Airtight (3 page)

Instead I became a witness and had to relate in excruciating detail exactly what transpired. I also, in the minds of at least some members of the public, was about to become a suspect. I had killed a man, and the burden would be on me to show that it was a justifiable act.

Emmit called in the report, and the scene immediately became chaotic. Captain Barone arrived pretty much at the same time as the homicide detectives, which meant that he was monitoring the situation very closely. It was far more involvement than was typical for him, but then again, calls from the Governor about a case were rather rare.

After I had given the first of what would be a number of official statements, Barone came over to me. “You OK?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah.” This was the first person I had ever killed; I had shot a previous suspect, but he was not badly wounded. I had even managed to serve in Iraq during Desert Storm without firing a weapon in anger.

I was feeling a little shaken by the experience, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from having killed Gallagher or from the realization that I could have been killed myself.

“You did what you had to do,” Barone said.

I nodded. “How come I don’t see any FBI agents here?”

He snapped his fingers. “Damn. I knew I forgot something.”

“You realize you’re going to have to bring them in, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Once we have forensics that connect this to Brennan.”

“Any indication of that so far?”

He nodded again. “Some bloody clothes in a plastic bag.” Then he smiled about as wide as I’ve ever seen him smile. “Oh, I forgot. There was also a bloody knife in the bag.”

I knew he had plenty of information to justify calling in the FBI, and so did he. He didn’t even need the forensics; just the fact that we were acting on a tip that Gallagher killed Brennan was enough. “They’re going to be pissed.”

“Ask me if I give a shit,” he said. “I don’t answer to them. The President didn’t call me; the Governor did.”

“You da boss.”

“Besides, they’ll know by tomorrow morning either way.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because they’ll see us on the
Today
show.”

He wasn’t kidding. The next morning a limousine was at my house at five thirty to take me into the city. Barone was already in the backseat waiting for me, wearing his Sunday best.

The publicity shit had hit the fan sometime during the night. Barone had alerted the Governor, the media, and the FBI, in that order. I was already being called a hero, which didn’t thrill me and led me to believe that our hero standards are being lowered somewhat. I had shot a drug-addled kid sitting on the floor; that didn’t exactly make me Davy Crockett defending the Alamo.

Lester Holt conducted the interview, which was fairly uncomfortable. He kept trying to talk to me, since I was the one who did the shooting, but Barone kept cutting in. It’s not that he was imparting crucial information; he basically repeated the mantra that the investigation was ongoing, so there was very little we could say. If I were Holt, I would have asked that if there was nothing we could say, what the hell were we doing there? But he didn’t.

Nor did anyone else, and there were plenty of opportunities. Barone had set up almost an entire day of news interviews, and we traveled from media location to media location, not answering the same questions, over and over again. It seems like half the people in this city are newscasters, while the other half somehow manages to have no idea what’s going on in the world.

If I’ve ever spent a less productive or more annoying day, I can’t remember when. Not only was no news being made, but the trappings were insufferable. For instance, each place insisted on applying makeup to our faces, even though it had already been applied repeatedly throughout the day. By the time we got to the fourth studio, I refused to allow it. Had I not, archaeologists would eventually have had to lead an expedition to dig down to my actual skin.

Barone handled it all with something between good cheer and outright jubilation. I wasn’t quite feeling so happy, and it wasn’t because of the pointless interviews. I had killed a young man, and it just didn’t strike me as something to celebrate. It’s not that I felt guilty about it; he had a gun and most likely would have killed me had I not shot first. My reaction was textbook police work, and would stand up to any scrutiny from anybody.

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.