Time Release (2 page)

The detective stared.

“Look, Grady, I'm not saying your kid isn't legit. But just because one sharp prosecutor built a case around repressed memories doesn't mean they're the key to every unsolved crime in the country. In my experience, severe posttraumatic stress, the kind that forces the bad stuff into the darkest corners of somebody's mind, isn't all that common.”

Downing turned away, stooped down, and examined the blue spine of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
that Christensen kept on a low shelf by the door.
“Nothing
about Primenyl was all that common.”

The detective stood. His face was softer, almost pleading. “Think about it, Jim. Just talk to the kid. If you say it's not there, I'll drop it.”

The Primenyl case. Hell of a Monday.

“What's the kid's name?”

Downing smiled like a man holding a fistful of kings. “Corbett. Michael Corbett. Everybody calls him Sonny.”

“I don't like this, Grady. But I'll think about it.”

Downing pulled the morning
Press
from under his arm, casually unfolded it, then laid it on the desk so Christensen could read the banner headline across the top of the front page: “Coroner confirms cyanide in Greene County tampering death.” It triggered something visceral in him, a prickly wave of dread.

Downing looked back over his shoulder as he opened the door. “Not to hurry your decision, Chickie, but we think he's killing again.”

Downing was leaning against the Ford's fender, his overcoat folded over his crossed arms as if he was waiting for someone, smoke curling from a new cigarette between the fingers of one hand. He smiled. “Gonna freeze without your coat.”

“The only cars made this ugly are unmarked cop cars, Grady. Everybody's onto that. You guys should wise up.”

“Want a ride?”

“Let's take a walk. I postponed my nine-fifteen until eleven,” Christensen said, shaking his head. “At least you could act surprised that I followed you out.”

Downing opened the car door and crawled across the front seat, pulling a thick file folder and a rumpled black-and-gold Steelers jacket with him as he backed out. The jacket snagged briefly on the black barrel of a shotgun mounted beneath the dashboard.

“People with consciences are so fucking predictable,” Downing said. “Wear this.”

The sleeves were short, since the detective was at least half a foot smaller, but it was roomy in the shoulders. Christensen wondered how Downing, who at sixty-two so casually abused the notion of fitness, was able to maintain such a broad and powerful upper torso which could fill the jacket as well as some Steelers linemen might have. He pulled the massive thing on, grateful for its warmth.

“I made a lot of promises to myself and God after Molly's accident,” Christensen said.

“Thought you gave up on God as things got worse.”

They'd talked a lot in the interrogation room that day. “At least I'm trying to keep the promises I made to myself, and not to forget what I learned.” Trust your moral compass. Damn the consequences. He'd ended Molly's life, such as it was at that point, for all the right reasons.

They walked south along Forbes Avenue, feeling the wind's bite, moving silently among the students headed to morning classes. Christensen loved the manic pace of youth, fed off its energy. He loved the urban campus, too, especially the gritty history that spoke from its still-sooty buildings and immense granite memorials. They passed the Forbes Quadrangle, where Forbes Field once stood. Decades gone, but the university, bless it, still maintained a commemorative section of the brick center-field wall, a street named for Roberto Clemente, and the glorious, spike-scarred home plate. It was entombed under glass in the floor of the Quadrangle building lobby.

“Hungry?”

He looked back at Downing, who was stopped in the surreal light of a flashing Iron City Beer sign in the window of Primanti Brothers.

“There's a coffee place on the next block. Great latte,” he pleaded as Downing disappeared inside. He followed into a warm wave of aroma, frying fish and onion.

“Two fried eggs and baloney on Italian,” Downing said to the counterman.

“Home fries on top?”

“Lots of ketchup.” Downing turned to Christensen. “Want something?”

Christensen made a face.

“Sorry, professor. No croissant.”

They stepped out again into the chill, stepping around a woman knotting her head scarf in the doorway.

“All right, Grady. What's this about?”

Downing took a bite and shifted the file folder from one arm to the other, balancing the sandwich.

“Things are curiouser and curiouser down in Greene County,” he said in a spray of greasy mulch, swabbing ketchup from his mustache with a hound's-tooth sleeve. “Definite product tampering. Cyanide again. Tox report confirmed it yesterday, but we've pretty much known all along. That's why the regional recall on the yogurt.”

Christensen flashed back to his frantic refrigerator search five days earlier. “I heard about it, but all I really know is the recall. I went berserk. My kids eat it by the gallon.”

“Standard precautionary stuff for manufacturers,” Downing said. “Good PR, but even the local cops knew within an hour we were dealing with tampering, not contamination. Found a pinhole in the foil lid where the syringe went in. Think about it. Yogurt's a semiliquid. What does somebody do just before they eat that crap?”

“Stir it up.”

“So there's nothing off-color, no reason to suspect. Probably tasted like hell, but the first spoonful might have been enough.”

Christensen tried to imagine the scene. “Random?”

“Just some kid's mom putting away groceries. You tell me: Sound like the work of anyone in particular?”

“What about a copycat?”

“Come on, Jim. Ten years to the day after the first Primenyl killing?”

Christensen blew into his hands, then shoved them deep into the jacket pockets. His pants were still damp. “It usually happens in cycles, you know.”

Downing stopped walking, giving him his full attention.

“I'm talking in real general terms here, okay? Think of the mind as a gyroscope. It stays pretty balanced for long periods of time. But from time to time it gets unbalanced, for whatever reason. And when that happens, the mind does what it needs to do to right itself.”

Downing turned suddenly, to the right and up the hill on Atwood Street. Christensen felt a twinge as the tower of Mount Mercy Hospital came into view. He scanned the building face, eyes fixing against his will on the left corner of the seventh floor. Intensive care. He realized Downing was ten steps ahead, waiting.

“‘Right itself'?” Downing asked as Christensen caught up.

“For me, that might mean going out for a long run when things get bad. I did that a lot, you know, after Molly's accident and everything else. You do things like that, too, I'm sure. It's how we stay sane. And whether we realize it or not, most of us get unbalanced in predictable cycles.”

“But ten years?”

“Not typically. But if we're talking about the Primenyl killer, we're not dealing with a typical mind. So yeah, ten years between the really severe imbalances is possible.”

Downing shook his head. “Hell of a way to keep your balance.”

“Considering the symmetry, though, my guess is you're dealing with something else here. The newspaper stories about the anniversary could have been enough to set him off again. If your theory is right, they may have reminded him how much he missed the attention.”

Downing walked north again on Fifth Avenue. Christensen tried his best to ignore the massive medical center to his left. Why did Downing have to turn on Atwood? And why was he stopping again, right across the goddamn street? The blood in his ears rose in tempo with each step. Was it his heartbeat, or the echoes of the frantic night nurse who'd pounded and cursed and wept outside the barred ICU door until the firemen finally broke through? They'd found him hugging Molly's limp body to his chest, her respirator disconnected, and watched him grieve until police arrived.

“Symmetry aside, Grady, there's no shortage of people walking the knife edge these days. Random killings are a strong salve for someone feeling powerless. There must be some other reason you think there's a link between this one and Primenyl.”

A Port Authority bus roared past, trailing a virulent cloud of warm air. Downing stared it into the distance.

“Our guy lives just a few miles outside Waynesburg, little place called Outcrop. Just a bunch of shacks, really, kind of place somebody might go to disappear. Been there since right after the 1986 killings. Probably drives the same roads our latest victim did, banks at the same bank, shops in the same stores.”

“And the local cops put all that together?”

Downing laughed. “The local cops questioned her husband for five days.”

“So why are you involved, then?”

Downing's smile disappeared. Whatever he said was lost to the dull roar of passing traffic. Christensen cupped a hand to his ear.

“I said I'm not involved, officially. At least not yet. But I'm trying to get back into it.”

“Back into it?”

They moved slowly away from Mount Mercy and the memories there, crossing one street, then two, before the detective spoke again.

“I was part of the original Primenyl investigation in 1986, but I never got to see it through.” He held up a hand, its thumb and index fingers an inch apart. “We were this fucking close, Jim, this close, but never got enough for an arrest.”

Christensen studied Downing's face, saying nothing, letting the weight of the moment pull the detective deeper into his story.

“Okay. The short version,” Downing said finally. “Name's Ron Corbett. Like I said before, real family man. Abused the wife. Abused the kids so bad the older boy, Sonny's brother, bit the pipe when he was fifteen.”

“Suicide?”

Downing nodded. “After the poisonings started, Corbett took off. A week after that David, the brother, takes the .38-caliber cure. Two weeks after that, Mom breaks down and winds up in Borman.”

“The state hospital.”

“Bingo. Sonny ends up in foster care with nobody to pick him up. For years.”

“So Dad's a son of a bitch, Grady. The world's full of them.”

“A
pharmacist
son of a bitch,” Downing said. “Knows about shelving methods, packaging, everything. There's some other stuff, too; trust me on that. But somebody in that house knew what Corbett was doing, maybe everybody. Add it up.”

Christensen tried hard not to react, figuring the more Downing talked, the closer he'd get to the truth. But there was an obvious question: “You're sure it wasn't one of the others?”

“Like who? The mom? If you'd ever met her, you'd understand. A couple teenage boys? Not likely. It was too calculated.”

The detective rubbed a hand across his face. Christensen noticed the wedding band and tried to remember Downing's wife's name.

“I'm retiring in five months, Jim.”

“About time. You've been eligible for, what? Five, six years?”

“I didn't want to leave it unfinished. I don't. Can't. You have mill-hunks in your family?”

Grady Downing, King of the Non Sequitur. After fourteen years in Pittsburgh, Christensen was getting good at spotting the descendants of Eastern Europeans who settled here to work in the steel mills. Hiring was based on the crassest of stereotypes: Poles and Slovaks for lifting, Jews for accounting, the Irish and blacks for shovel work. He'd actually seen a yellowed copy of a foreman's hire sheet that spelled it all out. Downing seemed like the son of a lifter.

“I didn't grow up here, Grady. You?”

“Three generations. And I remember my dad—he's dead now, probably mid-forties then—talking about the stage in life where you have to start letting go of your dreams. He'd started out in the rolling mill, strictly heavy-lifting stuff. After thirty-five years he clawed his way into some mid-level management job. First one in the family out of the mills. White shirt. Wing tips. The whole bit. But at some point, he said he knew he'd never be president of U.S. Steel, or USX or whatever the hell they call it now. Just wasn't the hand he was dealt, and there was nothing he could do about it.”

“That's pretty typical of men that age,” Christensen said. “My age.”

Downing shook his head. “But this isn't some midlife crisis, sport. Christ, I wish it was as simple as my dad said, of letting go of a dream. Shit. I stopped imagining myself as chief of detectives years ago. This is different. It's got me by the short hairs and won't let go.”

“You want to resolve it before you retire,” Christensen said, waiting for some sign of insecurity.

“I have to.”

“So, what then?”

“So I want to convince … I've got a meeting in a couple days with my lieutenant, maybe with the chief himself. Like I said, Corbett's no stranger. We're all on the same wavelength on this. But we've pumped everything else dry, so I want to take a new tack. Get 'em thinking about the Greene County case, and when I've got 'em listening, I'll tell them about Sonny. They all followed those repressed-memory cases pretty close, too.”

Like every other cop with a wish list and an unsolved murder. “And?”

“Maybe they'll cut me loose for a while to check this stuff out. I'm figuring I could nose around in Greene County while you got to know the kid. I'd really like your take on him.”

Neither spoke as they passed the twenty-story cylindrical dormitory towers labeled A, B, and C by the Pitt administration, and dubbed Ajax, Babo, and Comet by the students who lived there. They walked silently past the university bookstore and back into the parking lot of the William Pitt Union. Christensen opened the lobby door for Downing, then held it open for a woman walking about ten steps behind them. She nodded her thanks but stopped along the curb.

The psychologist pushed the elevator button and glanced at his wristwatch. Ten-twenty.

“All right, Grady. If this kid did see something that traumatic, that's the sort of thing that
could
force memories into the subconscious. But that stuff doesn't just sit there. It comes out in strange ways, even physical symptoms.”

Downing went wide-eyed. “Like numbness or something?”

“Any of a thousand ways. Why?”

“Sonny Corbett's got this thing with his hands. They go numb on him, and nobody can figure out why.”

Christensen waved off the words. “Look, let's make a deal. You investigate crime scenes and arrest bad guys, I'll handle the mental health issues, okay?”

“Temper, Chickie, temper.”

“This just isn't as simple as you make it sound, Grady. Sure the possibility exists. But hell, you mention repressed memories in a roomful of psychologists these days and you'll have a riot. And if I had to pick sides—”

“You think it's horseshit?”

“Didn't say that. But there's a weird hysteria out there right now. I mean, something's wrong when half the population of the United States remembers sacrificing babies by firelight.”

The elevator door opened with a soft rush of air. Christensen boarded first.

“I'll buy that,” Downing said. “But what about the cases where it's real? Does anybody listen now when somebody cries wolf?”