Christensen couldn’t say why, but this felt like a breakthrough. He could feel it in the raised hair on his arms and the sudden, prickling knot at the back of his skull.
“And you think there’s a connection?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But you find it upsetting. Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Teresa—” Christensen checked his frustration. For the first time, he sensed they were getting closer. When Teresa started down this path, Christensen could see no possible connection between an internal police investigation into a drug shoot-out and the vicious sexual attack on Teresa several months later. Now, at least, Teresa had found common ground. She’d been scheduled to talk with the IAD investigators about the Tidwell matter only two days after she was attacked.
“I was just thinking,” he said, “that’s really the first time you’ve put those two things together in the same time frame.”
“I know.”
“Any idea what it means?” He waited. Five seconds. Ten. An eternity, it seemed. He laid the file papers on the kitchen counter, determined to let Teresa lead, but the paper on top caught his eye. It was the printout of the Press story reporting the death of Tidwell and a rival drug dealer in an East Liberty alley. He scanned it again, focusing on the phrase “a New Year’s Eve drug transaction gone bad.” Both Tidwell and Fitzgerald dead at the scene, apparently for less than an hour. A pedestrian found them around midnight.
New Year’s Eve? Christensen couldn’t shake a feeling. The thought ricocheted from Teresa to the news story to the unfolded transcript page that lay beneath some of the other papers on the kitchen counter. Christensen tugged it out and ran his finger down the page until he found the phrase “New Year’s Eve, 1991.”
“Wait,” he said. “You said something a minute ago about New Year’s Eve. You were depressed.”
“It’s weird the things that come back,” she said.
“Teresa, what brought it back? Do you remember?”
“The Elvis Buddha, remember. I told you. It was in the box, the broken head of this little ceramic—”
“Tell me everything you remember.”
“About that New Year’s Eve?”
“Is that when you had the fight with David?”
“I don’t think so. It was maybe a couple days before. He left and took Buster, our puppy. I remembered all that, because I found the little head in the box and it all came back. But David came back, too. Later. Then he left again a few weeks before the attack, and that was the one I think really was the end, or at least that’s how I—”
“Teresa,” he said. “Focus on that night. New Year’s Eve. What do you remember?”
“Just that night?”
“Exactly.”
“Why?”
Christensen could see it now. He had more puzzle pieces than she did, and he pressed this latest one into place. The picture taking shape was repulsive. The urge to tell her was powerful, but he resisted.
“Don’t worry about why. Just tell me what you remember. What happened that night?”
“Nothing much.”
“Do better,” he said. “Tell me what did happen.”
“It sucked. I drank myself to sleep. I got sick. That’s about it.”
“Because you were depressed. Do you remember why?”
“David.”
“Because you’d had a fight?”
“Yes. There was something else in my worry box, too. A newspaper story.”
“About the Tidwell thing?”
“No. About these two cops who died in Bloomfield.”
“Not the Tidwell thing?”
“Completely different. They were classmates of mine at the academy, apparently, and I saved the story in my 1991 worry box. They were ambushed.”
“I remember that,” Christensen said. “They never found out who did it, did they?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “But it must have been a hell of a way to end the year. So between the thing with David, and that, it was … what I remember is locking my gun away and taking the key over to Carol’s house. She’s a neighbor.”
“She knew you were depressed?”
“We talked a lot. She’d invited me to go along with her and Alec to some restaurant. But I just wasn’t in the mood. We joked about it, how pathetic I was. I said, ‘I think I’ll just stay home and clean my gun or something.’ And we laughed. But later I put the gun in our lock box and took the key over to Carol’s. Didn’t even tell her what the key was to, just asked her to hold it for me. I was just gonna stay home and get drunk as a skunk, and I just, you know, I didn’t want to do anything stupid. I remember handing the key to her on her back porch.”
“You didn’t trust yourself with the gun?”
“Must not have. You think back, and you wonder how you could have got that way. But everything was just so shitty right then, and me all alone. Throw in a gun and a little booze and—”
“Wait, go back a sec,” he said. “You planned to be alone that night?”
A confused pause. “That’s what I said. David was gone. I was just planning to stay home and numb the pain.”
“All night?”
“You mean was I alone the whole night? Yeah.”
Christensen closed his eyes and braced himself on the edge of the kitchen counter. “You’re sure?”
“Why?”
“Teresa, you’re sure.”
“Jesus, I’m sure. Calm down.”
Christensen bit his tongue. Literally. He tasted iron, his own blood. Another puzzle piece fell into place.
“No one came to visit you that night?”
“No.”
“Not David?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he was that night?”
“No. He’d left a couple days before. I don’t remember when he moved back in, but it was later. After the New Year. Then he moved out again a few weeks before I was attacked, but I remember that one night pretty clear.”
“And you were alone the whole night?”
“Yes.”
Christensen felt as if she’d handed him a ticking bomb. Whoever had faxed him that transcript page must have known that David Harnett had a serious problem. Teresa was telling him in no uncertain terms that she was alone on New Year’s Eve 1991, the whole night. What stared Christensen in the face now was a clear and troubling probability: Her husband had told an IAD investigator he was with his estranged wife the night his accuser, Tidwell, was shot to death in an East Liberty alley. David had used Teresa as his alibi.
“There’s no question in your mind that you were alone that whole night?” Christensen asked.
“No question at all. Why?”
Christensen’s mind raced ahead. David Harnett had committed himself. He was with his wife that night, he told the investigator. They were mending wounds from their latest marital blowup. But the IAD investigation hadn’t stopped there. The investigators summoned Teresa to confirm her husband’s story. If she’d told them the same story she just told him, she would have completely undercut David’s alibi for the night Tidwell died. Even if he had nothing to hide, they’d want to know why David lied.
Following that thread brought Christensen back to the most troubling fact of all, and it made him dizzy: Teresa was attacked two days before she was scheduled to meet with IAD investigators.
“Teresa, do you remember why the IAD investigators wanted to meet with you?”
“The Tidwell thing. I told you that.”
“But what about it?”
“That I don’t remember.”
“Nothing? You don’t remember the grapevine gossip about what was happening with that case?”
“Oh yeah. But it was so … typical. Those drug guys are vermin. First thing they do when their ship starts to go down is see who they can drag down with them.”
“What had you heard? About Tidwell, I mean?”
“Rumors. The usual crap. He was talking to the D.A., trying to cut some deal. Nobody knew what it was about; they just knew IAD was looking into it. They’d talked to a bunch of people, mostly at the East Liberty station.”
Time to push a little. Christensen leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Sounds to me like they were taking what Tidwell told them pretty seriously. You said they’d talked to David a couple times. They’d talked to other people. They wanted to talk to you.”
“What are you getting at?” she snapped.
Christensen could feel it, something undeniable. Maybe Teresa felt it, too, but he wouldn’t nudge her closer to it. If she knew what it was, the decision to confront it had to be hers alone.
“I’m just trying to make sense of what you’re telling me, Teresa. The clear memories and the things you think you remember, the things David told you about your past and the things we know happened for sure. Sometimes they match up, and sometimes they don’t. That’s all. And I’m trying to sort all that out, just like you asked me to. Because somewhere in that fog, I think, is the answer to the question we started with.”
“About who attacked me?”
“Yes,” he said.
On the other end of the line, Teresa’s voice took on a sharp edge. “It wasn’t David,” she said. “I know that.”
Christensen wanted to lay out his suspicions. He wanted to tell her what he knew about New Year’s Eve and the IAD transcript and the conflict with her emerging memories. He wanted to ask Teresa why her husband would lie about his whereabouts that New Year’s Eve, and if she saw any coincidence in the fact that she ended up nearly dead two days before she might have contradicted his story. What Christensen did, though, was repeat the testimony that David Harnett gave during DellaVecchio’s original trial. “David was with Brian Milsevic the night you were attacked, wasn’t he?”
“Out whoring,” she said.
“Whoring?”
“That much I know. I was attacked about dinnertime. At that moment, David was running a credit-card tab in some titty bar out near South Park. You think I’m stupid? You think I haven’t thought the same thing you’re thinking? But I had to know. I made Brian tell me the whole story. He said that’s where they were when he got the page from headquarters.”
“About the attack?”
“He called in, then took David outside and told him what happened. David didn’t do it, Jim. I believe him, for those and a thousand other reasons.”
Christensen peered into the darkness outside. In an hour the sun would be up. In five, Teresa would be in court to face down Carmen DellaVecchio.
“The hearing’s today, Teresa,” he said. “Dagnolo’s got no choice at this point. You’re all he’s got. He’s going to call you to the stand again and ask you the only question that matters: Who did do it? What then?”
Christensen felt the silence like a weight on his shoulders. Then, without another word, Teresa Harnett gently hung up the phone.
Chapter 32
Christensen hit the Talk button and dialed Brenna’s after-hours office line as soon as he got a dial tone. He wasn’t sure exactly why. Today of all days, he couldn’t tell her anything about Teresa, that her memories had jumped to an entirely different track, that Carmen DellaVecchio’s name had barely even come up in all their conversations. He couldn’t tell her the significance of the fax page she had handed him yesterday morning. Hell, he couldn’t even tell her what he was now sure about: that David Harnett had something to hide. Without context, she couldn’t possibly understand the significance of Harnett’s lying about where he spent New Year’s Eve 1991. If Christensen couldn’t tell Brenna the whole story, or at least the story as it was developing, what could he tell her that would make any sense at all?
Nothing.
But he could at least hear her voice. He thought of the sniper shots into their bedroom, about the panic and fear and malice that drove whoever had a finger on that trigger. The threat to Brenna was real, no matter who the shooter was. Her voice. That was the reassurance he needed right now.
And wasn’t getting.
Three rings. Four.
He imagined her asleep on her office couch, exhausted from a late night of work and pre-hearing anxiety. How long would it take her to hear the phone, struggle to her feet, and walk to her desk?
Five rings.
Or maybe she was ignoring it. Who’d call at such a ridiculous hour anyway? Finally, a voice. Voice mail. “You’ve reached the law offices of Kennedy & Flaherty. We’re not able to take your call right now, but please leave a message. Thank you.”
“Bren, it’s me,” he said. “Just checking in. Sorry if I woke you. Just, ah, call home as soon as you get up. I know it’s a busy morning, but please touch base, OK?”
The microwave clock read 5:02. On a day like today, she’d be up by six, for sure. Christensen willed himself not to worry until then, but then started to worry. He drummed his fingers on the counter. Outside, the first signs of dawn. The peaked rooftops across the alley were outlined against the charcoal sky, where only fifteen minutes before everything had been black.
The whole thing made a sickening sort of sense, but he was the only one who could see it. He alone had accumulated the troubling facts, and he alone had pieced together a terrifying theory about who attacked Teresa, or rather who had the best motive to attack her. At the time, her marriage to David was unraveling. He’d walked out, supposedly for the last time, three weeks before the attack. What triggered that? Teresa had been contacted by the IAD. What if her husband had asked her to flat-out lie about his whereabouts the previous New Year’s Eve? What if she had refused, either on general principle or simply to protect her own job?
Maybe David was out on the town when it happened, but so what? Someone else could have carried out the actual attack. Besides, wouldn’t that be a logical thing for a vengeful husband to do, assuming he’d be on the short list of suspects?
Christensen thought of the evidence found in Teresa’s kitchen, and how limited it now seemed. A masked attacker who kept silent until he thought Teresa was safely dead. No fingerprints anywhere, just the artfully placed imprint of DellaVecchio’s distinctively worn shoe stamped once like a notary seal in Teresa’s blood. A savage sexual attack that was almost clinically clean, with none of the attacker’s semen or blood or pubic hair left behind as evidence.
Christensen’s heart was pounding as he paced the kitchen floor. He forced himself into a chair, tasting real fear in the gathering morning light. He tried Brenna’s number again, and again got voice mail. He tried her car phone and let it ring until an electronic voice informed him: “The cellular customer you’re trying to reach is unavailable. Please try your call again later.”
On the table, face up, lay the cryptic fax that had arrived the day before. That was the wild card. Someone else suspected Harnett, too. Someone who knew that Christensen was involved. Someone who had access to internal police documents. Dagnolo? He was notorious for leaking information, but no. The man was too invested in the Scarecrow stalker fantasy he’d worked so hard to build. Milsevic? Maybe. The night Brenna was injured, he’d implied he was working a different investigative track. Or maybe…
Kiger.
No one else knew he and Teresa were talking. No one else had access to IAD files. Who else had clear enough vision to see the ghastly questions beneath the convenient artifice of DellaVecchio’s arrest?
Kiger.
Christ
ensen was suddenly struck by a thought so terrifying that he stood straight up out of his kitchen chair. Had anyone asked David Harnett where he was the night the sniper took those shots at Brenna? Then another: Where was Harnett now? Where the hell was Brenna?
The urge to talk to Kiger was overpowering. Seconds later, Christensen was on his knees in the dark living room, sifting through the spilled papers from Teresa’s file. Somewhere in there was Kiger’s card, the one he remembered had a pager number on it. He crawled over to the security timer for the lamp and spun it until the light clicked back on, then continued his frantic search until the chief’s card finally surfaced.
He banged his shin on the coffee table again, same spot, tripping across the living room. He limped to the kitchen phone and squinted at Kiger’s card. He got the pager number in focus and dialed. At the prompt, he entered their home number and pushed the # button.
Then he waited. For Brenna. For Kiger. For any reassuring words in a twilight the color of ash.
Chapter 33
For the past hour, alone in his kitchen, Christensen watched the microwave clock, counting each minute that the phone didn’t ring. As he waited, he turned his theory about David Harnett around and around, looking for holes. He imagined dozens of grim scenarios of revenge, cover-up, violence, all with Brenna as an unwitting victim. When the phone finally rang, Christensen jumped like a condemned man awaiting the governor’s reprieve.
“Hello?” Practically shouted it, then held his breath.
“Who’m I speaking to, sir?”
Kiger. Christensen exhaled. He checked the clock—6:08. Surely Brenna was up by now. Maybe she’d gotten up already and gone downstairs to shower at the Centre Club before checking her messages.
“Got this number on my pager, but didn’t recognize—”
“Jim Christensen, Chief. Sorry. I’m about half out of my mind here, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“It’s fine,” Kiger said. “There a problem?”
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