the head and then set on fire. According to the fire department, that wasn’t what burned the house, though: The flames had only just reached that room when they arrived. The main blaze had been set in the basement, where the woman’s husband, Bill Anderson, had a workshop. From the debris it looked like someone had trashed the place, emptied out a bunch of filing cabinets full of notes and papers, and put a match to it all. I don’t know how well you know Seattle, but this is up in the Broadway area, overlooking downtown. The houses are close to each other, bungalows, two-story, mainly wooden construction. If the fire had really gotten going, it wouldn’t have taken much to jump to the ones around it and wipe out the whole block.”
“So where’s the husband?” I asked.
“No one knows. In the early part of the evening, he was out with two male friends. He’s a lecturer at the community college, about a half mile away. They have a semiregular night out, every six weeks. These guys confirm that Anderson was with them until a quarter after ten. They split up outside a bar, went their separate ways. Nobody’s seen Anderson since.”
“How are the police handling it?”
“Nobody saw anyone come or go from the house during the evening. The prevailing assumption is Anderson is the suspect, and they’re not looking anywhere else. Problem is working out why he’d do this. His colleagues say he seemed distracted, and they and others claim he’d been that way for a few weeks, maybe a month or more. But no one’s got anything on problems he might have had, there’s no talk of another woman or anything along those lines. Lecturers don’t make a whole lot of cash, and Gina Anderson wasn’t earning, but there’s no evidence of a drastic need for money. There’s a life insurance policy on the wife, but it’s hardly worth getting out of bed for, never mind killing someone.”
“The husband did it,” I said. “They always do. Except when it’s the wives.”
Fisher shook his head. “I don’t think so. According to the neighbors, everything was fine. Their son liked his music a little loud, but otherwise all was good. No arguments, no atmosphere.”
“Bad families are like the minds of functioning alcoholics. You have to live inside to have the first clue what’s going on.”
“So how do you read it?”
“Could be one of any number of scenarios. Maybe Bill was laying into Gina that night over something you and I will never understand. Son hears the noise, comes down, yells at Dad to stop. Dad won’t. Son’s been seeing this all his life, tonight he’s not taking it anymore. He goes to the closet and gets his father’s gun. Comes back and says he means it—stop beating up on Mom. They fight, Dad grabs hold of the gun, or it goes off accidentally, whatever. Son gets shot. Wife’s screaming the place down, his son’s lying on the floor, Anderson knows he’s not walking away from this. So he sets a fire in the part of the house that’s known to be his domain to make it look like an intruder, then makes sure there’s no witnesses to tell the story another way. Right now he’s on the other side of the country and drunk and practically out of his mind with remorse, or else halfway to convincing himself they brought it on themselves. He’ll either commit suicide within the week or get caught in eighteen months living quietly with a waitress in North Carolina.”
Fisher was silent for a moment. “That works, I guess,” he said. “But I don’t believe it. Three reasons. First is that Anderson is the nerds’ poster nerd, a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. He doesn’t present as someone who could physically dominate two other people.”
“Body weight is irrelevant,” I said. “Domination is mental. Always.”
“Which also doesn’t sound like Anderson, but I’ll let that pass. The second reason is there’s a witness who claims to have seen someone who looked like Anderson entering the street at around twenty to eleven. No one’s paying much attention to this woman, because she’s old and nuts and loaded to her back teeth with lithium, but she claims she saw him get far enough down the road to see his house, then turn and run away.”
“Not someone you’re going to put on the stand,” I said. “And even if she did see him, it could be Anderson setting up an alibi. What else you got?”
“Just this: Joshua Anderson died from the burn injuries in the end, but he was already leaving the world thanks to the gunshot wound to the face. But no bullet was found at the scene. The pathology report suggests it got trapped in the skull, bounced around, never made it out the other side. There’s no exit wound. But there are indications of subsequent trauma from a sharp instrument. So the person who killed him then stuck a knife in the mess and dug out the shell, while the kid’s clothes were on fire. That doesn’t sound to me like something a physics lecturer could do. To his son.” He sat back in his chair. “Especially when he didn’t own a gun in the first place.”
I shrugged. “Sure,” I admitted. “There’s loose ends. There always are. But the smart money stays on the husband. What’s your interest in this anyhow?”
“It relates to an estate we’re handling back home,” he said. “I can’t get into it more than that right now.”
For just a moment, Fisher seemed evasive, but the details of his professional life were not my concern.
“So why are you telling me about it?”
“I want your help.”
“With what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“It would benefit me, benefit us, to find out what actually took place that night.”
“The police are on it, aren’t they?”
“The cops are all about proving that Anderson murdered his wife and son, and I don’t think that’s what happened.”
I smiled. “So I gather. But that doesn’t mean you’re right. And I still don’t get why you’re here.”
“You’re a cop.”
“No. I was a cop.”
“Same thing. You have investigative experience.”
“For once your research fails you, Gary. I was with Patrol Division all the way. A street grunt.”
“Not formal experience, no. I know you never made detective. I also know you never even applied.”
I looked hard at him. “Gary, if you’re going to tell me you somehow got access to my personnel files, then…”
“I didn’t need to, Jack. You’re a smart guy. You wanted to make detective, you would have. You didn’t, so I figure you didn’t try.”
“I’m not very susceptible to flattery,” I said.
He smiled. “I know that, too. And I remember that you would rather not try than try and fail, and maybe that’s the real reason you spent nearly a decade on the streets.”
It had been awhile since someone had spoken to me this way. He saw it in my face.
“Look,” he said, holding up his hands. “This isn’t coming out right. I’m sorry. What happened to the Andersons isn’t actually a huge deal to me. It’s just a little weird and might make my life simpler if I could get it unraveled. I read your book. It seemed to me you might be interested. That’s all.”
“I appreciate the thought,” I said. “But that feels like another life now. Plus, I was on the job in L.A., not Seattle. I don’t know the city, and I don’t know the people. I couldn’t do much more than you, and I can do a lot less than the cops. If you genuinely think there’s a problem with the way they’re investigating this, it’s them you should be talking to.”
“I tried,” he said. “They think the same as you.”
“So probably that’s the way it is. A sad story. The end.”
Fisher nodded slowly, his eyes on the view outside the window. The light was beginning to turn, the sky heading toward a more leaden gray. “Looks like heavy weather. I should probably be heading back. I don’t want to be driving over that mountain in the dark.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, standing. “After that drive I guess you were hoping for more.”
“I wanted an opinion, and I got one. Too bad it wasn’t the one I was looking for.”
“Could have gotten you this far on the phone.” I smiled. “Like I said.”
“Yeah, I know. But hey—been good to see you after all this time. To catch up. Let’s keep in touch.”
I said yes it had, and yes we should, and that was that. We small-talked a bit longer, and then I walked him to the door and watched as he drove away.
I stayed outside for a few moments after he’d gone, though it was cold. I felt a little as if a bigger kid had
