“Can we see him?” Julie asked.

“Yes, but give it a little time. He’s going to be moved to a private room in Intensive Care; the nurse will come out to get you in a bit.”

So we waited. Captain Barone came in to see how things were going. He hugged all three of us, even Emmit. Barone was far more emotionally involved in this than I had realized.

After we had told him what little we knew about Bryan’s condition, he said, “So when the hell are you coming back to work?”

“I’m thinking vacation,” I said.

“Think again. We’ve got a murder case to solve.”

“Which one?”

“Judge Brennan,” he said. “When word gets out that Steven Gallagher didn’t do it, the Feds will be all over it. I want to beat them to it.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said, but the comment stung me. I hadn’t thought in a while about Steven Gallagher in that apartment, and the three bullets I pumped into him.

When Barone left, Emmit asked, “If Gallagher didn’t do it, who did?”

I was irritated that with all I had learned, I couldn’t come close to answering that question with any certainty. “If you’re asking who held the knife, my best guess would be Kagan. He possessed the necessary skills. I would have thought Carlton hired him.”

“Why?”

“Because he got half the money from Hanson, and Brennan could have been seen as a threat to that.”

“But somebody did Carlton, and Rhodes,” Emmit said, accurately. “And Rodriguez said Carlton was alive when Gallagher left the house that night.”

“Maybe it was William,” I said. “The butler did it.”

It was a bad joke, and Emmit correctly disregarded it. “Why would he kill his boss? Carlton already had the money; why would William have wanted him dead? Unless it’s Carlton’s wife; she was dumping him anyway.”

I didn’t believe that was likely, and said so. She was going to get a fortune in the divorce; it seemed unlikely that she would have engineered something like this, especially the Brennan killing. But anything was possible, and I would certainly investigate it.

We dropped the conversation and resumed staring at the door through which the nurse would allegedly come, inviting us in to see Bryan. I knew she hadn’t forgotten us, since I had gone to the desk at least a dozen times to remind them.

There were other things about the Brennan case, especially the situation in Brayton, that still bothered me. There were the items that Gallagher found in Rhodes’s hotel room, that he left with me. But even more troubling were the items he didn’t find. There were far more explosives missing than had been used, and the timers were not there as well. They could have been set by Rhodes before he died.

There was the Michael Oliver killing. I still couldn’t understand why he had been singled out to die; he was no longer a player once he submitted his report, and even before that had labored in anonymity.

But above all, it still made no sense that the violence was coming from different directions. Carlton and his partners had the motive for Brennan to be eliminated, yet all the rest of the violence was directed against Carlton’s side.

But sometimes things that don’t make sense suddenly do, all at once.

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “That has to be it.”

“Excuse me?”

I looked up, and there was the nurse. Julie and Emmit were already standing, but I had been so lost in thought that I was oblivious.

“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”

“You can see Mr. Somers now,” she said.

“You guys go ahead,” said Emmit. “I’ll wait here.”

Julie and I followed the nurse through the double doors, and down a corridor to the intensive-care area. She led us to a room, and opened the door for us. “Just for a few minutes,” she said, and we went in.

Bryan was lying in bed, tubes leading into his arm, looking better than I would have guessed. He had his eyes open, but didn’t seem to acknowledge us in any way. I reached him first, and gently bent down to give him a slight hug.

“Hey, Brother, it is damn good to see you,” I said.

I pulled back slightly, and thought I detected a slight smile, though I couldn’t be sure. I looked at him, and then Julie, and felt a tightening in my throat. Humans I have spoken to who are in touch with their emotions have told me that’s a precursor to crying, but I can’t speak from personal experience. I certainly wasn’t going to hang around there and find out.

Fortunately, I had something else to do. “I gotta go to work,” I said, and turned and left.

“We have fought the good fight,” Edward Holland said as media cameras rolled,

“and we are still fighting. We are not going to let the water our children drink, the very air that they breathe, become instruments of harm. Not on my watch.”

They cheered him, all eight thousand of them. It was by far the largest crowd ever assembled in Brayton, and Holland had them eating out of his hand. But he knew that was about to change and the cameras would capture that as well.

“But we are going to do it the right way, the Brayton way. Yes, we have lost the battle in the courts, but there are many more to be waged, and we will win more than our share. That I promise you.”

The cheers became louder, raining down on him. Alex Hutchinson stood behind him on the podium, smiling and nodding in agreement, though she had no idea what was going to happen next. Holland had debated whether to tell her in advance, but decided she might choose to sabotage it.

“There has been far too much violence, and our side is being blamed for much of it. I know they are false accusations, and you know it as well. But perception is reality, and we must not do anything that feeds that perception.

“I am also concerned for your safety. No, change that. I am responsiblefor your safety. It’s a responsibility I will not shirk and I will not delegate. I will do what is necessary, what is consistent with the oath I swore when I took this office, to protect you, the citizens of Brayton.”

Holland looked towards the outskirts of the crowd, and saw Chief Brus and his men standing there, waiting. They seemed ludicrously undermanned to get this crowd to do anything, and Holland silently cursed the decision of the Governor not to send in the state police, and the courts to delay issuing the evacuation order.

“We must be law-abiding. We must not trespass on someone else’s land, just as we must prevent them from polluting our air and water. We will get our justice, but we will do so lawfully, and safely.”

There was a murmuring at that, as the crowd was not sure where he was going but concerned by what they heard.

“To that end, I am directing Chief Tony Brus to help you conduct an organized and peaceful evacuation of this property.”

In an instant, the cheers had turned to grumbling and booing. Alex, surprised by what she had heard, was shaking her head no.

“I ask your cooperation in doing this.” He motioned to the media cameras. “Let’s show the world what Brayton is all about.”

Brus and his men slowly advanced into the crowd. They were not wearing riot gear, nor carrying weapons. There would be time to regroup and get all that later, if the situation called for it.

It didn’t take long for them to feel the pulse of the crowd, and know that much stronger measures were going to be required.

Holland had lost them, and all hell was going to break loose.

The drive to Brayton should take an hour and a half,

so I told Emmit he needed to make it in an hour. Along the way I tried to reach Alex Hutchinson, Edward Holland, and the Brayton Chief of Police, to no avail. They were all at the rally on the disputed land.

If I was right, it was Ground Zero.

When I finally gave up on the phone, Emmit asked, “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”