The Intruders

by Michael Marshall

  “You think Bethany has an additional person in her head.”

  “I know it. And who it is.”

  “For God’s sake—you told me you didn’t believe that crap about Donna. I thought you were just drunk.”

  “You didn’t watch me carefully enough that evening,” he said. “I didn’t finish half my beers. I don’t drink much anymore. I’m too smart for that.”

  “Right. Sure. Whatever. And what exactly does this have to do with my wife?”

  “Joe Cranfield had an intruder, too, Jack. He was the intruder, in fact, the older personality roosting in the body of the person I met. This is why Cranfield was able to hit the ground running. A financial prodigy, yes? A Mozart of music. He’s what clued me in to the whole thing in the first place. That’s why he cleared his estate at the end, without warning his wife—who wasn’t an intruder and so didn’t know the score. That’s got to be part of the system. The way these people work.”

  “Which people, Gary? Your two-year-old and a dead businessman from Illinois? They had some conspiracy going between the two of them? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Jack—of course not. There’s more of them, all over the world. A group who’ve organized things so they can come back, who’ve done it time and time again—figured out how to do this hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years ago. You said it yourself, back at school. You said that thing about Donna, remember? That she came into the world knowing things.”

  “Gary, that was just a figure of speech. I was eighteen, for Christ’s sake. I was just trying to sound smart.”

  “But you were right. That’s the thing—some people do come into life knowing things they shouldn’t, or at least the second soul that lives inside them does. A group of people figured out that they could come back, get into other people’s heads. Hitch along for another ride. They found ways of reminding themselves who they’d been before. They started to plan ahead, coming up with ways to be truly themselves next time, instead of just thoughts in the back of someone else’s head. This is why some people are born bad, Jack. This is—”

  “Gary, listen to someone with experience. People are not born bad—”

  “Really? You think all cops would say the same? All social workers? All defense lawyers? All the parents out there dealing with a kid who just cannot seem to behave, who is determined to go through all the wrong doors and kick them hard? Some of the intruders are good people, decent people. Joe Cranfield was. But some of them are not. They only come back because they didn’t fuck the world hard enough last time. The intruders wait until they’ve seen that a baby’s not going to die of some infant-mortality thing, then bed down inside it. This is why tantrums start around age two or three—as two souls start to struggle together for prominence. And why some kids have nightmares for the next five, six years, as they try to fend these things off in their sleep—confused, frightened, not understanding what’s moving into their heads in the night, when they’re vulnerable and weak. Note how prodigies always either die young or go nuts, Jack. It’s okay if you know what’s going on, if the intruder takes center stage and is in conscious charge of its destiny—if it’s part of the gang. But if you don’t know that this is what’s happening to you, then it’s too confusing and too much of the endless inner voices, and people drink or drug themselves to death or go insane.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. “I keep failing to hear how my wife fits into any of this bullshit, Gary.”

  “The firm that handled Joe’s estate works out of the building that has her name on the papers, Jack. Burnell and Lytton are tied in to the organization that keeps the system going. The intruders must have to fiscally reboot each time; otherwise you’d have people with huge amounts of cash they’d accumulated, without any inheritance route, which would blow things out into the open. So my guess is that when you’re coming to the end of your present lifetime, you have to get rid of everything. Start next time afresh. Which is what—”

  “Gary, you can’t use a lack of something to prove—”

  “I know that, Jack—I’m a fucking lawyer. But face it: Amy and Cranfield are connected. In the end it comes back to the ten percent kept aside from Cranfield’s estate. I didn’t tell you one thing because I didn’t think you’d believe any of this back then.”

  “I don’t believe any of it now.”

  “The charity Burnell and Lytton helps administer? The Psychomachy Trust. You won’t find the word in a modern dictionary. So at first I assumed it was made up. But it was in use a couple hundred years ago. It means ‘a conflict between the body and the soul’—or between a person and the thing that’s inside. The trust’s a front. When an intruder dies, it pays a tithe—in Cranfield’s case nearly twenty-six million dollars. This money is used to keep the system going, or staff, or…Look, I don’t know exactly how it all works,” he admitted irritably. “But—”

  “Okay,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to leave now. And seriously, Gary—go home. I mean it. Spend some time with your family and talk to someone good before this gets any worse.”

  “I don’t blame you for thinking I’m…I know this sounds very strange,” Fisher said. “I have evidence, Jack, lots of it. I’ve done my research. But you already know what some people are like. The dissatisfaction, the yearning to be or to have someone or something else, people who can’t stop themselves from doing things they know are wrong, other people who seem to be able to tap into some kind of higher power right from the get-go.”

  I was putting my gun in my jacket by now—I wasn’t going to need it here, I could see that, and being in this room with Fisher was making me feel worse even than talking to Anderson had. I wanted out.

  But I hesitated. I guess I was thinking of a woman who’d had nightmares as a child, started talking in her sleep a year ago. Who was not behaving like the woman I knew. Who almost smelled different. Since Natalie had asked me the question, I’d been forced to realize that, when I thought back, Amy had been changing subtly over the last couple of years, from even before what had happened with our son. Was all of this explicable through the hidden presence of another man? Some tea-drinking, pink-liking enabler, promoting the emergence of a different Amy? Was it simply time in her journey for a change, a chaotic swerve into midlife, with old baggage being abruptly thrown over the side?

  Or was there something else going on?

  I shook my head. No. I was leaping at anything that would explain Amy’s behavior in a way less injurious to me, less to do with lack of love and irreversible change. Almost anything felt better than the obvious.

  However ludicrous.

  “So why did they kill Anderson?” I asked, losing momentum. “What does he have to do with this?”

  “You tell me. You were the guy he talked to.”

  “He barely said anything before he got shot.”

  “Right. And what was that about? What could a man like Anderson do that would provoke someone to tear down his life and shoot him to death in a public place? You think that killer was working alone? Of course not. So what merits all this? What’s big enough? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. I—”

  My phone rang. I yanked it out. “Hello?”

  “Mother fucker,” a voice said.

  I swore. I’d forgotten just how much some guys won’t give up on the prospect of an easy buck. “L.T.,” I said. “I meant to block your number. I’ll do it now.”

  “You owe me. Last chance.”

  “Or what? I owe you shit. I already told you, I’m not interested.”

  “You sure? They here now.”

  “Who is?”

  “At the place. Three people just go in.”

  I reevaluated. “Into the building? What did they look like?”

  “You interested now, huh?”

  “Just tell me what they look like.”

  “Like any other white motherfuckers. One a businessman. He wearing a suit. Other two, I don’t know.”
>
  “Stay where you are. Call me if they leave.”

  I closed the phone. Fisher was sitting on the bed, staring at the frozen image of his daughter on the screen. He looked older. Older and smaller and alone. There were wet tracks down both of his cheeks.

  “What?” I asked, feeling cold. “Gary?”

  “I miss her,” he said quietly. “I miss them all.”

  “So go home. Forget about all this.”

  “It’s too late for that.” He looked at me. “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe in this.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. But some people just went into the building in Belltown. You want to find out who they are?”

  He rubbed his face with his hands, as if having to haul himself back into the here and now.

  But when he looked at me again, his eyes were clear. He stood and reached for his jacket. “Why would they even let us in the door?”

  I got a clip out and clicked it into my gun, so that—for the first time that day—it was loaded.

  “I’m not planning on giving them a choice.”

  chapter

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The call came in the dead of night. Todd had fought waking. Fought it hard. He’d lain wide-eyed for hours when he went to bed. When he finally found sleep, he wanted to stay there. The sound of the phone ringing had been faint, from downstairs. Livvie had banned a telephone by the bedside a decade before, after a spate of strange calls, some wacko calling up in the night to speak to their middle child, then only eleven years old.

  The ringing stopped as the machine clicked in. But barely thirty seconds later, it started again.

  Todd opened his eyes. That was weird. People hitting a wrong number usually understood their error as soon as they heard someone else’s message. They didn’t call back. Anyone with a legitimate message left a message.

  He rolled over. The clock said 3:21. Jesus.

  No call at that hour of the night can be ignored.

  He grabbed his robe and hurried downstairs. By the time he got to the hallway, the ringing had stopped again.

  He heard the answering machine click in. Nobody said anything. It clicked off. Then the ringing started once more. He grabbed the handset. “Look—”

  “Be quiet,” said a voice. A young girl’s voice. It made the hairs on the back of Todd’s neck rise.

  “Who is this?”

  “Listen.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “Dad?” A different voice. Older. Scared.

  Crane gripped the phone.

  “Dad, it’s me.”

  “Rachel? What’s going on?”

  He heard the catch of her breath. As if she were crying, trying not to let him hear. He felt frozen in place, heavy, blurred sleep turning to anger and fear.

  “I’m sorry.” Then she was gone.

  “Okay,” said the other voice, and he knew now where he’d heard it before. In his office the previous afternoon. “You’re going to listen now, Toddy. I found myself somewhere to stay. Guess where?”

  “Put my daughter back—”

  “That’s right. Rachel’s going to describe her situation to you now. Listen carefully.”

  A pause as the phone was handed over, and then his daughter spoke slowly into it. “I am tied to my table. She is standing behind me. She has a knife.”

  The other voice returned. “A little Hemingwayish for some tastes, perhaps, but I hope it gives a clear picture? I need you to be fully focused, Todd.”

  “Please,” Crane said. “Please don’t hurt her.”

  “I may not,” the voice said, as if considering the idea. “You never know. But that’s going to depend. I said I wanted to meet with someone. You were a bore about it. I need you to find another way of looking at the situation. A more workable solution, as a someone close to me might put it. I need you to set up that meeting.”

  “Who—”

  “Rose.”

  Todd opened his mouth, shut it again. “But—”

  “No. There can be no buts here, Todd. Don’t be thinking in a ‘but’ frame of mind, or I’m going to fuck Rachel up. Arrange it, and do it fast. If you don’t, I’ll just kill Rachel. If you talk to the cops, tell anyone else what’s going on, I’ll know. And then I’ll just work on her instead. So she’ll be around for you to see afterward. For you to know you made her this way, as you take out all the mirrors in her sweet little house and refit it for wheelchair access.”

  Todd opened his mouth, but it was dry.

  “Just do it,” the voice said, and then was gone.

  Todd was on the road in minutes. It didn’t occur to him to go wake his wife. This wasn’t something she could help with, and nothing he could do or say would stop her from getting on the phone to the police.

  He raced across the sleeping city in a daze, running red lights without even realizing. Drove past his daughter’s house, careful not to slow down. It was dark inside. He pulled the car around the next corner and came to a halt, trying to work out what to do.

  Would this person really know if he called the police? How could she? He was pretty sure that part had been a bluff, but the threat she’d made was not. More than anything, he’d been convinced by his daughter’s voice. What had he heard—twenty, thirty words? It was enough. Rachel was independent, tough, more like her father than either of her sisters was. Couldn’t seem to get her private life together, but it took a lot to knock her confidence. She’d sounded about four years old on the phone. And very, very scared. She was convinced by the person with her, and that was enough to convince Todd. If he called the police—even assuming they’d take seriously a report of a grown woman being held hostage by a child—and they knocked on the door politely, instead of just busting their way straight in…

  Todd couldn’t take that risk. Rachel could be dead and her killer away over a back fence before they got into the house.

  What if he went up to the door himself? That wouldn’t constitute calling anyone, would it? But he didn’t know if it was just the girl inside or if she had someone else helping her.

  He sat in the thrumming car, horribly irresolute. This was what fathers were supposed to be able to do, wasn’t it? To make this kind of call. To protect their young. To go charging in, confident of their ability to handle the situation, to prevent harm.

  But now he knew that this had to do with that other thing, the oddness that had circled in the back of his world for half his life, the people for whom he had once in a while done small things and from whom he had received career-making favors in return.

  And so he was not confident of his ability to control the situation. He was not confident of anything at all when it came to Rose.

  “You’ve got to listen to me,” he said twelve hours later. “I really have to meet with you. Today.”

  “Tell me over the phone,” she said. “I’m very busy.”

  Todd put his head in his hands. His palms were slick with sweat. He felt sick. It was now a little after three in the afternoon. It had taken all this time to get the woman on the phone. He had this shot, and that was it. He could not blow it.

  He raised his head. Stared out over the bay, at the mountains, tried to lock himself into the way he usually felt while at his desk, the habitual confidence.

  “I can’t do that,” he said, in a voice that sounded very reasonable and professional. The voice of a good boss. The voice of someone in control.

  “Why?”

  “I think my phone’s being tapped.”

  There was a pause. “Why would you think that?”

  “I hear strange noises.”

  “Are you quite all right, Mr. Crane? You haven’t been drinking? Had too long and convivial a lunch, in the pursuit of a client? Or a young lady, perhaps? Have you possibly reverted to the excessive use of cocaine that we once had to assist you in relinquishing?”

  “No,” he said, and he knew he could not keep this up for much longer. “I just have to talk to you in person
.”

  “That’s not going to happen, Mr.—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! Come on—it’s Todd. You know I’m not going to screw you around. I’ve just got to see you. I—” He stopped just in time.

  “You…what?”

  Todd hesitated. He knew what he was not supposed to say. But he also knew that without giving Rose something, she wasn’t going to do what he needed her to.

  “Someone came into the office yesterday,” he said carefully.

  “What do you mean, ‘someone’?”

  “A girl. But there was something weird about her.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “I’ll call you back in half an hour,” the woman said.

  The phone went dead. Crane sat there with it in his hands, shaking.

  As he sat waiting, he stared at the radio still lying on the floor. Tried not to see it as a symbol for all the other things he should have taken more care of while he had the chance. But once the mind thinks it’s found a sign or portent, it will not let go even if it discovers too late and only to punish you. When he reached KC&H that morning, he’d tried phoning Rachel’s work number. She had called in sick. Halfway through the morning, Livvie phoned, complaining she’d tried to get hold of Rachel on her cell to arrange lunch later in the week and gotten no reply. Todd told her he’d received an e-mail ten minutes earlier saying she’d lost her phone at some club the night before, was getting a replacement sent, sorry—he meant to tell her right away.

  He was doing all the right things. He was behaving well. He was going rapidly out of his mind.

  Rose called back twenty minutes later.

  “I can see you,” she said without preamble. “Around seven. I’ll confirm a venue closer to the time.”

  “I need to—” Todd stopped. He knew he couldn’t demand to know where they were going to meet. He couldn’t ask for a specific place either. Not yet.

  “Need what, Todd?”

  “To see you, that’s all.”

  “And it’s going to happen. I just hope I find it worthwhile.” Then she was gone.

  Todd pulled on his coat and hurried out of the office. Bianca tried to wave him down as he passed her office, but she could wait. Everything could wait.