by Craig Larsen
Jason Hamlin, cleanly shaven and dressed casually in jeans and a charcoal sweater, was seated behind a massive desk in a room that spanned the length of the penthouse suite. Framed by a wall of glass, the view behind him stretched all the way to the Olympic Mountains. He didn’t stand to greet Nick when the guard rapped on the solid door. Dismissing the guard, he let Nick traverse the spacious office to the edge of the huge desk, then, leaning back comfortably, waved a hand at a couple of guest chairs. “Take a seat,” he instructed, making no pretense at civility.
Nick stood in front of him, surveying the room. Three flat-panel plasma displays lined the far wall, each of them tuned mutely to a different program. An Oriental carpet covered the floor. In Hamlin’s presence, he felt ragged and poorly dressed. He hadn’t slept well, and he had gone straight from bed to the car. He ran a hand over his unshaven face, then through his unkempt hair. At last, realizing that Hamlin was waiting for him, he sat down. “I’ve never seen such an extraordinary view,” he said.
“Let’s dispense with the bullshit, Wilder. Okay?”
Nick knew that this wasn’t a social call, but Hamlin’s ugly candor surprised him. “What’s this about?” Nick asked. “Exactly.”
“No great mystery there, Wilder. I’m surprised you even have to ask.” Hamlin leaned forward in his chair and set his forearms down on the edge of the massive desk. “You’re going out with my daughter. I thought it was time we get acquainted.”
“You do this with all her friends?” The words were out of Nick’s mouth before he had the opportunity to reflect whether it was a good idea to provoke the powerful man.
“Only the ones she’s sleeping with,” Hamlin said with an unexpected smile. “I’m a pretty protective father. Some people might say overprotective.” He shrugged and loosened his neck, a fighter stepping into a ring. “Sara’s a beautiful girl.”
“Does she know about this?”
“This meeting?” Hamlin laughed. “Hell no. And she’s not going to know about it, either. Is she, Wilder? I think this is something best kept between men.” He settled back in his chair, keeping Nick in his sights.
Nick was distracted by the artwork hanging on the wall. Hamlin appeared to own an original Warhol and a small Picasso oil-on-canvas. Nick didn’t know whether the art held any significance for Hamlin. But he recognized that the paintings served their purpose. The wealth they represented was staggering. He returned his attention to the older man, awed despite himself. “So what is this, then,” he said, trying to regain some of his righteousness at Hamlin’s presumption. “Some kind of inquisition? You want me to convince you I’m worthy of your daughter?”
“Something like that,” Hamlin said. “Only don’t kid yourself. I already know who you are, and you’ll never be worthy of Sara.” He reached across the glistening desktop to a thin manila folder lying in its center and flipped it open, revealing an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph. After looking at it himself, he slid it across the desk toward Nick. Nick recognized the photograph. He didn’t move to touch it. “You’ve been seeing Sara for about a month now. You didn’t think that I might do a little background check on you in the meantime?”
Nick shook his head. As obvious as it was, the thought had never crossed his mind.
“That’s the photograph that landed you the job at the Seattle Telegraph. Am I right?”
“I had the job already,” Nick said, “when I took that picture.”
“You were on probation. After that picture, you were a photographer.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“A group of tree huggers protesting the construction of the new science lab at the university. Huh?”
Nick was conscious that Hamlin was trying to intimidate him. “The university’s private security company decided forcibly to remove the protestors one night,” he said, “despite the court’s stay of the proceeding against them. I just happened to be there that night. So I snapped a few pictures.”
“You have any idea how much those pictures cost me?”
Nick was confused. “How could this picture hurt you? It didn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Because of this one little picture, the court placed a permanent injunction on the project. Take a guess whose company had been awarded the contract to build that hundred-million-dollar science lab.”
Nick didn’t know what to say. He glanced down at the photograph. A university security guard had reached up into a tree and grabbed hold of a protestor by the ankle. Nick had focused the shot on a student calmly looking back at him from the middle of the melee, but the photograph had caught the protestor frozen in his rough flight to the ground. The guard’s face was a reflection of his exertion, the protestor’s a shocked question mark of surprise.
“It was a good photograph,” Nick said. “I’m sorry if it inadvertently cost you some money.”
The older man harrumphed. “A one hundred million dollar contract. Not just some money.” He furrowed his brow, determined to maintain control of the conversation. “I knew your brother,” he said. “Sam. Did you know that?”
The words gave Nick a small jolt. He knew already that Hamlin had been fronting Sam’s company start-up funding. There was enormous money chasing biotech projects in Seattle, and Sam and his partner, Blake Werner, had been on to something big. Nick hadn’t realized, though, that Hamlin had known Sam personally, by name. Nick made an effort not to reveal his surprise. “Sure,” he said. “I guess I’d heard.”
“He was an ambitious man, your brother. A real determined man. He had his eyes on the prize, and he wasn’t going to let anything or anyone stand in his way. It’s unfortunate he was murdered, and I feel for you. Believe it or not, I really do.”
Nick felt himself bristle. Sam had only been dead a week. His mutilated body still lay in a mortuary, released by the police the day before.
“The question in my mind, though,” Hamlin continued, oblivious to Nick’s increasing indignation, “isn’t how much compassion I’m supposed to be showing you. It’s whether my daughter should be sleeping with some stranger whose brother just got himself stabbed to death on the street. Sara deserves the best this world’s got to offer. I’m sure you’d agree, wouldn’t you?” He closed the manila folder over the photograph. “You’re damaged goods, Wilder. A wounded stray.”
Nick liked Hamlin less with every passing moment. His hands were sweaty and his chest was tight, but he couldn’t find his voice. Against his resolve, he had allowed the older man to bully him.
“Here’s the way I see it.” Hamlin leaned forward, engulfed in the glare of the bright light streaming through the huge plate of glass behind him. “Picture yourself at a crossroads. Looking one way, you’ve got a good job, a promising future. You’re a talented photographer. I’ll give you that. You make the right decision now, and there’s no telling how far you’ll go. Walk down the other road, though, and what do you see?” Hamlin’s icy blue eyes bored holes into Nick’s face. “Sara?” Hamlin’s lips formed an empty smile. “Do you honestly believe that you’ve got any sort of a future with Sara? Just how long do you think she’ll stay with you?”
Nick broke his silence. “If that’s true,” he heard himself say, “if she’s just playing with me, then why are we having this conversation?” His voice cracked, his heart pounded in his chest. All at once he could barely contain his rage. “Why did you feel the need to drag me down here to your office to threaten me?”
Hamlin continued looking at Nick, trying to stare him down. Nick returned his gaze, practically choking on his breath. At last, lacing his hands behind his head, the older man leaned back in his chair and raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Get out of my office, Wilder,” he said. “From now on, I’m going to be watching you. Understand?” The chair groaned beneath him. “Consider yourself warned.”
Nick was turning the confrontation with Jason Hamlin over in his mind later that morning. He was determined not to let the powerful man’s threats deter him. Wit
h the rush of everything happening around him, the single stable element in his life was Sara. Not just emotionally, but practically as well. In the days since Sam’s murder, when decisions had to be made, Sara had helped Nick make them. She had even been the one to organize the disposal of Sam’s body. After the police released Sam’s remains to a mortuary, Sara had taken it upon herself to visit the director, and without telling Nick she had paid for the cremation. Sara had become part of his life. Nick needed her, no matter what the consequence.
Nick stopped walking in front of a small antique jewelry store downtown. A long, thin silver chain with delicate, flattened links, scintillating in a halogen beam, had caught his eye. He glanced up at the lettering on the awning above the storefront, then approached the window. He hesitated, aware that his finances were pretty well tapped out until the payout on Sam’s insurance policy came through. Then he made up his mind and opened the door. He needed something tangible to demonstrate the depth of his feelings to Sara. Perhaps this chain wasn’t much, especially to a person used to real jewelry. Nevertheless, Nick wanted to see it around Sara’s neck.
chapter 19
At five that afternoon, Nick was standing on First Avenue, across the street from a rundown transient hotel. Night had begun to engulf the city. A group of women dressed in miniskirts and tight jackets had gathered at the entrance to the hotel, huddling together under its small rusting canopy to escape the drizzle. Trails of cigarette smoke wafted into the dark, misty air above their heads. Nick raised his camera to his eye and took a couple quick snaps of them, wondering if they had known Claire Scott. There weren’t that many streetwalkers left in Seattle. Prostitution had moved to the Internet and into the strip clubs. Nick listened to their hard voices. That’s right, girl. Keep it covered in plastic. Swallow at your own risk, baby. The string of nonsensical words dissolved into cackling laughter.
One of the women clicked open an umbrella and, craning her head toward the heavy sky, ventured onto the sidewalk. The others followed her in a pack. Nick waited until they had disappeared, then, glancing up at the five-story hotel’s grim brick façade, crossed the street to its entrance.
Nick entered the fluorescent-lit lobby, aware of the floor’s worn linoleum through the soles of his shoes, taking in the dark water stains on the walls. The clerk at the front desk eyed him from behind a greasy partition of bulletproof glass. “I got no rooms,” the old man said. “I’m full up.”
Nick rested his hands on the stainless-steel counter in front of the window. “I’m not looking for a room.”
“We don’t got any,” the man said again.
“I’m looking for someone. A man named Blake Werner.”
“He expecting you?”
“No.” Nick noticed the tiny pieces of crust around the man’s eyelids and the black gap in his mouth where a front tooth was missing. “Is he here?”
“He’s here, okay. I don’t figure he could be anywhere else.”
Nick pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the small, grimy steel tray at the base of the window. “What room is he in?”
“Take the elevator.” The green bill disappeared from the tray, and a raspy buzzer sounded behind the doors leading from the lobby into the hotel. “Fifth floor. Down to the left. Room four.”
The elevator opened onto a narrow, unlit hallway. Nick could hear voices through the hotel’s flimsy walls as he made his way down to Werner’s room. The number 4 was tacked to an old painted wooden door, dangling askew. He stood for few beats, listening. When he knocked, the number rattled, then dropped back into place. Nick could hear someone sitting up on a bed inside the room, followed by the hack of a man coughing.
“Blake?”
Farther down the hallway, another door opened. Nick glanced down the close corridor, aware of the eyes looking at him from a tight crack in a doorway. He knocked again.
“Who’s it?”
The words were slurred and forced. Nick hesitated, then placed a hand on the knob and tried the door.
“Who’s there?” the man inside repeated, panicked, when the locked door rattled in its frame.
“We met a couple of years ago,” Nick said. “You worked with my brother.”
Werner paused, absorbing the information. “What d’you want?”
“Nothing. Just to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Go away.” Nevertheless, the bed groaned beneath the man as he stood up, and the floorboards creaked as he moved across the small room.
Nick waited. The smell of alcohol nearly overwhelmed him when the man pulled the door open. Dressed in jeans and a grubby shirt, unshaven, his hair in a greasy heap on top of his head, Werner was barely the shadow of the man Nick remembered.
“Not quite what you were expecting,” the man said with a knowing, bleary-eyed smile. He reached a hand toward Nick. “Blake Werner,” he said unnecessarily when Nick clasped his hand. “But I guess you know that already. Dr. Blake Werner.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I remember. We met.”
Werner shrugged. Even as pathetic as he was, he was a beguiling man. Nick understood from his eyes that he was painfully aware of his own failure. He took a few halting steps back toward his bed, so incapacitated that he nearly fell before reaching it. “Help yourself to a drink,” he said, pointing at an open bottle of whisky on top of a beaten-up bureau. “Sit down. My home is your home. So you’re Sam’s brother—right?”
Ignoring the alcohol, Nick pulled a chair over from the desk. “Yeah. Sam’s brother.”
“How is it the old saying goes? Any brother of Sam’s is an enemy of mine, or something like that.”
Nick smiled uncomfortably. “I haven’t heard that one,” he said.
“I don’t sleep anymore,” Werner said, as though he were answering a question Nick had posed. “I dream all the time. I can’t seem to stop dreaming. Goddamn it. But I can’t sleep.”
The lanky man had huge dark circles underneath his eyes. His hands were trembling uncontrollably.
“Yeah,” Werner said, following Nick’s gaze, “it’s like I’ve got Parkinson’s disease, isn’t it? I used to run marathons. Honolulu. New York.” His eyes lit. “You remember the Seattle marathon, right? What was that, just two years ago? Seven forty-five a mile. I finished with your brother, and you know what a good runner Sam was. Today”—Werner shrugged—“I couldn’t even find the starting line.”
Nick took a quick look around the room. A small TV in the corner was switched off, its screen blank. The cramped space was littered with fifteen or twenty books, scattered around the floor as if they had been thrown there, their spines broken, their covers torn, some half-buried in heaps of soiled clothes. Above the bureau, Werner had tacked his Harvard diploma to the dirty wall. “You’ve been here a long time,” Nick said.
“Too long.”
“How long?”
Werner shook his head. “I really don’t remember.” He tracked Nick’s eyes to the bureau. “Say, friend,” he said, alert. “Do me the favor of handing me that bottle, would you?”
Nick reached for the whisky.
“I don’t need a glass,” Werner said. “There’s no one here to impress. Just Sam’s brother. One of my sworn enemies.” He took a large swig, then handed the bottle back to Nick. “Put that back where you got it, would you? Or I’ll finish the whole thing. Then what’ll I do, huh?”
“Listen, Blake,” Nick said. “There’re a few questions I want to ask you, okay?”
Blake shrugged his acquiescence.
“About Matrix Zarcon.”
“You were a reporter, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“So why not ask your brother, then? If you’ve got so many questions. I don’t want to revisit that sorry piece of history.”
It took Nick a moment to understand what Werner was saying. “You haven’t heard yet, have you?”
“Heard what?”
“Sam’s dead,” Nick said.
Werner l
ooked confused, then broke into an odd smile. “You’re kidding me, right?”
Nick shook his head.
“What, someone finally kill him?”
“Why do you say that?” Nick asked, stung by the offhand remark.
“You mean, how do I know?” Werner laughed, then began to cough. He held his crooked elbow up to his mouth, and when he brought it away Nick was aware that his forearm was freckled with blood. “Chalk it up to wishful thinking.”
“You really didn’t like my brother.”
Werner seemed not to hear. He took a crumpled cigarette from his shirt pocket and stuck it between his lips. “You’re a smoker, right?”
Nick shook his head. “I quit.”
“Once a smoker, always a smoker. It’s like riding a bike. You never forget how.” Werner harrumphed, half to himself. “You got a match?”
Nick ignored the interruption. “You didn’t like Sam,” he repeated, mastering his annoyance.
“Sam? Nobody liked Sam.”
“Why?”
Werner squinted at Nick, a slightly amused expression lighting his otherwise dark eyes. “Let me ask you something, friend.” He stuffed the unlit cigarette back into his pocket.
“Sure.”
“How well did you know him?”
“What?”
“I really mean it, friend. How well did you know your brother?”
Nick had taken shelter beneath the metal bleachers set up inside Memorial Stadium. He had arrived at the park next to the Space Needle early, two hours after the start of the race, in time to catch the first elite runners crossing the finish line. It had been raining earlier, and the marathoners were drenched and miserable as they entered the stadium. Their determination was audible in their footsteps over the excited cheers of the onlookers.
An hour later, the runners’ footsteps weren’t so emphatic anymore, and the crowd had become subdued. The sun peeked through the clouds, even as a few sprinkles chased the slower, spent runners into the stadium. Nick leaned under the edge of the bleachers to light a cigarette, then, squinting, taking a deep drag, stepped out into the momentary burst of sunlight. He didn’t want to miss Sam crossing the finish line. Sam must have repeated his instructions ten times. Be there with your camera, bro’. Don’t be late. He had made Nick promise.