Brenna shook her head. “It was a monster case—emotional, lots of pressure. Who knows? Maybe rage overtook reason.”
How much did she really know? Time for a quiz. “They ever get close to a suspect?”
“I’ve only heard it thirdhand.” She finished the last of her wine.
“Heard what?”
“They built a strong circumstantial case within a week of the first death, but Downing made some rookie error on the search warrant. They found some pretty incriminating stuff during the search, but Dagnolo wouldn’t touch it. Fruit of the poisoned tree and all that. Can you imagine the publicity if the Primenyl charges got kicked on a technicality?”
She sifted the clothes pile on his desk and picked out her panties. “The one case they couldn’t afford to screw up,” she said. “Biggest damn case they ever handled.”
Now Christensen was at the window, peering across the backyard and down the driveway to the street. He glanced at his watch as he clasped it around his wrist. Melissa was due home from her date ten minutes ago.
“So, what did they find?”
“A typewritten list.”
“Of victims?”
“Worse,” she said. “State-licensed cyanide distributors. But it wasn’t perfect. The guy apparently had someone else place the capsules for him, because he never turned up on any of the security camera tapes at the stores. There’s reasonable doubt right there.”
There’s no reason Downing should have told him the story, Christensen thought. And he probably has his version, too.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “If Downing blew it the first time, why would they let him reactivate the investigation now?”
Brenna stopped dressing. “Who said that?”
“Downing seems pretty sure the Greene County case is related.”
She shook her head. “Even so, I can’t imagine Downing’s going to be involved.”
Christensen stepped into his jeans. They slid to his waist without a struggle. “He’s about to retire, you know,” he said.
“So?”
“So maybe he wants another shot. If you’re right about all this, it’d probably be his last chance for some kind of professional redemption.”
Long silence.
“Are you going to talk to him?” Brenna said.
“Downing?”
“The kid.”
“Haven’t decided,” Christensen lied. “You know how I feel about what’s been happening. Repression’s in vogue. Has been since the early eighties. Look at the Menendez trial. There’s always a defense lawyer pushing from behind.”
He felt her glare even in the darkness.
“Present company excepted, of course. But I mean, look at the McMartin case. Repressed memories became a joke. Kids are so suggestible.”
“And this is different?”
“This kid’s got nothing to gain, Bren. He’s not in trouble. He’s probably trying to get on with his life. If he did repress something, recovering the memories would be the most painful thing he’d ever do.”
“And Downing thinks you can just coax him into therapy?”
“He just wants my opinion on whether he’s capable of repression, that’s all. He was twelve when it happened. I don’t know anything else about him, but I do know the mind’s pretty fragile at that age. Besides, what if this is the key to the Primenyl case? How can I walk away without at least trying it?”
He didn’t see her approach until her arms were around his waist.
“I’m sorry.” She laid her head on his chest and they both looked out the window. “But be careful with this, and not just because the wacko’s still out there. Downing’s another reason to steer clear.” She nodded toward the child monitor. “Think long and hard before you get involved.”
On the street outside, an unfamiliar light-colored car coasted to a stop in front of the driveway. It was pale, almost white, he decided before the headlights blinked off.
“Melissa’s home,” he said.
“I still think she’s too young to be dating,” Brenna said.
Me too, he thought. “I’m walking such a fine line with her on the independence thing. I just want her to know I trust her. Mind if we head in?”
They finished dressing in silence, turned off the monitor, bundled themselves into sweaters and raincoats, and crept in the back door, pretending they’d come in the back gate from a walk. Maybe Melissa wouldn’t notice their dry hair and lack of umbrella.
The house was quiet. “Melissa?”
Christensen checked her second-floor bedroom. “Melissa?”
Brenna had Taylor wrapped like a pierogi in his blanket, ready to leave, when he got back downstairs. He nodded toward the street and checked his watch again. “First date must be going well,” he said. “They’ve been out there for ten minutes.”
“How does Dad feel about that?” Brenna said.
“I say time’s up.”
Christensen snapped on the porch light and opened the door, but the spot in front of his driveway was empty. The wet street reflected the street lamps and a bright quarter-moon in the slowly clearing sky. He checked his watch again.
Brenna wrestled Taylor onto her shoulder. “When are you supposed to talk to the boy?”
“Downing said he’d have him call.”
She kissed him and turned away. Without another word, she carried her son out the door and down the steps to the driveway. Before her car was out of sight, a white Mustang rolled into the driveway, preceded by the low throb of overcranked bass speakers.
Chapter 5
The concrete felt like cold steel on Sonny’s bare feet, and the wind bit into his skin. He kneaded the yellow silicone swimming cap between his fingers as he paced the rim of Point State Park. Brown water swirled just below, taunting him.
He hated the cap, hated that he needed it to preserve body heat during his two latest training swims. But whatever core fuel kept him alive during these early fall workouts wasn’t enough. Not lately.
He’d shaken off the grim news on the Coast Guard information hot line an hour earlier. All three of Pittsburgh’s rivers were trashed after last night’s rain. The basin was like a giant storm sewer on days like this. Whatever wasn’t nailed down during the region’s vicious late fall storms washed down the hills and into the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, which met and formed the Ohio at the spot where he stood. The Point.
Sonny curled his bare toes over the rim and watched. Sewage was the least of it. Seat cushions. Thorny planks. An empty rabbit hutch. About fifty yards to his left, a full-size camp cooler in full sail. He’d stroked through worse. Just deal with it, he thought, dipping a foot into the water.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
Fifty-five degrees, the Coast Guard said. Four degrees colder than yesterday. The air temperature was 56, but winter was coming. In a couple months, if the snow belt slipped forty miles south of normal, as it did every few years, he’d be able to walk from bank to bank. Then where could he train?
“I seen this on TV,” came a woman’s voice from behind. “Whachacallem. Polar Bear Club or something.”
People usually ignored him during his spring and summer swims. But as September dragged into October, he’d noticed a change. Each swim brought the quiet rustle of down jackets as Point State Park visitors coasted to a stop directly behind him. By the first of November, they were less curious than concerned. Just last week, a woman grabbed his arm and urged him to reconsider.
“Ain’t no polar bear.” Man’s voice, same Pittsburgh accent. Had to be the husband. “Those fat old shitbags come dahn do their swim on New Year’s Day. Swim, hell. They jump in until the TV cameras go off, then haul out to the bars. Check ahht the shoulders. This guy’s a swimmer.”
Sonny tucked the cap unde
r one arm and ran his thumbs around the drawstring of his Speedo, eventually laying the tops of his hands against his bare back. He knew the risks of hypothermia better than most, knew he was even more vulnerable because of the unexpected squiggle of arrhythmia his doctor noticed on a heart monitor last year. But for two years, he’d conditioned himself to maintain a perfect balance between body heat generated and body heat lost. Not many people could survive prolonged exposure in water this cold. But at seventy-five strokes a minute, he felt sure he could maintain a stable core temperature even in water as cold as 45 degrees. And he could always stroke faster if he felt himself failing.
Besides, no swimmer had tried a winter crossing of Lake Erie. Why not him? Who else had worked so hard to adapt the human body to cold water? But he was a long way from where he needed to be for a late February attempt. Only long training swims on days like this could push him beyond the known barriers. If a swimming cap could help him survive ninety minutes in the river on a day like this, he’d wear it. At least until his body caught up with his mind.
He snapped it into place over his long brown hair, letting the short ponytail dangle down the center of his back. With his right hand, he massaged the tight muscle between his left shoulder and his neck. When it swelled with blood, he did the same on the opposite side. He windmilled his arms to pop the joints and remembered something his older brother used to do when they were kids. David was double-jointed in the shoulders—what a swimmer he’d have been—and early on discovered he could pretzel one arm behind his head. Once, he ran into the house screaming, planning to tell their parents he’d been hit by a trolley. David laughed too soon, before he fooled anybody. But it was one of the few times Sonny remembered his parents laughing out loud at the same time.
A shiver. Sonny pulled his goggles on and looked around, first at the dozen or so people gathered behind him, then at the water running fast and high. He dipped his foot again, felt another chill. Just relax, he told himself. Roll the shoulders awake. Shake it out. Focus.
“Keep this up, Chickie, your balls’ll look like BBs.”
That voice, like screeching brakes. Still, Sonny laughed. “Detective Downing,” he said without turning around. Sonny raised the goggles and faced Downing. Had he been there a second ago? No, he would have recognized that sports jacket, even with the goggles. Where’d he come from?
“Saw that piece-of-shit Toyota of yours in the Point parking lot, so I booked down to say hi. What do you pay those extortionists for a couple hours’ parking? You could park all day at the stadium for two bucks.”
He didn’t see Downing often, which was fine. But as unnerving as the detective could be, he also was nicer than most other adults Sonny knew. No one had tried as hard to help him in the last ten years, at least no one who wasn’t getting paid by the county to do it.
“Thanks for the tip.”
“You ever talk to that kid at CMU I told you about? The one selling the ’83 Aries? The little Einstein didn’t know squat about quality, selling a classic K-car for a song. Where else you gonna get that kind of style for under five hundred dollars? I’d of bought it myself, but I really wanted to see you in something American.”
“No, the Toyota’s still—”
“You never called him, did you? You little shit. Can’t beat a K-car. Pitt still treating you okay? I might be able to help you find something else if that’s not working out.”
Sonny shivered, suddenly aware of the cold. “Still in the chem department, stocking the labs and stuff. It’s good, four to midnight. My choice. Gives me time to train during daylight. Listen, if I don’t get my blood pumping pretty soon—”
“I know, I know. Serious about the BBs, though. Cold water makes you suck ’em up into your body. Water like this, they may never come back down. That’ll kill you long before that heart murmur or whatever. More painful, too.”
Sonny laughed again. He liked Downing.
“Not that I’m concerned, you understand,” the detective said. “Just with my luck, I’ll be the one sent down to fish you out of this river someday. And I’m not partial to floaters. Nothing personal.”
The detective reached into his pocket, pulled out a business card. He started to hand it over but stopped, apparently realizing Sonny had nowhere to put it.
“Why don’t I just slide this under your windshield wiper?” he said.
“What is it?”
“Guy I’d like you to call. Psychologist.”
Sonny studied him carefully. “No thanks.”
“This one’s different. Specializes in kids like you from broken homes. Told him about what happened to you, warned him you’d probably gag if you talked to another therapist. But after I told him about your hands, he insisted I have you call.”
Shivering hard and steady now. If he didn’t get in the water soon, start generating some body heat, there’d be real problems.
“Sorry, but I need to start swimming,” Sonny said. “What did he say about my hands?”
Downing stepped forward with the card. He snapped it between his fingers and held it up so Sonny could read the name: James K. Christensen. Then he tucked it back in his pocket. “You swim. And be careful. Rivers are full of garbage. Under your windshield wiper, okay?”
What about my hands? Sonny wondered. He pulled the goggles on again, and just that quick he was back in the moment. Deaf to the traffic on the yellow-gold bridges at the Point. Numb to everything but the task: to dive through the pain that would slide the length of his body like a cold metal ring, and then stroke into the swirling brown Ohio. The rest would follow, but that first step was the toughest.
The current carried him quickly into the center of the muddy river. He swam faster than the water, maybe eighty strokes a minute, trying to clear the river’s main channel before boat traffic resumed. At the bottom of his stroke, about three feet below the surface, 48-degree water numbed his fingertips. Each stroke sent waves of chilled satin over his shoulders and down his spine. During his first minutes in water this cold, he often imagined himself retreating down his throat and into his belly. It was safe there, with the warming blood flowing around him as his heart rate climbed.
Sonny once thought he’d invented the snug-in-the-guts fantasy, but Cox told him other open-water swimmers he trained talked about it, too. It’s physiological, he’d said. Small capillaries near the skin’s surface constrict in extreme cold, shunting blood into the body’s core where it can warm the vital organs. It’s the body’s best survival mechanism and makes the bloodless skin feel, with a little imagination, like a protective shell.
Sonny reached the shallows along the river’s north rim before he stopped. Behind him, the city’s redeveloped skyline rose like a dream, the crystal tower of PPG Place at its center, flanked by half a dozen new skyscrapers, some even taller, that went up as the steel industry went down. Distance washed away the city’s warts—the crumbling roads and bridges, the averted eyes of displaced steel workers, the human garbage displaced by redevelopment along Liberty Avenue. From downriver the city looked clean, untroubled, and Sonny liked that.
He checked his watch. Using his marathoner’s no-legs stroke, it would take him a little less than thirty minutes to reach the McKees Rocks Bridge, twice as long to get back upriver to the Point. He started, paced by the same inner drum that brought him to the water these days against Cox’s advice.
Tb relieve the tedium, he reviewed his trainer’s early warnings about cold-water distance swimming in these waters. Tugboats and barges were the least of it. Bacteria. Exhaustion. Dehydration. Disorientation. Hallucinations. Hypothermia. Death. “You want to be a swimmer? Learn to dive when a gun sounds and swim as fast as you can,” Cox had said when Sonny introduced himself two years earlier. “But you don’t need a coach if you want to swim that kind of open-water distance. You need a fucking shrink.”
True, Sonny thought.
At least some sports offered a shot at glory or money, or both. Distance swimming offered neither. And explaining it to others only complicated things. Assuming he could pull himself back onto the Point’s rim and struggle to the Ayatollah Corolla, he could look forward to thirty minutes of violent shivering inside the sun-warmed car. If there was sun. That would go on until his body temperature stabilized. Eventually, he would wiggle the loose wire underneath the dash and drive to his apartment. If he was lucky, sleep would pull him beneath the surface of a life that sometimes seemed as vast and cold and empty as Lake Erie.
Someday, he figured, he’d understand it all. For now, he just wanted to keep pushing himself. Colder. Longer.
About a mile downriver, his hands began to tingle. Not from exposure. That was a different feeling altogether. This was the phantom-prickle sensation that worried his doctor, like his hands suddenly fell asleep. He stroked on, boosting his pace to eighty strokes a minute, then eighty-five, but he could feel himself slowing down. He screamed at the river bottom, the word shiiit bubbling up around his ears, then angled toward the bank just beyond the Kaufmann’s warehouse. He thrashed into the shallows, both hands dead at the ends of his wrists.
Up the muddy bank, onto the curb of the giant warehouse parking lot. Asphalt to the horizon. No towel. No shoes. No warm-up suit. Just his marble-bag bathing suit and a twenty-minute jog between him and a car that might or might not start. He was halfway there, shivering like a junkie, when he remembered the goggles and cap. He tried to rake them off his head, feeling totally spastic, but the fingers just weren’t working.
Chapter 6
Christensen had reviewed hundreds of files from the Department of Children’s Services, but none as thick as this. It dominated the center of his home-office desk, a presence, like an unwelcome guest. Downing was right about one thing: Sonny Corbett had a history.
He opened it to the summary page and again scanned the long list of dates running down the left side, each one representing the arrival of a child welfare investigator on the Corbett family doorstep. He checked the birth dates listed in the upper right corner, then noted the date of the first entry—June 1974. A caseworker’s notes read: “Domestic. Both children temp. removed as precaution. Placement: Morningside Shelter. Duration: Six days.”
Time Release Page 4