For two hours, she and Arthur had waited in Arthur’s parked Lexus, intermittently running the engine for warmth, while Hank dashed back and forth between Mia’s apartment and the car, assuring them each time that Danes had “promised” they’d be ready for her soon. But “ready” no longer meant an expectation that she would be turning herself in to face charges of murdering her supposed coconspirator and lover, Travis Larson. Now Alice the former fugitive was their best hope of understanding why Mia Andrews had opened fire on two police officers when they knocked on her door.
After two hours of waiting beyond the growing swarm of police cars, they finally received instructions to head up to the Thirteenth Precinct. Danes and the New Jersey officer who accompanied him would be required to follow protocol for an officer-involved shooting, but John Shannon would meet them there.
Hank smiled when he delivered the news that a patrol car transport would not be necessary. She was free to ride with her attorney. Hank would drive his own car. If she still wanted him. As a translator of sorts. But only if she wanted him to go.
It had taken nearly three hours for the three of them—Hank, Alice, and Arthur—to lay out everything she had learned about Christie Kinley, Mia Andrews, and Robert Atkinson: that night in Bedford, the settlement and confidentiality agreement, Mia’s birth while Christie was supposedly at boarding school, Atkinson’s attempts to locate the old police reports. And, finally, Lily Harper, whom she had met at the gym six months earlier.
It was after midnight. Shannon had given her the option of going home for a few hours of sleep before resuming in the morning, but Alice had spent too many days without answers. If the NYPD had been slow to believe her in the beginning, the gunfire at Mia Andrews’s home had kicked them into Alice Humphrey–exoneration overdrive. She was afraid that if she fell asleep, she’d wake up to a new reality. And she wanted to think about something other than Ben overdosing in his bathroom.
So now she, her lawyer, and her new friend, Hank, sat huddled around John Shannon’s desk as they watched two uniformed officers escort Lily Harper into an interrogation room. Her once-trusted eyes remained locked on Alice as she walked the gauntlet, but Alice could read no emotion in them.
Once Lily was out of sight, Alice assumed her spot behind a one-way mirror, as Detective Shannon had instructed, ready to hear what her good friend had to say for herself.
Some facts simply could not be denied. Yes, Lily conceded, she knew Christie Kinley. They’d grown up together in Mount Kisco. Raised by her widower father, Lily had spent more nights at the Kinley home than her own. Practically a sister to her, Christie had remained Lily’s closest friend until her death. And, yes, she had known and practically helped raise Christie’s younger sister, Mia, and had watched her grow up into a troubled and yet nevertheless loved young woman. Lily’s admission of these truths meant nothing to Alice. After all, Detective Shannon had already shown her the photograph they’d found in Mia’s apartment.
But when it came to any involvement on Mia Andrews’s part in the bizarre events at the Highline Gallery, Lily feigned ignorance.
“I’m very sorry, Detective, but if you could please slow down and show a little empathy here. Your officers just dragged me from my home with no explanation, and now you’ve told me that cops killed a girl who was practically my own baby sister.”
Maybe Lily was the one who should have gone into acting.
“For the record, your honorary baby sister fired on them first, and the preliminary report from the scene is that she shot herself when she realized she couldn’t escape. We are looking now for connections between Mia and Travis Larson, the man who used the name Drew Campbell when he hired Alice to work at the gallery. We will find those links, Lily. There’s no doubt about it. Her fingerprints at his place, or his at hers. Phone records. E-mails. It will happen. And once we have that evidence, do you really want to be nailed down on your story that you had absolutely no idea that Alice’s dream job had something to do with Mia and her scumbag boyfriend? If I were you, I’d start looking to help yourself.”
“I never met Drew Campbell! I knew Mia was seeing a guy, but if it was the man who hired Alice, I certainly had no idea of that.”
“Was Mia’s boyfriend named Travis Larson?”
Someone who didn’t know Lily would have said she answered without hesitation. But Alice knew her. Or at least she thought she had. And she could tell Lily paused.
“Yes, I met him. Once. Down in Williamsburg, for dinner.” Dinner meant potential witnesses. Some facts simply could not be denied. “But how was I supposed to know he was the same guy who hired Alice? Are you sure Mia was involved? I can’t even begin to wrap my head around this.”
“Can you think of some other reason she might have opened fire on two police officers?”
“I didn’t even know she owned a gun.”
“Well, apparently she did, and it’s probably going to turn out to be the same weapon that killed her boyfriend. You deny knowing anything about the gallery setup, so let’s go back in time. What did you know about Christie Kinley’s settlement with Frank Humphrey?”
“Nothing.”
“This woman was one of your closest friends, and she never told you that Frank Humphrey raped her?”
Lily was thinking again. Mentally lining all the ducks in a row. How much could she deny? “I knew something bad happened to her. I wasn’t at that party, or maybe it wouldn’t have happened. But she told me the next day she got so drunk she blacked out. But she could tell—you know, from pain down there—that something might have happened. Something sexual. And then when she opened her purse, she found a camera and remembered the guy taking pictures. She must have grabbed it afterward when she ran out.”
“So you knew about the pictures all these years.”
“But I never saw them. I knew she was planning to go to the AV room at school to develop them, to get evidence against the guy. But then when I talked to her the next week, she said she didn’t want to have to testify and all that stuff. She never told me who the guy was, but I just assumed it was one of the other kids at the party. A couple of months later, she said her mom was pissed at her for getting so drunk and was sending her away for a year.”
“So you’re trying to tell me that you didn’t know Mia was Christie and Frank Humphrey’s daughter?”
More thinking. More calculating.
“Let me give you some advice, Lily. If you think there is even the slightest possibility that what you say here tonight is going to get you out of this jam, you are absolutely mistaken. Tonight is just the beginning. Whatever version of events you give us tonight, I am going to search high and low for evidence that’s either going to back that up or prove to me you’re a liar. I’ve got an officer outside your apartment right now, securing the premises until we get a warrant. We will search your computer. We’ll read every e-mail you ever exchanged with Mia. We’ll check your search history and see if you’ve been Googling Frank Humphrey in your spare time. Or if you checked out Alice before coincidentally befriending her at the gym. So I would choose your next words very carefully.”
She sighed dramatically, as if to acknowledge that this time, she was truly coming clean. “I had no idea about Frank Humphrey’s involvement, or even about Christie getting pregnant, until after Christie passed away. I was helping Mia clean out the house to get it ready for sale, and that’s when we found all the papers.”
“What papers?”
“Everything. Gloria—that’s Christie and Mia’s mom, or I guess only Christie’s mom—anyway, Gloria must have kept a file of everything, just in case. The photographs from that night. A copy of the police report Christie filed the day after the party. The settlement agreement. Mia’s birth records. The formal adoption by Gloria. We were in absolute shock.”
“And a couple of months later, you just happen to meet Frank Humphrey’s daughter and become one of her closest friends? It sounds to me like you and Mia spent those months planning your revenge.”
“It wasn’t like that. Yes, I’d say we were both pretty angry. I mean, here’s this grown man who fucking raped a fourteen-year-old girl and got off scot-free.”
“It was your friend and her mom who decided to settle.”
“Christie’s mother was hardly a stable parent, and Christie would have known how badly her mother needed that money. And I’m sure Frank Humphrey’s lawyer threatened to make those photographs public and to argue that Christie had been asking for it. So, yeah, she settled for the money, but it doesn’t make what Frank Humphrey did right.”
Alice hated that she found herself agreeing with her friend. She wanted so badly to believe there was an explanation for what Lily had done to her.
“Mia and I were both following Humphrey’s sex scandals really closely—like maybe these tabloid stories were karma biting him in the ass. And one night when I was surfing the news about him, I Googled the daughter who had given him an alibi.”
Even though the conversation in the room was being piped in through speakers, Alice leaned closer to the glass, as if proximity might help her understand.
“I found her Facebook page. It was so weird to think that this woman whose paths had crossed with Christie’s so long ago was living just a few blocks from me. Her profile mentioned which gym she went to, so, yeah, I was curious. I wanted to know whether Frank Humphrey’s family had any idea what kind of man he is. But then, you know what? Alice was just a regular person. And she wasn’t exactly giving her father a free pass. I liked her. And she became my friend.”
Alice wondered if Lily knew she was listening.
“You mentioned that you saw the settlement agreement.”
“Yes.”
“Then you would have seen that the agreement was between Christie and a company called ITH.”
“Yes.” Alice suspected that search teams at Mia’s apartment would soon find that old file of documents, and Lily’s fingerprints would be on them.
Alice saw a flicker behind Lily’s eyes as she realized the mistake she had made. Lily had been sitting right next to Alice when she had given Detective Shannon a copy of her pay stub with the ITH company name on it. They had talked about that name several times afterward. She had to have made the connection.
“I went to Mia the next day and confronted her.” Alice felt a scream building in her chest. This woman had played her from the very beginning, and now she was doing the same with Shannon. “She told me what she had done. Travis had a plan to sell porn without going through the Internet. I didn’t understand why that would be profitable—”
“Because it was child porn, Miss Harper. Your favorite little sister was peddling child porn with her boyfriend.”
Lily swallowed. “I had no idea, obviously. Mia made it sound like sex tapes or something. Travis had this plan, and she knew from me that Alice was in the art world and needed a job. She saw an opportunity to set Alice up as the fall guy. The money from the sales all got wired overseas. They’d run the scam for a while, then pull the plug and leave her high and dry.”
“Did she tell you she killed Travis Larson?”
She nodded. “The protesters outside the gallery had him spooked. Alice was demanding to speak to the gallery owner. The press was trying to find the supposed artist. It would only be a matter of time before someone figured out what was embedded in those thumb drives. Travis was supposed to call Alice and calm her down, but Mia heard him tell Alice to meet the next morning at the gallery. She went there and confronted him. He was planning to double-cross her. He was going to blame everything on Mia and then try to cozy up to Alice in the hopes of getting into her family money.”
Alice felt Hank’s eyes on her. The plan Lily described sounded right up Travis Larson’s alley.
“You told me you didn’t know Mia had a gun.”
“I meant that I didn’t know at first. She told me all this after the fact.”
“And from then on you decided you’d help frame Alice Humphrey.”
“No, I did not. I was trying to figure out how to help her without turning in Mia.”
“You ratted Alice out when we asked you about those gloves we found near the murder scene. Then you told her to run, pretty much guaranteeing her conviction.”
“I assumed her father would hire a bunch of lawyers to get her out of it. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. I know it sounds weird, but I do care about her. She’s my friend. But Mia—Mia was ... troubled. Seriously troubled, okay? But she was like family. I didn’t know what to do. You have to believe me.”
The tears that were beginning to fall seemed real, but Alice had one question for her friend that Shannon had not yet raised.
“Can I talk to Detective Shannon?” she asked.
Arthur Cronin was the kind of lawyer who had no qualms about tapping on the interrogation room glass. Shannon looked annoyed but stepped out of the room.
“I’m sorry, Detective, but she’s lying.”
“I know that. She’s admitting only as much as she has to and disputing everything else.”
“She wants you to believe that Mia did all of this on her own, and she only helped her after the fact. Mia Andrews wore my gloves and then left them near the crime scene with gunshot residue on them. But how did Mia get my gloves in the first place?”
When Shannon returned to the interrogation room to ask that very question, Lily Harper stopped crying and asked for a lawyer.