Long Gone by Alafair Burke

gallery in half, the glass-topped desk toward the front door, the very objects that she’d been careful to avoid bumping into as she’d worked her way to this place. But she saw nothing but evenness in her field of vision.
    “Drew?”
    Her voice sounded different in the room. Louder. With a touch of an echo.
    Every sense was telling her that something had changed. She fumbled inside her purse for her cell phone and activated the screen for a tiny pocket of light. Did a 180-degree scan of the room. Saw an empty floor where the benches had been. Saw uninterrupted blank space on the wall where Hans Schuler’s First had hung.
    Fuck. She had assumed the brown paper on the windows was a cheap publicity stunt—a very public effort to obscure their so-called pornography from public view—but now she realized Drew had been even busier this morning, and even more overreactive, than she’d first assumed. It looked like she wouldn’t be calling the shots about how the end would go down. Obviously the owner was pulling the plug.
    She was tempted to walk out the door and leave the entire experiment behind her, but thought Drew owed her an explanation. She assumed, based on the open gate, that he’d be returning.
    As she walked toward the front of the gallery, she noticed a shadow on the floor—some sort of pile. She took each step carefully, as if the sounds of her footsteps might disrupt it. Fifteen steps from the pile. Now ten. Five.
    Despite her caution, she felt the sole of her boot slide beneath her on the floor. Felt her weight pulling her down backward. She reflexively stuck her hands beneath her, forgetting all those old ski lessons about protecting your wrists in a fall. She heard her cell phone tumble to the floor.
    Her body hit the ground, palms first, and then slid against the tile. Wet. Warm. Sticky. Paint?
    She pulled herself to her knees and crawled toward the form on the ground. Used a tentative hand to tap what she recognized upon touch as some kind of fabric. A rug? A large canvas?
    She patted the form’s edges and jerked upright when she finally identified a texture with certainty. Hair. Coarse human hair.
    She scrambled on the slick tile, fumbling for her phone. Found the button at the bottom. Aimed the tiny beam of light toward what she now suspected was a body.
    Drew Campbell lay on his side, a magenta pool forming beneath him despite the bundling of his winter coat. Her hands and knees and shins and forearms were soaked in his fresh blood.
    She felt her fingertips stick to the glass screen of her phone as she dialed 911.

Chapter Sixteen
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    “God damn it.”
    Detective Jason Morhart hit the enter key on his computer once again, this time so hard he thought it might not pop back into place.
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    “Fuck.”
    “Cursing’s for the uncreative. They say ‘Frack!’ on Battlestar Galactica , and everyone still knows what it means.”
    Nancy had appeared at his desk about six presses of the return key ago. Her job was to process file requests. In her mind, that plus a few software classes at the community college made her the resident computer expert at the police department. No one had the heart to disabuse her of the notion. He knew for a fact that Nancy could out-cuss a cussing contest at a sailor’s convention, but that wasn’t going to stop her from ribbing him about his temper.
    “Cursing’s also for the seriously pissed off, Nancy. And I’ll let you in on another secret while I’m at it: Battlestar Galactica ’s for nerds. You’re never gonna land a man quoting a nerd show.”
    “Now, for that ? You really do deserve to have your mouth washed out with soap. Let me see that keyboard again.”
    She reached across him and typed in the Web address he’d been trying to pull up: Facebook.com. Hit