The Intruders

chapter

TWENTY-TWO

The Anderson house was on Federal, near Broadway Avenue, up on the ridge overlooking downtown and Elliott Bay. The avenue itself is a major thoroughfare, a long, wide street sparsely lined with generic businesses, redbrick banks, and more places to buy coffee. As a nation in general, we like our coffee, but the Northwest is insane on the subject. I’m surprised you can’t get it out of ATMs. Federal was a couple of streets back and overhung with big trees now shedding copper and yellow leaves. The speed limit was twenty, because people actually walked around here, and many houses had low hedges that someone remembered to cut or picket fences that had been painted sometime in living memory. Most were small. The cars on the street also said you did not have to be rich to live here, but it was easy to see why you might want to be.

The house itself was one back from a crossroads. Evidence of fire damage was minor from the outside, though the street-level windows had been covered with plywood sheets. I walked straight up the stairs onto the shallow porch, which is what you do when you have a right to be there. The door was sealed with tape, but I had a tool ready for that and another to pop the lock. A lot of cops have rudimentary breaking-and-entering skills. Mine are a little better than most.

I stepped into a dark space that smelled of old smoke and shut the door behind me.

I stood still for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust. There was little ambient light making its way around the window boards, however, and it didn’t get any better than very dark. I reached out to the side of the doorway and found a switch. The lights came on, the bill presumably still being automatically paid from the account of a man whose whereabouts were unknown.

I went upstairs first. Other than the smell and some shadowing on the walls, the fire had made few inroads here. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, another room used for storage and a home office. A hatch in the hall ceiling opened into a roof space thick with dust that had not been recently disturbed. I looked quickly through the bedrooms, doing little more than opening drawers and glancing into closets, then checked the obvious hiding places in the bathroom. Found evidence for nothing more than a middle-aged couple living with a teenage son. No sign of anywhere a gun would likely have been stowed, either: no lockbox, no wrap cloth, no carton of old shells.

Then I went back downstairs and halted a couple of steps short of the bottom to look down over the living room. The air was dead and quiet. This was obviously where Joshua Anderson had died, given the oblique blood splatter across one smoke-stained wall and the charred patch in the carpet. I descended the last couple of steps and walked around the room, not trying to make anything of it. There was no telling the degree to which things had been moved after the crime-scene people had logged and recorded the environment. But I was already beginning to think I could tell what had happened here. I’d seen it many times before.

I went through into the kitchen, then back across the hall to a den containing a smaller TV with a PlayStation attached and walls lined with shelves of DVDs and books. The latter broke down into paperback novels of a King/Koontz/Rice bent and a large array of hardcovers and papers relating to the physical sciences. Bill Anderson’s, presumably. I ran my eyes around these for a while, seeing a few titles that surprised me—Cremo, Corliss, Hancock, alternative-archaeology theorists—but it was not enough to stop me from leaving the room.

To one side of the doorway into the kitchen was another, narrower door. Beyond it lay a flight of makeshift steps down to the basement. When I reached the bottom, I found a pull cord that shed light over the most damaged part of the house. The floor was ankle deep with charred shreds of paper that had been burned and then soaked. The remains of a wooden workbench lay along one wall. Tools and electrical components of various sizes were mixed in with the other mess, and a couple of buckled filing cabinets lay on their sides down at the end. It didn’t look like someone had merely trashed the basement. It looked like a bomb had gone off.

Sometimes you have to be in the place. You have to stand there to tell.

People do strange things in their own environments, behave in ways you or I might find impossible to understand. But the chaotic intrusion of otherness leaves a distinctive quality, creates a fracture at some very deep level. The place is changed.

I pulled out my phone. I took a picture. I left.

As I was walking down the path, I saw a man standing in the doorway of a house on the other side of the street. I changed course and walked over to him.

“Are you supposed to be in that house?” he said.

“Yes. You live here?”

He nodded. He was early sixties. Gray hair thinning over the top, the mild eyes of a man who watches, and thinks, and is content to live that way. “Terrible, what happened.”

“Which was?”

“Well, you know—the murders.”

“You think Bill did it?”

He opened his mouth, hesitated. I knew what he needed to hear from me.

“I don’t,” I said. “I think Gina and Josh had another caller that night.”

“I didn’t see anyone,” the man said firmly. “And I don’t know anything, really. I…well, they’ve lived here over ten years. I saw them every day, near enough, one or the other, sometimes all. Wave, say hi, you know. Not a week before it happened—three, four days—I saw the two of them go out one night. They were arguing about something, bickering, kind of. Not loud, but right there in the street, as they walked to the corner. Happened once in a while. You understand what I mean?”

I did. “Thank you. That’s very helpful.”

The man nodded again, folded his arms, and slowly returned indoors, still looking back at the house.

I headed a further block south down Federal and knocked on the front door of something that might have once been a Craftsman bungalow worth preserving. After a very, very long time, a light went on behind it. I was mildly surprised by this—it was only early afternoon and, by Seattle’s standards, barely overcast—until the door was opened and I saw it was very dark inside, almost as dark as the Anderson house had been.

She stood in front of me now. Perhaps eighty, bent over to half my height, her face like an apple that had been left in the sun for a summer. When she looked up, her eyes reminded me of the windows in the building I’d stood outside in Belltown that morning, reflecting nothing but the clouds behind my head.

“Mrs. McKenna?”

“Yep.”

“You mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Nope.”

“You told the police that on the night of the fire up at the Andersons you saw someone coming down the street, see what had happened, then run away. That right?”

“Nope.”

I hesitated. “Did you say ‘No’?”

“Yep.”

“My understanding was that—”

“Didn’t see ‘someone.’ Saw Bill Anderson. You understand me now?”

“Yes I do.”

“Good. What’s your point?”

I looked across at the front of your house. “You always have your drapes drawn like this? Day and night?”

“Keeps out the light.”

“I can see how that would work. So, if you don’t mind me asking, how were you able to notice Mr. Anderson as he passed by on that evening?”

The old woman looked up at me suddenly, and her eyes were no longer reflective. You could see something inside now and tell that it was still very much alive.

“You one of them?”

“One of who?”

She stared hard at me a moment longer, shook her head. “I can see you’re not. Okay, so. I keep a watch. Especially at night. I hear someone walking up or down the street, I take a look. Someone’s got to. Keep a watch. Always. ’Round these parts it’s me.”

“Keep a watch for whom, ma’am?”

“You know. Those fellas no one can see. So I hear footsteps. Sound familiar, but I think I’ll check anyhow. Move aside the corner of the curtain, just a little. See it’s Bill. He’s okay. I don’t mind Bill. He walks a few yards past, and he stops. Stands there staring. I cain’t see what he’s looking at. But he starts to back away, and he turns and runs. I haven’t never seen Bill run before. Twenty minutes later you got sirens and what-all else.”

She coughed, violently and without warning, making no effort to cover her mouth but letting the dislodged materials rocket out and hit the ground. When she was done, she shook her head wearily.

“Don’t catch cancer, son. It’s a pain in the ass. Need anything else? I got a show to watch.”

I walked back to the crossroads, stood on the sidewalk there watching falling leaves while I smoked a cigarette. I wouldn’t want to count on Mrs. McKenna in court, but she didn’t come across as completely unreliable either. Even without the experience of being in the house, the conversation with the guy living across the street might already have started to change my mind. Couples living in long-term abusive relationships, the real heavy hitters, rarely exchange harsh words in public. Out in the world, everything’s fake peachy or icy polite, an occasional flash of angry eyes but no more. Their real business is private, an indoor sport. Add this to what Fisher had told me and maybe Bill Anderson hadn’t whacked his wife and child. So the question became who did.

That, and where Anderson was now.

I wasn’t kept waiting long at the station, which surprised me. Either they were having a quiet day or perhaps he was just intrigued.

Blanchard took me into a different room from the one where I’d sat with a hangover three days before. This room looked like it might be his office. It was certainly messy enough.

“I wanted to apologize,” I said.

“That sounds nice.”

“You were right. About my wife. She had just forgotten my number, and she was right there at home.”

He nodded. “So everything’s cool?”

“Right as rain.”

“That’s good. Well, you didn’t need to come here, but I appreciate it.”

“Actually, I wanted to pick your brains on something else while I was here.”

“That figures. Shoot.”

“What do you know about the Anderson murders? Up near Broadway, three weeks ago?”

He looked surprised. “Nothing. Well, two people died hard, word is the husband did it. No more than that.”

“Anderson is listed as a missing person?”

“No. As the suspect in a double homicide. Which is a different department, as you know.”

“You buy that? Him killing them?”

“It’s not a case I know anything about. The-husband-did-it is normally how it breaks down, as you’ll also know. Why—you got a different perspective?”

“I’ve just been up there,” I said. “Talked to a couple people.”

Blanchard frowned. “Are congratulations in order? You join SPD and make detective the same day? I’m a little surprised I didn’t hear about that.”

“Just a private citizen,” I said. “Talking with other private citizens.”

“Uh-huh. So what’s your interest, citizen?”

“Personal.”

“And what do you think you’ve discovered, in this new hobby of yours?”

“I don’t think Anderson killed them.”

“Uh-huh.” Blanchard started doodling on the pad in front of him, small looping spirals.

“The only eyewitness says she saw Anderson approaching the house after the fact. Okay, she’s not a great advocate, but she can’t be ignored. I talked to someone else who confirms the Andersons as a functional couple, which I gather is the general picture. If you take away the notion of some long-overdue boil-over, then I can’t find a reason for this happening. Can you?”

“You realize there was an eighty-thousand-dollar policy on Gina Anderson?”

“Didn’t know the figure. But that’s a bullshit motive. He didn’t even own a gun.”

“Far as we know.”

“There’s no prior, no flags, no indicators.”

“Come on, Jack, you were on the job. You know how it is. These people are like sleepers. They get up and go to work, day in, day out, have cookouts in the yard, fishing trips with the neighbors. Just like regular human beings. Then one night it turns out they’re a pod person after all, the thing inside comes out, and bang—it’s a whole different world and there’s blood on the walls. Eighty thousand is more than enough, especially if there was something else going on in his life.”

“That’s just it,” I said. “There was other stuff going on, but not the way you think. Things the investigators don’t know about.”

Blanchard stopped drawing on his pad. “Like what?”

“Couple months ago Anderson was a beneficiary in the will of a rich dead guy from Chicago. He received a check for a quarter of a million dollars.”

Now I had his attention. “How do you know this?”

“A lawyer involved in the case. He’s all bent out of shape over this and convinced Anderson didn’t do it.”

“Just because of the money? Proves nothing.”

“I know,” I said. “And that’s something my guy hasn’t considered, because he’s never been a cop. You’re thinking Anderson comes into this money, decides he wants to reinvent his life, and though he was okay with the wife and kid before, he doesn’t want them hanging around his neck now, taking up space on his new beach towel.”

“Why did you quit the job?” Blanchard asked. “Seems to me you might not have been the world’s worst cop.”

“But here’s the thing,” I said. “That check was never cashed. He had it for a month before he disappeared. Even if you’ve decided you’re going to move to Mexico and grow fat on fish tacos and Dos Equis with a series of loud women, you’re going to open an account and put that money in the bank. Not take the risk of this new life getting lost or stolen—or found out by your wife.”

Blanchard’s eyes were on the wall behind my head now, or at a point somewhere in between it and me. He ran his tongue around his mouth for a moment, then nodded once.

“Okay. Maybe. What’s this guy’s name? The lawyer?”

“Gary Fisher. I don’t know the name of his firm.”

“But he’s on the level?”

“I’ve known him a long time.”

“You got a number for him?”

“I left it back at the hotel.”

He looked at me. “Right. Have it your own way, concerned citizen. I’ll talk to some people, throw this into the pot. See if I can get anyone to care.”

“Thank you,” I said, standing up.

“We’re here to serve. In the meantime go home and stay out of trouble.”

“What?”

He stared me straight in the eye. “You just got that look about you. You did the first time I ever saw you.”

I’d told myself I wasn’t going to do it, but I’d known that I was lying. I did what I could to avoid it. I called Fisher, arranged to hook up later at the bar at the foot of Madison where I’d met Georj. I then took a long walk in the wrong direction, as the afternoon got grayer and darker and colder. As I walked, I noticed more than ever the shape of the land, the way it tilted sharply down toward Elliott Bay. Walking to the natural contours, seeing buildings only as things in my way, it was as if the work of man became insubstantial. I knew from my tourist visit with Amy that there had been extensive regrading work throughout the city in the last century. Given how hilly it remained, it would have been hard to imagine what attracted people in the first place, if you didn’t know that the ridge had once been thickly covered in profitable trees. I cut diagonally down to hit First and kept going south. Followed the odd forty-degree swerve that First makes around the bottom of James, and continued toward Yesler Way, where the streets suddenly run east-west instead of parallel to the water. I hadn’t headed for this area in particular, but it seemed that whenever I went walking in Seattle it was where I wound up, as if the city tipped me down in this direction.

I stopped at the corner of First and Yesler, looking across at the totem pole on the corner of Pioneer Square. On the other side was the terra-cotta bulk of the Yesler Building, to its right a monstrosity of a parking lot, built in the sixties to replace the fine old Occidental Hotel and so ugly it helped spark the campaign that saved the old town from being leveled into yet more parking lots. A few homeless people walked this way and that in the drizzle, single men, shoulders hunched. The irrelevance of the surrounding buildings seemed even more acute here, as if they could have no bearing on these passing humans and their lives. These were street dwellers, not the building kind. If they had a home in this city it existed at ground level only, and the appearance of sidewalks and road surfacing had not changed it much.

I went and stood in Pioneer Square, under blood-leaved trees in front of the drinking fountain with the Indian’s head on it, and read that it showed Seattle himself, chief of the local Suquamish tribe, one of the peoples who’d been living here before the white man came. This fountain, the city’s name, and the totem pole appeared to be the sole memorials to the tribe’s passing. There are middle-class dogs that have done better than that. I wondered if Seattle or his forebears had ever stood on the shores of the bay and seen tall ships in the distance and what their response had been. Whether they could have done things differently and, if so, whether anything would have changed.

There was something calming about the square, and I stayed awhile, sitting on a bench. Then I walked through the old town, stopping in the Elliott Bay Book Company, killing time any way I could. I stood in front of the bookstore’s True Crime section, wondering if I had it in me to produce something that could be filed next to the single copy of The Intruders they stocked. I doubted it, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. The big local seller of the moment appeared to be a garish hack job on the darker corners of Seattle’s last few decades. Arson and scandal. Famous suicides and murders. A long series of unexplained disappearances in the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, kidnappings of young girls, only a couple of badly mangled bodies ever being found, both having suffered abuse even this author balked at specifying, along with cuts into their faces so deep they’d gouged the bone.

I put the book back on the pile. I didn’t want to write that kind of thing, and even if I had, someone had beaten me to it. In the end I bought a thin précis of the city’s early history and wound up walking the streets again, until they ran out and deposited me unceremoniously in a tangle of busy new roads that showed so many twisting ways to go that ultimately there was no way to decide.

So I turned back around and tried to go some other place. Anywhere except where I’d been heading all along. But a little before five o’clock, I still found myself walking up Post Alley, in the direction of the Kerry, Crane & Hardy offices.

I went straight past their offices and checked out a couple of things. Then I returned to the corner deli with the window seats. I got a coffee and sat facing back up the alley. I had no way of telling if Crane was in there, and I told myself this was a good thing. I’d just sit awhile. Watch people go in, come out. Then people only coming out, and finally the lights dimming, and someone shutting and locking the door behind him at the end of the business day. Crane was a big wheel. Chances were that he’d be out of the office, sitting in some other people’s boardroom, making them feel good about whatever he wanted them to do. That was his job, and when we met, I’d been able to tell that he would be good at it. He’d go straight from the meeting to dinner with a client, or home to his picture-book family, and that was for the best. Sooner or later I’d get tired and bored and thirsty and hoist myself up off the stool and go into the night.

I sat there forty minutes, becoming more and more convinced of this scenario. Then Todd Crane came out.

He was alone, and he looked preoccupied. I was paid up and ready to go, in position at the door within seconds. He didn’t do what I expected, however. My scouting around had been to establish the closest entrance to the multistory parking lot. It was back up the alley, and I’d assumed that Crane would be the kind of man to arrive at work in something expensive. But he was walking toward me instead.

I faded back into the aisles of imported produce, but he walked straight past, eyes cast down and hands pushed deep into his coat pockets.

I slipped out of the deli and followed.

He walked quickly, heading for where the alley opened out into the underpass beneath the off-ramp. I would prefer privacy in which to ask this man if he’d been the person in the photographs Gary had taken, the man with his arm around my wife. I picked up my pace.

My phone rang. It was loud enough that I couldn’t just let it go on. I pulled it out of my pocket, still walking, suddenly convinced it would be Amy. The screen did not say AMY, however. It said ROSE.

I don’t know anyone named Rose. I put the phone up to my ear. “Who the hell—”

“Don’t do this,” said a woman’s voice, talking very fast and loud, and then the connection was cut.

I thumbed the green key twice to call the number back, but it rang and rang and was not answered. I stared around as it continued to ring, looking back along the alley and up at the windows of the buildings, but could not see anyone.

By the time I gave up and ran down to the end of the alley, Todd Crane had disappeared.