Authors: Alafair Burke
I
f anyone had told McKenna a week ago that she’d be standing in Joe Scanlin’s living room, she would have checked his pupils.
The house was clean but dated. An entire wall was nearly covered with framed photographs. A young Scanlin in uniform, probably right out of the academy. Scanlin in a tuxedo next to his gorgeous bride on the church steps. The young couple with their little girl in front of a muted blue background, probably at a JCPenney picture studio. She noticed that the wall-size scrapbook seemed to end abruptly. In the most recent photographs, Scanlin looked the way she remembered him from when Susan disappeared. It was as if life in this house were frozen still.
He caught her checking her cell phone again for missed calls. “I can take you back to Lenox Hill,” he offered.
“No. I’m fine. They said they’d call if they had any news.” Scanlin had the files from Susan’s disappearance at his house. By coming here with him, she’d given them an hour’s head start.
He spread the files across the table and gave her an overview. Most of it was information she’d been able to glean at the time: No blood, semen, or other physical evidence at Susan’s apartment. No financial problems. No enemies. No obvious motive for anyone to want to hurt Susan Hauptmann.
T
ell me again about the men,” she said.
He shrugged. “Well, from what I can tell, she may have been . . . a little open with her sexuality.”
McKenna looked away. It was no easier for her than for Scanlin to have this discussion. That side of Susan had always been there, but McKenna had never wanted to process the reality.
“It’s like a dark side,” she said. Since Susan’s disappearance, McKenna had been carrying around all the best memories of her friend. Her unparalleled generosity. Her courage. Her disarming humor.
Now she was recalling another side. “She seemed like a strong, independent, self-respecting woman, but at a certain time of day, all she really wanted was the attention of a man. She hid it from me, but there were signs. I just didn’t want to see them.”
How many times had an exhausted McKenna left a bar alone at two in the morning, a pit in her stomach because Susan insisted on staying behind for “one last drink,” almost always with some guy she’d just met. And what about all those late-night phone calls? The ones Susan would answer out of earshot, only to announce within the next few minutes that she needed to meet an old friend who was having a rough time.
Susan may have tried to hide her promiscuity from her girlfriends, but McKenna had suspected. Men, after all, weren’t so discreet. She’d heard the talk at happy hours. McKenna knew that Susan had hooked up with at least a couple of prosecutors she had met through McKenna, including Will Getty.
“You know, it’s funny,” Scanlin said. “Usually when we talk about a dark side, we’re talking about a man who turns all that anger and destruction against other people—his wife, his children, a stranger out of nowhere. But I used to see it back when I was in vice. These women with dark sides, they rarely turned against other people. They took it out on themselves.”
Scanlin pulled out another manila folder, this one less yellowed. “A neighbor in Susan’s building called in a noise report two days before she disappeared, but got the wrong apartment number. I talked to the neighbor, and it’s likely that what she overheard was a fight between Susan and a man. Take a look at some of the words she wrote down.” He pointed to the word “smack.” “Maybe one of Susan’s boyfriends had started getting physical with her, and they were arguing about it after the fact.” He pointed to another word. “Important.” “Maybe something like ‘It’s really important that you never smack me again.’ ”
“I think it’s safe to say that Hollywood won’t be calling you to write dialogue, Scanlin. Besides, if any guy raised a hand to Susan Hauptmann, he’d need a new set of teeth by the time she was done with him. But you mentioned working vice and how the prostitutes had a dark side.” She realized that in giving him her rundown, she’d left out Agent Mercado asking about Pamela Morris and Greg Larson. She told him about going out to Jersey City to talk to Pamela’s mother. “Susan was always trying to help lost souls. Maybe she crossed paths with Pamela. They both disappeared at the same time. Pamela Morris’s mother hasn’t seen her since the fall of 2003.”
“Then how does she know her daughter’s alive?”
“She gets letters a couple times a year. Pamela says she’s married to a preacher and travels around the country. I thought maybe that was her way of describing life with the P3s.”
“What does Pamela Morris look like?”
McKenna shrugged. “I’ve got one booking photo from 1998, and she’s got on a pound of makeup and sporting a fat lip. Brown hair, dyed blond at the time. Kind of regular.”
“Age? Height? Weight?”
She searched her memory for the details and saw where Scanlin was going. “Oh my God.”
“A couple cards a year to Mom are a small price to pay for a stolen identity.”
She remembered the fat lip lingering in Pamela’s booking photo. It wasn’t her first bust. She was deep into the life. And then she turned over a new leaf? That happened only in Hollywood. In real life, women who took the road chosen by Pamela Morris did not get happy endings. “You’re saying that the Pamela Morris who was living with the P3s out in Brentwood was actually Susan.”
“Hate to say it, but prostitutes die all the time,” Scanlin said. “A lot of them are never identified. Taking a dead person’s identity is one of the easiest ways in the world to get a fresh start.”
Susan had been at Scott Macklin’s house the day before he died. If Susan was the woman who had been living with the P3s as Pamela Morris, she must have survived the explosion on Long Island.
“But to take over Pamela’s identity, Susan would have to know that she was dead.”
She was looking at the papers spread across the dining room table, hoping an answer would come to her.
Then she saw it. “The neighbor. Susan’s neighbor who called about the noise from the argument. You said she reported the wrong apartment. Is it possible she made other mistakes? About what she actually heard?”
“Sure. She’s practically deaf now.”
“Look, Scanlin. Right here.” She jabbed her index finger against the page on the table. “Smack. But not
smack.
Mac! We know Susan went to Mac’s house the day before he died. But if she was arguing with him—or
about
him—two days before she suddenly disappeared? There’s a connection between Susan’s disappearance and whatever happened on that dock between Macklin and Marcus Jones.”
“And you’re trying to say that the connection—whatever it may be—would somehow explain why Susan is now using Pamela Morris’s name?”
He meant the statement sarcastically, but hearing him say the words out loud made all the difference. Scott Macklin. Pamela Morris. Together. Connected.
P
amela’s mother told me that toward the end, before she rode off into the sunset with her knight on a white horse, she was only seeing her regulars. Harmless, lonely married guys. That kind of thing. She specifically said that one of the guys was strange-looking and slow but nice to Pamela.”
Scanlin’s face didn’t register the point.
“Marcus Jones,” she said. “The pigmentation of his face was blotchy because of a skin condition called vitiligo. And his IQ was around seventy-five, placing him at what’s considered the borderline. His mother always maintained that he’d gone down to the docks to meet his girlfriend. We never found the girl, but he did have eighty dollars in his pocket.”
“And the docks are a frequent cruising spot for working girls,” Scanlin added.
“If Susan took over Pamela’s identity, she’d have to know that Pamela wouldn’t need it anymore. Maybe Marcus Jones wasn’t the only person who died at the pier that night. What if Mac’s shooting of Marcus Jones was bad, and Pamela Morris saw it?”
“You’re saying Mac intentionally killed her to cover it up? You’ve
got
to be kidding me. You know, this was a bad idea. I should have known—”
“Hey, we’re just talking things out, Scanlin. There are other explanations. Maybe Marcus was involved in something going down on the docks—selling stolen merchandise or something. Pamela Morris is there to meet him but sees something she’s not supposed to see. Marcus, or maybe someone else, hurts her. And then Mac comes along, and Marcus pulls the gun on him.”
“Mac never said anything about Marcus being with a girl, let alone someone killing her.”
“You see my point, don’t you? If something happened that night on the docks that we don’t know about—whatever
it
might be—that would explain the timing of Pamela going off the grid. And Susan’s disappearance, if she found out about it. And the fact that someone doesn’t want me rehashing that night.”
Scanlin was out of his chair, pacing. “Except—one—you don’t even know what the ‘something’ that happened might be. Two—you have no reason to think that Susan Hauptmann was connected to it. Look, no offense, but I think we’ve done all we can here. Compton’s a good cop. He’s going to look for whoever hurt your husband, and once he has some answers, maybe that will shed some light on Susan and everything else.” He took a look at his watch. “I’ve got a shift. I’ll drop you back in the city. You’ll feel better once you get an update about Patrick.”
T
he car ride was silent but for the adult contemporary radio station that Scanlin turned on to fill the void. When she thanked him as she got out at Lenox Hill, he simply nodded an acknowledgment.
The ICU was busier than when they’d left. The halls were filled with nurses and interns in scrubs. People stepped aside to make room for patients being moved on gurneys. McKenna got the attention of a nurse. There was no new information, but they had moved Patrick into a patient room, where she could sit with him if she’d like.
As long as she had known Patrick, he’d been healthy. He was just one of those people. He could pig out for four straight days over Thanksgiving and not gain a single ounce. He could stay up until two and wake at seven, looking refreshed, his eyes circle-free. If he got a cold, it came and went with a few sneezes, a couple of coughs, and a handful of over-the-counter meds. And though he had aged in their time together—the lines around his mouth, the gray hair at his temples—it wasn’t in a way that made him appear weak or frail; it made him look like a man who spent time outdoors.
So when she saw him in the hospital bed, she wanted to find the nurse and explain that she’d been sent to the wrong room. The man attached to all those tubes and hoses couldn’t be her husband. Just above the edge of his baby-blue polka-dotted gown was a wad of gauze taped around his neck. She knew that the gown and the gauze covered the gun wounds and surgery scars. If he managed to pull through this, those marks would be there forever, constant reminders of the events that had put him in this bed.
She looked at his pale, stubbled face beneath the oxygen mask. How could he have lost so much weight in one day? Was that possible? She wanted to see his eyes open. To watch him smile when he recognized her. To see
him.
To see him and know that they were going to be okay. That whatever secrets he may have been keeping were for all the best reasons. He would wake up and tell her everything, and then they could somehow make this right.
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.
A
s 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.
M
cKenna 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.