WILSON SAT IN HIS pickup outside John Smith’s apartment building in Ballard. There were too many shadows. A man could hide in a dozen different places on this block and not be seen until it was too late. Wilson was excited. He could feel John Smith’s presence.
According to the foreman, John Smith lived on the top floor. Wilson looked up and saw only one lit window in a top-floor apartment. Wilson checked the mailboxes. John Smith in 403. Hiestand in 402, Salgado in 401. Wilson tested the front door of the apartment building. Unlocked. A nonsecure building. Wilson took a deep breath. Wilson had no idea what John Smith would do when confronted.
Wilson slowly climbed the stairs, his bad knee aching with the effort. As a cop, he had been in many situations like this. A dark building, a potentially dangerous suspect somewhere up the stairs. It was never as dramatic as the movies or books. No cats springing into the frame as a false scare. No extras scrambling for cover. Only the cop, the dark stairs, and the suspect. Wilson had always enjoyed the hunt.
Wilson reached the fourth floor. He passed by 401 and 402. At 403, he stood close and listened. He could hear vague noises from inside the apartment. Smith was home. Wilson debated his options. He could bust down the door with weapon drawn. He could stand away from the door and shout orders to Smith. Come out with your hands up! But what would he do after Smith came out? Wilson thought hard, then he shrugged his shoulders, and knocked politely on the door.
“John!” cried the woman who threw open the door, an action that caused Wilson to jump back and reach inside his coat. He stopped himself when he noticed the white woman standing in the doorway.
“Oh,” said Wilson, embarrassed at his obvious error. “I’m sorry. I was looking for John Smith.”
“This is John’s apartment,” said Olivia Smith. “He’s my son.”
Wilson was confused. This beautiful blond, blue-eyed white woman could not be the mother of an Indian man.
“My name is Olivia Smith.” Wilson’s confusion was familiar to Olivia from so many faces. She was always forced to offer explanations. “And he’s adopted.”
“Oh, I see,” said Wilson. “Is John home?” He noticed how her face was drawn and pale. She looked like she’d been crying.
“No, no. Are you a friend of his?”
“Uh, not really, no.”
Olivia, suddenly nervous, took a small step back into the apartment. She had her hand on the door, ready to close it quickly.
“What do you want with my son?” asked Olivia.
“Well, ma’am, my name is Jack Wilson. I just wanted to ask him a few questions about a book I’m working on.”
“Jack Wilson?” asked Olivia. She recognized the name because she still read every book about Indians she could find. “You write those murder mysteries, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“Aristotle Little Hawk, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Wilson, flushing with pride.
“I like your books. You really get it right.”
“Thank you.”
Olivia invited Wilson into the apartment, feeling as if she somehow knew him simply because she’d read his books. She offered him a donut from a box sitting on the kitchen table. They were Seattle’s Best Donuts, but Wilson declined. He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, while Olivia sat at the table.
“What kind of book are you writing, Mr. Wilson?” asked Olivia, falling back on politeness.
“It’s about the Indian Killer,” said Wilson.
“You can’t think John has anything to do with that?” asked Olivia, alarmed now.
“No, no. I was just doing some research when I heard about this Indian guy, your son, a high-rise construction worker. I thought it was interesting.”
“It’s the last skyscraper they’re going to build in Seattle.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Can you imagine that? When we think of cities, don’t we think of tall buildings? Now we have all these computers and things. People can work from anywhere. They don’t need to be bunched up in the same big buildings anymore. They don’t even need to be in the same country to work together anymore. Things change, don’t they?”
“Yes, they do.”
Olivia picked up a donut, nibbled at it, then studied it.
“John loves these things,” said Olivia.
Wilson looked around the room. It was spare and cluttered at the same time. Prints with Indian themes hung at strange angles on the walls. The bed was made haphazardly. Boxes of assorted junk were stacked neatly in every corner.
“Where is John?” asked Wilson.
“I don’t know,” said Olivia. “We’ve been looking for him for a long time.”
Wilson looked at Olivia’s left hand. Married to a rich man, judging by the size of the diamond. She wore the standard casual outfit for middle-aged white women in Seattle: a white T-shirt, blue jeans, black blazer.
“Do you have a family, Mr. Wilson?”
“No.”
“No wife?”
“No, never.”
Surprised, Olivia quickly studied Wilson’s features. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, middle-aged, a writer, probably intelligent. He should have been married a couple times by now. Then Olivia remembered that he had been a cop, and changed her mind. He must have lots of problems. She thought about asking him to leave, but decided that it did not matter. She couldn’t see how her troubles could get much worse.
“My son doesn’t even know I’m here, Mr. Wilson. He’d be angry if he knew I had a key to his place. He’s got some real problems, with me, and his father. He’s got problems with everybody. I’m not sure he’d even talk to you.”
“What kind of problems?” asked Wilson.
Olivia hesitated for a moment, then continued, too tired to maintain secrets.
“He’s got everything and nothing,” she said. “Every time we took him to a new doctor, there was something else wrong with him. But hey, he doesn’t drink or do drugs. He doesn’t even take the drugs that are supposed to help him.”
Olivia started to cry, got angry at herself for breaking down, and then cried even harder. Wilson took a step toward her, raised his hand as some sort of clumsy offering, and stopped.
“I’m sorry,” said Olivia, wiping her face with her hands. “I’m just so tired. I can’t sleep. I’m so scared. I keep thinking about this Indian Killer. Sometimes, I wonder. I think, maybe…”
Olivia closed her eyes, swallowed hard, trying to maintain her composure. When she had visited the donut shop just before trying John’s apartment, Paul and Paul Too had told her about John’s wild behavior.
“John was such a gentle boy,” said Olivia. “He wouldn’t even kill bugs. Really. Me, I’m terrified of spiders. Just phobic. I remember this one time, John couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, and I was cleaning the upstairs bathroom. I can remember it like it was yesterday, you know?”
Wilson nodded his head, and glanced at his watch.
“I even remember the song on the radio. The Beatles. That strawberry song, remember? I was singing with the radio, cleaning the bathtub, when this huge spider came out of the drain. I screamed like crazy. Daniel, my husband, was at work. It must have been summer because John was home. He heard my screaming and he came running, you know, to save Mommy. I was trying to smash that spider with my shoe when John came into the bathroom. He just screamed at me, ‘No, no!’ and then I smashed that spider flat.”
Wilson walked a few steps closer to Olivia, who seemed lost in the memory.
“Oh, God, he cried over that spider. Just bawled. Made me bury it in the backyard. We even had a funeral. Isn’t that funny?”
Olivia looked up at Wilson and smiled. He smiled and nodded his head.
“Mrs. Smith,” said Wilson. “He sounds like a good boy.”
“He was,” said Olivia. “He was.”
“You don’t have any idea where he is?”
Olivia sat up in the chair, wiped her face again, sensing Wilson’s impatience.
“No, Mr. Wilson, I have no idea.”
Wilson took the foreman’s photograph out of his pocket and showed it to Olivia.
“Is this your son?”
Olivia stared at the photograph of her son, his face empty and dark.
“That’s John,” she said.
Wilson tucked the photograph back into his pocket and turned to leave.
“Thank you, Mrs. Smith,” said Wilson as he opened the door.
“Mr. Wilson,” said Olivia just before he closed the door behind him.
“Yes.”
“If you see John, tell him to come home.”
Wilson left Olivia alone at the table. He raced down the stairs and jumped into his pickup. He figured he could find John or somebody who knew John at Big Heart’s. As he drove away, Olivia watched him from the apartment window. She knew that everything was going wrong, but she felt powerless to stop it. Her husband was probably asleep on the couch in his study. That’s how it must be. He had been too tired to walk up the stairs to bed, so he slipped off his shoes and pants, loosened his tie, and then curled up on the couch. He had probably called out to her, had not received a response, and had assumed she was asleep. That was how it must be. He was asleep on the couch, wearing a nice shirt and loosened tie. A decent man, he was probably dreaming about his son. Daniel twisting and turning in his sleep. All of it quickly becoming a nightmare. Olivia loved her husband. She watched Wilson’s pickup until it disappeared into the rest of the city. He drove north. Olivia looked south toward downtown Seattle and counted the number of streetlights. One, two, three, then ten, then more. She counted until there were none left to be counted, and then she began again.