The notebook seemed to grow heavy in Christensen’s hand. He struggled for the right words. “So you know who the others are?” he managed.
“Yes.”
Christensen let go of the notebook, and it thrashed to the floor like a wounded bird. If Teresa was right, he’d just dropped a handwritten record that could ruin careers, send people to prison, destroy lives. Teresa picked up the notebook and tucked it back into her handbag. A one-word question formed on his lips—Who?—but Teresa cut him off before he could speak.
“Don’t,” she said. “You don’t need to know. You don’t want to. I didn’t, but now I do.”
Christensen stepped toward her. “Teresa … that’s why you’re carrying a gun, isn’t it? You know what it means. If David was in charge of tracking this money, that means four other people out there probably know this notebook exists. Teresa, you need to—”
She turned again toward the glass, but Christensen pulled her away, an instinct. He twisted the miniblinds shut and the office dimmed.
“Don’t push this,” she said, avoiding his eyes this time. “Please. I’m not ready.”
“Teresa, if what you’re saying is true—”
“Jim, stop,” she said.
“But—”
“Two of the five died about eight years ago, all right? I knew them. Well, I don’t remember them, but I must have known them.”
“Why do you sound so sure?” he asked.
“We were classmates at the academy. I must have known them.”
“But you know they’re dead?”
She nodded. “I found a newspaper story. They were ambushed. Together. Went to a warehouse in Bloomfield for some reason, but it was a setup. They never had a chance.”
A pause. “That happened the same day as Tidwell, about six hours before.”
Another pause. “I’m not sure anyone else has made the connection.”
Christensen felt his knees get weak. Three of the six people who knew the truth about the payoff scheme were shot to death on the same day, Tidwell and two of the cops he apparently was paying to protect his drug operation. The killings happened two months after Tidwell started cooperating with the IAD investigators, which left three survivors to share an incendiary secret.
“And now David’s dead,” he said. “That’s four, Tidwell and three of the cops.”
She nodded. The truth was unfolding, a terrifying origami.
“Who else?” he said. “Teresa, you may be in danger. Who else?”
“Please!”
“There are two others out there—”
Teresa reached into her purse and pulled out the notebook again. She flipped it open to the first page and jabbed her finger at one of the badge numbers, 4993. When she reached into her purse again, Christensen remembered the gun. He flinched, but Teresa grabbed his arm and held it tighter than he would have thought possible. Then she laid something on the desk between them. Badge 4993. She looked into his eyes.
“It’s mine.”
Chapter 43
If she’d drawn her gun and fired those words straight into Christensen’s chest, they couldn’t have been more devastating. He reached across his desk and pulled Teresa’s hand from his arm, then recoiled in his chair as a thousand flawed assumptions crashed around him.
“Yours?” he sputtered.
Teresa’s face crumpled, and she buried it in her hands. Christensen was numb, waiting for her to look up. This couldn’t be happening. He felt as if he’d stumbled into a hall of mirrors.
“I was part of it, this payoff operation,” she sobbed, tucking the badge back into her purse. “I must have been. But I don’t remember. Swear to God, Jim, I don’t remember.”
Teresa picked up the notebook and held it in her trembling hand. They both stared at the tiny, damning ledger. “I don’t … please believe me.”
Suddenly, too many things about Teresa made sense. Christensen’s mind reeled with questions, but he struggled to keep his emotions in check. She’d found solid evidence of a two-year scheme to extort cash from a drug dealer, then realized she was one of five police officers who were part of it. The memory lapse was plausible, considering the level of damage to her brain. And extortion he could handle. But the other possibility…
“Teresa, this got way more complicated than just dirty money from a protection racket.”
She nodded.
“From what you’re saying, it sounds like murder. Two months after the IAD started asking questions, those cops were ambushed. The same day, Tidwell died in what looks like a setup. The timing of all that … they sound like cover-up killings.”
“I know.”
Christensen turned his desk chair around so that his back was to her. He hoped the move looked contemplative, but in truth he didn’t want her to see whatever was registering on his face. Rage? Confusion? She had brought them both to a precipice, and Christensen felt every bit as exposed and vulnerable as Teresa.
“Teresa, what level of involvement … How much do you remember about it?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“About the payoffs? The killings?”
“Nothing. Jim, it’s a blank, and I swear to God nothing has ever scared me more. Nothing.”
Christensen turned around. Tears had spilled from Teresa’s eyes, adding desperation to her face. She held out the notebook.
“I don’t know who I am, Jim. For eight years I was one person. Then I find this, and suddenly I’m not who I thought I was. Who was I? What was I capable of?”
If nothing else, Christensen understood the impact those questions might have on Teresa’s fragile psyche. Psychosis was a real possibility for someone whose psychological armor lay in shards at her feet. His response would be critical, and he considered it a long time.
“I don’t believe you’re capable of murder,” he said, even as he wondered.
Teresa’s face transformed. She reached again across the desk, but this time her touch was gentler. She slipped her fingers into his hand, and he held them until the intimacy became awkward. Then Christensen let them go.
“That means a lot to me,” she said, returning her hand to her lap.
Christensen took a deep breath. “What do you think you’re capable of, Teresa? You must have been thinking about this a lot the last twenty-four hours.”
Teresa brushed the tears from her cheeks. “I haven’t slept. Guess you could tell.”
“Tell me what you’ve thought about,” Christensen said.
She looked away and closed her eyes. “Oh, hell. Maybe. I don’t know. I was young, a year out of the academy when I married David.”
“Your mentor, you said.”
Teresa was avoiding his eyes. “When somebody you admire, somebody you fall in love with, tells you how things work, when they say ‘This is the way it is,’ you’d probably trust him, or at least I think I would have at the time,” she said. “I’ve tried to imagine myself back then, knowing what was happening, the temptation … I come from a family of mill hunks. I told you that, right?”
“Clairton works, you said.”
“The crash hit my family pretty hard. By the late eighties, nobody was working. That much I remember, how it affected everything.” She held up the notebook. “This much easy money—”
“And David’s approval…”
Teresa nodded. “I could see me going along. Maybe to help out. Maybe just because I was sick of it all, watching everything my father worked for go down. It bothers me now to think I’d do it, but now isn’t then.”
Christensen decided not to let her rationalization pass. “That car you drive is barely a year old, Teresa. And it wasn’t cheap. You might have taken this money back then, bu
t you’re spending it now.”
She turned and met his gaze.
“You had to wonder where it was coming from,” he added.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I know it sounds lame, but David handled all that. That’s the truth,” she said. “From the beginning, and especially after the attack, our money was something he took care of. Do I like nice things? Yes. Could we afford them? Honestly, I wouldn’t have known.”
A telling answer, Christensen thought. Teresa’s subconscious mind was a zealous guardian, protecting her from what she couldn’t consciously face. But according to her husband’s ledger, she’d been an equal partner. She was having trouble admitting that now, even to herself. For her to do so would destroy, completely and forever, the self-image she’d worked for eight years to rebuild. She was clinging to its remains like a life preserver.
“You had no idea at all about the money?” he said, testing again.
She shook her head. “I trusted David right till the end.”
Christensen nodded slowly. “I understand.”
He looked again at her face, where her tears had crossed the plastic surgeon’s faded tracks. In a flash of grotesque logic, Christensen saw the puzzle nearly whole. The time sequence was telling. Teresa was attacked months after the two cops and Tidwell died, and just days before the internal affairs investigators planned to ask her about those things.
“Teresa, are you convinced all this is tied up somehow with the attack on you a few months after those other killings?”
“Yes.”
Christensen leaned forward. “If that’s the case, then, I see two possibilities. The first is what we’ve assumed up to this point: You were about to blow David’s alibi for the night Tidwell died. Whether you knew it or not, you were about to unravel the whole thing. Or, two, you knew about everything—the payoffs, the killings, everything—and David or somebody else involved was afraid you’d tell IAD what you knew.”
Teresa seemed excited by his reasoning. “I was really pissed at David at that point,” she said. “You think maybe I was trying to take him down?”
“The two of you had split three weeks before,” Christensen said. “Maybe you wanted to do more than just contradict David’s cover story. Maybe you wanted to tell IAD everything, as some sort of payback.”
She jabbed her finger at his desk. “A kamikaze thing? That I know I’m capable of. I wanted to hurt David, and I didn’t care how. I’d already tried. The thing with—”
Teresa gasped and raised her fist to her mouth, and their eyes locked across the desk. Christensen wondered if she was finally confronting the prospect that had occurred to him three days before, during their brief conversation after David’s graveside service. One badge number was left in her husband’s long-ago ledger, and Christensen was now sure whose it was. If he was right, it belonged to the man who’d been a central player in a decade-long drama of conspiracy and cover-up, and yet who from the beginning seemed to float above it all. One name fit neatly into too many possibilities.
But if they’d found the final piece to the puzzle, Christensen wanted Teresa to put it in place. The time had come to guide her back to the dark heart of it.
“Teresa,” he said, “tell me about the night you were attacked.”
Chapter 44
Christensen pushed away from his desk and wheeled his chair around to Teresa’s side. He could feel the truth like a rough beast in his tiny office, brutal, unavoidable. If Teresa sensed it, too, he wanted her to know she didn’t have to face it down alone. He touched her shoulder and she flinched.
“We’re just going to talk, all right?” he said. “I’m going to walk you through that night, and I want you to go with me. I’m going to ask you a lot of questions about it, and you may think some of those questions are trivial or silly. But what we’re going to try to do is create a safe environment for you to remember as much as you can.”
“No, I—”
“It’s time, Teresa.” Christensen reached for her hand and pressed it between his. “If any memories of the attack still exist, now’s the time to find out. You’ll be OK. I promise. This time, you’re the one in control.”
“Please.”
“This nightmare you keep having. Where does it start?”
“My kitchen. But—”
“What time of day?”
Teresa sat back, her resistance fading. She closed her eyes. “Dinnertime. I’m cooking.”
“Good. For yourself? Are you having someone over?”
She shook her head. “David was gone, but I was cooking a lot. Trying to deal with everything. Cooking took my mind off things.”
“So you were just cooking to cook, making comfort food?”
“Basically.”
“What do you smell?”
Teresa sniffed the air, retreating further, merging now with that distant scene. “Cinnamon.”
“Good.”
“And tomato sauce. I’m making cabbage rolls.”
“I love those. Now, what do you hear?”
She cocked her head. “Boiling water.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“No.”
“Light outside, or dark?”
“Dark.”
“Kitchen lights on?”
Teresa stood up suddenly and turned around, facing the small window of Christensen’s office. “Yes. I’m standing at my sink, stuffing cabbage rolls.”
“What’s straight ahead?”
“A window. It looks into my side yard.”
“What else?”
“A door. To my right. It’s open, but the screen door’s shut. The kitchen was getting warm, so I opened it.”
“And it’s dark outside?”
“Yes,” she said. “Well, no. The outside lights are on. They come on automatically at dusk and stay on for a couple of hours.”
“So you’d see someone coming through that yard, or someone coming through the door into your kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“What’s behind you?”
Teresa tensed and turned toward Christensen. Behind her eyelids, her eyes began to move, first to one side, then the other, as if searching the room. She backed away and hit the window ledge hard, but never opened her eyes.
“Teresa, what do you see?”
“Nothing. But I feel … something. Like I know there’s someone in the house.”
“Was there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could there have been?”
She shook her head. “Not unless they had a key or someone let them in. I was home all day.”
“Who had a key?”
“Just David. And our neighbor, Carol, the one who found me. We always kept each other’s keys in case somebody got locked out.”
Christensen crossed the room. He stopped maybe five feet from Teresa, who turned again and faced into the window’s shuttered light.
“David had left a couple weeks before,” Christensen said. “Do you think he could have come back?”
“Maybe.” Teresa wrapped her arms around herself, hunching her shoulders as if preparing for a blow.
“There’s somebody behind me,” she said. “I know there is.”
“Can you see him? Hear him?”
“I feel him. Just … I just know someone’s there. He’s there right now.”
“OK, I want you to freeze that moment, Teresa,” Christensen said. “Think of it like you’re watching all this on a VCR. You’ve just hit the Pause button, and everything in that picture is stopped, except you. You can still move. Have you done that?”
&
nbsp; “Yes.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be. He’s frozen. He can’t move. He can’t hurt you. You’re controlling everything he does. Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“Then turn around.”
Teresa turned, wary, her eyes still closed. She took one step back, pressing herself into the window blind, keeping a safe distance.
“Can you see him now?”
She nodded. Her breathing grew shallow. “He’s wearing a mask.”
“So you can’t see his face?”
“No. The mask—”
“Is he tall or short?”
“Medium.”
“Standing up straight?”
“It’s not DellaVecchio,” she said. “Way too tall.”
“How big?”
“Average.”
“So it’s not David, is it?”
Teresa shook her head and swallowed hard.
“Teresa, I want you do something for me. It’s going to be a little scary for you, but remember, he can’t move. You’re in total control. Now, I want you to reach out and take that mask off his face.”
When she hesitated, Christensen asked, “Are you ready to do that, Teresa?”
She nodded. “Now?”
“Just take it off. He can’t hurt you. I promise.”
Her hands shook as she reached up and touched Christensen’s face, peeling an imaginary ski mask from under his chin and up over his nose. He heard her gasp, a quick, pained thing, and her face reddened into rage.
She went for his eyes.
Christensen pulled her hands away, and they began to struggle. Teresa was lost in the illusion even as her eyes sprung open like window shades. Christensen saw the hatred in them, a white-hot fire. She was looking at him, but seeing the man who eight years before had crushed her skull, sexually savaged her, and left her for dead on her kitchen floor.
“You knew!” she cried. “You bastard.”
Christensen clutched her wrists, but her rage poured out. “Knew what?”
Straw Men Page 26