A man was sitting behind the desk, his face bathed in the pale light of a laptop screen. He looked up mildly. I stared at him.
“Ben?” I said.
Fisher stopped in his tracks. Ben Zimmerman looked at him, then at me.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “You were right.”
“Who?” I said. “Was right? About what?”
“I did warn you,” said another voice. I turned to see Bobbi Zimmerman standing by the other wall.
“First time she met you,” Ben said, to me this time. “Bobbi said you were trouble. I should listen more often.”
“Yes, you should,” his wife said.
Ben went back to typing. I realized I was still pointing my gun at him. I lowered my arm. It hadn’t seemed to unsettle him much. He looked different from any way I’d seen him in Birch Crossing. Instead of the usual battered khakis and sweater, he was wearing a dark suit with a shirt and tie, and his entire posture was altered. Gone was the stooped air of benign neglect. He didn’t look like a history professor anymore, and I knew immediately where I’d seen his likeness.
“Jack,” Fisher said. “How do you know this guy?”
“He’s my neighbor,” I said. There were blotches of color on Fisher’s cheeks, and the lines around his eyes were more pronounced than ever. “His name is Ben Zimmerman.”
“No,” Fisher said. He sounded like a petulant child. “It’s Ben Lytton. He’s one of the Cranfield lawyers. He’s the one who came to our office in Chicago.”
I pulled out the photos that had been there since Fisher gave them to me, only a couple days before and five minutes’ walk away. “So how come you couldn’t tell he was the man you photographed with Amy?”
Fisher looked at the photo, back at Ben. He seemed baffled. “I was a block away. I didn’t see his face.”
Ben ignored the whole exchange.
“Which is it?” I asked him. “Your name?”
“Zimmerman,” Ben said, without looking up.
“So why did you say it was Lytton?” Fisher said.
Ben’s fingers kept on going tap-tap-tap. “It’s traditional,” Bobbi said. “Lytton has been dead for quite some time. As has Burnell. This is rather an old firm.”
Fisher stared at her. “And who the hell are you?”
Ben looked up at me. “Mr. Fisher was never judged to be worth troubling about, what with…his situation. But you I foresee problems with, Jack. Something might have to be done.”
“Is that a threat? If so, be careful.”
“I’m well aware of your record.”
Fisher looked at me. “What’s he talking about?”
“Jack has shown a certain facility with violence,” Bobbi said. “Didn’t you know?”
My face felt hot. I was finding it hard to understand how come these people knew a lot more than they had any right to about my life. Had Amy told them?
Fisher was still staring at me. “What does she mean?”
“There was an incident,” I said as I remembered that Amy had been at the Zimmermans’ the morning I’d called after waking up in Seattle—when Bobbi handed the phone to her. “I saw suspicious activity one night. Found that the back door of a house had been forced. I went inside.”
“And?”
“People got hurt.”
Suddenly the phone rang, the jangling we’d heard from downstairs. The sound was coming from Zimmerman’s laptop. Ben reached forward, hit a key.
“Coming to collect,” said a woman’s voice from the laptop’s speakers. It sounded like the voice that had called my phone to derail me from confronting Todd Crane a couple days before.
Ben stood and started gathering papers from around the desk. Bobbi came over and picked up a handful of manila folders. They seemed to be in a hurry.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Is Shepherd here yet?” Ben asked, looking up and smiling briefly. I realized he wasn’t looking at me.
“On his way,” said a voice.
I turned to see two men standing in the doorway. One was blond. The other had short red hair. Both were armed this time. I realized that Georj had been right after all. These guys hadn’t come into the alley for him.
That didn’t seem important right then, however, because between them stood a third person. A woman.
My wife.
My head felt cold and my body as if it had turned to air. I couldn’t move. “Amy?”
She didn’t even look at me. It was as if my voice had made no sound. The Zimmermans walked past me.
“Out the back,” Amy said.
The red-haired man raised his gun to point it at me. “Your weapon, please,” the other man said.
“Yeah, right.”
Finally Amy glanced at me. “Do as he says, Mr. Whalen.”
“Amy…what…”
She just reached out, took the gun from my hand, and gave it to the red-haired man. Then she turned and left.
The two men backed out of the room after her and pulled the door shut.
As Fisher and I stared at it, we heard it lock.
chapter
THIRTY-EIGHT
When the phone rang, Todd yanked it out of his pocket so fast it slipped and went skittering across the sidewalk. He crawled after it on hands and knees, people snorting and laughing and not moving out of the way. He was beyond noticing. He’d spent three hours walking the streets. He couldn’t have gone back to his office, dealt with Bianca or the rest of them. He couldn’t possibly go home. He had to do something, and so he’d walked, attempting to lose himself in the press of normal people, trying not to feel once again that the streets were even more crowded than they looked, growing more so as the evening came on, that this feeling was worse than ever before.
“Yes?” he said into the phone.
It was Rose. She gave him the address. It was where it was supposed to be. Todd knew it well. A long time ago, he’d spent many hours in the building, supervising shoots, sitting in a chair with his name stenciled on it, selecting which PA would receive the offer of a quick and expensive dinner somewhere discreet. Since then, more than once, he’d raised the question of selling it. He had not been allowed to. Even though it was never used anymore and had small trees growing out of the roof, apparently it had to be kept. Maybe now he knew why.
As soon as Rose had gone, he called his daughter’s number. He gripped the phone till it nearly broke. Finally the other end picked up.
“Todd.” The little girl’s voice.
“It’s happening,” he said. “Now.”
“Excellent.”
“It’s in—”
“Belltown?”
“How did you know she’d choose where you wanted?”
“Because I’m a clever little girl. They changed the locks. They have something there that belongs to me.”
“Let me talk to my daughter.”
“She’s fine. How else do you think I’m going to get there? You remember what her car looks like, I assume?”
“Of course I—”
“Keep an eye out for it.”
Todd shouted in the street, a hopeless sound. He reeled off the main sidewalk and into an alley between buildings, away from normal people. He knew that the police couldn’t help him now, that this was about that building, and those people, and the things he’d never tried to understand.
He started to run.
When he got to the address, he was appalled to see police cars parked in the street. A tall black guy was hollering as he was manhandled into the back of one of them, barely twenty feet away from the door to the building.
Todd’s head was pounding from the journey, and his lungs were on fire. He looked at his watch—he’d made it here in fifteen minutes. Would the police be moving on in the next twenty? If not…Todd suddenly came to believe he was about to have a heart attack.