Michael Marshall Smith by The Intruders

Author:The Intruders [Intruders, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-01T22:02:27+00:00

chapter

TWENTY-TWO

The Anderson house was on Federal, near Broadway Avenue, up on the ridge overlooking downtown and Elliott Bay. The avenue itself is a major thoroughfare, a long, wide street sparsely lined with generic businesses, redbrick banks, and more places to buy coffee. As a nation in general, we like our coffee, but the Northwest is insane on the subject. I’m surprised you can’t get it out of ATMs. Federal was a couple of streets back and overhung with big trees now shedding copper and yellow leaves. The speed limit was twenty, because people actually walked around here, and many houses had low hedges that someone remembered to cut or picket fences that had been painted sometime in living memory. Most were small. The cars on the street also said you did not have to be rich to live here, but it was easy to see why you might want to be.

The house itself was one back from a crossroads. Evidence of fire damage was minor from the outside, though the street-level windows had been covered with plywood sheets. I walked straight up the stairs onto the shallow porch, which is what you do when you have a right to be there. The door was sealed with tape, but I had a tool ready for that and another to pop the lock. A lot of cops have rudimentary breaking-and-entering skills. Mine are a little better than most.

I stepped into a dark space that smelled of old smoke and shut the door behind me.

I stood still for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust. There was little ambient light making its way around the window boards, however, and it didn’t get any better than very dark. I reached out to the side of the doorway and found a switch. The lights came on, the bill presumably still being automatically paid from the account of a man whose whereabouts were unknown.

I went upstairs first. Other than the smell and some shadowing on the walls, the fire had made few inroads here. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, another room used for storage and a home office. A hatch in the hall ceiling opened into a roof space thick with dust that had not been recently disturbed. I looked quickly through the bedrooms, doing little more than opening drawers and glancing into closets, then checked the obvious hiding places in the bathroom. Found evidence for nothing more than a middle-aged couple living with a teenage son. No sign of anywhere a gun would likely have been stowed, either: no lockbox, no wrap cloth, no carton of old shells.

Then I went back downstairs and halted a couple of steps short of the bottom to look down over the living room. The air was dead and quiet. This was obviously where Joshua Anderson had died, given the oblique blood splatter across one smoke-stained wall and the charred patch in the carpet. I descended the last couple of steps and walked around the room, not trying to make anything of it.

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