Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  Christensen didn’t react. Couldn’t. Couldn’t even absorb it all. He remembered Brenna’s early warnings about Downing, her inability to comprehend the botched investigation, how a seasoned investigator could screw up so badly. If only she knew. He was probably half out of his mind by then.

  “Try to understand, Jim. I needed more than ever to stay on that investigation. And I needed to keep what I knew a secret. I know I didn’t kill her. You know I didn’t kill her. But can you imagine how some defense attorney might twist that information? So I had to stoneface it. Nobody knew about Carole and me. I knew that much. So they had no way of making the connection.”

  “To you?”

  “I was the only one who really understood what was happening. Corbett knew I was getting close, too close. He’d tried to intimidate me with the video, but I wasn’t backing off.”

  The two men settled into uncomfortable silence. Everything made sense now—Downing’s blunders in 1986, the relentless pursuit of Ron Corbett, his unwillingness to retire, his lying to get him involved with Sonny. This wasn’t just some professional obsession. It was personal.

  “You’ve carried that around all these years” he said.

  Downing’s face crumpled again, and the tears came. Christensen went into the bathroom to get him a Kleenex. Downing’s face was oddly blank when he returned, and he didn’t seem to notice the tissue Christensen tucked into his left hand. Clear mucus ran from Downing’s nose onto his mustache, but he didn’t try to stop it or brush it away. His tears still ran, but from eyes gone suddenly dead.

  “I watched them bring her into the morgue,” he said. His lips were the only thing moving. His gaze was fixed.

  “Jesus, Grady.” Christensen reached over and touched Downing’s forearm.

  “Nothing I could do. Had to pretend she was just another body while we waited for her dad to come down and identify her. He’s eighty-one fucking years old, Jim; she was his only child. There’s a little cubicle in the lobby with a TV screen. It’s all done with a remote control, so the family doesn’t have to go in. Heard him wailing, and I was up on the third floor. Same guy that used to ream me for bringing her home late when we were kids.”

  Christensen needed to do something. Anything. “I’m going to make some coffee.”

  “She was so beautiful. Hair down to her knees.”

  “Grady, I’m sorry.”

  “Ever seen an autopsy?”

  Christensen closed his eyes. He’d seen a dissection, imagined the horror of watching the clinical dismemberment of the woman you loved, watching a pathologist’s scalpel do its work on the body you’d held just hours before.

  “Know how right before they take off the top of the skull with the head saw, they have to loosen the skin? So they cut around the hairline with a scalpel.”

  “Grady, I—”

  “Then they peel the scalp away, then push the face down and tuck it under the chin. Simple, really. It slides right off the bone and muscle. That way they can do their three-notch cut and pop the top.”

  Christensen flirted with the idea of slipping upstairs to call 9-1-1. Downing was starting to sound seriously disturbed.

  “Know what I remember most, Jim, what I can’t, God help me, get out of my mind? What comes back to me at the oddest times, like whenever Ron Corbett’s name comes up? I think about Carole’s hair. Her head was propped on a V-block at the end of the table, and when the lab tech peeled her scalp back, her hair reached all the way to the floor. Ever seen the floor at the morgue?”

  Christensen shook his head. He couldn’t speak.

  “And the lab tech, he’s got these sneakers on, all crusted with gore, and he’s standing at her head. He plugs the Stryker saw into one of the overhead sockets and gives it a whir, just to test it. While he’s doing this, I notice he’s standing on Carole’s hair. Every time he moves his feet it pulls down on her scalp, and the skin behind her ears is tearing. And he’s testing his saw and bitching about how the county doesn’t get them the funding they need, and he’s wiping her blood on his apron.”

  Christensen wanted more than anything to get away, to walk out of the room and find a place to breathe.

  “He’s just doing his job, getting ready to carve out Carole’s brain, and he’s standing on her hair.”

  “Grady, stop.”

  “I can’t. I watched it, start to finish, and nobody ever knew.”

  “But why, Grady? You already knew it was Primenyl. Why watch the whole thing if you didn’t have to?” Christensen considered the possible answers and wished he hadn’t asked, but the detective didn’t respond.

  Christensen turned off the lamp, afraid Downing might see the horror he knew was registering on his face. And he couldn’t watch Downing’s blank stare any longer. At least in darkness the man could have some privacy. As they sat in silence, Christensen’s dilemma settled over him like a shroud. It was too late to back down. Too late to run. Corbett already knew everything he needed to know to play his terror games. And Downing was losing control. The three of them were locked together in mortal combat, and someone had to lose.

  Downing stood up, finally noticing the tissue in his hand. He wiped his nose in the pale light from the kitchen. “I just wanted you to know.”

  The man had just turned himself inside out. What to say? The son of a bitch should be down on his knees begging forgiveness. He should offer to post a twenty-four-hour guard, hire a food taster, make amends for suckering some blissful academic into the same whirlpool of a case that was apparently taking him down. Christensen opened his mouth, but all that came out was, “What now?”

  Downing moved toward the door. “Plan B,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  A sad smile. “You don’t want to know. Look, Jim, I understand if you think I’m an asshole. What I did was wrong. But you wouldn’t have helped if you knew. And I needed your help. So I made a choice. Still got no idea how Corbett found out about you. He must have been following me since right after the Greene County killing, knowing I’d try to get involved. We know he was following me that day out at Pitt, followed me right to you.”

  Christensen found his voice. “I was just a face on a video, Grady. He still wouldn’t have known who I was.”

  “Unless Sonny said something to him later. I didn’t think they still talked, but who knows? His mother, Jesus, she could say anything to anybody. Maybe Sonny told her and she told him. Corbett wouldn’t need much to put it together. He’s smart. And he likes to play. Hell, I’m wondering now if the whole Greene County thing was just a way to get me to play with him again. For all he knew, I’d lost interest. But Jim, I never would have lied if I thought there was a chance he’d turn on you, too.”

  Sonny. Christensen suddenly remembered their appointment. “I’m supposed to see Sonny again tomorrow. What should I do?”

  Downing shrugged. “I should get going,” he said, opening the front door.

  “Wait a goddamn minute, Grady. I’m not the only one you suckered here. It took a lot of guts on Sonny’s part to go after the memories he’s retrieved so far. Christ, I think he’s been on the verge of complete regression a couple times.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He didn’t just remember something—he started to relive it. That’s where this stuff gets dangerous. If he crosses into psychosis, he could hurt himself, other people, anything. We’ve got him out on a very shaky limb, and I won’t just leave him there.”

  “Your choice,” Downing said over his shoulder. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Christensen followed Downing down the front steps toward his car, shivering in the frigid midnight air. “It does, goddamnit. It matters to Sonny!”

  Downing turned around, one hand on the car door. “Then help him, Jim. Do what you can. If dredging up those memories helps him get on with his life, fine. But
they won’t do me any good now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Downing opened the door. A cardboard box the size of a brick was on the driver’s side. Christensen recognized a distinctive Pegasus logo on the box above the words “Webber Industries.”

  Downing noticed him staring and shoved the box under the seat. Then he closed the door and started the car. Through the frosted window, he mouthed the words “Plan B.”

  Chapter 30

  Christensen wasn’t easily spooked, but Downing’s midnight confessional was too much. He locked his house tight and fled his wide-open city neighborhood for Brenna’s house in Mount Lebanon, a secluded South Hills enclave of suburban tranquility. They wouldn’t be expecting him at 1:30 a.m., but he felt safer there. Nothing so far suggested Corbett knew Brenna’s name or where she lived.

  Christensen knew he wasn’t followed. He’d passed two police cruisers as he steered through the dark and quiet streets, one of which executed a U-turn and followed him into her driveway. The cop just wanted to check his ID, bless his overzealous, civil-rights-be-damned heart.

  Brenna’s front door opened silently with an easy turn of the knob. He hadn’t told her specifically why he wanted the girls to stay there, but he’d been very specific about her keeping the door locked, reporting anyone loitering in her neighborhood, and thoroughly checking packaged products. Brenna accused him of overreacting. She had no idea.

  Voices in the kitchen. A low murmur, but still odd. Who’d be up this late on a weeknight? And unless Annie was awake, who could possibly be talking? Melissa hardly ever spoke to Brenna. He checked the living room. Annie was curled into a tight ball on the sofa bed, the tattered remains of Molly’s silk nightgown clutched to her chest. Taylor, Brenna’s four-year-old, was snug against her. Spoons in a drawer, even at their ages, he thought. He moved the copy of “Love You Forever” from under Annie’s leg and laid it on the coffee table, then covered them both with Brenna’s thick goose-down comforter.

  Christensen froze. Melissa’s voice. And a phrase: “…Kevorked my mom.” She’d used the term once before—a sneering adaptation of the name Kevorkian as a verb—and it rose above the murmur like it was wired directly to his ear. It pulled him into the dark dining room adjacent to the kitchen. Curiosity outweighed his fear of detection as he leaned close to the swinging door, unabashedly eavesdropping. His daughter and his lover were talking about Molly.

  “…could have been talking about getting new tires. He wasn’t upset or anything, just sort of, you know, ‘I made the decision and I think it’s best.’ That was it.”

  “He didn’t tell you the whole story?” Brenna said.

  “Once, the morning the police let him go. This little speech I could tell he’d been rehearsing all night. Then he wanted to take us out to breakfast, like a Grand Slam at Denny’s would make everything okay. She’s dead twenty-four hours and he’s saying, ‘I think we can get this behind us and move on.’ I’m like, ‘Well, sorry, Dad. It doesn’t work that way.’”

  Christensen peeked through the crack in the door. He could see Brenna, who was in her blue flannel pajamas, sipping from a coffee mug at the kitchen table, nodding her head. At the moment, Melissa was somewhere outside his narrow field of vision.

  “I probably heard the same speech the night before, when I first met him in the holding cell,” Brenna said. “And I know what you’re saying. No emotion. It took me about four hours to get him talking about what happened. About your mom.”

  Brenna sipped her coffee. “Can I tell you something?”

  “That’s when you first met him?”

  “That night. Why?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He needed a lawyer and somebody gave him my name. He called me cold from the police station.”

  “And you’d never met him before?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I just thought you knew each other from before my mom died, that’s all. That’s what somebody from school said.” Long pause. “What did you want to tell me?”

  “We’re being honest here, right?”

  “I am.”

  Brenna leaned forward. Christensen closed his eyes to hear better. “That night changed my life,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, mine too.”

  Brenna ignored the bait, as he hoped she would. She ran a hand through her hair, twisted it into a ponytail and let it fall.

  “Maybe my change wasn’t as profound as yours. I know it wasn’t easy for you and your sister, losing your mom.”

  “It gets a little hairier when your dad actually does the killing. When your friends all read the newspaper stories about what he did. When everybody at school knows your dad couldn’t be bothered with a wife on a Veg-O-Matic.”

  Christensen knew he should leave, but he couldn’t.

  “That’s a pretty superficial way to look at it, Melissa, don’t you think?”

  “I guess I’m just a superficial person.”

  No one was better than Melissa at turning communication into confrontation. Hang in there, Brenna, he thought. Fight the urge to reach across the table and smack her. Don’t give up on the conversation. Recognize the child in pain and her elaborate machinery for emotional defense.

  “Spare me the horseshit, okay, Melissa?”

  Uh-oh.

  “I mean, if you want to talk about things that matter, let’s talk. But you need to get around your attitude. It’s poisoned every conversation we’ve ever had.”

  Christensen shrunk into a corner, expecting his daughter to burst through the dining room door. He imagined how betrayed she’d feel when she found him there, spying in the dark. The one time he’d tried the no-horseshit-tough-love approach, it backfired so badly Melissa had stayed at her friend Jerilyn’s house for a week.

  But instead, she apologized to Brenna in a voice he hadn’t heard in years. Then she asked, “What did you mean, it changed your life?”

  Christensen reached the door crack just as Brenna ran a fingertip around the rim of her cup. “I was never very good at love. It just happens for most people, but it never did for me.”

  “Even when you were married?”

  Brenna smiled. “People get married for all kinds of reasons. If they’re like my parents, they get married for all the wrong reasons and end up splitting after a year or two. Some people, ta-da, get married because that’s just what people their age do at a certain point in life. I just went along. He seemed like a nice guy.”

  “You make it sound like puberty.”

  Brenna laughed. “Fair enough. That’s probably how I approached it. Scared, confused. I didn’t have a good role model like you do. Your parents loved each other. A lot.”

  “My dad talks to you about that?”

  “Not in so many words. But it’s pretty obvious the way he talks about life with your mom before the accident. I know you don’t agree, but it’s obvious in the way he handled things afterward, too. Every once in a while, I see the hell he went through before he decided to end her life. He loved her so much, Melissa.”

  Christensen listened to the slow drip of the kitchen faucet. “They were nuts for each other,” Melissa said finally. “Always holding hands. I used to catch them necking in the kitchen.” Melissa’s voice trailed off. “Does talking about that bug you?”

  “Not at all. I mean, we’ve never talked about their relationship in those terms. But we never had to. I can tell just the way he talks about her. I know she had a crooked smile and was self-conscious about her overbite. I know she wouldn’t let him kiss her in public, and how irresistible he found that. Every once in a while, he’ll quote something—part of a poem, a descriptive phrase—and I’ll just know it’s something she wrote. He’s got a lot of her stories and poems memorized, like Scripture.”

  “Did he ever show you Carrie’s Dirt
y Shoe? It was one of the kid books she wrote.” Melissa laughed. “My mom was so deranged. It’s about a kid who steps in dog doo.”

  “I like it,” Brenna said.

  “She’s wearing these shoes with tread and she tries and tries to get it all off, but she can’t. And everybody at kindergarten treats her differently even though it wasn’t her fault. I loved that story. The last line is, ‘What would you do with doo on your shoe?’”

  Carrie’s Dirty Shoe was one of Christensen’s favorites, too. Molly only wrote a few children’s stories, but he considered each one a gem. Dead-Eye Daryl was about a boy who couldn’t hit the toilet.

  “She had a sense of humor, huh?”

  “Totally demented,” Melissa said. “Listen, can I ask you something? About when you met my dad.”

  “You seemed confused about that before.”

  “It’s just, see, somebody at school said you and him were … that he was seeing you before my mom got hurt. That you guys were having an affair or something.”

  Christensen braced himself on the doorjamb. In an instant, his daughter’s words had made sense of two years of hostility. My God, he thought, if that’s what she assumed about his relationship with Brenna, what must she think about why he ended Molly’s life? No wonder she hated him.

  Brenna seemed just as stunned. Finally, she said, “You and your dad don’t talk much, do you?”

  “He tries.”

  “You never asked him that question?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Christensen peeked through the crack. Brenna was holding her head in her hands, her fingers laced through strands of fallen hair above her forehead. “You really should. He’s so confused about you.”