The Intruders

chapter

TWENTY-SIX

“He’s not going to come.”

“So he doesn’t come,” I said.

Fisher shook his head, went back to staring out the window. It was a little after eight. We were in Byron’s, on the street level of Pike Place. You entered through the market, walked past bulky men bellowing about fish, and found yourself in a dusty, low-ceilinged and hazily sunlit diner that couldn’t decide whether greasy breakfasts or strong cocktails were its main business. Some of the patrons couldn’t either. In the center was a battered and grimy cook’s station, around which battered and grimy men perched on stools sucking down one type of fare or the other, occasionally both. Some wore the stained white coats of men who’d already been up for hours shifting raw seafood and ice, others were dressed white-collar, on the way to work, and trying to look like they’d wandered in by accident and found a beer in their hand the same way. One wall was mainly glass and looked out over Elliott Bay. The tables along the side were occupied by tourist families in defensive huddles, patriarchs staring into guidebooks with a look of worried betrayal.

I had a bucket of strong coffee. Fisher tried breakfast. He had admitted he didn’t drink much these days, and his leaden movements this morning confirmed he was out of practice. I didn’t feel so hot either. When the waitress stopped by to offer more coffee I said yes and left Fisher to toy biliously with his congealing food, while I went to have a cigarette outside.

My phone conversation with Anderson had been short. He wouldn’t say where he was. Wouldn’t come to Fisher’s hotel. Wouldn’t let us come to him. Chose Byron’s presumably on the grounds that it was a very public place. I said yes because I knew it, having nursed my head there the morning I woke in Occidental Park, before going to report Amy missing.

I stomped out the cigarette on the cobbled street and looked blearily at the people milling around. Tourists, market traders, adults, children. Selling, buying, browsing. Talking, shouting, silent. Everyone doing normal things, yet looking so strange. Bodies moving apparently with purpose, but controlled by intelligences whose existence I could determine only through their actions. Of course, it could have been the hangover.

To kill a few minutes, I walked across the way and got some money from an ATM. As I waited for the bills, I rubbed my eyes, hard. I needed to get my head together. I was feeling wide open, broken down, and far too tired.

Twenty minutes and half another coffee later, I spotted something.

“Okay,” I said to Fisher. “I think we’re on.”

He looked up. The diner’s door was jammed open, and through it you could see and hear the passing throng. There were intermittent gaps in the press of bodies outside, and through one I’d seen a man about thirty yards away, not far from where I’d stood to have a smoke. He was gone for a moment, then came back, a little closer. He was average height, gaunt. The skin around his cheekbones was gray and hung a little too loose, but in general he didn’t look very different from many of the other people around, except in his eyes. He was either about to attempt to overthrow the American government by force or a man standing on the edge of a steep drop only he could see.

“That’s him,” Fisher said. “At least, I think. He’s lost weight from the picture I saw.”

I looked the man in the eyes and gave a small upward nod of the head. Sat back in my chair and indicated for Fisher to do the same, giving Anderson a chance to confirm that we were only two, that our hands were empty and on the table, and that we had another chair. Then I went back to my coffee.

A couple of minutes later, he sat down.

When seen close up, the bright, turgid fear in his eyes was terrible. I pushed my coffee toward him. He picked it up, took a gulp.

“You okay?”

He did something with his face. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a smile. In his position I’m not sure how I would have answered either. It was a dumb question. Sometimes they have to be asked.

“I’m Jack,” I said. “This is Gary. And I want you to know right away, Bill, that neither of us thinks you did what you’re supposed to have done. I’ve been in your house, and I know it was the work of an intruder.”

“I can’t think about that at the moment.”

His voice was husky, like he was fighting off the flu.

“Sure,” I said. Not thinking about what had happened to his wife and child seemed to me a sound policy. I’m sure trauma counselors would advise differently, but they have homes and families to go to at the end of the day. “Where are you living?”

“Around,” he said. “I keep moving.”

“Do you have any money?”

“I had nearly fifty,” he said. “I bought a toothbrush, soap. Cheap change of clothes. Some food.”

I put my hand on the table close to his, moved it slightly to partially reveal the money I had folded over small. When he saw it, his face threatened to crumple.

“No,” he said, and shook his head.

“It’s only a loan. I want it back.”

After a moment’s hesitation, his hand moved to where mine had been and then down into his pocket, and there was nothing on the table anymore.

“You want something to eat?”

He shook his head. “Coffee.”

I waved to the waitress, and nothing was said until that was done. I knew that Anderson would need time to settle.

Fisher took the lead. “What happened, Bill?”

He shook his head again. “How am I supposed to know?”

“Why did you run?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“You didn’t want to get to the house, check if they were okay?”

“I would have run, too,” I said. “You’d know that the neighbors would do whatever you could do. That the cops were on their way. And you also knew that whatever happened was no accident, too, right?”

Anderson was crying now. There had been no change in his facial expression or posture, no indication he knew it was happening. His cheeks had been dry, and now they were wet. He put his coffee cup unsteadily back on the table.

“I should have gone in there anyway,” he said.

The truth was yes, he should have—assuming he could’ve held back from contact with his wife or child, thus muddying what might otherwise have been a strong forensic defense. But he didn’t need to hear that.

“You’re going to feel that way, of course, but it’s the past and there’s no changing it. They were dead before you entered the street. There was nothing you could have achieved except getting caught or killed, too. You understand that, right? It’s important that you do.”

He didn’t say anything. Up at the cook’s station, the grill flared suddenly, as a couple more burgers got flipped. Two children down at the far end of the diner were bickering about something, noisily, going at it so hard you almost believed they’d remember what it was tomorrow.

“Bill,” Fisher said, “I know it’s tough, but—”

“Oh, you know?” Anderson said. He turned away from us, the action resolute and possibly permanent. “You have absolutely no…”

His head dropped. He wasn’t going to say any more.

Fisher made a face. I let a silence settle, allowed Anderson to follow whatever thought was in his head and be left empty when it had gone.

“My father was murdered,” I said.

It felt strange to say it, to unearth this fact that lay as a semipermanent coloration in the back of my mind and had for so long that it was hard to believe that everyone didn’t already know. Strange, and also calculating. But if anyone was entitled to use this information, surely it was me.

Fisher stared at me. “I never knew that.”

“You wouldn’t. It happened a couple years after we left school. While I was at college.”

“Who killed him?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and by now Anderson was looking at me. “We never found out. I was away. My mother was visiting her sister overnight. Somebody broke in to the house. My father came downstairs, found them. He was not a man who was going to back down in that circumstance. They killed him—deliberately, accidentally, I don’t know—and then they took the stuff anyway. An old television and VCR, a handful of jewelry, and around eighty dollars in cash.”

Fisher looked as if he didn’t know what to say.

“I’m not equating this with your loss,” I told Anderson. “Point is, I can’t bring him back. You can’t bring your family back either. Somebody came into a place that was not theirs and took these people. They had no right. The question is, what do you do about it?”

Anderson sat completely still for maybe a minute. Then he turned back to face the table squarely.

“What can I do? The cops think I did it.”

“So tell us something that will help them see it differently. Like what this has to do with a check you received for a quarter of a million dollars.”

His eyes went wide. “How the hell do you know about that?”

I nodded to Fisher. I wanted a cigarette. Talking to Anderson was making me sad beyond belief, and I didn’t want to do it for much longer.

“I’m working on Joseph Cranfield’s estate,” Fisher said. “I’m a lawyer. You were one of a very limited number of individual beneficiaries. I couldn’t help noticing that the check was never deposited. Why?”

“I never met the guy,” Anderson said. “I never even heard of him. Then one morning there’s this ridiculous check. I have no idea what to do with it, why it’s there, nothing. But there’s a letter with it.”

“I know,” Fisher said. “I wrote it.”

“Then where the hell do you think you get off?”

“What?”

“Sending someone that much money, with conditions like that?”

“What do you mean? What conditions?”

“You wrote it, you know.”

“The letter I wrote just said, ‘Here’s the money, have a ball.’ And where it had come from. Nothing else. There were no conditions stipulated in the will.”

Anderson kept looking at Fisher, evidently not inclined to believe him. For a moment I wasn’t sure either, but Fisher’s face was just too confused.

“What was in the letter you received?” I asked.

There were two small spots of color on Anderson’s cheeks now, livid against the gray. “It said this Cranfield person had bequeathed me the money on the condition that I stop my work. That if I did so, the money was mine. That if I took the money and kept working, there would be consequences. And, between the lines, that I’d better take the money.”

“What work? Teaching at the university?”

“No,” Anderson said, and for a flicker of a moment he looked cagey. “A private project.”

“Private?” Fisher said. “Private from whom?”

“Everybody.”

I remembered the way the basement workshop in his house had looked. “So how did Cranfield even know about it?”

“I have no idea. I was in contact with a couple of people on the Internet. Had a few covert discussions. All I could think is, the information got to him that way.”

“And you made the decision not to take the money?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell anyone that’s what you were doing?”

“No. I just didn’t take the check to the bank.”

“Do you still have it now?”

“It was in the house.”

Fisher was looking into the middle distance. I imagined I knew why. He’d thought he was running the Cranfield estate, or at least in charge of his end. But someone had replaced his letter to Anderson, and somebody had been monitoring the account from which the bequest had been drawn. How else would they have known that Anderson had refused to be paid off, setting in motion the visit to his house three weeks earlier?

“How could they have done that?” I asked. “Replaced the letter?”

“It was part of a batch of stuff that went via Burnell and Lytton’s office,” Fisher said quietly. “One of them must have done it.”

“Did you lose everything?” I asked Anderson. “In the fire? Relating to the work, I mean?”

Anderson nodded. “Everything. I forgot to take my backup with me that night. Only place any of it’s left is in my head.”

“What was it?” Fisher asked. “What were you working on?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Yes,” Fisher said firmly. “You can. I have to know more.”

Maybe it was only the harsh morning glare coming at him through the glass, but right then Fisher looked a little strange. The lines at the corner of his eyes were pronounced, his mouth thin.

“More?” I said. “I didn’t realize that you knew anything at all about this.”

Fisher looked away, and I knew he’d been lying to me.

“What Gary means,” I said, turning to Anderson, “is that it would assist us if you could give an indication of what led to the events that occurred in your house. To help the cops look at this differently, we need to build a credible case toward an alternative perpetrator.”

“How do I know you’re not one of them? Or that he isn’t?”

“You don’t,” I said. “Neither of us has a badge saying ‘Certified Good Guy.’ If that’s what you need, you’re going to have to wait until you get to heaven.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, looking at me.

The implication was clear. I turned breezily to Fisher. “Gary. Wonder if you might want to get some more coffee for Bill? I could use a refill, while you’re at it.”

Fisher kept his face composed. “Whatever you say.”

He got up stiffly, walked toward the counter. Anderson looked around the restaurant for the hundredth time, eyes darting in every direction.

“Going to give you a tip,” I said. “Don’t be looking around the place like that the whole time. If you want to be invisible, then you have to look like you’re heading from A to B and you have the right to pass through all points in between. If a cop with time on his hands catches you doing the shadows-in-every-corner thing, he’ll check you out just on the off chance.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I used to be one.”

“You’re a cop?”

“Listen to all the words, Bill: used to be. Not anymore. Not on their side necessarily. Though I know they’re not all assholes either. You would be the main suspect for this case in any town in the U.S.A., trust me. Cops learn to break situations down according to the way they usually shake out. It saves time. It can save their lives. You’ve fallen on the wrong side of that process, but it doesn’t mean that the police are the axis of evil. Your best-case scenario right now is to get yourself to the point where you can go to them instead of hiding.”

Anderson shook his head. “How can I—”

“Tell me what this is about.” I said. “I get that it’s private. Something even Peter Chen doesn’t know about. It’s not my business, and I don’t even really care. But right now you’re running out of options, and this secret has already gotten people killed.”

“You’re not going to believe what I tell you.”

“Somebody evidently does,” I said. “So try me.”

He hesitated for a long time. I glanced toward the counter to signal to Fisher that I might be getting somewhere, but he wasn’t there. In the restroom, I guessed, or maybe he’d stomped outside. He was in a very spiky place this morning, especially for someone who’d found what he was supposed to be looking for.

When Anderson finally spoke, I knew it was not just in the hope that I might be able to help him but also because it was something he’d kept to himself for a long time. It’s not true that everyone wants to confess a crime, but most people do want to tell something of their story, to stop hiding for just a while.

“My field is wave dynamics,” he said. “Specifically those relating to sound. At college I just cover the physics of it, basically. But a couple years ago, I started to get interested in broader issues. How sound affects us in other ways.”

“Like how?” I said. After only a few sentences, I was finding it hard to believe that this was going to relate to anything of importance in my world.

Anderson’s response showed he’d read something of this in my face. “Sound is underestimated,” he said earnestly. “We all go on about seeing things, but sound is a lot more important than people realize. It gets taken for granted. Everybody knows we played heavy rock at Noriega to flush him out. Some people know that music was used when the FBI stormed Waco. But there’s a lot more to it than bombarding people with tunes they don’t like. You go to a restaurant where there’s loud music, and see how much less you enjoy eating. You can’t concentrate on the food—you almost can’t even taste it. Part of the brain switches off. Or you hear a piece of music, some song, for the first time in years, and it takes you right back to the time you associate with it. You’ll feel the same, even remember smells, tastes, relive other sensory data from this other time. You know this, right?”

“I guess. Yes, I do.”

Talking through something he cared about seemed to have momentarily helped Anderson forget the rest of his world. “Or you’re alone at night, in a place you don’t know—and all at once you hear a noise. It doesn’t matter that you can’t see anything wrong—suddenly sight doesn’t rule the roost anymore. You don’t need to see anything to be scared out of your wits. Your brain and body understand that sound matters a whole lot.”

“Okay,” I said. I knew I had to let him talk, but for some reason I felt unsettled, uncomfortable. I still couldn’t see Fisher, and this was beginning to stretch the length of a viable trip to the john. “I’ll take your word for this, Bill. You’re the science guy. But what’s your point? What were you working on specifically?”

“Infrasound,” he said. “Very-low-frequency sounds. Most people have been looking at eighteen hertz, but I went to nineteen hertz. It has…effects. Your eyes may water or blur when you’re exposed to it. You can get odd sensations in your ears, hyperventilation, muscle tension—a physicist called Vladimir Gavreau actually claimed that infrasound is a key component in urban anxiety. More simply, it just makes you feel like you’re afraid. And if you hit the resonant frequency of the human eye, which is right around this point, you can start thinking you’re seeing odd things, too. Everyone’s been assuming this is physiological, just a side effect of the physics of the eye, but it’s…not. It’s more complicated. Infrasound does strange things to us. Very strange things. It enables us to glimpse things we can’t normally see.”

I found myself looking around the restaurant, just as I’d told Anderson not to do. I saw nothing to explain what I was feeling, a sensation I didn’t even know how to describe. I looked out through the open door into the crowds. Just people, moving back and forth.

“What kinds of things, Bill? What are you actually talking about here? What was it that you did?”

I pulled my eyes back to him. He was looking down at his hands. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.

“I made a ghost machine,” he said.

But that’s when I saw a tall figure heading toward the diner through the crowds, walking quickly. He was dressed in a dark coat and looking not left or right but straight at Anderson.

“Get down,” I said quickly.

Anderson blinked at me, confused. I tried to stand, pushing him to one side as I rose, but I got caught under the table. I saw Fisher coming around the side of the center station, coffee cups in hand, just as the man in the coat pushed his way into the restaurant and removed one hand from an inside pocket.

I finally got clear of the table and shoved Anderson harder, shouting, “Bill, get out of the—”

It was too late. The man fired three times, measured, unhurried shots from a silenced handgun.

He’d disappeared back into the crowd before I even realized that none of the bullets had hit me. The shots had been quiet, but the sight of Anderson’s blood as it sprayed across the window was not—and everybody started running and shouting at once. When I bent over Anderson’s body and tried to find where he’d been shot, I couldn’t hear what he tried to say to me through the noise and the blood welling up out of his mouth, but I saw it open and close and knew it would be for the last time.