Airtight
you released. Who was your favorite baseball player growing up?

 
    Jonathon Stengel was a combination idealist/realist.
    Certainly the prospect of a financially successful career influenced his decision to go to law school, but that wasn’t all it was about for him. He also respected the justice system, and thought he could do good and worthwhile work within it.
    That was a significant factor in his decision, after graduating from NYU Law, not to head for the financial security of a large firm. Instead he was awarded a position as a clerk on the United States Court of Appeals, working for Judge Susan Dembeck.
    And the time he spent there was all he had hoped it would be, and more. He got to work with brilliant people, on important matters, all the while getting a look at the intimate workings of the system. He decided he would stay for only a year, leaving when Judge Dembeck left, but felt and hoped that he would someday be back, with clerks of his own.
    But Stengel also had a need to earn money, and a clerk’s pay was not going to get it done. Which was why he was susceptible to an approach from a fellow NYU alum, Edward Holland, the Mayor of Brayton, New York.
    No money would change hands, but Stengel would supply information to Holland, who was arguing the fracking case before the court. Stengel rationalized it with the knowledge that it was not information that would give Holland an unfair advantage; all it would do was provide a “heads-up” for Holland. Advance information would then allow him to position things politically, since his audience was the electorate.
    In return, Holland would use some of his significant connections in both the legal and political communities to aid Stengel in his career path.
    A simple transaction with no losers, only winners.
    To this point, there had been little for Stengel to provide, but now he finally had something. He did not want to make the call from home, and he certainly couldn’t do it from the court, so he found a rare pay phone on the street.
    Holland answered on his home number, and immediately recognized Stengel’s voice. “What have you got?” he asked.
    “Nothing good, but I thought you should know,” Stengel said.
    “She’s staying on?”
    “Yes, and she’s the deciding vote.”
    Both men knew what that meant. The only chance Holland had to win the case on behalf of Brayton was for Dembeck to leave the court and be replaced by Brennan. Once Brennan was murdered, Dembeck’s deciding to leave anyway would have left the court deadlocked.
    But the die was cast; Dembeck was staying, and Holland was backing a losing horse.
    “I’m sorry,” Stengel said.
    “Yeah. Me too.”

 
    I never got to ask Steven Gallagher if he had an alibi.
    My shooting him three times in the chest effectively derailed prospects for an in-depth interrogation.
    What would otherwise have taken place was my asking him where he was at the time of the Brennan murder. He could have said that he was home, or at a bar, or performing La Traviata at the Met. Whatever he said, I’d then be able to check it out, with the remote potential to exonerate him, or the far more likely potential to implicate him by proving he had lied.
    But all of that never happened, and with him in a drawer at the coroner’s office it wasn’t about to. So part of our investigation had to include trying to discover where Steven was at the time of the murder. The fact that we already knew he was in Judge Brennan’s garage swinging a knife was a complicating factor, but one that we had to overlook.
    Emmit’s role was to sift through the investigative information coming in, alerting me to things I should personally follow up on. Unfortunately, we were learning that Steven was a young man who had pretty much cut himself off from the world, once he descended into his drug use.
    A notable exception to that seemed to be Laura Schmitz. She was said to have been Steven’s girlfriend, though that relationship had

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