Airtight

The tabloids called it “The Judge-sicle Murder.”

It was a ridiculous name for an event so horrific and tragic, but it sold newspapers, and generated web hits, so it stuck.

In the immediate aftermath, very little was known and reported in the media, so they compensated by detailing the same facts over and over. Judge Daniel Brennan had attended a charity dinner earlier that evening at the Woodcliff Lakes Hilton. Judge Brennan generally avoided those type of events whenever he could, but in this case felt an obligation.

The Guest of Honor was Judge Susan Dembeck, who was at that point a sitting judge on the bench of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Since Judge Brennan’s nomination to that court was before the Senate and he was replacing the retiring Judge Dembeck, he made the obvious and proper decision to support his future predecessor by attending the event.

Others at the dinner estimated that Judge Brennan left at ten thirty, and that was confirmed by closed-circuit cameras in the lobby. He stopped at a 7-Eleven, five minutes from his Alpine, New Jersey, home, to buy a few minor items. The proprietor of the establishment, one Harold Murphy, said that Judge Brennan was a frequent patron of the store. He said it on the Today show the following morning, in what the network breathlessly promoted as an exclusive interview, which aired seven minutes before Good Morning America’s breathlessly promoted exclusive interview with Mr. Murphy.

Among the items that Murphy described Judge Brennan as buying was a Fudgsicle. It was, he said, one of the Judge’s weaknesses, regardless of the season. As was the Judge’s apparent custom, Murphy said that he started opening the Fudgsicle wrapper while walking to the door, such was his desire to eat it. Murphy seemed to cite this as evidence that the Judge was a “regular guy.”

Murphy didn’t mention, and wasn’t asked, the time that Judge Brennan arrived at the store. It was eleven forty-five, meaning the ten-minute drive from hotel to store had apparently taken an hour and fifteen minutes.

It was ten minutes after midnight when Thomas Phillips, who lived four doors down from Judge Brennan, walked by the Judge’s house with his black Lab, Duchess. In that affluent neighborhood, four doors down meant there was almost a quarter mile of separation between the two homes.

The Judge’s garage door was open, and his car was sitting inside, with its lights on. This was certainly an unusual occurrence, and Phillips called out the Judge’s name a few times. Getting no response, he walked towards the garage.

In the reflected light off the garage wall, he could see the Judge’s body, covered in blood that was slowly making its way towards where Phillips was standing. The Fudgsicle, melting but with the wrapper around the stick, was just a few inches from the victim’s mouth, a fact that Phillips related when he gave his own round of exclusive interviews.

The murder of a judge would be a very significant story in its own right, especially when the victim was up for a Court of Appeals appointment. But the fact that this particular judge was “Danny” Brennan elevated it to a media firestorm.

Brennan was forty-two years old and a rising star in the legal system. It was a comfortable role for him to play, as he had considerable experience as a rising star.

He was a phenom as a basketball player at Teaneck High School, moving on to Rutgers, where he earned first-team All America status. Rather than head to the NBA as a first-round draft choice after one season, which he could certainly have done, he chose instead to stay all four years. He then pulled a “Bill Bradley,” and went on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

When his studies had concluded, he finally moved on to the NBA, and within two years was the starting point guard for the Boston Celtics. It was during a play-off game against the Orlando Magic that on one play he cut right, while his knee cut left. He tore an ACL and MCL, which pretty much covers all the “CLs” a knee contains, and despite intensive rehab for a year and a half, he was never the same.

Confronted with physical limitations but no mental ones, Daniel Brennan went to Harvard Law, and began a rapid rise up the legal ladder.

A rise that ended in a garage, in a pool of blood and melted Fudgsicle.

“I can’t make it tonight,” I said.

I’m sure that my brother, Bryan, heard the news while lying in bed, because his response sounded a little groggy. “And you woke me at seven o’clock in the morning to tell me that?”

“I feel terrible about that, especially since I’ve been up all night. Don’t you work?”

“It’s Saturday, big brother.”

“You don’t rip off the indigent on Saturdays?” I asked, unable to help myself. It wasn’t that I lacked respect for Bryan’s position as an investment banker; the truth was I really didn’t even understand what it involved. But it made for an easy target.

“It’s way too early for occupational banter,” Bryan said. “Sorry you can’t join us.” Bryan certainly couldn’t have been surprised that I was backing out of the dinner; my cancellation rate had to be well over sixty percent. He continued. “Julie will be disappointed.”

“No she won’t,” I said, without much conviction. As always, it was impossible for me to have any idea what Julie might be thinking, which was unfortunate, because it was probably the thing I involuntarily pondered most.

In my mind’s eye I could see Bryan turning over in bed and talking to his wife, who herself I’m sure was just waking up. She was wearing a white nightgown, low at the neckline. My mind’s eye often has a very specific imagination. “Julie, Lucas can’t make dinner,” Bryan said. “Are you disappointed?”

“Of course.”

Bryan spoke back into the phone. “You were right; she’s delighted you’re not coming. What’s going on, Lucas? Why can’t you make it?”

Bryan was one of the few people on the planet who called me Lucas; to my friends and coworkers I was “Luke”; to people I arrested I was “asshole.” “Lucas” sounded formal, which I suppose made sense, since my brother is way more proper than I am. I almost expected him to call me by the name our parents stuck me with, Lucas Isaiah Somers.

“You didn’t hear what happened?” I asked.

“When?”

“Last night, just before midnight.”

“I went to sleep at ten thirty,” he said.

“Danny Brennan was murdered.”

Bryan went silent, probably mentally replaying his connections to Judge Brennan in his mind. Then, “I didn’t know him that well, just met him at a few charity dinners, but I liked him. This is awful. Is anyone in custody?”

“No.” I could hear him, in the background, telling Julie what had happened.

“Julie wants to know if it’s your case.”

It’s the exact question I knew she would ask, especially since it might wind up her case as well as a prosecutor. “Technically, but not that anyone would notice. Every FBI agent in the United States is either here or on the way. Apparently, when the President appoints a judge to the Appeals Court, the plan is that they are supposed to remain alive.”

“So you local hicks should stick to traffic tickets and picking up jaywalkers?”

“Not according to the Captain, which brings me back to why I can’t make dinner tonight.”

“OK. Good luck,” Bryan said. Then, “How did he die?”

“Stabbed to death in his garage when he got home. Thirty-seven wounds.”

He paused again to relay the information to Julie, and I heard her say, “Sounds like he pissed off an amateur.”

I knew exactly what she was talking about. Professional killers rarely used knives, and when they did they were precise and efficient. A blade in the heart, or a slice across the neck. Thirty-seven stab wounds meant the killer was an amateur and was venting fury. It was an emotional killing, or at least made to look like one.

I extricated myself from the call and walked over to the precinct meeting room. By that time the FBI had already assumed control of the investigation and had established a tip line. This was an irritant to my boss, Captain Charles Barone of the New Jersey State Police, though that in itself was hardly a news event. Not many days went by that something or someone didn’t irritate Captain Charles Barone.

“We are going to catch this guy,” is how he started the meeting he had called of the entire squad. That was no surprise; it was how he started pretty much every meeting about a specific case. But this time he doubled down. “All vacations are hereby canceled, and overtime is authorized and expected. We’ve got the home field advantage.”

He was referring to the fact that we knew the terrain; we lived in it, while the Feds were visitors. It was bravado, and most of it was false. Everyone in the room, including Barone, knew we were operating at a huge disadvantage. The FBI had taken over the crime scene, and was doing all the forensics. They would also be getting most of the tips, especially since a reward had already been established. It may have been our home field, but it felt like we were busing in from out of town.

Barone was right about one thing, though. Our connection to the area was a factor working in our favor. We had informants that we used with some frequency, and if those people had anything to share, they’d be leery of going to the Feds. They’d come to us, or they’d keep their mouths shut.

Assignments were given out, and I was chosen to lead the effort. I doubt if anyone was surprised by that, since even though I was one of four people at my rank, I was considered by most people to be the number two man in the department. Barone and I had worked together in one way or another for eleven of my sixteen years on the force, and he trusted me. Sometimes I wish he didn’t; I’d get more sleep.

In any event, my position of leadership on this case was not something anyone would resent. Not only would my colleagues have expected it, but they’d be delighted they weren’t stuck doing it.

The effort that I was going to lead would mostly include following up on those tips that were already coming in. It was a smaller amount than would usually be expected for a case that had generated this much publicity, a sure sign that most people were contacting the FBI. But some people still had it as their first instinct to call their local police, and those calls would be routed to us.

After the meeting, Barone called me into his office. “I just got off the phone with the Governor. He called me directly. He wants us to be the ones to catch this guy.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” I said. “Now I’m motivated.”

“Don’t be a wiseass, Somers. This is important.”

“Right,” I said. “The Governor wants to be President.”

He nodded. “And the Captain wants to be chief.”

I always found it refreshing that he acknowledged that, at least to me. He’d never say it to anyone else; it made me feel trusted. “So let’s catch the prick,” I said.

“Do we have a chance?” he asked.

“Zero.”

He frowned. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

“Come on, the guy would have to fall in our lap.”

“Did I mention that that was not what I wanted to hear?” he asked.

“OK, how’s this? We’ll get him, Captain. We’re closing in on him right now.”

“Good. That’s what I told the Governor.”

Sometimes, not often, an investigation just seems to fall into place.

This was one of those times.

The first thing I did was utilize the services of the state prosecutor’s office to get a list of the cases Judge Brennan presided over in the last ten years. There are very few jobs someone can have that piss people off as effectively as judges, and sometimes the pissed-off parties have years to sit in a cell and plot revenge.

I had reached a level within the department where I didn’t have a partner anymore, since most of my work was done on the inside, supervising other officers. This was a mixed blessing. On the minus side, I actually missed being on the street, closer to the action. The reason it was a mixed blessing was that sitting behind a desk significantly reduced the chance of my being shot at. Cops who are not in action are rarely killed in action.

For the Brennan case, I chose, if not a partner, then someone who I could count on to be a very willing, very competent slave. There would be quite a bit to delegate, and it was also my intention to go out on the street if a serious opportunity presented itself.

My choice was Emmit Jenkins, who at forty-eight years old had me by twelve years, and who at two hundred and sixty pounds had me by seventy-five pounds. Emmit was a walking contradiction; he was simultaneously the toughest, meanest, and most pleasant guy I’ve ever known.

Emmit was a twenty-two-year vet, and loved his job for every single minute of it. He had turned down four opportunities for promotions that I knew of, and probably as many more that I didn’t. Emmit wanted to be where the danger and excitement was, and he excelled in those circumstances.

Emmit had the list of Brennan’s cases, and therefore his potential enemies, within two hours of the request. The reason it was so quick, he informed me, was that the prosecutor’s office had already prepared the same list for the FBI.

I went through the list personally, paying special attention to two groups. Those people who went to prison and got out in the past year were a priority, as were those who recently fared poorly in Brennan’s court. Personally, if I were convicted of a felony, I’d be more pissed at the prosecutor, or witnesses, or jurors than at the judge, so I considered the revenge motive a long shot. But for the time being it was all we had.

As a Superior Court judge, Brennan handled a wide variety of cases, everything from high-level business fraud to low-level drug offenses. He had his share of violent crimes as well, four murders and thirty-one assaults, most of them armed, in the last five years. I instructed Emmit to find out which of the convicted defendants were out of jail.

Of course, even someone in jail could be responsible for planning the murder, since most violent felons didn’t hang around with altar boys or the chess club before they went in. But we had to prioritize; if we went through the obvious candidates and got nothing, then we could widen our search. That’s if the Feds hadn’t already made an arrest.

There were four criminals who had been sentenced by Judge Brennan and released within the previous year. There were also five people, four males and a female, who were convicted in trials over which Brennan presided during the previous year, who were either out on bail, pending appeal, or awaiting sentencing. The most recent was a twenty-two-year-old named Steven Gallagher, a third offense for crack cocaine possession and use.

“Anything look promising to you?” I asked Emmit.

“Only one way to find out,” he said. “Let’s run ’em down.”

That was Emmit’s upbeat way of agreeing that nothing looked promising. “Go get ’em,” I said.

“Who can I use?” he asked, meaning which detectives was I giving him permission to work with on this.

“Whoever the hell you want.”

He thought for a few moments. “I want Garfield, Miller, Wallace, and Freeman.”

“You’ve got Garfield, Miller, Wallace, and Freeman,” I said. It may have sounded like a law firm, but they were actually four of our best officers.

Emmit went out to get started, but came back less than ten minutes later, not nearly enough time to have gotten started with Garfield and Miller, never mind Wallace and Freeman. “We may have something,” he said.

“Talk to me.”

“We got a tip on the hotline, anonymous, that ID’d a kid named Steven Gallagher as the killer. He’s…”

“The user that Brennan was about to sentence,” is how I finished his sentence.

“Right.”

I didn’t ask if the tip seemed reliable, since anonymous tips were never reliable, except for the ones that were. They needed to be tracked down, and we were about to do just that with this one.

“Let’s go,” I said, standing up.

“We’re on this one ourselves?” he asked.

“You got other plans?”

He grinned. “Sure don’t.”

We arranged for backup, and within ten minutes we were on our way to the address Gallagher had given the court. Much to my amazement, a case that had nowhere to go for us now looked to be very possibly promising.

Sometimes, not often, an investigation just seems to fall into place.

Chris Gallagher didn’t need a travel agent to book his flight out of Afghanistan.

When you’re Marine Force Recon on your third tour, and you’re going on leave, there’s no need to check expedia.com.

It was actually an emergency leave for Chris, to the extent that it hadn’t been planned. But he had plenty of time accrued, and when events transpired as they did, his commanding officer expedited things and did not officially designate it as an emergency. It would have just meant more paperwork, while changing nothing.

The emergency was the arrest and subsequent conviction of Chris’s brother, Steven, on a drug offense. He was a repeat offender, and this was simply another chapter in a life going downhill. Unfortunately, it was a life that Chris had spent years trying to protect.

Darlene and Walter Gallagher were killed in a car crash when Chris was fourteen and Steven was seven. The Gallaghers had never made out a will, but that was basically of no consequence, since they had no money and little of value.

The boys went to live with an aunt, an alcoholic who reacted to the added responsibility by significantly increasing her alcohol intake. Chris became the responsible adult in the house, and took it upon himself to watch out for his little brother.

For a while it went well, until real life got in the way. When Chris was twenty-three he enlisted in the Marines, and the plan was for Steven to follow suit two years later. But Chris was shipped overseas, and Steven quickly befriended the wrong people.

Chris tried repeatedly to intervene from a distance, and when he was able to get home on leave he sometimes took more forceful action. Once he arranged to be there instead of Steven when his dealer, known only to Steven as Nick, came by to drop off cocaine and collect his money.

Chris attempted to reason with Nick, proposing in a respectful manner that the man stop peddling drugs to his brother and in return Chris would continue to let Nick live. Nick was six foot four and two hundred twenty pounds, meaning he was three inches and thirty pounds larger than Chris. It was that difference in size, as well as a serious misjudgment of his potential opponent, that made Nick laugh in response to the threat.

Once he heard the dismissive laugh, there were a number of ways that Chris could have handled the matter. He could have put a bullet in Nick’s brain, or slashed him across the throat with a knife, or broken his neck with his bare hands.

He chose option three.

He didn’t do it in anger; Chris had lost the capacity to experience anything approaching rage in the mountains of Afghanistan. Instead he did it with dispassionate resolve, and a sense of justice that he realized was unique to himself. It was as if he watched himself do it, with a measure of approval, but felt neither triumph nor guilt afterwards.

Once Chris decided that something was right, or necessary, or both, then he did it and never, ever looked back. Nick deserved to die, so he had died, and his body was never found.

But Chris knew that there would be other dealers, each willing to take full advantage of his brother’s human failings. There was a limit to how many necks Chris could break, especially since he was stationed so far away. So he tried to focus his efforts on helping Steven, rather than dispatching his suppliers and enablers.

He got him into therapy, once even a six-month program as an inpatient in a rehab facility. There were signs of hope, but months of positive progress would inevitably be undone by a single moment of weakness. And for Steven, weakness was always just around the corner.

The criminal justice system’s built-in insensitivity made matters worse. It was not set up to recognize that Steven suffered from a disease, and a noncontagious one at that. It treated him as a criminal, though he was clearly the sole victim of his own “crime.”

So it became a cycle of jail and rehab and progress and falling back, until the latest arrest and conviction. Judge Daniel Brennan had expressed a frustration and lack of patience with Steven, and had made it clear that he was going to sentence him to a prison term that would remove him as a problem for a very long period of time.

So now Chris was heading back home, not to pick up the pieces of Steven’s life, and certainly not to put them back together. He was coming back to witness his own greatest failure.

The loss of his little brother.

Who never hurt anyone but himself.

Steven Gallagher lived in a basement apartment in Paterson, New Jersey.

It was on Vernon Avenue, in one of a dreary collection of box-like houses. They were relatively well kept; these houses likely assumed their dreary persona within an hour of the time they were built.

Emmit and I were going to be the point men; we drove through the neighborhood a few times to get the lay of the land. We’d be the ones to go in and do the actual questioning. We didn’t have a search warrant with us, but one could be gotten quickly were Gallagher to prove uncooperative.

Such was the importance the department placed on this case that we had four officers with us as backup, positioned in the front and back of the house. We had no reason to believe yet that Gallagher might try to run, but if he did, he wouldn’t make it fifty feet.

Emmit and I went to the front door of the house to speak to the owner, who the records showed lived on the first floor. The basement apartment had an entrance and windows only at the back, so there was no way Gallagher could have known we were there, if he was at home. But in any event, we had the back well covered.

The owner was not on the premises, and there was no reason for us to wait for him. “Let’s go talk to our boy,” I said, and Emmit radioed our plans to the backup officers. Emmit walked around the right side of the house to the back, and I approached from the left.

There was a door with a broken screen, beyond which there were three concrete steps down to another door. We drew our weapons and I opened the first door. I walked down the steps, while Emmit stayed at the top, which gave him a better view of the whole picture.

I knocked on the door. “Gallagher?” I called out, but got no response. “Gallagher?”

“Leave me alone!” finally came the answer from inside. “You said you wouldn’t come back here!”

It was a voice filled with about as much stress as a voice could be filled with. “We’re the police, Gallagher. We want to talk to you.”

“NO! LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE!”

The voice had become firmer, more decisive; this was not a guy who wanted to talk. Which, of course, made him a more interesting candidate for us to talk to.

I edged to the side of the door, in case he was planning to fire a bullet through it. “Open the door, Gallagher.”

“No! I’m not going with you.”

“Nobody’s going anywhere. We just want to talk.”

“LIAR!”

“This is not voluntary, Gallagher. We’re going to talk; no reason to make this difficult. Nothing for you to worry about.”

There was no reaction at all. In these cases talking is good, no matter what is said. Silence is not so good.

“Open the door, Gallagher.”

Still no response. Emmit and I made eye contact, and he spoke softly into the radio, alerting the backup officers that “we’re going in. Suspect is present but uncooperative.”

I edged up along the side of the door, reaching for the knob, but expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t; it turned easily. This was the dangerous moment; there was no way to enter without being exposed, no matter how quickly we did so. If Gallagher had a gun, we had a problem.

I nodded to Emmit, and signaled that I would go first and he would follow. When one enters situations like this, the plan is not to saunter in saying, “Honey, I’m home.” Even though there is effectively no chance for surprise, as much shock and chaos must be created as possible, to rattle the suspect.

So I slowly turned the knob, took a deep breath, threw the door open, and burst through, screaming. I felt Emmit barreling in behind me, screaming as well. When it comes to barreling and screaming, he makes me look like an amateur.

The room was sparsely furnished and dirty. A small kitchen table had partially eaten food on it, and the bed, which was more like a cot, had only a blanket, no sheets or pillow. There was a small television sitting on the floor, with a “rabbit ears” antenna, and there was a laptop computer next to it.

I didn’t notice all these things until later, because my attention at that moment was on Steven Gallagher, sitting on the floor against the wall. More specifically, my attention was on his right hand, which was holding a gun, finger on the trigger.

It wasn’t pointed at me, which at the moment did not provide me with that much comfort. I pointed my own gun at him and screamed, “Drop the weapon!”

He looked at me strangely, almost as if he was trying to understand what I was saying. I saw a look of pain on his face, misery like I don’t think I have ever seen before, and I’ve seen a lot of it. Of course, everything I’m describing happened in a split second, so I could be wrong about all or part of it. But I don’t think I am.

He didn’t say anything, but he raised the gun. His finger was still on the trigger.

I didn’t wait to see what he would do with it; I put three bullets into his chest, pinning him back to the wall. Which means I never got to find out what he was going to do with the gun.

The moment my weapon discharged, I was no longer involved in the investigation.

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.

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.

The irony was that Julie cares about money less than almost anyone I know and she would wage a constant battle to get Bryan to lighten up and try to enjoy life more.

He would say that he was working fourteen-hour days, and earning money hand over fist, so that he could retire a young man. I certainly didn’t believe him, and I can’t imagine that Julie did, either. His identity seemed to be his success, which is one of the ways we were very different.

There was never any doubt that Bryan would settle down and get married, just like there was never any real chance that I would. I’m not sure why things turned out that way; maybe our parents only had one commitment gene and they gave it to him. Or dumped it on him, depending on your perspective.

The revelation that Julie and I had slept together, even though it was before they were married, would be a crusher for him. I knew that, but there was nothing I could do about it, other than sincerely apologize.

It would take a while for him to get over it, but eventually he would.

That’s what brothers do.

Bryan Somers slept for about two hours,

only because of the leftover effects of the drug Chris had administered. It was just enough to make him forget where he was, which led to the renewed horrible realization when he woke up.

He went straight to the computer and turned it on. It sprang to life, but did not have an Internet connection. Chris had said it would be online at noon, and Bryan would have to wait until then. He searched the drawer, and then the rest of the “apartment,” but he could not find a power cord. He would have only the amount of power in the battery, so he quickly turned the machine off; no sense wasting power when he couldn’t use the Internet.

Bryan hoped the computer would allow him to send e-mail, and expected it would, since that’s what Chris had said without prompting. It was a good news, bad news situation; Chris would allow him to be in contact with the outside world, but the reason he would was because Bryan would have no way to identify his location.

There were three pens and a pad of paper in the apartment, and Bryan decided to write out his e-mails in advance, with the computer off, so that he would not waste power while composing them.

He saw no reason to write to Julie. Though he was still in love with her, their marriage was effectively over the moment she revealed the betrayal. The truth was that it had probably been over well before that, but he had been oblivious to it.

The person he would contact would be his brother, Luke. If Chris was as efficient as Bryan believed, he would soon be telling Luke what had happened. How Luke reacted to that news would likely determine whether Bryan would live or die.

He would not be wasting time and power writing about Julie, and her affair with Luke. As horrible as that was, it took a distant backseat right now.

There would be time to hash that out later.

Or not.

It wasn’t the way Edward Holland had charted his career.

The plan had been to go to a top law school, join a big New York law firm, become very powerful, and make a fortune.

And for a while everything seemed on track. Holland went to NYU, for both undergraduate and law school, and finished in the top quarter of his class. Big law firms came calling, as they are wont to do at the better schools, and Holland had no trouble getting placed at one of the biggest and best.

The beginning of his work career was less than auspicious, though predictably so. Like every other newcomer to large firms, he worked like a dog, sometimes logging sixteen-hour days. And it was grunt work, behind-the-scenes research so that the partners could look good and well prepared, and so clients could hide their wealth from US taxes in financially friendly countries. But in terms of power, Holland couldn’t imagine having less.

He was an indentured servant, albeit a well-paid one. But even though the pay was very good by normal standards, New York was an expensive place to live, and Holland was certainly not getting rich.

After the fourth year, he took stock of his future, and wasn’t crazy about what he saw. There was the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that he would make partner after eight or nine years. That would provide him with an excellent income, though he would never be mega-wealthy. And while he would be respected, he would not be powerful. That was basically reserved for the clients, at least some of them.

So he made a career move that was outside the box, way outside. The Mayor of Brayton, New York, Holland’s hometown, was retiring after serving eleven three-year terms. Over drinks one night, a high school buddy, active in town politics, suggested that Holland could have the job for the asking.

So he asked. He talked to the local power players, who were impressed with his resume, and he secured a slot on the ballot. The fact that he ran unopposed reduced the number of election promises he had to make, and within eight months of the drinks in the bar Edward Holland was the Mayor of Brayton.

He took a seventy-five percent pay cut from his previous job, not the typical path to the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. But the mayoralty was not going to be the highest rung he hit on the political ladder, and you could count the number of successful, but poor, national politicians on very few fingers.

In terms of power, that would come down the road, but even now they were calling him “Your Honor,” which had a nice ring to it. And he was confident that before long the power would grow greater; there was no reason they wouldn’t someday be calling him “Mr. President.”

The responsibilities of the Mayor of Brayton are not exactly awesome. There’s no 3 AM phone call requiring momentous decisions, and very little crisis management. Deciding whether to install a traffic light a block from the grammar school is more typical of the day-to-day crises the Mayor must confront.

And then, suddenly, a serious and very significant issue dropped into his lap.

Carlton Auto Parts was by far the largest employer in the town. Richard Carlton represented the fourth generation of leadership in the family-owned manufacturing company and wholesaler, but to that point he had presided over, if not a debacle, then a gradual decline in fortunes.

Facing daunting competition from larger US companies, and even larger foreign ones, Carlton had not weathered the recession well. Profits were down, and layoffs followed, as they inevitably do. But the town was getting by, and for the most part people were employed.

Carlton was not only the largest employer; it was also the largest landowner. Brayton was a large community geographically, and Carlton owned a lot of it. Additionally, it had recently purchased huge tracts of land from the town of Brayton. It was land that was adjacent to the town but so far mostly unoccupied, and its assessed value was reflected in the very low price that Carlton paid.

And then, suddenly, the discovery of enormous pockets of shale on the land changed everything. A process called fracking might be able to extract natural gas from the shale, depending on the type and formation of the rock. Natural gas was starting to be seen as the key to America’s energy independence, and if fracking could be used on the Carlton land, the financial rewards would be mind-boggling.

But it seems as if energy development always comes with an environmental price, and fracking was the rule, rather than the exception. There were very serious concerns about its effects on nearby water supply, as well as air quality. Lawsuits were springing up around the country, with aggrieved citizens pointing to examples, some substantive and some anecdotal, of disease clusters that they felt were the result of the fracking residue.

It was a perfect opportunity for Holland. Not only could he rally the townspeople and get significant publicity throughout the state in his role as the Mayor, but he also was able to parley his legal stature into even greater prominence. Rather than forcing the impoverished town to hire outside counsel, he took on the job himself.

Win or lose, it would be a win for Holland. He could play up the heroic nature of the situation, putting it all on the line for the sake of the town. He would get great publicity, an invaluable boost to his political future.

Holland was all too aware, if no one else seemed to be, that he could not represent the town as well as a big-time firm could. The case was a long shot anyway; while fracking lawsuits around the country were finding mixed results, the majority favored the energy companies.

So Brayton lost at trial, and then subsequently appealed. Even with Holland in the counsel chair, the expenses were significant. If they lost on appeal, it would be unlikely that they would have the financial resources to go to the Supreme Court, especially if the Appeals Court made them post a bond, as they would likely do.

The arguments were made before the Second Circuit panel that included Judge Susan Dembeck. She was to be replaced by Judge Danny Brennan, but his nomination was held up in committee. If that changed before a decision was announced, then the case would have to be reargued.

Of course, Judge Brennan, murdered in his garage, wouldn’t be hearing any more cases.

A media story is like a campfire.

It reaches a full blaze quickly, and then gradually starts to die down. But as you add fuel, it flares up again.

The story of the Brennan murder, and my shooting of Steven Gallagher, was running out of fuel. That was mostly because we found Gallagher so quickly, and because his death meant there was no trial to look forward to. Had the crime not been solved, or if there was a manhunt, the story could have burned for weeks.

Much was already known about Gallagher, his difficult upbringing, his subsequent descent into addiction, and his Marine hero brother, Chris. Chris had not been heard from, though it was known that he was back in the states on leave.

A funeral was being planned for Judge Brennan for two days later, to give time for the large crowd who would surely attend to make arrangements. Messages of outrage and horror had already been chronicled, and published accounts revealed how many respected legal and business leaders actually used Twitter.

Judge Susan Dembeck had not yet announced whether she would stay in her post until a replacement for Judge Brennan was appointed and confirmed. It was expected that she would, though this represented something of a hardship for her, since her husband had a serious illness and she was retiring to help care for him.

The President would soon be appointing a new candidate to take the place of Judge Dembeck, but that person would begin at square one in the confirmation process, and the state of gridlock in the Senate would once again make it very time-consuming.

Billy Heyward kept me in touch with details of the case as it came together, and I was relieved to hear that initial DNA testing revealed that the clothes stuffed in Gallagher’s closet had Judge Brennan’s blood on them. That meant that the postmortem on the case would be quick and uncontroversial. It also confirmed my belief that I did the right thing.

But the day went by without my hearing from Bryan. I was surprised, but the truth was that I had little experience with a brother finding out that I had slept with his wife, so I wasn’t sure what normal behavior would be.

I was disturbed by a phone call from Julie near the end of the day. She asked if I had heard from Bryan, and I told her that I had not. “He hasn’t called me, either,” she said. “I’m worried about him.”

“I’m sure he needs the time to think this out, to digest it. Maybe to decide whether he wants to shoot me or hit me over the head with a baseball bat.”

“I know it’s got to be incredibly hard on him,” she said. “But I want to talk to him. I feel so terrible about this.”

“You could call him at work.”

“I was going to, but they called me.”

“What does that mean?”

“He didn’t show up for work, and didn’t contact anyone there. They were worried about him.”

The conversation with Julie must have been even more devastating for Bryan than I imagined, and I imagined it as being hugely upsetting. Bryan doesn’t miss a day of work, not ever; he’s the hardest-working person I know. And to just not show up, without notification, is totally and completely out of character.

I got off the phone and tried him at home. I got the machine, and left a message that I knew what he was going through, and I was sorry and we needed to talk.

With nothing else to do, I headed down to the Crows Nest for a couple of beers and a burger. It was a comfortable place to be; there were always cops around who I knew and usually liked, though the next time we talked about work there would be the first.

I got home at a little after nine, and parked in my driveway, which is along the side of the house. I walked around towards the front and as I went up the four steps to the porch I noticed that one of the windows on the left was open.

It was only open an inch, but hey, I’m a cop, and I notice stuff. What was important was that I hadn’t left it open. I’m an air-conditioning nut; I leave it on all day so the house will be cool when I get home. And this particular window was behind a table, so it’s not even one that I ever open.

So if I didn’t open it, someone else did. Which meant that someone might have been in my house, and might still be there.

It was safest to assume the latter, and if that was the case, then they would have heard me pull into the driveway. The smart thing for me to have done would have been to call for backup and go into the house in force.

I didn’t do that for a couple of reasons. The very stupid one was that it was my house and I could defend it without help from anyone. The less stupid one was that it could be Bryan, who found the doors locked and decided he wanted to wait for me inside. Climbing through a window would have been completely out of character for him, but with what he’d been going through, his behavior might be tending towards the unusual.

I went around to the back of the house. There was a ladder there; I hadn’t put it away after a visit by the satellite TV guy. I looked in through the window, and didn’t see anyone inside, so I placed the ladder against the house, as gently as I could.

I climbed up to a window in a guest bedroom, since I knew the lock on it was broken. If you’re going to break into a house, it’s easier if it’s the one you live in, since you know the nuances.

It was difficult climbing up to the window and then through it with my gun drawn, but the potentially most dangerous part of this operation was when I physically went through the window. The truth was that if there was somebody waiting for me there with a gun, having my own gun drawn would be of little help. Of course, if it was Bryan, having my gun drawn would make me feel like an idiot.

I got into the room undetected, and made my way out to the hallway, and then to the top of the steps. There was a light on in the den, which was just to the left off the stairs, but I could have left it that way. I’d know soon enough.

Having the high ground in battle is almost always an advantage, one of the exceptions being when the battlefield is a house in Paterson, New Jersey. If there were people down there, they could have been in a number of places, pointing their weapons at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for my convenient arrival.

I edged towards the outside wall of the den, then quickly moved in, gun in firing position. There was a man sitting on the couch; he wasn’t Bryan, and he wasn’t anyone I had seen before. The other thing he wasn’t, even though he was staring at my gun, was worried.

“You noticed the window I left open. Not bad … I was testing you.”

I kept the gun pointed. “Who the hell are you?”

“Chris Gallagher. You killed my brother.”

“The Marine,” I said.

He nodded. “The Marine.”

I lowered the gun, but still held it in my hand. Gallagher was far enough away from me that I’d have time to raise it and fire if he made a move. “I’m sorry about your brother.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Think what you want.”

“Steven never hurt anyone in his life, except himself.”

“His clothes were hidden in his closet with Judge Brennan’s blood all over them; they matched the DNA. He had a gun and raised it to shoot me when we came in. Maybe you didn’t know your brother as well as you think.”

“You got a brother Bryan, right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You know him pretty well?”

“I do,” I said, not liking where this was going.

“Heard from him today?”

Chris Gallagher described the situation calmly, without apparent emotion.

If that approach was to worry his audience, in this case me, it worked really well. His words reflected the fact that he was in total control, but his manner drove it home even more forcefully.

“I was here last night, looking for you. Your brother was on the porch; wrong time, wrong place. Not that it matters, but there’s a certain justice to it, don’t you think?”

“I don’t. Bryan has nothing to do with this.”

“And my brother had nothing to do with Brennan. But you made sure he’ll never have his day in court, so the world can always think he’s a murderer.”

“I didn’t want to shoot your brother. I wanted to talk to him, to question him and, if the facts warranted it, to arrest him. He made that impossible, and I’m sorry about that. I was sorry about it before you came here.”

If I was getting through to him, he was hiding it well. “You’re full of shit.”

“Where’s Bryan?” I asked.

“In major trouble.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s in an underground room, with no way out. Plenty of food and water, and a seven-day air supply, a little less now. If anything happens to me, that’s how long he’ll live.”

He was telling me that I couldn’t arrest him if I wanted to, because it would be a death sentence for Bryan. For the time being at least, I couldn’t see any flaws in that logic.

“Why did you come here yesterday?”

“Probably to kill you. So in a way he saved your life.”

“So why don’t you ditch ‘Plan B’ and start over? Let my brother go, and then come after me.”

He smiled. “You think you can handle me?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Luke, you have no idea what you’re dealing with. You’re sitting there holding a gun, and I’m unarmed, and if I wanted to kill you right now, you’d be dead in thirty seconds.”

“Let my brother go and you can prove it.”

“All right, that’s enough of this bullshit. Your brother has a hell of a lot more chance than my brother had. It’s up to you.”

“How is it up to me?”

“You know the investigation you didn’t do before you went in shooting? Do it now. Prove Steven didn’t do it; find the real killer and announce to the world that you were wrong. That you killed an innocent man.”

“And what if I find out he did do it?”

“He didn’t.”

“What if my investigation shows that he did?”

“Then we’re both short one brother.”

In a way this was a positive development, but a small one at best. While there was no chance that I was going to actually find information to exonerate Steven Gallagher, this at least gave me some time to try to figure out another way.

“OK, what are the ground rules?” I asked.

“There aren’t any. Do your job.”

“What if I have to reach you? Give me your cell number.”

“I’ll reach you,” he said.

He was no doubt aware that every cell phone has a built-in GPS signal that can be traced and located. My hope had been that I could find out through the signal where my brother was, when and if Gallagher went there.

“Can I use other detectives to help in the investigation?” I asked.

“I don’t care how you do it; just make sure you do it.”

“This won’t bring your brother back.”

“Really?” he sneered. “I wasn’t aware of that.” Then, “It’s my fault what happened to my brother. I wasn’t there for him when he needed me. That’s something I have to live with. Make sure you don’t know what it feels like to be responsible for your brother’s death.”

He started towards the door, and then stopped and turned. “Your brother’s got seven days, so don’t waste any time.”

I called and made an appointment to see Julie at 10 AM.

I wanted to break the news to her in her office, where things would seem less personal. I was aware that either way things were going to be intensely personal, but I needed Julie’s professional help if we were going to succeed.

Julie is an assistant prosecutor for the state of New Jersey. We worked together on a couple of cases a long time ago, but not since we had our sexual indiscretion. I assume she has structured things deliberately to not work on my cases; I’m just not sure why she’s done that, and I haven’t been about to ask.

I had met Julie while working on a case, and I was the one to introduce her to Bryan. I was in that phase of my life whereby a long relationship lasted three weeks, and in fact I’m still in that phase. Julie wasn’t the three-week type, that was immediately clear, and Bryan was looking for someone to settle down with. So I introduced them, and if there has been a twenty-four-hour period since in which I haven’t regretted doing it, I can’t recall one.

There was and is something special about Julie. She has the ability to see through me, but in a way that I never seem to mind. I’ve always thought she felt something for me as well, though I can’t pinpoint why I thought that. Our way of dealing with all of this was never, ever to deal with it.

When I called I spoke to Julie’s assistant, who had no reason to think it was strange that I was setting the meeting. Julie meets with cops all the time. But I knew that when Julie heard that I was coming in, she’d realize it was about Bryan.

I couldn’t sleep after Chris Gallagher left my house, so I tried to be productive, filling the time by analyzing the options that I had. I was positive that everything he said was true, and that he was fully capable of killing Bryan.

Goal number one had to be keeping Bryan alive until I could achieve goal number two, which was to free him. I had no idea yet how to get him out, but keeping him alive seemed achievable, as long as I followed Gallagher’s instructions.

So I would conduct the investigation into Brennan’s death that Gallagher was demanding. There was no doubt about that. The only questions to be resolved would be how I would go about it, specifically who I would recruit and confide in.

I couldn’t do it alone, and I certainly couldn’t do it in secret. I needed the access to information that my job provided, but people would inevitably become aware of my actions. I just had to make sure that they were people I could trust to exercise discretion. If the particulars of this situation got out, then I would have lost control, and Bryan would have lost a lot more.

I was going to conduct a serious investigation, though I had no expectation of proving Steven Gallagher innocent. My hope was to find information that proved his guilt so conclusively that even his brother would accept it as the truth. Chris Gallagher seemed capable of anything, and that included rational thought.

My first stop was to my office to speak to Emmit Jenkins. I needed him to be my right hand, if he was willing, and I was sure he would be.

I told him the story, and watched him get furious as I told it. I’m not sure what it says about me, but Emmit was far angrier at the situation than I was. Gallagher thought I killed his brother with no justification. If I were in his situation, and I recognized the irony that soon I might be, there would be no place the killer could hide.

“Give me ten minutes with him,” Emmit said. “He’ll be begging to tell me where your brother is.”

I have great respect for Emmit’s physical prowess, but I didn’t think there was anyone, anywhere, who could get Chris Gallagher to do much begging.

Then Emmit asked the key question, or at least the key question of the moment. “Who else are you going to tell?”

I had my thoughts on the matter, but wanted his view. “What do you think?”

“We gotta be careful,” he said, already using the pronoun that made us a team. “This gets out, somebody is going to want to arrest this guy for kidnapping.”

I nodded. “I know. But I need to tell Barone.”

He frowned his disagreement. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea; the Captain will want to cover his ass.”

“No doubt. But I need the resources of the department.”

Emmit left and I went in to see Barone. There were two officers in with him, so I said, “I need to see the Captain alone.”

They agreeably got up and left, and once they did, Barone said, “‘I need to see the Captain alone’ is not a phrase I like. The next thing I hear after that is usually a problem.”

“This one’s a beauty,” I said, and proceeded to lay it out for him.

“Damn,” he said when I was finished. “What are you going to do?” he asked, demonstrating that he and Emmit had little in common when it comes to pronoun usage.

“I’m going to do what he says, while at the same time trying to find my brother. I don’t see any other way.”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“I can’t do it alone, or just with Emmit,” I said. “I need the resources of the department.”

“I’m listening,” he said. “I’m cringing, but I’m listening.”

“No one except Emmit, you, and I will know about my brother. Everyone else involved will just think we’re covering our bases on the Brennan murder.”

He still wasn’t answering, so I said, “It’s just seven days, Captain.”

Finally he said, “You know the part you said about the three of us knowing the situation with your brother?”

“Yes.”

“Make it the two of you,” he said.

“Did I say three? I meant two.”

Barone nodded his approval. “So listen carefully. I am authorizing that you investigate the Brennan murder; I feel it’s important that we dot every ‘i.’ I am unaware of any secondary motives that you and Emmit might have.”

“You’re a profile in courage,” I said.

He nodded. “It comes naturally.”

He was still doing me a big favor, and he and I both knew it. “Thanks, Captain.”

“Keep me posted,” he said. “Unofficially.”

Were Richard Carlton to describe the citizens of Brayton in one word, it would be “ungrateful.”

The Carlton family, through their auto parts manufacturing plant, had been employing almost a third of the town for close to sixty years. Without it, it was fair to say that Brayton would have ceased to exist, at least in its present form, a long time ago.

Yes, there had been some layoffs in recent years; that’s what struggling businesses do. But for the most part Carlton took care of its employees, and did as much as it could for them.

Richard Carlton, in his five years since inheriting the leadership role from his father, had continued the tradition. His was an open door, though one had to get through quite a few other doors to reach it. But he was going to do what was best for his company, and that in turn would benefit Brayton.

A win-win all around.

But now there was the opportunity for a huge win, a game changer. Carlton had purchased enormous tracts of land from the town of Brayton, for the purpose of someday building housing units. Since the town had not been thriving in recent years, there would have been no one to live in new housing, so it hadn’t yet been built.

Not long after, it was discovered that the land contained enormous shale deposits. Carlton had contacted Hanson Oil and Gas, a company that had become a leader in natural gas in the US by taking a preeminent position in the fracking industry. It was the wave of the energy future, seen by many as our key to independence from the Middle East.

Hanson’s chief engineer, Michael Oliver, conducted a study that confirmed the shale was porous enough, plentiful enough, and configured in such a way as to be a prime candidate for fracking. It was one of the largest and most promising finds ever, and Hanson immediately made a preemptive offer of three hundred and fifty million dollars for the land, contingent on legal approvals.

But outside environmental groups came in and spread fear within the Brayton community of water contamination and air pollution. The Mayor, Edward Holland, took up the fight, and as a lawyer actually handled the lawsuit himself. He chose to file in Federal rather than state court, on the assumption that it would be a more favorable venue for Brayton.

Not many legal analysts agreed with that decision, and Brayton lost in District Court. They then filed their appeal, and the results would be known soon. Holland had already privately indicated that a loss there would unfortunately be the end, that the town simply did not have the resources to pursue it further.

So for Carlton it was a waiting game, but he looked at the big picture. And the big picture contained a lot of money.

I was not looking forward to my conversation with Julie.

She was in the reception area waiting for me when I got off the elevator. I could see the tension on her face, but I couldn’t hear it in her voice, because she didn’t say a word. She just turned and started walking back to her office, a silent invitation for me to follow. It was as if she didn’t want to delay hearing whatever news I was about to deliver by engaging in idle chitchat, like saying “hello.”

We went into her office, and she closed the door behind us. “How did it go?” she asked.

“How did what go?”

“Didn’t you speak to Bryan?”

“No.”

She seemed confused. “You never heard from him? Then why are you here?”

“Julie, I’ve got something important to tell you; this goes way beyond the level of marital spat.”

“It was more than a spat, Luke.”

“Then this goes way beyond the level of marital earthquake.”

“What is it?” She took a deep breath, as if bracing herself for the news.

“Bryan has been kidnapped by the brother of the kid I shot.”

I watched as her mind tried to compute what I was saying. It was so unlike what she expected that it took her a few moments to process it, and even then it didn’t make sense. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I went on to tell her the story, exactly as I related it to Emmit. I watched her intently as I spoke; Julie watching is something I’ve spent a lot of time doing over the years. She seemed to go back and forth between horror-stricken wife and law enforcement professional. It was the latter I needed to help me.

Her first words when I finished were not the ones I wanted to hear. “We need to go to the FBI with this.”

“I’ve thought about that, Julie, but I don’t see the upside, at least now.”

“The upside is that maybe they’ll catch him; maybe they’ll save Bryan. How can you not see that?”

“Catching him doesn’t save Bryan; it probably does exactly the opposite.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Maybe you’re right, and we need to get as much information as we can about Chris Gallagher so we can make that judgment. But for now Bryan is alive, and our doing what Gallagher asks keeps him alive.”

“Maybe he’ll kill him…,” she said, as her voice cracked and I thought she was going to break down. But she pulled it together. “… No matter what we do.”

“If that’s the case, then Bryan is probably dead already.” When she reacted, I added, “I’m sorry, Julie, but that’s the truth.”

She nodded her understanding, but said, “We have knowledge of a crime, Luke. It needs to be reported.”

“I’m a cop; consider it reported.”

We talked about it some more, and she reluctantly agreed to go along with my approach. I was relieved, but not as much as I expected. I was not confident that I was right; I just couldn’t think of a better way to go. With my brother’s life on the line, I would have liked to have greater conviction.

“So what can I do?” she asked, the professional in her kicking into gear.

“Can you start gathering information on Chris Gallagher?”

“Of course,” she said. “And I know a judge advocate at Quantico. We worked on a case together last year; a Marine got into a fight at a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike and killed a guy. I let the military handle it, so he owes me a favor.”

“Great; call it in,” I said. “We need to know who we’re dealing with.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to investigate a murder and pretend it’s not already solved.”

The door opened and I was looking straight ahead at a man’s chest.

I was at the late Judge Daniel Brennan’s house in Alpine, and I expected to be greeted by his wife, not a man who looked to be seven feet tall. But he obviously expected me, because the voice from up there asked, “Lieutenant Somers?”

I looked up. Way up. “Yes,” I said, to a face I recognized but in the moment couldn’t place.

He held out his hand. “Nate Davenport. Friends call me Ice.”

I shook his hand. We were just meeting for the first time, but I knew all about Nate “Ice Water” Davenport. He was the center for the Detroit Pistons in the late seventies and early eighties. He was one of the early big men who was also a great athlete; he could grab a defensive rebound and lead a fast break up court.

The “Ice Water” nickname came from the coolness that was said to run through his veins when it came time to take the key shot at the end of a game. He was a great clutch player, and though I wasn’t sure if he was in the Hall of Fame, he was certainly a candidate for it.

I’m not a huge pro basketball fan; I prefer football and baseball. But I read enough of the sports pages to have in the back of my mind that Davenport became an agent for players after he retired, though I wasn’t aware of a relationship with Judge Brennan when he played for the Celtics.

“Come on in,” he said. “Denise will be down in a minute.”

Denise was the recently widowed Mrs. Brennan, and my starting point in the investigation. “Good. Thanks.”

“I’m a longtime friend of the family; would you object to my sitting in on your talk? She would prefer that.”

I saw no problem with that, and said so. I wasn’t trying to trap her; I just wanted information, and the more at ease she was the more likely she was to provide it. “Whatever makes her comfortable.”

It was almost fifteen minutes before Denise Brennan came down the stairs, and if she spent that time trying to make herself appear not to be devastated, it was a wasted effort. She was a small, thin woman, and my guess was she looked a lot smaller and thinner than she had before her husband’s murder.

She apologized for keeping me waiting, and offered me coffee, which I accepted. Then, “Thank you for your efforts, Lieutenant. I share my husband’s disdain for capital punishment, but I must admit I wasn’t sorry to hear about the resolution of this situation.”

By “resolution,” she meant my putting three bullets into Steven Gallagher. “I understand,” I said, because I did. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions about your husband.”

“You don’t have any doubts about who committed the crime, do you?” asked Davenport.

I shook my head. “None. But in a situation like this, we have to tie up all loose ends,” I said, neglecting to mention that among the loose ends here was the fact that my brother had been kidnapped and in six days wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Had your husband ever mentioned Steven Gallagher, in any context?”

She shook her head. “No, he didn’t bring home his work. Once he took off the robe, that was it. His life on the job and his life at home were separate.”

“So he never felt threatened by anything that happened in court?”

She thought for a moment. “Yes, a few times. He never spoke about it, but I could tell.”

“How?”

“Sometimes he didn’t want me to go out somewhere, or he would go with me, even if it was shopping, or something else he didn’t like doing. And a few times I noticed some people that I think were security.”

“But he never told you why he was concerned, or who he was concerned about?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. He never addressed it in any way.”

“Was there anything unusual about the way he was acting recently? Any changes in mood? Anything that you noticed?”

She considered that for a few moments, and said, “I think he was feeling some stress, good kind of stress, over the Appeals Court appointment. When he testified before Congress, he was a little nervous. Dan rarely got nervous, so it surprised me. But it was more excitement than anything else.”

I basically asked the same questions a few more times, but this woman obviously had no information that would help me. I told her I appreciated her talking to me, and let Davenport walk me to the door.

“Thanks for your time,” I said.

“Strange way to spend yours.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you’re not sure the Gallagher kid did it. Otherwise what would be the difference if Danny had enemies?”

“Gallagher did it.”

“I hope so. But if the real son of a bitch is out there, let me know how I can help.”

“Will do.”

When we got to the door, he opened it and I stepped outside.

“Danny was a complicated man, but a good one,” he said. “A very, very good one.”

It was a strange thing to say. “Complicated how?”

He just shook his head very, very slightly. “He was my friend.”

I took one of my cards out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Call me if you want to talk about your friend some more.”

Tommy Rhodes considered that night’s job beneath him.

It wasn’t a big deal, and he certainly wasn’t going to complain about it. He was only thirty-four years old, but he thought of himself as an old-school guy, which meant that you did your job and moved on to the next one.

Of course, the fact that he was being paid enough money to last him until he was a hundred and thirty-four years old made him even more sanguine about the situation. He was a mercenary, pure and simple, and that was fine with him. As such, it wasn’t his job to strategize; it was his job to accomplish the mission.

This was an easy assignment. He didn’t really need Frankie Kagan there. Kagan had no experience in these kinds of operations; his talents were more in the areas of guns and knives. In this case he was there to provide protection for Tommy while he worked, though it was extremely unlikely that any problems would arise.

Tommy was resentful of Frankie’s role as leader of their end of the operation, but he realized that it was Frankie who had the connection, and who brought Tommy in. There might be a time when Tommy would try to move up in the hierarchy, but he would have to be careful; Frankie was very, very dangerous.

So for now Tommy just focused on the work. The jobs he would be doing would grow progressively harder, and considerably more dangerous, but nothing that Tommy couldn’t handle.

The toughest part was learning the terrain. His employers were smart enough to go outside the area to recruit, and had done their homework. Tommy was from Vegas, as was Frankie, or at least that’s the place they had been working. So finding their way around upstate New York was not that easy.

They didn’t want to use a GPS; if it was ever confiscated, the fact that it contained addresses of all of these criminal acts would be rather incriminating. So they did it the old-fashioned way, with a map, which was a bit of a pain in the ass.

Tommy didn’t really know what was going on, and he didn’t care. He had vaguely assumed that it had something to do with this mining thing, something about natural gas, and the fight that was going on over it. His target tonight confirmed that suspicion, but it really didn’t matter to him either way.

The house was on a secluded street, which was understating the case. It wasn’t really a street in the normally accepted sense; it was an estate with no other houses within a quarter of a mile. Tommy parked outside the property, and they walked towards where they were told the house would be, though it couldn’t be seen from there.

It was a long walk, and only when they got close did the lights from the house pierce the total darkness. It was certainly not a hardship for Tommy, who was in extraordinary physical shape, even though he was carrying a bag that weighed the equivalent of two bowling balls.

The house looked massive, triggering a vague childhood recollection of his parents taking him to Virginia to see where Thomas Jefferson lived. Tommy remembered seeing the slave quarters on the property, and thinking that Jefferson must have been an asshole.

Lights were on in the house, so Tommy assumed that people were home. He had no idea if Richard Carlton was there or not, and it didn’t matter to Tommy at all.

The guesthouse was off to the left, and that was where Tommy headed. It was dark and hard to see; the sky was cloudy and moonlight was almost nonexistent. Tommy was sorry that he didn’t bring his night vision glasses, but it wasn’t a big deal either way. He could see well enough to know that he had never lived in a house as nice as this guesthouse.

But those days were in the past. In six months he’d be living in a palace or, better yet, in a suite at the Bellagio.

The windows on the main floor were unlocked, as Tommy expected they would be. He opened one and climbed inside, signaling Frankie to stay outside and watch for intruders. Tommy did not wear gloves, and was not concerned about fingerprints.

Once inside, he entered an interior room and took out his small flashlight, shining it into the bag he was carrying. He emptied the contents, and spent the next twenty minutes positioning the explosives strategically around the house.

The army training had served him well; Tommy operated with an expertise that was instinctive, and a complete confidence that he was doing things correctly. The fact that there was no basement in the house made it easier, though only marginally.

Once he was finished, he did a check of his work, to make sure everything was in good condition. There was no hurry; he was not going to be detected. The only reason for moving quickly was that there was a basketball game on television later that night that he was anxious to see. He had a bet on the game, for an amount of money that in the future he wouldn’t be wasting his time on.

Tommy left through the front door, closing it and all the windows behind him. He didn’t want there to be anywhere for the air to escape, though that was just him being more cautious than necessary. He took pride in his work, and even though there was no chance of failure, he still wanted to do it exactly right.

“All good?” Frankie asked softly once Tommy was outside.

“All good.”

Thirty feet in front of the guesthouse, they stopped and Tommy took out the remaining items in the bag that he was carrying. They were a can of red paint and a brush, and he slowly and methodically painted letters on the driveway. It was difficult because of the darkness and the small light given off by the flashlight.

Once he was finished, he took his time to make sure the message was legible.

You will not hurt our children.

Satisfied with his work, Tommy took the now empty bag with him. He jogged back to the street, not because he was fearful of being caught but simply so he could get to his television and basketball game sooner. Frankie, not being a basketball fan, was not pleased, but since Tommy had the keys to the car, he was obliged to jog as well.

Once in the car, they drove about a half a mile, and then stopped. It would be close enough to confirm that the operation was a success, but far enough to ensure an easy getaway.

Tommy opened the window and dialed a number on his cell phone. Within two seconds of his pressing the last digit, he saw the flash of light in the distance, and then heard the explosion.

“All good?” Frankie asked.

“All good.”

If Richard Carlton was going to have guests any time soon, they’d be staying in a hotel.

Michael Oliver had a very important job.

It didn’t make him famous; it didn’t make him stand out at all. He could walk down the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, as he did every day on the way to and from work, and never be recognized.

Oliver was chief engineer of Hanson Oil and Gas. They didn’t have traditional titles there, but if they did, he probably would have been a Senior Vice President, or maybe an Executive Vice President. Which made him pretty high up the ladder.

But his significance was even greater than it appeared. As the head of a very small department, Oliver’s job was to analyze land for its potential to provide energy, be it oil or natural gas. Once this was completed, a cost-benefit analysis was done to determine how expensive it would be to extract that energy, versus how much it could be sold for.

Hanson was a middle level player in the industry, but it still had a market capitalization of over six billion dollars. It didn’t get that big by making mistakes, and Michael Oliver was the mistake preventer in chief.

When Oliver gave the go-ahead on a find, Hanson literally would take it to the bank. And if Oliver said the potential was not there, they did not go near it.

It was Oliver who personally did the analysis of the land near Brayton. It was he who determined that the shale was porous enough to yield natural gas and that it was set in a formation that could be harvested efficiently and very profitably. And it was he who estimated the immense amount of energy that could be derived.

For doing this, he was very well paid. But now, by simply putting another set of diagrams in an envelope and sending them off, he would have taken the final step towards ensuring he would get far more money than that.

So he put them in the envelope, and then drove an hour and fifteen minutes to a UPS store in Stillwater. He sent the package under an assumed name; it was the first illegal act he had ever committed, and he was not about to take any chances. It was why he did not simply e-mail the diagrams; e-mails lasted forever, and could not be shredded.

Oliver was not recognized in Stillwater, just as he was not recognized in Tulsa. But that didn’t make him any less important. And what he had just done, simply sending that package, had been the most significant act of a very significant life.

“Nothing has changed,” Barone said. “Overtime expected, vacations postponed, until we wrap this up.”

I had requested that he call the meeting, and he didn’t hesitate. There had been a letdown in effort on the case; cops have a tendency to stop focusing on a case when they believe it’s been solved and the bad guy killed.

Detective Johnny Pagan asked the obvious question. “Wrap what up?”

“The Brennan murder,” Barone said. “We want to nail Gallagher on the facts, not just because he pulled a gun on Luke. Shit, you know how many times I’ve wanted to shoot Luke?”

“What about the bloody clothes, and the DNA?” Pagan asked.

Barone hesitated for a second, so I jumped in. “It’s evidence, significant evidence, but it’s not everything. There’s a huge amount of attention focused on this case; we need to be right, and we need to demonstrate it beyond any doubt. So the Captain wants to handle it as if it’s going to trial, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Nobody in the room except Emmit had any idea what the hell was going on, but nor did they want to question it any further. They would work on the case, that’s their job, and the opportunity to get some overtime was just an added plus.

Emmit took over the meeting and gave out the assignments we had discussed. He would ride herd on them; Emmit was good at that. I saw no reason to tell anyone the seven-day deadline, but Emmit would see to it that they would be very busy days.

It was on the way back to my office when I felt a buzzing sensation in my pocket. All Sergeants and up are given BlackBerries, the purpose being to eliminate any semblance of a private life. The buzzing meant that I had an e-mail.

We are prohibited from using the devices for personal matters, so very few people outside of the department had this e-mail address. The only ones I could think of were Julie and Bryan, three or four prosecutors, an aunt in Florida, and a woman named Jeannie who I dated for four months. I gave it to her because she set what remains the record for my longest relationship, crushing the previous record holder by six weeks. The way things were going, you could say Jeannie was the Joe DiMaggio of my girlfriends.

I took the device out of my pocket and looked at it. I got what felt like a physical shock when I saw that it was Bryan’s e-mail address. My first thought was that it was Julie using it, though it would have been the first time that I was aware of.

I clicked on it.

Lucas … I’ve been kidnapped and imprisoned by the brother of the kid you shot. He said he was going to find you and demand that you do something before he will release me. He is dangerous. Don’t know where I am … he said it was underground. I only have seven days of air. Limited power on computer … don’t want to waste it … will check every ninety minutes.

Tell me whatever you can … please.

Bryan.

I read the message twice. It didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know, but the fact that Bryan sent it was enormously significant. It opened up the possibility that he could aid in his own rescue; there might be something he saw or heard that could help us find him.

There might also be a way for us to locate him through the e-mail itself, though that was way out of my area of expertise. To that end, I wasted no time in heading for Deb Guthrie’s office, which was located one flight up, at the far end of the building. I took the stairs two at a time.

Deb was a state police Lieutenant, as was I, but she occupied an entirely different world. She was in charge of the cybercrime unit, which is to say that I did not understand a single thing that she did. My computer proficiency was such that it was lucky I was able to open the e-mail.

I could see through the glass into her office; she was meeting with some guy in a suit, a meeting that was about to end. I barged in and said, “Deb, I need to talk to you.”

Deb and I have a really good relationship, and she could tell from my entrance and the tone of my voice that this was serious. “Kevin, let’s pick this up later,” she said, and the guy obligingly got up and left.

“What’s up, Luke?” she said when the door closed behind him.

“If someone sends you an e-mail, can you trace it to where they are located?”

“We can get their IP address, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

“I don’t even know what an IP address is. Is it like a real-world address?”

She shook her head. “No, but it’s close. We can certainly narrow it down to a specific area. What have you got?”

“Deb, I’m about to show you something that I need your help on. But in the process I’m going to be putting you in a difficult position, because you cannot tell anyone about it.”

“It’s business?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Does the Captain know about it?”

“He officially knows nothing.”

She smiled. “His favorite official posture. Let’s have a look, Luke.”

I showed her the e-mail, and she took her time reading it. “I assume you don’t want to answer any questions,” she said when she was finished.

“Correct.”

“Luke, the person that e-mailed you can find out the IP address himself, as long as he has Internet access.”

I hadn’t known that, but in any event it didn’t solve the problem. “No good,” I said. “His e-mails might be being read.”

She nodded. “OK. Give me your e-mail password.”

I did so, and she said, “I’ll call you as soon as I have the address.”

I left Deb’s office and went back to my own. By that point logic had overtaken optimism, for a number of reasons. For one, there seemed no possible way that Chris Gallagher had made a mistake in allowing Bryan to have the ability to e-mail. He had to have been completely confident that Bryan would not be able to aid in his rescue.

There was also a very significant possibility that it wasn’t Bryan e-mailing at all, but rather Gallagher using his account. He could be hoping to gain access to information in that manner. I would have to come up with a way to test that theory, and learn if it was really Bryan I was communicating with.

Even if it was Bryan, I had to assume that Gallagher had a way to monitor the account, and read our correspondence.

We still had a lot to learn about Chris Gallagher, but I suspected that we were going to learn he was smart, not the type to have made such a significant mistake. At the very least, he had to believe that he could not be hurt by Bryan being in contact with us, and more likely he saw it as a positive for himself.

As with our investigation, I would play it out the way Gallagher set it up, at least for the moment. I had no other choice. But first I had to answer Bryan.

Bryan … I spoke to Gallagher, and I’m working to get you released. Who was your favorite baseball player growing up?

Jonathon Stengel was a combination idealist/realist.

Certainly the prospect of a financially successful career influenced his decision to go to law school, but that wasn’t all it was about for him. He also respected the justice system, and thought he could do good and worthwhile work within it.

That was a significant factor in his decision, after graduating from NYU Law, not to head for the financial security of a large firm. Instead he was awarded a position as a clerk on the United States Court of Appeals, working for Judge Susan Dembeck.

And the time he spent there was all he had hoped it would be, and more. He got to work with brilliant people, on important matters, all the while getting a look at the intimate workings of the system. He decided he would stay for only a year, leaving when Judge Dembeck left, but felt and hoped that he would someday be back, with clerks of his own.

But Stengel also had a need to earn money, and a clerk’s pay was not going to get it done. Which was why he was susceptible to an approach from a fellow NYU alum, Edward Holland, the Mayor of Brayton, New York.

No money would change hands, but Stengel would supply information to Holland, who was arguing the fracking case before the court. Stengel rationalized it with the knowledge that it was not information that would give Holland an unfair advantage; all it would do was provide a “heads-up” for Holland. Advance information would then allow him to position things politically, since his audience was the electorate.

In return, Holland would use some of his significant connections in both the legal and political communities to aid Stengel in his career path.

A simple transaction with no losers, only winners.

To this point, there had been little for Stengel to provide, but now he finally had something. He did not want to make the call from home, and he certainly couldn’t do it from the court, so he found a rare pay phone on the street.

Holland answered on his home number, and immediately recognized Stengel’s voice. “What have you got?” he asked.

“Nothing good, but I thought you should know,” Stengel said.

“She’s staying on?”

“Yes, and she’s the deciding vote.”

Both men knew what that meant. The only chance Holland had to win the case on behalf of Brayton was for Dembeck to leave the court and be replaced by Brennan. Once Brennan was murdered, Dembeck’s deciding to leave anyway would have left the court deadlocked.

But the die was cast; Dembeck was staying, and Holland was backing a losing horse.

“I’m sorry,” Stengel said.

“Yeah. Me too.”

I never got to ask Steven Gallagher if he had an alibi.

My shooting him three times in the chest effectively derailed prospects for an in-depth interrogation.

What would otherwise have taken place was my asking him where he was at the time of the Brennan murder. He could have said that he was home, or at a bar, or performing La Traviata at the Met. Whatever he said, I’d then be able to check it out, with the remote potential to exonerate him, or the far more likely potential to implicate him by proving he had lied.

But all of that never happened, and with him in a drawer at the coroner’s office it wasn’t about to. So part of our investigation had to include trying to discover where Steven was at the time of the murder. The fact that we already knew he was in Judge Brennan’s garage swinging a knife was a complicating factor, but one that we had to overlook.

Emmit’s role was to sift through the investigative information coming in, alerting me to things I should personally follow up on. Unfortunately, we were learning that Steven was a young man who had pretty much cut himself off from the world, once he descended into his drug use.

A notable exception to that seemed to be Laura Schmitz. She was said to have been Steven’s girlfriend, though that relationship had apparently ended quite a while before his death. Steven’s phone records showed calls from Ms. Schmitz with some frequency, calls that continued pretty much until the time I shot him. So she was someone we needed to talk to.

Laura worked as a waitress at the Plaza Diner in Fort Lee. Emmit and I stopped at the cash register in the front, where the manager was handling the register. When I flashed my badge and told him we needed to talk to Laura, he pointed to a woman behind the counter.

“Laura, these guys are here to see you.”

She looked up, saw us, and quickly left the counter area, through an open door to the back. Emmit and I took off in pursuit.

It wasn’t a long pursuit. Laura was standing in a corridor, adjacent to the kitchen, staring at the floor and looking angry.

“You son of a bitch,” she said to me when we reached her. “You son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry, Laura. I know Steven was your friend.”

“He was a beautiful person. And you shot him like an animal.”

“It was not something I wanted to happen,” I said.

She shook her head sadly. “You and me both.”

“We just have to ask you a few questions.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

“Laura, don’t make this harder than it has to be. If you won’t answer the questions here, then you’ll have to go down to the station with us. You could be there a very long time.”

She seemed to consider this, but didn’t say anything. I took it as an invitation to continue. There was an open office off the corridor, and I suggested we go in there. She didn’t answer, but went into the office, and Emmit and I followed.

“Laura, do you know where Steven was on Friday night, just before midnight?”

“He was home.”

“You saw him there?” I asked.

“No, but I spoke to him on the phone at about seven o’clock.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t remember?”

“He wasn’t making much sense,” she said, then added grudgingly, “He was using.”

“Did he say what he was planning to do later that night?” Emmit asked.

She frowned at the question, as if she considered it stupid. “He wasn’t planning anything. When he got like that, he didn’t go out. He stayed in his apartment and wasted his life.” Then she looked at me. “Until you ended it.”

“But you can’t say for sure that he stayed home that night?”

She wouldn’t give in. “I’m sure.”

“Did he sound angry?”

“The only person Steven Gallagher was ever angry at was himself,” she said.

“Can you give us the names of some of his other friends? Maybe people who saw him or spoke to him that night?”

“I was his only friend, besides his brother. And I wasn’t there for him.”

“Do you know where his brother is?” I asked.

“No.”

“Have you seen him in the last couple of days?”

She nodded. “The night before last, but I haven’t seen him since.”

I asked if she had an address for him, but she said that she didn’t, and I believed her. Then I asked her if she had anything else to say.

She did.

“The idea that Steven Gallagher found out where that judge lived, that he even remembered the judge’s name, is ridiculous. The idea that he went to his house that night is even dumber. The idea that he killed him is beyond stupid. And the fact that you murdered Steven Gallagher means you are going to rot in hell.”

As interrogations go, that one was not great.

Bryan Somers couldn’t wait three hours to check e-mail.

He made it to two hours and fifteen minutes, and turned on the computer, simultaneously vowing to himself to wait the full three hours next time. This was extra important, he said, because it would reveal whether Luke was getting the messages.

When the machine powered on, the first thing he looked at was the percentage of power remaining, displayed in an icon near the top. It said “96 %,” which pleased Bryan. He had been afraid that the simple acts of turning the machine on and putting it to sleep might have caused a more precipitous drop. If he was disciplined about using it, the computer would last longer than he would.

The e-mail from Luke was incredibly relieving for Bryan. While the situation with Julie had caused him to question how well he knew his brother at all, Bryan had no doubt that he was a terrific cop. If anyone could find him, it was Luke. Whether anyone could find him was an open question.

He rushed to respond; not knowing whether Luke would answer, or what he would say, had made it impossible for Bryan to write out his message in advance.

He understood the question about his favorite ballplayer growing up. Luke had to make certain he wasn’t communicating with Chris Gallagher, though Bryan knew Luke would be aware that Gallagher could easily be monitoring the e-mails.

Gary Carter. Keith Hernandez. Ron Darling. Take your pick. Lucas, even though Gallagher might be reading these e-mails, keep me as updated as you can. I’m scared and running out of time.

I don’t think Gallagher was making empty threats.

Bryan was a Mets fanatic growing up, and he knew that Luke would view the list of ballplayers as evidence that it was really Bryan conducting the correspondence.

Very familiar with computers, Bryan next typed in a website that would let him find out his own IP address. He was sure that Luke was already trying to do the same, but he could do it more easily.

Except that he couldn’t. Much to his disappointment, he discovered that he did not have access to the web at all, simply to the e-mail account. For whatever reason, Chris had wanted him to be able to communicate with Luke and the outside world but not be able to browse sites. The disconnect from Internet access would substantially limit his ability to help Luke find him, but there was no way for him to override it.

He still had television as a way to learn what was happening outside, but his situation had not hit the news.

So there was nothing to do but wait for another e-mail from Luke. He assumed that Luke had not brought in the FBI, or other authorities, or it would have made it into the media. So Luke was his contact with civilization, and his only hope to rejoin it.

Bryan decided that he would write out questions for Luke for his next e-mail, though Luke would have to be discreet in answering them, since Gallagher was probably reading them.

He might also eventually write out an e-mail to send to Julie, but first he would have to sort through his feelings about her. With no parents, and no children, Luke and Julie were all he had in the world, and they had betrayed him.

It made Bryan feel very alone, and the worst part was that he knew it was not just a feeling.

He really was alone.

One hundred and sixty-eight hours.

That’s how I thought about the seven days that Bryan had been given. Somehow thinking about it in those terms made me press that much harder. But in the back of my mind, in the front of my mind, was the knowledge that I was wasting my time. I was not going to be able to prove that a guilty man was innocent.

Unless I lied.

Perhaps I could describe progress to Chris Gallagher that wasn’t real but would seem to exonerate his brother. I certainly had no moral qualms about doing so, but it would really have to be convincing.

I would need to fake some evidence, and come up with someone I could hold up as the real killer. It would take some creative thinking, but if I wasn’t making progress in the investigation, it would be a fallback position I would turn to.

So for the moment, I had to focus on the real-life investigation, and I was heading back to the office to get updated by Emmit. I turned on the radio, and they were still talking about the Brennan murder. One of his former basketball teammates was reflecting on his life, and the fact that he was a winner in everything he did.

“The fact that this happened just as he was reaching a goal, the Court of Appeals, makes it a particularly unspeakable tragedy,” the friend said.

I had never focused on that fact before. If Steven Gallagher committed the murder, it had nothing to do with Brennan’s appointment to the Appeals Court. Clearly Steven could not have cared less about that, if he knew it at all.

Instead, Steven’s stabbing Brennan to death would simply have had to do with the fact that Steven was bitter and vengeful about his drug conviction.

So it was an apparent coincidence. Brennan was ascending to his new position, and receiving substantial publicity for it, just before his murder. Except I don’t believe in coincidences, and had I not focused on Steven, I would have been cognizant of the fact that this one was a whopper.

So stepping back and looking at it, there were only two choices. One, that Brennan’s judicial appointment and murder coincidentally happened at the same time. Or two, that the appointment and murder were related. For my purposes it did me no good to assume the former; I had to go with the latter.

That realization opened up a new line of inquiry. Rather than analyze only Judge Brennan’s previous cases to find someone with motive, I could look at his future cases, or at least those in what was supposed to be his future.

It was well outside of my area of expertise, but I was sure there must be many cases awaiting Brennan when he arrived at the Appeals Court. Maybe someone didn’t want him helping to decide them, and killed him for it.

I was about to call Julie when she called me. I could hear the strain in her voice.

“Talk to me, Luke. I need to know what’s going on.”

“I heard from Bryan. For some reason Gallagher is allowing him to e-mail.”

“Is he OK?”

“So far. Julie, can we meet later, maybe have a quick dinner? I’ll download you on all that’s happening, though I wish it were more.”

“Of course. And I have some information on Gallagher I can give you then. I wish there were more also.”

“In the meantime, I need to talk to someone who would be familiar with the cases that Brennan would have heard on the Appeals Court.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I’m flailing around, trying everything.”

“OK. Call Lee Bollinger. No, don’t call him; go see him. He’s at his office in Teaneck; I spoke to him an hour ago. I’ll call ahead and tell him to get started on what you need.”

“I’m particularly interested in situations where someone knowledgeable would think that Brennan would have voted differently than Susan Dembeck.”

“OK, I’ll tell him that.”

“How do you know he’ll see me if I just show up?”

“Trust me, he’ll see you,” she said. When Julie sounds that certain about something, you can take it to the bank. In this case I would take it to Teaneck to see Lee Bollinger.

Bollinger is about as big an attorney as you can find on this side of the George Washington Bridge. Most of his clients are corporations, but he also handles some celebrities, especially sports figures. Somehow his cases often make it into the headlines; if a legal case becomes a hot publicity ticket, Bollinger is usually at the center of it.

But except for when his celebrity clients get hit with DUIs, or a domestic abuse offense or two, Bollinger rarely gets involved in criminal cases, which was why I was surprised that Julie knew him as well as she seemed to.

Bollinger’s firm has its own three-story building off Route 4 in Teaneck, and if he’s able to fill it with lawyers, then business must be pretty good.

When I walked into the reception area, I didn’t have to say a word. The receptionist preempted that with, “Lieutenant Somers? Mr. Bollinger is waiting for you.”

Within forty-five seconds I was sitting in the great man’s office, having just been provided with a cup of the most delicious coffee I’d ever tasted. Bollinger was not yet there, but he came in a few seconds later, carrying a folder and offering a big handshake.

After our hellos, I said, “Boy, Julie must have pictures of you in a closet with a goat or something.”

He laughed. “Better than that. She had discretion on a case involving one of my more famous clients, who shall remain nameless. She could have turned it into a huge PR fiasco, or quietly accepted a no contest plea.”

“So she took the plea?”

He nodded. “After telling me this morning that she wouldn’t.” He holds up the folder. “So this must be pretty important.”

“Not as much as you’d think.”

He smiled, obviously not believing me. “Yeah, right. So Brennan’s killer was a kid strung out on drugs, who was worried about how Brennan might decide future Appeals Court cases?”

“You remember what you said about Julie using discretion when it came to your client?”

“Of course.”

“You might want to use some of your own, or she’ll change her mind and discretion your client’s ass onto every tabloid front page in the country. “

He looked surprised, so I continued. “Just tell me what you have, and then don’t talk to anyone else about it, counselor.”

He smiled. “I am a model of discretion.”

“Good. What have you got?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea. It’s only been forty-five minutes since I spoke to Julie, and I put four lawyers on it. This is what they came up with, but I haven’t gotten a chance to look through it. There will be more.”

“How soon?”

“End of the day. I’ll messenger it to your office.”

I thanked him and took the folder.

“I hope you got the right guy,” he said.

“Me too.”

Bryan … he wants me to clear his brother and find out who really killed the Judge. I’m working on it now … the whole department is on it. We’ve got some good early leads. You feeling OK? Anything you can tell me about where you are? Gallagher says he’s not reading these e-mails but he probably is. In any event, tell me whatever you can.

You can punch me in the mouth when I get you out.

Keith Hernandez couldn’t carry Don Mattingly’s glove. Mattingly belongs in the Hall of Fame. Hernandez belongs on Seinfeld.

In all the time I was a cop, I never framed anyone.

I’m not just talking about out-and-out frames, where evidence is created and planted to implicate an innocent party. I’m talking about shadings, about things like not aggressively pursuing evidence that might help the accused, when I thought the accused was guilty.

I always prided myself on going after the truth whether or not it might butt up against my preconceived notions; I’d much rather adjust my point of view than adjust the evidence in any way.

I’m not looking for praise in saying this; it’s my job, and I could say the same of every cop I’ve ever worked with, with the possible exception of one or two. Or three at the most.

But I’d never been faced with a situation like this before, and my strategy was evolving. And it was becoming increasingly clear to me that in order to succeed, I was going to have to frame someone for the murder of Judge Danny Brennan.

My victim wouldn’t be going to jail; he or she wouldn’t even be going to trial. The sole judge and jury who would decide the case was Chris Gallagher. I had to credibly make a case to him that someone, other than his brother, committed the murder.

But I couldn’t come up with a perpetrator out of whole cloth. I also needed a motive, and an ability for someone to have committed the crime. And that was basically why I had gotten the information about the Appeals Court cases. I did not believe that anyone involved in those cases had slaughtered Danny Brennan in his garage. But I needed to make Chris Gallagher believe that they did.

I spent a few hours going over the information in the folder, plus additional material that Bollinger, as promised, messengered over. Much of it was legalese, which I only partially understood, but I identified at least three possible cases to pursue. I would bring it to dinner with Julie, since she was far more knowledgeable about this stuff than I was.

We met at Spumoni’s, a casual Italian place in Englewood. I’d eaten there a number of times with Julie and Bryan; sometimes I brought a date, and sometimes I didn’t. I even remember some of their names.

I got there first and took a quiet table near the back. Julie came in a few minutes later, the strain evident on her face. She still looked fantastic; that was a given. But this time she looked fantastic and very, very stressed.

We didn’t kiss hello; we never did. I don’t think I know another woman in the world, outside of work, who doesn’t kiss me hello, but Julie never did. At least not since the night we did a lot more than kiss.

She just about grabbed the waiter and ordered a drink, a favorite of hers called a “Dark and Stormy.” She asked for it the way she might ask for a life preserver on a ship about to go down, but didn’t wait for it to come before handing me the envelope she had brought.

“Everything you ever wanted to know about Christopher Gallagher,” she said.

“Summarize it,” I said.

“No, it’s bedtime reading for you, but you won’t sleep much after you read it. You do the talking.”

I took her through everything that had transpired since we last talked, including showing her printed copies of the e-mails that Bryan and I had exchanged. It was depressing in the telling, as it drove home the reality that we were getting nowhere.

I was getting nowhere.

“Do you think I should bring in the Feds?” I asked.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “And I don’t think you should.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re a machine, and they will do what they’re programmed to do. They’ll try and catch Gallagher, though I don’t think they’ll be able to. But if they did catch him, it wouldn’t go the way that we want.”

“I’m chasing something that doesn’t exist,” I said.

She nodded. “I know.”

“I’m going to have to fake it,” I said.

She nodded again, and pointed to the folder that I had brought. “Which is why you wanted the case information from Bollinger.”

“Right. I need you to go through it. I saw a few possibilities that we can go after, maybe find a credible villain…”

“So I’ve got my own bedtime reading,” she said.

“Yeah. Julie, is there anything you want me to say to Bryan for you? Or you could e-mail him yourself.”

“I don’t think I should. This is a nightmare for him, and I want it to be as bearable as possible. If he wanted to hear from me, he would e-mail me. You think I’m wrong?”

I nodded. “I think you’re wrong.”

She thought about it for a while. “Tell him I love him. And tell him I’m sorry.”

Chris Gallagher was waiting on my porch when I got home.

He was sitting there, not a care in the world, like he belonged and was thinking of organizing a neighborhood block party. I wasn’t particularly surprised.

“How come you didn’t break in?” I asked.

“No need for the drama anymore,” he said. “You want to talk inside, or out here?”

“Inside.”

We went into the kitchen, and I stopped at the refrigerator. I took out two bottles of beer, and tossed one to Gallagher.

“The gracious host,” he said.

“Hopefully you’re doing the same for my brother.”

“I assume you’re asking him in your e-mails,” he said.

“And I assume you’re reading them.”

He shook his head. “No. I could, but I’m not.”

“You’re full of shit,” I said.

He smiled. “I am many things, but I am not full of shit. I don’t say words unless I mean them.”

“So why are you letting him e-mail?”

“Steven e-mailed me in Afghanistan; it’s the way we kept in touch. I heard from him just six hours before you killed him. Unfortunately, all I did with his e-mails was read them.”

“So Bryan being able to e-mail me satisfies some sense of justice you have?”

He shrugged. “I guess so. I don’t try to figure myself out much.”

“So what are you doing here?” I asked.

“Checking on your progress, assuming you’re making some.”

“It’s been one day,” I said.

“You’ve only got seven.”

“That’s not enough.”

“On behalf of your brother, I’m sorry to hear that. Now tell me where you are.”

I was having a tough time deciding how much to tell him, since at that point I didn’t even know enough to come up with a credible fake scenario. I decided to be as nonspecific as I could get away with.

“There’s an entire task force working on this, though they are not aware of the situation with you and Bryan. We’re taking a two-pronged approach. We’re attempting to establish an alibi for Steven, trying to find out where he was at the time of the murder, and whether anyone can place him away from the scene.”

“How is that going?”

“We’re not there yet. But I have a proposition for you. I am willing to go on national television and say that Steven was innocent, that I shot the wrong man. And when Bryan is released, I won’t go back on that. I promise.”

“No good,” he said.

“Why not? It will clear Steven’s name in the eyes of the world. Isn’t that what this is about? You already believe in him; he doesn’t need to be cleared in your eyes, does he?”

He ignored this. “You said two-pronged approach; what’s the other one?”

“We’re trying to identify other suspects. These could come from defendants in Brennan’s courtroom who might have carried a grudge against him, or people with a reason to fear how Brennan might help decide cases before the Appeals Court.”

Gallagher nodded, apparently agreeing with the approach. “And where are you on all that?” he asked.

“We’re one day in, Gallagher. One day.”

“It took less time than that for you to go after Steven,” he said.

“We were there to question him, that’s all. He had a gun, and he raised it.”

“That’s bullshit.”

It hit me that Gallagher knew less than I had imagined. “He left a suicide note.”

Gallagher reacted angrily. “Be careful, Luke. I am not someone you want to bullshit.”

“I’m telling you the truth. It said that he couldn’t take it anymore. And he said, ‘Tell Chris I’m sorry.’”

“Shut your mouth.”

“So you’re better at telling the truth than hearing it? I can get the note and show it to you, if you’d like.”

He was quiet for a few moments, sort of bowing his head. I couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or not. The really unsettling thing was that I had no idea how he would react; he was a complete mystery to me. Bryan’s life would ultimately depend on whether I figured him out.

When he finally spoke, it was softly, and the words did not seem to come easily. “He was scared. He was alone, and he was scared, and everything ahead of him seemed awful. But you made sure there was nothing ahead of him.”

“That’s what Bryan is going through right now.”

“It’s different for him,” Gallagher said. “He’s got someone to help him. Don’t blow it.”

“Let him go, and I promise I’ll work just as hard to clear Steven.”

He stood up. “Six days,” he said, and then left.

Lucas … I’m feeling OK … I’m comfortable. He’s got me chained, but I can get around, and there’s plenty to eat and drink. Can’t access the Internet, but obviously can e-mail. I have television, local NY stations, and it seems to be satellite, if that helps.

I watched a clip of you doing a TV interview … you might want to spend some time on the treadmill.

The idea of punching you in the face is what keeps me going.

Remember the time Dad took us to a Mets game for the first time and we were amazed at how green the grass looked? I’d sort of like to see grass again sometime.

Please get me out of here.

Julie was right that reading about Chris Gallagher would not be fun.

She had somehow gotten his service record, plus letters written about him by his commanding officers and others he encountered during his military career.

The service record itself was scary, as much because of what it didn’t say as what it did. There were large gaps that did not detail where he was or what he was doing for months at a time. Instead the only listings during these periods categorized him as being TAD, which I knew to mean Temporarily Assigned Duty.

Having served in the military myself, I had no doubt what this really meant, and the dates confirmed it. He was Black Ops, meaning he was put into both Iraq and Afghanistan before we entered those countries. They would have been mostly reconnaissance missions, to prepare for our full-scale military entrance.

While Black Ops are there to scout the enemy, terrain, etc., they are quite prepared to engage any hostile forces they might meet. If they are captured, the US Government will not acknowledge their existence, which in and of itself is not that significant, since they would certainly be killed anyway.

Suffice it to say that our government uses very few wimps for these missions. They send the toughest of the tough, the most well-trained, disciplined soldiers we have. That was who Chris Gallagher was, and that was who Bryan and I were up against. And if Iraq and Afghanistan did not prove daunting for him, it was unlikely that New Jersey would fill him with fear.

Gallagher joined the Marines at the age of twenty-three, and was trained as a communications and electronics expert. Eighteen months later he applied for Force Recon status, which involves training in everything from parachute jumping to underwater demolition to enhanced combat techniques in extraordinarily difficult conditions.

His psychological evaluations seemed unremarkable, though they were filled with words like “resolute,” “determined,” and “purposeful.” The only relative he listed or apparently ever mentioned was his brother, Steven. Their parents were long deceased.

Nothing about Gallagher, or anyone else for that matter, frightened me physically. I think I was born without the “personal danger” gene; I just never get fearful about my own physical safety. It’s not necessarily a good quality for a cop.

Physical fear is as important as physical pain. People who can’t feel pain aren’t able to be protective; for instance, their skin could be being burned and they might not know it. In a similar fashion, fear acts to help one avoid dangerous situations, and my lack of fear is a negative for that reason. I don’t instinctively avoid danger; instead I must force my mind to be logical about it.

But I can feel fear for others, and I was feeling it big-time for Bryan. He always had the fear gene; we were very different in that way. He once confessed to me that it was a major reason why he didn’t follow me and my father into police work. And at the moment he had to be really, really scared of what was going to happen, so I was scared on his behalf.

One of the most disappointing things about the information Julie had given me on Gallagher was his lack of connections to anyone but his brother. I had hoped for friends, or other relatives, who he might be in contact with. They might have led me to Bryan; they might even have been helping to keep him captive. But at least for the moment, that avenue was closed.

I decided to focus on something more upbeat, though pretty much anything would have qualified. I again dove into the Appeals Court cases, since I needed to pick one to focus on. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the one most likely to tie in to the Brennan murder, but rather the one I could make Gallagher believe. They might have been one and the same, but maybe not.

I narrowed it down to two possibilities, and then chose the one that made the most sense. It was a case in which the town of Brayton was suing to prevent a company from doing something called fracking on land adjacent to the town. Fracking, which was the extrication of natural gas from shale, was claimed by the town to be environmentally devastating.

I chose the case for four reasons. One, it was relatively nearby. Two, there was close to four hundred million dollars at stake, just representing the purchase price of the land, and maybe billons more once the drilling took place. Three, the case was nearing a completion and Brennan’s addition to the court could have upset the applecart. And four, emotions in the town were running very high; there had even been violence that was being attributed to the situation. The guesthouse of the man who owned the land had been blown up.

All of this seemed to add up to a believable set of circumstances to lead to a murder.

Bryan, I will get you out … you have my word. Knowing about the NY stations is helpful; think hard about anything else you can tell me. Maybe something you saw or heard on the way there. No matter how insignificant it might seem, it can help.

Also look for serial numbers on any of the appliances.

That wasn’t me doing the interviews … it was a fat actor they hired to play me. Someday I’ll work myself into shape, like you investment bankers.

You’ll see grass again soon, but it will be in Yankee Stadium. Only the best for my brother.

“I am with you one hundred percent,” Edward Holland shouted.

He had just said pretty much the same thing, albeit more softly, at the council meeting inside the Brayton Town Hall. There he had been talking to the elected town officials, as well as the small number of citizens who could fit inside the cramped quarters.

But this was a much bigger gathering, and in many ways a more significant one. It numbered more than fifteen hundred people, holding signs and chanting their determination to protect their families and their lifestyle. For Brayton, it qualified as something akin to a Million Man March.

They were also voters, and they had put Holland in office. They had supported him throughout the fight against Richard Carlton and his company, trying to prevent the fracking that they all believed, that Holland had in fact told them, could threaten their health and well-being.

But they had to be handled, and Holland was the guy to do it. He was their hero, fighting valiantly against the corporate villains. It was an image that he had carefully cultivated throughout the battle, so much so that his “soldiers” were apparently getting carried away.

“I know how you feel, and I share your passion and your anger,” Holland said. “And I know you agree with me that violence is not the answer. It is not what we are about; it is not what Brayton is about.”

There had been no arrests made for the destruction of Richard Carlton’s guesthouse, but it was commonly believed that the perpetrators did what they did in retaliation for Carlton’s attempt to sell the land for fracking.

Holland’s call against violence was greeted by a mixture of cheers and angry yells; it was clear that not everyone in the audience was inclined to take the high road.

“The moneyed interests and many in the media are trying to paint you as vigilantes, as outlaws who are dangerous and disrespectful of the process. We cannot let them do that.”

This seemed to get a more enthusiastic response, so Holland continued. “We don’t need bombs, or guns, or violence of any kind. We have a greater power on our side; we have the truth.”

This was greeted with a roar of approval; Holland now had them under control. He turned to look at Alex Hutchinson, who had emerged in recent weeks as an unelected leader of the townspeople. Alex was nodding approval.

“We are law-abiding citizens,” Holland continued. “All we are seeking is justice and the ability to protect our children and our families. We will get that justice; I will accept nothing less.

“So have faith in the process. Have faith in the American system. Have faith in God. Your faith, our faith, will carry us through to victory.”

By then the crowd was completely with Edward Holland; they hung on his every word. They trusted him; if he said they would win in the courts, then they would win in the courts.

The only thing he failed to mention was what he knew to be the truth.

They were going to lose.

The drive to Brayton took an hour and ten minutes.

It would ordinarily have taken me an hour and a half, and with it raining like it was, maybe even longer than that. Which was why I brought Emmit along, and let him drive.

Emmit drives like an absolute maniac, and he rode the siren most of the way. He did this even though we had no jurisdiction in New York, figuring we could handle any local cops who had a problem. None did.

My first stop was going to be at the town hall to see the Mayor, Edward Holland. We had a brief conversation over the phone, but if I was going to pin Judge Brennan’s murder on the situation in Brayton, I needed as much firsthand exposure to it as possible. I was hoping Holland could draw me a road map.

Holland originally thought I was investigating the explosion at the house of Richard Carlton, his adversary in the legal proceedings concerning the proposed fracking. He quickly realized that it made no sense for the New Jersey State Police to have an interest in a New York crime, and asked why I wanted to meet.

“We believe that a case we are working on here may intersect with the controversy you’re involved in.”

“Can you be more specific?” he asked.

“I can, and I will when we meet.”

He made it clear to me how busy he was, as a way of telling me that the meeting would not be a long one, but he ultimately agreed. I made a similar call to Richard Carlton, who it turned out was in Manhattan for business meetings. I arranged to see him there the next day.

I liked Brayton a lot. It was a sort of sleepy place, with a town center consisting of basically three streets of shops. It was the kind of place where the superstores have not made their appearance, probably because the economics don’t warrant it.

All in all, a nice place to grow up, provided the water was safe to drink and the air breathable. I could see why people would be upset that big industry might damage the cocoon they had constructed around their families. It wasn’t Mayberry; it was considerably more sophisticated than that. But it felt right.

Emmit dropped me off at the town hall, while he went on ahead to the Brayton Police Station to get as much background as he could on the violence. Edward Holland had left instructions for me to be ushered into his office immediately upon my arrival, and that’s what happened.

“Is this about the Brennan murder?” he asked right away, surprising me.

I nodded. “Yes, but very loosely at this point. We’re covering our bases, and as part of that we’re looking into the cases he would have been involved in on the Court of Appeals.”

“That could take a while. He would have had a full caseload,” Holland said.

I nodded. “And we’re checking as many as manpower allows. The fact that there has already been some violence in connection with your case puts it near the top of the list.”

“Somebody blew up Richard Carlton’s guesthouse in frustration and anger. It is extraordinarily unlikely that whoever did it had the sophistication to try and control which judges would rule on the Court of Appeals.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said, and in fact I was sure he was right. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to implicate the “Brayton bomber” in the court run by Chris Gallagher. “But I’ve still got to ask the questions.”

He shrugged. “Ask away.”

“Do you have any idea who set the explosion?”

“Not the slightest. You’d be better off asking the police.”

I nodded. “My partner is doing that right now. I’m asking if you have any instincts about it.”

He shook his head. “I don’t; this has been a peaceful community for as long as I remember. But people are very, very upset, and rightfully so. Having said that, there is no one I know in this town that I would consider capable of such an act.”

“Are you going to win your case?”

“I have every confidence,” he said, without much conviction.

“Is that your official position?”

He smiled. “It is.”

“What impact would Brennan replacing Judge Dembeck have had on the case?”

He shrugged. “Hard to say, which is one of the reasons you’re wasting your time.”

“So you as the lead lawyer, and Mayor, had no preference for either Judge Dembeck or Judge Brennan?”

He thought for a moment, as if deciding how honest to be. “I doubt that Judge Dembeck is favorable to our position, based on her previous rulings, and her questions during oral arguments. Brennan would have been a wild card, hard to categorize.”

“Why?”

“A couple of reasons,” he said. “First, it was in his nature to be unpredictable; I think he relished it. Second, I’m not aware of any similar cases he had ever heard, and he had never written on the matter.”

“So you researched it?”

“Of course. Not to do so would have been unprofessional and borderline negligent.”

“So net-net, Brennan would have been better for your side than Dembeck? That’s your view?”

“Probably, but it’s all very, very speculative. Other lawyers might feel completely differently about it. Anticipating judicial decisions is no way to make a living.”

I was pretty much running out of questions, mostly because of his answers so far. If he was right that Brennan’s joining the court would be a possible problem for Carlton’s side, then they would have been the ones most inclined to prevent him from doing so. Which made them my most likely suspects.

I thanked him and walked over to the police station, which was in the same complex. Emmit was just coming out, having spoken to the lead detective assigned to the bombing of the Carlton guesthouse.

“They’ve got zip; the perp left nothing behind at the scene,” he said. “Which surprises them. They think it’s an amateur who behaved like a pro.”

“Why are they thinking amateur?”

“Because everybody in the town is pissed at Carlton and they aren’t the types to go out and hire professional muscle. So somebody got frustrated and angry, and did the job. They were just lucky.”

Holland had described the perpetrator in similar terms; no doubt he was in touch with his officers. “Is there a leader in the town on this issue, other than Holland?”

Emmit nodded. “According to the detective, the unofficial leader is Alex Hutchinson.”

I thought about it for a few moments, then shook my head. “Doesn’t work for us.”

“What do you mean?”

“According to Holland, the town’s side would have had reason to be in favor of Brennan joining the court. They might have bombed Carlton’s guesthouse, but killing Brennan is a tough sell. It would run counter to their interests. If there’s a killer we can point to, he’s on the other side.”

Emmit nodded his understanding. “Makes sense.”

“So let’s go talk to Alex Hutchinson.”

“You just said that doesn’t work for us.”

“We’re here anyway; maybe Hutchinson will say something to change my mind. Can’t hurt to talk to him; where is he?”

“She’s at the diner,” Emmit said.

“What?”

“Alex Hutchinson is a woman.”

Lucas … something happened this morning. I was watching television at about ten forty-five, and the satellite went out for about five minutes. Then, maybe twenty minutes later, it went out for three minutes. Could it be the weather? Would that have happened everywhere, or just certain areas?

Sorry to say serial numbers have been scraped off. He’s smart. Please be smarter (just this once).

Let me hear from you.

“What was the weather like there this morning?”

“The weather?” Julie asked, obviously puzzled as to why I had called to ask that question.

“Yes. Bryan’s satellite television went out for a few minutes twice this morning. It was out for five minutes at ten forty-five, then for three minutes at eleven ten.”

“I don’t know … I was in my office. I know it was raining; Danielle went out for coffee and took my umbrella.”

“OK, we-”

Julie interrupted me, knowing exactly where I was heading. “I’ll get a subpoena and get the satellite companies to give me any information on disruptions this morning. Maybe it’s isolated to a specific area.”

“That’s why Bryan told me about it.”

“I’ll get right on it,” she said. “It will give me something to do.”

I could hear the stress in her voice, and I felt for her. I also felt for me. But I especially felt for Bryan. “Julie, you OK?” I asked.

“Yes, other than the fact that my head feels like it’s going to explode.”

“I know the feeling. Did you get a chance to look through those Appeals Court cases?”

I could hear the sudden anger in her voice. I had always been struck by her ability to change moods on a dime; some people found it intimidating, but I was not one of them. “Did I get a chance?” she asked. “No, I went miniature golfing instead. Of course I got a chance.”

“Sorry. Unless you have a better idea, I’m focusing in on Carlton versus the town of Brayton, NY. Emmit and I are there now.”

“The fracking case. That’s the one I would go with as well.”

“Good. I need to know what impact Brennan not joining the court would have been expected to have on that case.”

“You think that could have something to do with Brennan’s murder?”

“In real life? No. But it could serve our purpose.”

She promised to dig more into the case immediately, and then asked, “How’s Bryan holding up?”

“Seems OK,” I said. “He’s tougher than I would have thought.”

“Doesn’t surprise me at all,” she said.

We got to Alex’s Country Diner at around one thirty, at what should have been near the end of the lunch hour rush. There were three cars in the parking lot; my guess was that Alex’s Country Diner hadn’t seen an actual rush in a very long time.

There were only ten tables in the place, and two were occupied, plus another three people were eating at the counter. In terms of employees, there was a woman behind the counter, and another at the cash register. Each was in her thirties; they could have been sisters.

It turned out that Alex Hutchinson was the cashier, and when we identified ourselves she nodded as if she was expecting us. She called out to her colleague to cover the register, and we went to a booth near the back.

“I’ve got nothing to tell you now that I didn’t tell you last time,” she said.

“This is the first time we’ve spoken to you,” I said.

“Don’t you guys talk to each other? Two other officers questioned me the other day.”

“They were local; we’re New Jersey State,” Emmit said.

She laughed a very likable laugh, one that said she couldn’t have been less intimidated by us. “New Jersey? What is it you think I did in New Jersey?”

“Actually, this works better if we ask the questions, so let’s start over,” I said. “Did you supply the other officers with your whereabouts when the explosion took place?”

“I told them I was at home, reading a story to my kids. The kids that Carlton is trying to poison.”

“You seem angry at him.”

“Duhhhh,” was her way of telling me I made a stupid statement. I almost laughed myself, because she was right, and called me on it.

“But not angry enough to blow up his guesthouse?” I asked.

“If I thought blowing up his guesthouse would protect my family, I’d blow up his guesthouse. But it won’t, so I didn’t.”

“Maybe you thought it would scare him into keeping the land pure.”

She laughed, quickly and derisively. “The only thing that scares the Richard Carltons of the world is not having a lot of money. What scares me is not being able to keep my family healthy.”

“Just so I understand, you’re not opposed to violence, as long as the cause is just?”

“What they’re trying to do is violence, and the worst kind. It’s murder for money.”

I liked her a lot, and in the moment identified with her. I was having some family protection issues myself.

I changed the subject. “What do you know about Judge Danny Brennan?”

“The basketball player who got murdered?”

“That’s the one.”

“My husband played against him in college, and he got stabbed to death, I think it was in his garage. And he became a judge. That exhausts my knowledge of him.”

“Do you have any thoughts about how he might have ruled in the case your town is involved in?”

“Not a clue, and I had no idea he’d be involved in our case. But if he would have been on our side, then Carlton’s the killer. Go get him.”

I turned to Emmit. “Might as well.”

Before we left I gave Alex my card, and said, “Please make me your first call if there’s anything you think I should know. Anything at all. I’m here to help, and to put the people that are doing this away.”

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.”

“And?”

“And I’m not saying it happened, but can you think of an easier person to frame?”

Emmit didn’t seem convinced, which was OK, because I wasn’t, either. “This murder was done in the dark, with no one around. As far as we know, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence at the scene which would have led us to the killer.”

It was my turn to cut the speech short. “So?”

“So why bother to frame him at all? The killer got away clean. Why go to all this trouble? It would only add to the risk.”

“Why do you ever frame someone? So the dumb cops would stop looking for the real killer. And in this case maybe there was another motive. Maybe it wasn’t just the killer they were protecting. Maybe they were protecting the reason for the killing.”

“You mean one of Brennan’s cases?”

I nodded. “Maybe we’ve been looking in the right place all along.”

Emmit was clearly skeptical. “You believe all this?”

“Probably not, but there’s one other thing that bugs me,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That the informant called us. The Feds had a hotline being advertised constantly on television; they even had a reward offered. But someone anonymously calls us. If it were one of our regular informants, I could understand it. But it obviously wasn’t. So why did he call us?”

“You have a theory on that?” he asked.

“I do. They thought we could be more easily manipulated than the Feds. That we’d take the bait, and maybe even go in shooting. They thought we’d be dumb enough to take it all at face value.

“And you know what?” I asked. “They were right.”

Bryan … we’re checking into weather patterns. Did you hear any thunder? Can you hear anything outside at all? Making progress, Brother … hang in there.

Julie said to tell you that she loves you. It wasn’t her fault … it was mine. You need to know that.

Finally Tommy Rhodes believed he was earning his money.

Well, maybe not all that money, but a lot of it. Because this was one of the most difficult things he had ever had to do.

Once again Frankie Kagan was along to provide protection against any unexpected intruders. Tommy would have preferred that Frankie help in the actual operation, since it involved some heavy work, but it also required a technical sophistication and expertise that Frankie didn’t possess. Frankie’s expertise was better suited to stabbing judges to death in their garages.

Explosives, by definition, are designed to destroy, to obliterate. As such, they often don’t have to be placed with great precision; if the bomb is big enough, the job will get done.

Sometimes, of course, the placement of explosives becomes an art. For instance, in the implosion of an aging building or sports stadium, they must be placed strategically, so that not only will the target come down, but it will come down in a specified and predictable manner.

Tommy had a great deal of military experience with all kinds of munitions, but this assignment was particularly challenging. It had to be done in darkness, in a period of a few days, but that was not what made it difficult.

Man-made structures are finite; like baseball managers who are hired to be fired, structures are built to eventually come down. Explosives can eventually hasten the process, but the end result is inevitable.

This was different. Nature was the target, at least the primary one. And the goal was to inflict damage that would take years, if not decades, to overcome.

He finished the job and set the timers for Saturday at 8 PM. For Tommy Rhodes that moment would be his crowning achievement, albeit a secret one.

But he would certainly have earned his money.

My dislike for Richard Carlton was pretty much instantaneous.

He deigned to see me in his suite in the Pierre Hotel on 61st Street, between 5th Avenue and Madison. I was greeted at the door by a guy who identified himself only as William, and who seemed to be an assistant of some sort. Or, more likely, based on the way William fit into his jacket, a bodyguard.

He led me into a private dining room, said, “He’ll be right out,” and left the room. Carlton came in a few minutes later.

In a bathrobe.

“You didn’t have to get dressed up,” I said.

He chuckled an annoying chuckle, which made me sorry I hadn’t been the one to blow up his guesthouse. Then, “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

I had decided to be aggressive about this interview. Since there was a very good chance that I was going to claim to Gallagher that the real killer was somewhere on the Carlton side of the court battle, I needed to act as if that’s what I believed.

I had to keep asking myself how I would proceed if this were a normal investigation, and in this case, if I suspected Carlton, I would try to shake him. He was obviously complacent and feeling in control, so I would scare him as best I could.

“I am conducting an investigation into the murder of Judge Daniel Brennan.”

He looked surprised. “I thought that crime was solved rather violently. Wasn’t a young man shot to death?”

“If the crime were solved I wouldn’t be here,” I said.

“Then why are you here?”

“We have strong reason to believe that the murder of Judge Brennan is directly connected to the fracking case before the Court of Appeals.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that the Judge was considered a solid vote on behalf of the town of Brayton.” I was vastly overstating it; Julie had solicited opinions that confirmed Holland’s view that Brennan was more likely to side with the town than Judge Dembeck. But it was far from a slam dunk.

“So?”

I decided not to answer that directly, at least not right then. “You share ownership of the land in question with an offshore company, Tarrant Industries.”

Carlton was clearly annoyed with my impertinence. “My company shares ownership, not me personally.”

“You own eighty percent of your company.”

“Is that a question?” He made a motion to look at his watch, as if he was late. It would have been more effective had he been wearing a watch.

“Tarrant Industries has set up a structure which is difficult to penetrate. Can you tell me the names of the principals of that company?”

“No,” he said.

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

“I can’t, but I wouldn’t if I could.”

“Are you denying that you own Tarrant as well?”

“I do not own Tarrant; that much I can tell you,” he said.

“Mr. Carlton, are you familiar with the concept of motive?”

He was now openly hostile. “What are you saying?”

“Your chances of making hundreds of million of dollars have increased dramatically now that Judge Brennan will not be on that court.”

He stood up. “You clearly have no idea who you are talking to. This interview is over. Direct any further communication to my attorney.”

With that he strode out of the room, and William entered moments later. “If you’ll follow me, Lieutenant…”

“Just a heads-up, William. Carlton seems a little pissy today.”

I can’t hear anything … total silence. It’s as if I’m at the bottom of the earth.

It was her fault, Lucas, and it was yours. But I can’t deal with that now. All I seem to be able to do is watch television, and the clock. I don’t think five minutes has gone by without me looking at the clock.

Please tell me about your investigation. I need something to think about that doesn’t involve me worried about being able to breathe.

“Three areas in New Jersey and one in Long Island experienced outages,” Julie said.

“But the Long Island one lasted for twenty minutes, so it doesn’t seem to fit what Bryan said. All the documents from the satellite company are in the folder, and I included a map showing where they are. The supervisor for that area was very helpful.”

Julie and I were having a quick dinner at a coffee shop near her office. Everything seemed to be quick these days, including the days themselves. Bryan was running out of time, so every second seemed precious.

“Terrific,” I said.

“What does it do for us?” she asked, picking at her French fries. Julie is the healthiest eater I know; she throws down broccoli and brussel sprouts like I do M amp;M’s. But this time she ordered a burger and fries, which probably said something about her mental state.

“At this point not enough. But if we get more information, we can cross-check it against this.”

She asked that I bring her up to date on the status of the investigations, which I did, starting with my concerns about Steven Gallagher’s ability to get to and from the crime scene.

“You really think he could have been framed?” she asked, her tone clearly displaying her skepticism.

“I think there’s a lot that a defense attorney could have used, if I had let it get to that.”

“He could have hitched a ride with a friend. He could have stolen a car and then dumped it.”

“There is no evidence that this kid ever harmed a fly in his entire life. He had probably been before a half-dozen judges on drug offenses in the past. All of a sudden he tracks down this one and becomes Jack the Goddamn Ripper?”

She seemed exasperated. “Come on, Luke, you’ve never arrested a first-time murderer? People snap, and drugs make them even more unstable.”

“You seem anxious for me to be wrong about this,” I said.

She shook her head. “I actually don’t care either way right now if Steven Gallagher was a killer or an altar boy. But I want you to focus on the prize, and not waste your time on re-solving the case.”

For some reason while she was talking I was looking at the wedding band she wore on her finger. I’m not sure why; I don’t think I’d ever noticed a ring on a woman in my life.

“You know, when I got there that day, the first thing Steven yelled was something like, ‘You said you wouldn’t come back here.’”

“So?”

“So maybe he thought he was talking to people that had framed him. Maybe they left the bloody clothes there, and he thought they had come back.”

She sighed. “You need to separate the facts there are from the facts that you wish there were,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he had motive. It means he probably couldn’t think clearly because of the drugs. It means he had the Judge’s blood on his clothes. And it means there’s not a jury in America that wouldn’t have convicted him.”

“That’s all true.” She was right in that I was having some difficulty in separating what I wanted to be facts from what I knew to be facts.

“But you’re not buying it?”

“Not entirely, no. I think there is a chance that Steven Gallagher was innocent.”

Julie seemed to decide there were much better things to do than continue pursuing that topic. “Let’s talk about the court case,” she said. “I’ve done some work on that.”

That sounded promising. “What did you come up with?”

“Carlton’s got some financial troubles.”

“His company? Or Carlton personally?” Remembering him in his robe in that hotel suite did not conjure up a picture of a guy worried about where his next meal was coming from.

“Both. The company has been bleeding money for quite a while now; it seems that each new generation of Carltons is less competent than the one before it. And Richard is in the middle of a tough divorce, which is sure to cost him a bunch of cash.”

“Interesting,” I say. “If he wins the court case, he gets four hundred million dollars. If he loses, he keeps a tract of undeveloped land near a depressed town. Pretty powerful motive. Not beyond a reasonable doubt, but definitely strong stuff.”

“Are you trying to convince a jury, or Gallagher?”

“Gallagher. Which might be harder.”

We got quiet for a while, neither of us eating our food. We were frustrated with each other, because neither of us could make the situation better.

Finally, she said, “Luke, I know it’s a long way from happening, but if you are able to do this, to prove his brother innocent, will he let Bryan go?”

“I might be crazy, but I believe that he will. He’s got a sense of justice that he follows, like an internal road map that tells him right and wrong.”

“But that would mean you would have killed an innocent man, his own brother. Wouldn’t he have to do the same to Bryan to satisfy that sense of justice?”

What she said made sense yet didn’t ring true. “I don’t think so; these are the rules he’s set up, and I think he’ll follow them.”

“And what if you can’t convince him that you have the proof? Will he…,” she said, unable to finish the sentence.

“I think he will.”

We were both quiet for a few moments, and then she said, “And then what will you do?”

“I’ll hunt him down and kill him, if it takes me twenty years,” I said. “So maybe he and I are not that different.”

She looked me in the eyes, so intensely that I thought she could see through the back of my head. “You’re very, very different. Did you tell Bryan I was sorry?”

“I did. Should I tell him you want him back? Back with you?”

She hesitated. “This is ground I’ve never covered before, Luke. Do I say what will make him feel good? Or do I tell the truth?”

“It depends what the truth is,” I said.

“The truth is that right now, at this moment, if you told me the only way to save his life would be for me to go on with our marriage, I would do it in a heartbeat. I care very deeply for him, and I would do anything to protect him. But if he comes back, and we resume as if nothing has happened, it ultimately will not work. He’ll know that as surely as I would.”

She smiled, and continued. “That’s how I feel right now, at this moment. Tomorrow, who knows?”

“Maybe you can make it work. Maybe you owe him that.”

“The problem is I don’t love him, Luke. I love you.”

That was something I had both waited a long time to hear and never wanted to hear. And under these circumstances, it was actually hard to process. I’m a disaster at being in touch with my feelings, and in this case my feelings and I weren’t on the same planet.

A hundred things raced through my mind as to how to respond to what she said, and I just as quickly rejected each of them. Finally, I settled on the only one I felt comfortable with.

“Oh,” I said.

But I said it with feeling.

We’re getting closer, Bryan. And there’s a definite chance that Steven Gallagher did not kill Brennan. I was played for a sucker … they sent me in there and I did their killing for them.

This is going to end well, Brother. I’m not saying we’ll laugh about it someday, but we’ll get through it.

Richard Carlton was worried and annoyed.

He wasn’t about to panic; that really wasn’t in his DNA. Things had always worked out for Carlton, and this situation would be no exception.

But it was very irritating, mainly because he thought this issue had been put to bed. With Brennan out of the way, there was nothing standing in the way of the Court of Appeals decision. That would end the legal battle, which would trigger the sale of the land, which would make Carlton unbelievably wealthy. The last roadblock had been removed, but the cop, Somers, was single-handedly dragging it back into the middle of the highway.

The implications were ominous. Cops were loathe to reopen solved cases, especially ones in which they had gunned down the alleged killer. For them to admit an error in a situation like that would be to expose themselves to outrage and ridicule, not something they were inclined to do under any circumstances.