“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.
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
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
