David Rosenfelt - Airtight

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 well,” 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.”