All the words were written in black ink except for HE MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO… LIVE, which he wrote in red. When he was done and the ink was dry, he folded the paper into quarters, slipped it into his back pocket opposite his wallet, and returned the original to his bag.
Mickey checked out of the Pegasus Motor Lodge around five-thirty and drove to a residential street he had scouted earlier. The houses were large and irregularly kept. Many of the lawns were overgrown and the trash cans filled with beer empties. Mickey assumed the renters here were mostly students from UT. He parked the car and unloaded the stolen bike from the backseat. As he rode he started to feel the rush, the anticipation of close contact.
Mickey took his time, careful to obey traffic laws, making a full stop at intersections. He hated people on bikes, especially kids, who thought they could drive on the wrong side of the road or blow through stop signs, expecting licensed drivers in cars and trucks to look out for them. It was still summer and still muggy, but a light breeze cooled his aging skin a bit, especially when he was in motion at twenty-five miles per hour, and when he arrived at the grocery store he dismounted and turned the bike around. He didn’t know the area well and wanted to make sure he didn’t become so lost in the getaway that he’d have to backtrack past the grocery after the cops arrived. If there were any cops at all, of course. One could never tell just how a target might react.
He entered the grocery, which belonged to a chain, although not one of the Texas-sized conglomerates with the travel agency and the copy center and the bank. At the registers, he turned into a small deli with four booths and a tiny pizza oven and a machine that made milk shakes. Four people stood in line ahead of him, and he stared indifferently at the menu board while he waited. When it was his turn he made sure not to put his hand flat against the stainless steel counter (not that they had his fingerprints in their database, or that fingerprints were even used much to ID people anymore, what with DNA being so much more reliable, but it didn’t serve any purpose to be leaving the ghost of his palm behind everywhere he went) and he ordered a turkey club sandwich, no cheese, and stood in another line by the register while they built layers of mayonnaise and sliced meat and lettuce and bacon on a slice of white bread.
His sandwich arrived at the cashier at the same time he did. A boy around seventeen asked him what he’d ordered and Mickey described the sandwich to him and produced a ten-dollar bill. The boy counted out his change, and when he handed it over, Mickey cupped the kid’s fingers in his hand, making sure that he felt the scales of Mickey’s raw, chapped skin.
“Are you Christopher Bel Geddes?” Mickey asked the boy casually. He knew the answer. He only wanted to get the kid’s attention. Most of the time when you talk to them, teenagers aren’t listening to you.
“Yeah?” The kid looked up.
Mickey leaned in and spoke in a low voice. The kid leaned forward as well until his lobe was near enough to Mickey’s mouth that Mickey could have bitten it with an attacking lunge. “Tell your father that he might be innocent in the eyes of the law,” Mickey said, his breath hot in the boy’s ear as he shoved the folded drawing roughly into his apron pocket, “but he still has to answer to the Hands of God.” He said this last bit in something like a Southern accent – Haints of Gwad – partially as a nod to Byron Bonavita and partially because, when he practiced it, he liked the menacing way it sounded to his own ear. He called that voice “the Sinister Minister.” It reminded him of De Niro in the remake of Cape Fear.
Christopher Bel Geddes was still bent over the counter when Mickey grabbed his sandwich and spun toward the door. He walked with his head down out into the grocery store, behind the row of fifteen registers, which counted off in backlit numbers above the cashiers’ heads. He walked in the direction of the double sets of automatic doors, which did their best to lock the cool air inside.
“Sir?” a voice asked. Mickey didn’t look up.
“Sir?” the voice said again. It was following behind him. “Can I see your receipt, sir?”
Mickey stopped. He didn’t even know if he had a receipt. Christ, they weren’t going to pinch him for shoplifting. Talk about an undignified end. He wished he had left the sandwich on the counter. Taking it was just cocky. He turned around. The security guard was small and his tie was too short and his uniform pinched the fat around his middle. “Um, I paid for it,” Mickey stammered. “They put it in this paper bag.”
“They should have given you a receipt.” The guard turned as if he wanted to lead Mickey back to the deli. Christopher Bel Geddes appeared from behind a stack of Coca-Cola, his leather-soled shoes sliding on the worn linoleum floor. From a hundred feet or so, his eyes brought Mickey and the guard into focus.
“Hey!” the kid yelled.
Mickey ran, his right shoulder checking the second set of sliding doors when they wouldn’t open fast enough. The security guard yelled after him. He saw his bike. No, screw the bike. He’d never get it started in time. He ran as fast he could across the parking lot and back down the road by which he’d come. Already he was winded. He had no chance of outrunning a seventeen-year-old kid. A cloud of shouting gained on him from behind.
He turned a corner and leapt awkwardly over a low chain-link fence, sprinting through someone’s yard. He climbed the fence on the other side and found a gulley that separated backyards between rows of homes along parallel streets and ran down the middle of it, his feet heavy against the mud and the weeds. This was too dangerous. They might see him from the side street.
Mickey jumped another fence, this one in the middle of a block, and ducked behind a yellow plastic playhouse to rest. He didn’t have a gun or even a knife with him. He had change in his pocket and, what else, the damn sandwich. He still had the damn paper bag in his hand.
“Hi,” a little girl’s voice yelled in his right ear. Mickey jumped, but he was too tired to run. There was a kid in the playhouse, maybe six years old. Her black hair was thick, and her new, grown-up teeth were too big for her pea-shaped head. She was leaning out the window and her head was beside his and she was giggling. “I’m Talia. I’m an eye doctor,” she told him, and with a pudgy finger she pushed the lower lid down and away from his right eye and leaned in until her irises were this close to his. Mickey didn’t swat the girl’s hand away, didn’t do anything to make her shout or cry or yell.
“Are your parents home?” Mickey asked. Then he added, “Dr. Talia.”
The girl nodded, still pinching the bag of skin under his eye. Of course her parents are home, Mickey thought. Parents don’t just leave the house when there’s a six-year-old in the yard. Good parents, anyway. “What about them?” Mickey asked. He pointed to a big white house with aluminum siding next door.
Dr. Talia shook her head. “They don’t have babies. Mommy says babies would crank their lightstyle.”
“Great. Thanks.” He waved good-bye and duckwalked into the neighbor’s yard as Talia called good-bye after him. She ran into her own house, no doubt to tell her mother about her new grown-up friend. Mickey made his way around the side of the garage and pushed a window screen in. They had a second car, thank God, an old Audi. He lifted himself up and squeezed through, landing on an empty rubber trash can. Using his own keys to expose the wires, he had the Audi started in less than two minutes. The remote for the garage door was on the passenger-side eyeshade. He backed out slowly.
Down the street and getting closer, he could see a handful of men darting in and out between homes. There were no cops yet, just an assortment of teens and old baldies in deli aprons. He caught a glimpse of the fat security guard catching up to the pack at last, still thinking they were chasing a shoplifter, no doubt. He was talking into a radio. Mickey reached for the clicker and closed the garage behind him as he pulled into the street, just like any home owner taking the Audi to meet his wife for dinner. Young Chris Bel Geddes and the rest of the deli crew hardly gave him a thought as he drove away.
That was a rush, Mickey thought to himself. Whe
n they go bad like that, it’s always a rush.
– 48 -
Graham Mendelsohn didn’t usually make house calls to his clients, but he and Davis had a scheduled round at the Northwood Country Club at one, and Graham phoned him at New Tech to say he’d be coming in a little early to talk business. Davis didn’t like the sound of that.
Tall and thin and about Davis’s age, Graham wore pressed khakis and a pink Polo, which put Davis at ease when he saw the attorney turn the corner into his office. A man bearing grim news wouldn’t deliver it in a ridiculous shirt like that. Davis tried to put him off message before Graham could turn the mood sour.
“Did you hear they almost nabbed him?” Davis asked.
Graham stopped rehearsing the announcement he was about to make and froze, resting his briefcase on an extra chair by the door. “No. Who?”
“Byron Bonavita,” Davis said. “He threatened Oliver Bel Geddes’s boy down in Austin and the kid chased him for a few blocks. Bastard got away, though.”
Graham frowned. “Balls. They get a description? DNA? Anything?”
Davis said, “No. A little girl got a good look at him up close, so I’m sure they’ll be out searching for Tigger tomorrow. Anyway, I hope you brought something to cheer me up.”
“Well, the good news is you won’t have to testify,” Graham said. “Ricky Weiss is taking a plea.”
Davis grinned. “No shit?” He made a move for his clubs. This would be the first truly relaxing round he had played in a year.
“I told you he’d fold eventually. Between his own wife and that Tweedy fellow, he was totally screwed.”
“Graham, after that I don’t care what the bad news could be.” Davis started to shut down his computer. They could celebrate with cigars on the first tee. “There is bad news, right?”
Graham nodded. “Martha Finn is pressing charges against you with the Lake County D.A. for stalking her son. I negotiated a voluntary surrender at noon tomorrow. They won’t announce it ahead of time. There won’t be a perp walk. That should keep it off the television news, anyway. The daily papers will probably bury it in the eighth ’graph of the Weiss story.”
The room around Davis tilted and shook like a cheap carnival ride. “Jesus Christ!”
Graham opened his briefcase and pulled out a stack of papers prepared just that morning by a paralegal. “Relax. Relax. We can look over the sentencing guidelines, the precedents. You’ll make bail at the arraignment, we’ll plead it to a misdemeanor, there’ll be a small fine, community service. I don’t expect the legal ramifications to be that bad.”
“Not bad?” Davis shrieked. He stood and hustled across the room to shut the door. “What about my practice? My medical license?”
“I scheduled a conference call at one-thirty with a firm in D.C. that’s more in tune with the medical ethics side. You’ll have to cancel our tee time, I’m afraid.”
“God. What a mess,” Davis said, falling back into his chair.
“Don’t worry. We’ll clean it up. But I think you should start today by finally telling me the real reason you bought all those pictures of Justin Finn.”
Davis shook his head. “Like I’ve told you many times, the last being at dinner Thursday, I can’t tell you. It was an experiment. Beyond that…”
The attorney leaned back in the leather chair and under his shifting weight it made a sound like an old record scratching. “Is the boy yours?”
“Justin?” Davis nearly snickered. “No. He’s not mine.” He tried to determine how little he’d have to confess. “In fact, he’s a clone.”
A thin brow tented over Graham’s left eye. “If that’s out there, the daily papers just became more interested in this story, especially the tabs. What’s special about him?”
“Nothing. He’s a healthy nine-year-old boy, conceived like dozens of others in this clinic.”
“But you don’t take the same interest in all your cloned children.”
“None of the other children I’ve cloned live a mile and a half from my door. Graham, you were sitting in the room when I answered all of this in my deposition for the Weiss trial.”
“She didn’t ask that many questions, frankly, and we were able to dodge most of the tough ones due to confidentiality laws. It’s a good thing you were never cross-examined. When you plea this out, and that’s my recommendation since you’ve already expressed a reluctance to testify about this matter publicly, you’ll have to stand before the judge and elocute. Say exactly what you did. I’d rather not hear the whole story for the first time at your sentencing.”
“All right,” Davis said. He had, after all, considered that it might come to this someday. “I had a theory I was trying to prove through Justin. Or I have one.”
“What theory is that?”
“That cloned children are even more like contemporaneous twins than we’ve imagined. That they share personality traits, interests, abilities, even when raised in a radically different environment. I was hoping to put together a longitudinal study following Justin’s development through childhood and compare it to the development of his cell donor.”
“Aren’t there other doctors, psychologists, doing the same thing?”
“Lots.”
“All with the parents’ permission, though.”
“That’s why they’re flawed. If Martha Finn knew what I was doing, she’d start to get curious about Justin’s donor. She’d ask a lot of questions. More importantly, it might affect the way she raised Justin.”
Footsteps thumped in the hall outside and Graham worried for a moment that they were talking too loudly. “Well, I have three things to say about that. First, you’ve made her very angry. Second, I don’t think you can hide behind scientific method with a story about half-assed secret research, and third, did you know that when the boy was three years old, Martha Finn and her now ex-husband hired a private investigator to track down Justin’s cell donor?”
Davis brought a hand to his face. He hadn’t shaved today and he’d noticed earlier, in the washroom, that more of his whiskers were coming in gray. He kneaded the woolly hairs with his fingers. “I didn’t,” he said, now fearing his attorney knew more than he had allowed. “What did they find out?”
Graham opened his briefcase again and removed a folder with a summary of discovery from the Weiss case. He flipped through it to a highlighted section. “Eric Lundquist. Syracuse, New York.”
“There you go,” Davis said. “Eric Lundquist. I wish I had known they knew about him. I’d have canceled the study. It would have saved me a lot of sneaking around.”
“If it had kept you from sneaking around the Finn boy, it would have saved you more than that,” Graham said.
“I suppose that’s true.”
“I just want you to know that I can’t help you suborn perjury,” Graham said.
“Then I won’t ask you to,” Davis said. “But you think I should plea it out?”
“If this is as good as your story gets? Yes.”
“Dammit,” Davis said. “Okay. But I want to make it a condition of the agreement that they won’t pursue Joan or anyone else here at the clinic. Joan was helping me with the other thing, in Brixton, helping me look for AK’s killer, but she had nothing to do with Justin. This is all on me.”
“We’ll ask,” Graham said. “If they believe you’re being honest with them, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Do you believe I’m being honest with you?” Davis asked.
“I’m your lawyer,” Graham said. “Believing you is the best I can do.”
– 49 -
Unprotected from the assault of cold rain that seemed to materialize from nothing in the yellow domes of streetlights above his head, Detective Teddy Ambrose walked around the blue apartment dumpster and felt his insides twist: everything above the equator of his navel clockwise, everything below it in the opposite direction.
He tried to remember what his life had been like yesterday, just hours ago, before this shift began.
His wife was pregnant with their second, but they hadn’t told anyone; the two of them glowed from their shared happy secret. If he could finagle a way around the department’s residency requirements, they were thinking about renting out the two-flat he’d inherited from his parents and moving to a bungalow in the suburbs. In the meantime, he and another cop, a guy he’d been through academy with, were ready with the down payment on a boat in Belmont Harbor.
Yesterday, as he’d driven up Grand Avenue toward Area Five headquarters, through the wet curtains of an all-day storm, he’d thought of the dozen closed murders he had credited to his name. He had so few open cases he had been likely to draw the next call. That was fine with him. Bring it on. His luck had been amazing of late: the pregnant teen who turned in her ex for clubbing his brother with an anchor and dumping his body in the lake; the hit-and-run who’d left just about the most costly paint flecks in the history of painted Porsches on the victim’s artificial leg; the carpenter who abandoned a screwdriver engraved with his own initials in the eye socket of his wife’s lover. The night before at Dante’s Tavern, Ambrose had boasted to his fellow cops that there was a point at which luck had to be considered destiny, and the number of cases Ambrose and his partner, Ian Cook, had sent to the D.A. in the last six months was surely on the verge of qualifying.
“You’ll jinx us.” Ian laughed.
The phone rang at 1:47 this morning with word of a female body discovered under a dumpster in a North Avenue alley. And when the evidence technician met their car with an umbrella and recounted the meager evidence at the scene, his partner spat angrily into a garbage can.
“You jinxed us, Brosie. I told ya you’d jinx us.”
Ambrose knelt beside the dumpster and turned his head. The victim’s hand was brown and stiff and cupped as if it were a wax demonstration for the proper fingering of a two-seam fastball. The hand was at the end of a brown arm and the arm disappeared behind the wheeled coaster of the dumpster. Still in a crouch, Ambrose took two sliding steps away and flattened his body, stomach down, against the wet concrete, letting the beam of his flashlight follow his panning eyes. The brown arm was connected to a shoulder, and the shoulder was connected to a torso, and at the top of it all was a head. A blue-and-tan dress had been torn almost from her body. There was something unnatural about the pose.
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