On Borrowed Time

by David Rosenfelt

  “They’re designed to hold video, but I’m not sure that’s what they use them for. They really can hold any kind of data.”

  “Why did you come to me with this, Marie?”

  “Because of your article, because I think I may be the reason that man died. We had to sign a paper saying we would never tell anyone anything about what we do.”

  “You did the right thing coming to us.”

  She nodded, then started to say something, but hesitated.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “They’re doing something to you. I don’t know what it is, but they said you were okay with it.”

  “I’m not,” I said, and she nodded.

  I gave her my phone number and asked her to call me if she learned anything else, but to be very careful. She gave me her cell phone number, but extracted a promise that I would call only if it was absolutely urgent.

  “You won’t tell anyone, right? I’ve got a little girl.”

  We assured her that her secret was safe with us, and after determining that she had nothing more to tell us, we left.

  Allie and I got home at nine P.M., and we were too wound up to eat. Our meeting with Marie Galasso had been hugely important, even if we didn’t know what it all meant. What we did know was that whatever was behind Jen’s disappearance, as well as what was done to me, originated in that annex.

  We talked until almost midnight, and we agreed that in the morning we would tell Kentris what we had learned. We would do so without mentioning Marie’s name, and only with a promise from Kentris to tread carefully. If she was right about Frank Donovan, and we believed she was, then she was right to be worried. If it was discovered she was talking to me, her life definitely would be in jeopardy.

  We were both exhausted, and we went to our respective bedrooms. I’d been feeling closer and closer to Allie, and I believe she felt the same, but as long as I believed Jen was alive there was no way I would let anything happen again.

  I am a big college basketball fan, and I used to eagerly devour the NCAA tournament every year. It was a sign of how preoccupied I’d been with learning the truth about what happened to Jen that the tournament had started and I didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on.

  I got into bed and turned on the television. I tuned in to SportsCenter, and they were talking about the tournament. Penn had upset North Carolina, and three talking heads were debating whether it was the biggest upset of all time.

  There was a knock on the door, and before I had a chance to say anything, it opened. It was Allie, but the look on her face said that she was not there with any amorous intentions.

  “Turn on CNN,” she said.

  I did so, and they were showing some ships at sea, obviously shot from a helicopter. But that wasn’t what caught my eye; what I noticed was the legend emblazoned on the bottom. It read:

  Prominent psychiatrist lost in plane crash.

  Allie and I listened to the newscasters saying that the victim had been piloting a private plane that had gone down ten miles off the coast of Maine.

  And then they showed a picture of Philip Garber.

  The most recent person to die because he knew me.

  I was planning to call Kentris first thing in the morning.

  That became moot when he called me at three A.M., and it was a sign of my level of stress that he didn’t wake me. I was already wide awake. “You hear about Garber?” were the first words out of his mouth.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it connected?” he asked.

  “I would say that the likelihood of that is somewhere north of one hundred percent.”

  “You’re a real good-luck charm,” he said.

  I proceeded to tell him about the last conversation I’d had with Garber, and how he was going to Quebec to chase down some pertinent information about Lassiter.

  “He gave you no hint what it was?”

  “Zero. And I tried to get him to tell me, but he didn’t want to say anything until he felt confident it was true.”

  Kentris had been watching the coverage longer than I had, and he said the NTSB was due to arrive on the scene by morning. They were saying on TV that because the wreckage was strewn over a relatively wide area, it was likely the plane had broken up in the air.

  “An explosion?” I asked.

  “Could be.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “You’ve got to go to law enforcement with this.”

  “I was under the impression that you were law enforcement,” I said.

  “No jurisdiction here; it happened off the coast, so it will be federal. But you have no way of knowing that, so you should go to the New York cops.”

  “They have nothing to do with this,” I said.

  “Exactly. They’ll send it on to the feds. Then we’ll see what happens. That will tell us a lot.”

  I told Kentris that I had reason to believe that whatever was going on at the hospital was happening in the annex building, though I didn’t even hint at how I knew that. I was not going to be responsible for anything happening to Marie Galasso; I had done enough damage already.

  My confusion at what was happening, while ever-present, was giving way to a barely controlled rage at Sean Lassiter, who I was now certain was behind this.

  I told Allie about the Kentris call when she woke up in the morning, and while she agreed I needed to go to the cops and tell them about my conversation with Garber, she had no confidence that it would go anywhere. “Nobody’s going to help us with this, Richard. Whatever can be done, we have to do ourselves.”

  It was incredibly comforting having Allie around; she was the one person I felt I could completely trust to have my back. I knew how difficult it must be for her; we had started this process each looking for a loved one, and thinking they were the same person. I was still searching, but her search had come to a crushing end. Yet she retained her energy and determination to help me find Jen.

  Or to learn what had happened to her.

  I was experiencing a strange sensation, and it was bothering me quite a bit. It wasn’t that I was forgetting Jen; she was still a vivid and powerful presence for me. It was more that certain events in our life together were becoming vague. For example, I would see a certain movie was going to be on television, and I couldn’t remember if I saw it in a theater with Jen, or with someone else.

  Speaking of movies, I’m a sucker for romantic comedies, films that others might call “chick flicks.” There’s a scene in one of those films, Sleepless in Seattle, in which Tom Hanks’s young son bemoans the fact that he is having trouble holding on to memories of his deceased mother. That is how I was starting to feel about Jen, but I wasn’t eight years old.

  I wished I was.

  I called the New York Police Department and was transferred to four different people before getting someone willing to hear my story. It was a limited story, simply relating to my contact with Philip Garber, and I did not mention that I was none other than the “psycho” who had been writing the articles about his missing girlfriend.

  They asked if I would come down to the precinct on West Eighty-fourth Street and talk to Detective Will Bortz, and I agreed to do so. When I got there, Bortz was busy, and I was forced to wait for forty-five minutes. I was in the process of leaving my phone number with the desk sergeant and taking off when word came out to me that Bortz was available to see me.

  Bortz was about forty, tall and thin, with blond hair, a look more suited to Venice Beach than Manhattan. He moved and talked quickly, and greeted me in a manner that said, Let’s get this over with.

  “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Kilmer. I hear you’ve got information about Philip Garber,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “Okay. Talk to me and then sign a statement. What have you got?”

  “I spoke to him about eight hours before he died. He was investigating something on my behalf, and he was flying to Canada because he had some information.”

  “In
vestigating? He was a shrink.”

  “I know that. I’m a writer, working on an article related to his field.”

  He looked at his notepad and said, “Kilmer. You the guy looking for his girlfriend?”

  “I am.”

  “This Garber thing relates to that? He was your shrink?”

  I was annoyed that Bortz seemed to think I was a nutcase, and was using the fact that Garber was a psychiatrist as evidence of it. “He was not my shrink. He was consulting with me.”

  “Right,” Bortz said. “Consulting. What was the information he was going to Canada for?”

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  “Why not?”

  “He wanted to make sure it was accurate first,” I said, wanting nothing more than to get out of that room.

  “Then what was he investigating?”

  “Sean Lassiter.”

  “Who might that be?” Bortz asked.

  “I’m working on a story about Lassiter possibly manipulating a drug study.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To make a billion dollars.”

  Bortz stopped to think about that for a few moments, and then said, “How does that find your girlfriend?”

  “It probably doesn’t.”

  Bortz nodded. “Somebody will be right in to take your statement. Thanks for coming in.”

  Moments after I left his office, I got a call from Robby Divine. “I’ve been looking into this Lassiter drug trial,” he said.

  “Thanks. What did you find out?”

  “The drug cleared phase one, which is a pretty low bar, and therefore has very little effect on the stock. All that does is move it on to phase two.”

  “Which is going on now?” I asked.

  “Which has been going on for a while. The street expects the results next week.”

  “And what happens if it’s a big success?”

  “Then Lassiter becomes much richer than me. And I hate when anyone is richer than me.”

  “Maybe I can organize a benefit dinner for you,” I said.

  “Don’t bother, because you know what the problem with money is?” he asked. “You can never have all of it.”

  The Stone felt like he should have been worried.

  He was closing in on a historic achievement, one that would both change the world and enrich him beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. It was within his grasp, almost there, but he’d be damned if he could find anything to be worried about.

  Everything was going exactly as it should, which had basically been true from day one of the operation. There were a couple of minor glitches, but he had put the proper people in place to deal with them, and they had done so effectively.

  Now it was out of his hands, the remaining events would proceed as they would proceed, but it was hard to see how anything could go very wrong.

  The only people who even had suspicions about what was going on were Kilmer, Kilmer’s new girlfriend, and the small-town cop, Kentris. Kilmer’s progress had been of the Stone’s design, and it had been carefully monitored every step of the way. The girlfriend was of no significance, and the cop didn’t have the resources or the knowledge to get in the way. At least not in a time frame that would matter.

  There had been more killings than the Stone would have liked. Not because he had any moral qualms; most of those people and many more would have soon died anyway. It’s just that deaths attract attention, and they came at a time when the Stone wanted to operate in the dark.

  But no one except Kilmer had made any kind of connection between them, and Garber’s plane going down was unlikely to change that. Perhaps over time the feds could figure it out, but one thing they did not have was time.

  The Stone would have things wrapped up very soon, and then they would all be pointing fingers, blaming each other for the disaster they faced.

  “I want to break into a building,” I said into the phone.

  Craig Langel’s response was to tell me to “shut up.” When I did so, he told me he’d come right over. Allie and I used the time to talk some more about the plan that we had come up with; it wasn’t particularly brilliant, but it was the best we could do.

  Craig was in my apartment within twenty minutes, and his first comment was, “Every bugging device known to man has been used on you, and you’re having phone conversations about breaking and entering?”

  “Good point.”

  Allie went into the kitchen to get us all coffee, and as soon as she left, Craig said, “You don’t think we should talk about this alone?”

  “I trust Allie completely,” I said.

  “You’re the boss,” he said, in a way that sounded like he considered that an unfortunate truth.

  When she came back in I told Craig that we felt we were running out of time, that we had to start applying as much pressure as we could. “Robby Divine, my Wall Street guy, said that Lassiter’s drug results come in next week. If it turns out like I think it will, he’ll have his money. He’ll have gotten what he wants.”

  “Other than the fact that you can’t stand him,” Craig asked, “what does that have to do with you?”

  “Because if he has Jen, then it might be to use her against me; to keep me in check in case I started to become a danger to him. If I got too close, he could play that card, threaten to hurt her. Once he wins, he wouldn’t need her for that anymore.”

  “Richard, I’ve been on this guy like white on rice, and I’ve seen no evidence that he has her. Absolutely none.”

  “We’ve got nothing else to go on,” Allie said.

  Craig frowned, his frustration obvious. “Okay. So you want to break into a building. Which one? The White House? Fort Knox?”

  “The annex building at Ardmore Hospital.”

  “Why?”

  I wasn’t going to share Marie Galasso’s name with Craig. Even though I trusted him, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that he wouldn’t mention it to someone else in the course of his investigation. With Philip Garber lying on the ocean floor, I simply could not take the chance. “I’ve got information that there might be something in there that can help us.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I can’t say that either.”

  He stood up, clearly ready to walk out. “In the face of all this trust, my eyes are filling up with tears.”

  “Craig, I need your help.”

  He stopped, thought about it for a few moments, then sighed and sat down. “What exactly are you asking me to do?”

  “You’re a security expert. You know how to keep buildings secure, and my guess is you know how to get into one if you have to. You certainly would be better at it than me.”

  He frowned, but said, “I need to know what I’m looking for once I get in, so that it can be done quickly. The first rule of breaking into buildings, in case you’re planning on turning this into a career, is to get in and get out.”

  “I’m going in with you,” I said. “And I don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Are you going also?” Craig asked Allie. “Because if so, I’ll need to get a date.”

  Craig’s attitude toward Allie seemed somewhat hostile, which I hadn’t noticed before. But it didn’t seem to faze her.

  “No, you two can have a boys’ night out. I’ve got my own plans.”

  I could see Craig wanted to ask what they were, but was afraid we would use the secrecy card again. So I jumped in. “She’s going to keep an eye on Lassiter.”

  Allie smiled. “A stakeout.”

  “What for?”

  “Because it’s better than sitting around here doing nothing. Maybe he’ll lead us to Jen, or maybe to something else.”

  Craig nodded, more in resignation than anything else. “Be careful,” he said, and Allie agreed that she would.

  “So are you in?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I’ll
check the place out; if I think there’s a way in without us getting caught, I’ll do it.” Then, “Even though I think this is nuts.”

  “You’re just figuring out that I’m nuts?”

  “I’ve had a hunch.”

  It took Craig two days to check things out to his satisfaction.

  He insisted we meet outside, in Riverside Park, to ensure privacy for our discussion. “I can get you in,” he said. “We can go tomorrow.”

  I was actually surprised to hear this assessment; I thought he’d say the place was too heavily guarded. “You sure?”

  He nodded. “I think so. After nine o’clock at night the place empties out. The security guard from the main building does a walk-through every forty-five minutes.”

  “So that’s how much time we have?” I asked.

  “Well, this guy is not exactly Special Forces; he probably wouldn’t notice if the Rose Bowl parade was going through the building while he was there. But there’s no sense taking chances, so I would say just under forty-five minutes,.”

  “What about burglar alarms, security cameras…?”

  He frowned. “Who do you think you’re talking to? I can handle all of that.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  We agreed to go forward on our mission the next night, and I went home to get nervous. Kentris called, more checking in than anything else, but I wasn’t about to tell him what we had planned.

  “You’re holding out on me,” he said, as the conversation neared an end.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “No way. Why would you say that?”

  “I’m a cop; I have a built-in bullshit detector.”

  I kept denying it, but there’s no way he believed me. The truth was, it didn’t matter if he believed me or not; I was going ahead with it.

  Allie was having no luck at all with Lassiter. She had already spent all of two days following him around, which basically consisted of watching him go to lunch. “You want to give it up?” I asked, as she set off for another day of the same.

  She shook her head. “No, maybe something will happen today.”