Authors: Alafair Burke
T
he 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.”
S
he 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 signing 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.”
McKenna remembered the night she’d told Susan about Macklin breaking down in her office. He’d just been moved into the state-federal team working with Homeland Security.
Between the two of them, McKenna and Patrick had told Susan everything she needed to exploit a potential hole in the country’s cargo inspection. By turning Macklin, she could have sneaked anything into the country.
“Is it possible Susan was involved in some kind of smuggling operation? Maybe with Gretchen’s dealers?”
Patrick looked at her as if she had proposed a move to the ocean to live with the mermaids. “First of all, I think Gretchen’s dealers were more corner hustlers than Pablo Escobars. Besides, Susan had her problems, but something like that? No way. She was more her dad’s daughter than she wanted to admit.”
He was starting to speak more slowly. She could tell he was getting tired. “I hate to ask you this,” she said, brushing his hair with her fingers, “but the police want to talk to you about the shooting. Are you sure there’s nothing else to tell? Because now’s the time to say so. We’ll hire a lawyer.”
He gave her a tired smile. “I swear. There’s nothing else. I’ll talk to the police.”
“What about today? Susan was here at the hospital?”
“I thought I dreamed that. When I first woke up, it was— God, McKenna, I thought I was dead. It was like I could see things, but then I’d fall back asleep. And I couldn’t talk. I thought I saw you, too, and we were in Cinque Terre, popping open that bottle of prosecco and letting the cork fly below us to the Riviera.”
She remembered the exact spot and wished they were there again. “You thought you saw Susan?”
“At one point, she was in that chair when my eyes opened. She looked relieved, and I was sure we were both dead, like she was welcoming me. But then she started crying uncontrollably and saying she was going to end this. No matter what. I thought maybe she was going to hurt herself, but I couldn’t move. The next time I woke up, she was gone.”
He was fading back into sleep even as he finished the sentence.
M
cKenna tracked down a nurse in the hallway. “He’s groggy again. Does the doctor need to check on him?”
“No, that’s natural. He’s on a morphine drip. Your husband’s very stoic, not a complainer, but he’s in a lot of pain. It’s better for him to rest.”
Stoic. Marla Tompkins had used the same word to describe General Hauptmann’s acceptance of impending death.
McKenna told the nurse she’d be in the lobby if Patrick became alert again. When she got there, she found Joe Scanlin waiting. He greeted her with a “hey,” and she took the seat next to him.
“You okay?” she asked. “I should have backed off this morning. Macklin was your friend. And I didn’t say enough about how sorry I am about his death. Or that you were the one to find him.”
He held up a hand. “Your husband was in critical condition, and you wanted to know why. I was an ass. And I put my blinders on about Mac. I promised to see this through, and I dropped the ball.”
She nodded. “You can tell Compton he can question Patrick as soon as his doctors think he’s up for it.”
“Compton won’t need to talk to your husband.”
“He needs to know about the phone call Patrick got. The Cleaner said I was in danger—”
“First of all, you don’t need to call him the Cleaner anymore,” Scanlin said. “We’ve got a name. I figured if he was connected to Susan, I’d check military fingerprints. Prints taken for military personnel before 2000 aren’t in AFIS. But with the military, I got a hit. Our guy’s name is Carl Buckner. Direct into army in 1995 after ROTC at Texas A&M. He put in sixteen years—military intelligence—and then quit. Honorable discharge.”
She knew from Patrick’s friends that twenty years of service meant retirement pay for life. “Did any of his service overlap with Susan’s?”
He shook his head. “No, but I talked to his most recent supervising officer. Apparently Buckner was brilliant. And a true believer. A lot of guys entered the army in the late nineties thinking they’d never see real danger. A little UN peacekeeping here and there, with all the benefits of service. Not Buckner. When other soldiers started silently cheering on the ‘bring home the troops’ crowd, Buckner wanted to stay in the Middle East and finish what we started.”
“And what exactly was that?”
“More than six thousand service members lost their lives for freedom, Jordan. For men like Buckner, that means something. When we decided to pull out with the job unfinished, he quit. Told his friends he’d spent sixteen years watching government contractors get rich without the sacrifices made by true soldiers. They got the impression he was moving on to the private sector, but we can’t find any evidence that Buckner used his social security number to earn a single dime, or rent a house, or buy a plane ticket since the day he came home from Afghanistan.”
For anyone who’d earned a reputation for brilliance among military intelligence, living off the grid for a couple of years must have been like tying shoes.
“I talked to Patrick.” She gave Scanlin an abbreviated version of her husband’s interactions with Susan. “He thinks he saw the Cleaner—Buckner—on the train but doesn’t know anything else about him.”
“I’ll get the full story from him,” Scanlin said. He saw the confusion register on her face. “I got the department to reassign the case to me. I told them it was connected to Susan Hauptmann’s disappearance. Do I have his lawyer’s permission to see him now?”
She placed a hand on his shoulder. She thought it was the most affection Scanlin could handle.
W
hile Scanlin went in search of Patrick’s doctor, McKenna placed a call to Marla Tompkins, the nurse who had taken care of George Hauptmann during his illness. Something had been bothering her about their earlier conversation, though she hadn’t put her finger on it until now.
“Mrs. Tompkins, it’s McKenna Jordan. I came to your apartment earlier this week.”
“Of course. I remember.”
“You mentioned that General Hauptmann’s daughter Gretchen visited him shortly before he passed away and that you gave her his diary as a memento.”
“Yes, that’s correct. He was so very happy to see her. I don’t think I’d ever seen him filled with that kind of joy.”
“Had you met Gretchen before?”
“No, it was the first time. She was very emotional also. It was— Well, General Hauptmann came to depend upon me, and he treated me so very, very well. But his daughter—she was family. I was surprised they remained estranged after she visited. I hoped at the time that I was witnessing a thawing of the ice.”
“Had you seen pictures of the Hauptmann daughters before?”
“No, ma’am. As I mentioned, he had already packed away most of his belongings, and I was told when I showed up for the home care that he found photographs of his family upsetting. Though he did have a wedding portrait of his wife right next to him on the nightstand. I saw him looking at it often.”
McKenna had seen that photograph before, on Susan’s bookshelf. She’d commented once on how much Susan looked like her mother.
“When Gretchen came to see her father, did you happen to notice if she looked like the late Mrs. Hauptmann?”
“Oh my goodness, yes. Isn’t she just the spitting image of her mother? I couldn’t stop commenting on it, but then I realized she seemed a bit uncomfortable with my remarks. My, yes, that’s the woman’s daughter, no question.”
It was one of Mrs. Hauptmann’s daughters, all right, but it hadn’t been Gretchen. Just like Gretchen had said, she had left the cord to her father severed, even as he’d been dying. Susan had been the one to see her father one last time, to let him know she was alive. Susan, the same woman who told Scott Macklin’s wife that she was a reporter and the Lenox Hill ICU that she was Mrs. Patrick Jordan, had told her father’s nurse she was her older sister, Gretchen.
“Mrs. Tompkins, I hope you won’t take my question the wrong way, but it’s important that I ask. I can tell that you were a complete professional in your care of General Hauptmann, but I imagine that when you gave his daughter that diary, you had your reasons.”
“I thought she would want it. That’s all.”
This proud woman did not want to admit there was more to the story. McKenna pressed again. “Wouldn’t it be part of his treatment for you to have a sense of his mental state as he was reaching the end? Or maybe you had seen him write something about his daughters, and you wanted Gretchen to know.”
“I don’t snoop, if that’s what you’re saying.”
“Of course not.” What sane person sharing a house with a lonely, decaying old man—a man who’d lived a life filled with power, politics, and international travel—wouldn’t sneak a peek at his journals? “But this is important, Mrs. Tompkins. Was there anything in the general’s journal about his other daughter, Susan, and the end of her military service?”
“Not really. No.”
“Not really” did not mean the same thing as “no.” “Did Susan ask him for help getting out of active duty?”
The silence confirmed it. It was only because McKenna knew the truth that the nurse was considering putting aside her loyalty to her former patient and friend. “I cared very much for General Hauptmann, and he was a brave and good man, but I never understood the hardness he showed toward his girls. You see, that’s why I read his journals. To see if there was something I could use to bring Gretchen back into his life—something he had written that he could not say to her directly. But all he wrote about was their shortcomings and his disappointment in them.”
“Like Susan leaving the military?”
“Yes. According to his journal, Susan came to him and begged for help. He pulled strings for her that regular people do not have access to. He said it reminded him of the senators’ sons and corporate nephews who got deferments in Vietnam. He said he had no regrets cutting off Gretchen, and now it was time to do the same with Susan. They never spoke again. He was so ashamed for helping her that he didn’t tell her himself. He said that he could find no way to deliver the news without sounding like he approved of her decision. He had his business partner tell her instead. She disappeared three months later.”
“Business partner? Do you mean Adam Bayne?”
“Yes, that’s right. I guess that was a long time ago, but Adam was like a son to General Hauptmann. Mrs. Jordan, if you talk to Gretchen, please tell her how sorry I am for giving her that journal. I wasn’t thinking about her feelings. I was thinking about the general.”
McKenna’s mind was racing. She didn’t understand the nurse’s last comment. “How were you helping General Hauptmann?”
“He was an important man, the kind of man people write about when they die. I didn’t want anyone to see what a terrible father he was.”
McKenna mumbled something to the nurse about being a good person and disconnected the call. Before she knew it, she was pulling up Adam Bayne on her phone and hitting dial.
“McKenna. I saw the news. They said Patrick was in critical condition. I didn’t know if it was okay to call. Any updates?”
Die. Die, die, die. You shot my husband, you evil motherfucker.
“He’s going to make it.” The catch in her voice wasn’t feigned. “He’s out of the woods.”
“Oh, thank God. If there’s anything at all I can do—”
You can go to hell, right after you die.
“Right now it’s only immediate family, but visiting hours start at six.” That gave her two hours. “Patrick’s asking for visitors. I think he’d really like you to come.”
“Oh. Well, absolutely, then.”
He was good, but she could hear the skepticism in his voice. At one point, Patrick and Adam had been close, but these days they were barely beyond holiday-cards friendship.
“In fact,” she added, “you’re the only person he asked me specifically to call. Maybe after that kind of danger, he just wants an old military friend to talk to.”
“Of course. Anything he needs. I’ll see him right at six.”
Scanlin was just finishing up with Patrick when she entered the hospital room. “How soon can we get a wire set up in here?”