Authors: Alafair Burke
E
ven with his eyes closed, Morhart would have known his location simply from the squeaks and
boing
s echoing down the hallway. The squeaks of rubber and the
boing
s of leather against maple. Nothing sounded quite like an indoor basketball court. This particular court, down this particular hallway, was familiar territory to Morhart, but Linwood High School felt so much smaller than it had when he graduated sixteen years earlier.
Lingering inside the double doors to check out the team’s practice, he recognized Dan Hunter right away from his Facebook photos. The players were in uniform, sprinting from half court to baseline, tagging the floor with their fingertips at each end. Hunter kept up okay step for step, but by the time the team was ten laps in, he lagged half a court back from the pack and would have eventually gotten lapped if the coach hadn’t blown the whistle. Next were rapid layups. The students fell into line, a few paces between them, each galloping toward the basket for a one-handed reach. This time Hunter wasn’t the worst, but he was no Air Jordan, apparently both slower and more prone to gravity than the average team member.
But then came the outside shots. Twelve boys formed an arc around the three-point line, hurling ball after ball after ball. Some throws ricocheted hard off the backboard. Some barely skimmed the metal rim. The coach shook his head as the number of airballs multiplied. But one kid was swooshing balls through the net, seven out of ten. Dan Hunter could shoot.
The shrillness of the whistle halted the cacophony of bouncing leather and squeaking rubber. Morhart stepped onto the court and raised a friendly wave. “Coach, you got a second?”
Not much older than Morhart himself, David DeCicco had started at Linwood High long after Morhart’s own years here, but he’d gotten to know the man two years earlier when Linwood’s starting center broke the wrist of a girl who dared to break up with him the day before prom. A lot of coaches would have been tempted to protect one of their best players, but DeCicco had walked into the station on his own to report that he’d once seen the player grab his girlfriend’s arm when she tried to walk away from him at a postgame party. Morhart had felt the man’s guilt for having looked the other way at the time. He heard later from the girl’s parents that the coach kicked the kid off the team and brought in a guidance counselor to talk to the other boys about teenage dating violence.
“Water break, guys, but no wandering off.” DeCicco shook Morhart’s hand. “Any chance you just had a sudden urge to watch a basketball practice, Detective?”
“Something like that. What can you tell me about Dan Hunter?”
“Aw, Jesus. Hunter? He’s the only man I got who can shoot from the outside. What the hell did he go and do?”
Morhart raised his palm. “Nothing like that, Coach. I’m talking to anyone who might have some insight into that missing girl, Becca Stevenson.”
DeCicco made the same
tsk
sound Morhart was already accustomed to hearing after every mention of Becca’s name.
“I wouldn’t have thought Hunter would even know that girl.”
“Why do you say that?”
He squinted. “You know how kids are. Cliques. Popularity contests. The social hierarchies, if you will. Hunter’s a jock. My thirteen-year-old daughter tells me he’s a cutey patootie. Her words, not mine. He’s into, you know, cheerleaders and pep squad girls with perky smiles and, well, perky everything, not that I try to notice. A girl like Becca—”
He cut himself off, but Morhart urged him to complete the thought. DeCicco glanced around and lowered his voice. “I’ll be blunt. She’s an odd bird. Had her in American History last year. I’m sure she’s a decent kid, but there’s something that’s, I don’t know, just
off
. Sullen. Dark. Probably very insecure. Something almost broken about her, but, you know, no big behavioral problems, no signs of abuse, no obvious indications of drug use. Not positive enough to really be engaged in school, but not quite bad off enough to be one of the problem children.”
“Invisible.”
“Exactly. One of those invisible kids. Look, I know the reality about a lot of my guys. For most of them, these will be the heydays. They’ll wind up going to JuCo at best, and they’ll never leave this town. But at least they’ll have their years in this building, with the cheering in the stadium and the letter jackets and the pretty girls to look back on as some moment in their lives when they were something. The kids my guys pick on? They’ll wind up inventing the next electric car or something. They’ll date supermodels and buy Italian villas or whatever, and will look back on this place as a joke. But then there are kids like Becca. These sad kids who don’t have much happiness now and give you the feeling they’ll never have anything in the future.”
“That’s fucking depressing.”
“Needless to say, I’m a little more encouraging to my players. Save the armchair psychology for the grown-ups.”
“And what would the shrink have to say about Dan Hunter if it turns out he was spending time with the Stevenson girl?”
He waited a full five seconds before answering. “He’s not a bad kid, but he’s not inherently good either. His ethics are, how can I put this? Situational.”
Hunter sported the shaggy hair that young kids seemed to favor these days, resorting to a series of lopsided head spasms to flip his long bangs out of his eyes. He swept the back of his hand across his face to wipe away some of the sweat.
“Coach said you wanted to see me?”
If Morhart’s introduction as a member of the police department made Hunter nervous, he didn’t show it.
“You might have heard that Becca Stevenson never came home Sunday night.”
“Yeah, I heard. Where is she?”
The kid asked the question as if Morhart would know. As if Morhart had come here to inform this kid personally what had become of Becca Stevenson. He had no idea what to make of it. Maybe the kid had been close to Becca, thinking about her, expecting to hear news. Or maybe he was just thick in the brain. He looked thick.
“Well, that’s sort of why I’m here, Dan. Talking to Becca’s friends. Trying to get some ideas about where she might have gone to.”
He offered no response, only nodded in a slow way that warned Morhart not to attribute too much wiliness to this one.
“So would you say you were one of Becca’s friends?”
Hunter shrugged. “My friends are guys, you know?”
“Did you know her?”
Another shrug. “I sort of know everyone at the school, you know?”
“Ever go out with her?”
“Go out?”
“Date. Hook up. Fuck?”
The obscenity shook the kid out of his supercool frat-boy daze. “No, nothing like that.”
“But something. Maybe a little road trip into Manhattan?”
“Yeah, okay, but that was a while ago. We were sort of talking and stuff last month, but it didn’t work out.”
“You need to start using complete sentences, son.”
“And with all due respect, sir, you need to stop calling me son. I mean, sorry, I know you’ve got your job and all, but just because I made the mistake of giving some screwed-up chick like Becca a chance doesn’t mean I deserve the third degree.”
Morhart could see what the coach had meant about the kid’s situational disposition.
“I do have a job, Dan. And it requires that I walk into a circumstance I know nothing about and make some quick decisions about where best to focus my time. And right now my focus is on you, and the more attitude you show toward me, the more likely it’s going to stay there and intensify like a white-hot laser beam. Now, with all due respect as you called it, please start telling me about your relationship to Becca Stevenson—who, if I must remind you, is missing and could very well be in jeopardy if not worse.”
“There’s not much to tell. She’s kind of weird, but I’ve always known she had a crush on me or whatever. I was getting sick of the usual girlfriend bullshit and thought I’d try something new. We started talking or whatever, and, yeah, we went into Manhattan a couple times. It was fun. She was, like, different or whatever. But I don’t know, it just didn’t work out. It was no big deal.”
“Why didn’t it work out?”
“It just didn’t, I don’t know. We were too different.”
“Who’s Ashleigh Reynolds?”
Hunter shook his head in frustration. “That’s what this is about? Yeah, so Ashleigh and I are what you’d call on-and-off. Needless to say, we were off when I was having conversations with Becca, and Ashleigh wasn’t having any of it. She was talking smack about Becca.”
“Like calling her a slut on your Facebook page?”
He looked at the floor. “Yeah. That was about the worst of it, really. Most of it was catty comments to her stupid girlfriends, but it was too much drama, so, whatever: that was that. No more Becca, and me and on-and-off Ashleigh are back on.”
“No more Becca, huh?”
“Jeez, man, not like that.”
“Where were you on Sunday night?”
“Come on, man. You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Then humor me. Decent-looking guy like you, lots of friends—I can’t imagine you spend too much time alone.”
“I was on the court kicking Jefferson High’s ass. You can check with the coach if you want.”
“And after the game?”
“You gonna bust me if it involves some underage drinking?”
“Not exactly my priority right now, kid.”
He paused, then smiled. “In that case, I was ripping some mighty beautiful keg stands in Jay Lindon’s basement. His parents are out of town. The whole team was there.”
Both components of the alibi would be easy to confirm—or break, as the case might be.
“Look, check me out all you want. I have no idea where Becca is, but—and I feel
bad
saying this—she was seriously screwed up, okay? Why do you think the school doesn’t have banners all over the building or a twenty-four/seven candlelight vigil on the front lawn? Everyone assumes she ran away. She’s long gone, and the sad thing is, no one really cares.”
According to her two-month-old driver’s license, Ashleigh Reynolds lived at an address in one of the more upscale neighborhoods of Dover, meaning new brick instead of linoleum siding, a smooth unmarred concrete driveway instead of oil-stained blacktop, and perfectly manicured yards. He used the shiny brass knocker on the magenta-painted door. A man in a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up but his tie still knotted, answered.
“Mr. Reynolds?”
The man greeted him with the friendly smile of a salesman, but his squint made clear he expected an introduction, which Morhart provided. “I was hoping to talk to your daughter, Ashleigh, about a girl from her school who’s been reported missing. Becca Stevenson?”
“Sure, we heard about that. Sad thing. I swear, my wife’s about to drive our daughter crazy watching out for her now.”
“So is your daughter here?” The echoes of a Taylor Swift song from inside the house suggested so.
“She’s working on her homework right now.”
“It’ll just be a few minutes, sir. I’m talking to everyone at the school trying to find some kind of lead. The poor girl’s mother is beside herself.”
Reynolds looked up the stairway behind him toward the sounds of the music. “Ashleigh’s mom and I already talked with our daughter about that issue, trying to see if maybe she could offer anything helpful. She didn’t know the girl, and obviously has no idea where she might have gone, or we would have called you right away.”
“So if she’d confirm that for me—”
“We don’t want her involved in this. Ashleigh and her friends are pretty scared wondering what might have become of that girl and whether they might be next. I heard her up pacing the house last night. She couldn’t sleep because she’d had a dream about being kidnapped. Talking to a police officer will only get her thoughts back into those dark places, and for what? She doesn’t know anything. I hope you’ll understand, Detective.”
Morhart blinked at the magenta door with the brass knocker, closed before he could respond.
By the time Morhart returned to the precinct, Dan Hunter had removed his Facebook tags from the New York photos, erasing any public evidence of the popular jock’s short-term involvement with the weird girl named Becca Stevenson.
A
lice was bundled in Jeff’s white terry bathrobe, her hair still damp from the shower. She turned sideways on the black leather couch to facilitate the shoulder rub Jeff had started. Somewhere along the road, she had forgotten all the simple ways he had of comforting her.
When the police were finally finished asking questions, all she could think of as a next step was to take a shower. To wash away the blood from her skin and clothing. To rinse off the smell of death. When she, Lily, and Jeff all crawled into the back of a cab, Lily had given the driver Alice’s address, but it was Alice who changed the directive. For reasons she could not explain, she did not want to be in her apartment, not even in the company of her two closest friends.
Maybe she just yearned for the sterility of Jeff’s ultramodern apartment. The white walls. White floors. High-gloss white cabinets. Sleek leather furniture. Steel accents. No clutter. No dust. No blood. Lightness and order compared to her shabby chic chaos.
But maybe it was more than just an aesthetic preference. Drew had been impossible to find yesterday, and then sounded panicked last night. He wouldn’t talk on the phone. He had asked to meet her—in person, and first thing in the morning. And now someone had killed him. Two gunshots to the chest, is what she overheard one of the policemen say. What if she had arrived at the gallery earlier? What if whoever killed Drew saw dropping in on her as part of finishing the job?
“I feel so awful about you both taking care of me. Don’t you need to get back to work?”
“My deposition was set over until next week. Had the whole day clear anyway.”
The question had been aimed primarily at Lily. Travel magazines weren’t exactly rolling in profits in this economy, and the Gorilla was not the kind of boss who took a missed day in stride. “Don’t worry about me. I told the Gorilla my sister was in the hospital.”
“You don’t have a sister.”
“Yeah, but the Gorilla doesn’t know that. Just got to remember to add that little factoid to the work persona. Now, what’s the appropriate period of mourning before we just throw down and get this woman skunk drunk?”
Lily was making herself at home in Jeff’s kitchen, foraging through the bar cabinet and pulling out whatever bottles of booze looked interesting.
“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.”