Authors: Alafair Burke
B
y the time McKenna got back to the city, it was after nine o’clock. She felt like she’d been awake for four days straight. Had it really been only that morning that Agent Mercado had summoned her to the Federal Building?
Patrick had called her eleven times and had left three additional messages.
Hey, it’s me again. Where are you? Call me at home, okay?
McKenna. You’re starting to worry me. You had a shitty day. I know. I want to help. Call me, okay?
All right, I’m trying not to lose it here. But you call me at work telling me you were questioned by an FBI agent about some ecoterrorism group and had your office searched. Someone’s setting you up at work. And now you’re gone? For hours? Maybe you’re working on something. I don’t know. Just call me. Even a text. Something. I’m still home. Okay. Bye.
She would have to face him eventually. She stepped outside to make the call. There was no answer at the apartment. When she tried his cell, she heard a ring, followed by a long tone, a ring, followed by a long tone. He was on the phone.
If he were home and on his cell, he would have picked up the apartment phone when it rang. At this time of night, he would know it was McKenna. He’d want to know where she was.
Which meant he wasn’t home. Maybe he was looking for her? But that wouldn’t make any sense. If he were so worried, wouldn’t he be glued to the apartment, waiting for the phone to ring? But he wasn’t, which meant that he was doing something besides waiting for her. He was doing something that he’d lie to her about later.
He was probably talking to Susan again. She tried to tell herself there must be an explanation. Maybe Susan had a good reason for leaving, and he was doing the right thing by helping her now. The fact that Susan had jumped in front of an oncoming train to save Nicky Cervantes suggested that she was the same kind person at heart. Her instinct to rescue others was ingrained.
But to leave like that? To let missing posters go up all over the city? To watch as her friends and family mourned her? To keep that a secret for ten years?
McKenna could still hear the coldness in Patrick’s voice
. I have it under control. Problem solved.
And then to call her moments later with
Hey, babe.
Maybe he and Susan were spies. Maybe Patrick was a national hero. Maybe he had a secret storage unit filled floor to ceiling with war medals for saving the country from alien invasion time and again. But to bifurcate his life that way? To know her for ten years—marriage for five—showing one face to her and one to Susan and whomever the hell else who knew whatever secrets they were carrying?
It didn’t matter why he had lied to her. She was afraid of him. She was afraid of her own husband.
She was so tired. She couldn’t think straight anymore. She needed to sleep. Where the
hell
was she going to sleep?
She was checking out last-minute hotel offers online when she realized she wasn’t sure how she would pay for it. All of their credit cards were in both of their names. Patrick would be monitoring her charges.
She had friends, but they were all “couple friends” at this point, which meant making up a story to explain her need for a crash pad, then having to explain why she’d lied once Patrick started calling around for her.
Fuck!
She scrolled through the contacts on her phone. Who the hell could she call? And then she knew.
Dana picked up on the second ring. “Holy hell, woman. All hail the renegade! Who knew you could go all gangsta?”
“I know,” McKenna said. “It’s absolutely insane.”
“That stunt you pulled with the magazine’s Twitter feed? Freakin’ brilliant!”
McKenna hadn’t checked the Twitter progress since she’d left for Jersey City. “Are people retweeting?”
“Oh my God. You’ve
totally
gone viral. Huff Post even put it on the front page of the Media section. Please tell me you’ve got your whole revenge plan up and ready to roll. Is it going to be like that TV show where the crazy bitch goes after a different enemy every week? You bringing a fire to their house or what?”
McKenna had always suspected that Dana’s passion had nothing to do with the magazine, but she never would have guessed that the usually unanimated hipster would be so enthusiastic about a workplace scandal.
“No fires. But I do have a huge favor to ask.”
“Hit it.”
“Can I crash at your place? I know it’s a lot to ask, but Patrick’s out of town, and a reporter just showed up at my apartment wanting to talk about the Knight e-mails. I just need a break, and seeing as how I don’t exactly have a salary anymore, a hotel would—”
“Just stop, okay? Of course it’s fine. Not exactly the Taj Mahal, but I got a sweet daybed from CB2 that should suit you fine. When are you coming?”
“Soon. If that’s okay.”
“No problem. And I’ve got a surprise when you get here.”
“Okay. Um, where am I going?” She’d never even been to the woman’s home and was inviting herself over for a slumber party.
“Oh, duh.” Dana gave her an address in Brooklyn. “Call me when you’re out front.”
D
ana’s address turned out to be for a three-story townhouse in Prospect Heights. McKenna called upstairs from the street, and Dana soon appeared at an open window on the top floor. “Catch!”
McKenna dodged to the left before the key chain hit her in the kneecaps. Upstairs, Dana was cracking up. “You can’t catch for shit! Third floor. Hopefully you can walk better than you field.”
At the apartment door, Dana said, “Come on in. I’ll give you the tour. This is— Well, this is pretty much it.” She had already opened the daybed and made it up, leaving barely enough room to walk between the open bed and the small TV stand in front of it. Beneath the window was a large desk with two laptops, a giant printer, and stacks of prints. To the side was a narrow galley kitchen.
“Oh, no. Am I taking your only bed?”
“In your dreams, McKenna. Your suppressed lesbian dreams. Nope, over here.” Past the desk, she opened two sliding doors that McKenna had assumed belonged to a closet. Inside was enough space for a full-size bed and a dresser. Compact but efficient, the way a starter New York City apartment should be.
“Thanks again for letting me crash. I promise it’ll just be for the night.”
Dana handed her a full glass of wine from the kitchen counter. “Figured you could use this after the day you’ve had.”
McKenna was happy to accept the offer. Dana clinked her own glass against McKenna’s. “To unemployment.”
The wine was awful, but McKenna said, “Mmm, nice.” She hadn’t known what good wine tasted like when she was twenty-five years old, either. “Word to the wise, though. Don’t joke about unemployment, especially in this economy. Take it from me.”
“Not just you. Me, too. I quit today.”
“What?”
“Solidarity, sister.” Dana held up her fist in a power salute. “Fuck the man. The way they threw you out with no notice?”
“Oh, no, no, no, no.
Please
tell me you’re joking.”
“No way. I’m out of there.”
“You can’t. Call Vance tomorrow morning and tell him you were mad and made a mistake. He’ll take you back. He’s a good guy.”
“Yeah, right. He was really good when he was shoving a knife in your back.”
“Do
not
do this for me.” Dana was just a dumb kid with a degree from the New School in some kind of art thing that McKenna had never heard of. A heavily tattooed photographer wouldn’t exactly be a hot ticket on the job market, and—based on her digs—she didn’t seem to have a trust fund lying around. “I’ll be fine. I can always go back to practice. Last time I checked, people still needed lawyers to get them out of jail and whatnot.”
“I didn’t do it for you. I mean, yeah, today seemed like the day to pull the trigger. But I hate it there. I only do it for the paycheck, and it’s not even a good paycheck. I just want to take my weird pictures and make cool stuff that oddball people like me will want to hang on their walls.”
“Yeah, but you were doing that stuff on the magazine’s clock, anyway.”
“Caught me. Really, though, it’s fine. My friend’s dad owns this huge photography studio—one of the big factories that does a ton of weddings and bar mitzvahs. He said he’ll let me do assistant stuff to help pay the bills. It’s better dough than the magazine, so I was already thinking about doing it. But telling Vance it was because of the way they were treating you made it seem a lot more rock-star.”
McKenna could see the appeal. “All right, then. Solidarity, sister.” She drank more of the wine, suppressing a wince at the paint-thinner flavor.
Dana took a seat on the unfolded bed. “Sorry, only place to sit without going in the bedroom, but, don’t worry, I don’t like you that much.” McKenna laughed and joined her. “Now, please, please, please tell me what’s going on. I know there’s
no. way.
you doctored up those e-mails about Judge Knight. At first I was thinking it could have been Knight himself who set you up. Like, he heard you were running a story exposing all his courthouse crassness to the world, so he decided to discredit the messenger.”
“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.
S
he 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.”
T
hose 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? Unimaginable. “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.