The single page had no real beginning or end. Its layout looked like a page from a transcript of some sort, with exchanges between two people represented by the initials RB and DH. The questions seemed to come from RB, the answers from DH. He spotted the reference to Teresa and thought, DH, David Harnett. Maybe. It began in mid-sentence:
may have. There were so many cases like it they all run together after a while.
RB: And nothing about that [unintelligible] stands out?
DH: No sir.
RB: Let’s move on then. You said before that you were home that night.
DH: Which night are you talking now?
RB: New Year’s Eve, 1991. You said you were home.
DH: That’s correct. [unintelligible] both had the night off, which is pretty rare.
RB: So you weren’t alone?
DH: Just me and my wife.
RB: Teresa.
DH: Correct.
RB: It was New Year’s Eve. Most people go out and celebrate. But you stayed home?
DH: That’s correct, sir.
RB: How come?
DH: It’s amateur night, sir. All the drunks on the road. We stayed home. A lot of people do.
RB: Because of the drunks on the road?
DH: Mostly. We’d also had a disagreement [unintelligible] before, I think. Neither one of us was in the mood to go out and party.
RB: Do anything unusual? Open a bottle of champagne? Toast the New Year? Anything like that?
DH: Champagne gives my wife headaches. We may have had a beer or something. Mostly we just talked.
RB: Remember what you talked about?
DH: Nothing particular. Relationship stuff, I think.
RB: Anyone come over that night?
DH: No sir.
RB: Did either of you go out? Run to the store for anything?
DH: No sir.
RB: So you and your wife were at your house there on Morningside Avenue the whole evening of Dec. 31, 1991?
DH: Yes sir.
RB: What about during the day? Home all day?
DH: No sir. Because of the disagreement I mentioned, I’d been staying elsewhere for a few days. But I came home probably midafternoon Dec. 31.
RB: To work things out?
The page ended there, with an unanswered question. Christensen was sure the DH referred to David Harnett. Much of what DH said fit neatly with things Teresa had mentioned. He looked again at the answers, the stiff formality of his language. No sir. Yes sir. That’s correct, sir. The language of a man in deference to some superior force.
Christensen flashed back to a conversation with Teresa, the one they had in her car the morning before. He remembered her astonished “Oh my God” as a memory came clear, the memory involving her husband, a drug dealer, and the police department’s Internal Affairs Division. What had she said? The investigative panel had called David twice.
Christensen looked again at the paper in his hand. It had to be a transcript of one of Harnett’s appearances before the IAD. But Kiger had told him those files were closed. Who would have access? And why would they fax him this page, which seemed inconsequential, even trivial. Odder still, why would someone fax it to his home and make sure that the fax was untraceable?
Christensen folded the paper again and put it away. He’d been so careful not to lead Teresa as she struggled into her past, but the memories she was unearthing all seemed to relate to her husband. Now this, and Christensen suddenly felt that someone was trying to lead him. But who?
“The lady over there said the one without a mane is really a boy,” Annie said. “But they call him Sheeba anyway.”
How long had his daughter been standing there?
Christensen stared a long time before saying, “I don’t understand.”
Annie rolled her eyes and pointed back through the enclosure window. “That lion. Somebody cut his nuts off.”
“Annie!” Christensen said, conscious of the stares from other zoo patrons. “Watch your language.” He looked at Taylor, who nodded and gestured subtly at his own crotch. “It’s true,” he said. “All his hair fell out when they castrated him. Sheeba’s really a he, but he looks like a lioness. You can see his thing if you look close.”
“Sheeba’s a he,” Christensen said, catching up.
“Heeba!” Annie said.
This cracked Taylor up, and off they went to tell the zoo guide.
Christensen checked his watch. Nearly noon. They’d seen everything in the zoo, some things twice, and still they’d given Brenna only half the day to herself. If they went to lunch and hit a movie, they could stay out of her hair for a couple more hours. But who was he kidding? He wasn’t just trying to give Brenna time to get ready for the DellaVecchio hearing tomorrow morning. He was avoiding her. Going home meant finally dealing with what had become a corrosive problem. It meant tension and confrontation. It meant facing down the reality of a relationship in serious trouble, and Christensen wasn’t at all sure he was ready for the consequences.
Chapter 30
The spot along Howe Street where Brenna usually parked was empty, so Christensen paralleled into the space. Taylor was asleep in the back seat. Annie was in the front passenger seat, crunching away on the last of her movie popcorn. The realization came to him as an afterthought: Where’s Brenna’s car? His first thought was for her safety. His second was a wave of relief that she might not be home.
“I’ll get Taylor if you get everything else,” he said to Annie, cutting the engine. “Deal?”
“Deal.”
He opened his door into the cold afternoon air.
“Dad?”
Christensen waited with one leg out of the car.
“I just want you to be happy.”
He shut the door and turned to his younger daughter.
“Are you?” she asked.
“Mostly. Are you?”
Annie shrugged. “Mostly.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’ve just seen you happier, is all.”
He reached across the seat and squeezed her shoulder. “Mostly’s not bad, sport. It’s really not. Some people never even get to mostly.”
Another shrug. “Always would be better.”
“Yep. Guess it would.” Christensen brushed popcorn shrapnel off his daughter’s face. “Know what? I miss your mom sometimes, too. It’s OK to feel that way.”
Annie nodded, then opened her door and climbed out. She gathered an armload of jackets and the empty popcorn bucket as she did. She shut the door with her foot and climbed the steps to the front porch. She was still waiting at the door when Christensen arrived with the dozing Taylor hoisted onto his shoulder.
“It’s locked,” she said.
Christensen shifted Taylor to his other arm and fished into his pants pocket for his keys, then unlocked the dead-bolt and pushed into the silent house. He noticed that Brenna’s office door was wide open as he keyed in the alarm code.
“Bren?”
He laid Taylor down on the living-room couch and covered the sleeping boy with a quilted comforter. Annie met him in the hall and handed him a yellow Post-it note as she rounded the corner, headed upstairs. “This was on the kitchen table,” she said. “Pretty lame.”
Christensen took the note. Brenna had written the time on top—3:25, just half an hour ago. The note read: “Sorry for the snit. I want to talk, too. Just not today. Better if I stay Downtown till after the hearing. Taking clothes etc. for tomorrow, overnighting at the office. Wish me luck. Tell Tay I’ll call later to say good night.”
An apology. An embedded acknowledgment of a problem. Christensen found those things promising. Maybe there was hope. Maybe the day’s dark thoughts stemmed from his own wounded ego rather than an organic problem with their relationship. And she was right. There was no sense talking now with DellaVecchio’s court appearance bearing down on her like a train.
Something unfamiliar caught his eye—a new answering machine Brenna had bought to replace the one the cops still had. Its tiny red eye winked at him from across the kitchen, and he crossed the room for a closer look. The numeral 1 was illuminated in blinking red on top. A large button in the middle said Play, so he pushed it.
“It’s me.”
A woman. Brenna? He leaned closer, feeling the machine’s sides for a volume knob.
“Can you . . . please pick up if you’re there. Hello?”
Not Brenna. Teresa.
“Shit,” she said. “I’ll have to call you back. It may be a while. Don’t call me. Just . . . don’t. But I need to talk to you, understand? I’ll call when I can.”
Christensen played the message again. Teresa’s voice, no question, but it was warped and strained. The new answering machine, maybe? He found a Play Greeting button and pressed it. Brenna’s outgoing message came through loud and clear, her voice as familiar as if she were standing beside him. So it wasn’t the machine. He played Teresa’s message a third time and recognized the fine thread of stress that made her voice higher and thinner than normal.
He had her home phone number, but resisted the impulse to call her there. She’d been clear on that, for reasons he could only guess. Uneasy, he went to the front door, opened it, and looked out on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Shadyside. What had he expected to see?
His next impulse was to call Brenna, and he felt a great relief when she picked up her private office line on the second ring.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“You OK?”
She laughed, but it sounded forced. “Dagnolo’s definitely decided to put Teresa on the stand tomorrow, which is fine because it means he hasn’t come up with anything stronger. My DNA lab guy’s got car trouble; we’re trying to figure out how to get him to court. I need to go over some things with Carmen, and he’s been out of touch since this morning. The cops all have their underwear in a bunch because his electronic bracelet’s on the blink and they think he’s screwing with it. Tell the truth, I’ll be a lot better tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’ll let you go then,” he said. “We still need to talk, but it can wait. I just wanted to touch base.”
“Thanks.”
Christensen waited to see where she might take the conversation.
“Baby, I know I’m deep in the hole with Tay, with everybody. I’ll make it up. But right now, this is where I need to be. I can’t let this thing fall apart tomorrow, not after how far we’ve come. Eight years it took me to right this thing. But I promise, this hearing tomorrow is the goal line.”
“Until the retrial,” he said. “Or the next high-profile case.”
“Wrong. This is once in a lifetime.”
“How?”
“Jim, I’m defending an innocent man. Because I didn’t do my job right the first time, he’s been in prison for eight years. I can’t let that happen again. I won’t. Please tell me you understand.”
Christensen tried. Brenna was talking about justice, but there was a difference between justice and redemption. Justice was about Carmen DellaVecchio. Redemption was about Brenna. Somewhere along the line, she’d lost sight of who she was doing this for, and who she was hurting in the process. It wasn’t the first time, and that selfishness was her tragic flaw. He saw that now more clearly than ever before.
“I understand why this case is important to you.” He winced at Brenna’s relieved “Thank you” on the other end of the line. “But that’s what we need to talk about when it’s over, Bren.”
There was a long pause before she said, “OK.”
“So, where will you sleep?”
“I’ll make up the couch in my office and use the showers downstairs at the Centre Club. I’d get home late and have to be back here first thing tomorrow, anyway. This just works out better.”
“I agree. There’s a twenty-four-hour security desk in the lobby, right?”
“Rent-a-cops,” she said, “but they’re usually awake.”
“Great. Are you sure—”
“I’ll be fine. You’ll explain everything to the kids?”
“Yep.”
“Jim?”
“Yeah, Bren.”
“I love you.”
The phrase was like a diamond, with countless facets, gradations in clarity, shadings of color. Christensen wished he knew what she meant. The best response that came was the one Brenna used so often: “I know.”
Chapter 31
Christensen woke with a start to an unfamiliar sound, like an electronic cricket. The room was dark. But which room? He rolled to his right and fell off the living-room sofa. Very dark now—the lamp was on a timer—and he was on his knees between the sofa and the coffee table. A crumpling beneath him. Paper. Now he remembered. Must have fallen asleep reading. A paper avalanche as he rolled off, showering him with the contents of Teresa Harnett’s file.
Now the sound again. From the kitchen. Chirrup-chirrup. The new telephone?
His shin hit the coffee table and he swore as he lurched toward the kitchen. His left foot was asleep. Still holding some of the file papers, he flipped the light switch with his free hand as he hobbled past. The overheads flooded the kitchen with soft-white light, revealing a table littered with the kids’ school books. His evening came rushing back at once: Brenna at her office for the night, the Sunday night homework crush, the usual bedtime battle, Brenna’s nine-thirty good-night call. All followed by an unsettling fear, nagging questions, and the eerie pulse of the silent house. Something had been bugging him, and he’d decided to review the notes of his conversations with Teresa.
He found the new phone’s Talk button. “Bren?” he said, and heard a ragged breath.
Finally: “No. Teresa.”
Groggy, he repeated the name.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
Christensen checked the digital clock on the microwave—4:42. Pitch black outside the kitchen window. “What’s wrong?”
A sob, followed by a strangled cry.
“Where are you?”
After a long, soggy moment: “Home. I’m OK.”
“Can you talk?”
“David just left.”
“Left? Again?”
“No, no. Not like that. He got a call maybe an hour ago, then he rummaged around in the garage for a while and left. Said it was nothing big, but he had to go. I wanted to tell you something this afternoon, but this is the first chance I’ve had to call you back.”
“What is it?”
Teresa took her time. “I found something.”
“Tell me.”
She told him about her worry boxes, about the baffling collection and occasional memories she’d found as she sifted their contents. She told him how she’d found the odd-sized 1991 box under the spare bed and realized that David had overlooked it; how she’d reconciled some of the stuff from that box with what she believed were real memories. The Elvis Buddha’s head and the fight with David. Saying good-bye to Buster. Suicidal thoughts. Her 1991 New Year’s Eve funk. “It’s weird,” she says, “all this stuff coming up since we started talking. A few days ago you said something, you know, how bad memories probably wouldn’t come back until I was ready? Well, maybe I’m ready. Maybe you’ve given me permission to remember.”
“Or you finally gave yourself permiss
ion,” he said.
He waited.
“I found something else,” she said.
“In the box?”
“No, in a drawer, way in the back. My appointment planner from 1992. I never made a worry box for that year, because of what happened that spring, but I’d started saving 1992 stuff before the attack. I found it today, in the drawer of this old desk, and I was looking through it, and I found something and it’s—” Another desperate breath. “Shit. I don’t know what it is. Goddamn it. Goddamn it.”
Christensen was fully awake now. “Do you want to come over?”
“David may come back. I can’t.”
Christensen stopped himself from pacing back and forth in front of the kitchen sink. “Don’t worry about what it means right now, Teresa. Just tell me what you found.”
“It’s just a note. An appointment. For the Monday after I was attacked. I don’t remember it at all. But it’s in my appointment book.”
“Meaning?”
“I live by those things. I had it scheduled, so it’s not like I’m remembering. It was scheduled.”
“What was scheduled, Teresa?”
“IAD,” she said. “For that Monday, it says ‘IAD, 10:30 a.m. Two hours.’ ”
Christensen was lost. “The internal affairs investigation? The one involving David?”
“They must have called me to appear,” she said. “From this, it looks like maybe I was supposed to talk to somebody from IAD that day. I’d blocked off two hours.”
“Do you remember what it was about?”
“The Tidwell thing, I’m sure. That’s the only reason they would have called me.”
Tidwell again. David. What was the link? “Do you remember what you said?”
“That’s the thing. It was scheduled for Monday. I never made it. The attack was on Saturday, remember, two days before. I was in Mount Mercy, half dead, so I never made it to the IAD appointment.”
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