Straw Men (13 page)

Perriman's first-floor study light was still on, a good sign. Christensen needed to talk to his longtime mentor, and it couldn't wait. The kids already were asleep at home by the time Teresa Harnett left his office, so he found himself cruising Squirrel Hill after their latest private session, thinking, doubting, gravitating as he often did to this house, this man.

He felt for the cold iron railing and started up the steps, remembering the many times he'd made the same trip years ago as a graduate student under Perriman's direction. The rule then was the same as now: If the study light was on, Perriman was up and available. If not, go away. Following that rule, Christensen had come calling as late as midnight without rebuke.

He was breathing hard as he mounted the last set of stairs and stepped onto the wooden porch. How spent would he be if he didn't run three times a week? The doorbell echoed in the cavernous house, and Christensen peeked through the chintz curtains, a sad reminder of Perriman's effervescent late wife, Pearl. Since her death a decade ago, Perriman had become stooped by age and the weight of his loneliness. Still, he was a brilliant man. Perriman's lifelong study of the human mind was never swayed by academic fashion or a philosophical agenda; common sense was never sacrificed to ego or the unreasonable demands of grant committees. What Christensen needed after his most recent sessions with Teresa Harnett was a reliable sounding board who would keep their conversation strictly private.

Perriman moved slowly toward the front door, a ghostly figure in a cardigan sweater squinting through his bifocals into the darkness outside. They talked often by phone, but it had been at least a year since Christensen saw him. He seemed smaller, more brittle. When Perriman reached for the switch for the porch light, his bony hand shook. But he recognized Christensen immediately.

“I'll be damned,” he said, tugging open the door. “Just like old times.”

Christensen reached across the threshold to shake his hand, startled by the coolness of the old man's touch. His circulation wasn't good. “I used to climb these steps a lot, Chaytor, but I was younger then,” he said. “How the hell do you get up and down them?”

Perriman stepped aside and pulled Christensen in. The place was overheated, maybe eighty degrees, and smelled to Christensen the same as his grandmother's house did when he used to visit as a child.

“I don't go out much,” Perriman said, “and I take the Checker when I do.” He paused as if thinking hard. “I honestly can't remember the last time I walked up.”

Perriman's phrasing gave Christensen pause. He'd spent too much time around Alzheimer's patients to ignore it. He shrugged out of his coat and laid it on a bench in the front hall. The old man's devotion to his lumbering Checker Marathon, a converted taxi, was among Christensen's fondest memories of Perriman. It was the world's ugliest car, the kind of car that looked unnatural in anything but yellow. Perriman had had his painted black when he bought it, but it was a discount job that over the years faded to the color of an eggplant.

“The Beast is still running?” he asked.

Perriman straightened up. “Two hundred thirty thousand miles and change, thank you very much. She'll outlive me.”

Still sharp,
Christensen thought. Still, he felt a sudden sadness. Perriman's car probably would outlive him.

He followed the old man into his study, where he'd apparently been working at his battered Royal typewriter. The academic journals that published his papers had nagged him for years to get a computer, or at least send his articles to a transcription service that could convert them into a computer-readable form. Perriman enjoyed tweaking the editors. “A Luddite's last stand,” he called it.

The room hadn't changed in more than twenty years, from what Christensen could tell. It was the classic lair of a lifelong academic, a dusty, musty repository of knowledge and accumulated wisdom. Perriman never allowed his cleaning lady past the door.

“So, here you are,” Perriman said, nonchalantly checking the wall clock. Was it really a quarter past eleven?

“Oh, geez, I knew it was late, but … I'm sorry, Chaytor. The session I had tonight went longer than I thought.”

“The light was on, Jim. It's fine.”

Christensen nodded his thanks. “I've got a situation. I need to kick some things around, just to make sure I'm not off base. I need somebody's viewpoint other than my own, and there's really no one I can talk to about this. You've always been my Yoda.”

Blank stare.

“My teacher,” Christensen said. “But this one's touchy. Has to stay between us.”

The clock read eleven-forty by the time Christensen finished his update. Perriman had followed the DellaVecchio case, and they'd conferred years ago when Christensen first questioned the apparent changes in Teresa Harnett's memories after the attack. Perriman had been the one who encouraged Christensen to focus his research on the evolution of post-traumatic memory, and he listened with apparent pride as his student told him about Teresa's gradual recovery of contradictory memories.

“Feels good to be right, doesn't it?”

Christensen allowed himself a smile. “It's a little more complicated than that.”

He explained about DellaVecchio's release and Burke Padgett's dark warning about his unpredictability; about the phone calls to Brenna and Teresa and the sniper's shot at Brenna. “All within the last two-and-a-half weeks,” Christensen said. “You can guess what happened next.”

“She started remembering.”

“Chaytor, it's like she was a pot of hot water on a stove, and somebody suddenly turned up the gas. Everything started to boil. It's happening fast, out of control. It's scary. Then tonight—”

“Typical, in a way,” Perriman said. “It's been eight years. What she described to you as ‘erased' memories may not have been damage at all. Maybe it was just easier not to remember than to remember, and now all this is forcing the issue.”

Christensen shook his head. “I don't think it's repression. More like regeneration. The memories were in there, but the retrieval circuits weren't working. Like Alzheimer's, but trauma-induced. Now, for whatever reason, those circuits are reconnecting.”

“Because of these fresh traumas.”

“Maybe.”

Perriman nodded. “Interesting.”

The night before, Christensen said, Teresa had been scared by the latest call, terrified by what the caller seemed to know about her.

“Then tonight, anger. The pot boiled over,” he said. “She was just plain pissed. Three hours she talked. Things just poured from her. Questions. Suspicions. Accusations. This is an angry woman who wants answers I'm not sure she'll ever get.”

Perriman leaned back in his ancient leather chair. Its springs creaked, the only sound in the room except for the ticking wooden wall clock.

Perriman laced his fingers across his chest. “What questions?”

“She's questioning everything now. The voice she hears that's not DellaVecchio's. How this caller knew about her pubic hair. The way the cops say it happened. How the guy got into her house that night. So much of what she remembers came from her husband, the personal memories. Now she's wondering why things don't add up, wondering about him.”

Perriman drummed his fingers. “What's he like?”

“They'd split before it happened. For reasons I'm still not sure I understand, he came back,” Christensen said. “And he really did help her rebuild her past, replaced the missing things from her childhood, college, their marriage.”

“The tragedy brought them together again?”

“Apparently. There's a strong bond there. He gave her back something she'd lost, and she appreciates that. But there's a cop inside her, too.”

“The cop wants answers.”

“Exactly. Like the DellaVecchio ID. She knows something was wrong there. Hell, Chaytor, she knew DellaVecchio's name as soon as the investigators showed her his picture. Said it right out, as a matter of fact. How? She wants to know.”

“She doesn't remember?”

Christensen shook his head. “She remembers the mug shot ID process vividly. They showed her hundreds of faces, but as soon as they gave her the six-pack of shots with DellaVecchio's face in it, she blurted his name. Doesn't know how she knew the name, but she did. And the investigators never asked her to explain it. Eight years go by, and now the cop in her wants to know why nobody questioned that. That should have been a red flag to the cops on the case. How would she know his name? Was there some sort of prior relationship there they should know about? But nobody ever asked.”

“You think it was planted?”

“Like a seed, Chaytor. Set aside the question of why. Here was a woman with great gaps in her memory, and she was relying on people like her husband to fill those gaps. At the same time, the police were developing a case against DellaVecchio. You can bet her husband was aware of that. He wasn't directly in the loop, but his best friend oversaw the investigation. I'm sure they talked.”

“So you think her husband helped skew her memories?”

“If he was convinced DellaVecchio was the guy, why wouldn't he try to goose her a little? He knows she'd be no help whatsoever during the prosecution if she couldn't remember anything from that night. So as long as he was rebuilding her memory, why not prime her so Carmen DellaVecchio's name and face were a top-of-the-mind thing for her when trial time came? These are all cops, remember? Cops with a personal grudge and what looks like a solid suspect. Can't you see it working that way? Can't you imagine them trying to push Teresa just a little so the case would gel?”

Perriman closed his eyes. He stayed that way so long Christensen wondered if maybe he'd fallen asleep. Finally, he nodded his head and said, “Layering.”

“Meaning?”

“It wouldn't have to be overt. And it wouldn't have to be all at once. Maybe she had some memory of the attack, and all they did was reinforce the memories they needed, or undercut the ones that didn't fit their theory. Was there any memory of the attack?”

“Nothing significant. Not until the last couple weeks. What are you thinking?”

“Let's assume she remembered nothing,” Perriman said. “Maybe her story, what became her story, was created in layers, like a painting. What if whoever, for whatever reason, started with a base coat? A description of the kitchen, maybe. Later, maybe he tells her that's where she got hurt. Suddenly she's got an image to build on, and her mind goes to work. Now she can see herself in that place, even if she doesn't know what happened there. She's in the hospital. She's in pain. Obviously, something bad happened there. Then maybe her husband tells her what it was. And that's where it really starts.”

“Because he's telling her the version the police have recreated, the one with DellaVecchio already singled out.”

“But at that point she's got an attacker with no face. So she starts trying to fill in those details. She wants to. She needs to. Memory abhors a vacuum, and her mind won't let it alone.”

“The cops already have some details,” Christensen said. “The bloody shoe print. The letter she'd received. Suddenly her attacker is a guy who wears those kind of sneakers, the kind of guy who'd stalk a woman. She's getting an image.”

“DellaVecchio, if I recall, had a record.”

Christensen clapped his hands together, startling the old man. “The lineup!” he said. “Brenna got the transcript of the police lineup process. Soon as DellaVecchio walked in, one of the cops said, ‘Guy's got a record a mile long.' It's right there in black and white. So it's reinforced at that point, too.”

Christensen stood up and put his hand to his forehead. “And the TV coverage! Another visual cue. Remember, the cops released DellaVecchio's mug shot a few weeks after it happened. They never said he was a suspect, just that they wanted to question him about the case. They do that to get the name and face out there, trying to flush out people who might know something. But God, if she'd even watched the news once—”

“His face leaves a strong impression,” Perriman said. “And in that context, what else could he be but a criminal? So now she's got a face. With a police record. That's what I mean by layering. The layers build, one on top of the other—”

“Until she gets to court,” Christensen said.

“And by then, she's filled in all the details. The painting is finished.”

Christensen recalled the precision of Teresa's testimony, the riveting detail, her unshakable confidence when she leveled that accusing finger at DellaVecchio.

“Now,” Christensen said, sitting again, “why?”

Perriman shrugged. “To make the case. Why else would they massage her like that?”

“I could believe that. Cops aren't shy about messing with evidence, physical evidence, some of them anyway. Why not tinker with a victim's memories? Teresa was an empty canvas.”

“The pressure was intense,” Perriman said. “That attack was so brutal, people wanted a fast arrest.” The old man lifted one wavering hand and gestured across his desk. “Now, let me ask you something: Do you think you know everything the police had?”

Christensen stood up again. “I don't follow.”

“I'm no lawyer, thank God almighty. Certainly not a detective. But I wonder if maybe there was evidence that never made it to court? Something damning about DellaVecchio, but something inadmissible? Looks to me like these people were sure of who they were after, sure enough that they may have bent the rules a bit to get him off the street. What made them so sure?”

Christensen considered the question for a long time, punctuating the process by saying, “Brenna might know.”

Perriman looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Can I ask you something else, Jim?” He waited for Christensen's nod. “How deeply do you trust this woman?”