Downing imagined Corbett’s knobby head exploding. Why had he buttoned his goddamned coat?
“I usually call first, just as a courtesy,” Downing said. “But I was in the neighborhood and all. Old friends shouldn’t need an invitation.”
Corbett jerked the shotgun to one side, and the snow at the base of the steps exploded in a roar that echoed into the hills. Downing’s left leg collapsed, like someone had knocked it out from under him with a baseball bat. He caught himself on the doorjamb before he fell, wondering how bad. He was still standing. Probably just a spray of pellets bouncing off the concrete. Corbett pumped another shell into the shotgun’s chamber, aimed the barrel back at Downing’s head.
Downing checked his leg, his fingers digging into the door frame. A dozen tiny holes in the rubber of his left boot. Felt like a deep bruise from the knee down. A man poked his head out the back door of the house behind Corbett. The guy with the willing wife.
“Need any help over there, Ray?”
“Got me a salesman,” Corbett said. “You got any use for him?”
The man laughed. “Be needing some fertilizer come spring,” he said, then went back inside. Downing’s leg was on fire, but he steeled himself. No fear. No fear.
“Ray?” Downing said. “Now what kind of upstanding citizen goes by a different name when he moves to a new neighborhood? Not trying to hide anything, are you, Ron?”
“Got more secrets than you’ll ever know, asswipe, but you got nothing on me. Never did.” Corbett shuddered, drew his shoulders tighter. All he had on was a sweatshirt and jeans. “You just like busting my balls.”
Blood was seeping into Downing’s sock. It wasn’t bad, just a trickle. He could probably dig the pellets out himself.
“Oh, but we do have a problem, Ron,” he said. “Just wanted to warn you, you know, as a public service. There’s some bad yogurt going around. Nasty stuff. Just check those expiration dates carefully next time you’re in the dairy aisle.”
Corbett lowered the gun, but only a couple inches. For the first time, he opened both eyes. “Been almost six weeks since,” he said. “Take you this long to find me?”
“Something I don’t understand, Ron,” Downing said. “Where are you getting the poison? Help me out here. There’s three ways I can think of. But since you’re not an authorized business, and you’re not a college or university, I figure you’re just stealing it from somewhere. Am I close?”
Corbett raised the gun again. “What size hole you think I could make in you from here?”
“And this one wasn’t your style, either, Chickie.”
“Because I didn’t do nothing,” he croaked. “Never did. You got no goddamned right.” Corbett was trembling, probably more from rage than the cold. People make mistakes when they’re mad, Downing thought. How far could he push?
“You’re just not that smart,” Downing said. “This one was slick, boy. Not like in ’86. No messy powders. No clumsy capsules. Just got the liquid stuff and squirted it right through the top.”
“You’re so fucking ignorant,” Corbett said. “You got no idea.”
“Made ’86 look downright inefficient. I’m no expert, Ron, but the yogurt thing seemed like a lot less work. And all that effort to get the capsules back into the bottles!”
“Fuck you.”
“Practice makes perfect, I suppose.”
“Fuck your mother,” Corbett roared. “You think somebody who filled prescriptions for a living would waste their time carving up the bottoms of sealed bottles? There’s lots easier ways.”
Their eyes met and held. Downing couldn’t suppress a smile. “Guess you’re right, Ron. Maybe I’ve been too hasty.” He lowered his right arm and extended his hand to Corbett. “Best friends?”
Corbett waved him away with the shotgun. “Get the hell off my property.”
The euphoria carried Downing back to his car and down the goat path to blacktop. He stopped at the first pay phone he saw, outside a convenience store, and called his boss despite his second thoughts. He had to tell somebody.
“DeLillo around?” he asked. He was wearing one shoe; the left foot was too swollen. The sock that covered it left damp red tracks, and his pants leg was sticking to his calf.
“May I say who’s calling?” The new receptionist, the councilman’s niece with the tits.
“It’s Grady Downing. Just put him on, would you?”
“Oh, hi! Thought you were off today.”
“I am,” he said. “Get DeLillo.”
Papers rustling. “Your wife called looking for you. And the morgue. Doctor, um, Pungpreecha-whatever-it-is said you’d know what it was about.”
“DeLillo, please. Now. Thanks.”
“Hoo-boy. Must be important. This job is so cool, like NYPD Blue.”
“Would you put goddamned DeLillo on the phone?”
He waited, ignoring the throbbing in his leg. The pellets had gone deep. He’d just have a nasty bruise once he dug them out.
“What do you want, Grady?” His ever-cheerful boss.
“Loose shoes, tight pussy, a warm place to shit. What more can a man ask, really?”
“Don’t screw around. I’m in a meeting.”
Downing cleared his throat, trying not to sound excited. “Just had some luck with Ron Corbett. Wanted to run it past you.”
“Ron Corbett?”
“I told you yesterday I was coming down to see what the Waynesburg cops had on that product tampering a few weeks back. You said it was fine.”
“I said what you do on your own time is your business, Grady, but what the fuck are you talking to Corbett for? You’re supposed to steer way clear of him.”
“Pure luck. Ran into him in Waynesburg.”
“Like hell.”
“Really. You want to hear this or not?”
“I don’t know,” DeLillo said. “Do I?”
Downing waited, let the anticipation build. “He knows how the loaded capsules got into the bottles in 1986. He knows about the holes in the bottoms.”
“So?”
“So, since there was a total product recall, we never released that detail. It never got into the papers. How would he know?”
Downing waited, imagining that little bombshell rolling around in DeLillo’s oversized head. An immense woman waddled from her car toward the convenience-store door, eyeing Downing’s leg. He gave her his best smile.
“I’m not sure I like this,” DeLillo said.
“What’s not to like? It’s an opening.”
“For shit, an opening. You got this conversation on videotape, did you?”
“I told you I saw him in downtown Waynesburg,” Downing said. “It’s not like it was in an interrogation room.”
“Tape recorder running? Witnesses?”
“No, goddamnit. It was a fucking street conversation. Why are you chopping me here?”
“Because you’ve got no business talking to Ronfucking Corbett, that’s why. I ought to take this to Kiger and get your ass fired, is what I ought to do.”
He could hear DeLillo opening drawers, shuffling papers, agitated. “I don’t get it,” Downing said. “I bring you some pretty hairy information about the biggest unsolved case in the country and all you do is squeeze my goddamned balls?”
“First off, you got nothing,” DeLillo said. “And God only knows how you got it. If the sheriff’s people have anything that seems relevant, tell me and I’ll pass it along to Pawlowski to check out. But otherwise stay out of this thing, you understand? You had your shot on this one.”
The line went dead. Downing smashed the phone onto its cradle, then kicked a newspaper box so hard its door fell open. Searing pain. Wrong leg. A circle of damp red tracks around the pay phone as he walked it off. That son of a bitch. Pawlow
ski. Christ. Guy hadn’t lifted a finger on Primenyl in two years.
Downing checked to see who was watching, grabbed the afternoon edition of the Courier from the box, and limped back to his car, ignoring the stare of the fat woman lumbering out of the store with a Slurpee. He scanned the headlines before starting the car, his eyes settling finally on the one above a story on the lower right corner of the front page: “Collapse of Boy, 11, Baffles Police.”
Kuhntown—A Union Elementary fourth-grader collapsed this morning while eating a frozen confection as he walked to school, then later lapsed into a coma.
Kuhntown police described the incident as “suspicious” but offered no further comment about what may have caused Kevin Usher, 11, to suddenly fall ill.
Police say the boy was walking to school with his older sister, Staci, and eating a popsicle-type snack shortly before 8 a.m. when he complained of a severe headache and dizziness. He appeared confused, his sister told police, then fell to the ground and began convulsing.
Downing closed his eyes, squeezed them shut with all his might to blind himself to the image already forming in his mind. But it came anyway: Carole face up beside her car, gazing through clouded eyes at the overhanging trees and the stars beyond and on into the black night above where she fell. He opened his eyes and read on:
Nearby residents heard Staci Usher’s screams and called for an ambulance. Paramedics arrived within minutes and rushed her brother to Washington Medical Center, where he remains comatose.
Local police cordoned off the area and an investigator from the Waynesburg Police Department arrived shortly after 10:30 a.m. to collect evidence at the scene. The investigation is continuing.
Downing checked his county map. Something didn’t make sense. Waynesburg was at least twenty miles from Kuhntown. He could see the local cops treating it like a crime scene until they knew more, but why would they call in an investigator from Waynesburg, and so soon? He already knew the answer. He pulled the notebook from his jacket pocket and checked a number, then fished into his pants pocket for another quarter as he hobbled back to the pay phone.
“Detective Ramsey, please,” he said to the dispatcher.
“He’s unavailable right now. Can I take a message?”
“Tell him it’s Grady Downing, Pittsburgh PD, calling to follow up on our meeting this morning. I’ll wait.”
“But he’s—”
“Just tell him.”
Downing tested his leg. It was getting stiff. Ramsey picked up, humorless as ever.
“You had a busy morning after I left,” Downing said.
The young detective volunteered nothing. “You heard about the incident in Kuhntown, then?”
“Read about it.” Downing waited until he could wait no more. “So, you gonna tell me, or what?”
“Tell you what?”
“Come on, Chickie. The paper said they taped the scene and called you. They found something.”
Downing waited again. “We’re not sure if it’s significant,” Ramsey said finally. “And there’s no reason now to think it is. We’ll have a statement tomorrow morn—”
“Look, sport, you’re not talking to John Q. here. I know you don’t have to tell me what you found, but I’d like to think we can trust each other.”
“Sorry. It’s just—”
“Look, the paper said the kid was eating a Popsicle or something. What’s up with that?”
“I can’t, you know, details like that—”
“That’s all I want to know. Really.” Downing waited some more. “I’ve been in your shoes, you know. Maybe I can help.”
Ramsey finally sighed. “You have kids?”
“One,” Downing said. “Grown. I know what you mean, though. Cases like this hit awful close.”
“Then you know how they do stuff, goofy things you just can’t figure.”
“Like?”
Downing heard riffling paper, the sound of someone flipping the pages of a spiral notebook. “Seven-thirty in the morning, right? Kid’s headed to school, and it’s what, thirty-five degrees outside? Cold as a well-digger’s ass. And before heading out the door, his mom says he stops by the freezer and takes out a Squeezie Pop for the walk to school.”
“One of those things on a stick?” Downing leaned his head against the pay phone as he waited through the long silence.
“That’s the thing,” Ramsey said. “It’s different than a Popsicle, one of those push-up things in the cellophane sleeve.”
Downing flashed back to lazy summer days spent squeezing frozen tubes of neon sugar water into his mouth. He remembered his daughter’s joy whenever she saw a box of those flaccid, liquid-filled sleeves in Trix’s grocery bag, how she hustled them into the freezer, waited for them to get solid enough to eat. An instant later, grim possibilities crowded the memories from his mind.
Chapter 13
Winter was a wonder. On mornings like this, with the first feathery dusting of flakes piled a half-inch deep on his front steps, it made Pittsburgh downright beautiful. As Christensen stood shivering, still in his bathrobe, broom in hand, he allowed himself a moment of appreciation before sweeping it away.
His morning Press was still dry in its plastic wrap. A rare treat. It usually was soaked through and unreadable. A plastic bag dangling from the front doorknob diverted his attention from the headlines. It was printed with the Press logo and had a jumble of sample products inside. All along both sides of the street, identical bags hung from every front door. He brought it inside and laid it with the papers on the kitchen table, then returned to the bottom of the stairs.
“Let’s go, ladies!” he shouted. “Last call for breakfast! It’s show time!”
The second-floor bathroom door slammed, its report echoing through the quiet house. At least Melissa was up.
“Annie!” he shouted again. She’d been sitting in bed when he last saw her, groggy but awake, clutching Silkie with both hands and wondering aloud, “If a dinosaur and a giant fought, who would win?” “Get dressed so I can do your hair, okay?”
He heard her feet hit the floor, smiled, then returned to the kitchen to assess the options. The Honeycomb box was almost empty, enough for one helping for Annie. He’d long ago given up trying to enforce Molly’s no-sugary-cereals rule. The only other cereal in the cupboard was his Fruit & Fibre, which Melissa detested. He thought he might assuage her with raisin toast, but a quick bread-box check ended that hope. Only the heels were left, and she hated heels. What else? What else? She was coming down the stairs.
“I thought I’d make some orange Danish,” he said as she collapsed into a kitchen chair. “It’ll take a little longer, but we’re on time this morning for once. What do you say?”
“Cereal’s fine,” she said.
He lifted the Honeycomb box from the counter and gave it a shake.
“Oh,” she said. “Great.”
“Sorry.”
“Raisin toast is fine.”
“Sorry.”
She surveyed the kitchen with a predator’s eyes, which settled on the sample product bag. “I’m not hungry,” she said, then stood up. “What’s this?’
Christensen poured coffee, noticing too late that he’d grabbed the hand-painted “World’s Best Mom” mug from the cupboard. His daughter noticed it too and looked away.
“Some promotional thing that came with the paper,” he said, holding the cup out for an arm’s-length inspection. “I remember the day you brought this home. I’ve seen coronations with less ceremony.”
“Third grade,” she said. A slight smile. “Mother’s Day.”
Neither spoke for a long time. Melissa’s lips tightened and she started to get up, but he wanted desperately to keep talking.
“I think Mom used it every morning since,” he said.
Christensen set the mug on the tile countertop and crossed his arms. Enough. This had to be settled. “We need to talk, Melissa. There’s too much we’ve left unsaid. I don’t want to lose you, too.”
She dumped the plastic bag onto the table and rummaged through the product samples. A one-load box of laundry detergent, a small tube of toothpaste, a sample box of Frosted Wheat Squares cereal, dental floss, miniature glass bottles of shampoo and mouthwash. “‘Lose’ is such a passive word,” she said.
“Meaning?”
She ignored him, studying the sample cereal box. She tossed it aside and picked the shampoo and mouthwash from the pile. “Nothing.”
“Meaning we didn’t just ‘lose’ Mom, right?” He knew he sounded defensive, but he couldn’t stop himself! “Is that what you’re saying?”
Melissa held his glare while bending slowly toward an electrical socket in the kitchen wall. He felt himself flinch as she pretended to pull a plug. His chest tightened and his eyes stung with sudden tears, which he wiped without embarrassment on the sleeve of his robe. He didn’t try to hide the damage in his voice, either.
“That’s so unfair.”
“Life’s not fair sometimes,” she said. “That’s what you said after the accident.”
“People can be fair, though. People have brains. People are capable of logic and rational thought. And mercy and forgiveness.”
Her face transformed into a cruel mask of wide-eyed insincerity. “Why would I need to forgive you? You said you only did what was right. I read it in the papers. I heard you say it on TV. Everybody saw you hug Brenna outside the jail when they let you go.”
He felt sick. How might her reaction to Molly’s death have differed without the storm of publicity and his high-profile arrest? It hadn’t mattered to her cruelest schoolmates that he was released after two days, or that Brenna was the main reason he wasn’t tried on a murder charge. He steadied himself on the edge of the counter.
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