Alafair Burke - Long Gone

Were her parents going to have to go away with these men because of Ben and his stupid underage drinking parties? All she could do was tell the truth: her mother had gone to bed early, and her father hadn’t paid the party any mind. He’d been in their screening room with her, watching an advance copy of The Goonies . He hadn’t really been watching it, of course. He’d been sneaking glimpses at scripts in the dim glow of a flashlight until he had a few too many scotches and fell asleep, but she didn’t see any point in adding that detail.

Her parents were the kind of people who dined with liberal senators and raised funds for elected officials, but who held in contempt the people who actually carried out the work of government. People like her parents saw police as security guards for people with “those kinds” of problems. She remembered that day because it was the day she learned that police officers-whom children naturally saw as helpers and heroes-were, to men like her father, unfit to intrude upon the private affairs of a family like theirs, unqualified to disrupt even a sixth-grade homework assignment. She would witness that attitude in her father several more times over the next fifteen-plus years, every time Ben had one of his scrapes with the law. He’d rail against the war on drugs. He’d demonize the nation’s irrational emphasis upon retribution over rehabilitation. But he’d never blame Ben for blowing so many second chances.

She didn’t want to think about how her father would respond if Willie Danes and John Shannon showed up at his doorstep unannounced, as they had with her.

Ben walked her to the door and gave her an awkward hug. “Try not to get ahead of yourself on this ITH stuff. Arthur represents thousands of clients at that huge firm, and that was like twenty-something years ago anyway. It’s probably just a coincidence. Hang tight, and I’m sure the police will figure this out.”

As she made her way to the 6 train, she passed the location of what used to be her favorite bar, Double Happiness. It seemed like only yesterday that she and her girlfriends were downing ginger martinis in the basement-level hangout-getting ejected once when her friend Danielle broke not one, but two, cocktail glasses-but she realized it had been closed now for almost five years. Terrific. First she was yelling at the group of hot party girls on the street. Now she was pining for the better-than-today places that used to be. Why didn’t she go ahead and adopt a dozen cats to seal her grumpy-lady fate?

She was just about to swipe her MetroCard through the turnstile when something about her conversation with Ben began to nag at her. The man behind her rammed into her when she failed to follow the usual rhythm of the subway system.

“Sorry.”

“You going or what, lady?”

She stepped out of his way, not wanting to board the train until she figured out what was bothering her. Something related to what Ben said about Cronin. What was it that he had said? That Art had a lot of clients, and it was a long time ago.

But she had never said anything to Ben about ITH being incorporated twenty-five years earlier. She nearly slipped on ice patches three different times as she ran back to his apartment. Despite five minutes of buzzing, no one answered.

H ank Beckman popped his third Advil in as many hours. He felt his eyes beginning to cross from the strain of reading entries on bank statements and deposit slips.

“Okay, Mrs. Ross. If we’ve identified every transaction at issue”-he punched a series of numbers into the calculator-“it looks like you transferred a total of $410,525.62 to Coulton since 2007. You withdrew only $35,000, leaving you with a loss of $375,525.62. Our charges against Coulton will reflect as much, and you might be needed to testify about the transactions and your communications with Coulton should the case proceed to trial.”

“What about the money? When will I get the money back?” Marlene Ross was a well-maintained woman with smooth skin and immobile hair. Had it not been for access to her official date of birth, he would have placed her a decade younger than her sixty-six years. She had tastefully applied whatever fragrance had created the subtle sweetness he smelled whenever she leaned toward him.

The U.S. Attorney was on the verge of indicting Richard Coulton in what would have been the office’s largest Ponzi scheme if Bernie Madoff had not blown that record out of the water a couple years back. “We’ll go after his assets, but there’s no guarantee, of course, of obtaining a complete recovery. The very nature of a Ponzi scheme is that Coulton used the money you gave him to cover promises he made to clients he enlisted years earlier.”

“So are you telling me that if you had just minded your own business and left him to his own devices, he would have received investment money from some other person in order to pay me back? He promised me a thirty percent return.”

The newspapers made it sound like the swindlers who engaged in pyramid schemes were taking food from the mouths of gullible investors, but Hank had found it difficult to sympathize with some of the entitled people who were supposedly Coulton’s victims.

He walked Mrs. Ross from the conference room. As she passed him, he noticed the ease with which she walked to the elevator in her six-inch heels, the designer red soles unscratched despite her claims that Coulton had left her “with nothing.”

Back at his desk, he Googled “Highline Gallery,” “Travis Larson,” and “Alice Humphrey,” as he had been doing obsessively since he divulged everything he knew to NYPD detective Willie Danes. No new information. He had seen the boxes of documents in the war room at the precinct. He had felt the energy and momentum of that investigation.

The police had a theory. He was certain of it. They had a suspect, that much had been obvious from their conversation. But three days had passed without an arrest. Probably some prosecutor had concluded that they lacked sufficient evidence for a trial, so now they were in that familiar holding pattern. He’d heard all the metaphors before: getting their ducks in a row; holding their cards close; letting the suspect wiggle free like a fish, careful not to try to grab it too early. Waiting for the media frenzy to die down. Waiting for another piece of the puzzle to fall into place. Waiting for the suspect to make a mistake. Waiting. Waiting.

He couldn’t wait any longer. For seven months, since Ellen died, he had thought about Travis Larson every single day. Now the man was dead, and Hank-for reasons he could not identify-felt like he had seen something that would somehow prove relevant. He hated being locked on the outside, left scouring the Internet for clues like one of those housebound true-crime crazies who routinely called the bureau with so-called tips gleaned from online surfing.

He kept recalling moments from the last days of Larson’s life, replaying mental videotapes from his periods of surveillance, wondering if he had overlooked the significance of something he had witnessed.

He also had an uneasy feeling about the identification process Danes had used to get him to name Alice Humphrey as the redhead he’d seen at Larson’s apartment. Last year, a federal court had released a man named Anthony James Adams after DNA evidence cleared him of raping a nurse working the night shift at St. Vincent’s Hospital thirteen years earlier. Hank had been the FBI agent in charge. He’d shown the victim a six-pack of photos, and after a minute of careful study, she’d identified Adams as the perpetrator. It would be more than another decade before a different man, Teddy Jackson, would tell his cellmate that he raped a nurse at a New York City hospital in 1997 and got away with it when another man took the rap. More sophisticated DNA analysis, unavailable during the original investigation, led to Adams’s release.