Straw Men

The words shot through her, surfacing from somewhere dark and deep. She was shaking, her knees pulled up against the T-shirt clinging to her chest and back.
You never rose
. Whose voice? Not his. Goddamn. Not his. The thought triggered a sudden sob, and she covered her mouth with her hand so she wouldn't wake David again.

His face was turned away. She listened for his breathing, held her own breath as she did.

“You're dreamin' again, Terese,” David said.

She found her voice. “I know. I'm sorry.”

“Need a pill?”

“No. I'm OK.”

“You sure? I'll get you a pill.”

“I don't want a pill.”

She threw back the damp sheets and dangled her legs off the bed, listening to her blood pulse. She closed her eyes, but the face, that unforgettable face, was still there. Always there. But something was different. The mouth still moved behind the ski mask, but the voice was different, deeper. Whose?

In the dark bathroom, she lifted handfuls of hot water to her reconstructed face. It soaked the dark hair that hid the surgical scars along her scalp, pasting a few strands to a forehead cross-hatched by the fading lines of long-ago incisions. Her face steamed from the water, but she still couldn't stop shivering. She pulled her terry robe off the back of the bathroom door and put it on, drawing the belt tight around her narrow waist. When that didn't stop the chill, she wrapped herself in bath towels, one around her shoulders and one around her legs. One of the towels swept across the countertop as she lurched toward the light switch, knocking a plastic jar of aloe gel into the sink. It bounced and clattered and finally rolled to a stop against the drain as she shut the door. She closed her eyes against the harsh light and groped back to the toilet, where she sat quaking, trying to make sense of the voice. Not his. But whose?

“You OK?” David called.

“Fine,” she said. “I'll be fine.”

When she opened her eyes the walls began to expand and contract, as if the bathroom itself were breathing. Its corners disappeared. Shapes shifted. Colors transformed. Everything started to move. She gagged once, then leaned over and vomited into the bathtub. She retched as the smell rose, then vomited again as she reached for the tap. A rush of cold water washed the worst of it away.

He knocked lightly. “Terese?”

She couldn't answer, just heaved again.

“Need some help?”

She clutched the sides of the tub, wiping her mouth on the towel around her shoulders. The worst was over, so she turned off the water. “No. Just…I'll be OK. Don't come in.”

“You sick? Or dreamin' again?”

“Must be sick,” she lied.

“Want me to get you something?”

Privacy
, she thought. “Just go back to bed, OK? I can handle it.”

“You let me know if you need anything. Pepto?”

She retched again, but nothing came up.

“Some toast?” he asked.

She turned on the water again, letting it drown out David's good intentions. It spilled into the tub, then began its search for a way out. She knew the feeling. So easy for water in a tub. Only one place to go. But what about her? What to do with these doubts after eight dead-certain years?

She turned off the tap, gathered the towel regally around her shoulders, and stood swaying before the mirror, a prom queen from hell. The face was familiar, but a storm raged behind her eyes. She felt the ground beneath her shifting, eroding everything she knew, everything she swore had happened that night. These memories didn't fit a version of reality that now seemed as carefully rebuilt as the face in the mirror. Something unthinkable was pulling her down, and she was whirling closer and closer to some dark truth. For her, there was no easy way out.

Christensen refused to look up, just stared harder at the borrowed black-and-white TV on the corner of his desk. He knew who was standing in his office door. No one else in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior spoke with the rolling cadence of a West Virginia native. No one else had Burke Padgett's flair for the ill-timed interruption.

“Not now, Burke, please. They just went live—”

“Crazy, ain't it? All three local channels down there covering this thang. Bumped the soaps, even. Mercy, man, you'd think they were unleashing Lucifer himself.”

Christensen finally turned. “No argument from you, right?”

Padgett shrugged. “I understand fear.”

Christensen pointed at the grainy screen, where a news anchor was about to toss to a field reporter at the Allegheny County Courthouse. Behind the anchor, a stylized graphic of Blind Justice.

“Then surely you understand fearmongering,” Christensen said.

Padgett smiled and stepped fully into Christensen's office. He was dressed, as always, in a three-piece suit fitted to his sprightly frame, a dapper elf. Perfectly proportioned but startlingly short, he was nonetheless an imposing figure in the country's elite circle of forensic psychiatrists. Padgett still hung around the department offices—some long-tenured professors still pretend they enjoy teaching—but he'd long ago grown bored with the more mundane aspects of scholarship. He now spent most of his time preparing psychological profiles of the nation's most complicated killers for prosecutors who adored his folksiness on the witness stand, if not his astounding fee as an expert witness.

Padgett's full beard and thick hair were as white as his skin was pink, and his penetrating green eyes made his face seem almost ethereal. It was a face once featured on the cover of
The New York Times Magazine,
where it appeared beside the bloodred cover line “Killers on the Couch.” Christensen was sure the profile pleased the little showman with its accounts of his dramatic psychological showdowns with various stars of death row. A book contract followed, and Padgett's heroic
Waltzing with Demons
spent several weeks on national bestseller lists.

“Still don't believe in the bogeyman, eh?” Padgett stepped forward, set his leather briefcase on Christensen's desk, and stood up straight. He looked like a man about to make a speech. “Well I do. He's real. I've met him. He's Dahmer and Bundy and Berkowitz. He's Speck and Ramirez and John Wayne Gacy. We maybe can figure the bogeyman out, but that doesn't make him any less dangerous.”

Straight from the book's cover copy,
Christensen thought. He sighed as Padgett perched on the armrest of the wooden chair facing the desk.

“But you're not here to talk about Dahmer and the rest, are you, Burke?”

Padgett gestured toward the screen, which was filled now with the bulging face of Channel 2's Myron Levin, the dean of Pittsburgh's courthouse reporters. Levin's toupee looked like a shag toilet-seat cover.

Today, of all days, Levin and the other reporters in Pittsburgh's Allegheny County Courthouse should have been hanging their heads. For eight years they'd played the mob role in a media-age lynching, unable to contain their contempt for the freak in question, Carmen DellaVecchio—the Scarecrow, to use the media's cruel nickname. Now, thanks to Brenna, a judge had turned eight years of assumptions about DellaVecchio's guilt inside out, tossing out key evidence that linked him to the city's most notorious case of sexual savagery and attempted murder. But Christensen saw no trace of remorse in Levin's face, only the fleeting thrill of breaking news. The word
Live
blinked on and off in the corner of the screen.

Christensen reached for the volume knob and cranked it high enough to discourage conversation.

“—looks like the Scarecrow is headed home, at least for now,” the reporter said. “What I'm seeing around the courthouse here, as far as reaction to the judge's ruling, is a sort of stunned disbelief. I think a lot of court watchers thought the new DNA evidence was strong enough to get Mr. DellaVecchio a new trial, but no one—least of all the district attorney—could have predicted the judge would release him after nearly eight years behind bars. In all my years covering the courthouse beat, I've never seen J. D. Dagnolo so angry.”

Levin set his mouth in a grim, aggressive nonsmile, then lifted a small notebook and riffled the pages.

“District Attorney Dagnolo argued his point rather emphatically, I thought, during this morning's hearing, but Judge Reinhardt disagreed. What the judge said was, ‘In light of this compelling new DNA evidence, this court is inclined to grant the defense request for supervised release of Mr. DellaVecchio until the district attorney can prepare an appropriate answer.' Which means, basically, that the Scarecrow will be free until a hearing three weeks from today.”

“ ‘Supervised release,' ” the off-camera news anchor asked. “What exactly does that mean, Myron?”

“Short term, Marci, DellaVecchio will wear an electronic monitor around his ankle to enforce an overnight curfew, but he'll most definitely be out of prison. And if this new evidence holds up, the conviction will be set aside. At that point it'll be up to the D.A. to decide whether to try him all over again. We expect a statement from DellaVecchio's defense attorney, Brenna Kennedy, anytime now.”

Padgett grinned. “Your lady friend bring an umbrella?”

Christensen stared.

“Helluva shitstorm she's about to walk into. She ready for that?”

Christensen turned back to the screen. “You obviously don't know Brenna.”

On the screen, Levin pressed his earphone deeper into the side of his head.

“What about Teresa Harnett?” Marci asked. “Any reaction from the victim in this case?”

Levin cocked a brushy eyebrow. “She wasn't in court today, but her husband, David, was. I'll try to get a word with him shortly. But I think we can all imagine how the Harnetts are reacting to the Scarecrow's unexpected release.”

Cut to Marci's frowny face. “We'll keep them in our thoughts,” she said.

Christensen blew a disgusted breath. “For God's sake, can you believe this?”

“Face it, Jim. Your guy scares the hell outta people.”

Cut to Levin. The camera jostled, then pulled back to a wider shot. Behind the reporter, the doors of Allegheny County Courtroom 29 swung open. A small herd of large men slipped past the media pack before it could react. The tallest of them, District Attorney J. D. Dagnolo, tossed a brusque “No comment” over his shoulder as his group moved down the hall. The pack wouldn't be fooled twice. The moment Brenna and her client stepped through the door, they found themselves at the center of a harsh, klieg-lit pool—a replay of a scene Christensen had watched once before.

The first time he ever saw Brenna was on TV, the day of DellaVecchio's preliminary hearing eight years before. The cops and the D.A. were blitzing the media, proclaiming the case solved, sharing credit, trying their damnedest to ease public outrage about the Harnett attack. Even be­fore the prelim, DellaVecchio's court-appointed public defender was practically waving a white flag. Then Brenna had stepped into the breach. She agreed to take up DellaVecchio's defense
pro bono,
and Christensen had listened with profound respect that day as she explained her reasons to the reporters swarming around her new client.

Carmen DellaVecchio clearly was an individual of diminished capacity, she'd said, unable to control his impulses because of his damaged brain. The charges against him did not reflect his condition, leaving him open to the law's harshest penalties. “An attempted-murder charge is the only choice available under state law as written, and that's wrong,” she'd said. “I think this case can change that.”

The case had changed so much more. The closer Brenna looked, the more holes she'd found in the prosecution's case. During discovery, the question of diminished capacity blurred into a question of innocence. Even after a jury convicted DellaVecchio in record time, Brenna never let up. It took her eight years, but science had finally affirmed her early faith in the damaged young man beside her.

Christensen leaned forward. Would she now blast the reporters for twisting her own “straw man” theory that someone had framed DellaVecchio into the impossibly cruel nickname “Scarecrow,” and for the gleeful way they chronicled the most humiliating courtroom defeat of her career? He hoped not, but then he noticed something only a lover might: Brenna was trying hard not to smile.

Beside her, DellaVecchio was grinning like a cadaver, showing rows of teeth ruined by chain-smoking and twenty-eight years of neglect. His wild, hollow eyes moved constantly beneath a brow that jutted like a mantelpiece. His ears looked like tiny fists. Somehow, they fit someone whose head was so misshapen. His cheeks seemed shrink-wrapped to cheekbones as sharp and angular as an unfinished marble carving—the unmistakable face of fetal alcohol syndrome. The sports coat and tie Brenna had bought for him earlier that week had an unintentionally comic effect, as if one of Satan's shock troops had dressed for church.

“She wanted this one bad, huh?” Padgett said, poking at the screen. “Needed a win after all these years in the Scarecrow's corner.”

“Use his name,” Christensen snapped.

Padgett blinked. “DellaVecchio.”

“Don't be like the rest.” Christensen stood up. “Burke, maybe you should leave. We've been colleagues a long time. We respect one another's work. But I don't see any benefit to having this conversation. I may say something I'll regret.”

Padgett rose to his full 5-foot-1 and clasped his hands behind his back. His suit jacket bowed open, revealing a delicate gold watch fob trailing into a vest pocket. He didn't so much look like Freud as someone trying hard to look like Freud. The man wasn't handling celebrity well.

“DellaVecchio's like a downed power line, Jim,” Padgett said. “Doesn't think about consequences. Doesn't make moral choices. He's a constant threat.”

“Yes, Burke, he is. But that's not the point here, is it? This isn't some legal technicality. Brenna didn't help him wriggle off the hook. If DellaVecchio's conviction is overturned, blame it on one annoying little detail: he didn't do it. I can understand the media losing sight of that. It makes the story so much more complicated. But you should know better.”

Padgett held up both hands, pink palms out. “Got no quibble with the science, Jim. This new evidence, the DNA, it's troubling, isn't it? Your girlfriend found the flaw in Dagnolo's case and just nailed it. And the evidence you developed during the original trial, that business about how the victim's memories evolved, it's groundbreaking stuff. I believe that. I really do.”

Christensen spread his arms wide. “The issues are so much bigger than this case, Burke. It's about how a shattered victim can go into a mug-shot session with investigators and come out with more and better memories than she went in with. It's about how a cop's phrasing can set a sketchy memory in stone. Look at all the research grants that rolled in after I started asking questions.”

“Envy of the department,” Padgett said.

“Because the more questions I ask, the more I find. About the malleability of post-traumatic memories. About factors that influence them most.” Christensen nodded at the TV. “Ever wonder if cops sometimes shape a victim's memories to fit existing evidence? To fit the description of a suspect? It happens, Burke. It happened here.”

Both of Padgett's hands took flight, a man waving away gnats. “So, what? You're gonna throw out all the basic assumptions about the value of eyewitness testimony?”

“Damn right I am.”

They both looked back at the screen, at a tight, devastating shot of DellaVecchio's face.

Padgett shook his head and hoisted his briefcase. “So now he's loose,” he said, turning for the door. “Sure hope y'all know what you're doing.”