Free If You Were Here by Alafair Burke Page A

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.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    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