The Intruders Read online

Todd shook his head slowly. “Not that I know of. But maybe, you know? Have you tried her hotel? We always book people in the Malo. Or is she staying with her…friends?”

  “I left a message for her there already. Just wanted to get this phone back to her as quick as I can.”

  “Understand that.” Todd nodded, all smiles again. “Lost without them these days, right? Wish I could help you more, Jack. She stops by, I’ll tell her you’re on the hunt. You want to give me your number?”

  “I left it already,” I said.

  “That’s right, sorry. Hell of a morning. Clients. Can’t live with them, not recommended business practice to shoot them in the head. Or so they say.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder and walked me out back along the corridor, filling the journey with praise of Amy and a sustained meditation on how her new position was going to shake things up for the company, and in a good way. It was not difficult to imagine him greeting his wife and kids in a similar manner every morning, a goals-and-achievements spiel capped with assurances of his best attention at all times, CC’d to his personal assistant.

  He left me at the door, and I walked across reception alone. I turned my head just before stepping back out into the world. It seemed to me that there might be someone standing behind the frosted-glass door watching me leave, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I walked down the alley slowly. I hadn’t brought Amy’s organizer, but I remembered the contents. Three days full of meetings. Sure, I hadn’t read the details, and they could theoretically have been in L.A., San Francisco, or Portland—the last only a three-hour drive away—but I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d confused the city. Plus, I had her phone in my pocket, found here in this city last night. Amy had come here and until the night before last had been in contact as usual. Now she was nowhere to be found. The hotel was a blank. The people at her job didn’t know where she was—or said they didn’t.

  And neither did I.

  Post Alley deposited me in a stubby dead end, over which the beginnings of an elevated street set off toward the bay before banking sharply left to join the Alaskan Viaduct above. The concrete supports had been covered in graffiti, over what looked like many years. REV9 and LATER and BACK AGAIN, it said, among other things. While my eyes were wandering over this, I felt a sudden itch in my shoulder blades.

  I turned, slowly, as if that were simply what I was doing next. A few people were walking back and forth at the end of the road, going about their business in the shadow of the elevated highway, getting in or out of cars, moving stuff here and there. Beyond that there was a wide road and a couple of piers, and then the flicker of light hitting water out on Elliott Bay.

  No one was looking in my direction. Everyone was in motion, walking or driving. Traffic rumbled over the elevated highway above, sending deep vibrations through the buildings and sidewalks around me, until the whole city almost seemed to be singing one long, low note.

  chapter

  NINE

  I found a bar downtown. I scored a table by the window and ordered a pot of coffee—employing the last of my charm to get the waitress to let me use an outlet behind the bar to plug in a power adapter I’d bought on the way for Amy’s phone. While I waited for the coffee, I watched people at the other tables. Bars used to be a place where you came to get away from the outside world. That was the point. Now everyone seemed to be sucking free Wi-fi or talking on cell phones.

  Nobody did anything interesting enough to distract me from the interlocking dialogues in my head. The fact that Amy wasn’t in town on Kerry, Crane & Hardy business could be explained. I knew that. I was calm. It was still possible there was nothing strange going on here except inside my own head, and it reminded me of a time a year or so before, when Amy went through a period of talking in her sleep. At first it was just a mumbling, and you couldn’t really make out anything. After a while it got stronger, words and sections of sentences. It would wake me up, night after night. It began to screw with both our sleep patterns. She tried adjusting her diet and caffeine intake and spending even longer in the gym on the way to work, but nothing helped. Then it just stopped, though it was a couple of weeks before I started sleeping soundly again. In the meantime I had plenty of time to lie in the dark and wonder what made the brain do such a thing, how it must be organized so that when all the conscious functions had apparently checked out, some part was still verbalizing about something. How was it doing that, and why? Who was it talking to?

  That’s what it felt as if my brain was doing right now. The part under my conscious control was sticking fingers in dikes and providing rational explanations. It was doing good work, suggesting that Amy might indeed be here on the quiet in the hope of bringing clients to KC&H as a lock, stock, and barrel triumph that couldn’t be group-owned. She lived and breathed office politics. Could even be that was what she’d been trying to explain the evening when I didn’t listen properly.

  But meanwhile other bits of my head were running scattershot in all directions. Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along. Or perhaps that’s just me.

  When Amy’s phone had enough charge, I retrieved it from behind the bar. Sitting with it in my hands felt strange. This was the only device through which I could talk to my wife: but it was currently with me and thus made her feel even farther away. We have evolved now, gained a sixth sense through the invention of e-mail and cell phones—an awareness of the utterances and circumstances of people who are not present. When this sense is taken away, you feel panicked, struck blind. I had a sudden idea and called the phone back at the house, but it rang and rang before switching to the machine. I left a message saying where I was and why, just in case Amy got home ahead of me. It should have felt like a good, sensible thing to do. Instead it was as if another road had just been washed away in the rain.

  Amy’s phone was a different brand from mine, and the keys were a lot smaller. As a result my first brush with the interface put me in the music player section by mistake. There were eight MP3 tracks listed, which surprised me. Like any other occupant of the twenty-first century who wasn’t Amish, Amy owned an iPod, a dedicated digital music player. She wasn’t going to be using her phone for music, but while I could imagine that a device might come with a couple of songs preloaded, eight seemed like a lot. Seven of the tracks were simply numbered Track 1 to Track 7, the other a long string of digits. I tried Track 1. Tinny music came out of the earpiece, old jazz, one of those crackly 1920s guys. Very much not Amy’s kind of thing—she’d gone on record more than once as hating jazz, or basically anything that predated Blondie. I tried another track, then one more, with similar results. It was like holding the world’s smallest speakeasy.

  I took another scroll through the contacts section, this time looking not for Kerry, Crane & Hardy but for anything else that stuck out. I didn’t see anything to make me linger. I didn’t recognize all the names, but I was never going to. Your partner’s workplace is like another country. You’ll always be a stranger there.

  So I headed to the SMS section. Amy had picked up the joy of SMS messaging from the younger dudes in the agency, and she and I now exchanged texts regularly—when I knew she’d be in a meeting or when she wanted to convey information that didn’t need my attention right away. Usually just to say hi. Sure enough, there were four from me there, going back a few months. A couple from her sister, Natalie, who lived down in Santa Monica, in the house where she and Amy had been born and had grown up.

  And eleven from somebody else.

  The messages from Natalie and me had our names attached. These others didn’t, just a phone number. It was the same number each time.

  I selected the earliest. It was blank. An SMS communication had been sent and received, but there was no text in it at all. The next was the same, and the next. Why would you keep sending texts without anything in them? Because you were incompetent maybe, but by the t
hird or fourth you’d think anyone could have gotten the hang of it. I kept scrolling. I’d grown so used to the single line of nothing in each message that when the sixth contained something else, it took me by surprise. It didn’t make much sense either.

  yes

  No period, even. The next few messages were blank again. Then I got to the final one.

  A rose by ny othr name wll sml as sweet…:-D

  I put the phone on the table and poured another cup of coffee. Eleven messages was a lot, even if most of them had nothing to say. Besides, Amy wasn’t the type to let her phone be clogged with other people’s Luddite errors. She was not sentimental. I’d already noted she’d only kept the texts from me that contained information of long-term use. A few thinking-of-you ones I’d sent a couple of days before, and which she’d replied to, had already been erased. The couple from Natalie looked like they’d been saved because they were especially annoying and could be used later as evidence against her.

  So why keep someone else’s blanks? And under what circumstances would you receive this many messages from someone and yet not have that person’s name in your list of contacts? The others came up as “Home”—my phone—and “Natalie.” These just listed the number. If you’re that regularly in contact, why not go to the minuscule trouble of entering the person’s name into your phone book? Unless it’s something you don’t want found?

  I flipped over to the made/received calls log. The number didn’t appear anywhere on it. Communication from this source evidently came only in the form of text, or at least no call had come from it in the last month.

  This gave me an idea, and I went back to the first SMS message and found that it had been sent a little over three months previously. There’d been a month gap between the first and the second. Then another two weeks. Then they’d started coming more frequently. The one saying “yes” had been sent six days before. And the one about roses had arrived just yesterday, late in the afternoon. Amy had seen this message—she must have; otherwise it would still have been filed under “Unread.” Then, sometime in the next few hours, she had lost the phone, during the course of an evening her schedule listed as blank.

  Then she had, so far as I could tell, lost herself.

  I navigated sideways from received messages into the section recording texts that Amy had sent. The list there was very short. A couple of replies to her sister and to me. And one other. It had been sent two minutes after the last message to her and consisted of the following:

  Bell 9. Will b waitng, whenever yr redE, 2dy, nxt wk, nxt year xoxox

  The waitress swung by at that moment to see if I wanted fresh coffee. I said no. I asked for beer.

  One thing my father was always good at was answering questions. He didn’t have infinite patience in other directions, but if you asked him something—how the moon was created, why cats slept all the time, why that man over there had only one arm—he’d always give you a grown-up answer, except for this one occasion. I was about twelve. I’d heard an older kid at school being pretentious and been somewhat impressed and came home and asked my dad what was the meaning of life, thinking it made me sound at least sixteen. He seemed unaccountably annoyed and said it was a dumb question. I didn’t understand. “Say you come back to your house one afternoon,” he said, “and there’s someone at your table, eating your food. You don’t ask him, ‘What the hell are you doing, sitting there, eating my dinner?’—because he could simply say he was hungry. Which is an answer to what you asked him, sure enough. But not to your real question, which is ‘What the hell are you doing in my house?’”

  I still didn’t get it, but I found I remembered this from time to time when I was older. It probably made me a slightly better cop, less prone to ask witnesses my questions instead of just letting them tell me what they knew. I remembered it again as I sat there in the bar in Seattle and started my first beer.

  My head felt heavy and cold, and I was coming to suspect that the day was not going to end well. I realized that maybe I had to stop asking where Amy was and starting thinking about why.

  chapter

  TEN

  Meanwhile a girl was standing in an airport concourse. A big clock suspended from the ceiling said it was twenty-four minutes to four. As she watched, the last number changed, going from 16:36 to 16:37. She kept watching until it flipped to 16:39. She liked the 9. She didn’t know why it should seem compelling, but it did. A recorded voice kept telling people not to smoke, which Madison suspected must be annoying for them.

  Madison was not sure where she was going next. She had not, for a couple of minutes, been sure where she was right at this moment. She recognized it now. It was the Portland airport, of course. She’d been here several times in the past, most recently when they went to visit Mom’s mom down in Florida in the spring. Madison could remember browsing around the little Powell’s bookstore and drinking a juice at the café where you could watch planes landing and taking off. Mom had been nervous about flying, and Dad had joked and made her feel better about it. There had been more joking in those days. A lot more.

  But today? Madison remembered early talk of a trip up to the grocery store in Cannon Beach that morning, discussion that hadn’t come to anything. Then a little time on the beach. It had been cold and windy. There had been no walk. A quiet and skimpy lunch, in the cottage. Mom stayed indoors afterward, so Madison went back out to hang on the beach by herself.

  After that…there was this gap. Like when she’d woken last night and couldn’t remember the time on the beach. It was like there was a cloud in the way.

  Mom wasn’t here at the airport with her, that was clear. Mom wouldn’t have walked off and left her by herself. Madison was wearing her new coat, too, she realized. That was also strange. She wouldn’t have gone out to the beach in her new coat. She would have worn her old coat, because it didn’t matter if that got sand on it. So she must have gone into the cottage after the beach, to change, and snuck back out.

  Then what? How had she gotten from there to Portland? Maddy knew the word her Uncle Brian would use for this: perplexing. In every other way, she felt fine. Just like normal. So what was the deal with the blank spot? And what was she supposed to do now?

  She realized that the hand in her pocket was holding something. She pulled it out. A notebook. It was small, bound in stained brown leather, and looked old. She opened it. The pages were covered in handwriting. The first line said:

  In the beginning there was Death.

  It was written in a pen that smudged occasionally, in an ink that was a kind of red-brown. There were drawings in the book, too, maps and diagrams, lists of names. One of the diagrams looked exactly like the drawing on the back of the business card she also had in her possession, the interlinked nines. Even the handwriting looked the same. Slipped in the front of the notebook was a long piece of paper. It was a United Airlines ticket.

  Wow—how had she bought that?

  These questions didn’t make her feel scared. Not quite. For the time being, there was something dreamlike about her situation. Maybe all that mattered was going where she needed to go, and she could worry about everything else later. Yes. That sounded good. Easier.

  Madison blinked, and by the time her eyelids had flipped back up, she had largely stopped worrying about trivia like how she’d traveled the fifty miles from Cannon Beach to the Portland airport, or how she’d purchased an airline ticket costing over a hundred dollars, or why she was alone.

  Instead she turned to look at the departures information, to find out where it was she needed to go.

  As far as Jim Morgan was concerned, there was a simple secret to life, and it was something he’d learned from his uncle Clive. His father’s cadaverous brother spent his entire working days in security at the Ready Ship dispatch warehouse over in Tigard. Checked trucks as they came in, checked them as they went out. He’d done this five days a week for over thirty years. Jim’s dad never hid the fact that as a (junior) executive in a bank, he con
sidered himself many steps up the ladder compared with his older sibling—but the curious thing was that while his father spent his life moaning and feeling put-upon, Uncle Clive seemed utterly content with his lot.

  One evening when Jim was thirteen, his uncle had spent an entire Sunday dinner talking about his job. This was not the first time—and Jim’s father and mother weren’t subtle about rolling their eyes—but on this occasion their son listened. He listened to information about schedules and shipping targets. He listened to discussion of procedures. He came to understand that every day, between the hours of eight and four, getting in and out of the Ready Ship warehouse was like shoving a fat camel through the eye of a needle. Uncle Clive was that needle. Didn’t matter who you were or what you were carrying, how late or urgent your shipment or how many times he’d seen your face before. You showed your badge or pass or letter. You were polite. You dealt with Uncle Clive in the proper manner. Otherwise you didn’t get past—or at least not without a protracted exchange involving two-way radios and head shaking, from which you would limp away feeling like an ass. Which you were. The rules were simple. You showed your pass. It was the law. You couldn’t get this through your head, it wasn’t Uncle Clive’s fault.

  Fifteen years later Jim had taken this to heart. You could do things the hard way or the right way, and it was always someone’s god-or government-given job to make sure you did like you’d been told. There was something else to be learned from this, a way of living your life. You took your pleasures where you could, and you made sure you were king of your own domain. Amen.

  Jim’s domain was the Portland airport security line. He ran a tight ship. People stood where and how they were supposed to stand, or they faced Jim’s wrath—he had no problem with stopping the checking process and walking slowly down the line of fretful travelers to tell the assholes at the back to keep the line straight. Jim had a system at the front, too. The person he was dealing with was allowed to approach. All others (including that person’s spouse, business partner, mother, or spirit guide) stood the hell back at the yellow line and waited their turn. Failure to comply would cause Jim to again stop what he was doing and step forward to explain it at uncomfortable length. He actually did have all day to spend on the matter, or at least a set of three two-hour shifts. The people in line weren’t on the side of the troublemaker at the front. They wanted to get on with their journey, buy a magazine, take a dump. Anyone obstructing these goals became an enemy of the people. Jim’s philosophy was “divide and rule,” or it would have been if he’d ever thought to articulate it. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t his job to explain things. His way was just the way it was.