Authors: Michael Marshall
Hallam’s voice came out of the tinny speaker sounding a little breathless. “Where are you?”
When I’d tried to get hold of him earlier, I’d been about to tell him everything I knew. Now I decided to stick to facts of current relevance.
“On Lido.”
“I only just got your message. You sounded freaked out. Is your wife still missing?”
“No. I know where she is now.”
There was a pause, and I heard the sound of a piece of loud, grinding machinery being used in the background of wherever Hallam was. “She okay?”
“She’s fine.”
“Get yourself back to The Breakers,” he said, sounding distracted. “Do it now.”
“I will,” I said. “But you know the falling-down apartment block at the end of Ben Franklin Drive?”
He raised his voice against background noise. “What? Yeah, I know it. What about it?”
“Go there. Look in apartment 34.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
I ended the call.
There was silence from behind me. I waited maybe thirty seconds—long, treacly seconds—before deciding that, if he was going to blow my brains out, I’d at least like to be facing him when it happened.
I turned slowly from the waist.
He wasn’t there.
H
allam barely heard the last few sentences with the Realtor. Despite him flapping his free hand at the guy with the angle grinder, the asshole kept on cutting around the lock on the door they’d found in the Warner basement. Every other route had been exhausted, and after dead-ending in his attempt to talk to the sheriff, Hallam had given the go-ahead to move to quick and dirty solutions.
The noise from the doorway behind him abruptly changed in tone and pitch and then cut out, accompanied by the sound of something falling to the floor.
“We’re in,” the guy said.
T
he second door was as heavy as the first, and Hallam had to lean his full weight against it to get it to move. It opened onto pitch-darkness. The air that seeped out was cool. He reached his hand around the side of the door frame and slid it up and down. No switch.
“Get me a flashlight,” he said.
He took a step into the space in the meantime. It remained colder than an enclosed space should be, which suggested it was as climate controlled as the rest of the building. It was almost perfectly odorless, too, although after a moment he detected something, a low, acrid note, and sniffed hard. The noise rebounded flatly.
“Here,” the remaining tech said, and Hallam took the flashlight and turned it on. At first all he could make out was rebounding white light. Once his eyes readjusted, he got that he was seeing tiles. He turned back toward the doorway and played the lamp along that wall until he spotted the switch, positioned an unusually wide distance from the opening. He flicked it, and three banks of fluorescent lights came on in unison.
“Oh,” said the tech, sounding relieved.
A low-ceilinged room, twenty feet deep by sixty feet wide. The ceiling, floor, and four walls were tiled in white, orderly rows of nine-inch squares. It was entirely empty, not a single object to be seen. There was something eerie and a little inhuman about the space.
Hallam didn’t share the tech’s assumption that this meant the matter was an end, however. This space had been laboriously dug out of the sand and bedrock of the island prior to the house being built. You didn’t go to that much trouble and expense just for this, nor did you temperature-control or ensure its cleanliness at some recent time with bleach—a process the tiling could have been designed to make easier.
“We’re not done yet,” he said.
T
hey walked methodically across the floor, a few feet apart, looking down. They did it in five passes. They saw nothing, no sign of suspicious substances, no splash of blood to echo the one discovered in the kitchen two days before. If Warner had been killed or wounded here, someone had cleaned up after himself very well.
At the far end they stopped. The tech had visibly started to relax. Hallam hadn’t. His mind told him it was just the notion that you didn’t go to this much trouble for a big white room. His heart, or stomach, had more to say. It could hear something. It was a sound he remembered from when his mother had taken him on a trip to visit relatives up in Canada. It was one of the few times he and his mother had spent quality time alone, and it was a happy memory but for one thing. They spent a week in a town called Colindale, a couple of hours north of Toronto. It had been cold in a way he’d never experienced before or since—wind chill taking it below minus ten most days. One afternoon, when cabin fever set in and Mrs. Hallam decided she either had to get away from her sister for a few hours or risk intersibling bloodshed, she and her son had spent a frigid afternoon trying to find something of interest on Colindale’s short main drag. Eventually they’d wound up in the church, a hulk of architectural nullity that was distinguished that day by having a lot of oil heaters turned up high.
Hallam’s mother wandered, arms folded, looking at the things on the walls and checking her watch. Her son, mollified by the promise that once they’d warmed up he’d be taken to eat a slice of pie in the diner, stood in the center of the church and waited fairly patiently for time to pass. After a while he realized he felt something. A sensation that felt like a sound. He turned, looked around. The only other person present was his mother, now at the far end by a notice board. There had been a priest around, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“Mom,” he called.
“Yes?” Her voice floated back to him as if from a greater distance than the building could circumscribe.
“Did you just hear something?”
“Only you.”
He stood it for five minutes longer, then gained permission to wait outside. It was cold as hell, especially after the stuffy warmth of the church, but he preferred it. Half an hour later, with feeling beginning to return to his fingertips and a big slab of chocolate fudge cake inside him, he would have been hard-pressed to say why the church had made him feel uncomfortable.
In the twenty years since, however, he’d recalled this feeling from time to time, almost exclusively when work or daily life caused him to be inside some kind of religious structure. He’d developed an explanation, electing to believe that it was merely what remains in buildings when people are quiet in them for long periods: the residual silence of prayer, an accretion of contemplation—and also of intense emotion in the process of being mollified, sidelined, shoved aside: the sound of all the voices that are trapped in people’s minds. The power of grief, escaping like a heat haze from heads lowered in reverence before some putative god.
He’d never mentioned this theory to anyone, of course. But that’s what he was feeling now, and it was much louder than he’d ever heard it before, and it did not feel like an echo of anything like calm.
H
e walked to the center of the room, glanced from side to side, got his bearings. Far as he could judge, this room went the width of the house. The plots along this stretch of the key were relatively narrow, which is why the houses were deep. So ignore the side walls for now. He returned to the back and headed to the far left corner side. The tech watched him, looking puzzled.
“Go to the other side,” Hallam told him. “Right into that corner. Stand a yard back from the wall.”
“And then what?”
“Shuffle toward me, a tile width at a time. Keep looking at the wall.”
They did it together. After a couple of steps their movements locked in time, and it began to sound as if they were engaged in a slow dance in an empty hall, moving toward each other in a pas de deux. Hallam pushed this out of his mind as long as he could, but then heard the sound of the tech sniggering.
“Shh,” Hallam said, though he was half laughing himself. “This is serious.”
That just made the tech laugh out loud. Then he stopped. “Hang on,” he said. “I think I see something.”
Hallam went over. “Where?”
The tech ran his finger up a vertical line of grout between two columns of tiles. “You see?”
“Nope.”
“Every other line I’ve seen is about the same. Like an eighth of an inch gap. This looks smaller.”
Hallam saw the guy was right—though he would have never noticed it himself. Guess that’s why some people make good techs. He felt around the wall either side of the line. After a minute he started pressing harder.
A moment later, there was a click. A section of tiling slowly bounced back half an inch.
Hallam heard an exhale. He wasn’t sure whether it was the tech or something else. He got his fingers around the edges of the door and pulled it back.
A corridor lay beyond, perhaps thirty feet long. Two doors on the left, a single one at the far end of the other side. They stepped into it together. They became enveloped in a silence so loud that they could hear each other breathe. They opened the doors, one by one.
The first held what could have been pieces of gym equipment, but for the straps. A short rack on the wall held a few tools that would have seemed more suitable to a workshop. Screwdrivers, short saws, a hand drill. There was a long mirror on the side wall.
The next room held two sofas, positioned so as to be able to watch through the one-way glass, and a good deal of video equipment. They came out of the room together and went, slowly, to the door on the other side.
This was much heavier than the others, and when it opened a burst of freezing air escaped and a sound like the flapping of wings.
The tech made some kind of a noise.
Hallam stared past him at the things hanging from a hook in the center of the room. The plastic had a frosted texture, presumably from the refrigeration. They looked like body bags. All were empty, now.
He reached out and pulled aside the flaps of the one nearest to him. The inside was smeared with dry, frozen blood. He looked more closely and saw indentations in the plastic, at about head height. They looked like teeth marks.
As if someone had been hung in one of these things, not yet dead, and had tried to bite their way out.
“Okay,” Hallam said quietly, acutely aware that what he did now would govern the rest of his career. “We need Barclay right away. I’m going to go find a signal and call him. You’re going to stand at the doorway in the wine cellar and let
no one
pass. And we talk to
nobody
until the sheriff says so. Got that?”
The tech tried to speak, could not, nodded instead.
I
waited an hour in the street outside the gates to Cass’s building. Hallam didn’t show. I didn’t know what else he had on his plate, but I believed that what I’d said should have been enough to get most cops to come take a look. Maybe he just didn’t give a damn.
A clot of pain was attached to the back of my skull, mingling badly with the lingering effects of the previous night’s drinking. It was making the world hot and bright and unreal. I called the cop’s phone but got routed to voice mail again. I didn’t leave a message. Fuck him.
I noticed I had an indicator saying that three Facebook “friends” had sent messages, presumably updating me on what passed for their news. Fuck them, too. The idea that I’d care about whatever was going on in their lives—that I’d
ever
cared, or pretended to—made me want to laugh out loud.
I’d sat absolutely still after finding he was no longer behind me, convinced he’d moved to some position I couldn’t see, the better to pull the trigger in safety. I gingerly got to my feet. I took some tentative steps, still half believing they were going to be my last. I darted forward and swept up my wallet and car keys. I made my way through the half-built structure until I found a thick plywood door. I stepped out into the glaring sun and a mothballed building site, and walked across it to the road. My car was parked there.
When I’d stood on Ben Franklin Drive for five minutes and watched vehicles drive past and a few tourists stroll by, I finally began to believe that the guy had simply gone. I limped along the road to the building where Cass had lived, and waited. In the meantime I’d checked on Steph and was told she was sleeping.
So now what? I realized suddenly that there was something I could do, and I should probably have thought of it before. I didn’t
want
to do it, but it’d become clear that I was no longer living in a world where what I wanted counted for much. It would also be, in its own horrible way, the smart thing to do. For once.
I hurried over to the big metal gates, pushed them open, and went inside.
W
hen I got to apartment 34, I hesitated. Getting my USB drive back, thus removing the evidence that I’d been in the apartment, was critical—even besides the importance of having copies of the pictures—so I could try to prove to the cops that something was going on. I was going in, no question. But still, I took a moment.
Then I turned the handle. I did so in a firm, even fashion—and pushed the door open, stepping out of sight as soon as I was sure it was on its way. Nothing happened. Nobody came running out, nobody fired a gun.
I cautiously stuck my head around. The door hung open, revealing the corridor beyond, bleached out by the light from the glass balcony door at the end.
I walked down into the living room. Before I stopped in the middle of last night’s cigarette ends, near the two empty wineglasses, I already knew something was different. We ignore smells a lot of the time. We’re all about what we can see and hear. But before either of these cut in, part of my brain had caught onto something else. The place didn’t smell like Cass anymore.
I looked at the bathroom door. It was a little chipped and could do with a lick of paint—but it no longer had a word daubed on it.
I turned on the spot, being careful not to knock over the nearest glass, and stepped carefully over to the bedroom door.
It was here that the loss of scent was most obvious. Whatever it was that Cassandra had worn, probably something cheap, it had gone. The bed had been made, too. Not excessively neatly, either, but exactly how it might have been made by a girl in a rush, setting the room vaguely to rights before hurrying out to a shift she was already running late for. I pulled the comforter back. The sheet underneath was white, a little crumpled. It could not have looked more normal. It was not soaked with blood. It was not suspiciously clean.
Back in the living area the effect remained seamless. A low-rent apartment the morning after two people had made a night of it. Only one thing had been erased from this space’s experience—whatever had happened to Cass.
I’m not dumb. I didn’t doubt my sanity for a second. I knew what had happened. Somebody had cleaned it up, removing all evidence that a murder had taken place—a murder that had been finessed and staged for my benefit.
Suddenly afraid that the cleanup had extended further, I went over to the desk. My thumb drive was still sticking out of the USB port on the side of the laptop, thank god. I stuck it in my pocket.
I took a few steps and sat heavily down on the sofa. I was relieved, terrible though that may sound. Cass was still dead—but I was now the only person who knew this. The evidence had disappeared. Whatever the world and its authorities might want to grill me over in the future, a murder scene was no longer one of them. I’d told Deputy Hallam to come meet me here, but now there was nothing to see.
I wondered—was that
why
he wasn’t here? I couldn’t imagine the cop being involved in what was happening, but . . . what if his absence hadn’t been caused by his being otherwise engaged? What if he hadn’t come
because he knew there was nothing to see
?
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. Or at least I had no evidence for it, and I needed to stick to things that I had some reason to believe or I was going to lose track of everything, including my mind.
I realized that there was actually one other person who knew what had taken place here, and I believed the time she had spoken of had now come. I got out my phone, found her number in the
INCOMING
log.
“So,” Jane Doe said, when she answered. “Does this mean you’re ready to listen now?”
I
was waiting out on the walkway when I saw her pickup park down in the street. It was a little after five and the air was softening. I was out there watching in case Hallam turned up. I was out there to smoke. I was out there because being in Cass’s apartment was making me feel wretched and confused.
The woman walked quickly across the courtyard below without looking up, and I heard her feet pattering up the spiral staircase. The rhythm was even and fast. When she arrived at the third story and strode up the walkway she wasn’t even out of breath.
“Fancy seeing you here,” she said, though her face was pinched and she looked wired. “What the hell happened to you? You didn’t look great this morning, but now you truly look like shit.”
I turned and walked into the apartment. When we reached the living area I stopped and looked at her.
She looked back at me. “What’s your point?”
“Look in the bedroom.”
“No need,” she said. “I trust the guys I put onto it.”
“Pardon me?”
“When you did your dumb split-and-run from Burger King this morning? This is what I was organizing.”
She stuck her head around the bedroom door, appeared satisfied.
“Her smell is gone,” I said.
“Solvents. Blood is a bitch to clean up. They did it right, though, if all you’re noticing is a lack of something else. Seriously, what happened to you? You really don’t look good.”
“I got hit on the back of the head,” I said. “I woke up in a disused building within a few yards of a dead woman. There was a guy with a gun. I thought he was going to kill me, but then he disappeared.”
“What guy?”
“Don’t know. Never offered me his card. He was very informal during the entire encounter. All I know is he killed a woman called Hazel Wilkins.”
“Fuck,” she said urgently, but not in surprise. “What happened to him? Where’d he go?”
“Don’t know that, either.” I remembered full well what had happened when I’d lashed out at her in the lot of the Burger King—otherwise I’d have done it again. “Listen, is it
all
going to be on a need-to-know basis? If so we’re heading quickly toward another parting of the ways. Either you talk to me or I’m leaving—because there’s other people I want to speak to.”
“The police are not going to be able to help.”
“That’s not who I meant.”
“The guy,” she said. “What did he look like?”
“Slim. Strong in the upper body. Early fifties. Ed Harris with hair.”
“His name is John Hunter,” she said. “I don’t know what he told you, but you’d be wise to disregard it. He just got out of a stretch in jail for murder.”
“He’s already killed again,” I said. “So that doesn’t tell me much I didn’t know.”
“Look, I don’t have the details, but I know he’s a very bad man.”
“Says who?”
“One of the people who employed me.”
“Employed you to fuck me up? Why would I trust them? Or you?”
She pulled out her cell phone. Hit a few buttons, waited, and then held it out to me. “Recognize this guy?”
I saw the face of a middle-aged man, not too slim, dark hair swept back. “David Warner.”
“No. He’s an actor. His name is Daniel Bauman.”
“Well, he’s the guy I met in—”
“I know.”
I opened my mouth, shut it again. I realized that Steph and I were in Krank’s pretty often—and it was all too possible that a stooge could have been told to go there, perhaps even night after night, and wait until a chance came to talk to me: at which point I could be lured on the promise of the sale of an expensive house. It was bait I’d be bound to take.
After which . . . everything else followed.
The actor calls the office. He gets Karren instead of me, plays that out for the initial assessment (about which he doesn’t care), then insists on dealing with me direct. This appeals to my vanity and I’m ready to be convinced to come out to the house, prepared to be left waiting and eventually stood up—setting me up for photographs that make it look like I’ve been peeping at my coworker . . . except that the photos hadn’t actually been taken that night but several days before. In preparation.
“How do you know this guy?”
“I hired him. Have I just watched you work out why?”
“To pretend to be David Warner, to provide a window during which my whereabouts were unknown and in which I could have taken those pictures of Karren White.”
“Good for you. I’d get Bauman on the phone to confirm all that to you, but he’s not picking up. Which is . . . worrying me a little.”
“Who are you? And don’t give me more of the Jane Doe crap—I don’t care about your name. I mean
what
are you?”
“I’m administrative support,” she said. “Edge work. Cleanup where required.”
“Are you some kind of cop?”
She laughed, a short, sad sound. “No. Ex-army. Left with skills that aren’t valued in civilian life. I bummed around for a while, getting in trouble. Then I was recruited for this.”
“Which is what?”
“I get paid to provide a buffer between certain situations and the real world. Containment, and holding up the scenery. Once in a while I play a part, like being a waitress at some lame-ass restaurant for hicks made good. Have you
really
got no better idea of what’s going on?”
“I got modified,” I said.
“Bingo.”
“Then what?”
“The plug got pulled.”
“And you don’t know why that happened, or why Cass got killed or by who, and that’s why you’re scared.”
She cocked her head. “Well, well. Maybe you aren’t that dumb at all.”
“Oh, I’m dumb enough. But here’s something else you don’t know. The guy who coldcocked me? He showed me an old photo of a bunch of people. One of them is now dead. Tony and Marie Thompson were in the picture, too. He evidently wants to talk to them real bad. I think maybe he’s on the way to do it right now.”
The woman blinked.
“Sorry,” I said, with bitter satisfaction. “Should I have mentioned that before?”