Time Release (5 page)

St. Michael's Cemetery was old Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh he knew best. Carved into Mount Washington high above the South Side, it could have been a three-acre model for the city itself. Poles and Slovaks over here, Italians over there, just past the Irish and the Greeks. Like the city, the European working stock remained segregated into tidy little ghettos, even in death. The Jews and blacks were with their own, of course, somewhere else.

Not that it was a bad place. Of the city's million or so cemeteries, St. Michael's, with its big-screen view of the Downtown skyline, was one of the best kept. Even now, with the brutal late November rain and the trees nearly bare, it had the feel of a high-end headstone showroom. Even so, Downing hated graveyards. Strictly a professional opinion: The colder the body, the less use a homicide cop has for it.

Carole was Italian, one of a couple Marinos among the Borellis and Cippolas and Tambellinis spread across a slope on the east side. Time blurs everything, even this, he thought. Could he find her again? He did, and stooped in the dim reflection of his headlights to brush leaves from the flat granite marker.

Carole Marino Carver. She'd kept her married name for the options it gave her in a town obsessed with ethnicity. But with her waist-length hair the color of Kona coffee, not to mention Italo-short fuses on her temper and her passion, Carole didn't fool anybody.

“How you been, baby?” Downing said.

He closed his eyes. He'd stopped praying ten years ago, but he always tried to remember the dead as they were premortem. And what came to mind first were Carole's panted whispers as she moved beneath him that last time, arching her back and stretching her arms through the spindles of her cherry-wood headboard. Only woman he ever knew who did that, and she'd done it even when they were in college.

Then he thought of the first time they met. He was eighteen, maybe nineteen, at a party. Bunch of kids just drinking and trying to get laid. She came in, and he heard himself sigh when he saw her. More of a moan. The air just left his chest, involuntarily. She told him she'd had nearly the same reaction. Within a week they started a relationship that lasted four years, off and on, until they graduated. Four years of blowout fights followed by the kind of sex he'd fantasized about ever since. Fight, fuck. Fight, fuck. When they got tired of the roller coaster, they'd talked themselves into separate lives, knowing it was the best thing. He remembered what she said on her way out the door: “We're two live wires, Grady. We both need grounds.”

He saw her under the Kaufmann's clock one morning thirty-four years later, standing there like she was waiting for him. They had lunch and laughed about the disaster that might have been their marriage, agreeing that both had found their grounds: Trix for him, CPA Gerald Carver for her, at least for the ten years their marriage lasted. Then they rocked Hilton room 663 all afternoon, breaking only to nibble fruit and sip cold duck from a room-service tray.

Downing tried to enjoy the memory, but a videotape began replaying in his head. It showed them sitting in his car, talking, kissing, vulnerable to the stalker behind the viewfinder. Then, like static interference, something else crackled into his mind. A high-pitched whine, like a dentist's drill, only coarser. The Stryker bone saw. And an image: a scalpel tracing a Y incision from the clavicle to the mons veneris. And another: that outrageous hair dangling to the floor, trampled and crusted with blood.

Downing willed the thoughts away.

“Told you I'd be back when I had some news,” he said.

A trickle of rain scored his spine, channeled along the deep gorge that divided his back into two muscular halves. Shivering, he felt his stomach tighten, reminding him of the slight cop gut he'd been able to avoid until the past few years. Rain made his right shoulder ache where a bullet entered years ago, but he'd learned to live with the occasional twinge.

Downing stood up, pulled his raincoat collar tight around his thick neck, and licked the raindrops from his mustache.

“Still don't know why, or what sets him off,” he said. “But Corbett's killing again.”

He'd got the word from some young Waynesburg detec­tive who called to pick his brain two days after the latest killing. They had a product-tampering case, he'd said, a poisoning, as if Downing didn't read the papers. “You're the guy that did the Primenyl case, right?” the cop asked. Downing had winced at the word, then set aside the Texas Ruby Red grapefruit he'd been peeling. The cop told a story Downing had heard six times already, but with a twist.

“Still holding the yogurt container when the paramedics found her on the kitchen floor,” the kid cop said. “We won't have final results for a few days, but tox is pretty sure it's potassium cyanide.”

“Probably not.” Downing remembered his crash course in chemistry in 1986. “Probably not sodium cyanide, either. Too unstable. The powders start reacting with carbon dioxide and moisture as soon as they're exposed to air. After more than a day or so in a container like that it wouldn't be potent enough to be fatal.”

Then he'd remembered another option: hydrogen cyanide, the liquid form. It's unstable, too, he'd thought; hell, it boils at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. But then, wouldn't yogurt be the perfect delivery vehicle for it? From your grocer's refrigerator to yours. The stuff tastes like hell, but who thinks about that first spoonful? And one would probably be enough.

“Get word out fast,” Downing told him. “Get any brand with the same packaging off the shelves of the local stores. You check the lot number on the container?” The kid cop said he'd done that first thing, adding, “We learn from mistakes.”

Downing pulled his collar tighter.
Fuck you,
was what he'd wanted to say. Have the spine to say what you're thinking: After the Primenyl screw-up, everybody knows the drill. Say it, you son of a bitch. But no. He'd taken a deep breath and swallowed the words, then asked: “What's the chance it was a family thing?”

“We're talking to the husband, but they're the Waltons, man. And her boy—maybe twelve; he was there when it happened—he says she ate it right out of the grocery bag.”

Downing hadn't listened as the cop described what happened next. He already knew. Racing pulse within seconds. A few pathetic minutes of gasping as the poison constricts the chest. Face pale as the body forces blood to the organs in a hopeless attempt to save itself. Falling blood pressure. Convulsions. Violent skittering of the limbs. Death. Downing saw everything long before the 9-1-1 recording hit the news, including the shit stains on her kitchen floor.

He'd wheeled his desk chair to the computer terminal as the deputy talked. “Where'd you say this happened?”

“Waynesburg. Near the college,” the deputy said.

Downing stopped, his hands frozen above the keyboard. “Name some of the other little burgs around there.”

“Old mining towns, mostly,” the deputy said. “Enterprise. Gypsy. Outcrop.”

Downing traced the grave marker's chiseled “1986” with his toe. Despite the rain and the hour, others were around. A car passed slowly along the cemetery road, washing him briefly in high beams. He looked away, just in case he knew them.

“You believe it, baby? Outcrop. Just one guy in the whole goddamned computer living near Waynesburg. Been there since right after the '86 killings. Knew it was Corbett even before he sent me the tape, even before I checked the database.”

The database. What started with his own scribbled notes about a random series of deaths that year became the most intensive manhunt in Pennsylvania history. He shuffled the numbers again: twenty-five thousand pages of finished reports by a hundred fifty federal, state, and local investigators stored in twelve different file cabinets. A computerized catalog of the sixty thousand names gathered between the end of 1986 and late 1988, when the Primenyl task force was disbanded. From the beginning, Ron Corbett's name stood apart.

“It's the opening I need,” Downing said. “Don't really want to jump back into this thing. Nearly killed me last time. But I got to, baby, because he won't stop at one. Got to for you. For the other five—now the other six, I guess. For me, too. So I'll get him this time, one way or the other.”

Soon he'd make his pitch, lay out the theory he'd been researching for more than a year, persuade his new boss to give him a second chance. He needed one thing to prosecute the bastard—a witness. And if Christensen didn't seem enthusiastic about working with Sonny, he at least seemed willing to help.

A thorn caught on Downing's wedding ring as he tugged the rose from inside his raincoat. He pulled it loose, relieved that the bud was intact and starring to open. He held it into the faint light and pouring rain and again tried to conjure pleasant memories of the woman beneath his feet, and of the last time he saw her alive. But the rose was the color of old blood, and the memory it triggered took his breath away.

He shuddered, closed his left fist around the flower, and turned his back. When he opened his hand, he was nearly at the car and panting. Had he been running? He dropped the crushed petals into a muddy pool, folded himself into the driver's seat, and eased the Ford toward the graveyard gate and down into the city.

Steam rose from Downing's pants as they dried on the heat vent beneath his office window. Through the mist, he could see the tugboat lights as they shoved silent barges along the inky Monongahela River three stories below. Across the Mon sat Station Square, once the gritty rail crossroads for the city's iron and steel exports, now a postindustrial shopping mall, fresh-scrubbed and trimmed in neon.

Half the guys in this bunker would kill for his window, he thought. After twenty-eight years with the department, the last nineteen in homicide, he'd finally got the lead investi­gator's office and the window in 1985, the year before the Primenyl killings. Lost the title two years later, an awkward rump-fuck of a demotion that nobody really talked about. But nobody ever asked for the office back, and Downing never brought it up.

The only problem with the view was just upriver, about a mile north of the Public Safety Building—the old Duquesne brewery. He'd played in its shadow as a kid, back when it was working three shifts to slake the quitting-time thirst of Big Steel. Big Steel was dead now and the leprous brick building was lifeless except for the clock face that covered a quarter-acre of the front wall. Its giant hands swept away the hours, mocking him, erasing the five months he had left until mandatory retirement.

Quarter to eleven. Jesus.

Downing snapped on his desk lamp, recoiling from the harsh, sudden light. He knocked over his open jar of freeze-dried coffee as he checked his watch.

“Damn.”

What must he look like to the night-shifters passing along the corridor? Rumpled. Puffy. Squinting like a mole through his bifocals. Bare legs propped on the windowsill. He turned out the lamp, smoothed his still-thick brown hair, and wriggled into his pants, which were damp below the point where his raincoat left off. He swept a mound of grapefruit peels into the wastebasket, then turned the lamp on again and snatched the phone from its cradle.

Trix wasn't answering, but he knew the game. On the fourth ring, he started to stroke the bronze elephant next to his Rolodex. The punch line of a private joke was taped to its side—M40.
National Geographic
once did a story about an old, dying elephant that in field research jargon was identified only as Male 40, or M40. The researchers tracked M40's last tortured walk to a clearing, where during the elephant's final agonized hours they witnessed behavior that scientists had never before seen. As M40 lay there, helpless and unable to stand, the younger males who'd followed him began, one by one, to mount him in a spirited show of dominance.

He'd laughed when Silverwood posted the story on the department bulletin board and scribbled, “Make reserva­tions now for Grady Downing's retirement party!” He'd even laughed when somebody left the little brass M40 on his desk two days later. But nobody ever took credit, which he thought gave the whole thing a darker, meaner edge. Truth be told, it cut close to the bone.

His wife answered after the tenth ring, like she always did from bed on the nights he forgot to call.

“Very nice, Grady.” He knew the rasp in her voice.

“You asleep already? It's…” He checked his watch again, as though she could see the gesture. “Jesus, Trix, I'm sorry. Just got—”

“Forget it.”

How many nights had they had this conversation? How many times had she tamped her anger and disappointment down with that simple response and rolled over again into fitful sleep? How long until she went berserk some night and carved his heart out while he dozed on the couch?

“He's killing again.” He paused, waiting for a prompt.

None came. He knew she'd need no explanation or context, so he just continued. “About an hour from here, in Greene County. Near Outcrop.”

“I wondered. Not Primenyl again?”

“No, but cyanide.”

Silence. Ten seconds. Twenty. He'd meant to tell her in person; now he knew he should have.

“What are you thinking?” The tremble in her voice told him this was going to be tough.

Deep breath. “Still waiting for more details. But if it looks like Corbett was involved, I'm going to DeLillo with my repressed-memories idea. Or maybe I'll just take it straight to Kiger.”

“The chief? DeLillo will love that.”

“Going over his head would be tricky, but I may have to. Kiger wasn't here in '86, so I've got no baggage with him.”

No reaction. And he needed to talk. Proceed with caution.

“Got five months left, Trix. And I think Kiger'll go for it, especially if I can convince him Corbett's involved in this one. But I'll argue to reopen even if he's not convinced. We know a lot more about how memory works than we did in '86. Corbett's wife is still around. So's Sonny, his youngest kid. Trix, they must have known what went on in that house. Maybe if I can get them thinking about it again, it'll nudge them enough. I'm sure the memories are in there. Getting them out is the tricky part.”