Straw Men (15 page)

The last time Christensen met Kiger on this turf, the circumstances were far from ideal. He had been detained for questioning just hours after the violent climax of the Primenyl investigation, in which he'd helped untangle the memories of a killer's twenty-two-year-old son. That time he'd been brought in the building's back entrance with the killer's blood still on his shoes, and Kiger had wanted answers. Fast.

This time, Christensen wandered into the lobby of the building like a lost freshman. “The chief's office is on seven, right?” he asked the sergeant at the front desk.

She looked him over. “Name?”

“Christensen,” he said. “I called about two hours ago. I think he's expec—”

The sergeant tossed a visitor's badge onto the counter. “Sign the book.”

Christensen signed the visitor's register, then opened his leather jacket and clipped the badge to his shirt pocket. “Top floor?”

The sergeant nodded and gestured to an elevator door to the left.

Christensen couldn't resist. “Nice talking to you,” he said as he stepped to the elevator doors and pushed the up arrow.

Kiger's secretary showed him down a narrow hall and into a conference room that overlooked Station Square to the right and the Liberty Bridge to the left. Across the Mon, the city's South Side stretched along the frigid river, bracing for a lively Saturday night. In the distance, beyond a thriving row of precious restaurants and micro-breweries and too-hip galleries, the dome of one of the city's dozen or so Eastern European churches rose like an upside-down onion. It lent an Old World touch to Pittsburgh's emerging new reality, a relic of the past adding dimension to the present.

Christensen sat in one of the conference room's metal-frame chairs and studied the walls. This was not some ceremonial reception area for the chief's visitors. This was a tactical operations room in Kiger's much-publicized war on drugs. Directly across from him hung a city map labeled “Locations with 10 or more drug calls, May–April, Hill District area.” Each troublesome address was marked with a red pushpin. To his left, another city map was labeled “Pittsburgh Weed and Seed,” the catchy name for a controversial program that increased penalties for drug violations in designated areas of the city. At the far end of the room hung a faded poster of former Steelers linebacker Greg Lloyd in full pads. Its caption read: “I would never go to work without my equipment, and neither should you. Save your life. Wear your ballistic vest today.”

Christensen wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. Was the room hot, or was it him? He waved his hand over the register, relieved to find it blasting hot air into the already stifling room. He turned around and twisted the aluminum handle on one of the windows and pushed it open. When he turned back, Kiger was standing directly across the conference table.

The chief had the look of a man who liked to startle. “Too hot for y'all?” he said.

Christensen tried to hide his surprise. “You don't see a lot of saunas with a conference table this size,” he said.

Kiger reached across the table and they shook hands. The chief sat down in another of the room's dozen institutional chairs, rolled his white shirtsleeves above his leg-of-lamb forearms and leaned on the table's fake-wood top. “Never have got used to this winter weather. It'll cool down in a sec with the window open.”

Christensen sat down. “I know this was short notice, so I appreciate you seeing me. You work every Saturday?”

“Most. So, you got something we need to know about?”

So much for chit-chat. “I'm not sure. Teresa and I are still talking. We talked this morning, actually. I have some questions.”

“For me?”

“About a case that ended up with internal affairs, apparently.” Christensen waited for a reaction. He got nothing but a blank stare. “Happened about eight years ago,” he added. “Involved Teresa's husband.”

Still nothing. Finally, the chief leaned forward. “Shoot,” he said.

“I mentioned it before, the case involving a drug dealer named Tidwell, Vulcan Tidwell. I guess he's dead now, but he was apparently involved in something back then that triggered some sort of internal review or an investigation or something. And David Harnett may have been involved somehow. Do you remember the case?”

Kiger ignored the question. “Where y'all going with this, Dr. Christensen?”

Christensen ignored Kiger's question. “So do you know what I'm talking about or not?”

The two men stared across the table. The issue was trust, and they both knew it.

“Fine,” Christensen said. “We can dance around this and play these cat-and-mouse games, or we can just be honest. That's what you promised when we started this thing. I'll start.”

He paused for effect.

“Teresa's struggling. And she's struggling with things I didn't expect to be dealing with, things that on the surface don't have anything to do with what happened the night she was attacked. She's focusing on stuff that happened in the weeks before, and in the weeks after, and on the role her husband played in helping her remember.”

“She's still poking holes in the story she's been telling about DellaVecchio?”

“DellaVecchio's been a non-issue so far.”

Kiger waited. The man was a sphinx, his face offering no clue about his thoughts.

“All right, let's try this another way,” Christensen said. “Tell me how this internal affairs division works. Generally. I know it's cops who investigate allegations against officers in the department, but beyond that I'm not sure.”

“Awright. Fire away.”

“How does an IAD investigation start?”

Kiger smiled. “Somebody usually gets pissed off. ‘Officer so-and-so called me a faggot,' or ‘Officer such-and-such threw me in the back of his car and I broke a fingernail.' Mostly that kinda boo-hoo crap. But we try to follow up.”

“You don't put much stock in it?”

The chief shrugged. “It's mostly the police-brutality crowd. But when there's something to it, it's not just whining, then IAD ends up with it.”

“For a full investigation?”

“IAD does fact-finding. Investigators talk to witnesses, track down everything they can. Then they talk to whoever was naughty, get his or her side of things. Then they write up a report and send it to me.”

“And you decide if there's anything to it and discipline the officer?”

Kiger nodded. “If I have to, but just in administrative cases. The little stuff. It's a criminal case, we got a special-operations squad that kicks in to do the investigatin'. They go after it like any other criminal case—surveillance, wires, whatever. They find something, it goes right to the D.A., just like anybody else.”

Christensen drummed his fingers on the table. “And you're comfortable having cops investigating other cops?”

Kiger's smile was patient, but his searing eyes made clear he understood Christensen's implication. “We tried havin' the dogcatcher do the investigatin', but he just didn't get it,” he said. “You got a better idea?”

“Seems like a conflict, that's all.”

“That's why we bust hump to make sure it's fair, sir, so nobody comes back with any conspiracy crap,” Kiger said. “Way I set it up, IAD's a plum job for any officer wants to get ahead. Anybody wants a promotion has to put in two years with IAD, see what it's like on that side of things. Going in they know the deal: They cook facts to save a bad cop, it's
their
ass out the door.”

Kiger jabbed a finger into the tabletop, punctuating the thought. “The system works. Ain't perfect, but it works.”

Christensen saw no need to belabor the point. And yet, they were back where they'd started. The trust issue. He needed specifics.

“And you won't talk about any one case?” Christensen asked. “Because unless you do, I can't know whether these memories of Teresa's are relevant or not. But I'll be honest with you, I suspect they are. Ever since we started, she's been coming back to the same things: David. Their marriage. The tension in their lives just before all this happened. There's got to be a reason.”

Kiger stood suddenly and closed the conference room door, then eased himself back into the chair. He folded his hands in front of him.

“That investigation's unresolved,” he said. “I'll tell you what I can, though. So ask.”

“Thank you,” Christensen said. “Can you start with the background? How did it begin?”

“Started with Tidwell.”

“Broken fingernail?”

Kiger shook his head. “ 'Bout six months before he started talking to us, we'd popped him for dealing. Street stuff, crack, meth. He was midlevel, but he knew some of the big boys. They knew him, too. He's one of those guys we coulda nailed for a whole lot more, but we decided to work him a little, see what happened.”

“Work him?”

“See if he'd flip for us, lead us to some of the folks higher up the food chain. We had a lot of ways to go with him. Coulda made it real hard on him, or real easy, depending on how we wanted to go, how cooperative he wanted to be. He didn't help us, he was looking at some serious time.”

“And if he did?”

The police chief winked. “We'da worked something out. Wouldna walked, but he'da walked a lot sooner. But he knew he was facing worse than Western Pen if he snitched out the people he was dealing with. They'd have made him pay big time. So he came up with something else.”

“I don't follow.”

Kiger's face turned serious. “Sumbitch floated something from out in left field, something bigger'n any of us expected.”

Christensen sat forward, leaning across the table. Kiger leaned forward too, close enough that Christensen could smell the sour coffee on his hot breath.

“Something you gotta understand about these people,” Kiger said, dropping the volume of his voice. “They're cons, every one of 'em. Truth's something they'll tell when they run out of lies, but ain't ever seen one run outta lies yet. Blow smoke like goddamn Bessemers, most of 'em. Most of what they'll tell you is like tits on a bull, useless.”

Christensen nodded. “But?”

Kiger looked around the room. “ 'Tween us. You clear on that?”

“Crystal.”

The look that crossed Kiger's face then was an odd mix of emotions. If Christensen read it right, he saw heavy doses of sadness and embarrassment.

“Drugs are pretty serious with me,” Kiger said. “Lost a daughter to heroin, my oldest, twelve years ago this month. So it's a priority, understand?”

Christensen nodded.

“So here comes this Tidwell sayin' he knows about a protection racket being run out of the East Liberty station. Says some of my own cops are involved, says it's been goin' on for years.” Kiger looked away in disgust. “That's something I'm gonna take real serious.”

“And you don't think he was just blowing smoke?”

Kiger weighed his words. “Let's say he had enough information to make it credible. Credible enough for IAD to look into it.”

“This special-operations unit you mentioned? Was it involved?”

Kiger nodded. “Never came up with enough for the D.A. to file, but there was sure enough to keep us asking questions.”

Christensen felt a prickle of anticipation. They were moving toward the crux.

“Tidwell gave names?” he asked.

Kiger studied him. “You can assume that.”

“David Harnett's?”

“He gave several,” the police chief said.

“And how long after that did Tidwell end up dead?”

Kiger closed his eyes. “Coupla months, if memory serves.”

Christensen leaned back. What at first seemed like an irrelevant back-alley dope deal gone bad was revealing itself in rancid layers, with Tidwell's convenient death at its core.

“You think Tidwell was murdered?” Christensen blurted.

Kiger shrugged. “Can't say. Happened on New Year's Eve. Strange things happen on New Year's Eve. Had no witnesses. What we did have was a crime scene with a lot of discrepancies. Trajectories, distance, the way the two bodies were lying. Not everything added up, but that ain't much to go on. So we just don't know.”

“But I'll bet the IAD investigation ended when Tidwell died, right?”

Kiger shook his head, then checked his watch. “Just got a little more complicated. We had him on videotape. We had a bunch more questions for him we never got to ask, but we at least had the videotape. The rest was up to IAD to flush out.”

The chief stood up. “I'm gonna have to get to a meetin'. Anything else?”

Christensen sifted the new information. So that was the pressure that helped tear the Harnetts' marriage apart. Teresa said her husband had been called twice to answer questions before the internal affairs panel. Even if he wasn't one of the corrupt cops that Tidwell named, the panel could have been asking him about fellow officers, pressuring him to break the police code by telling what he knew.

“Tell me something. Was that IAD investigation still open when Teresa was attacked a few months after Tidwell died?”

“Yep,” Kiger said, moving toward the door. “But it was going nowhere fast. When that happens, we mark it unresolved in the file and wait to see if anything changes. Truth is, some of the people we probably needed to pull it together turned up dead.” Kiger raised one eyebrow. “Or as good as dead.”

Christensen thought immediately of Teresa, not dead, but someone who by any measure should have been: a woman whose body lived on, but with her past shredded and pocked by gaping holes. As good as dead.

A few minutes later, Christensen was riding the elevator back down with that phrase and one question echoing above everything else: Were Teresa's most significant memories—the memories that might make sense of all this—lost in those holes?