Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  “I’m retiring in five months, Jim.”

  “About time. You’ve been eligible for, what? Five, six years?”

  “I didn’t want to leave it unfinished. I don’t. Can’t. You have mill-hunks in your family?”

  Grady Downing, King of the Non Sequitur. After fourteen years in Pittsburgh, Christensen was getting good at spotting the descendants of Eastern Europeans who settled here to work in the steel mills. Hiring was based on the crassest of stereotypes: Poles and Slovaks for lifting, Jews for accounting, the Irish and blacks for shovel work. He’d actually seen a yellowed copy of a foreman’s hire sheet that spelled it all out. Downing seemed like the son of a lifter.

  “I didn’t grow up here, Grady. You?”

  “Three generations. And I remember my dad—he’s dead now, probably mid-forties then—talking about the stage in life where you have to start letting go of your dreams. He’d started out in the rolling mill, strictly heavy-lifting stuff. After thirty-five years he clawed his way into some mid-level management job. First one in the family out of the mills. White shirt. Wing tips. The whole bit. But at some point, he said he knew he’d never be president of U.S. Steel, or USX or whatever the hell they call it now. Just wasn’t the hand he was dealt, and there was nothing he could do about it.”

  “That’s pretty typical of men that age,” Christensen said. “My age.”

  Downing shook his head. “But this isn’t some midlife crisis, sport. Christ, I wish it was as simple as my dad said, of letting go of a dream. Shit. I stopped imagining myself as chief of detectives years ago. This is different. It’s got me by the short hairs and won’t let go.”

  “You want to resolve it before you retire,” Christensen said, waiting for some sign of insecurity.

  “I have to.”

  “So, what then?”

  “So I want to convince … I’ve got a meeting in a couple days with my lieutenant, maybe with the chief himself. Like I said, Corbett’s no stranger. We’re all on the same wavelength on this. But we’ve pumped everything else dry, so I want to take a new tack. Get ’em thinking about the Greene County case, and when I’ve got ’em listening, I’ll tell them about Sonny. They all followed those repressed-memory cases pretty close, too.”

  Like every other cop with a wish list and an unsolved murder. “And?”

  “Maybe they’ll cut me loose for a while to check this stuff out. I’m figuring I could nose around in Greene County while you got to know the kid. I’d really like your take on him.”

  Neither spoke as they passed the twenty-story cylindrical dormitory towers labeled A, B, and C by the Pitt administration, and dubbed Ajax, Babo, and Comet by the students who lived there. They walked silently past the university bookstore and back into the parking lot of the William Pitt Union. Christensen opened the lobby door for Downing, then held it open for a woman walking about ten steps behind them. She nodded her thanks but stopped along the curb.

  The psychologist pushed the elevator button and glanced at his wristwatch. Ten-twenty.

  “All right, Grady. If this kid did see something that traumatic, that’s the sort of thing that could force memories into the subconscious. But that stuff doesn’t just sit there. It comes out in strange ways, even physical symptoms.”

  Downing went wide-eyed. “Like numbness or something?”

  “Any of a thousand ways. Why?”

  “Sonny Corbett’s got this thing with his hands. They go numb on him, and nobody can figure out why.”

  Christensen waved off the words. “Look, let’s make a deal. You investigate crime scenes and arrest bad guys, I’ll handle the mental health issues, okay?”

  “Temper, Chickie, temper.”

  “This just isn’t as simple as you make it sound, Grady. Sure the possibility exists. But hell, you mention repressed memories in a roomful of psychologists these days and you’ll have a riot. And if I had to pick sides—”

  “You think it’s horseshit?”

  “Didn’t say that. But there’s a weird hysteria out there right now. I mean, something’s wrong when half the population of the United States remembers sacrificing babies by firelight.”

  The elevator door opened with a soft rush of air. Christensen boarded first.

  “I’ll buy that,” Downing said. “But what about the cases where it’s real? Does anybody listen now when somebody cries wolf?”

  Christensen ran a finger along the groove where the elevator doors met. “Guilt won’t work on me, Grady.”

  “Sure it will.”

  The doors opened and Christensen stepped out. He turned and blocked Downing’s exit, holding the elevator door open with an extended arm. “I’ll talk to him. Once. Just to gauge his suggestibility. But repression as you’re imagining it is very rare. And even if there’s something to it, trying to recover the memories would pose incredible risks to this kid. Handle it wrong, you nudge him into psychosis. Understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Spell it out,” Downing said. “Don’t want any hard feelings from this.”

  “If there’s any reason for me to talk to this kid more than once, he becomes my client. Our conversations are private. And I won’t endanger someone under my care.”

  “Deal. But you’d tell me anything relevant to the Primenyl case, right?”

  “That’s up to the client.”

  The detective touched his arm with surprising gentleness. “You’ll talk to him, though?”

  “Have him call.”

  The detective stiff-armed the elevator door as it tried to rumble shut, then stepped out. He hefted the file folder, thick as a phone book, from the crook of his arm and offered it with both hands.

  “I’ll talk to Sonny tomorrow,” Downing said. “Thought you might want a little background.”

  Christensen eyed the file. “Such as?”

  “Sonny’s juvenile court records.”

  Christensen looked around, relieved that no one was passing by. “You’re not supposed to have those, Grady. They’re private.”

  Downing shrugged. “It’s just copies.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “You want it or not?”

  Christensen reached for the file. Its weight surprised him. Downing followed him to Lil’s desk.

  “Anybody call, Lil?”

  The receptionist gave Downing the stink-eye. She wouldn’t easily forgive him slipping in unnoticed this morning. Christensen marveled at how Downing could bring out the worst in the best people. “No,” she said. “But Brenna’s here. She was in Squirrel Hill for a deposition and said she’s taking the afternoon off. She’s offering to cook for you and the girls tonight, so I didn’t toss her out. Those are her groceries.”

  Two plastic bags from Frieda’s Deli in Squirrel Hill sat in one of the waiting-room chairs. Two students sat opposite the bags, fidgeting with brochures. One gave Christensen an uncertain smile.

  He felt a tug on his sleeve, sharper this time. Oh right, the Steelers jacket. Christensen pulled it off and Downing took it, but the detective’s face was frozen in an unmistakable leer as he absently wadded the jacket into a ball.

  “Brenna?”

  Christensen ignored the bait. “So you’ll have Sonny call me tomorrow?”

  Brenna Kennedy poked her blond-red head out Christensen’s office doorway, just down the hall. She saw him smile a lover’s smile, then disappeared again. She emerged in full stride with her overcoat in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Everything about her projected power except her face, which betrayed a deep well of compassion—a devastating combination for a defense attorney who sincerely felt every client’s pain.

  Brenna’s smile, that wonderfully imperfect smile, wavered the moment she recognized Downing. Nothing personal, Christensen knew. Just her gut reaction to cops in general.
She coasted to a stop a chaste distance from both men, then seemed to force the corners of her mouth back up again.

  “Detective Downing. How long has it been?” Brenna shook Downing’s extended hand without enthusiasm.

  “Two years, I’d say.” Downing made no effort to disguise his wink. “Working a little overtime, counselor?”

  Chapter 4

  The old green marshmallow of a chair wasn’t meant for this. With its overstuffed upholstery, the BarcaLounger was the perfect Sunday afternoon receptacle for a high-density Steelers fan. But as Brenna moved above him, knees braced on the worn padded arms, Christensen thought maybe his dad’s old throne was just now enjoying its best years.

  In the darkness, he could feel her long, fine hair more than he could see it. It tickled his face, neck, and chest as she touched her forehead to his, then kissed his eyelids. Except for the chair’s rhythmic creaking, they were quiet, not for lack of passion, but because a child monitor on the windowsill transmitted every cough and rustle from Annie’s bedroom, where his five-year-old and Brenna’s four-year-old son, Taylor, were sleeping. The kids in the adjoining main house couldn’t hear them, he reminded himself, but still. Plus, noisy passion didn’t seem proper here, in Molly’s writing room. Her photo enlarger was still in one corner.

  Christensen buried the thought. Brenna deserved his full attention, without the irrational guilt he felt about this place, this woman. As their movements quickened, he forced himself to think of less erotic things—the tried-and-true stalling tactic of men given to early release. His mind fixed improbably on the BarcaLounger’s history. His parents had exiled the once-proud centerpiece of their den to the basement as the 1970s fascination with avocado shades began to dim. He and Molly gave it a reprieve when they got married, offering it a prominent place in the living room of their graduate-school apartment. Two houses and two kids later, it finally ended up in the garage loft he built for her overlooking the house he now shared with their two daughters.

  Brenna arched her back, shuddered, and lurched forward, biting his upper lip. He pulled her to him, lost in the moment. They moved together on warm leatherette, Brenna cradling his head to her breasts as he guided her hips through their fevered, clutching climax. It would have been memorable even if the recliner hadn’t tipped backward and spilled them both onto the carpet beside his desk.

  They knotted again, laughing, and held each other for what seemed like days, listening to the cold rain.

  “Impressive,” she said. Her voice was like spilled honey after they made love. “I do believe you’re getting the hang of this.”

  He sighed. “Maybe we should stick to the futon.”

  “Boh-ring.”

  He felt that way with her sometimes, worried that his fondness for routine wasn’t adventurous enough. This was a woman who once dove off the New River Gorge Bridge, then complained that her bungee cord had been too tight. He admired her appetite for thrills, but it was a little intimidating.

  “So that’s all he wanted then? To see how you and the girls were doing?”

  Christensen opened his eyes, pulled from the edge of sleep.

  “Hmm?”

  “Downing.”

  Oh, right. The conversation they’d postponed forty minutes earlier when, with Annie and Taylor finally asleep, they’d retreated to the loft. “Sort of. He needs a favor.”

  Brenna sat up, shifting her weight to one arm and with the other pulling the hair away from her face. In daylight, it was the color of a new penny, and just as bright. She wore it down, even in court, resisting the notion that female attorneys should be relatively sexless. He liked that, for a lot of reasons. The moon winked improbably from behind the rain clouds and filtered through the window, defining her body with the palest of lines. Oh the secrets a Jil Sander suit can keep.

  “You don’t owe him anything, you know.” The sudden edge in her voice surprised him.

  “So you’ve said.”

  “How big a favor?”

  Christensen sat up. “Not big. He wants me to evaluate a kid, about twenty-two, I think. Downing thinks he may have witnessed something in a case he worked about ten years ago. He jumped with both feet onto this repressed-memories bandwagon, just like every other cop who’s running out of options.” He reached over to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, but Brenna pushed his hand away.

  “So that would have been about 1986?”

  Christensen couldn’t figure the attitude, but he sensed trouble. “About then, yeah, ’86. Something like that.”

  Brenna stretched, a sharp movement, not leisurely.

  “Grady Downing only worked one major case in 1986. Every cop and lawyer in town knows that.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Primenyl.” She stood and walked to the window. “Or didn’t he mention that?”

  Christensen felt uncomfortable for the first time since his conversation with the detective. Brenna knew local law enforcement as well as any cop. Attorneys who knew her well told him she practically lived in the courthouse during her years as a public defender, taking more than her share of cases to get the widest possible range of experience. It ruined her marriage, but she’d probably cross-examined every cop in the department at least once, making unlikely friends of most. They all shared departmental gossip with her, a function, he was sure, of the vague promise they imagined in her jade-green eyes.

  “I’m not on the stand here, Brenna. He just needs an evaluation done.”

  She watched raindrops wriggle down one of the windowpanes. “And you need a history lesson. How much do you know about the Primenyl investigation?”

  Christensen walked over to her, tried to hold her. But she moved away with a disciplined kiss.

  “There was a task force or something. Downing was on it. I remember talking to him about it after Molly died, but just in passing.”

  “He wasn’t on it. He led it for the first few months, until they yanked him off.”

  Something unspoken was driving the conversation. He knew of only one time that Brenna and Downing had been potential adversaries, two years earlier when Christensen had ended what Molly’s doctors described as a “persistent and irreversible vegetative state.” She’d died twelve minutes after he removed her respiration tube. But that uncomplicated act of love took place in the city’s largest Catholic hospital, and Christensen’s decision quickly became, to his horror, a morality play that divided the city. In the hours after Molly died, he stood alone on one side, joined eventually by Brenna, acting as his attorney. On the other side stood J. D. Dagnolo, the headline-whore of a district attorney who was shopping for a high-profile trial to impress the county’s heavily Catholic electorate.

  Downing, the investigator, had been caught squarely in the middle. In the end, he was the only thing that stood between Christensen and the public spectacle of a murder trial. He’d gathered the evidence, listened to Brenna’s argument that the law leaves room for mercy, and then simply told Dagnolo the case would be a damned messy one to take to the grand jury. Without the detective’s enthusiastic backing, Dagnolo looked for someone else to flay.

  “Brenna, can I stop you here a minute? I feel like I wandered into the middle of an old feud or something. I know Downing’s not the most attractive personality, but the three of us do have a history.”

  She followed a raindrop down the windowpane with her finger. “Your pal Downing has had an interesting career in homicide, you know.”

  “Well, I guess so. Especially if he’s been tracking the Primenyl killer all these years.”

  She turned suddenly. “That’s what he told you?”

  “Brenna, help me out here. What am I supposed to know but obviously don’t?”

  At Molly’s desk, Brenna shrugged into her coffee-stained oxford shirt and started to button it. When she finished, she rolled the c
uffs one, two, three times until her hands finally peeked out of the sleeves.

  “Primenyl was a badly compromised investigation,” she said, sipping from the same glass of chardonnay she had nursed through dinner. “All kinds of problems. Downing was one of the best product-tampering investigators in the country. That’s why he got to lead the task force even though the feds were involved. But something went way wrong for him on Primenyl.”

  Christensen pulled his faded Pitt sweatshirt over his head.

  “He made some big mistakes early on, senseless mistakes,” she said. “Word is the investigation never recovered.”

  “I don’t follow. What kind of mistakes?”

  “Two things, but I don’t remember all the specifics. First there was that business about the lot numbers. The killer apparently bought a bunch of bottles from the same shipment, probably off the same store shelf, then took them home, loaded them with bad capsules, and delivered them to a half a dozen other stores. If Downing had spotted the matching lot numbers on the first few tainted bottles, they might have identified Primenyl as the poison source three days earlier. Product-tampering 101, but Downing overlooked it.”

  Christensen recalled a vivid image from the recent newspaper stories about the enduring mystery of Primenyl.

  “Did you read the big tenth anniversary piece the Press ran on Primenyl a couple weeks back?” he asked. “It said it was like a neurologist looking at a brain scan and missing a tumor the size of a baseball. That was Downing?”

  Brenna nodded. “Downing and company did identify Primenyl as the source, but only after the coroner kept finding undigested capsules—”

  “They got the bottles off store shelves in record time or something, didn’t they?”

  “Once they figured it out,” she said. “But that didn’t make up for the time they wasted. Or help the four people who died during the delay.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Downing booted the big one, plain and simple,” she said. “No one ever really figured out why.”

  “Any theories?”