“What did they arrest you for?”
The man went back to the wall, sat down. He picked up my pack of cigarettes, took one. “You mind?”
I shook my head. I took a drink of water as I watched him light the cigarette.
He frowned, looked at the tip. “Haven’t done that in a long time,” he said. “Not sure I like it anymore.”
“For what?” I asked him again doggedly. “Why were you being arrested?”
He shook his head. “Been and done and not your business. I want to hear what’s been happening to you.”
So I told him. I didn’t see any reason not to. I could have got to my feet and run, I guess. I wasn’t tied up. I might have been able to find my way out of the building. He didn’t seem to bear me huge ill will, and so he might not have picked up his gun and shot me.
But, you know, he might have.
Added to which, this was a man who might know something about what had been going on in my life. He’d already admitted he’d killed the woman in the corner, and so it seemed unlikely he was a cop. It didn’t make it impossible—but it didn’t make a whole lot of difference anyway. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had to keep reminding myself of this, but it was true. The weird thing is that if you know you’ve done nothing wrong but the bad stuff keeps happening, you’re actually in a worse position than if you’re a bad guy to start off with. If you know you’re doing wrong things, then you can choose to stop. You know what to lie about, what to hide.
But how can you stop trying to be you? How can you put an end to living your normal life?
I told him about the cards I’d received. I told him how my e-mail account had been hacked and an online order placed in my name. I told him it seemed that someone had intercepted a shout-out on the Web for a bottle of wine, had obtained one, poisoned it, and sold it to me—maybe in an attempt to get at the Thompsons. I told him the cops wanted to talk to me because of weirdness over the whereabouts of some guy who’d vanished—although not completely, as I’d seen him yesterday evening, long after the cops had started investigating his apparent disappearance.
He seemed to react in some way at that part, but said nothing.
I told him that I’d woken up that morning in a girl’s apartment (an apartment that, if he was telling the truth about our current location, could only be half a mile from where I now sat) to find a word scrawled in her blood on a bathroom door. I told him that an unknown woman had then burst in, driven me away, and that I’d escaped from her soon after she started telling me a lot of stuff that didn’t make any sense.
He listened to it all, his eyes never leaving my face.
Finally I stopped, not because I’d run out of things to say but because my head hurt and I’d lost track of what I’d already told him and what I had not.
“Don’t know who the guy you saw last night was,” he said eventually. His voice was quiet and flat. “But it wasn’t Warner. That much I know. At that time he was still tied in the chair on the floor behind you.”
I swallowed, my throat feeling dry. I’d seen the bloodstains on the floor. This probably meant that Hazel was not the only person this man had killed. The disquieting thing was that he looked just like anyone else. You think there must be some kind of sign, a badge of darkness or aura of the killing kind. Evidently not. Some people have murdered other people; some people get overly pally with coworkers of the opposite sex; some people can read French fluently and while away their lives selling house paint. Unless you catch any of them in the act, you’re not going to know. Our essence is the stuff other people don’t know, the things we hide . . . which means that no one ever has the faintest idea of what’s really going on.
“Didn’t kill him,” the man said, contradicting my thoughts. “Had a mind to. He was the one person I was absolutely prepared to go down that road with. But . . . he escaped.” He held out the picture to me again. “Guy you didn’t recognize? That’s Warner, right there.”
“That’s not the guy I saw.”
“Can’t help that. I blame myself. When I left him last night, I told him the cops were taking an interest in his house. I was just fucking with his head. Only thing I can think is he pushed himself off that ledge up there, still tied to the chair.”
I looked up. “Christ.”
“Right. What’s going to make a man do that?” He closed his eyes, rubbed them. “Shit,” he muttered. “I got to get my head straight. There’s too much new information floating around. Got to integrate.”
We sat in silence for five minutes, interrupted finally by a buzzing sound. The man frowned. It took me a moment to realize what we were hearing, too. I only got it on the fourth ring, when I saw that my phone was starting to migrate across the concrete floor.
“It’s on vibrate,” I said.
The man looked at the screen. “Still not used to these things. Somebody called Hallam. Who’s that?”
“He’s one of Barclay’s deputies.”
“You want to talk to him?”
“Are you serious?”
“I can trust you not to be unhelpful about discussing your whereabouts, right?”
He picked up his gun, watched my face to check I’d got the message, and brought my phone over to me.
I hit the answer and speaker buttons simultaneously, uncomfortably aware that the man was now walking toward a point where he’d be standing behind me.
“Hey, Deputy,” I said, acting out a role in a drama called Everything’s Okay, and a Man with a Gun Is Not About to Shoot Me in the Back of the Head, Probably. “Thanks for calling back.”
Hallam’s voice came out of the tinny speaker sounding a little breathless. “Where are you?”
When I’d tried to get hold of him earlier, I’d been about to tell him everything I knew. Now I decided to stick to facts of current relevance.
“On Lido.”
“I only just got your message. You sounded freaked out. Is your wife still missing?”
“No. I know where she is now.”
There was a pause, and I heard the sound of a piece of loud, grinding machinery being used in the background of wherever Hallam was. “She okay?”
“She’s fine.”
“Get yourself back to The Breakers,” he said, sounding distracted. “Do it now.”
“I will,” I said. “But you know the falling-down apartment block at the end of Ben Franklin Drive?”
He raised his voice against background noise. “What? Yeah, I know it. What about it?”
“Go there. Look in apartment 34.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
I ended the call.
There was silence from behind me. I waited maybe thirty seconds—long, treacly seconds—before deciding that, if he was going to blow my brains out, I’d at least like to be facing him when it happened.
I turned slowly from the waist.
He wasn’t there.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Hallam barely heard the last few sentences with the Realtor. Despite him flapping his free hand at the guy with the angle grinder, the asshole kept on cutting around the lock on the door they’d found in the Warner basement. Every other route had been exhausted, and after dead-ending in his attempt to talk to the sheriff, Hallam had given the go-ahead to move to quick and dirty solutions.
The noise from the doorway behind him abruptly changed in tone and pitch and then cut out, accompanied by the sound of something falling to the floor.
“We’re in,” the guy said.
The second door was as heavy as the first, and Hallam had to lean his full weight against it to get it to move. It opened onto pitch-darkness. The air that seeped out was cool. He reached his hand around the side of the door frame and slid it up and down. No switch.
“Get me a flashlight,” he said.
He took a step into the space in the meantime. It remained colder than an enclosed space should be, which suggested it was as climate controlled as the rest of the building. It wa
s almost perfectly odorless, too, although after a moment he detected something, a low, acrid note, and sniffed hard. The noise rebounded flatly.
“Here,” the remaining tech said, and Hallam took the flashlight and turned it on. At first all he could make out was rebounding white light. Once his eyes readjusted, he got that he was seeing tiles. He turned back toward the doorway and played the lamp along that wall until he spotted the switch, positioned an unusually wide distance from the opening. He flicked it, and three banks of fluorescent lights came on in unison.
“Oh,” said the tech, sounding relieved.
A low-ceilinged room, twenty feet deep by sixty feet wide. The ceiling, floor, and four walls were tiled in white, orderly rows of nine-inch squares. It was entirely empty, not a single object to be seen. There was something eerie and a little inhuman about the space.
Hallam didn’t share the tech’s assumption that this meant the matter was an end, however. This space had been laboriously dug out of the sand and bedrock of the island prior to the house being built. You didn’t go to that much trouble and expense just for this, nor did you temperature-control or ensure its cleanliness at some recent time with bleach—a process the tiling could have been designed to make easier.
“We’re not done yet,” he said.
They walked methodically across the floor, a few feet apart, looking down. They did it in five passes. They saw nothing, no sign of suspicious substances, no splash of blood to echo the one discovered in the kitchen two days before. If Warner had been killed or wounded here, someone had cleaned up after himself very well.
At the far end they stopped. The tech had visibly started to relax. Hallam hadn’t. His mind told him it was just the notion that you didn’t go to this much trouble for a big white room. His heart, or stomach, had more to say. It could hear something. It was a sound he remembered from when his mother had taken him on a trip to visit relatives up in Canada. It was one of the few times he and his mother had spent quality time alone, and it was a happy memory but for one thing. They spent a week in a town called Colindale, a couple of hours north of Toronto. It had been cold in a way he’d never experienced before or since—wind chill taking it below minus ten most days. One afternoon, when cabin fever set in and Mrs. Hallam decided she either had to get away from her sister for a few hours or risk intersibling bloodshed, she and her son had spent a frigid afternoon trying to find something of interest on Colindale’s short main drag. Eventually they’d wound up in the church, a hulk of architectural nullity that was distinguished that day by having a lot of oil heaters turned up high.
Hallam’s mother wandered, arms folded, looking at the things on the walls and checking her watch. Her son, mollified by the promise that once they’d warmed up he’d be taken to eat a slice of pie in the diner, stood in the center of the church and waited fairly patiently for time to pass. After a while he realized he felt something. A sensation that felt like a sound. He turned, looked around. The only other person present was his mother, now at the far end by a notice board. There had been a priest around, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“Mom,” he called.
“Yes?” Her voice floated back to him as if from a greater distance than the building could circumscribe.
“Did you just hear something?”
“Only you.”
He stood it for five minutes longer, then gained permission to wait outside. It was cold as hell, especially after the stuffy warmth of the church, but he preferred it. Half an hour later, with feeling beginning to return to his fingertips and a big slab of chocolate fudge cake inside him, he would have been hard-pressed to say why the church had made him feel uncomfortable.
In the twenty years since, however, he’d recalled this feeling from time to time, almost exclusively when work or daily life caused him to be inside some kind of religious structure. He’d developed an explanation, electing to believe that it was merely what remains in buildings when people are quiet in them for long periods: the residual silence of prayer, an accretion of contemplation—and also of intense emotion in the process of being mollified, sidelined, shoved aside: the sound of all the voices that are trapped in people’s minds. The power of grief, escaping like a heat haze from heads lowered in reverence before some putative god.
He’d never mentioned this theory to anyone, of course. But that’s what he was feeling now, and it was much louder than he’d ever heard it before, and it did not feel like an echo of anything like calm.
He walked to the center of the room, glanced from side to side, got his bearings. Far as he could judge, this room went the width of the house. The plots along this stretch of the key were relatively narrow, which is why the houses were deep. So ignore the side walls for now. He returned to the back and headed to the far left corner side. The tech watched him, looking puzzled.
“Go to the other side,” Hallam told him. “Right into that corner. Stand a yard back from the wall.”
“And then what?”
“Shuffle toward me, a tile width at a time. Keep looking at the wall.”
They did it together. After a couple of steps their movements locked in time, and it began to sound as if they were engaged in a slow dance in an empty hall, moving toward each other in a pas de deux. Hallam pushed this out of his mind as long as he could, but then heard the sound of the tech sniggering.
“Shh,” Hallam said, though he was half laughing himself. “This is serious.”
That just made the tech laugh out loud. Then he stopped. “Hang on,” he said. “I think I see something.”
Hallam went over. “Where?”
The tech ran his finger up a vertical line of grout between two columns of tiles. “You see?”
“Nope.”
“Every other line I’ve seen is about the same. Like an eighth of an inch gap. This looks smaller.”
Hallam saw the guy was right—though he would have never noticed it himself. Guess that’s why some people make good techs. He felt around the wall either side of the line. After a minute he started pressing harder.
A moment later, there was a click. A section of tiling slowly bounced back half an inch.
Hallam heard an exhale. He wasn’t sure whether it was the tech or something else. He got his fingers around the edges of the door and pulled it back.
A corridor lay beyond, perhaps thirty feet long. Two doors on the left, a single one at the far end of the other side. They stepped into it together. They became enveloped in a silence so loud that they could hear each other breathe. They opened the doors, one by one.
The first held what could have been pieces of gym equipment, but for the straps. A short rack on the wall held a few tools that would have seemed more suitable to a workshop. Screwdrivers, short saws, a hand drill. There was a long mirror on the side wall.
The next room held two sofas, positioned so as to be able to watch through the one-way glass, and a good deal of video equipment. They came out of the room together and went, slowly, to the door on the other side.
This was much heavier than the others, and when it opened a burst of freezing air escaped and a sound like the flapping of wings.
The tech made some kind of a noise.
Hallam stared past him at the things hanging from a hook in the center of the room. The plastic had a frosted texture, presumably from the refrigeration. They looked like body bags. All were empty, now.
He reached out and pulled aside the flaps of the one nearest to him. The inside was smeared with dry, frozen blood. He looked more closely and saw indentations in the plastic, at about head height. They looked like teeth marks.
As if someone had been hung in one of these things, not yet dead, and had tried to bite their way out.
“Okay,” Hallam said quietly, acutely aware that what he did now would govern the rest of his career. “We need Barclay right away. I’m going to go find a signal and call him. You’re going to stand at the doorway in the wine cellar and let no one pass. And we talk to nobody until the sheri
ff says so. Got that?”
The tech tried to speak, could not, nodded instead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I waited an hour in the street outside the gates to Cass’s building. Hallam didn’t show. I didn’t know what else he had on his plate, but I believed that what I’d said should have been enough to get most cops to come take a look. Maybe he just didn’t give a damn.
A clot of pain was attached to the back of my skull, mingling badly with the lingering effects of the previous night’s drinking. It was making the world hot and bright and unreal. I called the cop’s phone but got routed to voice mail again. I didn’t leave a message. Fuck him.
I noticed I had an indicator saying that three Facebook “friends” had sent messages, presumably updating me on what passed for their news. Fuck them, too. The idea that I’d care about whatever was going on in their lives—that I’d ever cared, or pretended to—made me want to laugh out loud.
I’d sat absolutely still after finding he was no longer behind me, convinced he’d moved to some position I couldn’t see, the better to pull the trigger in safety. I gingerly got to my feet. I took some tentative steps, still half believing they were going to be my last. I darted forward and swept up my wallet and car keys. I made my way through the half-built structure until I found a thick plywood door. I stepped out into the glaring sun and a mothballed building site, and walked across it to the road. My car was parked there.
When I’d stood on Ben Franklin Drive for five minutes and watched vehicles drive past and a few tourists stroll by, I finally began to believe that the guy had simply gone. I limped along the road to the building where Cass had lived, and waited. In the meantime I’d checked on Steph and was told she was sleeping.
So now what? I realized suddenly that there was something I could do, and I should probably have thought of it before. I didn’t want to do it, but it’d become clear that I was no longer living in a world where what I wanted counted for much. It would also be, in its own horrible way, the smart thing to do. For once.
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