If You Were Here

by Alafair Burke

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.” Based on Dana’s comments, McKenna assumed that Vance hadn’t told the magazine staff that the bogus tip had supposedly originated from McKenna’s own iPad.

  “Well, that’s what I figured once you hijacked the magazine’s Twitter feed. I hadn’t heard of that Susan Hauptmann before, but I was reading up today. Sounds like it’s an old cold case.” Thanks to the proliferation of television procedurals, everyone with a cable box knew law enforcement lingo. “What the hell does the Knight story have to do with her?”

  “I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.”

  Dana reached for a laptop on the floor and opened it. “You’ve certainly gotten people’s attention. Take a look.” She had opened four different windows on her Internet browser. Huffington Post. The Daily Beast. Gawker. Gothamist. It was a story ready-made for the rapid-fire, speculation-heavy world of media driven by social networking. McKenna’s sudden firing from a traditional media outlet. The high-profile backstory. Her turn to Twitter to communicate with a curious public. The dangling of a “cold case” and the promise of more information to come.

  The story was so weird that commenters were beginning to speculate that the entire thing was a high-concept media hoax to build buzz for New York City magazine.

  If only that were true.

  When their wineglasses were empty, Dana offered her a refill. McKenna declined. “I’m sorry. I’m just really, really tired.”

  “Sure, of course. I’m going to hit the hay, too. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Once she was alone in the living room, McKenna checked her e-mail account. She had more than a hundred new messages, almost all of them along the lines of: Brilliant PR move. Can’t wait to see what you’re up to. You’ve got a reader for life. Who needs old-school publishing anyway? Three media requests. A disturbing number of comments about the hotness of her publicly available head shots and the things she might have time to do with strangers now that she was unemployed.

  Sometimes the Internet sucked.

  She picked up her cell phone and thought again about calling Patrick, wondering what she could say. More important, she wondered what he could say. She wasn’t ready to face the truth yet. That he had been lying to her from the minute they’d met. That he’d known more about Susan’s disappearance than he’d ever let on. That he had done something terrible that they could never undo.

  As long as she could tell herself that she was still looking into things, she could try to believe that everything might be okay.

  She typed a new text message:

  Sorry, I left the apartment because reporters were showing up trying to get a statement.

  Dana had bought the story without a hitch. Hopefully Patrick would, too. Just for the night.

  Felt overwhelmed and got a little hammered with a friend and fell asleep.

  A friend? Nope, that wasn’t going to fly. She went back and erased.

  Got a little hammered with the magazine crowd, trying to make me feel better. Fell asleep on the couch.

  Whose couch? It was the kind of detail that got skipped over in the shorthand of texting, especially if she were drunk.

  Really sorry. Don’t want to wake you and am too drunk to be walking around anyway. Going to crash here, but I’ll see you after work tomorrow. I’m fine. You were right. Everything’s going to be okay.

  She turned off her phone before it could ring again.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  She felt the cold steel bars in her palms. She heard the clink of manacles clamping around a prisoner next door. In the distance, jail keys rattled. Then a loud beeping sound filled the block. Inmates began to yell and bang objects against bars. Something was happening. But she wasn’t a prisoner. She was a guard. She opened the cell door and saw Patrick.

  McKenna opened her eyes, the sound from her dream filling her head. The source of the steady staccato beeping turned out to be a work truck backing up outside Dana’s building. She hadn’t realized she had fallen asleep, and now it was morning already.

  Dana’s sliding bedroom doors were closed. McKenna stepped quietly to the bathroom, pulling the door closed gently. Her face was puffy, her eyes were red, and her mouth felt like it was coated with flour. She found Dana’s toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and scrubbed her teeth with her finger.

  At Dana’s desk, she scribbled a quick note. Eternal thanks for the crash pad. I’m ready to face the world again. Owe you big-time! —McK

  Dana had come through in a pinch, but her eagerness for every last detail had been a little overwhelming. McKenna didn’t want to start the day with a new round of questions. She folded the sheets neatly in a corner and let herself out.

  The sign outside a coffee shop on Atlantic Avenue touted free Wi-Fi. She ordered a large coffee and a breakfast sandwich. She was finally hungry. That had to be a good sign.

  It was eight-forty-five. Unless Patrick were skipping work, he’d be on his bicycle. She took a chance and called his cell phone. No answer. “Hey, it’s me,” she said at the tone. “Sorry again about last night. They say drinking can’t solve your problems, but turns out that four ginger martinis can dull the pain. A sure sign of alcoholism, huh? Anyway, I crashed at Dana’s and am ready to face the world again. I’m going to see what I can find out about Judge Knight’s supporters at the courthouse. My best guess is that he got wind of the questions I was asking and forged the e-mails himself in an attempt to make the entire story seem false.” No mention of Susan. She was just an unemployed reporter trying to clear her name. “Hope work goes okay. Sorry I’m a lush, but I’ll see you at home tonight.”

  That gave her about nine hours to clear or confirm her worst suspicions.

  She started by calling Mallory. “It’s McKenna Jordan again. We talked about that video you had of the subway rescue?”

  “Yeah, sure. I just saw something on Gawker about you.” The girl’s flat affect made it impossible to know whether she saw McKenna’s newfound fame as a good thing or utter mortification.

  “I’m sorry to keep bothering you, but do you have some time this morning for a quick meeting?”

  “A meeting? I sit in a cubicle all day and proofread copy for fashion auctions on the Internet. I don’t exactly have a secretary keeping a calendar for me.”

  “I meant a few minutes to talk in person. I want to show you a picture to see if you recognize it.”

  “Can’t you just e-mail it to me?”

  McKenna wanted to make sure the girl took a close look. This was important. “It’ll only be a few minutes. I’ll come to you. You said something about a Starbucks near your office?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Forty-fifth Street and Sixth Avenue. Call me when you’re close, and I’ll meet you.”

  McKenna hung up and made another call. She got lucky. Nicky Cervantes was at home. He remembered her. “What time do you need to be at school?” she asked.

  “I don’t. Teacher prep day. Got practice at one, though.”

  “Any chance you can meet me near Times Square? I’ll make it worth your time. Twenty bucks?”

  She could tell he was thinking about negotiating.

  “Yeah. A’ight. Subway, too?”

  “The Starbucks at Forty-fifth Street and Sixth Avenue. No problem.”

  Those pictures don’t look right,” Nicky said. “They look old or something. Like her hair and clothes and stuff.”

  To McKenna, ten years ago didn’t seem that long ago. Sure, pictures from the 1980s? Peg-leg harem pants, Madonna bangles, and Cyndi Lauper hairdos were instant date-setters. But 2003? McKenna was certain she was wearing some of the same clothes. To a teenager like Nicky, 2003 probably looked as retro as Woodstock would have seemed to McKenna at his age.

  “She’d be ten years older now,” she said, pointing again at the photograph of Susan. Ten years to a teenager? Unimag
inable. “She’d be my age. Could this be the woman from the subway station?”

  “I don’t know. She was— Damn, she was chasing me most of the time.”

  “You must have looked at her in the beginning, scoped her out for at least a second.”

  “Let me see again. Yeah, okay. I got it. Her hair’s not as blond now, maybe there’s more red in it or something. But the face? It could definitely be her.”

  “Does that mean it could be her, or it’s definitely her?”

  He looked at her like the question made his head hurt. “What do you mean what do I mean? I guess I’m saying that lady in your pictures looks a lot more like the lady on the subway than you do, or my mother, or that lady over there, or that lady, or that one. So, yeah, it could definitely be her.”

  She’d take what she could get. At least he hadn’t ruled out the possibility. He grabbed the twenty-five dollars like it was the easiest money he’d ever made, even though McKenna knew it wasn’t.

  She called Mallory and said that she was waiting at the coffee shop. A few minutes later, a woman in her mid-twenties walked in, scanning the place with uncertainty.

  “Are you Mallory?” McKenna never would have expected from the girl’s voice that she’d be so attractive. She had clear alabaster skin, strawberry-blond hair, and big pool-blue eyes.

  “Yeah. I didn’t realize until I opened the door that I had no idea who I was looking for.” Mallory took a seat at the bistro table across from McKenna. “I made the mistake of telling my friend you called again. She wants me to ask whether your whole Twitter campaign is a PR thing for the magazine. She’s got some idea about doing the same kind of thing for her boyfriend’s band. Like anyone would care if there was a feud between members of some band no one’s ever heard of.”

  “It’s no stunt,” McKenna said. “Someone gave me a bogus tip for a story and tried to make it look like I made the whole thing up. It’s complicated, but I’m starting to wonder whether the same people wanted to make sure I didn’t get a lead on the subway video you shot.”

  “Whoa. That’s intense.” The woman had a way with understatement.

  McKenna pulled up the photograph of Susan that she’d showed Nicky Cervantes. “It’s over ten years old, so you’ve got to do some mental age progression. But is this the woman from the subway station?”

  “Oh my gosh. I think that’s her. I really think that’s her.”

  McKenna noticed then that Mallory’s coloring was close to Susan’s. It made sense that she might be better able to discern among similar-looking women than Nicky. They all looked the same when “they” didn’t resemble “you.”

  Nicky and Mallory had both seen the subway woman in person, and neither of them had ruled out a match. They were validating what McKenna had believed all along.

  The real reason she’d wanted to see Mallory in person was for another photograph entirely. McKenna scrolled through her photographs until she found one of Patrick alone.

  “You said you loaned your phone to a guy in the lunch line the day the subway video got erased. Could this be the man?”

  Mallory took a quick look, much shorter than her inspection of Susan’s picture. “Nope. Not him.”

  “You’re sure? You told me before that you couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.”

  “Exactly. Which is how I know this isn’t the guy. This guy’s pretty hot. I’d remember him. And my friend Jen? She would have found a way to give him her number. Trust me.”

  McKenna had never been so relieved to get a negative response. Whoever had borrowed Mallory’s phone must have been the person who deleted the subway video. It stood to reason that the same person had wiped out Dana’s Skybox account and fabricated the Knight e-mails sent to McKenna. Patrick had physical access to McKenna’s iPad, but a decent enough computer expert could have pulled it all off virtually.

  She needed to find the man who’d gotten into Mallory’s phone. “You said the man borrowed the phone while you were in line somewhere? That was on Wednesday, right? Do you happen to remember the time?”

  “Margon. Some of the city’s best Cuban food, tucked away in that wasteland of Times Square. The lines are massive, but it’s cheap. We were at the start of lunch break. It must have been between one and one-fifteen.”

  The man might have wiped out the video that McKenna was most interested in, but there were other cameras in the city. McKenna was going to start using that to her advantage. She was turning the tables.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Some people would have been puzzled by Mallory’s description of Times Square as a wasteland, but those people would be exposing themselves as non–New Yorkers. To non–New Yorkers—people who called the city the “Big Apple,” who thought of it as stressful, a place to visit but not live, people like McKenna’s mother—Times Square was New York City. But to people who lived here, Times Square was the place that gave their hometown a bad rap. It was like Disney World or Costco or the DMV—places you probably went but only under protest, for a very specific purpose.

  A few times a year, like every good New Yorker, McKenna ventured into this combat zone for an especially lauded performance or to meet an out-of-town friend at some ghastly hotel bar. Today she had a very different reason.

  It was only eleven-thirty, and a line had already formed outside Margon. As McKenna bypassed the line to the entrance, responses ranged from the passive-aggressive (“I didn’t think they took reservations”) to the aggressive-aggressive (“You’re not that special, lady! Back of the line!”).

  McKenna had assumed from the restaurant’s demand that it was the latest celebrity-soaked Manhattan hot spot. When she reached the front, she realized it was barely a restaurant at all. The long, narrow space was occupied primarily by a food counter with cafeteria-style service, complete with a sign reading LINE START HERE. The early birds had grabbed the few tables available for dining.

  The cashier seemed as in charge as anyone. It took a few tries before he understood McKenna’s request. When he finally did comprehend the question, he laughed quietly and shook his head. “No. No cameras.” He gestured around like, Look at this place.

  When McKenna walked out empty-handed, some of the line occupants gained newfound faith in karmic justice. “Yep, back of the line!”

  She followed the line, scoping out businesses whose security cameras might have captured the interaction between Mallory and the man who’d borrowed her phone. Nail salon. Indian restaurant. Tattoo parlor. Three strikes.

  Her next try was a parking garage. It was well past the length of the current line, but Mallory had been here during rush hour. It was worth a shot.

  The entrance to the underground garage was a steep, narrow ramp. A row of cars was backed up, waiting to be worked into the Tetris-like clump of vehicles squeezed into the cramped garage. She found herself cringing in anticipation of a crunch as the parking attendant lurched a Porsche Carrera from the line. With authority. Nothing but net. It would have taken her fifteen minutes of wiggling to free that car from its knot.

  She waited patiently while he retrieved cars for four customers standing nearby with claim tickets. People who needed favors couldn’t be pushy. When she got his attention, he was more than happy to chat. He probably didn’t get many opportunities to socialize in his profession.

  “Yeah, we got cameras. A bunch of them. Two years ago, some madman pulled a woman from the street and raped her right there on the ramp. My guy was down here the whole time, but he was washing cars and listening to the radio. Didn’t hear a thing. Me? If I’d heard something like that? Guy wouldn’t have gotten out of here alive. Now we got a bell that rings whenever anyone sets one foot inside the ramp—you walked down here, right? Yep. I heard the bell. Knew someone was coming but didn’t see a car. Works good. Plus we got cameras. A big system. Catches everything.”

  “What about outside the ramp? On the sidew
alk?”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, not like all of midtown or whatever. But yeah, sidewalk on both sides of the garage.”

  “Do you have tape?”

  “For fourteen days, then it cycles. Not sure I’m supposed to be showing it to anyone. No one’s ever asked.”

  She’d heard the anger in his voice when he spoke about the madman who attacked the woman two years before. “I’m on something of an amateur sleuth venture. My little sister was waiting in line for Margon—”

  “Oh, man, those rice and beans . . .”

  “Well, some guy borrowed her phone, saying it was an emergency. And when she got it back, he had put these crude pictures of himself on it.”

  “Now, see? What the hell is wrong with people? Who does something like that?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. The police say they can’t do anything about it, since the pictures he left—they’re not exactly of his face, you know? But maybe your cameras caught it on film.”

  “Say nothing more. I got you. We’re gonna catch this fucker.”

  The number of drivers waiting to drop off keys continued to grow as the attendant scanned through digital video files in the back office. “Just a second, guys. I’ve got a big emergency here. I’ll be right out. Promise!” He had queued up the feed from the camera on the west side of the garage from Wednesday, starting at one, the beginning of Mallory’s lunch hour. They could see people waiting in line on the sidewalk. He played it at high speed.

  “There!” McKenna saw Mallory deep in conversation with her friend. “That’s my sister,” she said. “Slow it down.” They watched at regular speed as a man in the line said something to them. Mallory barely looked at the man before handing him her phone.

  “Oh yeah.” The parking attendant was now her full partner in the investigation. “There’s the sicko. Yep, he’s doing something. Not taking pictures but fiddling with the controls. Probably had the pictures all ready at some website to download on the phone or something.”