he looked pretty much how I remembered him, albeit better dressed. He reached a hand across the coffee table. I shook it.
‘Looking good, Jack.’
‘You too.’
He was. You can tell men in good condition just from how they use a chair. There’s a confidence in their poise, a sense that sitting is not a relief but merely one of the many positions in which their body is at ease. Gary looked trim and fit. His hair was well cut and not-grey, and he had the skin that healthy eating and non-smoking delivers to those with the patience to endure that type of lifestyle. His face had matured into that of a youthful senator from somewhere unimportant, the kind who might have a shot at Vice President some day, and his eyes were clear and blue. The only thing I had over him was that the lines around my mouth and eyes were less pronounced, which surprised me.
He was silent for a few moments, doubtless making a similar assessment. Meeting a contemporary after a long time personifies the passage of time in a serious and irrevocable way.
‘I read your book,’ he said, confirming what I’d suspected.
‘So you’re the one.’
‘Really? Didn’t do so well? I’m surprised.’
‘It did okay,’ I admitted. ‘Better than. Problem is, I’m not sure there’s another.’
He shrugged. ‘Everyone thinks you’ve got to do things over and over. Nail your colours to the mast, make it who you are. Maybe one was all you had.’
‘Could be.’
‘You couldn’t go back to the police force?’ He saw the way I looked at him. ‘You thank the LAPD in the acknowledgements, Jack.’
Slightly against my will, I smiled back. Fisher still had that effect. ‘No. I’m done there. So how do you earn a buck these days?’
‘Corporate law. I’m a partner in a firm back east.’
Him being an attorney figured, but didn’t give me a lot to work with. We knocked sentences back and forth for a little while, mentioning people and places we’d once known, but it didn’t catch alight. It’s one thing if you’ve kept in touch over the years, lit beacons to steer you across the seas of time. Otherwise it seems strange, being confronted with this impostor who happens to have the same name as a kid you once knew. Though Fisher had referred to old times we didn’t really have any, unless pounding around the same sports track counted, or a shared ability to remember the menu at Radical Bob’s. A lot had happened to me since then, probably to him too. It was evident that neither of us counted classmates as friends or retained ties to the town where we’d grown up. The kids we’d once been now seemed imaginary, a genesis myth to explain how we’d used up our first twenty years.
‘So,’ I said, swallowing the rest of my coffee. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’
He smiled. ‘You’re done with the small talk?’
‘Never really been a core skill.’
‘I remember. What makes you think I’ve got something to say?’
‘You said you did. Plus, until you got my new number, you evidently thought I still lived in LA. That’s not a couple hours’ drive from Seattle. So you started looking for me for some other reason.’
He nodded, as if pleased. ‘How’d you find this place, anyway? Birch Crossing? Is it even on maps?’
‘Amy did. We’d talked about getting out of LA. I had, at least. She got this new job. It meant we could basically be anywhere as long as she could get to an airport once in a while. She found this place online or somewhere, came and checked it out. I took her word for it.’
‘Liking it?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Kind of a change from Los Angeles, though.’
‘That was partly the point.’
‘Any kids?’
‘No.’
‘I got a couple. Five and two years old. You should try it. They change your life, dude.’
‘So I hear. Where are you based these days?’
‘Evanston? Though I work downtown Chicago. Which brings me to it, I guess.’
He stared at his hands for a moment, and then started talking in earnest.
‘Here’s what I know,’ he said. ‘Three weeks ago two people were murdered in Seattle. A woman and her son, killed in their own home. The police were called after a neighbour noticed smoke and came outside to see flames in the house. When the police get in they find Gina Anderson, thirty-seven, lying in the living room. Someone dislocated her jaw and broke her neck. The other side of the room was Joshua Anderson. He’d been shot in the head and then set on fire. According to the fire department it wasn’t this that burned the house, though: the flames had only just got to that part 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 storey, mainly of 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 semi-regular night out, every six weeks. These guys confirm 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 neighbours, 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
