Alafair Burke - Long Gone

“You’re a smart man, Mr. Morhart, and I can tell that you care about the well-being of my daughter.”

“I do, sir. I want to find her and bring her home.”

“I will tell you everything I know, but I will not allow you to judge me. I know in my heart I was trying to do right by Becca.” He waited for Jason to protest, but hearing nothing, proceeded. “I was with Becca that night after she left her friend’s house. We had arranged to meet down the street. That’s what we had been doing. Mostly we would talk on the phone. And once she rode the train into the city-I believe she told her mother she was doing some kind of school activity-but I tried to drive out to Dover and catch a few minutes with her as I could. We’d leave Dover proper. See the parks in that area and whatnot.”

Jason wanted to grab the delicate tea cup from Hardy’s fingertips and smash it against his head, but he tried to remain expressionless.

“To understand what happened that night, you first have to know that the last time I had seen her was three weeks prior. That was the day she rode the train into the city. The plan had been for me to drive her back home after some sightseeing, but then she told me she was meeting some friends from school and asked me to drop her off downtown. I was uncomfortable dumping her in the middle of this hedonistic jungle, but she pointed out that if I waited for her friends to arrive, one of them might mention my existence to her mother. Frankly, I recognized that to be a bit of emotional blackmail, but I realized this was probably normal for a teenager, so I agreed.

“I am not, however, stupid. I cruised my car around the corner so I could make certain she was in the safety of a circle of suitable friends. Instead, I saw her talking to a man who was either locking or unlocking that gallery on Washington Street. A grown man. And rough looking.”

“Travis Larson.”

The reverend nodded. “Of course, I did not know his name at the time. Nor did I know the place was a gallery. It was empty. But I did see him open that door. And I did see my daughter walk into that building with him. She lied to me. My own daughter. She had me deliver her into the waiting hands of a grown man.”

“When was this?”

He doodled on the table, counting days backward. “Six Sundays ago.” Precisely three weeks before Becca disappeared. It was also the same date as the photographs Becca had posted on Facebook. Hardy concluded his daughter had lied, but she really had met her friends. Or at least, she had believed at the time they were her friends.

“Go on.”

“So when I saw her that last night, I asked her about it. Oh, boy, was she ever angry that I watched her.” Jason could tell from the man’s tone that he admired his daughter’s temper. “She swore up and down that she didn’t even know that man. That she had to go pee and saw the man there at the store and asked if she could use the bathroom. According to her, she was in and out of there in a few minutes.”

“That’s it ? We’ve spent all these days trying to find a connection between Becca and that gallery, and all she did was use the bathroom?”

“Well, that’s what she would’ve had me believe.”

He wanted the man to get to his point, but the reverend was obviously used to a captive audience.

“We went to the Dairy Queen off Route 15, and when she went to the little girls’ room, I looked at her cell phone. Now, don’t go judging me. She was only a child, and I bought her that phone for the purpose of communicating with me. I felt I was in the right. But when I looked in that phone, I saw the filth she’d engaged in. The dirty talk. And not just talk, I saw that picture. I saw that picture… of my own daughter .”

Jason could tell where this story was headed. He wanted to jump into the narrative and stop it. He wanted to run inside that Dairy Queen and tell this man he was making a horrible mistake.

“What did you do?”

“I went to the car, and I waited for her. When she got in, I did what I thought a father should do. I told her she had sinned. That the Lord saw all. That peddlers of flesh would be judged both here and in the hereafter.”

Based on what Joann had told him about George Hardy’s reaction to her pregnancy, Jason could only imagine the insults this man must have hurled at Becca. A teenage girl who had always been described as fragile. Who had opened herself up sexually for the first time to a boy, only to have him turn her into a laughingstock. Who had recently learned that the mother she trusted had lied to her about the circumstances of her own birth. Who was only beginning to know the father she never realized she had, only to have him call her the ugly words Jason knew the man had used.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone this, George?”

The reverend’s eyes were puffy and rimmed with red, the result of sleepless nights, tears, and (Jason guessed) regular tips of alcohol. “Just wait for me to explain it my way, all right, son? A couple days went by, and I didn’t feel right about how we left it. I tried calling her, but she wasn’t getting back to me. I assumed she was mad.”

“You didn’t know she was missing?”

“Who was going to tell me? Certainly not that mother of hers. So I drove by that storefront again, thinking I might find that man. Confront him. Tell him to stay away from Becca. And by that time, it was no longer vacant. It had opened as what they were calling a gallery. I saw those pictures on display in there. A man biting himself. And you can’t tell me that one with the girl’s belly in it was of a full-grown woman.”

“You assumed the man you’d seen at the gallery had taken improper photographs of Becca.”

“Of course I did. I saw some with my own eyes. I thought about calling the police directly, but then I’d have to tell them Becca was in those nasty pictures.”

“You were worried about her reputation.”

“Among other things, yes, I was. So I did what my church does best. I brought attention to the issue.”

“By protesting.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You thought if the press made the artist prove the age of the models in those photographs, you’d get the artwork removed without having to drag your daughter’s name into the matter.”

“I’m not a total fool, you see? But now here’s the thing that’s important for you to understand. I still didn’t know Becca was missing on that day we were protesting. It wasn’t until the next day that I heard about Becca’s disappearance on the radio news.”

“That was the day Travis Larson was found dead at the gallery.”

“And I heard about that story, too. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“You didn’t say anything because you thought Becca might have been involved in Travis’s murder.”

“I saw her with the man. And the man was trouble. It stood to reason.”

“But now the NYPD knows who killed Larson, and Becca didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I’m aware of that, son. And that’s why I’ve told you everything I know.”

“On that last night with Becca, how did you leave things?”

Hardy was fiddling with the handle of his empty teacup. “Not well. She jumped out of the car. I didn’t stop her.”

“Where?”

Jason called his captain as soon as he was inside his truck. “I got a lead on Becca Stevenson. She was last seen distraught near the vicinity of the River Styx Road marina, over by Lake Hopatcong.”

“This is a solid tip?”

“Like a rock.”

“What was she doing way over by the lake?”

She’d been having ice cream with a man whose love she had wanted more than life itself. She’d been having ice cream with a man who dealt her fragile sense of self the final blow. “We need to get divers down into the water, sir.”