Circles of Confusion

  Maybe the man who had followed her through the American Museum of Natural History had been just another visitor in a hurry. It was even possible that the man who had broken into her hotel room had just been looking for traveler's checks to steal. But there was no way to chalk up her neighbor, blown to bits on what should have been just another Friday, to Claire's overactive imagination. Until now, she had thought someone was after the painting. Now she didn't know what to think. Why would someone want to kill her? And why would they risk blowing up the painting along with her?

  She looked at her watch. Thirty minutes had passed since she had arrived. During that time, no one had entered or left the building. The security guard was still in the same position behind the front desk, slouched in his chair and slowly turning the pages of a paperback. To all appearances, everything was just as it should be on a Sunday evening, but Claire no longer trusted appearances. She took a deep breath and got out of her car.

  The guard, a big guy in his mid-twenties, looked vaguely familiar. Claire realized she had seen him a time or two, sneaking a smoke outside the back entrance to the building. "Good evening, ma'am." His voice reminded her of whoever had done the voice-overs on Dragnet, old-fashionedly polite and a little world-weary.

  "Hi. I'm Claire Montrose. I work on thirteen. In the specialty license plate division. I need to get up to my office for a second. I accidentally left something behind."

  "You'll need to sign in." The security guard—his name tag read Bruce—pushed a clipboard toward her. "Then just use your ID badge to get the elevator to take you to your floor."

  "That's the thing, see? I drove all the way over here and then realized I left my badge in my other coat." This was true, as far as it went. Claire's badge was in the pocket of the black raincoat she wore to work and had left at home five days before.

  "Sorry, ma'am. The rules are pretty strict. Can't let you in without your badge."

  "I can show you all my other ID. I've got two with pictures," Claire said, before realizing this would mean having to unzip her jacket, revealing the backpack she now wore across her chest. Bruce would probably decide he had a terrorist action on his hands and tackle her.

  "Oh, I know who you are. I see you every Monday. You come in right at seven-thirty just when I'm getting off work—and you're always in a hurry." He shrugged. "But that doesn't matter. The rules say I can't let you in without your badge."

  Maybe she could kill him with kindness. "Wow, if you're still here on Monday morning, you must really work a long shift."

  "Seven-thirty to seven-thirty. Twelve-hour shift, three days a week. The rest of the time I go to school. Criminology."

  "Do you work the whole twelve hours by yourself?" Claire put on an interested expression even though she felt like reaching across the counter and shaking him. The back of her neck itched. Was someone watching her even now, just as she had been watching the lobby only minutes before?

  "They don't really need more than one person. I'm just here to check people in and out, but it's the computer that decides where they can go. The whole thing practically runs itself. Having someone here is just—what do they call it? A system redundancy."

  "But can't you override the system? Just to let me up on my floor? I promise it won't take more than five minutes. All I want to do is"—What did she want to do, anyway? She hadn't thought this thing through, and now she was paying for it. Her glance fell on the Stephen King paperback tucked underneath the overhang of the counter—"is get a book I left up there. I forgot to take it home on Friday, and it's been driving me crazy thinking about it. I need to see how it turns out. I can't wait until tomorrow."

  "Well, just this once," Bruce said. "But you'd better be back here in ten minutes." He came out from behind the desk, almost but not quite smiling, clearly enjoying the power of saying yes or no. Closer to, he looked no more than twenty-three, his pressed white polyester shirt concealing both thick muscle and a layer of baby fat. His belt sagged under the weight of several key rings and various holsters. One held a flashlight, another a walkie-talkie, the third she guessed contained a pair of handcuffs. Bruce pressed the button for the elevator. When it arrived he leaned in, pulled his ID off his shirt, flashed it over the sensor and pressed the button for thirteen. "You've got ten minutes," he said as the doors were closing between him and Claire.

  On the plane, Claire had considered and rejected any number of places to hide the painting. In the movies, people hid things in airport lockers, but then again, in the movies that always turned out to be a bad idea. Finally, she hit on the idea of her office. After hours, her floor was accessible only to people holding a state-issued ID card, providing a built-in first wall of defense. But where to hide the painting once she got to work? She had considered tucking it in a filing cabinet or slipping it behind a bookcase. Maybe hiding it in the storage room full of boxes of forty-year-old motor vehicle records that Roland spoke vaguely about someday putting on microfiche.

  But then Claire had remembered the additional phone lines that had been installed two months before. The workman had stood on a ladder in the middle of the hallway. He had pushed up on one corner of an acoustic ceiling tile, then turned it at an angle and slid it between the silver metal struts that held it in place. One by one, he popped out an entire row. Then he had climbed up even farther to stand at the top of the ladder, so that he was visible only from the waist down, the top half of his body swallowed up by the ceiling, and strung the phone wire over the next row of intact ceiling tiles. The tiles certainly weren't strong enough to hold a person, but if they were strong enough to hold a bundle of phone wires, Claire thought they could easily hold a painting for a day or two. At least until she figured out what was going on.

  The elevator doors opened into a darkness broken only by the lights of the city sparkling in the windows and the green glow of the exit sign. For a few minutes, she watched the empty streets below, reassured to see no one following her in the building, no one loitering on a corner. Claire felt along the wall for a light switch. The office, which in the daylight was as familiar to her and as unremarkable as her own bedroom, was now filled with mysterious objects that threw themselves in her path. She tripped over the rolling step- stool the secretary used to get to the tops of the filing cabinets, stumbled into a chair that bruised her hip. Finally she found the switch. Under the artificial light, the flat orange carpeting looked particularly garish. She looked at her watch. Seven minutes left— not just to hide the painting, but also to try entering a name into the state's computer and see what popped up on the screen.

  She made it back to Bruce with fifteen seconds to spare.

  "Thanks again!" she called, already pushing open the door to the outside.'

  "Did you find your book?"

  "Yup, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it turns out!" She waved it vigorously in his direction, hoping she was moving too fast for him to read the title, The New American Dictionary of Slang.

  Chapter 23When she pulled up in front of the house she shared with Charlie, Claire felt something ease inside her. She was home. Fishing her key from her coat pocket, she stepped onto the porch. Duke's huge dish—-Charlie's inexpensive version of a burglar alarm—shone faintly in the streetlight. Usually it was full of dry kibble, but tonight it was empty. One of the neighborhood mutts must have discovered the stash. Then Claire's left foot slipped on something, and she realized that the shadows had obscured the dark pebbles littering the porch. Belatedly, she began to look around her, and she didn't like what she found. Why was the porch light not on? Why was the house dark?

  She put her key into the lock and turned it without hearing the tumblers click. The door was already unlocked. "Charlie?" she called, meaning her voice to carry to the back of the house. It came out in a near-whisper. "Charlie?" The word was more like a thought.

  She took a step into the darkened house. Slowly, she reached out for the light switch, half fearing that another, rougher hand would clamp down on her own.
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  The light revealed devastation. Everything that had been neat and orderly was now ripped, battered, strewn, broken, sliced, crushed and thrown. It was all too familiar—the mess of her hotel room, only on a bigger scale.

  With an effort, Claire made her voice bigger. "Charlie?" she called out into the dark house, already knowing it was futile. "Charlie?"

  Only silence answered her.

  The minute she had crossed the threshold, some part of her had known there was no point in calling Charlie's name. There was no one to answer. But did that really mean Charlie wasn't here? What if Charlie were here—but dead?

  An iron band closed around Claire's chest. Could whoever had trashed the house have also killed Charlie? It seemed all too possible. A tiny old lady in pink tennis shoes wouldn't pose much of an obstacle. Claire was frightened by how easily she could picture her best friend dead, just one more broken thing sprawled on a heap of broken things.

  Taking a deep breath before she crossed through each doorway, Claire went from room to room, searching. Everything had been reduced to an oddly featureless mess. It was hard to remember what things had once been. In Charlie's bedroom, her pillows and duvet had been gutted, and goose feathers lay in drifts. The chair where she did her cross-stitch had been sliced to the heart, exposing its coiled springs. But no Charlie, not even when Claire risked peeking in the closet.

  In the empty bathroom that lay between the two upstairs bedrooms, the intruder had efficiently destroyed two things at once by throwing Charlie's square bottle of Chanel No. 5 at the mirror, shattering both. The sweetish reek hung over Claire's bedroom, where every book had been thrown on the floor, every piece of clothing pulled from the dresser and closet. But still there was no sign of Charlie.

  Back downstairs, Claire stepped gingerly through the dining room, where the sideboard lay overturned amid shards of china. In the kitchen, the flour and sugar canisters lay in shards on the floor, and the resulting mess had been walked through a dozen times. Two veal cutlets, now dry and curling at the edges, lay on the counter.

  On legs that threatened to fail her, she came back to the living room, put the least damaged of the couch cushions back in place, and sat down. Something was bothering her. Although the house was like an echo of what had happened at her hotel room—had that only been this morning?—things seemed different. In New York, the damage had been, for want of a better word, functional. Things had been broken open or cut apart simply to verify that they did not hold the painting. But here, in her own house, things had been broken for the sake of breaking. Why else would someone pull the tulips from a hand-blown vase, lob the vase across the room so that it shattered against the wall, and then grind the flowers into the carpet until they bled crimson? Claire could almost feel the anger that had prompted such destruction.

  The phone rang and Claire leapt to her feet, her heart jackhammering. She followed the sound of the phone until she found the handset wedged behind the refrigerator.

  "Yes?" Her voice came out a cautious whisper, unready for another surprise.

  "Claire? Is that you?"

  "Dante?" At the sound of his voice, tears sprang to her eyes. Suddenly her suspicions of him seemed ridiculous. He was just a struggling painter, after all. There was no way he could be making bad things happen three thousand miles away.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I just walked in the door. Somebody broke in while I was gone. Everything's trashed. I think they were looking for the painting. But the worst thing is—I can't find any sign of my roommate." Claire gave words to her fear. "I'm afraid somebody kidnapped Charlie."

  "Have you called the police?"

  "I haven't even thought that far. It's all happening too fast."

  "What about the painting?"

  "I put it someplace safe. I was worried something like this might happen." Belatedly, Claire realized the mistake she had made. "Oh no."

  "What? Are you okay?" His words were nearly on top of hers.

  "I just realized that I called Charlie from the plane. Only now I don't remember what I said. Did I tell her I wasn't bringing it home?"

  "Did you tell her where you were going to put it? Claire, where did you put the painting?"

  Instead of answering, she began to wade through the debris in the living room, kicking it aside, seeking the black plastic base of the portable telephone. If they had listened to that!

  It was half hidden by a gift-wrapped package, broken open to show a smashed pair of earrings, silver hoops reduced to broken curls of metal. Claire had forgotten that tomorrow was her birthday. Just surviving until the end of the day was beginning to seem problematic.

  Dante's voice was insistent in her ear. "Claire, Claire, are you okay?"

  "Yes." She answered absently, turning the phone's base over. The light on the built-in answering machine shone a steady green. Her call from six thousand feet had been listened to, then. But who had done the listening—Charlie, or the people who had destroyed the house? And where was Charlie now? What exactly had she said on her message? Had she said anything about the painting? Exhaustion fogged Claire's brain. She scrubbed her face with her free hand.

  Dante's voice, insistent now, interrupted her thoughts. "Claire!

  Claire! I think you should leave the house now and go to the police. And listen, I'm gonna come out there. I'll take the first flight I can get. I should be in Portland by early afternoon your time. Three at the latest. Tell me a good place to meet you."

  "You shouldn't do that," she said, not knowing what she felt. Would she be crazy to trust him? She felt so alone, and trouble was multiplying all around her.

  "Just tell me when and where."

  Before she could decide on an answer, the doorbell chimed, startling her so that she nearly dropped the phone. Claire crunched her way to the front door and looked out through the tiny panes of beveled glass that marched in pairs across the top.

  Only six inches away, a pair of eyes the color of washed silver met her own. Their owner stepped back a bit, revealing a good-looking man about her own age. She saw white teeth bracketed by narrow lips, the upturned collar of a beige trench coat, the lapels of a dark suit. He flipped a black wallet open to show a gold badge and pressed it against one of the panes. Portland Police was stamped on the shield. Claire's knees loosened.

  "Listen, Dante, I've got to go. The cops are here. It must be about Charlie."

  "Wait—tell me where I can meet you!"

  She picked the first public place she thought of. "Three o'clock at the Lloyd Center ice skating rink. Any cabdriver should be able to get you there." She could decide later if she was really going to show up.

  "Okay, Lloyd Center ice rink, three o'clock, see you then. And Claire—be very careful. Somebody is serious about this."

  "I will," she said, but the connection was already dead. There was no place to set the phone down, so she tossed it on the couch. Before she opened it, she put the chain on the door, thinking it was rather like locking the barn door after the horses had headed for the hills.

  "Good evening, ma'am. Paul Roberts, detective with the Portland Police Department," He closed his wallet and slipped it inside the breast pocket of his jacket.

  "Do you know where Charlie is?" Please, please, let her not be dead.

  "Charlie? Who's Charlie?" the detective echoed. "I'm canvassing Sonia Wallin's neighbors. The woman who was killed Friday."

  "So you don't know anything about my roommate?" Claire's anxiety started to return.

  "No, I don't. But perhaps you can explain to me what you mean while I ask you about Ms. Wallin."

  "Can't we do that here?"

  "Through the door, you mean? Ma'am, I have a number of questions I must ask. I also have an Identikit that I'll need you to look at to help me identify any strangers you've seen in the neighborhood. I would really rather do this sitting down."

  His weary, bureaucratic way of speaking decided her. Claire took the chain off the door and opened it.

  She
thought that when the detective saw the mess he would ask what in the hell had happened, but that apparently wasn't how he operated. Instead he pulled out a narrow tan notebook and began to ask her a few routine questions—her name, her date of birth, her phone number, her occupation. His slow, methodical plodding, his serenity in the face of disaster, were surreal yet oddly comforting.

  The detective's first set of questions required no thought, so Claire was able to study him as he carefully noted her answers. He reminded her of someone, but she couldn't think of who it was. Then it came to her. Evan. Evan had that same careful, step-by-step approach to life. And if he was anything like Evan, there was no sense in hurrying him, even if part of her was screaming, Charlie! But where's Charlie!

  Detective Roberts was about the same age as Evan, too, and his hair was also blond, but there the resemblance ended. Every inch of him was stylish in ways that Evan would be oblivious to—pressed where Evan would be rumpled, 100 percent merino wool where Evan would have settled for a blend. His voice was as measured and precise as his manner, every syllable equally weighted, which had the effect of making him sound like a very articulate foreigner or a computer-generated voice. But it was his eyes that were truly distinctive, a color so pale that they were neither blue nor gray. Whenever he looked up from his notebook to her face, his eyes flashed like mercury.

  They sat in the ruins of the house while the detective carefully noted all the facts, numbers and dates that circumscribed Claire's life. Exhaustion weighted her eyelids, and after each blink she found it harder and harder to open them again. A surreptitious half-turn of her wrist allowed her to catch a glimpse of her watch. Nearly midnight. But if she were to go to bed right now, she knew her eyes would refuse to close, burning holes into the darkness.