Airtight by David Rosenfelt

waste it … will check every ninety minutes.
Tell me whatever you can … please.
Bryan.
    I read the message twice. It didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know, but the fact that Bryan sent it was enormously significant. It opened up the possibility that he could aid in his own rescue; there might be something he saw or heard that could help us find him.
    There might also be a way for us to locate him through the e-mail itself, though that was way out of my area of expertise. To that end, I wasted no time in heading for Deb Guthrie’s office, which was located one flight up, at the far end of the building. I took the stairs two at a time.
    Deb was a state police Lieutenant, as was I, but she occupied an entirely different world. She was in charge of the cybercrime unit, which is to say that I did not understand a single thing that she did. My computer proficiency was such that it was lucky I was able to open the e-mail.
    I could see through the glass into her office; she was meeting with some guy in a suit, a meeting that was about to end. I barged in and said, “Deb, I need to talk to you.”
    Deb and I have a really good relationship, and she could tell from my entrance and the tone of my voice that this was serious. “Kevin, let’s pick this up later,” she said, and the guy obligingly got up and left.
    “What’s up, Luke?” she said when the door closed behind him.
    “If someone sends you an e-mail, can you trace it to where they are located?”
    “We can get their IP address, if that’s what you mean,” she said.
    “I don’t even know what an IP address is. Is it like a real-world address?”
    She shook her head. “No, but it’s close. We can certainly narrow it down to a specific area. What have you got?”
    “Deb, I’m about to show you something that I need your help on. But in the process I’m going to be putting you in a difficult position, because you cannot tell anyone about it.”
    “It’s business?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Does the Captain know about it?”
    “He officially knows nothing.”
    She smiled. “His favorite official posture. Let’s have a look, Luke.”
    I showed her the e-mail, and she took her time reading it. “I assume you don’t want to answer any questions,” she said when she was finished.
    “Correct.”
    “Luke, the person that e-mailed you can find out the IP address himself, as long as he has Internet access.”
    I hadn’t known that, but in any event it didn’t solve the problem. “No good,” I said. “His e-mails might be being read.”
    She nodded. “OK. Give me your e-mail password.”
    I did so, and she said, “I’ll call you as soon as I have the address.”
    I left Deb’s office and went back to my own. By that point logic had overtaken optimism, for a number of reasons. For one, there seemed no possible way that Chris Gallagher had made a mistake in allowing Bryan to have the ability to e-mail. He had to have been completely confident that Bryan would not be able to aid in his rescue.
    There was also a very significant possibility that it wasn’t Bryan e-mailing at all, but rather Gallagher using his account. He could be hoping to gain access to information in that manner. I would have to come up with a way to test that theory, and learn if it was really Bryan I was communicating with.
    Even if it was Bryan, I had to assume that Gallagher had a way to monitor the account, and read our correspondence.
    We still had a lot to learn about Chris Gallagher, but I suspected that we were going to learn he was smart, not the type to have made such a significant mistake. At the very least, he had to believe that he could not be hurt by Bryan being in contact with us, and more likely he saw it as a positive for himself.
    As with our investigation, I would play it out the way Gallagher set it up, at least for the moment. I had no other choice. But first I had to answer Bryan.
Bryan … I spoke to Gallagher, and I’m working to get