Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  “Not sure. We can check,” Pawlowski said.

  “Do that. I want to know if they found any chemicals there.” The chief waved dismissively, then turned to Pit Stains as Pawlowski lumbered out. “You call the state cops back. We’ll need that basket and everything in it for tests. I want it treated like evidence, at least for now. If the same chemicals turn up in the grapefruit and that orange, we got us an explanation.”

  Christensen felt Brenna’s hand on his shoulder again. He looked up, surprised to see her crying. The second detective followed Pawlowski out the door, leaving them alone with the chief of police.

  “Thank you,” Christensen said when the door closed.

  Kiger scratched his nose, never taking his eyes from Christensen’s. “Sir?”

  “For believing me.”

  The police chief studied him, saying nothing. Saying everything. “Don’t leave town,” Kiger said. He nodded to Brenna, said, “Ma’am.” Then he stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him, leaving them alone.

  Chapter 42

  Melissa sipped her tea, which must have cooled considerably since she’d last lifted the mug to her lips. Her face crinkled and she got up to put it in the microwave. It was five-thirty, nearly dawn.

  She’d cornered him as soon as Annie was asleep, set a kettle to boil and gently shoved him down in a kitchen chair. “Start at the beginning,” she’d said. So Christensen did, recounting for her Downing’s approaching him about Sonny, his initial skepticism and reluctance to get involved, and the gradual recovery of Sonny’s memories. Then he told her about going to the house on Jancey Street, about what happened there ten years ago, about finding the bottle in the basement.

  He’d expected to stumble, but didn’t, at the part about Sandra Corbett, about the patterns of abuse that helped create an untraceable killer named Rachel and about his own role in her death, still less than twenty-four hours old. Sonny was being kept in the hospital for observation. His mother, or Rachel—the Primenyl killer—was dead, an unsettling smear of her blood still on his left shoe. He distilled the whole affair to a chronological accounting, pleased to have presented it without judging the people involved. “Then Detective Downing apparently made the mistake we didn’t,” he said, nodding toward the gift basket of oranges on the counter.

  He and Brenna had left the Public Safety Building about two-thirty in the morning and got to her house thirty minutes later. The sitter and Taylor were asleep, but both of his kids were awake. Between Brenna’s hurried explanation as she’d left and the eleven o’clock news, they’d figured out something was wrong. They were up and wanted to go home. He’d wanted to go home, too, to walk into their house again without fear. He’d wanted to wrap himself in its groaning pipes and creaking floorboards knowing that at last they were safe. Brenna dropped them off about four.

  The gift basket, sitting on the doorstep of the empty house since who-knows-when, hadn’t rattled him. He was almost expecting it, and he carried it inside using rubber scrub gloves from the downstairs bathroom. Once in the kitchen’s warm light, he read the greeting attached to the handle—one of Downing’s business cards with “Thanks for everything” scribbled on the back in a woman’s handwriting. It dominated the room, at once horrifying and reassuring. He’d been right about what happened to Downing.

  Melissa said nothing during the twenty seconds it took to warm her tea. She pulled out the mug and sat down. “So when are you going to call?”

  Soon, he thought. “I’m so tired of dealing with the police, but I guess it can’t wait much longer.”

  “I’ll call,” she said.

  “No, I will. I just didn’t want another scene while Annie was awake.”

  “She’ll be pissed if a bunch of cops show up and she misses it,” Melissa said.

  He smiled. She was right, but he knew the less Annie was exposed to all this, the better. Melissa sipped from her steaming mug, staring at him over the rim.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what’s bothering you?”

  His daughter set the tea on the counter. “It bothered me when you told me about Mom, but it doesn’t bother me now,” she said.

  “Honey, what?”

  “The way you just talked. Brenna called it your robot speech. All this stuff happened, but it’s like you were telling me about a dentist appointment or something. ‘Then this happened, then that happened.’ You never say how you feel.”

  She’d listened to his counsel more closely than he’d thought all these years. “I guess I sort of shut down,” he said. “It’s just the way I deal with things.”

  “Or don’t deal with them. I thought you were so cold about Mom, like snuffing her was on that day’s to-do list. I mean, you help people deal with their emotions every day, but you really suck when it comes to dealing with your own.”

  “Aren’t you precocious?” he said. “Now you’ll want your own couch?”

  “It’s true.”

  Christensen didn’t need this, not right now. Not after all that had happened. He stood up. “Well, I guess I should call back downtown about the basket.”

  Melissa shook her head. “See what I mean?”

  He moved toward the telephone, but she blocked his way. “Look—,” he started to say, but his daughter wrapped her arms around him. She held him tight, then put her hand on the back of his neck, pulled his head down, and whispered in his ear: “I love you anyway.” He stopped resisting and held his daughter in the middle of the kitchen, the two of them swaying in silence, her cheek wet with his tears.

  Pawlowski had gone home, and Christensen couldn’t remember Pit Stains’s name. Kiger was gone. Since it wasn’t an emergency, and the crime-lab crews changed shifts at 6 a.m., the watch commander said it’d be at least an hour before someone could pick up the basket and take his statement. Christensen thanked him, then donned the scrub gloves and carried the basket carefully into his office. Even though he wasn’t going to let it out of his sight, he put it on his highest bookshelf, well out of Annie’s reach, just in case. With Melissa in bed, he leaned back in his desk chair. She’d told him she loved him once more before she went upstairs. It felt like a first gasp of cool air after being too long underwater.

  The house was unusually quiet, settled for the moment rather than settling. Closing his eyes was risky. He didn’t want the police pounding on the door and waking the girls when they arrived. And he didn’t want to torture himself by replaying the unforgettable scene at the apartment. His mind fixed on Downing and the questions that wouldn’t go away.

  Why had he left the apartment so suddenly? To go where? He rewound the scene in his mind, scanning for clues. Ron Corbett lived in Greene County. But confronted with the truth about the Primenyl killer, why would Downing go there?

  Why?

  Christensen remembered the late night a couple weeks earlier when Downing had made his confession about Carole. He’d seen a change in him that night that he’d never understood. His smarmy, wisecracking manner replaced by … what? Resolve? No. More like resignation. “Doesn’t matter,” he’d said when Christensen asked how to proceed with Sonny. “His memories won’t do me any good now.”

  Christensen had followed the detective out to his car that night. “What now?” he’d demanded. Downing had repeated his answer, “Plan B,” the second time mouthing the words through the car-door window just before he drove away.

  Another memory bobbed to the surface: Downing’s flustered reaction that night as he shoved a brick-sized box under his car’s front seat. Christensen strained for a detail and, like something from a Polaroid photograph, an image slowly appeared: Pegasus. The box’s logo. He’d seen it again, just hours ago, it seemed.

  The sun was coming up, graying windows that had been black when Christensen first shut his eyes. He closed them a
gain, trying to read the words beside the logo on the box. God, he was tired. But he had the uneasy feeling he had fixed on something important, a key for unlocking Downing’s last secret.

  Opening his bottom desk drawer, he hoisted the Greater Pittsburgh White Pages to the center of his desk. He fanned to the P’s and ran his finger down the page headed Peeler-Pegman. Two listings for Pegasus. Neither seemed relevant. Pegasus Roofing & Paving. Pegasus, Demitri. He reached again into the bottom drawer and pulled out the Yellow Pages, then put them back. Those listings were by subject, not by name. Where would he start when all he had was a logo?

  He did have something else, though. A hunch. He lifted the Yellow Pages again, fanning to the C’s. It was worth a shot, Chemical cleaning—Industrial. Chemical plant equip­ment & sales. Chemicals—Retail. Chemicals—Whsle & Mfrs. The company names meant nothing, but he felt a chill as he turned the page. The winged-horse logo stared up at him, big as a silver dollar, from a quarter-page ad in the lower left corner. Webber Industries, “Complete Line of Lab Chemicals Blended to Your Order.”

  The name on the box in Downing’s car.

  The name on the hulking plant along I-79 in Ridgeville, the one he’d noticed from the police car as he was being driven away from Sandra Corbett’s apartment.

  He didn’t believe in fate. Or God. But he believed there was a strange natural logic that sometimes guides the human mind to specific and inescapable conclusions. And here, at this time and place, his mind had linked a seemingly inconsequential memory with a peculiar image, and linked both of those with an unexplainable hunch. And somehow, they’d all connected. It meant something.

  Christensen tried to think it through, adding up the day’s events, weighing what he knew, piecing together a theory. Maybe the Webber plant in Ridgeville was the source of the cyanide used in the poisonings. Sandra Corbett grew up nearby, probably knew people who worked there, maybe knew how to get in and out unnoticed. But why would Downing have had something in his car from Webber? Why did he head for Greene County as soon as the real killer’s identity was revealed?

  Plan B.

  Christensen bolted upright in his chair. He ran through the facts again, testing the theory. Everything fit. Downing’s obsessive pursuit of the Primenyl killer. His apparent resignation when it seemed Sonny’s memories wouldn’t be enough.

  Plan B. Killing Ron Corbett with a fatal dose of cyanide would have had the twisted symmetry that Downing would have enjoyed. Plant the poison somewhere in Corbett’s home, disappear, and wait. To Downing, justice would be served when the coroner declared Corbett a victim of cyanide poisoning, perhaps even the latest victim of the dreaded Primenyl killer. The perfect crime in every way—except that Downing would have killed an innocent man.

  Christensen remembered Downing’s rushed departure from the shooting scene. That, too, suddenly made sense. For all his faults, Downing was not without a conscience. Having sown the seeds of Ron Corbett’s death, and having realized his mistake, he would have acted. Christensen was sure of it. Corbett was scum, but he wasn’t a killer. The detective was headed for Greene County to undo whatever he’d done, to save the life of a man he’d despised and pursued for a decade. He never made it, and a new thought perched like a crow in Christensen’s mind:

  If he was right, Ron Corbett was still going to die.

  Christensen ran through the theory again. It was seam­less. He checked his watch, sure that a great burden had fallen to him. Somewhere in Greene County, an unsuspect­ing man was living with a chemical time bomb. No one else knew; no one else could save him. On the grand karmic scorecard, Christensen felt like he owed a life.

  His White Pages only included listings in Allegheny County. He dialed directory assistance and got three num­bers. The first, R. J. Corbett of Waynesburg, was a woman, Raylene. He apologized and hung up fast. The second number, for Ronald Corbett of Enterprise, was no longer in service. Christensen wiped the sweat from his hand before dialing the third number, also listed as Ronald Corbett. A woman answered, hoarse; she’d obviously been asleep when the phone rang.

  “Ronnie moved out,” she said. “Ain’t seen him in four months.”

  “It’s important,” Christensen said, figuring her next move would be to hang up. “I have information about his wife and son.”

  He waited through the long silence. “My Ronnie’s wife and son? Who is this?”

  “I know it’s early. I’m sorry. It’s very important. The Ron Corbett I’m looking for was married to a woman named Sandra and has a boy, about twenty-two, named Sonny.”

  “Wrong Ronnie.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “If he’d fathered a son when he was six, Mister, I’d know it.”

  Christensen did the math. “Ronnie’s twenty-eight.”

  “Bingo,” she said. “So fuck off.”

  The sun was up now. Christensen’s watch read 6:20 as he drummed his fingers on the handset of his sturdy desktop telephone. He had to follow his hunch as far as he could, or live with the consequences. What to do? His eyes eventually fell on Sonny’s juvenile records file, which still dominated one corner of the desk. He pulled it toward him and flipped it open, searching for information about Ron Corbett. An address, at least. If he was lucky, a phone number.

  He found one on a 1987 foster-care report. No address, but with western Pennsylvania’s 412 area code and an unfamiliar exchange. Steadying his trembling hand on the edges of his phone and praying out loud for the first time since Molly died, Christensen punched in the number, checking his watch as he listened to the distinctive ring of a rural phone. 6:15 a.m. What was he going to say?

  “Speak.” The voice sounded like a building collapse, surly and sleep-stupid.

  “Mr. Corbett?”

  A grunt. “It’s the middle of the fucking night.”

  “Sorry, but I—”

  “Who is this?”

  “I can’t give you my name, but I need to talk to you—”

  The line went dead. Christensen dialed again, hoping Corbett hadn’t left the phone off the hook.

  “Go to hell,” Corbett answered.

  “Your wife’s dead,” Christensen blurted. “It’s over.”

  The only sound was Corbett’s deep-bass breathing. Christensen used the silence to reassure himself. “This is Ron Corbett, right?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Somebody who knows what happened,” Christensen said, “Somebody who knows Sonny. I know about the killings in 1986, about Rachel.”

  Christensen waited through the long silence, letting the groggy man react. Why had Corbett kept the truth to himself all those years?

  “This that cop?” he rasped.

  “He’s dead, too.” Christensen unhooked his wire-rims’ cable stems from his ears and laid the glasses on the desk. “Poisoned.”

  “Sonny okay?” the man said.

  “He’s fine.”

  “She said she’d kill him if I ever—”

  “He remembered what happened. He remembered his mother, or Rachel, loading the capsules and sending him and his brother back to your store. She thought he was about to tell the police, and she tried to kill him. That’s how she died.”

  “Oh, Christ.” The pain was obvious even in Corbett’s improbable voice. “Sonny killed her?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “Look, there’s something you need to know.” Christensen stopped, thinking about Downing. How much did he want to tell Corbett? He needed to know there was poison in his house, but did it matter who put it there? The gift basket gave him an idea.

  “In the last few days, I think your wife was trying to poison anybody who knew anything about what happened back then. I think she got Grady Downing, the detective. Sonny was luckier. So was I. Get what I’m saying?”

&nbs
p; No answer.

  “Throw everything away, Mr. Corbett. Go through your refrigerator, your pantry, your bathroom. Everything. Get rid of anything that could be tampered with, anything you’d put in your mouth, especially oranges, grapefruit, yogurt, capsules. Anything. Don’t take any chances.”

  “Crazy goddamned woman,” Corbett said. “You don’t know what it is or where she put it?”

  “Something, somewhere. I’m almost sure. Please just do it. That’ll end it. It’ll be over.”

  Christensen wanted to talk more, to ask a thousand questions, but he’d said enough. His index finger, steadier now, hovered above the phone’s disconnect button. Some­thing held him back, something instinctive. A therapist’s need to heal. “You still have a son, you know,” he said, then brought his finger down.

  Epilogue

  Spring, even a false one, brought an overpowering sense of renewal to Highland Park. Up and down Bryant Street in front of Christensen’s house, kids reappeared, the sidewalks dried, and neighbors said hello again, even those who’d been reading about him in the Press and watching TV news in recent weeks. He could almost feel the promise in the skeletal branches of the neighborhood’s great overhanging oaks. All Sunday mornings should be like this, he thought.

  “Let me at least warm your coffee if I can’t persuade you to come in,” Brenna said.

  She was at the front door with the coffee carafe, dressed now, still a vision in jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. Annie pushed past her—through her legs, actually—followed by Taylor. Both were wearing hooded sweatshirts, and each held a half-eaten banana. Annie stopped in front of him and looked him square in the eye. She grinned broadly, and without warning banana mush began oozing from the spaces between her teeth.

  “Gross,” he said.

  Without a word, she led Taylor off the porch and on to her next project. He waited until they were around the corner of the house before he turned to face Brenna, who was restraining a laugh.