Airtight (2 page)

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.