The Intruders (26 page)

“Been talking to a few people, took longer than I thought. Chance I may be able to grab a beer with a couple of crime reporters later on.”

“That could work. You thinking of staying overnight?”

“Maybe. Okay with mission control?”

“Of course. I’ll inform the kitchen. So it’s looking like it might pan out, huh? The book idea?”

“Could be.” I felt bad about lying to her. I realized I had a handful of text messages, mainly blank, a couple of photographs that didn’t show much—and not a lot else.

“Well, that’s good. And honey, sorry if I was down on the idea last night. I was in kind of a funny mood.”

“Yeah, I got that.” I took a deep breath and stepped closer to the precipice. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. I couldn’t tell whether she said it too quickly, too slowly, or in an entirely normal way. I was listening too hard. “Just work, you know, the usual work crap. Blah-blah-blah in the head.”

“I thought moving out of L.A. was going to stop all that.”

“It will. Give it time.”

She said something else then, but I didn’t hear it, as there was a surge of noise in the background.

“I didn’t catch that.”

“Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s the TV—got a Sex and the City marathon about to start, and the microwave’s set to ping any second now.”

“So you’re in a happy place.”

“I am. You’ll be home tomorrow, though, right?”

“Around lunchtime.”

“Good. I miss you, trooper.”

When she said those words, she sounded so like Amy, so like the person I’d known, and married, and stood beside on many days both short and sweet and long and hard, that I couldn’t believe that anything was wrong, or that it ever could be.

It still took me a beat too long to say.

“I miss you, too.”

Fisher had claimed Anderson as his smoking gun. I wasn’t confident he merited this status, but I wasn’t sure I had one either. Maybe I should just have asked Amy about the building up in Belltown—which presumably had to be the place the cabdriver had dropped her on the evening she went missing. But how could I bring it up? I’d actually be asking something else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to open that box. Even if it turned out to be empty, it would never be properly reclosed. Utterance is a one-way street. Questions can never be unasked.

My phone buzzed. I had a text message. It was from Amy, and it said:

Hav fun. Dn’t drnk 2 much!:-D x

And it was a nice message, and it made me smile, but the smile didn’t stick for long. Two instances—this and the message that morning—were enough to make me notice that a woman who had always written a smiley as:-) had recently begun using:-D instead and started employing shorthand. Previously she’d always pecked out every letter of every word. Why change, unless she was picking it up from someone else? Or was this just another piece of dust that meant nothing unless you piled it up with others, almost as if you were trying to make a heap big enough to cast a shadow?

I rubbed my face in my hands, hard, and shook my head, dismissing this for the moment. It was time to go back to what I’d been doing since losing Crane.

Trying to work out who the hell Rose was and what she was doing on my phone.

I’d already realized that the name coming up on the screen meant there must be an entry for it in my contacts. I’d checked and found that yes, I had such an entry. A phone number, and a name. ROSE. But I hadn’t put it there. I’d owned the phone only about a month, having changed networks when we moved to Birch Crossing and discovered that my old provider’s coverage sucked. I had fewer than twenty numbers stored, could place every one except this. I didn’t even know anyone named Rose. Never had.

I selected the number and dialed it, as I had four previous times since whoever called herself by that name had derailed me—deliberately, I assumed—from having a private conversation with Todd Crane. As before, the number rang and rang, without being diverted to an answering ser vice. I could have gotten access to a reverse directory, tried to find some information about it that way. But something told me it would be a dead end in any case.

So I kept returning to how the number could have made its way onto the phone. I could think of only one time it could have taken place. After the fight with the guys Georj had denied knowledge of, I’d found myself in the bar near Pioneer Place. There had been a long blank spot between my sitting on a stool there and waking up in the park. I’d evidently been very drunk. Could I have stored the number on the phone then, the number of some person I’d been talking to? I would have called this a possibility were it not for one thing. The name was all in caps. ROSE. I use upper and lower, always, and when I text, I spell out every word—just as Amy used to. You might think if I was drunk enough to enter a woman’s name without remembering, then I’d have forgone typographical niceties, too, but that shows how little you know me. Being that drunk meant I would have been even more tight-assed about getting it right.

To prove to myself that I wasn’t drunk, see?

So I was back to someone else putting it there. And that left me in the middle of my own question, a question I appeared unable to solve and had no one to ask about.

Just after seven, Fisher walked into the bar. He was with someone. They came to where I was sitting in the corner.

“Who’s this?”

“Peter Chen,” Fisher said. “A friend of Bill Anderson’s. They were out together on the night that…you know.”

Chen was one of those slender, round-shouldered guys whose body knows that its sole function is to chauffeur the brain around. I put out my hand, and he shook it. It was like briefly holding the hand of a child.

He looked at Fisher with mild accusation. “You said he wasn’t a cop.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Listen, Peter, just sit down.”

He did, diffidently. Looked dubiously at a small bowl of nuts the waitress had brought against my will.

“Why did you want reassurance you weren’t being brought to talk to a policeman?” I asked. “You don’t present like someone with problems with the law.”

“Of course not,” Chen said. “It’s just that they’re so wrong about Bill, and I’m tired of listening to them bad-mouth him.”

“We’re aware that Bill didn’t kill Gina or Josh.”

“You are?”

“I’ve heard enough to believe he wasn’t that kind of man. And I’ve seen what happened to Bill’s basement. He didn’t do that himself.”

Fisher interrupted me. “You’ve been in the house?”

I ignored him, kept Chen’s attention. “So what do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.” He seemed a little more comfortable now. “Like I told the cops, Bill was on edge for a few weeks, maybe a couple months. I told them that, and they ran away with the idea that it was something in his personal life. But Bill didn’t have one. A personal life. I mean, he had Gina, and Josh. He didn’t want anything else.”

“So what was bugging him? Any idea?”

“Not really. But I think maybe it was a work thing.”

“Something to do with his job? At the college?”

Chen shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably not, he would have said. We got hassles there, we all talk about it.”

“Chew on it around the coffee machine.”

“Exactly. Right.”

Fisher spoke up. “But you think his work was involved?”

“Maybe. We’ve all got personal projects, you know—hobbies. We talk about them all the time. But for a while, I don’t know…seemed like Bill was holding back.”

I nodded. “And I’m assuming you haven’t heard from him, right? No contact that you’re keeping secret?”

“I wish.” Chen looked down. “I keep my phone with me all the time. I sent him e-mails every day for the first two weeks. I still check all the time. First couple days, I even left the back door of my house unlocked. Gerry did, too.” He looked up. “I think Bill’s dead.”

“Which e-mail address are you sending to? One associated with the college?”

“Yes.”

“He’s not going to be using that. Not going to be phoning you either. He knows that those will nail him. If he’s innocent, he’s terrified out of his mind and going through grief and survivor guilt simultaneously, and doing it on his own. That would be enough to put most people in a psych ward within two days. Right now he’s probably one of the most paranoid individuals in the state. You’ve got no other e-mail address for him, something he can access anonymously on the Web?”

“No. I thought of that, but I don’t know one. And he could have set one up anytime, used it to e-mail me.”

“Except that as far as he knows, you buy the prevailing story and would try to trick him into giving himself up.”

“No. He’d know I wouldn’t do that.”

“With respect, Peter, you have no idea what paranoia is like. What about online science forums, Usenet groups, anything like that? Virtual places you’d expect him to hang out.”

Chen cocked his head. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

“He’s hardly going to be swapping equations back and forth,” Fisher said. “Given the position he’s in.”

“Of course not. But remember: For us, what happened to Bill is just a part of life. For him, it’s everything that exists. If he’s still alive, he’s been in hiding for three weeks. He needs to talk to someone, very soon, and he’s going to be trying to work out how. But he’s going to be very scared of physical contact or anything he fears might lead a bad guy to him. We have to find a way of making that easier for him.”

“But we have no idea where he is.”

“He’s in the city,” I said. “He’s not Rambo. I don’t see him taking to the mountains with a hunting knife between his teeth. He has no money, because he’ll know that an ATM will tag him. But he’s a bright guy, and I’m sure he could panhandle enough cash for half an hour online. That’s the best way I can think of trying to get to him.”

I grabbed a napkin off the table and wrote my cell-phone number on it. I gave this to Chen.

“Go home,” I told him. “Get online. Go to the places you and Bill and Gerry used to hang out. Leave messages. Don’t make it obvious they’re for Bill, but put something in them that will catch his eye and at the same time confirm it’s from a friend. And put this phone number in it. Not in plain sight, obviously. Find a way of hiding it, but in a way Bill will get. Can you think of a method of doing that?”

He nodded quickly. I knew he would. He looked like a puzzle kind of guy. “Good. And try to communicate that there are people who believe he’s innocent and that the person on the end of that phone line is one of them.”

“Okay. But why your number? Why not mine?”

“Because if we’re right, then someone who wasn’t Bill broke his wife’s neck and shot his son in the face before setting him on fire. Whoever Anderson makes contact with stands a chance of running into this person.” I stubbed out my cigarette and looked at Chen. “Want that to be you?”

“Uh, no,” he said.

chapter
TWENTY-FOUR

When he’d gone, Fisher turned to me.

“You didn’t say you were going to get into the house. I would’ve liked to have been there.”

“Which is one of several reasons I didn’t tell you,” I said. “And there was nothing there for you to find.”

“Jack…”

“Jack nothing. You pulled me into this by throwing my wife’s name in my face. She’s my interest here, and I’ll do what I have to in order to find out what’s going on. Just liked you turned up here with that friend of Anderson’s without letting me know first.”

“Bad idea? Talking to him?”

“Not unless he’s involved with whoever killed Anderson’s family.”

“Christ—you think he is?”

“No, I don’t. But you didn’t even consider the question. What if Chen had let someone know that Anderson would be out of the house that evening? Or if he’d even agreed to make sure he was? If either of those were true, we’ve just put ourselves squarely on someone’s radar.”

Fisher looked down. “Jesus. I didn’t think. Sorry. I’m…This isn’t really my kind of thing.”

“Remember that. Something else—when you called, you knew I’d been to Seattle. I want to know how you knew.”

“Just happened to see you,” he said, shrugging. “I didn’t even mean to tell you about it.”

“Where?”

“Road at the foot of Post Alley, near where the Kerry, Crane, and Hardy offices are.”

“We just happened to be in the same place at the same time?”

“I have no idea why you were there,” he said irritably. “I was on my way to try to talk to Crane. About the building in Belltown. I told reception I was interested in buying it. He wasn’t in.”

“Actually,” I said, “he was. I’d just come from there.”

“Oh.” Fisher frowned. “Why?”

“I got a call the night before. From a cabdriver. He’d found Amy’s phone in the back of his car.” I hesitated before continuing. It felt disloyal to speak of Amy to Fisher, as if by doing so I was joining some campaign against her. But that was absurd. “There appeared to be discrepancies in her whereabouts. I went to see Crane to find out where her meetings were that day, to work out when I could return her phone.”

“And?”

“He didn’t know she was in town. Or so he said.”

“But now you’re wondering if he was the guy in the pictures I took.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” he said.

“I’m not convinced there’s anything to be sorry about.”

“I hope you’re right. But the downside of what you’ve just told me is that we both visited Crane’s offices within a half hour and mentioned your wife’s name. We’ve probably put ourselves on his radar, don’t you think?”

“Fine by me,” I said. “I talked with the guy. I don’t see him for murder.”

Fisher said nothing. For just a moment, I began to feel that my hands were not my own. “You’re going to have to stop looking at me that way,” I said quietly.

“What way?”

“Like we’re back in school and I’ve said something naïve.”

“That’s just in your head, Jack.”

“It’d better be,” I said.

“You think Anderson will call?”

“I have no idea. Chen may be right. Anderson may be dead. Whoever took out his family could’ve caught up with him. He could’ve gotten randomly mugged. He could’ve thrown himself into the bay. I’ll give him until midday tomorrow. Then I’m done.”