If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  “Please, Detective, I need to get to the hospital. I need to be with my husband.”

  “Mrs. Jordan. While I sympathize with your situation, another man is dead. And we’re looking at some very strange facts. The deceased victim had a gun in his waistband. We have witnesses who saw him reaching for it. And here’s the thing—the reason your husband’s alive and the other man is dead? Your husband came here with four thick law books strapped around his torso with duct tape, like a makeshift bulletproof vest.”

  She would have laughed at the ridiculousness of the image if this weren’t really happening. In the ongoing negotiations that determined their household TV-watching schedule, he’d tolerated her passion for a show about a burned spy. In one episode, the main character wrapped himself in books from the law library to protect himself from a knife. Patrick had known what she was going to ask before she’d even opened her mouth. Yes, that would work. She couldn’t imagine how desperate Patrick must have been to try something so haphazard.

  “This doesn’t appear to have been a random incident. We need information.”

  She knew now that Patrick had been lying to her. He’d known that Susan was still alive, and he’d known for perhaps the last ten years. She also knew from his note that Patrick had come here expecting to face danger. And he had come in a rush. No time to go to the museum for the gun he stored in a locker there. No time for real body armor, just stupid books. And he had done it not for Susan but for her.

  Ten years. If Patrick had lied to her, to the police, to Susan’s father for ten years? He must have had his reasons.

  “What did you say your name was, Detective?”

  “My apologies, ma’am. I’m Tim Compton.”

  “I hope you won’t take offense at this, Detective Compton, but there’s only one police officer I’m willing to talk to right now. His name’s Joe Scanlin. I can give you his number if you need it. Now, are you going to help me get to the hospital, or do I have to get there myself?”

  She woke up on a chair in the corner of the waiting room outside the Intensive Care Unit at Lenox Hill Hospital. Someone had placed a man’s sports coat over her body. She recognized it as the jacket Joe Scanlin had been wearing earlier that night.

  Or was it last night? Was it morning now?

  The clock above the double doors into the ICU said 6:20. Light seeped through the waiting room blinds. It was morning.

  She was at the nurses’ station trying to get someone’s attention when Scanlin walked in with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. He handed her one. “Hope black is all right.”

  She nodded her appreciation and took a quick sip. “Where’s Patrick? Any news?” She remembered being awake in the same waiting room chair at one-thirty in the morning, when the doctor emerged from the double doors. Patrick had two gunshot wounds. One in the torso, one in the neck. The damage was severe, but the surgery had gone well.

  “What does that mean?” she’d asked. “He’ll make it? When can I see him?”

  Everything the surgeon had said was straight out of the bedside-manner handbook. Have to wait and see. Up to his body to determine how he responds. Not yet conscious. She wanted to punch him in the throat when he used the phrase “cautiously optimistic.”

  Scanlin shook his head. “Nothing new. Sorry.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Just a couple of hours ago. I’d passed out at home by the time Compton started calling. He said you wouldn’t talk to him without me? Not a way to make friends with the police investigating your husband’s case.”

  “Compton told me that Patrick had taped some of my law books to his body like a makeshift protective vest. He has a gun, but it stays in a locker at work. Obviously he expected danger but didn’t have enough notice to get to the museum. And he didn’t call the police. Patrick is the bravest person I’ve ever known.” The kind of person you’d want in charge of the planet if it ever got invaded by aliens. That kind of brave. “He had to have his reasons for not calling the police.” She suspected the reasons were related to Susan’s decision to fake her own death.

  Scanlin cut her off. “All right, I get it. But Compton wants some answers. And maybe you and I have reached some kind of truce, but I’m still a cop. I’ve got to tell him what I know.”

  She nodded.

  “By the way,” he said, “those law books you mentioned? Compton says they saved your husband’s life. The torso shot would have been fatal, but it was barely a puncture wound by the time it passed through all those pages. If it hadn’t been for the neck shot, he would have walked away from the entire thing with nothing more than a bandage.”

  She remembered the surgeon telling her the same thing. How many times had Patrick asked her to throw out her old casebooks? Every time she’d moved, he’d said it was like lugging around six boxes of bricks.

  The books may have protected his body, but they hadn’t covered his neck. A gunshot in the neck. They were talking about it like it was something he could live through, but she could tell they were hiding the truth. Was there any part of the body that was more vulnerable than the neck?

  “Did you get any information from Compton?” she asked.

  “He showed me a photo of the man who was DOA. Not just a bystander. He’s the same guy who wiped out your video of Susan on the subway platform.”

  The Cleaner. “So who was he?”

  He shook his head. “No cell phone on the body. No ID. So far his prints have come up nada in the databases.”

  “Is he the one who shot Patrick?”

  “No. Based on what Compton knows for now, Patrick and the mystery man were standing in the same vicinity, which was packed with Occupy protestors. Gunshots rang out. The shooter was in the crowd wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and cape. He got lost in the ensuing chaos. I saw some video footage. Trying to track the guy on the tape was like keeping your eye on one bee in a hive.”

  Her husband’s shooting was on tape. At some point, she would see a man in a mask walk up to her husband and put a bullet in his neck.

  “I know you need to brief Compton,” she said. “But he won’t be any closer than we are to understanding what’s happening. There has to be some connection between Susan’s disappearance and Scott Macklin. There’s no way around it. You worked Susan’s case ten years ago. And I was the one who basically ended Macklin’s career. You knew him, and I knew her. If anyone’s going to figure out the connection, it’s us. You said last night you had the case file on Susan’s disappearance. Where is it?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  If anyone had told McKenna a week ago that she’d be standing in Joe Scanlin’s living room, she would have checked his pupils.

  The house was clean but dated. An entire wall was nearly covered with framed photographs. A young Scanlin in uniform, probably right out of the academy. Scanlin in a tuxedo next to his gorgeous bride on the church steps. The young couple with their little girl in front of a muted blue background, probably at a JCPenney picture studio. She noticed that the wall-size scrapbook seemed to end abruptly. In the most recent photographs, Scanlin looked the way she remembered him from when Susan disappeared. It was as if life in this house were frozen still.

  He caught her checking her cell phone again for missed calls. “I can take you back to Lenox Hill,” he offered.

  “No. I’m fine. They said they’d call if they had any news.” Scanlin had the files from Susan’s disappearance at his house. By coming here with him, she’d given them an hour’s head start.

  He spread the files across the table and gave her an overview. Most of it was information she’d been able to glean at the time: No blood, semen, or other physical evidence at Susan’s apartment. No financial problems. No enemies. No obvious motive for anyone to want to hurt Susan Hauptmann.

  Tell me again about the men,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Well, from what I can tell, she
may have been . . . a little open with her sexuality.”

  McKenna looked away. It was no easier for her than for Scanlin to have this discussion. That side of Susan had always been there, but McKenna had never wanted to process the reality.

  “It’s like a dark side,” she said. Since Susan’s disappearance, McKenna had been carrying around all the best memories of her friend. Her unparalleled generosity. Her courage. Her disarming humor.

  Now she was recalling another side. “She seemed like a strong, independent, self-respecting woman, but at a certain time of day, all she really wanted was the attention of a man. She hid it from me, but there were signs. I just didn’t want to see them.”

  How many times had an exhausted McKenna left a bar alone at two in the morning, a pit in her stomach because Susan insisted on staying behind for “one last drink,” almost always with some guy she’d just met. And what about all those late-night phone calls? The ones Susan would answer out of earshot, only to announce within the next few minutes that she needed to meet an old friend who was having a rough time.

  Susan may have tried to hide her promiscuity from her girlfriends, but McKenna had suspected. Men, after all, weren’t so discreet. She’d heard the talk at happy hours. McKenna knew that Susan had hooked up with at least a couple of prosecutors she had met through McKenna, including Will Getty.

  “You know, it’s funny,” Scanlin said. “Usually when we talk about a dark side, we’re talking about a man who turns all that anger and destruction against other people—his wife, his children, a stranger out of nowhere. But I used to see it back when I was in vice. These women with dark sides, they rarely turned against other people. They took it out on themselves.”

  Scanlin pulled out another manila folder, this one less yellowed. “A neighbor in Susan’s building called in a noise report two days before she disappeared, but got the wrong apartment number. I talked to the neighbor, and it’s likely that what she overheard was a fight between Susan and a man. Take a look at some of the words she wrote down.” He pointed to the word “smack.” “Maybe one of Susan’s boyfriends had started getting physical with her, and they were arguing about it after the fact.” He pointed to another word. “Important.” “Maybe something like ‘It’s really important that you never smack me again.’ ”

  “I think it’s safe to say that Hollywood won’t be calling you to write dialogue, Scanlin. Besides, if any guy raised a hand to Susan Hauptmann, he’d need a new set of teeth by the time she was done with him. But you mentioned working vice and how the prostitutes had a dark side.” She realized that in giving him her rundown, she’d left out Agent Mercado asking about Pamela Morris and Greg Larson. She told him about going out to Jersey City to talk to Pamela’s mother. “Susan was always trying to help lost souls. Maybe she crossed paths with Pamela. They both disappeared at the same time. Pamela Morris’s mother hasn’t seen her since the fall of 2003.”

  “Then how does she know her daughter’s alive?”

  “She gets letters a couple times a year. Pamela says she’s married to a preacher and travels around the country. I thought maybe that was her way of describing life with the P3s.”

  “What does Pamela Morris look like?”

  McKenna shrugged. “I’ve got one booking photo from 1998, and she’s got on a pound of makeup and sporting a fat lip. Brown hair, dyed blond at the time. Kind of regular.”

  “Age? Height? Weight?”

  She searched her memory for the details and saw where Scanlin was going. “Oh my God.”

  “A couple cards a year to Mom are a small price to pay for a stolen identity.”

  She remembered the fat lip lingering in Pamela’s booking photo. It wasn’t her first bust. She was deep into the life. And then she turned over a new leaf? That happened only in Hollywood. In real life, women who took the road chosen by Pamela Morris did not get happy endings. “You’re saying that the Pamela Morris who was living with the P3s out in Brentwood was actually Susan.”

  “Hate to say it, but prostitutes die all the time,” Scanlin said. “A lot of them are never identified. Taking a dead person’s identity is one of the easiest ways in the world to get a fresh start.”

  Susan had been at Scott Macklin’s house the day before he died. If Susan was the woman who had been living with the P3s as Pamela Morris, she must have survived the explosion on Long Island.

  “But to take over Pamela’s identity, Susan would have to know that she was dead.”

  She was looking at the papers spread across the dining room table, hoping an answer would come to her.

  Then she saw it. “The neighbor. Susan’s neighbor who called about the noise from the argument. You said she reported the wrong apartment. Is it possible she made other mistakes? About what she actually heard?”

  “Sure. She’s practically deaf now.”

  “Look, Scanlin. Right here.” She jabbed her index finger against the page on the table. “Smack. But not smack. Mac! We know Susan went to Mac’s house the day before he died. But if she was arguing with him—or about him—two days before she suddenly disappeared? There’s a connection between Susan’s disappearance and whatever happened on that dock between Macklin and Marcus Jones.”

  “And you’re trying to say that the connection—whatever it may be—would somehow explain why Susan is now using Pamela Morris’s name?”

  He meant the statement sarcastically, but hearing him say the words out loud made all the difference. Scott Macklin. Pamela Morris. Together. Connected.

  Pamela’s mother told me that toward the end, before she rode off into the sunset with her knight on a white horse, she was only seeing her regulars. Harmless, lonely married guys. That kind of thing. She specifically said that one of the guys was strange-looking and slow but nice to Pamela.”

  Scanlin’s face didn’t register the point.

  “Marcus Jones,” she said. “The pigmentation of his face was blotchy because of a skin condition called vitiligo. And his IQ was around seventy-five, placing him at what’s considered the borderline. His mother always maintained that he’d gone down to the docks to meet his girlfriend. We never found the girl, but he did have eighty dollars in his pocket.”

  “And the docks are a frequent cruising spot for working girls,” Scanlin added.

  “If Susan took over Pamela’s identity, she’d have to know that Pamela wouldn’t need it anymore. Maybe Marcus Jones wasn’t the only person who died at the pier that night. What if Mac’s shooting of Marcus Jones was bad, and Pamela Morris saw it?”

  “You’re saying Mac intentionally killed her to cover it up? You’ve got to be kidding me. You know, this was a bad idea. I should have known—”

  “Hey, we’re just talking things out, Scanlin. There are other explanations. Maybe Marcus was involved in something going down on the docks—selling stolen merchandise or something. Pamela Morris is there to meet him but sees something she’s not supposed to see. Marcus, or maybe someone else, hurts her. And then Mac comes along, and Marcus pulls the gun on him.”

  “Mac never said anything about Marcus being with a girl, let alone someone killing her.”

  “You see my point, don’t you? If something happened that night on the docks that we don’t know about—whatever it might be—that would explain the timing of Pamela going off the grid. And Susan’s disappearance, if she found out about it. And the fact that someone doesn’t want me rehashing that night.”

  Scanlin was out of his chair, pacing. “Except—one—you don’t even know what the ‘something’ that happened might be. Two—you have no reason to think that Susan Hauptmann was connected to it. Look, no offense, but I think we’ve done all we can here. Compton’s a good cop. He’s going to look for whoever hurt your husband, and once he has some answers, maybe that will shed some light on Susan and everything else.” He took a look at his watch. “I’ve got a shift. I’ll drop you back in the
city. You’ll feel better once you get an update about Patrick.”

  The car ride was silent but for the adult contemporary radio station that Scanlin turned on to fill the void. When she thanked him as she got out at Lenox Hill, he simply nodded an acknowledgment.

  The ICU was busier than when they’d left. The halls were filled with nurses and interns in scrubs. People stepped aside to make room for patients being moved on gurneys. McKenna got the attention of a nurse. There was no new information, but they had moved Patrick into a patient room, where she could sit with him if she’d like.

  As long as she had known Patrick, he’d been healthy. He was just one of those people. He could pig out for four straight days over Thanksgiving and not gain a single ounce. He could stay up until two and wake at seven, looking refreshed, his eyes circle-free. If he got a cold, it came and went with a few sneezes, a couple of coughs, and a handful of over-the-counter meds. And though he had aged in their time together—the lines around his mouth, the gray hair at his temples—it wasn’t in a way that made him appear weak or frail; it made him look like a man who spent time outdoors.

  So when she saw him in the hospital bed, she wanted to find the nurse and explain that she’d been sent to the wrong room. The man attached to all those tubes and hoses couldn’t be her husband. Just above the edge of his baby-blue polka-dotted gown was a wad of gauze taped around his neck. She knew that the gown and the gauze covered the gun wounds and surgery scars. If he managed to pull through this, those marks would be there forever, constant reminders of the events that had put him in this bed.

  She looked at his pale, stubbled face beneath the oxygen mask. How could he have lost so much weight in one day? Was that possible? She wanted to see his eyes open. To watch him smile when he recognized her. To see him. To see him and know that they were going to be okay. That whatever secrets he may have been keeping were for all the best reasons. He would wake up and tell her everything, and then they could somehow make this right.