The Intruders

  Anderson nodded. “Everything. I forgot to take my backup with me that night. Only place any of it’s left is in my head.”

  “What was it?” Fisher asked. “What were you working on?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Yes,” Fisher said firmly. “You can. I have to know more.”

  Maybe it was only the harsh morning glare coming at him through the glass, but right then Fisher looked a little strange. The lines at the corner of his eyes were pronounced, his mouth thin.

  “More?” I said. “I didn’t realize that you knew anything at all about this.”

  Fisher looked away, and I knew he’d been lying to me.

  “What Gary means,” I said, turning to Anderson, “is that it would assist us if you could give an indication of what led to the events that occurred in your house. To help the cops look at this differently, we need to build a credible case toward an alternative perpetrator.”

  “How do I know you’re not one of them? Or that he isn’t?”

  “You don’t,” I said. “Neither of us has a badge saying ‘Certified Good Guy.’ If that’s what you need, you’re going to have to wait until you get to heaven.”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, looking at me.

  The implication was clear. I turned breezily to Fisher. “Gary. Wonder if you might want to get some more coffee for Bill? I could use a refill, while you’re at it.”

  Fisher kept his face composed. “Whatever you say.”

  He got up stiffly, walked toward the counter. Anderson looked around the restaurant for the hundredth time, eyes darting in every direction.

  “Going to give you a tip,” I said. “Don’t be looking around the place like that the whole time. If you want to be invisible, then you have to look like you’re heading from A to B and you have the right to pass through all points in between. If a cop with time on his hands catches you doing the shadows-in-every-corner thing, he’ll check you out just on the off chance.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I used to be one.”

  “You’re a cop?”

  “Listen to all the words, Bill: used to be. Not anymore. Not on their side necessarily. Though I know they’re not all assholes either. You would be the main suspect for this case in any town in the U.S.A., trust me. Cops learn to break situations down according to the way they usually shake out. It saves time. It can save their lives. You’ve fallen on the wrong side of that process, but it doesn’t mean that the police are the axis of evil. Your best-case scenario right now is to get yourself to the point where you can go to them instead of hiding.”

  Anderson shook his head. “How can I—”

  “Tell me what this is about.” I said. “I get that it’s private. Something even Peter Chen doesn’t know about. It’s not my business, and I don’t even really care. But right now you’re running out of options, and this secret has already gotten people killed.”

  “You’re not going to believe what I tell you.”

  “Somebody evidently does,” I said. “So try me.”

  He hesitated for a long time. I glanced toward the counter to signal to Fisher that I might be getting somewhere, but he wasn’t there. In the restroom, I guessed, or maybe he’d stomped outside. He was in a very spiky place this morning, especially for someone who’d found what he was supposed to be looking for.

  When Anderson finally spoke, I knew it was not just in the hope that I might be able to help him but also because it was something he’d kept to himself for a long time. It’s not true that everyone wants to confess a crime, but most people do want to tell something of their story, to stop hiding for just a while.

  “My field is wave dynamics,” he said. “Specifically those relating to sound. At college I just cover the physics of it, basically. But a couple years ago, I started to get interested in broader issues. How sound affects us in other ways.”

  “Like how?” I said. After only a few sentences, I was finding it hard to believe that this was going to relate to anything of importance in my world.

  Anderson’s response showed he’d read something of this in my face. “Sound is underestimated,” he said earnestly. “We all go on about seeing things, but sound is a lot more important than people realize. It gets taken for granted. Everybody knows we played heavy rock at Noriega to flush him out. Some people know that music was used when the FBI stormed Waco. But there’s a lot more to it than bombarding people with tunes they don’t like. You go to a restaurant where there’s loud music, and see how much less you enjoy eating. You can’t concentrate on the food—you almost can’t even taste it. Part of the brain switches off. Or you hear a piece of music, some song, for the first time in years, and it takes you right back to the time you associate with it. You’ll feel the same, even remember smells, tastes, relive other sensory data from this other time. You know this, right?”

  “I guess. Yes, I do.”

  Talking through something he cared about seemed to have momentarily helped Anderson forget the rest of his world. “Or you’re alone at night, in a place you don’t know—and all at once you hear a noise. It doesn’t matter that you can’t see anything wrong—suddenly sight doesn’t rule the roost anymore. You don’t need to see anything to be scared out of your wits. Your brain and body understand that sound matters a whole lot.”

  “Okay,” I said. I knew I had to let him talk, but for some reason I felt unsettled, uncomfortable. I still couldn’t see Fisher, and this was beginning to stretch the length of a viable trip to the john. “I’ll take your word for this, Bill. You’re the science guy. But what’s your point? What were you working on specifically?”

  “Infrasound,” he said. “Very-low-frequency sounds. Most people have been looking at eighteen hertz, but I went to nineteen hertz. It has…effects. Your eyes may water or blur when you’re exposed to it. You can get odd sensations in your ears, hyperventilation, muscle tension—a physicist called Vladimir Gavreau actually claimed that infrasound is a key component in urban anxiety. More simply, it just makes you feel like you’re afraid. And if you hit the resonant frequency of the human eye, which is right around this point, you can start thinking you’re seeing odd things, too. Everyone’s been assuming this is physiological, just a side effect of the physics of the eye, but it’s…not. It’s more complicated. Infrasound does strange things to us. Very strange things. It enables us to glimpse things we can’t normally see.”

  I found myself looking around the restaurant, just as I’d told Anderson not to do. I saw nothing to explain what I was feeling, a sensation I didn’t even know how to describe. I looked out through the open door into the crowds. Just people, moving back and forth.

  “What kinds of things, Bill? What are you actually talking about here? What was it that you did?”

  I pulled my eyes back to him. He was looking down at his hands. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.

  “I made a ghost machine,” he said.

  But that’s when I saw a tall figure heading toward the diner through the crowds, walking quickly. He was dressed in a dark coat and looking not left or right but straight at Anderson.

  “Get down,” I said quickly.

  Anderson blinked at me, confused. I tried to stand, pushing him to one side as I rose, but I got caught under the table. I saw Fisher coming around the side of the center station, coffee cups in hand, just as the man in the coat pushed his way into the restaurant and removed one hand from an inside pocket.

  I finally got clear of the table and shoved Anderson harder, shouting, “Bill, get out of the—”

  It was too late. The man fired three times, measured, unhurried shots from a silenced handgun.

  He’d disappeared back into the crowd before I even realized that none of the bullets had hit me. The shots had been quiet, but the sight of Anderson’s blood as it sprayed across the window was not—and everybody started running and shouting at once. When I bent over Anderson’s body and tried to find where he’d been shot, I co
uldn’t hear what he tried to say to me through the noise and the blood welling up out of his mouth, but I saw it open and close and knew it would be for the last time.

  chapter

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “He’s dead.”

  I looked up to see Blanchard standing over me. It was two hours since Anderson had been shot, and I was sitting in a plastic chair in a corridor of a hospital I didn’t know the name of. A crowd of cops were standing down the far end. I’d been interviewed by two of them.

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “No idea,” he said. “And there is no ‘us.’ Be clear on that. I’m only here because I used to partner one of the lead detectives. You’re here as a courtesy and because witnesses are very firm on how you reacted when the gunman came in. Where’s your buddy? Fisher?”

  “Getting some air.”

  Blanchard sat down heavily in the chair beside me. “What the fuck happened? Really?”

  “What I told you. We got a message to Anderson through one of his colleagues. He came to talk to us.”

  “Why? That’s what I don’t get. Why you?”

  “Maybe because our pitch was that we knew he didn’t kill his family. We arranged to meet at the diner, at Anderson’s suggestion. How the guy with the gun found him, I have absolutely no idea.”

  “What did you get out of Anderson?”

  “He’d barely started to open up before it happened. He received the check I told you about but didn’t do anything with it because it came with conditions he wasn’t prepared to meet.”

  “Which were?”

  “That he stop work on some private project.”

  “Which was?”

  “We were getting into that when the ceiling fell in.”

  Blanchard turned to look at me but didn’t say anything.

  I shrugged. “Believe what you like. I was helping Gary out. Now that Anderson’s been found, it’s over. It’s up to your guys to sort out the mess.”

  “Mess?”

  “This makes Anderson a strikingly less credible suspect for the double homicide, don’t you think?”

  “Doesn’t have to be any link between the two events.”

  “Yeah, right. I’ll just bet everyone in SPD is telling themselves that. Better than admitting they spent a month looking for an innocent man and not finding him before someone came from nowhere and blew him away.”

  “Anderson fucked himself. He should have turned himself in. Gotten in contact, at least.”

  “That what you would have done under the circumstances?”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded slowly. Truth was that I still didn’t really get why Anderson had done as he had. I’d only intercepted when Fisher had pushed him on it because I knew that increasing Anderson’s feelings of guilt was not the way to get him to talk. Coupled with the caginess of his response when talking about his work, however, plus Chen and others’ view that he’d been on edge before the murders took place, I believed that Anderson had felt himself to be in a dangerous position even before the events of that night. The covering letter with the bequest had carried ominous weight. Was that enough to explain his running from the scene? Or was it something inherent to the work he’d been doing? Was he already spooked?

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

  I got up. There was nothing more for me to do here. “I appreciate the way you’ve dealt with this.”

  “You’re welcome. Just don’t make me regret it.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He looked down at his cupped hands. “I know a little more about the circumstances under which you left the LAPD,” he said. “We wouldn’t want anything like that happening here.”

  “Whatever you think you know isn’t what really happened.”

  “I know there were some dead guys involved. And you.”

  “Am I in jail right now?”

  “No. But what I just said still holds.”

  “Gotcha.” I started walking away.

  “Jack,” he said when I’d gotten about ten feet. “How deeply are you tied in to Fisher’s universe?”

  I stopped, turned back. “Not at all. Why?”

  “Keep it that way. I also talked to someone in Fisher’s firm. Why do you think he’s here?”

  “He’s tying up loose ends for them.”

  “Wrong. He’s on enforced leave. ‘Personal reasons.’ The colleague I spoke with was very discreet. But I got the sense they were distancing themselves. If I were you, I’d do the same. I think there’s stuff going on in that guy’s head you don’t know anything about.”

  I left, walking more quickly now. Fisher was not standing in front of the hospital. That could have been because of the media presence beginning to build there—the killing had been pretty public—but he wasn’t answering his phone either.

  And when I got back to his hotel, the man behind the desk told me he’d checked out a half hour before.

  I retrieved my car and drove out of town. On the way down to the freeway, I pulled over opposite Pioneer Square. I got out on impulse and walked over to it. My hands were shaking. I don’t know why. Because of Anderson. Because of what Blanchard had brought up about things that had happened in L.A. I sat on the bench for twenty minutes, taking deep breaths, until I felt okay again.

  Then I left the city, headed east toward the mountains. The morning was clear and bright at first, a few fluffy clouds only for decoration. Traffic was light, and I seemed to slip along almost too easily, as if the world was colluding in letting me run from a place where I’d been instrumental in a man’s death.

  As I pulled toward the top of the Cascades, it began to get colder, the scene more muted, rusty dogwood the only color among the trees and bushes, their stems looking a little too much like sprays of dried blood. The sky frosted over, and clouds crept down out of it to touch the land, roosting in trees like the ghosts of long-ago campfires, a damp and silent echo of the lives of the people who had once lived peacefully here with the wood and the earth and the water.

  Would something of this kind persist now in Byron’s, the impression of a man sitting hunched at a table in slanting morning sunlight, or would people sometimes see or sense a shape at the door or the window of the house up on Broadway, the remains of a man trapped on the other side of a curtain, trying to find his way home?

  A shadow of my father had remained in our house in Barstow after his death, I knew that much. My mother had lasted only five months before selling the place and moving to be closer to her sister, of whom she was not overly fond. I went home for the weekend perhaps three, four times during that period, and each time the house felt as if it had been dismantled while I was away and put together again exactly the same. I always felt like I was trying to catch up with what had happened in it, partly because of the way I’d received the news.

  At college I had a notably progressive professor who, among other fine qualities, was open to having favored students hanging out at his house on Friday evenings and—while engaged in suitably brainy talk—helping themselves to the alcohol-based contents of his fridge. It had been on a morning following one of these freewheeling tutorials that I’d woken to the knock of two cops on my dorm-room door. I was hung-over, majorly freaked out—there was a small stash of marijuana in my drawer—and their presence made me feel caught out, late, permanently off balance.

  My father was found on the kitchen floor, wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else. He’d heard something in the night, come down to investigate—as men must. He had suffered extensive stab wounds from a large, serrated hunting knife but died of blows to the head from a claw hammer. The hammer lay next to him on the floor. It was his. I’d been with him when he bought it, on a Saturday-morning walk, and had watched him use it to mend chairs and fences and put up pictures. As I’d told Anderson, the intruders had stolen little. The household’s money had always gone toward making sure that there was good food on the table, that I had clothes and the books I needed for sch
ool. The stuff that matters can’t be taken—except, I suppose, for fathers: stolen by strangers looking to finance the evening’s drinking or a new set of tires or a bet on a horse that was already set to lose.

  It was clear that whoever had shattered Bill Anderson’s life had not been on so mundane a quest. In a few days, it would rotate off the television and radio coverage, but not out of my life. I had lied to Blanchard. Up until 8:51 that morning, Anderson’s existence had been of tangential relevance to my own. But no longer. There is an intimacy to carrying someone else’s blood on your hands, in seeing their eyes as they realize the sharp and finite limit to how much more of the world they themselves will see. Anderson’s soul had now been nailed to my own, which meant that Joe Cranfield’s estate and the building in Belltown were problems I had to solve, together with the question of how this related to my wife.

  By the time I turned off onto 97 and started into the woods toward Birch Crossing, I knew that this was something I could not now let go of, and that this would not be a good thing for me, or for others. The God of Bad Things still knew where I lived. He always would. If I did nothing, he would come and find me anyway.

  Maybe it was time to take the fight to him.

  chapter

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Madison’s second night on the streets had felt even longer than the first. After going to see the silly man in his office—an episode that was a little cloudy to her now—she had walked for quite a while. She bought some food at a small market and ate it in a park, and cried for a bit, then went walking again, going on and on, long after all the stores and restaurants were shut, keeping to alleys and moving within shadows. She stood for a while in front of a building that was boarded up, even went and pressed on one of the buzzers. She took out the keys she’d found in the back of the notebook, tried them in the door. They did not fit. This annoyed her a great deal. Something had been stolen from her, she now believed. This was where it was.