Authors: Alafair Burke
I
never wanted to be the prosecutor who brought down a cop. If anything, I needed Scott Macklin to be vindicated. I became a prosecutor because I believed in a firm line between right and wrong. I wanted to help crime victims. I wanted to punish bad people who did bad things. But a prosecutor is only a lawyer. Though I had the legal knowledge and training to help the truth navigate its way through the justice system, every single one of my cases relied on police officers to educate me about the truth. They were the ones who questioned witnesses, interrogated suspects, and gathered physical evidence. If I couldn’t trust them, my job meant nothing.
And this wasn’t just any cop. It was Scott Macklin. He was a member of the Drug Enforcement Task Force of the Narcotics Division when I was trying drug cases. That meant I saw him more than other cops. He’d been in the grand jury room with me at least thirty times, testified in five of my trials, and come to my office for search warrants and legal advice dozens of times. And it wasn’t only about the work with him. He perused the frames on my office walls—the college and law school degrees, the certificate commemorating my time as a clerk for a federal judge, the absence of any personal photographs. One day he asked if I was married, quickly apologizing if he was being inappropriate. I assured him it was fine, but no, I wasn’t married. He told me that love had changed his life. It became a running joke. Whenever he was at the courthouse, he’d pass my office door: “You’re. Still. Here. You need to leave this office if you’re going to find love.”
He talked to anyone who would listen, including me, about his gorgeous wife, Josefina, and his new stepson, Thomas. Then one day he came to my office to tell me he was moving out of Narco into a new federal-state team formed through Homeland Security. He might not be around the drug unit so much.
I made some lame joke about him movin’ on up to a badass Homeland Security gig with the feds. Then he abruptly changed the topic. He asked me, “speaking of the federal government,” if I had learned anything about immigration law during my judicial clerkship. When I said that I hadn’t but had taken a course in law school, he closed my office door and told me that he was worried about some “complications” with Josefina’s legal status inside the country.
Complications.
I remember that word in particular because his voice broke when he said it. Her young son was at risk of being deported. He looked away from me, trying to regain his composure, but his emotions failed him. He shook his head in frustration and wiped away the tears starting to pool in the corners of his eyes. I offered him a Kleenex from my purse. I also wrote down the name and number of an immigration lawyer I knew from school.
Neither of us ever spoke of that day again, not even after I accused him of lying about Marcus Jones.
He trusted me. He talked to me like a friend, and he trusted me. I needed to believe cops, but I
really
needed to believe this one.
D
ammit. Now she was the one wiping away a tear. That moment in her office had gotten to her. Her memory of the details was fuzzy at best—something about Josefina entering the United States lawfully but her son being brought into the country later—but she remembered Macklin breaking down. He didn’t want to lose the family he’d only recently found. He didn’t want Josefina to get in trouble. He made too much money to qualify for free legal aid and not enough to retain a private lawyer.
She’d never seen a man cry, let alone a man like Macklin. He was at least fifteen years older than she was. Six-one, probably 220, he had a square head and thick hands like two baseball gloves. She had wondered whether he might resent her later for witnessing him in that state. She felt like she had emasculated him in some way. That night after work, she had talked to Susan about it, thinking that she must have seen men in vulnerable moments during her time in the army.
Susan had told her that men moved past their emotions. Though McKenna was sitting in the bar that night, reliving and questioning every second of that brief office interaction, Macklin was a man, and men, Susan explained, didn’t pore over every millisecond of every human encounter. Just then McKenna’s cell phone had rung—an incoming call from a lawyer she had just started seeing. When she rejected the call, Susan reiterated her point: “See now? If the tables were turned, and you had been the one calling him, you’d spend the rest of the night wondering why he didn’t pick up, what he was doing, and what you’d done wrong. A man won’t do that, not even a wussy man like Nature Boy. Nature Boy will just hang up and assume you’ll call him back later. We could stand to learn a few things from men.”
Nature Boy. Susan never seemed to approve of any of McKenna’s potential suitors—except Patrick, of course. She called poor Jason Eberly “Nature Boy” because he was a lawyer for an environmental nonprofit. A noble choice by any measure, but the nickname did manage to sum up Jason’s penchant for reminding everyone that he was more benevolent than they. He’d openly note that it was only through a loan forgiveness program that he was able to work for a nonprofit. When private lawyer friends would complain about an unreasonable client or nightmare partner, he’d say things like “That’s why I’m glad I work for a cause.” McKenna had nothing against his chosen cause, but Susan was right: Jason reeked of do-gooder-ness.
Jason. Benevolent, noble, earth-loving Nature Boy. If he was still working for environmental causes, he might know something about the organization whose button had been on the subway woman’s backpack.
She opened Google and searched for Jason Eberly. Up popped a slew of information about an up-and-coming teen singer. Who knew? She tried again, searching for “Jason Eberly attorney.” She found a hit at the website for the law firm of Walker Richardson & Jones. It was one of the ten largest firms in the country.
She clicked on the link. Gone were goatee and shaggy hair. From the looks of his closely shorn head, he’d lost most of his hair entirely. According to the bio, he was a new partner at the firm and had counseled clients on hundreds of transactions and litigation matters across all industries, nationally and globally, including chemical refining, oil and gas, mining, heavy manufacturing, and toxic torts. So much for saving the planet.
She jumped at the feeling of a hand on her shoulder.
“Patrick. Sorry, you scared me. Did I wake you?”
“My alarm went off. You’ve been up all night?”
She hadn’t noticed the sunlight beginning to make its way into the living room. “I was writing.”
“Looks to me like you’re surfing the Internet. Who’s Jason Eberly?”
“A lawyer I used to—”
“Oh, wait. That’s the guy you were dating when we first met, right?”
She knew how it looked. How many stories had she heard about extramarital affairs that began with an innocent “I wonder whatever happened to so-and-so” Google search? First comes Facebook, then comes Betrayal.
But her husband’s expression wasn’t jealous. He looked tired. And worried. And at least a little angry. He was looking at her and remembering all those nights when she drank too much, ate too little, and couldn’t sleep. She didn’t want him to think she was going back into the dark place that had kept them apart for so long.
“I really was working on the proposal. Then I realized I need to produce something for the magazine. I thought I could do a story about these people who are trying to reduce their carbon footprints to zero. One guy even stopped using toilet paper for a year. I thought Jason might know something about the movement. Turns out he’s gone to the dark side.” She rotated the laptop in his direction, making clear she had nothing to hide.
He took a quick look at the lawyer’s head shot. “Guess I don’t have anything to worry about there.”
“Never,” she said, arching her neck back and giving him a soft peck on his navel.
“Cold face,” he said, giving her hair a quick stroke. “I need to get to the museum a little early today. The queen of Jordan is supposed to be in. Can you grab a little more sleep before work?”
She nodded. She was tired, and the reception desk at Walker Richardson & Jones wouldn’t pick up until nine.
“You’ll remember to call Adam Bayne today?” she asked. “See if he still has Susan’s father’s stuff?”
“I really wish you’d rethink this. Last night it was Gretchen on Long Island, then the old man’s nurse. Look at you. You’re already exhausted. Just give it a rest, okay?”
“I just want to see if Adam has any of her things. If there’s nothing there, I’ll let it lie.” At least for a while, she told herself.
He assured her he would make the call, but she could tell he wasn’t happy about it. She climbed back into bed, working her way into the warmth Patrick had left under the blankets.
When Patrick kissed her on the cheek before he left, his lips felt soft and he smelled like toothpaste. She kept her eyes closed, pretending to have found sleep.
T
he slam of Scanlin’s coffee mug against his desk was harder and louder than he’d intended. One desk over, Ricky Munson—always trying to earn a reputation as the squad’s funny boy—couldn’t resist a comment. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop the clock. Haven’t you heard that it’s ‘be kind to dishes’ day?”
There was a reason Munson hadn’t yet achieved squad-comedian status.
Scanlin had slammed the mug for a reason, and the reason was that people were stupid. They were stupid, and they were assholes. Sometimes they were both. He’d just gotten off the phone with some finance guy whose in-home chef was found dead in the family townhouse the previous day. Odds of homicide were low, but thanks to an ambiguous bump on the woman’s head, Scanlin had to wait for official word from the medical examiner before releasing the crime scene.
It had been under twenty-four hours since the woman’s body had been wheeled away—a woman who’d cooked for this d-bag’s family for sixteen years. And the man wasn’t even in the city. He was calling from East Hampton, natch.
Didn’t matter. He insisted on a guarantee that his caterers would have access to the kitchen the following weekend. The best part was when he tried to defend himself against Scanlin’s suggestion that his priorities might be a bit
off.
“I’ll have you know we treated Rosalyn as family, Detective. She even stayed overnight in the pool house when she cooked for us in the summer.”
When Scanlin slammed the cup on his desk, maybe he was picturing the guy’s skull.
Now he welcomed the distraction of the delivery he had just received from the Records Department. He had reached out to Jared Klein, Susan’s former coworker who had mentioned her late-night attempt to turn work into pleasure. Klein remembered little about the night beyond what he’d said during the original investigation, but after some pressure, he repeated his suspicion that he had seen an entirely different side to Susan’s personality. “She was always such a—” He stopped himself from using the word he was undoubtedly thinking. “She was, you know, hard. Tough. Obviously came from a man’s world. She was fun, always trying to fit in, not like a feminazi or anything. But not a
seductress.
More like a raunchy kid sister. That night? God. I admit I still think about it sometimes.”
Maybe Klein realized it was more than a tad creepy to be fantasizing about a missing woman, because that was all he had to say about Susan.
The documents on Scanlin’s desk were copies of any and all reported incidents within a block of Susan’s building in the three weeks preceding her disappearance. It was the kind of step he should have taken at the time, but he couldn’t swear that he had. Neighborhood canvass, yes. A search for incidents involving her or her apartment, yes. But a three-week record search? Maybe not. Neighbors occasionally saw male guests coming and going at Susan’s apartment. Maybe one of them had gotten a parking ticket or had witnessed a neighborhood altercation.
As Scanlin flipped through the pages, he realized why he may have skipped the step ten years earlier. In densely packed Manhattan, a whole lot of podunk idiocy went down in a three-week period. A shoving match at Taco Bell when two customers simultaneously reached for the same root beer spigot. A couple of graffiti cleanups, courtesy of AmeriCorps, because the complainants had uttered the magic phrase “gang symbols.” One week must have seen particularly good weather because reports of ranting homeless people skyrocketed. A whole slew of noise complaints but remarkably few parking infractions. Were meter maids slacking, or had people figured out that even sky-high garage rates were better than the city’s $265 parking tickets?
Scanlin flipped back to two noise complaints that had originated from Susan’s apartment building. They were both called in by the same tenant—Vera Hadley, apartment 402. Same floor as Susan, who was in 406. The first complaint was about a loud stereo from the apartment downstairs at 10:40
P.M.
Twenty minutes later, Hadley called back to say that the music had stopped, “no thanks to you people.” The second complaint came in two days before Susan was last seen at the gym. According to Hadley, a man and a woman were screaming inside apartment 404. For reasons that weren’t clear, the call was logged in as possible DV—domestic violence—triggering a response from patrol officers. When police arrived, the hallway was quiet, no one answered the door at 404, and Hadley had no further information to offer. Call closed.
Scanlin shifted his attention to a separate pile of documents: summaries from the neighborhood canvass conducted after Susan was reported missing. No response at 404 over the course of four different days, at four different times. The tenant on the lease was a man named Paul Roca. According to the mailman, Roca had left “last week,” and his mail was being held for a month.
If the blockhead patrol officer talking to the mailman had thought to ask whether Roca had left before or after the next-door neighbor had disappeared, he hadn’t thought to make a note of it. A stupid mistake. And yet Scanlin had let it slide.
He did a quick search for Paul Roca. Still at the same address. Arrested six years earlier for hitting a girlfriend. The charges had been dismissed without prosecution but were enough to pique Scanlin’s curiosity.
Mr. Roca was worth a visit.