My hand is trembling as I holster my weapon. James and Alan come rushing up the stairs, followed by Tommy. Alan is weeping as he unties Elaina and gets a blanket around her, while James and Tommy ask me if I am hurt. I don’t reply.
I look down at him, dead on the floor. The man who provided Sands with access to my home, who was ultimately responsible for the death of my family, the scars on my face. I think about the swath of destruction his actions left behind him.
In the end, he proved his own point.
Death is always just a step away.
But then again, so is life, and all of its champions.
57
CALLIE ASKED THAT three people be here for this. Me, Marilyn, and Elaina. Bonnie is here by default, which seems fine with Callie.
Two days after Peter Hillstead died, Callie woke up. It’s been another two days since that, and the doctor is preparing to test her feet for sensitivity. Callie is doing her best to cover it, but I can tell that she is terrified.
She looks terrible. Pale, tired. But she is alive.
Now we’ll find out if she’s going to walk again.
The doctor holds one of those instruments everyone has seen but can’t name—like a revolving spur on the end of a handle. He is poised to run those sharp points across the bottom of her feet, and he looks up at Callie. “Ready?”
Elaina grips her hand on one side of the bed, I on the other. Marilyn stands to Elaina’s left. Bonnie looks on, a worried expression on her face.
“Tickle me, honey-love.”
He runs the spur across the sole of her left foot. Looks at her. “Did you feel that?”
Her eyes widen with fear. Her voice is small. “No.”
“Don’t panic,” he tries to reassure her. I can tell this is not working, because her hand is crushing mine. “Let’s try the other foot.” He runs the spur across it, we wait…
And then a twitch. The big toe moves. Callie holds her breath.
“Did you feel that?” he asks again.
“I’m not sure…”
“That’s okay. The toe moving is an excellent sign. Let’s try it again.” He runs the spur across the bottom of her foot. This time, the toe twitches immediately.
“I—I felt it!” Callie exclaims. “Not a lot—but I did.”
“That’s very, very, very good, Callie,” the doctor says, soothing. “Now I want you to try something else for me. I want you to try and move that toe for me, the one that twitched.”
Callie’s hands are sweating. I can feel the smallest tremble.
“Come on,” Elaina soothes. “Try it. You can do it.”
Callie is looking down at her big toe, an intensity of concentration that an Olympic runner couldn’t match. I can feel her mental strain as something palpable.
The toe moves.
“I felt something that time!” Callie says, excited. “More of a…connectedness. Does that make sense?”
The doctor smiles. It is a big smile, a huge smile. None of us have allowed ourselves to relax into relief yet, but I can feel the possibility building. We need to hear the words from his mouth. “Yes. That makes a lot of sense. And it is very good news. There is only a five percent chance that you’ll experience some impairment. Nothing that physical therapy can’t handle, but I don’t want you to worry if it happens. If that occurs, it’ll be a matter of retraining your body to accept the messages between brain and legs.” He pauses. “But I feel confident in saying this: You are not going to be paralyzed.”
Callie’s head goes back against her pillow and she closes her eyes, the room is filled with a chorus of “Thank God”s; it’s a hurricane of relief.
Then we all stop.
Because we hear the wail.
It is the sound of someone releasing something crippling and huge and awful, a keening, and we all turn to see where it is coming from.
Bonnie. Little Bonnie is against the door of Callie’s room, face red, tears practically bursting from her eyes, fist against her mouth. Trying to hold in a volcano of grief that is demanding release.
I am shocked into speechlessness. I feel as though someone has cut my heart in half with a straight razor.
Of us all, it is Bonnie who feared for Callie the most, and the sheer unexpectedness of this makes her grief all the more overwhelming. That, and my understanding of it. If Callie had been crippled, he would have won, in Bonnie’s eyes. She is wailing for her mother, for me, for Elaina, for Callie, and for herself.
Callie’s voice cuts through the air, a soft arrow. “Come here, honey-love,” she says, with a gentleness that makes me want to stagger.
Bonnie rushes over to her bedside. She takes Callie’s hand and closes her eyes and weeps against it as she rubs her cheek across the knuckles, over and over and over. Cherishing Callie’s life and crying for her own world, all at the same time.
Callie murmurs to her, wordless, while the rest of us remain mute.
We couldn’t speak if we wanted to.
Callie had asked to see me alone, for just a few moments.
“So,” Callie says, after a space of silence. “I suppose just everyone knows about me and Marilyn now?”
I grin. “Pretty much.”
She sighs, but it doesn’t sound like a sigh of regret. “Ah, well.” She’s quiet for a moment. “She loves me, you know.”
“I know.”
“But that’s not why I asked you to stay in here with me,” she says.
“No? Then why?”
“There’s something I need to do, and…well, I’m not quite ready to do it with Marilyn yet. Maybe never.”
I look at her, puzzled. “What?”
She motions me closer. I sit on the edge of the bed. “Scoot in a little bit closer.”
I do. She reaches out with her hands and gently grabs the sides of my arms, pulling me into her, until she is hugging me.
It takes me a moment to get it, and then I do, and I close my eyes and hug her tight.
She’s sobbing. Silent and wordless, but with everything she has.
So I hug her and let her cry, and I don’t feel sad.
These aren’t those kind of tears.
58
IT IS FIVE O’CLOCK, and James and I are the only ones left in the office. This is a rare moment. All the monsters have been put to bed, for now. We can leave on a schedule. I plan to take advantage of it.
I watch as my report prints out. The last page will come, and that single piece of paper will stand for the end of the Jack Jr. case. All its blood and misery and life snuffed out too soon.
But not really. The things he did, and how those things affected us and others, will resonate and echo for years to come. He cut with a broad sword, indiscriminate and deep. Scar tissue may be nerveless, but it’s still visible, and sometimes during the wee hours, it can tingle like a phantom limb.
Like Keenan and Shantz. That limb does not just tingle, it aches.
“Here are my notes,” James says, startling me. He drops them on the desk.
“Thanks. I’m almost done.”
He stands there, watching the printer as well. It’s another rare moment: James and I sharing a comfortable silence.
“So I guess we’ll never know,” he says.
“I guess not.”
We share the dark train, and so we both share the same wonder, without needing to put specific words to it.
Was there someone before Peter Hillstead’s father? Was there a deadly grandfather, or great-grandfather? If you could follow it back, before the days of true forensics and cross-referenced computerized data, would you take a trip across the ocean and find yourself in gaslamplit cobblestone streets?
Running from a faceless man holding a gleaming scalpel and wearing a top hat?
Would you finally put a face on a legendary terror?
Probably not.
But we’ll never know for sure.
It is the ability to let questions like this go unanswered, to walk away from them without looking back,
that lets us keep our sanity.
The last page prints out.
EPILOGUE
I HAD ANNIE buried next to Matt and Alexa. That way Bonnie and I can visit our families together.
It’s a beautiful day. That California sun, the kind my dad loved best, is out in all its glory, tempered by a cool breeze that keeps you from getting too hot.
The grass in the cemetery hasn’t been cut yet this week, and it waves every so often, all thick and lustrous green. Looking across the cemetery, where the gravestones go as far as the eye can see, I can imagine this as the bottom of the ocean, covered with seaweed and row after row of wrecked ghost ships.
I see other people, single or together, young or old. They are visiting their own wives or husbands, sons or daughters, brothers or sisters. Some died peacefully. Some died in violence. Some were comforted, while others died alone.
Some graves have no visitors. They grow old and cracked with neglect.
Though it is filled with memories of death and haunted by ghosts, it is a peaceful place. And this is a perfect day.
Bonnie has been planting flowers on Annie’s grave by hand. She finishes, standing up and brushing the dirt off her palms.
“You done, honey?” I ask her.
She looks at me, nods. Smiles.
Elaina has started chemo. Alan is still coming to work. I’ve accepted that the outcomes of both are beyond my control. All I can do is love my friends and be there for them.
James had his sister’s body reinterred. Leo bought a new dog, a Lab puppy he’s been talking about for days. Callie is healing well, becoming grumpier and grumpier about her confinement to a hospital bed, a good sign. Her daughter continues to visit her, and Callie seems to be coming to a grudging acceptance that she now has to bear the title of Grandmother. She doesn’t seem to mind.
Tommy and I have seen each other a few more times. Bonnie likes him. We’re taking it easy, seeing where it leads.
It turns out that Peter Hillstead had been responsible for the death of at least twelve women over the years. Most were perfect crimes—in fact, we know about them now only because of his journals. He kept meticulous notes, just like his father. And like his father, he’d hidden his victims, picking women who wouldn’t be missed, destroying their corpses when he was done with them. There was no evidence left of their passing, just—shadows. We still have no idea what other monsters he corresponded with and encouraged, beyond those we know about, or even if he did. I have learned to accept that this, too, is beyond my control. If they crawl out of their caves, I’ll be here to slap them down.
It turns out that Robert Street had known Hillstead for almost three years. He had participated only in the two most recent murders. To be honest, I don’t really care. Hillstead is dead and gone, and Street will soon take his own place on death row.
Hillstead had used his position as a doctor and as an authorized therapist for agents to gain access to personnel records, which is what we think led him down the road to Callie’s daughter. The Bureau had done a thorough background check on Callie; Marilyn hadn’t escaped their scrutiny.
He’d seemed omnipotent at times in his ability to find out everything about us. In the end, it turns out that he was just smart.
We were smarter, something I remain grimly smug about. I recognize the danger of this. The dark train is my own arrogance, one that could carry me off a cliff if I don’t watch it. For now, I let it ride. Dragons are prideful, after all.
The Hillsteads have the profilers in some kind of foaming-at-the-mouth tizzy. Something new and unheard of in a serial killer, blah, blah, blah.
I don’t think he was all that different from any of the other killers I’ve hunted and caught. He made a mistake, just like they all do. However “perfect” he may have been, it was Renee Parker—his first—who reached out from the grave in the end, pulling him down into the earth with her. This brings me a feeling of tremendous satisfaction.
The real ghosts of this world are just that, I have thought many times since: the consequences of our actions. The footprints of change we leave in our passage through time.
Consequences. They can haunt or harm us. They can also exalt us, and be a source of comfort in the night. Not all ghosts wail or weep. Some just smile.
Bonnie still isn’t speaking. She doesn’t scream in her sleep every night, but neither is every night peaceful. She is a beautiful child, smart, thoughtful, generous with her love. She is an artist as well, a painter. She churns them out, things beautiful and dark, and I recognize that for now they are her substitute for the spoken word.
We’ve settled into a routine. Not quite mother–daughter, not just yet. But we are making progress, and I am no longer terrified. I am happy with the First Rule of Mom, ready to let it take me wherever it wants to go.
The ghosts of Matt and Alexa visit me in my dreams, and they are a comfort. I no longer have the nightmares.
“You ready to go?”
Bonnie takes my hand as an answer.
She is mute, and I am scarred, but the day is beautiful, and the future no longer terrible. I have her and she has me, and from there grows love.
And from love—life.
We leave the cemetery hand in hand, watched by our ghosts.
I can feel them smiling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cody Mcfadyen lives with his family in California. Shadow Man is his first novel.
SHADOW MAN
A Bantam Book / June 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2006 by Cody Mcfadyen
Bantam is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mcfadyen, Cody.
Shadow man / Cody Mcfadyen.
p. cm.
1. Government investigators—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Fiction. 3. Serial murderers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.C438S53 2006
813'.6—dc22
2005054590
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90262-4
v3.0
Shadow Man Page 38