Alafair Burke - Long Gone

“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.