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.
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.
