Authors: Alafair Burke
H
ow did this happen?
It’s a question most people ask themselves at some point in their lives. For some, the question comes when they wake up one morning, look at the person sleeping next to them, and realize—all at once, for the first time, but with unambiguous clarity—that they no longer want to be married. For others, it’s a glance in the mirror at a face lost beneath years of self-neglect. Or the bank foreclosing on the house. Or a body that has lost its strength.
Most people experience a singular moment when they pause to take a hard look at their lives and don’t recognize what they see. For Alice Humphrey, that sobering moment came when she saw Drew Campbell’s body being carted through the narrow gallery door to a medical examiner’s van waiting at the curb.
An ambulance had previously arrived, just after the first marked police car. But the paramedics hadn’t bothered moving the body. Drew was that dead. Now his body was simply evidence. She felt herself flinch as the side of the metal gurney bumped the door frame.
That was the moment.
And, like anyone confronted with the fact she had been living a life she couldn’t recognize, she asked herself, How did this happen? And like anyone trying to answer that unanswerable question, she kept rewinding the clock, struggling to identify the second when the path of her life veered in this direction.
Maybe if she hadn’t walked into the gallery this morning, none of this would be happening. In retrospect, it made no sense that the front entrance had been unlocked, yet the windows covered with paper, when she had arrived. Maybe she ought to have walked away right then and there. If she’d gone home and forgotten all about Drew Campbell and this place, someone else eventually would have ventured into the gallery and been the lucky winner. Slipped in the blood. Called 911.
Or better yet, what if she hadn’t come to the gallery this morning at all? What if, instead, she had marched over to her brother’s apartment the second she saw that news story about his arrest? What kind of sister keeps a meeting at work when her brother might be in trouble? If she had tracked Ben down instead of simply trying his phone, maybe then, things would be different.
But eventually she would have been pulled into the investigation. She worked at the gallery. She had keys. She ran the place. She’d still be an essential part of the story of a man’s murder.
So she rewound the clock. How did this happen?
How did this happen? She took the job. It sounded dumb even to say it, but she was swept off her feet by Drew—not romantically, but professionally.
So if Alice was trying to figure out how all this had happened, she’d have to rewind the clock pretty far. Far enough so that when Drew Campbell first came along, she would have smiled at his generous offer and politely declined. She would have to have been in a position not to take the bait. She could have returned to her comfortable job as a teacher, or as a banker, or maybe as a wife and mother. She would not have become the proud manager of the Highline Gallery. She would not have walked into the gallery that morning to find the entire inventory missing. She would never have been forced to see those awful wounds. And she would not be sitting on a street curb, looking up at a detective and his note pad, while she could still feel the warm, sticky shadows of Drew’s blood on the palms of what her brain knew were now her cold, dry, clean hands.
“Was it usual for Mr. Campbell to be at the gallery this early in the morning by himself?”
“Um, no. I mean, nothing’s really
usual
. We only opened two days ago. But in theory I’m the only one who’s here. Drew hired me but wasn’t really involved going forward. And we don’t even open until eleven.” She caught the detective locking eyes with his partner and realized she was rambling. “We had something of an emergency—some religious protesters yesterday because of the nature of the work we were displaying. When I finally got hold of Drew last night, he told me to meet him here this morning. When I got here, well, you know what I found.”
She watched the detective’s head nod. She fiddled with the business card he had handed her. His name was John Shannon. Had Detective Shannon known about the protests before he arrived here? Or was he just now drawing the link between this location and a news story to which he’d paid only vague attention? Was he wondering about a connection between the protesters and Drew’s murder?
She found herself wishing this were an episode of one of those hour-long crime shows she loved on television instead of her new reality.
“Alice!”
She looked in the direction of the voice to see Lily bounding from the back of a cab, all long, skinny limbs and that baby-bird blond hair. A police officer immediately stepped in front of her to block her rapid movement toward the gallery.
“That’s my friend. I called her after I called 911.”
The detective made a beckoning motion toward the younger man in the uniform as an all-clear, and Lily ran to the curb, giving Alice a quick squeeze of the shoulder before settling down beside her. The detective acknowledged her with a polite nod but nothing more before continuing his questioning.
“We didn’t find a wallet or any other possessions on the body. Was that your experience with Mr. Campbell?”
“Um, no. Well, I guess I don’t know for sure.” She tried to clear her thoughts to think rationally. “No, he carries a wallet. When I first met him, he asked me for a card, but I didn’t have any. He wrote my number down on the back of some piece of paper from his wallet. And keys. He should have keys to a gray BMW.” For the first time, she realized Drew’s car should have been parked on the street in front of the gallery when she’d found the door unlocked before her arrival.
If she’d noticed the discrepancy then, would things be different? So many thoughts she had now that she should have had an hour earlier.
She saw the detective’s gaze follow hers up and down the street. She watched the detective make notes on his pad. No BMW at the curb. No keys or wallet in Drew’s pockets.
“And you say that when you left last night, the gallery wasn’t vacant like this?”
“It definitely wasn’t vacant. It was an open, functioning gallery. There was art and a desk and a computer and furniture.”
“And I assume this art was valuable?”
She had no idea how to answer his question under the circumstances. “Our current showing featured reprints of photography with a potentially limitless run, so the price point was relatively low—seven hundred dollars for a photograph. But I had more than a hundred copies already printed and ready to ship in the stockroom. I also had, I don’t know, probably ten canvases from other artists in the back, ready to show, once we were done with Schuler’s initial run.”
She realized she would need to call the artists whose works she had acquired for showing and explain that the paintings were gone. She had trusted Drew that the gallery was insured, but now had no idea whether she’d be able to make it up to the artists.
She watched as the detective scribbled more notes in his pad. She imagined the gears of his mind at work, churning through the possibilities. Religious protesters looking for vengeance? Art heist?
“What else can you tell me about the deceased?”
She had no idea what he meant. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Date of birth? Family? Friends? Without his wallet, we don’t even have an address for him.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I met him at a gallery a few weeks ago, and he hired me to manage this place.”
“So he’s the owner.”
“No, he was an intermediary.” She explained the backstory of Drew’s anonymous business contact, motivated by his relationship with the elusive Hans Schuler, and noticed the detective’s pen moving furiously in his notebook. He may as well have said it: rich, spoiled perverts.
“And you have no idea who the owner of the gallery is, or how to reach this man, Hans Schuler, other than through his Web site?”
“I’ve texted with Schuler and can give you that number, but that’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry.” Why was she apologizing?
“The place is pretty cleared out, as you know, but we did find a few of these on a shelf in one of your back storage closets.” He held up a clear plastic bag filled with the personalized thumb drives that served as freebies with every Schuler purchase. “Are they yours?”
“Not
mine
, technically, but, yes, the gallery’s. They were part of the promotional materials for the Schuler exhibit. Instead of a paper catalogue or other documents, each purchaser received one of those. You know, interactive stuff featuring the artwork. High-tech. Greener than paper. It’s sort of a gimmick.”
“So what about your paychecks? Where were those coming from?”
She fished through her handbag. One blessing of treating one’s purse like a sack of garbage: lingering remnants of recent business. She retrieved a torn pay stub from the one and only check she had received as manager of the Highline Gallery. Eleven hundred and change, paid to the order of Alice Humphrey, from the account of ITH Corp. She had been so happy to have a check to cash, she had never paused to wonder about the origin of the name.
“Can I keep this?” the detective asked.
“Of course.”
“Alice?”
She looked once again in the direction of her name. This time it was Jeff, emerging from the back of a taxi.
“Sorry,” she said to the detective. “I sort of called everyone I could think of after I called you guys.” Including her brother. She still hadn’t heard from Ben.
She watched as the detective—what was his name again?—waved Jeff through the inner sanctum enfolded by the growing array of law enforcement around them. Jeff nodded toward Lily and kissed the top of Alice’s head before joining them on the curb.
The detective continued to ask his questions, and she continued to answer them, but as much as she tried to ground herself in the severity of this moment, she found her mind wandering.
A man was dead. A life was lost. Drew hadn’t been her husband or family or even a friend. This wasn’t about her. Not in any way. So what if she lost a job? Who even cared that she had been through the shock of finding his body? Who cared about her junkie brother falling out of sobriety once again? She knew at a cognitive level that nothing about this situation involved her. Yet the feeling of Lily and Jeff on either side of her shivering body meant the world to her.
How did this happen?
Alice Humphrey had no idea.
She also had no idea the police would soon identify the person who had created ITH Corporation, the company named on her pay stub. She had no idea whose index finger would match a latent print that a crime scene analyst was currently pulling from the gallery’s bathroom door. She had no idea that, two hundred yards away, on the corner of Washington and Bank, as Alice answered a question about Drew Campbell, a police officer working the routine perimeter search for a discarded weapon had just found a pair of black leather gloves with mink lining resting on top of a discarded half bagel in a trash can. He thought about passing them on to his girlfriend, but then placed them in a plastic evidence baggie just in case. She had no idea that this same detective and his partner would be at her door the following day with a photograph that would change everything.
H
ank threw an offhand wave toward Charlie Dixon as he passed Dixon’s cubicle on the route to his own. Ever since the shit hit the fan two months ago with the reprimand, Hank felt like he was walking the gauntlet each time he padded through the narrow corridor formed between the makeshift light gray walls erected around the agents’ identical faux-grained desks. It was as if a wave of whispers rippled behind him as he moved through the open-air hallway. He knew it was mostly his imagination, of course, but mostly was not the same thing as entirely.
With Dixon, though, things were different. He’d always been a quiet guy. Came to work, did the job, and left. No group jogs. No lunchtime skins and shirts on the basketball court. No happy hours. But ever since the reprimand—the one that was supposed to be private but which the entire field office obviously knew about the very morning it had been delivered—Dixon had been just a notch more cordial. Intentional eye contact. Meaningful nods. Even hellos in the lunchroom. If the two men didn’t start to slow things down, they might actually share an entire conversation at some point.
At his computer, Hank checked the BMW’s VIN in the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System. Title information used to be maintained only by the states, meaning fifty different databases. Not surprisingly, the bad guys figured out how to use that gap to their advantage. In theory, stolen cars have limited value in a world where a routine traffic stop can turn into a felony bust in a matter of seconds. As a result, stolen cars were usually sold for pennies on the dollar to be exported out of the country or broken down for parts.
But then the bad guys figured out they could steal a car in Florida, install forged VIN tags matching an identical car from a dealer lot, and then register the cloned car in North Carolina. Voilà. Unless the legitimate purchaser of the car that was actually supposed to carry that number just happened to move to North Carolina, no one would ever know that two cars were cruising around with the same regulatory fingerprints.
The federal government had finally pulled its shit together a couple of years earlier to create this new national database. The usual privacy fanatics were apoplectic. About half of the state DMVs also refused to play nice, sensing a system that would rival the one they charged taxpayers to access. Now the system was up and running well enough to be useful in a lot of cases, but was still no guarantee he’d be free from a state-by-state search.
He got lucky. The VIN hit a match.
According to the database, the gray BMW was owned by QuickCar Inc. Hank was familiar with the company. QuickCar members had access to cars maintained in various lots throughout the city and paid only for their actual use. Rentals could be for hours, a full day, or longer. “Quick” out of the lot and dump the car back at any Quick site in the city. He searched for QuickCar on the Internet and dialed the company’s toll-free number. Even if another agent overheard the call, all he’d hear would be an innocuous question about a vehicle identification number. There’d be no need for the name Travis Larson to be spoken on his end of the line. No need for anyone to let slip to the SAC that Hank was once again keeping tabs on the man he was supposed to leave alone.
Let it lie, Beckman. As far as you’re concerned, Travis Larson does not exist. Forget the man’s name if you know what’s good for you.
“QuickCar.”
He identified himself as an FBI agent and explained that he needed to track down the identity of the person who’d been driving one of their gray BMWs as recently as this morning. “I have the vehicle identification number.”
“Can you hold for my supervisor?”
Not good.
“This is Mr. Martin. How can I help you?”
Mr. Martin obviously brought an intensity to his job as a rental car company’s phone-bank manager. Hank was tempted to hang up and move on to Plan B, but went ahead and restated his request.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not able to hand out identifying information about our customers on the telephone.”
“This is an urgent matter in a federal criminal investigation.”
“I understand that, Agent, but the company follows certain procedures. If you can fax over a subpoena ...”
“You do realize that a fax comes over the telephone line, no different than this phone call. Anyone could doctor a piece of paper.”
Mr. Martin didn’t have a ready response, but he also wasn’t budging.
“Never mind,” he said quickly. “I just got the information I needed from another route.”
He turned his attention back to his computer and pulled up another number, this time for a Quick rental location in midtown. A woman with a heavy Bronx accent answered after six rings. He could almost picture her chomping on the gum in her mouth.
Once again, he said he was an FBI agent with a VIN he needed to track down.
“Um, my manager’s not here right now.” He could hear someone yelling in the background about a car blocking the garage entrance. “
Hey, you! Yeah, girl in the Mazda. Can you back it up just like three feet so this guy can get out and stop yelling at the both of us? Thanks, hon!
Sorry, so, yeah, my manager’s out. Can you call back? I think you’re supposed go through corporate or something.”
“This is an urgent matter in a federal criminal investigation.”
The line meant absolutely nothing, of course, but Hank had been amazed over the years at its effectiveness. At heart, people were wired to comply with authority.
“Federal?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s urgent. My guess is, if I call corporate, they’ll have me hammer out a subpoena. Not a problem, of course, but it’s a delay. All I need is a name.” He heard another urgent voice in the background, and added in the kicker. “We have reason to believe that, in addition to the crimes we are investigating, whoever rented that car has switched the license plates on it, which could be an indication that he’s planning to use the car as an instrumentality of criminal activity. I’m sure Quick wouldn’t want one of its cars to be the next suspicious vehicle abandoned in Times Square. If you want verification that I’m at the FBI, I can give you the number of my office down here at Federal Plaza, and you can give me a call back.”
The voice in the background got louder. Something like,
If you’d ever get off that phone.
“Okay, give me that VIN again?”
He recited the numbers.
“Well, this is funny. The computer says it’s no longer in our inventory.”
“Why would that be? Do you sell cars out of your fleet?”
“Oh. Wait. This is a gray BMW 335i sedan? Says it was last checked in at a garage on Fourteenth Street.”
“That means something?”
“Oh, hell. I remember this. Some fool at that garage let some lady just run off with the keys.”
“It was stolen?”
“Oh, hell yeah. Must have been around a month ago. Now, you’re calling the central location, where every car on this lot’s a QuickCar, and I work directly for the company. But we keep our cars at garages all over the city, just a few cars here and there scattered at private lots for customer convenience. Not everyone’s gonna pay the same kind of attention to the cars, you know what I’m saying?”
“So one of the private garage attendants let his guard down?”
“Let his
something
down. All he could say afterward was that some pretty lady was asking questions about how the QuickCar rentals worked. He left to dig out a buried car for a resident. Next thing he knew, she was gone, and so was the Beemer.”
“He said it was a woman by herself?”
“Yeah. A white girl. A pretty white girl with long red hair.”