Free Airtight by David Rosenfelt Page B

they did not go near it.
    It was Oliver who personally did the analysis of the land near Brayton. It was he who determined that the shale was porous enough to yield natural gas and that it was set in a formation that could be harvested efficiently and very profitably. And it was he who estimated the immense amount of energy that could be derived.
    For doing this, he was very well paid. But now, by simply putting another set of diagrams in an envelope and sending them off, he would have taken the final step towards ensuring he would get far more money than that.
    So he put them in the envelope, and then drove an hour and fifteen minutes to a UPS store in Stillwater. He sent the package under an assumed name; it was the first illegal act he had ever committed, and he was not about to take any chances. It was why he did not simply e-mail the diagrams; e-mails lasted forever, and could not be shredded.
    Oliver was not recognized in Stillwater, just as he was not recognized in Tulsa. But that didn’t make him any less important. And what he had just done, simply sending that package, had been the most significant act of a very significant life.

 
    “Nothing has changed,” Barone said. “Overtime expected, vacations postponed, until we wrap this up.”
    I had requested that he call the meeting, and he didn’t hesitate. There had been a letdown in effort on the case; cops have a tendency to stop focusing on a case when they believe it’s been solved and the bad guy killed.
    Detective Johnny Pagan asked the obvious question. “Wrap what up?”
    “The Brennan murder,” Barone said. “We want to nail Gallagher on the facts, not just because he pulled a gun on Luke. Shit, you know how many times I’ve wanted to shoot Luke?”
    “What about the bloody clothes, and the DNA?” Pagan asked.
    Barone hesitated for a second, so I jumped in. “It’s evidence, significant evidence, but it’s not everything. There’s a huge amount of attention focused on this case; we need to be right, and we need to demonstrate it beyond any doubt. So the Captain wants to handle it as if it’s going to trial, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
    Nobody in the room except Emmit had any idea what the hell was going on, but nor did they want to question it any further. They would work on the case, that’s their job, and the opportunity to get some overtime was just an added plus.
    Emmit took over the meeting and gave out the assignments we had discussed. He would ride herd on them; Emmit was good at that. I saw no reason to tell anyone the seven-day deadline, but Emmit would see to it that they would be very busy days.
    It was on the way back to my office when I felt a buzzing sensation in my pocket. All Sergeants and up are given BlackBerries, the purpose being to eliminate any semblance of a private life. The buzzing meant that I had an e-mail.
    We are prohibited from using the devices for personal matters, so very few people outside of the department had this e-mail address. The only ones I could think of were Julie and Bryan, three or four prosecutors, an aunt in Florida, and a woman named Jeannie who I dated for four months. I gave it to her because she set what remains the record for my longest relationship, crushing the previous record holder by six weeks. The way things were going, you could say Jeannie was the Joe DiMaggio of my girlfriends.
    I took the device out of my pocket and looked at it. I got what felt like a physical shock when I saw that it was Bryan’s e-mail address. My first thought was that it was Julie using it, though it would have been the first time that I was aware of.
    I clicked on it.
Lucas … I’ve been kidnapped and imprisoned by the brother of the kid you shot. He said he was going to find you and demand that you do something before he will release me. He is dangerous. Don’t know where I am … he said it was underground. I only have seven days of air. Limited power on computer … don’t want to