Every day, something. But nothing of value.
Lewis was thinking it was time to abandon this idea, take out the camera, stop paying on the apartment.
And then the guy with the Pearl Paint bag shows up.
Lewis sat at the desk in the study of his Lower East Side apartment, looking at the oversized monitor of his computer. Studying. The man knocked three times with the hand holding the bag from the art store. Lewis, in his investigation of Allison Fitch, before and after her disappearance, had never seen him before. Had no idea who he was, or whether this visit was in any way significant.
Was the guy selling something? Was he at the wrong apartment? Was he, in fact, someone who knew one of the two previous tenants, and had stopped by for a visit? If he’d known the two people who’d lived here, wouldn’t he, possibly, have shouted into the door? Something like, “Hey, anybody home?” How had he gotten into the building? Did he have a key? Did someone heading out of the building allow him access, or had he buzzed a bunch of people at random until one of them was dumb enough to buzz back?
Did it matter? Was this visitor important at all?
Then Lewis caught a look at the piece of paper in his other hand.
What was that? It had flashed twice past the lens very quickly. Lewis played the short bit of footage several times but was unable to make it out.
So he paused the video, and then used the cursor to inch it along, ever so slowly, until he got to a place where the piece of paper was marginally visible.
It appeared to be a standard piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper. The kind you put into your printer. There was a square, color image in the upper left quadrant of the page. It looked like a grouping of windows, although it was hard to tell for sure.
At the top of the page, some printing. Impossible to read on the monitor. But there was a logo of some kind in the upper left corner, multicolored. Lewis wasn’t sure, but he thought he recognized it. It led off with a stylized W, and there appeared to be three numbers at the tail end.
Lewis was pretty sure he knew what it was. The Whirl360 logo. For that Web site that allowed you to look at the actual streets of cities all over the world. He used it now and then. Like everyone else did at some point, he’d looked to see whether the house he’d grown up in was online. He’d keyed in the address of his Denver home, and sure enough, there it was.
If this was, as he suspected, the logo for Whirl360, then it made sense that the image on the page had been printed off that Web site.
Lewis magnified the blurry image as far as the computer would allow. It did appear to be a series of windows, like the ones on the old tenement buildings in the neighborhood where Allison Fitch’s apartment was. But it was impossible to see anything with any clarity.
Well, Lewis reasoned, if this guy could find the image online, then he could do it, too.
He opened up a browser, went to the Whirl360 site, and entered “Orchard Street, New York City.” And almost instantly, he was there, clicking his way down the street. When he got to the block where Fitch lived, he dragged the mouse across the screen, allowing himself to whirl around Orchard, looking from north to south and back again.
Maybe this guy who’d banged on the door was some kind of architecture student. Or someone from the city’s building department. Who the hell knew?
He positioned the image so he was looking directly at Fitch’s building, moved the mouse to the top of it, clicked, held, and dragged down, which had the effect of craning one’s neck upward to see the building’s upper stories.
“What?” he said under his breath. “What…is…that?”
He was focused on one particular window. He clicked to magnify the image.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
THEY met again on the same Central Park bench. Lewis Blocker handed Howard Talliman a sheet of paper, folded once.
“What’s this?” Talliman asked.
“Something I printed off the Net. Just look at it.”
Talliman unfolded the sheet and looked at it, puzzled. “I have no idea what this is.” Howard had never been to the Orchard Street address.
“That window, that’s the apartment. What you’re holding there, that’s a printout from the Internet.”
Howard touched his index finger to the head in the window. “Lewis, is this what I think it is?”
“Yes.”
Howard handed the page back to Lewis, who tucked it into his jacket. “I still don’t understand.”
“You familiar with Whirl360?” Lewis asked.
“I don’t live in a cave, Lewis.”
“That was printed right off the site. That picture, as we speak, is online. Anyone in the world with a computer who happens to explore Orchard Street and angles right there can see that. What had to have happened is, one of those Whirl360 cars with the panoramic cameras was going along Orchard Street at the same time that Nicole was doing her thing at the window.”
Howard, starting to grasp the enormity of it, blurted, “Dear God. How the hell did you discover this? You just found it?”
“No,” Lewis said. “It was brought to my attention.”
“What? How?”
“Someone came to the apartment. A man, I’d say late thirties, early forties. Knocked on the door. The camera activated.”
“Okay.”
Lewis patted his jacket where the printout was resting. “He had a sheet, just like this, in his hand.”
Howard’s mouth was open. He put a hand to his forehead. “Who was he?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was he doing with that? How would he have that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What the hell do you know, Lewis?”
He remained unruffled. “I know that we have a couple of problems, Howard. The first is this man. Who is he? Why does he have that printout? How did he discover it online? Did he happen upon it, or did he know it was already there? Is he acting alone, or on someone else’s behalf? Does he know what that image represents? Is he with the police? Why was he knocking on Fitch’s apartment door with it in his hand? What did he want? Who was he looking for?”
“Jesus,” Howard said. He paused a moment, then looked at Lewis. “What’s the second problem?”
“The image,” he said. “It’s still up there. On that Web site. Just waiting for someone else to find it.”
THIRTY-ONE
IT was nearly ten when I turned down the driveway. What struck me first was how dark the house looked.
The front porch light, the one at the side of the house, and the one on the barn door are all on timers, so they were on. But there was no light emanating from behind the windows. The living room was in darkness. Same for the second floor. Not even a bluish computer haze from Thomas’s room. It seemed unlikely, but maybe he’d gone to bed early.
The front door was locked. I let myself in, turned on some lights, then stopped and listened. No sounds. Not that Thomas was ordinarily noisy. Whirl360 had no audio.
“Thomas?” I called out softly, thinking he might be asleep. I didn’t want to wake him. I had expected him to be waiting up for me, eager to know what I’d learned. Not much, as it turned out, but he didn’t know that yet.
I could see through to the kitchen. “Shit,” I said under my breath.
Dirty dishes littered the table. Not just from breakfast, but lunch, too. Dinner I wasn’t too sure about. I put my hand on the half-full container of milk left sitting out. Room temperature. I gave it a sniff.
“Jeesh,” I said, and upended it in the sink. Then I noticed the peanut-butter-smeared knife stuck to the counter next to the open jar.
I mounted the stairs to the second floor and knocked on Thomas’s door ever so quietly. When there was no response, I eased it open.
I didn’t need to turn on a light to see whether he was in his bed. Moonlight streaming through the window illuminated the covers. The bed was empty. At that point, I flicked on the light.
The comput
er tower was still humming but the screen had gone to black from disuse. It was Thomas’s routine to shut everything down when he was done for the day.
I stepped out into the hall, traveled a few steps down to the bathroom. The door was open. I hit the light.
No sign of him there.
“Thomas!” I called out, no longer worried about making too much noise. “Thomas! I’m home!”
Unease washed over me. I never should have gone into Manhattan and left him for an entire day. He’d gotten into some kind of trouble, but what, exactly? I hoped to God the FBI hadn’t returned and taken him away.
I returned to the first floor, made my way to the door to the basement that was off the kitchen. “Thomas?”
No reply, but I descended the steps, anyway. Using light from the kitchen to reach the bottom, I then pulled the chain to turn on a bare bulb fixture. This room was used mostly for storage, and there were innumerable boxes of things my parents had stored over the years. An awful lot of stuff to have to go through. I walked around the room, peeked behind the furnace. Thomas was not down here.
I went out the kitchen door and took a few steps into the yard. The air was cool, the landscape lit softly by the moon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and if I’d ever studied astronomy I might have been able to pick out some constellations other than the Big Dipper.
“Thomas!” I shouted, then, under my breath, said, “Goddamn.”
I wondered whether I should call the police. I decided to do more searching first. Starting with the barn. I sprinted across the yard and slid open the broad, towering door. Once inside, I found the large electrical box screwed into a vertical beam and turned on the lights.
There wasn’t much in here, aside from the lawn tractor that had killed our father.
“Thomas! Damn it, if you’re hiding from me—”
I cut myself off, knowing how unlike Thomas it would be to play hide-and-seek. Displays of playfulness were rare from him. Once I’d stopped shouting, I listened. There was the nightly chorus of crickets, the kind of noise that’s always there, but that you really don’t notice. Not far from me, there was rustling in the bits of leftover straw that had been there for several decades, back to the time when this building was actually owned by a farmer.
A mouse scurried along, looking for safety.
I took a few steps into the structure, running my hand along the cracked hood of the tractor as I passed it. I wished, at this moment, that Thomas owned a cell phone. I would have tried calling him.
Struggling to think where he might be, I wondered whether he’d gone down to the creek, to where he’d found Dad. I killed the barn lights and ran to the crest of the hill behind the house. “You down there, Thomas?”
Nothing.
Who was there to call, other than the police? Thomas had no friends. It wasn’t like he’d gone to a sleepover.
This wasn’t like him.
I went back inside, decided I couldn’t wait any longer, and called the Promise Falls police. I told them my brother was missing.
“Sir, we’ll have an officer out to your place as soon as possible,” said the female dispatcher, “but in the meantime, I need you to provide a description of your brother. First of all, how old is he?”
I had to stop and think. “Thirty-five? He’s a couple of years younger than me.”
“And when did he go missing?”
“I don’t know. I was out for the day and I just got home and he’s not here.”
“Uh, well, hang on a second, Mr. Kilbride. This is a grown man of thirty-five you’re talking about? And for all you know he might have stepped out just before you returned? Maybe he went to the store or something, or for a drive.”
“No, it’s not like that. He doesn’t leave the house.”
“Maybe he finally got tired of being cooped up.”
This was going to take too long to explain. “Thomas is a psychiatric patient. Okay, not a patient, exactly, but he does see a psychiatrist on a regular basis, and this is not normal for him, to leave, to not be here.”
“You left a psychiatric patient on his own, Mr. Kilbride?”
“Jesus, it’s not—could you just send someone out and I’ll try to explain it to them?”
“We’ll send a car around, sir. But—”
“I have to go,” I said.
I didn’t want to spend my time arguing with the dispatcher the whole time I waited for a cop to show up.
Even after I called the police, my unease was evolving into panic. I went out to the porch, looking out to the road and to the left where, about a hundred yards away, our closest neighbor lived. A woman who’d been on her own since her husband died several years ago. I didn’t see anything else I could do right now aside from waking her up.
That was when a car started slowing along the highway, coming from the direction of town. About two car lengths from the end of our driveway, it edged off the pavement, tires crunching on gravel.
The car turned and started approaching the house. I came down the porch steps, worried that this was not someone bringing Thomas home, but someone bringing me bad news about him.
With the headlights shining directly at me, I couldn’t make out the car or tell whether anyone was in it beside the driver. It pulled up just behind and on the other side of mine, so that when the passenger door opened, I could see Thomas getting out, but not the person behind the wheel.
“Thomas! Where the hell have you been?”
He was holding something in his hand, about half the size of a clipboard. I realized it was one of those high-tech tablets that allowed you to do a hundred things, including surf the Web. He didn’t look the slightest bit concerned about the worry he’d caused me. “I went out to get something to eat. KFC. This thing is way better than the GPS in your car. What did you find out in New York? I want to hear everything. Come into the house because it’s cold outside.”
He strolled right past me, went up the steps into the house.
I heard the driver’s door open and close. Seconds later, someone appeared, looked at me, and smiled.
“Hey,” Julie said. “Your brother’s something else. We had a great time. And this thing about somebody’s head in a bag? Man, that’s some kind of story.”
THIRTY-TWO
BEFORE saying a word to either Thomas or Julie, I took out my cell and called the police back and told them my brother was home safe. Then I said to Julie, “What’s going on?”
“You said drop by. I dropped by. You were out. Thomas was home. He was puzzling over what to do about dinner so I asked him if he wanted to go out and grab a bite and he said sure. You asking me in for a drink or am I gonna have to drive home sober?”
“What did you find out?” Thomas shouted. He’d come back out and was standing on the porch with the tablet in his hand.
“Give me a second here,” I said to him. “I’ll be right in.” To Julie, I said, “Where’d he get the thing?”
“I’m letting him borrow it,” she said. “I showed him how he could look up maps on it anywhere. Doesn’t have to be sitting at his desk all the time.”
“I want to get one of these, Ray,” Thomas said. “Can you get me one of these?”
“Thomas,” I said, aggravation creeping into my voice, “I’ll be in, in a minute.”
Thomas went back into the house.
“He’s right,” Julie said.
“About what?”
“The way you talk to him,” Julie said. “He said you’re mean to him.”
“I am not—he said that?”
Julie nodded, and said offhandedly, “That’s what he tells me.”
“I’m not mean to him. I’m trying to do my best.”
She smiled. “I’m sure you are.”
“You’re patronizing me.”
Her smile broadened. “Yeah, I guess. Listen, I suppose I’ll just head back and—”
“No, come on in,” I said. “You can fill me in on what a terrible brother I am.”
> “How much time do you have?”
As we were going up the steps, I said, “I’m surprised you got him to leave the house. He hates leaving the house.”
“Letting him play with the gadget helped. That, and offering to get him some KFC.”
“That would do it,” I said as we walked inside.
Thomas could be heard clicking away upstairs. He called down, “Come upstairs!”
“I better deal with this,” I said. “You wanna come up?” She nodded. “I kind of need to prepare you for what it looks like up here.”
“Thomas already showed me,” Julie said. “No big deal. My brother used to have naked women all over his wall. I’ll take maps.”
I looked at her for a second and shook my head. “Okay.”
“Well?” Thomas said as we came into his room, his eyes on the center monitor, advancing forward through some metropolis somewhere.
“If we’re going to talk about this, you have to stop and look at me,” I said.
“That’s just what he was talking about,” Julie whispered to me. “You talk to him like he’s a kid.”
I shot her a look as Thomas lifted his hand from the mouse and did a quarter circle on his computer chair. “So what happened?”
I cleared my throat. “Okay, so I went to Orchard Street, and I found the address. Here.” I took out my phone, opened the camera app, and handed it to him. “There’s a picture of the place.”
Thomas studied the tiny image, then compared it to a printout similar to the one he had given me before I’d gone to Manhattan.
He nodded. “That’s the window. The brick patterns all match up.”
“And as you can see,” I said, “there’s no head in the window.”
“You say that like it proves something,” Thomas said.
“I’m just pointing it out, that’s all.”
“If someone had a car accident at the end of our driveway six months ago, and you took a picture of it, taking another picture at the end of our driveway today wouldn’t prove that the accident never happened.”
Trust Your Eyes Page 19
