The Intruders (21 page)

When I’d left her that morning, saying I was heading to the city to try to make some crime contacts, she looked up sharply, hesitated, and then shrugged.

“I just don’t think it’s so great an idea,” she said, and went back to work. But after I’d been on the road barely twenty minutes, I got a text from her:

Good luck:-D

I didn’t really know what to think, and I sat there in the cold early-morning sunshine not-thinking it. I heard a story once, about the early settlers of the region. It told that when Europeans finally landed on the northwestern shores of America, feeling like conquering heroes in a new world, they were disconcerted to find that the locals were not surprised to see them. This was not because unknown white men had forged a route overland from the East, however, but because over the last several generations the tribes had very occasionally seen trading ships far out to sea—once every ten, twenty, fifty years. They knew these could not be the work of local people and therefore surmised that some other group of men or beings were on their way, however slowly.

When I first heard this story, I shivered. I don’t even know whether it’s true, but it has stayed with me: the idea of these hazy visitations, of inexplicable form, seen from afar, never coming closer—but, once seen, impossible to unsee. A first indication that the world held more than had been bargained for, a foreshadowing of events that would be impossible to change, impossible to hurry, impossible to stop. Portents of unknown type and provenance, far out in the mist of the seas, a future held in abeyance, for now, but irrevocably on its way.

The local people watched and saw, then turned their backs on the sea and got on with their lives.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to do that.

When Fisher arrived, I was struck first by how tired he looked. He sat down in the chair on the other side of my table, took a deep swallow of the coffee he’d brought.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

I just stared at him.

“Okay.” He reached into his coat pocket, hesitated. “I’m going to show you something. Then I’m going to tell you something before I explain what you’re seeing. It’s going to take a few minutes, and you’re not going to want to listen, but you have to, or you’re not going to understand my interest here. Okay?”

I nodded. He pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. I opened it and withdrew the contents. Two photographs, six-by-four. Both had the muddy, blown-out quality of digital pictures taken beyond the limits of the lens range.

The first showed a woman standing outside an unremarkable-looking doorway, in a street that could have been pretty much anywhere. The door was open. The woman’s face was in profile. It was Amy.

When you looked a little closer, you could see there was someone else in the picture, a shadowed shape in the doorway. The quality of the light suggested that the photo was taken in the late afternoon.

“Big deal,” I said. Fisher said nothing.

The second photograph was of another street, or the same street from a different angle. It showed a man and woman walking together, shot from behind. They were fairly close together, and the man had his arm around the woman’s shoulders. From the angle at which the picture had been taken, it was impossible to tell whether this man was the one I’d seen in the photo on Amy’s phone. He was a little over average in height, wearing a suit, could be either blue or black, dark hair. You couldn’t see their faces, but the clothes the woman wore were the same as in the other photograph.

I glanced up. Fisher had his eyes elsewhere.

Photographs do lie, and one of the ways is by only capturing instants. Advertising people are tactile. Amy could have been walking along the street with a colleague or client, and he’d grabbed her shoulder to make some point or celebrate a corporate victory. Or she could have said she was cold and he’d momentarily looped his arm around her, awkward, feeling it was a man’s job to do something and knowing that convention allowed this brief intrusion on personal space. Captured at the right instant, frozen beyond their true duration, any of these gestures could have looked like more than they were. Or so I wanted to believe. “Where are these from?”

“Taken in Seattle last Friday,” Fisher said.

When I was also here in town. I took a long, slow breath. I’ve spent a lot of hours getting statements from witnesses. If you want them to talk, you have to let them. And you’re not allowed to hit them first.

“So talk,” I said.

He stood up. “Walk with me.”

Fisher led me out of the antiderelict enclosure around the coffeehouse and up First. He took us north for a couple blocks, then steered several rights and lefts.

“I told you my interest in the Anderson murders came from an estate,” he said as we walked. “A client of the firm. Name was Joseph Cranfield. Heard of him?”

“No. Should I?”

“I guess not. Old patriarchal business type. Tough, six foot and still square-shouldered in his late seventies. Started work at thirteen—one of those kids who had a job when he was in diapers, crawls around delivering papers with his teeth. You ever wonder how some people are ready from the get-go, looking for the main chance and knowing what to do when they find it?”

I’d met people like that in my own life, the ones who hit the ground running. I’d never thought too much about it, and I wasn’t in the mood to start now.

“I guess.”

“By the 1950s Joe was into failing mills in New England, turning them around and then reselling them. Soon as that was killed by overseas markets, he sidestepped to retail, franchises, anything that kept money coming in. From there into real estate, became a partner in some of the earliest supermalls in Illinois. It wasn’t like he never made a mistake. But he took the hits, moved on.”

“An American hero,” I said. “There should be statues everywhere.”

Gary nodded. “Right. Could have been the smuggest asshole to ever draw breath. I met him when I was fresh out of law school. After a couple weeks, they sent me to Cranfield’s office, to advise on some tiny thing. I was scared. I’m twenty-three, I’ve lucked into an all-star firm. If I fail this rite of passage, I’m history. So I show up in my new suit and shiny briefcase knowing that this is a meeting where my life can split two ways. My gastrointestinal tract was empty, I’ll tell you that.”

The thought of Gary Fisher being nervous was more compelling than what he was telling me, which appeared to have no bearing on any universe I cared about.

Despite myself, I said, “And?”

“He sat me down, got me coffee, explained what he needed done. Thankfully, it was something I could handle easily, and once he saw that, he just told me to get on with it. A week later there’s a note of thanks on my desk. From Cranfield, in his own hand. As the years go by, I wind up reporting to his office more and more. Finally one of the senior partners gets a little drunk and admits that Joe asks for me by name when he wants something done. This is a very big deal to me, and by now I know Joe well enough to understand he doesn’t do anything by accident. He mentioned my name to someone and put a checkmark next to it. Six months later I was made junior partner.”

“He have you running private work on the side, things he wanted kept out of sight?”

“You’re a cynical man, Jack.”

“I was a cop for ten years. And I’ve been a human all my life.”

“No, he did not,” Gary said as he steered us across an intersection. We seemed to be getting farther from the parts of Seattle that are featured in tourist brochures. “I’m sure Joe did things fast and loose back in the day—nobody gets rich playing by M.B.A. rules—but he never asked me to do anything your grandmother wouldn’t smile upon. Life went on, except I scored a bigger office and got paid a bunch more.”

“Until?”

“One morning the call comes in. Joe Cranfield died in his sleep. Bam—just like that.”

We were walking more slowly now, and Gary was silent for a moment.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. It was a blow. Okay, he was eighty-one by then, but he looked like he’d make a hundred without breaking a sweat. Barely an hour after we find out he’s passed, we get a call from some firm none of us have ever heard of. Turns out he’d used another crew to handle his personal affairs. Okay, it happens—but this is a tiny outfit based half the country away, and we’re all like, What? The guy on the phone has instructions, however, and he wants us on it right away. And this is where it started to get weird.”

“Weird how?”

“The will. Two million to his wife, one million to each child, two-fifty K to each of his grandchildren. A little over eight all told.”

I didn’t get what he was driving at. “How much was he worth when he died?”

“Nearly two hundred sixty million dollars.”

I raised my eyebrows, and Fisher smiled tightly.

“Now you’re listening. Strictly B-list in global terms, but hardly destitute. It had been more, but it turned out he’d been unloading briskly over the last five years, to institutions, charities, schools. A hospital ward here, drop-in center there, Old Master or two on permanent loan to some tiny gallery in Europe. We knew about a lot of it, of course, because of tax issues, but no one had really had a handle on exactly how much he’d moved out. It was close to seventy million.”

I revised my opinion of the old man, and for the better. “So where was the rest of it destined for?”

“That’s the thing. The afternoon of Cranfield’s funeral, Lytton—one of the two named partners in this firm—turned up on our doorstep with a case of paperwork. Everyone with juice in the firm headed into the boardroom and went through it together. Cranfield left detailed instructions on how his empire was to be dismantled, and half of it was already started, triggered by Burnell & Lytton—who it turns out had overriding power of attorney. For the rest of it, Lytton basically deals with us like we’re junior clerks: Do this, do that, do it now. Joe had thought of everything—down to the dispersal of a roadside food shack in Houma, Louisiana. That was a bequest to the old woman who’d been running it all these years, and there were other things like that, random citizens getting a chunk here and there, but everything else was to be liquidated. Even his houses were to be sold. And the resulting funds, minus ten percent, were to be split among nine main beneficiaries.”

“Who were?”

“Battered women. Inner-city education and antidrug initiatives. Long-term medical supplies to godforsaken parts of Africa. Even a campaign to save the fucking sea otters, run by some hippie down in Monterey—who received six point five million dollars to keep up the good fight. I got to phone this guy with the news. He nearly heart-attacked right there on the line. He’d never met Cranfield in his life. Never even heard of him.”

“Where did the last ten percent go?”

“A trust administered by Burnell & Lytton, which fed into an international charitable network.”

“So how did the family take this?”

“How do you think? They went apeshit, Jack. I had men and women in their fifties, people who’d had everything on a plate since birth, coming into my office and screaming like crack addicts let down by the man. It went on for weeks. These people had lived their lives assuming they’d get a huge check someday, and now we’re telling them it was all a dream? They contested the will, of course, but it was signed, filed in triplicate, and quadruple-witnessed by judges and priests demonstrably in their right minds. We had guys who’d built entire careers drilling holes in this kind of paperwork, real wolves, and they couldn’t get their pencils sharpened. The only person who didn’t go nuts was Cranfield’s wife, and I’ll come back to that. Bottom line is that he knew what he wanted to do and he did it. Everything else was after the fact. So…the children sued us instead.”

We’d stopped at another intersection. Over the last minutes, my mind had found its way back to the photograph of Amy. I was trying to imagine what the man’s hand had done in the moments after the picture had been taken. Gary had about another minute of me playing nice.

“How did that pan out?”

Fisher’s face tensed, and I got the idea that the lines around his eyes had not been there long. “Ongoing. Everyone else in the firm has turned away from Cranfield’s affairs, like a bad smell. But I couldn’t do that. A month ago I came up against something that needed sorting out, figured what the hell, and flew here to Seattle. I went to the Burnell & Lytton office.”

“And?” I asked.

“It wasn’t there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d been working with these guys for three months by then, okay? I know their address and phone numbers by heart. I landed at Sea-Tac, got a cab straight there. The neighborhood is more the kind of place I’d expect to find a bail bondsman, and when I walk up to the street address, I see it’s a storefront that’s been boarded up. And not recently. Before that, it looks like it was a coffee shop. There’s a fucking tree growing out of the roof. No sign for Burnell & Lytton anywhere. There is an entry system, but it’s really, really old. There’s ten buzzers, and only the second to last looks like it’s been used since I was born. So I press that one first. No response. I press all the others. Nada.

“By this stage I’m a little confused. I walk up to the corner, buy a coffee, call the office, double-check the address. So then I phone Burnell & Lytton. Lytton’s secretary picks up. I ask to speak to him. She says he’s out. I ask to check the address with her, say I have an important package. She reels off the same old zip code. So I ask her which buzzer you need to press.

“And she went quiet. Just completely silent. Then she said ‘You’re here?’ And she sounded weird, really imperious, not like a secretary anymore.”

“That’s a little strange.”

“Yes, it is. So I find myself saying no, I’m not in Seattle, but my assistant’s sick and I want to fill out the waybill properly. She’s all friendly again, tells me it doesn’t matter, just the street address is fine. I thank her, leave a message for her bosses to call me, put down the phone. I sit there thinking for a minute, and then my cell rings. It’s one of my colleagues, back in Seattle. Lytton has just called the office, asking for me. Luckily, my assistant only told him I was out, not saying I was in Seattle. It could just be a coincidence. But it’s odd. So I walk back to the address. Ring the buzzer, still no response. Then I call their number again. There’s no answer this time. But I realize I can hear something. A ringing sound, from above.”