Land of the Blind (25 page)

S
he’s lost Clark. Of all the terrible things that could happen now—and there are others—this is the most terrible; Caroline has no idea what to do next. She stands in the doorway of Interview Two and stares, unbelieving, at the empty chair. No legal pads. No pen. No coffee cup. It’s as if he were never here. Now that she could finally sit across from Clark and say,
Look, I know what happened,
there is no Clark to sit across from.

She’d come back to drop the whole thing in his lap that way—Eli Boyle and Pete Decker and Louis Carver, all of it—to tell him that his time was up and his confession was over. Oh, it’s over all right. She steps out into the hallway to look for the uniform that Kaye was supposed to post on the door, but there’s no one. Fucking Kaye. She begins moving toward the front desk.

“Caroline!”

She turns. Spivey is at the other end of the hall, coming out of the bathroom, wearing jeans and a Mariners sweatshirt, with his cop haircut and that ridiculous caterpillar of a mustache on his thin upper lip. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“There was a guy in Interview Two—”

“Mason?”

“Yeah,” Caroline says. “You know where he is?”

“I cut him loose.”

“What?” She begins stalking toward Spivey. “When?”

“I don’t know. Fifteen minutes ago. After I finished questioning him.”

“You questioned him?”

Spivey laughs bitterly. “Yeah, that’s what we do with witnesses. Remember? We don’t throw them in a room and disappear for two days. You want to tell me—”

“You didn’t charge him?”

“Who?”

“Mason.”

“Charge him with what? Being a fucking nut job?”

“What about the body? Boyle?”

“What are you talking about, Caroline? The suicide you found?”

“Suicide? There was no gun.”

“Sure there was. We found it in the lawn, right where Mason said he threw it. Said he freaked out, grabbed the gun, opened the door, and threw it across the lawn. Kept saying he was responsible. But don’t worry. I took care of him. Put the fear of God into him, told him we could charge him with evidence tampering if he didn’t put down his pen and cooperate.”

She falls back against the wall. “Suicide?”

“Yeah, the vic had powder residue all over his fingers. His prints were all over the gun. From the angle, the ME said it had to be self-inflicted. Straight up through his noggin.” Spivey puts his forefinger against his cheek, elbow tight against his side, to demonstrate. “We tested Mason’s fingers just to be sure. No powder residue. Besides, he’s got an alibi. Boyle’s neighbors heard a gunshot at four
P.M
. Friday. Your boyfriend was on an airplane at four. It’s all here.” He waves a single sheet of paper.

Caroline grabs it and reads. Spivey has typed it up. Clark has signed it.

The statement falls to her side. It’s not right.

“So what the hell got into you?” Spivey is not finished lecturing. “Letting that poor wack job sit in here sweating all weekend, convincing himself he’s a murderer?”

Caroline ignores him. “The thing he was writing. His statement. Did you read it?”

“Oh, I looked at it—four notebooks of crazy shit about growing up with the dead guy and going to the prom. Listen, you are not a psychiatrist, Caroline, and no matter how much you want to help someone—”

“Where is it?”

“What?”

“The statement. Where is it?”

“He said he wanted you to have it. I put the whole thing on your desk.”

Caroline turns away from Spivey, walks into the Major Crimes office, and switches on the light. She finds the four legal pads stacked neatly and begins flipping through the first one, looking for…what? She can feel adrenaline, and for a moment, she forgets that she hasn’t slept for two days.

“Listen, Caroline,” he says, “I’m serious about this. You really fucked up this weekend. I’m gonna have to write this up, you know.”

She sets the first section down and starts flipping the pages of the second legal pad, Clark’s handwriting loosening as he gets tired. The words pour over her like water; none of it sticks. Maybe Spivey’s right; Clark is crazy.

“I don’t know why you didn’t just call me,” Spivey says, “why you have to make everything so difficult all the time.”

She sets the second legal pad down and starts skimming the third. More rambling. She’s about to set it down when the last sentence catches her attention.
“…the world would be a better and simpler place if Michael Langford were not in it.”

“Where’s the gun?” she asks without looking up.

“What?”

“The gun. You said you found the gun in the grass. Where is it?”

“On my desk. God damn it, Caroline—”

She brushes past him, reaches for a box of surgical gloves on the counter, and grabs one as she stomps past the cubicles to Spivey’s glass-walled office.

He follows her in. “I’m not kidding here, Caroline! You really fucked up—”

She can take no more. “I fucked up?” She spins on her heel and up into his
face. “Patrol found this guy on the twelfth floor of a vacant building. Staring out a window.”

Spivey shrugs. “So?”

“So before you kicked him loose, did you consider why a depressed guy might go up to the twelfth floor of a vacant building by himself?”

Spivey takes a step back. “Oh.”

She turns away, reaches into the plastic bag, and removes the black handgun, an evidence tag wrapped around the trigger guard. “Or did you ask yourself why, when Mason’s friend is lying there dead, his first thought is to pick up the gun?” Caroline releases the pin and flips the gun open. She holds it up and stares at Spivey through the empty chambers. “Two,” she says.

“What?”

She holds out the gun for him to see. “There are two empty chambers. One slug went through Boyle. So where’s the other one?”

It is remarkably quiet in these offices at one-thirty on a Sunday morning. Caroline’s eyes drift from Spivey to the gun and finally to the stack of legal pads, on top of which Clark has written, in big block letters,
STATEMENT OF FACT
.

Y
ou’re probably wondering how a man falls so far so fast—how an idealistic, socially conscious lawyer one day finds himself planning a murder, of all things, how a man who’s never broken any laws (okay, there were a few narcotics statutes) skips over all the other felonies and misdemeanors and goes straight for a premeditated murder. Of course, the explanation begins with my overpowering ambition and, especially, my unfailing blindness to the desires and motivations of people around me. But there are two other forces at work here, and between them, these two hard cases are undoubtedly the cause of more criminal acts than all the other suspects combined:

Love.

And politics.

This is the shape of my confession, then, a dark story of love and politics, a reckoning, a cautionary tale of how far one man can fall in this world. And to describe a fall, of course, one must start with height.

So let me just say this: I was rich.

I use this as the measure of my success because it is the gauge of my generation, a generation which will fade from even the shortest history because we contributed so little in the way of art and politics and bravery, because our currency was…well, currency. We were an entire cut of people in their twenties and thirties still running creative and procreative juices but spending the current of our days discussing stock options and price-to-earnings ratios and small market capitalization and “What’s in your 401(k)?”

Since profanity is nothing without a tease—a glimpse of flesh beneath the satin—it is a fair question to ask: How rich was I?

At the peak of my wealth, in 1999, I had seven million dollars in various checkbooks, savings accounts, stock portfolios, retirement accounts, and pants pockets. I had a condo in downtown Seattle, a new BMW roadster, a new Range Rover, and a vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycle. I was shopping for
a boat. Now by the standards of the founders of Microsoft and Amazon and countless other late-century techno-thieves, my portfolio was little more than cab fare, but to me it was as much money as existed in the world.

I remember the first time it occurred to me that I was rich: in 1997, when I was making one of my rare visits to see my parents. I stood in their driveway as my father paced around my Harley.

“It’s a beaut,” he said. “How much was it?”

“It really wasn’t too expensive.”

“How much?” he asked.

When I told him that it cost thirty-two thousand dollars, he laughed giddily, but then his face set and he cocked his head. “Huh,” he said, and he didn’t have to tell me that it was more than he’d earned any year of his life.

I won’t bore you with the details of my windfall, the picks and splits, the mergers and offerings, the good fortune that I convinced myself was good analysis. Suffice it to say that after I helped Eli get Empire off the ground (at least conceptually; in other ways, that Spruce Goose would remain forever grounded), I returned to Seattle and threw myself into the hunt for technology start-ups, to show Dana that I could succeed in her world or, rather, in her husband’s world. I worked nonstop, hounding the city for raccoon-eyed computer geeks, for Microsoft drones looking to break off from the mothership, for coders and programmers, dreamers and brainstormers, people with the slimmest ideas as long as they involved somehow hunching over a keyboard and staring into a glass box. I read newspapers and trade magazines, hung out at cyber cafés and the technology departments of local universities. I beat the bushes until, by 1998, I’d flushed three dozen successful start-ups out into the open for Michael’s venture capital riflemen, and written the contracts and done the various other legal work for five successful IPOs. You have probably heard of some of these companies, and may have even owned their stock, the most noteworthy being CybSysTechTronic (CSTT—the nation’s premier producer of data cap transponders and backup port regulators for wireless modem and data recovery chips) and Myonlineshoestore.com, which was, for eight wonderful months, the number two online shoe store
in the whole country
.

Not all of my companies were successful, of course, and after the crash a certain newsmagazine looking to describe the irrational frenzy of the late nineties listed among the heavily funded and lightly considered tech busi
nesses one discovery of mine: MousePants (later MousePants.com), which manufactured computer-friendly clothing, beginning with cargo pants with small mouse pads on the thighs (I suppose we should’ve stopped production once we saw the ubiquity of laptop rollerballs and touchpads, but even without the eponymous gimmick this was a good-looking, comfortable pant).

From the outside, the legal part of my job was not glamorous—a daily diet of IPO’s, recaps, mergers and acquisitions, management buyouts, divestitures, bridge financing, debt and equity placement, credit lines, reorganizations, and countless other functions that were simply a shifting of money from one pocket to another. First for Michael and Dana, and later for one of Seattle’s bigger law firms (I will not tempt action from those carnivores by mentioning the partners on their letterhead), I worked as a buffer, as Michael said, between Chad and Charlie, drafting paper maneuvers that ensured Charlie would give Chad an endless supply of money and Chad would give Charlie “a position” in some emerging tech business. Any guilt I felt over our…exaggerated display of Empire quickly faded when I saw the speculative prospects that brought in millions in seed money and made our game seem as established as Monopoly, when I saw that the point of this new economy was not some finished machinery, but the money that greased it so fully that it would take five years to realize the machine was running only on that grease.

But most of my wealth came not from my legal work, but from tips and insights I gleaned about start-ups and new products, buyouts and takeovers. Each time I bought stock for myself, I picked up a few for Eli, too, and while he spent most of his money paying back investors and genuinely trying to turn Empire into a computer game, he managed to do pretty well alongside me, two unlikely success stories from Empire Road in the Spokane Valley.

But while it is the most obvious, money wasn’t the only measure of my success, and not even the one that motivated me. I am a perception junkie, always have been; my drug is the way people see me. I had kicked the habit briefly during my ascetic phase following Ben’s death, but now I was back on the shit. And all of Seattle seemed to be tripping with me, a full-blown collective high.

My own symptoms were so acute I began to doubt that I even existed when no one was there to see me. I craved that fleeting moment when I stepped into restaurants and people looked up, or meetings when it was my
turn to speak. I dated every girl who would go out with me, always eager for new eyes in which to see myself. When I pulled to a stop at a traffic light I looked around for my reflection in the windows of buildings, my forty-dollar-trimmed hair, my tailored suit, my glass eye and sunglasses—near-perfection encased in a black BMW.

I was chained again to this self-addiction, and it wasn’t long before I began to imagine the black tar of my particular habit—politics. I joined a few groups, a taste there and here—the Jaycees, a Bar Association committee on technology, nothing too extravagant. I got involved with the Democratic Party, and donated money to a handful of candidates. But the little tastes made me want more, until I found myself having the old daydream: a podium, bunting, my name on a banner behind me, a crowd of supporters:
Mason. Mason. Mason
.

During those days, older, established lawyers occasionally sought me out to explain this new world of high-tech business, and I developed something of a reputation as an expert in my field. I spoke at conferences to rooms full of gray-haired lawyers about the speed and dexterity with which we would need to practice contract law to keep up with the demands of an industry that seemed to change by the minute. During these presentations I sometimes began sentences with the words “In the future,” and I rambled on about the day when client conferences would be video-streamed over broadband, when computers would automatically read through a trial transcript and make the appropriate appeal, when entire hearings would be held on the Internet and the lawyer would never have to leave his office (except, I suppose, to jetpack home to have sex with his robot girlfriend in his cryogenic sleeping portal).

That’s how it happened that, in April 1998, I accepted a request to speak at the first annual “Spokane Technology Symposium” with various civic leaders, elected officials, and local entrepreneurs (always shy about such things, Eli had given them my name when they tried to recruit him for the symposium). The whole endeavor smacked of desperation, as the local leaders tried to spark the kind of twelfth-hour high-tech boom that had transformed Seattle and Portland—and much of the rest of the country—but passed Spokane by like a long-haul trucker on bennies.

The symposium was held in the conference room of an airport hotel. We sat at round tables as waiters brought us fingers of chicken left over from
some canceled flight, and a salad that consisted of cottage cheese and Jell-O. At each table sat a member of the city government and several representatives of the technology elite of Spokane.

At my table was a frowning, buzz-cut retired air force corpsman who had recently been elected to the city council and who wanted to make sure the library computers weren’t being used to access porn; a junior high school student with razor-wire braces who won a computer science contest by using his laptop to graph local marijuana prices; the furtive founder of a local keyboard manufacturing company that was in the process of moving to Belize; and the manager of one especially cutting-edge firm called Jocko’s Soft Tacos: “We just got a new computer for our drive-thru window that has cut in half the number of Mexi-Bobs that we throw away.”

I also spoke to the mayor, a nice older gentleman who had retired from “the carpet industry, myself,” and who ran for office because he was tired of gardening with his wife all day. He admitted that he was catching hell for failing to bring technology companies to Spokane, and for allowing sharp minds such as mine to escape.

“My kids like the computers,” he said. “Me, I wouldn’t know how to turn the goddamn thing on if you put my hand on the crank.” He struggled to frame the problem, using his fingers to put quote marks around every eighth word. His opponent in the upcoming election claimed that to “attract” certain kinds of industry, cities must offer “incentives” to help convince entrepreneurs that a certain “atmosphere” existed.

That’s true, I said. Tax incentives, growth districts, infrastructure—there were things a city could do to attract technology companies.

“And how long does it take, all of that?”

“Well…it can take years,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s no good. I only got three months.”

I suppose that’s when it first dawned on me that my newfound success connected at some point with my old dream—that I could be a kind of visionary figure, a political candidate for the twenty-first century. It would be more than a year before I would do anything about this vision, though, and even that day, I got drunk and didn’t give any more thought to my political career. And beyond that flash of inspiration, I suppose Spokane’s first technology symposium isn’t very important to the core of my confession—except for one other detail.

After dinner (barbecued ribs and coleslaw) and several drinks, I staggered to the elevator fairly drunk—and not quite alone. That night, in a small room on the fourth floor of a hotel built into the hillside over my old hometown—the lights of Spokane sparkling below us like a lake of stars—I had sex for the first time with Dana Brett.