“…fine.” I said. “Keep your voice down.”
I pulled out the cheap flashlight I’d bought in the convenience store. I pointed it back toward the door, ran the beam along the wall at shoulder height. Saw a bank of switches. Flicked them one by one. Nothing happened. Pointed the light down at the floor instead. There was nothing lying there.
“No power,” Fisher said.
“But no mail or junk either. Someone picks up.”
We were standing in a wide, high-ceilinged corridor, peeling paper on the walls and an uneven floor. Once it had been tiled in a simple, businesslike way. Now many of the tiles were broken or missing. I made my way along it, treading carefully. The building smelled damp and fusty and old. Ten feet away a door hung ajar slightly, on the right. It opened into a long, narrow kitchen, the ser vice area of the coffee shop that had been the last occupant of the front part of the building. In the glow thrown by the lamp, it looked like the proprietors had left work one evening and decided never to come back. Broken cups, rusty machinery, the scent of rats’ passing, and beneath all that the smell of Seattle itself, old coffee and fog. This building was dead. It was like being in the hold of a shipwreck, hundreds of feet under the sea.
The two doors farther along the corridor were both open onto a wide, dark area cluttered with large pieces of display furniture, dating back to when the place had been a department store, moved out from the walls and left stranded in the space like more tall, abandoned ships.
I came back out and found a door in the back wall, too. I gave this a shake. It didn’t move at all. This must be the one we’d seen in the parking lot. There was another door around the back of the staircase. I opened it, looked down. Pitch-black and cold, with narrow wooden stairs leading to a basement.
I went back and headed up the stairs, climbed quietly to the next floor, shifting my weight along the banister until I was sure the treads of the staircase were sound. Fisher followed. When I got up to the second level, I gestured to keep him still and listened.
No sound of conversation or movement, no creaking floorboards.
All the doors on this level were shut and locked. The same on the next. Someone had gone to some trouble to make sure fire precautions had been followed, closing the doors to stop a blaze flooding from room to room. On the third level, I chose the door at the front of the building and quietly jacked the lock.
The other side was a wide, empty space, the full width of the building’s street frontage, faint lines of light around boarded-in windows. A flick around with the lamp revealed a few pieces of furniture, extension cords running the perimeter and up and down the walls, and a collection of rolls of mildewed backdrop tilted into one corner. Presumably this was the area that had been used as a studio. I tried to imagine a much younger Amy perched in one of those chairs, cradling a coffee, watching a shoot. I couldn’t.
Fisher had stayed in the doorway, his face a paler patch in the gloom. I pointed at the ceiling.
“Try them again.”
He called. We could hear a phone ring on the floor above, the kind that sounds like someone hammering frenetically on a tiny bell, a dusty, echoing sound. It wasn’t answered, and no machine clicked in.
The tension in my stomach and shoulders was starting to fade back, and I felt a sense of focus that had been lost to me for over a year.
“Are you okay?” Fisher whispered. His face was pinched and nervous, and he was looking at me strangely.
Not at my face, but down at my right hand. I realized that the tension had not faded at all, merely spread so it was throughout my entire body.
And also that, without any recollection of doing so, I had taken out my gun.
“I’m fine,” I said.
I walked past him to the end of the corridor, crooked my head to look up the next flight of stairs, directing the little light obliquely off the side wall. Held my hand up again to keep Fisher back.
I went halfway up, stepping carefully. Stopped and listened. I could hear nothing except the faint sounds of traffic outside the building, a drip of water somewhere. I gestured for Fisher to follow and made it up the rest of the way. I waited where I was until he stood next to me on the top level, at the mouth of the staircase.
This landing was arranged in the same way as the lower floors with a long return, doors to spaces at the front and side areas of the building. I switched the flashlight off. Darkness. The long arm on our left was as featureless as the void of space.
But beneath the door to the room at the front of the building, there was a faint glow. Fisher saw it, too.
I stepped quietly over to the door, cupped the end of the light in my hand, and turned it back on. Close up, you could see that this door was different from the ones on the lower levels. Thicker, newer, reinforced. A padlock the size of my fist hung off the handle.
I turned the light back off, slipped it into my pocket. I felt my right thumb flicking the safety off my gun and decided not to interfere. Reached for the door handle and pushed the door inward a breath, to give the mechanism a chance to turn soundlessly.
It was heavy, but the doorknob turned all the way.
Holding it steady, I moved to the right and gestured with my head for Fisher to come behind me. Then I pulled the door open. It moved slowly and silently.
I stopped when the gap was less than two inches wide.
The space on the other side was dimly lit by a lamp on the corner of what looked like a desk, one of the old low lamps with a folded green shade. I could make out a narrow strip of wall beyond, a bookcase lined floor to ceiling with leather spines. Now that the door was cracked open I could hear a faint skittering sound.
At first I thought it might be a rat, or rats, pattering across a wooden floor within. Then I recognized it. It was a sound I had made myself from time to time, though not lately.
You don’t take a breath before entering a room. You just do it.
I stepped right into a space that was, except for the desk and shelves, completely empty. The dividing walls on the floor had been removed, creating one very large, L-shaped area. Bare floorboards. No chairs. The windows boarded over. Just that single lamp.
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.
