Cast of Shadows - v4 (5 page)

“You know about them?”

“What’s the matter? More complicated than you thought?”

“Nah.” He looked at his feet. “Is that what this is about? I mess around with other girls?”

“No.” She shook her head. That wasn’t it. The problem she didn’t want to admit to was guilt. She felt a bit used. She felt a bit like a user. No one was forcing her to meet Sam, of course. She liked being with him. They did things together that seemed grown-up. They did things together that frightened her. Things that excited her.
That
was the problem. She liked the way he could thrill her, the dangerous feeling she had when they were together. When she thought about it, though, she didn’t much like
him
. Although he was intelligent, Sam could be cruel to people he didn’t like, and he treated his friends only marginally better. To get laughs he said mean things to people’s faces (instead of following the widely accepted high school policy that called for saying mean things behind people’s backs). He was indifferent and selfish and cynical, and while these things made him cool and even a kind of popular, that didn’t mean that anybody really liked him. If they were dating, she would have to defend him, and Anna Kat didn’t know how she would do that.

Sam’s hand was inside her shirt and flat against her bare back, pushing her toward him. They were sweaty and gritty and aroused. Sam’s teeth closed around her right earring and pulled just the right amount too hard. “Did you lock the door?” he whispered.

“No… ,” she said, as if an apology were coming.

“Good,” Sam said, and he pulled her down on top of him in the narrow space between the rolled-up mat and the wall.

In her locker, several walls and halls away, Anna Kat’s cell phone was ringing.

There was no place she knew where Dr. Joan Burton felt more useless than in a hospital emergency waiting room. In a building filled with sick people, sick people she had been trained to help, she could do nothing but sit and do triage helplessly in her head. That boy, twelve or so, has a broken finger. The young man — newly minted from college, she suspected — folded into a chair across from the television like a passenger waiting for his plane to crash, possibly appendicitis. An older woman, escorted irritably by a husband of too many years, most likely psychosomatic something or other; she becomes ill to force him to pay attention to her, Joan quietly diagnosed.

Gregor and Pete, the other partners in New Tech, sat in chairs equidistant from her, the three of them facing different directions. No one spoke. They were worried about Davis (although, secretly, Joan suspected that she cared for his health more than they did, even if they’d known him longer), but there was another element to their concern: it could be any one of them bleeding out in the operating room just now.

The clinic building was on the television, monitored by a rerouted traffic helicopter. From the air it looked institutional and generic, which is what Gregor and Pete and Davis had in mind when they moved in, Joan guessed. The building was nonthreatening, its cube shape unobjectionable to anyone but an architecture critic. Deliberate police paced the lawn in front. She could see yellow evidence flags stuck in the ground at varying radii to the spot where Davis fell. Curious bystanders assembled at a safe distance. A banner of text across the bottom titled the events “Clone Clinic Terror.”

Frantic nurses had led Davis’s sobbing wife and daughter to another room inside. Joan was thankful for that, mostly because she wouldn’t know what to say to them. She had always been uncomfortable around Jackie Moore. Even under these circumstances, every glance between them would be loaded with subtext in Joan’s mind.

Davis had confided their occasional troubles to her in intimate detail. Ever attracted to older men (Joan’s graduate school relationships consisted of a series of affairs with professors and residents), she reciprocated in an empty, flirtatious way, knowing the aspects of his character that made Davis most desirable — loyalty, confidence, empathy — were the very traits that would keep him tethered to home, even (or rather, especially) if home was making him miserable.

Joan had had three sexual relationships with married men in the past, and she eventually regretted them all. Two of those men were now divorced, and that assuaged and compounded her guilt in equal amounts. The third was still married, and when she was reminded of their affair — by a photograph, or a printed reference to the Garfield Park Conservatory (which he had admired), or by the exit to his home on the Edens Expressway — an icy shiver consumed her. Never again, she thought.

The status quo in her relations with Davis suited her fine. He liked her and she liked him, and except for a touch on the arm that lasted two seconds too long when he was helping her with her coat at last year’s Christmas party, it remained unphysical. She could enjoy the vicarious attentions of a smart and handsome and fit older man, and she could sneak looks at him in the office and imagine, in the car on the way home or alone in bed at night, what might have been possible between them had they met at another time, in some other place.

When Gregor appeared through the swinging doors to the trauma center, Joan realized she hadn’t noticed he’d been gone.

“It looks good,” Gregor said. “He’s going to be fine.”

“Thank God. Lord. Christ,” Pete said. “Are you sure? Can we see him? Can I call that reporter?”

“What reporter?” Joan frowned.

“Channel seven. I’d have to look up her name. She promised me she’d keep the cameras away from the hospital if I called her as soon as we knew something.”

Gregor nodded. “Yeah. Call her. In a minute.” He looked at the TV. “Any news? Have they caught the guy?”

Pete said they hadn’t.

“Bonavita!” Gregor growled. “Fucking Bonavita for sure. He’s going cross-country. Memphis, Chicago, probably Saint Louis next.”

“I have to call my wife,” Pete said. “She’s at her cousin’s house in Barrington.” He slid a hand flush to his forehead, under his short bangs. “Can we go home, do you think?”

Joan said, “We can’t hide.”

Her partners gave no indication they agreed.

An hour or so later, after Pete and Gregor had made their calls and they had waited again in silence for a nurse to tell them it was okay to come back, they walked through emergency to an elevator that took them to the third floor and Davis’s private room.

Davis was unconscious, tubes pushing out of his nose and mouth like the legs of an oversized translucent insect. His thin, taut blond wife, her almost comically round blue eyes tethered to the dressing on his wound, leaned over his bed with the weightless control of an ex-gymnast.

“He needed a lot of blood,” Jackie said. “He needed a lot of blood, but he’s going to be all right.”

Joan suggested New Tech set up a temporary Red Cross donation center at the clinic, and all three doctors agreed to give blood the next day. Joan gave red-eyed Anna Kat a stiff squeeze with one arm, which she answered with a wet, worried stare.

At home, in the dark morning, alone in bed, Joan relived her own years-ago encounter with unchecked evil and told herself, as she would say again in a few months’ time when evil would come again, for Anna Kat, that at least the stuff it took from Davis could be replaced.

Mickey the Gerund was over three hundred miles away, in a forty-dollar-a-night highway motel room near Alexandria, Minnesota, before he knew Davis Moore had survived.

Moore had left the office a little earlier than he had the past few days, but Mickey was ready, barrel pointed, scope tuned to the proper focal length. He recognized Moore in the shadows of the foyer, disappearing momentarily into a conference room, where, for some reason, he opened the vertical blinds. Mickey thought about taking him out at the window, and even tensed on the trigger when he knew he had the shot, but decided it was better to be patient. They wouldn’t let photographers inside the clinic to see the body, and this was, after all, a media event. He wanted every mad scientist in the world to see Davis Moore bleed out on the ground, and for that he needed to drop the body where the helicopters would have an unobstructed view.

Of the four doctors at New Tech, he’d picked Moore because he was the worst sinner. He was one of the country’s most vocal advocates of reproductive cloning, testifying before Congress and writing papers for the journals, and newspaper editorials. He was handsome and eloquent and he helped give the procedure respectability. One of his colleagues had said, after one heated battle in Congress, that if it hadn’t been for the advocacy of Davis Moore, the cloning procedure would be unavailable to the thousands of parents who needed it. Somewhere in the backseat of the Cutlass was a torn photo from a magazine, mailed to the Hands of God by a sympathetic acquaintance, that celebrated the smiling physician as if he were a movie star. Davis Moore was near the top of the Hands of God hit list.

“Shit,” Mickey spat when the woman on the news said Moore was in stable condition, recovering. The sinner would live to ridicule God another day, and the Gerund’s pride was hurt on top of it. He considered himself a good shot at that distance. Still, Mickey had fired a bullet, the bullet had struck flesh, and news of the event was right now on televisions in Minnesota and California and Washington and probably even Hong Kong. Cameras were showing the yellow-bordered crime scene and reporters were describing to the world the diabolical things Davis Moore did for money and how his assailant clearly wanted him and doctors like him dead. That was the point, after all. There wouldn’t be many “fertility” doctors or researchers or even drug manufacturers getting good, sound sleep tonight.

Mickey liked to be philosophical at moments like this. It might be a while, years even, but someday he’d get another crack at Dr. Davis Moore, God willing.

A twenty-four-hour news network, one of only eight channels beamed into this cheap motel, interviewed a pair of advocates, one pro-cloning and one anti-cloning. Mickey sat at the edge of the queen-sized bed holding a bowl underneath his chin and spooning oatmeal he’d made on a hot plate. The ugly pro-cloning woman was ranting about the radical right wing and terrorism and how even her life had been threatened recently by these fanatics. It sounded like an empty, pathetic cry for sympathy but Mickey knew the claim was true because he had done the threatening, plucking her name and dozens of others off the screen during interviews just like this one.

Mickey had seen the anti-clone pansy before, as well. The liberal networks always brought him out to speak for the opposition because they wanted to make anti-cloners look ineffectual. He had a red beard that covered a weak chin, and he wore bad makeup and sweated a lot. He sent his best wishes to the Moore family and said his organization condemned violence and wished the police would bring the criminals responsible for this shooting to justice. Mickey hated this fellow, who cared more about politics than morality. Mickey wasn’t anti-cloning, he was pro-God, and he wanted to show the world that God’s warriors were strong. He didn’t believe that might made right, but rather that the righteous were mighty and the scientists and the feminists and other soldiers of sin would need more than the backing of the Supreme Court and the complicity of the news media to force the surrender of good people. Mickey had a gun and goodwill and a visa stamped by God’s hand that would allow him free passage anywhere the Lord’s work called him.

Phil and the others would be watching the news back at the church now. Mickey wanted to call them, but they had a rule against that. The feds knew about the Hands of God. They’d be watching the phone traffic. Mickey the Gerund didn’t make stupid mistakes.

He opened an atlas on the bed and began charting his way toward the next target. He’d driven miles out of his way tonight, but that was part of his strategy. Mickey had steered to the expressway, pulled on in a random direction, and driven until he was too tired to stay on the road. If he didn’t plan his getaway ahead of time, it would be harder for any fed profiler who tried to get inside his mind to catch up with him, impossible to predict his next move.

He’d stay another day in Minnesota to relax. Do some reading. Maybe find a place in the woods where he could take some unscheduled target practice. Obviously he needed it.

Then on to Denver.

LOCAL WOMAN SLAIN AT OAK STREET STORE
Staff report, Northwood Life

Police are investigating the brutal rape and strangulation of a woman found slain at the Gap store on Oak Street in downtown Northwood late Wednesday.
Anna Katherine Moore, 17, was found dead shortly after 12 a.m. at the clothing store, where she worked as assistant manager.
Sgt. L. C. Clayton of the Northwood Police Department confirmed Thursday that Moore’s body was discovered by the store manager, Lisa Stephens, after she received a call from the victim’s parents, who became concerned when their daughter didn’t return home from work. Moore had been beaten and strangled and there was possible evidence of sexual assault, sources say.
Investigators believe the attack occurred shortly after 8:45 p.m., when Moore sent two other clerks home in advance of a coming snowstorm.
“She had told these individuals that she was going to lock up and head straight home,” Clayton said. “Obviously someone stopped her.”
Police hope to be able to say more over the next few days as to who might be responsible. “Our detectives are continuing to interview people in an attempt to identify suspects,” police spokeswoman Donna Bartlett said.
Moore, who would have graduated in June from Northwood East High School, had worked part time at the store for less than a year. She was planning to attend the University of Illinois in the fall, where she hoped to major in psychology, Stephens said.
Moore was the only daughter of Dr. Davis and Jacqueline Moore of Northwood. Her father, a partner at the New Tech Fertility Clinic on Sheridan Road, was wounded in a shooting incident last year. Police say there is no evidence of a connection between the incidents.
On Thursday, the store remained closed, the sidewalks and entrances fenced in with crime scene tape, as police searched for clues. Individuals who had been to the Gap store on Wednesday, or who might have information regarding this crime, are being asked to contact police.
As news of Moore’s death spread through town, residents expressed a range of emotions.
“She was so beautiful and so kind. Who would want to hurt her like this?” Stephens said.
“It makes me real nervous,” said a female resident who asked not to be identified. “I’ve never thought twice about coming down here at night. Nothing ever goes on in this town.
“It’s scary,” she added, staring at the police tape across the front door.
By Thursday afternoon, a makeshift memorial of flowers and signs had appeared by the main entrance to Northwood East High School. Within hours, friends of the victim had added stuffed animals, photographs, poems, and other notes of remembrance.
“I can’t believe it,” said one student who described himself as a friend of the deceased. “She loved everybody. And everybody loved her.”