“I told them I was at home, reading a story to my kids. The kids that Carlton is trying to poison.”
“You seem angry at him.”
“Duhhhh,” was her way of telling me I made a stupid statement. I almost laughed myself, because she was right, and called me on it.
“But not angry enough to blow up his guesthouse?” I asked.
“If I thought blowing up his guesthouse would protect my family, I’d blow up his guesthouse. But it won’t, so I didn’t.”
“Maybe you thought it would scare him into keeping the land pure.”
She laughed, quickly and derisively. “The only thing that scares the Richard Carltons of the world is not having a lot of money. What scares me is not being able to keep my family healthy.”
“Just so I understand, you’re not opposed to violence, as long as the cause is just?”
“What they’re trying to do is violence, and the worst kind. It’s murder for money.”
I liked her a lot, and in the moment identified with her. I was having some family protection issues myself.
I changed the subject. “What do you know about Judge Danny Brennan?”
“The basketball player who got murdered?”
“That’s the one.”
“My husband played against him in college, and he got stabbed to death, I think it was in his garage. And he became a judge. That exhausts my knowledge of him.”
“Do you have any thoughts about how he might have ruled in the case your town is involved in?”
“Not a clue, and I had no idea he’d be involved in our case. But if he would have been on our side, then Carlton’s the killer. Go get him.”
I turned to Emmit. “Might as well.”
Before we left I gave Alex my card, and said, “Please make me your first call if there’s anything you think I should know. Anything at all. I’m here to help, and to put the people that are doing this away.”
She nodded and said, “I will.” I believed her, and I thought she believed me. It seemed like Alex Hutchinson only said things if she meant them.
On the way out, Emmit smiled and said, “I don’t think it would be a good idea to get on her bad side.”
“You got that right.”
While we were at the diner, I had gotten a message from Deb Guthrie, asking me to call her back. I did so as soon as we got into the car.
“You’re up against somebody that’s good,” she said.
“How so?”
“We traced your brother’s e-mail back to the IP address. It’s in Afghanistan.”
“That’s crazy, Deb. There’s no way he’s in Afghanistan.”
“I didn’t say he was. It’s a trick that’s used. Not to make it too complicated, they route the traffic through servers set up for the purpose of concealment. He’s probably using multiple servers in different countries; the next e-mail your brother sends could come up with an IP address in some other country.”
“So no way to crack it?”
“Not likely,” she said. “But your brother could find it out himself; there are websites he could go to. He’d get the address before it’s routed.”
“He doesn’t have web access, only e-mails.”
“Like I said, you’re up against somebody that’s good.”
There really wasn’t much for Chris Gallagher to do.
He had accomplished his initial goal, which was to send Lucas Somers out in search of Steven’s exoneration. He had no idea what Somers would come up with, but he had no intention of extending the deadline.
After seven days, if the goal had not been achieved, Lucas Somers’s brother would die. Gallagher didn’t see that as revenge; he saw it as justice, as a form of equality. He wouldn’t be happy about it; he’d much prefer to have Somers succeed. But nor would he feel any particular remorse. He had seen plenty of innocent people sacrificed for a mission; it was simply a fact of life.
If Somers failed, an outcome probably more likely than not, Gallagher would have to come up with another way to defend Steven in death. But he had confidence that he’d figure out something, and wouldn’t worry about it until events dictated it.
Which left him with some time on his hands, a situation that Gallagher was neither used to nor comfortable 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.”