CHAPTER NINETEEN
The address Kim had pulled for Thomas Brennan put him in a third-floor apartment in a residential building in Hoboken, a narrow five-story walk-up wedged between a dry cleaner and a cell phone repair shop.
It was a dingy place, the sort of building you might drive by fifty times without really seeing it.
"Try the super?" she said.
"Yeah, I guess.” Still, he knocked a third time and waited.
Still nothing. He exhaled through his nose and looked down the hallway, at the water-stained ceiling tiles and the single overhead fixture casting its flat light across the worn carpet.
The building had the tired, compressed feel of a place where people lived close together and kept mostly to themselves.
"All right," Miles said. "Let's find the super, get a confirmation he actually lives here. Maybe he's working somewhere. If so, we can find out where and pay a visit to him there."
They turned and started back toward the stairwell. Miles was already thinking about next steps, about whether Kim could pull a cell phone number or a work record, when he registered the figure at the far end of the hallway.
A man had just come around the corner from the stairwell as they made their way through.
After a few steps, the man stopped dead when he saw them.
He was broad-shouldered and heavyset, somewhere in his mid-fifties, wearing a canvas work jacket with the collar turned up despite the weather.
He was carrying a paper bag from a deli.
He stood there for two full seconds, looking at them with an expression that was not confusion or curiosity but something much more specific than either.
He turned to go back the way he'd come, as if he’d forgotten something. Only, there was an almost robotic quality to the way he was moving. It was the deliberateness of it that caught Miles. Not a casual pivot, not someone who'd forgotten something. A decision.
"Mr. Brennan?" Vic called out.
The man broke into a run right away.
He was fast for his size, already through the stairwell door by the time Miles covered half the hallway, still not quite sure what the hell was going on.
Miles hit the door at full speed and took the stairs down in long strides, gripping the railing at the turns, hearing Brennan's footfalls below him, the heavy slap of work boots on concrete.
Third floor, second, the first-floor door banging open ahead of him.
Miles came out into the lobby, saw the front door still swinging, and went through it onto the sidewalk.
Brennan had turned left and was running hard, shouldering past a woman walking a dog, the paper bag from the deli still somehow in his hand.
Miles went after him, closing the distance, his body still slightly off-kilter from switching into chase-mode so quickly.
Brennan was apparently not the best runner, and Miles could feel the gap shrinking with every few lunging strides.
Behind him he heard Vic come out of the building.
He also heard her call out something he couldn't make out over the sound of his own breathing and the traffic and the general noise of the street.
Up ahead, Brennan cut right at the next intersection without slowing, nearly clipping the front bumper of a cab that leaned on its horn.
Miles made the same turn, his shoes finding grip on the concrete.
A FedEx driver standing outside his truck watched them go past with wide eyes and said nothing.
Half a block down, Brennan ducked left into a narrow alley running between two commercial buildings.
He didn’t remotely hesitate when he made the move, making it clear that he knew where he was going—that he may have already planned out this escape route for moments just like these.
Miles followed and the daylight dropped sharply, the buildings close on both sides, a metal dumpster and a stack of wooden pallets on the right.
The alley bent slightly and then ended abruptly at a chain-link gate that was padlocked shut, beyond which sat the raised concrete platform of a loading dock with nowhere to go.
Brennan hit the gate, grabbed it, shook it hard twice. The padlock held. He turned around with his back against the chain-link, breathing heavily, looking at Miles the way a man looks when he knows the running is over.
Miles stopped about eight feet from him, drew his weapon, and leveled it.
"Get down on the ground," he screamed. His voice came out lower and harder than he intended, stripped of the professional evenness he usually maintained. He could hear his own pulse in his ears. Two dead. Kane loose. And now there was Brennan, running from them down a street as if he had known that someday, he’d be on the run. It stank of guilt.
"Get down. Now."
Brennan held up both hands. "I'm not armed, I'm not—"
"I said get down on the fucking ground!" Miles took a step forward. "Two people are dead. You are going to get on your knees right now or I swear to God—"
"Miles." Vic's voice came from behind him, sharp and clear.
She had made the corner and was breathing hard from the run, her own weapon drawn but pointed downward.
She looked at Brennan first to confirm the scene, then at Miles, and something shifted in her expression.
Not alarm, exactly. Closer to the specific attention she paid when a situation was about to go in the wrong direction.
"Miles," she said again, quieter this time.
He held the weapon on Brennan for another moment. Brennan hadn't moved, hands still raised, back against the gate, watching Miles with something between fear and calculation.
Miles took a breath. Then another. He kept his weapon up but he stopped moving forward and let his shoulders drop a fraction. He understood how he was overreacting but there was a part of him that simply didn’t care…and that was the scariest part.
Vic stepped up beside him. Her voice was even and professional when she spoke.
"Thomas Brennan, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
You have the right to an attorney." She kept talking through the Miranda rights, her voice filling the narrow space between the buildings while the ambient noise of the street continued on the other side of the alley wall, indifferent.
Brennan lowered himself to his knees without being told again. He put his hands on top of his head and looked at Miles once more with an expression that Miles couldn't fully read, and then he looked at the ground.
"Mr. Brennan," Miles said. The edge in his voice had flattened but hadn't disappeared entirely. "Tell me where you've been. Tell me what you know about the murders. Tell me what your connection is to Gabriel Kane."
Brennan said nothing, though he did look plenty scared.
"We have your history with Ashford Fine Jewelers.
We know your financial situation after the bankruptcy.
We know you have the technical skill to do exactly what was done to those two people.
" Miles holstered his weapon and crouched down to Brennan's eye level.
"If you know something, now is the time. "
Brennan looked at him steadily. "I want my lawyer."
"We can talk first and—"
"I want my lawyer." He said it the same way both times. No panic, no anger, no performance. Just four words, repeated with the patience of someone who had decided that was the only sentence he was going to say.
Miles straightened up and looked over at Vic.
She was watching him with the particular expression she reserved for moments when she had something to say but was choosing the time and place for it carefully. She pulled out her handcuffs and moved around behind Brennan.
"Hands behind your back," she said.
Brennan complied. The cuffs clicked into place. Vic helped him to his feet with a hand under his arm, not roughly, and stood him against the chain-link gate. She did a quick pat-down and found nothing except a phone and a set of keys, which she bagged.
They walked him back out of the alley. A teenager on a bicycle had stopped at the entrance to watch and moved off without comment when Vic looked at him.
On the street, the FedEx driver was still at his truck.
He looked at the three of them as they came back out onto the sidewalk, Brennan in cuffs between them, and went back to his clipboard.
Miles called it in, requesting a transport unit and letting the field office know they had Brennan in custody. While he was on the phone, he walked a few feet ahead, and Vic stayed with Brennan near the mouth of the alley.
She didn't say anything to him about what had happened at the gate.
She didn't need to and he knew it. He'd gotten close to something he shouldn't have gotten close to and she had pulled him back and they would talk about it later, away from the suspect, in the direct and unceremonious way they talked about things when something had gone sideways.
He finished the call and stood on the sidewalk waiting for transport, watching the street.
The deli bag Brennan had dropped was still at the corner where he'd left it, tipped on its side, a wrapped sandwich half out on the pavement. Some small ordinary thing from an ordinary errand, the last moment before the running started.
Miles stared at it for a moment and then looked away, wondering: why did he run in the first place?