Straw Men (25 page)

“No, no. It's fine.”

She tucked her purse under her arm. “Please. I'd rather.”

Christensen watched her step through the door and into the hall, then turn right toward the vending area. At that moment, the fax machine on a nearby credenza began to ring, too. He picked up his desk phone and heard the thrum of a car engine, the hollow, boxy background noise of a car phone. “Hello?”

“Me, baby.”

“You're in the car?”

“Me and the kids. Jim, there's something—”

“Bren, you're supposed to be in bed. The doctor said—”

“Jim, listen. I'm fine. But something really creepy came up about thirty minutes ago. I just feel better out of the house. I've got the kids. We're fine.”

“Where are you?”

“We're fine. But I got a call from somebody Downtown, a cop friend. She told me something, and if it's true I'm a little freaked, OK? I just, hell, I just don't know what to make of it.”

Christensen listened to the road drone, trying to gauge the anxiety level in Brenna's voice. He heard genuine confusion and muted panic.

“Bren, tell me what you heard. It may confirm something that just happened here.”

In the background, Christensen heard Annie's voice, a sharp rebuke, followed by Taylor's whining appeal to his mother. Brenna pleaded with them for quiet, then said, “What do you know?”

“Please, Bren, just tell me what you heard.”

“The evidence on the apartment roof,” she said. “They got some tests back. The DNA. It's not the answer they expected.”

“The saliva on the cigarette butts?”

“Definitely DellaVecchio's,” she said. “A 99.9 percent match. So that fits.”

“You figured it was planted evidence all along.”

“Yeah, but the thing is—”

“The semen,” Christensen said. “Not DellaVecchio, right?”

“No. But it gets worse.”

“Not Harnett either.”

No reaction. Finally, Brenna spoke just loud enough for him to hear over the road noise: “They don't know who, baby, but it's not either of them. Somebody else was up there that night.”

“Do you have a copy of the test results?” he said.

“They're preliminary, and I haven't seen them. Liisa has them at my office. I told her to fax them to me there. I'm on my way.”

“Bren, wait. Don't hang up, OK? And don't come here. For now just keep driving. Understand?”

Christensen set the handset down and went to the fax machine. The cover page in the receiving tray was from Brenna's law office. He recognized the second page, halfway out, as the scattered-dot pattern of DNA test results. The letterhead was from a lab Christensen didn't recognize, Genetech, apparently the one preferred by the Pittsburgh Police Department. As soon as the fax page was finished, he took it back to his desk and opened his lap drawer. There, lying on top, was a photocopy of a similar page of results—the unidentified DNA lifted from the envelope Teresa received before she was attacked.

Christensen laid the pages side by side and saw in black-and-white what he already suspected. He picked up the phone.

“It's the same pattern as from the envelope Teresa got eight years ago, Bren. Exactly. Your friend at DigiGene said they might have some results today on the material I gave him a few days ago. What have—”

“Liisa said there's an envelope at the office. You want her to open it?”

“Tell her to fax it, Bren, fast. Just the results page. I'll hold.”

The road noise disappeared, and Christensen stared at the identical genetic patterns before him. Christensen was checking for holes in the story when the fax machine's ring jolted him back.

“She says it's on its way,” Brenna said.

“Be right back.”

Christensen retrieved the new fax and laid the DigiGene page beside the other two. It sketched the DNA pattern lifted from the gooey wad of nicotine gum he'd plucked from the dirt that day in Panther Hollow. The identical markers might just as well have spelled the name.

“Milsevic,” he said.

Brenna repeated the name as a startled question the moment Christensen lifted the phone to his ear. Had the name even blipped onto her radar screen in the past eight years?

“OK,” she said finally. “Can you tell me what you know?”

“Not now, not the whole story,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “But Harnett, Milsevic, and Teresa were involved in something that goes way back, even before the attack on Teresa. She's got proof. She's here now. If you follow the connections between a lot of different things, you get the whole picture. Harnett and Milsevic were still part of it, working together, right up until Panther Hollow.”

“But—”

Christensen saw it clearly now. Milsevic was waiting at Brenna's grave while Harnett retrieved her from the car. When he heard the commotion and saw Christensen struggling with Harnett, he seized the moment. He waited until the homicide would be justifiable, then put a kill shot in his partner's skull. With it, Milsevic severed the only solid connection between himself and the bloody clutter in their wake. With a little Milsevic spin, he became the heroic case-buster instead of the sole survivor of an obscene conspiracy.

Even then, the scene had seemed almost too contrived. It was clear as Harnett lay dying that Milsevic's analysis was too quick, too convenient. So on a hunch, Christensen had plucked Milsevic's gum from where he'd flung it, wondering even then what secrets it might reveal.

“It was perfect,” Christensen blurted. “Milsevic didn't respond to the goddamned radio call about Panther Hollow. He was already down there with Harnett.
They
grabbed you from your office.
They
put you in your car. Harnett drove it, with Milsevic following. Milsevic left his car a safe distance away, then
they
drove your car into the hollow.
They
were going to kill you and pin it on DellaVecchio again. Then Milsevic—”

“But Harnett's the one who was wearing Carmen's shoes,” Brenna said.

“Exactly! They were trying to place DellaVecchio at the scene, just like before. Those shoes would have fit Milsevic much better, right? He's smaller. But somehow he convinced Harnett to wear them. That way, if something went wrong—”

Brenna gasped. “The second straw man.”

“Harnett was the last person alive who knew the whole story, the last person who could blow everything.”

“Wait, Jim. I'm lost. You've been talking to Teresa about the night she was—”

“It's all connected!” He suddenly realized how little of the story Brenna knew. “Bren, Milsevic's the one who attacked her. Teresa remembers it now. That's why he got so worried when you found that unidentified DNA on the envelope. It's his!”

“You're sure?”

“It's right here in front of me, Bren. He knew you were getting close. That's why he wanted you dead. He wasn't sure what you had, but if anyone ever linked the envelope to him—”

“Whoa, whoa. Jim, let's go back a sec. That doesn't explain why they wanted Teresa dead.”

Where to start? Down the hall, a vending machine disgorged a soft drink can.

“I'll explain later,” he said. “Right now, I've got to call Kiger. This thing's not over.”

“You know what you're doing?”

Good question. “I need to go. Stay mobile, OK? You and the kids just keep driving. Go somewhere, anywhere, just not home. I'll call you as soon as I know it's safe.”

Christensen expected an argument, but got none. All Brenna said was, “Baby, be careful.”

“Promise. I'll call as soon—”

“Jim?”

He listened, nearly choked by what he now knew. Still, he understood the significance when Brenna said she loved him.

“I love you, too,” he said, and hung up.

Now what? Teresa finally understood the full horror of a conspiracy between her husband and his friend, her one-time lover. What did she plan to do with it? Christensen imagined her despair.

“Teresa!” he called.

When she didn't answer, he crossed the office floor and leaned into the hall. An obese woman stood in the vending area, sipping a Diet Coke. She stopped drinking and said, “What?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I was just expecting … Is anyone else down there?”

The woman turned around, a lumbering move, then shrugged.

“Did you see anybody else down there in the last few minutes? A woman?”

“Just got here a second ago. But the place is empty.”

Christensen looked left, down the deserted Harmony corridor.

“Teresa!” he called, moving down the hall as he spoke. Each step felt more ominous. When he called her name again, all he heard was a hopeless echo.

“Pittsburgh Police.”

“Chief Kiger, please.”

“He's not available right now. May I take a—”

“It's an emergency.”

“Sir, the emergency number—” the secretary said.

“No, no. I need to talk to
him.
My name's Jim Christensen. He'll understand. Is he there, or can you connect me to him somehow?”

“Please hold.”

Christensen wasn't just panicked about Milsevic. He'd also made a grim, on-the-spot assessment of Teresa's fragile psychological condition. She'd arrived depressed. She'd discovered an appalling truth about herself, as well as a truth that shattered every illusion she ever had about two men with whom she'd shared everything. She probably felt more alone than she ever had in her life. Christensen tried to imagine the choices Teresa saw for herself at the moment. To confront Milsevic on her own? To take her husband's damning ledger to the police, and in doing so confess her own apparent criminal conduct? Or to self-destruct, surrendering to what surely was an overwhelming sense of isolation?

For someone in her situation, he guessed, the first impulse might be to go home to die. Christensen was thinking about the gun in Teresa's purse when Kiger drawled, “What's goin' on?”

“Teresa found something you need to know about,” Christensen said. “And I've got some new information that's … Are you by yourself?”

“In a meetin', but June told me there was some kinda emerg—”

“Is Milsevic with you?”

Christensen heard a babble of voices in the background, imagined Kiger in a crowded office.

“You hang on a sec, OK?” the chief said. “I'm gonna catch this in the other room.”

Christensen waited through a long pause.

“Speak,” Kiger said when he picked up again.

“So Milsevic was there with you?”

“Nope. He's on administrative leave till the disciplinary hearing. Gotta coupla department heads in for a butt-chewin'.”

“Chief, do you know where he is?”

“Captain Milsevic? Off. That's policy after any police-involved. Think you better tell me why you're so—”

“He's the one,” Christensen blurted. “I'm sure of it. We're sure of it.”

“What one?”

“Tidwell. Teresa. Brenna. We think he may have set Harnett up just like he and Harnett set up DellaVecchio. He's behind everything.”

Christensen let that settle.

“What kinda new information you talkin' about?”

“A notebook,” Christensen said. “Sort of a ledger. Tidwell was paying protection money to five cops, for years. What Tidwell was telling you was true, and Teresa's sure her husband and Milsevic were involved. Even she—” Christensen checked himself. Was it right for him to implicate Teresa? “She was going through her husband's things and found a notebook and a lot of cash in his safety deposit box. Thing is, Harnett kept track of how they divided up the money in this little notebook.”

“It's got names?”

“It's coded, but Teresa figured it out. The money was divided five ways, and the five cops are ID'ed by their badge numbers. Three of them are dead, Harnett and … Remember that New Year's Eve ambush in Bloomfield, the one where two cops died?”

“Boyle and Vance,” Kiger said.

“Teresa says they were involved. I have no idea about that, but we do know they died the same day Tidwell did.”

“So the fourth badge number—”

“Milsevic.”

“And the fifth?”

Christensen saw no way out. “Chief, she says it's hers.”

Kiger cleared his throat, and started to say something. What he said, after another false start, was “Fuckaduck.”

“Unbelievable, I know.”

“Hell, I'd take unbelievable. This is … Lemme ask you sump'n. With her memory all screwed up, any chance she's—”

“That's the thing. She doesn't remember any of that. It's all from the notebook. It rattled the hell out of her, but she still brought it to me. I think we can trust it.”

“Where's she now?”

“That's what worries me. She dropped all this on me in my research office in O'Hara township, at the Harmony Center, just a little while ago. But I got a phone call, and by the time I was done she was gone. Chief, I know it's easier not to believe this…”

Christensen looked down at the three pages of identical DNA results on his desk. “But I think I can prove it was Milsevic's saliva on the letter Teresa got back then, and his semen on the apartment roof from two weeks ago. As soon as you get a blood sample from him you'll see what I'm talking about.”

A skeptical silence.

“Even if you don't buy it, we're dealing with what's real to Teresa. What I'm telling you is what really happened, I'm sure of it. But right now, that's less important than what Teresa
believes
happened. And she believes, with good reason, that Milsevic killed or helped kill Tidwell and those two cops. She believes he's the one who attacked her. She believes he shot her husband so there'd be no one left to tell the tale. Right now, both Teresa and Milsevic are out there somewhere. They're both capable of anything. First thing is to find them.”

Kiger issued a disapproving grunt. “Any guesses where she's headed?”

“Home, I'd bet,” Christensen said. “She was depressed. She had a gun in her purse.”

“How big a lead's she got on you?”

“Maybe ten minutes. Fifteen at the outside. I'm just worried about her. Knowing what she knows, feeling what she probably feels … if she's self-destructive, I think she'd go there.”

“Awright then—”

“But Chief,” Christensen said, “she could be looking for Milsevic.”

Kiger swore softly. “She ought not try sump'n like that. She's way out on a limb there, way out where I can't help her.”

“I can be at Teresa's house in fifteen minutes. Can you track down Milsevic?”

“Aw, hell,” Kiger said. “I ain't pulling him in, but we'll find him and keep an eye on him till we see this notebook you're talking about. Then maybe we'll start asking questions.”

Christensen folded the three pages of DNA results and tucked them into his shirt pocket, then reached for his car keys. The last thing he heard Kiger say was, “Meantime, no more a that hero crap, y'hear?”