Cast of Shadows - v4 (32 page)

She was still young enough to have children — Davis himself had coaxed babies from countless women older than she — but Joan understood how unfair that would be. He was only now accepting that his daughter was gone. If she could have Davis — all of him — to herself, it would be enough, Joan thought.

Later, together, tangled, asleep, they each had horrible, sheet-twisting dreams in which the other was absent.

When Davis Moore shoved Mickey the Gerund back into the hotel elevator cab, it took just about all the willpower Mickey had not to laugh, or to grab Moore’s arm, or even to shout some epithet after him while remaining in drunken character. Instead, he stumbled silently back and watched the doors close and felt the elevator lurch upward. Mickey thought Moore was an affront to God, an obstacle to God’s will, and he had shot him once because of it. It was a source of some irritation to Mickey, all these years later, that he hadn’t killed Davis Moore. That he hadn’t felled him with a head shot the way he intended. Mickey hadn’t missed many times in his career. Occasionally he killed a person he didn’t intend to — collateral damage — but he rarely missed a doctor he wanted dead.

Sometimes he fantasized about a second chance at the man. Maybe someday, after he had finished the mission, he could go back and correct his mistakes. Others in the movement never gave it a second thought, probably, but to Mickey, his errant shot at Davis Moore was an irritating black mark on his own fearsome reputation.

Still, Moore wasn’t the reason he was here. Moore had left his practice, at least, and although the man’s public advocacy would still make him a legitimate target, the ex-doctor had become a sympathetic public character over the years. Taking another shot at him now would do more harm than good. Mickey was trying to make dead doctors, not unnecessary martyrs.

Because Moore had palmed the control panel, the doors opened and closed four times before Mickey arrived at the twenty-second floor. He stumbled out, still pretending to be drunk although he was alone in the halls (except for security cameras, he reminded himself) and made his way, head down, to room 2240. In his pocket was a gift from Harold Devereaux.

Phillip had advised him not to go to the CALS conference. There were too many people who might remember him from the scene of a previous operation. Given Mickey’s busy schedule over the last four years, there were probably two dozen doctors and lab rats in the ballroom downstairs who had seen him before. Whether they could connect him to a shooting or bombing or specific act of intimidation was another matter. Mickey didn’t much care, anyway. He hadn’t planned on showing himself at any of the seminars. The Hands of God didn’t make his agenda anymore. He’d earned the right to designate an appropriate target, to determine what was an acceptable risk. And although he had already ninety percent decided to come to Palm Springs, the envelope from Harold Devereaux had sealed the deal.

Who knows where Harold got it. He had friends and supporters everywhere. Many of them were so timid they wouldn’t even enter into an argument about religion or science with their families and coworkers, but privately they did what was right. What had Reverend Falwell called them years and years ago? The silent majority? One member of the silent majority must have mailed this to Harold, and Harold knew just what to do with it. He sent it to the Hands of God with a note to forward it on to the Gerund. The envelope had a message in Harold’s handwriting and all it said was, “Good at any Prince Resort Hotel worldwide.” Mickey hadn’t even told Harold of his plans to be here, but Harold knew a device like this would come in handy sometime.

A master key card.

Mickey slid it through the vertical slot of the lock at room 2240. The security light blinked once yellow, then Mickey heard a click and the light blinked green and he opened the door and slipped inside. The room was dark and empty and cold. He sidestepped into the bathroom to see if the shower had a curtain or a door. It had a frosted-glass door, translucent enough to make for a poor hiding space. He walked back into the room and slid open the mirrored closet. The hangers were bare. The couple must have been vacationing out of their suitcases, or possibly they had hung up their formal wear, the clothes they were wearing tonight, and left bathing suits and blue jeans and golf shirts folded in their bags. They were scheduled to be here for only three days.

Inside the closet, Mickey slid the door shut and scooted to the opposite end, the side least likely to be opened. He grabbed a pillow from a high shelf, placed it between his aching back and a miniature ironing board, and cracked the door a few centimeters in case he had to stay in here for several hours.

Dr. Poonwalla and his wife arrived forty minutes later, announcing themselves with exhausted sighs and loud whispers.

“That Davis Moore is a charmer, isn’t he?” said Mrs. Poonwalla.

Dr. Poonwalla said, “Yes, such a tragedy what has happened to him, although I’d like to know the real story behind that unpleasantness in Chicago. His story about
secret experiments
was a bit hard to swallow, I’ll admit.”

“Still, a good man.”

“Yes. Yes, he is.”

After washing up, the Poonwallas draped their clothes someplace other than the closet and went to bed with a kiss reaffirming their vows. Mickey waited until he heard snoring, then stepped out of the closet and through the fat extra pillow fired two shots from a pistol at close range, one into each of their foreheads.

When she took time to consider it, Ms. Eberlein thought it an odd and even disturbing subject for a social studies report, but she had to admit it qualified as current events. Off and on for three and a half years, the Wicker Man had been reliable front-page news in the city, a recurring nightmare for six million people. He didn’t strike in a regular pattern — at one time there was a nine-month gap between homicides with the killer’s signature — but every time the city relaxed, every time the nightclubs on the West Side filled up with carefree
twenty-somethings, every time folks felt safe alone on the El, every time people stopped calling friends and family to let them know they arrived home safely, another body would appear, a lifeless message breaking across the morning news programs.

News of a fresh killing was particularly stressful for young single females like Ms. Eberlein. All but two of the Wicker Man’s eleven victims had been women, and police suspected the men were not intended targets. In both cases they believed the men had responded to cries for help, or had been killed because they witnessed the crime. Like thousands of other young Chicagoans, Ms. Eberlein had taken a self-defense class at her neighborhood gym and armed herself with pepper spray. After four years of living by herself downtown, Ms. Eberlein sold her condo (paid for by her parents when she received her master’s degree) and moved into an apartment with space enough for a roommate and a rottweiler.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising that one of her juniors wanted to do a report on the Wicker Man murders. What concerned her was the student’s age. Justin Finn had skipped three grades before landing in her class, and he was so bright it was unnerving to think he was only fourteen. When he first came into her classroom last semester, she wondered casually if he had a single hair on his body beyond the long, curly blond mess that sprawled across his head, then she banished the thought with a self-reproaching scowl. It was bad enough when she noticed the emerging sexuality of the older boys in the school. She couldn’t deny that Justin would be a good-looking young man someday, however, probably around the time he got his law degree at nineteen.

“What’s amazing about the Wicker Man is that he hasn’t left any physical evidence,” Justin explained to the class. “Nearly all violent criminals leave something behind — blood, hair, semen” — a boy in the back of the room guffawed, and a girl sitting in front of him rolled her eyes and grinned — “but not the Wicker Man. This has given him an almost supernatural aura in the mind of the public. I’d compare him in some ways to the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, whose cryptic notes and spooky costume compounded the terror of his killings. The Wicker Man is a real-life bogeyman.”

“How do you think he’s been able to avoid leaving evidence?” Ms. Eberlein asked. Students were encouraged to interrupt the speaker at any time with a relevant question. It made the exercise less boring for her, kept the class engaged, and made it difficult for the presenter to learn only fifteen minutes of facts. Usually she had to ask the first question herself, however.

Justin nodded and held up his bound report as if to say the answer was within. “Clearly he spends a lot of time with the bodies after they’re dead. We know this because of the peculiar pose he leaves them in — the details of which police have managed to keep secret. Obviously this also gives him time to clean up. Some police believe he uses a condom” — another muffled snicker — “and that’s certainly possible, but just about every one of the attacks have taken place on nights when it’s raining. I think that’s deliberate. He lets nature wash away any trace of him. Also, people with their heads hunched under an umbrella or a hood are less likely to be aware of other pedestrians or suspicious activity. His victims can’t see him coming, and potential witnesses are less likely to notice.”

Impressive. Ms. Eberlein hadn’t heard that theory before. She mentally added it to the list of street-smart facts that might someday save her life.

A girl named Lydia raised her hand and Justin nodded at her.

“I remember, like, three months ago, the police said they had a suspect and this guy with a bad mustache was all over the TV, but they never arrested him and then I never heard anything more about it. What happened to him?”

Justin grimaced. “That’s been a major embarrassment for the police. The suspect’s name was Armand Gutierrez, and he was connected to two of the female victims. One had been in a ballroom-dancing class with him at the Discovery Center and another was a regular customer at the grocery store where he worked. Investigators thought it was just too big a coincidence, and so everything about him seemed suspicious after that. He had some kind of weird porn collection — nothing illegal, but it piqued the interest of the cops who searched his apartment. He was also a butcher in an Italian deli, and one of the male victims had been carved up brutally with a big knife. The police have been under intense pressure from City Hall to solve the case, and they leaked his name to the press last October in order to get some good news out there before the mayoral election. But Gutierrez had alibis for almost every night a body was found, and they just couldn’t make the case. Some cops still think he’s the killer, but the state’s attorney and the FBI have pretty much written Gutierrez off. He’s suing the city, by the way, and will probably make out with a bundle.”

“You mentioned the FBI.” A popular boy the kids all called Foo didn’t wait for Justin to call on him. “Do they have a, you know, what do you call that, where they look at the crime scenes and they write up what they think the killer is like—”

“A
profile,
” Justin said. “Yeah, they believe he’s a white male, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, highly intelligent, if not educated, probably lives in Wicker Park or Ukrainian Village, or at least on the North or Near West Side. He’s shown incredible restraint — being able to go months, it appears, without killing anyone. The FBI believes this means that he is either in a highly supervised situation — that is, he’s institutionalized in some way, perhaps in a treatment facility or a halfway house, and his opportunities are somehow limited — or that he leaves the city for long stretches of time, or that he’s killed many more people than we know and has just done a better job of hiding their bodies.”

Ms. Eberlein, who was sitting in Justin’s usual chair, raised her hand. “You’ve obviously spent some time with this subject. Which of those scenarios do you think is most likely?”

Justin was standing behind a portable lectern that had been set up on Ms. Eberlein’s metal desk and he ducked his head modestly, as if he were looking for something among the notes in front of him. “None of them, actually.” He smiled. “I think he leads a pretty normal life — he might even be very successful, given that everyone agrees he is intelligent — and that he has another way of blowing off steam. Whatever it is that compels him to kill, he has another way of sublimating” — scoffing from somewhere, as if to say no fourteen-year-old would use that word if they weren’t just showing off — “his desire. Maybe he has an aggressive hobby, like boxing. Or maybe he’s into sadomasochism” — outright laughter — “and he’s able to get his kicks in nonlethal ways. But every once in a while, something just builds up inside him and he can’t help himself. He has to kill.”

Ms. Eberlein raised her eyebrows and whistled. “I think you’d make a pretty good FBI profiler yourself, Justin. It sounds like you’ve really gotten inside this guy’s head.” For better or worse, she thought to herself.

The bell rang and the students offered up lazy applause, and Justin smiled at Ms. Eberlein and switched places with her long enough to retrieve his books from under his chair. As the students bottlenecked at the door, she shouted the names of tomorrow’s presenters after their backs and opened her black vinyl grade book, where she wrote next to Justin’s name, “Creepy. A+.”

The panoramic cityscape through the window of Sam Coyne’s apartment was like a Realist painting on the days and nights when fog or rain or snow didn’t entirely obscure the view. However, on blustery days, which were common, even the pleated flannel curtains had more depth than the flat gray haze of the Chicago sky.

This night the air had clarity worthy of the pricey window-washing service Sam hired as a redundancy to his own fastidiousness. The empty skyscrapers glowed at twenty percent of their maximum wattage, lighting floor upon floor of unoccupied space. From thirty-nine stories up, the Lake Michigan shoreline was discernible only as an imaginary line separating the fluorescent city grid from the black void of the water. Sam loved how empty Lake Michigan was at night, loved the depth of its nothingness, and earlier this night, when he’d turned a twenty-six-year-old Leo Burnett art director onto her hands and knees, he made sure with the push of his hips and the pull of his hands that she could see the same blackness in the lake that he saw, and he could tell from her response — her narrow pelvis tight against his thighs, and the base of her skull pressing against the heel of his palm — that she was like him, that she recognized the blackness inside her was the blackness of nature, the blackness inside every one of us.