The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

  The girl said nothing, and Todd began to think she couldn’t have heard. Then, in a voice muffled by the hands in front of her face, he heard her say, “Coffee.”

  “Coffee? Really? Not…a soda? Or water?”

  She shook her head. “Coffee. Black.”

  He went to the machine in the corner, poured a cup. Brought it back over. He slipped into the role of subservient waiter easily, having done it often enough with his own daughters. Sometimes an apparent reversal of power was the only thing that would placate a kid enough to get them to do what you wanted. Children seemed to arrive with keenly political natures, to understand how things worked right from the start.

  “Here,” he said, realizing she couldn’t see him.

  Slowly she pulled her hands down. Looked at the cup and reached for it with both hands. She brought it to her face and took a long, deep sip, though Todd knew that it came off the plate hot enough to sear. Cradled the cup in her hands afterward, looking down into the remaining liquid.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. Then she turned her face up toward him and slowly smiled.

  “So, Todd,” she said. “How have you been?”

  He blinked at her. Everything about her—her voice, her smile—seemed different. The distraught child had been replaced by…he wasn’t sure what. But he did know that he didn’t want her in his office anymore.

  “You’re going to have to leave now,” he said. “I can get someone to call you a cab if you need a ride home.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking past him out the window. “Always generous with the small things.”

  “Look—who are you?”

  “Guess,” she said.

  “I really have no idea,” Todd said firmly. “You got in here claiming to be a friend of my daughter’s. We both know that’s not true.”

  “Please,” she said. “Tell me. Tell me who I am.”

  “You’re a little girl.”

  She laughed, apparently genuinely, an uproarious guffaw that took him entirely by surprise.

  “I know,” she said. “Isn’t it priceless?”

  “It’s a riot,” he said, leaning over to press the button to summon Bianca.

  “Don’t do that,” the girl said. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Listen,” Todd said briskly, “I’m done with this. I don’t know what you’re doing here, and you seem to me to be an odd little person. That’s your parents’ problem, thankfully, not mine. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Oh, hush,” she said. “I’ve got no desire to spend a moment longer in your company than necessary, believe me. You recall the saying about the organ grinder and the monkey? You’re a flea on the monkey’s ass, and you always have been. But beggars can’t be choosers, and so you’re going to do a few things for me. Lucky boy.”

  “I’m not doing—”

  She ignored him. “First, somewhere for me to stay. I need a shower, and I’m tired of dealing with street trash from a position of weakness. Not to mention that I could use a good night’s sleep. As could you, by the look of it.”

  Her voice was firm and confident now, and Todd could see how she might have been able to convince Jenni to let her up here. He was also horribly reminded of his cousin, when she’d been in the hospital recovering from a bad car accident, back in ’98. During most of the critical period, she’d floated on a river of morphine, but occasionally she fought her way free of chemicals and pain to deliver remarks whose normality came to seem extraordinary and bizarre. The contrast made the hairs rise on the back of your neck. This girl had the same effect, even though you knew she could only be mimicking some adult she knew.

  She seemed to take his silence as acquiescence. “When I arise, bright like a phoenix from Lethe’s snoozy flames, there’s someone I very much want to meet again. A mutual friend. You’re going to make it happen.”

  “I can’t imagine who you’re talking about,” Todd said, finally pressing the button, glad to be on solid ground. “We don’t feature anyone from boy bands or TV shows. It’s a policy.”

  “A ‘boy band’? What on earth are you talking about?”

  He heard his assistant’s door opening along the corridor, then her hurried footsteps. Bianca was paid 20 percent more than anyone else at the same job level in the company. She was worth it.

  The little girl heard it, too. Her face darkened. “Toddy, this is one of those times where you can make a bad choice or a good one. Don’t fuck it up.”

  The door opened, and Bianca came striding in. “This person’s going to leave now,” Crane told her.

  The girl sighed histrionically. He ignored her. “If she makes a fuss, call the police. She’s here under false pretenses, wants to meet a celebrity.”

  Bianca stood by the chair, looking balefully down at the girl. “On your feet,” she said. “Now, princess.”

  “Oh, you tedious people,” the girl muttered wearily. She stood, ignoring the hand Bianca held out, her eyes still on Crane. “I don’t want to cause a fuss. You’re forcing my hand, don’t you see?”

  Todd retreated stiffly behind his desk. Bianca would handle this, had indeed already taken the girl’s upper arm in her hand and gotten her as far as the open door.

  He looked down at his papers, suddenly anxious to immerse himself in work. There was something about the way the girl had spoken in the closing stages that was tugging at him. Tugging hard.

  “Good-bye,” he muttered.

  The girl winked. “Watch your back,” she said, and then she was gone.

  Todd Crane’s head jerked up, and he stared after her as she disappeared down the corridor.

  Five minutes later he saw her emerge into Post Alley, two stories below. She drifted to a halt. Slowly she started to turn, to raise her head—and though Todd darted back from the window as quickly as he could, she caught him.

  When he leaned cautiously back, she was still there, looking right up at him. She shifted her face into something that was like a smile and raised one hand, the index finger extended. Using her whole arm, she moved it to describe a symbol in the air. A short spiral, like the number 9.

  Then she turned away as if he were of no account and walked rapidly up the alley and out of sight.

  Todd watched the alley a little longer, in case she came back. He wasn’t really sure why the prospect worried him. Something about that last phrase. It had seemed so ridiculous, coming from a little girl, that it…it had reminded him of something. Someone.

  A meaningless coincidence, nothing more, the mind joining unrelated dots from across the years. Time was weighing on him, that’s all—he’d worked that out before. What he needed was a rejuvenator. He tried to remember exactly what Jenni in reception looked like and was a little worried to find that he could not. He could redress that later. Perhaps over a drink.

  As his mind clicked back onto old paths and the work in front of him started to get done, Todd began to feel more like himself once again.

  chapter

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Anderson house was on Federal, near Broadway Avenue, up on the ridge overlooking downtown and Elliott Bay. The avenue itself is a major thoroughfare, a long, wide street sparsely lined with generic businesses, redbrick banks, and more places to buy coffee. As a nation in general, we like our coffee, but the Northwest is insane on the subject. I’m surprised you can’t get it out of ATMs. Federal was a couple of streets back and overhung with big trees now shedding copper and yellow leaves. The speed limit was twenty, because people actually walked around here, and many houses had low hedges that someone remembered to cut or picket fences that had been painted sometime in living memory. Most were small. The cars on the street also said you did not have to be rich to live here, but it was easy to see why you might want to be.

  The house itself was one back from a crossroads. Evidence of fire damage was minor from the outside, though the street-level windows had been covered with plywood sheets. I walked straight up the stairs onto the shallow porch, whic
h is what you do when you have a right to be there. The door was sealed with tape, but I had a tool ready for that and another to pop the lock. A lot of cops have rudimentary breaking-and-entering skills. Mine are a little better than most.

  I stepped into a dark space that smelled of old smoke and shut the door behind me.

  I stood still for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust. There was little ambient light making its way around the window boards, however, and it didn’t get any better than very dark. I reached out to the side of the doorway and found a switch. The lights came on, the bill presumably still being automatically paid from the account of a man whose whereabouts were unknown.

  I went upstairs first. Other than the smell and some shadowing on the walls, the fire had made few inroads here. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, another room used for storage and a home office. A hatch in the hall ceiling opened into a roof space thick with dust that had not been recently disturbed. I looked quickly through the bedrooms, doing little more than opening drawers and glancing into closets, then checked the obvious hiding places in the bathroom. Found evidence for nothing more than a middle-aged couple living with a teenage son. No sign of anywhere a gun would likely have been stowed, either: no lockbox, no wrap cloth, no carton of old shells.

  Then I went back downstairs and halted a couple of steps short of the bottom to look down over the living room. The air was dead and quiet. This was obviously where Joshua Anderson had died, given the oblique blood splatter across one smoke-stained wall and the charred patch in the carpet. I descended the last couple of steps and walked around the room, not trying to make anything of it. There was no telling the degree to which things had been moved after the crime-scene people had logged and recorded the environment. But I was already beginning to think I could tell what had happened here. I’d seen it many times before.

  I went through into the kitchen, then back across the hall to a den containing a smaller TV with a PlayStation attached and walls lined with shelves of DVDs and books. The latter broke down into paperback novels of a King/Koontz/Rice bent and a large array of hardcovers and papers relating to the physical sciences. Bill Anderson’s, presumably. I ran my eyes around these for a while, seeing a few titles that surprised me—Cremo, Corliss, Hancock, alternative-archaeology theorists—but it was not enough to stop me from leaving the room.

  To one side of the doorway into the kitchen was another, narrower door. Beyond it lay a flight of makeshift steps down to the basement. When I reached the bottom, I found a pull cord that shed light over the most damaged part of the house. The floor was ankle deep with charred shreds of paper that had been burned and then soaked. The remains of a wooden workbench lay along one wall. Tools and electrical components of various sizes were mixed in with the other mess, and a couple of buckled filing cabinets lay on their sides down at the end. It didn’t look like someone had merely trashed the basement. It looked like a bomb had gone off.

  Sometimes you have to be in the place. You have to stand there to tell.

  People do strange things in their own environments, behave in ways you or I might find impossible to understand. But the chaotic intrusion of otherness leaves a distinctive quality, creates a fracture at some very deep level. The place is changed.

  I pulled out my phone. I took a picture. I left.

  As I was walking down the path, I saw a man standing in the doorway of a house on the other side of the street. I changed course and walked over to him.

  “Are you supposed to be in that house?” he said.

  “Yes. You live here?”

  He nodded. He was early sixties. Gray hair thinning over the top, the mild eyes of a man who watches, and thinks, and is content to live that way. “Terrible, what happened.”

  “Which was?”

  “Well, you know—the murders.”

  “You think Bill did it?”

  He opened his mouth, hesitated. I knew what he needed to hear from me.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I think Gina and Josh had another caller that night.”

  “I didn’t see anyone,” the man said firmly. “And I don’t know anything, really. I…well, they’ve lived here over ten years. I saw them every day, near enough, one or the other, sometimes all. Wave, say hi, you know. Not a week before it happened—three, four days—I saw the two of them go out one night. They were arguing about something, bickering, kind of. Not loud, but right there in the street, as they walked to the corner. Happened once in a while. You understand what I mean?”

  I did. “Thank you. That’s very helpful.”

  The man nodded again, folded his arms, and slowly returned indoors, still looking back at the house.

  I headed a further block south down Federal and knocked on the front door of something that might have once been a Craftsman bungalow worth preserving. After a very, very long time, a light went on behind it. I was mildly surprised by this—it was only early afternoon and, by Seattle’s standards, barely overcast—until the door was opened and I saw it was very dark inside, almost as dark as the Anderson house had been.

  She stood in front of me now. Perhaps eighty, bent over to half my height, her face like an apple that had been left in the sun for a summer. When she looked up, her eyes reminded me of the windows in the building I’d stood outside in Belltown that morning, reflecting nothing but the clouds behind my head.

  “Mrs. McKenna?”

  “Yep.”

  “You mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “Nope.”

  “You told the police that on the night of the fire up at the Andersons you saw someone coming down the street, see what had happened, then run away. That right?”

  “Nope.”

  I hesitated. “Did you say ‘No’?”

  “Yep.”

  “My understanding was that—”

  “Didn’t see ‘someone.’ Saw Bill Anderson. You understand me now?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Good. What’s your point?”

  I looked across at the front of your house. “You always have your drapes drawn like this? Day and night?”

  “Keeps out the light.”

  “I can see how that would work. So, if you don’t mind me asking, how were you able to notice Mr. Anderson as he passed by on that evening?”

  The old woman looked up at me suddenly, and her eyes were no longer reflective. You could see something inside now and tell that it was still very much alive.

  “You one of them?”

  “One of who?”

  She stared hard at me a moment longer, shook her head. “I can see you’re not. Okay, so. I keep a watch. Especially at night. I hear someone walking up or down the street, I take a look. Someone’s got to. Keep a watch. Always. ’Round these parts it’s me.”

  “Keep a watch for whom, ma’am?”

  “You know. Those fellas no one can see. So I hear footsteps. Sound familiar, but I think I’ll check anyhow. Move aside the corner of the curtain, just a little. See it’s Bill. He’s okay. I don’t mind Bill. He walks a few yards past, and he stops. Stands there staring. I cain’t see what he’s looking at. But he starts to back away, and he turns and runs. I haven’t never seen Bill run before. Twenty minutes later you got sirens and what-all else.”

  She coughed, violently and without warning, making no effort to cover her mouth but letting the dislodged materials rocket out and hit the ground. When she was done, she shook her head wearily.

  “Don’t catch cancer, son. It’s a pain in the ass. Need anything else? I got a show to watch.”

  I walked back to the crossroads, stood on the sidewalk there watching falling leaves while I smoked a cigarette. I wouldn’t want to count on Mrs. McKenna in court, but she didn’t come across as completely unreliable either. Even without the experience of being in the house, the conversation with the guy living across the street might already have started to change my mind. Couples living in long-term abusive relationships, the real heavy hitters, rarely exchange harsh words in public. Ou
t in the world, everything’s fake peachy or icy polite, an occasional flash of angry eyes but no more. Their real business is private, an indoor sport. Add this to what Fisher had told me and maybe Bill Anderson hadn’t whacked his wife and child. So the question became who did.

  That, and where Anderson was now.

  I wasn’t kept waiting long at the station, which surprised me. Either they were having a quiet day or perhaps he was just intrigued.

  Blanchard took me into a different room from the one where I’d sat with a hangover three days before. This room looked like it might be his office. It was certainly messy enough.

  “I wanted to apologize,” I said.

  “That sounds nice.”

  “You were right. About my wife. She had just forgotten my number, and she was right there at home.”

  He nodded. “So everything’s cool?”

  “Right as rain.”

  “That’s good. Well, you didn’t need to come here, but I appreciate it.”

  “Actually, I wanted to pick your brains on something else while I was here.”

  “That figures. Shoot.”

  “What do you know about the Anderson murders? Up near Broadway, three weeks ago?”

  He looked surprised. “Nothing. Well, two people died hard, word is the husband did it. No more than that.”

  “Anderson is listed as a missing person?”

  “No. As the suspect in a double homicide. Which is a different department, as you know.”

  “You buy that? Him killing them?”

  “It’s not a case I know anything about. The-husband-did-it is normally how it breaks down, as you’ll also know. Why—you got a different perspective?”

  “I’ve just been up there,” I said. “Talked to a couple people.”

  Blanchard frowned. “Are congratulations in order? You join SPD and make detective the same day? I’m a little surprised I didn’t hear about that.”

  “Just a private citizen,” I said. “Talking with other private citizens.”