Long Gone (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

T
here was a time when the Upper East Side was Alice’s front and back yard. The townhouse on Seventy-second Street. Shopping on Madison Avenue. Burgers at P.J. Clarke’s. Saturday-morning tea with her mother in the trustees’ dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In retrospect, she realized how odd it was that her lefty lib parents opted for a neighborhood where residents were occasionally wistful for the other side of the park’s devil-may-care stance on blue jeans. But the Upper East Side was home to almost all the exclusive girls’ schools, and her mother had always valued Alice’s convenience over Ben’s. Her father had never seen this part of the city as his home, but he would have deferred to her mother, since he basically lived at their country home in Bedford when he wasn’t in L.A. or away on location.

Today, though, he had come into the city especially to see Alice, and he had insisted that she make herself available. She rang the doorbell and then followed the assistant she remembered as Mabel into the front parlor. Mabel was fiftyish and professional, and she looked like a Mabel. She’d appeared in place of the younger, more attractive assistant last year, just after the big blowup. The woman who’d looked like a younger Rose Sampson was out, and Mabel was in.

“Sort of silly to ring the doorbell at your own childhood home, isn’t it?” Her father wore a bulky gray cardigan. She smelled fresh cedar and soap when he leaned in to kiss her cheek.

“It’s a bit presumptuous for a grown woman to walk into her parents’ house without knocking.”

“Touché. I don’t have to tell you to take a seat, do I?”

She took her usual place on a mid-century recliner and waved off Mabel’s gesture toward an aperitif from the bar cart. She knew she had been summoned here for a reason, so wasted no time laying out the abbreviated version of the still-unfathomable events that had landed her and her former employer on the crime pages of the
Daily News
: “Murder on the Highline.”

“You say this like it’s nothing, Alice. As if this were yet another little cycle in your life—getting married, that move to St. Louis, returning home, the MFA, finding a dead body at what turned out to be a nonexistent job. Where is the shock? Where is the fear?”

“You have no right to tell me how to
act.
I am not one of your starlets for you to direct. Trust me, I feel fear and shock and terror and fury. I feel it so much that I’m numb.”

“Yet you still can’t call us for help. I practically had to beg you to come here and tell me what is happening. You want to punish me so badly that you’ll punish yourself in the process.”

“If I thought you could help, I would have asked you. This isn’t late rent or a job interview. Money or a phone call isn’t going to make this go away.”

“So you think that’s the only way I know how to help? By handing you money or throwing Hollywood names around?”

“No, Papa, that’s not what I meant. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“We always worry about you, baby girl.”

He had called her that as long as she could remember. There had been times as a teenager when the sound of it made her cringe, but she had to admit she liked hearing the term of endearment now. She liked being here in this familiar room. In this particular chair. She wanted to close her eyes and believe her father could make everything all right.

“The police obviously think I was the one who set up the gallery. And if I lied to them, and I was the one who found that man’s body, I can only imagine what they must be thinking. I’m really scared, Papa. I’m scared they’re going to arrest me with who-knows-what kind of evidence someone has cooked up. And I’m scared that whoever killed that man might come after me. But then if I leave town to protect myself, they’ll think that’s a sign of guilt. And I’m—I’m terrified that someone has done this to me. I just don’t understand it.” She wiped away a tear. “See? This is why I wasn’t showing you that shock and fear you were looking for. It’s all I can do to hold myself together.”

“These police officers are probably bureaucrats who would love to make their careers by hanging this on an attractive, wealthy woman with a famous last name. They can’t possible believe—”

“Papa, the contract was under what they think is my alias, with my photograph. They have a picture of me kissing a guy I swore was only my employer. What they’re thinking is so damn believable that sometimes I wonder if I’m the one going crazy.”

“Well, this may not be something you thought I could help with, but you know I will insist. Do not talk to them any more without a lawyer.”

“Jeff said the same thing, but I think that makes me look even guiltier.”

“You went to Jeff with something like this? No, you need someone good. Let me call Arthur. He was trying cases when Jeff was in diapers.”

“Jeff graduated top ten percent from law school. He has his own firm. He’s perfectly capable of protecting me from a police interrogation.” And Arthur was with you on a few of those mile-high-club adventures on your private jet, she wanted to say. He knew all about your dalliances, and yet continued to be a friend and confidant to your wife and children. He continued to let my mother host his frequent weekends to the guest cottage in Bedford that he jokingly called his country home. Yeah, I’m going to trust Arthur Cronin.

“It’s not about book smarts. It’s about stature. Did you read
Outliers
?”

She shook her head.

“Well, Malcolm talks about something called ‘practical intelligence
.
’” Since her father had struck up a friendship a few years earlier with the author Malcolm Gladwell, he had taken to frequently quoting his friend, and always by first name. “It’s about the ability to read a situation. To know what to say and how and when to say it. Arthur Cronin went to some crap school in Florida, but he made a name for himself based on his work. Jeff? Jeff is a simple little boy who cares so much about his bourgeois, two-kids-and-a-picket-fence, brainwashed, cookie-cutter lifestyle that he hurt a bright, talented, and thoughtful woman. He
hurt
you, Alice. I remember you calling us in Bedford that night. We could hardly understand you, you were so distraught. We got in the car and drove to the city to make sure you wouldn’t hurt yourself. Our beautiful baby girl. We were
that
worried about you. And that little asshole Jeff Wilkerson is the one who put you in that state.”

“That was a long time ago, Papa.”

It had been nearly three years since Jeff suddenly announced they had no future. He wanted children. She had learned during her first marriage that she could not carry any. That fact had never been a secret from Jeff, but one night during dessert at Babbo, he came to (or at least vocalized) the conclusion that a future with biological children meant more to him than a future with her. He tried to blame the disclosure’s poor timing on the wine, but he could not retract the sentiment.

“It’s not as if anything has changed with him. He shows up, and then he’s gone again. He’s in your life, then he’s out. I hate to say this, but the man uses you, Alice, and it breaks my heart to see it.”

“I guess you know about using women.”

She regretted the words immediately and knew there was no way she could ever explain to her father why she had hurled them. Her father had always given her unconditional praise, however undeserved. When she was still acting, he would tell her she was absolute perfection, conveying more expression in a single glance than most girls her age could manage in a five-minute monologue. Anyone who criticized her was written off as a hack, too jealous or untalented to fathom the enormity of the career she would ultimately have.

He had only the best intentions. He had wanted a daughter who believed in herself absolutely and without reservation. But, at least for Alice, to be told that she was perfect when she knew otherwise only invited her to form—and then internalize—the obvious counterarguments. I’m not perfect. I’m not better than the other girls in class. I’m not pretty. I’m not talented.

Even now, as her father insisted the police must be idiots, she could only see how rational their suspicions of her actually were.

And now her father was also telling her that she was too good for someone like Jeff. Jeff, who had always been honest with her about wanting to father children. Who was still trying to find a place in his life for her despite that desire. Who had dropped everything when she had needed him at the gallery. Who, once he eventually did get married and have his children, would never do what her father had been doing—and denying—all these years.

“There is something you can help me with, Papa.”

When he said nothing, she was thankful he’d accepted the change in subject.

“This is the photograph the police have of me and the man I knew as Drew Campbell.” She handed him the copy the detectives had left with her. “It’s either someone who looks a lot like me, or it’s been Photoshopped, or both. Can you tell whether it’s been doctored?”

Although her father had become famous as a director, he was also considered one of the best cinematographers and photographers in the world.

“Looking at it right now, it is hard to say offhand. I see no obvious mistakes. No missing earlobes,” he said with a smile. “Seems consistent in perspective and shadow. I can take a closer look at it if you leave it here. Maybe I can let one of the visual effects people have at it, if that’s all right with you?”

She thanked her father for his help before she left, and for the first time in what had been a very long year, she meant it.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I
t had been five days since Becca Stevenson had disappeared, and Morhart could already feel the case losing momentum. He’d handled missing-kid reports before, but he’d always had a resolution within a day or so. With one exception, the kids had turned up, after either running away or a simple misunderstanding about so-and-so’s slumber party. He didn’t like thinking about the one exception, a stepmother who had faked an abduction with her lover in an attempt to extract ransom from her husband. The boy’s body had been found in the Jersey City Reservoir.

Morhart may not have juggled one of these prolonged searches before, but he’d seen some of them unfold in the news. Some kids got the full treatment—the high-profile Amber Alerts, front-page headlines, and around-the-clock cable news updates. Others got one paragraph in the back pages, and then just disappeared—both in life and from the media. Anyone willing to be honest about our lingering unconscious biases could recognize the role that race played in those distinctions. Morhart couldn’t recall a single case where the media took up the cause of a victim of color. But he had a relatively attractive white girl at stake, and he needed her face in the newspapers and on television if he had any hope of generating new leads.

The problem, he suspected, was the narrative. Not a cheerleader. Not an honor student. A messed-up girl with a single mother who didn’t even notice her kid was missing until morning because she was busy getting nailed by her new boyfriend. Those reporters were assuming what everyone else was—that Becca had simply run away. Morhart found himself thinking the same thing, but it didn’t change the fact that he wanted a resolution. He wanted to know where Becca was and why. He wanted to know if she was still alive. He wanted to keep his promise to a mother who struck him as a better woman than she was believing herself to be right now.

Five days had passed, and he felt like he was swimming in Jell-O. The bullying Becca had been experiencing at school. The secret cell phone. The recent reappearance of her father. Those illicit photographs. He could not help thinking there had to be a connection between the fact that Becca had taken a nude picture of herself and her father’s subsequent allegations against an art exhibit featuring controversial photography.

He walked into the precinct to find Nancy bent over his desk, scribbling a note, her left hand still resting on his telephone. He could smell her powdery perfume ten feet away.

“I’ve told you a hundred times, Nancy, just let the calls go to voice mail.” On calls about his cases, he preferred to hear the callers’ demeanor and exact words himself. Not to mention that Nancy had a habit of switching digits around when distracted.

“Your phone rings so darn loud, I can’t help it sometimes. Here you go.”

He looked down at her bubbly, cursive letters. “Det. John Shannon, Homicide, NYPD,” followed by a phone number.

“He said it was about Becca Stevenson.”

“So, we compared those pictures you sent over to the images we have of the so-called artwork that was up at our gallery.”

Morhart felt like the tide was finally breaking. The images would match. Shannon was about to confirm that Becca was the girl depicted in those photographs. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. A connection between her and the gallery would be a step toward a resolution, but he suspected it would not be a happy one in light of the murder that had occurred there.

“No match.”

Morhart found himself relieved. He wanted Becca to be safe even more than he wanted answers. “Are you sure? You said your pictures didn’t have any faces in them.”

“The ones on display in the museum—or the gallery, I guess—just showed little snippets of bare skin, but we’ve actually found some other photographs that are of more interest to us.”

“What other pictures?”

“Stuff that wouldn’t be on display anywhere.”

“Are these minors? Is it child pornography?”

“Christ, Morhart. You’re worse than my partner. Can you let me get a word in, here? We’ve got a bunch of pictures, and trust me, none of them matches. Your girl was a little, um, softer than the girls in these pictures. But it doesn’t matter, okay? You were right. There’s a connection.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The fingerprints. We had them run the latents picked up from the gallery against the prints you pulled from your vic’s bedroom. We found a right index and ring finger match on the bathroom doorknob.”

“She was there.”

“Correct. Becca Stevenson was inside the Highline Gallery.”