Time Release (26 page)

“She always wore them in her hair,” he said, his voice toneless. “She was wearing them the day she sent David to the store, the day he came back and caught her holding my head underwater. Oh, Christ—”

Sonny crumbled. His wail rattled the window, the cry of an animal in pain. He swept the chopstick from the counter and it disappeared into a snarl of garden tools against a far wall. “Damn her to hell!” he screamed. Kicking hard at the base of the cupboard, rousting the demon, prodding it from his subconscious into his conscious mind. It finally had a name, a face, Christensen thought. Confronting it hadn't been easy, but at least now Sonny could see it, wrestle it down as best he could.

“I'm here, Sonny. Let it out.”

A baseboard splintered. Sonny kicked some more, crush­ing a cupboard door. Cursing her. Hating her. Kicking until his white shoe showed a deep red stain at the toe. Chris­tensen watched, helpless and scared but unwilling to inter­vene. When Sonny's rage slowed, he fell to his knees and sobbed. His shoulders, once so imposing, sunk beneath some unseen weight and rolled with each ragged breath. His right hand was cradled in his lap, his face buried in his left even as he spoke.

“She could have taken me to God. I wish she had.”

Christensen bent down. “Wouldn't have changed a thing. All those people still would have died. You couldn't have saved your brother or stopped your father from leaving. Couldn't have kept your mother out of Borman. What happened then was bigger than everybody. Thing is, you're the one who survived. You.”

Sonny's hand roved up through his hair, revealing a face still haunted. He shook his head. “I wish she had.”

“I'm glad she didn't.” Christensen cleared his throat and offered an awkward hug. He let pass what he thought was an appropriate time. “Sonny, there have been other killings, or attempts, very similar. A few months ago, down in Greene County, down near where your father's living. Some others around here. Your aunt Rachel may be at it again, and I think the police need to know about this. Understand what I'm saying?”

A single nod. Nothing more.

“So, where is she now?”

Another nod, an indecipherable smile. “You don't get it, do you?”

“Not everything, no. You and I have a lot more talking to do.”

“No, I mean—”

“But Sonny, she's still a threat, and right now I think we need to let someone know where to find her.”

Sonny hooked his good hand around the back of his neck and put his chin on his chest, then muttered a single word: “Ridgeville.”

Sonny was sitting on the Jancey Street living room's low hearth, his broken hand packed in melting snow and wrapped in an old towel they'd found in a downstairs bathroom. His left arm held both knees tight to his chest, an almost fetal posture, but his eyes were alive again, ques­tioning, comprehending.

“What's your first memory of Rachel?” Christensen asked.

Sonny studied his shoes. “Hard to say. My mom's been sick for so long,” he said. “At first she'd have these spells where she just acted different. But that was it. Just different. Rachel came later.”

“But at some point you knew she'd dissociated?”

Sonny looked confused.

“When someone creates an alternate personality. You're sure that happened?”

Sonny nodded. “She didn't have a name, at first. But my mom would talk different. Carried herself different. It's funny, my dad wouldn't cross her when she was like that. David and I kind of liked that at first. She stood up for herself, and he backed off. But I knew something was really wrong because of the cigarettes. One night she just lit up during dinner.”

“She doesn't smoke?”

Sonny shook his head. “Hated it. Rachel's a neat freak, too, not like my mom.”

Christensen flicked a dead fly from the windowsill. “So eventually you knew her as Rachel?”

“She just one day asked us to call her that, is all.”

“And you always knew who was who?”

“They were so different,” Sonny said.

Christensen shook his head. “Dissociation isn't always that extreme. And without knowing more about her, without knowing more about her perp, I can't—”

“Her what?”

“Your grandfather. I can only guess why she needs an alternate personality like Rachel.”

“Guess, then,” Sonny said.

“Think about it. Rachel is strong, independent, aggressive—everything your mom isn't. Most people can inte­grate the parts of their personality that aren't consistent and become fully functioning. For people who can't, sometimes it's easier just to take the inconsistent parts and create another identity, or identities. That's why alters, typically, are so different from the person who created them.”

Sonny perked up. “So there can be more than one?”

“I've read about cases with more than a hundred alters. That's the exception, but it happens.”

Sonny's sudden deep breath was hard to interpret. Frus­tration? Relief? “She went out sometimes, to bars, the nights my father was away. She'd leave my brother and me with Mrs. Sadowski down the street and go off for a few hours to party. Sometimes she'd bring guys back to the house. Never inside, but right to the doorstep. In summer, when the windows were open, we'd hear them fucking on the porch from three houses away. Everybody knew.”

Christensen imagined the commotion that would make along a street as tightly packed and nosy as Jancey. “Maybe it was another alter,” he said. “The part of your mom that wanted to humiliate your dad the way he humiliated her. What did he do when he found out?”

Sonny smiled. “Nobody ever told him. He wasn't the most popular guy around here. Everybody knew he would have killed her.”

A thought passed quickly, and Christensen kept it to himself: If one of Sandra Corbett's alters couldn't humiliate Ron Corbett by boffing strangers on their front porch, if the neighbors didn't play the tattletale role she wanted them to play, maybe she created Rachel to take it to the next level. Another thought: “Do you think the name is significant?”

“Rachel?”

“Why Rachel?”

Sonny rewrapped his hand, slowly, methodically. “It's from the Bible, which makes sense, because of my grandfather. He died when I was five, but I know my mom hated him, hated everything he preached. Only thing I ever saw her get passionate about.”

“Rachel sure knew her Scripture.”

Sonny was silent and intense, like he was replaying some long-ago conversation. “All I remember about the Bible Rachel was she was married to the same guy as her sister.”

Love those Bible stories, Christensen thought. “An aunt to her sister's children,” he said. “Interesting. See, all that stuff was in your mom's head, probably drilled into her as a kid, but she apparently had no use for it. So she gave it to Rachel, who I'm guessing interpreted it pretty broadly.”

Sonny nodded. “Talked a lot about Revelations.”

“The Apocalypse,” Christensen said.

“About the angel Michael, too. That's who I'm named after.”

Against all odds, Christensen dredged a biblical biogra­phy from somewhere deep in his parochial-school past. Michael, leader of the righteous angels in the battle for Heaven; Michael, star of the Renaissance painting where he's casting Satan into the pit. Rachel probably kept the picture in her wallet.

“How you feeling, Sonny?”

“Like shit. Wrung out.”

“The hand?”

“Hurts like hell.”

“There's safer ways to have done this, you know. That's why I didn't want you to come back here. You'd probably have remembered everything eventually, but a little at a time, not in a flood. Would that have been so bad?”

Sonny ran his good hand through his hair and closed his eyes. “If I'd lived that long.”

“Meaning?”

Sonny's eyes drifted around the room, eventually settling on the steel ribs of an ancient radiator. “I had a dream I never told you about. A water dream. Must have had it a dozen times in the last couple years.”

“Tell me now.”

“It's different than the drowning ones at the sink. Not something that ever really happened, I'm sure. Just a dream.”

Christensen moved across the room and sat cross-legged on the floor beside Sonny on the hardwood floor. “What happens?”

“I'm swimming in open water, a channel or something. It's night. I'm alone, swimming hard. But there's something behind me, something fast, much faster than me. I swim harder, but it's still coming. I can't get away from it, and it's scary. Really scary. I don't know what it is, but I'm sure I can't outswim it.”

“It's chasing you?”

“It's going to kill me.”

Christensen put a hand on Sonny's knee. “But it doesn't, does it?”

“I always wake up. But it was getting closer each time.”

Across the room, a dark shape the size of a golf ball moved along the baseboard beneath the stairs. A mouse.

“We should go, Sonny. I still think we need to call Grady Downing.”

“Another minute.” Sonny fished into his daypack and rooted around, pulling out a dripping navel orange that had apparently been crushed when Sonny stumbled over the pack a few minutes earlier. “Wondered why my pack was soaked.”

The room was almost dark. The smell of ripe citrus filled Christensen's head, cutting through the mildew and dust of the abandoned house. It smelled good, familiar, comforting. But there was something else, another smell. He took the smashed orange from Sonny and split it, sniffing again more analytically.

“What?” Sonny said when the two halves fell.

“Something's not right. Where'd you get this?”

The wavering halves stopped on the floor between them. Sonny's face became a mask in the fading light, vacant and emotionless. Christensen answered his own question: “From your mother.”

Sonny flinched, staring at the orange. “She loaded me up with food the last time I was out,” he said.

Christensen picked up both halves and shoved them into the daypack. Sandra Corbett may have given Sonny the fruit, but Rachel worked on it first. Still trying to take Sonny to God. He grabbed Sonny by both shoulders, forcing him to look into his eyes. “Let's go. I need to call Downing. Now.”

“In a minute.”

“We need to go.”

Sonny looked away. “I'll wait here.”

“I think you should come with me.”

“I'm okay. Really.”

Christensen checked his watch. Maybe he could borrow somebody's phone. “Five minutes,” he said, and bolted out the front door. He'd tell Downing what happened—about Sandra Corbett's dissociation into Rachel, about the cyanide in the basement and Sonny's breakthrough that finally brought the Primenyl killer's face into focus, about Rachel's willingness to kill even Sonny as he closed in on the truth. He'd turn the whole hellish nightmare over to people who knew what to do now. He wanted Sandra Corbett in custody, but mostly he wanted out.

He was standing in a suspicious neighbor's foyer, snow melting off his shoes, when, from the corner of his eye, he saw it through the front-door window. A flash of forest green accelerating down Jancey Street toward Braxton Avenue.

The Explorer.

“Oh Jesus,” he said just as Downing's phone clicked into voice mail.

The wait had been torture. All his efforts to reach Downing had ended in voice mail, and there was no telling when he'd return the page. The cab company was deluged by calls as the snow piled up. Nothing for at least half an hour, the dispatcher had said. So he'd made small talk with the crone, Mrs. Torisky, suppressing his desperation, wait­ing in the swirling butter-onion smell of frying pierogies for her ancient black telephone to ring.

When Downing had finally called from West Virginia, Mrs. Torisky hadn't even pretended to give him privacy. She'd listened as he spun the story at full volume: Sonny's sudden urge to visit the house; the dangerous flood of tormented memories; the cyanide they found deep in a basement wall; Aunt Rachel as a figment of Sandra Corbett's tortured psyche. “She's the one, Grady, not Ron!” he'd blurted. “She made her goddamned kids drop the Primenyl!”

All Mrs. Torisky ever said, in her heavy Slovak accent, was, “Crazy people.” She was holding a rosary as he climbed into the taxi and waved.

“Ridgeville,” Christensen barked, checking his watch. He was at least forty minutes behind Sonny, but he had no doubt where the young man was headed. He repeated the apartment name Downing gave him. “Lakeview Pointe Estates.”

The driver turned around. “In this shit?” Serious kielbasa breath.

“How fast can you get there?”

Big laugh, yellow teeth. Mr. Kielbasa adjusted his porkpie hat. “Where youn's been, Skip? Parkway's a fuckin' mess. Take us a fuckin' hour just to get through the Fort Pitt Tunnel. I'll get you there if you gotta go, but you better have plenty of cash.”

Christensen pulled his wallet from an inside jacket pocket and fanned four twenties, a ten, and two ones, every cent he had with him. He dropped his bills over the back of the front seat.

“That'll spend,” the driver said. Big wink. Then he began to whistle “Winter Wonderland” as a back tire whirred and the cab started to move. Please God, don't let this guy be a talker, Christensen prayed. There was too much to think about.

The puzzle was coming together, but the picture was no less baffling. Had Sandra's dissociation revealed itself during her years of therapy? Were her doctors aware she'd developed an alter aggressive enough to kill? She should never have left Borman. Probably one of the Reagan era's deinstitutionalized mentally ill, he reasoned.

Christensen thought about Sonny's grandfather. If her original perp was dead, maybe Sandra had focused her alter's rage on the tormentor she married, the only one upon whom she could inflict revenge. Maybe that single focus intensified the rage, made it combustible. But why wasn't it enough just to kill him? Why this elaborate and deadly plan to show the world his evil?

As improbable as it seemed, the Primenyl case had taken on an even more sinister meaning: Killing didn't simply fill some sociopath's twisted need. The random poisoning and their attendant agony were nothing more than a means to an end, one necessary strand in a spider's intricate web. He imagined Sandra at its center, surrounded by the sons she'd inadvertently snared. David's body spun into a silken sarcophagus; Sonny fighting for his life; the intended prey, her husband, lucky enough to have avoided capture and smart enough to have removed himself from her life.

Christensen recounted the circumstantial evidence Down­ing was sure pointed to Ron Corbett: the abusive past, the pharmacy training, the typewritten list of licensed cyanide distributors found inside Corbett's home. How flimsy it all seemed now, and how neatly it meshed with Sonny's retrieved memories. Corbett's sudden flight in 1986 and lack of contact since—what Downing interpreted as callous belligerence—probably was the frantic response of a man who knew what his wife had done but felt he couldn't come forward. If he had, who would have believed him? Down­ing?

The cab crept through Oakland's slushy streets, then onto the Parkway East high above a gentle curve in the Mon River. He could see the water clearly now that the old J&L steel plant was gone. Ice clung to the riverbanks, and he found himself trying to make sense of Sonny's swimming. Why did he force himself into a river's excruciating winter embrace four times a week? Was it self-destructive, a victim's subconscious punishment? That's what he'd first thought, but now he wondered if maybe it was something far different—an extreme expression of self-preservation by someone who couldn't forget a near-drowning in a basement laundry sink.

Traffic slowed as they neared the Fort Pitt Bridge, but the snarl wasn't as bad as he'd feared. Five lanes of cars knitted themselves into two strands that snaked across and disappeared into the tunnel on the other side. Green Tree Hill beyond the tunnel was bound to be a slip-and-slide, but for some reason traffic was moving.

“Youn's must be praying back there or something.” Two laughing eyes in the rearview mirror. “This is light even for a Saturday. The snow's keeping people home.”

Christensen leaned forward. “How much longer do you figure?'

“Don't get all bunched up. Another twenty minutes, Skip, at least.” The driver tossed a crumpled paper lunch bag into the backseat. It bounced off Christensen's knee. “Pickle?”