If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  And yet.

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but your name wasn’t in the article.”

  “You don’t need to explain anything, Wright. And not that my opinion means squat, but I happen to think that you handled it very professionally.”

  Her article had focused on the protests following Marcus Jones’s death and the eventual exoneration of Officer Macklin. She had disclosed the fact that she—the author of the piece—was the junior prosecutor who had raised doubts about Macklin’s self-defense claim. There had been no reason to bring Getty’s name into the piece.

  She knew Getty well enough to get straight to the point. “I’ve been asked to write a book. Not write but propose. Who knows what will happen—”

  “A book about the Marcus Jones case?”

  “Not about the case itself but my place in it. It would be a more personal account than the article. A thirty-year-old woman who, for a couple of months, was in the middle of—I think at one point we agreed to call it a shitstorm?”

  The problem boiled down to the gun. Scott Macklin claimed Marcus Jones pulled one, and the gun was found resting in Jones’s limp right hand. Jones’s mother insisted her son did not own a gun and accused Macklin of planting it. The pistol was a Glock compact with a filed-down serial number. McKenna had recently read an article about the ability of crime laboratories to restore obliterated serial numbers. Eager to prove herself, she’d filed a request with the local field office of the ATF, which was able to determine the last four digits. A search of the ATF’s database scored a match, meaning that the gun was used in a previous crime.

  McKenna remembered the adrenaline rush that had come with the news. She wanted Marcus’s mother to be wrong and Scott Macklin to be right. A boy was dead, killed by a good cop. McKenna wanted proof that Marcus was the bad guy. She wanted proof that he had left Macklin with no choice. The gun in Marcus’s hand had been used in a previous crime. Marcus, at only nineteen, was a longtime criminal. She knew she’d find the connection.

  But the connection between the Glock and that night at the West Harlem Piers wasn’t the one she’d expected to find. The serial number of the handgun was in the ATF’s database because the gun had been seized by the NYPD in 1992 after it was found in a garbage can. It was slated for destruction in accordance with the NYPD’s weapons disposal policy. As part of a public relations campaign called Safe Streets, the police department would make a show of feeding that gun—and hundreds of other seized weapons—to a smelter, subjecting them to three-thousand-degree temperatures until liquefied. But the gun never made it to the smelter. It wound up next to Marcus Jones’s body eleven years later.

  Eleven years before his death, Marcus Jones was only eight years old. There was no reason to believe that he could have come into possession of the gun back then, and certainly no explanation for how the gun could have made its way to him from an NYPD property room.

  But eleven years earlier, Scott Macklin was already a police officer, two years into his service. More notably, he was one of the young, enthusiastic, telegenic officers who had served as the face for Safe Streets. A New York Post article about the program showed Macklin delivering a truck full of guns to the smelter. Officer Scott Macklin said that more than four hundred guns would be destroyed. “Any day we can take guns that might be used in crimes or accidental shootings and turn them into manhole covers and chain-link fences is a good day for the citizens of New York City.”

  All these years later, she remembered the sick feeling in her stomach when she’d learned that Marcus’s gun—Marcus’s supposed gun—had a direct connection to Scott Macklin.

  Macklin was third-generation NYPD. His grandfather and father and uncles would have told him about the days when every cop carried a “drop gun,” an unregistered weapon to toss at the side of a suspect to justify a shooting, if needed. Macklin was a newer breed of police, but tradition in blue families could be deep, as if passed by blood. It would have been easy to slip a gun from the Safe Streets pile.

  She’d taken the evidence to the prosecutor in charge, Will Getty. He was one of the most respected lawyers in the office. He had become something of a friend after accompanying her to one of Susan’s happy hours. She trusted him.

  But as she explained to him all the work she had done—the serial-number recovery, the ATF database search, the old newspaper article connecting Macklin to Safe Streets—she realized how ridiculously eager she sounded. After all, she was a mere drug prosecutor, and her special assignment of second-chairing this investigation was a glorified term for carrying Getty’s bags. She had been hoping to be rewarded for taking the initiative, but instead, she’d made herself look like a total freak by pursuing a side investigation into a politically and racially sensitive case without any input from the lawyer in charge.

  She could remember what he said to her. “We don’t want to do anything rash. But good work, Wright. You’ve got a good eye for detail.”

  He told her he would recess the grand jury for a couple of days while he looked into it.

  Days went by. Then a week. When she asked him for an update, he explained that things took time and that he was working on it.

  And then she’d heard nothing. Hearing nothing wasn’t McKenna’s forte. With each passing day, she became more convinced that Getty was finding a way to steer the grand jury in Macklin’s favor without her.

  At the end of the second week, she met with Bob Vance at a dive bar in the East Village and told him everything she knew. The papers depicted her as a whistle-blower. She declined offers to appear on cable news and at protest rallies, but the people who accepted those invitations made a point of crediting her for revealing the “truth” about Marcus Jones’s shooting.

  And then Will Getty figured out how that gun really had gone from Safe Streets storage to the right hand of Marcus Jones’s dead body, and McKenna wasn’t so beloved anymore.

  Ironically (or maybe predictably), Will had always been supportive of her. He was the one who told everyone who would listen that she’d been trying at every moment to do the right thing. Even as it was becoming clear that McKenna had to leave the DA’s office, he had gone so far as to write an essay for the New York Law Journal, arguing that she epitomized the ideal version of a prosecutor who was doing justice. He called her at home and conceded that if he’d communicated with her better after she’d gone to him with the Safe Streets connection, he could have prevented the “tragic misunderstanding.”

  “Have you ever stopped to think,” he asked her now, “that in a weird way, that case helped you find your true calling. You were a good lawyer, Wright, but do you know how many lawyers would kill to write? I don’t care how much trash the people around this place were talking. They were all reading your novel, they were all loving it, and they all would have given their left nut to be in your shoes.”

  Her first career move after leaving the DA’s office was almost accidental. After two months of wallowing on her sofa, she had started tinkering with a short story on her computer. As the story slowly blossomed into a book, she lived off her modest savings, supplementing with credit card debt as necessary.

  The book was her escape from the real world—pure, unabashed, relentless fiction. When Unreasonable Doubt came out, her former coworkers nevertheless chose to see the book as an attempt to cash in on her platform as a scorned ADA.

  As it turned out, there was no real profit involved. Despite every lawyer’s fantasy of writing a novel and retiring, she’d earned barely enough on the advance to pay off the debt she’d racked up while writing. But she had written a novel. It had gotten good reviews. She felt better about herself. She let herself be happy for a while, which seemed to stabilize what had been an erratic relationship with Patrick.

  Then she took another two years to write a second book, and by then the publishing industry had changed. Stores were closing. Sales were down. Apparently the legal thriller
was dead. That book was sitting on her hard drive, unpublished.

  By then she was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer with a five-year gap in her résumé; well educated but with only one real interest: in crime.

  No prosecutor’s office would have her. Even defense firms didn’t want her because they believed prosecutors would blacklist her on plea bargains.

  She’d written a novel (two, if an unsold book counted), so she knew she could write. And she knew how to tell a story. She wrote a few pieces on spec, and then Bob Vance gave her a chance at a full-time job. That was career change number two. She despised the fluff pieces that dominated her work, but at least she had a paycheck until she figured something else out.

  Back in Getty’s office after all these years, she felt herself gripping the worn upholstery of the chair arms, knowing she was doing the right thing but wanting to get it over with. Getty was a good lawyer. She could see him processing the information. Considering his words carefully.

  “Do you want to do it? The Marcus Jones book?”

  “I think so. If I can find a way to do it that is respectful of the people who deserve respect.” She patted his desk.

  “What you’re saying is that the article didn’t mention my name, but a book would.”

  “I wanted you to hear it from me first. And I promise to treat you fairly.”

  “Okay, then. Can’t ask more than that, can I?”

  The hug he gave her when she left wasn’t quite as warm as the one she’d received when she arrived.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Two hours later, Joe Scanlin was back at the Twelfth Precinct. The estranged wife of a suspect in yet another drug-related killing had agreed to come in for questioning.

  He knew the history. Six 911 calls made from their shared address just in the last four years. Three arrests of the husband for domestic violence. One time she went to the hospital with a broken jaw. No charges ever filed.

  She moved out two months earlier when Child Protective Services threatened to take her kids if they continued to witness the violence against her.

  But “separated” and “separate” weren’t synonymous.

  “Kenny don’t sell,” the woman insisted. “He don’t even use. No way he’d have something to do with that. His no-good friends always dragging him down. That’s all that is. They the ones did this. Don’t you listen to their noise.”

  Scanlin walked out of the interrogation room while she was talking. He didn’t need to hear the rest. Been there too many times. She wasn’t under arrest, but he knew she’d stay there in the box until he told her she was allowed to leave. No one ever tried to leave, certainly not a woman who’d gotten used to being beat on.

  Back at his desk, Scanlin found himself fiddling with McKenna Wright’s—Jordan’s—business card. Since she’d called that morning, he had felt off his game. Like he was walking and listening and talking through a filter, smothered by a layer of dust. He was trying to pinpoint the reason why. The moment she’d said her name, he had been pulled into this cloud.

  Even as he was insisting that she meet him downtown—at the courthouse, near the courthouse, anywhere that would remind her of her former existence—he had known he was being transparently vengeful. But there were legitimate reasons to remind that woman of the past. She was a vulture. A user. A one-lady wrecking ball. Like so many lawyers before her, she had tried to build a career on the backs of decent men. Everyone knew that most prosecutors worked the job as a stepping-stone to the bench or elected office, and the fastest shortcut was across the back of a dirty cop. If you had to make up corruption where none existed, so be it.

  Even with the disappearance of her friend, she never seemed as interested in the truth as she was in telling Scanlin how he should do his job. For a moment down there at the park, he had let his guard down. He’d felt the hardness that he’d readied in the courthouse elevator begin to soften at the sight of her business card. Changed job. Changed name. She was a woman who cared about her friend after all these years.

  Now he found himself wondering whether her phone call had anything to do with Susan Hauptmann. All those years ago, she was so convinced that something horrible had happened to her friend. Now she pulled a one-eighty: not only had Scanlin been right back then; now she had a firsthand eyewitnessing of the long-missing woman. No details, mind you. Just the promise of a video he was never shown.

  He wouldn’t put it past her to dangle the promise of photographic evidence as a carrot. She could pretend to be tracking down Hauptmann as a pretext to talk him up. That was how users like her worked. They saw people as chips that could be cashed in for a favor.

  Scanlin knew that Susan Hauptmann was out there somewhere, hopefully living a happier life. Regardless, Scanlin could die satisfied if he never heard her name or McKenna Jordan’s again.

  Scanlin had been all too aware of his age the moment McKenna Jordan recognized him across the park. He saw himself through the younger woman’s eyes. It wasn’t just that years had passed since she’d last seen him. He had changed.

  There was a time when Scanlin worked the job a hundred percent, knowing that at the end of the day, Melissa would be waiting—makeup on, hair curled, dinner either on the stove or ordered from one of their favorite Italian places on Arthur Avenue. They weren’t rich, but they managed to make their life glamorous. His life was different now, and those differences had manifested themselves in his appearance.

  He’d seen the Jordan woman’s big article, of course. The story meant nothing to the new cops, but the guys who’d been around for a while paid attention. Scanlin had read it online for free, refusing to shell out six bucks at the newsstand.

  He was too smart not to wonder whether her phone call had something to do with her newfound interest in rehashing the past. For all she knew, Scanlin could get her access to the man he suspected she was truly interested in—the man whose career she’d ruined, the man she could use to help sell more magazines.

  Scott Macklin was an old friend in both senses of the word. Over a decade had passed since Mac decided to cut off ties with his NYPD buddies. He was an aged friend because—well, because they both went and got old.

  Scanlin checked his e-mail. No video from McKenna Jordan. Not even an e-mail. Maybe she had imagined seeing her friend and come to her senses. More likely, the woman was working an angle. The less he thought about her and the trouble she brought down on those around her, the better.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  McKenna never voiced the opinion aloud, but she believed that she excelled at everything she did. Even thinking it, she realized how narcissistic it sounded. She didn’t mean it in a boastful or arrogant way.

  To say that she was good at everything she did wasn’t to say that she was good at everything. The assertion said very little about her natural talents but spoke volumes about something she wasn’t good at—taking risks. McKenna excelled at everything she did because she’d spent her life avoiding the things she could not do.

  She remembered returning her flute to that tiny old music store in Seattle. Her parents had bought the instrument used, on an installment plan. They were only on the fourth payment by the time it was clear McKenna was no longer interested, deciding that she had a better chance of mastering the violin. The sympathetic owner agreed to rent the family a violin. Then a viola. Then a saxophone and a trumpet. McKenna wound up in debate club instead.

  She was no more tenacious as a grown-up. One of her female law professors led a series of golf lessons for the Woman’s Law Association, plugging the sport as a way for women to spar with the boys in law practice. For three weeks, McKenna watched as, one by one, her peers got the hang of the swing plane, the cocked wrists, the release of the club, the follow-through. When it was McKenna’s turn, the ball would roll forward a pathetic ten feet, as if felled by her wood-chopping swing. No more golf for her.

  Her predilection f
or favoring skills based solely on mastery had almost led her into a math major. She couldn’t imagine a life crunching numbers, but they came easily to her, so she’d stuck by them. Lucky for her, she had also been a good writer, a good arguer, and a pretty decent speaker. Even luckier, she happened to live in a world where good writers, arguers, and speakers could usually find a place for themselves.

  As a result, even while her career had taken turn upon unpredictable turn, McKenna had always believed that everything would turn out okay because she had been good at enough things to patch together a facade of effortless talent. She was still waiting for that faith to prove well placed.

  It seemed these days that her natural talents for breaking down facts and weaving them into a story collided increasingly with her fundamental inability to understand computers. To break down facts, one first needed to gather them. And where gathering facts used to involve questioning witnesses, subpoenaing documents (as a lawyer), or talking her way into file cabinets that were meant to be off limits (as a reporter), now it seemed like every time she needed a piece of information, technology got in her way. McKenna was barely forty years old, but with a librarian mother and an English-teacher father, she was one of those rare young people who was more comfortable with microfiche and dusty notebooks than WAV files and thumb drives.

  Today it was this stupid Skybox program, or website, or app—whatever—that was making her crazy. She had watched the subway video from the link Dana had given her at least a hundred times, but now all she was getting was an error message informing her that the link was invalid.

  She had seen Scanlin’s skeptical look when she promised to send him the video. Now hours were ticking by, and she had bupkes.

  So much for her credibility—not that she had any with the man. She had rubbed Scanlin the wrong way from the minute she badged her way into Susan’s apartment, insisting that the police brief her on the status of the investigation. It had been a rookie move, but she’d bought in to the idea that her position as an assistant district attorney for New York County entitled her to a certain amount of respect as a law enforcement officer. She hadn’t been around long enough to realize that the general maxim didn’t hold true with the other half of the equation—cops.