Time Release (22 page)

Melissa was up as well. She was still in the clothes she wore to school, carrying her backpack. He'd asked her to come straight here from school, but she'd obviously come in late. Brenna must have been waiting up for her. Christensen stepped to the hinged side of the swinging door, hoping they'd leave the kitchen through the front-hall door instead. He held his breath. The kitchen light went out and Melissa headed up the stairs to the spare bedroom. Brenna followed her into the hall, but stopped in the living room, at the sofa bed. She started to tuck in the kids, then stopped. She picked up “Love You Forever” from the coffee table, looked around the room, and set it back down. She checked the front door, then disappeared down the hall toward her workroom.

Christensen's head pounded. His blunder hit home. He'd moved the book. He'd covered the kids. She must be wondering. An eternity passed. Down the hall, the distant sound of a door opening, then closing. What was she doing?

The front-hall light clicked on. Footsteps. The sliding door to the hall closet opened and closed. The hall bathroom light, with its rattling fan, clicked on. The overhead kitchen light. Christensen suddenly realized she was searching the downstairs, room by room. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He waited for the blaze of light from the dining room chandelier, shielded his eyes when it finally came. Brenna was standing in the broad dining room entryway holding a cordless phone to her ear with one hand, a gun in the other. His hands went up, spaghetti-Western style, purely by instinct.

“You shit,” she said, lowering both hands.

Christensen started breathing again. “A gun?”

“I figured it was you. Burglars don't tuck little kids into bed. But why take chances?”

Christensen dropped his hands. They were shaking. His voice was unsteady. “I'm sorry.”

“How long were you there?”

“I don't know.”

“Why'd you come?”

How to explain? “I'm pretty sure Ron Corbett knows where I live, and he apparently pulled some stuff with Downing in 1986 that's got me worried.”

“You talking to somebody down there?” Melissa called from the top of the stairs.

“Just checking CNN,” Brenna said. “Good night.”

They waited until the spare-bedroom door closed.

“I'll leave,” he said.

Brenna clicked on the gun's safety. Defense attorneys keep rough company, but he still couldn't reconcile the image. She kept a gun?

“We could tell her you came in later,” she said. “Or you could tell her the truth. Your choice.”

“I'll just leave. She doesn't have to know I was eavesdropping.”

“How brave of you.”

He cleared his throat. “She hates me enough as it is. What about you?”

“I should have shot first.”

They stared across the room. He had no defense. Excuses would seem pathetic. “I'm sorry,” he repeated.

He swallowed hard and fought back tears. She moved away as he passed into the living room, heading for the front door. Thank God Annie was still asleep, he thought.

“It's not over,” he said, turning back.

“No,” Brenna said, “but I have a lot to think about. This kind of stinks, snooping on a private conversation. I'm not sure how I feel about it.”

Christensen nodded. “I meant the Primenyl stuff. I still need your help. Can the girls stay here a while?”

Brenna nodded. “You, I should throw to the wolves. But if it's getting that weird, I guess you can stay, too.”

Sonny held the photograph closer to his eyes. It was the first of ten in the folder Christensen had shoved across the desk moments before, the folder he'd assembled that morning with countless reservations. Before handing it over, he'd memorized the order. The first picture was of a man seated on a plastic chair, staring through a thick window at a passing fish. He'd found it, like half of the others, in a box of Molly's old black-and-white prints. The rest he culled from magazines and books, all but one.

“There's no right answer, Sonny. Just tell me what comes to mind with each one.” Christensen turned on his desk lamp for more light, angled it toward the pictures in Sonny's hands.

“The Aquazoo. We went there on a school field trip once. Pretty funny picture, though.”

Sonny had arrived on time, apparently eager to resume, unaware that the stakes had changed. Christensen needed a breakthrough, and he couldn't let Sonny explore his mind's dark caverns any longer without helping him focus the search.

The second picture was of an immense woman hand-making pierogies. Molly had met her after photographing a High Mass in Polish Hill. The finished pierogies were stacked like bricks beside her, and her fingers were crimping the edges of yet another little dough bomb. A smiling priest stood behind her.

“The fat lady's cooking something. Not sure what. And there's a preacher.”

“Good,” Christensen said. Sonny was being too literal. “Again, you don't have to stop with just describing what's in the picture, Sonny. The point of the exercise is to let you explore a lot of different feelings. Anything else come to mind?”

Sonny studied the print. “My grandfather was a preacher. That what you mean?”

“Really?”

“He died when I was four. Mom never talks about him, but I know that much, that he was a preacher. And he was a real son of a bitch, strict and everything. Smoked cigars and spit little bits of tobacco all the time.”

“Funny the things you remember when you're that young.”

Sonny flipped up the third picture. The dancer. One of Molly's strangest. They'd gone to see Les Ballets Trockadero at Heinz Hall. One of the male dancers, dressed as a ballerina in a parody of
Swan
Lake,
had struck a regal pose. Head up. Smile fixed. Left arm raised gracefully above his head, exposing a full thatch of armpit hair. Sonny laughed out loud. Christensen laughed, too, thinking about the picture, one of the most sexually confusing images he had ever seen.

“Twisted,” Sonny said. “I'm not a fudge-pounder, by the way. You could have just asked.”

The kid was bright, no question. “What? And waste all this expensive psychological training?”

Even as they joked, Christensen could hear the edge creeping into his voice. Four more pictures and Sonny would find the one image that was there for a reason. Could he tell? Could he sense the anticipation, the purpose? Did Sonny know how uncomfortable this ambush made him, how contrary it felt to everything Christensen believed about the safest and most reliable ways to recover repressed memories?

Sonny flipped to the fourth photograph. A tenement family—two girls, two boys—sleeping on a fire escape on a hot summer night in the Hill District. That one he got from a back copy of
Pittsburgh Magazine,
the one with the story on “Unseen Pittsburgh.”

“They're not dead?”

“You tell me. What's happening in the picture?”

“They're just sleeping, I think. Looks like outside. You can see parked cars underneath them. Not sure where they are, but they look like they're sleeping.”

“What else?”

“They don't have much money. They're black.”

“Do you think their race is significant?”

“No. They're just black.”

“Fair enough.”

Picture five. A Pulitzer Prize–winning image of police taking an abusive father into custody as his bruised wife and ten-year-old daughter cower in a corner of the family's small living room.

“Home sweet home,” Sonny said. A pained smile. “You know about my dad.”

“Knew that one might be painful for you, but I thought it might be a basis for discussion. What did you think when you first saw it?”

Sonny stared at the picture. “How little the kid looks.”

“Little?”

“And how sad the mom looks. He must have been hitting her, but somebody called the cops.”

“Do you think they could have handled the situation differently? The mom and daughter, I mean.”

Sonny grinned. “Name Lorena Bobbitt ring a bell?”

Christensen marveled at Sonny's grasp of his own emotions. He was bitter, had every right to be, but somehow maintained an objective distance. It was like he'd watched his entire life on TV rather than experienced it firsthand. Christensen swallowed hard, knowing he was about to put that objectivity to a severe test.

The sixth picture was a cipher. A color weather service photograph of a tornado bearing down on a small town as two residents in the foreground calmly record the scene on their camcorder.

“Dumb shits,” was Sonny's only comment.

The seventh picture. Christensen steeled himself.

“A gun,” Sonny said. “Looks like a .38.”

Christensen studied Sonny's face for a reaction. He seemed to absorb the details of the black-and-white glossy. At first glance, it could have been a gun manufacturer's promotional close-up. The gun was propped neatly at an angle that highlighted its details against a distinctive diamond-pattern backdrop. Nothing in the frame would have suggested the grisly context to anyone except Sonny Corbett, who, Christensen hoped, might recognize the background as the shirt his brother was wearing when Sonny found his body a decade earlier. The gun had come to rest, improbably, on David's shoulder, the back-spray of gore invisible against the dark shirt. The coroner's photographer had underexposed it, and Christensen thought its ambiguity was a plus when he found it among the more graphic suicide-scene shots in Sonny's file.

Sonny flipped to the next photograph.

“This one—” He smiled as he held up the eighth picture, one of Molly's shots, the one she called “Coitus Interruptus.” A fat man had been forced to evacuate a Liberty Avenue massage parlor after a water main break. He was wrapped in a small towel, dancing beneath the parlor's “Magic Fingers” neon sign. Before Sonny could finish, the picture slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. He tried to pick it up, and when he finally did, it fell again.

“Shit,” he said.

It fell again, then the whole stack of pictures fell from Sonny's lap onto the floor when he bent to get it. Something was wrong. Christensen circled his desk to help and found Sonny on his knees, sitting back on his heels and staring at the photograph that had landed face up on top. The gun. Sonny was suddenly pale, his hands limp and apparently useless.

Christensen touched his shoulder. “What is it?”

“Nothing. My hands. It comes and goes.” He pressed them between his knees, palms together.

“I'll get these,” Christensen said, sweeping the pictures into a pile. “Can I get you some water? You need a break?”

“I'm fine,” Sonny said. “You know what, though. I just remembered I'm supposed to work tonight. What time is it?”

Christensen checked the clock on the bookshelf behind Sonny. “Quarter after seven. I thought you were working days.”

“I am, or was,” Sonny said. He stood up and started pacing. “Oh shit. Dumb me. There's this new department head who screwed around with the chem department work schedules, and I was supposed to fill in for someone. Can we finish this next time?”

No eye contact whatsoever. Flexing his fingers as he talked. Sonny was upset, but probably didn't know why. If he did, he wasn't letting on.

“You'll still be able to come at least two nights a week?”

“I'll check the schedule and let you know,” Sonny said, hooking one arm through the strap on his backpack and moving toward the door. “Sorry about this.”

The office door was slightly ajar, and Sonny pried it open with his foot as he wriggled the pack up to his shoulder. “Later. I'll call.”

He disappeared through the outer door and his footsteps faded down the carpeted corridor. Took the stairs instead of the elevator. Christensen started to panic. Should he follow? If Sonny had recognized the picture from the suicide scene, even subconsciously, Christensen had forced the young man to confront what probably was one of his most painful memories, one he had repressed for ten years. What a clumsy, ham-fisted thing to have done. He should have paid more attention to his reservations.

From the window, he watched Sonny jog across a parking lot covered by an inch of fresh snow. Distance was comforting. If Sonny hadn't been wearing only a cotton shirt, Christensen might have pretended he was just another student headed for a night class instead of an emotional time bomb. Maybe he really was late for work. Maybe his hands hadn't gone numb when he saw the coroner's picture. Maybe Christensen hadn't just crushed Sonny's only defense and shoved him one step closer to the edge.

He picked up the pile of photographs and laid them on his desk, the coroner's picture still on top. He turned it face down, then sat. For better or worse, Sonny was getting closer now, an arm's length from whatever demons he'd locked away. Experience told him Sonny was either going to open the door and confront them, or they were going to burst through and devour him. For Sonny, now, there was no turning back. Was he ready?

Christensen dialed his answering service. All he could do was make sure Sonny had somewhere to turn if—when—the time release began. He left Sonny's name and made sure the operator understood it was a priority. He hesitated, then approved the release of his home number and address if Sonny asked for it. He hung up the phone, shrugged into his overcoat, and turned out the lights, then sat down in the chair beside the door feeling helpless, waiting, knowing that neither he nor Sonny would ever be more vulnerable.

A single headlight rounded the corner ahead, bumping toward him along the rutted road. He'd expected to wait hours, maybe overnight. Could he be this lucky? Downing rolled everything back into the towel and shoved it into the satchel. In his various visits to Outcrop, he'd only seen three working cars parked among the rusted junkers and rickety houses. One was usually on blocks, an orange-colored Dodge. Another, an old Beetle, was dark blue. He could tell by the engine noise it wasn't the VW. The third was Corbett's. It wasn't registered, so he'd never been able to nail down the make and model. But it was light-colored and it rolled, making it easy to identify even at night. He'd know soon enough.

The car turned left, its light sweeping the grove of spruce, hemlock, and pines where Downing was parked. He squinted into the country darkness. It was Corbett's car. Had to be. The cone of its headlight beam moved down the access road, away from the strip mine toward civilization. The son of a bitch would be gone at least thirty minutes, because there was nowhere to go between here and the main road, and the main road was at least fifteen minutes down the goat path that wound its way to Outcrop. “Bye-bye, Chickie,” Downing said.

He planned to work fast anyway, to be safe. He pushed the small silver button on his wristwatch. When the watch beeped in twenty minutes, he'd know it was time to clear out.

He locked the car out of habit and crossed the road at the curve. Something skittered into the underbrush to his right, making him jump, but the sound of his breathing and the crunch of his footsteps on the night-crusted snow calmed him again. The open pit to his left stretched forever, like a black ocean.

The path that wound through the woods to the back of Corbett's house angled steeply up from the road. Downing climbed the bank to the flat path, breathing a little harder now, his nose tingling from the sulfury smoke from the houses. Would anyone wonder about the fresh footprints? Since this could take weeks or months to work, would the footprints even be there by the time Corbett died? And even if they were, would the Greene County investigators think to look for them? He'd get rid of the boots on the way back, just in case.

Downing was close enough now to see the faint glow of lights in every house but Corbett's. Had to have been Corbett in that car. He stopped in the pine grove behind the houses to map his path to the back door. No chance of being seen. And unless Corbett had changed the back-door lock since his last visit, getting in would be a piece of cake. This might be easier than he'd imagined.

Or would it? He'd killed twice, but both times had been pure instinct. There's no decision when it's a simple question of survival, when a gun's pointed at your chest.

Those killings hadn't involved painstaking preparation. Or premeditation. The world didn't call them murder.

This was different—but no less moral, he reminded himself. He closed his eyes, looking for an image to give him courage. He found himself again at the Allegheny County morgue, thinking about lopping shears. Lab techs call them rib-cutters. How easily the tech had scissored open Carole's torso. How unforgettable the sound, like someone pruning wet branches from a tree.

He shoved his ski gloves into the satchel and pulled on a pair of latex surgical gloves, then started down.

His leg tingled as he climbed the back steps. Funny. Hadn't bothered him in days, but suddenly it came back as he stood there working the tool into the keyhole. He was in Ron Corbett's kitchen in less than a minute, groping into his satchel for the flashlight. He left his boots on the back steps. He intended to ditch the boots, so he wasn't worried about being identified. He just wanted to make sure Corbett didn't suspect someone had been in his house. If this was going to work, everything had to seem normal.

The kitchen smelled of cigarettes, grease, and mildew; the floor was sticky beneath his stocking feet. Downing set the satchel down beside the battered Frigidaire and opened its door.
Shit.
Practically empty. Three cans left from a Bud six-pack on the top shelf. A jar of baby kosher dills. Yellow mustard. A squeeze bottle of ketchup. He opened the carton of eggs, wondering if Corbett would notice a needle prick in one of the two that were left. Too risky. He lifted the lid from a saucepan to find what looked like a pork chop in tomato sauce. Slipping it into the red mess would be easy enough, but that would be all wrong. He needed something that would go straight from a store-bought container into Corbett's mouth.

An orange in the vegetable drawer. If nothing else turned up, that was a possibility. But that would be risky, too. If it sat too long, it might get discolored. Corbett had probably experimented on everything, and even a slight imperfection might tip him off. Downing closed the refrigerator. Maybe he'd have better luck in the bathroom.

The flashlight beam cut through the gloom, and Downing followed it from the kitchen into the tiny living room at the front of the house. Corbett didn't spend a lot of time decorating. An old recliner was anchored in front of a small TV, which sat on an upturned wooden fruit crate. The only light source was a fixtureless overhead bulb in the center of the ceiling. Downing kept the flashlight trained on the floor so he wouldn't attract attention from outside.

He passed a narrow stairway leading to the second floor, but he didn't go up. It was clear from the night he'd watched Corbett double-team the neighbor lady that the bedroom was on the ground floor. After checking the bed, just to make sure he was right about it having been Corbett in the car, he moved to the door he thought led to the bathroom. Even before he opened it, revealing a closet jammed with boxes, he remembered the outhouse. Goddamn. If Corbett didn't have a bathroom, he didn't have a medicine cabinet. And if he didn't have a medicine cabinet, where would he keep his medicine? Downing checked his watch. Five minutes already gone.

He opened every kitchen cupboard, sweeping his light across the mostly empty shelves. Did the same under the sink. He rifled the contents of a cardboard box on the counter: A half-empty bag of sugar. Salt and pepper. A few canned vegetables. Christ. Think. Where would the guy brush his teeth or shave? He played the beam on the kitchen sink, then on the windowsill just above it. He moved closer. On the left corner of the sill sat an old leather travel kit. The zipper was broken, and it yawned open wide when Downing lifted one rigid edge. Bingo. Buried under a half-empty Aqua Velvet bottle, down among a nest of crumpled Band-Aids and rubbers, was a beautiful white plastic bottle. He set the flashlight on the counter and poked a finger in, rotating the bottle so the label faced up. Could the gods of fate have a sense of humor?

Primenyl capsules.

Downing carefully unloaded the kit, laying each item on the counter in the order he removed it. He wanted to put everything back just the way he found it. The bottle was open, about half full. Perfect. The Primenyl killer
should
die this way, in an apparently random death that seems like the work of … the Primenyl killer. The symmetry of it! He pulled the towel from the satchel and unrolled it on the counter. Only a childproof cap stood between him and the end of this nightmare.

Downing poured the capsules from his envelope into a tiny mound on the towel and brought the flashlight beam in close. He separated the green-and-white Primenyl capsule from the rest, then poured a few capsules from the bottle into his hand just to make sure they matched. The moment he dropped the loaded capsule among the others in his hand, it was lost; no way he could tell them apart even if he wanted to back out. He poured them all back into the bottle, replaced the cap, and gave the bottle a quick shake, just to make things interesting. As he reassembled the contents of the travel kit, he thought how sickeningly easy it had been.

He held the flashlight close to his wristwatch, then set it back on the counter. Seven and a half minutes left of the twenty he'd given himself—a comfortable cushion to get back to the car. But he planned on staying in the car until Corbett got back. He didn't want to take the chance of passing him along the goat path. He'd wait all night if he had to. If Corbett wasn't back before dawn, he'd have to chance it. No way he'd get out unnoticed in daylight.

The kitchen suddenly got bright. Downing froze. He counted, one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, then slowly turned his head to the left. The generous neighbor lady was in her kitchen, maybe twenty feet away, in a loose burgundy robe. Same peroxide-nuked hair, which was bound up in pink curlers. She'd looked younger with her clothes off. A sullen, pan-faced boy with a crew cut, maybe twelve or thirteen, trailed behind her. Straight out of
Deliverance.
No curtains filtered the light pouring through their window into Corbett's kitchen, but then, none of these people seemed too worried about privacy.

The boy turned and left the kitchen, and she disappeared for a few seconds from the window that framed her. She was working on a slice of white bread when she reappeared, then stopped at what must have been a kitchen table. From there, she could see straight into Corbett's kitchen. Downing tried to follow her eyes. Was she looking down at the table, or at him? Reading something? Downing noticed his flashlight on the counter. Still on.
Fuck.
What would she notice more easily, light or motion? He decided to stay still, leaning as best he could into the shadow of Corbett's refrigerator. What was she doing?

She turned a garish, colored page. One of the tabloids.
Christ.
The kid wandered through the window frame again. Then an older guy, talking at the kid's back loud enough that Downing could make out a few words. Had to be his father. The kid passed again, and for a moment all three were framed in the small window. Downing stole another look at his watch.

At least he was ready to go. In the unexpected light, he double-checked the floor for any sign of his passage. He'd touched nothing in the kitchen except the refrigerator handle and the travel kit, and that was back on the windowsill where he'd found it. Nothing he'd brought had left the towel, which was rolled back into the satchel at his feet. His boots were on the back steps, and he could pick them up and disappear into the woods in a few seconds. All he needed was darkness.

She was alone again, absently flipping pages, tuning out the rumble, which had moved into another room. She opened her robe, exposing one bulbous breast, then cinched the belt tight again. Downing felt himself get hard. Trix was right: Men are pigs. He knew it. He should have been repulsed watching Corbett's three-way circus through the window that summer night. What he was, though, was jealous. For one lost moment, he was Ron Corbett. Tasting the whiskey, watching the action from bedside, savoring the chance for seconds, fucking a woman while her husband watched from a chair. On an average day, how different was he, really, from that hateful bastard?

A tinny electronic beep. In the tense silence, his watch alarm seemed like a factory whistle. Did she see him recoil? See his right arm move to shut it off? Could she have heard? Blondie flipped another page, oblivious. Then, as suddenly as she arrived, she turned out the kitchen light and was gone. Darkness returned. Downing breathed.

He pulled the back door shut behind him, making sure it locked, then grabbed his boots and ran through the snow toward the trees behind the house and onto the trail leading back to the car. His heavy wool socks were soaked by the time he stopped, but he wanted to get away from the houses, away from possible witnesses. He peeled off the socks and pulled the boots over his bare feet, then took off running again. Out here, he was exposed. Corbett was probably just making a cigarette run, and that Stop-N-Go store wasn't far off the goat path. He could be back any minute, and Downing wanted to be safe inside his car when Corbett got home.

And he was, but barely. The pinpoint of Corbett's single headlight appeared somewhere down the hill just as Downing was opening his car door. Downing was still panting from his run, watching through the gray fog on his windshield, when Corbett's car swept around the right curve toward the houses.

“Sleep tight, Chickie,” he said, watching the car bounce over the rise and out of sight.

Corbett's engine noise would cover the sound of his car starting, assuming the Ford didn't stutter too long in this cold. Downing turned the key, thinking,
Start, you bastard,
saying,
Thank you, Jesus
when it did. He backed up to clear the trees, then started down the goat path in the winking moonlight, waiting until he was halfway to the main road before turning on his headlights.

Downing was forty miles away, somewhere along Hartwell Creek, when he pulled off I-79 to find a place to get rid of the boots. That's when he wondered, for the first time, where he'd left his socks.