Straw Men (22 page)

If David Harnett wasn't dead, he was dying. A ghastly hole punctuated the brow just above his right eye. Christensen moved toward Brenna, who lay dead-still in the mud. He stripped off his jacket and laid it beside her. He found the ragged edge of the duct tape that bound her wrists and began to unwind it. When he was done, he cupped one hand under her neck, rolled her onto her back, and laid her head on the jacket. She blinked as he gently peeled the tape from her mouth.

“Hang on, Bren.”

She blinked again, opened her mouth and forced a breath. “H—”

“Easy.”

“Hurt,” she managed.

“I know.”

“Dizzy.”

“Relax, OK? We'll get you fixed up.”

An electronic crackle. Milsevic lifted a small handheld radio to his mouth and spoke an incomprehensible stream of police radio code. The dispatcher answered back with a question. “Captain Milsevic?”

Milsevic dug the gum from his mouth and tossed it away. It landed near the front tire of Brenna's car.

“Affirmative. I was on my way in when I heard the radio call. Listen, we've got an officer down, plus one head trauma. Panther Hollow. Roll some medics for the head trauma. There's a maintenance road runs behind Phipps. My unit's parked up top, near the equipment yard, but tell them they can drive all the way down.”

“The Bottoms?” she asked.

“I'll meet them there. And tell Walsh to roll someone too.”

“That's one rescue and one coroner's unit?”

“Affirmative.” Milsevic looked up, fixing Christensen with a stare he couldn't quite decipher. “And notify homicide. It's an officer-involved.”

The two men's eyes locked during the long pause, until the dispatcher broke in.

“Need a clarification. Previous, you said ‘officer down.' ”

“Affirmative. Officer down
and
officer-involved. I'm the shooter. I want this by the book.”

Brenna moved, then gasped. A tear rolled from one eye, mixing with the blood and mud and damp strands of hair crisscrossing her face.

“Stay still, baby,” Christensen said. “We'll get you out of here.”

When he looked up, Milsevic was standing again. He'd moved away from Harnett's body and turned his back. His shoulders sagged, reminding Christensen that Milsevic and Harnett had been close friends. Christensen fought the impulse to speak, to comfort, because Milsevic was no doubt walking an emotional tightrope. There were a lot of things Christensen could say, and most of them would be wrong.

“You saved my life,” he said after a while. “Our lives.”

Milsevic just stared into the trees. He pulled up his anorak and tucked the gun into a holster belted into the small of his back. Finally he turned around, and Christensen saw the face of a man struggling for control.

“Thank you,” Christensen said. “If you hadn't shown up when you did…”

Milsevic waved the words away and nodded toward Brenna. “How's she doing?”

“Maybe in shock. How long before somebody gets here?”

“Not long.” He nodded toward the car. “She keep any old blankets or anything in the trunk? Something we could use to keep her warm?”

Brenna's car keys were still in the trunk lock, so Christensen reached up and turned them. The rear deck popped open, but nothing useful was inside. He noticed a damp kidney-shaped stain on the charcoal-colored carpet. She must have been bleeding before Harnett put her into the trunk.

“She was right,” Milsevic said, standing over Brenna now. He looked down at Harnett's body. “He played us all for suckers.”

“When did you know?”

Milsevic cleared his throat. “Been watching him since the hearing three weeks ago. Figured whoever did it would start to panic at that point. There was something about the way he reacted made me wonder. I knew he was up to something.”

Christensen studied him. “That night at our house, after the shooting. You sounded like you were already looking into—”

Milsevic nodded.

“But—” Christensen looked for the least hostile way to ask an obvious question. “Aren't you the one who covered for him the night Teresa was attacked?”

Milsevic nodded again. “Like I said, he suckered us all. I'm guessing he arranged a contract hit, set up DellaVecchio, and made sure he was with me when it happened.” He pointed toward Brenna. “We knew from her DNA results someone else was involved.”

“But it was a big leap to get to Harnett. When did you know?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

The police captain turned and pointed at Harnett's feet. “See those?”
Milsevic asked.

One of Harnett's sneakers had come off when he fell and lay on its side near his knee. The other shoe encased a foot that stood perfectly straight on its heel. The tread was worn deeply on one side, but was almost new on the other.

“The shoes?”

Milsevic nodded. “See how small they are? The wear pattern? DellaVecchio's shoes were missing from the jail's property room the day they released him. They sent him home in prison slippers, remember?”

“Harnett took his shoes?”

“To leave tracks. Same as he did with Teresa. He was setting DellaVecchio up again, just like last time.”

Christensen wasn't following the logic. How had he known it was Harnett? Milsevic noticed his confusion.

“We still have DellaVecchio's shoes from back then,” Milsevic said. “And you know what? In all those years, nobody ever dusted them for prints. So I dug them out of the evidence room yesterday afternoon.” He stood up and nudged Harnett's ghostly white hand with his toe. “For whatever reason, he didn't wear gloves when he handled them. He got cocky. Who the hell would ever dust DellaVecchio's shoes for fingerprints? But that's when I knew. David's prints were all over them.”

Milsevic looked down at the crumpled Harnett. He suddenly drew back his right leg as if he were going to cave in Harnett's ribs with a crushing kick of his hiking boots. His foot stopped inches short, and he raised both fists in the air, a gesture of seething frustration. “
Bastard!
”
he screamed, and the word resounded through the trees.

Christensen heard the thudding approach of a helicopter. He squinted through the branches and saw it above them, holding its position, adding a low bass beat to the scene. Milsevic looked up at the familiar logo on the helicopter's door, then looked down at the radio in his hand as if it had betrayed him.

“Channel fucking 2,” he said.

Christensen looked down at Brenna, who'd finally closed her eyes. Her breathing was steady.

When Milsevic turned again to Harnett's body, the rage was gone. “So many things I should have seen back then, so many things we didn't pursue, all the questions we never asked because it was so much easier to believe what Teresa was telling us. She was
telling
us it was DellaVecchio, for Chrissakes.”

Christensen felt a strange mix of loathing and vindication. He pointed at Harnett. “Because that's what
he
was telling
her.
Don't you see? Teresa wanted so badly to remember. At that point, her memory was like a Petri dish. Once you contaminate it, all kinds of things grow.”

In the near distance, the sound of wheels on wet dirt. Both men looked up and saw a white paramedic van moving through the trees along the service road. Behind it, a Pittsburgh PD black-and-white. Behind that, news vans from Channels 2 and 11. The police captain swore again, then bolted toward the road, waving his arms. “Back here!” he called. To the lone officer in the patrol car, Milsevic barked: “Secure the goddamned perimeter, now.” Then, loud enough for the TV crews to hear: “Those sons of bitches set one foot out of their vans, shoot 'em. This is a crime scene.”

Uneasy, Christensen stroked Brenna's hair. She opened her eyes just enough to see his face. “You're doing great,” he said, bending down to kiss her forehead. When he sat up, her eyes were closed again and she suddenly went rigid. He felt an icy panic.

“Bren,” he said, shaking her lightly. “Baby, you won.”

That's when she smiled.

He couldn't vouch for Sashay's abilities, but he admired her savvy. What mortal soul entering these gates wouldn't think twice about stopping? Survivors. Mourners. People looking for answers. Anyone entering a cemetery was more aware than most of the quick-ticking Big Clock that had claimed someone they knew, that someday would claim them all. Even Christensen tapped the brakes, wondering whether Sashay was open, but he steered up the hill, dodging potholes full of murky water.

He'd come to bury David Harnett. Why? The simple answer was that Teresa had asked him to come. She'd excused him from the funeral mass, where she knew he'd have to face the inevitable flock of news reporters fixated by Harnett's sensational death and Christensen's role in bringing his evil to light. But the burial was private, she'd said, invitation only. Come. Please.

“A small funeral? For a cop?” he'd said. “That's an oxymoron.”

“Not this time,” she'd replied.

Still, being here meant leaving the kids for two hours at the hospital with Brenna, whose eyes were still black from Harnett's pistol-whipping. It meant reliving Panther Hollow for the ten-thousandth time, wondering again how different things might have been if Milsevic hadn't arrived when he did. It meant dignifying the life of a man apparently without conscience, and trying hard not to smile as they buried the son-of-a-bitch forever.

But Christensen came. For Teresa.

He steered the Explorer around a sweeping right curve. The headstones were getting bigger the higher he climbed. In death as in life, the high-end real estate apparently went to the people whose egos matched their money. The road forked just ahead, and Christensen squinted at an indistinct figure in a yellow rain slicker standing at the Y, a cemetery security guard. The man waved him to the left, and Christensen splashed on, across the hill and then down into a valley. The headstones got smaller. Still no sign of life. He wondered how many of Pittsburgh's finest would turn out to mourn a man who had shamed them all.

The answer lay just ahead: Not many.

A dozen scattered cars were parked along the rutted road. Nearby, about twenty people stood beneath a canopy of black umbrellas, waiting in the rain as a funeral director and six saturated pallbearers lifted a gunmetal-gray coffin from the back of a hearse. One he recognized—Brian Milsevic. The rest were taller, but none of them looked like cops. Family maybe?
They had to be here,
Christensen thought. But clearly, anyone who didn't have to probably wasn't.

He parked well away from the group and pulled pliable waterproof boots over his loafers. After opening the door, he shot his retractable umbrella into the gap between the door frame and the car, then stepped out. All heads turned, and he nodded to the familiar faces—Milsevic, Teresa, Chief Kiger. It was a long walk across the slick grass, and Christensen stopped well short of the others. He stood apart, because that's where he felt most comfortable.

No one spoke as the six men set the casket on the lowering straps across the open grave. The funeral director, a thuggish man in a black London Fog, stepped forward and placed a small spray of mixed flowers atop the casket—the only color besides black, white, or gray that Christensen could see anywhere. The funeral director fussed with the blooms, a miscast rhinoceros.

When he was done, all eyes shifted to a young priest standing on the other side of the grave. His black hair was pasted to his broad Slavic forehead, and he blinked raindrops from his long eyelashes as he kissed a purple silk stole. He draped it around his neck and tucked it inside his topcoat. Then he opened his own black umbrella.

“My apologies for this weather,” he said. “My influence is obviously limited.”

Everyone smiled, but no one laughed.

“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “We're here to return our brother, David, to God our Father in Heaven. And as I said at Mass, we do so reassured that whatever good David did in this life will be measured against the bad, and that the Lord understands that the true nature of a man is found in the balance of those two things.”

The priest shifted his umbrella's position to shield his prayer book from the downpour. Christensen scanned the gathered faces and found all eyes fixed on the young cleric. No one was looking at one another. No one was looking at Harnett's casket, either.

“God is capable of astounding acts of forgiveness, and it's important to remind ourselves on this dark day that it is His judgment, not ours, that matters in the end. In that we can also find some reassurance.”

The priest opened the black leather book and recited a prayer. Christensen looked at Teresa, who stood ramrod straight beside Kiger. She was slightly taller than the chief, but she had a tight grip on his arm. If her emotions were mixed, it didn't show. Her eyes were clear, her shoulders squared, her head held high. Kiger was as unreadable as ever, though Christensen was pleased by his show of support for Teresa.

The priest closed his prayer book. He picked up one side of the purple stole and held it out for everyone to see.

“In the United States, this great land of individualists, we priests are given a certain latitude in our style of dress. Within reason, of course.” More weak smiles. “I chose a violet stole today, and there's a reason. Violet is a penance color, and I'd like to talk a little about penance.”

An elderly man coughed, a rasping hack from somewhere in the assembly of Harnett's relatives. Not one of them looked comfortable. The priest looked at Teresa.

“I know that for many of the people here today, the pain David Harnett caused, physical and mental, will continue for many years to come. But it's important for us to remember that none of us are without sin. And whatever our brother David may have done in the past, or even in the weeks before he died, has to be weighed against how he lived his life the past few years. Whatever else he was, we know he was also a devoted caregiver who helped bring his wife back from injuries for which we now believe he was responsible. To her immense credit, Teresa even now will not deny the impact David's love and support had on her recovery.”

The priest swept his arm across the people gathered at Harnett's grave. “In his efforts to help Teresa heal, David showed us all a moral side of himself. Maybe he did it out of love, or maybe as penance for what he'd done. I can't say why, and it's not my place to judge. But I know this: To truly repent, a sinner needs to fall on his knees before the Father himself, to plead for mercy, to accept as his own the pain that he has caused. That is penance. That is the way of forgiveness. That—” He paused. “—is the
only
way. At this difficult time, in these difficult circumstances, we hope David has the courage to take that step, and we hope God will find room in His kingdom for this imperfect man.”

The priest scanned the eyes of the gathered.

“Now, let us pray.”

As the priest riffled the pages of his book, everyone except Teresa shuffled their feet. Christensen felt the tension ease as the priest launched into a short series of traditional prayers for the dead. When he was done, the priest reached into a silver bucket at his feet and pulled out what looked like a dripping microphone. He sprinkled the casket with holy water, muttered another quick prayer, and signaled the end of the graveside ceremony by sketching a cross in the damp air above the grave.

No one moved.

“Please go in peace,” he added.

Behind them, the funeral director opened the rear passenger door of a black limousine. Teresa passed once among the gathered guests, hugging most, and then moved toward the car, the chief offering his sturdy arm to keep her from slipping on the grass. She stopped halfway and whispered something in Kiger's ear. The chief extended his hand and Teresa shook it, then offered him a hug—a gesture that seemed to fluster Kiger. He moved on down the slope to his own car, leaving his black umbrella with Teresa.

The knot of people around the grave began to loosen. The only people not moving toward the cars were the young priest and Milsevic, who were talking quietly in the rain at the grave's edge. Or rather, the priest was talking. Milsevic was watching Teresa move across the lawn toward Christensen.

“Thank you,” Teresa said, reaching for Christensen's hand.

“I wanted to be here,” he said. “For you.”

She smiled. “You have been so far.”

Her gratitude washed over him like absolution. He nodded toward the priest. “What he said about David's moral side. Did you ask him to say that?”

Teresa nodded. “But I can't forgive him. Not after everything.” Her mouth began to tremble, and for the first time since he arrived Christensen saw sadness flicker across her face.

“Shit,” she said, dabbing a tear from the corner of one eye. The umbrella hadn't spared her completely from the steady downpour, and in places her heavy makeup had run.

“It's OK. You're allowed to cry.” Christensen looked again at the priest, who now stood alone. Milsevic was coming to join them. Christensen saw a sudden discomfort in Teresa's eyes, but by the time the police captain reached them she offered him a hug.

“Brian, thank you for coming,” she said.

“The chief and I wanted to be here,” Milsevic said. “David did a lot of good during his years with the department. We wanted to honor that.”

“Thank you,” Teresa said.

An uncomfortable silence settled over the three of them. The funeral director, still holding open the limo door, cleared his throat.

“Somebody wants to get out of the rain,” Milsevic said.

“Guess so,” Teresa said.

Another long pause. No one moved.

“I'd better get back, too,” Milsevic said. He turned to Christensen, thrust out his hand and said, “Jim.”

Christensen fumbled for something to say. “Thank you again. For Brenna, too. She wanted me to tell you that.”

“How's she doing?”

Christensen shrugged. “Concussions are tricky, but I think she'll be fine. She's trying to run the hospital already, everything from the meds schedule to nursing protocols. They'll be glad to get rid of her.”

“Type A all the way, huh?” Milsevic said.

“Some things never change.”

Milsevic turned away and took a few steps toward his car. Then he stopped and turned back, looking like a man doing penance of his own.

“I want you to know how truly sorry I am about what happened on our end,” he said. “The pressure to ice that case … I just didn't want to sidetrack my investigators, and I kept pushing the DellaVecchio angle. It seemed so solid. I made a bad call, and I'm paying for that now.”

Milsevic now faced a departmental hearing for focusing the original investigation too narrowly. In the newspaper story Christensen had
read about it, Kiger promised an impartial review of Milsevic's conduct and, if warranted, swift discipline.

“Teresa, I—”

“Brian, don't,” she said. “We all—”

“As far as David shaping your testimony, I had no idea. I just knew we needed more than what we had. Something this serious, juries want to hear it from a witness, and they need to hear it loud and clear. They want somebody to point at the guy at the defense table and say, ‘
That's
the bastard that did this.' Anything less—that finger wavers, any hesitation at all—and you've got reasonable doubt. The game's over. Nobody wins. You know how it is.”

“Brian—”

Milsevic nodded toward Harnett's coffin. “Back then, we all wanted to believe what we were hearing, never thinking he was using you the way he did. You were telling us what we wanted to hear, but we should have questioned it. We didn't, and I'm sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Milsevic smiled weakly. He pulled a dose of nicotine gum from his pocket, but didn't open it. He held it in his palm like a talisman. “You need anything, anything at all, you call me first. I mean that.”

“I know, Brian. Thanks.”

“OK, then.” Milsevic looked at them both again. “I'm off. Take care.”

They watched him walk to his dark department-issue Chevy, the car Christensen saw as he raced into Panther Hollow. Teresa waited until Milsevic started the engine and eased away before she looked back at Christensen. She stepped forward, close enough that their umbrellas bumped. The moment struck Christensen as almost intimate. He took a step back.

“Am I missing something here?” he asked.

“Why?”

“That just seemed awkward.”

She studied him. “It was that obvious?”

“Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. I guess nobody's comfortable at a funeral.”

Teresa looked away. She noticed the funeral director still waiting beside the limo's open door. “I'll be a minute,” she said. “Please?” The man bowed and slammed the door, then folded himself into the dry front seat to wait with the driver. Teresa watched him, then spoke without turning back toward Christensen.

“I told you once, early on, about this thing I had with a married man at work. I didn't call it an affair, but I guess that's what it was.”

Christensen understood. “Milsevic,” he said. “David's best friend.”

Teresa cocked her head toward the casket poised for burial. “I was so pissed at David … I initiated it, and I've regretted it ever since.”

“You called it ‘angry and desperate.' I remember that,” he said. “And now it's awkward.”

“What would you call it?”

He smiled. “Awkward.”

Christensen felt a little awkward himself, huddled with Teresa in the gloom on a cemetery hillside. “So, what now?”

She shrugged. “Paperwork. Pension forms. Bank accounts. Life-insurance stuff—
that
should be an interesting battle. And all the accumulated crap. David has file cabinets full of stuff I still have to go through.”

“That can be therapeutic.”