Authors: Alafair Burke
M
cKenna checked her cell as she walked to the car. No calls but two new e-mail messages, both from the same unfamiliar address, both with the same subject line: Big Pig. She skimmed them quickly.
One of her contacts at the courthouse had come through. Big Pig was one of many nicknames Judge Frederick Knight had earned among the local bar, this one referring to both his massive girth and his blatant sexism. The messages were forwards of e-mails Judge Knight had sent from his judicial address. They must have come from someone with access to the network. If they were authentic, they were tangible proof to confirm rumors that had been whispered for years. She would have enough material to expose Judge Frederick Knight as the lazy SOB he was.
When she took the driver’s seat, she could feel Dana staring at her. “What?”
Dana continued to look at her expectantly.
“I’ve worked with you for two years, Dana. If I’ve got something funky on my nose, you’re supposed to tell me.” She rubbed her face with her index finger.
“You’re snot-free. I’m just wondering if you want to talk about anything.”
“Such as?”
“The article?”
“We work for a magazine, Dana. There are a lot of articles out there.”
“Your article.
The
article.”
“No. I most definitely do
not
want to talk about the article. No one should talk about the article. I’m starting to think I made a huge mistake writing the stupid thing.”
“Tammy told me you got a call from a literary agent. And from HarperCollins.” Tammy the editorial assistant always knew something about everything. Those calls had been to McKenna’s direct line.
“Stop listening to Tammy. She’s a noodnik.”
“Can a woman be a noodnik?” Dana asked.
McKenna had no clue. She grew up in Seattle. Went to college and law school in the Bay Area. A dozen years since her move to New York, her Yiddish still couldn’t be trusted. “Whatever. Tammy’s not exactly an accurate narrator.”
“Well, the narrator says you have a book proposal that goes to auction next week. The magazine piece was to start the buzz rolling.”
As usual, Tammy knew just enough to get the story wrong. The publishing house had asked about a proposal, and the agent had talked about the possibility of an auction, but a proposal going to auction next week? Not even close. Not to mention, the agent had made it clear that the book would need to be more than an extended version of the magazine article. It would have to be personal. “Intimate.” “Maybe even in the first person.” “Like a novel but true.” “You were barely thirty years old—dating and drinking at night, facing down cops and DAs by day.
That’
s the book!” The dreaded “memoir” word had been raised.
At first, when McKenna thought she’d be reporting real news, she saw journalism as an extension of her original work as a prosecutor. Attorneys and reporters both investigated facts and wove them into a compelling—and often spun—story. Ten years ago, when McKenna was an assistant district attorney, she made the mistake of becoming a character in one of those stories she was supposed to narrate. Two weeks ago, she had repeated that mistake as a journalist by writing a ten-page feature article about the same case. But a
memoir
? What was that saying about the definition of insanity: making the same decisions over and over, yet expecting a different result?
McKenna’s phone rang from her jacket pocket. She didn’t recognize the number on the screen but answered anyway, eager for the distraction from Dana’s interrogation.
The voice on the other end of the line sounded like a young woman. She said her name was Mallory. She talked the way all young women seemed to these days, slowing the pace of her speech and dipping her voice low into a “fry” at the end of her sentences.
“Hiiii. My boyfriend said to call. I was on the subway the other day when that lady pulled that kid off the traaaacks.”
“Has anyone else contacted you about it?” It seemed like every witness expected to be paid for an interview or at least to get on television.
“No. After you e-mailed my boyfriend because of that comment you saw online, I told him to delete it. It happened so fast, the video doesn’t even really show anything.”
“Well, I’d love to see it.” McKenna tried not to let her tone reveal her excitement. It was a stupid story, but at least it was a story. First Judge Knight’s e-mails, now a video of the subway incident that had the entire city talking. She might have enough material to meet her next
two
deadlines.
“Yeah, okay.”
“Can you e-mail it to me?” McKenna rattled off her address, but next to her in the passenger seat, Dana was shaking her head.
“Our e-mail system’s for shit,” she said. “Won’t accept a big video file. Have her send it to my Skybox.”
The details that came tumbling from Dana’s mouth were Greek to McKenna. Her attempts to repeat them to young Mallory were reminiscent of the slumber-party game Operator, where words lost all meaning when passed down a line of communicators. Frustrated, Dana finally extended a hand for the phone so she could speak to Mallory directly. Whatever had seemed so complicated to McKenna was cake to the two of them; Dana soon returned the phone with a satisfied smile.
“Thanks for that, Mallory. Do you mind if I ask, have you shown this to anyone else? Put it on YouTube or Facebook or anything?” Nowadays, anyone with a phone was an amateur reporter. The video wouldn’t be of any value to McKenna once it hit a public website.
“That’s so last year. Social networking is social
not-
working. I’m more into, like, privacy, so just leave my name out of it, okay? It was cool and everything, but I can’t believe people are making such a big deal out it. I mean, you’re a reporter. Last time I checked, our country was still at war, you know?”
It wasn’t the first time McKenna had wondered about the merits of her career choices.
O
nce McKenna was off the phone, Dana retrieved the iPad she had stored beneath the seat for safekeeping. “Don’t want to forget this when you return the car,” she said. “You got 3G on this thing? I can hook you up on my Skybox action.”
McKenna nodded for Dana to work her magic, marveling at the woman’s ability to use the virtual keyboard for real typing. “I told Mallory to send the video to my public directory,” Dana explained. McKenna caught a quick peek at two heavily pierced twins holding fire hoses. She really didn’t understand Dana’s artistic impulses. “And I’m hitting bookmark so you can find it online without having to download to your device.”
Within seconds, Dana had tilted the screen toward her so they could watch together. The video was typical cell-phone footage: shaky, staccato, grainy. A close-up of someone’s back. The cement platform. McKenna turned up the volume. Voices, mostly inaudible. Screams. Someone yelling, “Oh my God!” Someone else yelling something about the train.
By the time Mallory had managed to point the lens toward the tracks below her, a woman in a white sweater, backpack secured tightly on her shoulders, was lifting a stunned Nicky Cervantes to his feet. As she grabbed him around the waist and hefted him halfway up the height of the platform, Nicky’s body blocked the camera’s view of the woman’s face. A man in a denim jacket took Nicky by the wrists and rolled him onto the concrete.
The cell phone jerked toward the woman just as she finished hoisting herself onto the platform unassisted. She turned and sprinted barefoot toward the stairs, ponytail bouncing at the nape of her neck, just above her backpack. The footage returned quickly to Nicky before going black.
Dana let out a whistle. “That chick’s kickass. Nicky probably weighs one-seventy. Did you see how she dead-lifted him?”
McKenna wasn’t interested in the woman’s strength. She rewound the video and tried to stop on the brief glimpse of the woman’s face before she turned to run away. After three attempts, McKenna managed to hit pause at just the right moment.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
She hit replay and watched the entire clip again.
“So much for identifying Superwoman,” Dana said. The image was grainy at best. “Don’t worry. You’ll find another way to hook in the masses. You always do.”
But Dana had misinterpreted McKenna’s expression. She wasn’t disappointed. She was in shock.
She never thought she would see that face again. Susan Hauptmann had disappeared without a trace ten years ago.
M
cKenna automatically clicked to her computer’s screen saver when she felt Bob Vance walk into her office, looming over her.
Her editor laughed. “If you’re going to keep doing that, could you get some pictures of something that’s
not
food?” Her current wallpaper was a photograph of a fried-egg pizza. “When are you going to realize that one of the advantages of being a journalist is that you can look at whatever the hell you want and call it research. If you believe Walt, he’s been working on a big exposé of the porn industry for the past seven years.”
Stanford undergrad. Boalt Law School. A federal judicial clerkship. Four years at the district attorney’s office. It had been a decade since she’d left those uptight surroundings, but old habits died hard. McKenna was a natural rule follower. Even as a child, she would lecture her parents for parking in loading zones.
Today, though, she had a reason to hide the screen from her supervisor. She had spent the last hour searching for current information about Susan Hauptmann. There was nothing. In a sadly familiar pattern, Susan’s disappearance had consumed the media for a few weeks, with coverage steadily waning in the ensuing months. Now a search for her name pulled up only isolated comments from bloggers and true-crime addicts asking, “Whatever happened to that girl?”
“I hear there’s talk of a book,” he said.
She rotated in her chair to face him. “You were the one who suggested the article, Bob, and you know how I felt. I don’t think I’m up to writing an entire book about it, so don’t make me do it.”
“I’m not your daddy, Jordan. I can’t
make
you do anything, especially when it’s not for the magazine. I’m just saying that if the rumors are true—if there’s that kind of interest from publishers—something like that happens once in a journalistic career, and only if you’re lucky. And this is real news, not the kind of stuff we usually get to do around here.”
When McKenna had left the district attorney’s office nearly ten years ago, she had vowed not to do any further damage to the people and institutions she had harmed. But somehow, the career moves she’d made in the aftermath had managed to alienate her even more from a job that once was the core of her identity.
It was Bob Vance who had given her a start at a new one. After McKenna had published one not so successful legal thriller and a few pieces on spec about city crime issues, he’d brought her on as a full-time writer. She had fantasized about specializing in local crime and courts, but had come to accept that it would be hard to provide legitimate coverage of the criminal justice system when almost every cop in the city hated her. Instead, she was a features reporter. Given the increasingly silly tone of the barely afloat magazine, she felt more like a paparazzo.
The saving grace was that Vance was a real journalist at heart. The recent article had been his suggestion: a retrospective of the case that had ended her career at the DA’s office—a police officer’s shooting of a nineteen-year-old named Marcus Jones.
“It’s a bad idea,” she’d told Vance when he’d proposed it. “Honestly, no one will be interested in Marcus Jones all these years later.”
“Ten years. It’s an anniversary, so there
will
be interest. People like anniversaries. They distract themselves with the controversies of old rather than fight the battles of today. In my humble and not so ignorant opinion, I think that if anyone’s going to tap in to whatever you might have to say, it should be you. You can control the story.”
“I tried to control the story ten years ago, and look where it got me.” It wasn’t only McKenna’s prosecutorial career that had taken a hit. It was her general credibility. After her first big feature for the magazine, online commentators gleefully celebrated the irony that a woman who’d made false claims at the DA’s office was supposed to be a journalist. The criticism had been so intense that she’d stopped reading the comments before she broke down at her desk.
Although McKenna had written the ten-year anniversary article reluctantly, Vance’s instincts had been right. There had been interest, so much that McKenna was getting calls from agents and publishing houses about possible book deals.
“Look,” Vance said now, slapping a hand against the desk for emphasis, “all I’m saying is that if I were you, I’d jump at the chance. As your boss? I guess I’m here to tell you that anything you write for the magazine belongs to the magazine. A book’s got to be on your own time. You know what I’m saying?”
He didn’t wink, and he didn’t nod, but he may as well have. Writing for a magazine wasn’t a nine-to-five gig, so they both knew that her time was fungible. Just like Dana—working on her artistic photography when she was supposedly photographing Zuccotti Park—McKenna could easily sneak in a few pages of a book during her daytime hours.
“Got the message, boss.”
“So you going for the book?” When she didn’t respond, Vance held up both palms. “Fine, I tried. I still need four thousand words from you by end of day tomorrow. You working on this subway mystery gal or what?”
Was it work, or was it personal curiosity? Was she seeing things in that grainy cell-phone video? She wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.
“I was hoping to find a different angle on the story, but there may not be much more to it.”
“I thought you told me someone might have a video.”
“It didn’t pan out.”
“Did you get the video or not?”
Sometimes McKenna wondered whether Bob Vance should have been a lawyer instead of a magazine editor. “The girl sent it, but it was just a bunch of shaking and bumping around.”
“Better than nothing. Let’s pop it on the website and see where it goes.”
“I promised the girl I wouldn’t post it,” she said, stretching the truth. “Trust me, it’s so useless that people would scream at us for wasting their time.” At a time when print media was still trying to find its way in an online world, the specter of anonymous Internet vitriol was enough to make Vance back down.
Her first big feature as a journalist had happened because Bob Vance had taken a chance on her. He’d given her a paycheck and a new start. Now she was looking the man straight in the eye and lying to him: “The subway story’s not going anywhere.”
A
lone again in her office, she pulled up the video on her screen and hit replay to view it from the beginning. She hit pause at just the right moment to freeze on Susan’s face. Maybe Susan’s face.
One thing she hadn’t lied about to Vance: the quality was crap.
But there was something about the face that was so distinctive. Susan was one of those naturally beautiful women with clear skin, wide bow-shaped lips, and a knowing smile. Her bright green almond-shaped eyes always glinted with the humor of a silent joke. Her appearance gave off alertness and intelligence. Somehow, despite the video’s poor quality, McKenna could make out all of this. Above her left eye, right by her hairline, wasn’t that the same small scar?
Or maybe she wasn’t seeing anything. Maybe she was projecting the resemblance. Had all this talk about the ten-year anniversary of the Marcus Jones shooting pulled her memory back to the time when she left the DA’s office? Was that why she was thinking about Susan? Missing her. Wondering about her. Seeing her ghost in grainy images.
She let the video play and watched the ghost turn from the camera and sprint up the stairs. Even the sprint was familiar. While many women ran with arms swinging side to side as if rocking a baby, the ghost pumped her arms like an Olympian, fingers outstretched like knife blades. How many times had Susan lost McKenna with those effortless dashes? She would wait patiently outside the subway entrance until McKenna emerged from the darkness, slightly out of breath.
McKenna paused it again. There was something in the woman’s right hand. Something black and rectangular.
She hit rewind and watched from the beginning. There. Pause. It was right after the woman had hoisted her weight from the tracks to the platform. Both palms were braced past the platform’s edge. She swung one leg up to the side. As she pressed herself to standing, she reached her right hand along the cement. Grabbed something.
McKenna had her suspicions that Nicky Cervantes was not the honor-student athlete the morning papers had made him out to be. Now she thought she might know why this woman had been chasing him.
She dialed Nicky’s home number. When he answered, she said, “Nicky, it’s McKenna Jordan. I talked to you today during baseball practice.”
“From the magazine. The lady with all the questions.”
“I need to know something very important. And I promise not to tell anyone.”
“There’s nothing else to tell. I fell.”
“Just listen, okay? I need the
real
truth, Nicky. And I won’t print it.”
“Right. ’Cause reporters are all about keeping things on the down-low.”
“I’m also a member of the New York bar.” She wasn’t. Not anymore. “That means I’m licensed as a lawyer. I will get disbarred if I repeat anything you say to me.”
“Will you give me legal advice for free?”
Sure, why not? “I need to know the truth. You took that woman’s cell phone, didn’t you?”
“Why you asking me that?”
“I need to know.” She realized she sounded desperate. She tried to calm herself, but she knew her instincts were right. That rectangle in the woman’s hand. The city’s familiar warnings to commuters not to use their handheld electronics on the train. “You took her phone, didn’t you? And she was chasing you to get it back.”
She knew from his pause that he was about to come clean. “Yeah,” he finally said, his voice quiet. “And then when I was down there, thinking about that train, she jumped in like Jackie Chan. Threw my ass to safety.”
Fast. And strong. Like Susan.
“Now what?” he asked. “What’s your advice?”
“Keep it to yourself, Nicky. Don’t tell a soul. And don’t
ever
do something so stupid again. Snatching a phone from a distracted commuter might seem minor to you, but the state of New York views it as robbery in the third degree. It can land you seven years. Bye-bye baseball, hello prison yard.”
“I’m done with all that. Told Coach I need to go back to the paint store. He says we’ll work something out on practice. Like I said today, I changed. Laying there next to the rats, the sound of that train—I changed.”
Though McKenna had heard so many defendants say the same two words at countless sentencing hearings, she actually believed Nicky. She gave him her number in case he ever needed a favor, then she wished him luck with the season.
She watched the video one more time. There was no way to be certain, but the woman in the video looked more like Susan with every viewing. If Susan were alive, where had she been all this time? Why did she leave? Why didn’t she tell anyone? And why was she back now?
McKenna thought about the wealth of information stored on her own phone. Text messages. To-do lists. Voice mails. Call logs. Notes to self. E-mails. Whoever Superwoman was, she had gone to tremendous lengths to get that little black rectangle back.