DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (4 page)

“Nope,” said Tremont. He turned his head to look out into the corridor. Brendan heard the noise; a CO was on his way, making rounds. They had to end the conversation.

“So Grimm has more than a single problem.”

Tremont grunted. “One strike of a match could burn him down entirely.”

The plane flew into LaGuardia airport. As it banked to land, Jennifer could see Rikers Island out the window. Rikers was New York City’s main jail complex. It was on a four-hundred-acre island in the East River, between Queens and the Bronx. The flat land mass was green and brown, strapped with roads and parking lots, populated with white, X-shaped buildings that looked like targets. As the plane’s tires barked against the macadam Jennifer realized she was gripping the arms of the seat hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

They left the airport in a convoy— three SUVs and two NYPD escorts; a lead and a follow car. They drove up 81
st
street and onto 19
th
Ave. As they turned towards the bridge which spanned Queens and Rikers Island, she found herself wishing the drive was longer. The sign on the road leading to the bridge read:
City of New York Correction Department. Rikers Island. Home of New York’s Boldest.
It suddenly felt like it was all happening too fast.

She realized her anxiety was caused by a sense of guilt. It had been seven months since Brendan Healy had made the call to the authorities which had resulted in the FBI busting down the door to the room where she’d been held captive. Recovering from her injuries in the hospital, she’d vowed to see Healy right away. To thank him. To help him. But the time had never come. And the Justice Department and the FBI had warned her off a visit.

The train of vehicles crossed the bridge. Jennifer looked out over the choppy waters of Bowery Bay. John Rascher told her that, for a time, Healy had acted delusional, spewing conspiracy theories about the government. Wild conjecture to the New York Police that the CSS was somehow involved in the black markets, the private equity firm Titan, and working with Heilshorn himself. But then, suddenly, Healy had “dropped the act,” and took back any accusations.

Rascher concluded that Healy had deep-seated issues. This whole thing was a shot in the dark.

They closed in on Rikers Island. The buildings seeming to grow in the windshield as the caravan of feds and cops crossed the bridge. On the other side, they passed through a massive parking area and came to a stop at the entry gate. The guards gave everyone’s credentials a cursory look. In a short time, they were waved through. Jennifer felt her stomach lurch as the gate lifted and the vehicles continued their march along Hazen Street, further into the massive complex.

It was like its own city, in some apocalyptic vision of the future. They said it was the world’s largest penal colony, a prison compound of drab, colorless buildings. In a strange way, it wasn’t much different from DC, if it hadn’t been for the endless coils of razor wire.

They turned into the lot for Mothcan Center and at last the vehicles came to a rest. The group of federal agents and city cops milled around in the parking area for a moment. Detective Kendall, who’d been on the Alexander Heilshorn murder case since day one, lit a cigarette. The New York DA had sent him and another NYPD detective to audit. She liked Kendall well enough; he seemed to have his head on straight. He caught her looking at him and smiled. Feeling the blood rise to her cheeks, she looked away towards where Rascher was standing with Harlan Doherty, from the FBI. She approached them.

“I need to see Healy alone.”

“Not going to happen,” Doherty said. The summer day was warm and bright, the sun directly overhead, draping Doherty’s face in deep shadows around his squinty eyes and beneath his handlebar mustache. Since Doherty had met them at the airport, he’d assumed command of the situation. He was a big man, broad shouldered, looked like he could’ve been in a biker gang in another life.

Rascher was studying her, giving her a skeptical look. “Why?”

“Come on, this is my thing,” she said, focusing only on Rascher and trying to ignore Doherty’s ill-concealed look of contempt. “Healy’s been in there, pretrial, for seven months. It changes people; waiting, incarceration. This calls for a friendly face, not an overwhelming gang of cops.” She glanced at Doherty. “No offense.”

Rascher continued to stare at her, as if trying to pry loose some underlying motive. He was the same way he’d been in college, she thought; at once possessive and emotionally unavailable. She knew he was thinking this had to do with some romanticized notion she had of Healy. But he had to know she was right, and not just because she’d studied penology as an undergrad. You couldn’t just steamroll a guy who’d been in jail for this long with half a dozen cops and expect to get good results. Healy would’ve learned to be careful in there. He would be on the defensive. It didn’t matter who a person was on the outside, it happened. It was survival. And the nicest fell the hardest, once the doors slammed home. They changed the most.

“A human-to-human talk,” Doherty muttered, off to the side. “There’s a national threat we’re concerned with, here, Agent Aiken.”

“I know that,” she said. “Which is why this is critical. Healy doesn’t owe us anything.”

Doherty broke out in a gravely mirthless laugh. “Jesus,” he said, translation:
Get a load of this chick.
She looked into his eyes which were a dull, fingerprint-gray color.

“He owes his country,” Doherty said.

She could sense the others; Kendall, smoking and watching them from a few yards away with the other NYPD detective, more uniformed police, looking decidedly out of their depth, gawked around at the buildings, the sky, their feet. The day was mild and breezy, but it felt like a lie. In the air was the scent of men in cages. The bricks and mortar baking under the sun, the odor of metal, of pent-up bodies and aggression.

* * *

After they passed through the security checkpoint with the metal detectors and went through several sets of large, steel-piston doors, Doherty fell in astride Jennifer as they were led down the hall by a CO and the Deputy Warden, a man named Grimm. Jennifer noticed the way Doherty walked, his pelvis thrust forward, his shoulders back, swaying side to side. “You get off on this stuff, huh?” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Last year. You went to Bedford Women’s Facility to speak with the woman who murdered Rebecca Heilshorn. That psycho shrink.”

“That’s right.” She wondered where Doherty was going with this, but he said nothing further. It made her think about the encounter with Olivia Jane. At the end of the Heilshorn murder investigation, once behind bars, Jane had told Brendan Healy that Titan was entwined with the government. It seemed like the feds wanted to throw Brendan into the same padded room as Jane; a criminal crackpot, making desperate claims. So why were they so averse to her seeing him alone?

Ahead of them, Grimm, heavyset, turned to look back at the group following him. Grimm had dark circles beneath his eyes that burnt into his cheeks. He was flanked by two corrections officers. He seemed to be studying the team of law enforcement, as if taking mental pictures. He looked uncomfortable, Jennifer decided. This was his facility, his house, and he was wary of outsiders.

They turned down a corridor and came to a room reserved for special meetings. Jennifer was familiar with these types of rooms. Defense lawyers usually met with their clients in more visible places, either in the visitation center, or sometimes in the cells. The majority of Rikers was pretrial, so there was a lot of legal traffic as inmates awaited their fate. This was a room where defense lawyers caved and prosecutors struck deals, cops interrogated prisoners who sweated under the pressure, seeking ways to end their nightmare. It was equipped with a one-way mirror so that others could look on as the offender was worked over.

The group, composed of Jennifer, Doherty, Rascher, and the two NYPD detectives, filed into the room. Grimm nodded at the CO standing with Jennifer and then he slipped into the viewing room as the CO jangled his keys and opened the main room next door. Everything seemed to echo: the footfalls, the keys, the metal door swinging open. Like it was all happening at the bottom of a well.

There was a long desk, with at least a dozen chairs crowded around. Some of the chairs were different from the rest, the folding-kind brought in to augment the supply in the room. Probably inmates didn’t usually meet with six cops all at once, even in rooms like this. The domestic terrorism threat had forged a nexus of law enforcement.

All of the chairs faced the back wall. The one chair for the inmate faced the door. It was just one more prison precaution: keep the prisoner as far from the exit as possible.

Everyone took their seats, no one talked. Jennifer tried to keep her heart rate down; she took long, deep breaths. She envisioned Grimm on the other side of the one-way mirror at the end of the rectangular shaped room watching her, but she didn’t look that way. She didn’t want to see her reflection.

She rested her eyes, straight ahead, at the back wall. The walls were painted darker than the rest of the prison. The enclosed space smelled of disinfectant, which did not entirely mask the other odors lingering beneath. The acrid tinge of sweat. The stink of bad breath and old coffee. But mostly the smell of concrete, that cool, dank aroma of a cave.

She put her hands in front of her on the table and enfolded the fingers. She was just about to say something to Rascher, break the awkward silence which had descended, when the keys hit the lock behind her. Her heart jumped. The door opened and she was suddenly gripped with fear. Here she’d been thinking that she knew prisons, she felt she understood Healy, yet in that moment one thought crystallized out of all others: she knew nothing.

She wondered if she should turn to look behind her, but she waited. She heard the shuffling of feet and the rattle of chains. These sounds moved around to her right side and then he came into view in her peripheral vision. She turned her head to watch as Brendan Healy shuffled around the table and sat down. His eyes were on her the whole time.

Healy was wearing jail fatigues, institutional green, with INMATE 909896 stenciled on the front and back. He looked bigger than she’d envisioned, more muscular. She’d conjured his appearance from pictures, a few shots gleaned from the media during the Rebecca Heilshorn case, where Healy, appearing reluctant, would be partially hidden behind Lawrence Taber and Ambrose Delaney, the lead investigator. She’d seen earlier pictures taken during his graduate study at NYU Langone in Manhattan, publicity photos for the medical center. In those, Healy had been thin, his eyes often hangover red. He’d dressed in decent suits. Though his ties revealed that he was a bachelor, no wife would choose those colors. Now, his dark hair had been cut short, and he was at least ten pounds heavier than she’d expected, solid on his tall frame. There was a faded purple bruise around his left eye and yellow discoloration along his jaw.

He looked at her across the table, unblinking, his lips pressed into a straight line. He seemed to be waiting for her to make the first move. They all were.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice sounded funny to her ears and she cleared her throat. “I’m Jennifer Aiken.”

“I know.”

Of course he knew. But what other way was there to begin? On the drive to the Island, on the flight in — hell, from the moment she’d first decided to meet with him — Jennifer had thought about what she would say. Any sense of preparedness deserted her now.

“How are you?” she asked.

She watched him calculate a response. It was just something in his eyes, alive and alert, which suggested he was going through some rubric in his mind. He was guarded, of that there was no doubt; but there was more. She felt a renewed pang of guilt. Surely he questioned why it had taken her all this time to come. Or was that self-centered? Maybe he hadn’t been thinking about it at all.

“I’m good.” His voice was rather toneless. “What can I do for you, Agent Aiken?”

“Well,” she began. At the same time she pulled her fingers apart. She realized she had lost feeling in her hands, a strange sensation, and she dropped them to her lap. “First, I want to thank you. You saved my life.”

It felt rehearsed, insincere, but it was the best she could do. So much time had passed. “Without you,” she said, fumbling a little over the words, “I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

He remained expressionless, cutting through her with that studied glare. She waited for him to respond, but it didn’t seem like he was going to. And now she began to feel exasperation. She needed to know why he’d thrown himself under the bus for the Heilshorn murder. Why he seemed to prefer going to prison for the rest of his life rather than any other alternative.

“I’m sure Sloane Dewan thanks you, too,” she added.

Now something seemed to ripple his unemotional demeanor. His expression changed and his lips parted slightly. Then he turned his head away.

Jennifer spoke quickly. “Has she been to see you: Sloane?”

“No,” he said.

“Probably because your trial is still pending. Your date is in three days. I’m sure her attorney advised her that it would be best not to come. Just as I’ve had my hands tied, too.”

He looked back at her again and just for a moment she felt like she’d used a cheap ploy; she was trying to get herself off her own hook, assuage her own sense of guilt. But he didn’t seem to take it that way.

“I told her to stay away,” he said. “I wouldn’t see her.”

“Why?”

Jennifer didn’t need a response, and Healy didn’t give one. He had confessed to the murder of Alexander Heilshorn, claiming he’d acted alone. He said he’d brought Sloane Dewan with him against her will. Either he feared Sloane would try to get him to change his story, or that seeing her would be too difficult, or both. Jennifer changed the subject.

“You’ve waived having your own attorney here today.”

“Yes.”

She took her hands from her lap, lightly gripped the edge of the table and leaned forward a little. “But I can help you, Brendan. I want to help you. I want to make things better for you. Maybe even keep you from trial. Get you out.”

“With all due respect, I don’t want your help.”

“Brendan, you’re facing—”

“Thank you, Agent Aiken,” Doherty said gruffly, yanking his chair forward closer to the table. He settled his large body and glared at Brendan Healy.

“So here you are,” said Doherty. “What a pleasure to finally meet you. I’m sorry to interrupt your banter with our Justice Department Agent, but we have a national crisis here, and you’re gonna help us.”

Brendan withdrew his hands from the table, chainlinks chattering again. His gaze brushed over the cops, and then landed back on Doherty. He sniffed. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try.”

Doherty slapped a large file on the table, then clicked on a digital audio recorder he slid over towards Brendan. “Mr. Healy, tell us everything you know about a group called Nonsystem.”

Jennifer glanced at the recorder. “Brendan, at any time you decide you’d feel more comfortable with your lawyer here, you let us know.”

Doherty shot her a snide look. “We’ve already established that Mr. Healy has waived his right to counsel.” He returned his attention to Brendan. “Besides, we’re just talking. One professional to another. Mr. Healy seems to have been up front about everything so far. Right, Mr. Healy?”

Brendan spoke. “I don’t know much about them. I think they’re something like the Anonymous group. But that their focus is on digital currency. It’s not really my field.”

“They’re hackers,” Doherty said, “cyber-terrorists, libertarians, pick your precedent. They specialize in crypto-currency. Know what that is? It’s digital currency, virtual currency, that’s been concealed. Hidden from the public ledger.”

Brendan nodded. “Okay. So they write software to secure digital currency.”

“Secure? That’s a hell of a way to look at it. We’re talking about hiding transactions where people pay for things with bitcoin. Like when they buy drugs online, or hire murderers, or buy friggin’ body parts. You name it. They want to keep it hidden, so they use cryptocurrency. Nonsystem is preeminent in that area.”

Brendan said nothing. Jennifer was watching him closely. She thought she read something behind his eyes, a reaction to the mention of bitcoin.

Doherty pressed further. “Are you familiar with any member of Nonsystem, personally?”

Brendan shook his head. “No.”

Doherty and Rascher exchanged looks.

Now Doherty looked around for the NYPD detectives. “Okay, Healy. Let’s put a pin in that for a second. I’d like to introduce you to . . .”

One of the detectives spoke up. “Detective Kendall.” Kendall had a medium build, thinning reddish brown hair, hazel eyes. He wore a light gray trench coat and looked overheated. “We’ve met,” Kendall said, nodding at Brendan. Then he glanced around with a half-smile. “FBI,” he said, “DOJ, NYPD. Any letters of the alphabet we’re missing?”

Jennifer suppressed a smile, finding the humor in it nonetheless. The air was tense and the levity welcome, as far as she was concerned. But then she refocused on what Doherty was saying. Bringing in the NYPD detectives had been his idea. He was not only piggybacking her interview with Brendan, he seemed to be co-opting it entirely.

Doherty went on, “Of course you’ve met. You met when you were arrested for the murder of Alexander Heilshorn.”

“Correct,” said Kendall. “I took Mr. Healy’s statement when he—”

Doherty cut him off. “I want to clarify a couple of things, Mr. Healy.” He leaned in and sort of hunkered down, dropping his head between his broad shoulders. “After you were first arrested, and you were questioned by NYPD detectives, by Detective Sergeant Jim Kendall, you were taken to a holding cell. Ordinarily, arrestees first talk to their own lawyers, or to a public defender. But, you were visited by someone else.”

Doherty opened the file. He started pulling out photographs. “These are still images taken from the video camera in the holding cell where you were for several hours before arraignment. As you can see, it’s not easy to get a clear picture of his face. Who did you meet with?”

Brendan looked at the photos, then glanced up at Doherty. “Wouldn’t the jail have that on record? Don’t visitors have to sign in?”

One of the other detectives, the woman, leaned forward. “Detective Connors,” she said. She spoke loudly and looked at the audio recorder on the desk, as if making sure her voice was picked up. She was dark-skinned with an athletic build, and bullshit-detector eyes. “We determined the identification provided by the visitor to be forged. He provided credentials that allowed him to pass through the system.”

“What sort of credentials?” Brendan asked.

“Let’s let this side of the table ask the questions,” Doherty snapped. “What’s important here is that shortly after meeting with this man, you changed your story about what happened at Roosevelt Hospital, with the murder of Alexander Heilshorn.”

“I didn’t change anything.”

“Well, you suddenly became very adamant about falling on the grenade for Heilshorn’s murder. You seemed to want to make sure any and all blame was shifted away from the girl, Sloane Dewan, and onto yourself. Why?”

“Because the blame is mine. Because I was the reason she was there. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“And you maintain that you were the one to kill Heilshorn. With this.” He pulled another photo and placed it atop the pile; a fire extinguisher lying on the carpet in Heilshorn’s office, blood spattered on and around it.

Brendan didn’t look at the photo, but stared at Doherty. Jennifer watched Brendan’s face, the muscle twitching in his neck, the set of his jaw. He was almost close to having convinced himself of it; it was nearly his reality. She didn’t know why it wasn’t hers.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s correct.”

“It was found resting next to Heilshorn’s body, after being hurled through the air and delivering a fatal blow. Sloane Dewan’s fingerprints were on it.”

“She touched it when she moved it aside in her attempt to revive him. I’ve already gone over all of this with the lawyers.”

“Uh-huh.” Doherty was unconvinced. He ran a hand over his slicked-back hair. “Then you claim you yanked her out of there, and the two of you ran through the hospital, evading law enforcement until your capture in the hospital basement parking garage.”

Brendan looked from Doherty to Jennifer. It was hard to make out what was in his mind, but it seemed clear he wasn’t going to sit here and take this much longer.

Doherty leaned back a little. “So what did you and this man talk about? Your visitor in the holding cell?”

Brendan didn’t respond.

“Because we have
other
pictures, Mr. Healy,” and Doherty took them out quickly, tossing them on the pile, almost throwing them at Brendan. The photos slid over one another, spinning and coming to rest. One had rotated around so Jennifer could see it clearly from her angle. Her stomach eddied.

“These are photos taken when people enter and leave the jail. We’ve accounted for everyone that we have pictures of for the few hours you were there, before your first court appearance, when you pled guilty to murder. The only person we couldn’t account for was this man. Because of his falsified credentials. But we found out who he is.”

Jennifer felt her heart beating above her swirling stomach as she stared at the pictures. She couldn’t help but flashback to the time she’d spent locked in the Manhattan skyscraper.

Jeremy Staryles had stood in front of her. He’d placed the vial of thallus sulfate on the floor. He’d been gentle, well-spoken, but completely insane. A sociopath.

Doherty glared at Brendan. He tilted his head. “Anything, Brendan? You want to tell me what you and Staryles chatted about? Because this man is a fucking fairy tale. The Defense Department can only tell us so much, to protect national secrets, but we know he was in black ops. Part of special surgical teams on night raids in Central Asia, and other parts of the world. But then, he disappears. We can’t find anything on him, nothing in the DMV database, no social security, nothing. It’s like he never existed.”

Now Jennifer saw Brendan looking down at the picture. His expression remained inscrutable, his eyes unwavering. He kept silent.

“There were more deaths at Roosevelt Hospital than Alexander Heilshorn,” Doherty said. “And as much as you’d probably take credit for those too, I don’t think you killed two security guards.” Doherty jabbed his finger down on the picture of Staryles. “I think he did.”

Brendan at last looked up at Doherty. “Okay.”

“Okay? That’s all you have to say? You like being in here, Brendan? Maybe you do. Because I think you’re dangling a limited hangout. You’re taking the brunt of the Heilshorn murder and you’re acting crazy and calling on government conspiracies as a cover. Why don’t you tell me about Nonsystem?”

“Why do you think I know anything about them?”

“You want things to get worse for you? You think this is bad? This place?” Doherty suddenly looked around, waving his hands at the room, the jail. “This is a walk in the park, my friend. A friggin’ lead pipe cinch compared to where people go who threaten national security. You need to open up. You need to work with us.”