Time Release (7 page)

“What?” Melissa snarled, lifting the earphone from her Discman. Her head kept pace with the music's insistent cadence.

“Nothing,” Christensen said, flustered. He'd nearly forgotten she was in the car. “Didn't realize I was talking out loud.”

His older daughter rolled her eyes, then shut him out again. She clamped the headphones back on and tapped out a beat on her knees with the fat drumsticks she'd brought from band practice. He wished he knew more about her musical tastes. The CD case read “Nine Inch Nails,” but the band name meant nothing to him.

He touched his daughter's shoulder, and she lifted the earpiece again. “I need to stop at the Giant Eagle to get stuff for dinner,” he said. “It'll just take a few minutes, and we've got time. As long as we pick up Annie from Mrs. Taubman's by six.”

“Whatever.”

“We also need to talk about something,” he said, trying to seem upbeat.

Melissa stabbed the Discman's stop button with her middle finger, then pulled the headphones off, clearly unhappy with the prospect of having to conduct a conversation. She stared straight ahead. “What?”

“Something came up at work that may keep me pretty busy for a while. One night a week for now, a couple evenings a week if it works out. So we're going to have to figure a way to get Annie home from day care, you home from school on band practice days, and then how to get your dinners on the nights when I can't be there.”

“I'll just stay at Jerilyn's after practice,” she said. “I can eat there, too. Her mom's cool.”

“No, see, that doesn't solve the problem. Someone needs to walk Annie home from day care and get her fed. And I'm going to need your help on that.”

Melissa finally turned toward him, if only to glare. “You need me to do it, in other words.”

“Afraid so.”

“That means I have to ride the bus with all the dorks.”

“It's only Thursdays, for now. And if it's on a band practice day, you can always get a ride home with somebody. So it shouldn't be that bad.”

Christensen splashed the Explorer through a flooded gutter and into the supermarket parking lot. Though he'd maintained an even calm in his voice, he realized his stress level had risen when a speed bump rocked them back in their seats. He slowed to a more reasonable parking-lot speed.

“It's not something I can help. And I'm not sure how long it'll last.”

She turned away again and stared out the windshield. “You just want me to watch Annie so you can go out with Brenna,” she said. “Why don't you just keep doing it in Mom's loft so I don't get screwed, too.”

Christensen wheeled into a parking space, tires squealing, and crushed a shopping cart against the concrete base of a light pole. He backed off two feet, but said nothing. He thought he saw his daughter smiling as he shoved the gearshift into park and yanked the emergency brake. She knew exactly where his buttons were, and exactly how hard to push them. He turned the engine off and sat, knowing he'd explode if he tried to talk.

He reached for Melissa's arm as she lifted the earphones to her head. She looked down at his shaking hand, then directly at him. Her smirk disappeared, and he saw real fear in her eyes. Maybe she knew she'd gone too far. He took a deep breath. Another. And another, until he felt back in control.

“I'd like an apology,” he said.

“Sorry.” She shrugged. “You really wasted that cart.”

“No, a real apology. You don't need to assault me like that. And this has nothing to do with Brenna. There's a special client I need to see, someone the police asked me to work with. Evenings are the best time for him.”

She pulled her arm away. “I'm sorry, okay?”

With the wipers stilled, the wet windshield began to twinkle with reflected lights, reds and whites, from cars moving around the lot. Christensen unbuckled his seat belt
.
Maybe now was the time to talk about their real problem.

“I miss your mom,” he said.

Melissa sniffed indifferently and unbuckled her own seat belt. He wanted to talk, to confront the thing that for two years had stood between them like a wall. But he felt the opportunity disappearing as she pulled her arm away and reached for the door latch.

“I did what Mom wanted, what she needed me to do at that point. And you're still punishing me for it.”

“Yeah, well,” Melissa said. “You made your choice.”

The car door slammed, and he watched her jump puddles until she stood in the fluorescent frame of the grocery store door waiting, oddly, for him to catch up. His hands still shook, less from rage now than from an overwhelming sense of frustration. He was losing his oldest daughter because, in her mind, he had killed her mother. Forget the mercy of that decision. Forget the shades of gray that even the district attorney had been forced to acknowledge. Forget his own emotional devastation in the wake of Molly's death. He had killed her mother. And he was now involved with the woman who'd entered their lives on the very day that Molly died. So, in purely clinical terms, Christensen understood his daughter's reaction: Her mother was gone, and her father was trying too soon to fill the hole in their lives. But understanding it didn't make the gulf between them any less terrifying.

He stepped down into a puddle, slammed the door, and checked the Explorer's unscathed front bumper. The shopping cart hadn't fared as well. It was standing but unstable, its wheelbase radically compressed. He tipped it over and leaned it against the base of the light pole.

“Need a fresh cart?” Melissa asked as he approached. Her smile seemed less hostile than mischievous, so he smiled back.

“I really crushed it.”

“No heroic measures,” she said, then turned and pushed through the automatic doors into the store.

The aisles were empty, surprisingly so for this time of day. Christensen had never got the hang of the sort of leisurely weekend shopping that Molly used to do. She'd spend hours among Strip District produce vendors every Saturday morning, looking for deals, buying in bulk, enjoy­ing the sensory experience of the city's chaotic warehouse marketplace. He, by contrast, was always fighting predinner crowds at the supermarket, scavenging for that evening's meal.

Melissa stopped at the dairy case. She loaded a half-gallon of 1 percent milk and a brick of cheddar cheese, then started pulling yogurt containers from an upper shelf. Christensen absently chose one from the cart and looked it over. The brand name, Yo-ssert, triggered something visceral.

“Wasn't this stuff recalled?” he said.

Melissa stopped, but offered only a blank stare until interrupted by a short young man who was stocking the shelves.

“New shipment,” he said, carving open another Yo-ssert carton and stowing his retractable knife in a back pocket of his jeans. “Check the date. We took all the others off the shelf a few weeks ago.”

Melissa resumed her selections, unconcerned, clearly partial toward blueberry. Christensen set the container down, then picked it back up. He rolled it in his hand, initially to check the expiration date. But he found himself trying to imagine it as an instrument of death. What had Downing said about the Greene County case? The killer injected cyanide through the lid? He turned the container right side up and examined its colored foil top. A puncture in the black lines of the printed Yo-ssert corporate logo would be invisible to all but the most discerning eye.

The chill Christensen felt didn't come from the refrigerated display case. It was a Bambi-in-the-meadow feeling, a sudden and palpable sense of danger that surged through him like an electric current. He looked around, wondering if someone was watching, but he was alone in the dairy aisle. Melissa had moved on to baked goods.

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?”