above her wine glass, as she announced her engagement to the man sitting beside her? The man who just hadn’t rubbed Hank right. The man who was too young. The man whose name turned out not to be Randall after all.
He shook the image away as if it were sand in an Etch A Sketch and instead pulled up a visual of Larson’s front window. Pictured the
Larson hadn’t had an E-ZPass, the automated toll-payment device users mounted to their front windshield. Hank moved two lanes to the left, pulling himself closer to the Cash Only toll lanes. He spotted Larson two lanes over, about six car lengths in front of him.
No problem. Hank inched up, watching his progress against Larson until he merged into his E-ZPass lane.
By the time the gray BMW emerged from the tunnel, Hank was lingering in the right lane, ready to pull in behind him.
He worried about the man spotting him. Hank had made the trip in his personal vehicle, confident from his past rounds of surveillance that Larson would be dead to the world this early. He found comfort in Larson’s speed. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to traffic around him. He didn’t act like a man worried about a tail.
Larson drove north on Sixth Avenue, then curved into the West Village on West Fourth Street. Hank forced himself to remain a block and a half behind the BMW on the narrow streets, still quiet this time of morning. When he spotted the glow of Larson’s brake lights midblock past the stop sign at Bank Street, he immediately hit the button to roll down his window as he pulled to the curb on Washington. He watched as Larson parallel-parked. Leaned his ear outside as Larson hopped out of the car, looking both ways before crossing the street. He saw Larson disappear into a storefront, but couldn’t identify the business from this vantage point.
Hank pulled forward to the stop sign, hung a left on Bank, and then circled around to park north of the BMW and head south on foot. He took the red wool scarf he’d brought for the occasion-remembered Ellen giving it to him for Christmas-and wrapped it around his cheeks. Slipped the slim jim up his coat sleeve.
He paused at the curb beside the BMW. Did a quick visual of the interior. Nothing. He was relieved to see that Larson had removed the magazine from the dash. He had a clear look at the VIN and jotted it down.
He felt the slim jim against his forearm. It was an unnecessary risk, but he was moving too fast now to rethink his decision. He hadn’t heard the
He forced the slim jim past the rubber seal of the driver’s side window. Allowed himself to exhale when no alarm blasted the neighborhood silence. He began to jiggle, counting off the passed seconds in his head. One, one thousand, two, one thousand. He had vowed to give himself only fifteen seconds before hightailing it back to his own car.
Thirteen thousand. He felt the lock release.
Still seeing no one, he popped the glove box. Completely empty. Pulled the lever for the trunk, shut the door, and headed to the rear of the car. Also empty.
He clicked the trunk shut and made his way north to his Toyota Camry. Made three left turns: Greenwich, to Bethune, and back onto Washington.
As he cruised past the parked BMW, he checked out the storefronts across the street. He identified what looked like a flower shop and a shoe store as candidates for Larson’s location, a closed-down storefront separating the two.
Nice car. Pretty girl. Early-morning drives. And absolutely nothing in his ride, not even an owner’s manual or registration.
The next step was to run the VIN.
Chapter Fifteen
H er apartment had to be cold-it always was in the winter, thanks to the lousy furnace and cheap windows-but Alice woke up with the covers kicked from her body and a thin sheen of perspiration coating her skin. She was thankful to be one of those people who could never truly remember her dreams. Although the details of last night’s sleep were fuzzy, they’d left behind a shadow of anxiety still lingering in her core.
Even as she shuffled into the shower, images from her sleep flashed through her mind. Hans Schuler’s photographs. The protesters. Those ugly words plastered onto their signs. News cameras. Standing at a podium before an auditorium full of reporters. The white lights of flashbulbs blinding her. A hush covering the room as she began to speak. Looking down at her notes to find nothing but blank paper. A thin, balding man chasing her. In her dream, she imagined he was Hans Schuler. Or maybe he was the Reverend George Harvey. Or perhaps he was no one-just a physical representation of the horrible feeling she carried in her subconscious about yesterday’s protest at the gallery.
She held her head beneath the spray of hot water, as if she could literally wash away the thoughts from her mind and send them spiraling down the drain.
Even after the long shower, she had too much time on her hands before her meet-up with Drew. She used the extra minutes to check the online situation.
She entered “Highline Gallery Hans Schuler” into her search engine and hit enter. As the computer did its thinking, she hoped against hope that she would find no new results since the previous night.
No such luck. As she’d suspected, the story had gone viral. What started as a local New York story had been picked up on the wires, was spreading blog to blog, and was now being “retweeted” across the Web with irreverent headlines like “Hans Smut-ler” and “New York Art Show: Mainstream Radicalism or Old School Porn?”
On the
She moved her cursor back to the search window. This time, she searched for her own name, plus the words “Highline Gallery.” Maybe Channel 7 would be the only outlet to play up her family background.
Despite her hopes, she found story after story identifying the gallery’s manager as the daughter of Frank Humphrey and Rose Sampson. Almost all of them alluded to the controversies her father had created with his own work. Most also mentioned his recently exposed infidelities-the “casting couch” allegations, the scandalous ages of the women involved. Then she reached a news update that she found herself rereading.
Alice Humphrey is only the latest member of her family to find herself at the center of controversy. In addition to her father’s reported extramarital and perhaps even coerced sexual activity going back decades, her brother, Ben, was arrested last weekend for drug possession. According to two separate NYPD sources, Ben Humphrey, 41, was arrested after police found marijuana in his possession while investigating a noise complaint outside of a West Village bar.
She remembered Ben’s unexplained absence from the gallery opening. Recalled her parents’ anxious expressions, wondering whether he was back to his old ways.
She quickly pulled up his number on her cell, but heard only his familiar outgoing message: “This is Ben. You know the drill.” Even when he was clean, Ben was not the type to answer a phone this early in the morning.
As she disconnected the call, she caught the time displayed on the screen: 6:34. Shit. Time to meet Drew. Her brother’s problems would have to wait.
She found herself working the metal of the gallery key between her bare fingers inside her coat pocket like a worry stone. If it weren’t for those ridiculous protesters, she would have had time yesterday to pick up a new pair of gloves to replace the ones that were still missing. One more reason to hate the fuckers.
Alice wasn’t proud of this aspect of her personality, the complete inability to harness free-floating anxieties. She was the kind of person who could not sit still once she realized an unsent piece of mail still lingered on her desk, who would wake in the middle of the night with a recollection of an unreturned phone call.
Her relationship with stress was one of the reasons she had never felt at ease with the acting career her mother had so desperately sought for her. The standing around, biding time before the next scene. Wondering if the
