Authors: Alafair Burke
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—”
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.
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.