Airtight

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Airtight Page 10

by David Rosenfelt


  “What they’re trying to do is violence, and the worst kind. It’s murder for money.”

  I liked her a lot, and in the moment identified with her. I was having some family protection issues myself.

  I changed the subject. “What do you know about Judge Danny Brennan?”

  “The basketball player who got murdered?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “My husband played against him in college, and he got stabbed to death, I think it was in his garage. And he became a judge. That exhausts my knowledge of him.”

  “Do you have any thoughts about how he might have ruled in the case your town is involved in?”

  “Not a clue, and I had no idea he’d be involved in our case. But if he would have been on our side, then Carlton’s the killer. Go get him.”

  I turned to Emmit. “Might as well.”

  Before we left I gave Alex my card, and said, “Please make me your first call if there’s anything you think I should know. Anything at all. I’m here to help, and to put the people that are doing this away.”

  She nodded and said, “I will.” I believed her, and I thought she believed me. It seemed like Alex Hutchinson only said things if she meant them.

  On the way out, Emmit smiled and said, “I don’t think it would be a good idea to get on her bad side.”

  “You got that right.”

  While we were at the diner, I had gotten a message from Deb Guthrie, asking me to call her back. I did so as soon as we got into the car.

  “You’re up against somebody that’s good,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “We traced your brother’s e-mail back to the IP address. It’s in Afghanistan.”

  “That’s crazy, Deb. There’s no way he’s in Afghanistan.”

  “I didn’t say he was. It’s a trick that’s used. Not to make it too complicated, they route the traffic through servers set up for the purpose of concealment. He’s probably using multiple servers in different countries; the next e-mail your brother sends could come up with an IP address in some other country.”

  “So no way to crack it?”

  “Not likely,” she said. “But your brother could find it out himself; there are websites he could go to. He’d get the address before it’s routed.”

  “He doesn’t have web access, only e-mails.”

  “Like I said, you’re up against somebody that’s good.”

  There really wasn’t much for Chris Gallagher to do.

  He had accomplished his initial goal, which was to send Lucas Somers out in search of Steven’s exoneration. He had no idea what Somers would come up with, but he had no intention of extending the deadline.

  After seven days, if the goal had not been achieved, Lucas Somers’s brother would die. Gallagher didn’t see that as revenge; he saw it as justice, as a form of equality. He wouldn’t be happy about it; he’d much prefer to have Somers succeed. But nor would he feel any particular remorse. He had seen plenty of innocent people sacrificed for a mission; it was simply a fact of life.

  If Somers failed, an outcome probably more likely than not, Gallagher would have to come up with another way to defend Steven in death. But he had confidence that he’d figure out something, and wouldn’t worry about it until events dictated it.

  Which left him with some time on his hands, a situation that Gallagher was neither used to nor comfortable with. He wasn’t in hiding; there was no need for that. Somers was obviously smart enough to realize that he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by putting out an arrest warrant, so the police were neither after him nor looking for him. If Bryan Somers wound up dying, then of course that would change. No matter; Gallagher could handle it either way.

  But hanging out and watching television while Somers was doing the work wasn’t quite Gallagher’s style, so instead he decided to more closely monitor the situation. He would follow Somers from a distance, to see firsthand what he was up to.

  The act of doing so would not be difficult. Gallagher had trailed the enemy through mountain terrain in Afghanistan; by comparison the New York State Thruway was a piece of cake. And Somers would not be alert to the possibility; he would have no reason to think he was being followed.

  The purpose was not just to kill time, nor to make sure that Somers wasn’t able to locate his brother. The house and shelter was owned by a marine buddy of Gallagher’s, but there would be no record of them having been together in the service. They were both Black Ops, which in army terms was to say that they barely even existed.

  Gallagher’s buddy had done what buddies do; he didn’t ask questions when Gallagher asked for the use of the place for ten days. It even gave the guy an excuse to visit his sister in Syracuse.

  Gallagher was going to follow Somers to gather information and help him judge the veracity of what Somers was telling him. He fully expected Somers to dramatically exaggerate his investigative progress, thinking that it would make Gallagher inclined to spare his brother.

  So Gallagher followed Somers and his partner out to Brayton, and waited as he went into the town hall, and then on to the diner. Gallagher had no idea who he met with in the town hall, but saw that the cashier in the diner accompanied them to the booth in the back as soon as they walked in. Clearly they were not there for lunch, they were there to talk to her.

  When they left, he decided not to follow them, but rather to enter the diner. The place was almost empty, and he found it easy to strike up a conversation with the woman who said her name was Alex Hutchinson.

  She was more than willing to talk about her crusade to protect her town and family from the environmental disaster she was sure they were facing. And when she mentioned the fact that it was before the Court of Appeals, Gallagher knew why Somers had gone there in the first place.

  He left to head back to his motel room, where he would research the case on the Internet.

  It would give him something to do.

  I asked Emmit to gather any information detectives had uncovered regarding an alibi for Steven Gallagher.

  I had not been paying much attention to that part of the investigation for a couple of reasons. First of all, I strongly believed he was the killer, so by definition there could be no credible alibi. But secondly, I feared that just an alibi and a proclamation of Steven’s innocence would never be enough for his brother. We were going to need to come up with an actual guilty party, and just developing an alibi for Steven didn’t get us there.

  “Nothing good to report,” Emmit said when he entered my office carrying a large folder with the accumulated information. “Nobody has come forward claiming to having seen Steven Gallagher that night. He made a couple of phone calls, but they were three and four hours before the murder. The last e-mail he sent was earlier that day, to his brother.”

  For some reason, when I heard that information, it struck me differently than it had Emmit. But before I voiced my point of view, I asked Emmit to give me a half hour with the detectives’ reports to go over them.

  When he came back I said, “Somebody saw Gallagher that night.”

  “Where did you see that?” he asked.

  “The nine-one-one call. Whoever made that call must have seen him.”

  “Unless Gallagher told him about it the next day.”

  I shook my head. “He was a loner, had almost no friends, but he happened to see someone the next day and mention that he murdered a judge? Doesn’t make sense.”

  “So someone saw him come home with blood on his clothes, made the anonymous call, but hasn’t come forward,” he said.

  “It was nighttime, Steven was wearing dark clothing, but somebody saw the blood and knew that’s what it was? And then connected Steven to a judge’s murder twenty miles away?”

  “Maybe they knew Steven, and knew Brennan had sentenced him.”

  “It’s a stretch, but maybe,” I said. “How did Steven get to and from Brennan’s house? He didn’t own a car.”

  “That’s bothered me as we
ll,” Emmit said. “Brennan lived miles from a bus stop, and there’s certainly no bus that goes anywhere near a route from Steven’s house in Paterson to Brennan’s neighborhood.”

  I nodded. “Have them check the buses anyway, and every cab company that services the area.”

  “Will do. Maybe Steven has a friend that gave him a ride, then realized what had happened and called nine-one-one anonymously.”

  “So how come we haven’t found the friend?”

  Emmit shrugged. “Doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. Somebody called nine-one-one, and we found the bloody clothes. With Brennan’s DNA. You can’t wish that away, Luke.”

  Right then all I was wishing was that I hadn’t been so intent on developing a lie, because it had stopped me from searching for the truth. “Emmit, this kid was strung out on drugs. He lived in a dump with no locks on the windows. Almost never went out of the house. He had no friends. No support structure. Danny Brennan was about to sentence him to prison.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m not saying it happened, but can you think of an easier person to frame?”

  Emmit didn’t seem convinced, which was OK, because I wasn’t, either. “This murder was done in the dark, with no one around. As far as we know, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence at the scene which would have led us to the killer.”

  It was my turn to cut the speech short. “So?”

  “So why bother to frame him at all? The killer got away clean. Why go to all this trouble? It would only add to the risk.”

  “Why do you ever frame someone? So the dumb cops would stop looking for the real killer. And in this case maybe there was another motive. Maybe it wasn’t just the killer they were protecting. Maybe they were protecting the reason for the killing.”

  “You mean one of Brennan’s cases?”

  I nodded. “Maybe we’ve been looking in the right place all along.”

  Emmit was clearly skeptical. “You believe all this?”

  “Probably not, but there’s one other thing that bugs me,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That the informant called us. The Feds had a hotline being advertised constantly on television; they even had a reward offered. But someone anonymously calls us. If it were one of our regular informants, I could understand it. But it obviously wasn’t. So why did he call us?”

  “You have a theory on that?” he asked.

  “I do. They thought we could be more easily manipulated than the Feds. That we’d take the bait, and maybe even go in shooting. They thought we’d be dumb enough to take it all at face value.

  “And you know what?” I asked. “They were right.”

  Bryan … we’re checking into weather patterns. Did you hear any thunder? Can you hear anything outside at all? Making progress, Brother … hang in there.

  Julie said to tell you that she loves you. It wasn’t her fault … it was mine. You need to know that.

  Finally Tommy Rhodes believed he was earning his money.

  Well, maybe not all that money, but a lot of it. Because this was one of the most difficult things he had ever had to do.

  Once again Frankie Kagan was along to provide protection against any unexpected intruders. Tommy would have preferred that Frankie help in the actual operation, since it involved some heavy work, but it also required a technical sophistication and expertise that Frankie didn’t possess. Frankie’s expertise was better suited to stabbing judges to death in their garages.

  Explosives, by definition, are designed to destroy, to obliterate. As such, they often don’t have to be placed with great precision; if the bomb is big enough, the job will get done.

  Sometimes, of course, the placement of explosives becomes an art. For instance, in the implosion of an aging building or sports stadium, they must be placed strategically, so that not only will the target come down, but it will come down in a specified and predictable manner.

  Tommy had a great deal of military experience with all kinds of munitions, but this assignment was particularly challenging. It had to be done in darkness, in a period of a few days, but that was not what made it difficult.

  Man-made structures are finite; like baseball managers who are hired to be fired, structures are built to eventually come down. Explosives can eventually hasten the process, but the end result is inevitable.

  This was different. Nature was the target, at least the primary one. And the goal was to inflict damage that would take years, if not decades, to overcome.

  He finished the job and set the timers for Saturday at 8 PM. For Tommy Rhodes that moment would be his crowning achievement, albeit a secret one.

  But he would certainly have earned his money.

  My dislike for Richard Carlton was pretty much instantaneous.

  He deigned to see me in his suite in the Pierre Hotel on 61st Street, between 5th Avenue and Madison. I was greeted at the door by a guy who identified himself only as William, and who seemed to be an assistant of some sort. Or, more likely, based on the way William fit into his jacket, a bodyguard.

  He led me into a private dining room, said, “He’ll be right out,” and left the room. Carlton came in a few minutes later.

  In a bathrobe.

  “You didn’t have to get dressed up,” I said.

  He chuckled an annoying chuckle, which made me sorry I hadn’t been the one to blow up his guesthouse. Then, “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

  I had decided to be aggressive about this interview. Since there was a very good chance that I was going to claim to Gallagher that the real killer was somewhere on the Carlton side of the court battle, I needed to act as if that’s what I believed.

  I had to keep asking myself how I would proceed if this were a normal investigation, and in this case, if I suspected Carlton, I would try to shake him. He was obviously complacent and feeling in control, so I would scare him as best I could.

  “I am conducting an investigation into the murder of Judge Daniel Brennan.”

  He looked surprised. “I thought that crime was solved rather violently. Wasn’t a young man shot to death?”

  “If the crime were solved I wouldn’t be here,” I said.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “We have strong reason to believe that the murder of Judge Brennan is directly connected to the fracking case before the Court of Appeals.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means that the Judge was considered a solid vote on behalf of the town of Brayton.” I was vastly overstating it; Julie had solicited opinions that confirmed Holland’s view that Brennan was more likely to side with the town than Judge Dembeck. But it was far from a slam dunk.

  “So?”

  I decided not to answer that directly, at least not right then. “You share ownership of the land in question with an offshore company, Tarrant Industries.”

  Carlton was clearly annoyed with my impertinence. “My company shares ownership, not me personally.”

  “You own eighty percent of your company.”

  “Is that a question?” He made a motion to look at his watch, as if he was late. It would have been more effective had he been wearing a watch.

  “Tarrant Industries has set up a structure which is difficult to penetrate. Can you tell me the names of the principals of that company?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You can’t, or you won’t?”

  “I can’t, but I wouldn’t if I could.”

  “Are you denying that you own Tarrant as well?”

  “I do not own Tarrant; that much I can tell you,” he said.

  “Mr. Carlton, are you familiar with the concept of motive?”

  He was now openly hostile. “What are you saying?”

  “Your chances of making hundreds of million of dollars have increased dramatically now that Judge Brennan will not be on that court.”

  He stood up. “You clearly have no idea who you are talking to. This interview is over. Direct any further
communication to my attorney.”

  With that he strode out of the room, and William entered moments later. “If you’ll follow me, Lieutenant…”

  “Just a heads-up, William. Carlton seems a little pissy today.”

  I can’t hear anything … total silence. It’s as if I’m at the bottom of the earth.

  It was her fault, Lucas, and it was yours. But I can’t deal with that now. All I seem to be able to do is watch television, and the clock. I don’t think five minutes has gone by without me looking at the clock.

  Please tell me about your investigation. I need something to think about that doesn’t involve me worried about being able to breathe.

  “Three areas in New Jersey and one in Long Island experienced outages,” Julie said.

  “But the Long Island one lasted for twenty minutes, so it doesn’t seem to fit what Bryan said. All the documents from the satellite company are in the folder, and I included a map showing where they are. The supervisor for that area was very helpful.”

  Julie and I were having a quick dinner at a coffee shop near her office. Everything seemed to be quick these days, including the days themselves. Bryan was running out of time, so every second seemed precious.

  “Terrific,” I said.

  “What does it do for us?” she asked, picking at her French fries. Julie is the healthiest eater I know; she throws down broccoli and brussel sprouts like I do M&M’s. But this time she ordered a burger and fries, which probably said something about her mental state.

  “At this point not enough. But if we get more information, we can cross-check it against this.”

  She asked that I bring her up to date on the status of the investigations, which I did, starting with my concerns about Steven Gallagher’s ability to get to and from the crime scene.

  “You really think he could have been framed?” she asked, her tone clearly displaying her skepticism.

  “I think there’s a lot that a defense attorney could have used, if I had let it get to that.”

  “He could have hitched a ride with a friend. He could have stolen a car and then dumped it.”

 

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