The Intruders Read online

  The Intruders

  Michael Marshall

  For ex-cop Jack Whalen, it all begins with a visit from a childhood friend, a lawyer who needs Jack's help. The family of a noted scientist has been senselessly, brutally murdered, and the scientist is nowhere to be found.

  But Jack has more pressing concerns. The past that drove him from the L.A.P.D. continues to haunt him. And his wife has disappeared during a routine business trip to Seattle. She never checked into her hotel, she isn't answering her cell phone. She is gone.

  A third missing person, a little girl in Oregon, is found miles away. But it soon becomes obvious that she is not an innocent victim . . . and far from defenseless.

  Something very strange is happening—a perplexing series of troubling events that's leading Jack Whalen into the shadows. And the secrets buried there are unlike anything he, or anyone, could possibly have imagined.

  THE INTRUDERS

  Michael Marshall

  For Nathaniel

  —I did it

  How can we be sure we are not impostors?

  —Jacques Lacan

  The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

  Prologue

  Thump, thump, thump. You could hear it halfway up the street. It was bizarre that the neighbors didn’t complain. Or do so more often and more stridently. Gina sure as hell would—especially if the music sucked this bad. She knew she ought to go upstairs as soon as she got indoors, yell at Josh to turn it down. She also knew he’d look at her in that way teenagers have, like they’re wondering who you are and what gives you the right to bother them and what the hell happened in your life to make you so boring and old. He was a good son at heart, though, and so he’d roll his eyes and nudge the stereo down a notch, and then over the next half hour the volume would creep up until it was even louder than before.

  Usually Bill was around to get into it with him—if he wasn’t hidden in his basement, tinkering—but tonight he was out with a couple of faculty colleagues. That was good, partly so he could get the bowling out of his system without involving Gina, who couldn’t stand the dumb sport, and also because he went out very seldom. They usually managed to grab a meal somewhere once every couple weeks, just the two of them, but most evenings this year had seen him disappearing downstairs after dinner, wrench in hand and a pleasurably preoccupied look on his face. For a while he’d generated his own strange noises down there, low booming sounds you felt in the pit of your stomach, but thankfully that had stopped. It was healthy for a guy to get out of the house now and then, hang with other guys—even if Pete Chen and Gerry Johnson were two of the geekiest dudes Gina had met in her entire life, and she found it impossible to imagine them cutting loose at bowling or drinking or indeed anything at all that didn’t involve UNIX and/or a soldering iron. It also gave Gina a little time to herself, which—no matter how much you love your husband—is a nice thing once in a while. Her plan was a couple hours in front of the tube with her choice of show—screw the documentary channels. In preparation she’d gone to the big deli on Broadway, picked up groceries for the week and a handful of deluxe nibbles for right now.

  As she opened the door to the house and stepped into a zone of even higher volume, she wondered if Josh ever considered that his vanilla mom might have rocked out on her own account, back in the day. That before she’d fallen in love with a young physics lecturer named Bill Anderson and settled down to a life of happy domesticity, she’d done plenty time in the grungier venues of Seattle-Tacoma and its environs, had been no stranger to high volume, cheap beer, and waking up with a head that felt like someone had gone at it with hammers. That she’d bounced sweatily to Pearl Jam and Ideal Mausoleum and even Nirvana—back when they were local unknowns and sharp and hungry instead of hollow-faced and dying—most memorably on a summer night when she’d puked while crowd surfing, been dropped on her head, and still got lucky in the soaking and dope-reeking restrooms with some guy she’d never met before and never saw again.

  Probably not. She smiled to herself.

  Just went to show kids didn’t know everything, huh?

  An hour later she’d had enough. The thumping was okay while she was just watching with half an eye—and the volume had actually dropped for a while, which maybe suggested he was doing some homework, and that was a relief—but it had started ratcheting up again, and in ten minutes there was a rerun of a West Wing episode she’d never seen before. You needed a clear head and peace and quiet to follow what the hell was going on with those guys, they talked so fast. Plus, Jesus, it was half past nine and getting beyond a joke.

  She tried hollering up at the ceiling (Josh’s bedroom was directly overhead) but received no indication she’d been heard. So she sighed, put her depleted plate of goodies on the coffee table, and hoisted herself off the couch. Trudged upstairs, feeling as if she were pushing against a wall of noise, and banged on his door.

  After a fairly short time, it was opened by some skinny guy with extraordinary hair. For a split second, Gina didn’t even recognize him. She wasn’t looking at a boy anymore, nothing like, and Gina realized suddenly that she and Bill were sharing their house with a young man.

  “Honey,” she said, “I don’t want to cramp your style, but do you have anything that’s more like actual music, if you’re going to play it that loud?”

  “Huh?”

  “Turn it down.”

  He grinned lopsidedly and walked into the room to jack the volume back. He actually cut it in half, which emboldened Gina to take a step into his room. It struck her that it had been a while since she’d been there when he was also present. In years past she and Bill had spent hours sitting on the floor here together, watching their toddler careering around on wobbly legs and bringing them random objects with a triumphant “Gah!,” thinking how magical it all was, then later tucking him in and reading a story, or two, or three; then perched on the bed in the early years of homework and puzzling out math problems.

  At some point in the last year, the rules had changed. It was a solo mission now when she came in to fix the bed or sweep up piles of T-shirts. She was in and out quickly, too, remembering her own youth well enough to respect her child’s space.

  She saw that, among the chaos of clothing and CD cases and pieces of at least one dismembered computer, there was evidence of homework being tackled.

  “How’s it going?”

  He shrugged. Shrugging was the lingua franca. She remembered that, too. “Okay,” he added.

  “Good. Who’s that you’re listening to anyway?”

  Josh blushed faintly, as if his mom had asked who this Connie Lingus was, that everyone was talking about.

  “Stu Rezni,” he said diffidently. “He—”

  “Used to hit sticks for Fallow. I know. I saw him at the Astoria. Before they knocked it down. He was so wasted he fell off his stool.”

  She was gratified to see her son’s eyebrows shoot up. She tried not to smile.

  “Can you keep the volume sane for a while, honey? There’s a show I want to watch. Plus, people are staggering up the street with bleeding ears, and you know what that does to property values.”

  “Sure,” he said with a genuine smile. “Sorry.”

  “No problem,” she said, thinking, I hope he’s going to be okay. He was a nice boy, polite, a slacker who still got (most of) his chores done eventually. She hoped without a trace of egotism that he’d taken on enough of her, too, along with the big old helping of Bill he’d absorbed. This young man already spent a lot of time alone, and he seldom seemed more content than when taking something apart or putting it back together. That was cool, of course, but she hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she saw evidence of his first hangover. Man cannot live by coding skills alone, not
even in these strange days.

  “Later,” she said, hoping it didn’t sound too lame.

  The doorbell rang.

  As she hurried downstairs, she heard the volume drop a little further and smiled. She still had this expression on her face when she opened the front door.

  It was dark outside, the streetlamps at the corner spreading orange light over the fallen leaves on the lawn and sidewalk. A strong breeze rustled those still left on the trees, sending a few to spiral down and around the crossroads where the two residential streets met.

  A figure was standing a couple of yards back from the door. It was tall, wearing a long, dark coat.

  “Yes?” Gina said.

  She flipped the porch light on. It showed a man in his mid-fifties, with short, dark hair, sallow skin in flat planes around his face. His eyes seemed dark, too, almost black. They gave no impression of depth, as if they had been painted on his head from the outside.

  “I’m looking for William Anderson,” he said.

  “He’s not here right now. Who are you?”

  “Agent Shepherd, FBI,” the man said, and then paused, for a deep cough. “Mind if I come inside?”

  Gina did mind, but he just stepped up onto the porch and walked right past her and into the house.

  “Hold on a second there, buster,” she said, leaving the door open and following him. “Can I see some ID?”

  The man pulled out a wallet and flipped it open at her without bothering to look in her direction. Instead he panned his gaze methodically around the room, then up at the ceiling.

  “What’s this about?” Gina asked. She’d seen the three big letters clearly enough, but the idea of having a real live fed in the house didn’t even slightly compute.

  “I need to talk to your husband,” the man said. His matter-of-factness made the situation seem even more absurd.

  Gina put her hands on her hips. This was her house, after all. “Well, he’s out, like I said.”

  The man turned toward her. His eyes, which had appeared flat and dead before, slowly seemed to be coming alive.

  “You did, and I heard you. I want to know where he is. And I need to take a look around your house.”

  “The hell you do,” Gina said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but—”

  His hand came up so fast she didn’t even see it. The first she knew was when it was clamped around the bottom of her face, holding her jaw like a claw.

  She was too shocked to make a sound as he began to pull her slowly toward him. But then she started to shout, substituting volume for the articulation denied her by being unable to move the lower half of her mouth.

  “Where is it?” he asked. Matter-of-fact had become almost bored.

  Gina had no clue what he was talking about. She tried to yank away, hitting at him with her fists, kicking out, jerking her head back and forth. He put up with this for about one second and then whipped his other hand around to smack her across the side of her head. Her ears rang like a dropped hubcap and she nearly fell, but he held her up, wrenching her jaw to the side in the process, making it feel like it was going to pop out.

  “I’m going to find it anyway,” he said, and now she knew she could feel something tearing at the side of her head. “But you can save us both some time and trouble. Where is it? Where does he work?”

  “I…don’t…”

  “Mom?”

  Gina and the man turned together, to see Josh at the bottom of the stairs. Her son blinked, a deep frown spreading across his face.

  “Let go of my mom.”

  Gina tried to tell Josh to get back upstairs, to just run, but it came out as desperate, breathless grunts. The man stuck his other hand in the pocket of his coat, started taking something out.

  Josh hit the ground running and launched himself across the living room. “Let go of my—”

  Gina just had time to realize she’d gotten it wrong before, that her son wasn’t a man after all, that he was just a little boy, stretched taller and thinner but still so young, when the man shot him in the face.

  She screamed then, or tried to, and the tall man swore quietly and dragged her with him as he walked over to the front door and pushed it shut.

  Then he pulled her back into the room where her son lay on the floor, one arm and one leg moving in twitches. Her head felt like it was full of bright light, stuttering with shock. Then he punched her precisely on the jaw, and she didn’t know where she was.

  A second or several minutes passed.

  At length she was aware again, sprawled on the floor, half propped against the couch she’d been curled up in ten minutes before. The plate of food lay upside down within arm’s reach. Her jaw was hanging loose, and she couldn’t seem to move it. It felt as if someone had pushed long, thick nails into both of her ears.

  The man in the coat was squatted down next to Josh, whose right arm was still moving, lazily smearing its way through the pool of blood seeping from his head.

  The smell of gasoline reached Gina’s face. The man finished squirting something from a small metal can all over her son, then dropped it on him and stood up.

  He looked down at Gina.

  “Last chance,” he said. His forehead was beaded with sweat, though the house was not warm. In one hand he held a cigarette lighter. In the other he held his gun. “Where is it?”

  As he flicked on the lighter, holding it over Josh and looking her in the eyes, Gina knew that—whatever this was—it wasn’t a last chance to live.

  Part I

  The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  The Sickness Unto Death

  chapter

  ONE

  There was this girl I knew back in high school. Her name was Donna, and even that was wrong about her, as if she’d been mislabeled at birth. She wasn’t a Donna. Not in real terms. She made you realize there must be an underlying rhythm to the universe, and you knew this purely because she wasn’t hitting it. She walked a little too quickly. She turned her head a little too slowly. It was like she was dubbed onto reality a beat out of true. She was one of those kids you saw at a distance, toting a pile of books, standing diffidently with people you didn’t realize were even at the school. She had friends, she did okay in class, she wasn’t a total loser, and she wasn’t dumb. She was just kind of hard to see.

  Like all schools we had a pecking order of looks, but Donna somehow wasn’t on the same scale. Her skin was pale and her features fine-boned and evenly spaced, faultless except for a crescent scar to the side of her right eye, legacy of some toddling collision with a table. The eyes themselves were inky gray and very clear, and on the rare occasions when you got to look into them, you received a vivid sense she was real after all—which only made you wonder what you thought she was the rest of the time. She was a little skinny, maybe, but otherwise slightly cute in every way except that she somehow just…wasn’t. It was as if she released no pheromones, or they operated on an inaudible wavelength, broadcasting their signal to sexual radios either out of date or not yet invented.

  I found her attractive nonetheless, though I was never really sure why. So I noticed when it looked like she was hanging out with—or in the vicinity of—a guy named Gary Fisher. Fisher was one of the kids who strode the halls as if accompanied by fanfare, the group that makes anyone who’s been through the American school system instantly wary of egalitarian philosophies later in life. He played football with conspicuous success. He was on the starting basketball lineup, played significant tennis, too. He was good-looking, naturally: When God confers control of sports spheres, he tends to wrap it in a prettier package, too. Fisher wasn’t like the actors you see in teen movies now, impossibly handsome and free of facial blemish, but he looked right, back in the days when the rest of us sta
red dismally in the mirror every morning and wondered what had gone wrong and whether it would get better—or even worse.

  He was also, oddly, not too much of an asshole. I knew him a little from track, where I had a minor talent for hurling things a long way. I’d gathered from the jock grapevine that a realignment had taken place among the ruling classes, principally that Gary’s girl, Nicole, was now going with one of his friends instead, in what appeared to be an amicable transfer of chattels. You didn’t have to be too keen an observer of the social scene to perceive a degree of interest in taking her place—but the truly weird thing was that Donna seemed to believe herself in the running. It was as if she had received intelligence from somewhere that the caste system was illusory and you actually could fit a square peg in a round hole. She couldn’t sit at the same table at lunch, of course, but would wind up at one nearby, close to Gary’s line of sight. She would engineer “accidental” bumps in the corridor but manage nothing more than nervous laughs. I even saw her a couple of Fridays out at Radical Bob’s, a burger/pizza place where people tended to start the weekend. She would stop by whatever table Fisher was sitting at and deliver some remark about a class or assignment, which would fall to the floor like a brick. Then she would wander off, a little too slowly now, as if hoping to be called back. This never happened. Other than being mildly perplexed, I doubt Fisher had the slightest clue what was going on. After a couple weeks, a deal was done in some gilded back room—or the backseat of a gilded car, more likely—and one morning Gary was to be found in the company of Courtney Willis, textbook hot blonde. Life went on.

  For most of us.

  Two days later Donna was found in the bathtub at her parents’ home. Her wrists had been cut with determination and only one testing slash on the forearm. The adult consensus, which I overheard more than once, was that it could not have been a fast way to go—despite a last-ditch attempt to hasten progress by pushing a pair of nail scissors deep into her right eye socket, as if that crescent scar had been some kind of omen. There was a handwritten letter to Gary Fisher on the floor, the words blurred by water that had spilled over the edges of the tub. Lots of people later claimed to have seen the letter, or a photocopy, or overheard someone saying what was in it. But, as far as I know, none of this was true.