Alafair Burke - Long Gone

Alice saw a flicker behind Lily’s eyes as she realized the mistake she had made. Lily had been sitting right next to Alice when she had given Detective Shannon a copy of her pay stub with the ITH company name on it. They had talked about that name several times afterward. She had to have made the connection.

“I went to Mia the next day and confronted her.” Alice felt a scream building in her chest. This woman had played her from the very beginning, and now she was doing the same with Shannon. “She told me what she had done. Travis had a plan to sell porn without going through the Internet. I didn’t understand why that would be profitable-”

“Because it was child porn, Miss Harper. Your favorite little sister was peddling child porn with her boyfriend.”

Lily swallowed. “I had no idea, obviously. Mia made it sound like sex tapes or something. Travis had this plan, and she knew from me that Alice was in the art world and needed a job. She saw an opportunity to set Alice up as the fall guy. The money from the sales all got wired overseas. They’d run the scam for a while, then pull the plug and leave her high and dry.”

“Did she tell you she killed Travis Larson?”

She nodded. “The protesters outside the gallery had him spooked. Alice was demanding to speak to the gallery owner. The press was trying to find the supposed artist. It would only be a matter of time before someone figured out what was embedded in those thumb drives. Travis was supposed to call Alice and calm her down, but Mia heard him tell Alice to meet the next morning at the gallery. She went there and confronted him. He was planning to double-cross her. He was going to blame everything on Mia and then try to cozy up to Alice in the hopes of getting into her family money.”

Alice felt Hank’s eyes on her. The plan Lily described sounded right up Travis Larson’s alley.

“You told me you didn’t know Mia had a gun.”

“I meant that I didn’t know at first. She told me all this after the fact.”

“And from then on you decided you’d help frame Alice Humphrey.”

“No, I did not. I was trying to figure out how to help her without turning in Mia.”

“You ratted Alice out when we asked you about those gloves we found near the murder scene. Then you told her to run, pretty much guaranteeing her conviction.”

“I assumed her father would hire a bunch of lawyers to get her out of it. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. I know it sounds weird, but I do care about her. She’s my friend. But Mia-Mia was… troubled. Seriously troubled, okay? But she was like family. I didn’t know what to do. You have to believe me.”

The tears that were beginning to fall seemed real, but Alice had one question for her friend that Shannon had not yet raised.

“Can I talk to Detective Shannon?” she asked.

Arthur Cronin was the kind of lawyer who had no qualms about tapping on the interrogation room glass. Shannon looked annoyed but stepped out of the room.

“I’m sorry, Detective, but she’s lying.”

“I know that. She’s admitting only as much as she has to and disputing everything else.”

“She wants you to believe that Mia did all of this on her own, and she only helped her after the fact. Mia Andrews wore my gloves and then left them near the crime scene with gunshot residue on them. But how did Mia get my gloves in the first place?”

When Shannon returned to the interrogation room to ask that very question, Lily Harper stopped crying and asked for a lawyer.

Two Weeks Later

“I ’d have to say this has been a much more pleasant visit than the last couple of times you popped in on me.”

Alice poured coffee for Detectives John Shannon and Willie Danes, as if they were two old pals in her living room rather than the two men who had tried to put her behind bars for the rest of her life.

“Your hair’s back to red,” Danes observed, gesturing awkwardly to her head.

“Yeah, the bottled version for now. The red roots were poking through. I looked like Pepé Le Pew on acid.”

“Again, we just really want to apologize, both officially on behalf of the NYPD, but also for ourselves. We realize in retrospect that you were trying to work with us. We were too convinced of what we thought was the truth to hear you out.”

They had already given her a layperson’s debriefing of the case. Mia Andrews’s neighbors could place Travis Larson at Mia’s apartment as early as eight months ago. That photograph of her kissing Larson-planted on “Drew Campbell’s” fake Facebook profile for police to find-had looked candid but was one of sixty similarly staged images found in Mia’s digital camera. Activity on Mia’s home computer proved that the artwork supposedly by Hans Schuler was her own. She had also been the one to join a members-only message board catering to “specialty erotica,” advertising the Schuler exhibit at Highline Gallery and promising “secret bonus photographs with no traceable downloads” for those who followed the posted instructions. The.38 she used to deliver a fatal shot to her head was the same weapon used to kill Travis Larson. Robert Atkinson’s briefcase and laptop were also found in her apartment.

“Will you ever know for certain whether she killed my brother?”

Danes frowned. “We’re sorry, Alice. Nothing in her apartment ties her to Ben. We did, however, find recent calls from your brother to a suspected dealer. We spoke to that individual, and he indicated that your brother had started using again. What happens sometimes is, if a person who had been using drugs stops-as your brother did-his tolerance goes down. If he slips and uses the same amount, what used to be an acceptable quantity is just too much.”

“I see.”

“I mean, it’s possible she somehow mixed his stash with something purer. Or maybe she got there after the fact and rifled through the apartment, as you suspected someone had.”

Or it was possible her brother was a junkie who had let the multimillion-dollar loft her parents had purchased for him go to shit before sticking a needle in his arm one last time.

“It’s okay, Detective. I understand.”

Arthur had advised her what to expect. This home visit was part of the department’s overall damage-control strategy. The city’s attorneys had probably counseled them to win her over in an attempt to forestall a lawsuit.

As far as she was concerned, however, there was only one thing she wanted from them.

“Why hasn’t Lily Harper been arrested?”

Danes looked at Shannon, who decided to do the talking on that one.

“The statements she made before lawyering up have actually panned out. If in fact she did not know about Mia’s involvement with your job at the gallery until after Larson was murdered, then she’s not an accessory.”

“She led you to believe I was a murderer.”

“And unfortunately the law does not impose a duty upon people to come forward to us with the truth. Even if she knew Mia was responsible, she doesn’t have to report her. The only affirmative statement she ever made to us was when we asked her to identify your gloves. She told us they were yours, which was, in fact, a truthful statement. Letting you hang in the wind makes her a shitty person, but not an accomplice.”

Arthur had already tried to explain that aspect of the law to her.

“But how else could Mia have gotten my gloves? Lily must have given them to her, which proves she knew what Mia was up to.”

The detectives exchanged glances again.

“Will you please stop staring at each other and just talk to me like a normal person? I’m not going to sue you, but I want you to be honest with me. I deserve that. At the very least, I deserve absolute honesty.”