If You Were Here (14 page)
Authors: Alafair Burke
S
canlin wasn’t usually the type to cheer on members of the judiciary. Judges sat behind their benches, literally elevated above the courtroom and clothed in antiquated garb to remind the world of their superiority. Yet they knew nothing about the real world affected by their rulings. (Even the word played into the myth of judicial superiority, as if they actually “ruled” over others.) How many times had Scanlin seen routine consent searches bounced, all because some lefty judge who had never been north of Eighty-sixth Street believed that no one who was carrying would be stupid enough to let a cop check his pockets? Judges were glorified lawyers who didn’t know the unwritten rules of the streets. Even the judges who tended to rule for the state—judges like Frederick Knight—did it more for political popularity or disdain of criminal defendants than respect for police work.
But what was that saying about the enemy of my enemy being a friend? The maxim must hold water because, on this particular day, Scanlin found himself hoping that Frederick Knight was out there somewhere, treating his gluttonous self to all the fried eggs and bacon in lower Manhattan.
Just that morning,
New York City
magazine had issued a retraction of a hatchet job they’d run against Knight the previous day. The language on the website was formal but apologetic, explaining that the contemptuous e-mails supposedly authored by Knight were apparently fabricated; offering sincere regrets about the story; and promising a thorough investigation and complete transparency as additional information was gathered. Scanlin’s favorite line was the final one: New York City
magazine has terminated its relationship with the author of the article, McKenna Jordan.
In the cutthroat world of New York City media, the circling sharks smelled fresh, oozing blood. Several other media outlets—the
Daily News, New York
magazine, Gawker, Mediabistro—were comparing the emerging story to other journalistic scandals, but it was the
New York Post
that went furthest, not only digging in a knife but giving the blade a vengeful twist.
Although NYC magazine promises its readers a thorough investigation into the events that led to the fabricated article, critics will argue that the scandal should be anything but a surprise. The reporter in question, McKenna Jordan, née Wright, made headlines a decade ago as an assistant district attorney. Wright was the junior prosecutor who went to the press with evidence that she claimed would prove that a twelve-year police veteran’s shooting of nineteen-year-old felon Marcus Jones was not justified. Her allegation poured fuel on a fire simmering between civil rights activists and supporters of the NYPD. She resigned from the district attorney’s office when an investigation revealed further evidence to back the officer’s self-defense claim. She subsequently published a novel that was a thinly veiled depiction of her former life as a prosecutor. And the reporter who ran with her claims all those years ago? His name was Bob Vance. That’s right: the same Bob Vance who now sits as editor in chief at
New York City
magazine.
Scanlin wondered if the demise of McKenna Wright Jordan would provide any kind of karmic justice to his old friend Scott Macklin.
Scanlin couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Macklin. It must have been about six years ago, after Mac heard that Melissa finally had to go to the home. He stopped by with a casserole from his own wife. Scanlin didn’t mention that he already had a freezer full of Pyrex dishes. Apparently Scanlin was going to be treated as the neighborhood widower, even though Melissa was very much alive—at least to him back then.
Even six years ago, Mac’s decline was obvious. It had been fast. If anything, age had taken hold of him even faster than it had Scanlin. Before, when Mac announced that he was marrying Josefina, he was like Benjamin Button, aging backward, whistling like a giddy newlywed. He insisted that life with Josefina’s young son, whom he treated as his own, only made him feel younger. The guys who sported bags under their eyes from trying to keep up with their own growing broods begged to differ, but no one begrudged Mac his happiness. How could you carry one ill thought about a man who’d do anything in the world for his family and the fellow officers he treated as such?
But then Marcus Jones pulled a gun, and Mac became the white cop who killed a black teenager. Throw in the reckless, grandstanding antics of McKenna Wright, and Mac’s miraculous reverse aging reversed itself again and then some. By the time Mac came to see Scanlin with the casserole, he just seemed old and sad.
Now Scanlin opened the second drawer on his desk and pulled out a Rolodex that had been made obsolete by electronic databases. Miscellaneous business cards were stuffed randomly among the yellowing notes. He skipped to the tab marked M and flipped through the entries. MAC. It was the only name the man needed.
Josefina picked up the phone. She sounded distracted but happy. Harried but not annoyed, like maybe she was balancing the phone between her cheek and shoulder while unloading a bag of groceries. He wished Melissa were still around to answer their phone that way a busy woman does. Before the diagnosis, Melissa had gotten crabby, snapping at the mildest irritation. He chose to think it was the dementia setting in and not the changes between them, but there was no real way to know.
Mac wasn’t home. His wife asked if she could take a message.
“I was hoping to talk to him. To, I don’t know . . . catch up.”
“He’s helping Tommy move a mini-fridge into his dorm room. He should be back in an hour or so.”
“That little rug rat’s off to college already?”
“Freshman at Hofstra. He wants to be called Thomas now, but I can’t help it. Mama’s always going to call him Tommy.”
“I’ll give Mac a call later, then. I don’t know if this is a touchy subject, but it’s about that prosecutor who tried to jam Scott up back when—you know, when he was still on the job.”
Her end of the line went silent. He pictured her freeze, momentarily distracted from the groceries. Her voice was lower when she spoke. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. Scott— You know how a man is. He shielded us from the details. We don’t like talking about that.”
Scanlin regretted mentioning it. He should have ended with the polite chitchat and a routine message. “Sure, I totally understand. Trust me, this is a good thing. Karma’s biting the ass of someone who deserves it big-time.” He felt uncomfortable about using profanity with her. “I’ll let you get back to what you were doing. I’ll give Mac a call later.”
He hit the print key on the
New York Post
’s delicious massacre of the reporter and former prosecutor in question. He’d bring it to Mac in person. It was even better than a casserole.
M
aybe if Patrick had come home at that moment—right when McKenna ended the call with Detective Forbus—everything would have been different. But that wasn’t what happened. She was left there in the apartment, alone with her thoughts.
And when McKenna was alone with nothing but time and energy, she had to stay busy. She stayed busy by opening the box that had arrived via messenger, courtesy of Adam Bayne, while she was talking to Agent Mercado that morning. According to what Adam had told Patrick, George Hauptmann had one box in storage marked S
USAN.
Adam could never bring himself to dispose of it.
The box was small. If Susan’s father were alive, McKenna could ask him why he had chosen to keep these six cubic feet of his daughter’s belongings. Photographs, school merit certificates, the West Point degree—those items made sense. But as McKenna unpacked the box, she also found a commemorative plate from the Mount Vernon estate, a wine opener from Napa Valley, and a pink plastic Slinky. Were these items from special moments they had shared together? Or had the best intentions to preserve treasured memories collided with the last-minute realities of packing up an apartment?
McKenna set aside the bulkier items and made a stack of photographs—some framed, some bound in albums, many thrown haphazardly into the box. Flipping through the completed pile provided an escape, a reprieve from reality, while she waited. Waited for what, she didn’t know. For Patrick to come home and make her feel better? For someone to realize that the Knight e-mails were legit? For the mysterious subway woman to emerge, bearing only a superficial resemblance to Susan Hauptmann? For the FBI somehow to
un
search her office? There wasn’t always an end point to waiting.
She almost missed the picture. So many of them were of people she’d never seen. Or they were old, old, old pictures of the Hauptmanns—George, Carol, Gretchen, and Susan, looking like any other 1970s family in polyester shirts and flared pants. But McKenna paid slightly more attention to the pictures from the college years. West Point. Those beautiful, rolling hills next to the Hudson. The tanned, hard-bodied, buzz-cut men in tank tops and shorts, arms around shoulders, wrestling, tackling each other to the ground. How many times had she teased Patrick that the U.S. Military Academy was the gayest place on earth?
Of course, the entire campus wasn’t all young men. Some of the cadets were tanned, hard-bodied young women. Women like Susan, far outnumbered by her male colleagues.
It shouldn’t have bothered her. The photograph was taken twenty years ago. But the look on Patrick’s face. The smile. The twinkle in the eyes. The joy. She loved seeing that look, which she had always thought was reserved exclusively for her.
The way his hands rested so comfortably on Susan’s stomach as he hugged her from behind. Susan’s lips on his neck. McKenna’s mind filled with other images of the two of them together. Laughing. Kissing. Removing clothes. Her own intimate memories of her husband, but with Susan.
Those weren’t the only thoughts pulling at her. From the minute she had shown him the video of the woman on the subway, Patrick had been steering her away from looking into Susan’s death. He had insisted that the woman didn’t look like Susan, even though the resemblance was so clear.
She felt her fingers shake as she scrolled through her contacts list, searching for Adam Bayne’s phone number.
He sounded cheerful when he answered. “McKenna, I’m so glad you called. I wanted to make sure that you got the box we sent over. I’m not sure what you were looking for, but that’s all the General kept from Susan’s things.”
“Yes, it’s here. Thanks for sending it.”
“Look, McKenna. I—I heard about your situation with the magazine.” She wondered whether there was anyone in America who hadn’t. “Our firm has investigators, computer experts, that kind of thing. Let me know if we can do anything to help.”
From what McKenna gathered, it was no surprise that Susan’s father had invited Adam to work for him. Adam had been a West Point “Star Man,” a cadet entitled to wear a small star on his uniform collar, signaling his place in the top five percent of his class. Other cadets called them “star geeks” on the assumption that all they did was study, but Adam’s skills went beyond book smarts. He was fearless and decisive, traits that would later serve him well in the Special Forces.
General Hauptmann’s contracting firm had never lived up to the man’s goals, but Adam had managed to land on his feet. After winding down the General’s active work in the Middle East, Adam returned to New York to launch his own private security firm. Adam’s clients tended to be sports teams, celebrities, and other “high-value” clientele.
“Thanks, Adam. I appreciate it. I actually have a question for you. And I feel kind of weird asking it, but were Susan and Patrick ever . . . together? I found a picture of them—”
“I thought you were trying to write about what happened to Susan. I’m not sure how old flirtations could have anything to do with that.”
“So they were a couple?” McKenna tried to block out the mental images.
“If you can even call it that. I guess I assumed you knew. I mean,
I
certainly knew.”
“No, I didn’t. I thought she was with you in college.”
“She was. Mostly. But we were on and off. We were young. You know how it is. Didn’t you and Patrick go through the same thing? Sometimes being together isn’t as clean as we’d like to think. Things worked out for you guys. Not that it’s my place to give advice—we don’t know each other well, and God knows it took me long enough to settle down—but it’s never helpful to start thinking about your spouse’s exes. Isn’t that the whole point of being married? You’re there for each other from that point on, and the past doesn’t matter.”
“I was with Patrick for
five years
before we got married. Were they together even after he met me?” She thought about the weeks that would go by when they were taking a break. How stupid she felt sitting at home, wondering whether he would call. Wondering whether she should call. Where had Susan been all of those nights? She remembered Gretchen’s comment to Patrick at her house:
Don’t even get me started on you.
Adam sighed loudly. “Look, McKenna. You know how Susan was. I loved her, but she had problems, and needing the attention of men was one of them. It was a big part of the reason it didn’t work out for us. She couldn’t be with one guy, so yeah, sometimes she was with Patrick. She was with a lot of guys we knew. But it was never serious. It was just— Well, you know.”
“If the sex didn’t matter, how come neither of them ever told me?”
“I should’ve gone through that stupid box myself before sending it over. No offense, McKenna, but if you ask me, you’ve got bigger things to be thinking about right now. Again, let me know if we can do anything to help. You take care, okay?”
M
cKenna had heard the sympathy in Adam’s voice before he’d hung up. She could imagine him thinking, Poor thing. Poor, pathetic thing.
She was pathetic, sitting here alone on the living room floor, frantically sorting through old photographs, wondering how long Patrick’s relationship with Susan had lasted. How happy they had been together. What trips they may have taken.
She looked at the clock. She had time for a quick walk before Patrick got home. She needed to clear her head before she saw him.
She headed up toward Madison Square Park. This stretch of Broadway, between Fourteenth and Twenty-third, once was so congested that you literally had to press yourself sideways against adjacent buildings to pass another person on the sidewalk. A few years ago, the city had closed most of the street to car traffic, forming a pedestrian walkway complete with tables and umbrellas for shade. It was all part of the ongoing campaign to make the city more
livable.
Her mother always said to her, “I love visiting you, but how long are you going to continue
living
there? The crowds and the honking. All that noise. It’s so
stressful
.” But Manhattan’s packed sidewalks had always been a kind of comfort to McKenna. Losing herself in a crowd allowed her thoughts to roam free. Some of her best ideas—whether for a closing argument, her novel, or story concepts—came when she meandered anonymously among the thousands of other tiny specks of humanity occupying this little island.
She still felt shamed by Adam’s admonishment. He was right, of course. Everyone had a past. She certainly hadn’t been a virgin when she met Patrick. When they started dating, she began the whole “what’s your history” conversation. When she asked about his last girlfriend (first name Ally, last name unknown), he described her as “a big-boned girl. Not in a strong way, either. Soft. Smushy, if you will. With red frizzy hair. Lots of brown freckles. Moles, too. Big ones, on her nose and chin. Not the brightest bulb. And a voice like a horse. A real doll.”
Point made. There was nothing to be gained by hearing details about former lovers. No one else mattered once they met each other.
At the time, it had seemed like such a sweet and simple solution to avoiding petty jealousies. Now McKenna wondered if, at some level, he had been avoiding the truth about his past (present?) with Susan. But why did any of it matter? Like Adam said, she had bigger problems to deal with.
Yet there was a reason the picture of Patrick and Susan had shaken her. If he and Susan had been that close, they could still be in contact. He may have known this entire time that Susan was out there. He could be making sure that McKenna didn’t search for Susan—or publish the subway video.
He had seen her log in to Dana’s Skybox account, which meant he could have signed in to wipe it out. Once she thought of that possibility, she realized he also had access to her iPad, which meant he could have been the one to send the forged e-mails about Judge Knight. Without the video, no one would believe she’d seen a woman who’d been missing for ten years, and the Knight e-mails had put the nail in her credibility’s coffin.
Okay, she was seriously losing it. If she said any of that out loud, the listener really would call the nice men with the butterfly nets and a white van.
She was at the park now. She smiled as she looked at the long, winding Shake Shack line, extending from the hamburger stand, across the south side of the park, and turning north toward the dog run. If Patrick were here, he’d have something funny to say about New Yorkers being like cattle, standing in lines only because they existed. Two summers ago, he had nearly thrown a woman out of the five-hour line for the Alexander McQueen exhibit when, two hours in, she said, “Wait. You mean it’s dresses?”
She gave herself a mental pep talk before heading home. She liked to say she’d been with Patrick for ten years, but becoming a couple was never as clean as you liked to remember. They were different people ten years ago. Neither was ready to do the work that came with a real relationship. They took breaks. A lot of them. She spent nights with other men. He was with other women, and Susan might have been one of them. It didn’t matter.
But that picture had taught McKenna one thing: she didn’t know Susan very well. They were friends. They drank together. Giggled. Partied. Commiserated over their jobs. She’d known Susan had no problem with one-night stands or “no commitment” hookups, but Susan had always given McKenna the impression that her relationship with Adam was stable and monogamous before they broke it off. Similarly, McKenna had known about Gretchen’s drug problem, but Susan never told her about Gretchen’s arrest, even though McKenna was a prosecutor when it happened. What other information had Susan been keeping to herself?
Then it dawned on McKenna that she might not be in this mess if she hadn’t been playing so close to the vest herself. She should have posted the subway video to the Internet immediately, asking people to identify the mystery woman. She should have told Scanlin, Vance, and Gretchen about the sighting. Even that morning, she should have told Mercado about the link between Susan and the P3s.
Instead, she had held back. And where had all the secrecy gotten her?
It was time to try a different route.
She pulled out her iPad and opened her Twitter app. She typed as quickly as she could before she lost the nerve:
Contact me w/ ANY info about disappearance of Susan Hauptmann (’03). There’s a connection b/w past & present. Help me find it.
She ended with an embedded link to her e-mail address. Thanks to her active efforts, nearly ten thousand people followed her personal Twitter account. Still, the odds of one of them knowing anything helpful about Susan were minuscule. She needed an even bigger audience. Then she realized she probably had one.
She switched accounts and logged in to the official
New York City
magazine feed. She watched as the little thinking wheel at the top of her iPad turned, a sign that it was processing the request.
She was in. They hadn’t thought to change the password.
NYCM changed its locks but not Twitter password. Please RT any & all of my messages before they delete & change PW. —McKenna Jordan (fired)
She included a link to her e-mail account, hit send, and began typing a second message.
NYCM not telling full story. Help me do it. Contact me w/ ANY info about disappearance of Susan Hauptmann (’03). RT b4 they delete! McK J
In the abbreviated world of Twitter, with its 140-character limitation, she had asked her fellow Twitter users to “retweet,” or repeat her message to their own followers, before the magazine could delete it. She wished she could be a fly on the wall when Bob Vance gave the magazine’s lawyers the news.
She made her way back down Broadway, feeling confident that she had her head on straight. She didn’t know why someone had gone to such lengths to erase the subway video. She didn’t know how the video was connected to this morning’s explosion on Long Island. And she was still unemployed and disgraced, thanks to someone’s efforts to make sure she looked like a total loon.
But at least she was doing something about it. She wouldn’t stop until she answered every last question. And Patrick would help her.
She was about to slip her key in the front door when she heard Patrick’s voice inside. He’d beat her home.
Maybe the internal pep talk to quell the paranoid voices hadn’t worked after all, because she didn’t insert the key. She paused. She paused to eavesdrop on her own husband in their own home.
“I don’t know where she is,” Patrick was saying inside the apartment. “I told her I was coming home.”
Silence.
“I’m about to call her. I just walked in. She’s not here. Her purse is gone.”
Silence.
“I
know
it could be nothing. But she’s got a bunch of your old stuff scattered all over our living room floor. Is there something in here that could be an issue?”
Silence.
“Fine. I’ll let you know when I find her. But don’t worry. I have it under control. Problem solved. Just take care of yourself.”
Silence. Silence. Silence.