“Ben?”
She knew her brother was in the habit of leaving the door unlocked when he was home, but she didn’t think he was stupid enough to do so when he was out.
The place was messier than it had been three nights earlier. The kitchen cabinets were open. A stack of entertainment magazines had slid from the coffee table onto the floor. Thebathroom door was ajar, and she could only imagine the filth to be found there. But she saw no obvious drugs or paraphernalia in view, and was relieved not to be confronted with undeniable proof that her brother was using again.
She walked directly to the dresser in the bedroom area of his loft and opened the top drawer. A pad of bills about an inch thick was tucked to the side of a row of neatly folded boxer briefs, one of the perks of sending laundry out for service. She shoved the wad of cash in her purse, not bothering to count. The police would know her brother lived nearby. The super would tell them she was here.
In her rush to walk away, she almost didn’t see his cell phone on the nightstand. They would be tracking hers, but probably not his. An extra phone could come in handy.
Where was he?
She looked out the window, hoping to see him strolling toward the building, cup of coffee or bagel bag in hand. She couldn’t wait here all day.
As she stepped away from the window, she caught a glimpse of the dusty framed photograph on the sill. It was one of her favorites as well-an eleven-year-old Alice decorating her napping teenage brother with a shaving cream beard while her conspiring father caught the footage. Her father might have hated his wife’s penchant for mid-1980s decor, but Ben had loved it, sneaking into his father’s office whenever possible to laze on the red sofa.
And then she realized why some of the photographs on the Hans Schuler thumb drives had struck her as dated. When she’d discovered those hidden images, her attention had been pulled to their most vile elements, and then immediately repelled. She had never focused on the background, but now she remembered. The pictures that had seemed scanned-the ones that appeared to be of a young girl and an older man-had contained images of steel gray brocade curtains, a red velvet sofa, and the black-and-white-striped wallpaper that her father had once called schizophrenia-inducing.
And now that she recalled the background of those horrible photographs, she understood her dream from the previous night. She had dreamed she was a child, standing in her father’s office and not wanting to leave, because some part of her subconscious had known. In her sleep, she had been on the verge of figuring it out.
The pictures of that young girl with the older man had been taken twenty-five years ago in her father’s office in Bedford.
Setting aside her guilt, she slipped Ben’s cell into her purse. She’d explain it all to him later.
She left her brother’s apartment in such a fog that she did not see the man step from the green Toyota and begin to follow her on foot.
Chapter Forty-Six
A s Alice watched clumps of hair fall from the scissor blades into the trash can, she tried to process the pieces of cognitive data that told her that the dark locks belonged to her. She had stopped herself before walking into Duane Reade. The chain drugstore would surely have security cameras stocked with tapes that could be handed over to the police department, revealing her purchases. Instead, she had opted for the smaller Ricky’s beauty supply shop, where she had paid cash for a pair of shears, a bottle of “Temptation” brown dye, and latex gloves to protect her finger tips.
Scoring an hour alone in the Union Square hotel room had turned out to be easier than she would have thought. Just last year, she had read a crime novel in which the seemingly indestructible hero had slipped a few bucks to a New York City bellhop in exchange for a night in an unrented hotel room. The agreement she’d struck had cost her more than a few bucks, and had secured her only an hour of solitude, but the transaction had been in cash and had cost her only $40 of the wad she’d grabbed from Ben’s dresser.
She bent over at the waist, blasting her hair with the hotel room’s dryer, then flipped up to check out her newly shorn coif. She had remembered to dab some of the dye on her eyebrows with a Q-tip, just like the hairdresser had that one time in high school when she had briefly decided to be a brunette.
When she was young, her mother had said she looked just like Little Orphan Annie, only prettier. Now her trademark long red hair with natural highlights had been replaced by an abrupt, black-no, “Temptation”-colored- chin-length bob. She used another minute of her room time to line her eyes with the ninety-nine-cent pencil she had also picked up at Ricky’s. She barely recognized the vamp gazing back at her from the mirror.
The tips of her hair were still damp against her jawline as she propped herself on the foot of the hotel bed, contemplating Ben’s cell phone. By now, he had probably figured out it was missing. From there, he would have checked his stash of cash in the dresser. She should try to get word to him that she’d been the culprit before he called police.
The detectives might be monitoring calls to her parents and closest friends, but maybe she could call one of Ben’s friends. As she scrolled through the list of Ben’s recent calls, she saw a name that felt familiar.
Where had she heard that name? She tried to jog her memory of Ben’s acquaintances, but no one by that name came to mind. Then she remembered. The name had nothing to do with Ben at all. Robert Atkinson was the reporter who had been trying to call her all week. According to Ben’s phone, the two men had spoken to each other several times, enough for her brother to have added the reporter’s name to his phone directory.
She picked up the room phone and dialed 9 for an outside line, followed by Robert Atkinson’s telephone number.
“Empire Media.”
“I’m calling for Robert Atkinson.”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“This is, um, a source on one of his stories.” She wondered if the tidbits she had read in newspapers about journalists protecting the confidentiality of their sources was accurate.
“If you can tell me generally the story with which you were assisting, I can forward your call as appropriate?” The woman sounded young, perhaps in her early twenties, still at that period of life when every sentence seemed to end in a question mark, even when not asking a question.
“I’d rather speak to Mr. Atkinson personally.”
“You haven’t heard?”
“About what exactly?”
“Bob’s dead. He was killed in a car accident last night on I-684.”
Hank Beckman recognized the prefix of the 212 number on his cell phone screen as an incoming call from the NYPD.
“Beckman.” He plugged his free ear closed with his index finger in an attempt to block the sound of traffic on Park Avenue.
Detective John Shannon did not bother identifying himself. “We were copied on an incident report filed by a Miss Alice Humphrey. She claimed a man in a green Camry was following her. She wrote down the license plate.”
“Nothing illegal about driving around Manhattan.” Supposedly the bureau’s determination regarding his termination was still pending, but Hank could read the writing on the wall. He was for all practical purposes a free agent now.
“I hear your days at the bureau might be numbered. I don’t know what you have in mind, but don’t fuck this all up for both of us, Beckman.”
“I tried to tell you: Alice Humphrey is not the woman I saw with Larson. I’m sure of that. You think you can just gloss that over?”
“The mountain of evidence I’ve got against the recollection of a burnout like you? I’m not losing sleep.”
“Have you arrested her?”
“Not yet. We’ve got enough, though. The DA’s office is working on the warrants now. I mean it, Beckman: stay
