Ellery’s posture became closed, almost hostile. “Maybe they deserve it,” she said hotly.
“Maybe. The point is we don’t know.” McGreevy had trained Reed, had gone to bat for him last year when his life had been imploding. They were yoked in a way that went beyond the usual chain of command: if Reed blew the whistle and destroyed the reputation of one of the Bureau’s most decorated agents, the director might force McGreevy’s resignation, but he wouldn’t be shaking Reed’s hand for the trouble. Reed could kiss any chance of promotion good-bye forever. Or, possibly worse, no one might actually care that the FBI had potentially railroaded an innocent man twenty-five years ago, and Reed wasn’t sure how he was supposed to live with that outcome, either.
“So we look for him,” Ellery said, sticking out her chin. “We find Earl Stanfield and see what he knows.”
“I’ve done the usual searches already,” Reed told her. “If he’s still living, he’s off the grid.”
There was a sharp knock at the front door, making Ellery jump. “Now what?” she muttered as Bump went skittering toward the door, barking his fool head off. Reed followed her to see who it was, and the opened door revealed Detective Rhodes on the other side. “Ms. Hathaway, you’re looking decidedly less green today. I hope you’re feeling better.” She did not wait to be invited in but crossed the threshold with breezy confidence, forcing Ellery to the side.
“Yes, thanks,” Ellery replied as she shut the door behind the detective.
Rhodes nodded in his direction. “Agent Markham,” she said slyly. “Still on the job, I see.”
Reed cleared his throat, suddenly self-conscious that he was standing around dressed in yesterday’s clothes. Then he realized Rhodes hadn’t changed, either. “Ms. Hathaway, I wondered if you’d had any further ideas about the shooter from last night.”
Ellery shook her head slowly. “I told you—I never saw them.”
“Well, maybe this will help. The tech boys took that video and got it cleaned up as good as possible. This is the best view we got of the shooter. Does he look familiar to you at all?”
Ellery took the printed image from her and studied it for a long moment. “I’m not sure. I don’t recognize him at all, but there is something familiar…”
Reed stepped nearer so he could look, too. The black-and-white photo was grainy and dark, but the face was clear enough to him. “I know him,” he said, and both women turned in surprise. “That’s Jacob Gallagher.”
A furrow appeared in Rhodes’s otherwise smooth brown forehead. “Who?”
“Oh my God, I think you’re right.” Ellery regarded Reed with wide eyes. “What the hell was he doing in that alley?”
“Saving your life, apparently.”
Rhodes put her hands on her hips. “Hello? You two want to fill me in here? Who is Jacob Gallagher?”
“Have you heard about that furniture store fire from the 1980s?” Ellery said. “The one where the boy died. His name was Bobby Gallagher, and Jacob is his brother.”
“And you know him how?”
“I’ve never actually met him,” Ellery said as she handed back the police photo. “I know his mother, sort of. We belong to a group together.”
Rhodes had her notebook out now. “What kind of group?”
Ellery hesitated. “Survivors of violent crime. Myra Gallagher, she was badly burned in the fire, and of course her son Bobby was killed.”
Rhodes touched the side of her head like it was starting to ache. “And this has what to do with the other son, Jacob?”
Reed glanced at Ellery, both of them measuring how much to say. “Jacob was at the scene the night of the fire,” Reed said eventually. “He would have been sixteen at the time.” He crossed to the coffee table and withdrew his laptop from his briefcase. Within a minute or so, he had called up the enhanced news photos that clearly depicted young Jacob Gallagher among the crowd shots from the night of the furniture store fire. For added measure, he showed Rhodes Jacob’s current driver’s license picture so that she could see the resemblance to the image of the shooter.
“You’re right, it looks like the same guy,” she said as she looked back and forth between the two photos. Then she trained her gaze squarely on Ellery. “So assuming the shooter is Jacob Gallagher—the question is, why? Why was he in the alley and why did he shoot Michael Murphy?”
Ellery was used to hard questions, and she didn’t wilt under Rhodes’s stare. “As I’ve said, I was unconscious at the time. Maybe when you find Jacob Gallagher, you can ask him.”
Rhodes thinned her lips and narrowed her eyes. “This little revelation you two uncovered—that Jacob Gallagher was there the night his family’s store burned up—does he know about it?”
“We haven’t said anything to him,” Reed replied, and Ellery looked at the floor. He suspected that meant she’d passed on the information to Myra, which meant Jacob could very well know they had been investigating him.
Rhodes clearly sensed this, too, because she shook her head and took out the photo of their shooter again. “I’ll put my people on Jacob Gallagher and see what turns up,” she said. “And in the meantime, I’d advise you both to stay away from him. If you see him anywhere, you don’t confront him, don’t ask him any questions—you call me, you got that?”
“He saved my life,” Ellery said, plainly not intimidated by the thought of encountering Jacob Gallagher.
“Oh, yeah? We’ll see about pinning a medal on him. Meanwhile, I’ll ask you: how often do you have to visit the range to stay accurate with your weapon? Four times per year? More? I was down at Moon Island last month checking out the new recruits, and most of ’em couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.”
“And your point is?” Ellery asked.
Rhodes shrugged. “Gallagher—if in fact this is him in the picture—he shot Murphy with your gun. That probably means he didn’t have a gun on him, which also probably means he doesn’t own one, because I’m thinking he’d bring it if he was planning on hanging around some back alley in the middle of the night. So there he is, standing at the end of the alley while the two of you are fighting back and forth in the dark. He sees the gun, grabs it.” She pantomimed picking up the gun and aiming it in Ellery’s direction. “He hits Murphy with one shot but the other two were wide to the right by about three feet, including one that hit the Dumpster not too far from your head.”
Ellery blinked. Reed’s breath caught in his throat. Rhodes dropped her imaginary weapon. “So my point is,” she said with emphasis, “maybe Murphy wasn’t the person who Jacob Gallagher was aiming at.”
13
Night began in the midafternoon. The shortest day was coming, and with it, a reminder that Boston properly belonged one time zone over, out in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere. Ellery and Reed were sitting in her rented car in the hospital parking lot, but to Ellery, it felt like the edge of a cliff. He had the wheel—her head injury meant she shouldn’t drive—and they took turns watching the clock count down the minutes until she had to be inside for group and he had missed the Florida deadline. She sat on her hands so she wouldn’t bite her nails and regarded his face in the shadows. She could feel it slipping away from him, the future he’d thought he was going to have, and this was his reward: to sit in a cold, dark parking lot with her.
She had wondered off and on what it might be like to be someone’s priority, to be number one, even if it was only for a short time. Her father had left when she was ten and never looked back. Had he seen the news later on? Had he heard what had happened to her? She liked to imagine he didn’t know, that maybe he’d found a place far away where Francis Coben did not exist. Her mother had had to choose between the child who was dying and the one who’d made it out alive, and so it had been no choice at all. Once the injuries had healed, Ellery was on her own again. The only person to pick her, to choose her best of all, had been the man who’d locked her in a closet and threatened to chop off her hands. After that, anonymity and detachment had felt welcomi
ng, like a lessening of pressure, a way to disappear.
She felt that pressure bearing down on her as she fidgeted in her seat next to Reed. Don’t do this, she wanted to tell him. I’m not worth it. She couldn’t let herself get used to him being there, because eventually he would have to go home again. Sooner or later he would realize everything he’d lost.
“You could still go,” she said softly, and he tore his gaze from the clock.
They stared at each other in the low light and she couldn’t read his expression. “It’s done,” he said finally. “Now we wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“To see what happens next.”
Ellery was no good at waiting, so she ducked out into the frigid wind, fighting its force all the way across the parking lot until she could escape into the relative quiet of the hospital corridor. She found the usual room with its familiar roster of faces. Miles gave her a crinkle-eyed smile and a little wave. Tabitha was scrolling through her phone and didn’t bother to look up. Alex was making himself a coffee, while Dr. Sunny leafed through her notes. Ellery took an empty seat next to Wendy, who was slouched in her chair, her eyes fixed somewhere beyond the confines of the room. “Hey,” Ellery murmured to her. “How’s it going?” She was interested in the answer, but she was also watching the door for Myra’s arrival. She wasn’t sure exactly how to start a conversation this time: Hey, did your son happen to take some shots at me? Any idea where he might be now?
Wendy gave a tight, one-shoulder shrug. “My sister wants me to move out. She says it’s been months since it happened and I should be over it by now. That if he wanted to come back for me, he would’ve. She says I freak her kids out, hanging around the house all day, crying at weird times.”
Ellery’s heart squeezed in sympathy and she felt useless all over again. “I’m sorry.”
Wendy turned to her abruptly, her dark eyes flashing. “You think they’ll ever kill him? Coben? He’s been on death row forever. What are they even waiting for anymore? Stick the needle in already!”
“I—I don’t know.” Ellery swallowed. “It’s not up to me.”
Wendy shrank back into her seat, huddling down. “It should be.”
“Okay, everyone, it’s time to get started,” Dr. Sunny called pleasantly, and the others took their seats. Ellery glanced at the door but Myra wasn’t rolling through it. Maybe the cops had been to see her. Maybe she was off somewhere, hiding Jacob. Ellery considered myriad possibilities and only partially paid attention to what was happening around her. She deferred when it was her turn to talk, and Dr. Sunny let it go with a small frown. Alex was talking about his plans for the Christmas holidays, but Ellery was subtly using her phone to look up Myra Gallagher’s address. Her search came back empty.
When the group broke up, Ellery hung back until she could approach Dr. Sunny alone. Dr. Sunny greeted her with a calm smile. “Ellery. Can I help you with something?”
“Myra wasn’t here today.”
“Yes, I noticed that. It’s not unusual for her to skip a session or two here and there.”
The group was not due to meet again until after the New Year, and Ellery couldn’t wait that long. “I need to get in touch with her,” she said. “Do you happen to have her address?”
Dr. Sunny paused from gathering up her things. “I’m sorry, but I can’t share that information with you. It’s confidential.”
Ellery blocked her path to the door. “Please,” she said. “It’s urgent.”
Dr. Sunny’s normally impassive face appeared skeptical. “Urgent?”
“Myra might be in danger.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. If Jacob was going around shooting people, it was impossible to predict what he might do next.
“Then you should contact the police,” Dr. Sunny said.
“I am the police.” Ellery’s frustration crept up a notch.
“No, you’re not. And at the rate you’re going, that situation is going to become permanent.”
Ellery reined in her temper. She had temporarily forgotten the part about where Dr. Sunny would be reporting her every word and thought back to the brass. “I’ve done everything you asked me to, showed up to every session.”
“Yes,” Dr. Sunny acknowledged with a tilt of her head. “You’re here, physically. You answer questions when asked. But your participation is limited and your attention often seems elsewhere. You volunteer almost nothing about your experience.”
“What can I add that hasn’t already been said? It’s all out there already in books and movies and magazines.” She waved wildly in the direction of the windows. “When I think about the gallons of ink that’ve been spilled already on Francis Coben, it makes me want to never mention him again. He wants me to talk about him—don’t you get that? He’d love it if he knew you guys had me sitting in some shrink’s office, reliving every minute in Technicolor detail. That’d be like a friggin’ wet dream for him!”
Dr. Sunny did not appear moved by her tirade. “I’m not saying you need to talk about Coben. I want you to talk about you.”
Ellery opened her mouth and closed it again. The woman didn’t get it: there was no way to separate the two. Ellery shook her head and looked away. “I told you at the beginning, I don’t go in for talking. I’ve told the whole damn story multiple times now, and the ending never changes.”
“And it won’t,” Dr. Sunny agreed. “Not until you say the part of the story you’ve been leaving out.”
Ellery looked at her sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll have to tell me. Whatever you’ve been afraid to say—whatever causes you to shut down every time we talk about your future—that’s what you need to examine.”
Ellery bit back a sarcastic reply about how nice it must be to sit around and examine one’s feelings all day, but her time was better served trying to keep dangerous criminals off the street. Sure, it might mean fewer terrorized clients for Dr. Sunny, but busting a sadistic rapist or a deadly arsonist had to be viewed as an overall net benefit for humanity—whether they felt all sunshiny about that fact or not. “Right now, what I need is to reach Myra Gallagher. Maybe you have a phone number, or an email…”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”
Back in the parking lot, Ellery found Reed checking his email on his phone. “Not fired yet,” he remarked with grim humor as she climbed inside the car.
“Myra wasn’t at group today. The doctor says she does that sometimes—skips a meeting—but the timing worries me.”
“It does seem odd. Of course, she may be tied up with Detective Rhodes for all we know.”
Ellery felt a prick of guilt about Rhodes and all the parts of the story she’d left out from telling the detective. Rhodes was out there crusading on her behalf with only partial information. “Myra Gallagher’s address isn’t publicly listed,” she began, and Reed gave her a long-suffering look, no doubt because he imagined her asking him to use his FBI connections to dig up the information, despite the fact that he had no legal standing to do so. “But I was thinking about Jake, about how he stayed even after his brother died, about how everyone seems to stay, generation after generation, right in the same neighborhood, even when it might be better to get out. The Gallaghers had their store burn down. Their child died. Maybe … maybe they stayed, too.”
“The address would be in the initial reports,” he said, following her logic as he started up the engine.
A quick stop at her apartment allowed Ellery to dump some kibble in Bump’s bowl and then to look up the Gallaghers’ old address from the files that Bertie Jenkins had passed along to them. They had lived in a small house on Everett Street in East Boston at the time, and a quick check of property records indicated it had not been sold since 1982. Assuming the Gallaghers had been the ones to buy the place, there was a reasonable chance they still lived there.
Reed drove across town while Ellery swallowed a pair of painkillers and leaned carefully back in her seat. Even the soft leather head
rest made the lump on her skull start to throb. She closed her eyes and willed the pain to subside, waiting for the blessed moment when the pills would do their work. Reed let her rest for quite a while before he finally asked the obvious question: “What are you going to say to her?”
Ellery kept her eyes shut for a few moments longer. All these years, Myra had been pinning her anger on Luis Carnevale, thinking the monster was locked safely in a cage, when the real danger was possibly lurking right within her own family. To have birthed two children, only to have one kill the other … Ellery couldn’t imagine how to face a truth that ugly. Myra might very well slam the door in her face and never speak to her again. It was only the slim chance that Jake could be, if not redeemed, then rescued before an overzealous cop shot him in the streets, which gave Ellery any hope at all. “If she’s hiding Jake, she should know the truth,” she said, opening her eyes to look at Reed. “She should know everything she’s risking.”
When they reached the address that Ellery had dug out from the files, she wiped her palm against the foggy glass of the car window to peer at the house. “This has to be the place,” she said when she saw the front steps had a cement wheelchair ramp constructed alongside them. It was a boxy two-story place wedged in between larger, if not grander, homes. The multicolored lights of a Christmas tree glowed from the downstairs window and there was an evergreen wreath hung upon the door. “Maybe you should wait here,” she said when she saw Reed had unbuckled his seat belt to accompany her. “They are going to be even less likely to talk to me if I bring the FBI with me.”
“I might well have ceased to be the FBI some hours ago,” Reed replied as he got out with her. “Either way, I am not letting you go inside alone to a place that might be harboring the man who shot at you last night.”
“That’s just one theory. We don’t know he was after me.”
“Oh, no?” Puffs of his breath misted in the air. “You think he was out in the middle of the night following Mick Murphy, do you? Hell of a coincidence that would be.”
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