“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”
I got up. There was nothing more for me to do here. “I appreciate the way you’ve dealt with this.”
“You’re welcome. Just don’t make me regret it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He looked down at his cupped hands. “I know a little more about the circumstances under which you left the LAPD,” he said. “We wouldn’t want anything like that happening here.”
“Whatever you think you know isn’t what really happened.”
“I know there were some dead guys involved. And you.”
“Am I in jail right now?”
“No. But what I just said still holds.”
“Gotcha.” I started walking away.
“Jack,” he said when I’d gotten about ten feet. “How deeply are you tied in to Fisher’s universe?”
I stopped, turned back. “Not at all. Why?”
“Keep it that way. I also talked to someone in Fisher’s firm. Why do you think he’s here?”
“He’s tying up loose ends for them.”
“Wrong. He’s on enforced leave. ‘Personal reasons.’ The colleague I spoke with was very discreet. But I got the sense they were distancing themselves. If I were you, I’d do the same. I think there’s stuff going on in that guy’s head you don’t know anything about.”
I left, walking more quickly now. Fisher was not standing in front of the hospital. That could have been because of the media presence beginning to build there—the killing had been pretty public—but he wasn’t answering his phone either.
And when I got back to his hotel, the man behind the desk told me he’d checked out a half hour before.
I retrieved my car and drove out of town. On the way down to the freeway, I pulled over opposite Pioneer Square. I got out on impulse and walked over to it. My hands were shaking. I don’t know why. Because of Anderson. Because of what Blanchard had brought up about things that had happened in L.A. I sat on the bench for twenty minutes, taking deep breaths, until I felt okay again.
Then I left the city, headed east toward the mountains. The morning was clear and bright at first, a few fluffy clouds only for decoration. Traffic was light, and I seemed to slip along almost too easily, as if the world was colluding in letting me run from a place where I’d been instrumental in a man’s death.
As I pulled toward the top of the Cascades, it began to get colder, the scene more muted, rusty dogwood the only color among the trees and bushes, their stems looking a little too much like sprays of dried blood. The sky frosted over, and clouds crept down out of it to touch the land, roosting in trees like the ghosts of long-ago campfires, a damp and silent echo of the lives of the people who had once lived peacefully here with the wood and the earth and the water.
Would something of this kind persist now in Byron’s, the impression of a man sitting hunched at a table in slanting morning sunlight, or would people sometimes see or sense a shape at the door or the window of the house up on Broadway, the remains of a man trapped on the other side of a curtain, trying to find his way home?
A shadow of my father had remained in our house in Barstow after his death, I knew that much. My mother had lasted only five months before selling the place and moving to be closer to her sister, of whom she was not overly fond. I went home for the weekend perhaps three, four times during that period, and each time the house felt as if it had been dismantled while I was away and put together again exactly the same. I always felt like I was trying to catch up with what had happened in it, partly because of the way I’d received the news.
At college I had a notably progressive professor who, among other fine qualities, was open to having favored students hanging out at his house on Friday evenings and—while engaged in suitably brainy talk—helping themselves to the alcohol-based contents of his fridge. It had been on a morning following one of these freewheeling tutorials that I’d woken to the knock of two cops on my dorm-room door. I was hung-over, majorly freaked out—there was a small stash of marijuana in my drawer—and their presence made me feel caught out, late, permanently off balance.
My father was found on the kitchen floor, wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else. He’d heard something in the night, come down to investigate—as men must. He had suffered extensive stab wounds from a large, serrated hunting knife but died of blows to the head from a claw hammer. The hammer lay next to him on the floor. It was his. I’d been with him when he bought it, on a Saturday-morning walk, and had watched him use it to mend chairs and fences and put up pictures. As I’d told Anderson, the intruders had stolen little. The household’s money had always gone toward making sure that there was good food on the table, that I had clothes and the books I needed for school. The stuff that matters can’t be taken—except, I suppose, for fathers: stolen by strangers looking to finance the evening’s drinking or a new set of tires or a bet on a horse that was already set to lose.
It was clear that whoever had shattered Bill Anderson’s life had not been on so mundane a quest. In a few days, it would rotate off the television and radio coverage, but not out of my life. I had lied to Blanchard. Up until 8:51 that morning, Anderson’s existence had been of tangential relevance to my own. But no longer. There is an intimacy to carrying someone else’s blood on your hands, in seeing their eyes as they realize the sharp and finite limit to how much more of the world they themselves will see. Anderson’s soul had now been nailed to my own, which meant that Joe Cranfield’s estate and the building in Belltown were problems I had to solve, together with the question of how this related to my wife.
By the time I turned off onto 97 and started into the woods toward Birch Crossing, I knew that this was something I could not now let go of, and that this would not be a good thing for me, or for others. The God of Bad Things still knew where I lived. He always would. If I did nothing, he would come and find me anyway.
Maybe it was time to take the fight to him.
chapter
TWENTY-EIGHT
Madison’s second night on the streets had felt even longer than the first. After going to see the silly man in his office—an episode that was a little cloudy to her now—she had walked for quite a while. She bought some food at a small market and ate it in a park, and cried for a bit, then went walking again, going on and on, long after all the stores and restaurants were shut, keeping to alleys and moving within shadows. She stood for a while in front of a building that was boarded up, even went and pressed on one of the buzzers. She took out the keys she’d found in the back of the notebook, tried them in the door. They did not fit. This annoyed her a great deal. Something had been stolen from her, she now believed. This was where it was.
She turned away from the building and stalked back into downtown and along near the Barnes & Noble, past the public library with its weird glass and metal. She let herself be led down the right side of the slope, diagonally toward the bay. She walked for so long that after a while it seemed to her that she was asleep and only dreaming that she was a little girl, always on the move, trying to find something she knew was important. The only problem was, no one had ever told her what that something was. She finally wound up in an area from which she had no inclination to move. It was a tiny park in front of an old building, but there was nothing obviously special about it—except, she noticed, that the building had the name “Yesler” on it, one she recognized from reading the notebook. The park had no grass, just trees and a covered place to sit and a totem pole. There was also a small statue of an Indian chief’s head, where you could get a drink of water.