If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense Page 16

  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?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  McKenna 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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  McKenna was frozen in the hallway, the apartment key hovering one inch from the lock.

  She had to get out of here. She took the stairs one floor down, to be sure Patrick wouldn’t hear the elevator ding on their floor, and then she headed straight to the Union Square subway station to lose herself in the nearest crowd available.

  I have it under control. Problem solved.

  There was only one person who could have been on the other end of that phone call. Those paranoid voices were making more sense.

  I have it under control.

  She made her way into a pack of subway commuters standing just inside the turnstiles to watch a guy playing an electric violin on the makeshift staging area at the southwest corner of the station. McKenna had seen the performer before. He favored recognizable rock anthems, punctuating the high notes with eccentric moves like side squats and karate kicks. She knew he’d draw a large enough crowd to keep her concealed. She also knew she could get a phone signal this close to the station entrance.

  She checked Twitter. Her blasts were working. The magazine had deleted her posts from its official feed, but there had to be nearly a hundred retweets already. Those people’s friends would continue the pattern, and then theirs, and so on. She also had eight hundred new followers to her personal account. If the trend continued, she’d have a healthy platform to communicate directly to the public as more information came in.

  She checked her e-mail next, in case any tips had come in. There was a message from Detective Forbus. The attachment was a booking photo for Pamela Morris from a prostitution arrest in 1998. Morris would have been twenty-four at the time but looked at least thirty. Three inches of roots revealed her to be a natural brunette, but the rest of her hair was bleached and processed to the texture of straw. Her face was simultaneously drawn and sagging. Although she’d clearly tried to put on a tough face for the camera, black smears around her red eyes revealed that she’d been crying. It looked like she was recovering from a fat lip.

  That was fifteen years ago. No arrests since, but that morning an FBI agent had mentioned her name in the context of a weapons explosion at the suspected site of domestic terrorists. McKenna reminded herself that she had no way of knowing whether this Pamela Morris was the same Pamela Morris.

  This particular Pamela Morris had been—in Forbus’s words—keeping a low profile. Plus, Mercado had said that the college student who owned the house had been shacking up with a group of “older” P3s, and this Pamela Morris was closer to Greg Larson’s age than to a college student’s.

  McKenna’s cell phone rang. It was the home number. She almost answered it. Maybe Patrick would have an explanation.

  But she knew what she’d heard. And now she was hearing those voices in her head again. The picture of him with Susan. All his attempts to talk her out of looking into her disappearance. The afternoon when he left work early but denied it later. The worst-case scenarios.

  She waited for the voice-mail alert to flash on her phone and then checked the message. “Hey, babe. I got home as fast as I could, but now you’re not here. Let me know where you are, okay? We’ll figure this out. Try not to worry.”

  How could his voice sound so different than it had a few minutes earlier? When she’d heard him inside their apartment, his voice had been crisp. Stern. The way people sounded when they were alarmed or angry or frantic but struggling to maintain control. His military voice.

  And now? When he called her? Hey, babe. Like, Hey, let’s go grab some enchiladas and margaritas and make everything better. Even the tone of his voice was a lie.

  She thought about calling Adam Bayne. He did private security. He had offered to help.

  But he already thought she was nuts for asking about Patrick’s past with Susan. If she started talking about erased Skybox accounts and forged e-mails from her iPad, he’d think she was certifiable. And he’d known Patrick a hell of a lot longer than he’d known her.

  She was on her own.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The address McKenna had gotten from Detective Forbus for Pamela Morris’s mother turned out to be a brick duplex south of downtown Jersey City. Two symmetrical halves. Fifty-fifty odds.

  The east side of the porch was adorned with an array of well-maintained potted plants. A plaster frog sat next to a teak rocking chair. The welcome mat read, HI. I’M MAT. The west side of the porch was . . . a porch.

  McKenna was looking for the mother of a middle-aged former prostitute. She played the odds and rang the west bell.

  The woman who came to the door fit the role. Probably only in her mid-sixties, but hard years. She wore sweatpants and a New York Jets T-shirt and smelled like an ashtray. Despite the age difference, she bore a strong resemblance to Pamela Morris’s booking photograph. Pale eyes and thick eyelids. Wide bridge of the nose.

  The look she gave McKenna made her feel like she was supposed to give the woman something.

  “I’m looking for Loretta Morris,” McKenna said.

  “You can stop looking, because I’m right here.”

  “My name is McKenna Jordan. I’m trying to find an old friend of mine, and I think she might be connected to your daughter, Pamela. I’m a
fraid it’s a bit of a long story, ma’am.”

  “I’ve got nothing if not time, and you look harmless enough.” She stepped aside to usher McKenna in.

  The house was dated and cluttered but otherwise well maintained. Linoleum entranceway. Fake brick fireplace. Brown carpet in the living room. Probably typical of the homes built in the neighborhood in the 1970s.

  Loretta let out a small groan as she lowered herself to the sofa. McKenna took a seat next to her. “Is there any way I can get in touch with your daughter? That might be the easiest way to find my friend.”

  “Is your friend in Pamela’s church?”

  McKenna couldn’t imagine trying to explain: Well, you see, I think I saw my long-lost friend, but the only lead I have is a button for a batshit-crazy environmental group that blew up its own house this morning. And someone named Pamela Morris—who may or may not be the same Pamela Morris as your daughter—had something to do with that bombing. But now the house is blown to bits, and the people inside—including maybe your daughter and maybe my friend—are now pink vapor.

  Instead, she lied. “My friend is missing, and I’m trying to find her. She told me she was doing some kind of work with a woman named Pamela Morris. It might not be your daughter, but I figured if I find every Pamela Morris in the area, I’ll eventually find the one who knew my friend.”

  “Sounds sensible enough, but my Pamela’s not in the area.”

  “Is that right?” Her one lead was fizzling out.

  “She travels. Found herself a nice man some years ago. He’s a preacher. They’re sort of like missionaries, I guess—going around the country, converting people or whatever. I was never much for religion, but I guess it works for them.”

  If Pamela were tied up with the head of the P3s, she could have sugarcoated it for her mother. In the fictional version of Pamela’s life, the lead organizer for an ecoterrorist group became a preacher. Attacks on research laboratories and oil refineries became missionary work. Protests became proselytizing. “Do you know where she is now? It would be helpful to contact her.”