Free Time Release by Martin J Smith Page A

pull evidence out of your hat. And you can’t wall me out again.”
    Finally: “I’m scared, Grady.”
    Scary damn business. “He’s not finished, Trix. Everything I’ve read predicted he’d kill again. Now he has. And there’s no reason to think he’ll stop now.”
    â€œYou don’t know that. You’ve made an awfully big assumption here. I don’t understand you sometimes.”
    Downing picked up the elephant and considered heaving it through the glass of his office door. She could never understand, because she would never know about Carole.
    â€œThere’s still time,” he said. “I want to use it all.”
    â€œHave you mentioned it to anyone yet?”
    â€œChristensen. Just to run the repressed-memories theory past him, see if he’d talk to Sonny.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œHe reads the papers, too. Totally agreed with me. Said this sounds at least as strong as the stuff in California last year. And after the Primenyl killings, he said he’d heard Mom and the kid had their emergency lights flashing.”
    Trix sighed. “What time you coming home? I haven’t fed your dinner to Rodney. Yet.”
    Dinner. Right. Downing swiveled in his chair and propped a foot on the window ledge. In the distance, the brewery clock showed no mercy. He smiled anyway.
    â€œI’ll leave now. Don’t give it to the dog. Nothing worse than a basset hound with calluses on his belly. Notice how he’s starting to drag?”
    He expected a laugh. They’d always shared that much, anyway. But Trix didn’t laugh. He turned back toward his desk and propped his elbows on the contents of a coroner’s file labeled “Corbett, David.” An image of every parent’s nightmare stared up at him: a black-and-white photograph of a troubled fifteen-year-old hunched grotesquely in a sturdy wing chair, left dome of his skull gone, the gun balanced improbably on his right shoulder. Another print of the same frame was in the file he gave Christensen.
    The edge was back in her voice when she said good night. Downing closed his eyes. “Trix?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œCome on. It’ll be fine.”
    â€œSure,” she said. “You’ve got that dead man’s brake, remember? Stops you right before the cliff. That’s what you always say. But God, Grady, can you be sure it still works?” She hung up, and he listened to the phone’s disconnect pulse as long as he could stand it.

Chapter 8
    Christensen compared the unfamiliar number flashing on his beeper with the one Downing had given him. They matched. Sonny Corbett was trying to reach him.
    He’d waited three days for the call, wondering when—if—Sonny would take the first step. The long run he took after dinner had helped clear his head, and by the time he panted up the front steps and struggled out of his sweats, he was sure Sonny wouldn’t call. Ever. Forty minutes later, his beeper went off. Monday night, 9:46 p.m., according to the digital clock on the stove. Why now?
    Just to be sure, he set aside Annie’s beloved plastic palomino, Pugs, whose broken foreleg now was a gooey web of poorly applied household cement, and picked up a pen. He scribbled the flashing number on the back of a Lucky Charms box and checked it again. Then he picked up the phone, and was startled to hear Melissa’s voice, which stopped in mid-sentence.
    â€œI’m
talking,
” she said from an upstairs extension.
    â€œI thought you were in bed, Lissa, Sorry.” He started to hang up, then reconsidered. Something about the attitude. “Somebody’s trying to reach me, so I’m going to need the phone for a few minutes. Sorry to interrupt, but it’s important. Let me know when you’re off.”
    While he waited, drumming his fingers on the kitchen table, Christensen reviewed how he wanted to begin his relationship with Sonny.