Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

There was almost always something. Usually, it was the super, vacuuming the hall. One day, a pizza delivery guy at the wrong door. Lewis watched as he got out his cell phone, called his dispatcher, and sorted it out.

Lewis got a little hungry, watching that one.

On Halloween, some kids got into the building and went door to door, looking for candy. Two girls, one dressed as Lady Gaga, the other as an alien from another world-actually, he wasn’t sure which was which-struck out at apartment 305.

Every day, something. But nothing of value.

Lewis was thinking it was time to abandon this idea, take out the camera, stop paying on the apartment.

And then the guy with the Pearl Paint bag shows up.

Lewis sat at the desk in the study of his Lower East Side apartment, looking at the oversized monitor of his computer. Studying. The man knocked three times with the hand holding the bag from the art store. Lewis, in his investigation of Allison Fitch, before and after her disappearance, had never seen him before. Had no idea who he was, or whether this visit was in any way significant.

Was the guy selling something? Was he at the wrong apartment? Was he, in fact, someone who knew one of the two previous tenants, and had stopped by for a visit? If he’d known the two people who’d lived here, wouldn’t he, possibly, have shouted into the door? Something like, “Hey, anybody home?” How had he gotten into the building? Did he have a key? Did someone heading out of the building allow him access, or had he buzzed a bunch of people at random until one of them was dumb enough to buzz back?

Did it matter? Was this visitor important at all?

Then Lewis caught a look at the piece of paper in his other hand.

What was that? It had flashed twice past the lens very quickly. Lewis played the short bit of footage several times but was unable to make it out.

So he paused the video, and then used the cursor to inch it along, ever so slowly, until he got to a place where the piece of paper was marginally visible.

It appeared to be a standard piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper. The kind you put into your printer. There was a square, color image in the upper left quadrant of the page. It looked like a grouping of windows, although it was hard to tell for sure.

At the top of the page, some printing. Impossible to read on the monitor. But there was a logo of some kind in the upper left corner, multicolored. Lewis wasn’t sure, but he thought he recognized it. It led off with a stylized W, and there appeared to be three numbers at the tail end.

Lewis was pretty sure he knew what it was. The Whirl360 logo. For that Web site that allowed you to look at the actual streets of cities all over the world. He used it now and then. Like everyone else did at some point, he’d looked to see whether the house he’d grown up in was online. He’d keyed in the address of his Denver home, and sure enough, there it was.

If this was, as he suspected, the logo for Whirl360, then it made sense that the image on the page had been printed off that Web site.

Lewis magnified the blurry image as far as the computer would allow. It did appear to be a series of windows, like the ones on the old tenement buildings in the neighborhood where Allison Fitch’s apartment was. But it was impossible to see anything with any clarity.

Well, Lewis reasoned, if this guy could find the image online, then he could do it, too.

He opened up a browser, went to the Whirl360 site, and entered “Orchard Street, New York City.” And almost instantly, he was there, clicking his way down the street. When he got to the block where Fitch lived, he dragged the mouse across the screen, allowing himself to whirl around Orchard, looking from north to south and back again.

Maybe this guy who’d banged on the door was some kind of architecture student. Or someone from the city’s building department. Who the hell knew?

He positioned the image so he was looking directly at Fitch’s building, moved the mouse to the top of it, clicked, held, and dragged down, which had the effect of craning one’s neck upward to see the building’s upper stories.

“What?” he said under his breath. “What…is…that?”

He was focused on one particular window. He clicked to magnify the image.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

THEY met again on the same Central Park bench. Lewis Blocker handed Howard Talliman a sheet of paper, folded once.

“What’s this?” Talliman asked.

“Something I printed off the Net. Just look at it.”

Talliman unfolded the sheet and looked at it, puzzled. “I have no idea what this is.” Howard had never been to the Orchard Street address.

“That window, that’s the apartment. What you’re holding there, that’s a printout from the Internet.”

Howard touched his index finger to the head in the window. “Lewis, is this what I think it is?”

“Yes.”

Howard handed the page back to Lewis, who tucked it into his jacket. “I still don’t understand.”

“You familiar with Whirl360?” Lewis asked.

“I don’t live in a cave, Lewis.”

“That was printed right off the site. That picture, as we speak, is online. Anyone in the world with a computer who happens to explore Orchard Street and angles right there can see that. What had to have happened is, one of those Whirl360 cars with the panoramic cameras was going along Orchard Street at the same time that Nicole was doing her thing at the window.”

Howard, starting to grasp the enormity of it, blurted, “Dear God. How the hell did you discover this? You just found it?”

“No,” Lewis said. “It was brought to my attention.”

“What? How?”

“Someone came to the apartment. A man, I’d say late thirties, early forties. Knocked on the door. The camera activated.”

“Okay.”

Lewis patted his jacket where the printout was resting. “He had a sheet, just like this, in his hand.”

Howard’s mouth was open. He put a hand to his forehead. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was he doing with that? How would he have that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the hell do you know, Lewis?”

He remained unruffled. “I know that we have a couple of problems, Howard. The first is this man. Who is he? Why does he have that printout? How did he discover it online? Did he happen upon it, or did he know it was already there? Is he acting alone, or on someone else’s behalf? Does he know what that image represents? Is he with the police? Why was he knocking on Fitch’s apartment door with it in his hand? What did he want? Who was he looking for?”

“Jesus,” Howard said. He paused a moment, then looked at Lewis. “What’s the second problem?”

“The image,” he said. “It’s still up there. On that Web site. Just waiting for someone else to find it.”

It was nearly ten when I turned down the driveway. What struck me first was how dark the house looked.

The front porch light, the one at the side of the house, and the one on the barn door are all on timers, so they were on. But there was no light emanating from behind the windows. The living room was in darkness. Same for the second floor. Not even a bluish computer haze from Thomas’s room. It seemed unlikely, but maybe he’d gone to bed early.

The front door was locked. I let myself in, turned on some lights, then stopped and listened. No sounds. Not that Thomas was ordinarily noisy. Whirl360 had no audio.

“Thomas?” I called out softly, thinking he might be asleep. I didn’t want to wake him. I had expected him to be waiting up for me, eager to know what I’d learned. Not much, as it turned out, but he didn’t know that yet.