If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  But he didn’t open his eyes.

  She felt herself starting to shut down from the inside like a child’s toy whose battery had died. They’d find her body, slumped and nonresponsive, in this orange vinyl visitor’s chair.

  She reached out and placed her hand on Patrick’s bicep, the only part of his body exposed between the blankets and the cotton gown. She tried to remember what it felt like to place her head on that exact spot as he slept, their bodies pressed together like spoons.

  She never should have gone to Dana’s. She should have gone home and confronted him. Torn off the bandages and learned the truth, however ugly. She hadn’t, and now he was here, and she might never know why.

  She leaned down and kissed his forehead. No response, not like a fairy tale, where the prince awakes. Not even a fleeting moment of comfort in which she magically knew that everything would be okay. It was just her dry lips against his warm skin.

  She was not going to stay here and collapse out of helplessness. Only two weeks earlier, she had published a six-page article to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Marcus Jones. Now Scott Macklin was dead. So was the man who had wiped out the videos of Susan on the subway platform. Patrick was in critical condition. And it all had something to do with the night Marcus Jones died.

  She had missed something. Ten years ago, her suspicions about the gun next to Marcus Jones’s body had briefly shone a light on the events that had transpired on the docks the night of October 16. But then she was disproved and the lights went dark. A decade later, with the publication of a six-page article, she had managed to lose her job, her reputation, and most important, her husband’s safety. Someone wanted the lights to remain off. She was going to turn them on again.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  As McKenna stepped off the elevator on the basement level of the courthouse, she heard two women whisper as they passed: “That’s the magazine reporter who teed off on Knight.” She couldn’t make out the second woman’s complete response, but she did hear “he had it coming” and “basically true.”

  That was the way the truth worked sometimes. An eyewitness might make a mistake about the color of the gunman’s shirt but still pick the right man. Maybe McKenna had been wrong ten years ago when she claimed that Macklin had planted a drop gun on Marcus’s body, but maybe the core of the allegation had been on the mark.

  The woman at the front desk of the Supreme Court record room was reading a novel called Criminal.

  “How about that,” McKenna said. “A real, live hardcover book with pages and everything. Nice to know I’m not the only person around who likes my reading old-school.”

  Instead of leaving the book open with a broken spine, the woman carefully placed a Post-it note to mark her spot. “My son bought me one of those e-readers for Christmas. It was good for my summer cruise. On that tiny little machine, I took a book for every day of the trip. But there’s something about turning the pages of a hefty book.”

  McKenna had learned the fine art of talking up administrative staff during her judicial clerkship. She could call for district court records and have pages faxed within the hour. Her coclerk, Richard, who made it clear in every call that he was a very, very impressive young lawyer working for a very, very influential appellate court judge, never understood why his requests took a week to answer. It wasn’t about power or authority or official obligations. It was basic human nature: people wanted to help the nice guys and shaft the douches.

  “I’m hoping you can help me out with something. I need the court file for People v. Scott Macklin. It’s an old one, I’m afraid.” McKenna gave the month and year for the original opening of the file.

  “Oh, sure. I remember this one.” The woman must have been too engrossed in her novel to have read the news about Macklin’s death. “You think that’s old, I had a girl in here this morning asking for a forty-year-old landlord-tenant dispute. Her building is claiming that her grandmother was evicted from a rent-controlled apartment back in the seventies, which would mean she had no right to live there now. Poor thing couldn’t stop crying. I found the file, though. Turns out the eviction was never finalized. It’s nice when you actually get a happy ending.”

  “Well, if you could find that, my file should be a cinch.”

  “Is there a specific document you’re looking for, or do you want the whole thing? Keep in mind that photocopies are a quarter a page. And no, in case you’re wondering, the money does not go to the nice lady who runs the copies.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice. I want the whole file, but trust me, it’s a thin one.”

  “My favorite kind,” the woman said with a smile.

  Twenty minutes later, McKenna had what she needed. A twenty-minute wait at the courthouse was the equivalent of the speed of light in the rest of the world.

  McKenna found a bench at the far end of the basement hallway and settled in to review the file.

  The stack of pages was, as expected, thin. The file was thin because there had been no charges at all. Typically there would be no documentation other than a single slip of paper with a checkmark from the grand jury, indicating that it had not true-billed the case—a fancy way of saying flushed. But the Marcus Jones shooting wasn’t typical, especially after a young but respected ADA stuck her neck out and claimed that the grand jury hadn’t heard all the relevant evidence.

  Because of the intense public scrutiny, the district attorney had taken the extra step of filing a memorandum declining to pursue the case further, complete with a detailed justification. It was signed by the lead prosecutor who had presented the case to the grand jury, Will Getty.

  She skimmed the introduction. Scott Macklin. Thirteen years with NYPD. At the seaport that night for a routine assignment pursuant to a federal-state cargo inspection program.

  The report moved on to Macklin’s version of the night’s events. He noticed Marcus near the inland edge of the dock. Marcus appeared to be monitoring the movement of computer parts into a shipping container. Because the docks still saw the occasional snatch-and-grab, Macklin approached the teenager as a precaution. When Marcus saw Macklin heading his way, he turned and ran. Macklin pursued him, turned a corner around a shipping container, and saw Marcus reach for a weapon. He had no choice but to shoot.

  The next section of the report summarized Marcus Jones’s background, his mother’s insistence that he did not own a gun, and McKenna’s tracing of the gun back to Safe Streets, the police-sponsored gun destruction program. Only four NYPD officers had been scheduled to transport the Safe Streets guns from a locked property room to the smelter. Scott Macklin was one of them.

  The report did everything it could to make McKenna’s inference appear reasonable, which it would have been if not for Don Whitman. As the report went on to explain, Whitman was one of the other three Safe Streets cops. More significantly, he was convicted a few years later for being on the Crips’ payroll.

  When Getty realized that Whitman could have walked off with a Safe Streets gun just as easily as Macklin, he sent investigators back into Marcus’s neighborhood, searching for someone who could tie Marcus to a gun slipped eight years earlier to the Crips.

  The witness was James Low. The twenty-two-year-old lived in the same housing project as Marcus Jones. He testified to the grand jury that he’d sold the gun to Jones for two hundred bucks after finding it in his father’s dresser following his father’s death. Before his uneventful death from acute myocardial infarction, James Low, Sr., was considered a “five-star universal elite” in the New York City Crips hierarchy.

  When McKenna had heard the news, only one word captured her surprise: “Un-fucking-believable.”

  The grand jury testimony of James Low, Jr., completed the chain from property room, to junk pile, to Officer Don Whitman, to James Low, Sr., to Jr., to Marcus Jones. In comparison, Macklin’s connection to the gun was a fluke.

 
Or was it? McKenna had been so mortified by her rush to judgment that she had never stopped to question the alternative. She had simply assumed that Low was telling the truth.

  She made her way back to the file room. The nice reading lady was back into her novel. “That was quick,” she said.

  “I’ve got another request, if you don’t mind. Can you tell me whether you have any cases involving a James Low?”

  The woman typed a few commands into a computer on the front desk. “I’ve got a few, all criminal. Starts back in 1972, looks like the most recent is 2004.”

  “There was a Senior and a Junior. I’m interested in the kid.”

  “Got it. Yes, the younger was charged as Junior. I got three cases, all resulting in convictions—theft in 1999, assault-three in 2001, and an assault-three in 2004.”

  McKenna already knew from the Marcus Jones case that by the time Low testified before the grand jury, he had two misdemeanor convictions—a shoplifting incident in 1999, and a misdemeanor assault in 2001 for punching a guy who spent too much time checking out Low’s girlfriend at a bowling alley. McKenna asked the nice reading lady for a copy of the 2004 file.

  This time McKenna didn’t bother to resume her spot on the hallway bench. She skimmed the file at the counter. The nice lady, returning to her novel, didn’t seem to mind.

  According to the probable-cause affidavit filed the night of Low’s arrest, Low had been one of several men in the VIP lounge of a hip-hop club in Chelsea. An argument broke out between two groups of customers. The genesis of the dispute was stupid, as usual—something about a member of the other group insulting the ex-girlfriend of Low’s cousin’s friend’s brother—but it culminated in Low’s side attacking the rivals with liquor bottles.

  The arresting officer booked Low for felony assault. A bottle was a weapon. Multiple perpetrators made the assault a gang attack.

  McKenna knew the district attorney’s filing policies. This was definitely a felony. Low’s misdemeanor assault only three years earlier would have made him an unsympathetic candidate for plea bargaining and sentencing.

  And yet.

  Low pleaded to a misdemeanor. Seven days in jail, which in reality meant a night or two before early release. Instead of doing real time in state prison, he chilled out in local for a few hours and walked away without a felony conviction. In highbrow legal terms, it was a sweetheart deal, and it came only a little over a year after Low’s grand jury testimony had saved New York’s law enforcement community from a scandal whose toxicity would have lingered for a generation.

  Even before she turned to the last page of the file, where the attorneys of record were listed on the final page of the conviction order, she knew what name she would find there. For the people of New York County: Assistant District Attorney Will Getty.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Susan had her fair share of dalliances, and Will Getty was on the list.

  Neither of them flaunted that fact, but McKenna wasn’t blind. She had been the one to introduce them. She remembered the night.

  McKenna didn’t know Getty well yet. It was about four months before the Marcus Jones shooting. He was one of the lifers, already handling major crimes. She was only four years in, handling drug cases but beginning to eye more serious assignments.

  She had worked late, as usual. When she left, Getty was also heading out. It began with chitchat in the elevator.

  “Not that I’m monitoring you or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen you leave the office. I was starting to think you lived here.”

  “That’s a hologram to fool people into thinking I’m actually working.”

  “I’ll deny it if you ever tell anyone I said this, but take it easy. You don’t want to burn out before you get to the fun stuff.”

  “Duly noted.”

  They stepped out on the ground floor.

  “You heading to happy hour?” he asked.

  “I am heading to a happy hour but not the office happy hour.”

  “Another piece of unsolicited advice: spend less time at your desk and more time drinking with your coworkers. Friendships matter.”

  “Trust me. If you knew how much I drank my first two years in this office, you’d sign me up for the liver transplant waiting list.”

  “Ah, but that’s when you were just a baby ADA, playing with the other kids. We career guys know how it works. Most of the newbies are here for a couple years of trial experience, then jump ship to make some dough. We don’t bother getting to know people until they’ve been around a while. Now you need to jump in with the older generation. Graduate to the lifer crowd.”

  “Can you seriously tell me that hanging with the lifer crowd is any different than the usual scene in this office?”

  “Did you really just use the word ‘scene’ to describe the DA’s office?”

  “You know what I mean. The war stories. Who crushed which defense attorney at trial. Who hauled out the most badass line during plea negotiations. Everyone’s always trying to out-macho each other.”

  Wincing, he started to offer a retort but stopped himself. “Yeah, that does sound familiar, doesn’t it?”

  “At least when I play, I do it with people who don’t talk shop all night.”

  He looked at his watch. “They’re probably all gone by now. Damn, I could use a drink. I had a cooperating codefendant retract his confession on me today. Total nightmare.”

  “Well, my happy hour’s just getting started. You should come.”

  “Nah, I’d be crashing.”

  “No such thing.” She explained the concept of Susan’s monthly the-more-the-merrier gatherings. “Seriously, you should come. It’s my chance to convince you that I do have a life outside this office.”

  She could tell he was on the fence. She pressed him. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think you’d have fun. And you did say you needed a drink.”

  “Sold.”

  Susan had been delighted to see McKenna arrive with a guest in tow—a decent-looking male guest, to boot. Despite McKenna’s assurances to Getty, she had not enjoyed much of a life beyond work recently. After a long dry spell, she had met Jason Eberly (aka Nature Boy) two weeks earlier at a city bar event, but it was nothing serious. And it never would be, because McKenna would meet Patrick at the next Bruno happy hour.

  In typical Susan fashion, she wasted no time jumping into the gutter once Getty broke away to the men’s room. “I knew you wanted a faster track to trying homicides, but sleeping with your boss? A bit unseemly for you, dear.”

  “Not funny, Bruno. That’s how rumors get started.”

  “He’s single, right?”

  “To my knowledge.”

  “And he’s not technically your boss.”

  “No, but he could be down the road.”

  Though the conversation could have ended there, Susan went on. “You’re absolutely certain you’re not interested? Hundred percent?”

  “A hundred and ten percent. Nothing good comes from interoffice romance.”

  When Getty returned to the table, Susan moved her chair a hair closer to his and laughed at his jokes with a little more enthusiasm. McKenna had seen the transition before. And she could tell Getty liked it.

  Four months later, Scott Macklin would shoot Marcus Jones, and Getty would select McKenna to assist with the grand jury investigation. She would wonder at the time whether she got the assignment because of her hard work or because she’d inadvertently gotten him laid.

  She wouldn’t really care. She had a homicide—the sexiest kind, an officer-involved shooting. Her career was finally starting. And then it ended. And Susan was gone. And now McKenna was wondering if it was all because she had bumped into Will Getty on that elevator.

  Thanks anyway,” McKenna said to the nice reading lady. “Thanks for everything.”

 
The woman hadn’t found any record of a conviction for the final name McKenna had asked about. There was only one person who could provide the information she needed.

  McKenna couldn’t get cell reception in the file room, so she took the elevator up to the ground floor of the courthouse. Gretchen answered on the third ring. “I told you I don’t want to be involved.”

  Stupid caller ID. Given how their last encounter ended, it was a wonder that Susan’s sister had picked up at all.

  “It’s one question, Gretchen. I promise. You said you almost got prosecuted federally when you were arrested, but you worked out a plea deal for a state conviction with rehab and probation.”

  “It’s all ancient history, McKenna.”

  “You said the case was pending for a while, but you got the deal just a couple of months before Susan disappeared?” There was no record of Gretchen’s conviction in New York County, which meant she had gotten her record expunged—a lenient outcome considering the severity of the initial allegations.

  “Glad you were listening.”

  Damn, she was a bitch. “Do you know if a local prosecutor was involved?”

  “Sure. My attorney did a full-court press. Finally found a guy willing to make a call to the feds—someone Susan knew. I was surprised she didn’t go to you. She must not have wanted you to know.”

  McKenna didn’t have the kind of network that a more experienced prosecutor would have. Like Getty had said, sometimes the job was about the friendships you’d made. The question was how close a friend he’d been with Susan before she disappeared.

  “Was the prosecutor a guy called Will Getty?”

  “My record’s supposed to be clear. How did you know?”

  The night Susan and Getty met couldn’t have been a one-night stand if Susan had reached out to Getty for a favor four months down the road. Maybe they’d had something resembling a relationship. If Getty was involved in covering up the Marcus Jones shooting, Susan could have found out about it.