The Intruders (28 page)
It was the first time he’d been motionless since reaching the city, having spent the whole day on foot. He had been to a residential street up in the Queen Anne District. He had been to a plush hotel bar in downtown. He had worked the streets, up and down, walking the central area, the international district, and also Broadway, in a grid pattern.
He had not found her.
Rose arrived an hour late. She came by herself, but Shepherd noted that none of the derelicts did more than glance at a woman, not so tall, walking alone across a park at night. Far more than those at the center of society, people on the edge have a fine sense of whom to avoid. There is evolution among the dispossessed, too, natural selection at work through violence and bad drugs: They sense things that others do not.
She sat the other side of the concrete table and did not smile or say hello.
“Evidently I misunderstood,” she said. “I believed that the idea was you returned calls right away. Not ignore them for three fucking weeks.”
“I’ve been busy,” he said. “Doing things you told me to do.”
“And?”
Shepherd realized that lone figures, male and female, now sat at some of the other tables in the park, in nondescript clothing, could-be-anybody style. Another stood thirty yards away, a guy with short red hair. None was looking at him, and none looked familiar. He knew who they were, however. Others like him, people who carried their lives in a suitcase. He was intrigued that Rose had felt the desire to have protection tonight.
Assuming that was what it was.
He refolded his arms, allowing his right hand to slip inside his coat toward the gun there.
“The last one is done,” he said. “Which was a waste of time. No one was going to listen to Oz Turner. But whatever. Anyone who ever communicated with Anderson over his thing is now dead. His notes were destroyed. It’s finished.”
“Are you kidding me?”
He shrugged. “He’s vanished. Probably dead. So…”
“One of your colleagues got a sighting of him.” she said. “Yesterday. He’s still here in the city.”
“If you’ve got someone who knows where he is, why don’t they deal with him?”
“Because it’s your responsibility. And your job.”
“The situation is not my fault,” he said calmly. “I said that whacking Anderson was unnecessary from the start.”
“Strange. Word’s always had it you’re the go-to guy for black-and-white solutions. You were when we met.”
“I still am. But once in a while that means choosing white. Getting Anderson fired would have been enough. They shouldn’t have let one of the Nine try to handle it his own way.”
“The others had no warning of it. Once Joe Cranfield had done what he did, it was always going to have to be tidied up. I was given the task of coordinating it. Yours not to reason why, Shepherd.”
“Don’t patronize me,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since you were still shitting your pants.”
“Congratulations. And your point?”
“After a while you start to reason why.”
“But then you do what you were told in the first place, right? That’s the deal.”
The deal, yes. A cold wind came up across the bay. Shepherd’s gaze was on the cars that came and went along the Alaskan Viaduct, donkeys following the carrots of their own headlights. When he’d been young, the big science-fiction ideas had included cars that needed no human intervention, that followed predetermined tracks. He wondered how many people realized that it had already happened, and you didn’t even need a car.
“I’m worried about you,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Really. You don’t look so well.”
He glanced away from the view to see that her sharp, gray eyes were on him. “I’m fine, Rose.”
“I’m assuming you must be. Because of how dumb it would be for you not to say.”
“Give me what you have,” he said.
She handed him a piece of paper upon which something had been written. “No collateral damage this time. Don’t fuck it up, in other words.”
He looked up at her slowly and was glad to see her move back a little from the table. He was also aware, in the background, of the men and women at the other tables getting up, as if to protect her. He wondered just how far Rose’s star had now risen.
“I won’t,” he said.
The others melted away, leaving Shepherd and Rose alone. They walked up the slope of the park past the tall, thin shapes of totem poles placed there by civic-minded individuals of the past who either had not known or did not care that such things had never been made by the local tribes, nor by any Native Americans at all, before the white men had arrived with their metal tools, and who had felt it reasonable to steal the city’s poles, including the celebrated one in Pioneer Square, from Indian villages that lay hundreds of miles away.
Just before they got to Western Avenue, the boundary of the park, he stopped. Now was the time to get this under way.
“There’s another problem,” he said offhand. “Maybe. A girl’s gone missing in Oregon.”
“So?”
“I think she’s one of you.”
“What makes you believe that?”
“I tracked her down, had a conversation with her. She’s extremely confused. It could be dangerous if she talks to anyone. She got away from me.”
“That’s clumsy.”
“It was a public place.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Some random kid runs away from home and you leap straight to a major crisis?”
“I’ve been doing this a long time, Rose. It’s the way it works sometimes. They start to remember, things get ahead of themselves. A child, a good family, normal life, no history of problems—one morning they just disappear. Adults, too. Vanish off the face of the earth. Everyone assumes they got killed by accident or design or wound up two states away on crack. Not always so. They crop up elsewhere sometimes, yes. But alive. And feeling different about themselves.”
She considered this. “And?”
“I think she’s in Seattle. Or at least headed this way.”
Rose swore. Shepherd knew that the very last thing this woman wanted was trouble in the city. Especially right now.
“When you say ‘ahead of time’—how old is she?”
“Nine.”
“Nine?” She stared at him. “Shepherd, do you know something about this that you’re not telling me?”
“Me?” he said, holding her gaze. It was not easy. “I’m just here to serve.”
“Kill her,” she said, and walked away.
Shepherd watched her go and smiled.
“He’s not going to come.”
“So he doesn’t come,” I said.
Fisher shook his head, went back to staring out the window. It was a little after eight. We were in Byron’s, on the street level of Pike Place. You entered through the market, walked past bulky men bellowing about fish, and found yourself in a dusty, low-ceilinged and hazily sunlit diner that couldn’t decide whether greasy breakfasts or strong cocktails were its main business. Some of the patrons couldn’t either. In the center was a battered and grimy cook’s station, around which battered and grimy men perched on stools sucking down one type of fare or the other, occasionally both. Some wore the stained white coats of men who’d already been up for hours shifting raw seafood and ice, others were dressed white-collar, on the way to work, and trying to look like they’d wandered in by accident and found a beer in their hand the same way. One wall was mainly glass and looked out over Elliott Bay. The tables along the side were occupied by tourist families in defensive huddles, patriarchs staring into guidebooks with a look of worried betrayal.
I had a bucket of strong coffee. Fisher tried breakfast. He had admitted he didn’t drink much these days, and his leaden movements this morning confirmed he was out of practice. I didn’t feel so hot either. When the waitress stopped by to offer more coffee I said yes and left Fisher to toy biliously with his congealing food, while I went to have a cigarette outside.
My phone conversation with Anderson had been short. He wouldn’t say where he was. Wouldn’t come to Fisher’s hotel. Wouldn’t let us come to him. Chose Byron’s presumably on the grounds that it was a very public place. I said yes because I knew it, having nursed my head there the morning I woke in Occidental Park, before going to report Amy missing.
I stomped out the cigarette on the cobbled street and looked blearily at the people milling around. Tourists, market traders, adults, children. Selling, buying, browsing. Talking, shouting, silent. Everyone doing normal things, yet looking so strange. Bodies moving apparently with purpose, but controlled by intelligences whose existence I could determine only through their actions. Of course, it could have been the hangover.
To kill a few minutes, I walked across the way and got some money from an ATM. As I waited for the bills, I rubbed my eyes, hard. I needed to get my head together. I was feeling wide open, broken down, and far too tired.
Twenty minutes and half another coffee later, I spotted something.
“Okay,” I said to Fisher. “I think we’re on.”
He looked up. The diner’s door was jammed open, and through it you could see and hear the passing throng. There were intermittent gaps in the press of bodies outside, and through one I’d seen a man about thirty yards away, not far from where I’d stood to have a smoke. He was gone for a moment, then came back, a little closer. He was average height, gaunt. The skin around his cheekbones was gray and hung a little too loose, but in general he didn’t look very different from many of the other people around, except in his eyes. He was either about to attempt to overthrow the American government by force or a man standing on the edge of a steep drop only he could see.
“That’s him,” Fisher said. “At least, I think. He’s lost weight from the picture I saw.”
I looked the man in the eyes and gave a small upward nod of the head. Sat back in my chair and indicated for Fisher to do the same, giving Anderson a chance to confirm that we were only two, that our hands were empty and on the table, and that we had another chair. Then I went back to my coffee.
A couple of minutes later, he sat down.
When seen close up, the bright, turgid fear in his eyes was terrible. I pushed my coffee toward him. He picked it up, took a gulp.
“You okay?”
He did something with his face. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a smile. In his position I’m not sure how I would have answered either. It was a dumb question. Sometimes they have to be asked.
“I’m Jack,” I said. “This is Gary. And I want you to know right away, Bill, that neither of us thinks you did what you’re supposed to have done. I’ve been in your house, and I know it was the work of an intruder.”
“I can’t think about that at the moment.”
His voice was husky, like he was fighting off the flu.
“Sure,” I said. Not thinking about what had happened to his wife and child seemed to me a sound policy. I’m sure trauma counselors would advise differently, but they have homes and families to go to at the end of the day. “Where are you living?”
“Around,” he said. “I keep moving.”
“Do you have any money?”
“I had nearly fifty,” he said. “I bought a toothbrush, soap. Cheap change of clothes. Some food.”
I put my hand on the table close to his, moved it slightly to partially reveal the money I had folded over small. When he saw it, his face threatened to crumple.
“No,” he said, and shook his head.
“It’s only a loan. I want it back.”
After a moment’s hesitation, his hand moved to where mine had been and then down into his pocket, and there was nothing on the table anymore.
“You want something to eat?”
He shook his head. “Coffee.”
I waved to the waitress, and nothing was said until that was done. I knew that Anderson would need time to settle.
Fisher took the lead. “What happened, Bill?”
He shook his head again. “How am I supposed to know?”
“Why did you run?”
“Because I was afraid.”
“You didn’t want to get to the house, check if they were okay?”
“I would have run, too,” I said. “You’d know that the neighbors would do whatever you could do. That the cops were on their way. And you also knew that whatever happened was no accident, too, right?”
Anderson was crying now. There had been no change in his facial expression or posture, no indication he knew it was happening. His cheeks had been dry, and now they were wet. He put his coffee cup unsteadily back on the table.
“I should have gone in there anyway,” he said.
The truth was yes, he should have—assuming he could’ve held back from contact with his wife or child, thus muddying what might otherwise have been a strong forensic defense. But he didn’t need to hear that.
“You’re going to feel that way, of course, but it’s the past and there’s no changing it. They were dead before you entered the street. There was nothing you could have achieved except getting caught or killed, too. You understand that, right? It’s important that you do.”
He didn’t say anything. Up at the cook’s station, the grill flared suddenly, as a couple more burgers got flipped. Two children down at the far end of the diner were bickering about something, noisily, going at it so hard you almost believed they’d remember what it was tomorrow.
“Bill,” Fisher said, “I know it’s tough, but—”
“Oh, you know?” Anderson said. He turned away from us, the action resolute and possibly permanent. “You have absolutely no…”
His head dropped. He wasn’t going to say any more.
Fisher made a face. I let a silence settle, allowed Anderson to follow whatever thought was in his head and be left empty when it had gone.
“My father was murdered,” I said.
It felt strange to say it, to unearth this fact that lay as a semipermanent coloration in the back of my mind and had for so long that it was hard to believe that everyone didn’t already know. Strange, and also calculating. But if anyone was entitled to use this information, surely it was me.
Fisher stared at me. “I never knew that.”
“You wouldn’t. It happened a couple years after we left school. While I was at college.”