She seemed to take his silence as acquiescence. “When I arise, bright like a phoenix from Lethe’s snoozy flames, there’s someone I very much want to meet again. A mutual friend. You’re going to make it happen.”
“I can’t imagine who you’re talking about,” Todd said, finally pressing the button, glad to be on solid ground. “We don’t feature anyone from boy bands or TV shows. It’s a policy.”
“A ‘boy band’? What on earth are you talking about?”
He heard his assistant’s door opening along the corridor, then her hurried footsteps. Bianca was paid 20 percent more than anyone else at the same job level in the company. She was worth it.
The little girl heard it, too. Her face darkened. “Toddy, this is one of those times where you can make a bad choice or a good one. Don’t fuck it up.”
The door opened, and Bianca came striding in. “This person’s going to leave now,” Crane told her.
The girl sighed histrionically. He ignored her. “If she makes a fuss, call the police. She’s here under false pretenses, wants to meet a celebrity.”
Bianca stood by the chair, looking balefully down at the girl. “On your feet,” she said. “Now, princess.”
“Oh, you tedious people,” the girl muttered wearily. She stood, ignoring the hand Bianca held out, her eyes still on Crane. “I don’t want to cause a fuss. You’re forcing my hand, don’t you see?”
Todd retreated stiffly behind his desk. Bianca would handle this, had indeed already taken the girl’s upper arm in her hand and gotten her as far as the open door.
He looked down at his papers, suddenly anxious to immerse himself in work. There was something about the way the girl had spoken in the closing stages that was tugging at him. Tugging hard.
“Good-bye,” he muttered.
The girl winked. “Watch your back,” she said, and then she was gone.
Todd Crane’s head jerked up, and he stared after her as she disappeared down the corridor.
Five minutes later he saw her emerge into Post Alley, two stories below. She drifted to a halt. Slowly she started to turn, to raise her head—and though Todd darted back from the window as quickly as he could, she caught him.
When he leaned cautiously back, she was still there, looking right up at him. She shifted her face into something that was like a smile and raised one hand, the index finger extended. Using her whole arm, she moved it to describe a symbol in the air. A short spiral, like the number 9.
Then she turned away as if he were of no account and walked rapidly up the alley and out of sight.
Todd watched the alley a little longer, in case she came back. He wasn’t really sure why the prospect worried him. Something about that last phrase. It had seemed so ridiculous, coming from a little girl, that it…it had reminded him of something. Someone.
A meaningless coincidence, nothing more, the mind joining unrelated dots from across the years. Time was weighing on him, that’s all—he’d worked that out before. What he needed was a rejuvenator. He tried to remember exactly what Jenni in reception looked like and was a little worried to find that he could not. He could redress that later. Perhaps over a drink.
As his mind clicked back onto old paths and the work in front of him started to get done, Todd began to feel more like himself once again.
chapter
TWENTY-TWO
The Anderson house was on Federal, near Broadway Avenue, up on the ridge overlooking downtown and Elliott Bay. The avenue itself is a major thoroughfare, a long, wide street sparsely lined with generic businesses, redbrick banks, and more places to buy coffee. As a nation in general, we like our coffee, but the Northwest is insane on the subject. I’m surprised you can’t get it out of ATMs. Federal was a couple of streets back and overhung with big trees now shedding copper and yellow leaves. The speed limit was twenty, because people actually walked around here, and many houses had low hedges that someone remembered to cut or picket fences that had been painted sometime in living memory. Most were small. The cars on the street also said you did not have to be rich to live here, but it was easy to see why you might want to be.
The house itself was one back from a crossroads. Evidence of fire damage was minor from the outside, though the street-level windows had been covered with plywood sheets. I walked straight up the stairs onto the shallow porch, which is what you do when you have a right to be there. The door was sealed with tape, but I had a tool ready for that and another to pop the lock. A lot of cops have rudimentary breaking-and-entering skills. Mine are a little better than most.
I stepped into a dark space that smelled of old smoke and shut the door behind me.
I stood still for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust. There was little ambient light making its way around the window boards, however, and it didn’t get any better than very dark. I reached out to the side of the doorway and found a switch. The lights came on, the bill presumably still being automatically paid from the account of a man whose whereabouts were unknown.
I went upstairs first. Other than the smell and some shadowing on the walls, the fire had made few inroads here. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, another room used for storage and a home office. A hatch in the hall ceiling opened into a roof space thick with dust that had not been recently disturbed. I looked quickly through the bedrooms, doing little more than opening drawers and glancing into closets, then checked the obvious hiding places in the bathroom. Found evidence for nothing more than a middle-aged couple living with a teenage son. No sign of anywhere a gun would likely have been stowed, either: no lockbox, no wrap cloth, no carton of old shells.
Then I went back downstairs and halted a couple of steps short of the bottom to look down over the living room. The air was dead and quiet. This was obviously where Joshua Anderson had died, given the oblique blood splatter across one smoke-stained wall and the charred patch in the carpet. I descended the last couple of steps and walked around the room, not trying to make anything of it. There was no telling the degree to which things had been moved after the crime-scene people had logged and recorded the environment. But I was already beginning to think I could tell what had happened here. I’d seen it many times before.
I went through into the kitchen, then back across the hall to a den containing a smaller TV with a PlayStation attached and walls lined with shelves of DVDs and books. The latter broke down into paperback novels of a King/Koontz/Rice bent and a large array of hardcovers and papers relating to the physical sciences. Bill Anderson’s, presumably. I ran my eyes around these for a while, seeing a few titles that surprised me—Cremo, Corliss, Hancock, alternative-archaeology theorists—but it was not enough to stop me from leaving the room.
To one side of the doorway into the kitchen was another, narrower door. Beyond it lay a flight of makeshift steps down to the basement. When I reached the bottom, I found a pull cord that shed light over the most damaged part of the house. The floor was ankle deep with charred shreds of paper that had been burned and then soaked. The remains of a wooden workbench lay along one wall. Tools and electrical components of various sizes were mixed in with the other mess, and a couple of buckled filing cabinets lay on their sides down at the end. It didn’t look like someone had merely trashed the basement. It looked like a bomb had gone off.
Sometimes you have to be in the place. You have to stand there to tell.
People do strange things in their own environments, behave in ways you or I might find impossible to understand. But the chaotic intrusion of otherness leaves a distinctive quality, creates a fracture at some very deep level. The place is changed.