Authors: Alafair Burke
T
wo hours later, Joe Scanlin was back at the Twelfth Precinct. The estranged wife of a suspect in yet another drug-related killing had agreed to come in for questioning.
He knew the history. Six 911 calls made from their shared address just in the last four years. Three arrests of the husband for domestic violence. One time she went to the hospital with a broken jaw. No charges ever filed.
She moved out two months earlier when Child Protective Services threatened to take her kids if they continued to witness the violence against her.
But “separated” and “separate” weren’t synonymous.
“Kenny don’t sell,” the woman insisted. “He don’t even use. No way he’d have something to do with
that
. His no-good friends always dragging him down. That’s all that is. They the ones did this. Don’t you listen to their noise.”
Scanlin walked out of the interrogation room while she was talking. He didn’t need to hear the rest. Been there too many times. She wasn’t under arrest, but he knew she’d stay there in the box until he told her she was allowed to leave. No one ever tried to leave, certainly not a woman who’d gotten used to being beat on.
Back at his desk, Scanlin found himself fiddling with McKenna Wright’s—Jordan’s—business card. Since she’d called that morning, he had felt off his game. Like he was walking and listening and talking through a filter, smothered by a layer of dust. He was trying to pinpoint the reason why. The moment she’d said her name, he had been pulled into this cloud.
Even as he was insisting that she meet him downtown—at the courthouse, near the courthouse, anywhere that would remind her of her former existence—he had known he was being transparently vengeful. But there were legitimate reasons to remind that woman of the past. She was a vulture. A user. A one-lady wrecking ball. Like so many lawyers before her, she had tried to build a career on the backs of decent men. Everyone knew that most prosecutors worked the job as a stepping-stone to the bench or elected office, and the fastest shortcut was across the back of a dirty cop. If you had to make up corruption where none existed, so be it.
Even with the disappearance of her friend, she never seemed as interested in the truth as she was in telling Scanlin how he should do his job. For a moment down there at the park, he had let his guard down. He’d felt the hardness that he’d readied in the courthouse elevator begin to soften at the sight of her business card. Changed job. Changed name. She was a woman who cared about her friend after all these years.
Now he found himself wondering whether her phone call had anything to do with Susan Hauptmann. All those years ago, she was so convinced that something horrible had happened to her friend. Now she pulled a one-eighty: not only had Scanlin been right back then; now she had a firsthand eyewitnessing of the long-missing woman. No details, mind you. Just the promise of a video he was never shown.
He wouldn’t put it past her to dangle the promise of photographic evidence as a carrot. She could pretend to be tracking down Hauptmann as a pretext to talk him up. That was how users like her worked. They saw people as chips that could be cashed in for a favor.
Scanlin knew that Susan Hauptmann was out there somewhere, hopefully living a happier life. Regardless, Scanlin could die satisfied if he never heard her name or McKenna Jordan’s again.
Scanlin had been all too aware of his age the moment McKenna Jordan recognized him across the park. He saw himself through the younger woman’s eyes. It wasn’t just that years had passed since she’d last seen him. He had changed.
There was a time when Scanlin worked the job a hundred percent, knowing that at the end of the day, Melissa would be waiting—makeup on, hair curled, dinner either on the stove or ordered from one of their favorite Italian places on Arthur Avenue. They weren’t rich, but they managed to make their life glamorous. His life was different now, and those differences had manifested themselves in his appearance.
He’d seen the Jordan woman’s big article, of course. The story meant nothing to the new cops, but the guys who’d been around for a while paid attention. Scanlin had read it online for free, refusing to shell out six bucks at the newsstand.
He was too smart not to wonder whether her phone call had something to do with her newfound interest in rehashing the past. For all she knew, Scanlin could get her access to the man he suspected she was truly interested in—the man whose career she’d ruined, the man she could use to help sell more magazines.
Scott Macklin was an old friend in both senses of the word. Over a decade had passed since Mac decided to cut off ties with his NYPD buddies. He was an aged friend because—well, because they both went and got old.
Scanlin checked his e-mail. No video from McKenna Jordan. Not even an e-mail. Maybe she had imagined seeing her friend and come to her senses. More likely, the woman was working an angle. The less he thought about her and the trouble she brought down on those around her, the better.
M
cKenna never voiced the opinion aloud, but she believed that she excelled at everything she did. Even thinking it, she realized how narcissistic it sounded. She didn’t mean it in a boastful or arrogant way.
To say that she was good at everything she did wasn’t to say that she was good at
everything
. The assertion said very little about her natural talents but spoke volumes about something she wasn’t good at—taking risks. McKenna excelled at everything she did because she’d spent her life avoiding the things she could not do.
She remembered returning her flute to that tiny old music store in Seattle. Her parents had bought the instrument used, on an installment plan. They were only on the fourth payment by the time it was clear McKenna was no longer interested, deciding that she had a better chance of mastering the violin. The sympathetic owner agreed to rent the family a violin. Then a viola. Then a saxophone and a trumpet. McKenna wound up in debate club instead.
She was no more tenacious as a grown-up. One of her female law professors led a series of golf lessons for the Woman’s Law Association, plugging the sport as a way for women to spar with the boys in law practice. For three weeks, McKenna watched as, one by one, her peers got the hang of the swing plane, the cocked wrists, the release of the club, the follow-through. When it was McKenna’s turn, the ball would roll forward a pathetic ten feet, as if felled by her wood-chopping swing. No more golf for her.
Her predilection for favoring skills based solely on mastery had almost led her into a math major. She couldn’t imagine a life crunching numbers, but they came easily to her, so she’d stuck by them. Lucky for her, she had also been a good writer, a good arguer, and a pretty decent speaker. Even luckier, she happened to live in a world where good writers, arguers, and speakers could usually find a place for themselves.
As a result, even while her career had taken turn upon unpredictable turn, McKenna had always believed that everything would turn out okay because she had been good at enough things to patch together a facade of effortless talent. She was still waiting for that faith to prove well placed.
It seemed these days that her natural talents for breaking down facts and weaving them into a story collided increasingly with her fundamental inability to understand computers. To break down facts, one first needed to gather them. And where gathering facts used to involve questioning witnesses, subpoenaing documents (as a lawyer), or talking her way into file cabinets that were meant to be off limits (as a reporter), now it seemed like every time she needed a piece of information, technology got in her way. McKenna was barely forty years old, but with a librarian mother and an English-teacher father, she was one of those rare young people who was more comfortable with microfiche and dusty notebooks than WAV files and thumb drives.
Today it was this stupid Skybox program, or website, or app—
whatever
—that was making her crazy. She had watched the subway video from the link Dana had given her at least a hundred times, but now all she was getting was an error message informing her that the link was invalid.
She had seen Scanlin’s skeptical look when she promised to send him the video. Now hours were ticking by, and she had bupkes.
So much for her credibility—not that she had any with the man. She had rubbed Scanlin the wrong way from the minute she badged her way into Susan’s apartment, insisting that the police brief her on the status of the investigation. It had been a rookie move, but she’d bought in to the idea that her position as an assistant district attorney for New York County entitled her to a certain amount of respect as a law enforcement officer. She hadn’t been around long enough to realize that the general maxim didn’t hold true with the other half of the equation—cops.
To make matters worse, Scanlin had spent four years in a precinct with Scott Macklin. It hadn’t taken Scanlin long to make the connection between the nosy ADA pushing her way into his investigation and the bitch who was accusing his old friend of lying about an officer-involved shooting. She remembered the way Scanlin had raised the issue. She had called him the day after storming into Susan’s apartment. The point of the call was to apologize for her heavy-handed approach, but she never got the words out. Instead, she got an earful from Scanlin about the honor, integrity, and courageousness of Scott Macklin, followed by a warning that she was “nobody” as far as Susan’s case was concerned, followed by a prediction that karma would catch up with her, followed by a
click
.
She remembered her response to the click in her ear. She had run to the ladies’ room down the hall at the DA’s office and held her hair back while she vomited. Susan was missing. McKenna had publicly accused a police officer of homicide and perjury. And now the Marcus Jones mess was keeping her from helping Susan.
She had wanted to call Scanlin back. She wanted to explain to him how hard it was to come forward with her suspicions about that shooting. She wanted him to know that she liked Scott Macklin. He’d been a regular in her office at the drug unit. He had shown her the pictures of his new wife, Josefina, and her eight-year-old son, Thomas. He had talked to her like a friend.
So, yeah, she wanted Scanlin to know that she didn’t need a lecture about honor and courageousness and karma. All she wanted was to do the right thing, but locked in that bathroom stall, sobbing into a ball of toilet paper, she had known that the Scott Macklins and the Joe Scanlins of the world would forever see her as a backstabbing, ladder-climbing careerist.
Now Scanlin would think she was yanking his chain once again with the promise of a video that McKenna could no longer find. Another fucking error message on the computer.
McKenna had called Dana twice, and both times got voice mail. She normally approved of Dana’s ability to disappear from the reservation with no accountability, but now she was beginning to understand Bob Vance’s frustration with her freelancing ways. It was four o’clock. Where was Dana?
She hit redial on her cell. This time she recognized Dana’s ring tone—a snippet of the Blondie song “Call Me”
—
chirping from the pool of desks beyond her office.
“Dana?” she yelled, hitting refresh on her keyboard in a futile attempt to pull up the link. “Is Dana back?”
She was answered with the blurt of a “fuck”—Dana’s voice—followed by an explanation from Pete the junior assistant: “You might want to lay low. She’s having, like, a meltdown or something.”
McKenna found Dana bent over the computer in her cubicle. “I can’t
believe
this. It’s gone. Every freakin’ thing is gone.”
“Your Skybox? That’s what I’ve been calling about. I can’t pull up that subway video.”
“Screw the video. My photographs. My entire backup account. The entire thing is wiped out.”
“It’s not just the link?”
Dana looked at McKenna as if she were a child asking why dogs couldn’t talk. There was no need to provide a response. Instead, she continued ranting to herself. “I’m going to have to call them. You know there won’t be a live person. Fuuuuck!”
McKenna could tell it wasn’t a good time to press the subject of the video. She turned to Pete. “Do you know anything about this stuff? Why would her account be down?”
“It’s not down,” he whispered. “It’s deleted. It’s like someone logged in as her and erased the entire thing. That was her
backup
. She’s totally screwed.”
C
arter was situated comfortably in the second-to-last row of the PATH train, by all appearances deeply interested in the
Wall Street Journal
’s analysis of the latest tech-industry initial public offering. There had been a time when Carter followed the markets, squirreling away his few extra dollars in an IRA, hoping that sensible choices would create slow, steady gains that would lead to a comfortable retirement long down the road. That was when he bought in to the idea that if you were a good person and tried hard enough and kept your head down, everything would work out in the end. That was back when he believed in institutions and loyalty and hierarchies. That was back when he believed in . . . anything.
Carter was a different person now. Now he was the kind of person who stayed liquid.
He knew that most of what was covered in this newspaper was irrelevant to the way the world actually worked, but the paper served its current purpose of helping him blend into a sea of commuters departing Penn Station.
The woman’s
People
magazine served a similar purpose. It was four o’clock, and commuter traffic was already getting heavy. She could be calling it an early day after a long presentation at her job in marketing. Or heading back after those part-time classes she was taking to get that advanced degree she was always talking about. Or going home to her kids from her monthly mommy day in the city for a facial and a haircut. She looked like any other woman. You’d never know that three days earlier, she had chased a kid onto the tracks of the subway only to rescue him seconds later.
Carter had to hand it to the woman. She was good. The casual observer would think she was genuinely engrossed by the latest celebrity baby bump or ongoing love triangle involving a teen mom. But he could see her eyes sweeping the car, monitoring the platform at each stop. So far, she hadn’t noticed him. She was good; he was just better.
What was she looking for?
He almost missed it. The man stepped into the train right before its departure. He sat in the seat behind hers, so they faced opposite directions. He sported earbuds blasting metal that was loud enough for other passengers to hear from a comfortable distance away. He even threw in an occasional mock air drum. He didn’t seem like Miss
People
Magazine’s type.
But then Carter saw the woman’s left hand move ever so quickly to her side, just as his right hand swished down from the drum solo playing in his head. He had given something to her, as if they were two grade-school children passing notes. Very skillful grade-school children.
When the heavy-metal guy stepped from the train at Thirteenth Street, Carter stepped off, too. When he walked up Sixth Avenue, Carter followed. The earbuds stayed in. The metal kept playing.
Carter pulled his cell phone from the breast pocket of his cashmere sport coat. Pretended to send a text but zoomed in and took a quick snapshot once the man’s head was turned to the side.
Carter watched the man enter a residential building. He noted the address. He watched through the glass as the man stopped to retrieve his mail from the wall of boxes.
Other people would have called it a gut feeling, but Carter knew it was all about facts. He did not like the facts he was gathering.
He waited for the man to leave the lobby and then entered. He approached the doorman with a friendly smile. “Hi, there. I’m looking for a rental. Wondering if this is a rental building or only ownership?”
“Ownership. It’s a co-op.”
“Ah, okay. Thanks.” He turned to look at the building’s mailboxes. Four rows over, three boxes down. That was the one the man had opened. Apartment 602.
It was time to call the client.
He knew by now that the preferred reporting style was to use as few words as possible. Train. Man. Address. “I have his picture.”
“Send it. You know the number.”
That cell phone number—untraceable—was pretty much the only thing Carter knew about his client. “Sure thing.”
He texted the man’s photograph.
Two minutes later, Carter’s phone rang. The client used the same crisp style—no extraneous words. A minute after, Carter hung up, knowing that his mission had just changed. So much for the easy life.