Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  As he walked, the yogurt still in his hand, he scanned the shelves, seeing the market in a way that was less familiar than frightening. He’d never thought much about product packaging, assuming manufacturers made everything tamper-proof after the Tylenol poisonings in, what, 1982? But what was tamper-proof? That cardboard half-gallon of milk seemed pretty vulnerable. All those tucks and folds where someone could hide a needle prick. How would milk react to the poison? Why did only the expensive brand of cottage cheese include a tamper-proof plastic seal around the container’s rim? What color was liquefied cyanide? Clear? If cottage cheese already was curdled, would a fatal dose of clear poison make any difference in the way it looked? What about sour cream?

  He was holding a carton of eggs, wondering what kind of damage a syringe might do to an eggshell, when Melissa asked, “Raisin bread okay?”

  Jesus. His heart was pounding.

  “Fine,” he said.

  She dropped it into the cart. “I think we have a coupon,” she said. “We already have a dozen eggs at home, don’t we?”

  In the condiments and sauces aisle, Christensen’s mind shifted to vacuum-sealed pop-up lids. Great theory, but during a predinner rush, who’d really notice if their Ragu jar had already been opened? And would some hungry bachelor really let it stop him from dumping the thick red sauce into a pan after a long day at work? What did cyanide taste like? Would it be noticeable in a heaping spoonful of, say, Grey Poupon? If someone got it into a jar of pickles, would a single pickle absorb enough for a lethal dose?

  By the time he reached the end of the aisle, his eyes were those of a killer in search of opportunity. Reaching into another refrigerated display, he opened a tub of margarine and closed it again. No safety seal. And no one saw him. How long would it take? He did the same with a container of off-brand salsa. The pudding snacks Annie loved had foil lids just like the ones on Yo-ssert containers. If someone wanted to inject something into a packaged hot dog, how hard would it be?

  The meat case stretched across the back of the store. Chicken breasts, pot roasts, hams, sausage. A micron of plastic wrap was all that stood between them and someone with a syringe. To his left, a freezer case. Ice cream! He imagined a calculating killer prying the lid from one of the round containers of vanilla, sprinkling in white powder like some demented Jack Frost, and calmly putting the lid back on. It wouldn’t be any more complicated than opening a carton to check for cracked eggs.

  Melissa had disappeared. He checked the next aisle. Lightbulbs, diapers, and baby food. No sign of her, but he thought back to the harried days when the girls were younger, to countless scenes of him and Molly pushing mush into one tiny mouth or the other. Would either of them have noticed during the feeding frenzy if a jar of strained carrots didn’t open with a reassuring shhhtk? Or if a cardboard apple juice box had a tiny hole near the top of one side?

  He passed a young man, probably a student, and he thought again of Sonny Corbett, of Sonny’s father, of 1986. Suddenly there weren’t academic questions about product packaging. These were questions that begged for reassuring answers, considering what the young man in his office the day before may actually have seen; considering the psychopath, whoever he was, that still walked free. How deeply could he allow himself, and his children, to be pulled into Grady Downing’s Primenyl investigation?

  The grim possibilities drew him down aisle 4, even though Melissa wasn’t there. Bottled water in plastic jugs. Cooking oils in plastic bottles. He picked a kids’ fruit snack from the shelf, wondering how its “squishy center” might be manipulated. Ten feet farther, he stopped again. The tiny jars of artichoke hearts, asparagus, and other marinated vegetables did not have pop-up safety lids, even the name brands. He unscrewed the lid from a classic glass ketchup bottle and peered in, finding nothing between him and the contents. Up and down the aisles, Christensen imagined the worst.

  Melissa was in produce, bagging oranges. Fruit and vegetables were stacked in neat and colorful piles all around him. He usually lingered here, savoring the fresh smells, but his mind was racing. Packaged products were one thing, he thought, but my God, how easy would it be to poison an orange? Or a tomato? How difficult to get cyanide into a watermelon or cantaloupe? How much poison could a single grape hold? Enough to take a life?

  “Do you need more oranges?” Melissa asked as he approached.

  He answered without context or explanation, a reflex he couldn’t control. “Too risky here. And no grapefruit, either.”

  Melissa seemed confused.

  “I’ll get a case in the Strip,” he added, trying to recover.

  Melissa rolled her eyes, then picked up three large oranges, placed them into a plastic produce bag with a dramatic flourish, and twirled the bag shut. She tied its neck into a tight knot, dropped it into the cart, and stalked off toward checkout. Christensen followed, mentioning to an assistant manager he saw along the way that he’d be glad to replace the cart that lay mangled outside. The manager told him not to worry, but Christensen’s mind already was on other things.

  The phone rang a dozen times before someone answered, “Homicide.”

  “Grady Downing, please.”

  Christensen drained the last of his coffee. Without Annie, dinner would have been a slow-motion conversational disaster. She kept him laughing, explaining that the photographs she’d carefully clipped from a magazine at Mrs. Taubman’s that afternoon were from a publication featuring “mostly girls, makeup, and sparkly things.” Cosmo, he guessed from the cleavage, although Mrs. Taubman hardly fit the magazine’s demographics. Annie presented the clippings of lipsticks, anorexic models, and garish jewelry with a reverence he found odd, especially in a child also enthralled by Rambo.

  Melissa, on the other hand, ate in silence, resuming her brooding even though he apologized for his odd behavior in the produce section. Paranoia had got the best of him in the store, but even now he couldn’t shake it completely. Maybe Downing could help.

  “Investigations.”

  “Grady? Jim Christensen. You’re in? Aren’t you guys always out stomping around crime scenes, chasing perps, that sort of thing?”

  “Yeah, well. Slow week. Sonny ever call you?”

  “Met with him yesterday, believe it or not. Interesting kid,” Christensen said, then waited.

  “So?” Downing asked.

  “Very casual. Didn’t talk about anything significant. But I’m going to try to get him to meet again next week. If it goes well, I hope we’ll start getting together a couple times a week. I’m trying to work my schedule around it.”

  He waited for some reaction from Downing, but heard none. “You’re right,” he continued, “the hand thing is pretty odd. So maybe I can help. We’ll just see where it goes from there.”

  The detective sighed. “So you don’t think I’m totally off-base?”

  “Do I see any big red flags? No. But I read his file and felt him out a bit. There are indicators I’d like to explore. I just want to make sure we give him every chance to deal with things, if that’s what he needs.”

  “Never mind what everybody says,” Downing said, “I knew you weren’t such an asshole.”

  “Thanks so much,” Christensen said. “But I’ve got to be honest. I’m not willing to take the kind of risks I’ve taken with you in the past. If one of your suspects goes after me now, I leave two orphans. What if Tataglia had had better aim last year? The girls would have lost me just a year after losing Molly.”

  “Totally different situation,” Downing said.

  “Bullshit, Grady. There’s a particularly vicious mass murderer out there somewhere. If you’re right, he’s still operating. And he’s smart. His victims die without ever knowing what hit them. I went nuts in the grocery store tonight thinking of all the ways he could get me or the kids if he decided to try. If you weren’t a cop, would you want to be involved?” />
  Downing seemed to consider the question. “Do you think you weigh more or less after you fart?” he said finally. “Think about it before you answer.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I think more, since methane is lighter than air. Makes your body like a hot-air balloon, you know. Once you let ’er rip, I think you’d weigh more.”

  “Goddamnit, Grady. Are you listening?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Chickie, lighten up,” he said. “But you’re right. I suppose there’s some exposure on your part, talking to his kid and all.”

  “Exposure?”

  “You know. Risk. But not much.”

  “Explain.”

  “I’ve seen the report the FBI profilers down at Quantico did on the Primenyl killer,” Downing said. “Dead ringer for Corbett, by the way. More important, it says randomness is his thing. That’s the thrill. So it’d be completely out of character for him to fuck with people like us. He’s not motivated by revenge or because he’s afraid of getting caught. He’s got some other agenda. So I really don’t think it’s an issue.”

  “Not an issue,” Christensen repeated. It wasn’t the reassurance he’d hoped for, but Downing was probably right.

  “Don’t just blow me off, Grady.”

  “Got to, sport. Gotta run. Some crackhead down in the Hill just blew a big hole in his dealer. Sent him and two handfuls of cash through a second-floor window onto Wylie Avenue. Quite a party when he landed. Somebody’s gotta clean up the trash.”

  Drug killings in the Hill District. Rookie stuff. “Who’d you piss off?” Christensen said. During the long silence, he remembered Brenna’s story about Downing’s fall from grace during Primenyl. He suddenly regretted the words, knew they must have cut deep.

  “You’ll keep me posted on Sonny, then?” Downing said.

  “Sure, Grady,” Christensen said. “Listen, I didn’t mean—” But Downing had already hung up.

  Chapter 11

  The Maverick coasted down the Interstate 79 exit ramp, stopping finally in the loose gravel beside a peeling chamber of commerce sign: “Work where you must, but live and shop in Ridgeville!” The driver studied it a moment, snorting when he was done.

  “Sure you want out here?”

  Sonny fumbled for the door handle, which came off in his hand as the door sprung open. He handed it to the driver, hoisted his daypack onto one shoulder, and scratched the head of the panting hound in the backseat. Then he pointed to the southbound entrance ramp just across the road. “Appreciate the ride. You can get back on right there.”

  He watched until the car wheezed up the ramp, trailing vapor in the 40-degree air, and was gone. No, he didn’t want out here. Hitching rides was bad enough, but this place flat-out scared him. Ridgeville was dominated by Webber Industries, the town’s biggest employer, operating out of an industrial terror of a plant just across the interstate. All rusting metal vats and screeching noise and random puffs of chemical-smelling vapor. He recognized the company’s Pegasus logo from the Pitt chem lab stockroom, and for the first time it occurred to him that his mother had lived much of her life in the shadow of the country’s most frequently indicted industrial chemical producer.

  To Sonny’s left sat one of Ridgeville’s other booming enterprises, a drive-thru beer distributorship. The owner of Boboli’s Beer Haus never met an ID card he didn’t like. Sonny stopped to marvel again at the ballsiness of it all—a line of beater cars lined up from the loading dock into the street, a cocky teenager behind the wheel of each one. On Saturday mornings like this, the line never seemed to shrink.

  The path to his mother’s apartment ran along Hartwell Creek, a twenty-yard-wide gash of rust-colored water that ran right past the Webber plant and never froze, no matter how cold the weather got. Sonny noticed, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else. The plant was all the town had left after I-79 started carrying most of the traffic past, rather than through, Ridgeville. But Sonny saw the creek water with the eyes of an open-water swimmer, and swimmers had a phrase for water like that: death soup.

  In the distance, maybe half a mile beyond Webber, the front face of Borman State Hospital rose like a redbrick tombstone. The lawn was well-barbered in summer—with dazed patients always shuffling along behind lawn mowers—but the grass had turned crisp and brown with the early frost. What in August usually looked like a stately old plantation seemed, under the threatening sky, like the Hollywood version of a mental hospital, which it pretty much was.

  He’d visited his mother there once during her six-month stay, but only once. A social worker brought him out on a Sunday a month or so after his dad left, a couple weeks after David’s funeral. He remembered because it was the day he realized, as they drove out through Borman’s wrought-iron gate and away from a woman who didn’t seem to recognize him, that he was alone. He’d never felt the same about Ridgeville again.

  Until then, his impression of his mother’s hometown was shaped by her stories of growing up there, rosy small-town memories she told often and fondly when he was a kid. The Borman hospital in those stories was just a place she played, the biggest yard in town, a place with a secret tire swing and a creek and a rope just long enough to reach deep water. That Borman, the one his mother talked about, sounded like a kids’ paradise. The Borman just ahead, the one she wouldn’t talk about anymore, had bars on the windows and smelled like piss and disinfectant. Sonny remembered that much from one visit eight years ago, that and the vivid sounds of corralled madness.

  The path veered left, then plunged into a thicket of dead blackberry bushes and scrub oak. Branches scratched his bare arms, but he didn’t try to clear the way. Best to push on, do his duty, then hitch back across town before the whole day was shot. He came out in a clearing just twenty yards from the entrance to Lakeview Pointe Estates, apartments with no lake view, pointe, or estates. Sonny took a deep breath, then walked up the crumbling driveway, stepping carefully to keep the pea-gravel out of his shoes.

  The curtains of his mother’s second-floor apartment were drawn. Maybe he’d misunderstood. Or maybe she was out of medicine again and depressed. As he knocked, he noticed that her car wasn’t in its usual spot. Where could she have gone? The drapes suddenly parted and his mother squinted out, offering a smile and a timid wave. Sonny waited while she undid the door’s various dead bolts and chain locks.

  “Saturday already?” she said. She pulled a strand of gray-streaked brown hair from in front of her face and tucked it behind her ear. “Oh, Sonny. I haven’t cleaned. I haven’t cooked.”

  “Mom, it’s okay.”

  She waved him off, then started pacing, arms folded, hands cupping her opposite elbows. She was wearing a long flannel nightgown underneath a knee-length Penguins jersey, topped by the peacoat he bought her for $12 at a Goodwill store in East Liberty. “I didn’t get any groceries. I haven’t been hungry,” she said. “So I don’t have anything for you to eat. I’m just so tired all the time. God, it’s good to see you. Look at me. I’m such a mess. My teeth aren’t brushed. They’re so yellow. I don’t know why. I brush and brush but nothing helps.”

  She always seemed small when she was depressed. Her narrow shoulders rolled forward, her head dipped, her voice became little more than a stage whisper. Her eyes drifted, caught on things that didn’t matter, then drifted again. He thought she was pretty, even on bad days like this. When he was a kid, she wore her long hair in a tight bun anchored by a single crossways chopstick—something he’d always found exotic and wonderful. Now her hair was dirty and unbrushed, and she seldom saw the point in getting dressed. He knew enough about mental illness to understand, but affection isn’t easy after being stranded for five years in foster care. Duty was the only thing that brought him here on Saturday mornings.

  Sonny gently moved her aside so he could get into the apartment. It was like walking into a desert, dry and hot. “Wh
ere’s your car, Mom?”

  She shrugged, then started to dead-bolt the door. The room smelled like the stale air inside a basketball, but with a trace of tobacco. The Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote carried on their endless chase on the tiny TV in the living room. Sonny turned down the volume and adjusted the antenna. He passed his hand over the electric heat register under the apartment’s single front window. It was blowing hard. The thermostat needle was pegged at 85.

  “Did you loan your car to Mr. Balkin again?”

  “Can I get you some Gatorade? I still have Gatorade. I like the strawberry kind.”

  Sonny put his hand on her shoulder, but she wouldn’t look at him. “Mom, does Mr. Balkin have your car again?”

  “He’s a nice man. You know him, don’t you? Lives over in C? Longish hair? Very nice, really. Helps me out with things. He changed one of those fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen the other day just because I asked him.”

  Real nice man, Sonny thought. Borrowed her car for an afternoon last month and kept it two weeks. Brought it back, no apologies, with an empty tank and a crushed left taillight. He didn’t admit it happened during one of his low-grade parking-lot drug deals until Sonny threatened to call the cops, and only then did he peel off five twenties to pay for it. Sonny used the money for her groceries and put that month’s disability check into her bank account.

  Seeing her treated like a doormat still bothered him, but it had been that way as long as Sonny could remember. She seemed to bring out the worst in people who prey on the weak, people like his dad. At the end, he was such a bastard. Sonny flashed on a scene: A Sunday afternoon. Summer. The Jancey Street house. He and his brother sitting, bruised and crying, in the window seat of an upstairs bedroom. All they’d done was ask him for another dog, but he’d been drinking and it set him off. When he was done with them he turned, as usual, on their mother. From above, they watched the torture carry into the front yard. His father’s twisted laugh. The neighbors’ dumbstruck faces. Their mother on all fours, still in her nightgown, barking each time his bare foot landed on her rump.