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
Even 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.
“D
on’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 co
untry 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.
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