DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3)

by T. J. Brearton

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “What we would like — what we feel is the best course to take here — is to smoke them out of hiding so we can see who they are, learn what they are planning, exactly. And since we have some overlap in the players; and you’re the biggest proponent of that — Staryles, Argon, Heilshorn — we have a parallel opportunity with the HTPU case on XList.”

  She thought about this carefully. They were asking her to take part in a sting. Or, at least, find an in for a sting through her XList investigation. But Staryles was elusive, and Argon and Heilshorn were dead. Titan was massive and multifaceted. Money flowed from Titan into rat-holes where it disappeared, offshore accounts gobbled it up, slush funds, shell companies; it was a chimera. An entity too big to fail, too big to prosecute.

  The kind she couldn’t resist.

  “Alright,” she said.

  His eyes seemed to clear and his mouth jerked into a tentative smile.

  “One condition,” she said, halting the smile in its tracks. “I want to bring in Brendan Healy on it.”

  “Healy? No way.”

  “He’s the one who cracked open the XList case in the first place.”

  “He’s in prison on murder charges. No.”

  “John, I just spent an hour telling a group of people in a very nice way that we don’t know shit about how to take down XList after two years. You want to piggyback this threat on the XList case? Okay. Then I need a jumpstart.”

  Rascher looked uncomfortable. He turned his head and gazed out the window at Jennifer’s housing complex, the marina beyond, white yachts bobbing in the slate blue water. She could sense him calculating. She thought she even caught a whiff of jealousy beneath the fug of his cologne.

  “Alright,” he said at last. “But there’s no way the US AG or the Director are going to agree to that unless Harlan Doherty is there, at least. And I’m sure the New York City District Attorney will be interested — or harangue us if we don’t at least notify her. God, Jen.”

  Fine, she thought. Whatever it took.

  She offered a smile and slipped out the door. Before she left the SUV she leaned back in and said, “See you tomorrow.”

  It was already time to go back to New York.

  CHAPTER TWO / FIVE MONTHS AGO

  Louis Tremont was a bank robber. Unlike most of the Rikers population, which was pretrial, Tremont was doing six months for a parole violation. He was obese, with dark, glossy skin and hair that sprouted from his ears. He became Brendan’s new cellmate when Brendan was transferred to the West Facility, and not by coincidence. Deputy Warden Grimm wanted Brendan and Tremont together.

  Tremont said he was going to spend his time inside dropping the extra weight. “When I was on the job,” he told Brendan at lunch, “I was in shape, man, positively svelte. I was a smokin’ hottie, you hear me?” Tremont was also an avid reader. He claimed he’d read every book on safe-cracking ever written, even though he’d never been a cat burglar and never had to enter a bank safe without assistance from a teller and a key. He also told Brendan that though he hadn’t robbed a bank or armored car in more than seven years, he never stopped casing. He cased everything, he said, all the time. And, true to his word, while he sat at the cafeteria table, he seemed to watch the comings and goings of the food line and the kitchen behind it with great interest, computing something in his mind.

  The two men sat alone at one end of a cafeteria table. West Facility was sparsely populated compared to Mothcan Center, or any of the other ten buildings on Rikers Island, which were all overflowing.

  “What are you doing here, Healy?” Tremont stuck a piece of apple in his mouth and bit down, squirting some of the juice. It was breakfast in the chow hall. Other than apples, there was cereal, toast, milk, coffee and the scrambled eggs that looked like Play-Doh and tasted like mouse shit. “West Facility is for contagious inmates, protective custody, and a few sentenced cons, like me. You’re pretrial. What do you got — witness protection?”

  Brendan took a piece of toast off his plate, looked at it, and dropped it back down. No one was supposed to know what Brendan was doing for Grimm, not even Tremont. When Brendan didn’t respond, Tremont shrugged and picked up another slice of apple. There were wet-smacking sounds as he popped it into his large mouth and gobbled it down. He said, “I heard of you, you know.”

  Brendan raised his eyebrows. He decided at least the tea was tolerable and he took a sip. It had stayed warm because the chow hall was probably ninety degrees with the heat blasting. Tremont was sweating, runlets coming down the stubbly sides of his wide face. Now the large man nodded his head. “Yup. You held some big league doctor at gun point last year. Ran through a hospital, turning the place upside down; had practically the whole NYPD come looking to blow your porch light. Amazed you made it out of there alive.”

  They weren’t the only ones after me, Brendan thought.

  He got to the point. “What do you know about what’s coming in to Rikers? Chieva, tina, amidone, bug juice, any of it.”

  “That’s an awfully coppish question,” Tremont said, sucking the juice from his fingers now. “You still on the job in here? What’re you, on the bumper for Grimm? What’re you getting?”

  That hadn’t taken long.

  “Maybe I just want a taste,” Brendan said.

  Tremont’s eyebrows raised again, ridges of skin cutting through his forehead deep enough to jam slices of the apple. “You? Nah. You ain’t a drinker or a drugger. Your eyes are too clear. Bet you used to be, though.”

  “Probably three quarters of the population of Rikers are ex-users. I’m curious about the people who are still using while they’re in here.”

  Tremont took some more apple from his plate, playfully, pinching a slice, like Gulliver holding up a Lilliputian. He tossed his in his mouth, sat back, chewed, and looked Brendan over.

  “Come on. What did they do in that movie? The one with Jodie Foster. ‘Quid pro quo,’ baby. Feed my brain. You were a druggie? Or a drunk. I’m thinking a drunk. The odds are good, but the goods are odd, right? You got that Irish hothead thing in you, I can see it. Mixed in with the Italian fuckin’ attitude.” Tremont started to laugh. They had one half of a long table to themselves, but he was drawing looks from the other end, and surrounding convicts. “Boy, didn’t you get a nice mix, huh? Probably can’t keep a relationship for shit, either. Keeps em guessing, though, huh? I bet you got a lot of tail on the outside. I bet you got one waiting for you . . .”

  “I was studying neuroscience before I became a cop,” Brendan said, to shut Tremont up. “Yes, I’m an alcoholic.” The more he could throw at Tremont and redirect the big man’s attention from Brendan’s motives, the better.

  Tremont absorbed the information silently. His expression sobered up and he leaned forward, put his elbows on the table, took a napkin, and started cleaning the sticky apple juice from his fingers.

  “Science, huh? Thing with the sciences,” he said, “it’s like being a cop in a weird way. Right? Because with either of these things, when you look for explanations, you look for things that are never too complex. There’s no great mystery; nature vies with itself, so does the street. And just like there’s no sweet old man, no god behind nature, there’s no mastermind, no arch-criminal behind crime. If you got a dead body and you think your little old lady neighbor did it, then she probably did.”

  “Sounds about right, I guess.” Brendan pushed his tray away and gazed across the table at Tremont.

  Tremont was enjoying himself. Brendan waited patiently, but the garrulous, bank-robbing convict wasn’t through.

  “I heard rumors.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. That you’re in here because of the CSS.”

  Brendan felt a sudden chill despite the cloying heat. He was instantly angry with himself, tired of feeling this way.

  “I find that intriguing.”

  “Good for you.” Brendan pulled his tray back to himself, and made ready to leave. M
aybe now wasn’t the time to work Tremont. It was going the wrong way.

  “I mean, for one thing, it’s the fucking Central Security Service. Not every day you meet a detainee who agrees, you know, nature and crime are simple, there are no great conspiracies, and it’s the Central Security Service put him here.”

  Brendan’s eyes cut over to a Corrections Officer walking around the room. He couldn’t help feeling anxious the way he and Tremont were talking. This had been a bad idea. If Tremont knew anything about the drugs moving through the prison, he was going to be an ass about it. It was the wrong venue for such a discussion, anyway; they were surrounded by other convicts, any one of them could be tuning in.

  After fondling it forever, Tremont popped the last slice of fruit in his mouth and talked around the white juicy flashes of the apple. “What do I get?”

  “Huh?”

  “You want me to tell you what I seen. What I know. I’m askin’, it’s the only question anyone asks, really — what’s in it for me?”

  Healy stared at Tremont. He could feel his pulse elevating. “If I gotta tell you, then it isn’t worth it.”

  Tremont tossed his head back and laughed like a bullfrog, his neck throbbing in and out. He slapped his hands together, hands both thick and nimble-fingered. A safe-cracker’s grip, though he claimed he never laid a hand on a combination lock. “That’s rich. That’s juicy. What’re you, a bleeding heart? You gonna ply me with social justice concerns?” He grew straight-faced and angled his sweaty forehead at Brendan. “Yeah, the Left is always going on about social concerns. Meanwhile, the Right says, ‘Okay . . . but how you gonna pay for that?’ That’s what I’m asking, Healy. Pay to play.”

  Brendan’s teeth were on edge. When he spoke his lips barely moved. “Tell you what, Tremont. Like you figured, I was a cop. But I wonder if you know something.”

  He held up his hand. His fingers were long and slender, unlike Tremont’s. “According to the Department of Justice, if you’re missing any of these, you go on the terrorist watch-list.” Brendan wriggled the three fingers he had left.

  Tremont swallowed the apple. He knuckled down onto the table, leaned forward, pressing into it with his large belly. He got an eyeful of Brendan’s hand, inadvertently bumped his silverware, which bounced out of his tray and clattered onto the ground. The convicts near them frowned and drew inward.

  Tremont spoke in a low voice now. “You’re the one they said was a terrorist.”

  Brendan stared across the table. He lowered his hand. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s me.”

  * * *

  Their shared cell was eight feet wide by ten feet long. They had a small steel sink, a steel toilet, and a desktop that could be folded up into the wall. There was one chair, and one set of bunk beds. Convicts referred to their bed as a Cadillac. Tremont was on the bottom, Brendan on the top.

  “Alright,” said Tremont. “What do you want to know?”

  Brendan was on his back, hands on his chest, looking up at the ceiling. He was silent for a moment, feeling a wave of relief. He’d gambled with that little bit of drama in the cafeteria, hoping to push the right buttons with Tremont. It had worked. In years of things mostly not-working, it was a small victory. “I’ve seen how you look around this place,” he said to Tremont.

  He could feel Tremont adjust himself on the lower bunk and again the whole apparatus shook with the man’s movements. Brendan continued in a low whisper. “You’re always watching, right? When you’re not obsessing about your prison diet. You know there are drugs here, you know how they’re getting in.”

  “I like you, Healy.”

  “Stay on your bunk.”

  Tremont laughed. “Inmates want drugs, and COs profit from the trafficking. It’s a no-brainer. Some COs are paid to look the other way, to gloss over the cavity searches on new inmates smuggling things in, in dark places, if you know what I mean. Other COs are bolder; they come right in on the ferry, driving the shit in, in their personal vehicles.”

  “Where does it go when it gets here?”

  “Alright.” There was a tremendous quaking as Tremont got off the bunk bed. He moved across the small dark space and sat in the single chair. Brendan looked down at him, half of the man’s heavy face limned in the corridor lights, points of it glinting in his eyes. “There are common areas that are staging points for sale and distribution. Like the guard locker rooms. And in the chow hall. There’s stuff that comes in, in the food trucks, which goes right into the kitchen and is distributed from there.”

  “How would that work?”

  “Prison food is from corporations like Sodexo, or it’s military surplus. My last celly spent three months working in the kitchen. He told me about boxes labeled ‘for institutional use only,’ labeled, ‘not for human consumption,’ and ‘Desert Storm.’”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nah. I’ve seen a whole day in here go to shit after everyone got sick from the chicken. Boxes labeled ‘beef tongue’ ain’t much better. Sometimes we get special meals, that’s what they call them. But I’ve always noticed the pigeon population decreases right after one of these ‘special meals.’” Tremont started laughing again.

  “Shh,” said Brendan, glancing out into the corridor. “Now you’re messing with me.”

  “Am I? Okay, I don’t know about the pigeons, but everything else is true. Like you said, I’m obsessed.”

  “Desert Storm? That was over twenty years ago.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing. There are DOC food service administrators all over the country under investigation for taking kickbacks to accept outdated food. At least three people I know of have been indicted by the feds. But that was years ago. Anyway, before Gallo walked out of here, that’s my old celly, he told me he saw the other stuff coming in. So, I watch. I sit at jug-up and I watch, see if I can see anything. And then you show up, and start asking your questions.”

  “The contraband.”

  “Right. You watch close enough, you’ll see guards come and scoop up certain boxes whose content never made its way onto the food trays. That’s probably the biggest pipeline.”

  Brendan soaked this in. Tremont had just given him what could be very helpful information.

  Tremont seemed to rest after the disclosure, his eyes shining faintly.

  “It’s a cottage industry,” he said quietly, as if to himself. “You got forty percent of Rikers inmates diagnosed with mental health disorders; guys come in addicted to drugs. Like you said. But, then you gotta deal with all this shit. Monotony, isolation, aggression, overpopulation. The correction system ain’t equipped. So you’ve got stressed-out guards going crazy. Deputy Warden losing his mind.”

  “I have a hard time feeling bad for the Deputy Warden.”

  “Yeah. No shit. Want to hear about Grimm? Okay, not long ago an inmate poisoned himself with disinfectant — it was being used to treat cells after a raw sewage back up — be glad you missed that one. They knew he was taking the disinfectant, and a guard told Grimm, and Grimm said, and I quote, ‘Don’t bother me if you have live breathing bodies. You only come to me if you have an extraction, or if you got a dead body.’” Tremont’s eyes flared white as more light caught them. “You believe that shit? The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, citing negligence. Denial of medical care. Now Grimm’s got that hanging over his head. Not to mention the city suit a guy filed for getting the shit beat out of him by two guards. Ass kicked so bad he’s got fused vertebrae and a plate in his neck. Dumbass gets himself thrown back in jail because of a parole violation.”

  “Here?”

  “Yeah, he’s in the RNDC. Other side of the island.”

  “Not protective custody?”

  “Nope,” said Tremont. He turned his head to look out into the corridor. Brendan heard the noise; a CO was on his way, making rounds. They had to end the conversation.

  “So Grimm has more than a single problem.”

  Tremont grunted. “One strike of a match could burn
him down entirely.”

  CHAPTER THREE / WEDNESDAY, 11:12 AM

  The plane flew into LaGuardia airport. As it banked to land, Jennifer could see Rikers Island out the window. Rikers was New York City’s main jail complex. It was on a four-hundred-acre island in the East River, between Queens and the Bronx. The flat land mass was green and brown, strapped with roads and parking lots, populated with white, X-shaped buildings that looked like targets. As the plane’s tires barked against the macadam Jennifer realized she was gripping the arms of the seat hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

  They left the airport in a convoy— three SUVs and two NYPD escorts; a lead and a follow car. They drove up 81st street and onto 19th Ave. As they turned towards the bridge which spanned Queens and Rikers Island, she found herself wishing the drive was longer. The sign on the road leading to the bridge read: City of New York Correction Department. Rikers Island. Home of New York’s Boldest. It suddenly felt like it was all happening too fast.

  She realized her anxiety was caused by a sense of guilt. It had been seven months since Brendan Healy had made the call to the authorities which had resulted in the FBI busting down the door to the room where she’d been held captive. Recovering from her injuries in the hospital, she’d vowed to see Healy right away. To thank him. To help him. But the time had never come. And the Justice Department and the FBI had warned her off a visit.

  The train of vehicles crossed the bridge. Jennifer looked out over the choppy waters of Bowery Bay. John Rascher told her that, for a time, Healy had acted delusional, spewing conspiracy theories about the government. Wild conjecture to the New York Police that the CSS was somehow involved in the black markets, the private equity firm Titan, and working with Heilshorn himself. But then, suddenly, Healy had “dropped the act,” and took back any accusations.

  Rascher concluded that Healy had deep-seated issues. This whole thing was a shot in the dark.

  They closed in on Rikers Island. The buildings seeming to grow in the windshield as the caravan of feds and cops crossed the bridge. On the other side, they passed through a massive parking area and came to a stop at the entry gate. The guards gave everyone’s credentials a cursory look. In a short time, they were waved through. Jennifer felt her stomach lurch as the gate lifted and the vehicles continued their march along Hazen Street, further into the massive complex.