Time Release (6 page)

“Grady—”

“It was like somebody dropped a bomb on that family, Trix. The killings start, and within a couple weeks three of the four family members are a few shrimp short of a cocktail? You tell me what the fuck they saw Corbett doing.”

The line hummed, electronic silence.

“How's it going to end?” she said, her voice flat but not emotionless. It made him uncomfortable, mostly because he wasn't sure what she meant. “After it's over, are you ready to deal with it either way? Win or lose?”

“Trix—”

“I mean, if you reopen this case, Grady, it could happen to you all over again. And I'm not sure I can help you through it this time. I never understood why you got so involved, because it never happened before or since. But I see it happening again. The way you talked just now. It takes you over. I know part of you died with those people, but you did your job. You just can't make witnesses out of clay. You can't pull evidence out of your hat. And you can't wall me out again.”

Finally: “I'm scared, Grady.”

Scary damn business. “He's not finished, Trix. Everything I've read predicted he'd kill again. Now he has. And there's no reason to think he'll stop now.”

“You don't know that. You've made an awfully big assumption here. I don't understand you sometimes.”

Downing picked up the elephant and considered heaving it through the glass of his office door. She could never understand, because she would never know about Carole.

“There's still time,” he said. “I want to use it all.”

“Have you mentioned it to anyone yet?”

“Christensen. Just to run the repressed-memories theory past him, see if he'd talk to Sonny.”

“And?”

“He reads the papers, too. Totally agreed with me. Said this sounds at least as strong as the stuff in California last year. And after the Primenyl killings, he said he'd heard Mom and the kid had their emergency lights flashing.”

Trix sighed. “What time you coming home? I haven't fed your dinner to Rodney. Yet.”

Dinner. Right. Downing swiveled in his chair and propped a foot on the window ledge. In the distance, the brewery clock showed no mercy. He smiled anyway.

“I'll leave now. Don't give it to the dog. Nothing worse than a basset hound with calluses on his belly. Notice how he's starting to drag?”

He expected a laugh. They'd always shared that much, anyway. But Trix didn't laugh. He turned back toward his desk and propped his elbows on the contents of a coroner's file labeled “Corbett, David.” An image of every parent's nightmare stared up at him: a black-and-white photograph of a troubled fifteen-year-old hunched grotesquely in a sturdy wing chair, left dome of his skull gone, the gun balanced improbably on his right shoulder. Another print of the same frame was in the file he gave Christensen.

The edge was back in her voice when she said good night. Downing closed his eyes. “Trix?”

“What?”

“Come on. It'll be fine.”

“Sure,” she said. “You've got that dead man's brake, remember? Stops you right before the cliff. That's what you always say. But God, Grady, can you be sure it still works?” She hung up, and he listened to the phone's disconnect pulse as long as he could stand it.

He'd waited three days for the call, wondering when—if—Sonny would take the first step. The long run he took after dinner had helped clear his head, and by the time he panted up the front steps and struggled out of his sweats, he was sure Sonny wouldn't call. Ever. Forty minutes later, his beeper went off. Monday night, 9:46 p.m., according to the digital clock on the stove. Why now?

Just to be sure, he set aside Annie's beloved plastic palomino, Pugs, whose broken foreleg now was a gooey web of poorly applied household cement, and picked up a pen. He scribbled the flashing number on the back of a Lucky Charms box and checked it again. Then he picked up the phone, and was startled to hear Melissa's voice, which stopped in mid-sentence.

“I'm
talking,
” she said from an upstairs extension.

“I thought you were in bed, Lissa, Sorry.” He started to hang up, then reconsidered. Something about the attitude. “Somebody's trying to reach me, so I'm going to need the phone for a few minutes. Sorry to interrupt, but it's important. Let me know when you're off.”

While he waited, drumming his fingers on the kitchen table, Christensen reviewed how he wanted to begin his relationship with Sonny. Under no circumstances would he ever directly suggest that the numbness in Sonny's hands might be the result of repressed memories or posttraumatic stress. He knew better than to pursue that conversation, even though recent studies were profound. One in particular, a study of Cambodian refugees living in Long Beach, California, suggested a direct link between posttraumatic stress and hysterical blindness among older women who'd watched the Khmer Rouge butcher their husbands or children. After seeing the unthinkable, their eyes had simply stopped seeing.

But Christensen couldn't suggest anything that would lead Sonny in any particular direction. To initiate a discussion about Sonny's childhood traumas could skew Sonny's recollections, and the last thing Christensen needed was to be accused of luring Sonny into repression therapy. That was happening too often, with reckless therapists allowing false memories to take root and grow. Which is bad enough in the privacy of the therapist's office, but even worse when the cops use those memories as the basis of a criminal prosecution.

Upstairs, a door slammed with rattling force. Melissa was off the phone.

“Thank you,” he called.

He did intend to plant
one
seed with Sonny, though. To gauge the young man's suggestibility, he intended to work into their initial conversation a detailed description of a memorable moment from Sonny's life. It would be emotional, vivid—and entirely fictional. Then he'd wait. If that false memory turned up in a subsequent conversation with Sonny, and if Sonny treated it as a real memory, Christensen intended to go no further. He would tell Downing that Sonny's recovered memories would be too unreliable for meaningful therapy and, he assumed, utterly vulnerable to cross-examination, if it ever came to that. At that point, he would end his role in Downing's investigation with a clear conscience.

Christensen cleared his throat and dialed. The phone rang only once. “Hello, my name is Jim Christensen and I'm returning—”

“Yeah, hi.” A young man's voice, gentle, a little unsure.

“Is this Sonny Corbett?”

“You called back right away,” he said. “I didn't think you would.”

Christensen tried to conjure an image from the sound of the voice. He saw a young Art Garfunkel. “Actually, I've been expecting your call since I talked to Grady Downing earlier this week. He told me about the numbness in your hands. I hear you're a swimmer, and numbness has to be pretty awkward. Grady thought maybe I could help.”

“It's weird is what it is,” the voice said. “Been to two or three doctors, plus my trainer. None of them can figure it out, because after a while the numbness just goes away until the next time. I told my trainer I was thinking about calling you. He said, ‘What the hell. We've tried everything
but
a shrink.'”

Christensen laughed. “The last hope of lost causes. I'll take it as a compliment. You must swim competitively, then?”

“Not on a team or anything.”

Christensen tried to make sense of that, then decided to push on. “So what's it feel like?”

“You ever sleep on your hands?” Sonny said after a long pause.

“Like when one just goes dead in the middle of the night and you have to move it around with the other one until it finally starts to tingle again?”

“Like that,” Sonny said. “Except it can happen anytime, and sometimes it stays like that for hours.”

“Does it ever happen when you're swimming?”

“Mostly. I swim a lot.”

Christensen considered the predicament of a swimmer with useless hands. “But you're able to get to the side of the pool okay?”

“I can get out of the water, if that's what you mean.”

“Have you ever pegged it to anything physical—carpal tunnel syndrome, maybe some other repetitive stress injury?”

“That's what the doctors thought. First thing they checked, but that's not it.”

“You've tried physical therapy?” Christensen asked.

“Helps control the numbness, but doesn't prevent it.”

Christensen suggested a few more possible physical causes, but none seemed likely. And Sonny was familiar with them all, making him think Sonny's doctors had traveled this road before.

“Tell you what,” Christensen said. “Can you stop by my office in the next few days—nothing formal. We'll just talk, see if we can start figuring this thing out.”

They set a time for Thursday, apparently one of Sonny's rare free weeknights. Christensen told him how to find his private office on one of Oakland's ambiguous side streets.

“You must know Grady Downing pretty well,” Christensen said, feigning an afterthought.

“I guess. Why?”

“Just my impression. He and I were talking about your hands and he seemed to know so much about you.”

“Like what?” Sonny said.

“Nothing in particular. I forget how we even got on it now. But he told me about the time you got lost in Three Rivers Stadium during a Pirate game.”

Sonny said nothing.

“When you were about seven or so? You got separated from your parents for about an hour?”

“I don't remember,” Sonny said.

Christensen tried to seem casual about forcing the conversation. “I don't even know why Grady mentioned it. He said you told him about how you heard your name echo across the field and saw it on the center-field scoreboard. About how the stadium security guard had to pry your fingers from the upper-deck railing so he could take you to the lost-child area. That must have been the connection—we'd been talking about your hands.”

No response.

It wasn't graceful, but at least the seed was planted. “So anyway,” Christensen said, “six p.m. Thursday?”

“Sonny?”

The young man offered a noncommittal smile. He was tall, much taller than Christensen had imagined, with the unmistakable shoulders of an athlete. His oversized white oxford shirt tunneled down into the unstrained waistband of perfectly faded Levi's. Frayed hole in the right knee. Docksiders, no socks. This was not the fragile boy Christensen had assembled from their phone conversation and the puzzle pieces in the juvenile records. This was someone who reminded Christensen of himself at that age—confident, almost cocky, as lean and tight as piano wire.

His cheeks were bright pink, probably from the late fall winds. The color contrasted sharply with the dark crescents beneath his eyes. He looked like every frat boy on campus after cramming for spring finals, right down to the bare ankles.

“I'm Jim Christensen, Sonny. Glad you could come. Did you leave your coat out in the reception area? I have a rack in here.”

Sonny looked confused. “I didn't bring one,” he said finally.

Christensen remembered fighting the late November gale between his car and the office door an hour earlier. The temperature may have been in the 40s, but the wind felt like flying glass. He looked again at Sonny's bare ankles. “I'm glad you could make it,” he said.

Christensen walked over to the wing chairs beside his desk and took the one nearest the window, then gestured to the other. Sonny moved toward it, but stopped. For a moment, his confidence seemed to vanish.

“I don't have much money,” he said.

Christensen smiled, again offering the chair. “I won't tell if you won't.”

Sonny still hesitated.

Christensen thought a moment, then asked, “You take any classes at the university?”

The young man shook his head. “Just work there.”

“Really? You're staff, then. Students and staff have access to the University Counseling Center over in the student union. I volunteer there two days a week. Let's just pretend we're
there
and call it even. Deal?”

Sonny sat down, moving again with a relaxed power Christensen found unsettling. Nothing in Sonny's life should have added up this way. During the fifteen minutes they'd spent on the phone arranging this meeting, Christensen's presumptions about Sonny Corbett remained intact. The rhythms of Sonny's voice were slow and quiet, almost annoyingly so, like a dripping faucet. Christensen imagined him as withdrawn, distracted, and damaged by a childhood of apparently constant turmoil. But in person Sonny seemed a full-on alpha male, all calm power and controlled confidence.

“What do you think it is?” Sonny said, almost without inflection. Then he added, “My hands.”

“How do they feel now?” Christensen leaned back in his chair, hoping a relaxed body posture would encourage a more meandering conversation.

“Fine. Just happens once in a while.”

“Usually when you swim, you said.” Christensen laced his fingers together and clasped them behind his head. He tended to overuse his hands when nervous.

Sonny looked away, then picked up the inflatable Wham-It from the coffee table that lay between them. It was an eighteen-inch version of the large stand-up punching bags that Christensen had enjoyed pummeling as a kid. Someone had taken that concept, reduced it to desktop size, and successfully marketed it as an executive stress-relief toy. Christensen kept the Wham-It within easy reach of all his private counseling patients as a focus for their anxieties. Everyone picked it up sooner or later.

Sonny gave the Wham-It a slow once-over before putting it back on the table. “Usually,” he said.

A gust of wind rattled the wide office window, drawing their attention. The sky was the color of a bruise, promising more rain. The only thing worse than Pittsburgh now, in early winter, was Pittsburgh during winter's last gasps. Both offered the same ground-zero landscape apparent through the window, but at least now the streets weren't coated with the brackish sludge of melting snow.

“Human beings are pretty complex creatures,” Christensen said. “I don't know how familiar you are with it, but a lot of studies have been done on the interrelationship of the body and mind. But I'm guessing you know that, or you wouldn't be here.”

Sonny said nothing, clearly at full attention.

“Say you break your nose,” Christensen said. “Not only is the pain intense, but you're also dealing with a lot of issues that have nothing to do with physical healing. Self-image. Confidence. Mental injuries, if you will. I'm not saying that's the case with your hands, but one theory goes that if a physical injury can affect your mind, why can't a mental injury affect your body?”

“Psychosomatic,” Sonny said.

“No fair reading ahead.”

Sonny leaned forward and absently flicked the Wham-It with his finger. It fell backward onto the tabletop, then slowly rose again. “Sounds pretty bogus.”

“Some people think it's bogus, some don't,” Christensen said. “Smart people sometimes disagree. But the human brain has a pretty remarkable defense system. It's nothing but a big filing cabinet, and sometimes it files the things that hurt or frighten us way in the back so we don't have to deal with them as often, or ever.”

“Like the baseball game thing?” Sonny asked.

Bingo.

“Like the baseball game thing. You remembered it then?” Christensen tried not to seem pleased. He had expected Sonny to absorb and repackage the story as a memory, but not this quickly. “The other day you sounded like it didn't ring a bell.”

Sonny shook his head. “Still doesn't,” he said. “We weren't much for family outings. I'd remember if we ever went to a Pirate game.”

Christensen picked up the Wham-It, then put it back down. “Not at all?”

“Sorry. Maybe Detective Downing was thinking of somebody else.”

Christensen stood and walked to the window, stalling, wondering what to do next. Sonny had passed his first test. If he continued to resist suggestion, his memories probably would be credible. And God knows a young man capable of denying his brother's suicide was capable of wholesale memory repression. What if Downing's last-ditch scenario was right? If the young man before him was the missing piece to the city's biggest crime puzzle, how could he turn away?

“I'd like to start meeting here twice a week, Sonny,” Christensen heard himself say. He turned and leaned back against the window. “How free are your evenings?”

“I told you, I work nights except Thursdays,” Sonny said.

“Any day-shift openings?”

“I like working nights,” Sonny said. “I'm the only one in the whole chem department, and it leaves my days free to train.”

“But that doesn't solve the numbness problem with your hands,” Christensen said. “No promises, mind you, but maybe we can find a way to stop that. That's got to affect your swimming.”

Sonny said nothing for a few long moments. Finally, he stood. “I'd have to think about it.”

“Tell you what,” Christensen said. “You off any days during the week?”

“Thursdays, like I said.”

“Then let's get together next Thursday evening to talk, about six again. We'll just take it one day at a time. And if you don't get anything out of it, we'll stop. That seem fair?”

Sonny started for the office door, then paused only long enough to say, “I'll let you know.”