The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “Uh-huh. So what’s your interest, citizen?”

  “Personal.”

  “And what do you think you’ve discovered, in this new hobby of yours?”

  “I don’t think Anderson killed them.”

  “Uh-huh.” Blanchard started doodling on the pad in front of him, small looping spirals.

  “The only eyewitness says she saw Anderson approaching the house after the fact. Okay, she’s not a great advocate, but she can’t be ignored. I talked to someone else who confirms the Andersons as a functional couple, which I gather is the general picture. If you take away the notion of some long-overdue boil-over, then I can’t find a reason for this happening. Can you?”

  “You realize there was an eighty-thousand-dollar policy on Gina Anderson?”

  “Didn’t know the figure. But that’s a bullshit motive. He didn’t even own a gun.”

  “Far as we know.”

  “There’s no prior, no flags, no indicators.”

  “Come on, Jack, you were on the job. You know how it is. These people are like sleepers. They get up and go to work, day in, day out, have cookouts in the yard, fishing trips with the neighbors. Just like regular human beings. Then one night it turns out they’re a pod person after all, the thing inside comes out, and bang—it’s a whole different world and there’s blood on the walls. Eighty thousand is more than enough, especially if there was something else going on in his life.”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “There was other stuff going on, but not the way you think. Things the investigators don’t know about.”

  Blanchard stopped drawing on his pad. “Like what?”

  “Couple months ago Anderson was a beneficiary in the will of a rich dead guy from Chicago. He received a check for a quarter of a million dollars.”

  Now I had his attention. “How do you know this?”

  “A lawyer involved in the case. He’s all bent out of shape over this and convinced Anderson didn’t do it.”

  “Just because of the money? Proves nothing.”

  “I know,” I said. “And that’s something my guy hasn’t considered, because he’s never been a cop. You’re thinking Anderson comes into this money, decides he wants to reinvent his life, and though he was okay with the wife and kid before, he doesn’t want them hanging around his neck now, taking up space on his new beach towel.”

  “Why did you quit the job?” Blanchard asked. “Seems to me you might not have been the world’s worst cop.”

  “But here’s the thing,” I said. “That check was never cashed. He had it for a month before he disappeared. Even if you’ve decided you’re going to move to Mexico and grow fat on fish tacos and Dos Equis with a series of loud women, you’re going to open an account and put that money in the bank. Not take the risk of this new life getting lost or stolen—or found out by your wife.”

  Blanchard’s eyes were on the wall behind my head now, or at a point somewhere in between it and me. He ran his tongue around his mouth for a moment, then nodded once.

  “Okay. Maybe. What’s this guy’s name? The lawyer?”

  “Gary Fisher. I don’t know the name of his firm.”

  “But he’s on the level?”

  “I’ve known him a long time.”

  “You got a number for him?”

  “I left it back at the hotel.”

  He looked at me. “Right. Have it your own way, concerned citizen. I’ll talk to some people, throw this into the pot. See if I can get anyone to care.”

  “Thank you,” I said, standing up.

  “We’re here to serve. In the meantime go home and stay out of trouble.”

  “What?”

  He stared me straight in the eye. “You just got that look about you. You did the first time I ever saw you.”

  I’d told myself I wasn’t going to do it, but I’d known that I was lying. I did what I could to avoid it. I called Fisher, arranged to hook up later at the bar at the foot of Madison where I’d met Georj. I then took a long walk in the wrong direction, as the afternoon got grayer and darker and colder. As I walked, I noticed more than ever the shape of the land, the way it tilted sharply down toward Elliott Bay. Walking to the natural contours, seeing buildings only as things in my way, it was as if the work of man became insubstantial. I knew from my tourist visit with Amy that there had been extensive regrading work throughout the city in the last century. Given how hilly it remained, it would have been hard to imagine what attracted people in the first place, if you didn’t know that the ridge had once been thickly covered in profitable trees. I cut diagonally down to hit First and kept going south. Followed the odd forty-degree swerve that First makes around the bottom of James, and continued toward Yesler Way, where the streets suddenly run east-west instead of parallel to the water. I hadn’t headed for this area in particular, but it seemed that whenever I went walking in Seattle it was where I wound up, as if the city tipped me down in this direction.

  I stopped at the corner of First and Yesler, looking across at the totem pole on the corner of Pioneer Square. On the other side was the terra-cotta bulk of the Yesler Building, to its right a monstrosity of a parking lot, built in the sixties to replace the fine old Occidental Hotel and so ugly it helped spark the campaign that saved the old town from being leveled into yet more parking lots. A few homeless people walked this way and that in the drizzle, single men, shoulders hunched. The irrelevance of the surrounding buildings seemed even more acute here, as if they could have no bearing on these passing humans and their lives. These were street dwellers, not the building kind. If they had a home in this city it existed at ground level only, and the appearance of sidewalks and road surfacing had not changed it much.

  I went and stood in Pioneer Square, under blood-leaved trees in front of the drinking fountain with the Indian’s head on it, and read that it showed Seattle himself, chief of the local Suquamish tribe, one of the peoples who’d been living here before the white man came. This fountain, the city’s name, and the totem pole appeared to be the sole memorials to the tribe’s passing. There are middle-class dogs that have done better than that. I wondered if Seattle or his forebears had ever stood on the shores of the bay and seen tall ships in the distance and what their response had been. Whether they could have done things differently and, if so, whether anything would have changed.

  There was something calming about the square, and I stayed awhile, sitting on a bench. Then I walked through the old town, stopping in the Elliott Bay Book Company, killing time any way I could. I stood in front of the bookstore’s True Crime section, wondering if I had it in me to produce something that could be filed next to the single copy of The Intruders they stocked. I doubted it, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. The big local seller of the moment appeared to be a garish hack job on the darker corners of Seattle’s last few decades. Arson and scandal. Famous suicides and murders. A long series of unexplained disappearances in the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, kidnappings of young girls, only a couple of badly mangled bodies ever being found, both having suffered abuse even this author balked at specifying, along with cuts into their faces so deep they’d gouged the bone.

  I put the book back on the pile. I didn’t want to write that kind of thing, and even if I had, someone had beaten me to it. In the end I bought a thin précis of the city’s early history and wound up walking the streets again, until they ran out and deposited me unceremoniously in a tangle of busy new roads that showed so many twisting ways to go that ultimately there was no way to decide.

  So I turned back around and tried to go some other place. Anywhere except where I’d been heading all along. But a little before five o’clock, I still found myself walking up Post Alley, in the direction of the Kerry, Crane & Hardy offices.

  I went straight past their offices and checked out a couple of things. Then I returned to the corner deli with the window seats. I got a coffee and sat facing back up the alley. I had no way of telling if Crane was in there, and I told myself this was a go
od thing. I’d just sit awhile. Watch people go in, come out. Then people only coming out, and finally the lights dimming, and someone shutting and locking the door behind him at the end of the business day. Crane was a big wheel. Chances were that he’d be out of the office, sitting in some other people’s boardroom, making them feel good about whatever he wanted them to do. That was his job, and when we met, I’d been able to tell that he would be good at it. He’d go straight from the meeting to dinner with a client, or home to his picture-book family, and that was for the best. Sooner or later I’d get tired and bored and thirsty and hoist myself up off the stool and go into the night.

  I sat there forty minutes, becoming more and more convinced of this scenario. Then Todd Crane came out.

  He was alone, and he looked preoccupied. I was paid up and ready to go, in position at the door within seconds. He didn’t do what I expected, however. My scouting around had been to establish the closest entrance to the multistory parking lot. It was back up the alley, and I’d assumed that Crane would be the kind of man to arrive at work in something expensive. But he was walking toward me instead.

  I faded back into the aisles of imported produce, but he walked straight past, eyes cast down and hands pushed deep into his coat pockets.

  I slipped out of the deli and followed.

  He walked quickly, heading for where the alley opened out into the underpass beneath the off-ramp. I would prefer privacy in which to ask this man if he’d been the person in the photographs Gary had taken, the man with his arm around my wife. I picked up my pace.

  My phone rang. It was loud enough that I couldn’t just let it go on. I pulled it out of my pocket, still walking, suddenly convinced it would be Amy. The screen did not say AMY, however. It said ROSE.

  I don’t know anyone named Rose. I put the phone up to my ear. “Who the hell—”

  “Don’t do this,” said a woman’s voice, talking very fast and loud, and then the connection was cut.

  I thumbed the green key twice to call the number back, but it rang and rang and was not answered. I stared around as it continued to ring, looking back along the alley and up at the windows of the buildings, but could not see anyone.

  By the time I gave up and ran down to the end of the alley, Todd Crane had disappeared.

  chapter

  TWENTY-THREE

  I was at the bar a while before the time I’d arranged to meet Fisher. I needed somewhere to think. And I needed to call home. I had to let Amy know I wouldn’t be home tonight. The thought of her made me defensive and angry, though I didn’t really know what about. The building in Belltown was Fisher’s obsession, not mine: Amy’s name on the papers didn’t necessarily have any bearing on my life. We hadn’t even known each other when she was involved. A business formality, a company name on a company deal. I hated having these questions to consider, however, just as I hated my inability to stop wondering who the man in the photographs was. In the end I gave up trying to prepare myself and just pressed her number.

  “Hey,” she said. She picked up quickly, as if she had already been holding her phone. Had she? Did it mean anything if she had? “What’s the news in the bright lights? Thought you’d be home by now.”

  Her voice sounded as it always did. The telephone, though a remarkable device, is not designed for real communication, for the heavy lifting of personal interaction. For the big stuff, you have to be in the same physical space. Questions are asked and answered on a chemical level: Our species lived and loved and dealt with each other for millions of years before we developed language. It’s still only ever background music.

  “Been talking to a few people, took longer than I thought. Chance I may be able to grab a beer with a couple of crime reporters later on.”

  “That could work. You thinking of staying overnight?”

  “Maybe. Okay with mission control?”

  “Of course. I’ll inform the kitchen. So it’s looking like it might pan out, huh? The book idea?”

  “Could be.” I felt bad about lying to her. I realized I had a handful of text messages, mainly blank, a couple of photographs that didn’t show much—and not a lot else.

  “Well, that’s good. And honey, sorry if I was down on the idea last night. I was in kind of a funny mood.”

  “Yeah, I got that.” I took a deep breath and stepped closer to the precipice. “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. I couldn’t tell whether she said it too quickly, too slowly, or in an entirely normal way. I was listening too hard. “Just work, you know, the usual work crap. Blah-blah-blah in the head.”

  “I thought moving out of L.A. was going to stop all that.”

  “It will. Give it time.”

  She said something else then, but I didn’t hear it, as there was a surge of noise in the background.

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s the TV—got a Sex and the City marathon about to start, and the microwave’s set to ping any second now.”

  “So you’re in a happy place.”

  “I am. You’ll be home tomorrow, though, right?”

  “Around lunchtime.”

  “Good. I miss you, trooper.”

  When she said those words, she sounded so like Amy, so like the person I’d known, and married, and stood beside on many days both short and sweet and long and hard, that I couldn’t believe that anything was wrong, or that it ever could be.

  It still took me a beat too long to say.

  “I miss you, too.”

  Fisher had claimed Anderson as his smoking gun. I wasn’t confident he merited this status, but I wasn’t sure I had one either. Maybe I should just have asked Amy about the building up in Belltown—which presumably had to be the place the cabdriver had dropped her on the evening she went missing. But how could I bring it up? I’d actually be asking something else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to open that box. Even if it turned out to be empty, it would never be properly reclosed. Utterance is a one-way street. Questions can never be unasked.

  My phone buzzed. I had a text message. It was from Amy, and it said:

  Hav fun. Dn’t drnk 2 much!:-D x

  And it was a nice message, and it made me smile, but the smile didn’t stick for long. Two instances—this and the message that morning—were enough to make me notice that a woman who had always written a smiley as:-) had recently begun using:-D instead and started employing shorthand. Previously she’d always pecked out every letter of every word. Why change, unless she was picking it up from someone else? Or was this just another piece of dust that meant nothing unless you piled it up with others, almost as if you were trying to make a heap big enough to cast a shadow?

  I rubbed my face in my hands, hard, and shook my head, dismissing this for the moment. It was time to go back to what I’d been doing since losing Crane.

  Trying to work out who the hell Rose was and what she was doing on my phone.

  I’d already realized that the name coming up on the screen meant there must be an entry for it in my contacts. I’d checked and found that yes, I had such an entry. A phone number, and a name. ROSE. But I hadn’t put it there. I’d owned the phone only about a month, having changed networks when we moved to Birch Crossing and discovered that my old provider’s coverage sucked. I had fewer than twenty numbers stored, could place every one except this. I didn’t even know anyone named Rose. Never had.

  I selected the number and dialed it, as I had four previous times since whoever called herself by that name had derailed me—deliberately, I assumed—from having a private conversation with Todd Crane. As before, the number rang and rang, without being diverted to an answering ser vice. I could have gotten access to a reverse directory, tried to find some information about it that way. But something told me it would be a dead end in any case.

  So I kept returning to how the number could have made its way onto the phone. I could think of only one time it could have taken place. After the fight with the guy
s Georj had denied knowledge of, I’d found myself in the bar near Pioneer Place. There had been a long blank spot between my sitting on a stool there and waking up in the park. I’d evidently been very drunk. Could I have stored the number on the phone then, the number of some person I’d been talking to? I would have called this a possibility were it not for one thing. The name was all in caps. ROSE. I use upper and lower, always, and when I text, I spell out every word—just as Amy used to. You might think if I was drunk enough to enter a woman’s name without remembering, then I’d have forgone typographical niceties, too, but that shows how little you know me. Being that drunk meant I would have been even more tight-assed about getting it right.

  To prove to myself that I wasn’t drunk, see?

  So I was back to someone else putting it there. And that left me in the middle of my own question, a question I appeared unable to solve and had no one to ask about.

  Just after seven, Fisher walked into the bar. He was with someone. They came to where I was sitting in the corner.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Peter Chen,” Fisher said. “A friend of Bill Anderson’s. They were out together on the night that…you know.”

  Chen was one of those slender, round-shouldered guys whose body knows that its sole function is to chauffeur the brain around. I put out my hand, and he shook it. It was like briefly holding the hand of a child.

  He looked at Fisher with mild accusation. “You said he wasn’t a cop.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Listen, Peter, just sit down.”

  He did, diffidently. Looked dubiously at a small bowl of nuts the waitress had brought against my will.

  “Why did you want reassurance you weren’t being brought to talk to a policeman?” I asked. “You don’t present like someone with problems with the law.”

  “Of course not,” Chen said. “It’s just that they’re so wrong about Bill, and I’m tired of listening to them bad-mouth him.”

  “We’re aware that Bill didn’t kill Gina or Josh.”