If You Were Here (13 page)
Authors: Alafair Burke
M
cKenna ducked into a deli two blocks from the Federal Building and quickly jotted down the names from Mercado’s piece of paper. She had just finished scribbling when her cell phone rang. She recognized her editor’s number.
“Hey, Bob. I’m just on my way in. I should be there in fifteen—”
“Where are you now?”
“Not far. Downtown. I’ll be right—”
“Don’t come in.”
“You’ve got something for me?”
“No, I mean, we’ve got something of a shit sandwich here.” He sounded strange. Panicked. Vance didn’t panic. “Look, I can only say so much.”
“Why, Bob? Are the aliens listening?”
“This isn’t funny, McKenna.” Usually Bob Vance could find anything funny, and he wasn’t the one who’d spent the morning being grilled by an FBI agent. “I can’t say much because the magazine’s counsel doesn’t want me to.”
“Counsel like an attorney?”
“Attorneys. Multiple. There are—some issues.”
“Issues?”
“Jesus, please stop repeating everything I say. These obviously aren’t my usual word choices, all right? Our lawyers got an affidavit this morning from the state court’s tech people. They inspected the primary e-mail database for the judicial system, and those Big Pig— The e-mails we ran in your piece about Judge Knight didn’t come from his account.”
“I don’t understand. I thought he was a no-comment.”
“Well, after he gave you a no-comment, he called a lawyer who was able to do what we couldn’t. The judiciary keeps complete records of all e-mails sent through its systems. They checked the dates and times when Knight supposedly sent those messages, and there was nothing. And they did a text search for the content of the messages. Nothing.”
“But why would someone—”
“It gets worse, McKenna.”
“I published forged documents. I have New York State’s court system saying I got a story wrong. I’m not sure how it can be worse, Bob.”
“Knight’s attorney used the affidavit from the court system to go to the free e-mail service that was used to forward you the supposed messages. They have IP addresses. That kind of junk.”
“Okay. And?”
“Jesus, McKenna. If there’s something you need to say, tell me now. I can still fight for you. If I’m in front of it, I can control the damage. I mean, did I push you too hard? Were you spread thin with the pressure to write a book?”
“Bob, I swear to God, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this. The IP address. The 3G connection or whatever used to access the anonymous e-mail account that sent you those messages about Knight? Your so-called anonymous source e-mailed you from your own iPad, McKenna.”
“No. There’s no way that’s right. I’ll take a lie detector right now, Bob. Tell them.”
“It’s ironclad. Your IP address. Your iPad.”
“I’ll find some tech geek to fix this. There’s no way—”
“It’s not going to be that simple. I was on the phone, weighing the options with counsel. I thought I could hold them at bay, but there’s some serious shit going down here. I’ve got an FBI agent searching your office right now, McKenna. They’re saying that opening an account like that to forge e-mails could amount to a felony—”
“Wait, Bob. Who’s saying that? Is it an Agent Mercado? Female? Dark hair?” Mercado would have to be Wonder Woman to have gotten to the magazine with a warrant already. She must have applied for it the second she got the call from Jason Eberly.
“No, the agent’s a man, and he’s not saying a word. It’s the lawyers who are calling the shots.”
“Listen to me, Bob. The FBI thing has nothing to do with Knight. It’s a story I was working on about environmental terrorism. There was a bombing or something late last night.” As she tried to tell him about her call to an old friend who was an environmental lawyer, and the road to her interrogation with Mercado, she realized how crazy it all sounded. So much for Mercado pretending to believe McKenna when she said she didn’t have any information.
“There’s nothing I can do, McKenna. The lawyers are going into bunker mode in case Knight sues. They were saying it was worse than Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.” Given the kind of fluff work the magazine had steered her toward, she never would have expected to be compared to two of journalism’s most infamous liars.
“So what are you saying?”
“You’re terminated immediately until further notification. Your entry card into the offices has been deactivated. Your press credentials are revoked. Your log-in to our databases will no longer work.”
“Bob, my work. My e-mails. All of my data—”
“I’m sorry, McKenna.”
She could tell that he was, in fact, sorry, but it was the kind of regret that came from trusting a person only to be disappointed. Bob Vance didn’t believe her.
E
veryone was a liar.
Carter had no shortage of examples. The Bible-belting, Jesus-loving politicians who got caught with hookers and rent-a-boys. The fat housewives who swore they kept a reasonable diet and a regular exercise regimen but breezed through the McDonald’s drive-through three times a week when no one was looking. The spoiled trust-fund kids who held themselves out as writers and artists and “entrepreneurs.”
Most people didn’t really mean to lie. But the story they told themselves and the world was a better version of the truth. It was as if they implicitly measured themselves against a bell curve of human behavior created in their own minds. By imagining others as worse, everyone could say they were above average.
As a result, Carter knew that what people believed to be true about themselves was rarely the absolute truth. It was the relative truth. Carter’s own identity—these days, at least—was very much about the tricks he had learned in the positions to which he’d been trusted. Tricks like explosives.
Carter thought of himself as one of the best in his line of business. He certainly knew more than the average bear. He was smart. He was ambitious. He was willing to sell his skills to the highest bidder.
The actual skills? His talent was understanding people. Including the people who had started hiring him once he realized there was money to be made on the skills he had acquired. But when it came to his knowledge of explosives, he may have exaggerated. Sure, he knew more than the average person, but the average person could barely light a match. And he hadn’t set up explosives since 2007.
He had moved to the Marriott after one night at the Four Seasons. The Marriott sucked, but it could be counted on to forget its guests. Given the change in mission, he needed to be forgettable.
Now he was sitting at the built-in desk in the corner of his room, with those stupid outlets at the base of the lamp that never worked. He was checking the tracker on his laptop again, hoping to get an update on the woman’s location. Nothing.
He checked the news reports again, too. The explosion had definitely taken place. Two women were in custody. No reports about the other two occupants, in particular the one he was interested in.
He shouldn’t have driven away. He should have waited nearby. Watched the explosion. Made sure no one walked out alive.
But any decent emergency response to a bombing would have been quick and overwhelming. And if he’d gotten stopped? Toast.
The time estimates varied by news report. Ten-thirty
P.M.
? Ten-forty? Eleven?
He hadn’t made the explosion big enough. He’d wanted to make sure the investigators found evidence that the people who lived there had been stockpiling bomb materials—that they were the ones who had done this.
She must have seen the detonator. She could have leaped from a window at the last minute and escaped the blast.
All he knew for sure was that her phone somehow made it out of that house. The woman—Carter didn’t know her real name, so he just called her “the woman”—didn’t know it, but his client had installed a GPS tracker in her phone.
Carter knew he had a problem when the woman’s phone moved from the house, down the block, to the left, and then to the right. It was a route toward the Long Island Expressway, 1.6 miles. It took about ten minutes. She was probably running. Fast. And then she stopped. And then she turned off the phone. Twenty-two seconds later, she realized that killing the power wasn’t good enough.
The tracker went dead. Maybe she threw the phone under the tire of an eighteen-wheeler. Or pulled out the SIM card and lit it on fire. Whatever, the tracker was now dead.
The woman wasn’t. She was alive. And she knew she was being hunted.
This had gone very, very wrong.
Carter set aside any inch of doubt he had allowed to creep in and replaced it with the confidence that had come with fifteen years of work, training, and specialization. There was a reason he had his job.
Because he was an expert, he knew that the tracker in the woman’s phone had been put there by his client, which meant his client would be monitoring it, which meant his client would know what Carter knew.
He called the special number.
“We have a problem,” he said. “She’s alive.”
T
hough she’d admit it only to her closest friends, McKenna had a Google Alert. A million years ago, when “Google” still sounded like a masturbation euphemism, McKenna was publishing a debut novel. In awe of the fact that newspapers, magazines, and trade reviews would weigh in on the value of her wee little book, she had set up the ongoing search service. Every time her name appeared on the Interwebs, she got an alert.
Today the Google Alert was going wild. If only her novel had brought so much buzz. Since
New York City
magazine had posted its retraction of the Knight story, her name had gone viral. Print media. TV. Blogs. Twitter. It was a weird feeling to be sitting at her familiar spot on the living room sofa, knowing at only the most abstract level that her name was rapidly becoming a part of the zeitgeist outside the bubble of her home. The first telephone call was from the literary agent who had been so damn hot to see a book proposal about the Marcus Jones shooting.
Needless to say, the timing’s probably not great right now. If anything changes, I’ll be sure to give you a call. But until then— Well, I wish you all the best.
No bueno.
She finally closed her e-mail to avoid the incoming Alerts. She was interested in an entirely different news story. Word of the explosion in Brentwood had gotten out, as Agent Mercado had predicted. Although details were fuzzy, multiple media outlets were reporting that the FBI had two people in custody on suspicion for possession of weapons of mass destruction.
When her cell phone rang, she was tempted to ignore it but checked the screen to see if she recognized the caller. Patrick. She had tried to sound cool when she left a message earlier, but he had probably heard about her firing.
“Hey,” she said.
“So it’s true?” They’d been together long enough that apparently “hey” could say everything.
“How much have you heard?” she asked.
“Someone burned you on the Knight e-mails, and the magazine’s throwing you under the bus.”
“That’s— Well, no. It’s worse. It started when I went to see Jason Eberly this morning—”
“Your secret boyfriend?”
He was trying to cheer her up, but he had no idea how much her world had changed today. That was her fault. She hadn’t even been honest with him about her reason for contacting Jason. “He called an FBI agent for background information about that environmental group.” She didn’t bother to say “the group I thought Susan might be part of.” She knew his thoughts on the issue. “The next thing I know, the agent was hauling me in for questioning because they’re a bunch of ecoterrorists. There was an explosion at a house where they were storing bomb materials. Then the FBI showed up at my office with a search warrant, right when Knight was bringing down the hammer on those e-mails. Plus, the magazine is saying there’s evidence that I was the one who fabricated the e-mails. Bob actually asked me if I was under too much pressure. They think I’m going crazy.”
“I’m coming home.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. I’ll be right there. I know it’s bad, McKenna, but everything’s going to be okay. I promise. We’re going to be fine.”
Those words brought more comfort than McKenna ever could have predicted. She found herself watching the clock on her computer, counting down the minutes she had to sit here alone. She needed someone with her right now. Not any someone—Patrick.
She finally forced herself to pull her attention back to the real world.
The New York Times
seemed to have the most detailed coverage about last night’s explosion. McKenna recognized the names of the two women in custody—Carolyn Maroney and Andrea Sanderson—from the list that Agent Mercado had shown her.
That left only two more names, one male and one female. She typed the man’s name, Greg Larson, into Google, but the search brought up too many results to be helpful. She narrowed it down to “Greg Larson and People for the Preservation of the Planet.” She found a few hits quoting Larson at various environmental protests. According to several reports, he was the de facto leader, even though the group eschewed any hierarchical structure.
The remaining female name on Mercado’s list of names, Pamela Morris, also proved too common to be of use. Even when McKenna coupled it with the environmental movement, she found nothing.
She called a homicide detective she knew at the Thirteenth Precinct. Female. Youngish. Most important, Detective Forbus owed her a favor for running a story three months ago about a gang killing that no one cared about until it consumed four full pages of a widely circulated magazine.
Forbus picked up on the second ring. “Forbus.”
Though McKenna started in with introductions, but Forbus remembered from the earlier case. “Tough break about the magazine,” Forbus offered. “If it helps any, everything you said about Knight is a hundred percent accurate. If he didn’t write those e-mails, I guarantee you he thought every last word.”
“Put it this way,” McKenna said. “If you framed a guilty man, would his guilt really matter?”
“Nope, but like I said:
if
it helps.”
“What would help is a search. Greg Larson. Forty-six years old. Has at least one arrest, for criminal trespass at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland in 2007.”
“Yep, got him. And that’s one of many. All misdemeanors—petty stuff. Trespassing. Vandalism. Public disorder. Disobeying the order of a police officer. Oregon. California. Arizona. Montana. Illinois. D.C. D.C. D.C. D.C. Texas. D.C. Busy guy.”
If Larson was running the movement and had been willing to face arrest so many times for his beliefs, he was unlikely to divulge any information. McKenna had to hope that the last person on Mercado’s list might know something—and had lived. “One more name?” she asked. “Pamela Morris.”
“And?”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“Date of birth? State? Something?”
“Nothing.” She thought about the age ranges of the other residents in the house. The youngest was Carolyn Maroney, twenty-two. Greg Larson was the oldest. “Between twenty and fifty,” she offered. “And probably in New York, at least until recently.”
“Very helpful,” Forbus deadpanned. McKenna waited as she heard fingertips against a keyboard. “Yeah, what I thought. I’ve got fourteen driver’s licenses in New York alone. And just to be clear, this counts as a favor—an actual call-it-even favor, whether it helps you out or not.”
“Fine. Um, narrow it down to criminal histories.”
More typing. “Yeah, okay. Down to one, but it’s way back. Pamela Morris. Thirty-nine years old. Two prostitution pops in the late nineties. Nothing since. Maybe got out of the life. Happens sometimes, even outside of Hollywood fairy tales.”
“Can you run her with the date of birth in the general databases? See what you find?”
“Look at you, little Miss Jessica Fletcher.” More typing. “Yep, I got her. Huh.”
Huh?
Huh
was usually bad.
“ ‘Huh’?”
“Well, it could be anything. But your girl’s very low-radar. No driver’s licenses. No car registrations. No NCIC hits.” Meaning no involvement with law enforcement. “Very minimal. Like, off the grid.”
“Does she have contacts in the area?” Pamela Morris might be able to confirm that Susan Hauptmann was the woman from the subway platform.
“All right. Let me see.” More typing. “I’ve got a mom here. Arresting officer called her after one of the two prostitution busts. Loretta Morris.” She rattled off an address in Jersey City. More typing. “From what I can tell, the mom’s still at the same address. That’s all I’ve got, Jordan.”
“What about a booking photo on the prostitution pop?”
“
Pop
. Listen to you with the cop talk.” More typing. “Looks like she was cited and released on her first arrest, but yeah, she got booked on the second
pop
. I’ll shoot it over to you. E-mail okay?”
“I’ll take it.” McKenna started to recite her work address out of habit, then caught herself and provided her Gmail account instead.
“I’ll make a note of it. And best of luck. Because if you ask me? Whoever Pamela Morris is, she doesn’t want to be found.”