Текст книги "Airtight"

Автор книги: David Rosenfelt

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Gallagher also was likely the man who murdered Judge Brennan, so his removal from the planet was certainly not going to usher in a round of hand-wringing from me or anyone else. I expected I’d feel a little better when evidence tied him conclusively to the Brennan murder, but I was quite sure that it would. But for the moment, I was uncomfortable receiving plaudits for ending a young life.

I called my answering machine at home, and discovered it was filled. There were eighteen messages, mostly from people I worked with, calling to congratulate me, and inviting me to come down to the Crows Nest that night. It’s the bar we always go to whenever there is something to celebrate, or whenever there isn’t.

The only nonwork person who called was Linda Farmer, a girlfriend I had broken up with two weeks before. She hadn’t seemed that devastated by the breakup at the time, perhaps because we dated less than a month. But apparently my new hero status was motivation for her to try and resurrect the relationship.

I decided that I’d go to the office and do more of the mountain of paperwork that I would have to fill out. Then I’d go home … no ex-girlfriends and no celebrating that night. Just me and a frozen pizza.

It was while I was at my desk that Lieutenant Billy Heyward called me. He had been assigned to take over my supervision of the case, now that I had become a key player by shooting the suspect. Billy was a good friend, and a very good cop.

“There’s something I think you should know,” Billy said. “They found a note.”

I knew instantly what he meant, but I confirmed it anyway. “A suicide note?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Looks like you may have done him a favor.”

“Did the note mention Brennan?”

“No. Boilerplate ‘my life isn’t worth living’ kind of stuff. He wrote it to his brother; said: ‘Sorry I couldn’t be more like you.’”

“Have you found the brother yet?” I asked.

“Working on that now. He’s a Marine in Afghanistan.”

I got off the phone and thought about what this meant. I couldn’t get away from the realization that it was entirely possible that Steven Gallagher was raising the gun to shoot himself in the head, before I made that unnecessary. He certainly looked like he was in the kind of pain that made that possibility credible.

None of this made him less likely to have killed Judge Brennan; if anything it probably argued for his guilt. And it certainly didn’t make my claim of self-defense any less justified, at least not to the legal system. Unfortunately, it did make it less justified to me, even though I believed at the time that I was about to get shot at.

I changed my mind, and as soon as I finished the paperwork I headed out to join my friends at the bar.

Not because I wanted to celebrate.

Because I wanted to drink.

The C-130 landed at McGuire AFB at one thirty in the afternoon.

Chris Gallagher got off the plane refreshed and well rested, having slept a good portion of the way. It was a trait common to Force Recon Marines, that branch’s version of the Navy Seals and Army Green Berets. They had the ability to sleep whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. In their line of work, there was no way to know when the next chance would come.

Of course, sleeping on the plane did not require any special talent or training. There was absolutely nothing else to keep him occupied or entertained, not even conversation, since all of his fellow travelers were asleep as well.

Chris expected to hitch a ride with someone towards New York City. There were always people heading that way from McGuire; New York was the obvious first choice for soldiers coming home from Afghanistan. It was the anti-Kabul.

It turned out that Chris didn’t have to look around for a ride. Waiting for him was Laura Schmitz, his brother Steven’s ex-girlfriend. Chris had called and told her he was coming home, but she hadn’t mentioned that she would meet his flight, and he certainly had no reason to expect that she would.

Laura and Steven had broken up two years before, but she remained his friend, and good friends were what he needed as much as anything. She was always there for him, but like Chris, she was ultimately powerless to help him turn his life around. She and Chris kept in contact because of their shared caring for Steven, and while they celebrated his successes, they more often commiserated about his inevitable setbacks.

Laura looked pained and upset, no surprise to Chris, since Steven was in such serious trouble. “Thanks, but you didn’t have to come,” Chris said.

“Yes, I did,” Laura said, in a tone that sent a cold chill through him.

“What’s wrong?”

“In the car. Please,” she said, and they walked out of the building and into the parking lot.

There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that her first words when they got into the car would be, “Steven is dead.” He had been dreading the words, but knowing that he would hear them, for years.

What he did not expect was her next sentence: “The police shot him.”

It didn’t compute. A drug overdose, that was the most likely cause. Suicide, as horrible as that was to contemplate, was always a possibility, when the pain became too much.

But shot by the police? How could that be? Steven was completely nonviolent, dangerous to no one but himself. Chris had time to speculate while Laura was crying, and the most likely scenario he could come up with was that Steven had been caught in the middle of a drug shoot-out between the cops and his dealer.

He wasn’t even close.

“They shot him in his apartment,” Laura said. “They said he was holding the gun when they came in.”

They both knew that Steven only had a gun at Chris’s insistence. In the neighborhood that he lived in, Chris felt it was necessary. But it was another example of Chris’s futility in trying to protect his brother; Steven had once admitted that he usually kept it unloaded.

“Tell me everything you know,” he said.

“There’s a judge, Judge Brennan, who was murdered; I think just a couple of days ago. He’s the one who was going to sentence Steven. For some reason they thought that Steven committed the murder, so they went to his apartment. The cop who did it said he had the gun, and that he shot Steven in self-defense. They’re calling him a hero. But he’s lying, Chris. The person he’s describing is not Steven.”

“Let’s go to your apartment.”

Chris said little during the ride. He had already pushed the pain and sense of loss at least temporarily to the side, as he was trained to do. That training led him to instead plan and focus on the mission, even though he was not yet sure what the mission would be. But one thing was certain; he was not going to simply accept his brother’s death and head back to Afghanistan.

What he needed was information, much more than Laura could provide. And much easier to gather than most people might realize.

He had brought a computer with him; it went with him everywhere. His specialty, before he went Force Recon, was in communications, which in the modern military was totally computer driven.

Gallagher sat down with the computer in front of the TV set in Laura’s apartment and got to work. It was even easier than he thought. Biographical information on Lieutenant Lucas Somers was plentiful; he had won a series of awards and commendations, and each story about them went on at length about his background.

Within a few minutes Chris knew Lucas Somers’s life story, knew that his parents were deceased, that he had a brother who worked as an investment banker on Wall Street, and a sister-in-law who was a prosecuting attorney. He even had pictures of everyone, and committed them to memory. This was not a time for mistaken identity.

Amazingly, Somers’s phone number wasn’t even unlisted, so Chris had that as well, though there was no address shown.

The newscasts left little doubt as to how the police operation took place. Somers led a team into Steven’s apartment and gunned him down. They had little interest in taking him alive; all they wanted was the kill and the subsequent glory, so that they could make their victory tour on television the next day.

Chris had all he could do not to focus on what must have been going through Steven’s mind as his killers entered the apartment. He knew the intense fear he must have been feeling, with no one, especially not his brother, there to help him.

Chris had a number of ways to find out where Somers lived, but he didn’t have to utilize them. That’s because the TV coverage included his neighbors being interviewed. One of them referred to Somers living “right next door,” as he pointed to his left from in front of his own house.

The newscast gave the man’s name, and his address was listed in the phone book, which meant that Chris now had Somers’s address as well.

He would be paying him a visit, and how Somers answered his questions would determine whether he lived or died.

They were easily the most devastating words Bryan Somers had ever heard.

Not even the sentences informing him of the deaths of his parents had that kind of impact. They had each been ill, and he had time to prepare for what had become the inevitable.

This came out of left field, and left him reeling.

And left him looking for his brother.

He didn’t call Luke, and it was not because he had forgotten his cell phone at home when he left … almost staggered, out of the house. On a gut level he knew that he had to speak to his brother in person, to see his face when they spoke, even though he had no real idea what he would say.

It was a twenty-five-minute drive from his house in Englewood Cliffs to Luke’s house in Paterson. He didn’t even notice the time as he drove, but it wasn’t because he was lost in thought. He had lost the ability to think clearly in those moments, probably the first time that had ever happened to him.

He arrived at Luke’s house on East Thirty-Ninth Street and parked in front. It was a well-kept residential neighborhood, but economic light-years apart from Bryan’s own home. The houses were on small plots of land, with less than twenty feet separating them on each side. Bryan’s pool probably could fit on Luke’s property, but only if the house were removed first.

There was a car parked in front of Luke’s darkened house, unusual in that there was an ordinance prohibiting parking on the street at night. Bryan might have wondered why it was parked in that particular spot, since the street was otherwise empty and Luke did not appear to be home. Bryan might have noticed this, if he was in a mental state to notice anything.

Even though it seemed as if no one was home, Bryan got out and went to the front door anyway. He did so basically because he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. And no matter what happened, he was going to talk to Luke that night.

The doorbell went unanswered, so without a cell phone to call Luke and ask him to come home, Bryan stayed on the porch, sitting on the steps and occasionally getting up to pace. After a half hour, he wondered whether Luke might already know that he was there and, more important, why. Perhaps Julie had called him. Either way, there was nothing to do but wait, and he would wait as long as it took.

Bryan didn’t notice Chris Gallagher sitting in the driver’s seat of the car parked out front. There were no street lamps nearby, and the interior of the car was too dark to make anything out. But Chris had not taken his eyes off Bryan since his arrival.

Chris had spent that time formulating a plan. He knew from his online research that the man on the porch was Luke’s brother, Bryan. He seemed agitated, but that was not Chris’s concern, since it was highly unlikely that his distress had anything to do with Chris’s situation, or Steven’s death.

As he was trained to do, he weighed the merits of the plan in his mind, careful to keep it untainted by emotion. It seemed to Chris to be more than workable; it could provide cold justice to the cop who had killed Steven while, more important, giving Steven a posthumous exoneration.

He made one phone call, keeping the phone turned in such a way that Bryan could not see the light. The call was to a marine buddy, to ask for the favor that could make the plan workable.

It was a large favor, but it was granted, no questions asked, as Chris knew it would be.

Chris got out of his car, closing the door softly behind him, so that it was still ajar, but the light would not stay on. He approached the porch, and did it all so quietly that Bryan did not even realize he was there until he heard his voice.

“What time do you expect your brother?” Chris asked, though he knew that it was a question for which Bryan did not have an answer. Bryan would not have arrived when he did if he knew when Luke would get there. And he certainly would not have rung the doorbell, checking to see if Luke had been home.

Bryan felt a twinge of fear. He couldn’t make out Chris’s features in the darkness, but the voice was not familiar. Yet this man somehow knew that Luke was Bryan’s brother.

“Any minute,” Bryan said, annoyed with himself for using Luke for protection in that way. At that moment, with his anger at Luke so intense, he did not want to have to depend on him for anything.

“Really,” Chris said. It was not a question, but rather a statement that revealed, with some amusement, his certainty that Bryan was lying.

“Do I know you?” Bryan asked.

“You’re about to,” Chris said, and in one incredibly quick and silent movement glided forward and rammed an elbow into the side of Bryan’s head.

Bryan slumped to the ground, or would have had Chris not been there to catch him. He lifted Bryan as if he were a toy, put him over his shoulder, and carried him to his car. He looked around to see if he had been seen, though it wouldn’t have mattered much either way.

Chris drove away, with Bryan unconscious in the backseat. He took no particular satisfaction in what he had done. He and Luke were not yet even, not even close.

But they would be.

The phone woke me at five o’clock in the morning.

Cops are not like normal people when it comes to middle of the night phone calls. Most people experience a moment of panic, fearful that the hour of the call means that something bad has happened to someone they care about. And very often their fears are justified.

We cops are different in that we’re positive that something bad has happened; nobody calls a cop when they have good news. For example, I’ve never gotten a radio transmission or call urging me to head to a place where someone has reported reading a good book, or listening to pleasing music.

The other difference is that we don’t worry so much about the call when it comes, because it’s almost never about someone we care about, or even know. There’s no personal attachment to it; we care, and we’re sworn to protect, but it’s a job.

But caller ID this time told me that this was something different, and I instantly became just like every other person in this situation. It was my brother calling from home, so something had to be wrong with either him or Julie.

“Bryan?” I said when I picked up the phone.

“It’s not Bryan,” Julie said.

Even in just those three words I could hear the anxiety in her voice.

“Julie, what’s wrong?”

“Bryan’s gone, Luke. He left last night, and he hasn’t come back.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. We talked about our marriage. I said things I’ve needed to say … I’ve wanted to say … for a long time. I told him I needed time to think about our marriage.”

“Think about your marriage?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

“Thinking about whether I wanted to stay in it,” she said. “God, Lucas … what the hell is the matter with me?”

“Take it easy, Julie.” What she had said opened up all kinds of questions, none of which I was willing to ask. Instead I focused on Bryan. “So he just stormed off?” I asked. “Did you try and call him?”

“He slammed the door so hard it broke the handle. He left his cell phone here, so I have no way to reach him. He didn’t go to your house?”

“No, I haven’t heard from him. He’s probably at a hotel, maybe in the city.” In a way I was actually a little relieved. The worry of the late night phone call was at least removed; wherever Bryan was, he and Julie were physically fine.

“Luke, I also told him some things I didn’t mean to say.” She paused while I cringed. “Things I shouldn’t have said.”

“Oh, shit. Julie.…” Alarm bells were going off in my head.

“I’m sorry, Luke. I know I promised.”

Julie and I had a brief affair, if you could call it that. I prefer to think of it as a moment of sexual weakness, even though that isn’t technically an accurate description, either. It happened six years ago, a month before she and Bryan were to be married, when he was expressing doubts about going through with the wedding.

So she was angry, and we were out commiserating, since I had recently had a breakup of my own. Not that my breakups were exactly news events; you could set your clock by them.

But what happened between Julie and me wasn’t revenge sex or even rebound sex. I wish it were, since that would have been the end of it. I was in love with Julie, I was before it happened, and I have been ever since. I also believed that she was in love with me.

We never talked about it again after that night, and until this phone call I thought we never would. But I learned a lesson; if you’re going to fall in love with someone, your sister-in-law is not a terrific idea. Unfortunately, I was never able to put that lesson to any good use, since Julie is my only sister-in-law. And it was too late to stop loving her.

“It’s OK, Julie. We’ll deal with it. I’m sure I’ll be hearing from him soon.”

“Please tell him to come home, Luke.”

“I’ve got a hunch that right about now advice from me isn’t going to carry the day.”

“Will you let me know if he calls you?” she asked.

“Of course.” Then, “Julie, why did you tell him?” She had to know it would be devastating and hurtful to him, which made it uncharacteristic for her to have said it. She was also breaking a promise to me in the process, which represented another surprise.

“You know why, Luke.”

The truth was that I did not have the slightest idea why. For some reason, women are always crediting me with being way more intuitive about them than I actually am. It’s the worst of both worlds; I’ve never had a clue what they are thinking, but because they believe I do, they’re less inclined to spell it out for me.

But whatever the reason, the way she said, “You know why,” made me less eager to press the issue. I was now at the place I had no desire to be, directly in the middle of their marriage. When Bryan started screaming at me, I wanted to have as little information as possible, sort of like a POW undergoing interrogation. I wanted to be on a “need to know” basis, and I didn’t need to know any of this.

Julie and I once again agreed to contact each other if either of us heard from Bryan, and no longer able to sleep, I got dressed and headed for the office.

The media furor had not quite died down yet, as reporters were focused on delving into Steven Gallagher’s background. His life was both short and difficult, though no one seemed to have any idea that he had violent tendencies.

Those who knew him professed shock that he could have committed a murder, but that has become standard stuff these days. For every serial killer there seems to be a dozen neighbors who swear he seemed like a quiet, nice guy, the last person you’d expect to have chopped up all those people.

Media requests for interviews were still coming in, but I declined all of them. I had “been there, done that” and I didn’t want to spend the whole day refusing to answer the questions I had refused to answer the day before. Besides, it had taken me twenty minutes to remove the makeup; from now on I was going strictly “au naturel.”

I had plenty else to do. I had a bunch of recent homicides to occupy my attention, and it’s not like the citizens of New Jersey were going to stop killing other citizens of New Jersey any time soon.

So I tried as best I could to make the day “business as usual,” but in the back of my mind was Julie’s phone call, and the fact that I hadn’t heard from Bryan. His silence brought home very powerfully how hurt he must have been by what he saw as our betrayal. And the truth is that he was right, “betrayal” was the correct word for it.

Bryan was not exactly the type to shy away from verbal confrontations; he believed everything should always be out in the open and discussed to death. It was one of the many ways in which we were different; I was always on the lookout for rugs to sweep things under.

So I knew we would have the conversation, he was entitled to at least that much, and that it would be a difficult one. I always felt huge guilt about the night with Julie, and while I had obsessed over it ever since, I had done so privately. Now it would be out in the open and openly talked about.

Ugh.

But I deserved whatever grief Bryan would give me.

I just wanted to get it over with.

It was a completely disorienting feeling.

Bryan Somers woke up having no idea where he was, or how he got there. It wasn’t that he was groggy; he actually came to a state of alertness fairly quickly. Fear and confusion can do that.

He was lying on a couch in a dimly lit room. There were no windows, the walls were gray-painted cement, and light was provided by recessed bulbs in the ceiling. It seemed to be a small studio apartment; he was in a den-like area, which was attached to a small kitchen. There was a bar stool tucked under a counter, a dresser across from the couch, and a small television sitting on the dresser. There was also a small receiving box on top of the television.

The strangeness of the surroundings, and his lack of knowledge of how he got there, was horrifying enough. Worse yet was his discovery that a metal clasp on his leg was attached to a long chain, which in turn was attached to a radiator in the corner of the room.

He got up and walked around the room, checking it out. There was a small bathroom with a stall shower, and the kitchen was fully stocked with food and drink. He was not going to starve to death, at least not for a while.

The door was locked from the outside, and no amount of pulling, pushing, or shoving affected it. Screaming for help yielded nothing as well, and from the solid nature of the walls, he doubted that anyone outside could hear him, even if they were out there. There was no phone and no computer, and therefore no apparent way to get in touch with the outside world.

Bryan turned on the television, and was very surprised to see that it worked. It seemed to be satellite television, and Bryan quickly recognized the stations as all New York affiliates. Wherever he was, it was in the New York Metropolitan Area.

He tried to piece together how he had gotten there, but drew a blank. He remembered the conversation with Julie, and it brought back a wave of pain. He also remembered going to Luke’s house, and waiting for him when he wasn’t home.

But after that it was a blank. Could Luke have done this to him? Even though Julie’s revelation made him question how well he knew his brother, Luke kidnapping him in this manner made absolutely no sense.

Yet the sequence of events was troubling. Just an hour or so after an earth-shaking conversation with his wife, one in which his world was turned upside down, Bryan found himself in this situation. Was it possible that the two things were not related? Could there be a coincidence that great?

Bryan was scared to a degree he had never come close to experiencing before. He found a local news program on television and started watching it, hoping that it might shed some light on what was happening. That was unlikely, he knew, since it was a morning news program, which meant he was not gone for very long. No one would have reported him missing yet, so no one would be looking for him.

So he sat down to wait. It was not a physically uncomfortable situation to be in; the chain reached to the kitchen and bathroom, and the couch was relatively comfortable. He tried to take mental consolation in the fact that someone inclined to hurt or kill him could have done so already, and would not have provided this type of environment.

But it was small comfort.

He was a prisoner.

It was three very long hours before the door opened and his captor walked in. He was a large man, at least three inches and thirty pounds bigger than Bryan. He gave off an air of physicality and toughness, even though he had a smile on his face that in other situations might seem disarming.

“You’re up,” the man said. “How are you feeling?”

“Who are you, and what the hell am I doing here?”

“My name is Chris Gallagher. You’re here because I kidnapped you. You feeling OK? I hit you harder than I should have, and then I injected you with Sodium Pentothal. You probably don’t remember any of it.”

“Let me ask this again; why the hell am I here?” He tried to have his tone reflect his outrage, but the fear took the sting out of it.

“Your brother Luke killed my brother; his name was Steven Gallagher. So you have become what is commonly known as an innocent victim. Collateral damage, as it were. As was Steven.”

Bryan’s memory was coming back to him, and he asked, “Is this about the Brennan murder?”

Chris nodded. “That seems to be what your brother thought, but he was wrong. So he didn’t ask any questions; he just went in firing. And then he went on television to brag about it. The conquering goddamn hero.”

“This has nothing to do with me.”

“It does now.”

“What are you hoping to accomplish?”

“I’m going to be talking to Luke, and I’ll instruct him to do things. If he does them, and does them well, then you’ve got a chance. If not, you’re going to die.”

He said it in a matter-of-fact, sincere way that left Bryan with no doubt that he was telling the truth. His mind was racing for something to say that might change this man’s mind. “You think that killing one innocent person makes up for the killing of another?”

Chris shrugged. “It’s the only system of justice I’ve got.”

“And in the meantime?”

“You’ll stay here, as you are now. You’re fifteen feet underground, so there’s no one to hear you, and no way out. But I guess you’ll want to find that out for yourself, if you haven’t already. There’s a seven-day air supply. Seven and a half if you’re lucky.”

“What happens when it runs out?”

“You won’t be able to breathe.”

Bryan totally understood what was happening, but it still was somehow confusing. It was all just too surreal. “Come on, you can’t do this. Please.”

“We both know that I can,” Chris said.

“People will be looking for me. What if they catch you?”

“They won’t.”

“They might. What if they do?”

Chris shook his head. “Nobody catches me if I don’t want to be caught. But your brother won’t even try.”

“Why not?”

“Because he wants you to live.” Chris laughed and said, “He does, right?”

“I don’t deserve this. You seem like a smart guy, a decent guy. You’ve got to know that.”

“Don’t try to play me, OK? It won’t get you anywhere, and you don’t want me pissed off at you. Here’s what I know; the world is one big stick, and you just got the short end of it. So your role in this is to just hang out and wait to see what happens.”

Chris walked to the desk and unlocked the drawer. “There’s a computer in here; e-mail service will be connected as of noon tomorrow.”

He turned to leave but stopped, reached into his pocket, and put a very small plastic bag on the table; in it were two pills. “These are poison; if you start to run out of air, you’ll feel light-headed. It’ll be downhill fast from there. If I were you I’d take the pills; it’s a much better way to die.”

The panic Bryan was feeling was overwhelming, but he tried to keep himself under control in front of his captor. “Thanks a lot.”

Chris laughed. “Hey, I could get in trouble for giving you those. But it’s OK; I kept a couple for myself.”

I wouldn’t say that Bryan and I were close.

That seems an almost irrelevant way to describe our relationship. I would instead say we were brothers, which is a giant step past close. It has nothing to do with how much time we spent together, or how often we talked. Having a brother, being a brother, is in a category of its own.

Our mother, Cynthia Shuster Somers, died when I was seven and Bryan was three. Our father, Cal Somers, was not exactly the talkative type, as evidenced by the fact that I was seventeen before I learned that Mom’s death was from smoking-induced lung cancer. My aunt Martha spilled the beans about that one.

I don’t remember my mother much at all, so I’m certain that Bryan would have no recollection of her. But I certainly remember my father, a police captain who wanted nothing more than to have his children follow him on to the force.

I did that, of course, and I never felt coerced by his goal for me. It seemed like a natural progression, and I can’t say that I remember making a conscious career decision. I also can’t say that I regret where I wound up.

Bryan took a different route, and I’ve sometimes wondered what he would have done if our father lived past forty-one. Bryan was seventeen when Cal died of the heart attack, his third, sitting at the kitchen table.

There were no longer live footsteps to follow, and Bryan went his own way. He was always about fifty times smarter than me, and he parlayed those brains into a scholarship to Penn, followed by an MBA from the University of Virginia. From there he went into investment banking, which in my mind means he brings a basket to the office, so he can cart home money every day.

Money was always very, very important to Bryan, and that only increased when he met Julie. While he didn’t follow our father’s career path, he always thought he was destined to mirror his lack of longevity.

“Obsession” might be too strong a word, so I’ll say that he became very focused on making sure his family was well provided for after he was gone. Bryan had to have had more life insurance than anyone, anywhere. He used to joke that his death would bring the insurance industry to its knees.