with. He wasn’t in hiding; there was no need for that. Somers was obviously smart enough to realize that he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by putting out an arrest warrant, so the police were neither after him nor looking for him. If Bryan Somers wound up dying, then of course that would change. No matter; Gallagher could handle it either way.
But hanging out and watching television while Somers was doing the work wasn’t quite Gallagher’s style, so instead he decided to more closely monitor the situation. He would follow Somers from a distance, to see firsthand what he was up to.
The act of doing so would not be difficult. Gallagher had trailed the enemy through mountain terrain in Afghanistan; by comparison the New York State Thruway was a piece of cake. And Somers would not be alert to the possibility; he would have no reason to think he was being followed.
The purpose was not just to kill time, nor to make sure that Somers wasn’t able to locate his brother. The house and shelter was owned by a marine buddy of Gallagher’s, but there would be no record of them having been together in the service. They were both Black Ops, which in army terms was to say that they barely even existed.
Gallagher’s buddy had done what buddies do; he didn’t ask questions when Gallagher asked for the use of the place for ten days. It even gave the guy an excuse to visit his sister in Syracuse.
Gallagher was going to follow Somers to gather information and help him judge the veracity of what Somers was telling him. He fully expected Somers to dramatically exaggerate his investigative progress, thinking that it would make Gallagher inclined to spare his brother.
So Gallagher followed Somers and his partner out to Brayton, and waited as he went into the town hall, and then on to the diner. Gallagher had no idea who he met with in the town hall, but saw that the cashier in the diner accompanied them to the booth in the back as soon as they walked in. Clearly they were not there for lunch, they were there to talk to her.
When they left, he decided not to follow them, but rather to enter the diner. The place was almost empty, and he found it easy to strike up a conversation with the woman who said her name was Alex Hutchinson.
She was more than willing to talk about her crusade to protect her town and family from the environmental disaster she was sure they were facing. And when she mentioned the fact that it was before the Court of Appeals, Gallagher knew why Somers had gone there in the first place.
He left to head back to his motel room, where he would research the case on the Internet.
It would give him something to do.
I asked Emmit to gather any information detectives had uncovered regarding an alibi for Steven Gallagher.
I had not been paying much attention to that part of the investigation for a couple of reasons. First of all, I strongly believed he was the killer, so by definition there could be no credible alibi. But secondly, I feared that just an alibi and a proclamation of Steven’s innocence would never be enough for his brother. We were going to need to come up with an actual guilty party, and just developing an alibi for Steven didn’t get us there.
“Nothing good to report,” Emmit said when he entered my office carrying a large folder with the accumulated information. “Nobody has come forward claiming to having seen Steven Gallagher that night. He made a couple of phone calls, but they were three and four hours before the murder. The last e-mail he sent was earlier that day, to his brother.”
For some reason, when I heard that information, it struck me differently than it had Emmit. But before I voiced my point of view, I asked Emmit to give me a half hour with the detectives’ reports to go over them.
When he came back I said, “Somebody saw Gallagher that night.”
“Where did you see that?” he asked.
“The nine-one-one call. Whoever made that call must have seen him.”
“Unless Gallagher told him about it the next day.”
I shook my head. “He was a loner, had almost no friends, but he happened to see someone the next day and mention that he murdered a judge? Doesn’t make sense.”
“So someone saw him come home with blood on his clothes, made the anonymous call, but hasn’t come forward,” he said.
“It was nighttime, Steven was wearing dark clothing, but somebody saw the blood and knew that’s what it was? And then connected Steven to a judge’s murder twenty miles away?”
“Maybe they knew Steven, and knew Brennan had sentenced him.”
“It’s a stretch, but maybe,” I said. “How did Steven get to and from Brennan’s house? He didn’t own a car.”
“That’s bothered me as well,” Emmit said. “Brennan lived miles from a bus stop, and there’s certainly no bus that goes anywhere near a route from Steven’s house in Paterson to Brennan’s neighborhood.”
I nodded. “Have them check the buses anyway, and every cab company that services the area.”
“Will do. Maybe Steven has a friend that gave him a ride, then realized what had happened and called nine- one-one anonymously.”
“So how come we haven’t found the friend?”
Emmit shrugged. “Doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. Somebody called nine-one-one, and we found the bloody clothes. With Brennan’s DNA. You can’t wish that away, Luke.”
Right then all I was wishing was that I hadn’t been so intent on developing a lie, because it had stopped me from searching for the truth. “Emmit, this kid was strung out on drugs. He lived in a dump with no locks on the windows. Almost never went out of the house. He had no friends. No support structure. Danny Brennan was about to sentence him to prison.”
“And?”
“And I’m not saying it happened, but can you think of an easier person to frame?”
Emmit didn’t seem convinced, which was OK, because I wasn’t, either. “This murder was done in the dark, with no one around. As far as we know, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence at the scene which would have led us to the killer.”
It was my turn to cut the speech short. “So?”
“So why bother to frame him at all? The killer got away clean. Why go to all this trouble? It would only add to the risk.”
“Why do you ever frame someone? So the dumb cops would stop looking for the real killer. And in this case maybe there was another motive. Maybe it wasn’t just the killer they were protecting. Maybe they were protecting the reason for the killing.”
“You mean one of Brennan’s cases?”
I nodded. “Maybe we’ve been looking in the right place all along.”
Emmit was clearly skeptical. “You believe all this?”
“Probably not, but there’s one other thing that bugs me,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“That the informant called us. The Feds had a hotline being advertised constantly on television; they even had a reward offered. But someone anonymously calls us. If it were one of our regular informants, I could understand it. But it obviously wasn’t. So why did he call us?”
“You have a theory on that?” he asked.
“I do. They thought we could be more easily manipulated than the Feds. That we’d take the bait, and maybe even go in shooting. They thought we’d be dumb enough to take it all at face value.
“And you know what?” I asked. “They were right.”
Finally Tommy Rhodes believed he was earning his money.
Well, maybe not all that money, but a lot of it. Because this was one of the most difficult things he had ever
