Free If You Were Here by Alafair Burke

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,