The Intruders (15 page)
And then she started to run.
The first thing I saw was a big man looming over me. I was freezing, and my head felt like it was broken, but even so I could tell that there was something extremely wrong with this person. His proportions were badly odd. His features were too strong and skewed, and the texture of his skin was ragged and worn, even in this early, low light. He was also, I finally realized, really, really huge.
And made of wood.
I sat up quickly. My brain followed later. I found I was huddled against the back of a building, partly covered in leaves. There were a couple of boarded-up windows and doors with rusty locks, the disused backs of shops on the other side. In front lay a small park. There were bushes and trees, at least, though the ground was paved in granite cobblestones. The buildings on the other side were made of dark stone, a uniform three stories high. A couple of other guys reclined on benches, most under dismantled cardboard boxes. More professional about their situation than I was, in other words.
The thing I’d seen when I first opened my eyes was a totem pole, or something like it. Big and wooden and primitive, certainly. There were several more dotted around, including one that looked like a pair of misshapen monsters wrestling, or about to wring each other’s necks. The site collided heavily with dreams I must have been having, full of darkness and violence, of shouts in rooms where the air was dead. With looking for my father in the house where I grew up and not being able to find him.
My watch said it was ten past six in the morning. I was surprised I still had it. I hurriedly checked and discovered I also retained my phone, Amy’s phone, and my wallet. Either the local thieves weren’t up to much or they just hadn’t wanted to get close to me. My face and hands hurt, but the physical discomfort was nothing compared to how I felt emotionally and spiritually. I assumed I must still be in Seattle, but otherwise the map was blank. I’m not a heavy drinker, most of the time. I don’t find myself in these kinds of situations, and I have neither the skills nor the experience to deal with them. I felt sick and afraid. I stood up, hoping this would help.
“Sir, are you okay?”
I turned sluggishly to see a guy with a bicycle was standing six feet away. “Is this Seattle?”
“Occidental Park, sir,” the guy said, coming closer. He was wearing a white cycling helmet, and his jacket was white, too. Everything about him was clean and upstanding—and white. He was like me with the word “not” in front.
“Which is in Seattle, right?” I asked doggedly, and immediately regretted it. While obviously not an actual cop, it was clear the bike guy occupied some kind of semiofficial law-and-order capacity. Could you be arrested in this town just for being an asshole?
“Yes, sir. You’re a couple of blocks from Pioneer Square, if that means anything.”
It did. I was actually only about five minutes’ walk from where I could last recall being. “Look, I’m fine. Had a couple drinks too many, that’s all.”
He nodded, politely avoiding loading the action with too much No shit.
“Are you hurt?” He was looking at my face.
“Slipped on a steep sidewalk, banged myself up some.”
“You lost anything overnight?”
I went through my pockets again, for his benefit. “Everything’s present and accounted for,” I said, hoping the choice of words would signal I was a stranger to this kind of situation. In fact it just made me look worse, like a half-senile old woman talking incessantly to prove she’s not half senile.
“Do you have somewhere to stay?”
“Got a car. Will be driving home. Today.”
“Wouldn’t be in any hurry,” he said. “And some breakfast would be a good idea.”
He got back on his bike and pedaled off.
I walked out of the park. A single block got me to First, a right and another couple hundred yards to Pioneer Square. This is a small triangle rather than an actual square, with First on one edge, Yesler on another, the third arm cobbled over along with the rest of the “square.” None of the sides is as much as fifty yards long. It has a paved area with a seating area protected by Victorian-style ironwork, trees, a drinking fountain with an Indian’s head on it, and a totem pole, this one a taller and a more explicable straight-up-and-down affair.
I stood outside the Starbucks across the way, which wasn’t yet open, and looked at the trees. There were people out sweeping the streets. One raised an eyebrow as he passed and paused, as if offering me the opportunity to be gathered up into his pile of detritus and cleaned up out of public sight. It was quite amusing, but I could have done without it. I still felt physically desperate, but I was no longer in the location where I’d woken up, and so I could start pretending that it hadn’t really happened. The closing stages of the previous evening were opaque, the parts after the fight, but now that I could see it across the square, I distantly remembered being in a bar there called Doc Maynard’s, perched belligerently on a stool in a dark and crowded room, knowing I was far past the point of recovery and deciding I might as well follow the road and see where it led. Very wise. I wished I could go back and stand next to this other self and punch him in the mouth. It ends with you waking in a park! I would have shouted. How fucking cool is that?
I decided to take the advice of the man in white and get some breakfast, specifically the kind that is hot and wet and comes in cups. If I was going to do what I guessed I now had to do, then not smelling too obviously of alcohol would be better. I lit a cigarette to gird my soul for the long, cold hack up to Pike Place Market, the one place presumably doing business at this hour. My head hurt in three ways. I had localized but significant pains in my back, neck, and right hand. My mouth felt like a seabed that had been drained after years of environmental disaster had rendered it ecologically dead.
But none of these was the real problem.
The problem was that over the last six months I had come to be concerned that my wife’s feelings toward me had changed, and that yesterday I’d started to wonder if she might be actually having an affair. And that if either was true, I didn’t know what I was going to do.
About her or about myself.
I sat in a waiting room for forty minutes reading grim posters and moving my feet occasionally to let people walk past. Some of them were sad, some of them were angry, some were shouting, some looked like they’d never say anything again. I had consumed enough coffee and weapons-grade headache pills to feel both a little better and a lot worse. I’d brushed my teeth and changed into a new shirt I’d bought on the way. As far as anyone could tell, I hoped, I looked almost like a normal person.
Eventually a guy in shirtsleeves and a tie appeared out of a door in back and said my name. I followed him down a corridor and into a room that had no windows. He introduced himself as Detective Blanchard and indicated for me to sit down at the other side of a table.
He spent a few minutes looking through the information I’d given earlier, and I found my hands tightening on the metal arms of the chair. The room was small and had gray walls and was not designed to provide diversion. I was stuck with watching the detective as he tried to memorize the stuff in front of him—or perhaps translated it to Chinook in his head. He was comfortably overweight, with soft-looking skin and pale, wispy hair that looked as if it was rapidly deserting his head to leave him looking even more like a large, confident baby. I tried to ignore everything else and concentrate on breathing deeply and evenly. I could feel it not working.
“My wife,” I repeated fifteen minutes later, “is missing. Which word are you finding problematic?”
“Define ‘missing’ for me.”
“She is not in the hotel where she’s supposed to be.”
“So she checked out.”
“She never checked in. They have no reservation for her. As it says in those notes.”
“Was it a Hilton? We got a few of those. Maybe you went to the wrong one.”
“No,” I said. “It was the Malo, as you also know if you were actually reading what’s there in front of you.”
“The Malo. Nice. What does she do, your wife?”
“Advertising.”
He nodded, as if Amy’s occupation explained something significant about her or me. “Travel on business often?”
“Seven, eight times a year.”
“Seasoned. So she changed her mind. Or someone screwed up the booking and she had to find an alternative.”
“I’ve been through this. She’s still missing.”
“You ever call her while she was here this week, get her on the Hotel Malo number?”
“No, because—and I’ll keep repeating this until it gets through to you—she was never there. I always call her cell when she’s away. It’s easier.”
“Right—except now she doesn’t have it.”
“It’s been thirty hours since it was reported lost. She would have called to let me know what was going on.”
“But you’re not at home, right?”
“I have a cell phone, too.”
“She tap in the number every time?”
“She had it on speed dial,” I admitted. He had a point, annoyingly. If asked to quote Amy’s cell number from memory, I wasn’t sure how far I’d get. But Amy was different. Her brain was optimized for that kind of information. Although…I had changed networks when we moved, and I hadn’t had the new number very long.
“So she wants to call to let you know the score, but she never learned your number by heart and her phone’s missing. You see what I’m saying?”
“She’d remember it. The number.”
“You’re sure?”
“I know my wife.”
He sat back and looked at me, judging that he didn’t need to comment on this, given the current situation. Also that it might be unwise to. “Do you know how to pick up your home messages remotely?”
“No,” I said. “Never had a need to.”
“You do now. Got a neighbor with a set of keys?”
I knew this was bullshit, but it was clear I wasn’t getting anywhere without jumping through this guy’s hoops. Ben Zimmerman wouldn’t mind going around and checking the machine, though I would mind asking him. I nodded.
Blanchard drove it home. “Excellent. See if your wife has been trying to get in touch. Maybe she’s wondering where you are. Filing her own missing-persons report out in…” He consulted the form again. “Birch Crossing. Wherever that is.”
“And if there’s no message?”
“Come back and we’ll talk again. Mr. Whalen, I appreciate that it maybe seems like I’m being obstructive. My wife went off radar for a couple nights, I’d freak out, too. But right now I can’t do anything you haven’t already done. Meanwhile there’s stuff going on in this city that needs people paying attention to it. I am one of those people. You were, too, from what I gather.”
I stared at him.
“Yes,” he said with a faint smile. “Guy comes in with an alleged missing wife, we run his name. You get no red flags, I’m happy to say. No reports about late-night shouting matches. No freaked-out calls to emergency ser vices. But I got a Jack Whalen with ten years in LAPD Patrol Division, West. Resigned a little under a year ago. That you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “So?”
He did nothing but sit looking at me, remaining silent for long enough to become insulting.
I cocked my head. “You got a hearing problem?”
“Just intrigued,” he said. “You present more like the kind of guy I’d expect to see on the other side of the desk. Wearing handcuffs, maybe.”
“I had a bad night’s sleep,” I said. “I’m very concerned about my wife’s safety, and I’m having more trouble than I anticipated in getting someone to take a missing-persons report seriously.”
“Right now we don’t have a missing person,” Blanchard said firmly. His voice wasn’t as flabby as his face. “We have a missing phone. Except it isn’t missing anymore, because you’ve got it in your jacket, right?”
“Right,” I said. I stood up, banging the table accidentally. This is precisely why I hadn’t gone to the cops the day before. I felt dumb for doing so now.
“I’m curious,” Blanchard said, folding my information in half. “Care to tell me why you left the force?”
“No. But I’m curious, too. You actually do any police work, ever?”
He smiled down at the table. “I’m going to tell you what I think your bottom line is, sir. Your wife didn’t stay in the hotel she said she was going to, and in the last day and a half she’s declined the opportunity to get in touch with you. Either there’s a straightforward explanation or she’s missing on purpose. That’s not the law’s problem, Mr. Whalen.” He looked up at me. “It’s just yours.”
I walked fast and randomly for ten minutes and finally got out Amy’s phone and scrolled through her contacts. I’d noticed yesterday that she had the Zimmermans in her list. Just as well, because I didn’t.
My heart sank when Bobbi answered. She got straight to asking if their vehicle was okay and when it would be back, implying that she needed it right now to ferry carloads of sick children and wounded nuns to the hospital.
“The car is fine,” I said. “I’m still in Seattle, that’s all.”
“You said you would be back yesterday afternoon.”
“Something came up, and I’m sorry, but…look, is Ben around?”
“No,” she snapped. “That’s the whole point, Jack. He’s flying down to the Bay Area this morning to visit an old friend of ours. Who is dying.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said again, relieved at being able to apologize for something that wasn’t actually my fault.
“Benjamin had to take the other car. I’m stuck here in the house because we thought you’d be back last night. Which is…Why do you want to talk to him?”
“I’ve got a problem.”
“That much is abundantly clear,” she said. “But—”
“Bobbi,” I said, “would you just listen for one second? Amy’s missing.”
There was silence at the other end of the line for a long moment. “Missing?”
“Yes.” I hadn’t wanted to get into this but I didn’t know how else to get through to her. “She lost her phone two nights ago, and I’m hoping it’s just that she doesn’t know my cell number to tell me where she is. She might have remembered the number at the house, and so I wanted to ask Ben if he’d go see if there were any messages.”