Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  “Probably not.” Downing remembered his crash course in chemistry in 1986. “Probably not sodium cyanide, either. Too unstable. The powders start reacting with carbon dioxide and moisture as soon as they’re exposed to air. After more than a day or so in a container like that it wouldn’t be potent enough to be fatal.”

  Then he’d remembered another option: hydrogen cyanide, the liquid form. It’s unstable, too, he’d thought; hell, it boils at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. But then, wouldn’t yogurt be the perfect delivery vehicle for it? From your grocer’s refrigerator to yours. The stuff tastes like hell, but who thinks about that first spoonful? And one would probably be enough.

  “Get word out fast,” Downing told him. “Get any brand with the same packaging off the shelves of the local stores. You check the lot number on the container?” The kid cop said he’d done that first thing, adding, “We learn from mistakes.”

  Downing pulled his collar tighter. Fuck you, was what he’d wanted to say. Have the spine to say what you’re thinking: After the Primenyl screw-up, everybody knows the drill. Say it, you son of a bitch. But no. He’d taken a deep breath and swallowed the words, then asked: “What’s the chance it was a family thing?”

  “We’re talking to the husband, but they’re the Waltons, man. And her boy—maybe twelve; he was there when it happened—he says she ate it right out of the grocery bag.”

  Downing hadn’t listened as the cop described what happened next. He already knew. Racing pulse within seconds. A few pathetic minutes of gasping as the poison constricts the chest. Face pale as the body forces blood to the organs in a hopeless attempt to save itself. Falling blood pressure. Convulsions. Violent skittering of the limbs. Death. Downing saw everything long before the 9-1-1 recording hit the news, including the shit stains on her kitchen floor.

  He’d wheeled his desk chair to the computer terminal as the deputy talked. “Where’d you say this happened?”

  “Waynesburg. Near the college,” the deputy said.

  Downing stopped, his hands frozen above the keyboard. “Name some of the other little burgs around there.”

  “Old mining towns, mostly,” the deputy said. “Enterprise. Gypsy. Outcrop.”

  Downing traced the grave marker’s chiseled “1986” with his toe. Despite the rain and the hour, others were around. A car passed slowly along the cemetery road, washing him briefly in high beams. He looked away, just in case he knew them.

  “You believe it, baby? Outcrop. Just one guy in the whole goddamned computer living near Waynesburg. Been there since right after the ’86 killings. Knew it was Corbett even before he sent me the tape, even before I checked the database.”

  The database. What started with his own scribbled notes about a random series of deaths that year became the most intensive manhunt in Pennsylvania history. He shuffled the numbers again: twenty-five thousand pages of finished reports by a hundred fifty federal, state, and local investigators stored in twelve different file cabinets. A computerized catalog of the sixty thousand names gathered between the end of 1986 and late 1988, when the Primenyl task force was disbanded. From the beginning, Ron Corbett’s name stood apart.

  “It’s the opening I need,” Downing said. “Don’t really want to jump back into this thing. Nearly killed me last time. But I got to, baby, because he won’t stop at one. Got to for you. For the other five—now the other six, I guess. For me, too. So I’ll get him this time, one way or the other.”

  Soon he’d make his pitch, lay out the theory he’d been researching for more than a year, persuade his new boss to give him a second chance. He needed one thing to prosecute the bastard—a witness. And if Christensen didn’t seem enthusiastic about working with Sonny, he at least seemed willing to help.

  A thorn caught on Downing’s wedding ring as he tugged the rose from inside his raincoat. He pulled it loose, relieved that the bud was intact and starring to open. He held it into the faint light and pouring rain and again tried to conjure pleasant memories of the woman beneath his feet, and of the last time he saw her alive. But the rose was the color of old blood, and the memory it triggered took his breath away.

  He shuddered, closed his left fist around the flower, and turned his back. When he opened his hand, he was nearly at the car and panting. Had he been running? He dropped the crushed petals into a muddy pool, folded himself into the driver’s seat, and eased the Ford toward the graveyard gate and down into the city.

  Steam rose from Downing’s pants as they dried on the heat vent beneath his office window. Through the mist, he could see the tugboat lights as they shoved silent barges along the inky Monongahela River three stories below. Across the Mon sat Station Square, once the gritty rail crossroads for the city’s iron and steel exports, now a postindustrial shopping mall, fresh-scrubbed and trimmed in neon.

  Half the guys in this bunker would kill for his window, he thought. After twenty-eight years with the department, the last nineteen in homicide, he’d finally got the lead investi­gator’s office and the window in 1985, the year before the Primenyl killings. Lost the title two years later, an awkward rump-fuck of a demotion that nobody really talked about. But nobody ever asked for the office back, and Downing never brought it up.

  The only problem with the view was just upriver, about a mile north of the Public Safety Building—the old Duquesne brewery. He’d played in its shadow as a kid, back when it was working three shifts to slake the quitting-time thirst of Big Steel. Big Steel was dead now and the leprous brick building was lifeless except for the clock face that covered a quarter-acre of the front wall. Its giant hands swept away the hours, mocking him, erasing the five months he had left until mandatory retirement.

  Quarter to eleven. Jesus.

  Downing snapped on his desk lamp, recoiling from the harsh, sudden light. He knocked over his open jar of freeze-dried coffee as he checked his watch.

  “Damn.”

  What must he look like to the night-shifters passing along the corridor? Rumpled. Puffy. Squinting like a mole through his bifocals. Bare legs propped on the windowsill. He turned out the lamp, smoothed his still-thick brown hair, and wriggled into his pants, which were damp below the point where his raincoat left off. He swept a mound of grapefruit peels into the wastebasket, then turned the lamp on again and snatched the phone from its cradle.

  Trix wasn’t answering, but he knew the game. On the fourth ring, he started to stroke the bronze elephant next to his Rolodex. The punch line of a private joke was taped to its side—M40. National Geographic once did a story about an old, dying elephant that in field research jargon was identified only as Male 40, or M40. The researchers tracked M40’s last tortured walk to a clearing, where during the elephant’s final agonized hours they witnessed behavior that scientists had never before seen. As M40 lay there, helpless and unable to stand, the younger males who’d followed him began, one by one, to mount him in a spirited show of dominance.

  He’d laughed when Silverwood posted the story on the department bulletin board and scribbled, “Make reserva­tions now for Grady Downing’s retirement party!” He’d even laughed when somebody left the little brass M40 on his desk two days later. But nobody ever took credit, which he thought gave the whole thing a darker, meaner edge. Truth be told, it cut close to the bone.

  His wife answered after the tenth ring, like she always did from bed on the nights he forgot to call.

  “Very nice, Grady.” He knew the rasp in her voice.

  “You asleep already? It’s…” He checked his watch again, as though she could see the gesture. “Jesus, Trix, I’m sorry. Just got—”

  “Forget it.”

  How many nights had they had this conversation? How many times had she tamped her anger and disappointment down with that simple response and rolled over again into fitful sleep? How long until she went berserk some night and carved his heart out while he dozed on the couch
?

  “He’s killing again.” He paused, waiting for a prompt.

  None came. He knew she’d need no explanation or context, so he just continued. “About an hour from here, in Greene County. Near Outcrop.”

  “I wondered. Not Primenyl again?”

  “No, but cyanide.”

  Silence. Ten seconds. Twenty. He’d meant to tell her in person; now he knew he should have.

  “What are you thinking?” The tremble in her voice told him this was going to be tough.

  Deep breath. “Still waiting for more details. But if it looks like Corbett was involved, I’m going to DeLillo with my repressed-memories idea. Or maybe I’ll just take it straight to Kiger.”

  “The chief? DeLillo will love that.”

  “Going over his head would be tricky, but I may have to. Kiger wasn’t here in ’86, so I’ve got no baggage with him.”

  No reaction. And he needed to talk. Proceed with caution.

  “Got five months left, Trix. And I think Kiger’ll go for it, especially if I can convince him Corbett’s involved in this one. But I’ll argue to reopen even if he’s not convinced. We know a lot more about how memory works than we did in ’86. Corbett’s wife is still around. So’s Sonny, his youngest kid. Trix, they must have known what went on in that house. Maybe if I can get them thinking about it again, it’ll nudge them enough. I’m sure the memories are in there. Getting them out is the tricky part.”

  “Grady—”

  “It was like somebody dropped a bomb on that family, Trix. The killings start, and within a couple weeks three of the four family members are a few shrimp short of a cocktail? You tell me what the fuck they saw Corbett doing.”

  The line hummed, electronic silence.

  “How’s it going to end?” she said, her voice flat but not emotionless. It made him uncomfortable, mostly because he wasn’t sure what she meant. “After it’s over, are you ready to deal with it either way? Win or lose?”

  “Trix—”

  “I mean, if you reopen this case, Grady, it could happen to you all over again. And I’m not sure I can help you through it this time. I never understood why you got so involved, because it never happened before or since. But I see it happening again. The way you talked just now. It takes you over. I know part of you died with those people, but you did your job. You just can’t make witnesses out of clay. You can’t pull evidence out of your hat. And you can’t wall me out again.”

  Finally: “I’m scared, Grady.”

  Scary damn business. “He’s not finished, Trix. Everything I’ve read predicted he’d kill again. Now he has. And there’s no reason to think he’ll stop now.”

  “You don’t know that. You’ve made an awfully big assumption here. I don’t understand you sometimes.”

  Downing picked up the elephant and considered heaving it through the glass of his office door. She could never understand, because she would never know about Carole.

  “There’s still time,” he said. “I want to use it all.”

  “Have you mentioned it to anyone yet?”

  “Christensen. Just to run the repressed-memories theory past him, see if he’d talk to Sonny.”

  “And?”

  “He reads the papers, too. Totally agreed with me. Said this sounds at least as strong as the stuff in California last year. And after the Primenyl killings, he said he’d heard Mom and the kid had their emergency lights flashing.”

  Trix sighed. “What time you coming home? I haven’t fed your dinner to Rodney. Yet.”

  Dinner. Right. Downing swiveled in his chair and propped a foot on the window ledge. In the distance, the brewery clock showed no mercy. He smiled anyway.

  “I’ll leave now. Don’t give it to the dog. Nothing worse than a basset hound with calluses on his belly. Notice how he’s starting to drag?”

  He expected a laugh. They’d always shared that much, anyway. But Trix didn’t laugh. He turned back toward his desk and propped his elbows on the contents of a coroner’s file labeled “Corbett, David.” An image of every parent’s nightmare stared up at him: a black-and-white photograph of a troubled fifteen-year-old hunched grotesquely in a sturdy wing chair, left dome of his skull gone, the gun balanced improbably on his right shoulder. Another print of the same frame was in the file he gave Christensen.

  The edge was back in her voice when she said good night. Downing closed his eyes. “Trix?”

  “What?”

  “Come on. It’ll be fine.”

  “Sure,” she said. “You’ve got that dead man’s brake, remember? Stops you right before the cliff. That’s what you always say. But God, Grady, can you be sure it still works?” She hung up, and he listened to the phone’s disconnect pulse as long as he could stand it.

  Chapter 8

  Christensen compared the unfamiliar number flashing on his beeper with the one Downing had given him. They matched. Sonny Corbett was trying to reach him.

  He’d waited three days for the call, wondering when—if—Sonny would take the first step. The long run he took after dinner had helped clear his head, and by the time he panted up the front steps and struggled out of his sweats, he was sure Sonny wouldn’t call. Ever. Forty minutes later, his beeper went off. Monday night, 9:46 p.m., according to the digital clock on the stove. Why now?

  Just to be sure, he set aside Annie’s beloved plastic palomino, Pugs, whose broken foreleg now was a gooey web of poorly applied household cement, and picked up a pen. He scribbled the flashing number on the back of a Lucky Charms box and checked it again. Then he picked up the phone, and was startled to hear Melissa’s voice, which stopped in mid-sentence.

  “I’m talking,” she said from an upstairs extension.

  “I thought you were in bed, Lissa, Sorry.” He started to hang up, then reconsidered. Something about the attitude. “Somebody’s trying to reach me, so I’m going to need the phone for a few minutes. Sorry to interrupt, but it’s important. Let me know when you’re off.”

  While he waited, drumming his fingers on the kitchen table, Christensen reviewed how he wanted to begin his relationship with Sonny. Under no circumstances would he ever directly suggest that the numbness in Sonny’s hands might be the result of repressed memories or posttraumatic stress. He knew better than to pursue that conversation, even though recent studies were profound. One in particular, a study of Cambodian refugees living in Long Beach, California, suggested a direct link between posttraumatic stress and hysterical blindness among older women who’d watched the Khmer Rouge butcher their husbands or children. After seeing the unthinkable, their eyes had simply stopped seeing.

  But Christensen couldn’t suggest anything that would lead Sonny in any particular direction. To initiate a discussion about Sonny’s childhood traumas could skew Sonny’s recollections, and the last thing Christensen needed was to be accused of luring Sonny into repression therapy. That was happening too often, with reckless therapists allowing false memories to take root and grow. Which is bad enough in the privacy of the therapist’s office, but even worse when the cops use those memories as the basis of a criminal prosecution.

  Upstairs, a door slammed with rattling force. Melissa was off the phone.

  “Thank you,” he called.

  He did intend to plant one seed with Sonny, though. To gauge the young man’s suggestibility, he intended to work into their initial conversation a detailed description of a memorable moment from Sonny’s life. It would be emotional, vivid—and entirely fictional. Then he’d wait. If that false memory turned up in a subsequent conversation with Sonny, and if Sonny treated it as a real memory, Christensen intended to go no further. He would tell Downing that Sonny’s recovered memories would be too unreliable for meaningful therapy and, he assumed, utterly vulnerable to cross-examination, if it ever came to that. At that point, he would end his role
in Downing’s investigation with a clear conscience.

  Christensen cleared his throat and dialed. The phone rang only once. “Hello, my name is Jim Christensen and I’m returning—”

  “Yeah, hi.” A young man’s voice, gentle, a little unsure.

  “Is this Sonny Corbett?”

  “You called back right away,” he said. “I didn’t think you would.”

  Christensen tried to conjure an image from the sound of the voice. He saw a young Art Garfunkel. “Actually, I’ve been expecting your call since I talked to Grady Downing earlier this week. He told me about the numbness in your hands. I hear you’re a swimmer, and numbness has to be pretty awkward. Grady thought maybe I could help.”

  “It’s weird is what it is,” the voice said. “Been to two or three doctors, plus my trainer. None of them can figure it out, because after a while the numbness just goes away until the next time. I told my trainer I was thinking about calling you. He said, ‘What the hell. We’ve tried everything but a shrink.’”

  Christensen laughed. “The last hope of lost causes. I’ll take it as a compliment. You must swim competitively, then?”

  “Not on a team or anything.”

  Christensen tried to make sense of that, then decided to push on. “So what’s it feel like?”

  “You ever sleep on your hands?” Sonny said after a long pause.

  “Like when one just goes dead in the middle of the night and you have to move it around with the other one until it finally starts to tingle again?”

  “Like that,” Sonny said. “Except it can happen anytime, and sometimes it stays like that for hours.”

  “Does it ever happen when you’re swimming?”

  “Mostly. I swim a lot.”

  Christensen considered the predicament of a swimmer with useless hands. “But you’re able to get to the side of the pool okay?”

  “I can get out of the water, if that’s what you mean.”