“Good 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 voilà, 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?”
Danes placed his hands on his hips and hung his head before looking at Morhart. “I wish we had better news for you, guy. We don’t know.”
Morhart intertwined his fingers behind his head and looked up at the ceiling.
“You’ve got nothing connecting Larson to Becca?”
“Just her prints on the gallery’s bathroom doorknob. No e-mails. No phone calls. And I’m telling you, none of these pictures we found were of your girl.”
“Fuck.”
“Best we can figure, maybe Larson was grooming Becca to pose for him or maybe worse. Something went down in the operation and got Larson killed. It could have scared her off as well.”
They both knew Danes’s theory was complete speculation.
“A second ago, you said something about she. That she might have kicked Larson postmortem to make sure he was dead. You’ve got a suspect?”
Danes pointed to a five-by-seven photograph pinned to a rolling bulletin board behind him. “Her name’s Alice Humphrey. She was the ‘manager’ of the gallery.” He used air quotes to emphasize his skepticism. “According to her, she doesn’t know shit about anything, but we’ve got pictures of her with Larson and evidence tying her to an alias used to start both the gallery and its bank account. As far as we can tell, she had something to prove to her BFD father. She persuaded him to start the gallery, but then hooked up with Larson and his smut to make sure she turned a profit.”
Morhart looked at Alice Humphrey’s photograph. He recognized it from one of the articles he’d read about George Hardy’s protests at the gallery. Rare was the woman who victimized a child for her own pleasure, but even out in the sticks, he’d learned that people would do anything for money.
“Who’s the big-fucking-deal father?”
“Frank Humphrey.”
“The director?”
“Yep. And quite the lothario, if you read the tabloids. You’d have to ask Freud whether that has anything to do with his daughter’s venture into child porn. All we know is that she apparently had a falling-out with him some time last year. Maybe this was her way of starting over, separate from her family.”
“And you think Alice Humphrey killed Travis Larson?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time a woman killed a lover. Or who knows? Maybe he double-crossed her. Love and money are powerful motivators. Hopefully we’ll nail down the precise motive when we eventually get a confession. We can tie the gallery laptop to some of the messages that were posted in the chat rooms. We seized that laptop from her possession, but she can always say Larson posted the messages, not her. And even if we can nail her on the kiddie pictures, that’s not enough to carry through to murder. The truth is, we don’t have quite enough to hook her up on anything yet.”
Morhart heard the creak of the door once again. This time, the Asian guy popped only his head inside. “Good news, man. Those gloves from the garbage on Bank and Washington? CSU called. Positive for GSR.”
Morhart didn’t know the city well, but he recognized Bank and Washington as located somewhere downtown, in the unnumbered part of Manhattan, presumably near the gallery. Apparently the crime scene unit had discovered gunshot residue on a pair of gloves found near the crime scene.
Danes pumped his fist at what remained of his waistline. “All we got to do is connect our girl to these gloves, and we just might be in business.”