Time Release (28 page)

Christensen lifted the gun on instinct and leveled it at the woman's back. “Leave him alone!” he bellowed.

She turned slowly, seemingly unconcerned by the ferocity of his demand. The sheet fell from her shoulders and gathered in a heap at her ankles, leaving her naked. A strained and ghastly smile split her face as she fought Sonny, giving no quarter to the intruder with the gun. She turned away, recommitting herself to her grim work.

“Rachel!” Christensen roared. “I said leave him alone!” He gripped the gun's handle tighter.

Her sinewy back muscles moved like serpents beneath her pale skin as she leveraged herself against her son. She had position. Strength didn't matter. “You … don't … know … me,” she said without turning around.

Christensen bolted across the room and shoved her with his free hand, hoping to break her grip. “Let him up, I said. Now!”

He backed off four steps, his panic rising. It was as if she'd simply ignored him. Sonny's body suddenly went limp. His legs twitched, but they had no power. All that seemed left were reflexes.

“Move away from him, goddamnit,” Christensen said. “Get away now! Don't make me kill you.”

The woman eased her grip on Sonny's hair and let go of the spigot. Sonny's head remained, sickeningly, beneath the water.

“I said move away.”

She turned fully toward him, unashamed, panting from the struggle, and took one small step toward the refrigerator to her right, then another. Even as her chest rose and fell, she leaned almost casually against the counter. Her right hand disappeared behind her back.

“Kill me,” she said.

“Across the room,” Christensen ordered. He wanted her away from the sink when he tried to revive Sonny. “Move across the fucking room, I said.”

He heard the scream, an almost feral sound, before he realized she was charging. She was ten feet away when he recognized a pair of silvery sewing scissors in the hand high above her head. In that instant, Christensen felt the gun become weightless, independent, an extension of a hand driven by adrenaline and fear and a powerful will to live.

It popped once and jumped, and the woman spun, a single off-balance pirouette. She faced him again, still clutching the scissors, and touched the dark nickel-sized star below her left shoulder. Christensen steadied the gun with both hands, keeping her in sight. He wanted to vomit as a tiny red stream curled from the wound and traced the outer curve of her breast.

“Holy Jesus,” he said.

She smiled. A sad, unknowable smile. Her legs wobbled beneath her. She opened her mouth, and for a moment Christensen thought she might speak, might forgive his intrusion, might simply declare the moment impossible and ask Sonny to rise and start the scene again. What came out, though, was a thick red bubble. It burst, and was followed by a low rumble from somewhere deep within. The sound built slowly, like the basso profundo of an approaching locomotive. When it reached a guttural howl, she raised the scissors again.

This time, Christensen aimed. Her head snapped back as the bullet crashed into her forehead, then immediately jerked forward again, propelled by the red-gray jet from the exit wound. She crumpled at his feet, and he spun away, letting the gun fall. The scream continued, but it was his own.

Christensen grabbed the collar of Sonny's shirt and in a single motion heaved him off the counter and onto the floor. Sonny's face was as gray as fog, his eyes closed. No pulse. Christensen laid his ear against his chest. The heart was faint, but beating. He rolled Sonny onto his stomach. Christensen hadn't had a lifesaving class since the Boy Scouts, had never actually used what he learned, but he knew the drill.

He kneaded his hands into that muscular back, pumping the water from Sonny's lungs. After thirty seconds, Sonny coughed and vomited. Water poured from his mouth onto the kitchen floor, diluting the deep red pool beside him to a garish pink. Sonny struggled onto his elbows, choking, gasping, drawing quick, shallow breaths. He vomited again.

“That's it, Sonny,” he said. “Get it all out.”

As Sonny struggled, Christensen tried to stand. He fell back against the low cupboards and sat down on the floor, covering his eyes with the heels of his hands, pressing hard, blotting out a scene he could never have imagined. How had he been drawn into someone else's nightmare? When he opened his eyes, Sonny was sitting back on his heels, staring without apparent emotion at the vacant face of his mother. She'd died on her back, eyes wide, mouth open as if stopped in mid-sentence.

“Sonny?”

Sonny tried to talk, but coughed up another mouthful of water. Without taking his eyes off his mother, he steadied himself and tried again, this time choking out the words.

“Are they dead?”

Christensen got up, unable to take his eyes off the horror on the floor. Sandra Corbett lay face up in a widening crimson pool. The back of her head where the bullet emerged was a soggy clump of hair, clearly the source of the blood. Her pale breasts slumped toward her armpits, and one leg, the right, was bent beneath her. She'd probably died before hitting the ground. The scissors were still in her hand.

He put a hand on Sonny's shoulder, only to have it batted away. The second time he tried, Sonny didn't resist.

“We'll get through this,” Christensen said. “Really, we will.” He wanted to believe it. Had to.

Sonny ignored him. Or his mind may simply have shut down, unable to process what he'd just seen. The accumulated brutalities of his life could not have been more traumatic than what he'd been through today, Christensen thought. He knew Sonny might never recover from it, might not even survive it.

The sink was still full. Sonny dipped his hands in and splashed his still-wet face. Then he yanked the silvery bead chain attached to the rubber plug with his good hand. He seemed transfixed as the water swirled away.

The bag of oranges and two grapefruit on the windowsill reminded Christensen of what had set this disaster in motion. This must have been where she'd prepared the orange they found in Sonny's backpack. A man's toilet kit, black leather, sat on the sill beside the fruit. He unzipped it and looked inside at a dozen or more safety syringes, each individually wrapped.

“She was diabetic,” Sonny said. The last of the water gurgled away.

He imagined her at this spot surrounded by her tools. A syringe. A yogurt container. An orange. Somewhere in the apartment, he was sure, was a brown bottle of cyanide similar to the one they'd found in the Jancey Street basement. Had she worked here, too, with the Squeezie Pops and breakfast cereal and the shampoo that burned Melissa? They'd probably bury the answers with her.

She moaned. Christensen spun around, his heart pounding. Sonny's mother was still twisted in the same pallid heap. She couldn't be alive.

“Air from her lungs,” he said, but Sonny didn't seem concerned.

Christensen inspected the neat pile to his left on the counter, wondered about the roll of red cellophane, the pale straw, the ribbon. She'd been gift-wrapping something, which explained why the scissors were within easy reach.

Outside, a car door thumped shut. Sonny laid his head on the counter, his right hand hanging limply at his side.

“Wait here,” Christensen said. He eased past the body and bumped his way into the living room, still lit blue by the soundless TV. He fumbled with a lamp, looking for a switch, but only managed to knock it to the floor with a ceramic crash. When he opened the apartment's front door, he found Downing crouched in the snow against the balcony railing, his gun steady and extended with both hands, aiming at his chest.

“Jesusfucking Christ,” Downing said. He lowered the gun and shook his head. “That could have been bad.”

“It's already bad,” Christensen said.

Downing pushed past him into the apartment. Christensen found him in the kitchen stooped over Sonny's mother, searching with two fingers for a pulse in her neck. “Who did this?” he said.

“She was trying to kill Sonny. She came after me when I tried to stop her, Grady. I had Brenna's gun.”

Christensen started into the kitchen again. “Stay back,” Downing said. “Don't track the place up any more than it is.”

Sonny hadn't moved, his head still buried beneath his arms on the kitchen counter. He looked as if he was folding into himself, awkwardly, like some damaged origami. Downing laid a hand on his back. “Just leave me alone,” Sonny said, his voice muffled.

“How about you, Jim?” Downing said, turning back toward the arched doorway where Christensen stood.

“Been better.”

Downing checked the other rooms, opening every door, his gun still drawn. His face was a grim mask, missing the studied nonchalance that Christensen had always found so reassuring during a crisis. Unable to look at the crumpled body any longer, Christensen retreated to the living room and sat down on the floor. He slouched against the wall.

Downing finished his search, holstered his gun, and stooped down, his face betraying nothing. He leaned close. “Nice fucking shot, Kojak,” he whispered.

Christensen noticed Downing's trembling hands, his forced attempt to seem casual. “I'm scared, Grady. I know you are, too.”

Downing offered a weak smile. “I, uh, I … Scared? Christ. I'm still not sure I … It's just I, he … Look, I'm not gonna bullshit you. Any chance you're wrong about this?”

It wasn't what Christensen needed to hear. But what could Downing or anyone else have said at that moment that he'd have found reassuring?

“She's the one,” Christensen said. “She set Ron up. Wanted everyone to hate him the way she did.”

Downing lit a cigarette and fumbled with his lighter, then paced back and forth across his smoke trail.

“Oh God, Grady,” Christensen blurted. “What'll happen now?”

Downing peeked through a gap in the front curtains, then went to the open front door and looked out, to the right and left. Satisfied that none of the neighbors had heard the commotion, or that at least they were pretending not to have, he came back in.

“Think anybody heard?” he asked.

“I don't know.”

“Because if nobody heard, we've got options.”

They waited. Two minutes. Five? Hard to say.

“Okay,” Downing said finally, glancing at his watch, “here's what'll happen.” The cigarette dangled from his lips, and he squinted through the white ribbon that rose past his nose. “You stay here. If nobody comes around, wait another thirty minutes and call 9-1-1 and report the shooting. The local cops will take you in, but then they'll take you and Sonny to the Public Safety Building downtown to answer questions.”

“You'll be with us, right?” Christensen said.

Downing looked away. He flicked his ash into the palm of his still-shaking hand. “I'll be there as soon as I can to corroborate the story.”

“But you'll go downtown with us, to tell them? They know I was working with you, right?”

Downing shrugged, still avoiding Christensen's eyes. “A lot'll depend on who handles the questioning.”

“I want you there, Grady.”

“Jim, it'll be fine. Just tell them the story. The truth. Ask for Chief Kiger if they give you problems. He and I talked a while back. He may not admit it, but at least he knows. Tell him the truth.”

“Goddamnit, Grady, I want you there. Where do I start a story like this, where I wind up shooting”—he swallowed hard—“killing a woman I've never met in front of her only son, my client?”

“Start it at the beginning, when you and I first talked about Primenyl. Lay it off on me. The facts will bear us out.”

“The facts,” he repeated.

“What you found at the house. What Sonny remembers.”

“I need you there, Grady. I'm not sure how much help Sonny'll be in telling the story. What's so goddamned important that you can't just go with us?”

Downing stood and turned his back, looking at his watch again. “Just something I need to take care of. Look, by the time they get you downtown, I'll be back. Just don't say anything until I get there, okay? Call Brenna, too. You'll want an attorney there.”

“Grady—”

“Trust me.”

They stared across a widening gulf. Trusting Downing had gotten him into this. He put his head between his knees and sobbed. When he looked up, Downing was gone. He wasn't in the kitchen with Sonny, either. The sound of a starting car drew him back to the front door. From the balcony, he heard the chink-chink-chink of tire chains and watched Downing's Ford slide down the steep drive of Lakeview Pointe Estates. It skidded onto the dark and deserted road, its headlights illuminating the gauzy-white snow as the car moved off through a tunnel of trees toward town.

Christensen watched it coast through a red traffic signal, past Ridgeville's only gas station and onto the entrance ramp of I-79. Downing was headed south in a snowstorm on the main road to Greene County.

Christensen marveled at the spent energy that had created the gouge, the fidgety panic of someone under intense scrutiny, his nail tracing and retracing the same path for hours, marking his passage through this sad portal. Yes, he'd been in this room before. Two years before.

“Something I don't quite follow, Jimmy,” the detective said. “Mind if we go over the Primenyl part again? Kind of a special interest of mine.”

Brenna stood up. She was wearing jeans and a cashmere sweater, what she'd been wearing, apparently, when he called. This whole thing must seem like dèjá vu to her, too, Christensen figured, though they'd only acknowledged it with their eyes.

“Look, Detective Pawlowski,” she said. “We've said everything we're going to say for now. If you guys are talking to Sonny, we assume he's corroborating everything up until the point where he blacked out. And it sounds to me like almost everything else in the story can be backed up with supporting evidence.”

“Really?”

“At the Jancey Street house,” she said, “and at the apartment in Ridgeville.”

The man eased one massive thigh onto the table and sat down, a hippopotamus trying to look casual. The seams of his pants were performing heroically. “Sorry, counselor,” he said. “We don't know that.”

“I guess you gentlemen have some fieldwork to do, then. We'll wait.”

The detective laughed. “Like you've got a choice?”

The door opened. Cool air swept in as the second detective, the polite one with the rheumy eyes and damp yellow crescents at his armpits, returned with the promised drinks. “Hope Orange Crush is okay for everybody,” Pit Stains said, a bit too deliberately, a bit too close to the running tape recorder. “They only restock the darned machine once a year.”

“Anything from Grady?” Christensen said.

Brenna shot him a look. She'd asked him not to open his mouth again.

“Hasn't returned his page,” Pit Stains said. “Shame.”

“Funny thing,” Pawlowski said. “You'd think if Grady Downing was working on the Primenyl investigation again, he'd at least mention it to somebody.” He smiled. Teeth the color of wheat. “Like me, for instance. Not that he'd have to, of course. You'd just think he might, being as it's been my case since the feds bowed out. See, the thing about Prim—”

The ringing phone punctured the moment. Pawlowski glared at Pit Stains, who snatched the handset off the wall beside the door.

Christensen felt sick. He was piecing together an image of Downing as a rogue cop, a man driven less by pure investigative zeal than by an obsession to avenge a lover's death. He'd suspected as much since the night Downing told him about Carole. But even with his tunnel vision about Ron Corbett, even with his motives clouded, Downing's instincts were right. The Jancey Street house
was
the staging area for the 1986 killings. Sonny
did
know the truth.

“We've said all we're going to say right now, gentlemen,” Brenna said, popping open her soda can. Both detectives watched her drink. Then Pit Stains said; “Oh, Christ. Don't fuck with me, Wally.”

The detective's eyes fixed on the far wall as he listened. Something was happening, or had happened. You could tell from Pit Stain's posture, his manner, the way he avoided looking directly at anyone in the room, including his partner. And they were all looking at him. He listened for another minute without a word.

“Jesus,” he said under his breath. “Trix know yet?”

Christensen's brain fired. Trix. Downing's wife. “What's going on?” he asked. He needed to know, imagined the worst.

“Like I fucking know,” Pawlowski said. “Just shut up,”

Christensen pulled Brenna closer and whispered into her ear, “Something's wrong.”

Pit Stains curled away from them, hiding his face as he listened, aware he was being watched. Christensen's eye twitched, the coppery taste of insurgent fear suddenly at the back of his throat. No one spoke until they heard a muttered “Okay” and the sound of a telephone handset being gently returned to its cradle. “Excuse me, if you would,” the detective said, and led Pawlowski out the door.

Christensen and Brenna strained to hear the muffled voices outside. The tape machine recorded the room's stifling silence, unless it picked up the bee-sound of the voices or the soft caress of Brenna's lips on Christensen's forehead. She rubbed his hands, too, looking for pressure points.

The door opened again, and Brenna backed off. The two detectives came in, their faces drained of even the pretense of goodwill.

“What is it?” Christensen asked.

“I want the tape recorder off,” Brenna said. “And if this is some bullshit ploy—”

“Grady Downing's dead,” Pawlowski said.

The words washed over Christensen like an anesthetic. It simply wasn't possible. Where would that leave me? he asked himself. He imagined the predicament, remembered the collision of circumstances that had brought him here. He laughed. He couldn't help it.

“Strange sense of humor,” Pawlowski said. “Not the reaction I'd expect from somebody who just lost his alibi.”

Christensen laughed again. It was just too impossible. Brenna dug her fingernails deep into his shoulder.

“If you guys are jamming us here—,” she began.

“Car accident, about two hours ago,” Pit Stains said. “Skidded off 79 down around the Greene County line. Hit a bridge abutment.”

Pawlowski shook his head. It looked choreographed. Everything he did seemed calculated. “God strike me dead,” he said, “but what kind of asshole tries to eat a grapefruit at seventy miles an hour in weather like this? That's just fucking nuts.”

“No,” Pit Stains said, “even weirder than that. PennDOT had just cleared the road, and he had chains on the tires. No skid marks, so he never lost control. Drove straight into it.”

Brenna squeezed harder as the implication settled: suicide. Pawlowski leaned over the table, checking the tape recorder but trying hard not to look like he was doing so. Christensen buried his head in his hands, overwhelmed by the room's weighty calm.

“Let's go over something again,” Pawlowski said. “Detective Downing showed up at the apartment, saw Mrs. Corbett there all shot up and dead, then left?”

Brenna eased her grip. Christensen nodded.

“Interesting.” Pawlowski turned to his partner. “Hey, Al, does that seem like something a homicide detective would do? Walk into a murder scene, have a look around, then decide to go for a drive out in the country in a snowstorm?”

Christensen looked up. “He seemed pretty agitated,” he said. “And he told me he had something he needed to take care of. Those were his words, I swear. Then he just took off. Said he'd meet us down here.”

“What else did he say?” Pit Stains said.

“He told me to tell you the whole story, from the beginning. And to call Brenna. And, oh Christ—” Christensen buckled. “‘Trust me,' he said.”

“Did you?” Pawlowski said.

The room started to move. “I don't know,” Christensen said.

“'Cause he's really left you way out on a limb here. Left us all with a big mess to clean up. Anything else he said that seems relevant?”

Christensen shook his head. “No, wait. He said to ask for the chief if there were problems.”

“The chief?” Pawlowski and Pit Stains traded looks, then snickered. “Kiger? I doubt they'd even met.”

Brenna's hand was back on his shoulder, like a vise, stopping him from answering. “Look,” she said, addressing the detectives. “You asked him what Downing said. He's trying to tell you. So back off or I'll shut this little tea party down right now. We're trying to cooperate.”

“Are you?” Pawlowski sneered. “Like we're gonna buy that fantasy about him and Grady Downing playing Hardy Boys with
my
investigation?”

The interrogation room door opened so quietly that neither cop noticed. Both stood over Christensen, glowering, but behind them, a third man stepped into the room. He was short and thick, a walking cannonball in a tailored brown suit. It took a second, but Christensen recognized him from news clips as the city's new chief of police. Kiger. The man nodded a greeting as he entered, and Christensen nodded back.

Both cops whipped around. Pit Stains's hand went reflexively to his shoulder holster.

“Sorry for the intrusion,” the chief said. He cocked his head toward the mirror. “Hope ya'll don't mind me bird-dogging you here.”

Pit Stains tried to remove his hand from his gun without anyone noticing. Everyone noticed. Kiger stepped deeper into the room, between the two detectives, and stabbed the tape recorder's stop button with a stubby index finger.

“I wonder if I might interrupt your discussion here for a few minutes to speak with Detectives Pawlowski and Joyce?” He crossed the room again and twisted the doorknob. “In my office.”

The two detectives reacted like schoolboys in trouble. They looked at each other as Kiger held the door open. It felt like a pivotal moment, but Christensen couldn't say why. He wished he knew what it meant. The three were almost out the door when his brain suddenly engaged.

“Wait,” he said.

The door slowly opened again and the chief peeked around its edge. “Something the matter?” he said.

Christensen wasn't thinking; it was more of a delayed reaction. “Something he said, about grapefruit.”

“Jim, let's let them talk first,” Brenna said.

“No, no,” Christensen said. He needed to know. “The one detective said something about Grady peeling a grapefruit. What was that?”

The three cops shuffled back in. Kiger looked at Pawlowski, who knocked the wall phone off the hook as he squeezed past his partner and into the room.

“Just something the Staties told Al about the accident,” Pawlowski said. “But it's still under investigation, so I'm not sure if it's appropriate—”

“It's all right,” Kiger said, turning to Pit Stains. “Tell us what they told you.”

“I don't even think it's relevant,” the thinner detective said.

Kiger crossed his arms. His smile could have melted steel. “Please answer the gentleman's question, detective.”

Pit Stains looked like he'd been slapped. “But—,” he began, then stopped. “State cops still aren't sure what happened. Just from the patrol officer's report, it looks like Grady never touched the brakes and drove straight into the concrete abutment. Nobody saw it—no other cars on the road because of the storm—but the plow had been by just a few minutes before. If he'd skidded, they'd know. He didn't skid. Died from the blunt force of the impact.”

“But the grapefruit,” Christensen said. “What about that?”

The detective shrugged. “Just something they said. They found some kind of fruit basket on the floor of the front seat.” Pit Stains turned toward the chief. “See, Downing had this thing about grapefruit. Ate 'em all the time, these bright red ones. Carried 'em in his pants pocket sometimes, stuck way out to here. His coat pocket. Had a drawerful of them in his desk. Hardly ever saw him without one.”

“But there was a basket?” Christensen said. “With red cellophane?”

“No idea. It was like a gift basket or something. He was getting ready to retire.”

“But it had grapefruit in it?”

“From the records-room girls,” the detective said. “The Staties told me that's what the card on the basket handle said.”

“It was open, though? He'd eaten one of them?”

“That's what they think. There were rinds on the floor.” The detective stopped himself, trying to reconcile something. “But if he'd been peeling one and lost control, wouldn't he have hit the brakes at some point?”

Christensen clasped his hands at the back of his neck and brought his elbows together beneath his chin, looking at the floor. He knew what happened. He closed his eyes and watched the scene play out. “Unless he was unconscious,” he said. “Or already dead.”

He looked up into four confused faces. Kiger shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “What are you saying, sir?”

“At the apartment,” he said. “She'd been doing something in the kitchen. I saw grapefruit and oranges, and stuff for making a gift basket. Red cellophane. Straw. And syringes. All that stuff was together on the counter. Sonny said that's where he got his orange. I'm guessing you guys'll find cyanide there somewhere.”

Kiger leaned against the grimy wall. “Anybody know where he got the basket? Or when?”

The two detectives shook their heads. “The card said—”

“Let's find out,” Kiger said. “Crime-scene people back from the apartment?”

“Not sure. We can check,” Pawlowski said.

“Do that. I want to know if they found any chemicals there.” The chief waved dismissively, then turned to Pit Stains as Pawlowski lumbered out. “You call the state cops back. We'll need that basket and everything in it for tests. I want it treated like evidence, at least for now. If the same chemicals turn up in the grapefruit and that orange, we got us an explanation.”

Christensen felt Brenna's hand on his shoulder again. He looked up, surprised to see her crying. The second detective followed Pawlowski out the door, leaving them alone with the chief of police.

“Thank you,” Christensen said when the door closed.

Kiger scratched his nose, never taking his eyes from Christensen's. “Sir?”

“For believing me.”

The police chief studied him, saying nothing. Saying everything. “Don't leave town,” Kiger said. He nodded to Brenna, said, “Ma'am.” Then he stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him, leaving them alone.