“My field is wave dynamics,” he said. “Specifically those relating to sound. At college I just cover the physics of it, basically. But a couple years ago, I started to get interested in broader issues. How sound affects us in other ways.”
“Like how?” I said. After only a few sentences, I was finding it hard to believe that this was going to relate to anything of importance in my world.
Anderson’s response showed he’d read something of this in my face. “Sound is underestimated,” he said earnestly. “We all go on about seeing things, but sound is a lot more important than people realize. It gets taken for granted. Everybody knows we played heavy rock at Noriega to flush him out. Some people know that music was used when the FBI stormed Waco. But there’s a lot more to it than bombarding people with tunes they don’t like. You go to a restaurant where there’s loud music, and see how much less you enjoy eating. You can’t concentrate on the food—you almost can’t even taste it. Part of the brain switches off. Or you hear a piece of music, some song, for the first time in years, and it takes you right back to the time you associate with it. You’ll feel the same, even remember smells, tastes, relive other sensory data from this other time. You know this, right?”
“I guess. Yes, I do.”
Talking through something he cared about seemed to have momentarily helped Anderson forget the rest of his world. “Or you’re alone at night, in a place you don’t know—and all at once you hear a noise. It doesn’t matter that you can’t see anything wrong—suddenly sight doesn’t rule the roost anymore. You don’t need to see anything to be scared out of your wits. Your brain and body understand that sound matters a whole lot.”
“Okay,” I said. I knew I had to let him talk, but for some reason I felt unsettled, uncomfortable. I still couldn’t see Fisher, and this was beginning to stretch the length of a viable trip to the john. “I’ll take your word for this, Bill. You’re the science guy. But what’s your point? What were you working on specifically?”
“Infrasound,” he said. “Very-low-frequency sounds. Most people have been looking at eighteen hertz, but I went to nineteen hertz. It has…effects. Your eyes may water or blur when you’re exposed to it. You can get odd sensations in your ears, hyperventilation, muscle tension—a physicist called Vladimir Gavreau actually claimed that infrasound is a key component in urban anxiety. More simply, it just makes you feel like you’re afraid. And if you hit the resonant frequency of the human eye, which is right around this point, you can start thinking you’re seeing odd things, too. Everyone’s been assuming this is physiological, just a side effect of the physics of the eye, but it’s…not. It’s more complicated. Infrasound does strange things to us. Very strange things. It enables us to glimpse things we can’t normally see.”
I found myself looking around the restaurant, just as I’d told Anderson not to do. I saw nothing to explain what I was feeling, a sensation I didn’t even know how to describe. I looked out through the open door into the crowds. Just people, moving back and forth.
“What kinds of things, Bill? What are you actually talking about here? What was it that you did?”
I pulled my eyes back to him. He was looking down at his hands. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.
“I made a ghost machine,” he said.
But that’s when I saw a tall figure heading toward the diner through the crowds, walking quickly. He was dressed in a dark coat and looking not left or right but straight at Anderson.
“Get down,” I said quickly.
Anderson blinked at me, confused. I tried to stand, pushing him to one side as I rose, but I got caught under the table. I saw Fisher coming around the side of the center station, coffee cups in hand, just as the man in the coat pushed his way into the restaurant and removed one hand from an inside pocket.
I finally got clear of the table and shoved Anderson harder, shouting, “Bill, get out of the—”
It was too late. The man fired three times, measured, unhurried shots from a silenced handgun.
He’d disappeared back into the crowd before I even realized that none of the bullets had hit me. The shots had been quiet, but the sight of Anderson’s blood as it sprayed across the window was not—and everybody started running and shouting at once. When I bent over Anderson’s body and tried to find where he’d been shot, I couldn’t hear what he tried to say to me through the noise and the blood welling up out of his mouth, but I saw it open and close and knew it would be for the last time.
chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN
“He’s dead.”
I looked up to see Blanchard standing over me. It was two hours since Anderson had been shot, and I was sitting in a plastic chair in a corridor of a hospital I didn’t know the name of. A crowd of cops were standing down the far end. I’d been interviewed by two of them.
“So where does that leave us?”
“No idea,” he said. “And there is no ‘us.’ Be clear on that. I’m only here because I used to partner one of the lead detectives. You’re here as a courtesy and because witnesses are very firm on how you reacted when the gunman came in. Where’s your buddy? Fisher?”
“Getting some air.”
Blanchard sat down heavily in the chair beside me. “What the fuck happened? Really?”
“What I told you. We got a message to Anderson through one of his colleagues. He came to talk to us.”
“Why? That’s what I don’t get. Why you?”
“Maybe because our pitch was that we knew he didn’t kill his family. We arranged to meet at the diner, at Anderson’s suggestion. How the guy with the gun found him, I have absolutely no idea.”
“What did you get out of Anderson?”
“He’d barely started to open up before it happened. He received the check I told you about but didn’t do anything with it because it came with conditions he wasn’t prepared to meet.”
“Which were?”
“That he stop work on some private project.”
“Which was?”
“We were getting into that when the ceiling fell in.”
Blanchard turned to look at me but didn’t say anything.
I shrugged. “Believe what you like. I was helping Gary out. Now that Anderson’s been found, it’s over. It’s up to your guys to sort out the mess.”
“Mess?”
“This makes Anderson a strikingly less credible suspect for the double homicide, don’t you think?”
“Doesn’t have to be any link between the two events.”
“Yeah, right. I’ll just bet everyone in SPD is telling themselves that. Better than admitting they spent a month looking for an innocent man and not finding him before someone came from nowhere and blew him away.”
“Anderson fucked himself. He should have turned himself in. Gotten in contact, at least.”
“That what you would have done under the circumstances?”
“Yes.”
I nodded slowly. Truth was that I still didn’t really get why Anderson had done as he had. I’d only intercepted when Fisher had pushed him on it because I knew that increasing Anderson’s feelings of guilt was not the way to get him to talk. Coupled with the caginess of his response when talking about his work, however, plus Chen and others’ view that he’d been on edge before the murders took place, I believed that Anderson had felt himself to be in a dangerous position even before the events of that night. The covering letter with the bequest had carried ominous weight. Was that enough to explain his running from the scene? Or was it something inherent to the work he’d been doing? Was he already spooked?