Authors: Alafair Burke
M
cKenna went to the office early to sneak in some work on her book proposal. As much as she had been telling Dana and Bob Vance and the agent and the editor that she was on the fence, she was beginning to think of it as
her book
.
Vance’s advice the previous day had gotten to her. This could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a chance to make something of her time at the DA’s office. A chance to write something other than marshmallowy fluffs of city gossip. She had to admit, she’d felt good writing those few pages the previous day, even though she had no idea what role they’d play in the end product. Her plan was to jot down a few more sample scenes here and there. Just enough to figure out whether she wanted to go all in.
She had written a book before. She was a published novelist, after all. But that was different. She’d started writing her novel after she was forced to leave the district attorney’s office. She had taken two years off to write it, and she hadn’t even begun to try selling it until it was completely finished.
According to the agent, the nonfiction book that she couldn’t bring herself to call a memoir could be sold off of a proposal. It should have a “jazzy”—she hated that word—overview, a table of contents, and a summary of each chapter.
She had no idea how to outline the events that had led to the end of her legal career. So far, she had been working on the overview, but instead of jazz, it was turning into cacophony.
I
t was the gun. Not the gun itself—not at first—but Tasha Jones’s insistence that her son, Marcus, didn’t carry one. She never vouched for Marcus’s character. Neither did I, not once. The case was never a matter of character. Marcus Jones was only nineteen years old, but he had eleven juvie interactions with law enforcement and was out on bail pending felony theft charges when a bullet from Officer Scott Macklin’s gun killed him.
“My boy stole,” Tasha told me when she cornered me on the courtroom staircase. “Always did and always would. The schools said his IQ was only seventy-eight, but he knew robbery was harder time than theft, and armed robbery, more trouble still. He didn’t have no gun. He didn’t have no gun, because he never wanted to be in a position to be pointing one, let alone at the po-lice. He went to the docks that night to meet his girlfriend. What he need a gun for?”
Police never found any evidence of a girl. They did, however, find eighty bucks in Marcus’s front pocket, despite the fact that the kid had no lawful means of income. I truly believed I would find evidence connecting Marcus to that gun.
I never thought of myself as the most talented trial attorney in the office. It always seemed to be the lawyers from the local schools who were labeled real naturals or geniuses in the courtroom.
But I was a hard worker. I was thorough.
And so I traced the gun, hoping (and expecting) to prove Marcus’s mother wrong. Hoping (and expecting) to strengthen Macklin’s claim of self-defense. Hoping (and expecting) to make the grand jury’s job that much easier.
But the gun had another story to tell.
T
his wasn’t working. McKenna was supposed to write about the case from her own perspective. Her excitement as a relatively junior lawyer to be working on her first homicide—and an officer-involved shooting, at that. Her loyalty to the officer involved: Scott Macklin. The stress of being in the middle of a news story that had taken on unmistakable racial tones. The gradual onset of doubts about his side of the story. Her decision to come forward.
And her utter shock when that decision nearly tore the city apart.
How could she do that in a synopsis? She could never pull it off.
She closed the file. The truth was, she couldn’t look back on that time in her life without thinking about Susan. And any thought of Susan pulled her back to the infuriating video. She opened the video again and hit play.
Bob Vance gave a cursory tap on her office door before entering. “Four thousand words. You promised yesterday. Whatcha got for me?”
“I’m going with Judge Knight.”
“He’s the fatty, right?”
“More important, he’s lazy, offensive, and—according to the smoking-gun evidence I now have—disdainful of the public he’s supposed to serve.”
She handed him printouts of the two e-mails she had received the previous day. “Frederick Knight has been on the bench for five years. From the beginning, there were questions about his intellectual heft—no pun intended. Last week, I got an anonymous call from a woman claiming to have been a juror in one of his recent cases. She said he was rolling his eyes and cutting off witnesses. He’d go off-record, but she heard him tell a domestic-violence victim that she was
too attractive
to get beaten. And he spent most of the trial fiddling with his phone and laptop. I’ve heard these kinds of things about him before, so I decided to put out some feelers at the courthouse to see if anyone might come forward.”
“And?”
“Those appeared in my in-box yesterday.”
The messages were short but damning. One, sent by Knight three days earlier: “Can’t stand these people. Dirtbags hurting dirtbags. Lock them all in a cage together and give them bats and chain saws. The world would be better off.” And the other, sent just yesterday morning: “Going out on a ledge here because I feel like I’m on a ledge. You guys have space for special counsel? I go on civil rotation in two weeks and can throw your firm some bones until the transition’s official. I’m serious: I can’t take this anymore.”
“Can this be four thousand words?” Vance asked.
“No question. Knight came to the bench after practicing only two years as a law firm associate and then serving for nine years as the judicial clerk to Chief Judge Alan Silver. Clerks are supposed to be clerks, but it’s become common practice for judges to grease the wheels for lower-level judicial appointments as a reward for their most loyal clerks. Knight was on the criminal court for two years and then got bumped up to felonies. I can have a section about other clerks who found their way to the bench with questionable credentials. I’ve got a pattern of Knight always siding with the state against criminal defendants, sexist comments—even on the record—and resisting the appointment of defense counsel to the indigent. These e-mail messages would be the nail in the coffin.”
Though the smoking-gun e-mails would be the bait to sell magazines, the story was substantive. It was the kind of thing she’d hoped to do full-time when she’d accepted the job.
“They’re legit?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I knew it would be hard getting anyone to go on record about a sitting judge, so I reached out to a network of potential sources and promised anonymity. Unfortunately, instead of trusting me to protect their identity, someone opened a free e-mail account and sent these to me. They deleted the address information of the recipients, so I can’t look there for confirmation.”
“Stands to reason that whoever sent you these was probably the original recipient, right?”
“It could be one of his clerks or his secretary. Or, because he was stupid enough to use his public e-mail account, a public employee with auditing abilities could have lawfully obtained access. Or someone could have hacked in.”
“I get the point. You’re making me nervous.”
“I’m trying to nail it down. I confirmed through the court system’s directory that the e-mail address listed on the two messages is in fact Judge Knight’s. I did some digging, and three days ago, when the ‘dirtbags hurting dirtbags’ comment was sent, Knight was hearing a bench trial of a shooting arising from a drug deal gone bad. I got the attorneys on both sides to confirm that Knight pressured the prosecutor to come up with a plea because it was a—quote—‘who cares’ case. I also confirmed that Knight is indeed scheduled to start hearing civil cases in two weeks, where he’d be in a position to help big-firm lawyers.”
Vance smiled. “Jeez, Jordan. It’s like you’re a real journalist or something. The messages are self-authenticating when you put them in that context.”
“That’s what I was thinking. I figured I had enough to call Knight. All he gave me was a ‘No comment.’ ”
“All right, then. Let’s run with it.”
She was relieved when Vance left without further mention of the subway video.
W
hen McKenna was in the zone, she could write almost as quickly as she could talk. Two hours after getting the go-ahead from Vance, she had transformed the notes she’d been keeping on Judge Knight into a full-length article. Although block quotes from the e-mail messages in 28-size font would be the red meat to pull in readers ravenous for easily digestible scandal, she had used Knight as a case study to delve into the cronyism that perverted the court system and a culture in which lawyers were too afraid of retaliation to blow the whistle on bad judges.
She hit the submit key on the article. The modern publishing process moved so rapidly that the article would be online by afternoon.
She turned her attention back to the video. She had seen it so many times, she knew where to stop for any single moment that interested her, but she was still at a loss as to how to confirm that the woman was Susan Hauptmann.
Her eyes were beginning to cross from squinting at the screen, as if that could make the images any clearer. This time, when she hit pause, it wasn’t to study the mysterious woman’s blurry face. McKenna was focused on the very end of the video, pausing as Nicky’s rescuer sprinted up the stairs.
There was something attached to the woman’s backpack. A button. Round. About four inches wide. Some design on it, maybe a few letters at the bottom.
She pulled out her cell and sent a text message to Dana.
Before I give up on that video from yesterday: Looks like there’s a button pinned to Superwoman’s backpack. Can you try to get a better look?
The phone pinged a few short seconds later.
You know it ain’t like TV, right?
McKenna smiled. Recently, she and Patrick had tried to watch a series about a hotshot security team at a Las Vegas casino. Only half an episode in, Patrick had flipped the channel when the security team, suspicious of a drop-dead-gorgeous woman at the nickel slot machines, enlarged the house camera’s glimpse of the woman’s unzipped purse to zoom in on a perfectly legible handwritten note inside—all in about five seconds.
With Patrick incapable of tolerating shows about security, the military, or law enforcement, and McKenna refusing to watch anything about lawyers, they were on an eternal search for television shows they could enjoy together. Most recently, they had tried watching a show about zombies, but Patrick kept interrupting with surefire plans for battle. Note to self, McKenna thought, scythes are apparently the key to surviving a zombie apocalypse.
She sent a return text to Dana:
Got it. I’ll take whatever you can give me.
When McKenna didn’t receive an immediate response, she used the wait time to cull through her in-box, under constant attack by an ongoing assault of unwanted messages. Vance had just fired off a reminder about the importance of filing deadlines. Human Resources was admonishing the staff once again not to abandon food in the refrigerators. Then there were all the irrelevant mass mailings she received by virtue of being listed as a retired member of the New York State Bar: the American Bar Association’s report on electronic discovery, a continuing legal education session on accounting for lawyers, a last-chance offer for a personalized plaque to commemorate her fifteenth year as a lawyer—now, how in the world was
that
possible? Delete, delete, delete.
She’d paused to check out a book recommendation e-mailed to her from a friend when a new message arrived from Dana.
This is what I have for now. Try running it through Google Images. And don’t say you don’t know how. I showed you myself. I’ll work on your girl’s face tonight—an image of it, not a makeover. You know what I mean.
Dana had warned McKenna not to expect a miracle, but the snapshot attached to the e-mail wasn’t too shabby. McKenna’s guess had been correct. Pinned to Superwoman’s backpack was a round button, the background plain white, the abstract design a blue circle with a series of lines inside it. Two lines formed a cross in the middle of the circle, dividing the circle into four quadrants. Three of the four quadrants contained curved lines, creating the impression of half circles.
The image on the button meant nothing to her. That was where Dana’s suggestion of Google Images came in.
McKenna pulled up Google Images on her computer. Inside the bar where she was used to typing search terms was an image of a small camera. She clicked on it and was prompted with “Search by Image,” followed by “Upload an Image.” Dana had walked her through these steps last month when McKenna was trying to locate the driver of a delivery truck outside the townhouse of an actress constantly rumored to be planning another march down the aisle. By searching for the logo printed on the side of the truck, they managed to find the name and phone number of a bakery in Brooklyn. Turned out the driver was delivering tasting samples for a wedding cake. It wasn’t the kind of scoop McKenna was proud of, but the magazine tripled its newsstand sales that week.
She uploaded the digital image that Dana had extracted from the video and watched Google work its magic. She immediately got a perfect hit: P
EOPLE
P
ROTECTING THE
P
LANET.
The picture on the backpack button was Planet Earth behind crosshairs. The three semicircles had transformed the straight lines of the crosshairs into three P’s—an acronym for the organization.
She ran a separate search for information about the group. According to a sympathetic website, PPP carried out “direct actions to defend the planet by liberating animals, disrupting the activities of polluters, and depriving predatory corporate entities of their ill-gotten gains.” Another website called the organization “eco-saboteurs.” Another claimed the group was on the government’s ecoterrorist watch list.
Whether People Protecting the Planet were saviors or a domestic threat, they didn’t sound like Susan’s crowd. She was from a military family and had gone to West Point. Even after leaving the army for business school, she’d kept a toe in the water through the reserves. She was deployed for nearly a year in Afghanistan through the Civil Affairs Brigade, completing her service as an economic development officer, helping the Afghanis stabilize their banking system.
After all those years in uniform, Susan had enjoyed her freedom from a dress code. She was more of an Armani-suit-and-Prada-handbag woman than a button-adorned-backpack type.
The observation sent McKenna’s mind back to one of her last memories of Susan, teetering on sky-high Jimmy Choos. A few years earlier, the heels would have set her back close to a month’s take-home pay. Even on a consulting firm salary, they were a splurge, but Susan was so proud, strutting around the store while other women marveled at her ability to maintain balance. “I’m taking these bad boys home. And for the right bad boy,” she added with an out-thrust hip, “I’ll wear them with nothing but a thong.”
The other customers hooted their support. Susan had that way about her.
Those shoes—along with the rest of her belongings—were found in her apartment after her disappearance. It made no more sense today than it had all those years ago.
McKenna dialed a number she had looked up an hour earlier but hadn’t had the guts to call.
“Scanlin.”
Even ten years ago, McKenna had figured the guy to be close to his twenty-two years of service. Some cops couldn’t leave the job.
“Detective Scanlin, this is McKenna Jor—McKenna
Wright
. Please don’t hang up. It’s important.”
“As I recall, everything you believe to be true is always so . . . darn . . .
important
.”
“I’m calling about Susan Hauptmann. Can you meet me in person?”