“But evidently this is what he wanted.”
“It still doesn’t make sense. I’m boring my wife senseless about it, barely spending any time with the kids. And so I went to visit Cranfield’s widow. I’d met Norma often over the years, had dinner at the house a few times. This is not some trophy wife. They’d been together fifty years. So I went up to the house a few weeks ago and sat with her in a big room that’s halfway through being packed up. I listened to how she was going to move into a small apartment in town, and every now and then I thought I could sense a confusion behind her eyes, as if she wondered when she was going to wake up. In the end I had to ask. Did she understand what was going on?”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing for a moment. Then she got up and went to a bureau in the corner. Opened a drawer, got something out. A card, old black-and-white photograph of an old pier stuck to the front, by hand. I asked her what the picture showed, and she said it was Monterey, the place she and Cranfield first met. Inside there’s a message, in Joe’s handwriting. It said, ‘Don’t hate me.’”
“That’s it?”
“Those three words. I looked at her, and she shrugged and said, ‘That’s all I know.’ She hadn’t told anyone else about the note. Not even her kids. I drove straight back to the office, sat down with the documentation, and I went over it for the hundredth time. Not to break the thing, but to try to understand. I looked into the nine organizations that got the big money, but there’s nothing strange there. Even the sea otters now made sense, up to a point. Norma told me they had a long weekend in Monterey ten years back, and Joe had been taken with the aquarium, loved watching the otters swim around. So I started looking at the minor beneficiaries. There’s about thirty of them, people like the restaurant-shack woman, small figures from Joe’s distant past. I can make sense of all of them, relate them to some old part of Cranfield’s business, apart from one. A guy who seems to bear no relation to anything Joe’s been into. And so I did a Google search, and that’s when I find out this person lives in Seattle and also that his family has recently become dead.”
“Bill Anderson.”
“He was FedExed a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar check—the same amount Joe’s own grandchildren got, remember. It was signed for seven weeks ago, a whole month before he disappeared. But it still hasn’t been cashed. Four, five years’ salary, and he doesn’t bother banking it? This being, incidentally, another reason I’m inclined to dismiss financial motive in killing his own wife.”
“I can see that,” I said. “And maybe you should have mentioned it when you first came to see me.”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Maybe.”
“Bill is the closest thing I’ve got to a smoking gun with Cranfield’s estate, something to unlock why he did something that no one—not his lawyers or children or his own wife—can understand. And I really did read your book when it came out, because I recognized your name, and I really did need a cop. I think Anderson’s family was killed by an intruder. Your book was even called The Intruders. Tell me it doesn’t make sense for me to come to you, get your advice.”
“Start talking to me about Amy,” I said.
“I’m going to. But you’ve got a bad look on your face, so bear in mind I’m just the messenger. I came over to Seattle again, to look into the Anderson murders. It’s not hard for me to get the time. As you so nicely put it, my stock by then is falling fast.”
I started to say something, but he held up his hand. “No, you were right, Jack. But what you don’t know is what it’s like in my world, once you start to drop rungs. The corporate world is based on confidence and very little else. Either you fix the slide fast or they simply take the ladder away. I’d accepted the glow of association while Joe was alive, so…”
“So what did you find out when you got here?”
“What I told you at your house. Bottom line, if I’m honest, I don’t even really care if Anderson took out his family. I just want to know why he was sent the money and what it means. Meanwhile I’m sitting in a hotel room with a Web connection and time to kill. So I keep digging in any direction I can find. The first road that leads anywhere is the building you and I just visited.”
“The Burnell and Lytton offices.”
“Such as they are. I soon find out they don’t own the property, they lease. The former coffeehouse is no help either. The company’s long dead. Eventually I discovered that for a few years back in the mid-1990s the second floor was rented out as studio space for photography and video shoots—Belltown was a complete hole back then; you could pick up property for next to nothing. It’s not used for that anymore, but the firm still owns the building. That company is called Kerry, Crane, and Hardy.”
I nearly dropped my glass. Fisher rested his hands flat on the table and leaned forward, with the air of a man who’s glad that someone is finally listening to him.
“Yes,” he said. “Didn’t mean anything to me at first. I check them on the Web, find they’re some big ad agency, I can’t see how that leads anywhere. I even called the company but couldn’t get high enough to speak to anyone who knew what I was talking about. It’s just another dead end for now. Which leaves me one final door to push on. Guess what that is?”
“The charity that got the ten percent out of Cranfield’s estate.”
Fisher smiled. “See,” he said quietly. “This is why I believe you can help.”
“What did you find out?”
“The charity is called the Psychomachy Trust, based in Boston. It has zero presence on the radar, never appears to solicit money from private individuals or the public at large. It’s administered by Burnell and Lytton and a few other guys I can’t dredge up anything about, probably not U.S. nationals. The interesting thing is that it’s part of a network. Charity structures are easier to trace because they have to meet tax regulations. This trust, along with others in Paris, Berlin, Jerusalem, Tokyo, and other major cities around the world—they all feed back to a parent organization based in London. It’s old. At least two, three hundred years, gets vaguer before that. Basically, I hit a dead end there, too, but just as that happens, I get hold of more information on the building we’ve just been to. I get a copy of the papers and find out whose names are on them.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Flattened it and put it on the table in front of me. I didn’t look down but lit a cigarette instead, and waited.
“There’s three,” he said. “One of them makes sense right away—Todd Crane, principal in the owning company. The second is a man called Marcus Fox, who I believe was once a business associate of Joe Cranfield’s here in Seattle.”
“It starts to come home.”
“Exactly. Fox disappears from Cranfield’s world in the mid-nineties, can’t find anything more about him. The third name I can’t get anywhere with at all until I have another scout around the Kerry, Crane, and Hardy Web site, where I spot someone with the same first name.”
It wasn’t hard to find, even in a page dense with the minutiae of property law.
The third name was Amy Dyer.
Seeing her name in print made me feel as if the car had finally smacked into me. It took me a while to notice that the document was dated 1992, six years before I’d met her.
“You knew about this when you came to see me.”
“Yes, Jack. I found out that Amy Dyer was now Amy Whalen and that her husband is you. But at that stage she was still just a name on a piece of paper. I came to talk to you, and I heard your view, and I backed off. But I’m kind of camped out in Seattle for the time being and—”
“You’re spending a lot of time away from home.”