Cast of Shadows - v4 (53 page)

The defense tried to cast doubt on the DNA evidence, insisting their client hadn’t been anywhere near North and the Kennedy that night. He’d been playing a video game, alone in his apartment, and Shadow World records showed, in fact, that he had been logged on at the time. To the prosecution, however, this looked like premeditation. An attempt to establish an alibi before the fact.

DNA, they said, didn’t lie.

When Lieutenant Ambrose took the stand he was grilled by the defense about Armand Gutierrez, the original suspect in the Wicker Man case. He was also asked about Suspect M, the Candlestick Maker: a wealthy commodities broker named Francis Caleb Stasio.
Isn’t it true, Lieutenant, that right up until the very hour your men burst into Sam Coyne’s apartment and brought him in shackles to Area Five headquarters for questioning, you believed with all your heart Francis Stasio was the Wicker Man?

Ambrose had to admit that Stasio had been his best suspect before the murder of Deirdre Thorson. He wasn’t asked what changed his mind.

And didn’t Mr. Stasio leave the country shortly after the arrest of Mr. Coyne?
Ambrose said Mr. Stasio was free to travel wherever he wanted.

Sally Barwick took the stand as well.
Isn’t it true, Ms. Barwick, that you had a personal dispute with the defendant? That you have not named your alleged “source” within the police department? That you have received an advance worth several hundred thousand dollars for a book about the Wicker Man case?

Sally admitted it all, but the judge refused to compel her to give up her sources. As the prosecution pointed out in chambers, the DNA proved Ms. Barwick’s allegations. The identity of the person who initially provided her with the tip was irrelevant.

Coyne’s attorneys (there were five of them) brought out the details of almost a dozen murders in Chicago, Aurora, Milwaukee, and Madison, each having been committed since Coyne had been arrested and denied bail. The judge also permitted expert witnesses to testify to the facts of six killings that had taken place in Seattle while Coyne was in custody. “Maybe the Wicker Man has moved on to Seattle,” one of Coyne’s attorneys said in his closing argument. “Maybe he has taken the opportunity provided by my client’s arrest to flee the country. Maybe he’s still here in Chicago. I don’t know for certain. What I do know for certain is that it is reasonable for you to doubt that Sam Coyne is the Wicker Man.” Prosecutors dismissed the more recent murders as copycats. Once all the details of the Wicker Man case had become public, Ted Ambrose explained, specifically the way the bodies had been arranged by the killer postmortem, similarities between the crime scenes became irrelevant.

As the jury deliberated, prosecutors offered a surprise deal. If Coyne would plead guilty to the murder of Deirdre Thorson — the one count where the evidence was rock-solid — they’d drop the other charges, and the death penalty with them. Sam’s lawyers begged him to take it. They had danced around the DNA evidence, tried to confuse the jury with probabilities and statistics, but no one on the defense team believed they’d been convincing. Every year it became harder to fool a jury about DNA. With genetic therapy leading to miracle cures, and cloned children filling out youth soccer rosters, people understood the concept now. DNA didn’t lie.

“But it
is
lying,” Sam insisted during courthouse press conferences. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t kill Deirdre Thorson, or any of those girls.” Observers and television pundits agreed that Coyne sounded sincere.

Nevertheless, after six days, the jury found Coyne guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to die by lethal injection.

In the motel room, Justin kicked the sheet away and sat cross-legged on the bed. His chest and his feet were bare. His jeans were unbuttoned, revealing just the thin, logoed waistband of his white briefs. He examined the machine as Davis assembled it.

“Yellow, green, then red,” he said. “Hello, old bean, you’re dead.”

Davis removed the phone and the digital alarm clock and the heavy lamp from the nightstand. Watching Justin on the sidelines of his field of vision, Davis tried to reconcile Justin’s relaxed and indifferent pose with what the boy was about to do. Last night, awake in bed next to slumbering Joan, and again in the car on the way here, he had rehearsed a speech designed to talk Justin out of this. This isn’t necessary, he would tell him. Of course, he knew Justin would say the fact that it’s unnecessary is also what makes it right. And Davis recognized that although he could not want this for Justin, he selfishly wanted Justin to want it for himself.

Davis sat on the hard mattress with his back to Justin. “If you want to make it look like an overdose, then why don’t you just overdose?”

“Overdosing is hard. It’s like killing yourself with a hammer.” The boy laughed into Davis’s back and his mildewed breath stung through Davis’s cotton shirt. “You still haven’t figured it out. You still don’t know why I need to do this, and yet you’re still here. That’s you. Loyal. Reliable. Just like a real dad. Just the way I want it.”

“It’s
not
the way I want it,” Davis said. “Explain it to me. Convince me this is what you want.”

Justin put his hand on Davis’s shoulder and spun him gently onto the mattress so his polished black wing tips rested on the starchy pillowcases and he propped his weight awkwardly on his arms at the foot of the bed. They were facing each other now in a way that, to Davis, felt inappropriately casual. Executions should have a formality to them, he thought. A formality befitting their finality.

“I don’t want to commit suicide,” Justin said. “There’s no justice when a bad man goes out on his own terms. Deirdre Thorson needs someone to avenge her. Just as AK did.”

“But Justin, these
are
your terms,” Davis said, dodging the opportunity to tell Justin he wasn’t a bad man. “I’m here because you asked me to be. As much as I hate what you’ve become, if you changed your mind right now, I’d pack all this up and leave.” That was true. What he’d do next, he had no idea.

Justin said, “I have to do this. And I need
you
to do it because
you
want me dead.”

“It’s not true.”

“Yeah, it is.” Justin picked up the IV attached to Davis’s death machine and pressed the capped point of it into his palm, stopping himself before he broke the skin. “We caught Coyne. He’ll get a needle in his arm, even if it’s not anytime soon. But you’re angry and you’re sad at the lengths I had to go to, to get him. Measures you were unwilling to take. And now I’m a liability to you. I am evidence of your crime, your seventeen-year-old crime, in the same way that I was evidence of Coyne’s. The only way you can put all this behind you, all the pain from the last twenty years, is if I’m dead. And the only way Deirdre Thorson can have justice is if somebody kills me. Somebody who wants me dead.”

“You don’t have to die. You could go to prison.”

“Would it have been good enough for Anna Kat if Coyne got thirty-five to life?” Davis didn’t answer. “Ten years from now the state’d just put a needle in my arm, anyway, with a lot less dignity and a lot more agony and a lot more shame for my mom. Not to mention that they’d put you in prison with me. That ain’t right.” With a finger he touched the metal skeleton and its poisonous plastic organs. “Set up this scary death thingy and everyone gets what they want. Everyone gets what they deserve.”

“Not me,” Davis said softly, putting his feet on the floor again.

“But you don’t have to be in a hurry,” Justin said. Davis expelled a quiet laugh.

They talked for another hour. About books. About philosophy. About the chemicals in the plastic bags and what they did. How long it would be between the time he fell asleep and the time his heart stopped, and how long after his heart stopped before he was dead.

“If they do an autopsy they’ll catch this,” Davis warned, his conscience still pushing him
half-heartedly to act as if he cared. “They’ll know it wasn’t heroin.”

“Doubtful,” Justin said. “Cook County Coroner is way understaffed. They hardly do autopsies anymore — like maybe one in ten corpses that come through. Cause of death is almost always declared on the scene. I read it in
Time
magazine. If it looks like an overdose, if it smells like an overdose—” He reached into a backpack on the other side of the bed and pulled out a small bag of white powder and a
pocket-knife. He opened the knife and sliced the bag open, spilling it onto the polyester flowered-print bedspread.

“I guess I’ve never seen heroin before,” Davis said. It sounded almost like a confession. “I thought I had but I hadn’t. Not like that, anyway. They showed it to us in med school but it wasn’t so, so
white.
”

Running his fingers in a tight pattern through it, Justin said, “Ninety-eight percent pure. This shit’ll kill ya.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Around. Another of those things you shouldn’t know,” Justin said. “Hand me all that stuff over there.”

Davis dug into his own bag and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. Then he grabbed the spoon and the lighter and the leather strap and the can bottom and the syringe and a distended cigarette filter, and he took them to Justin. Justin tossed them on top of the spilled heroin and bounced gently on the mattress a few times so the tableau would appear less arranged. He took a sip of water from the nightstand and spilled the rest on the sheet and on the floor next to the bed, tossing the plastic cup after it. There wasn’t enough of the powder to cause a cloud, but Davis waved his arm around in front of his face and wished he’d brought a surgical mask.

“Let’s do this now,” Justin said. He put his head back on the pillow and dropped his arms to his sides.

The tubes and the valves and the salt water and the poison, all connected to Justin’s heart through a narrow needle in a blue vein. Davis tightened Justin’s belt around his forearm to help him find a way in, and he swabbed the area with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol. Looking at his young, pale skin, Davis wondered if anyone would believe Justin was an addict. That this was an OD. Maybe they would if they tasted the white powder on the bed and realized his stuff was too strong. Stronger than he knew, they’d conclude. But who would sell a kid like him pure heroin? What would be the point? (And yet, in truth, somebody had.) Still, any cop with a second thought in his head would see right through this, he was certain. There was no stopping it, though. Nothing to do but finish it. He thought about something Justin had once told him about the illusion of free will and realized that he, Davis, made the choice to be here twenty years ago, when he first held Sam Coyne’s DNA in his hands. When he didn’t destroy it along with that first evil notion.

“All right, then,” Davis said.

“It’s the right thing,” Justin said again, and Davis was embarrassed that the boy should be comforting him.

There was no eulogy. No good-bye. No sentimental exchange. No meaningful looks. No expressions of gratitude or understanding or love. No paternal speech. No acknowledgment of debt. No outward acceptance of their roles. Davis inserted the IV into Justin’s right arm and attached the plastic strap to his left wrist, and Justin reached underneath the tube running across his body and pressed the yellow lever. The saline drip began.

“Now what?”

“When you’re ready, push the green one. Just keep your left arm out over the side of the bed, next to the machine. When you fall asleep, your arm will drop and the red lever will flip, and that will be it. Just don’t drop your arm before then.”

“What happens if I drop my arm early?”

“It will be a lot more painful,” Davis said in his even, practiced bedside tone. “But don’t worry about that. I’m watching you. You can start the thiopental whenever you’re ready.”

“Nuh-uh,” Justin said. “You have to do it.”

“Justin…”

“You have to. Push the green one.”

“I don’t want to kill you.”

“You have to do it.”

“No, I don’t.”

“If you don’t, I’m going to stop it.” Justin lifted up his right arm and tensed it, like he was about to yank it free from the IV.

Davis said, “Then go ahead. Stop it. You’ve read a lot of books, Justin, absorbed a lot of abstract knowledge, but this doesn’t balance any cosmic scales, no matter what you think. The woman you killed has a family — a mother and father and brothers and sisters — and they’ll never know how their little girl died. They’ll never be able to look into the eyes of the person who killed her and try to understand why it happened. If you want to give them justice, then you should come clean with what you did — with what
we
did. Throw the whole sick story out there in the open and let people gape at the perversity of it. When they lock the two of us up,
that
will be something like a comeuppance.”

Davis stood, a pain like heartburn in his chest. Justin stared up at him, nothing in his expression hinting at a reply. Davis rushed into the bathroom and knelt before the toilet. If he wasn’t for certain going to throw up before, the feel of the slick, unclean linoleum triggered a gag reflex inside him and he hacked a tablespoon of stomach acid into the bowl. He sat there a moment, delaying his return by wiping down the floor and the outside of the bowl with a wet towel, wondering if the effort to remove any traces of his presence might cause suspicious zones of cleanliness in a room as dirty as this one. He flushed and wondered if Justin might have pushed the green lever in his absence and asked himself if he wished that were true, then walked back into the motel room before admitting to the answer.

Justin was still awake, staring at the ceiling.

“They can’t, but you can,” Justin said.

“What?” Davis returned to his seat at the side of Justin’s bed.

“Look into the eyes of the man who killed your daughter and try to understand why it happened.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“No, it’s not.” Justin picked up his head and turned it awkwardly in Davis’s direction. “Dr. Moore, when I killed that woman,
I was him.
I felt what Coyne felt when he put his hands around Anna Kat’s neck and squeezed the breath out of her. I felt powerful. Like nothing I imagined. I can’t get that from any drug. From any book. There was nothing abstract about it. I felt
good.
I felt
invincible.
And I didn’t feel any remorse. No sadness for her. No empathy. Nothing for the people she loved and left behind. The only difference between Coyne and me is I know it’s wrong to feel nothing for other people, and that’s barely a difference at all. Deirdre Thorson’s parents
won’t
be
able to look into the eyes of the man who killed their daughter, but you can look into the eyes of the man who killed yours. These are his eyes. Exactly his eyes, and now they’ve seen what he saw. And how many times over the last twenty years did you think about looking into these eyes, about being this close, not in a courtroom, or through jailhouse glass, but alone with these eyes in a room like this one so you could make them see just for once that they aren’t always in control?” Justin waited a moment for Davis to respond, but he didn’t. Davis stared. His expression was inscrutable beyond sadness. They looked at each other, neither one moving or talking or even breathing, it seemed.