Straw Men (24 page)

“Yours?” he sputtered.

Teresa's face crumpled, and she buried it in her hands. Christensen was numb, waiting for her to look up. This couldn't be happening. He felt as if he'd stumbled into a hall of mirrors.

“I was part of it, this payoff operation,” she sobbed, tucking the badge back into her purse. “I must have been. But I don't remember. Swear to God, Jim, I don't remember.”

Teresa picked up the notebook and held it in her trembling hand. They both stared at the tiny, damning ledger. “I don't … please believe me.”

Suddenly, too many things about Teresa made sense. Christensen's mind reeled with questions, but he struggled to keep his emotions in check. She'd found solid evidence of a two-year scheme to extort cash from a drug dealer, then realized she was one of five police officers who were part of it. The memory lapse was plausible, considering the level of damage to her brain. And extortion he could handle. But the other possibility…

“Teresa, this got way more complicated than just dirty money from a protection racket.”

She nodded.

“From what you're saying, it sounds like murder. Two months after the IAD started asking questions, those cops were ambushed. The same day, Tidwell died in what looks like a setup. The timing of all that … they sound like cover-up killings.”

“I know.”

Christensen turned his desk chair around so that his back was to her. He hoped the move looked contemplative, but in truth he didn't want her to see whatever was registering on his face. Rage? Confusion? She had brought them both to a precipice, and Christensen felt every bit as exposed and vulnerable as Teresa.

“Teresa, what level of involvement … How much do you remember about it?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“About the payoffs? The killings?”

“Nothing. Jim, it's a blank, and I swear to God nothing has ever scared me more. Nothing.”

Christensen turned around. Tears had spilled from Teresa's eyes, adding desperation to her face. She held out the notebook.

“I don't know who I am, Jim. For eight years I was one person. Then I find this, and suddenly I'm not who I thought I was. Who was I? What was I capable of?”

If nothing else, Christensen understood the impact those questions might have on Teresa's fragile psyche. Psychosis was a real possibility for someone whose psychological armor lay in shards at her feet. His response would be critical, and he considered it a long time.

“I don't believe you're capable of murder,” he said, even as he wondered.

Teresa's face transformed. She reached again across the desk, but this time her touch was gentler. She slipped her fingers into his hand, and he held them until the intimacy became awkward. Then Christensen let them go.

“That means a lot to me,” she said, returning her hand to her lap.

Christensen took a deep breath. “What do
you
think you're capable of, Teresa? You must have been thinking about this a lot the last twenty-four hours.”

Teresa brushed the tears from her cheeks. “I haven't slept. Guess you could tell.”

“Tell me what you've thought about,” Christensen said.

She looked away and closed her eyes. “Oh, hell. Maybe. I don't know. I was young, a year out of the academy when I married David.”

“Your mentor, you said.”

Teresa was avoiding his eyes. “When somebody you admire, somebody you fall in love with, tells you how things work, when they say ‘This is the way it is,' you'd probably trust him, or at least I think I would have at the time,” she said. “I've tried to imagine myself back then, knowing what was happening, the temptation … I come from a family of mill hunks. I told you that, right?”

“Clairton works, you said.”

“The crash hit my family pretty hard. By the late eighties, nobody was working. That much I remember, how it affected everything.” She held up the notebook. “This much easy money—”

“And David's approval…”

Teresa nodded. “I could see me going along. Maybe to help out. Maybe just because I was sick of it all, watching everything my father worked for go down. It bothers me now to think I'd do it, but now isn't then.”

Christensen decided not to let her rationalization pass. “That car you drive is barely a year old, Teresa. And it wasn't cheap. You might have taken this money back then, but you're spending it now.”

She turned and met his gaze.

“You had to wonder where it was coming from,” he added.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I know it sounds lame, but David handled all that. That's the truth,” she said. “From the beginning, and especially after the attack, our money was something he took care of. Do I like nice things? Yes. Could we afford them? Honestly, I wouldn't have known.”

A telling answer, Christensen thought. Teresa's subconscious mind was a zealous guardian, protecting her from what she couldn't consciously face. But according to her husband's ledger, she'd been an equal partner. She was having trouble admitting that now, even to herself. For her to do so would destroy, completely and forever, the self-image she'd worked for eight years to rebuild. She was clinging to its remains like a life preserver.

“You had no idea at all about the money?” he said, testing again.

She shook her head. “I trusted David right till the end.”

Christensen nodded slowly. “I understand.”

He looked again at her face, where her tears had crossed the plastic surgeon's faded tracks. In a flash of grotesque logic, Christensen saw the puzzle nearly whole. The time sequence was telling. Teresa was attacked months after the two cops and Tidwell died, and just days before the internal affairs investigators planned to ask her about those things.

“Teresa, are you convinced all this is tied up somehow with the attack on you a few months after those other killings?”

“Yes.”

Christensen leaned forward. “If that's the case, then, I see two possibilities. The first is what we've assumed up to this point: You were about to blow David's alibi for the night Tidwell died. Whether you knew it or not, you were about to unravel the whole thing. Or, two, you knew about everything—the payoffs, the killings, everything—and David or somebody else involved was afraid you'd tell IAD what you knew.”

Teresa seemed excited by his reasoning. “I was really pissed at David at that point,” she said. “You think maybe I was trying to take him down?”

“The two of you had split three weeks before,” Christensen said. “Maybe you wanted to do more than just contradict David's cover story. Maybe you wanted to tell IAD everything, as some sort of payback.”

She jabbed her finger at his desk. “A kamikaze thing? That I
know
I'm capable of. I wanted to hurt David, and I didn't care how. I'd already tried. The thing with—”

Teresa gasped and raised her fist to her mouth, and their eyes locked across the desk. Christensen wondered if she was finally confronting the prospect that had occurred to him three days before, during their brief conversation after David's graveside service. One badge number was left in her husband's long-ago ledger, and Christensen was now sure whose it was. If he was right, it belonged to the man who'd been a central player in a decade-long drama of conspiracy and cover-up, and yet who from the beginning seemed to float above it all. One name fit neatly into too many possibilities.

But if they'd found the final piece to the puzzle, Christensen wanted Teresa to put it in place. The time had come to guide her back to the dark heart of it.

“Teresa,” he said, “tell me about the night you were attacked.”

“We're just going to talk, all right?” he said. “I'm going to walk you through that night, and I want you to go with me. I'm going to ask you a lot of questions about it, and you may think some of those questions are trivial or silly. But what we're going to try to do is create a safe environment for you to remember as much as you can.”

“No, I—”

“It's time, Teresa.” Christensen reached for her hand and pressed it between his. “If any memories of the attack still exist, now's the time to find out. You'll be OK. I promise. This time, you're the one in control.”

“Please.”

“This nightmare you keep having. Where does it start?”

“My kitchen. But—”

“What time of day?”

Teresa sat back, her resistance fading. She closed her eyes. “Dinnertime. I'm cooking.”

“Good. For yourself? Are you having someone over?”

She shook her head. “David was gone, but I was cooking a lot. Trying to deal with everything. Cooking took my mind off things.”

“So you were just cooking to cook, making comfort food?”

“Basically.”

“What do you smell?”

Teresa sniffed the air, retreating further, merging now with that distant scene. “Cinnamon.”

“Good.”

“And tomato sauce. I'm making cabbage rolls.”

“I love those. Now, what do you hear?”

She cocked her head. “Boiling water.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“No.”

“Light outside, or dark?”

“Dark.”

“Kitchen lights on?”

Teresa stood up suddenly and turned around, facing the small window of Christensen's office. “Yes. I'm standing at my sink, stuffing cabbage rolls.”

“What's straight ahead?”

“A window. It looks into my side yard.”

“What else?”

“A door. To my right. It's open, but the screen door's shut. The kitchen was getting warm, so I opened it.”

“And it's dark outside?”

“Yes,” she said. “Well, no. The outside lights are on. They come on automatically at dusk and stay on for a couple of hours.”

“So you'd see someone coming through that yard, or someone coming through the door into your kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“What's behind you?”

Teresa tensed and turned toward Christensen. Behind her eyelids, her eyes began to move, first to one side, then the other, as if searching the room. She backed away and hit the window ledge hard, but never opened her eyes.

“Teresa, what do you see?”

“Nothing. But I feel … something. Like I know there's someone in the house.”

“Was there?”

“I don't know.”

“Could there have been?”

She shook her head. “Not unless they had a key or someone let them in. I was home all day.”

“Who had a key?”

“Just David. And our neighbor, Carol, the one who found me. We always kept each other's keys in case somebody got locked out.”

Christensen crossed the room. He stopped maybe five feet from Teresa, who turned again and faced into the window's shuttered light.

“David had left a couple weeks before,” Christensen said. “Do you think he could have come back?”

“Maybe.” Teresa wrapped her arms around herself, hunching her shoulders as if preparing for a blow.

“There's somebody behind me,” she said. “I know there is.”

“Can you see him? Hear him?”

“I feel him. Just … I just know someone's there. He's there right now.”

“OK, I want you to freeze that moment, Teresa,” Christensen said. “Think of it like you're watching all this on a VCR. You've just hit the Pause button, and everything in that picture is stopped, except you. You can still move. Have you done that?”

“Yes.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Don't be. He's frozen. He can't move. He can't hurt you. You're controlling everything he does. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Then turn around.”

Teresa turned, wary, her eyes still closed. She took one step back, pressing herself into the window blind, keeping a safe distance.

“Can you see him now?”

She nodded. Her breathing grew shallow. “He's wearing a mask.”

“So you can't see his face?”

“No. The mask—”

“Is he tall or short?”

“Medium.”

“Standing up straight?”

“It's not DellaVecchio,” she said. “Way too tall.”

“How big?”

“Average.”

“So it's not David, is it?”

Teresa shook her head and swallowed hard.

“Teresa, I want you do something for me. It's going to be a little scary for you, but remember, he can't move. You're in total control. Now, I want you to reach out and take that mask off his face.”

When she hesitated, Christensen asked, “Are you ready to do that, Teresa?”

She nodded. “Now?”

“Just take it off. He can't hurt you. I promise.”

Her hands shook as she reached up and touched Christensen's face, peeling an imaginary ski mask from under his chin and up over his nose. He heard her gasp, a quick, pained thing, and her face reddened into rage.

She went for his eyes.

Christensen pulled her hands away, and they began to struggle. Teresa was lost in the illusion even as her eyes sprung open like window shades. Christensen saw the hatred in them, a white-hot fire. She was looking at him, but seeing the man who eight years before had crushed her skull, sexually savaged her, and left her for dead on her kitchen floor.

“You knew!” she cried. “You
bastard.
”

Christensen clutched her wrists, but her rage poured out. “Knew what?”

“You
knew
I'd shaved for David. You
knew
I'd stopped. Goddamn you. Goddamn—”

Teresa's eyes suddenly cleared. Christensen eased his grip on her wrists, and slowly, gently, she reached up and touched his cheek. She bit her lower lip, hard, and collapsed into him.

“Oh my God, I'm sorry,” she said, her head on his chest. “Why couldn't I see it before? I heard him, his voice, but I couldn't see him. The other badge number…”

Christensen put his hands on her shoulders and eased her away. He looked deep into her damp eyes, and she returned his gaze.

“Teresa, who did this to you?”

Her voice was strong as she said the name.

“Brian Milsevic.”

If the revelation brought her any relief, Christensen couldn't find it in Teresa's eyes. What he saw was a woman whose mind already was two steps ahead.

“Teresa, we have to tell someone,” he said.

She waited an excruciating moment. “Do whatever you want. It doesn't matter.”

They both flinched as Christensen's telephone started to ring.