Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

“You see that window?” he said. “On the third floor?”

I looked. There was a white blob in the window’s lower half. “Yeah, I see it.”

“What do you think that is?”

“Beats me.”

“I’m going to zoom in on it,” Thomas said. He clicked twice on the image. That had the effect of making it larger, but slightly less distinct. But it was starting to look like something.

“Now what do you think it is?” my brother asked me.

“It kind of looks like…it looks like a head,” I answered. “But with something wrapped around it.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “You look here and you can see the shape of the nose and the mouth, and there’s the chin, and up here’s the forehead. It’s a face.”

“I think you’re right, Thomas. It’s a face.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I don’t really know what to make of it. It looks like someone with a bag over their face.”

Thomas nodded. “Yes. But because you can see all the person’s features so well, the bag has to be on really tight.”

“I guess,” I said. “Maybe it’s a mask or something.”

“But there are no holes for the eyes, or the mouth, or the nose. If that’s a mask, how is the person supposed to breathe?”

“Can you zoom in on it any more? Can you get closer?”

“I could make it bigger, but it starts to get blurry. This is as good a picture as I can get out of it.”

I stared at the image, not sure what to make of it. “I don’t know, Thomas. It is what it is. Someone goofing around with a bag on his head. People do dumb shit. Maybe someone knew the Whirl360 car was coming and thought they’d do something silly for the camera when it went by.”

“On the third floor? If you wanted to do something silly, wouldn’t you stand on the sidewalk?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I don’t think this person is goofing around,” he said.

“Okay, so you tell me what you believe is happening here.”

“I think this person is being killed,” Thomas said. “This is a murder.”

“Sure it is. Come on, Thomas.”

“This person is being smothered.”

I turned from looking at the screen to stare at my brother. “That’s what you think.”

“Yes.”

“And just what the hell do you want me to do?” I asked.

“I want you to check it out,” Thomas said.

“Check it out,” I repeated.

“Yup. I want you to go there.”

“You want me to go to New York and check out this window,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“Well then, I guess I’ll have to make some calls,” Thomas said, “and I’m sorry, but I’m going to have no choice but to e-mail the CIA and ask them to look into it.”

“Thomas, listen very carefully to me. First of all, you are not making any calls to the CIA or Homeland Security or the Promise Falls Fire Department, for that matter. And as far as my going into the city to look at this stupid window, that’s not happening.”

I went downstairs.

A few minutes later, as I was making myself comfortable on the couch, wondering what there might be to watch on Dad’s big flat screen, Thomas came down the stairs.

He said nothing to me, didn’t even look in my direction. He went to the closet by the front door, opened it, and grabbed a jacket. He slipped his arms into it and was zipping it up when I asked, “Where you off to?”

“New York,” he said.

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Where in New York?”

“I’m going to look at that window.”

“How you getting there?”

“I’m going to walk.” He paused. “I know the way.”

“That’s going to take a while,” I said.

“It’s 192.3 miles,” he said. “If I walk twenty miles a day, I’ll be there in-”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

If the traffic’s not bad, you can drive from Promise Falls to New York in about three and a half hours. But that’s a big if certainly where the latter part of the drive is concerned. You can be clipping along just great, the Manhattan skyline looking close enough that you could stick your hand out the window and touch it. Then some idiot in a delivery van cuts off a cabbie, sets off a chain reaction crash, and you’re bumper to bumper for two hours.

So I opted for the train. The plan was to catch it early in the morning, do what I’d promised to do, and catch one home the same day, so I wouldn’t be leaving Thomas alone overnight. Maybe, another time, I would have trusted him to be on his own from one day to the next, but ever since the FBI incident, I didn’t like to let him out of my sight for any longer than I had to.

He’d promised he wouldn’t do anything that would upset me while I was gone, so long as I kept my part of the bargain.

If Thomas wanted to think I was making this trip into New York just for him, he was welcome to. But the moment he started pushing for me to go into the city, I thought of the woman Jeremy wanted me to meet. This was something I really needed to deal with. It meant future money for me, and from the sound of it, quite a bit. As soon as I left Thomas’s room I called Jeremy and asked whether he could set something up for the following day, and he said he’d get back to me. An hour later he reported that while Kathleen Ford already had a luncheon engagement, she could meet us for a drink afterward at the Tribeca Grand Hotel.

I said I’d be there.

Jeremy said we should grab lunch beforehand, and we arranged to meet at the Waverly Restaurant, on Sixth Avenue between Waverly Place and Eighth Street, which would be handy enough to get to the hotel, and to run my little errand for Thomas.

When I told Thomas where I was having lunch, he closed his eyes and said, “At Avenue of the Americas, or Sixth Avenue, as I believe it is more commonly called, and Waverly Place. There’s a neon sign hanging over the door, ‘Waverly’ in green letters and ‘Restaurant’ in red, right across the avenue from a Duane Reade drugstore, and to the south, across Waverly Place, there’s a store that sells vitamins. The ‘t’ in ‘Restaurant,’ the first one, isn’t lighting up when you look at the sign if you’re coming down Waverly from the west.”

I was up before the sun, drove into Albany, caught the train at Rensselaer, and managed to get some more sleep during the two-and-a-half-hour trip. While I was awake, looking out the window at the scenery flying by, I had time to think about whether agreeing to go by the Orchard Street address, where Thomas had seen the smothered head in the window, was a stupid thing to do-whether it would just encourage him.

But if it kept Thomas from sending another message to a federal agency and attracting any more unwanted attention, it was a smart thing to do. Short of straitjacketing him, there really wasn’t any way to keep Thomas from getting in touch with the outside world. I wasn’t about to unplug his computer again, and even if I’d been willing to deal with the fallout from doing so, Thomas could always pick up the phone and just call someone. He could write a goddamn letter and put it in the mail. And while Thomas chose to stay in the house, I didn’t want him to feel as though he was some kind of prisoner whose access to others was strictly controlled.

The problem with giving in to Thomas on this particular occasion was, what if he saw something else, in another window, in another city, tomorrow, and that city just happened to be Istanbul? Would he expect me to check that out, too?

I figured I’d deal with Thomas on a case-by-case basis. If he did come across something else on one of his virtual travels that he wanted me to investigate, I’d be able to point out that the last time I’d indulged him it had cost me an entire day, not to mention a train ticket. Whether that would persuade my brother to let something go was anyone’s guess.