The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “Bill Anderson.”

  “He was FedExed a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar check—the same amount Joe’s own grandchildren got, remember. It was signed for seven weeks ago, a whole month before he disappeared. But it still hasn’t been cashed. Four, five years’ salary, and he doesn’t bother banking it? This being, incidentally, another reason I’m inclined to dismiss financial motive in killing his own wife.”

  “I can see that,” I said. “And maybe you should have mentioned it when you first came to see me.”

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Bill is the closest thing I’ve got to a smoking gun with Cranfield’s estate, something to unlock why he did something that no one—not his lawyers or children or his own wife—can understand. And I really did read your book when it came out, because I recognized your name, and I really did need a cop. I think Anderson’s family was killed by an intruder. Your book was even called The Intruders. Tell me it doesn’t make sense for me to come to you, get your advice.”

  “Start talking to me about Amy,” I said.

  “I’m going to. But you’ve got a bad look on your face, so bear in mind I’m just the messenger. I came over to Seattle again, to look into the Anderson murders. It’s not hard for me to get the time. As you so nicely put it, my stock by then is falling fast.”

  I started to say something, but he held up his hand. “No, you were right, Jack. But what you don’t know is what it’s like in my world, once you start to drop rungs. The corporate world is based on confidence and very little else. Either you fix the slide fast or they simply take the ladder away. I’d accepted the glow of association while Joe was alive, so…”

  “So what did you find out when you got here?”

  “What I told you at your house. Bottom line, if I’m honest, I don’t even really care if Anderson took out his family. I just want to know why he was sent the money and what it means. Meanwhile I’m sitting in a hotel room with a Web connection and time to kill. So I keep digging in any direction I can find. The first road that leads anywhere is the building you and I just visited.”

  “The Burnell and Lytton offices.”

  “Such as they are. I soon find out they don’t own the property, they lease. The former coffeehouse is no help either. The company’s long dead. Eventually I discovered that for a few years back in the mid-1990s the second floor was rented out as studio space for photography and video shoots—Belltown was a complete hole back then; you could pick up property for next to nothing. It’s not used for that anymore, but the firm still owns the building. That company is called Kerry, Crane, and Hardy.”

  I nearly dropped my glass. Fisher rested his hands flat on the table and leaned forward, with the air of a man who’s glad that someone is finally listening to him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Didn’t mean anything to me at first. I check them on the Web, find they’re some big ad agency, I can’t see how that leads anywhere. I even called the company but couldn’t get high enough to speak to anyone who knew what I was talking about. It’s just another dead end for now. Which leaves me one final door to push on. Guess what that is?”

  “The charity that got the ten percent out of Cranfield’s estate.”

  Fisher smiled. “See,” he said quietly. “This is why I believe you can help.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “The charity is called the Psychomachy Trust, based in Boston. It has zero presence on the radar, never appears to solicit money from private individuals or the public at large. It’s administered by Burnell and Lytton and a few other guys I can’t dredge up anything about, probably not U.S. nationals. The interesting thing is that it’s part of a network. Charity structures are easier to trace because they have to meet tax regulations. This trust, along with others in Paris, Berlin, Jerusalem, Tokyo, and other major cities around the world—they all feed back to a parent organization based in London. It’s old. At least two, three hundred years, gets vaguer before that. Basically, I hit a dead end there, too, but just as that happens, I get hold of more information on the building we’ve just been to. I get a copy of the papers and find out whose names are on them.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Flattened it and put it on the table in front of me. I didn’t look down but lit a cigarette instead, and waited.

  “There’s three,” he said. “One of them makes sense right away—Todd Crane, principal in the owning company. The second is a man called Marcus Fox, who I believe was once a business associate of Joe Cranfield’s here in Seattle.”

  “It starts to come home.”

  “Exactly. Fox disappears from Cranfield’s world in the mid-nineties, can’t find anything more about him. The third name I can’t get anywhere with at all until I have another scout around the Kerry, Crane, and Hardy Web site, where I spot someone with the same first name.”

  It wasn’t hard to find, even in a page dense with the minutiae of property law.

  The third name was Amy Dyer.

  Seeing her name in print made me feel as if the car had finally smacked into me. It took me a while to notice that the document was dated 1992, six years before I’d met her.

  “You knew about this when you came to see me.”

  “Yes, Jack. I found out that Amy Dyer was now Amy Whalen and that her husband is you. But at that stage she was still just a name on a piece of paper. I came to talk to you, and I heard your view, and I backed off. But I’m kind of camped out in Seattle for the time being and—”

  “You’re spending a lot of time away from home.”

  “While I sort this out, yes. And meantime I’ve developed a habit of walking past that building once in a while. Last Friday I spent a couple hours up at the next corner. There’s another coffeehouse there. It’s an okay place to sit. And toward the end of the afternoon, when I’m getting cold and beginning to feel ridiculous—and not for the first time, believe me—I see someone turn up at that door. And those pictures show what I saw.”

  “Do you have any more?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t want to be too obvious. Surveillance is not my field. Plus, there were some ominous street people walking around, and I don’t have your easy manner with them. I stayed the hell back and just snapped those two pictures. Never got a decent look at the guy. Honestly.”

  The door to the bar opened, and a group of parched-looking individuals entered in a brief glare of light. The start of the lunchtime crowd. Fisher sat in silence as I watched, though I was not really seeing them. In my mind’s eye, I could see two people, a man and a woman, close together as they headed down a street.

  I stubbed out my cigarette. “I want to see the originals of the photographs you took.”

  Fisher promptly pulled a small digital camera from his pocket, popped the memory card, and handed it to me. “Does this mean…?”

  “For now yes,” I said. “Give me everything you have on Bill Anderson. Then go away and leave me alone.”

  chapter

  TWENTY-ONE

  Todd Crane was sitting in his office. Most of his desk was lost under paper, which was in turn covered with bullet-pointed lists and slogans and sketches. He was supposed to have read, digested, and commented on it all. Creative teams were standing by. A pile of DVDs from commercial directors stood to one side. He was supposed to have watched all these, too, and passed down his views so that account handlers and production managers could get busy with checking availability and fees and booking talent and generally kicking KC&H toward further glorious triumphs in the pursuit of getting people to buy shit they didn’t actually need.

  He had done none of these things.

  Instead he’d turned his chair to face the big window and was gazing blankly down across Elliott Bay. From up here you could see the piers, the roof of the market building hard to the right, and the sprawling docks over on the far left. Behind all this was the gray-blue expanse of the bay itself, an
d beyond that the cloud-shrouded Olympic Mountains. For many years Todd and a few college buddies had a habit of spending a long weekend every year in the forests of those mountains, hiking and drinking beer in moderation and openly one-upping each other on material success. He couldn’t remember the last time this had happened. Six years, seven? Ten? Could be. In time, presumably, the memory would become a pleasurable thing, another example of the life-affirming activity he’d enjoyed as part of the richness of his existence, further evidence that you could—if you possessed character and money (and a tolerant wife)—live within one long advertisement for your own life.

  But right now it felt like something that was slipping away, like the idea that he would ever become fluent in French or visit the carved-rock temples of Petra or play decent finger-style blues guitar. He didn’t even really know why these things were important to him, or ever had been. He’d just assumed they’d happen sooner or later, that they’d be part of his life. For some reason he was no longer sure of that.

  Sitting on the floor in one corner of the office was an old radio, which he’d come across in his den a few weeks before. It had been a present from his parents, back when Todd was in his early twenties. An upscale device, a significant gift from two people now both dead. It worked for a couple years, then stopped. It was likely that the problem was minor, and radios were easy and economical to fix, but somehow in thirty years he hadn’t gotten around to it. It had sat on shelves, in drawers, drifting in and out of awareness, never formally sidelined or retired, forever on the verge of repair. It was absurd. He’d brought it into the office a week ago, in the hope that this would galvanize him to getting the job done. Yet there it sat. Maybe it was just never going to get fixed. Maybe life held a lot of things like that.

  Todd turned irritably from the view. He was fifty-four years old, for God’s sake. Barely middle-aged these days. So why did it feel like life was beginning to get away from him? Why was he becoming prone to notice the things he had not done instead of the multitude of things he had achieved? He wasn’t sleeping well. He knew that this had nothing to do with the pincer movement of projects represented by the mess on his desk. He’d been busy all his life and slept like a baby ninety-nine nights out of a hundred. So what was the problem? Faced with no rational explanation, his famously creative mind had offered up several that made little sense. He’d become convinced for a few weeks earlier in the year, for example, that when he walked the streets of this city, something felt different about them. That they seemed unseasonably crowded. He’d even briefly taken to sitting outside coffeehouses in the midafternoon, ostensibly to work in peace, in fact to monitor the number of people on the streets. When he did this, he could see that they were not crowded at all. His analyst was no help. She never had been, with anything, even during the five months they slept together. The fact that they’d now successfully regained a straightforward therapeutic relationship suggested to Todd that neither the sex nor the therapy had ever made much impact on either of them.

  Another thing that hadn’t helped was the visit of the ex-cop. Amy’s husband. There was something about the man that made you want to build a high wall around you. More unsettling still, Todd believed that the man had not been telling the truth. He didn’t believe that Whalen had the faintest idea of what his wife was doing in Seattle, and he didn’t buy the lost-phone story either. But it was likely that Amy had actually been in town; her husband didn’t seem the kind of guy who’d be wrong about something like that. So what had she been doing here? A side deal? Possibly, in which case he didn’t care. But maybe it wasn’t that simple. Maybe it had to do with other matters. Something told him this was more likely, especially considering the fact that Bianca had on that afternoon deflected another man, who had come to ask questions about a certain building. Something told him that it was this that was creating the hard, dark lesion in his stomach, that people were knocking on the door of a part of his life he’d never really understood.

  He had never been a man prey to self-doubt or prone to concern about the passage of time. But now he was. And why would that be, unless it was something about this past that was bothering him?

  He’d finally begun dealing with the paperwork when he was startled by the buzzing of the intercom. He stabbed the button.

  “Christ, yes?”

  “It’s Jenni, at reception?”

  Todd considered reminding her that everyone except Bianca had been advised not to bother him with anything short of world-shaking news. Unfortunately, he believed he had a reputation as a good boss, which meant only chewing out the staff once in a very great while. He’d realized long ago that being a good boss sucked, but it was too late to break the habit. “What is it, Jenni?”

  “There’s somebody here from Meadow’s school,” she said. “They’d like to talk to you.”

  He frowned. Someone from his youngest daughter’s school? “What do they want?”

  “She wishes to speak with you privately.”

  Todd told her to bring the person up. He grabbed the phone to call Livvie, to see if she knew what was going on, but then remembered that his wife had Pilates or yoga or some other body magic this afternoon. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t gotten to be CEO of the Pacific Northwest’s most profitable advertising agency without being able to deal with people unbriefed. And there was a limit to how much trouble a twelve-year-old could have gotten into, surely.

  Hopefully.

  He took a minute to check his reflection in the hand mirror he kept in his bottom drawer. He looked tired but otherwise fine. The door opened, and his assistant entered, accompanied by someone who was clearly not a teacher at his daughter’s or anyone else’s school. Todd froze, halfway to his feet.

  “Who’s this?”

  Bianca indicated via a raised eyebrow that she had absolutely no idea. Meanwhile the person in question looked at him steadily and answered for herself.

  “My name’s Madison,” she said.

  Bianca hovered. Part of her job was to second-guess and covertly undermine every call made by whichever girl was currently working reception. Thus were the subtle hierarchies of the corporate world maintained where they really mattered—at the bottom.

  “Are you—”

  “I’m fine,” Todd said. She nodded once and left.

  “So,” he said warmly, coming around to sit on the edge of the desk and indicating the nearest chair, “you’re at school with Meadow, right?”

  “No,” the girl said as she sat neatly in the exact center of the chair. “I’ve never met her.”

  “But you told—”

  “How else was I going to get up here?”

  Todd didn’t have an answer for that. The girl pointed at the photograph on the corner of his desk. “She’s what? Thirteen?”

  Todd nodded, wondering at what point he should get Bianca back in. Soon, he was thinking. Maybe even…very soon. “Yes. Nearly.”

  The girl smiled cheerfully. “And I’m nine. But I told the woman downstairs we were in the same class. And she believed me. So I guess she’s not very bright, huh?”

  “She’s…never met Meadow. I’m sure she was just being polite.” This came easily into Todd’s mouth, though privately he was wondering what had gotten into Jenni, letting a random child into the building.

  The girl nodded. “Maybe. Are you sleeping with her?”

  Now she had his full attention. “What?”

  “You look a bit ancient, it’s true. But I’m sure you can still hear reasonably well. And still do the old dirty bop.”

  The…what? “Look, kid, whatever your name—”

  “Madison. I just told you.”

  Todd moved back around to the chair side of his desk. It was time to get Bianca the hell in here.

  But then a thought occurred to him. He hesitated, hand over the phone. “If you’re not at school with her, how do you know my daughter’s name?”

  The girl made a face. “Actually, I don’t know. I just do. Like I know that yo
ur other daughters are a lot older. And your wife used to drink, too—”

  She stopped talking, and her head slowly dropped. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s really rude.”

  For a moment she appeared blank. Then she looked up again suddenly, and her face seemed different. She was blinking rapidly and seemed extremely agitated.

  “Please,” she said, “can I have a piece of paper? And a pen?”

  Todd’s hand was still over the button on the phone system that would summon his assistant. He moved it to point at a Post-it pad. The girl grabbed a pen from his desk and wrote something on the top note. It looked like a series of numbers.

  She got four or five down and then faltered. “No,” she said, angrily. “No…”

  She quickly added two numbers to the beginning. Tore off the note and stuffed it deep in the pocket of her coat, looking for an instant like some juvenile street person, hiding her favorite piece of string from aliens or the CIA or naughty ghosts. Then she threw herself back into the chair and covered her face with her hands.

  Todd watched all this wide-eyed. Soon he could hear her crying behind them. It was a low, measured sound, more exhaustion than sobs. He stood again, disconcerted. Why on earth had he let Bianca even leave the room?

  “Look,” he said, trying to sound more friendly than nonplussed. “Can I get you something? A drink?”