If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense
Dedication
In Memory of Judge Betty Binns Fletcher
Contents
Dedication
PART I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
PART II
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
PART III
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
PART IV
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
PART V
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
March
Acknowledgments
A Note to Readers
About the Author
Also by Alafair Burke
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART I
All around me are familiar faces.
—Tears for Fears
CHAPTER ONE
Nicky Cervantes smiled to himself as two Wall Street boys pressed past him, one reporting excitedly to the other that Apple stock was up six percent with the release of the company’s new iPhone. He could tell from their tone that the good news for the market meant a hefty check for the duo.
Nicky was smiling because one might say he was sort of invested in the market himself these days. And those boys in suits and ties might be whistling over a six percent bump, but Nicky’s own payback on the brand had nearly tripled in recent days. When demand for the latest gadget was this red-hot, no one seemed to care where the hardware came from. No additional work for Nicky, either. If anything, he felt a little less guilty about it. Anyone dumb enough to buy jack the day it came out deserved to lose it, was how he figured.
In truth, he never had felt much guilt over it. The first time, he expected to feel real bad, like maybe the lady would start crying or there would be pictures on there of her baby that she’d never get back. But when he finally worked up the courage to do it—to just grab that shit out of her hand while she was preparing some text message to send aboveground—the girl didn’t seem to care. He still remembered her reaction. One hand protecting the thousand-dollar bag, the other covering the cleavage peering from the deep V in her wrap dress. In her eyes, he was dirt, and the phone was a small price to pay to protect the things that really mattered.
He knew he wasn’t dirt. But he also knew he wasn’t VIP, like those Wall Street dudes. Not yet, anyway.
He was just a kid whose mom needed the six hundred dollars a month he’d been able to kick in to the household since he’d been working at Mr. Robinson’s paint store on Flatbush the past year. And he was the star pitcher for the Medgar Evers High School baseball team with a .6 ERA, an 88 MPH fastball, a .450 batting average, and a sweeping curve and change-up that consistently racked up strikes. With numbers like that, the nine bucks an hour he was getting from Mr. Robinson had to go once the coach told him he was spread too thin. If all went according to plan, Nicky might even be drafted right out of high school. He could donate a thousand phones to charity out of his first paycheck to make up for what he was doing now.
Nicky was already fifty reach-and-grabs in, but he was still careful, compared to some of the dudes he’d met who also sold hardware. Tonight he was waiting on the N/R ramp at Times Square, six-thirty P.M. Packed trains. High ratio of Manhattanites to outer-borough types. Low odds of resistance.
It really was like taking candy from a baby. But the candy was a five-hundred-dollar phone, and the baby was some hot chick whose sugar daddy would buy her a new one. The standard play was to linger on the platform, like he was waiting to get on the train. Look for someone—inattentive, weak, female—standing near the door, fiddling with a gadget.
Reach. Grab. Run. By the time the girl realized her phone was gone, Nicky was halfway up the stairs. Easy.
He heard the rattle of the approaching train. Watched the lights heading his way. Joined the other cattle gathering close at the edge of the platform in eager anticipation of scoring a New York commuter’s lottery ticket—an empty seat.
Six trains had come and gone without a baby and her candy.
This time, as the train lurched to a halt, Nicky saw what he’d been looking for through the glass of the car doors. Eyes down, phone out.
Reddish blond hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. Long-sleeved white sweater, backpack straps looped over both shoulders. Despite the train’s lurch, she typed with two hands, stabilizing herself against the bounce with her core strength.
Maybe that should have been a sign.
He stepped one foot into the car, grabbed the phone, and pivoted a one-eighty, like he had fifty times before. He pushed through the clump of angry riders who had followed him into the car and now stood before him, all hoping to secure a few square feet on the crowded train before the doors closed.
Had he known what would happen next, maybe he would have run faster for the staircase.
It wasn’t until he hit t
he top of the landing that he realized he had a problem. Somehow he heard it. Not the sound of the shoes but the sound of surprised bystanders reacting.
Hey!
What the . . .
You lost your shoe, lady!
Oh my God, David. We have to leave the city.
Nicky sneaked a glance behind him to see the woman kicking off her remaining ballet flat as she took two steps at a time in pursuit. She had looked sort of average middle-aged through the subway doors, but now she had a crazy look of determination on her face. In her eyes. In the energy of her forearms as they whipped back and forth at her sides.
At the top of the stairs, he spun left and then right, up the ramp toward the electronics store positioned between the N/R tracks and the 1/2. Why were some trains labeled with letters and others with numbers? Strange how random thoughts popped into his head when he was stressed.
He could hear the thump of an old Run-DMC song that his father listened to when he was still around. Nicky was in luck. The break dancers always attracted a dense semicircle of onlookers.
He leaped over a stroller on the near side of the audience, evoking an “oooooh” from viewers who thought his vault across the makeshift stage was part of the act. Picked up the pace once again, gaze fixed on the stairs that would take him to the 1/2 platform.
He heard more shouts behind him. The crowd hadn’t stopped her. A kid cried as he fell to the ground.
Girl wasn’t messing around.
He sprinted down the stairs, hoping to hear the familiar clack of an incoming train. No luck.
He thought about abandoning the phone, but the platform was too packed. The phone would fall to the ground, unnoticed by her, scooped up by someone whose good luck today rivaled his bad.
He decided to use the crowd to his advantage. He analyzed the platform that awaited him like an obstacle course, plotting out three or four weaves to maneuver his way to the next exit.
He risked another look behind. The woman had gained on him. She was just as fast, maybe faster. And she was smaller, more nimble. She was finding a more direct path than he’d navigated.
Up ahead, he spotted a busker warbling some “Kumbaya” song behind a cardboard sign he couldn’t read from his vantage point. The music was shit, but something about the message must have been magic, because a mass of people huddled around the open guitar case.
They were spread out across the platform. No gaps that he could see.
She was still gaining on him.
He heard the distant clack of a train. Saw lights coming on the left. A local train north.
One pivot around the crowd and he’d be fine. He’d keep running until the train stopped. Hop on board at the last second. Wave goodbye to all this once the doors closed behind him.
Almost over.
He dodged to the left, turning sideways to scoot around a pillar.
He saw a lady’s long black hair swing like a shampoo ad. He heard himself say “sorry” on impulse as he felt the heavy thud against his right hip. As he fell backward, he saw the object that had bumped him—the brunette’s hot-pink duffel bag—followed by the message on the busker’s cardboard sign (THE PREZ AIN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO NEEDS CHANGE), followed by a sea of shocked faces as his body hit the tracks.
It was funny what he thought of in the few seconds that passed as he lay there. His right arm. Would his right arm be okay? As the sound of the train grew louder, he wondered whether his mother would find out why he’d been in the Times Square transit station after school instead of behind a cash register at Mr. Robinson’s paint store.
Reflexes kicked in. More than reflex: a deep desire to live. Without any conscious thought, he pressed himself flat between the tracks. More screaming.
He closed his eyes, hoping he wouldn’t feel the impact.
And then he felt something he hadn’t expected: his body being lifted from the ground. He opened his eyes but saw only white. Was this heaven?
The plane of white moved, making way for the scene of the subway platform again. People staring. Screaming. Asking if he was okay.
He looked toward the blurred, fading plane of white. It was her sweater, topped by the strawberry-blond ponytail, still tightly in place. The forearms were pumping again as she took the stairs two at a time, no pause in sight.
She held her recovered iPhone in her hand.
And Nicky?
Nicky was going to live.
CHAPTER TWO
Sitting in a borrowed Chevy Malibu outside Medgar Evers High School, McKenna Jordan thought that kids sure had changed in twenty years. Twenty-five, actually, she realized, since she was their age. How was that possible?
The last bell had sounded only three minutes earlier, and the street in front of the block-long brick building was filled with boys in low-slung pants and ball caps and girls in baby tees and skinny jeans. Some lit cigarettes before hitting the bottom step of the school entrance. Public displays of affection ran rampant—full-on make-out sessions, complete with roaming hands. Even with her car windows up, McKenna had overheard just about every obscenity with which she was familiar, plus a couple of new ones. (At least when one girl called another a “dick trap,” McKenna assumed that wasn’t a good thing.)
It wasn’t as if McKenna and her friends had been angels: smoking, drinking, cussing, even a few teen pregnancies at the school, as she recalled. But at 3:03 P.M.? Right outside the school building? In open view of parents, teachers, and administrators? No way. They’d been too afraid of the consequences.
Maybe the kids hadn’t changed after all. Maybe it was the adults who were different.
She checked her phone again for messages. Nothing. McKenna hated waiting for the cooperation of fickle sources. She owed the magazine an article for the next edition. One possibility involved the kid she was here to see at the high school. The other was about Judge Frederick Knight, a notoriously offensive judge who should have been thrown from the bench years before. Both stories needed significant work before she could go to print—work that required information from people whose conduct she couldn’t control. That saying about letting go of the things you couldn’t control? Not McKenna’s motto.
She jerked at the sound of knuckles rapping against the glass of the passenger-side window. She clicked the doors unlocked, and Dana Frazier hopped into the seat next to her. The dark colorful ink that spiraled up her left arm was in stark contrast to the rest of her appearance. Standing barely five feet tall with a blond pixie haircut, Dana was one of those people who looked like she might fit in your pocket. She was so compact that her tiny torso was dwarfed by the enormous Canon hanging from her neck.
McKenna reached out and flicked the camera strap. “You had a two-thousand-dollar camera bouncing around you on the F train? Haven’t you heard? Apparently people actually steal things on the New York City subway.”
Dana flexed her tattooed arm. “I’ve got mad self-defense skills.”
McKenna handed her the car keys. “You mind waiting here after the pictures? I want to talk to the kid alone before we go.”
“No problem.”
When McKenna had called Dana to ask if she could snap some photos down in Fort Greene, the photographer had said she was taking shots of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, hanging out in the Financial District months after the national attention had passed. McKenna had offered a ride in one of the magazine’s fleet cars, but Dana declined, most likely because she had been somewhere else entirely, probably working on the avant-garde photographs she took on the side.
Good for Dana, McKenna thought.
“Speaking of theft,” Dana said, holding up the iPad that McKenna had left on the car dash. “I’m putting this under the seat. These ruffians will grab anything that’s not bolted down.”
The high school didn’t have its own baseball field. McKenna and Dana found the team practicing on a squa
re of concrete that served the triple function of baseball diamond, basketball court, and playground to the neighboring grade school.
A well-built man with a shaved head and a golf shirt stretched tight around his biceps watched his suited-up team jog laps around the bases. Once the two women hit his periphery, he rotated toward them, hands never leaving his hips.
McKenna handled the introductions. “Hi there. I’m McKenna Jordan, a writer for NYC magazine. This is Dana Frazier. We were hoping to get a word with one of your players, Nicky Cervantes.”
The coach sighed. “Been doing everything I can to make that boy famous for his right arm. Now he’s the klutz who tripped onto the subway tracks and had to be saved by a woman.”
McKenna threw Dana a warning glance. They were here to make friends, not change gender attitudes.
“Mind if we pull him away for a few minutes?” McKenna asked. “We’ll be quick. Who knows, maybe all the attention will help him in the draft come June.”
The coach bothered to look at McKenna instead of his team. He smiled beneath the bill of his blue Mets cap. “You know anything about Major League Baseball?”