Authors: Alafair Burke
M
cKenna scoped out the landscape at Collect Pond Park. The good news was that the city was experiencing a warm, bright, beautiful October day. The bad news was that the unseasonably pleasant temperatures had brought out the masses. The place was hopping.
She opted for a bench holding one other person. His one person managed to occupy more than half the bench, but there was enough room for her to sit, and he was far too preoccupied by his newspaper to give her a second glance.
Scanlin was the one who’d chosen the park for the meet, placing her smack-dab in the middle of a strip of action below Canal Street that was the heart of the Manhattan criminal court system. This territory used to feel like her heartland, too, pumping blood through her system. How many times had she carried a yogurt down to this park, or a bit farther south to Foley Square, just to breathe some fresh air and enjoy a brief respite from the courthouse’s fluorescent lighting?
She used to know all the hot-dog vendors—not by name but by face, cataloged mentally by the characteristics that really mattered. Good mustard. Softest pretzels. The guy who stocked Tab.
She knew which homeless people were regulars on the civil commitment and misdemeanor dockets, and which were harmless enough to become part of the daily banter. Back then Reggie was one of her favorites. “Whatchu gonna use to eat that salad with, my dear?” “I’m going to use this here fork, Reggie.” “Well, go on, then. Fork yourself!” Reggie would laugh and laugh and laugh, even though he used the same line four times a day, every single day.
She looked around, wondering what had become of the man. She didn’t see him. She didn’t recognize anyone.
She felt like an outsider. She
was
an outsider.
When she’d caught Scanlin on the phone, he was just leaving the squad room to give testimony in a motion to suppress. “If it’s so important,” he’d said, “why don’t you meet me downtown?”
He initially suggested meeting in the courtroom where he’d be testifying. But while she used to be able to whisk past security, asking the guards about last night’s Giants game, giving a self-satisfied wave to the defense attorneys waiting to enter, McKenna now had to line up with the rest of the citizens to be cleared for entry. Wasn’t there a more convenient place to meet? she had asked Scanlin. She’d been hoping for a coffee shop near the precinct, but he had insisted on a location by the courthouse, finally selecting the park. “You said it was important. I’m just trying to make sure you see me as soon as I’m done testifying.”
She knew he took a certain pleasure in beckoning her to hostile territory that once was her home.
S
he wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t looked directly at her from the courthouse steps and made a beeline to her park bench. “You need to be here, guy?” Scanlin asked. From behind his open newspaper, McKenna’s neighbor on the bench threw her an annoyed look. She shrugged, but one glance over the paper at Scanlin sent the man shuffling in search of a new spot to crash.
“Well, how about you? You look pretty much the same. Not too many people can say that after a decade. You should be proud of yourself, ADA Wright.”
McKenna didn’t know what to say. Scanlin had to know she wasn’t proud. She wasn’t an ADA anymore. She wasn’t even a Wright anymore. When she and Patrick married, she picked up on his preference that she change her name. In his world, that was what wives did. In her world, the whole thing seemed ridiculous, but she made the change anyway. Maybe her name wasn’t the only thing she was trying to change at the time. Her writing name would be McKenna Jordan. Not McKenna Wright, the disgraced prosecutor.
She couldn’t return Scanlin’s compliment. She’d met him in person only twice, right after Susan disappeared—once when she’d shown up unannounced at Susan’s apartment, insisting on speaking to the detective in charge; and a week later, when she appeared unannounced at the precinct, accusing him of avoiding her phone calls based on what she’d considered a conflict of interest.
The man she remembered had been close to fifty years old, with a well-groomed mustache that matched his dark hair. She remembered that he wore cuff links and a subtle cologne that smelled a little like pine. He was the kind of man who made the effort.
Now he took up nearly as much room on the park bench as its previous resident. No mustache, just the graying stubble of a skipped day or two from shaving. No cologne or cuff links. His tie was loose, and the wool of his navy sport coat was beginning to shine from too many cleanings. No, she couldn’t say that he looked pretty much the same.
“Thanks for meeting me, Detective.”
“What detective doesn’t want a face-to-face with a member of the illustrious media?”
She could tell from his smile that he was enjoying his barbs. “I’m not here as a writer. Or as a former prosecutor, for that matter. Is Susan Hauptmann’s case still open?”
“It was never cleared, so it was never closed. Last time I checked, not closed means open.”
“But is anyone working it? Is anyone looking for her?”
“Not my case anymore. I’m in homicide at the Twelfth now.”
“You never considered the case a homicide even when she was in your jurisdiction.”
“I know
you
did. You made that clear the day you came storming to my lieutenant accusing me of stonewalling you.”
“I’m not trying to relive the past, Detective. I’m asking you why you were so sure that Susan up and left when everyone who knew her said otherwise.”
“We never found evidence of foul play. I guess you didn’t need much in the way of evidence to go around making claims.”
McKenna ignored the superfluous dig and tried to focus on Susan. She could feel the stirrings of all those old frustrations. “To the people who knew Susan best, her sudden disappearance was the strongest possible evidence. She would never put her friends and family through that kind of uncertainty.”
McKenna remembered the few basic facts she’d been able to glean from Susan’s father and her own queries: Susan’s gym card had been scanned at Equinox on the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving. One of the trainers remembered waving hello as she cranked away on the treadmill, seemingly lost in the beat of the music pumping into her headphones. She had RSVP’d to a friend’s Sunday card game as a maybe, so no one gave her absence any thought. It wasn’t until Monday night that a coworker dropped by Susan’s apartment building, assuming she must be incredibly sick to miss work and not call in. At the end of Tuesday, the building superintendent unlocked the apartment door at the request of Susan’s father. The police took two hours to show up, and only after ADA McKenna Wright made a phone call.
Though there was no point in rehashing all of the details with Scanlin, McKenna highlighted the key points. “She left her purse, her passport, her wallet.”
“You don’t have to remind me, Ms. Wright. I know that you, of all people, don’t hold the police in the highest regard—”
“That’s not fair—”
He waved a hand, not to concede the point so much as to signal his unwillingness to debate it. “I remember my cases. I can tell you the life stories of missing people—men
and
women—that I still wake up wondering about. And I can tell you that I believe I failed by moving on without them, without answers for their families. But I never felt like that with your friend. You know why? Because you and I view the same facts in a different way. Every single thing was in its place at her apartment. You see that simple fact the way you see it. But I’ve been a cop for over thirty years, and I know that a woman who goes somewhere takes her pocketbook with her. She takes her wallet. Hell, she at least takes her damn
keys
. And there was no sign of disruption to the apartment, even though, by every account, Susan Hauptmann was an athlete. A trained soldier. A fighter.”
McKenna thought about the woman in the white sweater, pulling Nicky Cervantes from the tracks and sprinting up the subway staircase. Fast. And strong. A fighter. She knew where Scanlin’s reasoning was headed.
“No blood. No knocked-over furniture. Not even a pillow out of place. No sign of a struggle means that no one harmed a fighter like Susan Hauptmann in that apartment. We’ve got no evidence of harm
inside
the apartment. We’ve got no evidence that she was surprised on some normal kind of outing
away
from the apartment.”
“People don’t just evaporate.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Not physically, not like abracadabra. But that’s exactly what they do. Or at least
want
to do. Evaporate. Susan Hauptmann left behind her passport, her wallet, her pocketbook, her keys. She left behind her life. She . . .
left
. You didn’t want to believe that.”
“I didn’t
want
to believe it because I couldn’t believe it. I
knew
her.”
Scanlin said nothing, but his gaze, though focused across the street at the courthouse, grew sharper. For a moment, behind the razor stubble, sloppy tie, and extra layers of fat, McKenna recognized the intensity she’d sensed in him so many years ago.
“Why are we talking about this now?” he asked.
“Because I think you were right. I think Susan’s still alive. I saw her.”
“I’m glad to know it. It’s too bad her father didn’t live to hear the news.” Susan and her father always had a difficult relationship, but he was the one who pushed the investigation and worked the media, even though he had just been diagnosed with cancer. McKenna had seen his obituary in
The New York Times
two months ago.
“Aren’t you even curious about what I just said?” she asked.
“I don’t need to be. I know if you ran into her at the movies and caught up like old pals, you wouldn’t be here talking to me. Why don’t you go ahead and get to your point. What do you want from me, Ms. Wright?”
She opened her iPad and pulled up the link for the public drive of Dana’s Skybox to play the video clip. She hoped that Scanlin had studied enough pictures of Susan back then to recognize her now.
The connection was timing out. Maybe Dana had changed the settings. Or maybe the iPad wasn’t getting a good enough data connection to access the Internet. Or, more likely, McKenna the Luddite had managed to do something wrong.
“I’m sorry. I have a video here. I want to show it to you.”
“Just tell me what I need to know, all right?”
She started to speak but realized how ridiculous it sounded. He needed to see the actual image.
“I’m so sorry. I’ll go back to my computer.” The only still photograph Dana had e-mailed her was of the button on the woman’s backpack; Dana hadn’t yet created a still version of Susan’s face. Maybe once she did, she could enhance it for better clarity. “If I e-mail it to you, will you please just look at it?”
His gaze moved to the distance again before speaking. “Yeah, sure. Send whatever you want.”
He handed her a business card, and she automatically responded with one of her own. “Thank you, Detective. Really. I know what you must think of me, but I always cared about Susan, and I need to know what happened to her.”
He fingered the edges of her card. “I noticed the name change when you started at the magazine.”
She held up her left hand, ring forward. “Five years now. To Patrick Jordan. You might remember him from the investigation. He was another one of Susan’s friends.”
“Seems like you’ve got a good thing going for yourself now. The writing thing. A husband. I would’ve thought, of all people—after everything that happened—you would’ve learned that some things are better left alone.”
Scanlin pushed himself off the bench as he stood. She watched him walk to his fleet car, parked just outside the courthouse.
Scanlin resented her. He still had the same conflict of interest she’d raised with his lieutenant ten years earlier. He looked at her and saw his friend Scott Macklin on the front page of a newspaper, beneath the headline C
OP
H
ERO OR
M
URDERER?
But Scanlin was on the job, he remembered Susan, and McKenna had gotten somewhere with him: he’d look at the video. That was all that mattered. It was a start.
She was about to walk to the subway when she looked again at the courthouse. There was another conversation she needed to have in person.
A
ssistant District Attorney Will Getty rose from his desk to greet her with a warm hug. “McKenna Wright.” Everyone from the DA’s office—at least the people willing to acknowledge her existence—called her by her maiden name. “Speak of the devil.”
She returned the hug and took a seat. This was the same chair she sat in a little over ten years ago, when Getty called her into his office to offer a chance to work with him on an officer-involved shooting. A cop named Scott Macklin had shot a thug named Marcus Jones at the West Harlem Piers.
“Was someone speaking of me?” she asked.
“The chattering classes are very excited. Rumor is you’ve been asking for dirt on Judge Knight. You can’t possibly expect me to help you with that hot potato.”
His conspiratorial smile brought out lines that hadn’t been there when she’d first met him, but he was still handsome—more handsome than he ever wanted to let on. Neat haircut, but not too fashionable. Respectable suit, but not showy, and probably a size bigger than the salesperson recommended. Will Getty was the kind of trial lawyer who knew that jurors were distrustful of men who were too good-looking.
“I am here about a hot potato—just not that one.”
“I saw the article. I was wondering if I might hear from you.”
McKenna had thought about calling him before the Marcus Jones article went to print. But he was her superior ten years ago. She was a journalist now and didn’t need his permission to publish a story.
And yet.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but your name wasn’t in the article.”
“You don’t need to explain anything, Wright. And not that my opinion means squat, but I happen to think that you handled it very professionally.”
Her article had focused on the protests following Marcus Jones’s death and the eventual exoneration of Officer Macklin. She had disclosed the fact that she—the author of the piece—was the junior prosecutor who had raised doubts about Macklin’s self-defense claim. There had been no reason to bring Getty’s name into the piece.
She knew Getty well enough to get straight to the point. “I’ve been asked to write a book. Not write but propose. Who knows what will happen—”
“A book about the Marcus Jones case?”
“Not about the case itself but my place in it. It would be a more personal account than the article. A thirty-year-old woman who, for a couple of months, was in the middle of—I think at one point we agreed to call it a shitstorm?”
The problem boiled down to the gun. Scott Macklin claimed Marcus Jones pulled one, and the gun was found resting in Jones’s limp right hand. Jones’s mother insisted her son did not own a gun and accused Macklin of planting it. The pistol was a Glock compact with a filed-down serial number. McKenna had recently read an article about the ability of crime laboratories to restore obliterated serial numbers. Eager to prove herself, she’d filed a request with the local field office of the ATF, which was able to determine the last four digits. A search of the ATF’s database scored a match, meaning that the gun was used in a previous crime.
McKenna remembered the adrenaline rush that had come with the news. She wanted Marcus’s mother to be wrong and Scott Macklin to be right. A boy was dead, killed by a good cop. McKenna wanted proof that Marcus was the bad guy. She wanted proof that he had left Macklin with no choice. The gun in Marcus’s hand had been used in a previous crime. Marcus, at only nineteen, was a longtime criminal. She knew she’d find the connection.
But the connection between the Glock and that night at the West Harlem Piers wasn’t the one she’d expected to find. The serial number of the handgun was in the ATF’s database because the gun had been seized by the NYPD in 1992 after it was found in a garbage can. It was slated for destruction in accordance with the NYPD’s weapons disposal policy. As part of a public relations campaign called Safe Streets, the police department would make a show of feeding that gun—and hundreds of other seized weapons—to a smelter, subjecting them to three-thousand-degree temperatures until liquefied. But the gun never made it to the smelter. It wound up next to Marcus Jones’s body eleven years later.
Eleven years before his death, Marcus Jones was only eight years old. There was no reason to believe that he could have come into possession of the gun back then, and certainly no explanation for how the gun could have made its way to him from an NYPD property room.
But eleven years earlier, Scott Macklin was already a police officer, two years into his service. More notably, he was one of the young, enthusiastic, telegenic officers who had served as the face for Safe Streets. A
New York Post
article about the program showed Macklin delivering a truck full of guns to the smelter.
Officer Scott Macklin said that more than four hundred guns would be destroyed. “Any day we can take guns that might be used in crimes or accidental shootings and turn them into manhole covers and chain-link fences is a good day for the citizens of New York City.”
All these years later, she remembered the sick feeling in her stomach when she’d learned that Marcus’s gun—Marcus’s
supposed
gun—had a direct connection to Scott Macklin.
Macklin was third-generation NYPD. His grandfather and father and uncles would have told him about the days when every cop carried a “drop gun,” an unregistered weapon to toss at the side of a suspect to justify a shooting, if needed. Macklin was a newer breed of police, but tradition in blue families could be deep, as if passed by blood. It would have been easy to slip a gun from the Safe Streets pile.
She’d taken the evidence to the prosecutor in charge, Will Getty. He was one of the most respected lawyers in the office. He had become something of a friend after accompanying her to one of Susan’s happy hours. She trusted him.
But as she explained to him all the work she had done—the serial-number recovery, the ATF database search, the old newspaper article connecting Macklin to Safe Streets—she realized how ridiculously eager she sounded. After all, she was a mere drug prosecutor, and her special assignment of second-chairing this investigation was a glorified term for carrying Getty’s bags. She had been hoping to be rewarded for taking the initiative, but instead, she’d made herself look like a total freak by pursuing a side investigation into a politically and racially sensitive case without any input from the lawyer in charge.
She could remember what he said to her. “We don’t want to do anything rash. But good work, Wright. You’ve got a good eye for detail.”
He told her he would recess the grand jury for a couple of days while he looked into it.
Days went by. Then a week. When she asked him for an update, he explained that things took time and that he was working on it.
And then she’d heard nothing. Hearing nothing wasn’t McKenna’s forte. With each passing day, she became more convinced that Getty was finding a way to steer the grand jury in Macklin’s favor without her.
At the end of the second week, she met with Bob Vance at a dive bar in the East Village and told him everything she knew. The papers depicted her as a whistle-blower. She declined offers to appear on cable news and at protest rallies, but the people who accepted those invitations made a point of crediting her for revealing the “truth” about Marcus Jones’s shooting.
And then Will Getty figured out how that gun really had gone from Safe Streets storage to the right hand of Marcus Jones’s dead body, and McKenna wasn’t so beloved anymore.
I
ronically (or maybe predictably), Will had always been supportive of her. He was the one who told everyone who would listen that she’d been trying at every moment to do the right thing. Even as it was becoming clear that McKenna had to leave the DA’s office, he had gone so far as to write an essay for the
New York Law Journal
, arguing that she epitomized the ideal version of a prosecutor who was doing justice. He called her at home and conceded that if he’d communicated with her better after she’d gone to him with the Safe Streets connection, he could have prevented the “tragic misunderstanding.”
“Have you ever stopped to think,” he asked her now, “that in a weird way, that case helped you find your true calling. You were a good lawyer, Wright, but do you know how many lawyers would kill to write? I don’t care how much trash the people around this place were talking. They were all reading your novel, they were all loving it, and they all would have given their left nut to be in your shoes.”
Her first career move after leaving the DA’s office was almost accidental. After two months of wallowing on her sofa, she had started tinkering with a short story on her computer. As the story slowly blossomed into a book, she lived off her modest savings, supplementing with credit card debt as necessary.
The book was her escape from the real world—pure, unabashed, relentless fiction. When
Unreasonable Doubt
came out, her former coworkers nevertheless chose to see the book as an attempt to cash in on her platform as a scorned ADA.
As it turned out, there was no real profit involved. Despite every lawyer’s fantasy of writing a novel and retiring, she’d earned barely enough on the advance to pay off the debt she’d racked up while writing. But she had written a novel. It had gotten good reviews. She felt better about herself. She let herself be happy for a while, which seemed to stabilize what had been an erratic relationship with Patrick.
Then she took another two years to write a second book, and by then the publishing industry had changed. Stores were closing. Sales were down. Apparently the legal thriller was dead. That book was sitting on her hard drive, unpublished.
By then she was a thirty-five-year-old lawyer with a five-year gap in her résumé; well educated but with only one real interest: in crime.
No prosecutor’s office would have her. Even defense firms didn’t want her because they believed prosecutors would blacklist her on plea bargains.
She’d written a novel (two, if an unsold book counted), so she knew she could write. And she knew how to tell a story. She wrote a few pieces on spec, and then Bob Vance gave her a chance at a full-time job. That was career change number two. She despised the fluff pieces that dominated her work, but at least she had a paycheck until she figured something else out.
Back in Getty’s office after all these years, she felt herself gripping the worn upholstery of the chair arms, knowing she was doing the right thing but wanting to get it over with. Getty was a good lawyer. She could see him processing the information. Considering his words carefully.
“Do you want to do it? The Marcus Jones book?”
“I think so. If I can find a way to do it that is respectful of the people who deserve respect.” She patted his desk.
“What you’re saying is that the article didn’t mention my name, but a book would.”
“I wanted you to hear it from me first. And I promise to treat you fairly.”
“Okay, then. Can’t ask more than that, can I?”
The hug he gave her when she left wasn’t quite as warm as the one she’d received when she arrived.