If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense Read online

She’d paused to check out a book recommendation e-mailed to her from a friend when a new message arrived from Dana.

  This is what I have for now. Try running it through Google Images. And don’t say you don’t know how. I showed you myself. I’ll work on your girl’s face tonight—an image of it, not a makeover. You know what I mean.

  Dana had warned McKenna not to expect a miracle, but the snapshot attached to the e-mail wasn’t too shabby. McKenna’s guess had been correct. Pinned to Superwoman’s backpack was a round button, the background plain white, the abstract design a blue circle with a series of lines inside it. Two lines formed a cross in the middle of the circle, dividing the circle into four quadrants. Three of the four quadrants contained curved lines, creating the impression of half circles.

  The image on the button meant nothing to her. That was where Dana’s suggestion of Google Images came in.

  McKenna pulled up Google Images on her computer. Inside the bar where she was used to typing search terms was an image of a small camera. She clicked on it and was prompted with “Search by Image,” followed by “Upload an Image.” Dana had walked her through these steps last month when McKenna was trying to locate the driver of a delivery truck outside the townhouse of an actress constantly rumored to be planning another march down the aisle. By searching for the logo printed on the side of the truck, they managed to find the name and phone number of a bakery in Brooklyn. Turned out the driver was delivering tasting samples for a wedding cake. It wasn’t the kind of scoop McKenna was proud of, but the magazine tripled its newsstand sales that week.

  She uploaded the digital image that Dana had extracted from the video and watched Google work its magic. She immediately got a perfect hit: PEOPLE PROTECTING THE PLANET. The picture on the backpack button was Planet Earth behind crosshairs. The three semicircles had transformed the straight lines of the crosshairs into three P’s—an acronym for the organization.

  She ran a separate search for information about the group. According to a sympathetic website, PPP carried out “direct actions to defend the planet by liberating animals, disrupting the activities of polluters, and depriving predatory corporate entities of their ill-gotten gains.” Another website called the organization “eco-saboteurs.” Another claimed the group was on the government’s ecoterrorist watch list.

  Whether People Protecting the Planet were saviors or a domestic threat, they didn’t sound like Susan’s crowd. She was from a military family and had gone to West Point. Even after leaving the army for business school, she’d kept a toe in the water through the reserves. She was deployed for nearly a year in Afghanistan through the Civil Affairs Brigade, completing her service as an economic development officer, helping the Afghanis stabilize their banking system.

  After all those years in uniform, Susan had enjoyed her freedom from a dress code. She was more of an Armani-suit-and-Prada-handbag woman than a button-adorned-backpack type.

  The observation sent McKenna’s mind back to one of her last memories of Susan, teetering on sky-high Jimmy Choos. A few years earlier, the heels would have set her back close to a month’s take-home pay. Even on a consulting firm salary, they were a splurge, but Susan was so proud, strutting around the store while other women marveled at her ability to maintain balance. “I’m taking these bad boys home. And for the right bad boy,” she added with an out-thrust hip, “I’ll wear them with nothing but a thong.”

  The other customers hooted their support. Susan had that way about her.

  Those shoes—along with the rest of her belongings—were found in her apartment after her disappearance. It made no more sense today than it had all those years ago.

  McKenna dialed a number she had looked up an hour earlier but hadn’t had the guts to call.

  “Scanlin.”

  Even ten years ago, McKenna had figured the guy to be close to his twenty-two years of service. Some cops couldn’t leave the job.

  “Detective Scanlin, this is McKenna Jor—McKenna Wright. Please don’t hang up. It’s important.”

  “As I recall, everything you believe to be true is always so . . . darn . . . important.”

  “I’m calling about Susan Hauptmann. Can you meet me in person?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  McKenna scoped out the landscape at Collect Pond Park. The good news was that the city was experiencing a warm, bright, beautiful October day. The bad news was that the unseasonably pleasant temperatures had brought out the masses. The place was hopping.

  She opted for a bench holding one other person. His one person managed to occupy more than half the bench, but there was enough room for her to sit, and he was far too preoccupied by his newspaper to give her a second glance.

  Scanlin was the one who’d chosen the park for the meet, placing her smack-dab in the middle of a strip of action below Canal Street that was the heart of the Manhattan criminal court system. This territory used to feel like her heartland, too, pumping blood through her system. How many times had she carried a yogurt down to this park, or a bit farther south to Foley Square, just to breathe some fresh air and enjoy a brief respite from the courthouse’s fluorescent lighting?

  She used to know all the hot-dog vendors—not by name but by face, cataloged mentally by the characteristics that really mattered. Good mustard. Softest pretzels. The guy who stocked Tab.

  She knew which homeless people were regulars on the civil commitment and misdemeanor dockets, and which were harmless enough to become part of the daily banter. Back then Reggie was one of her favorites. “Whatchu gonna use to eat that salad with, my dear?” “I’m going to use this here fork, Reggie.” “Well, go on, then. Fork yourself!” Reggie would laugh and laugh and laugh, even though he used the same line four times a day, every single day.

  She looked around, wondering what had become of the man. She didn’t see him. She didn’t recognize anyone.

  She felt like an outsider. She was an outsider.

  When she’d caught Scanlin on the phone, he was just leaving the squad room to give testimony in a motion to suppress. “If it’s so important,” he’d said, “why don’t you meet me downtown?”

  He initially suggested meeting in the courtroom where he’d be testifying. But while she used to be able to whisk past security, asking the guards about last night’s Giants game, giving a self-satisfied wave to the defense attorneys waiting to enter, McKenna now had to line up with the rest of the citizens to be cleared for entry. Wasn’t there a more convenient place to meet? she had asked Scanlin. She’d been hoping for a coffee shop near the precinct, but he had insisted on a location by the courthouse, finally selecting the park. “You said it was important. I’m just trying to make sure you see me as soon as I’m done testifying.”

  She knew he took a certain pleasure in beckoning her to hostile territory that once was her home.

  She wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t looked directly at her from the courthouse steps and made a beeline to her park bench. “You need to be here, guy?” Scanlin asked. From behind his open newspaper, McKenna’s neighbor on the bench threw her an annoyed look. She shrugged, but one glance over the paper at Scanlin sent the man shuffling in search of a new spot to crash.

  “Well, how about you? You look pretty much the same. Not too many people can say that after a decade. You should be proud of yourself, ADA Wright.”

  McKenna didn’t know what to say. Scanlin had to know she wasn’t proud. She wasn’t an ADA anymore. She wasn’t even a Wright anymore. When she and Patrick married, she picked up on his preference that she change her name. In his world, that was what wives did. In her world, the whole thing seemed ridiculous, but she made the change anyway. Maybe her name wasn’t the only thing she was trying to change at the time. Her writing name would be McKenna Jordan. Not McKenna Wright, the disgraced prosecutor.

  She couldn’t return Scanlin’s compliment. She’d met him in person only twice, right af
ter Susan disappeared—once when she’d shown up unannounced at Susan’s apartment, insisting on speaking to the detective in charge; and a week later, when she appeared unannounced at the precinct, accusing him of avoiding her phone calls based on what she’d considered a conflict of interest.

  The man she remembered had been close to fifty years old, with a well-groomed mustache that matched his dark hair. She remembered that he wore cuff links and a subtle cologne that smelled a little like pine. He was the kind of man who made the effort.

  Now he took up nearly as much room on the park bench as its previous resident. No mustache, just the graying stubble of a skipped day or two from shaving. No cologne or cuff links. His tie was loose, and the wool of his navy sport coat was beginning to shine from too many cleanings. No, she couldn’t say that he looked pretty much the same.

  “Thanks for meeting me, Detective.”

  “What detective doesn’t want a face-to-face with a member of the illustrious media?”

  She could tell from his smile that he was enjoying his barbs. “I’m not here as a writer. Or as a former prosecutor, for that matter. Is Susan Hauptmann’s case still open?”

  “It was never cleared, so it was never closed. Last time I checked, not closed means open.”

  “But is anyone working it? Is anyone looking for her?”

  “Not my case anymore. I’m in homicide at the Twelfth now.”

  “You never considered the case a homicide even when she was in your jurisdiction.”

  “I know you did. You made that clear the day you came storming to my lieutenant accusing me of stonewalling you.”

  “I’m not trying to relive the past, Detective. I’m asking you why you were so sure that Susan up and left when everyone who knew her said otherwise.”

  “We never found evidence of foul play. I guess you didn’t need much in the way of evidence to go around making claims.”

  McKenna ignored the superfluous dig and tried to focus on Susan. She could feel the stirrings of all those old frustrations. “To the people who knew Susan best, her sudden disappearance was the strongest possible evidence. She would never put her friends and family through that kind of uncertainty.”

  McKenna remembered the few basic facts she’d been able to glean from Susan’s father and her own queries: Susan’s gym card had been scanned at Equinox on the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving. One of the trainers remembered waving hello as she cranked away on the treadmill, seemingly lost in the beat of the music pumping into her headphones. She had RSVP’d to a friend’s Sunday card game as a maybe, so no one gave her absence any thought. It wasn’t until Monday night that a coworker dropped by Susan’s apartment building, assuming she must be incredibly sick to miss work and not call in. At the end of Tuesday, the building superintendent unlocked the apartment door at the request of Susan’s father. The police took two hours to show up, and only after ADA McKenna Wright made a phone call.

  Though there was no point in rehashing all of the details with Scanlin, McKenna highlighted the key points. “She left her purse, her passport, her wallet.”

  “You don’t have to remind me, Ms. Wright. I know that you, of all people, don’t hold the police in the highest regard—”

  “That’s not fair—”

  He waved a hand, not to concede the point so much as to signal his unwillingness to debate it. “I remember my cases. I can tell you the life stories of missing people—men and women—that I still wake up wondering about. And I can tell you that I believe I failed by moving on without them, without answers for their families. But I never felt like that with your friend. You know why? Because you and I view the same facts in a different way. Every single thing was in its place at her apartment. You see that simple fact the way you see it. But I’ve been a cop for over thirty years, and I know that a woman who goes somewhere takes her pocketbook with her. She takes her wallet. Hell, she at least takes her damn keys. And there was no sign of disruption to the apartment, even though, by every account, Susan Hauptmann was an athlete. A trained soldier. A fighter.”

  McKenna thought about the woman in the white sweater, pulling Nicky Cervantes from the tracks and sprinting up the subway staircase. Fast. And strong. A fighter. She knew where Scanlin’s reasoning was headed.

  “No blood. No knocked-over furniture. Not even a pillow out of place. No sign of a struggle means that no one harmed a fighter like Susan Hauptmann in that apartment. We’ve got no evidence of harm inside the apartment. We’ve got no evidence that she was surprised on some normal kind of outing away from the apartment.”

  “People don’t just evaporate.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. Not physically, not like abracadabra. But that’s exactly what they do. Or at least want to do. Evaporate. Susan Hauptmann left behind her passport, her wallet, her pocketbook, her keys. She left behind her life. She . . . left. You didn’t want to believe that.”

  “I didn’t want to believe it because I couldn’t believe it. I knew her.”

  Scanlin said nothing, but his gaze, though focused across the street at the courthouse, grew sharper. For a moment, behind the razor stubble, sloppy tie, and extra layers of fat, McKenna recognized the intensity she’d sensed in him so many years ago.

  “Why are we talking about this now?” he asked.

  “Because I think you were right. I think Susan’s still alive. I saw her.”

  “I’m glad to know it. It’s too bad her father didn’t live to hear the news.” Susan and her father always had a difficult relationship, but he was the one who pushed the investigation and worked the media, even though he had just been diagnosed with cancer. McKenna had seen his obituary in The New York Times two months ago.

  “Aren’t you even curious about what I just said?” she asked.

  “I don’t need to be. I know if you ran into her at the movies and caught up like old pals, you wouldn’t be here talking to me. Why don’t you go ahead and get to your point. What do you want from me, Ms. Wright?”

  She opened her iPad and pulled up the link for the public drive of Dana’s Skybox to play the video clip. She hoped that Scanlin had studied enough pictures of Susan back then to recognize her now.

  The connection was timing out. Maybe Dana had changed the settings. Or maybe the iPad wasn’t getting a good enough data connection to access the Internet. Or, more likely, McKenna the Luddite had managed to do something wrong.

  “I’m sorry. I have a video here. I want to show it to you.”

  “Just tell me what I need to know, all right?”

  She started to speak but realized how ridiculous it sounded. He needed to see the actual image.

  “I’m so sorry. I’ll go back to my computer.” The only still photograph Dana had e-mailed her was of the button on the woman’s backpack; Dana hadn’t yet created a still version of Susan’s face. Maybe once she did, she could enhance it for better clarity. “If I e-mail it to you, will you please just look at it?”

  His gaze moved to the distance again before speaking. “Yeah, sure. Send whatever you want.”

  He handed her a business card, and she automatically responded with one of her own. “Thank you, Detective. Really. I know what you must think of me, but I always cared about Susan, and I need to know what happened to her.”

  He fingered the edges of her card. “I noticed the name change when you started at the magazine.”

  She held up her left hand, ring forward. “Five years now. To Patrick Jordan. You might remember him from the investigation. He was another one of Susan’s friends.”

  “Seems like you’ve got a good thing going for yourself now. The writing thing. A husband. I would’ve thought, of all people—after everything that happened—you would’ve learned that some things are better left alone.”

  Scanlin pushed himself off the bench as he stood. She watched him walk to his fleet car, parked just outs
ide the courthouse.

  Scanlin resented her. He still had the same conflict of interest she’d raised with his lieutenant ten years earlier. He looked at her and saw his friend Scott Macklin on the front page of a newspaper, beneath the headline COP HERO OR MURDERER?

  But Scanlin was on the job, he remembered Susan, and McKenna had gotten somewhere with him: he’d look at the video. That was all that mattered. It was a start.

  She was about to walk to the subway when she looked again at the courthouse. There was another conversation she needed to have in person.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Assistant District Attorney Will Getty rose from his desk to greet her with a warm hug. “McKenna Wright.” Everyone from the DA’s office—at least the people willing to acknowledge her existence—called her by her maiden name. “Speak of the devil.”

  She returned the hug and took a seat. This was the same chair she sat in a little over ten years ago, when Getty called her into his office to offer a chance to work with him on an officer-involved shooting. A cop named Scott Macklin had shot a thug named Marcus Jones at the West Harlem Piers.

  “Was someone speaking of me?” she asked.

  “The chattering classes are very excited. Rumor is you’ve been asking for dirt on Judge Knight. You can’t possibly expect me to help you with that hot potato.”

  His conspiratorial smile brought out lines that hadn’t been there when she’d first met him, but he was still handsome—more handsome than he ever wanted to let on. Neat haircut, but not too fashionable. Respectable suit, but not showy, and probably a size bigger than the salesperson recommended. Will Getty was the kind of trial lawyer who knew that jurors were distrustful of men who were too good-looking.

  “I am here about a hot potato—just not that one.”

  “I saw the article. I was wondering if I might hear from you.”

  McKenna had thought about calling him before the Marcus Jones article went to print. But he was her superior ten years ago. She was a journalist now and didn’t need his permission to publish a story.