SURVIVORS (crime thriller books)

by T. J. Brearton

  And what about Philomena, for that matter? What if he showed up at the nursing home where Argon’s only sibling lived and someone else found out about her, where she lived? What significance was there in that she had inherited everything? Taber had wanted Brendan to find some secret that Argon had hidden away. For all Brendan knew, Philomena was it. And he might lead whoever was watching right to her.

  “Goddammit,” he said, as the first snowflakes started to twirl down from the sky.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE / Monday, 11:53 AM

  Jennifer paced back and forth in the studio space high above the streets of Manhattan’s Upper East Side where a delicate snow was falling. Her rational side suggested that she should conserve energy – if she really had been poisoned, walking around like this was only working the toxin into her blood stream faster, carrying it towards her vital organs.

  Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but her other side was suggesting a different scenario entirely: she hadn’t been poisoned at all, and this was some sort of test, some trick to see what she would do. It was such an outlandish idea – poisoning by thallium – it had to be a bluff. They were watching her, she decided, so she had spent ten minutes scanning the room for any type of recording device. A miniature camera – they could get them so small now that they could be put up someone’s rectum, so it could be anywhere in the room – or a small audio recorder, something.

  Beneath the bank of windows overlooking 2nd or 3rd Avenue (she was leaning towards 3rd) was a long radiator. It was the tall kind, about a foot and a half high, mounted to the wall.

  The radiator was divided into sections. She found four seams, indicating five individual units riveted together. If she could find something to jam into the seams she might be able to pry one unit partially away from the other. She wasn’t sure why she would want to do this; perhaps she thought she could yell down a piece of conduit. But Jennifer didn’t know much about heating. Did these units carry water? Or were there electric heating coils in there? Her lack of knowledge didn’t stop her from banging on the radiators as loud as she could and screaming for help for a full three minutes, until she lost her voice. She left a dent in one of the contiguous units – she’d kicked it harder than anything ever in her life. Her foot was still throbbing inside her running shoe; the big toe felt twice its size.

  No, kicking and screaming and yelling down radiator shafts wasn’t going to do anything. She needed to use her mind, not resort to some base, caged-animal routine. She needed to think her way through this case, take what she knew, and put it together now, when it counted the most.

  She forced herself to sit down. She crossed her legs and sat Indian-style, straightening her spine, placing her hands on her knees, and closing her eyes for a moment, as if about to meditate.

  She decided to do a mental exercise: a search for a link between the Heilshorn murder and the dead police officer, Seamus Argon. That was the way to get perspective. It was also the way to not go into shock.

  She conjured up the names and faces of every player involved. This included the detectives and the Sheriff from the Heilshorn case – all the law enforcement there – as well as the victim, of course, and all of the suspects and persons of interests. She had been over the files so many times, doing her routine, working in a way she knew some of her co-workers poked fun at – laying out all the papers, tacking documents and images up to bulletin boards.

  It helped that she had a borderline-eidetic memory. She could see them all now, faces, names, rap sheets, and biographies.

  And then she did the same for the Argon situation, consulting the information she’d managed to cobble together after her enlightening talk with that psycho-witch Olivia Jane. There was Seamus himself, front and center, a mustache like Magnum P.I., skin crinkled around the eyes. A good cop, from everything she’d read. A hero cop, several times over, but his crowning glory the rescue of a premature baby from the bowels of White Plains. Then there was Cushing, the new chief of police for Mount Pleasant, so green he was still dripping sap. And Goro Uchida, from Internal Affairs, who had replaced Anthony Carrera (his outgoing message, when she’d tried to call him, ended with a cryptic arriba, ciao, which had stuck in her mind.) Carrera did a pretty big “ciao” on everyone after all, and mysteriously dropped out of the picture.

  Of course, any connective tissue between the Heilshorn case and the Argon case was majorly assumptive. The task force had only begun to unearth, let alone prove, that a human trafficking issue was unquestionably at the heart of all of this. A stygian network of high-profile escorts which was somehow entwined with organized crime, and possibly even certain parts of the government. It was the backdrop, but it was as ungraspable as smoke.

  But the relationships between the individuals, Jennifer thought; those connections were where the truth was revealed. There was a bridge. Something or someone connected Heilshorn to Argon.

  And she felt she had her answer – or, at least, part of one.

  Brendan Healy.

  FBI profiler Petrino had put together some interesting findings. Seamus Argon had taken Brendan Healy under his wing after he had lost his wife and daughter and become suicidally depressed. This was corroborated, in a fashion, by Olivia Jane, who said that Healy’s aggressive behavior, mood swings, substance abuse, and chronic depression rendered him unstable. The more Jennifer reflected on the interview with Jane, the more convinced she felt that Jane had been trying to persuade her of something. To prove that Brendan Healy was unreliable, incidental, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. To discredit him, and what he might know.

  As Jennifer mulled this over, she felt the first sensations of something wrong in her body. It felt like she’d swallowed baking soda and it was bringing up some gas. She realized she was thirsty, too, and hadn’t had a drink of water since the previous night. Nothing to eat either – she didn’t eat before a run.

  She tried to ignore the feelings of thirst, and the unpleasant unraveling of something in her gut, which was forcing air up her esophagus. Nevertheless, she burped, and it tasted briny and toxic. The thallium was working its way deeper into her body. And she was locked in this room.

  Unable to keep it all at bay any longer, Jennifer started to cry.

  Soon the sadness was sucked back up by the anger, like a dwindling fire suddenly fed on a fresh source of oxygen. She got to her feet and found herself back where she had been twenty minutes before, banging on the radiators and shouting, then standing and whacking at the windows with her bare palms; then the hands as fists as she pounded on the door, screaming now, her voice getting hoarse, her palms and knuckles red and bloody, until she slid down the door and crumpled into a ball on the floor, holding her hands out in front of her like mangled things.

  There she breathed shallowly and her mind went blank.

  She stayed like that for a while until she heard a noise.

  It sounded like a freight elevator was ascending or descending somewhere on the other side of the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR / Monday, 12:09 PM

  She was dressed casually, in a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of black leggings. She bunched herself together in the cold and jogged down the walkway in front of her apartment building to Brendan’s car, running half-bent like she was leaving a helicopter.

  What are you doing? You better be right about this.

  As soon as she got in, he looked over at her and said, “No jacket? Nothing?” He put on his best fake smile.

  “I hate jackets,” she said. “Too constrictive.”

  He pulled away from the curb and merged in with traffic. They didn’t have too far to go – Dobbs Ferry was only about ten minutes away. There wasn’t a lot of time. The first full minute of the drive was filled with a heavy silence. She started fiddling around, like a kid, poking at the radio, dialing through the stations, fingering the heating system, cranking the warm air, and finally opening the glove box.

  He would’ve stopped her, but she needed to know anyway.

 
; “Seriously?” she said, looking at the .38. “You’re going to bring your Clint Eastwood gun to visit an old folks’ home?”

  Just get right to it.

  “We’re being tracked.”

  She tilted her head way back, and wrinkled up her forehead.

  “We’re what? You mean, like, by Indians? You really are a cowboy.”

  “Seriously, Sloane. There’s a tracking device underneath this car right now. I was looking for the cat and I, uh, I found it.”

  “Una? She ran away on you?”

  “That’s the cat’s name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, I’m being followed. I swept the interior of the car and couldn’t find any sort of bugs.”

  “What about in Argon’s house? You check?”

  He threw her another glance. She was either acting cavalier because she was scared, or maybe she didn’t believe him, not really, and was playing along. He couldn’t be sure. She seemed smart, though, so he had to go with scared.

  “I didn’t. But, I assumed. I assumed whoever’s listening, watching, that they know about our plans to visit Argon’s sister. That if I started tearing the house apart for bugs, or made a sudden change in plans, they might know they were made. Which could hasten . . . I don’t know. Could make things more dangerous. So I figured I’d proceed as planned.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Does it? Look, there’s nothing that says you can’t suddenly have a change of heart. Decide you forgot you had another appointment. Something. Have me drop you somewhere, right now.”

  “Would you still go see Mena?”

  “Yes. I have to.”

  “Well, so do I. The cops called the home, and told the nurses about Argon, but no one has seen her in person yet.”

  “I got that feeling.”

  “Yeah, so.”

  They fell into silence, each of their minds buzzing. In five minutes they would be there.

  “Can I ask you a question?” said Brendan.

  “Shoot.” She had her palms in front of the heating vents.

  “Ever ask Argon how he found you?”

  “You mean was it divine intervention or something?”

  “Well, I just mean . . . baby in a storm drain, pretty far down there, rainy afternoon, cop who’s on road patrol just happens by . . . I’m sorry if this is uncomfortable.”

  “It’s okay. But, what are you saying? That Argon knew to be there?”

  “Do you think he did?”

  She considered this for a moment. “All I know is that in life, the inexplicable happens. All the time. Every day. Things we can’t explain. They’re connected. We don’t know how, and ninety-nine percent of the time we’re unaware of it, or we deny it. And when it shows up, it’s trivial things. Minor things – you think the same thought at the same time as someone, or you text one another at the same time. It’s stronger with people who are closer together . . . but I read this thing, you know? About the Field. This the mass of everything which surrounds us. Kind of like the frigging Force. Star Wars, not cops. But cops too. And in the Field, electrons come together and once they do, they stay in contact with each other forever. Doesn’t matter how far apart they get, or how long. They stay in contact.”

  Whether she knew it or not, Sloane was talking about quantum physics. It was outside of his subject of neuroscience, but Brendan had always felt that the sciences had lot of overlap. He gave Sloane a glance, wondering if a nerdy, armchair scientist lurked beneath her tough exterior.

  He looked back at the road. “But they have to come into contact to begin with.”

  He wasn’t challenging her, just trying something out. He’d been wondering if Argon and Taber’s connection had been more than a tenuous friendship and a mutual interest in law enforcement. Brendan felt that a more accurate understanding of their connection would help.

  “You think Argon had something to do with why my whore mother gave herself a late-term abortion and shit me into a storm drain?” she said, with her characteristic linguistic pungency.

  Her hostility suddenly filled the car like poisonous gas. It was like she was suddenly radiating energy. Maybe it was just the heat which she had cranked up like a furnace. But he remembered thinking that she was capable of stabbing him with her spaghetti fork, as innocent as she also seemed, with her slight speech impediment and diminutive stature.

  “I’m not saying anything like that at all. I just . . . I got a situation I’m trying to figure out. You know? About how Argon died, and what he may have been involved in – something he might’ve known which could have contributed to his death. And maybe, okay? Just maybe, your mother was forced to do what she did.”

  He felt something knuckle into his heart as he said the words, a kind of pressure on his chest. Had he just overstepped? The last thing he wanted was to mess with Sloane’s head. Bad enough he’d dragged her into this dangerous situation at all. But there were so many connections to be made – so many of these pulsing electrons in the dark. He thought of Dutko, talking about the baby in the trunk, the discarded infants in the garage of some suburban home.

  Sloane had gone quiet, withdrawn towards the passenger door. She had her arms wrapped around her body. She looked out the window, and he felt a mild sense of relief not to be under her scrutiny. He also felt the need to balance the scales, to try to make Sloane feel more comfortable by sharing something from his own sordid past.

  He could only think, really, of one thing.

  She stayed huddled, looking out the window.

  He took the Ashford Ave exit off of the Saw Mill and they were only two miles away from Laurel Grove, the nursing home where Philomena lived.

  “In Wyoming, there are no requirements for private investigation beyond a normal business license. I got started right away and had plenty of time to work. But in two years, I’ve barely had a real case. Just little things. Background checks on people, wife suspecting her husband of cheating – he wasn’t, that I could find – and one stolen vehicle case where the guy was a pot dealer and didn’t want to involve the cops. I’ve been living in Laramie, beautiful spot, but I barely go out. I don’t ski, I don’t even sled. I’ve spent just about all of my free time for the past two years doing the same thing. God, it’s been a long time.”

  He thought maybe she was sitting up a little straighter, not recoiled so much toward the passenger door, but he wasn’t sure. He pressed on.

  “My wife and daughter died. It’s been ten years now. In fact, the anniversary of their death is in two days; November 17th.”

  He glanced sideways at her. Sloane was now facing front, looking out the windshield.

  “After I moved out west, I started going online, and looking into chat groups – something I had never done – about people who’d lost loved ones like I did.” He shifted in his seat, trying to get more comfortable. “It was my fault that they died. I was supposed to be driving them home from a night out at a restaurant. My wife hated driving at night – it affected her eyes. But I was drunk, and wanted to get drunker, and she and I were arguing – or, I was making some shit up to argue about – and so I stayed behind at the restaurant bar.”

  “What do you do online besides chat rooms?” He saw her glance at him for a second.

  “I sort of spy on Angie’s parents. That was my wife: Angie. Her mother actually keeps a blog. She’s a very smart woman. So I check into them. I sneak looks at her mother’s Facebook page.”

  “You’ve never spoken with them?”

  “No. I haven’t seen them in person since the funeral. They knew who I was, what I was like. I couldn’t even make eye contact with them that day. I didn’t even do the eulogy – her father did. He’s a pastor, so I got a get-out-of-jail-free card, I guess. My response was to sit in my garage with the engine running. I tried to kill myself.”

  Ahead, Laurel Grove was a series of single-story buildings on a campus that overlooked a foggy Hudson River. A few snowflakes were blowing in on the river breeze.


  He navigated to a small parking lot, expecting a reaction from Sloane, but she merely faced forward, profiling her small, ski-jump nose, her large lashes, her slightly longer upper lip. She looked fine, like a pixie, but Brendan knew what lay beneath.

  He steered into a parking spot. He gazed out at the river. “I was a wimp – I couldn’t shoot myself. I’ve sat with the gun pointed at my temple. I chose a coward’s way out. And I still go to bed most nights hoping . . . that’s it. That something comes crashing down on me in my sleep.

  “I had one case as a detective in Oneida County. I’ve never really been able to let it go, even though I’ve tried to put so much distance between it and me, to forget about it. I have trouble with that, I guess. Forget about the girl I saw, dead, forget about the escort service she was a part of. She’d had two children, kept hidden in order to protect them from the organization she worked for.”

  He glanced at Sloane for a reaction, but she remained unreadable.

  “We’re here,” she said. She nodded once at the glove compartment. “Better get your gun, cowboy.” Then she got out.

  * * *

  They were asked to sign in at the front desk. Brendan lingered over the guest sheets, a single piece of paper on a clip board, doing a scan of the names and dates.

  Seamus had been the last person to visit Philomena. Before that, Sloane’s name was on the register. There were two names he did not recognize, both female. Luella Brown and Carmella Enduche. His eyes continued scrolling up, taking in each name, and something occurred to him. Just a hunch.

  He looked at Sloane, her eyebrows raised to indicate she was waiting long-sufferingly.

  “You want to go ahead? I just need a minute.”

  “Sure,” she said, and flashed the desk nurse a pleasant smile, which she then dropped abruptly for Brendan, and walked away. It felt like they were in some kind of fight, almost a lover’s quarrel.

  The nurse looked up at him with a friendly, patient expression. She was a pretty woman with her black hair in a bun.