If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  Now she didn’t really care about any of it.

  “So who’s the guy in the picture?” he asked.

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “You should reach out to Dana. She quit in a huff about the magazine letting you go, but I saw her talking to that agent outside the building.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  In a strange way, McKenna had always been intimidated by Dana, who was younger, shorter, and less educated, but bold enough to pierce her tongue and stomp through a newsroom in a tank top with her bra straps showing. She dropped the F-bomb without mercy. And she didn’t seem to care that she usually smelled like garlic.

  McKenna realized now that all of the brashness was a veil. Dana pretended to place art above real-world concerns like employment, rent, and a retirement account, but she was a phony. She was for sale, no less than the corporate drones she liked to mock.

  She wasn’t even worth a subway ride to Brooklyn. McKenna could deal with her in a phone call.

  “Hey there, M.”

  One night on the girl’s daybed, and Dana was using a nickname that only Patrick called her.

  “Do you realize that what you did amounts to wire fraud under the federal criminal code?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  McKenna gave her a brief tutorial in the law. As an employee, Dana owed the magazine her duty of honest services. By taking a bribe and then using the Internet to delete the magazine’s intellectual property (the video of Susan) and to fabricate a false story about Judge Knight’s supposed e-mails, she had committed wire fraud. The maximum sentence was twenty years.

  Dana continued to deny it.

  “I’m not playing with you, Dana. You are in so far over your five-foot-tall head that you can’t begin to understand the rain of hell I will bring down on you. The man who hired you? Bob Vance saw you together. He’s dead now. Maybe you woke up long enough today to hear about the shooting at Grand Central? He was killed, and my husband nearly was, too.”

  Dana was making “oh my God” noises on the other end of the line.

  “Shut up, Dana. And grow up. I am giving you one chance to do what I’m telling you. After that, I go to the U.S. attorney’s office, and you take your chances with a grand jury.”

  “I’ll do anything, McKenna. I didn’t know—I thought it was just one story. Then you got fired. And oh my God, that guy’s dead? And Patrick—”

  “What did that man want from you?”

  “At first I didn’t know. He offered me two hundred bucks to tell him what you were working on. I told him about the Knight story—your search for a smoking gun. He paid me five grand to make it look like you manufactured your own evidence.”

  “I got fired for that, Dana.” Worse. Because of Dana, McKenna had suspected her own husband of being behind the setup.

  “I didn’t think it would be that bad. It was a lot of money. That’s like almost three months’ pay. I was supposed to keep him updated. When you got the video of the subway lady, he gave me another grand to delete it.”

  “So the temper tantrum you threw about your backup being deleted was bogus.”

  “I didn’t know you’d get fired. When I quit, it was my way of trying to make it up to you.”

  “Your being out of a job does absolutely nothing to help me, Dana. Nothing about your life is at all relevant to mine.”

  “You don’t have to be such a bitch—”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I need to be right now. Because here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go to Bob Vance—in person, at NYC magazine—and you’re going to tell him what you did. You can make whatever lame excuse you want: alcoholism, bipolar disorder, I’d probably go with a practical joke that got out of hand. You already quit, so I doubt they’ll do anything more to punish you. But you will make it clear that you were the one who set me up on the Knight article.

  “Alternatively, I will make sure the U.S. attorney’s office knows that you accepted a bribe and forged e-mails under the name of a sitting New York County supreme court judge. Do I need to ask you more than once?”

  McKenna’s pulse was just returning to normal when her cell phone rang. She recognized the general number for the district attorney’s Office.

  “This is McKenna.”

  Getty didn’t bother introducing himself. “You know, Wright, I was the one person in the office who defended you when the Macklin case imploded. I felt responsible for your going public. But you know what? You proved today that my initial instincts were right. Every bad word anyone has ever said about you is right. You’ve got no judgment.”

  What comes around goes around. She had just gone off on Dana, and now Will Getty was venting at her.

  “Will, you have no idea what I’m dealing with right now. I just had a few questions—”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You were basically accusing me of knowing something about Susan’s disappearance and taking perjured testimony from James Low to cover up for a bad cop. It’s ridiculous. But if you want to start throwing accusations at every man who fell into Susan’s bed, there’s another name you should know about.”

  Don’t say it, Will. Please don’t say it.

  “I told you before that things didn’t work out with Susan and me. I said it was because of the deployment, because I was trying to protect your feelings. But there was something else. She told me she was in love with one of her best friends and wanted to make something work with him.”

  No, don’t say it. Don’t say it. No, no, no.

  “Guess what, Wright? The friend was none other than your husband, Patrick Jordan. Maybe you better find out what he knows before you weave together your master conspiracy theory.”

  The line fell silent. She tasted bile in the back of her throat.

  Her phone chirped again in her hand. If Getty was calling to apologize, it was too late. Some things could not be taken back.

  The call was from a different number.

  “This is McKenna.”

  “I’m calling for Dr. Gifford at Lenox Hill Hospital. We thought you’d like to know that your husband is awake. He’s awake, and he’s talking. He made it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  The ICU was marked by the same chaos McKenna had left behind that morning. Same overcrowded hallways. Same loud, scratchy pages over the intercom system. Same weird antiseptic odor.

  Patrick, though, had moved. The bed he’d occupied was now home to a twentysomething woman surrounded by balloon bouquets and teddy bears. The smocked staff had changed, too. McKenna didn’t recognize any of the nurses she’d ingratiated herself with the previous night. She zeroed in on the sole woman at the nursing station who seemed to be standing in one spot for consecutive seconds.

  “I’m looking for my husband, Patrick Jordan. He was in room 610, but he must have been transferred.”

  The woman gave her a confused look. “Mr. Jordan was moved to a room in our recovery wing. Do you mind if I check your identification?”

  McKenna placed her driver’s license on the counter.

  “Room 640. Just through these double doors, take the first right turn, and then it’s the third room on your left. And sorry about the ID check. I could’ve sworn another woman was just here saying she was the patient’s wife, but I must have misheard her. We’re a bit swamped today. Probably another member of your family.”

  Probably not.

  For all Susan’s talk about how Patrick and McKenna were soul mates, meant to be, it was obviously Susan and Patrick who shared the deep connection. Susan had probably been sneaking around with him the whole time McKenna had been falling in love. Whatever they had for each other could have been going on the entire time Susan was supposedly missing, and she had dragged him into something that had gotten him shot.

  And now she had been here
. With him. At his bedside, instead of her.

  McKenna hated both of them.

  How could Patrick ever fix this?

  A pair of open eyes and a chapped-lip smile turned out to be a remarkable beginning. All of the horrible mental images she’d been carrying around disappeared. She didn’t have any answers, but suddenly, it wasn’t about his phone call or leaving work early one day or discouraging her from looking for Susan. Somehow she knew at a basic, cellular level that Patrick would have an explanation.

  “You’re here,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse.

  She placed a hand over her mouth and fought back tears. She rushed to him, leaning in to hug him tight, and then froze at the sight of the hoses and tubes. She settled for a palm against his temple and a kiss on his cheek. “You scared me.”

  “You scared me, too. I guess we’re even.”

  When she’d decided to go to Dana’s that night, it never dawned on her that he’d be worried about her safety. The fact that she’d trusted Dana over her own husband made her feel sick. Seeing him now, she knew she never should have doubted him.

  “You may need to buy me some new casebooks for Christmas.”

  His laugh quickly turned into a cough. “Shh,” she whispered. “Take it easy. I promise never to be funny ever again.”

  “The surgeon told me how smart I was. I had to confess I saw it on one of your TV shows. Remember?”

  She nodded and wiped a tear from her cheek. “I almost lost you.”

  So much had changed since they’d gotten married. They had taken the plunge after a year of uninterrupted bliss had convinced them they had finally worked out all the kinks. He’d thought she was over the pain of what had happened at the DA’s office. That now that she was happy in her new life as a writer, she could be happy with him. But then her second book got rejected, and she had turned into the same moody, self-centered person she’d been before. When she was unhappy, it affected the way she treated Patrick. His potty humor, once endearing, was immature. His penchant for constancy, so reliable and admirable when they met, was boring.

  It was as though she’d gotten married believing he’d change, and he’d married her on the assumption that she’d always be the same. If it hadn’t been for the marriage license and the apartment they’d bought together, they might have gone right back to their previous cyclical ways: on, then off, then on. She wouldn’t let that happen again. Her professional life was in tatters, but all she cared about right now was Patrick.

  He looked away from her. “I’m so sorry, McKenna. I—I don’t know how I let this happen. There’s so much I need to tell you.”

  “She was here, wasn’t she? Susan. She was here with you.”

  He started to cry. In all the years she had known him, she had never seen him cry. “How did you know—”

  “I know a lot, Patrick. And now I need you to tell me the rest.”

  She e-mailed me at work last Monday. From an anonymous account.” It had been two days after Susan rescued Nicky Cervantes from the subway tracks—the same day McKenna had shown Patrick the video of Susan. The same day he’d pretended the woman looked nothing like Susan. The same day he’d sat next to her on the sofa and lied to her face.

  “Just out of the blue? After ten years?”

  “She told me that she couldn’t explain everything, but I had to trust her: I had to make sure you didn’t write anything else about the Marcus Jones shooting. And she said I couldn’t tell anyone she was alive. That she was in danger, and you might be, too, if I didn’t keep you out of it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. I thought it was someone’s sick idea of a joke, so I said I was going to call the police and tell them about her e-mail unless she agreed to see me in person. I was shocked when she sent me instructions about which train to board, which car, which seat to take. She was obviously worried about being watched.”

  “So you met her?”

  “I’m not sure you can call it that. I handed her a flash drive with a letter on it, trying to convince her to come back. To take her life back. I didn’t hear from her again until she called me two days later, wanting to know why you were posting calls for information about her on Twitter. I tried telling her that I’d done everything I could—”

  “I overheard that call,” McKenna confessed. “I found a picture of you together in the box Adam sent over. And then I heard you talking to her. I thought—I thought you’d been in touch with her all this time, and I left. If I had only—”

  “Stop it, McKenna. If it’s anyone’s fault—”

  “You know what? Let’s not do that right now. Let’s not apologize to each other or place blame or any of that. She called you, and then what?”

  “I figured she had something to do with those e-mails that got you fired. She swore up and down that she didn’t know anything about it, but I didn’t know what to believe. All I knew was that you were supposed to be home, and you weren’t, and you’d obviously been going through that box. I figured you saw something that upset you. I should have realized she’d have pictures. Jesus, I should have told you at the very beginning, when we met. Because I didn’t, it always seemed too late to do it. And then the more time went by—”

  “It’s not important, Patrick. Not right now, at least.”

  She could tell he was forcing himself to move along with the facts. “You finally called me, saying you’d gone out with the work crowd and were crashing at Dana’s. I wanted to believe everything was okay, but you didn’t come home the next night, either. And then I got that phone call. A guy saying he had you and to meet him at Grand Central. Susan had said that you could be in danger, so I—”

  “You taped yourself up in my law books.” She took his hand and kissed the inside of his wrist.

  “It wasn’t the guy I was meeting who shot me. It was a guy who came out of the crowd of protestors. In a mask and a cape. He shot us both.”

  She told him about the Cleaner. She also told him that he hadn’t been as lucky as Patrick.

  “Who is he?”

  “They don’t know yet,” she said. “Part of me wondered whether he was someone you and Susan knew.”

  “No. I mean, when I showed up at Grand Central, I thought he might have been watching me the one time I met Susan on the PATH train. I’d never seen him before that.”

  “And that’s it?” she asked. “You really don’t know anything else?”

  He shook his head, and that was all it took. She knew Patrick. She believed him.

  “I saw her cold-case file,” she said. “I know you told the police back then that you thought she’d left on her own. Why didn’t you ever mention that to me?”

  “I only suspected. I knew she had reupped her obligation to the army in 2001, right before 9/11. She’d already been deployed once, and there would obviously be more where that came from. Remember how worried you were that I’d get called up, and I wasn’t even active reserves anymore.”

  She remembered. As she recalled it, she wasn’t the only one who’d been worried. She could still picture Patrick’s expression the day he’d opened a letter from the army declaring in official terms that he was “hereby recommissioned” as a captain in the army and ordering him to accept the commission by signing the enclosed documents. It was only on more careful inspection that she had seen the small type at the bottom of the form: if he failed to accept the commission by the stated date, the offer would expire and there would be no guarantee that he could rejoin at his former rank.

  By the time Patrick received the letter, the news was reporting stories of the army pulling in forty-year-old officers who had been out of the military for a decade, under a program called the Inactive Ready Reserve. The military’s position was that any officer who retained a single benefit of military service—including a military identification card—could be activated at will, whether duped into sign
ing a recommission letter or not.

  “A lot of people were looking for ways to get out. We had a classmate who hired a lawyer to make sure he had severed all possible connections to the army. Even that was enough for the crew to write him off, like some draft dodger running to Canada. But Susan? Given who her father was? If she didn’t want to go back? Part of me could imagine her just starting over.”

  According to Will Getty, Susan had been pulled back into active duty. “Did she say anything about getting ready for another deployment?” McKenna asked.

  “No. We talked about the possibility. She was headstrong about not going back if that happened.”

  “If she had been activated, would pregnancy be a basis for getting out?”

  “No. Women can defer depending on the due date and the timing, but it’s just a deferral. But Susan wasn’t—”

  He could see from her face that Susan, in fact, had been pregnant. Was McKenna only imagining it, or was he mentally running the math, counting the weeks? They were still together, even then. When, Patrick, when? Was it the entire time? But they weren’t going to talk about that. Not now. Not yet.

  “She still would have owed the army her time,” he said.

  “Giving up her identity seems like a drastic way to get out of service.”

  Then McKenna realized that she’d been looking at everything wrong. She’d been trying to work out how Susan might have stumbled upon whatever happened at the docks that night. She had never seen that Susan could have been the one to make it all happen.

  “Do you remember that cargo import program you told me about?” she asked. “Where the museum’s shipments got spot-checked, and you were certified to do the complete inspection on your own? Did you ever mention that program to Susan?”

  “Yeah, I guess I did. Some night when I had to bail on one of her parties because I was working late.”