SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (12 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN / Monday 12:53 AM

Jennifer lay awake. She turned and looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly one in the morning. She needed to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a big day. Returning to her condo after dinner, she had been visited by a courier who delivered the package she’d been waiting for. It contained the requested materials on Alexander Heilshorn.

The condo that the Justice Department had rented for her was in White Plains, on Westchester Ave, a place chosen for being in close proximity to several key locations. It was not far from the Bedford prison where she had interviewed Olivia Jane, it was thirty minutes by train from Alexander Heilshorn’s office in Manhattan, and twenty minutes from his home in Scarsdale. From her bed, she could hear the muffled sounds of traffic on Westchester Avenue coming from the direction of the terrace, which overlooked the busy road.

Jennifer turned over and plumped up the pillow. She closed her eyes but couldn’t shut her mind off. She kept thinking about how she’d arrived here, how a cascade of events had landed her in White Plains, NY, trying to crack the biggest case of her nascent career. A judge from Oneida County had subpoenaed Alexander Heilshorn’s accounts at the behest of State Detective Colinas two years ago during the Rebecca Heilshorn case. After Reginald Forrester and Olivia Jane had been arrested, and Jane convicted of murder, the financial statements obtained from Heilshorn’s accountant were placed with the rest of the evidentiary material in storage. The documents were considered ancillary to the investigation at that point, which had been a homicide case. Reginald Forrester had been taken into custody, but was then poisoned while in County jail. This had opened another investigation, into his murder. To say that detectives involved in the Forrester case were unenthused would have been putting it mildly. As far as everyone was concerned, a monster was dead. Still, they had to go through the motions.

It was later, during Olivia Jane’s trial, that the DOJ had taken notice. Jane was convicted for murder, though what aroused interest from the DOJ were allegations about motive. The prosecution painted the picture that Jane and Forrester were coaxing young women into prostitution and pornography, essentially turning them into high-priced hookers for high-profile clients. It seemed like something the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit should follow up on, and they began a preliminary investigation of their own. The first agent on the case, a man named Wyn Weston, had sought all of the data from the original Rebecca Heilshorn case and from the Forrester poisoning. After Weston had personal issues compelling him to leave the case, materials he had been working with moved into yet another set of hands – Jennifer’s. She’d been following the case and wanted it.

Two weeks ago she’d made the call to the Justice Office and Heilshorn’s records were subpoenaed for further review. She already had the electronic files, but she preferred hard copies. The digital world was excellent for researching new, current information, but she didn’t trust digital archives. They were too easily tampered with. And she liked spreading the papers across a table. Sometimes you found things that you couldn’t spot on a computer screen. She realized that this was a habit she couldn’t shake, from her days and nights of doing research in the library at SUNY Albany.

She missed school sometimes. It had often been lonely – she had ripped through the entire catalog of
The Wire
sitting alone in her two-room apartment over the course of one semester – and she may have even been depressed, but then there were those other times, those moments she felt that this was as good as life got. She had her entire career ahead of her, knowledge at her fingertips, and professors and classmates to confer with.

Only one shadow fell across her memories.

And Jennifer realized why she was still awake.

That bitch had looked right inside of her. She didn’t know the details, no of course she couldn’t – Olivia Jane might be perceptive but she wasn’t omniscient – however she had picked up on this element of Jennifer’s past with such dexterity that Jennifer was left feeling queasily exposed. She knew it was foolish; Jane was a trained psychotherapist, and she’d had weeks to prepare herself for Jennifer’s visit – she could have easily guessed at a bad relationship in Jennifer’s past – everyone had one of those.

But it wasn’t that Jane had seen into her past that was bothering her. It was that she herself was still carrying it around when she needed to set it down and finally move on. The doubt, the anger, it was time it stopped. Time to forget the only man she had ever given her heart to.

The man who had shattered it.

John Rascher.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN / Monday 1:03 AM

The strongbox lay broken open on the floor. In it was Argon’s will.

A quick scan revealed that Argon had left everything to his sister, Philomena. His estate consisted of the house, the truck, some small savings, and two more pieces of property. There was a parcel of land in Scotland, and there was the small house in Cape Cod.

Brendan put everything back inside the box. It wouldn’t close now, since he had mangled it in his fit of rage. He gave up and went outside and lit a cigarette.

He looked at his phone and saw how late it was. He was exhausted, yet his mind was wide awake.
He dialed the number without even thinking about it, an entrenched habit.

“Rudy Colinas,” the state police detective said sleepily.

Brendan stood in the driveway, smoking. He looked at the cars on East Drive. There was no blue sedan, but rather a black Ford Explorer, a Saturn, a Honda CRV, all within view, and they all appeared empty. He shivered in the cold night air, having come out without a coat.

“Colinas. It’s Healy. Sorry to call so late.”

He’d acquired a new prepaid phone earlier in the evening – Colinas wouldn’t have recognized the incoming call.

“Brendan. Jesus, man. Can’t we have these talks during the day? I’m trying to jerk off, here.” Even woken up in the middle of the night, the young detective was affable.

“How’s the baby?”

“Oh man. Good, good. She’s my little Psychic Buddha Alien from Outer Space. You know?”

“That’s great man. How are you and the missus?”

Rudy sounded like he had climbed out of bed and was walking. “Changes everything. My wife used to dote on me, you know? If I came home from a hard day, rub my shoulders, get me some tea, ‘You okay honey? Let’s have sex.’ Now, man, I get the flu, can barely move, she says, ‘Take some pills, Rudy. We can’t have you sick.’”

Brendan laughed.

“So you down in Westchester?” Colinas asked.

“Yeah.”

“How are things?”

“What did Taber tell you?”

“Taber? Nothing.”

“Any unusual activity going on? I mean, have you received any strange phone calls, been approached by anyone?”

“My whole life is unusual activity. That’s the job. Now it’s people who want to see the baby. Everybody wants to see the baby.”

“About the Heilshorn case.”

Silence for a moment. “The Heilshorn case? Nah, man. Nothing. I mean, a year or so ago there was someone from the State Department – or maybe it was the Justice Department – who came in to get files on it because of the related investigation into trafficking . . . we never went over this?”

“No,” said Brendan. Over the past two years he’d called Rudy Colinas a handful of times, usually in the night, when things were at their worst. Rudy was a friendly voice. They would keep the conversation light, catching up on some news, mostly on Rudy’s end. The talks never lasted more than ten minutes.

“Well,” Rudy went on, “some guy with one of those names . . . Wyn Weston, I think, was from the DOJ. And then there was the investigation into Forrester’s murder.”

“Right.” As much as he had tried to shut the door on Oneida and move on, he’d kept an eye on it from afar. As it was, the Forrester homicide investigation had turned up nothing but dead ends.

“What’s going on, anyway?” asked Rudy.

“I’m looking into a few things down here about Argon’s death.”

Rudy was silent, considering. “I mean, we had the toxicology report on Forrester. The guy was poisoned, no two ways about that. We didn’t need the medical examiner to tell us. Guy looked like he died from some absolutely horrible disease. Thallium poisoning.”

“I remember that.”

“I mean, yeah all this was there when you were still around, but we made all the formal assessments after you’d gone. We tried to trace the source of the thallium, to figure out how it had gotten into the jail. Thallium can be absorbed through the skin, takes an average of three to five days to kill its subject, you believe that? Forrester was a pretty hearty guy, a big guy. It could have taken longer. He could have been dosed before he went in. He could have even dosed himself.”

“When, though? I was there and then you showed up with the cavalry and he was taken into custody.”

“Good question.”

“Thallium is not exactly exotic,” Brendan said, thinking it through out loud. “It’s found in the crust of the Earth. It’s a metal. Trace elements of it are everywhere – it gets into plants. Besides being absorbed by the skin, it can be eaten, inhaled, et cetera. It’s tasteless, it’s odorless – it can be combined with all sorts of other things. You can put it in iodine – stuff you use to treat wounds with. Forrester was pretty messed up at the time of his arrest. He was treated by a medical team. The thallium that killed him could have been in the iodine they used to swab his wounds. Was all that gone over?”

“Oh yeah. We interviewed everyone on the medical team. We tried to impound the ambulance, but a judge overruled it – too costly to take it out of play, too much in use, not enough evidence, that sort of thing. We looked into the medical suppliers for the ambulance. But it could have been anything, you know? That’s the point. He could have eaten oatmeal that morning with the fucking thallium in it. He could have . . .”

“Who was the medical supplier for the emergency services crew?”

“Huh? Oh jeeze. I’d have to look at the case files.”

Brendan puffed his cigarette and hugged himself, still standing out in the cold.

“You remember what we talked about? At the end of the investigation? After we had Forrester and Olivia Jane in custody, I mean?”

“She was something else, huh? I guess she’s in Bedford Hills.”

This struck Brendan for a moment. He hadn’t known that. He returned to his main train of thought.

“But you remember . . . Titan. We came close to something; we brushed up against some major shit, Rudy.”

“Like organized crime, sure. I remember thinking so. I still do. But that’s way above my pay grade.”

“Well, that, and, maybe, I don’t know, protected organized crime.”

Colinas was quiet for a moment and Brendan got the distinct impression that an elephant had wandered into the room. When Colinas continued talking, his voice took on a paternal tone.

“Healy, look. That was a rough one. Especially for your first. I’ve tried to be a friend to you, you know?”

“And I appreciate it, Rudy.”

“I mean that thing was fucked all over the place. And I know we got sucked in by it, and even I said some things. We were pretty jacked-up when we put those two away. And maybe there is something else going on – there almost always is. You know that, and I know that. But . . . I mean, I understand you needed to get out of Dodge, man. Everyone understood that. You got the worst of it, for sure. But, I just, you know, man? I just . . .”

“You don’t think it’s healthy for me to go around with these ideas. Right? That what you were going to say?”

He didn’t want to argue with Colinas, but he felt defensive. It was cold out, too. He finished his cigarette, dropped it, and stubbed it out under his shoe. He turned and headed back inside.

“I’m just worried about you, bro. I figured, you didn’t usually want to talk about this stuff when you’d call me up out of the blue, maybe you’d put it behind you. But you haven’t. You’ve been carrying this around. Bad thing for a cop to do.”

“I’m not a cop anymore.”

“Yeah. Exactly. So what are you doing?”

Brendan started to defend himself, but then remembered he had Colinas to thank for his life. What was Brendan doing now? Trying to draw him into some weird vortex of paranoia and conjecture? What did he really have to go on so far? Argon was dead. His medical records had mysteriously disappeared from the hospital. Taber suspected foul play, but was vague and curt on the phone. Brendan thought he was being watched, but he’d been troubled by that idea for two years now. None of it amounted to anything.

And while Olivia Jane had been convincing, if memory served, had he ever had any real contact with Titan? The online evidence was a porn site called XList, and that was also the name of the escort service Rebecca Heilshorn had worked for. But the only person who’d actually said they were from Titan, the gumshoe, Brown, had been two-timing both Forrester and Alexander Heilshorn and wasn’t exactly credible.

All the evidence had been turned over to the DA, Stony, who would have charged Forrester with a bunch of crimes had he lived. Conspiracy to commit murder, aggravated sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child. Olivia Jane had been convicted of first degree murder. And then that had been it. The investigation into Forrester’s poisoning had involved Colinas and other state detectives. Brendan had been long gone by then.

I was born under the black smoke of September.

Nothing. Just the rantings of a psychopath. And Brendan had let himself be taken in by it, wasting two years of his life in fear and hiding.

“Just do me a favor, Rudy? Actually two favors, okay? And I promise these late night calls are over.”

“Anything you need,” said Colinas, sounding grateful, as if they had just steered away from something uncomfortable.

“Keep your eye on Taber. I think he’s in some trouble.”

“What? Jesus. I hadn’t heard anything like that. What did he say, exactly?”

“I think he’s keeping whatever trouble he’s got quiet.”

“Roger that.” Colinas was silent for minute. “Sounds like Taber. I’ll do what I can. See what I can determine.”

“And one other thing.”

“Shoot.”

“Get me the name of that medical supplier? Just for old times’ sake.”

“You got it, boss.”

“Thank you, Rudy. Watch yourself out there, okay?”

“Always do. Night, bro.”

Brendan hung up and went back into the house. He dropped his phone on the couch and then sat down.

Just the rantings of a psychopath. Just phantoms.

After a few minutes of staring off into the darkness of the room, wondering, Brendan dozed off in his seat.