Free If You Were Here by Alafair Burke Page B

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