Straw Men Read online

  “—until the hearing, he’ll have to be in his father’s house between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. But the judge went that far because the new DNA evidence we presented today undercuts the prosecution’s entire theory. In other words, if this whole thing happened the way the district attorney insists it did, then someone other than Mr. DellaVecchio stalked and attacked Teresa Harnett. Which is what we’ve said from the start.”

  “So this is a final ruling?” a Channel 11 reporter asked.

  Brenna shook her head. “The district attorney has three weeks to make a case against the new DNA evidence, and I’m sure Mr. Dagnolo will do everything within his power to convince the judge that our evidence proves nothing. That’s his job. But Judge Reinhardt released my client pending that hearing, and that speaks, I think, to the credibility of the new evidence. Frankly, this case has confounded me since the beginning, so I won’t try to predict what’ll happen three weeks from now. We’re not looking beyond that.”

  Someone off-camera cleared his throat, and the scene widened to include Myron Levin’s bloated face. The reporter smiled. He always did just before lobbing some journalistic grenade. Brenna actually liked the guy, even respected his skills. But her left eye stress-twitched as she offered a pleasant, “Another question?”

  “Ms. Kennedy, considering the brutality of the crime for which your client remains convicted, do you think it wise for Judge Reinhardt to release him, even on a provisional basis, before making a final decision on the case?”

  “I’m the one who asked the judge to release Mr. DellaVecchio, Myron. Are you asking me if I agree with his decision to do so?”

  Levin shook his head, showing the folks at home he could laugh at himself. “Good point. I’ll rephrase the question then.” He paused until he was sure everyone was listening. “A jury convicted your client of one of the most savage attacks this city has seen in decades. He’s accused of stalking a woman, a police officer no less, then bludgeoning her nearly to death with a wine bottle. He then, the jury agreed, stabbed her with that bottle’s shattered remains and sexually assaulted her with the broken neck of that bottle as she lay bleeding and semiconscious. Then he left her to die.”

  Levin took a breath, and Brenna took advantage. “Or so the theory went until today.”

  “All things considered,” Levin pressed on, “do you feel this ruling is fair to the public, including the jurors who saw the evidence eight years ago and found Mr. DellaVecchio guilty?”

  The wait was forever, the camera unflinching. Christensen hoped Brenna was calming herself before opening her mouth. He’d taught her the technique himself. Finally, she said: “You mean the jurors who bought the prosecution’s cockeyed version of the crime based on wishful thinking and the D.A.’s few shreds of circumstantial evidence? The jurors who never saw the DNA evidence we presented today that proves he didn’t do it?”

  Levin tightened his grip on his microphone. “Hyperbole notwithstanding, Ms. Kennedy, your client was—and is—convicted of this crime. Do you think it’s fair that he’s now going free before the court rules on all the evidence?”

  “If the court can put him in prison for eight years based on partial evidence, why shouldn’t it be allowed to free him on the same basis?”

  Levin edged closer. “If your client wasn’t at the scene of the Harnett attack, then how did his shoe end up tracking blood all over the crime scene? How do you explain the threatening letter to Teresa Harnett that was written on a typewriter found outside DellaVecchio’s home in Lawrenceville?”

  Brenna’s delicate jaw tightened, but she managed a calm smile. “I won’t retry this case in the courthouse hall, Myron. But for your information, we conceded long ago that Mr. DellaVecchio’s shoe made those tracks. The tread wear pattern was an exact match and very distinctive due to my client’s unusual gait. But we’ve argued since the beginning that Carmen wasn’t wearing those shoes at the time, and that he did not write that letter.”

  “Then who did?”

  Brenna took her time answering, letting the moment ripen. She reached into her briefcase and pulled out three 8½-by-11 photocopies of the foamboard displays she’d presented to the judge that morning. She held them up high so the reporters in the back could see. One was labeled 00–65921/A, DELLAVECCHIO; the others were 00–65921/B, SALIVA/ENVELOPE, and 00–65921/C, STAMP. The details were lost in the TV’s electronic snow, but Christensen knew each display showed a spotty trail of DNA markers running vertically down the page. Anyone could see the difference between DellaVecchio’s DNA pattern and the DNA sample lifted from the letter Harnett received just days before she was attacked.

  “Remember,” Brenna said, “the letter was the cornerstone of the prosecution’s theory that my client stalked Officer Harnett, and that stalking theory is the foundation of the argument that he later attacked her. But if it’s not Mr. DellaVecchio’s DNA on the letter—and we know now that it’s not—the whole case comes tumbling down. It’s that simple.”

  Beside her, DellaVecchio thrust a defiant fist into the air. His voice, raspy and strained as always, rose above the din: “Fuck-an-A!”

  Brenna, unflustered, whispered in one of DellaVecchio’s shrunken ears. He stepped back, still grinning, and she picked up where she left off.

  “Who wrote that letter, then wiped that typewriter clean and dumped it near my client’s home? Who licked that envelope, not knowing we someday could extract genetic material from saliva just like we can from blood and semen? Who set Mr. DellaVecchio up from the very beginning? All good questions, and we might have had answers years ago if the original investigation hadn’t been so narrowly focused.”

  “But you’re forgetting Officer’s Harnett’s testimony,” Levin said. “She identified—”

  “Memories can be wrong, Myron. Memories can be manipulated. This…” Brenna held up the unmatched DNA strands again. “This can’t. Carmen DellaVecchio has lost almost eight years from his life because someone set him up, and because the district attorney built a convincing case from unfair assumptions and flawed logic. Eight years of injustice is enough. It’s long past time—”

  Christensen flinched at the soft knock on his office door. He turned the volume all the way down and listened.

  “Go away, Burke,” he said.

  The heat kicked on, its hum the only sound in the small office. Another knock, a little harder, insistent.

  “No apologies necessary. Just come back some other time, OK?”

  “Hello?”

  Woman’s voice. Christensen poked the power button and the set blinked off. One of his grad students? He checked his planner. No appointments. He smoothed his hair and stood. “Be right there.” He crossed the room and pulled the door open. “Sorry, I—”

  The face registered immediately, still pretty but with hints of ruin that showed when she offered a hesitant smile. One of her eyes seemed lower than the other, just slightly, and the skin at her jaw line was tight as a drum head. A subtle ridge ran from beneath her hairline down to the bridge of her nose. He’d never noticed it before, but he’d never looked straight into her face from this close up.

  “I’m Teresa Harnett,” she said, extending her hand.

  Christensen leaned forward to take it, pure reflex. He felt a powerful pulse in her fingers. She looked him in the eye, actually stared long and hard enough to make him uncomfortable. He felt suddenly out of phase. He looked back at the silent TV, then at the woman before him.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Teresa surveyed the hall with a tormented look, like someone being pursued. “I’d like to talk to you. Privately.”

  The best he could manage was, “Do you think that’s appropriate?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Neither do I.”

  She nodded.
“So, can I come in?” Another glance down the hall. “Please?”

  Christensen stood aside, knowing he was opening the door into an ethical minefield. He raised another weak objection, but Teresa sat down in the chair across from his desk with no apparent intention of leaving.

  “Close the door,” she said.

  He stood dumbstruck. Finally: “Ms. Harnett, I—”

  “Lock it if you can.”

  Chapter 3

  Christensen’s utter confusion felt like vertigo. The woman sitting across from him shouldn’t be here. He felt that as deeply as he’d felt anything during his professional life. He couldn’t imagine the tortured road that had led Teresa Harnett to the door of his obscure academic office at virtually the same moment the man she had accused was being processed out of prison. He took off his glasses and adjusted the wire frame, stalling, plucking nervously at the short hairs of his salt-and-pepper beard. What could he say?

  “Does anyone know you’re here?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  Christensen hooked the fragile gold stems around his ears. Teresa’s features sharpened again as his eyes adjusted, but they still seemed skewed in the same way the image in a jigsaw puzzle never looks quite right. He imagined her head the way it must have been after the attack, a shattered sack of crushed bone and damaged brain tissue. The top of a velvety pink scar peeked from the open collar of her yellow oxford shirt just above her right breast, the place where her attacker stabbed her with the broken neck of the wine bottle he then used to rape her. Christensen felt absolutely certain, at that moment, that whoever had attacked her wanted her dead.

  But here she was, eight years later, walking, talking, a miracle of trauma medicine, neurosurgery, bone grafts, and intensive physical and mental rehabilitation. She was thin but not frail, obviously fit enough to have been one of the first women to crack the clubby, all-male ranks of the Pittsburgh Police Department. Her dignity and confidence apparently survived the brutality and degradation she’d endured.

  “David’s Downtown,” she said.

  The husband, also a cop. Christensen remembered him as a block of granite with a head, one of the men he’d seen with Dagnolo as they slipped past reporters just a few minutes ago. Teresa offered nothing else, just crossed one denim leg over the other with considerable effort.

  “And you didn’t tell him you were coming here?”

  “Not to see you, no. Told him I had a rehab appointment. I’m putting you in an awkward position. I realize that.”

  Christensen nodded, glad for the acknowledgment. “You understand I have no official role in this case. I testified during the original trial as an expert witness on memory, but other than my relationship with Brenna I’m in no way—”

  “There was a time I would have killed Brenna Kennedy if I ever got the chance. I want you to know that up front.”

  Christensen studied her eyes for the hatred behind those words, but saw none. Was she just trying to provoke him? He wished they were in his private counseling office five blocks away, rather than this cramped and comfortless working space.

  “In a therapy situation, this is where I’d say, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere!’ ” he said. “But we’re not, and I guess I’m trying to understand where that came from.”

  “You’re a smart man, Dr. Christensen. I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “Because she defended DellaVecchio?” he said.

  Teresa leaned forward and looked him in the eye. “You’ll never understand what it took for me to get up on that witness stand during the trial. Looking and talking like I did back then, like Frankenstein’s bride with a mouthful of marbles. Having to face down that smirking little shit at the defense table, having to sit twenty feet away from the face in my nightmares for two full days, smelling his BO, reliving that night. Pray to God you’ll never know what that was like.”

  “You’re—”

  “She tried her best to make me look like a liar,” Teresa said. “Then she put you on the stand to make it worse. You with your little theory about ‘evolving memories,’ telling the jurors that what I’d said, what I’d turned myself inside out about for two fucking days, was basically a crock—”

  “No, I never—”

  “—that what I remembered was unreliable, ‘polluted’ was your word. That I wasn’t really remembering what happened, just parroting back a convenient story concocted for me by investigators who just wanted a collar. I wanted you both to die when I heard that, Dr. Christensen, and I wanted to watch. DellaVecchio, Brenna Kennedy, and you. Those were the names on my list back then, in that order.”

  Christensen knew better than to react, so he waited. She’d delivered her rage in a reasoned narrative, passionate but without obvious emotion. Just as when she testified, her voice never once wavered. She might have been telling him about picking up her laundry, or locking her keys in the car. It was one of the most remarkable moments of self-control he’d ever seen.

  “I just wanted you to know that,” she said.

  He nodded. “I understand.”

  She offered no apologies or absolution, but the room seemed to depressurize as she leaned back in her chair. “But that’s not why I came.”

  “It gets worse?” he asked.

  She didn’t smile, but instead looked down and cleared her throat. “I came to tell you … you might have been right.”

  Christensen opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He looked away, then back into those penetrating eyes. He’d imagined this moment, wondered if it might someday come for her, but he never once imagined that he’d see it firsthand. But here she was, openly questioning a narrative that for eight years had grown from damaged and sketchy memories of a vicious assault into a vivid and horrifying tale of Carmen DellaVecchio’s brutality.

  She was no longer sure. That’s what she was saying. But why was she saying it to him?

  “It started after the DNA story broke a couple weeks ago,” she said. “It rattled me, understand? Hell, I was a cop. We use DNA to convict people all the time. Brenna Kennedy’s right. You can’t ignore it. So that started working on my head.”

  “In a psychological sense, you couldn’t reconcile the conflict between what Brenna found and what you believed,” he said.

  Her brow furrowed.

  “You finally gave yourself permission to question,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  There was something else. Christensen hoped his silence would bring it out.

  “Then I got a phone call,” she said.

  “From?”

  “Him.”

  Christensen sat up straight. “Who?”

  Teresa turned her back. She stayed that way, looking toward his office window. Her shoulders suddenly heaved with a series of quick breaths and she started to tremble. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve heard DellaVecchio talk in court. He sounds like he swallowed gravel, and this guy who called sounded like that, too.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “This guy … It’s what he said that made me—”

  Remember, Christensen thought. “What did he say?”

  She took a long time to answer. “You never rose,” she said at last.

  “You never rose?”

  She winced. “It’s what he said that night. In my ear, he whispered it after … everything. I was fading out, and he bent down and whispered it.”

  “So you think it was DellaVecchio on the phone? I’m confused.”

  “No. Maybe.” She waved away his words. “Goddamn it. Goddamn it. It could have been him. It sounded like him. What I’m saying—oh Jesus Christ! It’s what he said.”

  Christensen sat back. She needed no more
prompting.

  “He whispered it in my ear that night, but I didn’t remember it until now, when the caller said that phrase on the phone. ‘You never rose.’ So I know this caller has to be the one who attacked me. Thing is, the voice I remember is different from the guy who called, the guy who sounds like DellaVecchio.” She leaned forward. “The voice I heard that night … it was someone else.”

  There. The truth lay between them like a land mine. Teresa had pulled the cornerstone from the reality to which she’d sworn.

  “You’re remembering the real attacker’s voice,” he said. “And it’s not DellaVecchio’s voice.”

  She stood suddenly and walked to the office window, which overlooked the gothic roof of the Stephen Foster Memorial sixteen floors below. “I’ve had this nightmare. For years, since it happened. The attack. But before it was like a silent movie. Now, I can hear his voice. ‘You never rose.’ Like that. ‘You never rose.’ He thought I was dead and he kissed my cheek and whispered it in this voice, this—”

  “A different voice.”

  “Somebody else’s voice.” Teresa turned to him suddenly. She yanked the sleeve of her jacket up to her elbow. The hair on her arms was standing on end. “Look at this. Goddamn it. Something’s wrong.”

  Three quick steps brought her back to the front of his desk. She grasped its edges, held on like a woman afraid of falling. Her desperate eyes brimming. “Help me.”

  “Coke OK?”

  Teresa nodded, took the cold can, and held it to her forehead. She’d composed herself in the minute it took Christensen to get her a drink from the machine one floor below. But in the uncontrolled moment just before, with her pleas coming in choked sobs, Christensen knew their lives had suddenly knotted. No one in the city, maybe no one in the country, understood the uncertain terrain of human memory the way he did. He was uniquely qualified to work with her, to guide her safely back, to explore her contaminated memories for the truth of what happened that night.