A Person of Interest (36 page)

“They’ve asked me not to come back,” Lee said. “Until this is resolved.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” When this brought no immediate response, Jeff added, but without eagerness, “If you’re saying this was an unlawful dismissal, then that’s something you should talk to someone about.”

“I don’t know if it’s that. I don’t know if I’m . . . dismissed,” Lee said, blindly struggling into his jacket, feeling he couldn’t leave the office too quickly, even with the five cars keeping vigil outside. Now it was close to noon, and, amazing as it was, all the self-satisfi ed bustle of a normal weekday was in progress throughout the few modest blocks of downtown where Jeff Trulli kept his office, not far from Penney’s and Sears and the rest of the town’s somehow changeless attractions, which persevered despite two shopping malls and the strips of cheap commerce along the highway. The five cars, if they were still there, were camouflaged now amid identical cars parked the length of the street, and the traffic was as congested as it ever got, without losing any of its Sunday gentility, and as he groped his way into its lazy current, Lee dared to wonder if the five cars were actually gone. Almost as soon as he’d parted from Jeff, his eyes had sprung a leak, and he wiped at them with alternate hands, impatiently and ineffectively, smearing wet down his cheeks. Despite the gray weather, old people and young mothers with strollers were ambling through the cross-walks. He compulsively rechecked his mirrors, glimpsing drivers who might have gasped and jumped out of their cars if they’d seen him, the day’s breaking news, in return. He emerged from the small traffi c snarl into the emptier streets on the edge of downtown. Then he saw, in the heartbeat between his quick glances, the car with the baseball-cap man reappear behind him.

Now it was the streetscape in front, not behind, that came to him in disconnected tableaux, while the nose of the baseball-cap car was an
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ongoing presence. The baseball-cap man betrayed nothing, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his jaw clean and impassive. When they stopped at a light, Lee’s eyes darted and his head jerked the same half rotation again and again, to confirm what the mirror told him. He remembered the day he had gotten the letter, and the tears he had shed, driving home.

“You goddamned lousy sonofabitch!” Lee cried out suddenly.

“Sonofabitch murderer! So you got what you wanted! You got it!” The light changed, and he stamped on the gas in his rage, as a phantom form passed by his hood—could Gaither have managed this, too? Conjured a mother and baby, or a little old lady, or a Boy Scout and his dog, in the path of Lee’s car? But before Lee had seen that it was just an illusion, he braked, with an inhale of horror, and felt the baseball-cap car hitting him.

He sat stunned, while an echo of impact seemed to pulse from the back of his neck. He had already shifted to park, but he only noticed when he found himself trying to grind the gearshift further into that notch. Perhaps it was the feeling in his neck that made him unable to look behind him; he was even afraid to look into the mirror. His Nissan was running through its repertoire of ill noises while idling, and each gurgle and wheeze sounded slightly more dire than it had in the past.

A police car appeared, as if magically summoned. “License and registration?” the policeman asked when Lee had tremblingly rolled down his window.

“He hit me,” Lee said.

“I can see something happened,” the policeman said amiably.

“License and registration. Let’s just do first things fi rst.” The baseball-cap man still had not left his car. Seeking his wallet with trembling fingers, Lee saw, finally daring to look at his mirror, the baseball-cap man with one elbow propped in his car’s window, speaking into the same sort of portable phone Agent Shenkman had used.

An older woman had appeared, lumpy and slow in an aqua sweat-suit. “I saw everything,” Lee heard her say to the policeman. “That fi rst car pulled out, and then all of a sudden it stopped. It’s that car’s fault for sure.”

The baseball-cap man now got out of his car, in the same motion snapping the little phone shut. “My car’s fine if yours is,” he remarked
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to Lee casually. His gaze captured Lee’s like a snare; Lee couldn’t look away from it. Baseball Cap stared at Lee blankly yet confidently, as if he knew every contour of Lee that there was and at the same time could never have told him apart from the world’s countless other small, brown-skinned old men for whom he did not give a damn.

“That’s him!” the woman said suddenly, following Baseball Cap’s gaze. “That’s the man that they showed on TV!”

“I don’t know,” the agreeable, stupid policeman was saying. “I may have to file a report. This lady says he was braking to create a hazard, and that merits a ticket.”

“It’s him!” the woman repeated, pointing. Lee shrank back in his seat, his laboriously located wallet now clenched in his fist; the rush of detestation he felt for her struck him like nausea. How had he lived in this town, with these people, for so many years?

“Stop pointing at me!” Lee shrieked at her. The policeman looked up in surprise.

“Can I just have a word with you, Officer Patchett?” Baseball Cap said with easy authority, leaning forward to read the man’s badge as he reached toward his own rear pants pocket for something his gesture implied would be a similar object.

In the next moment Lee found himself speeding away.

He’d never broken the speed limit—he’d never broken any law—

in all the time he’d lived in this country, and for some reason it was this ghastly perversion, and none of the others, that obsessed him as he raced along in the protesting Nissan.
Never in my life,
his mind kept dumbly blurting. Never, never in my life! Before he realized where he was he had turned through the entranceway to the state park, where the accelerated onset of spring gave substance to his sense that the last time he’d been here was eons ago, when in fact it was a week ago Tuesday, the day that he’d had his first idiot’s notion about what kind of person the Brain Bomber was. A week of unfurling green leaves and the thorough unraveling of his own life. He parked at the farther side of the empty lot and turned on his car radio, expecting reports of his flight, but no stations had news, only agonized popular music of the kind Esther might have once liked. More than anything he wanted to sleep, to slip free of the waking nightmare by becoming unconscious.

The familiar symptoms of insomnial hangover underlay all his
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panicked attempts at clear thinking. He could not go home, where the five cars had no doubt reassembled, with reinforcements, to pick up his trail. He couldn’t go to the department; he thought of Peter Littell and Emma Stiles and Rachel and even Sondra and their disgusted condemnation of him. He couldn’t go to a pay phone, or anywhere else where a townsperson might recognize him. He did not know Fasano’s address; this deficiency seemed the only obstacle, if an insurmount-able one, to driving the two thousand miles to California. He had no idea where Esther was living. But was it possible Esther had heard what was happening to him? Was she on her way here?

It was difficult to distinguish his longings from his practical needs, and both from likelihoods. He knew it was not really likely that Esther was racing to save him, but his chest still kept leaping out hopefully toward that idea. And he knew he should now regard Morrison as his enemy, but he also saw him as a singular arbiter. If his cravings for sleep and for the company of his estranged only child weren’t exactly useful, at least his craving to beg Morrison for mercy touched directly on one of the principal elements of this disaster. He thought resent-fully of young Baseball Cap and his portable phone; if he possessed such a thing, he could call Morrison from right here! Now it was the top of the hour, and the music had paused for a news break: “
FBI offi -

cials this morning searched the Farmfield Estates home of the math
professor who was working next door to Dr. Richard Hendley at the time
of the bombing that claimed Hendley’s life. FBI officials describe Dr. Lee
as a Person of Interest to their investigation. No charges have been fi led
yet in the case. In local sports news—
” Lee snapped off the radio in horror, not just at what he heard but from the illogical sense that by receiving the radio transmission he was somehow broadcasting his location. In the silence that followed, his tinnitus, a condition he’d temporarily suffered after Michiko’s departure, returned in the form of a low-level shriek in his ears. Across the empty expanse of the parking lot, he saw another car entering, and because there was nowhere to run he sat staring at it, hardly breathing, as it parked far from him, and the young woman driver got out and liberated a huge wolflike dog from the hatchback, clipped the dog to a leash, and strode off with her bounding companion. Lee longed to go walking himself, almost as much as he longed to sleep, but because
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he was afraid to leave the car, he instead reclined his seat and closed his eyes by an effort of will. Little bugs seemed to jump and squirm under his eyelids. He had to sleep; it would help him to think, and it would make the time pass.

He pressed his hands to his eyes, removed them, and stared up at the lint-colored cloth that lined the roof of his car. He consulted his Seiko and the Nissan’s clock hundreds of times and reconfi rmed every time that the two disagreed by just under three minutes. He could hear, beyond his tinnitus shriek, the satisfied chirring of newborn insects in the depths of the park, and a few times, at the ends of long struggles to empty his mind, he felt himself sweetly subsiding in imagining crawling among them, like a primitive man, and lying down on the ground. . . . Then he startled awake, terrified by the lapse in alertness that at the same time he’d been trying so hard to accomplish.

Finally he must have succumbed. When he startled again, the sky was purple and dim, and his wristwatch and clock had skipped forward.

And he had a plan, now, for evading the five cars and reaching his phone.

20.

IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME HE WAS NAVIGATING THE

asphalt margin of the Street, or Lane, or Way, or Circle—although not circular, but this wouldn’t have mattered—whose proper name he had never learned in ten years of proximate residency. His subdivision, all oversize beige and blue houses on unfenced sod lawns pierced by spindly saplings, backed onto another development that predated it by around twenty years. This neighborhood was split-levels and ranch-styles in heavy earth tones, on more generous lawns with back fences and even some dignified, columnar trees. A twin of the neighborhood Lee and Aileen and Esther had lived in and that Lee had loathed for its generic cheapness, though the twin neighborhood now was strangely enriched in appearance, perhaps by the passage of time, or by comparison with what had come after. Lee had discovered the connection, the secret seam between worlds, back when he had still jogged and
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had wanted to get in his run without having to drive. Out his door, left three times to pass the house of his back-facing neighbor, with whom he’d bought the pine trees, then past endless iterations of that house and his house and two other models of house, distinguished by just a few variations in color and siding, until the road dipped and crossed the pasture boundary of a previous era, a line of old, vigilant oaks stretching in both directions. From here, dappled shade and deep lawns and six or eight different models of dwelling instead of just four, and even more in the way of the surface distinctions, the shutters and porches and claddings of brick or wood shingle. It still hadn’t been enough for Lee not to feel crushed by its sameness, whether its sameness to itself or its sameness to that other farm tract–become–

suburb he’d lived in with Aileen and Esther, he couldn’t have said.

After just a few tries, he’d stopped jogging those streets, and his own, and returned to the twenty-minute drive to the riverside path, so that on this night, in this darkness, he hadn’t been here in years.

He almost missed the entrance, a modest pair of stone walls, bracket-shaped, each adorned with a lantern and barely discernible curving black letters: Mashtamowtahpa Trails Estates. A single miles-across square of once-farmland contained Mashtamowtahpa Trails and Farmfi eld, Mashtamowtahpa’s gate on the square’s western side, State Road 28, while Farmfield’s (ostentatiously huge and fl oodlit) gateway lay on the north, along Route 19. This meant that the membrane dividing the two neighborhoods was somewhere to Lee’s left, now that he’d cautiously passed through the brackets. He advanced the car slowly, scarcely touched the gas pedal, almost noiselessly rolled through the waxing and waning of widely spaced streetlamps, each sifting its light down like pale orange snow; he was struck by the depth of the darkness in which the neighborhood lay. Single porch lights and even wide panes of curtained house glow seemed to snuff out as soon as he saw them. His own headlights a weak stain just ahead that was always retreating. He turned and turned along the dim involutions, found himself in a cul-de-sac, ringed by six houses, and felt his panic returning, as if the houses together would sense his intrusion and tighten on him like a noose. . . . He quickly rotated the Nissan and retraced himself. A left turn off the cul-de-sac street and he was mounting a crest and then dipping, and he remembered the
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attenuated version of that quick rise and fall, the signal it beat in his calves, his footfalls on the road, the unremarkable conjunction of place and sensation he’d possessed perhaps three times in all, although it came to him powerfully now, as a precious lost thing. Against an opening of night sky, he sensed the shapes of the oaks, black on black, angling off from the road. He had entered his own neighborhood. He turned the Nissan sharply and bumped off the asphalt and into the weeds. No one seemed to own the oaks or the ribbon of land that they stood on. There was a drainage ditch here and some mounds of dead leaves that had clearly been dumped. The nearest house was a half lot away. Lee turned off his lights and his engine and got out of the car, realizing he was standing lined up with the oaks, when he had always passed through them. For all their superior height, he had an uneasy notion of subterranean passage, as if on this spring night he’d smelled the chill, damp-earth breath of a cave.