“Which people, Gary? Your two-year-old and a dead businessman from Illinois? They had some conspiracy going between the two of them? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Jack—of course not. There’s more of them, all over the world. A group who’ve organized things so they can come back, who’ve done it time and time again—figured out how to do this hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years ago. You said it yourself, back at school. You said that thing about Donna, remember? That she came into the world knowing things.”
“Gary, that was just a figure of speech. I was eighteen, for Christ’s sake. I was just trying to sound smart.”
“But you were right. That’s the thing—some people do come into life knowing things they shouldn’t, or at least the second soul that lives inside them does. A group of people figured out that they could come back, get into other people’s heads. Hitch along for another ride. They found ways of reminding themselves who they’d been before. They started to plan ahead, coming up with ways to be truly themselves next time, instead of just thoughts in the back of someone else’s head. This is why some people are born bad, Jack. This is—”
“Gary, listen to someone with experience. People are not born bad—”
“Really? You think all cops would say the same? All social workers? All defense lawyers? All the parents out there dealing with a kid who just cannot seem to behave, who is determined to go through all the wrong doors and kick them hard? Some of the intruders are good people, decent people. Joe Cranfield was. But some of them are not. They only come back because they didn’t fuck the world hard enough last time. The intruders wait until they’ve seen that a baby’s not going to die of some infant-mortality thing, then bed down inside it. This is why tantrums start around age two or three—as two souls start to struggle together for prominence. And why some kids have nightmares for the next five, six years, as they try to fend these things off in their sleep—confused, frightened, not understanding what’s moving into their heads in the night, when they’re vulnerable and weak. Note how prodigies always either die young or go nuts, Jack. It’s okay if you know what’s going on, if the intruder takes center stage and is in conscious charge of its destiny—if it’s part of the gang. But if you don’t know that this is what’s happening to you, then it’s too confusing and too much of the endless inner voices, and people drink or drug themselves to death or go insane.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. “I keep failing to hear how my wife fits into any of this bullshit, Gary.”
“The firm that handled Joe’s estate works out of the building that has her name on the papers, Jack. Burnell and Lytton are tied in to the organization that keeps the system going. The intruders must have to fiscally reboot each time; otherwise you’d have people with huge amounts of cash they’d accumulated, without any inheritance route, which would blow things out into the open. So my guess is that when you’re coming to the end of your present lifetime, you have to get rid of everything. Start next time afresh. Which is what—”
“Gary, you can’t use a lack of something to prove—”
“I know that, Jack—I’m a fucking lawyer. But face it: Amy and Cranfield are connected. In the end it comes back to the ten percent kept aside from Cranfield’s estate. I didn’t tell you one thing because I didn’t think you’d believe any of this back then.”
“I don’t believe any of it now.”
“The charity Burnell and Lytton helps administer? The Psychomachy Trust. You won’t find the word in a modern dictionary. So at first I assumed it was made up. But it was in use a couple hundred years ago. It means ‘a conflict between the body and the soul’—or between a person and the thing that’s inside. The trust’s a front. When an intruder dies, it pays a tithe—in Cranfield’s case nearly twenty-six million dollars. This money is used to keep the system going, or staff, or…Look, I don’t know exactly how it all works,” he admitted irritably. “But—”
“Okay,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to leave now. And seriously, Gary—go home. I mean it. Spend some time with your family and talk to someone good before this gets any worse.”
“I don’t blame you for thinking I’m…I know this sounds very strange,” Fisher said. “I have evidence, Jack, lots of it. I’ve done my research. But you already know what some people are like. The dissatisfaction, the yearning to be or to have someone or something else, people who can’t stop themselves from doing things they know are wrong, other people who seem to be able to tap into some kind of higher power right from the get-go.”
I was putting my gun in my jacket by now—I wasn’t going to need it here, I could see that, and being in this room with Fisher was making me feel worse even than talking to Anderson had. I wanted out.
But I hesitated. I guess I was thinking of a woman who’d had nightmares as a child, started talking in her sleep a year ago. Who was not behaving like the woman I knew. Who almost smelled different. Since Natalie had asked me the question, I’d been forced to realize that, when I thought back, Amy had been changing subtly over the last couple of years, from even before what had happened with our son. Was all of this explicable through the hidden presence of another man? Some tea-drinking, pink-liking enabler, promoting the emergence of a different Amy? Was it simply time in her journey for a change, a chaotic swerve into midlife, with old baggage being abruptly thrown over the side?
Or was there something else going on?
I shook my head. No. I was leaping at anything that would explain Amy’s behavior in a way less injurious to me, less to do with lack of love and irreversible change. Almost anything felt better than the obvious.
However ludicrous.
“So why did they kill Anderson?” I asked, losing momentum. “What does he have to do with this?”
“You tell me. You were the guy he talked to.”
“He barely said anything before he got shot.”
“Right. And what was that about? What could a man like Anderson do that would provoke someone to tear down his life and shoot him to death in a public place? You think that killer was working alone? Of course not. So what merits all this? What’s big enough? Tell me.”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I—”
My phone rang. I yanked it out. “Hello?”
“Mother fucker,” a voice said.
I swore. I’d forgotten just how much some guys won’t give up on the prospect of an easy buck. “L.T.,” I said. “I meant to block your number. I’ll do it now.”
“You owe me. Last chance.”
“Or what? I owe you shit. I already told you, I’m not interested.”
“You sure? They here now.”
“Who is?”
“At the place. Three people just go in.”
I reevaluated. “Into the building? What did they look like?”
“You interested now, huh?”
“Just tell me what they look like.”
“Like any other white motherfuckers. One a businessman. He wearing a suit. Other two, I don’t know.”
“Stay where you are. Call me if they leave.”
I closed the phone. Fisher was sitting on the bed, staring at the frozen image of his daughter on the screen. He looked older. Older and smaller and alone. There were wet tracks down both of his cheeks.
“What?” I asked, feeling cold. “Gary?”
“I miss her,” he said quietly. “I miss them all.”
“So go home. Forget about all this.”
“It’s too late for that.” He looked at me. “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe in this.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. But some people just went into the building in Belltown. You want to find out who they are?”