If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense Page 12

  Everything Patrick said made sense. As she watched him finish his salad, she made a point of nibbling some bread, just to prove she could.

  Patrick was already removing his coat in the elevator.

  “A strip tease? All for me?” She feigned a seductive tone.

  “Nothing sexy about it. I’m exhausted. And I need to drop a—”

  She held up her palm. “No. Don’t even say it.” She was well aware of his many sayings for what it was he needed to do in the privacy of their home, and she didn’t try to hide her disgust. When they first got together, she was mortified by Patrick’s comfort with physiological realities. Peeing with the bathroom door open. Smelling his underarms on a hot day. Farting, no question. When she found him fanning what he called his “undercarriage” in front of her air-conditioning unit after a bicycle ride, she finally had to say something. “How in the world do you expect someone to put up with this? Where’s the romance? The mystery? You mean to tell me you’d still find me attractive if you walked in here to find me doing something like that?”

  “I don’t believe in being anything but myself. Besides, I like the idea of walking in to find you doing all sorts of things you never planned on anyone seeing.” It was a good line, and it had worked. For a while. For a few years, she had found his frankness charming. Now she was rolling her eyes.

  As previously announced, Patrick was tired. He crashed as soon as they hit the bed. But she was high from running around all night. She was also more than a little buzzed from her martini and the bottomless glass of wine that had accompanied her pasta.

  Patrick reached for her as she slipped out of bed. “Don’t. You promised.”

  She hadn’t promised, but it wasn’t Susan’s case that she wanted to work on. Her book proposal wasn’t getting anywhere. Maybe if she made some progress on it, her thinking would be clearer. She didn’t bother turning on the living room lights as she flipped open her laptop. She worked best this way. She’d written at least half of her novel while drunk between bouts of crying on the sofa, just her and the dim illumination of her computer screen.

  She reread what she had written the previous day. It was the gun.

  No shit, it was the gun. She had been so damn proud of her investigative skills for tracing that stupid gun. The serial number. The hit in the ATF database. Hell, even when she realized the eleven-year-old connection between Scott Macklin and the gun, she hated the implications but felt certain she had uncovered a truth that would have remained buried without her industriousness.

  Only problem was, she was wrong. How in the world had she been wrong?

  Her fingers flew above the keyboard as she recalled the story of that damn gun.

  The serial number was a match. The Glock next to Marcus Jones’s body had been seized by the NYPD eleven years earlier and scheduled for destruction as part of the city’s Safe Streets program. Only four of the NYPD’s 34,800 police officers had been assigned to that year’s gun destruction project. And one of them was Scott Macklin.

  Coincidence? Impossible.

  I brought the information to my supervisor, Will Getty. We had to take the evidence to the grand jury. It was a no-brainer.

  But the funny thing about odds is that even if it’s one in a million, there is a distinctive one, apart from the 999,999 others. There’s always an exception. Some poor schmuck golfer gets struck by lightning in his backswing. A lucky waitress actually wins the Powerball. And eleven years after Scott Macklin worked the Safe Streets gun destruction program, he looked down the barrel of one of those guns that was supposed to have been liquefied.

  For Macklin, the odds of being one of the cops who had unmonitored access to the guns scheduled for destruction in 1992 weren’t one in a million. They were four in 34,800. Macklin was one of the four. That left three others.

  I never stopped to think about the other three. Will Getty did.

  One of the other cops on gun-smelting duty in 1992 was Don Whitman. By the time Macklin shot Marcus Jones, Whitman was already serving six to eight for selling tips, favors, and other forms of support to the Crips in their effort to dominate the Latin Kings in a deadly turf war during the late 1990s.

  A cop on a gang payroll had been given access to truckloads of weapons slated for destruction. That at least one went missing no longer seemed shocking. It was inevitable. From a dirty cop to the Crips to the streets to Jones’s hands over a decade later.

  When Will Getty finally found James Low—the kid in the neighborhood who admitted selling the gun to Marcus—the truth became clear: I had accused a cop of murder and sent the city into race-based tensions and protests, all over a coincidence.

  McKenna always wondered what would have happened if she’d stopped to think about the other three cops who’d had access to that gun. She could have been the one to prove that Marcus Jones had carried that Glock to the docks that night. She could have cleared Macklin of any suspicion in front of the grand jury, instead of running to a reporter with specious claims.

  Those two weeks—after she’d gone to Getty and before she’d gone to Bob Vance—had been wasted. Instead of checking out the other Safe Streets officers, or at least pushing Getty to update her, she had treated his silence as conspiratorial. She had assumed that he was burying the evidence.

  By then McKenna had known Patrick for three months. She considered asking his advice before going to the press, but he had worries of his own. It had been six months since a banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier declared mission accomplished, but Saddam Hussein hadn’t been captured, and a suicide bomber had attacked the UN headquarters in Iraq. There were rumors that the army—struggling to fight two wars in the Middle East—was pulling retired officers back into active duty. McKenna’s problems had seemed minor in comparison.

  She pulled her thoughts back to the book proposal. She knew the facts cold. She suspected that she always would. But this book was supposed to be more than facts. It was supposed to be the human story behind the events. She needed to focus on the people.

  While writing her novel, she’d thought of the characters as living, breathing, sentient beings and had let them drive the narrative. If she were going to write a book about the Marcus Jones shooting and its aftermath, she would be a character, though not the only one. Perhaps not even the main character.

  She needed to write about Marcus, initially labeled a thug based on his criminal history but who had been known in his neighborhood as Patches—the sweet but strange boy whose face was spotted from a skin condition called vitiligo. She needed to write about Marcus’s mother, who once chased members of the 137th Street Crew down Madison with a broom when she found out they were pressuring thirteen-year-old Marcus to join their gang. McKenna needed to write about Will Getty, of whom she’d assumed the worst but who was simply being cautious with the investigation of a politically sensitive case.

  And she needed to write about the man she had accused of perjury and murder. She pictured Scott Macklin’s face and began to type.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I never wanted to be the prosecutor who brought down a cop. If anything, I needed Scott Macklin to be vindicated. I became a prosecutor because I believed in a firm line between right and wrong. I wanted to help crime victims. I wanted to punish bad people who did bad things. But a prosecutor is only a lawyer. Though I had the legal knowledge and training to help the truth navigate its way through the justice system, every single one of my cases relied on police officers to educate me about the truth. They were the ones who questioned witnesses, interrogated suspects, and gathered physical evidence. If I couldn’t trust them, my job meant nothing.

  And this wasn’t just any cop. It was Scott Macklin. He was a member of the Drug Enforcement Task Force of the Narcotics Division when I was trying drug cases. That meant I saw him more than other cops. He’d been in the grand jury room with me at least thirty times, testified in five of my tri
als, and come to my office for search warrants and legal advice dozens of times. And it wasn’t only about the work with him. He perused the frames on my office walls—the college and law school degrees, the certificate commemorating my time as a clerk for a federal judge, the absence of any personal photographs. One day he asked if I was married, quickly apologizing if he was being inappropriate. I assured him it was fine, but no, I wasn’t married. He told me that love had changed his life. It became a running joke. Whenever he was at the courthouse, he’d pass my office door: “You’re. Still. Here. You need to leave this office if you’re going to find love.”

  He talked to anyone who would listen, including me, about his gorgeous wife, Josefina, and his new stepson, Thomas. Then one day he came to my office to tell me he was moving out of Narco into a new federal-state team formed through Homeland Security. He might not be around the drug unit so much.

  I made some lame joke about him movin’ on up to a badass Homeland Security gig with the feds. Then he abruptly changed the topic. He asked me, “speaking of the federal government,” if I had learned anything about immigration law during my judicial clerkship. When I said that I hadn’t but had taken a course in law school, he closed my office door and told me that he was worried about some “complications” with Josefina’s legal status inside the country. Complications. I remember that word in particular because his voice broke when he said it. Her young son was at risk of being deported. He looked away from me, trying to regain his composure, but his emotions failed him. He shook his head in frustration and wiped away the tears starting to pool in the corners of his eyes. I offered him a Kleenex from my purse. I also wrote down the name and number of an immigration lawyer I knew from school.

  Neither of us ever spoke of that day again, not even after I accused him of lying about Marcus Jones.

  He trusted me. He talked to me like a friend, and he trusted me. I needed to believe cops, but I really needed to believe this one.

  Dammit. Now she was the one wiping away a tear. That moment in her office had gotten to her. Her memory of the details was fuzzy at best—something about Josefina entering the United States lawfully but her son being brought into the country later—but she remembered Macklin breaking down. He didn’t want to lose the family he’d only recently found. He didn’t want Josefina to get in trouble. He made too much money to qualify for free legal aid and not enough to retain a private lawyer.

  She’d never seen a man cry, let alone a man like Macklin. He was at least fifteen years older than she was. Six-one, probably 220, he had a square head and thick hands like two baseball gloves. She had wondered whether he might resent her later for witnessing him in that state. She felt like she had emasculated him in some way. That night after work, she had talked to Susan about it, thinking that she must have seen men in vulnerable moments during her time in the army.

  Susan had told her that men moved past their emotions. Though McKenna was sitting in the bar that night, reliving and questioning every second of that brief office interaction, Macklin was a man, and men, Susan explained, didn’t pore over every millisecond of every human encounter. Just then McKenna’s cell phone had rung—an incoming call from a lawyer she had just started seeing. When she rejected the call, Susan reiterated her point: “See now? If the tables were turned, and you had been the one calling him, you’d spend the rest of the night wondering why he didn’t pick up, what he was doing, and what you’d done wrong. A man won’t do that, not even a wussy man like Nature Boy. Nature Boy will just hang up and assume you’ll call him back later. We could stand to learn a few things from men.”

  Nature Boy. Susan never seemed to approve of any of McKenna’s potential suitors—except Patrick, of course. She called poor Jason Eberly “Nature Boy” because he was a lawyer for an environmental nonprofit. A noble choice by any measure, but the nickname did manage to sum up Jason’s penchant for reminding everyone that he was more benevolent than they. He’d openly note that it was only through a loan forgiveness program that he was able to work for a nonprofit. When private lawyer friends would complain about an unreasonable client or nightmare partner, he’d say things like “That’s why I’m glad I work for a cause.” McKenna had nothing against his chosen cause, but Susan was right: Jason reeked of do-gooder-ness.

  Jason. Benevolent, noble, earth-loving Nature Boy. If he was still working for environmental causes, he might know something about the organization whose button had been on the subway woman’s backpack.

  She opened Google and searched for Jason Eberly. Up popped a slew of information about an up-and-coming teen singer. Who knew? She tried again, searching for “Jason Eberly attorney.” She found a hit at the website for the law firm of Walker Richardson & Jones. It was one of the ten largest firms in the country.

  She clicked on the link. Gone were goatee and shaggy hair. From the looks of his closely shorn head, he’d lost most of his hair entirely. According to the bio, he was a new partner at the firm and had counseled clients on hundreds of transactions and litigation matters across all industries, nationally and globally, including chemical refining, oil and gas, mining, heavy manufacturing, and toxic torts. So much for saving the planet.

  She jumped at the feeling of a hand on her shoulder.

  “Patrick. Sorry, you scared me. Did I wake you?”

  “My alarm went off. You’ve been up all night?”

  She hadn’t noticed the sunlight beginning to make its way into the living room. “I was writing.”

  “Looks to me like you’re surfing the Internet. Who’s Jason Eberly?”

  “A lawyer I used to—”

  “Oh, wait. That’s the guy you were dating when we first met, right?”

  She knew how it looked. How many stories had she heard about extramarital affairs that began with an innocent “I wonder whatever happened to so-and-so” Google search? First comes Facebook, then comes Betrayal.

  But her husband’s expression wasn’t jealous. He looked tired. And worried. And at least a little angry. He was looking at her and remembering all those nights when she drank too much, ate too little, and couldn’t sleep. She didn’t want him to think she was going back into the dark place that had kept them apart for so long.

  “I really was working on the proposal. Then I realized I need to produce something for the magazine. I thought I could do a story about these people who are trying to reduce their carbon footprints to zero. One guy even stopped using toilet paper for a year. I thought Jason might know something about the movement. Turns out he’s gone to the dark side.” She rotated the laptop in his direction, making clear she had nothing to hide.

  He took a quick look at the lawyer’s head shot. “Guess I don’t have anything to worry about there.”

  “Never,” she said, arching her neck back and giving him a soft peck on his navel.

  “Cold face,” he said, giving her hair a quick stroke. “I need to get to the museum a little early today. The queen of Jordan is supposed to be in. Can you grab a little more sleep before work?”

  She nodded. She was tired, and the reception desk at Walker Richardson & Jones wouldn’t pick up until nine.

  “You’ll remember to call Adam Bayne today?” she asked. “See if he still has Susan’s father’s stuff?”

  “I really wish you’d rethink this. Last night it was Gretchen on Long Island, then the old man’s nurse. Look at you. You’re already exhausted. Just give it a rest, okay?”

  “I just want to see if Adam has any of her things. If there’s nothing there, I’ll let it lie.” At least for a while, she told herself.

  He assured her he would make the call, but she could tell he wasn’t happy about it. She climbed back into bed, working her way into the warmth Patrick had left under the blankets.

  When Patrick kissed her on the cheek before he left, his lips felt soft and he smelled like toothpaste. She kept her eyes closed, pretending to have found slee
p.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The slam of Scanlin’s coffee mug against his desk was harder and louder than he’d intended. One desk over, Ricky Munson—always trying to earn a reputation as the squad’s funny boy—couldn’t resist a comment. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop the clock. Haven’t you heard that it’s ‘be kind to dishes’ day?”

  There was a reason Munson hadn’t yet achieved squad-comedian status.

  Scanlin had slammed the mug for a reason, and the reason was that people were stupid. They were stupid, and they were assholes. Sometimes they were both. He’d just gotten off the phone with some finance guy whose in-home chef was found dead in the family townhouse the previous day. Odds of homicide were low, but thanks to an ambiguous bump on the woman’s head, Scanlin had to wait for official word from the medical examiner before releasing the crime scene.

  It had been under twenty-four hours since the woman’s body had been wheeled away—a woman who’d cooked for this d-bag’s family for sixteen years. And the man wasn’t even in the city. He was calling from East Hampton, natch.

  Didn’t matter. He insisted on a guarantee that his caterers would have access to the kitchen the following weekend. The best part was when he tried to defend himself against Scanlin’s suggestion that his priorities might be a bit off. “I’ll have you know we treated Rosalyn as family, Detective. She even stayed overnight in the pool house when she cooked for us in the summer.”

  When Scanlin slammed the cup on his desk, maybe he was picturing the guy’s skull.

  Now he welcomed the distraction of the delivery he had just received from the Records Department. He had reached out to Jared Klein, Susan’s former coworker who had mentioned her late-night attempt to turn work into pleasure. Klein remembered little about the night beyond what he’d said during the original investigation, but after some pressure, he repeated his suspicion that he had seen an entirely different side to Susan’s personality. “She was always such a—” He stopped himself from using the word he was undoubtedly thinking. “She was, you know, hard. Tough. Obviously came from a man’s world. She was fun, always trying to fit in, not like a feminazi or anything. But not a seductress. More like a raunchy kid sister. That night? God. I admit I still think about it sometimes.”