11
Earlier that Thursday morning in August, Wyatt Rider, a licensed private investigator, had met with Liam O’Hara in the billionaire’s signature building, in his personal apartment high above Seattle. The study was a large corner room with floor-to-ceiling windows and spectacular views of both Puget Sound to the west and, to the north, lesser skyscrapers than O’Hara’s own, shouldering one another along the streets of the metropolis.
The vistas beyond the windows might have rendered the study furnishings unmemorable if they had been any less dramatic than the massive steel desk, which had a quartzite top the white of fractured ice with veins as blue as arctic seawater. The enormous David Hockney paintings, from his California swimming-pool-art period, provided warmth in contrast to the steel and quartzite, a warmth that was a quality of O’Hara himself.
The forty-six-year-old billionaire had come from a family of modest means, the son of a lumber-mill worker and a diner waitress. Brilliant and driven, he had made his fortune fast in the high-tech revolution, but he never forgot where his roots were.
Wyatt Rider, too, remained always aware of his origins, but his father and mother hadn’t been as humble and hardworking as O’Hara’s parents. Although smart enough to know the risks, they had sought the easy money that could be snatched up by deceiving the naive and vulnerable.
Wyatt had done jobs for Liam six times, not the least of which had involved serious threats against the two O’Hara children, Laura and Tavis, and he was accustomed to being greeted with a broad smile and vigorous handshake. The lumberman’s son was reliably energetic and in high spirits, as if his gratitude for such good luck would not allow him to indulge in a moment of anxiety or depression.
On this occasion, however, when the butler showed Wyatt to the study, Liam O’Hara’s smile and handshake were perfunctory. He didn’t offer his guest coffee, didn’t engage in small talk, but escorted him directly to one of four leather armchairs encircling a steel-and-glass coffee table. The billionaire settled in the chair to the left of Wyatt’s and sat forward on the edge, his hands clutching the padded arms much as he might have held fast to the security bar in a roller-coaster car.
He lacked even the shadow of a beard, as though he must have American Indian genes in his lineage, but his face was freckled, his hair rust red, and his eyes as green as shamrocks.
He spoke rapidly, as he often did, but not with his customary ebullience, instead with quiet anxiety. “For a couple years, I’ve been buying land in Montana—ranches, contiguous properties. Not in or around the town where I was raised, but in the adjacent county. My parents have passed away, as you know, and I don’t really have friends back there. Anyway, I’m trying to put together maybe ten or twelve thousand acres, not just for sentimental reasons and not just as a place to get away to now and then, but also to preserve the land. It’s so beautiful there. Have you ever been? No, that’s right, I asked you that before, and you’ve never been. Well, I’d like you to go now, today, or as soon as you can, and look into a certain situation for me. Lyndsey and the kids and I went there last Friday, meant to stay a week at this ranch called Rustling Willows, roughing it, just the four of us, no entourage, but we got the hell out of there on Monday. The last few days, I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened, but I can’t. Damn if I can. What happened—it was kind of magical at first, but it got weird pretty quickly, and then it scared the shit out of me.”
When Liam took a breath, Wyatt said, “Tell me what happened.”
The billionaire met Wyatt’s eyes, but then looked quickly away and hesitated, though his habit had always been to make direct eye contact and speak forthrightly. His attention seemed to be caught by a helicopter moving parallel to the superbly insulated windows, as silent as if it were a hallucination. But Wyatt sensed that Liam was less distracted by the aircraft than he was seeking a distraction to delay making what revelation he intended to impart.
Finally, he said, “I don’t believe in the supernatural—ghosts, spirits, possession, any of that. Do you?”
“Not actively,” Wyatt said. “But I keep an open mind.”
As he followed the receding helicopter, Liam said, “Anyway, whatever it was, it wasn’t any of that.”
After perhaps half a minute, Wyatt said, “I’m growing old here, Liam. Soon you’ll need to hire a younger gumshoe.”
Liam met his eyes and didn’t look away this time. “None of what I tell you can ever be repeated in any public forum. They’d think I’ve lost it, slid into drugs or something, and the company’s stock price would plummet.”