Straw Men (19 page)

“Out whoring,” she said.

“Whoring?”

“That much I know. I was attacked about dinnertime. At that moment, David was running a credit-card tab in some titty bar out near South Park. You think I'm stupid? You think I haven't thought the same thing you're thinking? But I had to know. I made Brian tell me the whole story. He said that's where they were when he got the page from headquarters.”

“About the attack?”

“He called in, then took David outside and told him what happened. David didn't do it, Jim. I believe him, for those and a thousand other reasons.”

Christensen peered into the darkness outside. In an hour the sun would be up. In five, Teresa would be in court to face down Carmen DellaVecchio.

“The hearing's today, Teresa,” he said. “Dagnolo's got no choice at this point. You're all he's got. He's going to call you to the stand again and ask you the only question that matters: Who
did
do it? What then?”

Christensen felt the silence like a weight on his shoulders. Then, without another word, Teresa Harnett gently hung up the phone.

Nothing.

But he could at least hear her voice. He thought of the sniper shots into their bedroom, about the panic and fear and malice that drove whoever had a finger on that trigger. The threat to Brenna was real, no matter who the shooter was. Her voice. That was the reassurance he needed right now.

And wasn't getting.

Three rings. Four.

He imagined her asleep on her office couch, exhausted from a late night of work and pre-hearing anxiety. How long would it take her to hear the phone, struggle to her feet, and walk to her desk?

Five rings.

Or maybe she was ignoring it. Who'd call at such a ridiculous hour anyway? Finally, a voice. Voice mail. “You've reached the law offices of Kennedy & Flaherty. We're not able to take your call right now, but please leave a message. Thank you.”

“Bren, it's me,” he said. “Just checking in. Sorry if I woke you. Just, ah, call home as soon as you get up. I know it's a busy morning, but please touch base, OK?”

The microwave clock read 5:02. On a day like today, she'd be up by six, for sure. Christensen willed himself not to worry until then, but then started to worry. He drummed his fingers on the counter. Outside, the first signs of dawn. The peaked rooftops across the alley were outlined against the charcoal sky, where only fifteen minutes before everything had been black.

The whole thing made a sickening sort of sense, but he was the only one who could see it. He alone had accumulated the troubling facts, and he alone had pieced together a terrifying theory about who attacked Teresa, or rather who had the best
motive
to attack her. At the time, her marriage to David was unraveling. He'd walked out, supposedly for the last time, three weeks before the attack. What triggered that? Teresa had been contacted by the IAD. What if her husband had asked her to flat-out lie about his whereabouts the previous New Year's Eve? What if she had refused, either on general principle or simply to protect her own job?

Maybe David
was
out on the town when it happened, but so what? Someone else could have carried out the actual attack. Besides, wouldn't that be a logical thing for a vengeful husband to do, assuming he'd be on the short list of suspects?

Christensen thought of the evidence found in Teresa's kitchen, and how limited it now seemed. A masked attacker who kept silent until he thought Teresa was safely dead. No fingerprints anywhere, just the artfully placed imprint of DellaVecchio's distinctively worn shoe stamped once like a notary seal in Teresa's blood. A savage sexual attack that was almost clinically clean, with none of the attacker's semen or blood or pubic hair left behind as evidence.

Christensen's heart was pounding as he paced the kitchen floor. He forced himself into a chair, tasting real fear in the gathering morning light. He tried Brenna's number again, and again got voice mail. He tried her car phone and let it ring until an electronic voice informed him: “The cellular customer you're trying to reach is unavailable. Please try your call again later.”

On the table, face up, lay the cryptic fax that had arrived the day before. That was the wild card. Someone else suspected Harnett, too. Someone who knew that Christensen was involved. Someone who had access to internal police documents. Dagnolo? He was notorious for leaking information, but no. The man was too invested in the Scarecrow stalker fantasy he'd worked so hard to build. Milsevic? Maybe. The night Brenna was injured, he'd implied he was working a different investigative track. Or maybe…

Kiger.

No one else knew he and Teresa were talking. No one else had access to IAD files. Who else had clear enough vision to see the ghastly questions beneath the convenient artifice of DellaVecchio's arrest?

Kiger.

Christensen was suddenly struck by a thought so terrifying that he stood straight up out of his kitchen chair. Had anyone asked David Harnett where
he
was the night the sniper took those shots at Brenna? Then another: Where was Harnett now? Where the hell was Brenna?

The urge to talk to Kiger was overpowering. Seconds later, Christensen was on his knees in the dark living room, sifting through the spilled papers from Teresa's file. Somewhere in there was Kiger's card, the one he remembered had a pager number on it. He crawled over to the security timer for the lamp and spun it until the light clicked back on, then continued his frantic search until the chief's card finally surfaced.

He banged his shin on the coffee table again, same spot, tripping across the living room. He limped to the kitchen phone and squinted at Kiger's card. He got the pager number in focus and dialed. At the prompt, he entered their home number and pushed the # button.

Then he waited. For Brenna. For Kiger. For any reassuring words in a twilight the color of ash.

“Hello?” Practically shouted it, then held his breath.

“Who'm I speaking to, sir?”

Kiger. Christensen exhaled. He checked the clock—6:08. Surely Brenna was up by now. Maybe she'd gotten up already and gone downstairs to shower at the Centre Club before checking her messages.

“Got this number on my pager, but didn't recognize—”

“Jim Christensen, Chief. Sorry. I'm about half out of my mind here, and I couldn't think of anything else to do.”

“It's fine,” Kiger said. “There a problem?”

Where to start? Christensen tried to wring the panic from his voice. He was about to suggest, based on wisps of evidence and growing suspicion, that David Harnett may have tried to kill his wife eight years ago, and that Harnett may have done so to protect himself from Kiger's own investigators. He was about to suggest, too, that Harnett may have been responsible for murdering a mouthy drug dealer named Vulcan Tidwell.

“You still there?” Kiger asked.

“I'm just … this is really complicated. I'm not sure where to wade into it.”

“Start with Teresa. What's going on?”

“Teresa,” Christensen repeated. “OK. She's still focused on things I never expected. Her marriage, specifically.”

“But what's she saying about DellaVecchio?”

Christensen shook his head. “A non-issue for her at this point.”

The chief laughed, and the sarcastic edge to it was unmistakable. “She might be the only one,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Christensen said.

“You watching TV? Ca-rist.
‘Good Mornin', Pittsburgh!'
just led with it. You'd think this hearing was Judgment Day itself. So Teresa's not talking about DellaVecchio.” He laughed again. “Well, got news for ya. Ever'body else in this damned town—”

“Chief,” Christensen interrupted. “I need to tell you something, and I need to tell you now, and the first thing you need to know is that we've got two people missing that I'd like to get accounted for.” Christensen knew it was spilling out, but couldn't stop it. “Brenna's one of them. Because of the hearing, she decided to stay Downtown at her office overnight. I talked to her about nine-thirty last night, but I've been calling her private line for the past hour and all I get is voice mail. She should be there, but I don't think she is. Or at least she's not answering, there or on her car phone. With everything that's happened, I'm worried.”

“OK,” Kiger said. “Who else?”

“David Harnett.”

Christensen waited through a long pause, looking again at the clock—6:12.

“What you mean he's missing?”

“Teresa called me a little over an hour ago, very upset. Long story short, the memories she's coming up with all involve David. And now she's come up with something—something she's corroborated with an old appointment book, something she trusts—that makes me think he's involved in this a lot deeper than we ever thought. He might even have played some role in trying to kill her, and he may actually have killed someone else before that.”

There. He'd said it.

“You're talking about the drug case,” Kiger said.

“Right. There's a connection, I think. I got this fax—”

Christensen waited. He was sure now it came from Kiger. How would he react? When he didn't, Christensen continued.

“It's too complicated to explain right now. But basically, I think she was supposed to be David's alibi for the night Tidwell was killed.”

“New Year's Eve, 1991,” Kiger said.

“Exactly. When I put everything together, it looks like she wasn't even with him. She's telling me they had a big blowup a few days before. Couple months later he moved out. And not long after that she was called to talk to your IAD guys.”

“That's the appointment y'all are talking about?”

“For a Monday. Somebody tried to kill her two days before. That's the sequence of events we should be looking at here. I'm thinking maybe David asked her to lie, and maybe she'd decided not to back him up. The minute she tells your investigators what she knows, David becomes a liar
and
a murder suspect. He
couldn't
let them question her.”

He could hear Kiger's breathing.

“Teresa was supposed to die, Chief. She didn't, but she might as well have. Like you said before, she was as good as dead. Her memory of all that was wiped completely clean, along with her memories of a lot of other things. Who was in the best position to realize that? Who was the only person who understood she was no longer a threat? David.”

“But DellaVecchio—”

“The straw man from the start, like Brenna's been saying,” Christensen said. “Harnett planned for everything, because he knew Milsevic and the other investigators would be all over this one. DellaVecchio was tailor-made. He had a history, and Harnett was very familiar with it. Harnett could have hired somebody to kill Teresa, then had him plant the evidence that led straight to DellaVecchio. He also made damned sure his alibi was solid, Chief.”

“He was—”

“With Milsevic,” Christensen said. “He must have known the lead homicide investigator would get the call on a high-profile case, so he made sure he was with Milsevic when it happened. It was perfect.”

Kiger said nothing for an eternal moment. Then: “One problem. David's the one worked so hard to help Teresa put it all back together, right? She'd be the first one to tell you that.”

“That's what I've been saying for years,” Christensen said. “He was able to rebuild her past any way he wanted to, or needed to. A suggestion here. A prompt there. Then he waited for those suggestions to come back as ‘memories.' He took Teresa out of the Tidwell equation at the same time he built your case against DellaVecchio. When she finally testified, she said exactly what he needed her to say. He steered her, and all of you, right to DellaVecchio. And I think maybe he's doing it again. How hard would it be to imitate DellaVecchio's voice on the phone, or to dump one of his ashtrays on that roof?”

Kiger cleared his throat. “Lemme get this straight. Y'all are saying what she remembers is mostly what he told her? And what he told her was what he needed her to say?”

“About everything. About DellaVecchio. About the night she was attacked. About the night Tidwell died. Some memories he planted. Some he weeded out. And what she's struggling with now are conflicts between what he told her happened and the memories she's starting to recover. They don't always match up, so for her it becomes a question of trust. Should she trust David, or her own memories?”

“But if that's the case—” Kiger said, then stopped. Christensen could almost hear the inconsistencies rolling around in the chief's head. “Tell me sump'n. Why's she still with somebody she thinks mighta tried to kill her?”

“I can't answer that,” Christensen said. “When I push her on it, she pushes back. She says she considered the possibility that David attacked her, even did some checking on her own. Bottom line, she just doesn't believe he could have, or would have, done it.”

A skeptical silence.

“Think about it,” Christensen said. “Forget the asshole who was driving her nuts with his affairs and indifference before the attack. Think about the man she knows, the one who's been with her since the attack. The husband she knows is devoted to her. He's helped give her back something she lost. He was there for her when she needed him most. How could she possibly believe he would try to kill her? It just wouldn't compute.”

“Well,
somebody
attacked her. So you ain't really moved us much from where we started.”

“I'd bet David hired someone. The point is, he's the one with a
reason
to kill her. That's the main thing you people look at, isn't it? Motive?”

“You're saying he carried on that devoted-husband charade? For eight years?”

“Maybe it's not a charade,” Christensen said. “I'm not convinced it is.” Another glance at the clock—6:15.

“Then why—”

“Could be a couple different things. Self-preservation, maybe. He needed access to her to control her memories, and the only way to maintain access was to be the devoted husband, or at least play the role. Or maybe it's just guilt. Say all this is true, that he tried to kill her, or have her killed. The attempt failed, but in the process she lost the memories he considered a threat. There
was
a relationship there, remember, even as flawed as it was. Maybe he felt like he owed her because he'd hurt her so bad. Guilt. Or maybe it was just easier for him to love someone he knew couldn't hurt him.”

Christensen's mind skipped back to an earlier conversation with Teresa, the one about her pubic hair and the reason she was growing it back. “Wait. There's something else that came up. Teresa's convinced that whoever attacked her knew her pretty well.” He cleared his throat, deciding how much to say. “He knew personal things, stuff only someone who knew her intimately, and before the attack, would have known.”

“David again?” Kiger said.

“Maybe. Probably. But remember, the marriage was falling apart. She told me herself she was no saint. She was seeing somebody, too. But I have no idea who—”

The possibility must have struck them both at the same time.

“Can you find out?” the chief said.

“She won't tell me until she's ready, but I can try.”

“Do that.”

The microwave's blue digits blinked again—6:18. “Damn,” Christensen said. “I've got to try Brenna again. The more I think about this … You have any idea where Harnett might have gone early this morning? Teresa said he got a call and left their house a couple hours ago.”

“You're thinking what?”

“I'm thinking—hell. In about three hours Brenna's going into court to prove that somebody other than Carmen DellaVecchio tried to kill Teresa. If she's good—and Brenna's very good—she'll do more than that. She'll leave so many questions hanging in that courtroom that whoever did it is going to feel the searchlight pass damned close. He's known this was coming for three weeks now. He's already tried to kill Brenna once, thinking he can shut the whole thing down if he can just shut her down. Now he's running out of time, really starting to sweat. Desperate people do desperate things. That's what I'm thinking.”

Christensen closed his eyes. “I need your help,” he said.

It was a reckless appeal, but straight from his heart. Kiger's reaction would say a lot, for better or worse.

“Awright,” the chief said. “I'm not saying there's anything to this theory a yours, understand? But I'll send somebody over. Tell me where she's supposed to be.”