Straw Men (12 page)

“Am I late?” he asked when she finally opened her door.

Teresa didn't answer, just nodded toward the elevator. “Let's get inside.”

They rode up together, but neither spoke. Christensen felt like a man on the downside of a dam ready to burst. She paced the hall while he worked the key into the lock, then pushed past him as he hung his coat on the rack near Lynn's empty desk. Teresa kept her coat on. By the time he joined her in his office's sitting area, she had a G-force grip on the arms of the wing chair.

“What happened?” Christensen said.

“He called again.”

She'd been home alone the night before, drying dishes, her husband at work. Just hours before one of Kiger's investigators was supposed to run a tap on her home phone, it rang. And she knew.

“How?”

“I just did.”

She'd picked it up on the third ring. Didn't even say hello; just picked it up and waited. And he'd started talking, rasping and strained. Somehow, she said, he knew she was alone. He'd stopped after a few seconds when her best ceramic baking dish shattered on the kitchen floor. Then he hung up.

“Like DellaVecchio's voice,” she said. “Same as during the trial.”

“You're sure?”

She just glared.

“This guy, did he threaten you?”

Her whole body shuddered, and she gripped the arms of the chair even tighter. “He said things—” Teresa looked away, as if scanning the corners of the room. She bit her trembling lower lip. “I'm sorry.”

Christensen felt a numbing dread.

“Sexual things? Violent things?”

Teresa waved the words away. “Don't.”

Christensen thought of Brenna, of the calls she'd received, and fought his impulse to push. “When you're ready, Teresa. Just relax.”

She was crying now, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her wool jacket. He snatched a tissue from the box on an end table and handed it to her.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She pounded her thigh with a fist. “That piece of shit. Goddamn him.”

“I know this is tough. But you're safe here.”

She waited, and in the pause she seemed to regain her balance. “You're worried about her, I know.”

“Brenna? I'd be lying if I said no. But we're all in this together now. It's us against him, whoever he is.”

Christensen leaned forward. “What was different about this call, Teresa? I've seen you handle this stuff before. This one is different, but you're not telling me why.”

“Because he
knows
things,” she said.

“Personal things?”

She nodded. “That's how I know it's him. Remember yesterday when we were talking about stuff you do when you're young and stupid? I was younger then, maybe not stupid, but doing things I can't believe I did. Things that embarrass me now because they're so, I don't know, childish. Things you do when you're—” She crooked her fingers as quotation marks. “—‘in love' with somebody.”

“As opposed to ‘loving' someone,” he said.

“Exactly.”

Teresa drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. Christensen could tell she was stepping away from herself, from the damaged woman she probably detested, and cloaking herself in whatever armor she'd created. The armor protected her; the distance gave her perspective.

“David's much older, you know,” she said. “Seventeen years.”

Back to David. Why? “What was the attraction?” he asked.

“Back then?”

She waited for the right words to come.

“He was my mentor in a lot of ways,” she said. “My first partner on street patrol. That covers a lot of ground. You had crushes on high school teachers, didn't you? There's no logic to it. It's just the way we're wired. We respect the people who play that role in our lives, trust them. Sometimes those things grow into something else, or get confused with something else, and all of a sudden you're in bed and it sort of goes from there. The next thing I knew he was leaving his wife and kids for me.”

Christensen nodded. “David did that? Left his first wife when you two got involved?”

“Second wife. He was married twice before me. Two kids from the second marriage.”

“Ages?”

Teresa thought hard. “Lizzie's three years younger than me, so she's about 31 now. That makes Todd 28.”

Christensen scribbled some notes, hoping her momentum would keep her talking. After a while, he said, “You joked about hating your father yesterday. Anything to that?”

She smiled. “No. Dad's great. But what you really want to know is if I subconsciously married my dad, right?”

“You've been reading ahead.”

“You're pretty transparent sometimes.”

“Sorry,” Christensen said. “So?”

She let go of the chair's arms. “In some ways, maybe. Dad came up through the Clairton mill, the coke plant. He's big like David, strong as a plow horse. But Daddy always smelled like coal tar and benzene. I'd never marry somebody like that. And Daddy didn't lose interest in me when I got to be an old lady of twenty-six.”

Christensen took the bait. “Let's turn it around: Do you think David married his daughter?”

She nodded as if she'd expected the question. “He married young all three times. And the women he was seeing when we split were interns, secretaries, all about his mother's age when she died if you want to get really weird about it. I think he understands it now. He's past it. But God, he was such a cliché. He was forty when we got married. Called me his sports-car substitute.”

“That bother you?”

“I wasn't exactly naïve. I'd been through college. I'd been through the academy. We'd been patrol partners for over a year when we got married. It was a joke. I laughed about it, too.”

“Sometimes people laugh to be part of the joke, so they won't be the object of it.”

Teresa's eyes drifted around the room. Then she closed them for an uncomfortable length of time. When she opened them, Christensen sensed a resolve that wasn't there before, as if she'd been to a reservoir of it somewhere inside her body.

“I was ‘in love,' ” she said. “And when you're ‘in love' you do things that seem pretty stupid once you're not ‘in love' anymore. So back then, when David asked me to shave my pubic hair, I did it. And kept doing it. He liked it, so what the hell? It was no big deal to me.”

Christensen scrambled for an appropriate response. He crooked his fingers. “You were ‘in love.' ”

“It's one of the memories I lost. Believe me, I could have lived a full life without it. But now I remember. Everything about it. How it excited David the first time. How it itched like hell if I didn't shave every couple days. God, it was a pain. But I still did it, and kept doing it for the first three years we were married.”

Christensen felt for footing. “Do you resent that now?”

She shook her head. “Not at all. It's just, you know, one of the stupid things you do when you're young and ‘in love.' ”

“So you don't see it as unhealthy on David's part or anything like that?”

“No.”

Christensen set down his pen and rested his notebook in his lap. “Then, I'm lost. I know you brought that up for a reason, but I'm trying to relate it to what we were—”

“He knew,” she said.

Christensen felt disoriented by the sudden edge in her voice. “David knew?”

She batted his question away. Then, her lower lip trembled again. Her resolve disappeared like a wisp of smoke, and just that quick Christensen understood what she'd been trying to say.

“The caller knew,” he said. “The voice on the phone.”

She nodded. “After David left, I stopped shaving. I was angry. I was hurt. I was moving on. That was three weeks before—” Teresa turned her head to one side, apparently embarrassed more by her rising emotion than the subject.

“You were attacked, Teresa. There's no shame—”

She suddenly slammed her fist onto the coffee table. Christensen jumped.

“Raped!” she shouted. “He
knew,
goddamn it. This guy on the phone, talking about the stubble. ‘Like sandpaper,' he said. He whispered it. ‘Pussy like sandpaper.' And it seemed like he knew why I was growing it back. He knew
why.
That's when I dropped the dish. That memory, the whole history, just blinked back on, all of it. In one second. And in that second, I knew I was talking to the one who did this.”

Christensen felt sick. Before, when she first came to him, Teresa was confused by a voice from her muddled past. What was she to make of the different voice she remembered whispering in her ear as she lay near death?
You never rose.
That wasn't DellaVecchio's voice. Now, a new horror. The voice on the phone, DellaVecchio's voice, whispering something about her that even she'd forgotten, something intimate and grotesque.

Christensen passed another tissue, and Teresa crumbled it into a ball.

“And he sounds like DellaVecchio?” Christensen asked.

She nodded. “But somebody could fake that over the phone. It's either him or someone trying to sound like him.”

“Why aren't you sure?” Christensen leaned forward. “Something's confusing you about it.”

She shrugged. “It's not like I know the guy.”

“DellaVecchio? If you have a question about him I'll try to answer it.”

Teresa took a deep, ragged breath. “This fetal alcohol syndrome. What's it do to the brain?”

“Depends,” Christensen said. “In his case, it affected the centers that control aggression and impulse. Other than that—”

“Intelligence?”

Christensen sat back. “DellaVecchio's seems limited, but not strikingly so. He never finished high school, mostly because of behavioral problems.”

“Vocabulary?”

Christensen had never had a conversation with DellaVecchio; he knew mostly what Brenna told him and what he'd seen on TV. “It's hard for me to say, Teresa. My guess, from what I know about him, is that it's limited, too. He's got processing problems. People like that tend to keep things simple. No fancy language. They just don't retain it.”

Teresa leaned back in her chair and studied the ceiling. A car's headlights flashed through the office window. Christensen tried to seem nonchalant as he stood up and closed the vertical blinds.

“This guy who called, he used the word
emancipation,
”
she said, pronouncing each syllable like a separate word.

“Emancipation,” Christensen repeated. “As in—”

“Emancipation Proclamation. That's what he called it.” She looked away. “My pubic hair. Growing it back. That's what he called it.”

Christensen tried to imagine those words, that concept, coming from Carmen DellaVecchio's mouth. He couldn't. He could tell Teresa was thinking the same thing.

“If it was DellaVecchio who attacked me, he'd know that I shaved, or used to shave,” she said. “He'd have seen it that night. But he wouldn't know why. The guy on the phone, he knows the story. He knows
why.
”

“But how?”

“I don't know.”

“Had you told anyone?”

“I might have. I don't remember.”

“Friends? Women friends? Something that might have come up in the police locker room where other women saw you?”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“David?”

“He knew I shaved.”

“But not that you'd stopped?”

She shook her head. “I can't remember.”

“Who else? You told me you were seeing someone, a married man. Did he know?”

She was crying as she stood up. She headed for the door, and for a moment Christensen thought she was leaving. But she came back and put her shaking hands on the back of her chair. Her face was normally hard to read, but there was no mistaking her frustration. She looked him dead in the eye, and through clenched teeth, one word at a time, she repeated her answer.

“I. Can't. Remember.”

She'd been there. Stayed maybe two weeks before David's voice coaxed her back. It was another month before she accepted him as her husband, and only then because he'd told her so. It was a month after that before she accepted as her own the past he described. David had saved her, sprung her from limbo, gave her back her past with his photo albums and mementos and endless stories about the life she had led.

Who was she to question?

Teresa slipped from beneath the covers and steadied herself on the edge of their bed. David stirred, grabbed his pillow tighter, then fell back into a deep-breathing sleep. Her feet found her slippers, and when she had them on she stood up. Equilibrium was still a problem, so she waited until the room stopped moving before taking a step. She reached around the bathroom door to lift her robe from the hook there, hoping the door wouldn't creak. David's breathing didn't falter as she crossed the room and stepped into the hall. She felt for the stair rail in the dark.

She wanted time to think. By herself. She had her own thoughts now, her own memories. They were unexpected but undeniable, bobbing up like mines. They looked real to her. They felt real. But they didn't fit neatly into the familiar narrative of her reconstructed past. She could feel the danger, especially after her session with Christensen a few hours before.

The pieces just didn't fit.

And so she'd begun to wonder: Which did she trust? The reality presented to her by the dedicated man in her bed? Or the vivid memories that seemed to be rising, with Christensen's help, from her own black depths?

She stepped to the left side of the creaky fourth and twelfth steps. At the bottom, she angled into the kitchen. For years, she'd remembered nothing of what happened there. Nothing. She'd accepted the version she was told by David, the version supported by the evidence presented in court. But lately, memories had flickered like strobe flashes in a dark room.

She flipped on the kitchen light, squeezing her eyes shut tight until they adjusted. She scanned the room—the top-end Sub-Zero refrigerator, the polished marble countertops, the copper-faced Italian espresso machine.

The place had long ago lost its power over her. It was just her kitchen now, and the waking nightmare she'd lived there was just a story, like a horror movie described to her by friends who had seen it. That wasn't her half-dead on the floor with her torn panties around one ankle. That wasn't her gasping for breath in the widening pool of blood beneath that pulpy head, which in places looked like the lump of ground lamb that had landed in a heap where her mixing bowl fell that night. That wasn't her with the neck of a broken champagne bottle jammed far enough into her uterus that a hysterectomy was the trauma surgeon's only choice to stop the bleeding. None of that existed for her in a real way. She'd simply accepted it, never questioned it, because the retelling was all she had to go on.

Now, she felt as if she had license to test it.

From her years on the force, she remembered the concept of “leftovers,” pieces that didn't fit anywhere after the puzzle seemed complete. As inconvenient as they were, she knew leftovers sometimes were the most important pieces. They were the building blocks of criminal defense; they raised reasonable doubt. They sometimes hinted at undiscovered truths, and to ignore them was a mistake. Leftovers could haunt you.

Her story, or the story she'd been told was hers, had too many leftovers, things that existed outside the strobe flashes she'd been seeing lately. Inconsistencies she'd left too long unexplored. Little leaps of logic that she'd never questioned. Actions and reactions attributed to her that just didn't seem like the way she would behave. When Brenna Kennedy brought them up during DellaVecchio's trial, she'd dismissed them as a last-ditch effort to defend the indefensible. Now she wondered.

Like the windows. They arced around the kitchen sink, offering a view of her side-yard garden. They were the reason she liked the house, the reason they bought it the year after she and David were married. Along with the atrium to the left of the big window and the glass panel in the door to the right, they offered in daylight a nearly panoramic view of that side of their property. If she was working in the kitchen after dark, like the night it happened, the yard outside would have been lit by the spotlight on that side of the house. It came on automatically for a couple hours at dusk, then any time it detected motion in the yard. It was sensitive enough that a stalking cat could set it off.

She'd been standing at the sink, making cabbage rolls. She remembered none of it, but she was sure of that much. The crime scene photographer had caught it all. The water pot was still on the stove when he arrived, although the first officer on the scene had turned off the burner. She'd separated the cabbage leaves and had them stacked beside the bubbling pot, ready to blanch them. She would have dunked them using the tongs, which were propped in the spoon holder beside the leaves. The lamb-and-rice stuffing was mixed and probably sat in one of her stainless steel bowls on the sideboard until she picked it up. She apparently had done just that when he'd swung the heavy bottle for the first time. If the metal bowl hadn't clattered to the floor, her neighbor Carol wouldn't have heard. No one would have called 911. She would be dead.

But that's how it happened. She was sure of that.

What bothered her now were the windows. Making cabbage rolls her mother's way was an intensive process of separating and washing leaves, chopping ingredients, mixing meat and cooked rice and spices. Getting to that point, where she was ready to blanch and roll the leaves, would have taken her at least an hour. At that sink. Overlooking the side-yard garden.

He'd hit her from behind with the bottle, a mighty swing that landed solid on the left side of her head. It knocked her instantly unconscious. Her blood spattered up and to the right, leaving a trail across the ceramic plate that hung there, peppering the plate's painted slogan: “Live long. Laugh often. Love much.”

They said he'd somehow slipped in the side door while she wasn't looking. It was spring. If it was warm, the door would have been open wide to the evening and the garden smells outside. They said he'd eased the screen door open while she worked at the stove, slid along the row of cupboards where the wine rack sat, grabbed a bottle and silently moved up behind her. Or so the story went. All the pieces fit.

Except.

She went to the sink. Except for brief turns to get ingredients from the refrigerator at her back, that's where she would have been for at least an hour before he hit her. But as she stood there now, she wondered about the pieces that didn't fit. Straight ahead, through the banked bay windows, she had a 180-degree view of practically the whole side yard. She moved back three steps toward the refrigerator. From there, she could see farther toward the front and back of the house through the window-box atrium and the door's glass panel. True, she was working, focused on the sink and cutting boards that flanked the sink. But that time of day, the yard lights should have been on. Even if they weren't, how could someone cross that expanse without tripping the motion detector? How could he have opened the aluminum screen door without pressing the noisy release button on the handle?

“Somehow” wasn't working for her anymore.

If the investigators were wrong, that meant he either would have come in through the house's front door, or else had been hiding somewhere in the house, for at least an hour, before he struck.

She'd read the crime scene report. The front door was locked. If he'd come in that way, he'd have needed a key. If he'd left that way, hurrying and still high from the savagery, would he really have taken the time to lock it again? If he was hiding in the house, where could he have been that she wouldn't have noticed him? Upstairs, maybe, but the only way down was by taking the creaky wooden stairs that ended at the kitchen's right rear corner. They knew from the bloody print of DellaVecchio's sneaker on her kitchen floor that that's what the attacker wore. But even so, there'd have been some noise as he came down the stairs.

So how did he get in?

“Terese?”

She whirled around, suddenly off balance, a flush of adrenaline jolting her body. David was standing bare-chested, nearly filling the doorway to the stairs. As she started to fall, she grabbed for and missed the edge of the counter. Her husband crossed the kitchen floor in what seemed like a single stride and gathered her in his arms. She dug her fingernails into his rough skin, knowing she was hurting him, but battling a dizziness that left her unable to stand.

“I've got you, baby,” he soothed. “I've got you.”

He held her tight against him until she was steady and her breathing slowed. She felt safe in his arms. After a while, he kissed her on the top of her head.

“Didn't mean to scare you, hon.”

“It's OK,” she said, pushing herself away. “I just didn't hear you.”