Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  “Remember the Primenyl case?”

  Christensen looked up from the briefcase he’d begun unloading onto the desk. “Might as well ask someone from Dallas if November 22, 1963, rings a bell.”

  The detective turned, more reaction than gesture, and seemed to force a smile. “Got a favor to ask.”

  Christensen sat down in the hard plastic chair usually reserved for troubled students. “Now there’s a shocker,” he said, smiling. But Downing had turned away again.

  “How much do you remember? About Primenyl?”

  How long ago was it? When was Molly’s accident? It was eight years before that. “Didn’t I just see a newspaper story about the tenth anniversary a couple weeks ago?”

  Downing nodded.

  “Who could forget? Six people dead. City half out of its mind over product tampering. No arrests. No suspects.”

  The detective waited a long time, squinting into the daylight. Tension drifted back into the room like a fog. “One suspect,” he said.

  “I don’t follow. You mean the guy that worked for the drug company, right? The one that killed himself?”

  Downing shook his head from side to side.

  “Then you mean you’ve got a psychological profile of the killer,” Christensen said.

  “No, I mean we know who he is.”

  Weighing the implications took Christensen no time at all. In late 1986, someone had slipped powdered potassium cyanide into capsules inside supposedly tamper-proof packages of the painkiller. That person had watched without apparent conscience or remorse the horrific deaths that followed, then for years hovered like a reaper over the city, watching, maybe waiting to kill again, a presence as undeniable in Pittsburgh’s collective psyche as any Carnegie or Mellon or Heinz, yet without a name. Christensen knew better than to ask who.

  “When’s all this going to break, Grady? Haven’t read anything about it.”

  Downing ran a finger along the edge of the desk, then seemed to trace something on the desktop. He looked up. “You won’t. Unless things change.”

  Christensen sat forward, knowing Downing would interpret the movement as a sign of his interest. But he couldn’t help himself.

  “Look, I’m not gonna dance around this,” Downing said. “You know how much an arrest in this case would mean. For everybody in this city. Truth is, we knew who did it within a week of the first death. And we’ve got circumstantial evidence out the gazoo. A lot more than that, but it’s not enough to file. We’ve got a DA that won’t take anything to the grand jury unless it’s a slam dunk, especially when it’s high-profile.”

  Agitation strained the detective’s voice, an edge Christensen had never noticed before. Even Downing’s forced smile was gone, replaced by the hard mask of a man struggling with something unseen.

  Christensen felt suddenly vulnerable. “Wait a minute. Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I need some advice about repressed memories,” Downing said.

  “That I can give. But what does it have to do with Primenyl?”

  Downing smiled broadly, walked around the desk, and sat on its edge. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  The detective pulled a pack of Winstons from inside his nightmarish hound’s-tooth sports jacket, offering a flash of leather shoulder holster as he did. The reflected flame of his butane lighter danced in the Plexiglas “Thanks for Not Smoking” sign on the office wall.

  “Our guy had a wife and kid—two kids, at the time. Oldest boy was fifteen, youngest was twelve. They all lived in this big old house in Irondale a couple blocks from the Pharmco where the first capsules were found.”

  “Molly used to shop there. The one on Chislett.”

  Downing nodded. “Old man’s a classic case—alcoholic, abusive, a gutless little nobody trying to make his mark. Pharmacist by trade, which explains a lot. Anyway, we’re pretty sure Mom and the boys knew what the old man was doing, pretty sure they saw some things, you know?”

  Christensen exaggerated a roll of his eyes. “And you think they’re repressing the memories.”

  “Just the youngest boy.”

  Christensen couldn’t stop an involuntary laugh. Downing had been watching the news. “The California case, right? Daughter remembers Daddy bashing her little pal twenty years after the fact and goes to the cops.”

  “Jury believed her,” Downing said.

  “Overturned on appeal.”

  “What are you saying, Jim? People don’t repress things?”

  “They do. All the time. But you’re talking about something way beyond that. It’s one thing to get somebody who’s been traumatized to confront memories like that. A painful, dangerous thing. It’s another thing to try to mine those memories and then twist them into a criminal prosecution.”

  Downing held up both hands, palms out. “Don’t get ahead of me here. I’m just trying to get an expert read on the kid.”

  “I know you better than that.”

  “Just talk to the kid, Jim. He’s twenty-two now, been through every social service agency in the county. There’s a file a foot thick on him, and at least two of his counselors saw red flags. If there was ever a candidate, it’s him. Just feel him out, let me know if it’s a possibility. Unless his old man makes a mistake, he may be our only shot.”

  Christensen’s mind was racing, “It’s the media. That’s the problem. Give them something sensational like the California trial and they swarm like bees. Ritual abuse! Satanic ceremonies! Reporters are so busy looking for the next big outrage that they never look at what’s really happening. The big story never gets told as long as there’s a goddamn trial lawyer willing to hold a press conference on the courthouse steps or a quack therapist who’ll let some poor bastard ‘remember’ sacrificing babies and eating their spleens.”

  “Ever consider decaf?”

  Christensen took a deep breath. Repressed memories. “In seventeen years of private practice, I’ve seen maybe a dozen legitimate cases stemming from posttraumatic stress. In the few years since publicity started on the California trial, probably half of my clients decided they must be repressing something.”

  The detective stared.

  “Look, Grady, I’m not saying your kid isn’t legit. But just because one sharp prosecutor built a case around repressed memories doesn’t mean they’re the key to every unsolved crime in the country. In my experience, severe posttraumatic stress, the kind that forces the bad stuff into the darkest corners of somebody’s mind, isn’t all that common.”

  Downing turned away, stooped down, and examined the blue spine of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that Christensen kept on a low shelf by the door. “Nothing about Primenyl was all that common.”

  The detective stood. His face was softer, almost pleading. “Think about it, Jim. Just talk to the kid. If you say it’s not there, I’ll drop it.”

  The Primenyl case. Hell of a Monday.

  “What’s the kid’s name?”

  Downing smiled like a man holding a fistful of kings. “Corbett. Michael Corbett. Everybody calls him Sonny.”

  “I don’t like this, Grady. But I’ll think about it.”

  Downing pulled the morning Press from under his arm, casually unfolded it, then laid it on the desk so Christensen could read the banner headline across the top of the front page: “Coroner confirms cyanide in Greene County tampering death.” It triggered something visceral in him, a prickly wave of dread.

  Downing looked back over his shoulder as he opened the door. “Not to hurry your decision, Chickie, but we think he’s killing again.”

  Chapter 3

  Christensen followed the sports jacket from a distance, certain that no one else on campus was wearing one like it. He hurried across the Cathedral of Learning lawn, down the service stairs, and into
the tiny loading dock between the Cathedral and the Stephen Foster Memorial, where a beige Ford was parked between a mail truck and a vending company van.

  Downing was leaning against the Ford’s fender, his overcoat folded over his crossed arms as if he was waiting for someone, smoke curling from a new cigarette between the fingers of one hand. He smiled. “Gonna freeze without your coat.”

  “The only cars made this ugly are unmarked cop cars, Grady. Everybody’s onto that. You guys should wise up.”

  “Want a ride?”

  “Let’s take a walk. I postponed my nine-fifteen until eleven,” Christensen said, shaking his head. “At least you could act surprised that I followed you out.”

  Downing opened the car door and crawled across the front seat, pulling a thick file folder and a rumpled black-and-gold Steelers jacket with him as he backed out. The jacket snagged briefly on the black barrel of a shotgun mounted beneath the dashboard.

  “People with consciences are so fucking predictable,” Downing said. “Wear this.”

  The sleeves were short, since the detective was at least half a foot smaller, but it was roomy in the shoulders. Christensen wondered how Downing, who at sixty-two so casually abused the notion of fitness, was able to maintain such a broad and powerful upper torso which could fill the jacket as well as some Steelers linemen might have. He pulled the massive thing on, grateful for its warmth.

  “I made a lot of promises to myself and God after Molly’s accident,” Christensen said.

  “Thought you gave up on God as things got worse.”

  They’d talked a lot in the interrogation room that day. “At least I’m trying to keep the promises I made to myself, and not to forget what I learned.” Trust your moral compass. Damn the consequences. He’d ended Molly’s life, such as it was at that point, for all the right reasons.

  They walked south along Forbes Avenue, feeling the wind’s bite, moving silently among the students headed to morning classes. Christensen loved the manic pace of youth, fed off its energy. He loved the urban campus, too, especially the gritty history that spoke from its still-sooty buildings and immense granite memorials. They passed the Forbes Quadrangle, where Forbes Field once stood. Decades gone, but the university, bless it, still maintained a commemorative section of the brick center-field wall, a street named for Roberto Clemente, and the glorious, spike-scarred home plate. It was entombed under glass in the floor of the Quadrangle building lobby.

  “Hungry?”

  He looked back at Downing, who was stopped in the surreal light of a flashing Iron City Beer sign in the window of Primanti Brothers.

  “There’s a coffee place on the next block. Great latte,” he pleaded as Downing disappeared inside. He followed into a warm wave of aroma, frying fish and onion.

  “Two fried eggs and baloney on Italian,” Downing said to the counterman.

  “Home fries on top?”

  “Lots of ketchup.” Downing turned to Christensen. “Want something?”

  Christensen made a face.

  “Sorry, professor. No croissant.”

  They stepped out again into the chill, stepping around a woman knotting her head scarf in the doorway.

  “All right, Grady. What’s this about?”

  Downing took a bite and shifted the file folder from one arm to the other, balancing the sandwich.

  “Things are curiouser and curiouser down in Greene County,” he said in a spray of greasy mulch, swabbing ketchup from his mustache with a hound’s-tooth sleeve. “Definite product tampering. Cyanide again. Tox report confirmed it yesterday, but we’ve pretty much known all along. That’s why the regional recall on the yogurt.”

  Christensen flashed back to his frantic refrigerator search five days earlier. “I heard about it, but all I really know is the recall. I went berserk. My kids eat it by the gallon.”

  “Standard precautionary stuff for manufacturers,” Downing said. “Good PR, but even the local cops knew within an hour we were dealing with tampering, not contamination. Found a pinhole in the foil lid where the syringe went in. Think about it. Yogurt’s a semiliquid. What does somebody do just before they eat that crap?”

  “Stir it up.”

  “So there’s nothing off-color, no reason to suspect. Probably tasted like hell, but the first spoonful might have been enough.”

  Christensen tried to imagine the scene. “Random?”

  “Just some kid’s mom putting away groceries. You tell me: Sound like the work of anyone in particular?”

  “What about a copycat?”

  “Come on, Jim. Ten years to the day after the first Primenyl killing?”

  Christensen blew into his hands, then shoved them deep into the jacket pockets. His pants were still damp. “It usually happens in cycles, you know.”

  Downing stopped walking, giving him his full attention.

  “I’m talking in real general terms here, okay? Think of the mind as a gyroscope. It stays pretty balanced for long periods of time. But from time to time it gets unbalanced, for whatever reason. And when that happens, the mind does what it needs to do to right itself.”

  Downing turned suddenly, to the right and up the hill on Atwood Street. Christensen felt a twinge as the tower of Mount Mercy Hospital came into view. He scanned the building face, eyes fixing against his will on the left corner of the seventh floor. Intensive care. He realized Downing was ten steps ahead, waiting.

  “‘Right itself’?” Downing asked as Christensen caught up.

  “For me, that might mean going out for a long run when things get bad. I did that a lot, you know, after Molly’s accident and everything else. You do things like that, too, I’m sure. It’s how we stay sane. And whether we realize it or not, most of us get unbalanced in predictable cycles.”

  “But ten years?”

  “Not typically. But if we’re talking about the Primenyl killer, we’re not dealing with a typical mind. So yeah, ten years between the really severe imbalances is possible.”

  Downing shook his head. “Hell of a way to keep your balance.”

  “Considering the symmetry, though, my guess is you’re dealing with something else here. The newspaper stories about the anniversary could have been enough to set him off again. If your theory is right, they may have reminded him how much he missed the attention.”

  Downing walked north again on Fifth Avenue. Christensen tried his best to ignore the massive medical center to his left. Why did Downing have to turn on Atwood? And why was he stopping again, right across the goddamn street? The blood in his ears rose in tempo with each step. Was it his heartbeat, or the echoes of the frantic night nurse who’d pounded and cursed and wept outside the barred ICU door until the firemen finally broke through? They’d found him hugging Molly’s limp body to his chest, her respirator disconnected, and watched him grieve until police arrived.

  “Symmetry aside, Grady, there’s no shortage of people walking the knife edge these days. Random killings are a strong salve for someone feeling powerless. There must be some other reason you think there’s a link between this one and Primenyl.”

  A Port Authority bus roared past, trailing a virulent cloud of warm air. Downing stared it into the distance.

  “Our guy lives just a few miles outside Waynesburg, little place called Outcrop. Just a bunch of shacks, really, kind of place somebody might go to disappear. Been there since right after the 1986 killings. Probably drives the same roads our latest victim did, banks at the same bank, shops in the same stores.”

  “And the local cops put all that together?”

  Downing laughed. “The local cops questioned her husband for five days.”

  “So why are you involved, then?”

  Downing’s smile disappeared. Whatever he said was lost to the dull roar of passing traffic. Christensen cupped a hand to hi
s ear.

  “I said I’m not involved, officially. At least not yet. But I’m trying to get back into it.”

  “Back into it?”

  They moved slowly away from Mount Mercy and the memories there, crossing one street, then two, before the detective spoke again.

  “I was part of the original Primenyl investigation in 1986, but I never got to see it through.” He held up a hand, its thumb and index fingers an inch apart. “We were this fucking close, Jim, this close, but never got enough for an arrest.”

  Christensen studied Downing’s face, saying nothing, letting the weight of the moment pull the detective deeper into his story.

  “Okay. The short version,” Downing said finally. “Name’s Ron Corbett. Like I said before, real family man. Abused the wife. Abused the kids so bad the older boy, Sonny’s brother, bit the pipe when he was fifteen.”

  “Suicide?”

  Downing nodded. “After the poisonings started, Corbett took off. A week after that David, the brother, takes the .38-caliber cure. Two weeks after that, Mom breaks down and winds up in Borman.”

  “The state hospital.”

  “Bingo. Sonny ends up in foster care with nobody to pick him up. For years.”

  “So Dad’s a son of a bitch, Grady. The world’s full of them.”

  “A pharmacist son of a bitch,” Downing said. “Knows about shelving methods, packaging, everything. There’s some other stuff, too; trust me on that. But somebody in that house knew what Corbett was doing, maybe everybody. Add it up.”

  Christensen tried hard not to react, figuring the more Downing talked, the closer he’d get to the truth. But there was an obvious question: “You’re sure it wasn’t one of the others?”

  “Like who? The mom? If you’d ever met her, you’d understand. A couple teenage boys? Not likely. It was too calculated.”

  The detective rubbed a hand across his face. Christensen noticed the wedding band and tried to remember Downing’s wife’s name.