SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE / 11:18 AM

Brendan was about to get into the rental and finally make the trip to Dobbs Ferry to see Argon’s sister when he realized something.

“Ah, crap,” he said, looking around. He’d lost the cat. It wasn’t vitally important, but it bothered him enough to permit a brief diversion. The cat was something that Argon had left behind.

He went back into the house and looked everywhere. He made “tsking” noises to try and draw the cat out. He had no idea if the cat would actually respond to such solicitations – he’d never had a cat. He checked all of the rooms, and trotted down into the basement to do a quick sweep. No feline anywhere.

Back in the kitchen, he stood looking down at the litter box in the corner. He wondered if there were any fresh lumps in there. The bowl of cat food sat untouched – Sloane had filled it before she’d left. Was that the last time he had seen the cat? It had been there when they were having dinner. When had he last seen the damned thing? If memory served, it had been licking itself near the fireplace when he’d gone into Argon’s bedroom to look through the cop’s belongings. After that he’d spent maybe twenty minutes in the basement, come back upstairs, and then passed out on Argon’s couch. Time was ticking away. He had to let it go.

* * *

He decided to circle the house for one last check. He called out softly as he went, ruffling the bushes, but no luck. Back in the driveway he searched along the shrubbery and then found himself standing at his rental car again.

He gazed out at the street, East View, at the few cars parked along the curb. Nary a blue sedan since Russell Gide’s BMW.

Still.

He looked at the neighboring houses. To his right, a white one with black shutters. Across the street, a broad Colonial with a lower bay window. He thought he saw a shape move behind the glass, or perhaps it was just the reflection of a rustling tree.

He turned his attention to the rental car.

A thought began to form in his mind. It built like a thunderstorm.

“Here, kitty kitty,” he said softly.

His eyes darted from side to side, sure now that he was being watched. Somewhere, somehow, he was being watched. It was just in the air. He could feel it crawling over him.

Brendan lowered himself onto the pavement next to the rental, wincing at the pain in his hip. “Here, kitty.” He dipped his head down and scanned the underside of the vehicle.

He was no auto mechanic, but everything appeared to be normal.

Still, he got down on his stomach and inched himself beneath the vehicle for a closer look.

“Kitty,” he said more loudly. “Is that you?”

He checked everywhere he could think. There were dozens of different devices used to bug a vehicle, they came in many shapes and sizes. Most attached with a strong magnet. The device could be hotwired into the car’s electrical system or contain a long-life battery.

After ten minutes of uncomfortable searching, he found it, tucked up under the right front wheel well. Brendan felt a sense of accomplishment and fear as he snapped free the small black casing, about the size of a cell phone. Still beneath the car, he popped it open to reveal a small black box with two red telltale lights, blinking. On one side of the face were the letters GSM, on the other, GPS. There were two circled numbers, three and four. Just below that was the port for a SIM card.

A tracking device.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO / Monday, 11:36 AM

The phone buzzing in his pocket nearly gave him a heart attack.

“Titan Med Tech,” Colinas said as Brendan pulled himself out from underneath the car. “That’s the company which supplied the medical equipment. EMTs on scene at UAlbany, where we took Forrester down; their supplier was Titan Med.”

“Bingo,” said Brendan. He stood and dusted himself off, looking around.

“Something . . . something messed up about this, Healy. I mean, maybe you’re right. There’s definitely a ‘Titan.’ But, right out there up front? The construction company, the med tech supplier. What the hell, man?”

“Yeah,” Brendan said. He stared down at the shadow beneath the car, thinking of the tracker.

“I don’t get it. It leaves an obvious trail,” said Colinas.

“Probably to nowhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, it leads somewhere. Titan Med Tech is a company that Alexander Heilshorn invested heavily in. I went through those financial records again, the ones we subpoenaed, you know, doing our due diligence, on the Heilshorn case. Titan Med was behind a huge super PAC in the last gubernatorial campaign. Not long after the Supreme Court Citizens United ruling made it possible for businesses to pour in unlimited money. The right to free speech and all that – monetary giving is considered indirect speech and protected under the First Amendment. That’s the theory anyway.”

“Janseth?”

“Yup, that’s him. They said he was a surefire bet for governor until some other guy showed up and they said he was going to give Janseth a run for his money. Guy coming out of the legislature. But then he got into all that hot water, upsy-daisy went his campaign.”

Brendan felt something move deep within his memory, a large stone rolling away.

“Largo.”

“That’s right, I think.” Colinas paused, and Brendan could hear him breathe. “You think Janseth or Largo are involved in what happened to Forrester? Man, whenever you bring this shit up, it makes my head ache.”

“Me too.”

“We need bigger guns on this.”

“I know. There are bigger guns. I think Argon’s death was T-O-T-ed to the FBI, or some other Fed agency. Maybe the HTPU is already on it. I need a contact over there; the one I’ve got is not answering her phone. Can you find out who is running the show?”

“Jesus, Healy. You give me too much credit. I mean, I am a superhero, but no one is supposed to know my secret identity.” Colinas was being typically jocular, but Brendan heard the fear in the state detective’s voice. Brendan could understand it completely. He thought of the tracking device underneath the rental car, as he considered his next move.

“Just do your best. Would you do that for me?”

“Yeah man. I don’t have any other cases piled up on my desk, a detective sergeant who’s breathing down my neck, a wife who needs me every other hour while the baby sucks her dry. Nothing like that.”

Brendan chuckled. It was an empty sound. The morning was filled with low stratus clouds, like fire ash. Everything seemed too shaded, too grimy. Snow was in the air.

“I’m sorry, bud.”

Colinas sighed. “Oh and you wanted to know how Taber’s doing. You’re going to love this.”

“What?”

“Vacation. Started this morning. He’s off for two weeks and no one at the department knows where. In fact, I think I stirred up a bunch of shit. Bostrom said he was going to Florida, and then the woman – I forget her name – said he was going to Bermuda. I asked who with. They said alone. Personal reasons, they said. Know what I think?”

“Please tell me.”

“Taber is going through a divorce. I made a quick call to Bostrom. All that’s left is the signing, from what he told me, but he didn’t know for sure. He seemed sick over it, and you know Bostrom; he doesn’t show much emotion.”

Brendan remembered Bostrom well. Bostrom had been the OSO, the deputy first on-scene at the Rebecca Heilshorn murder. He was a genuine tough guy: crew-cut, muscle. Bostrom was fiercely loyal to Taber. So if Bostrom said Taber was going through a divorce, then it was probably true.

Colinas continued to display some nervousness. “Has Taber lost it, or something? Divorce can be a bitch, man, my brother went through it. What do you want me to do?”

“Just sit tight. I’ll be in touch again soon.”

“Roger that.”

“Thank you, Rudy. I owe you.”

“Yes, you do.”

Brendan hung up. This thing was beginning to unravel faster than he could follow. He felt like he needed to launch up into space, to get some vantage point where he could see it all together from above, and his intuition told him that Sloane was part of getting a grip on it all.

He felt anxiety settling into his neck and shoulders. The last thing he wanted to do was put anyone in danger. He was being tracked by the same people who’d had a hand in Argon’s death.

But then again, the best thing to do would be to keep up appearances. Picking up Sloane, a friend of Argon’s, and visiting the sister was the natural thing to do.

If someone was after him, though, they’d know right where he was headed. He could be putting Sloane in serious jeopardy.

He couldn’t do that. He had to proceed without her. He decided to call her and tell her he wasn’t going to be able to make it, that something else had come up. He hated to lie, it seemed like he was knee-deep in lies and cover-ups, but he owed it to Argon to protect Sloane.

And what about Philomena, for that matter? What if he showed up at the nursing home where Argon’s only sibling lived and someone else found out about her, where she lived? What significance was there in that she had inherited everything? Taber had wanted Brendan to find some secret that Argon had hidden away. For all Brendan knew, Philomena was it. And he might lead whoever was watching right to her.

“Goddammit,” he said, as the first snowflakes started to twirl down from the sky.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE / Monday, 11:53 AM

Jennifer paced back and forth in the studio space high above the streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side where a delicate snow was falling. Her rational side suggested that she should conserve energy – if she really had been poisoned, walking around like this was only working the toxin into her blood stream faster, carrying it towards her vital organs.

Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but her other side was suggesting a different scenario entirely: she hadn’t been poisoned at all, and this was some sort of test, some trick to see what she would do. It was such an outlandish idea – poisoning by thallium – it had to be a bluff. They were watching her, she decided, so she had spent ten minutes scanning the room for any type of recording device. A miniature camera – they could get them so small now that they could be put up someone’s rectum, so it could be anywhere in the room – or a small audio recorder, something.

Beneath the bank of windows overlooking 2
nd
or 3
rd
Avenue (she was leaning towards 3
rd
) was a long radiator. It was the tall kind, about a foot and a half high, mounted to the wall.

The radiator was divided into sections. She found four seams, indicating five individual units riveted together. If she could find something to jam into the seams she might be able to pry one unit partially away from the other. She wasn’t sure why she would want to do this; perhaps she thought she could yell down a piece of conduit. But Jennifer didn’t know much about heating. Did these units carry water? Or were there electric heating coils in there? Her lack of knowledge didn’t stop her from banging on the radiators as loud as she could and screaming for help for a full three minutes, until she lost her voice. She left a dent in one of the contiguous units – she’d kicked it harder than anything ever in her life. Her foot was still throbbing inside her running shoe; the big toe felt twice its size.

No, kicking and screaming and yelling down radiator shafts wasn’t going to do anything. She needed to use her mind, not resort to some base, caged-animal routine. She needed to think her way through this case, take what she knew, and put it together now, when it counted the most.

She forced herself to sit down. She crossed her legs and sat Indian-style, straightening her spine, placing her hands on her knees, and closing her eyes for a moment, as if about to meditate.

She decided to do a mental exercise: a search for a link between the Heilshorn murder and the dead police officer, Seamus Argon. That was the way to get perspective. It was also the way to not go into shock.

She conjured up the names and faces of every player involved. This included the detectives and the Sheriff from the Heilshorn case – all the law enforcement there – as well as the victim, of course, and all of the suspects and persons of interests. She had been over the files so many times, doing her routine, working in a way she knew some of her co-workers poked fun at – laying out all the papers, tacking documents and images up to bulletin boards.

It helped that she had a borderline-eidetic memory. She could see them all now, faces, names, rap sheets, and biographies.

And then she did the same for the Argon situation, consulting the information she’d managed to cobble together after her enlightening talk with that psycho-witch Olivia Jane. There was Seamus himself, front and center, a mustache like
Magnum P.I.
, skin crinkled around the eyes. A good cop, from everything she’d read. A hero cop, several times over, but his crowning glory the rescue of a premature baby from the bowels of White Plains. Then there was Cushing, the new chief of police for Mount Pleasant, so green he was still dripping sap. And Goro Uchida, from Internal Affairs, who had replaced Anthony Carrera (his outgoing message, when she’d tried to call him, ended with a cryptic
arriba, ciao
, which had stuck in her mind.) Carrera did a pretty big “ciao” on everyone after all, and mysteriously dropped out of the picture.

Of course, any connective tissue between the Heilshorn case and the Argon case was majorly assumptive. The task force had only begun to unearth, let alone prove, that a human trafficking issue was unquestionably at the heart of all of this. A stygian network of high-profile escorts which was somehow entwined with organized crime, and possibly even certain parts of the government. It was the backdrop, but it was as ungraspable as smoke.

But the relationships between the individuals, Jennifer thought; those connections were where the truth was revealed. There was a bridge. Something or someone connected Heilshorn to Argon.

And she felt she had her answer – or, at least, part of one.

Brendan Healy.

FBI profiler Petrino had put together some interesting findings. Seamus Argon had taken Brendan Healy under his wing after he had lost his wife and daughter and become suicidally depressed. This was corroborated, in a fashion, by Olivia Jane, who said that Healy’s aggressive behavior, mood swings, substance abuse, and chronic depression rendered him unstable. The more Jennifer reflected on the interview with Jane, the more convinced she felt that Jane had been trying to persuade her of something. To prove that Brendan Healy was unreliable, incidental, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. To discredit him, and what he might know.

As Jennifer mulled this over, she felt the first sensations of something wrong in her body. It felt like she’d swallowed baking soda and it was bringing up some gas. She realized she was thirsty, too, and hadn’t had a drink of water since the previous night. Nothing to eat either – she didn’t eat before a run.

She tried to ignore the feelings of thirst, and the unpleasant unraveling of something in her gut, which was forcing air up her esophagus. Nevertheless, she burped, and it tasted briny and toxic. The thallium was working its way deeper into her body. And she was locked in this room.

Unable to keep it all at bay any longer, Jennifer started to cry.

Soon the sadness was sucked back up by the anger, like a dwindling fire suddenly fed on a fresh source of oxygen. She got to her feet and found herself back where she had been twenty minutes before, banging on the radiators and shouting, then standing and whacking at the windows with her bare palms; then the hands as fists as she pounded on the door, screaming now, her voice getting hoarse, her palms and knuckles red and bloody, until she slid down the door and crumpled into a ball on the floor, holding her hands out in front of her like mangled things.

There she breathed shallowly and her mind went blank.

She stayed like that for a while until she heard a noise.

It sounded like a freight elevator was ascending or descending somewhere on the other side of the door.