directive. For reasons she could not explain, she did not want to be in her apartment, not even in the company of her two closest friends.
Maybe she just yearned for the sterility of Jeff’s ultramodern apartment. The white walls. White floors. High- gloss white cabinets. Sleek leather furniture. Steel accents. No clutter. No dust. No blood. Lightness and order compared to her shabby chic chaos.
But maybe it was more than just an aesthetic preference. Drew had been impossible to find yesterday, and then sounded panicked last night. He wouldn’t talk on the phone. He had asked to meet her-in person, and first thing in the morning. And now someone had killed him. Two gunshots to the chest, is what she overheard one of the policemen say. What if she had arrived at the gallery earlier? What if whoever killed Drew saw dropping in on her as part of finishing the job?
“I feel so awful about you both taking care of me. Don’t you need to get back to work?”
“My deposition was set over until next week. Had the whole day clear anyway.”
The question had been aimed primarily at Lily. Travel magazines weren’t exactly rolling in profits in this economy, and the Gorilla was not the kind of boss who took a missed day in stride. “Don’t worry about me. I told the Gorilla my sister was in the hospital.”
“You don’t have a sister.”
“Yeah, but the Gorilla doesn’t know that. Just got to remember to add that little factoid to the work persona. Now, what’s the appropriate period of mourning before we just throw down and get this woman skunk drunk?”
Lily was making herself at home in Jeff’s kitchen, foraging through the bar cabinet and pulling out whatever bottles of booze looked interesting.
“Seriously, Lily. I don’t think I can do it.”
“I don’t want to make light of your boss being dead, but c’mon, Alice, you really didn’t even know the guy. He showed up at an art exhibit, offered you a job running a gallery with an anonymous owner, hooked you up with some weirdo artist you can’t even get a hold of-he was obviously doing something shady. Whatever it was caught up to him. And whatever it was, the police will eventually sort it all out. You’re no longer involved.”
“What do you mean, whatever he was up to? Obviously, whatever got him killed had something to do with the gallery. You saw the place. It was stripped bare. No signs of life.”
“Literally,” Lily said, inspecting the label on a bottle of neon blue liquor. “Sorry, too soon?”
“Look. Maybe we should talk about something else for a while.” Jeff had slipped off one of his loafers. “Or, better yet: Al, why don’t you try lying down for a while. You could use the rest. Sprawl out and watch some TV. Or take the bedroom.”
“Watch out, Alice. He’s just trying to get you back in the sack.”
“Jesus, Lily.”
“It’s fine,” Alice said, placing a hand on Jeff’s knee. “I don’t want to go to sleep. I want to talk about it.”
He was trying to protect her, but the truth was, Lily’s bluntness was what she needed right now. Jeff didn’t argue with her, but the shoulder rub came to an end. He was not one of Lily’s biggest fans, but his usual preference to avoid her company was not a priority today.
“If we’re going to talk about it, let’s really talk. Alice is right. We can’t ignore the fact that someone went to great lengths to empty out the gallery. The question is why.”
“No,” Lily said, finally opting for a bottle of Grey Goose vodka and tipping it over a glass of orange juice. “The question is why the two of you think we need to be the ones asking those kinds of questions. Unless I missed something, we’re not Shaggy, Velma, and Daphne squirreled up like meddling kids on the Mystery Machine van with Scooby-Doo. Alice is a witness to a crime-an after-the-fact witness at that. Nothing more. End of story. She should worry about her own problems and leave all this to the police.”
“It’s only natural that she’d worry about her own safety. And figuring out what might have happened to Campbell this morning-and why-is a first step to figuring out whether she’s in any danger.”
“And what if she does figure something out? Did it ever dawn on you that figuring out too much is precisely what could put her in danger?”
“Hello? The third-person
“Good girl,” Lily said. “Take your medicine.”
The first sip burned. By the third, Alice wanted to retract the orange juice.
“There’s nothing dangerous about talking through the possibilities,” Alice said. Talking with them would keep her mind moving. Would keep her thoughts from carrying her back to the floor beside Drew’s body. Keep her imagination from conjuring flashes of her big brother in handcuffs. Keep her eyes away from the screen on her cell phone, still black despite multiple messages, begging Ben for a return call. Most of all, talking would help her feel-at least for a few brief moments, however manufactured-like she had retained some tiny portion of her agency in a world that had spiraled out of control. “So, let’s play the Mystery Machine. What are the possible scenarios that could have led to what I saw this morning?”
Lily let out an audible sigh, but saw that she was outvoted.
“One,” she said, extending her thumb, “theft. A large-scale jacking of the entire contents of the gallery, with Drew ending up the unlucky victim. The problems with that are: A-the art wasn’t worth much compared to an established gallery, and B-why not grab the art and run? Why clear out every last stapler and pencil?”
She added her index finger to the count. “Two: the religious nut jobs who were protesting yesterday. Maybe they decided to take matters into their own hands. They couldn’t track down the artist, but they could send a message by eviscerating the gallery this morning when someone showed up to open. But we’ve got a problem there, too. Even if they’re rabid enough to try to pull something like this off, why kill Drew? I mean, if they’re violent enough to shoot someone, why not just firebomb the place? A dead body in an empty gallery? Not exactly dramatic and protester-y, you know? And that, boys and girls, leaves us with option number three.” Out went a third finger.
“And you said this was none of our business,” Jeff said.
“I said I thought minding our own business was the best thing for Alice. And part of the reason I thought that- and still think that-is because I’ve been running through the options since she called me this morning, and only one of them makes any sense. Three,” she continued, “that lingering feeling you had that this job was too good to be true was right on the money. Campbell was up to no good. Maybe he double-crossed the owner. Or the artist. Or maybe the anonymous owner story was total bullshit from the very start. Maybe he was the one pulling the strings, using the gallery as a front to hide stolen money. Maybe the protesters brought a little bit too much attention to the place. He was trying to get rid of all evidence of the place when someone caught up to him. Or maybe whoever he crossed decided it was lights out for both Drew and his pet project.”
No one else in the room spoke. There was nothing to add. Lily was right. Three options: two highly improbable, and the third raising more questions than they could even begin to answer.
Lily added another shot of vodka to Alice’s glass. “I’ll help you out however you want, but if I were you? I’d consider yourself lucky you don’t know more about Drew Campbell and the Highline Gallery.”
Less than a mile away, in the homicide unit at the Thirteenth Precinct, NYPD Detective John Shannon told his partner, Willie Danes, they had a problem.
“I’m not finding a Drew Campbell who looks anything like our guy.”
“Wouldn’t be the first person to hide his bridge-and-tunnel status. Everyone who’s anyone’s got to live in the city these days.” Danes was chewing on a toothpick. Five years into the partnership, Danes knew Shannon hated the toothpick chewing. Five years into the partnership, the chewing of the toothpick was still a daily habit.
“Except I checked Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. No Drew or Andrew Campbells who resemble our vic. I’ve looked at so many DMV photos my eyes are blurring.” The cell phone numbers Alice Humphrey had given them for Drew Campbell and Hans Schuler had both come back to disposable phones that were untraceable. “What about the company on the paycheck?”
“ITH Corporation?”
“Yeah, that’s it. You getting anywhere?”
Danes swirled the toothpick around his tongue. “Depends whether up my own ass counts as somewhere. The company was incorporated twenty-five years ago, but I can’t figure out what the hell it does. State records show the stock is owned by a trust called ITH Trust, but trusts aren’t recorded, so there’s no way to know what it does or who it benefits. The registered agent is one of the big services, so that’s a dead end. I nearly had to give up a
