Fisher had stayed in the doorway, his face a paler patch in the gloom. I pointed at the ceiling.
“Try them again.”
He called. We could hear a phone ring on the floor above, the kind that sounds like someone hammering frenetically on a tiny bell, a dusty, echoing sound. It wasn’t answered, and no machine clicked in.
The tension in my stomach and shoulders was starting to fade back, and I felt a sense of focus that had been lost to me for over a year.
“Are you okay?” Fisher whispered. His face was pinched and nervous, and he was looking at me strangely.
Not at my face, but down at my right hand. I realized that the tension had not faded at all, merely spread so it was throughout my entire body.
And also that, without any recollection of doing so, I had taken out my gun.
“I’m fine,” I said.
I walked past him to the end of the corridor, crooked my head to look up the next flight of stairs, directing the little light obliquely off the side wall. Held my hand up again to keep Fisher back.
I went halfway up, stepping carefully. Stopped and listened. I could hear nothing except the faint sounds of traffic outside the building, a drip of water somewhere. I gestured for Fisher to follow and made it up the rest of the way. I waited where I was until he stood next to me on the top level, at the mouth of the staircase.
This landing was arranged in the same way as the lower floors with a long return, doors to spaces at the front and side areas of the building. I switched the flashlight off. Darkness. The long arm on our left was as featureless as the void of space.
But beneath the door to the room at the front of the building, there was a faint glow. Fisher saw it, too.
I stepped quietly over to the door, cupped the end of the light in my hand, and turned it back on. Close up, you could see that this door was different from the ones on the lower levels. Thicker, newer, reinforced. A padlock the size of my fist hung off the handle.
I turned the light back off, slipped it into my pocket. I felt my right thumb flicking the safety off my gun and decided not to interfere. Reached for the door handle and pushed the door inward a breath, to give the mechanism a chance to turn soundlessly.
It was heavy, but the doorknob turned all the way.
Holding it steady, I moved to the right and gestured with my head for Fisher to come behind me. Then I pulled the door open. It moved slowly and silently.
I stopped when the gap was less than two inches wide.
The space on the other side was dimly lit by a lamp on the corner of what looked like a desk, one of the old low lamps with a folded green shade. I could make out a narrow strip of wall beyond, a bookcase lined floor to ceiling with leather spines. Now that the door was cracked open I could hear a faint skittering sound.
At first I thought it might be a rat, or rats, pattering across a wooden floor within. Then I recognized it. It was a sound I had made myself from time to time, though not lately.
You don’t take a breath before entering a room. You just do it.
I stepped right into a space that was, except for the desk and shelves, completely empty. The dividing walls on the floor had been removed, creating one very large, L-shaped area. Bare floorboards. No chairs. The windows boarded over. Just that single lamp.
A man was sitting behind the desk, his face bathed in the pale light of a laptop screen. He looked up mildly. I stared at him.
“Ben?” I said.
Fisher stopped in his tracks. Ben Zimmerman looked at him, then at me.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “You were right.”
“Who?” I said. “Was right? About what?”
“I did warn you,” said another voice. I turned to see Bobbi Zimmerman standing by the other wall.
“First time she met you,” Ben said, to me this time. “Bobbi said you were trouble. I should listen more often.”
“Yes, you should,” his wife said.
Ben went back to typing. I realized I was still pointing my gun at him. I lowered my arm. It hadn’t seemed to unsettle him much. He looked different from any way I’d seen him in Birch Crossing. Instead of the usual battered khakis and sweater, he was wearing a dark suit with a shirt and tie, and his entire posture was altered. Gone was the stooped air of benign neglect. He didn’t look like a history professor anymore, and I knew immediately where I’d seen his likeness.
“Jack,” Fisher said. “How do you know this guy?”
“He’s my neighbor,” I said. There were blotches of color on Fisher’s cheeks, and the lines around his eyes were more pronounced than ever. “His name is Ben Zimmerman.”
“No,” Fisher said. He sounded like a petulant child. “It’s Ben Lytton. He’s one of the Cranfield lawyers. He’s the one who came to our office in Chicago.”
I pulled out the photos that had been there since Fisher gave them to me, only a couple days before and five minutes’ walk away. “So how come you couldn’t tell he was the man you photographed with Amy?”
Fisher looked at the photo, back at Ben. He seemed baffled. “I was a block away. I didn’t see his face.”
Ben ignored the whole exchange.
“Which is it?” I asked him. “Your name?”
“Zimmerman,” Ben said, without looking up.
“So why did you say it was Lytton?” Fisher said.
Ben’s fingers kept on going tap-tap-tap. “It’s traditional,” Bobbi said. “Lytton has been dead for quite some time. As has Burnell. This is rather an old firm.”
Fisher stared at her. “And who the hell are you?”
Ben looked up at me. “Mr. Fisher was never judged to be worth troubling about, what with…his situation. But you I foresee problems with, Jack. Something might have to be done.”
“Is that a threat? If so, be careful.”
“I’m well aware of your record.”
Fisher looked at me. “What’s he talking about?”
“Jack has shown a certain facility with violence,” Bobbi said. “Didn’t you know?”
My face felt hot. I was finding it hard to understand how come these people knew a lot more than they had any right to about my life. Had Amy told them?
Fisher was still staring at me. “What does she mean?”
“There was an incident,” I said as I remembered that Amy had been at the Zimmermans’ the morning I’d called after waking up in Seattle—when Bobbi handed the phone to her. “I saw suspicious activity one night. Found that the back door of a house had been forced. I went inside.”
“And?”
“People got hurt.”
Suddenly the phone rang, the jangling we’d heard from downstairs. The sound was coming from Zimmerman’s laptop. Ben reached forward, hit a key.
“Coming to collect,” said a woman’s voice from the laptop’s speakers. It sounded like the voice that had called my phone to derail me from confronting Todd Crane a couple days before.
Ben stood and started gathering papers from around the desk. Bobbi came over and picked up a handful of manila folders. They seemed to be in a hurry.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Is Shepherd here yet?” Ben asked, looking up and smiling briefly. I realized he wasn’t looking at me.
“On his way,” said a voice.
I turned to see two men standing in the doorway. One was blond. The other had short red hair. Both were armed this time. I realized that Georj had been right after all. These guys hadn’t come into the alley for him.
That didn’t seem important right then, however, because between them stood a third person. A woman.
My wife.
My head felt cold and my body as if it had turned to air. I couldn’t move. “Amy?”
She didn’t even look at me. It was as if my voice had made no sound. The Zimmermans walked past me.
“Out the back,” Amy said.
The red-haired man raised his gun to point it at me. “Your weapon, please,” the other man said.
“
Yeah, right.”
Finally Amy glanced at me. “Do as he says, Mr. Whalen.”
“Amy…what…”
She just reached out, took the gun from my hand, and gave it to the red-haired man. Then she turned and left.
The two men backed out of the room after her and pulled the door shut.
As Fisher and I stared at it, we heard it lock.
chapter
THIRTY-EIGHT
When the phone rang, Todd yanked it out of his pocket so fast it slipped and went skittering across the sidewalk. He crawled after it on hands and knees, people snorting and laughing and not moving out of the way. He was beyond noticing. He’d spent three hours walking the streets. He couldn’t have gone back to his office, dealt with Bianca or the rest of them. He couldn’t possibly go home. He had to do something, and so he’d walked, attempting to lose himself in the press of normal people, trying not to feel once again that the streets were even more crowded than they looked, growing more so as the evening came on, that this feeling was worse than ever before.
“Yes?” he said into the phone.
It was Rose. She gave him the address. It was where it was supposed to be. Todd knew it well. A long time ago, he’d spent many hours in the building, supervising shoots, sitting in a chair with his name stenciled on it, selecting which PA would receive the offer of a quick and expensive dinner somewhere discreet. Since then, more than once, he’d raised the question of selling it. He had not been allowed to. Even though it was never used anymore and had small trees growing out of the roof, apparently it had to be kept. Maybe now he knew why.
As soon as Rose had gone, he called his daughter’s number. He gripped the phone till it nearly broke. Finally the other end picked up.
“Todd.” The little girl’s voice.
“It’s happening,” he said. “Now.”
“Excellent.”
“It’s in—”
“Belltown?”
“How did you know she’d choose where you wanted?”
“Because I’m a clever little girl. They changed the locks. They have something there that belongs to me.”
“Let me talk to my daughter.”
“She’s fine. How else do you think I’m going to get there? You remember what her car looks like, I assume?”
“Of course I—”
“Keep an eye out for it.”
Todd shouted in the street, a hopeless sound. He reeled off the main sidewalk and into an alley between buildings, away from normal people. He knew that the police couldn’t help him now, that this was about that building, and those people, and the things he’d never tried to understand.
He started to run.
When he got to the address, he was appalled to see police cars parked in the street. A tall black guy was hollering as he was manhandled into the back of one of them, barely twenty feet away from the door to the building.
Todd’s head was pounding from the journey, and his lungs were on fire. He looked at his watch—he’d made it here in fifteen minutes. Would the police be moving on in the next twenty? If not…Todd suddenly came to believe he was about to have a heart attack.
He stopped, made himself breathe evenly. Walked across the street and positioned himself under the awning of a gallery that had closed for the night. He watched as the black guy fought the law, and he called upon whichever sleek god looked after admen of a certain age to send the junkie motherfucker a heart attack of his own. Now. Right now.
That god was not listening, however, unless he operated with kindness and through the offices of a cop from the second car, who eventually came over and helped his colleague shove the guy sharply into the backseat. Then the policemen stood around for a while, talking, pointing this way and that. Todd watched them, aware of nothing but these men, knowing dismally that they would take an hour or so to wrap this up and he would never see his daughter alive again.
But then, unbelievably, the cops all got in their cars and drove away. It was over. With five minutes to spare.
Todd’s phone rang. He didn’t know what to do when he saw who it was, but he knew she wouldn’t just go away.
“Hey,” he said. “Look, honey, I’m really busy.”
“For God’s sake,” Livvie said, entering the conversation at full tilt, a skill of hers. “You’re supposed to be here.”
Todd had no idea what she was talking about. Then he remembered. New clients. Japanese. Due at his house for dinner in…about an hour.
“Christ, I—”
“No, Todd. No. There is no conceivable end to that sentence that is going to work for me. So don’t even finish it. Just come home.”
“I will. I’m…look…”
For a split second, he remembered the Livvie of twenty-five years ago, when life had been brighter and so much more straightforward. He wanted everything that had happened since to have not happened. He wanted to wipe all the slates clean, to do whatever it would take to make Livvie not angry at him all the time, to find inside her the raucous college girl he’d not been able to stop thinking about, who had for a while made the rest of her sex obsolete. Most of all he wanted to tell her what was going on now and ask her to help, for her to make everything all right. In the end that’s what men want most of women, and the thing they can never ask for out loud.
Then he saw it. A pale green VW Beetle, his twenty-first-birthday present to his daughter. It was coming quickly up the street.
“I’ve got to go,” he said.
He closed the phone on whatever his wife was now saying and ran across the road.
The car pulled over just past the building. Todd ran up to it, heart thumping. Rachel was hollow-eyed in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. The passenger-side window was already rolled down. The girl was sitting there.
“Observe my hand,” she said.
Todd had already seen that the girl’s arm was up against his daughter’s stomach and that something hidden in her sleeve protruded a little past the tips of her fingers. Also that there was a splash of dried blood under Rachel’s nose and a livid bruise on the side of her head.
“Baby, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Rachel said. Her voice was dry, quiet.
“Open the front door,” the girl said. “Go inside, leave it ajar.”
“No. You—”
“Do what she says, Dad,” Rachel said. “Please.”
Todd turned, walked stiffly over to the building. Found a key on his ring that he hadn’t used in six or seven years. Opened the door and went inside, leaving it open behind him. He turned back to watch what happened in the car, wondering if he could make it there in time.
He saw the girl talking to Rachel. Saw his daughter nod her head, slowly. He saw in her face the tiny being he’d held in his arms, the ghost of that long-ago child. And he wondered what, if anything, was left inside Todd Crane, what dead thing unable to comprehend or affect the cramped prison it had built around itself.
The little girl got out of the car, came across the sidewalk and toward the building. Past her shoulder Todd saw his daughter slump forward until her head rested on the steering wheel. His stomach rolled over.
But then he saw Rachel’s head lift again and turn toward him. Her eyes locked with his.
The girl walked straight past him and into the hallway of the building, pulling the door shut behind her.
The sudden darkness made Todd’s eyeballs twitch. He moved back involuntarily, as if he were here not with a child but with someone larger and older and incomparably more dangerous. Which he was, of course. He knew that now. It made no sense, but there was no other way it could be. He realized he should have listened harder to the voice within him that had said it recognized the parting shot of the child who’d been led out of his office by Bianca the previous afternoon. An expression he’d heard a certain man use a long time ago, a man he’d had few dealings with but had instinctively disliked a very great deal.
There was a click. A st
rong white beam of light from a flashlight illuminated the little girl’s face as she stood there between Todd and the door.
She cocked her head. “Let’s make sure we’re on the same page here, Todd,” she said.
The girl let the long knife slip smoothly out of the sleeve of her nice, expensive coat. “You hearing me?”
Crane felt sick. “Yes, Marcus, I hear you loud and clear.”
She smiled. “Glad you got there in the end.”
chapter
THIRTY-NINE
Five seconds too late, I was all about movement. I threw myself at the door, calling Amy’s name.
“Can’t you open it? Pick the lock?” Fisher had gone straight to the bookcase and started pulling books off the shelves.
“It’s padlocked on the other side.”
Gary leafed through another book, dropped it to the floor. “They’re all just law manuals.”
“It’s a lawyer’s office.”
“Lytton works out of here. Zimmerman. Whatever his name really is.”
I kicked the door, uselessly. “So either they’ve got the sense not to keep anything in an obvious place or maybe there’s just nothing to be found.”
“Jesus, Jack. What does it take?”
The truth was, I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Two armed guards plus your wife,” Fisher said. “Heavy backup for just some lawyer, don’t you think?”
For either a lawyer or an ex–history professor, and I couldn’t begin to understand what Amy had been doing here. My only chance of finding out lay in catching up with her. I headed into the portion of the room that led to the back of the building. The doors in this section were as thick and heavy and locked as the first one.
“Why replace the doors up here?” Gary insisted. “Why make them so tough? What are they protecting?”
“I don’t give a shit, Gary. I have to get to Amy. Anything else is your problem.”
The window at the back had been secured with a sheet of plywood. I wedged my fingers under the bottom and tugged. It didn’t feel like it was going to move easily. I took a step back and slammed my heel into it. After a couple more kicks, it began to splinter.
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