Authors: Alafair Burke
SUSAN
M
cKenna never would have thought that the best rest she’d had in a week would be on a narrow sliver of a hospital bed, listening to her husband talk between bouts of morphine-induced sleep.
His reminiscing about Susan was hard to take at first. Through the entire course of Patrick and McKenna’s relationship, they had pretended—falsely, of course—that their romantic existences had begun and ended with each other. But once she got past the shock of imagining Patrick with another woman, his drug-addled memories of nights, weekends, sometimes even weeks—but never months—with Susan began to feel like period pieces. Vignettes from another time, featuring two familiar characters, but wholly unrelated to her own reality.
It had started the beginning of their third year at West Point.
Though McKenna had imagined the most passionate hypotheticals between her husband and Susan, she wanted to believe that any physical connection had been fleeting. Awkward. Meaningless.
The first time had been two days after Patrick learned his father died from an aneurysm. The commandant had him pulled from noon formation, shook his hand, and gave him the news. He also gave him the choice of taking the day off or returning to lunch. Patrick was Patrick, so he opted for the latter, then didn’t say a word to anyone about the death of his father until two days later, when Susan cornered him after dinner and said she could tell he was feeling blue.
Those were Patrick’s words.
She could tell I was feeling blue.
McKenna knew the Susan of ten years ago, who was only eight years older than the Susan who had been there to comfort Patrick when his father died. She had a preferred method for escaping the pains of the world, and that night she’d shared it with Patrick.
At least from his perspective, it had never been a relationship. He was twenty years old, and by that time, Susan had convinced herself that wanting sex like a man—often and without strings—was a form of female empowerment. They were never what others perceived as an official couple.
A year after graduation, Susan had taken a weekend leave from Fort Sill to find him at Fort Bragg, supposedly to escape the Oklahoma heat, though he suspected she was there for more. He told her then that he loved her as a friend, but—And she had cut him off.
As if! Dude, that’s like incest.
Except maybe not, since she still wanted to sleep with him. Only for the sex. Because other guys sucked.
“We all chose to believe that was how she wanted it,” he said. “We were a bunch of macho kids who thought we could have a friend who was just like us, except she was a woman who would . . . be with us.” He brushed McKenna’s hair back from her face. She had always known that he’d adopted the move because she’d made it clear that she liked it. “I was such an idiot then.”
She’d heard enough for now. “I thought the only woman you knew before me was Ally, the big-boned girl. Frizzy red hair. Freckles and moles. Dumb as a rock.”
“A real doll,” he said, repeating the joke he’d made so many times when she was still trying to find out about his old girlfriends. “McKenna, I want you to know, however much—”
She shook her head. “It was a long time ago. We started over so many times, even after she was gone. And then we finally got it right.” Maybe someday McKenna would press for details about the timing of the end to his hookups with Susan and the beginning of his relationship with her. Right now she didn’t want them.
He saw her looking at the digital bedside clock. Susan was giving a complete videotaped debriefing this afternoon. Mercado and Scanlin had said they wanted McKenna there in case she could fill in any blanks. She suspected that Mercado was afraid she’d go public with the story if she weren’t kept in the loop.
“I should go. I need to stop by the apartment first. I’ve been wearing the same clothes for two days straight.”
“You’re gross.” He kissed the top of her head. “You sure you want to do this? You said they’d be fine without you.”
“They would. But we’re never going to understand what Susan did if we don’t hear it straight from her. I’ll be back as soon as it’s over.”
M
cKenna was alone in their apartment, her first time home since she’d learned that Patrick had been shot. Susan’s belongings were still scattered across the living room floor. McKenna packed them back in the box that Adam had sent over and pushed it all in a corner behind Patrick’s bicycle. She didn’t want to see it.
She stripped off her clothing, climbed into the hot shower, and turned her face up into the water stream. She felt the past week flow off of her. As the shampoo suds swirled into the drain beneath her, she imagined their problems carried away through the plumbing.
Adam Bayne was in custody. McKenna didn’t have all the details, but Scanlin had told her this morning that he was confident they had enough to hold him for a long time. Carl Buckner—whether he’d been trying in the end to help them or hurt them—was dead. The police department was labeling Macklin’s death a murder, so his family at least would be able to collect his life insurance and pension.
Tomorrow McKenna would go to see Bob Vance. By now, the editor knew that Dana had been the one who set her up. McKenna would sit down with the magazine’s lawyers to make sure the retraction was sufficient to clear her name. And she would make sure they knew how much she could embarrass them with the fact that they’d allowed someone to search a journalist’s office without verifying his credentials or the legitimacy of his supposed warrant. She would call the shots.
Did she even want that job?
As she turned off the shower, she let herself entertain the possibility that the district attorney’s office might invite her back. Maybe she didn’t want that job, either. Maybe it was time for her to write a book. Not on an agent’s terms, or an acquiring editor’s, but because she really had something to say.
For now, she deserved to sit on her ass for a couple of weeks. Right after she made one last visit to the Federal Building.
Tom the mailman gave her a wolf whistle when she stepped from the apartment elevator. “Take a look at the big shot. You clean up pretty good.”
Her usual attire was business casual at best, but she’d hauled out her nice Hugo Boss dress, the one she’d bought when her dog-walker article had earned her a five-minute interview on CNN. (Ever stop to wonder how you know your dog got walked? That’s right. You don’t.)
“Thank you, Tom. I’ve got to look like a grown-up today.”
“You’ve got a couple days’ mail backed up here. Want me to leave it with the doorman?”
“No, I’ll take it.” She folded the stack in half and tucked it into her briefcase.
“I mean it, McKenna. Don’t let that tough husband know I said it, but you look fantastic.”
She left feeling happy about the compliment. And then she realized how pathetic she was for caring about her appearance today. She cared because she wanted to look better than Susan.
M
ercado met McKenna in the reception area and led the way to her office, where Scanlin was waiting. “Susan spent last night at MDC,” Mercado explained. “We transported her this morning to continue the debriefing we began last night.”
After four sleepless years at West Point and another five in the army, Susan had always insisted on perfect sleeping conditions: room-darkening curtains, Egyptian-cotton sheets, and absolute silence. McKenna could not imagine her at the Metropolitan Detention Center.
It didn’t take long for Mercado to bring McKenna up to speed. “Based on what we got from Susan, we searched Bayne’s home and office. Unfortunately, as we feared, the guy is careful. No evidence yet tying him to Carl Buckner or to either Macklin’s death or the Grand Central shooting. The better news is that we’ve got a forensic accountant examining his financial records. He’s just getting started on what’s going to be a long process, but he tells me he’s found discrepancies already. Namely, a fifty-thousand-dollar withdrawal one day before James Low, Jr., showed up at the DA’s office claiming to have sold a gun to Marcus Jones. Plus, way more deposits than reported income, and right before Susan disappeared. He used a lot of it to set up his company in New York after he left the Hauptmann firm.”
The money would corroborate Susan’s claim about the drug importing. The unreported income alone could send him away for a decade. It had worked on Al Capone.
“What exactly did Susan tell you?” McKenna asked.
“You’re about to hear for yourself,” Scanlin said.
Mercado explained the process. Susan had already been talking for hours. Now they would get a straight, clean narrative on videotape.
McKenna remembered defense attorneys’ complaints about videotaped confessions. The cops never recorded the stuff that happened earlier.
“Obviously the tape will be admissible against her,” Mercado said. “We’ll also give it to Bayne’s lawyers to put the pressure on. If he knows for sure that she’s flipped and is a compelling witness, he might do the same. My guess is he has names of other private contractors who were involved on the Afghanistan side of the operation.”
“How does this work? I’ll watch through a one-way glass?”
Mercado nodded, but gave Scanlin a look.
“There’s one catch,” Scanlin said. McKenna knew they had a reason for asking her here. “Susan’s the one who wanted you to come. She wants you to hear her statement—kind of like an explanation, I guess. But she wants a few minutes alone with you before she’ll go on tape.”
S
usan’s orange jail scrubs were at least a size too big. They made her look like a young, waiflike girl. So did her posture—slumped in the chair, hands in her lap. Just a week ago, this same woman had outrun a high school athlete and dead-lifted his full weight.
“They told me you wanted to see me,” McKenna said. It was the first time they’d been in the same room since their few minutes at the hospital prior to Susan’s arrest.
Susan looked up and smiled sadly. “Of course I wanted to see you. But not to try and tell you what happened. They don’t want you knowing anything other than what we’re about to put on video. Undermines the evidentiary value or something.”
“So why, Susan? Why am I here?” McKenna didn’t try to hide the anger in her voice. She had spent the last day wondering whether she would have preferred that Susan had been murdered, as she’d always suspected. Ultimately she couldn’t feel that way about anyone, but Susan had gotten people killed. And now she had to drag McKenna into the carnage of her own personal hurricane one last time.
“Because I want to tell you how sorry I am. Not just for—I mean, my God, for everything, but
personally.
I’m sorry for the harm I caused to you personally, McKenna. You’ll hear soon enough why I did what Adam wanted, and why I ran away instead of owning up to it. You can decide for yourself how you feel about that. But I am sorry. I hope someday you’ll forgive me.”
McKenna stared at Susan in silence. She thought about walking out but took a seat across from her at the table. “Your coming to the hospital yesterday was the beginning,” she finally said. It was hard not to feel sorry for Susan. She was looking at serious prison time, and all because she’d chosen to turn herself in. “There was no other way to make sure Adam wouldn’t come after Patrick again.”
Susan nodded. “Don’t thank me. It’s only because I reached out to Patrick that he was in danger. I had to stop it.”
“Patrick remembers seeing you in his hospital room. Sobbing. You still love him, don’t you?”
Susan looked away.
“I know about you two. And I know you told Getty you were still in love with Patrick and wanted to be with him. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I almost did. That night we left Telephone Bar together, after the two of you met? I nearly told you. But I knew you’d never go out with him if I did. You’d been alone for a while, and he and I were never right together. I stole that mug for myself at first—like a memento of the night I really lost him. I gave it to you instead.”
McKenna shook her head. “You didn’t tell me because it would have been selfish.” Typical Susan. She could have guaranteed with one sentence that she’d never have to watch the man she loved fall in love with her best friend. She could have sabotaged McKenna’s relationship with Patrick before it started. But she wasn’t selfish. She never was.
“My intentions weren’t always pure,” Susan said. “After I told Will I still had feelings for Patrick, I really was going to give it one more shot. I had this whole scene planned where I would pour my heart out, and he’d realize that he felt the same way, and maybe you’d even understand. But when I went to his apartment, all he could talk about was you. You guys had rented a paddleboat in Central Park or something. So
not
Patrick. So
completely
the kind of thing he’d usually mock. But because it was with you—anyway, I knew we were never going to happen.”
“Were you pregnant then?”
She nodded.
“They told me you lost the baby. I’m sorry, Susan.”
She shrugged.
“Was it Patrick’s?” She regretted asking as soon as the words came out of her mouth. She’d been so careful not to press Patrick for the details. The idea of them being together after she and Patrick met had been enough to send McKenna out of their apartment after she’d found a college photograph. But now? She honestly didn’t care.
Or perhaps she cared a little, because she felt relieved when Susan shook her head. “Of course not. We stopped crossing that line way before he met you. Or at least
he
stopped crossing that line. Let’s just say there would have been a long list of paternity candidates.”
McKenna had been idealizing her friendship with Susan, the way people do with friends who die. Now that Susan was back, McKenna realized that the personality differences she’d sensed a year into rooming together were a chasm.
McKenna placed her hands, palms up, on the table. Susan accepted the invitation. The two of them sat there, fingers entwined, in silence. It was the reunion they didn’t have time for at the hospital. It wasn’t much, but it was all McKenna could give. She wanted to be with her husband.
“Thank you for the apology,” McKenna said, releasing Susan’s hands. “And for your help exposing Adam. I imagine they’ll want to start the taping soon.”
“There’s something else.” Susan’s voice dropped slightly. “So far I’ve been acting without a lawyer because, as you know, the best shot I have at leniency is to give complete cooperation. And I need people to understand how truly sorry I am. I didn’t know— Well, again, they don’t want me getting into that with you. Just the tape. I’m basically at their mercy.”
“Turning yourself in and helping the government is a good start.”
“I’m scared, McKenna. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life behind bars. I thought about just killing myself, but then Adam would get away with what he did. I know I have no right to ask anything of you, but will you please consider writing my side of the story?”
“I don’t know, Susan. I don’t even have a job at this point. And Patrick nearly—”
“I know, I get it. But I’m doing everything I can to make sure Adam never gets out. That’s why I’m here, probably for good. Just—just stay and listen to what I have to say. You can decide then whether you want to help me. Just listen and think about it.” Susan took the lack of opposition as acquiescence. She clasped her palms together in gratitude. “Thank you, McKenna. Really.”
“Whatever does happen, you eventually need a lawyer,” McKenna said. “I’m sure you’ll have people lined up to represent you for free, just for the publicity.”
“Actually, I’m planning to hire Hester Crimstein.”
The name required no further explanation. If what Susan needed was a trial by public opinion, the larger-than-life Hester was the right woman for the job. Susan’s private work during her period of hiding must have been very lucrative.
“You’ll be in good hands,” McKenna said. “I’m going to let them know we’re done here.”
“Again, I’m so sorry, McKenna. For everything.”
Though Susan had supposedly brought her here to apologize, she had also asked for help. McKenna felt her emotions competing again. Anger at Susan for all the harm she’d caused. The lies. The destruction. Gratitude that she’d come forward to tell the truth. Sympathy.
She would stay long enough to hear what Susan had to say for herself.