To prove to myself that I wasn’t drunk, see?
So I was back to someone else putting it there. And that left me in the middle of my own question, a question I appeared unable to solve and had no one to ask about.
Just after seven, Fisher walked into the bar. He was with someone. They came to where I was sitting in the corner.
“Who’s this?”
“Peter Chen,” Fisher said. “A friend of Bill Anderson’s. They were out together on the night that…you know.”
Chen was one of those slender, round-shouldered guys whose body knows that its sole function is to chauffeur the brain around. I put out my hand, and he shook it. It was like briefly holding the hand of a child.
He looked at Fisher with mild accusation. “You said he wasn’t a cop.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Listen, Peter, just sit down.”
He did, diffidently. Looked dubiously at a small bowl of nuts the waitress had brought against my will.
“Why did you want reassurance you weren’t being brought to talk to a policeman?” I asked. “You don’t present like someone with problems with the law.”
“Of course not,” Chen said. “It’s just that they’re so wrong about Bill, and I’m tired of listening to them bad-mouth him.”
“We’re aware that Bill didn’t kill Gina or Josh.”
“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.”