infrasound is a key component in urban anxiety. More simply, it just makes you feel like you’re afraid. And if you hit the resonant frequency of the human eye, which is right around this point, you can start thinking you’re seeing odd things, too. Everyone’s been assuming this is physiological, just a side effect of the physics of the eye, but it’s…not. It’s more complicated. Infrasound does strange things to us. Very strange things. It enables us to glimpse things we can’t normally see.”
I found myself looking around the restaurant, just as I’d told Anderson not to do. I saw nothing to explain what I was feeling, a sensation I didn’t even know how to describe. I looked out through the open door into the crowds. Just people, moving back and forth.
“What kinds of things, Bill? What are you actually talking about here? What was it that you did?”
I pulled my eyes back to him. He was looking down at his hands. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.
“I made a ghost machine,” he said.
But that’s when I saw a tall figure heading toward the diner through the crowds, walking quickly. He was dressed in a dark coat and looking not left or right but straight at Anderson.
“Get down,” I said quickly.
Anderson blinked at me, confused. I tried to stand, pushing him to one side as I rose, but I got caught under the table. I saw Fisher coming around the side of the center station, coffee cups in hand, just as the man in the coat pushed his way into the restaurant and removed one hand from an inside pocket.
I finally got clear of the table and shoved Anderson harder, shouting, “Bill, get out of the—”
It was too late. The man fired three times, measured, unhurried shots from a silenced handgun.
He’d disappeared back into the crowd before I even realized that none of the bullets had hit me. The shots had been quiet, but the sight of Anderson’s blood as it sprayed across the window was not—and everybody started running and shouting at once. When I bent over Anderson’s body and tried to find where he’d been shot, I couldn’t hear what he tried to say to me through the noise and the blood welling up out of his mouth, but I saw it open and close and knew it would be for the last time.
chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN
“He’s dead.”
I looked up to see Blanchard standing over me. It was two hours since Anderson had been shot, and I was sitting in a plastic chair in a corridor of a hospital I didn’t know the name of. A crowd of cops were standing down the far end. I’d been interviewed by two of them.
“So where does that leave us?”
“No idea,” he said. “And there is no ‘us.’ Be clear on that. I’m only here because I used to partner one of the lead detectives. You’re here as a courtesy and because witnesses are very firm on how you reacted when the gunman came in. Where’s your buddy? Fisher?”
“Getting some air.”
Blanchard sat down heavily in the chair beside me. “What the fuck happened? Really?”
“What I told you. We got a message to Anderson through one of his colleagues. He came to talk to us.”
“Why? That’s what I don’t get. Why you?”
“Maybe because our pitch was that we knew he didn’t kill his family. We arranged to meet at the diner, at Anderson’s suggestion. How the guy with the gun found him, I have absolutely no idea.”
“What did you get out of Anderson?”
“He’d barely started to open up before it happened. He received the check I told you about but didn’t do anything with it because it came with conditions he wasn’t prepared to meet.”
“Which were?”
“That he stop work on some private project.”
“Which was?”
“We were getting into that when the ceiling fell in.”
Blanchard turned to look at me but didn’t say anything.
I shrugged. “Believe what you like. I was helping Gary out. Now that Anderson’s been found, it’s over. It’s up to your guys to sort out the mess.”
“Mess?”
“This makes Anderson a strikingly less credible suspect for the double homicide, don’t you think?”
“Doesn’t have to be any link between the two events.”
“Yeah, right. I’ll just bet everyone in SPD is telling themselves that. Better than admitting they spent a month looking for an innocent man and not finding him before someone came from nowhere and blew him away.”
“Anderson fucked himself. He should have turned himself in. Gotten in contact, at least.”
“That what you would have done under the circumstances?”
“Yes.”
I nodded slowly. Truth was that I still didn’t really get why Anderson had done as he had. I’d only intercepted when Fisher had pushed him on it because I knew that increasing Anderson’s feelings of guilt was not the way to get him to talk. Coupled with the caginess of his response when talking about his work, however, plus Chen and others’ view that he’d been on edge before the murders took place, I believed that Anderson had felt himself to be in a dangerous position even before the events of that night. The covering letter with the bequest had carried ominous weight. Was that enough to explain his running from the scene? Or was it something inherent to the work he’d been doing? Was he already spooked?
“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”
I got up. There was nothing more for me to do here. “I appreciate the way you’ve dealt with this.”
“You’re welcome. Just don’t make me regret it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He looked down at his cupped hands. “I know a little more about the circumstances under which you left the LAPD,” he said. “We wouldn’t want anything like that happening here.”
“Whatever you think you know isn’t what really happened.”
“I know there were some dead guys involved. And you.”
“Am I in jail right now?”
“No. But what I just said still holds.”
“Gotcha.” I started walking away.
“Jack,” he said when I’d gotten about ten feet. “How deeply are you tied in to Fisher’s universe?”
I stopped, turned back. “Not at all. Why?”
“Keep it that way. I also talked to someone in Fisher’s firm. Why do you think he’s here?”
“He’s tying up loose ends for them.”
“Wrong. He’s on enforced leave. ‘Personal reasons.’ The colleague I spoke with was very discreet. But I got the sense they were distancing themselves. If I were you, I’d do the same. I think there’s stuff going on in that guy’s head you don’t know anything about.”
I left, walking more quickly now. Fisher was not standing in front of the hospital. That could have been because of the media presence beginning to build there—the killing had been pretty public—but he wasn’t answering his phone either.
And when I got back to his hotel, the man behind the desk told me he’d checked out a half hour before.
I retrieved my car and drove out of town. On the way down to the freeway, I pulled over opposite Pioneer Square. I got out on impulse and walked over to it. My hands were shaking. I don’t know why. Because of Anderson. Because of what Blanchard had brought up about things that had happened in L.A. I sat on the bench for twenty minutes, taking deep breaths, until I felt okay again.
Then I left the city, headed east toward the mountains. The morning was clear and bright at first, a few fluffy clouds only for decoration. Traffic was light, and I seemed to slip along almost too easily, as if the world was
