Long Gone

through the gallery by selling child pornography on those thumb drives, then framed me for the entire enterprise.”

She felt like she’d just released a hundred pounds of poison into the air, but Hank seemed completely impassive. “Okay, so let’s start looking for evidence that cuts one way or another on that. Atkinson told the records clerk up at the police department in Bedford that he had been sandbagged. Maybe he was on to the story back when it happened, but got shut down.”

No shock or judgment or drama. He had allowed her to voice what she’d been thinking without having to hear someone else express how horrific the idea was.

“Where do we search, given that someone else already got to Atkinson, his car, and this apartment?”

“Whoever rifled through this place did it in a hurry. They probably assumed that his briefcase and the computer covered what was there to find. But if Atkinson really was playing his cards close to his vest, he might have taken extra precautions. Let’s see if the FBI hasn’t taught me a thing or two about where people stash the good stuff.”

Hank knew he wasn’t the best investigator in the country. He was behind the curve on the technological advances that increasingly drove cutting-edge law enforcement strategies. And he didn’t have those hyper-honed intuitions some investigators had about human motivations and desires. But he was good with witnesses. He knew how to handle himself in interrogations and interviews. And he was proud of himself for waiting on Alice Humphrey to articulate her suspicions about Christie Kinley, her father, those photographs, and the settlement agreement. If he had been the one to say it first, he just might have lost her.

He allowed her to help with the search, knowing that her forays into the apartment closets and under Atkinson’s sofa and bed would get them nowhere. In many ways, this investigation really was hers. She was the one with her freedom on the line. She was the one who knew her father and the history that was indisputably tangled up with Travis Larson and the scam he was running at Highline Gallery. He was just there to supply the expertise.

So, in light of that expertise, he left the drawer-digging and cabinet-foraging to her while he looked. Really looked. He wasn’t sure yet what he was searching for, but he’d know it once he saw it. A loose floorboard. An old coffee can in the freezer, despite a fresh bag of beans on the kitchen countertop. A slightly crooked painting that might be covering a vault in the wall. Whoever was here before them had already rummaged through the obvious places. He was looking for something so ordinary as to be misleading.

Atkinson’s apartment was small, so the options were limited. He’d already checked the oven, the freezer, and the inside of the bread machine inexplicably stored in the front closet, probably a remnant from a past relationship like the waffle maker Jen had purchased for him just a few months before moving out of their place.

And then he saw it. On the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf next to the desk, Atkinson had crammed books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs. From what Hank could tell from the media setup in the living room, Atkinson had been a tech guy: plasma screen TV, sound system, Blu-ray, TiVo, the works. There was no ancient VCR in sight. But next to the desk, in the pile of chaos that had been pulled from the bookshelf, was an unmarked plastic videocassette case.

He pulled it open, and a tightly rolled bundle of papers fell out. Alice rushed over from the sofa, where she had been searching in the cracks beneath the cushions. He forced himself to hand her the documents. She deserved to see them first. If she didn’t want to look, she could always decline. Instead, she took a seat on the hardwood floor and spread the papers out before her.

Alice felt sick. Literally sick. Not literally the way people nowadays said literally when they in fact meant figuratively-as in, “my head literally exploded .” Alice felt actually sick. She took a deep breath and swallowed the bile she felt forming in her esophagus.

She could not stop reading the tiny sidebar column on the yellowed page of newsprint from the May 2, 1985, edition of the National Star, byline Robert Atkinson:

GUESS THE CELEBRITY

What A-lister (as in Academy Award winner) is at the center of a criminal sex investigation? That the cad is married to a beloved celeb is the tamest aspect of this emerging scandal. Sources tell us a fourteen-year-old girl claims this director sweet-talked her into his home and then forced himself on her. Charges have not yet been filed, but we anticipate that this scumbag will soon feel like he’s in hell.

Inside the same rolled tube of documents they had found another sheet torn from the National Star, this one of May 9, 1985, retracting the earlier tidbit:

Last week, we printed a “blind item” suggesting that an Academy Award-winning director was being investigated on sex-related criminal charges. We did not name the individual in question at the time because the story did not yet meet our rigorous standards for publication. Unfortunately, the source upon which we relied for the anonymous “blind item” was misinformed, as were we. Readers should not attempt to surmise the identity of the story’s subject, since the original story was not based on truth or fact. We apologize for our mistake.

“I’d say on the spectrum of confirming or disconfirming evidence, we’ve pretty much confirmed it.”

“Or disconfirmed,” Hank said, “if you believe the retraction.”

“Of course I don’t believe the retraction. The National Star was ahead of its time. You see these blind items all the time. They don’t name the person so they can’t get sued by a celebrity willing to spend millions of dollars on attorneys’ fees. But my father has worked with an actor who sues tabloids for retractions every single time one of them publishes an article hinting he’s gay. Well, guess what? The guy is for all practical purposes married to another supposedly straight actor. It’s just like Atkinson said. The girl got paid off in a settlement. My dad must have bribed the cops to make the police report go away. And he probably threatened to sue the National Star once all Atkinson’s so-called evidence had been wiped away.”

“So that’s why he said he got sandbagged. Maybe he finally figured out that his original story was actually true and was trying to get himself paid, too. Your father had all those tabloid stories come out last year. That could have been the trigger for Atkinson to start digging back into that night in Bedford again.”

“That explains why he was calling me and my brother-to see what we remembered about that weekend.”

Her father and Art’s cover story that Kinley was a former employee was a classic move on their part: treat her like a child, while they pulled secret strings in an attempt to help her. They probably figured Arthur would come up with a solution without having to tell anyone about that night in Bedford. But she was the one who had been sucked into the Highline Gallery mess. She was the one who had found that man’s body. And she was the one being investigated by the police. She had a right to know everything.

“Was Christie Kinley at your brother’s party that night?”

She shook her head. “I was inside the whole time. But obviously Ben would know.”

“We really need to find your brother.”

Hank had been able to nudge her toward a vocalization of her worst fears, but this time she rambled out loud about Ben’s various acquaintances without reaching the logical inference he’d been suggesting. He decided to give her one more push.

“How harmful would it be to your father if Atkinson had dredged up those old allegations?”

“To be accused of-that?” He’d been careful so far not to use the word rape, and she stopped before saying it herself. “Obviously that would destroy him.”

Now he allowed the silence to fill Robert Atkinson’s apartment again, waiting for her to draw her own conclusions.

“If you think my father had something to do with Atkinson’s car accident, you’re out of your mind. When all those women were coming out of the woodwork last year, he was totally unfazed. At worst, he might do damage control and pay Atkinson off, like he did with Christie Kinley, but he’d never resort to violence. Absolutely not. It’s unimaginable. I would bet my life on that.”

“So then who goes to the trouble of setting you up using pictures of your father and Christie Kinley, only to decide they don’t want Atkinson’s story out there in the public domain?”