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Authors: Martin J Smith

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Police Procedurals, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Mystery, #FICTION/Thrillers

Time Release (4 page)

BOOK: Time Release
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“How does Dad feel about that?” Brenna said.

“I say time's up.”

Christensen snapped on the porch light and opened the door, but the spot in front of his driveway was empty. The wet street reflected the street lamps and a bright quarter-moon in the slowly clearing sky. He checked his watch again.

Brenna wrestled Taylor onto her shoulder. “When are you supposed to talk to the boy?”

“Downing said he'd have him call.”

She kissed him and turned away. Without another word, she carried her son out the door and down the steps to the driveway. Before her car was out of sight, a white Mustang rolled into the driveway, preceded by the low throb of overcranked bass speakers.

Chapter 5

The concrete felt like cold steel on Sonny's bare feet, and the wind bit into his skin. He kneaded the yellow silicone swimming cap between his fingers as he paced the rim of Point State Park. Brown water swirled just below, taunting him.

He hated the cap, hated that he needed it to preserve body heat during his two latest training swims. But whatever core fuel kept him alive during these early fall workouts wasn't enough. Not lately.

He'd shaken off the grim news on the Coast Guard information hot line an hour earlier. All three of Pittsburgh's rivers were trashed after last night's rain. The basin was like a giant storm sewer on days like this. Whatever wasn't nailed down during the region's vicious late fall storms washed down the hills and into the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, which met and formed the Ohio at the spot where he stood. The Point.

Sonny curled his bare toes over the rim and watched. Sewage was the least of it. Seat cushions. Thorny planks. An empty rabbit hutch. About fifty yards to his left, a full-size camp cooler in full sail. He'd stroked through worse. Just deal with it, he thought, dipping a foot into the water.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Fifty-five degrees, the Coast Guard said. Four degrees colder than yesterday. The air temperature was 56, but winter was coming. In a couple months, if the snow belt slipped forty miles south of normal, as it did every few years, he'd be able to walk from bank to bank. Then where could he train?

“I seen this on TV,” came a woman's voice from behind. “Whachacallem. Polar Bear Club or something.”

People usually ignored him during his spring and summer swims. But as September dragged into October, he'd noticed a change. Each swim brought the quiet rustle of down jackets as Point State Park visitors coasted to a stop directly behind him. By the first of November, they were less curious than concerned. Just last week, a woman grabbed his arm and urged him to reconsider.

“Ain't no polar bear.” Man's voice, same Pittsburgh accent. Had to be the husband. “Those fat old shitbags come dahn do their swim on New Year's Day. Swim, hell. They jump in until the TV cameras go off, then haul out to the bars. Check ahht the shoulders. This guy's a swimmer.”

Sonny tucked the cap under one arm and ran his thumbs around the drawstring of his Speedo, eventually laying the tops of his hands against his bare back. He knew the risks of hypothermia better than most, knew he was even more vulnerable because of the unexpected squiggle of arrhythmia his doctor noticed on a heart monitor last year. But for two years, he'd conditioned himself to maintain a perfect balance between body heat generated and body heat lost. Not many people could survive prolonged exposure in water this cold. But at seventy-five strokes a minute, he felt sure he could maintain a stable core temperature even in water as cold as 45 degrees. And he could always stroke faster if he felt himself failing.

Besides, no swimmer had tried a winter crossing of Lake Erie. Why not him? Who else had worked so hard to adapt the human body to cold water? But he was a long way from where he needed to be for a late February attempt. Only long training swims on days like this could push him beyond the known barriers. If a swimming cap could help him survive ninety minutes in the river on a day like this, he'd wear it. At least until his body caught up with his mind.

He snapped it into place over his long brown hair, letting the short ponytail dangle down the center of his back. With his right hand, he massaged the tight muscle between his left shoulder and his neck. When it swelled with blood, he did the same on the opposite side. He windmilled his arms to pop the joints and remembered something his older brother used to do when they were kids. David was double-jointed in the shoulders—what a swimmer he'd have been—and early on discovered he could pretzel one arm behind his head. Once, he ran into the house screaming, planning to tell their parents he'd been hit by a trolley. David laughed too soon, before he fooled anybody. But it was one of the few times Sonny remembered his parents laughing out loud at the same time.

A shiver. Sonny pulled his goggles on and looked around, first at the dozen or so people gathered behind him, then at the water running fast and high. He dipped his foot again, felt another chill. Just relax, he told himself. Roll the shoulders awake. Shake it out. Focus.

“Keep this up, Chickie, your balls'll look like BBs.”

That voice, like screeching brakes. Still, Sonny laughed. “Detective Downing,” he said without turning around. Sonny raised the goggles and faced Downing. Had he been there a second ago? No, he would have recognized that sports jacket, even with the goggles. Where'd he come from?

“Saw that piece-of-shit Toyota of yours in the Point parking lot, so I booked down to say hi. What do you pay those extortionists for a couple hours' parking? You could park all day at the stadium for two bucks.”

He didn't see Downing often, which was fine. But as unnerving as the detective could be, he also was nicer than most other adults Sonny knew. No one had tried as hard to help him in the last ten years, at least no one who wasn't getting paid by the county to do it.

“Thanks for the tip.”

“You ever talk to that kid at CMU I told you about? The one selling the '83 Aries? The little Einstein didn't know squat about quality, selling a classic K-car for a song. Where else you gonna get that kind of style for under five hundred dollars? I'd of bought it myself, but I really wanted to see you in something American.”

“No, the Toyota's still—”

“You never called him, did you? You little shit. Can't beat a K-car. Pitt still treating you okay? I might be able to help you find something else if that's not working out.”

Sonny shivered, suddenly aware of the cold. “Still in the chem department, stocking the labs and stuff. It's good, four to midnight. My choice. Gives me time to train during daylight. Listen, if I don't get my blood pumping pretty soon—”

“I know, I know. Serious about the BBs, though. Cold water makes you suck 'em up into your body. Water like this, they may never come back down. That'll kill you long before that heart murmur or whatever. More painful, too.”

Sonny laughed again. He liked Downing.

“Not that I'm concerned, you understand,” the detective said. “Just with my luck, I'll be the one sent down to fish you out of this river someday. And I'm not partial to floaters. Nothing personal.”

The detective reached into his pocket, pulled out a business card. He started to hand it over but stopped, apparently realizing Sonny had nowhere to put it.

“Why don't I just slide this under your windshield wiper?” he said.

“What is it?”

“Guy I'd like you to call. Psychologist.”

Sonny studied him carefully. “No thanks.”

“This one's different. Specializes in kids like you from broken homes. Told him about what happened to you, warned him you'd probably gag if you talked to another therapist. But after I told him about your hands, he insisted I have you call.”

Shivering hard and steady now. If he didn't get in the water soon, start generating some body heat, there'd be real problems.

“Sorry, but I need to start swimming,” Sonny said. “What did he say about my hands?”

Downing stepped forward with the card. He snapped it between his fingers and held it up so Sonny could read the name: James K. Christensen. Then he tucked it back in his pocket. “You swim. And be careful. Rivers are full of garbage. Under your windshield wiper, okay?”

What about my hands? Sonny wondered. He pulled the goggles on again, and just that quick he was back in the moment. Deaf to the traffic on the yellow-gold bridges at the Point. Numb to everything but the task: to dive through the pain that would slide the length of his body like a cold metal ring, and then stroke into the swirling brown Ohio. The rest would follow, but that first step was the toughest.

The current carried him quickly into the center of the muddy river. He swam faster than the water, maybe eighty strokes a minute, trying to clear the river's main channel before boat traffic resumed. At the bottom of his stroke, about three feet below the surface, 48-degree water numbed his fingertips. Each stroke sent waves of chilled satin over his shoulders and down his spine. During his first minutes in water this cold, he often imagined himself retreating down his throat and into his belly. It was safe there, with the warming blood flowing around him as his heart rate climbed.

Sonny once thought he'd invented the snug-in-the-guts fantasy, but Cox told him other open-water swimmers he trained talked about it, too. It's physiological, he'd said. Small capillaries near the skin's surface constrict in extreme cold, shunting blood into the body's core where it can warm the vital organs. It's the body's best survival mechanism and makes the bloodless skin feel, with a little imagination, like a protective shell.

Sonny reached the shallows along the river's north rim before he stopped. Behind him, the city's redeveloped skyline rose like a dream, the crystal tower of PPG Place at its center, flanked by half a dozen new skyscrapers, some even taller, that went up as the steel industry went down. Distance washed away the city's warts—the crumbling roads and bridges, the averted eyes of displaced steel workers, the human garbage displaced by redevelopment along Liberty Avenue. From downriver the city looked clean, untroubled, and Sonny liked that.

He checked his watch. Using his marathoner's no-legs stroke, it would take him a little less than thirty minutes to reach the McKees Rocks Bridge, twice as long to get back upriver to the Point. He started, paced by the same inner drum that brought him to the water these days against Cox's advice.

Tb relieve the tedium, he reviewed his trainer's early warnings about cold-water distance swimming in these waters. Tugboats and barges were the least of it. Bacteria. Exhaustion. Dehydration. Disorientation. Hallucinations. Hypothermia. Death. “You want to be a swimmer? Learn to dive when a gun sounds and swim as fast as you can,” Cox had said when Sonny introduced himself two years earlier. “But you don't need a coach if you want to swim that kind of open-water distance. You need a fucking shrink.”

True, Sonny thought. At least some sports offered a shot at glory or money, or both. Distance swimming offered neither. And explaining it to others only complicated things. Assuming he could pull himself back onto the Point's rim and struggle to the Ayatollah Corolla, he could look forward to thirty minutes of violent shivering inside the sun-warmed car. If there was sun. That would go on until his body temperature stabilized. Eventually, he would wiggle the loose wire underneath the dash and drive to his apartment. If he was lucky, sleep would pull him beneath the surface of a life that sometimes seemed as vast and cold and empty as Lake Erie.

Someday, he figured, he'd understand it all. For now, he just wanted to keep pushing himself. Colder. Longer.

About a mile downriver, his hands began to tingle. Not from exposure. That was a different feeling altogether. This was the phantom-prickle sensation that worried his doctor, like his hands suddenly fell asleep. He stroked on, boosting his pace to eighty strokes a minute, then eighty-five, but he could feel himself slowing down. He screamed at the river bottom, the word
shiiit
bubbling up around his ears, then angled toward the bank just beyond the Kaufmann's warehouse. He thrashed into the shallows, both hands dead at the ends of his wrists.

Up the muddy bank, onto the curb of the giant warehouse parking lot. Asphalt to the horizon. No towel. No shoes. No warm-up suit. Just his marble-bag bathing suit and a twenty-minute jog between him and a car that might or might not start. He was halfway there, shivering like a junkie, when he remembered the goggles and cap. He tried to rake them off his head, feeling totally spastic, but the fingers just weren't working.

Chapter 6

Christensen had reviewed hundreds of files from the Department of Children's Services, but none as thick as this. It dominated the center of his home-office desk, a presence, like an unwelcome guest. Downing was right about one thing: Sonny Corbett had a history.

He opened it to the summary page and again scanned the long list of dates running down the left side, each one representing the arrival of a child welfare investigator on the Corbett family doorstep. He checked the birth dates listed in the upper right corner, then noted the date of the first entry—June 1974. A caseworker's notes read: “Domestic. Both children temp. removed as precaution. Placement: Morningside Shelter. Duration: Six days.”

Sonny had been four months old; his brother, David, just past three years. A short childhood for both.

Reproductive organs should be licensed, Christensen thought, like concealed weapons, only stricter. Assholes carry handguns all the time but only a few actually hurt anybody. When assholes have kids, though, they inflict themselves not only on their children, but on generations they'll never live to see. “I had no idea you were Aryan,” Molly had said the night he mentioned his licensing idea after a particularly bad day, but she'd never spent much time with the children of monsters, never heard a nine-year-old recount a rape, never watched a child numbly describe a parent's unstoppable rage.

The sound of machine-gun fire and the amplified screams of its victims filtered in from the adjoining den, along with Annie's unrestrained laughter.

“Annie! What are you watching?” He raised his voice loud enough to be heard, but controlled, calm. “Melissa! Anybody?”

No response, save for a sudden increase in volume. Melissa had the remote control. He took a deep breath. Then another. One more before he opened the door into inevitable confrontation.

“Hey, guys. School night. Let's wrap it up.”

Sylvester Stallone appeared on the screen, camouflaged, rippling, lethal. He hoisted a gun the size of a Cadillac bumper and put down another charging cadre of screeching VC.

“Almost over,” Melissa said.

“Dad, watch this.” Annie sat upright and pointed one of her five-year-old fingers at the screen, across which had bloomed a gory fireball. Bodies everywhere. Close-up of Stallone's sneering grin.

“You've seen this before?”

Melissa shrugged with the studied indifference of a fifteen-year-old. “Third time. It's war movie month on HBO.”

Christensen heard himself sigh. He usually held back, but not tonight. Damn her right to teenage self-determination. She was baiting him.

“Turn it off.”

Melissa glared from beneath a loose curtain of black hair, her mother's hair. “It's almost over.”

“Good night,” he said. He crossed the room and jabbed the TV's power button with more force than necessary.

Annie bolted to her feet, hands on her tiny hips. Her shoulders were squared. The blond pigtails that Melissa braided for her that morning were mostly unraveled, Heidi with an attitude. “That's not appropriate, Dad.”

Melissa rolled her eyes, collected her ice cream bowl, and padded off toward the kitchen. Christensen stepped to the couch and hugged Annie to his chest.

“You're upset, and I understand that. But we've talked about how some movies just aren't suitable for kids your age.”

“Rambo's like the Power Rangers, only grown up.”

“Sorry. Brush your teeth?”

Annie tightened her thin lips over two gleaming rows of baby teeth, going bug-eyed to enhance the presentation. The telephone rang once, twice as he inspected her mouth.

“Beautiful. Got Silkie?”

She held up the remains of Molly's favorite nightgown.

“Guess who-oo?” Melissa said as she walked the cordless phone in from the kitchen. She handed it off and headed up the stairs without making eye contact.

“Hi,” he said. “Can you hang a minute? I'm putting Annie to bed.”

“Call me back,” Brenna said.

“No, wait. Please. Ten seconds.”

Christensen hugged Annie and began their ritual song, loosening her surviving braids as he sang. “Night night. Sleep tight. Please don't let the bedbugs bite.”

“If they do, hit 'em with a shoe,” Annie replied, echoing the unfortunate refrain taught her by a former nanny, “till they're black and blue.”

Something crossed behind his eyes like a raptor's shadow, something he'd just read on a decade-old record in Sonny Corbett's file. An injury report. He pulled his daughter to him and hugged her again until she wriggled away.

“ 'Night,” he called as she followed her older sister up the creaky wooden stairs. “Ask Melissa to brush your hair out, okay? And tomorrow's Share Day, so don't forget to pick out something before you go to bed.”

He didn't speak again until his daughters were out of sight, and even then in a whisper until he realized how ridiculous that seemed.

“Rough night,” he said.

“So I gathered,” Brenna said. Hearing her voice made him lonely.

“Cramming for the Cheverton trial?”

“Nope. I needed a break. Got Taylor to sleep by nine, took a long bath, and brought a glass of wine to bed.”

Loneliness transformed briefly into lust, then receded as he checked his watch. Lust was out of the question. But he let his mind linger on the thought of her between the sheets, scented by bath oil and smoothed by lotion, her white cotton nightshirt clinging to the gentle curve of her still-damp breasts.

He picked up Annie's Garfield slippers and put them on the end of the banister. “Spent the night working on my ‘Daddy Dearest' routine.”

“We all play hardball sometimes, Jim. Don't be too tough on yourself.”

“I got tied up reading a file tonight, and didn't realize until too late that they were watching some bloodfeast on TV. Annie too. Now I'm a dictator for making them shut it off.”

“It's your job,” she said. “What file?”

Sometimes she was more prosecutor than defense attor­ney. “Don't start,” he said. “You know what file.”

“The one you're not supposed to have?”

Long silence. “Look, it's late,” he said. “Why don't we try this again tomorrow.”

“Oh, lighten up.”

“Sorry. This whole thing has me a little on edge.”

“The Primenyl case did that to people, I hear. How is Detective Downing, anyway?”

Christensen ignored the jab. Some sort of grunge nihil-rock suddenly issued from the stereo in Melissa's upstairs bedroom, at a volume clearly intended to provoke. He backed into his office and closed the door.

“I think his instincts are damned good,” he said, thinking: That should shift the conversation a bit. “I can't imagine a better crucible for memory repression than 154 Jancey Street.”

“Where?”

“Casa Corbett. The Irondale house the family lived in for a while.”

“In 1986?”

“For two years before the killings and for a few weeks afterward. As twisted as the family was before then, that's where it all seemed to disintegrate. For everybody in the house except Sonny.”

“So?”

“So what's wrong with this picture? You've got three people in the family who crash and burn, psychologically speaking, but the fourth, the youngest, walks away without a scratch?”

“It happens,” she said. “There was that study on resilient personalities. People with totally screwed-up backgrounds who survive and succeed. Maybe Sonny's that type.”

Christensen shook his head. “Irrelevant, counselor. There's a big difference between resilience and repression. A resilient person acknowledges the past, deals with it, and moves on. Someone who's repressing never gets past step one. And I think there may be a lot Sonny never even confronted. Hold on, I want to read you something.”

Christensen circled his desk and opened the file again, flipping to a 1988 foster care placement report. He picked up his desk telephone from its cradle and hung up the cordless, trying at least to eliminate the cordless's annoying static from the rest of the aural assault.

“Sonny was in and out of half a dozen foster homes, right? And each time he was placed, they sat him down with a therapist. Once in late 1986. Twice in 1987. Sonny never talked about his family in those three sessions, and appar­ently no one pushed him to do so. But in February 1988—this is two years after his mother went to Borman, his father abandoned him, and his big brother committed suicide—Chaytor Perriman had a session with him. His notes are in the file. Interesting stuff.”

“Chaytor's a good guy,” Brenna said. “Not that I want to encourage you in any way.”

“It says, and I'm reading from Chaytor's notes: ‘Sonny initiated an extended discussion about his brother. Described in some detail the car accident in which his brother died and his recent progress coming to terms with brother's death.'”

Christensen counted four beats before Brenna spoke. “Wait,” she said. “You said it was suicide.”

Gotcha. “It was. They shared a bedroom. Sonny found the body.”

“Chaytor noted all that?”

“He did. Plus, there's a coroner's report in the file. In his summary, Chaytor wrote something pretty intriguing: ‘Sonny's recollections about his family seem scoured of the instability reflected in police reports and court records.'”

“‘Scoured'?” Brenna said.

Christensen took a deep breath. He wanted Brenna to feel at least some of the chill that passed through him when he first read the therapist's report. “Sonny doesn't talk about his brother at all for two years, then when he does, he puts the death into a fantasy scenario so he can deal with it. Very telling.”

“A form of repression.” She said it without emotion. “Anything else?”

“Something very weird. Got no idea what to make of it. The file's full of old police reports, mostly domestic calls to the Jancey Street home in '84, '85, '86. A few incident reports about the brother, just vandalism and stuff. Not the most stable kid, apparently. But there's one about Sonny, from 1989.”

Brenna sipped her wine again. “So he was, what? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Something happened at his mother's apartment. She was out of Borman, living on her own, and caseworkers dropped Sonny off every couple weeks for a visit, just a couple hours at a time. But there was an incident, and it's not clear.”

“Something Sonny did?”

“That's what the report said. His mom apparently watched a neighbor's kid in the afternoons to earn a little money. Well, when the caseworker comes back to pick up Sonny, there's a patrol car outside. Neighbors heard this commotion. Turns out Sonny was playing with the neighbor kid, two years old, I think, when the kid almost drowned in the apartment's bathtub.”

He waited. Finally, Brenna asked: “Why would Sonny have him in a tub?”

“No idea. Both of them were soaking wet. The kid wasn't hurt, more scared than anything, but Sonny never said a word to the police about it. His mom apparently was in another room at the time, so she wasn't much help either.”

“So?”

“I don't know. Really, I don't. Peculiar, though, don't you think?”

The music upstairs stopped as suddenly as it had started. He knew it would if Melissa didn't get an immediate reaction, but it left him waiting through a long, uncomfortable silence for Brenna to continue. His eyes strayed to the right corner of his desk, to the wood-framed portrait of Molly and the girls, taken for him just two weeks before the accident. It arrived with the photographer's invoice on the day of Molly's funeral.

“So when will you see Sonny?”

Her voice made him jump, but he wasn't sure why. “Tomorrow. Downing talked to him yesterday, said Sonny could call any day to set up a get-to-know-you session. Mostly I want to test his suggestibility. There are a couple ways to do that.”

He stopped. The tonelessness of her voice made him recall the chilly discussion they'd had on the day Downing first approached him about the case.

“Look, Brenna, are you okay with this? I'm not committed to anything. And I wouldn't do it if there was any risk.”

“Reality isn't really your thing, is it?” she said. He was at least grateful for the sudden life in her voice. “I know you better than that. You wouldn't walk away now even if I
could
convince you Downing's a flake.”

He laughed. “But really, aren't you curious now?”

She didn't answer. “Just be careful, all right? Don't let Downing drag you into the quicksand.”

Except for the ticking of the ancient radiators, the house was quiet after they hung up. It was the same healing tranquility he sought at the end of every hectic day, and he leaned back in his desk chair to enjoy it. But when his eyes fell again on Sonny's file, the familiar silence suddenly made him edgy. He snapped off his lamp and left the room, closing the door behind him.

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