Alafair Burke - Long Gone

And then he’d gone to Seattle for a week to visit his brother. And then she’d opened the gallery.

Friends , he said. That’s apparently all they were. And he’d been willing to do anything for her-except examine the possibility that there might be a life without children but with his best friend.

She pushed the thoughts away, knowing they were planted by her father’s words. All she needed right now was a friend.

“Your father says the photo’s legit, huh?”

“I don’t understand the technicalities of it, but apparently he knows some high-speed visual effects guys who can examine a photograph for inconsistencies-like a shadow that falls the wrong direction given the light, or problems with respective sizing of different people in the image. The picture’s not great quality, but I guess nothing jumped out as phony.”

“But it could still be doctored.”

“Possibly, if someone did a good job. Or they found a woman who looked an awful lot like me.”

“Because you know for certain it’s not you, right?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He flashed that disarming smile that always managed to check any anger brewing in her. “I know. I’m an asshole. Just making sure there were no intoxicated evenings with that handsome boss of yours. Maybe something you didn’t even remember?”

“Absolutely not. You, my sir, are the only man I’ve drunkenly stumbled into bed with lately.”

The woman at the next table coughed loudly.

“Very subtle,” Jeff whispered. “Wait until she hears us talking about dead bodies and right-wing conspiracies.”

“My father can be paranoid, but as they say-”

“Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.”

“So do you think the amorphous they are out to get my father?” Her father’s theory sounded crazy, but it would explain the bizarre timing of George Hardy’s protesters outside the gallery just before Campbell’s murder.

“Crazier things have happened. You had wondered why they targeted you for this job. If the entire point was to make your father look bad, taking advantage of you-and the fact that you needed a job-would be a vehicle to get to him.”

“And yet?”

“That’s a pretty complicated way of dragging you and your father through the mud. Someone had to set up a bank account, forge a driver’s license with your picture under Drew Campbell’s name, enlist Campbell to recruit you, create Hans Schuler’s artwork and Web site, rent the gallery space, pay for the furniture, pay for the space-”

“I get the picture.”

“I know this isn’t exactly my expertise, but I represented some pretty amoral corporations when I was at the firm, and now I’m handling some criminal cases. In my experience? There are cheap ways to get revenge. Violence. Lies. Threats. That stuff doesn’t cost a cent. People who spend money do it to earn money.”

“Okay, so maybe you and my father are both right. What if there’s a dual motive-some financial gain, but then leaving me and my father holding the bag was the icing on the cake?”

“How would that fit in with George Hardy?”

“Is it that hard to believe that the pastor at some fly-by-night, crazy church would be involved in illicit activity? I think I’ve read that story before, Reverend Ted. So what kind of operation could they be running?”

“All kinds of nefarious activities require a cover story. They could have been using the gallery to launder money. Or smuggle drugs. Or smuggle people.”

“But we didn’t really have any cargo. All we had coming in and out of there were Schuler’s prints.”

“Which you sold a lot of, right?”

“More than a hundred.”

“Which is what? Like, seventy grand? By an unknown artist who in hindsight appears to be nonexistent?”

“And almost all the orders came in online. I got people into the door based on hype, but I had a hard time selling anything in person. All that money was from the Web.”

“So where’d the money go?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t have access to whatever account it went to, but if the police are still talking to me, my guess is the account is either untraceable or yet another thing that somehow traces back to me or my dad.”

“Okay, so where did all the money come from? Why was the show so successful?”

“At the time, I wanted to believe it was because of my viral marketing prowess.”

“And now?”

“I feel like an idiot. They weren’t smuggling anything. The gallery wasn’t a cover at all. They were selling the pictures. That’s where the money to cover the operation came from.”

“So how did they generate demand? Why would all those people pay seven hundred dollars for pictures that aren’t worth anything?”

“Shit, we have to go.”

He was throwing cash on the table before she had a chance to explain.

“It wasn’t just the prints that I’d mail to the customers.”

He obviously didn’t remember.

“The thumb drives, Jeff. Remember? Every customer received a little stick of data about Hans Schuler. And whoever cleared out the gallery only left two things behind for the cops: Drew Campbell’s body and a bag of those thumb drives. Whatever’s on there, the police have already found.”

“Do you still have any?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to look.”

“That night I went to the gallery before you opened-you showed me the whole setup on your laptop and then slipped the thumb drive in your pocket when you were done. I remember.”

They ran all the way to her apartment, where she found the pair of Hudson bootcuts she had not worn since she had first shown him the so-called Han Schuler exhibit. The thumb drive was still in the front pocket.

“I can’t believe I didn’t see through this bullshit.”

She had viewed all of these files before: images of Schuler’s art, an interactive game where users could cut and paste portions of the images to create their own virtual mosaics, and a program that created desktop background images from Schuler’s work, complete with trite sayings about inner reflection and mainstream radicalism.

“And yet more than a hundred people were willing to pay seven hundred bucks for this crap.”

“What are we missing?”

“Try downloading all the desktop backgrounds, and see if something happens.”

“Like what?”

“Obviously I don’t know, but there’s got to be something there.”

She downloaded all four alternatives, but other than the changes to the background of her laptop desktop, nothing seemed to happen.

“Maybe it’s embedded somewhere.” She began clicking her mouse across the various images. On the photograph called Fluids , the centerpiece of Schuler’s SELF series, she clicked on what was supposedly the artist’s lips, the saliva extending from his mouth, the bite marks in his wrist. Nothing.

She moved on to Wince , a similarly themed close-up of the artist biting his lower lip.

Her clicking became more random and desperate as she moved on to First , the photograph that had created such an uproar after George Hardy and his protesters arrived outside the gallery. It was a collage of cutouts from the image of a body that was obviously not Schuler’s. Pale, smooth skin. Thin hips. A chest just starting to develop above still-bony ribs. She moved her mouse over a dilated pupil and clicked.

The full-screen image of First started to fly away like shards of broken glass. The screen went black.

Enter password.

They tried Schuler. Hans. Hans Schuler. Highline. Self.

Then she typed the name of the photograph that had created this passageway: F-I-R-S-T.