If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The man behind the reception desk at the Four Seasons was oily. Not literally. He wasn’t shiny or glistening or greasy. But the way he peered out and up beneath thick black eyelashes, not even bothering to lift his chin despite speaking to a man six inches taller than he; the way he smiled without parting his lips; the way his clenched jaw failed to hide the grinding of teeth behind the forced smile—all of it reeked of unctuousness.

  “No reservation, sir?”

  “I’m afraid not. Thought I’d be back on the train to New Canaan tonight—deal sealed—but I guess the lawyers had other plans. Guess that’s what happens when you let these firms bill you by the hour. How can you tell when an attorney’s lying? His lips are moving.” He dropped an American Express card on the counter. The name read Michael Carter. That would be his name for the foreseeable future. Until he needed to be someone else. “I’ll take whatever room you have available. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?”

  There was that sealed-lip smile again, as if the request didn’t bother him a bit. The clench in the jaw told a different story while he tap-tap-tapped away at his merry keyboard.

  “Our standard rooms are all sold out tonight, sir. We do have a city-view executive suite. This would be your rate, exclusive of taxes, of course.”

  The clerk pushed a piece of paper discreetly across the counter: $995 per night. Exclusive of taxes. Of course.

  Carter nodded his approval and watched the black card swish through the reader. Beneath the name Michael Carter was the name of a company: Acumen Inc. The company was real, incorporated as a shell, permitting him to funnel untraceable money through a series of offshore accounts. Panama was popular these days.

  “How many keys, sir?”

  “Just the one, please.” One was the right answer for a businessman unexpectedly stuck in the city for an evening. It struck Carter that two was probably the more typical request, given the liaisons he’d observed so many times in high-end hotel lounges. But a request for two keys by a solo traveler was interesting. It provoked curiosity. Carter made a very nice living—with unplanned and unexplained expenses part of the package—by being completely, entirely, and utterly uninteresting and unprovocative.

  He returned the clerk’s smile while accepting the room key. Throughout the entire transaction, Carter remained angled away from the security camera that hung on the wall behind and to the right of reception. Now he pivoted to his left, depriving the lens of any look at his face.

  Not that it mattered. Just habit.

  His fib to the reception clerk hadn’t been too far from the truth. He was, in a sense, a businessman with an unexpectedly long detour in New York City.

  Compared to the work that had gotten him here, Carter’s current position was practically a desk job. His job was to watch. To monitor. To stand to the side and make sure there were no problems. He thought of himself as an auditor hired by people who didn’t want the audits discovered.

  He had mastered the language used to describe his line of work. People paid him a lot of money as a precaution. For peace of mind. For comfort. They paid Carter to watch for red flags. Alarms. People used these terms to describe what they believed to be a feeling of gut instinct. Carter knew there was no such thing. Facts raised flags. Events sounded alarms. Carter knew how to articulate the subtle culmination of facts and events that caused lesser people to experience an inexplicable “feeling.”

  Usually he could tell when a target was going to be a problem. Living a life filled with secrets required highly choreographed management of both time and physical location. It meant sneaking away for a supposed bathroom break but placing a brief phone call from the men’s room. It meant telling your coworkers you had a headache and needed to turn in early, then driving to a rest stop thirty miles out of town for a clandestine handoff of a package.

  He had no problems locating the subject of the audit, thanks to the GPS tracker that she didn’t know she was carrying. Carter had been hired because the GPS tracker had traced the woman to other parts of the New York metropolitan area. Carter’s boss wanted a better idea of what those side trips entailed.

  The first two days had been like punching a clock. No gut feelings. More important, no facts to raise red flags or alarms. Just a lot of time out in Suffolk County, where she was supposed to be.

  On the third day of observation, she hopped on an Amtrak to Penn Station. He followed. She didn’t seem to notice.

  But he noticed her. He noticed that she was using a second phone. Not the one with the GPS tracker in it. A different one.

  She’d been typing away on it when that boy had grabbed it from her hands. And then she was gone, barely making it past the subway doors before they slammed shut, sealing him inside that crowded tube. Unknowing. Without eyes or ears. Utterly useless for a moment.

  He had hopped off at the next stop, Herald Square, then headed north to Times Square. Clipping through the station, he could overhear the leftover rumblings of commotion. Did you hear? Some guy fell on the tracks! Someone saved him. It hadn’t taken him long to find the two EMTs at the foot of the platform stairs, one flashing a penlight in the kid’s stunned eyes.

  The kid was fine. The woman he had robbed was gone.

  Carter called his boss from aboveground.

  Yesterday morning the papers had called the woman the 1-train heroine—an unidentified mystery woman. She had Carter to thank for her continued anonymity. It had taken some persuasion, backed by cash, for Carter to render the MTA’s security footage unavailable. What seemed like a lot of dough to an MTA technician was chump change to the kind of people who hired Carter.

  He knew what the mystery woman called herself. And where she was supposed to be. He did not know why she had come to New York City or why she had been so desperate to recover her second telephone. But he had a very strong, and very bad, feeling.

  And if Carter had learned anything in his forty-two years, it was never to accept the unknown.

  CHAPTER NINE

  McKenna went to the office early to sneak in some work on her book proposal. As much as she had been telling Dana and Bob Vance and the agent and the editor that she was on the fence, she was beginning to think of it as her book.

  Vance’s advice the previous day had gotten to her. This could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a chance to make something of her time at the DA’s office. A chance to write something other than marshmallowy fluffs of city gossip. She had to admit, she’d felt good writing those few pages the previous day, even though she had no idea what role they’d play in the end product. Her plan was to jot down a few more sample scenes here and there. Just enough to figure out whether she wanted to go all in.

  She had written a book before. She was a published novelist, after all. But that was different. She’d started writing her novel after she was forced to leave the district attorney’s office. She had taken two years off to write it, and she hadn’t even begun to try selling it until it was completely finished.

  According to the agent, the nonfiction book that she couldn’t bring herself to call a memoir could be sold off of a proposal. It should have a “jazzy”—she hated that word—overview, a table of contents, and a summary of each chapter.

  She had no idea how to outline the events that had led to the end of her legal career. So far, she had been working on the overview, but instead of jazz, it was turning into cacophony.

  It was the gun. Not the gun itself—not at first—but Tasha Jones’s insistence that her son, Marcus, didn’t carry one. She never vouched for Marcus’s character. Neither did I, not once. The case was never a matter of character. Marcus Jones was only nineteen years old, but he had eleven juvie interactions with law enforcement and was out on bail pending felony theft charges when a bullet from Officer Scott Macklin’s gun killed him.

  “My boy stole,” Tasha told me when she cornered me on the courtroom sta
ircase. “Always did and always would. The schools said his IQ was only seventy-eight, but he knew robbery was harder time than theft, and armed robbery, more trouble still. He didn’t have no gun. He didn’t have no gun, because he never wanted to be in a position to be pointing one, let alone at the po-lice. He went to the docks that night to meet his girlfriend. What he need a gun for?”

  Police never found any evidence of a girl. They did, however, find eighty bucks in Marcus’s front pocket, despite the fact that the kid had no lawful means of income. I truly believed I would find evidence connecting Marcus to that gun.

  I never thought of myself as the most talented trial attorney in the office. It always seemed to be the lawyers from the local schools who were labeled real naturals or geniuses in the courtroom. But I was a hard worker. I was thorough.

  And so I traced the gun, hoping (and expecting) to prove Marcus’s mother wrong. Hoping (and expecting) to strengthen Macklin’s claim of self-defense. Hoping (and expecting) to make the grand jury’s job that much easier.

  But the gun had another story to tell.

  This wasn’t working. McKenna was supposed to write about the case from her own perspective. Her excitement as a relatively junior lawyer to be working on her first homicide—and an officer-involved shooting, at that. Her loyalty to the officer involved: Scott Macklin. The stress of being in the middle of a news story that had taken on unmistakable racial tones. The gradual onset of doubts about his side of the story. Her decision to come forward.

  And her utter shock when that decision nearly tore the city apart.

  How could she do that in a synopsis? She could never pull it off.

  She closed the file. The truth was, she couldn’t look back on that time in her life without thinking about Susan. And any thought of Susan pulled her back to the infuriating video. She opened the video again and hit play.

  Bob Vance gave a cursory tap on her office door before entering. “Four thousand words. You promised yesterday. Whatcha got for me?”

  “I’m going with Judge Knight.”

  “He’s the fatty, right?”

  “More important, he’s lazy, offensive, and—according to the smoking-gun evidence I now have—disdainful of the public he’s supposed to serve.”

  She handed him printouts of the two e-mails she had received the previous day. “Frederick Knight has been on the bench for five years. From the beginning, there were questions about his intellectual heft—no pun intended. Last week, I got an anonymous call from a woman claiming to have been a juror in one of his recent cases. She said he was rolling his eyes and cutting off witnesses. He’d go off-record, but she heard him tell a domestic-violence victim that she was too attractive to get beaten. And he spent most of the trial fiddling with his phone and laptop. I’ve heard these kinds of things about him before, so I decided to put out some feelers at the courthouse to see if anyone might come forward.”

  “And?”

  “Those appeared in my in-box yesterday.”

  The messages were short but damning. One, sent by Knight three days earlier: “Can’t stand these people. Dirtbags hurting dirtbags. Lock them all in a cage together and give them bats and chain saws. The world would be better off.” And the other, sent just yesterday morning: “Going out on a ledge here because I feel like I’m on a ledge. You guys have space for special counsel? I go on civil rotation in two weeks and can throw your firm some bones until the transition’s official. I’m serious: I can’t take this anymore.”

  “Can this be four thousand words?” Vance asked.

  “No question. Knight came to the bench after practicing only two years as a law firm associate and then serving for nine years as the judicial clerk to Chief Judge Alan Silver. Clerks are supposed to be clerks, but it’s become common practice for judges to grease the wheels for lower-level judicial appointments as a reward for their most loyal clerks. Knight was on the criminal court for two years and then got bumped up to felonies. I can have a section about other clerks who found their way to the bench with questionable credentials. I’ve got a pattern of Knight always siding with the state against criminal defendants, sexist comments—even on the record—and resisting the appointment of defense counsel to the indigent. These e-mail messages would be the nail in the coffin.”

  Though the smoking-gun e-mails would be the bait to sell magazines, the story was substantive. It was the kind of thing she’d hoped to do full-time when she’d accepted the job.

  “They’re legit?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I knew it would be hard getting anyone to go on record about a sitting judge, so I reached out to a network of potential sources and promised anonymity. Unfortunately, instead of trusting me to protect their identity, someone opened a free e-mail account and sent these to me. They deleted the address information of the recipients, so I can’t look there for confirmation.”

  “Stands to reason that whoever sent you these was probably the original recipient, right?”

  “It could be one of his clerks or his secretary. Or, because he was stupid enough to use his public e-mail account, a public employee with auditing abilities could have lawfully obtained access. Or someone could have hacked in.”

  “I get the point. You’re making me nervous.”

  “I’m trying to nail it down. I confirmed through the court system’s directory that the e-mail address listed on the two messages is in fact Judge Knight’s. I did some digging, and three days ago, when the ‘dirtbags hurting dirtbags’ comment was sent, Knight was hearing a bench trial of a shooting arising from a drug deal gone bad. I got the attorneys on both sides to confirm that Knight pressured the prosecutor to come up with a plea because it was a—quote—‘who cares’ case. I also confirmed that Knight is indeed scheduled to start hearing civil cases in two weeks, where he’d be in a position to help big-firm lawyers.”

  Vance smiled. “Jeez, Jordan. It’s like you’re a real journalist or something. The messages are self-authenticating when you put them in that context.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. I figured I had enough to call Knight. All he gave me was a ‘No comment.’ ”

  “All right, then. Let’s run with it.”

  She was relieved when Vance left without further mention of the subway video.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When McKenna was in the zone, she could write almost as quickly as she could talk. Two hours after getting the go-ahead from Vance, she had transformed the notes she’d been keeping on Judge Knight into a full-length article. Although block quotes from the e-mail messages in 28-size font would be the red meat to pull in readers ravenous for easily digestible scandal, she had used Knight as a case study to delve into the cronyism that perverted the court system and a culture in which lawyers were too afraid of retaliation to blow the whistle on bad judges.

  She hit the submit key on the article. The modern publishing process moved so rapidly that the article would be online by afternoon.

  She turned her attention back to the video. She had seen it so many times, she knew where to stop for any single moment that interested her, but she was still at a loss as to how to confirm that the woman was Susan Hauptmann.

  Her eyes were beginning to cross from squinting at the screen, as if that could make the images any clearer. This time, when she hit pause, it wasn’t to study the mysterious woman’s blurry face. McKenna was focused on the very end of the video, pausing as Nicky’s rescuer sprinted up the stairs.

  There was something attached to the woman’s backpack. A button. Round. About four inches wide. Some design on it, maybe a few letters at the bottom.

  She pulled out her cell and sent a text message to Dana.

  Before I give up on that video from yesterday: Looks like there’s a button pinned to Superwoman’s backpack. Can you try to get a better look?

  The phone pinged a few short seconds later.


  You know it ain’t like TV, right?

  McKenna smiled. Recently, she and Patrick had tried to watch a series about a hotshot security team at a Las Vegas casino. Only half an episode in, Patrick had flipped the channel when the security team, suspicious of a drop-dead-gorgeous woman at the nickel slot machines, enlarged the house camera’s glimpse of the woman’s unzipped purse to zoom in on a perfectly legible handwritten note inside—all in about five seconds.

  With Patrick incapable of tolerating shows about security, the military, or law enforcement, and McKenna refusing to watch anything about lawyers, they were on an eternal search for television shows they could enjoy together. Most recently, they had tried watching a show about zombies, but Patrick kept interrupting with surefire plans for battle. Note to self, McKenna thought, scythes are apparently the key to surviving a zombie apocalypse.

  She sent a return text to Dana:

  Got it. I’ll take whatever you can give me.

  When McKenna didn’t receive an immediate response, she used the wait time to cull through her in-box, under constant attack by an ongoing assault of unwanted messages. Vance had just fired off a reminder about the importance of filing deadlines. Human Resources was admonishing the staff once again not to abandon food in the refrigerators. Then there were all the irrelevant mass mailings she received by virtue of being listed as a retired member of the New York State Bar: the American Bar Association’s report on electronic discovery, a continuing legal education session on accounting for lawyers, a last-chance offer for a personalized plaque to commemorate her fifteenth year as a lawyer—now, how in the world was that possible? Delete, delete, delete.