David Rosenfelt: Airtight

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.