Cast of Shadows - v4 (42 page)

“A stretch. You said yourself the correlation between the real murders and Shadow World murders was shaky.”

“There’s nothing exact about psychology. And we know he’s capable of it, Dr. Moore. He’s a brutal killer. We know that for a fact. How big a stretch is it to suggest AK isn’t the only girl he’s killed?”

That much is true,
Davis admitted to himself. “Justin, you’re perfectly free to play your computer game however you want. I just don’t see the point of chasing Sam Coyne around some virtual version of Chicago. From the way you describe it to me, even if he is killing other characters in Shadow World, he’s not doing anything illegal. There’s nothing there we could go to the police with.”

“You’ve already said Coyne couldn’t be convicted for Anna Kat’s murder, even though we both know he did it,” Justin said. “Our only chance of nailing him is to catch him at some other crime. Sally Barwick is a real reporter. For the
real Chicago Tribune
. If I can convince
her
that Coyne is a killer, maybe she can get an actual investigation started.”

He continued, “The game is the safest place to poke around this guy’s life. If we’re caught following him or if we mess up or if we’re just plain wrong about him, it won’t matter. It’s only pretend. But there’s also a chance we’ll find out something we don’t know. Something we can use.” Justin could tell he wasn’t convincing him. “Look, Dr. Moore. Sally’s like you. She thinks I’m really pushing it, accusing Coyne of being the Wicker Man. But she’s also really into the game. She’s a True-to-Lifer. She lives as much in that world as she does in this one, and what happens in Shadow World is as important to her as what happens out here. She wants to catch the Shadow World thrill killer as much as she wants to stop the Wicker Man. If I can use that to get her curious about Sam Coyne, then what’s the harm?”

Davis said, “Just remember that coincidence is not evidence. I’m worried you’re just looking at two things you’re obsessed with and trying to make connections between them. The Wicker Man killings appear to be random. Coyne, on the other hand, knew Anna Kat. Or they were in the same class at school, anyway. She was strangled, and many of the Wicker Man victims were stabbed. I’ve seen practically every piece of evidence in the investigation of AK’s murder, and there’s not as much similarity as you might think.” He tapped his finger on the steering wheel. The boy was going through with this no matter what he said. “Look, your idea is a good one. Even if he isn’t the Wicker Man, Coyne must have done
something
else in the last fifteen years. Hurt another girl. An animal capable of that kind of violence doesn’t get a taste of it and just quit. So see if you can get Sally Barwick interested. Maybe something will turn up. But be
careful
.”

“I will.” Justin cleared his throat with an uncomfortable growl. “To tell you the truth, I like it that you’re worried about me.” It was one of many unsubtle cues Justin had given Davis since they’d become reacquainted, and he let a number of seconds pass before acknowledging it.

“Have you heard from your father lately?”

The passenger side lock thumped up and down a few times. “Nah. Three months probably. He’s got his own kids by Denise now and they’re more important to him. I’m a thousand miles away and he doesn’t think of me as his real kid anyhow.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“He’s practically said it to my face. I know he’s said it behind my back. To Mom, not that she’d bad-mouth him to me. It’s okay. Dad’s right. He had nothing to do with bringing me into the world. I don’t even think he wanted a kid in the first place. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re closer to being my father than he is. You’re the one who made me.”

Davis inhaled a whistling breath between clenched teeth. “No, Justin. I mean, I’m not comfortable with that—”

With a brooding kick, Justin tried to untangle the straps of the backpack between his feet. “Okay. But it’s true whether you’re comfortable with it or not. What do you think, I’m angry about it? Hell, no. Without you I wouldn’t be here. That’s cool. I mean, who else do I have for a father figure? Sam Coyne?” He chuckled sadly, the way people at a wake laugh at dark jokes. “That’s a fucked-up couple of parents: a revenge-mad doctor and a cold-blooded killer.”

Davis wanted to deny it even as he was tempted to scold Justin for swearing.

“I’ll see you here next week,” Justin said. “Hopefully, Sally and I will find out something by then.” He opened the door and tumbled out.

In the rearview mirror, Davis watched Justin disappear into the forest preserve, the hum of his electric bike diminishing between snowdrifts until it sounded like an electric razor on a shallow beard. With his window down, through the birdless silence, Davis heard a coed football game crunching in the snow, and smelled a dirty winter grill with fresh brats and burgers and vegetables on a kabob. He wasn’t the boy’s father. That was practically paragraph one in the cloning professional’s oath, or it would be if they had such a thing. Every seminar he ever attended had a lecture on that very topic.
This job will make you feel a little bit like God,
he heard a speaker say once.
Don’t believe it for a second. We coax life into the world so that people can lead fuller, happier lives, but we don’t make life. It is the nature of life to propagate, and cloning is another evolutionary step in the history of human reproduction. We are only tools.

Davis had proved that was a lie. The physical process that brought Justin into the world was identical to that of every other clone. But the act of creation had taken place the moment he held Sam Coyne’s DNA in his hand and decided he would make the switch. Justin was not conceived in a lab or in the womb but in Davis’s mind. He existed because Davis had wanted him to, and what kind of being does that describe if not a god?

He didn’t feel like a god, though if he did
,
what obligation does God have to his creations?
Any at all? God doesn’t always act like it.
One way or the other he had a special obligation to Justin, and it was something like being a father to him, although not exactly.

He had an obligation to Anna Kat for certain, and on that score he was failing her. Again. Most nights he sat down in the blue room, among his old family files and eighteen years of cold evidence, sat there in the silence doing nothing. Pretending. As if just sitting in the chair where he once obsessed over her murder was the same as tracking down her killer. It reminded him of the way Jackie used to pray, in an indifferent and rehearsed whisper, as if the words meant something even if she didn’t believe them. Even if Justin were only chasing his own demons, the kid was doing more to find Anna Kat’s killer than he was. Davis thought,
My God, what’s a fifteen-year-old doing with demons?
and then he felt guilt in his stomach incubating like a virus. He pushed back against the headrest, listened as carefree voices converged from around the forest preserve, and he thought about suicide, about men who had parked along lonely roads like this one with a rubber tube attached to the exhaust pipe and looped in through the cracked window, the rest of the opening caulked shut with a towel. He tried to block out other thoughts for a minute, his eyes closed, imagining what it must be like for the terminally desperate in the final moments when their survival instinct surrenders to the lure of permanent sedation. It was a meditation he did, not often but sometimes, in places where he was truly alone. In the car it was always a rubber tube. In the bathroom it was razor blades. In the blue room it was a gun. The instruments were location specific but his imagined last words were always the same.

“I’m sorry, Jackie,” he whispered. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”

The back door opened and closed, and Martha heard a pair of boots clunking to the kitchen floor, and she felt a teenaged body displacing air as it moved through the house, and when it climbed the stairs to its bedroom every sock-footed step seemed to be lying to her.

She learned this during her divorce: when a person you love is lying to you, everything they do or say is a lie until they confess it. Even a nominally true statement — “I want raisin bran for breakfast” — is still a lie because it takes the place of the truth. Small truths, told between lies, are just part of the cover-up.

These many years later, Martha remembered how normal her life with Terry had been during the months in which he’d carried on with his seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a-year glorified secretary. She suspected he was cheating, knew it in her gut, and yet those were happy days for her somehow. Sally Barwick had been lying to her then, too. So much of her life at the time had been a fiction, and yet she remembered it fondly, like a favorite novel. She could almost understand the appeal of a game like Shadow World.

Sadly, that brand of happiness eluded her now. She was wiser and more mature, and it was her son who was lying. Those were the differences, she supposed. Plus, she distrusted Davis Moore. Hated him even. That made the current situation unbearable. When her husband started having an affair with Denise Keene, Martha didn’t even know the little slut existed. Dr. Moore, on the other hand, was taunting her through notes in her son’s blue jeans.

When a two-thirty appointment canceled on her that afternoon, Martha thought she would call and see if Sara could sneak her in a few days early. She hated the way her hair was growing out, and had done as many blunt scissor repairs on her bangs as she was able. Midway through dialing, however, she changed her mind and decided to follow her son home from school.

A long bike path led from the umbrella-shaped bike-battery dock, past the athletic fields, and through a narrow gate in the chain-link surrounding the school grounds. Martha idled her cream Sable about fifty feet away and watched a hundred or more kids walk and ride out onto the sidewalk on Copes Street. The radio played an old rock song, from before her time even, and she hummed nervously along with it, even though the singer’s angst over love lost reminded her of the last days of her marriage.

Her son appeared at last, bundled in his jacket, his backpack as big as a Sherpa’s. A few weeks ago, when there was real snow on the ground, he’d have been walking or taking the bus. She resisted the temptation to shift out of park and followed him instead with her eyes. If he was going home he would take a left onto Delaware, she thought. When he didn’t, she wondered if he was headed for a friend’s house and why they weren’t walking with him.

The slow-speed chase that followed was ridiculous, she knew. Several times she pulled over to the curb and pretended to be lost or looking for something under the seat so an irate driver could pass. Three cars behind him in the turn lane at a light, she was afraid he had spotted her. He made a left, accelerating through a narrow opening between oncoming cars, and by the time she passed through the intersection, he was gone.

Driving through an area with no houses and thick old-growth trees close to the shoulder on either side, Martha wondered where he could have gone. There was little out this way but commercial real estate — office parks and fast-food joints. She was more and more certain Justin was on his way to a meeting with Davis Moore, but unless she happened to see his bike parked somewhere, she was sunk.

A quarter mile past the red-and-white sign marking the entrance, she figured it out:
the forest preserve.
He’d turned into the forest preserve.

Usually a strict disciple of driving etiquette, Martha made a blind three-point turn on the narrow road and reversed direction toward the blacktopped drive that wound through the preserve. There was hardly anyone here on a Thursday in winter, but high school students made use of the grounds all year round, for smoking or drinking or necking or, she hoped not to discover, holding secret meetings with a creepy doctor who’d been charged with stalking them when they were small children.

Martha stopped the car. What if Justin wasn’t here to meet Davis Moore? What if Justin really had come to the woods for smoking or drinking or necking? How embarrassed she’d be if he discovered her spying on his ordinary teen mischief. She sickened at the thought of Davis Moore and his
experiments
(or
studies
or whatever he had called them in his deposition) and lurched the car forward again. No one said being a parent wouldn’t be embarrassing.

The black SUV was parked halfway down a dead end. Martha might not have seen it except that the evenings were short and cold and Moore had no doubt left the engine running for the heat. Against the dimming horizon, she could see the curls of exhaust and the red glow of his taillights, and next to it, in the cold, matted grass, Justin’s silver bike. She could see broad streaks of white on the back of the older man’s head in the driver’s seat. Justin was turned toward him, his profile recognizable in silhouette.

With her car angled across the only exit, they were trapped up the road, but what would be the point of approaching? She still couldn’t confront them without unpredictable repercussions from Justin, and despite the satisfaction of seeing the ever more prominent Davis Moore, the darling of libertarians and television magazine programs, explaining himself in front of a judge and hiding his lying face from the news cameras, she knew she couldn’t just march up to the car and start screaming at them both. When her husband abandoned her, she had at least been a party to the action. She’d had a lawyer. Some input into the dissolution. She realized that unlike a spouse, a parent was helpless in this situation. A teenager can walk out on his mother without ever leaving the house.

She let up on the brake, coasted down the road, and drove home to wait for her son.

Locking and chaining his bedroom door and staring gravely into its white-painted paneling, Justin let a discontented noise expire softly in his throat. Adults. They worry so much. They have much to worry about, of course, but he worried enough for all of them. Didn’t they understand that’s why he was sent here? Why he was brought here? Sent here or brought here, he wasn’t sure which, but it didn’t much matter one way or the other. His responsibility was the same: to wonder, to worry, to
act
.