, the two of them had been there the instant she’d needed them and had not once taken a break, not for a phone call or an e-mail or even to rest. They had taken care of her the way only true friends could.
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