Long Gone

“And yet more than a hundred people were willing to pay seven hundred bucks for this crap.”

“What are we missing?”

“Try downloading all the desktop backgrounds, and see if something happens.”

“Like what?”

“Obviously I don’t know, but there’s got to be something there.”

She downloaded all four alternatives, but other than the changes to the background of her laptop desktop, nothing seemed to happen.

“Maybe it’s embedded somewhere.” She began clicking her mouse across the various images. On the photograph called Fluids, the centerpiece of Schuler’s SELF series, she clicked on what was supposedly the artist’s lips, the saliva extending from his mouth, the bite marks in his wrist. Nothing.

She moved on to Wince, a similarly themed close-up of the artist biting his lower lip.

Her clicking became more random and desperate as she moved on to First, the photograph that had created such an uproar after George Hardy and his protesters arrived outside the gallery. It was a collage of cutouts from the image of a body that was obviously not Schuler’s. Pale, smooth skin. Thin hips. A chest just starting to develop above still-bony ribs. She moved her mouse over a dilated pupil and clicked.

The full-screen image of First started to fly away like shards of broken glass. The screen went black.

Enter password.

They tried Schuler. Hans. Hans Schuler. Highline. Self.

Then she typed the name of the photograph that had created this passageway: F-I-R-S-T.

A list of files appeared on the screen, each named with a seven-digit number. She felt her eyes moving involuntarily from the images as she flipped through them. If there was any ambiguity about the age of the woman in the First photograph, there was none in these. Several of the images seemed to be of an older girl, maybe a young teenager. Her face had been cropped from the pictures. The photos seemed from another era for reasons Alice couldn’t immediately identify. And slightly muddled, as if they had been scanned from physical photographs. She quickened the pace of her clicking, not wanting to see the details. There was a man in some of the photos, also faceless.

The pictures of the older girl were spliced in among other, higher-resolution photographs of children, maybe six to eight years old. Both boys and girls. Alone. With adults. With each other.

She felt the few bites of food she’d allowed herself at dinner working their way up her esophagus. Jeff placed a palm on the small of her back. She closed her laptop, harder than necessary, and heard her voice waver when she finally spoke.

“What am I going to do?”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“G ood to see you again, Morhart.”

Willie Danes gave Morhart a hearty handshake and extended a half-eaten bag of Cheetos in his direction like they were old friends. Morhart didn’t doubt that he had earned some brownie points with these NYPD guys by tipping them off to Becca Stevenson’s connection to their case, but he also suspected that he had top-down bureaucracy to thank for his presence today in the Thirteenth Precinct. He hadn’t voted for Mayor Kyle Jenson since the mayor cut the town’s community policing program seven years earlier, but the man enjoyed a natural ability to charm. He’d called the chief for an update on the Stevenson investigation. When he found out the road had led to a gallery in New York City, he had called Danes’s deputy inspector personally. Now the NYPD and the Dover Police Department had an “understanding” that their investigators would fully share information in their separate but overlapping cases.

Morhart believed he had already delivered his half of the quid pro quo with Becca’s fingerprint match. Because of him, Danes and his partner, John Shannon, knew that a missing fifteen-year-old girl had previously entered the gallery where their victim was killed. They knew that the girl’s father-the one who had only recently appeared in her life-had just happened to protest that very gallery the day before the body was found.

Now he was about to see the NYPD’s cards. He stepped carefully around piles of documents and disheveled boxes to take a seat in the overpacked interrogation room. He did his best to ignore the sounds of the creaking door as a young, unintroduced Asian guy walked in and out the room while Danes spoke.

“My partner couldn’t be here,” Danes explained. “He’s down reviewing the final results of the ME’s report. You ready to share the sandbox?”

“Did the ME find anything interesting?” It seemed to Morhart that medical examiners often confirmed what was obvious from the initial crime scene. A victim filled with bullets usually had died of gunshot wounds.

“Not much. We already had a short window on time of death, since the body was fresh. Two shots from a.38. Chest and stomach. He did find postmortem bruising on the genitals.” Danes’s bag of Cheetos shifted protectively in front of his torso, and Morhart felt his own knees clench together involuntarily.

“So whoever killed him really hated him.”

“Or she was making sure he wasn’t faking it.” Morhart noticed the use of the feminine pronoun. “Maybe she’ll eventually tell us. Anyway, from what we hear, if anyone deserved a kick in the balls even after death, it was Larson.”

Danes recited the background information they had collected so far on their victim, Travis Larson. A string of insignificant sales jobs through his late twenties, and then no lawful employment since. No family. An apartment filled with stolen mail, skillfully faked IDs, forged checks, and pilfered credit card solicitations. An FBI agent who claimed that his sister was just one of many women Larson had deceived and sponged from over the years.

“From what we can tell, he started looking for a way to move his criminal activity indoors since that FBI agent called him out on the cougar-swindling last year. Our techno-geeks found evidence on the gallery computer of downloading and producing child pornography starting about five months ago.” He removed a data stick from the pocket of his short-sleeved dress shirt and tossed it to Morhart. Morhart dusted off the bright orange crumbs. /SELF. “As you may know, the feds have gotten aggressive in their enforcement against smut on the Net. If they think someone’s peddling child porn online, they do an instant download, and voila, they shut the site down. One step removed, the dirtbags might require a mail order, but again-the feds place an order, then verify the contents of the product and track down the origin of the package to make the bust.”

Morhart had no personal involvement in those types of investigations, but he did his best to keep up with the times by reading law enforcement Web sites. “As much as technology has helped the bad guys, it’s helped us to track them down.”

“Exactly. So it’s no surprise that someone might try to use a high-tech way to attract customers and build demand, but a low-tech method of delivery to evade detection.”

“That’s where this comes in?” Morhart asked, holding up the data stick.

“Any customer who placed an order through the Highline Gallery received one of these. On the surface, it’s filled with a bunch of bullshit. But find the embedded link, and enter the requisite password, and some seriously perverted shit awaits. Our computer nerds tracked down messages going back six weeks on some of these chester chat boards, alerting them to the pictures they could buy through the Highline.”

“And no one monitoring these sites picked up on it?”

“I’ve seen some shit the past two days that makes me want to stab my eyes out. The truth is, this stuff’s like catching fish in a barrel for the feds. They chase down the easy prey-the guys with instant downloads, file exchanges, and mail-order operations. Someone who posts a link to a gallery with the promise of hot young things and a password to come later? Tracking that down takes one or two or three steps more than the easy cases, so no one follows up. It’s actually pretty clever.”

“So they line up their customers through these message boards, then when the gallery opens, they accept orders and ship the data sticks. Where’d the money go?”

“An offshore account. Totally untraceable.”

“Where do George Hardy and Becca Stevenson fit in?”