Alafair Burke - Long Gone

“You’re right,” Shannon said. “I’m sorry. Lily’s attorney has an explanation for the gloves. You remember how you thought Larson first found you at that art showing because you had it posted on your Facebook page?”

She nodded.

“Well, the following night, you posted something about a killer pizza at a place called Otto?”

She remembered. “Clams. It was a clam pizza.”

“Did you happen to check your coat?” She nodded. “Lily’s lawyer pointed out that Mia could have worn her matching blue coat to Otto and pulled some stunt at the coat check about the gloves.”

“Or, more likely, Lily knows I always check my coat because the bar gets so crowded, and she’s had two weeks to think up a story.”

“You wanted honesty, Alice, and I’m giving it to you straight. No bullshit. You’ve got a valid point about those gloves, but we’re never going to know for sure. And no prosecutor’s going to try Lily based only on our speculation about those gloves.”

“So Lily walks?”

“We’re pushing the DA to charge her with obstruction. We’d argue that her linking you to the gloves, knowing full well you were innocent, essentially obligated her to tell us the whole truth. She also counseled you to run, which we might be able to bootstrap into something.”

“You don’t sound optimistic.”

“It’s up to the DA. Even if we can convince him to file, she probably won’t do time. And she’ll haul out the sad story about her dead friend and her secret daughter and all of that in the process.”

“At least there’s some good news,” Danes said, searching for a change in subject. “You probably heard that your father’s in the clear.”

Even though Alice’s arrest warrant was promptly withdrawn, the affidavit filed in its support had been leaked to the media. An enterprising reporter at the National Enquirer had unearthed the old blind item by Robert Atkinson. It had taken the churning wheel of Internet news only three days to declare Academy Award-winning director Frank Humphrey a child rapist.

When the district attorney’s office asked her father for a DNA sample, Arthur wanted to fight it. The statute of limitations on anything that had happened in 1985 had long passed. The government was just doing the tabloid media’s bidding, Arthur argued. But for the first time in a long while, her father had done the right thing. He had made the decision with only one interest in mind-the truth.

“So does anyone even know who Mia’s father actually was?”

The funny thing about the truth was its constant ability to surprise. Even though her father had been resigned to accept the fact that he had fathered the illegitimate child of a barely teenage girl in 1985, Frank Humphrey’s DNA did not, in fact, match Mia Andrews’s. Christie Kinley may have believed that her pregnancy resulted from that night in her father’s office, but she’d been mistaken.

Danes shook his head. “Could be anyone in Westchester County, from what we hear.”

“And how are you holding up?” she asked. She had been through hell, but Willie Danes was the one who’d been shot at.

“I’m back on the job, as you can see. The guy from New Jersey and I were both cleared in our involvement. It shouldn’t have happened that way. If I’d been treating your information more seriously, we could have gotten her out alive.”

“Well, it sounds like she was the one who decided how it would end. Your bullets didn’t kill her.” Ballistics tests had proven that Mia Andrews’s own gun had delivered the fatal shot to her face.

“I suppose there’s that. The irony is that she could’ve just run down the fire escape when we knocked. She must’ve assumed we’d brought the cavalry.”

“The bigger mystery is what Becca Stevenson’s fingerprints were doing in that gallery bathroom,” Shannon said. “We haven’t found a single piece of evidence to tie Mia to Becca, but, as of three days ago, the NYPD officially declared us uninvolved in her disappearance. The investigation is back in Jersey. Anyhoo, got any other questions we can answer?”

They placed their coffee cups on the table in synchronicity, and she could tell they were eager to put this case in their rearview mirror.

“Not right now, detectives, but I will certainly call you if I need anything. And I do appreciate your coming here.”

They apologized once again as they made their way out the door.

She would have thought that the news about Lily not being charged would be the sour note ringing in her head after the detectives’ departure. Instead, she kept hearing Danes’s voice: Your father’s in the clear.

Alice had been at her parents’ apartment when Arthur had called them with the news. Her mother had actually let out a little yelp, as if the fact that her husband hadn’t actually impregnated his rape victim was something to celebrate. At least her father had the decency to be somber.

On the same day he had agreed to the blood test, her father had paid her an unannounced visit to confess everything he remembered about April 18, 1985-which was very little. Mom had gone to bed early, annoyed at how much he’d been drinking at dinner. Alice broke in to point out the irony of that detail, given how their lives had played out in the intervening quarter century, but it was clear her father did not want to be interrupted.

He knew Ben and his friends were drinking out back, but the boy’s sixteenth birthday had been the previous weekend, and it seemed like harmless high school mischief. Arthur called it quits shortly after dinner himself. Alice had been begging to watch the screening copy of Goonies he had scored from Warner Brothers, so the two of them had moved into the theater. His rendition was just as Alice remembered the night.

As her father slowly recited his version of the evening, she realized that he had somehow convinced himself that his baby girl had forgotten his pre-sobriety days. “I was upset with your mother, even though she had a point about the drinking. But knowing she was right, and knowing she had locked herself away in our room because of it, only made me want to drink more. To this day, I can’t tell you what that damn Goonies movie is even about, I was so inebriated. I passed out. And don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the first time. But I actually blacked out. I woke up in the morning on the floor of the theater, and I couldn’t remember a thing. When I saw Arthur later, he made some remark about the girl being too young even for me, and I didn’t even know what he was talking about. He told me he walked out of the guest cottage to smoke a cigar and saw me talking to one of the girls from Ben’s party. Obviously, his comment was just a joke. As you know by now, Alice-and this isn’t easy for me to talk about with you-but, as you know, I have not always been faithful, not even close. And Arthur knew that. But he was only kidding. Of course I would never even think of striking something up with a girl of that age.”

She had wanted to yell at him. But you did, Dad. And it’s not “striking something up” when the girl is fourteen years old. But she said nothing and allowed him to continue his monologue.

“And then the police came on Sunday and told me a girl from the party was claiming I raped her. She said I took pictures during the act. I went into my office, and my camera was gone. The girl said she grabbed it when she ran away. I didn’t know what to say. I knew that if I told them I was too drunk to remember where I had been all night, they would take me away. That’s when I found you in your room. I brought you into my office to talk to them because I knew you would tell them we were watching a movie. I knew it would be just enough of an alibi to keep them from arresting me. I called Arthur right away, and we wound up reaching a settlement with the girl and her family.”