The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “You are?”

  “I’ve heard enough to believe he wasn’t that kind of man. And I’ve seen what happened to Bill’s basement. He didn’t do that himself.”

  Fisher interrupted me. “You’ve been in the house?”

  I ignored him, kept Chen’s attention. “So what do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know.” He seemed a little more comfortable now. “Like I told the cops, Bill was on edge for a few weeks, maybe a couple months. I told them that, and they ran away with the idea that it was something in his personal life. But Bill didn’t have one. A personal life. I mean, he had Gina, and Josh. He didn’t want anything else.”

  “So what was bugging him? Any idea?”

  “Not really. But I think maybe it was a work thing.”

  “Something to do with his job? At the college?”

  Chen shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably not, he would have said. We got hassles there, we all talk about it.”

  “Chew on it around the coffee machine.”

  “Exactly. Right.”

  Fisher spoke up. “But you think his work was involved?”

  “Maybe. We’ve all got personal projects, you know—hobbies. We talk about them all the time. But for a while, I don’t know…seemed like Bill was holding back.”

  I nodded. “And I’m assuming you haven’t heard from him, right? No contact that you’re keeping secret?”

  “I wish.” Chen looked down. “I keep my phone with me all the time. I sent him e-mails every day for the first two weeks. I still check all the time. First couple days, I even left the back door of my house unlocked. Gerry did, too.” He looked up. “I think Bill’s dead.”

  “Which e-mail address are you sending to? One associated with the college?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s not going to be using that. Not going to be phoning you either. He knows that those will nail him. If he’s innocent, he’s terrified out of his mind and going through grief and survivor guilt simultaneously, and doing it on his own. That would be enough to put most people in a psych ward within two days. Right now he’s probably one of the most paranoid individuals in the state. You’ve got no other e-mail address for him, something he can access anonymously on the Web?”

  “No. I thought of that, but I don’t know one. And he could have set one up anytime, used it to e-mail me.”

  “Except that as far as he knows, you buy the prevailing story and would try to trick him into giving himself up.”

  “No. He’d know I wouldn’t do that.”

  “With respect, Peter, you have no idea what paranoia is like. What about online science forums, Usenet groups, anything like that? Virtual places you’d expect him to hang out.”

  Chen cocked his head. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “He’s hardly going to be swapping equations back and forth,” Fisher said. “Given the position he’s in.”

  “Of course not. But remember: For us, what happened to Bill is just a part of life. For him, it’s everything that exists. If he’s still alive, he’s been in hiding for three weeks. He needs to talk to someone, very soon, and he’s going to be trying to work out how. But he’s going to be very scared of physical contact or anything he fears might lead a bad guy to him. We have to find a way of making that easier for him.”

  “But we have no idea where he is.”

  “He’s in the city,” I said. “He’s not Rambo. I don’t see him taking to the mountains with a hunting knife between his teeth. He has no money, because he’ll know that an ATM will tag him. But he’s a bright guy, and I’m sure he could panhandle enough cash for half an hour online. That’s the best way I can think of trying to get to him.”

  I grabbed a napkin off the table and wrote my cell-phone number on it. I gave this to Chen.

  “Go home,” I told him. “Get online. Go to the places you and Bill and Gerry used to hang out. Leave messages. Don’t make it obvious they’re for Bill, but put something in them that will catch his eye and at the same time confirm it’s from a friend. And put this phone number in it. Not in plain sight, obviously. Find a way of hiding it, but in a way Bill will get. Can you think of a method of doing that?”

  He nodded quickly. I knew he would. He looked like a puzzle kind of guy. “Good. And try to communicate that there are people who believe he’s innocent and that the person on the end of that phone line is one of them.”

  “Okay. But why your number? Why not mine?”

  “Because if we’re right, then someone who wasn’t Bill broke his wife’s neck and shot his son in the face before setting him on fire. Whoever Anderson makes contact with stands a chance of running into this person.” I stubbed out my cigarette and looked at Chen. “Want that to be you?”

  “Uh, no,” he said.

  chapter

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When he’d gone, Fisher turned to me.

  “You didn’t say you were going to get into the house. I would’ve liked to have been there.”

  “Which is one of several reasons I didn’t tell you,” I said. “And there was nothing there for you to find.”

  “Jack…”

  “Jack nothing. You pulled me into this by throwing my wife’s name in my face. She’s my interest here, and I’ll do what I have to in order to find out what’s going on. Just liked you turned up here with that friend of Anderson’s without letting me know first.”

  “Bad idea? Talking to him?”

  “Not unless he’s involved with whoever killed Anderson’s family.”

  “Christ—you think he is?”

  “No, I don’t. But you didn’t even consider the question. What if Chen had let someone know that Anderson would be out of the house that evening? Or if he’d even agreed to make sure he was? If either of those were true, we’ve just put ourselves squarely on someone’s radar.”

  Fisher looked down. “Jesus. I didn’t think. Sorry. I’m…This isn’t really my kind of thing.”

  “Remember that. Something else—when you called, you knew I’d been to Seattle. I want to know how you knew.”

  “Just happened to see you,” he said, shrugging. “I didn’t even mean to tell you about it.”

  “Where?”

  “Road at the foot of Post Alley, near where the Kerry, Crane, and Hardy offices are.”

  “We just happened to be in the same place at the same time?”

  “I have no idea why you were there,” he said irritably. “I was on my way to try to talk to Crane. About the building in Belltown. I told reception I was interested in buying it. He wasn’t in.”

  “Actually,” I said, “he was. I’d just come from there.”

  “Oh.” Fisher frowned. “Why?”

  “I got a call the night before. From a cabdriver. He’d found Amy’s phone in the back of his car.” I hesitated before continuing. It felt disloyal to speak of Amy to Fisher, as if by doing so I was joining some campaign against her. But that was absurd. “There appeared to be discrepancies in her whereabouts. I went to see Crane to find out where her meetings were that day, to work out when I could return her phone.”

  “And?”

  “He didn’t know she was in town. Or so he said.”

  “But now you’re wondering if he was the guy in the pictures I took.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” he said.

  “I’m not convinced there’s anything to be sorry about.”

  “I hope you’re right. But the downside of what you’ve just told me is that we both visited Crane’s offices within a half hour and mentioned your wife’s name. We’ve probably put ourselves on his radar, don’t you think?”

  “Fine by me,” I said. “I talked with the guy. I don’t see him for murder.”

  Fisher said nothing. For just a moment, I began to feel that my hands were not my own. “You’re going to have to stop looking at me that way,” I said quietly.

  “What way?”

  “Like we’
re back in school and I’ve said something naïve.”

  “That’s just in your head, Jack.”

  “It’d better be,” I said.

  “You think Anderson will call?”

  “I have no idea. Chen may be right. Anderson may be dead. Whoever took out his family could’ve caught up with him. He could’ve gotten randomly mugged. He could’ve thrown himself into the bay. I’ll give him until midday tomorrow. Then I’m done.”

  “But what if he calls after that?”

  “I’ll redirect him to you. I don’t care about Anderson. Neither do you, though I can see that it’s interesting that Bill’s odd mood maybe dates from around the time he received the check from Cranfield’s will. I’m giving you twenty-four hours as a favor, and because you showed me something it’s possible I need to know. After that, I’m going home. If I’ve got real problems, then it’s there that they’re going to be solved.”

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I do appreciate it.”

  “Good. So buy me another beer.”

  Our waitress seemed to have been abducted, and so Fisher went up to the bar to deal direct. I watched him as he handled the girl there, saw the flash of his artless smile, and realized that in the end I’d wound up joining his game after all. He came back soon enough, and we set about doing what two men in a bar in a strange town usually do.

  We got drunk.

  Sometime later we were in Fisher’s hotel. It was sort of in downtown but had little else to recommend it. Amy wouldn’t have set foot in there, put it that way.

  The guy behind the bar was an asshole, by which I mean he wouldn’t serve us. So we went upstairs. Fisher’s room was large and frank in its rectangularity and had a window over yet another of the city’s ubiquitous ground-cover parking lots. I looked out over this as Fisher turned on a couple of lights. People came and went with greater regularity than the need to park usually requires. Most of them didn’t even have cars. Had I been in need of an easy drug collar, instinct told me the lot would be a good place to start. After a few moments, I spotted the seller, recognizing him instantly. Not because I’d seen him before but because I knew his type. The subspecies. Thin, pale, pinch-faced, with short, dark hair like a pelt, the kind of man you’ll see emerging nonchalantly in the early hours from a car he’s just broken into. Without morals, guilt, or empathy, culturally imbecilic. Ratlike, perhaps, though rats are actually far more noble, a species whose reputation we’ve sullied to provide a cheap symbol for members of our own, the ones prepared to gnaw their way into anyone else’s life in the hope of an easy score.

  The minibar was well stocked and proved willing to accommodate us. Fisher and I sat on opposite sides of the room, in its two armchairs. The walk had been cold and long. It was after eleven, and it had occurred to me to send a text message to Amy. I wasn’t sure what. Something short. Preferably something nice. I knew I should probably not do this, at least not without a clearer intention in mind, and I’d already made the decision not to. Twice. But the idea evidently didn’t feel it had been dealt with as it wished, and it refused to get out of my head. If things got much later, she’d be in bed.

  I sat there, arms hanging over the side of the chair, head tilted back, not knowing what to do, feeling tired but as if I would never sleep.

  “How come you don’t have kids?” Fisher asked after a while.

  “Amy works hard,” I said, feeling bad.

  There was another silence. Then Fisher spoke again. “I dream of her,” he said.

  I was confused. “Who?”

  “Donna.”

  I struggled for a moment, then realized who he was talking about. I tilted my head down to look at him. “From school? The girl who killed herself?”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I guess it’s going to crop up. From what I could tell, it changed your life.”

  “It did,” he said. “But you don’t get it. I never used to think about her at all. What happened was bad, sure. I was screwed up over it for a while.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know that,” he said, with a very brief smile. “You told me back then, and I was grateful. To be frank, if we hadn’t had the conversation at the track that afternoon, I probably wouldn’t have remembered you at all. My point is, after a while I came to terms with what Donna did, realized I couldn’t be held responsible for her choices. I was a kid, I was probably kind of dumb and definitely too full of myself—but neither of those is actually a crime, right? I didn’t do anything to lead her on and certainly nothing to make her kill herself. I saw a therapist for a couple years while I was at college, and I gradually stopped feeling bad about it. I got on with my life. It was a pretty good life.”

  “Was?”

  He ignored me. “She didn’t cross my mind for years at a time after that—and when she did, it was like some story I’d been told, one that had a moral I’d already absorbed and didn’t need to hear again. Then one night about a year ago, I dreamed about her.”

  He stared down at his hands. The light in the room was low, but it looked to me as if they were trembling.

  “I dreamed I came home from work early, and the house was empty. I wasn’t worried—I knew that my kids would still be in kindergarten and my wife would be at the store or having coffee with the neighbor. I had papers to go through, and so I went into the den. But after a while I thought I could hear water running. I couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from. Finally I realized it was upstairs. That’s very odd, because I’m alone in the house, so I go to the bottom of the staircase. I look up.” His face twitched. “And a shadow crosses the hallway at the top of the stairs.”

  “Did you go up?”

  “Of course. It’s a dream, right? It’s all about me going up those stairs. I ran up them, in fact, because the shadow…it was pretty low on the wall. I have two little kids, and I’m worried. Scared. I run up the stairs convinced one of them is in trouble, and when I get to the top, the sound of the water is much louder. I run to the end of the hallway, and the door to the bathroom is closed. I pull at the handle, but I can’t open it. I know there’s no lock on the door—we had it taken off when the kids got old enough to shut themselves in. I kick it. I can hear someone inside, someone making a sound, no words, just a noise like they’re frightened, and I know it’s one of my kids. And I’m so desperate that I take a step back and throw my shoulder at the door, and suddenly it has no resistance and I go tumbling into the bathroom.

  “There’s no one in there. No water in the tub. The room’s exactly as it should be. All my wife’s shampoos in ten neat rows. Line of books above the john. A green plastic whale full of little kiddy toys for bathtime. Everything’s fine. But then I hear this tiny click.

  “I walk back out into the hallway, and one of the doors ahead falls open, just a bit. I reach for the handle, but suddenly I don’t want to open it. The door’s ajar enough that I can see through into my daughter’s bedroom, a patch of carpet and a slice of wall. And I see a shadow fall across it, but this time it’s too big for a child, and I hear the crib rustle as if someone has pulled aside the bedspread and climbed in, curled up into the space, and I don’t understand how I know this, but I know that person is naked and she’s waiting for me—but it’s only when I start to push the door open that I realize it’s going to be Donna lying in the bed.”

  He stopped abruptly. “And by then it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  He shook his head, as if either I should know already or he just couldn’t say. “And since then I can’t get her out of my head. I have that dream every couple weeks, sometimes more. Each time the door gets a little wider before I wake up. And I know that if it’s ever wide enough for me to see her face, then I won’t wake up. That I’ll step in and she’ll be lying there smiling and the door will close and I’ll never get out again.”

  I wasn’t sure what I could say. “We’re getting older,” I tried eventually. �
�Today’s too muddy and confusing, and so you retreat to when it all seemed simpler, even if it actually wasn’t.”

  He let out a short, harsh laugh. “What she did wasn’t simple.”

  “I know, but…”

  “There’s something else. The dream kept coming back. I was exhausted, couldn’t focus at work.”

  “Did you talk to anyone about it?”

  “Not really. I never told my wife about it. I was so over the whole thing by the time we met. And…you know, when something’s really in your head, if you tell someone else about it and they don’t get it, don’t understand its weight, you feel even worse for opening your mouth and blabbing your dark secret. So…”

  He stopped again. Outside the window a police car went by, siren blaring. I imagined the dealer and his clients scattering like frightened mice, to return within minutes.

  “But, so…anyway,” Gary said. “How well do you remember Donna?”

  “A little. I knew her some. She wasn’t unattractive. Plus, you know, she died.”

  He nodded. “All the time I was in therapy at college, I was barely able to recall what she looked like at all. But after I started having the dreams, I could remember her in every detail.”

  “That’s because—”

  “Just shut up, Jack, and let me speak. So one Saturday afternoon I’m in the park with Bethany. My daughter. Just turned two. I’m pushing her around on one of those trike things, you know, a handle up out the back so they don’t have to pedal. And I’m very tired because of work and not sleeping, and it’s gotten real cloudy and is clearly going to rain, and I’ve basically had enough. I tell her it’s time to go home. She turns and looks up at me, and that’s when I see it.”

  “Saw what?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it. She was mighty pissed, because she wanted to keep going around the park, but that wasn’t it. Not just that. There was something else coming out of them at me. Out of her eyes.”

  “I don’t get what you mean.”

  He shrugged. “Over the next few days…Well, kids change week to week, even day by day. You know that. She’s at that age. But…”