He snapped his fingers. “Damn. I knew I forgot something.”
“You realize you’re going to have to bring them in, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Once we have forensics that connect this to Brennan.”
“Any indication of that so far?”
He nodded again. “Some bloody clothes in a plastic bag.” Then he smiled about as wide as I’ve ever seen him smile. “Oh, I forgot. There was also a bloody knife in the bag.”
I knew he had plenty of information to justify calling in the FBI, and so did he. He didn’t even need the forensics; just the fact that we were acting on a tip that Gallagher killed Brennan was enough. “They’re going to be pissed.”
“Ask me if I give a shit,” he said. “I don’t answer to them. The President didn’t call me; the Governor did.”
“You da boss.”
“Besides, they’ll know by tomorrow morning either way.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because they’ll see us on the Today show.”
He wasn’t kidding. The next morning a limousine was at my house at five thirty to take me into the city. Barone was already in the backseat waiting for me, wearing his Sunday best.
The publicity shit had hit the fan sometime during the night. Barone had alerted the Governor, the media, and the FBI, in that order. I was already being called a hero, which didn’t thrill me and led me to believe that our hero standards are being lowered somewhat. I had shot a drug-addled kid sitting on the floor; that didn’t exactly make me Davy Crockett defending the Alamo.
Lester Holt conducted the interview, which was fairly uncomfortable. He kept trying to talk to me, since I was the one who did the shooting, but Barone kept cutting in. It’s not that he was imparting crucial information; he basically repeated the mantra that the investigation was ongoing, so there was very little we could say. If I were Holt, I would have asked that if there was nothing we could say, what the hell were we doing there? But he didn’t.
Nor did anyone else, and there were plenty of opportunities. Barone had set up almost an entire day of news interviews, and we traveled from media location to media location, not answering the same questions, over and over again. It seems like half the people in this city are newscasters, while the other half somehow manages to have no idea what’s going on in the world.
If I’ve ever spent a less productive or more annoying day, I can’t remember when. Not only was no news being made, but the trappings were insufferable. For instance, each place insisted on applying makeup to our faces, even though it had already been applied repeatedly throughout the day. By the time we got to the fourth studio, I refused to allow it. Had I not, archaeologists would eventually have had to lead an expedition to dig down to my actual skin.
Barone handled it all with something between good cheer and outright jubilation. I wasn’t quite feeling so happy, and it wasn’t because of the pointless interviews. I had killed a young man, and it just didn’t strike me as something to celebrate. It’s not that I felt guilty about it; he had a gun and most likely would have killed me had I not shot first. My reaction was textbook police work, and would stand up to any scrutiny from anybody.
Gallagher also was likely the man who murdered Judge Brennan, so his removal from the planet was certainly not going to usher in a round of hand-wringing from me or anyone else. I expected I’d feel a little better when evidence tied him conclusively to the Brennan murder, but I was quite sure that it would. But for the moment, I was uncomfortable receiving plaudits for ending a young life.
I called my answering machine at home, and discovered it was filled. There were eighteen messages, mostly from people I worked with, calling to congratulate me, and inviting me to come down to the Crows Nest that night. It’s the bar we always go to whenever there is something to celebrate, or whenever there isn’t.
The only nonwork person who called was Linda Farmer, a girlfriend I had broken up with two weeks before. She hadn’t seemed that devastated by the breakup at the time, perhaps because we dated less than a month. But apparently my new hero status was motivation for her to try and resurrect the relationship.
I decided that I’d go to the office and do more of the mountain of paperwork that I would have to fill out. Then I’d go home … no ex-girlfriends and no celebrating that night. Just me and a frozen pizza.
It was while I was at my desk that Lieutenant Billy Heyward called me. He had been assigned to take over my supervision of the case, now that I had become a key player by shooting the suspect. Billy was a good friend, and a very good cop.
“There’s something I think you should know,” Billy said. “They found a note.”
I knew instantly what he meant, but I confirmed it anyway. “A suicide note?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Looks like you may have done him a favor.”
“Did the note mention Brennan?”
“No. Boilerplate ‘my life isn’t worth living’ kind of stuff. He wrote it to his brother; said: ‘Sorry I couldn’t be more like you.’”
“Have you found the brother yet?” I asked.
“Working on that now. He’s a Marine in Afghanistan.”
I got off the phone and thought about what this meant. I couldn’t get away from the realization that it was entirely possible that Steven Gallagher was raising the gun to shoot himself in the head, before I made that unnecessary. He certainly looked like he was in the kind of pain that made that possibility credible.
None of this made him less likely to have killed Judge Brennan; if anything it probably argued for his guilt. And it certainly didn’t make my claim of self-defense any less justified, at least not to the legal system. Unfortunately, it did make it less justified to me, even though I believed at the time that I was about to get shot at.
I changed my mind, and as soon as I finished the paperwork I headed out to join my friends at the bar.
Not because I wanted to celebrate.
Because I wanted to drink.
The C-130 landed at McGuire AFB at one thirty in the afternoon.
Chris Gallagher got off the plane refreshed and well rested, having slept a good portion of the way. It was a trait common to Force Recon Marines, that branch’s version of the Navy Seals and Army Green Berets. They had the ability to sleep whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. In their line of work, there was no way to know when the next chance would come.
Of course, sleeping on the plane did not require any special talent or training. There was absolutely nothing else to keep him occupied or entertained, not even conversation, since all of his fellow travelers were asleep as well.
Chris expected to hitch a ride with someone towards New York City. There were always people heading that way from McGuire; New York was the obvious first choice for soldiers coming home from Afghanistan. It was the anti-Kabul.
It turned out that Chris didn’t have to look around for a ride. Waiting for him was Laura Schmitz, his brother Steven’s ex-girlfriend. Chris had called and told her he was coming home, but she hadn’t mentioned that she would meet his flight, and he certainly had no reason to expect that she would.
Laura and Steven had broken up two years before, but she remained his friend, and good friends were what he needed as much as anything. She was always there for him, but like Chris, she was ultimately powerless to help him turn his life around. She and Chris kept in contact because of their shared caring for Steven, and while they celebrated his successes, they more often commiserated about his inevitable setbacks.
Laura looked pained and upset, no surprise to Chris, since Steven was in such serious trouble. “Thanks, but you didn’t have to come,” Chris said.
“Yes, I did,” Laura said, in a tone that sent a cold chill through him.
“What’s wrong?”
“In the car. Please,” she said, and they walked out of the building and into the parking lot.
There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that her first words when they got into the car would be, “Steven is dead.” He had been dreading the words, but knowing that he would hear them, for years.
What he did not expect was her next sentence: “The police shot him.”
It didn’t compute. A drug overdose, that was the most likely cause. Suicide, as horrible as that was to contemplate, was always a possibility, when the pain became too much.
But shot by the police? How could that be? Steven was completely nonviolent, dangerous to no one but himself. Chris had time to speculate while Laura was crying, and the most likely scenario he could come up with was that Steven had been caught in the middle of a drug shoot-out between the cops and his dealer.
He wasn’t even close.