Cast Of Shadows

by Kevin Guilfoile

  The concrete was raised in the middle of the alley, and the whole area sloped slightly to the east. A river of rainwater washed around the body, carrying away blood and hair and transferred skin cells and depositing them in a drain twenty yards on, along with Ambrose’s near-perfect clearance record.

  “A fucking whodunit.” Ian scowled as his partner pushed himself to his feet and brushed pebbles from his dark blue slicker. “An honest-to-Jesus whodunit.”

  “We don’t know that, man,” Ambrose said in his least assuring tone. They would find out who this girl was and if she had a husband or a boyfriend. If she was messed up with drugs. They would talk to her friends. Find out where she’d last been seen. But even if those queries presented them with a good suspect, say an asshole boyfriend with a weak alibi and a history of threatening behavior, the assistant state’s attorney wouldn’t be happy about the lack of physical evidence. Crime scene technicians had become expert at collecting even the smallest traces of DNA, and juries had become accustomed to seeing a genetic comparison between the perpetrator and the accused. Defense attorneys routinely cited a lack of DNA evidence as constituting reasonable doubt all by itself. Frequently juries agreed. The increasingly sophisticated science of DNA made the dumb criminals easier to catch and the smart ones (or the lucky ones) that much harder.

  Reading his own twisted guts, Ambrose worried this case might be on his desk for a long, long time.

  – 50 -

  Martha never pressed charges against Sam Coyne for attacking her. The only person with whom she discussed the incident in detail was a therapist she began seeing a month or so after. The therapist helped her some, and she always had felt that the therapy mandated by cloning regulations had helped Justin, and so, as she entered her mid-thirties, she began to think even her father could have benefited from a few sessions with an understanding professional. She directed her anger at Davis Moore instead, and tried to forget that the idea of suing him had originated with Coyne. She found a different lawyer to help her through it, of course.

  By now, Justin was devouring the works of great philosophers in the least turgid English translations. His impatience in class had brought Martha to the school for a dozen or more teacher conferences, and his irritability (coupled with his obvious intelligence) eventually pushed his third-grade teacher into a conspiracy with the school’s fourth-grade teachers, and the result was a joint recommendation that Justin skip ahead.

  He didn’t attract more friends in the fifth grade, of course. The older kids thought him an even bigger geek than the third-graders had, but none of this seemed to bother Justin. He received excellent grades in every class and even excelled in gym when the physical skills being rehearsed weren’t the team kind. He proved outstanding in gymnastics and he was faster than all but three or four of the older boys, which earned him a certain amount of respect. He was a bit smaller than most of his new classmates, but he was growing at an advanced rate and didn’t appear so out of place in the class pictures. Throughout the first semester of the fifth-grade experiment, Martha was certain she’d made the right decision.

  Justin stepped off the bus every afternoon dragging a bag heavy with books, but his broadening back was able to manage the burden. When Martha unzipped it one evening looking for evidence to lodge a complaint over the mountain of homework being assigned, she discovered only a few slim textbooks. The rest were books Justin was reading on his own: not philosophy, to her surprise, but true crime.

  In his room, under his bed, she found more books on Bundy and Berkowitz, Starkweather and Speck. Even Charles Ng, whose name, unappealingly, caused Martha to think of her mother. Shaken, she gathered them in her arms, a dozen or so volumes, and brought them to the kitchen table.

  “Where did you get these?” she asked.

  Justin seemed surprised at the accusing tone. “A boy in my class. James. I’m only borrowing them.” He said this as if he feared theft were her only concern. “His parents read them.”

  “Justin,” Martha said, choosing words with care, not wanting to sound worried or judgmental, “why do you want to read these horrible books?”

  Justin blinked a few times and touched her on the arm with a grown-up’s confidence. “The Wicker Man,” he said. “I want to keep us safe from the Wicker Man.”

  Of course, Martha thought, expelling a relieved laugh. She leaned forward and hugged him. The Wicker Man was all over the news, and much of downtown was living in fear of him – dating in groups, loading up on pepper spray, even staying home at night. He had killed six people so far in the Wicker Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side, five women and one man. The police assumed there were more victims as well, better hidden, perhaps elsewhere in the city. The women had been sexually assaulted and stabbed. The man’s throat had been cut. They found fiber evidence, bloody shoeprints, but they had no good witnesses, no DNA, no links between victims, no evidence that could lead to a suspect. It horrified Martha to think her son had been getting such gory details from the news, but it was almost unavoidable. If the Wicker Man was the biggest local news story of the fall, then the second-biggest story was the degree to which talk of the Wicker Man had saturated the Chicago media.

  “Justin, sweetie, the Wicker Man isn’t going to hurt us. He lives far away from here.”

  Justin didn’t speak but implied with a disappointed expression, a flat smile, and puffy eyes that he didn’t believe her. That broke Martha’s heart.

  “Can I go up to my room and play Shadow World?” Justin asked. Shadow World was a computer game her sister had bought Justin for Christmas. It was generally thought to be for grown-ups, but lots of kids played it too, and Martha had activated all of the strict parental controls.

  “Sure, honey,” she said. As he padded toward the stairs, she tried to read his state of mind. The worst thing about Justin was that he soaked everything in, but the best thing about him was the way he bounced back. It wasn’t that Justin couldn’t handle the truth as much as that Martha couldn’t handle him knowing. She would talk with him about the Wicker Man, or Ted Bundy, or even goddamn Charles Ng, but she knew she would never be able to talk with Justin about what happened that night between her and Sam Coyne.

  – 51 -

  There are thousands of views of Lake Michigan from the city, but none quite like that from Abbott’s, the pricey glass-enclosed two-story restaurant a hundred yards out on Navy Pier. From the right table at Abbott’s you felt surrounded by water, protected by it. Davis had hoped for, asked for, and received such a table, and was so comforted by the environs he had to be cajoled by the waiter into finally opening his menu.

  The dress Joan wore was black – her little black one, he presumed – and she was as stunning in it as it was stunning on her. It was difficult to tell, in fact, whether she or the dress benefited more from the pairing. Davis had seen her in dresses before, at holiday parties and professional functions, and once by coincidence at the symphony, a night Jackie had been unnecessarily rude to Joan and her date, leaving Davis alone with them at intermission, stammering to cover his jealousy and embarrassment. For all he knew this might have been the same dress she wore that evening, but tonight she wore it specifically for him, specifically to please him, and he was suddenly ashamed of his brown suit, not because it wasn’t flattering, but because he had given so little thought to putting it on.

  “Frankly, I’m surprised you wanted to be with me tonight,” she said after the waiter had refilled their glasses with pricey sparkling water and then drifted out of earshot.

  “Who else?” he asked, almost suavely.

  “On the night before your sentencing? I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just surprised.” Her smile was self-conscious.

  “I don’t have many friends anymore, to be honest.” Davis realized almost immediately how unseductive that sounded, and also how true it was. “I’ve seen enough of Graham the last few months. My next-closest friend is Walter Hirschberg, I suppose, and I’m not sure this would be the m
ost comfortable evening to spend with an ethicist.”

  “Well, even if I was at the top of a short list, thank you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “And not just for dinner.”

  Davis was foolishly optimistic about her intentions.

  “Thank you for keeping me out of it,” she said, reaching over and brushing his hand. “They might have been easier on you if you offered them something. Given me up. Many people would have, to save themselves.”

  “I’m hardly worth saving,” Davis said. “Besides, you had nothing to do with it. If anything, I used you. They should tack time onto my sentence for that, not shave it off.”

  Joan retracted her hand and placed it over the pearls at her neck. “I thought you said you wouldn’t have to go to prison.”

  “Graham doesn’t think so, but there’s always a chance. It’s actually mandatory in the guidelines, but he thinks they’ll suspend it.”

  “And then?”

  He let a sip of Shiraz trickle down the back of his throat. “Put it behind me.”

  “Really?” she asked. “Put it all behind you?” She had her hair up for the night, but it refused to be contained. Long, wavy tendrils hung down past the corners of her brown eyes to her cheeks.

  “It’s been ten years since I did it. A fifth of my life. The worst fifth of my life. I made a lot of other people miserable or worse. Including you. For all I know, the guy who killed Anna Kat is dead or rotting in jail by now, anyway. Odds are, he is. It’s time for me to stop caring and see that the next fifth of my life is better. I don’t have many fifths left.”

  “Don’t be ashamed of what you tried to do,” Joan said. “It was stupid.” She looked at him honestly. “But you did what you did because you loved Anna Kat. And what happened to Jackie wasn’t your fault.”

  “Yes. It was.”

  “No. God, Davis. I don’t want to speak ill of her, but she was deeply troubled.” A pair of waiters arrived with their plates and Davis and Joan gazed at each other in silence until they were alone again and she was able to finish the thought. “Did you know Jackie slashed the tires on my car?”

  “No! When?”

  “Maybe four months before she passed away. It was parked in the driveway of my condo. On a Tuesday night. I found it the next morning.”

  “How do you know it was her?”

  “She didn’t try to hide it. She came to my house the next day and warned me to stay away from you. I told her there was nothing going on, which was a lie, I guess, but nothing sexual was going on.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “Oh, really, Davis. Call the cops on your wife?”

  “You should have told me…”

  She puffed her lips. “That would have been worse.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Joan allowed herself a breather for a few bites of pumpkin ravioli. “So, was there something going on?”

  Davis squinted. “What? With you and me?”

  “With you and anyone. I mean, the woman was suspicious about something. She might have been unbalanced, but I don’t think it came from nowhere.”

  The restaurant was full now, and the late setting sun reflected against the glass of downtown in an orange glow. “Yeah, well, nowhere was kind of a theme with Jackie.”

  Joan whispered, “Even I wondered about you once. That day at the Finns’ house.” She took a sip of Chardonnay and said, almost inaudibly, “Maybe I was just jealous, too.”

  “I remember,” Davis said. “But no. I never cheated on Jackie.”

  “See? You always had that perspective. Take care of the people closest to you. At all costs.”

  “I wanted to once,” he told her.

  “Cheat? Really?” she said, mouth full, somehow unsuspecting. “When?”

  “Brixton,” he said.

  She nodded, slowly, sincerely. He didn’t feel bad for having said it.

  After dinner, they walked to the end of the pier to enjoy the blackness over the lake. To their left was Festival Hall, part of the original pier built in 1916. He and Jackie had been married there, in the Grand Ballroom, and it suddenly struck Davis as inappropriate that he should be here with Joan. Some subconscious gremlin had caused him to make reservations at Abbott’s, where he and Jackie had celebrated a handful of their early anniversaries (although the restaurant had another name then). It was impossible that this wouldn’t have occurred to him before now, impossible that he couldn’t have seen how callous it was to be here with Joan on what amounted to, if he was being honest with himself, their first date – his first date with the woman Jackie had accused of threatening their marriage. And although Jackie might have been half crazy, about that she was at least half right.

  For that reason, demonstrating what he recognized as too-little-too-late respect for the memory of his wife, Davis didn’t take Joan’s hand as they walked, and if she had expected him to, she didn’t show it. Joan, her fingers holding a light black sweater over her bare shoulders, seemed content, commenting on the wonderful smells of the shore and the pleasant breeze and the number of children about at so late an hour.

  At the tip of the pier stood a crowd of maybe thirty people, staring off into the darkness. In the back a young man in shorts hopped on his toes for a better view, but all Davis could see from his six feet three inches was a couple of midsized boats – not pleasure craft, but not the massive party-and-tour yachts that docked here in the summer, either – about seventy-five yards out. They were working boats, with electronic gear and a radio dish and men in uniform scurrying on deck and men in diving gear going over the side.

  “What happened?” Davis posed the question to the back of the crowd, offering it to anyone who thought they knew the answer.

  “They found another girl,” somebody said without turning around. “Another dead girl.”

  Part Two

  Justin at Fourteen

  – 52 -

  Davis pushed the remains of an overcooked chicken back and forth across the heavy white Prince Hotel Palm Springs catering plate. He knew he was being watched, and the scrutiny had poisoned his appetite. Every one of the three hundred or so doctors and researchers and ethicists in this room probably brought with them to this conference an opinion, rumor, or assumption about Davis Moore. He still wasn’t comfortable with the kind of celebrity he had become.

  His difficulties with the Lake County state’s attorney had resolved themselves much as Graham had promised. Davis pled to a misdemeanor and paid an affordable fine, was sentenced to seven days in jail, suspended, and worked at a free clinic on Chicago’s West Side every Tuesday for six months. Martha Finn followed up with a civil suit, which Graham settled out of court for less than $75,000. Following his community service, the Congressional Board of Oversight and the AMA suspended his license for another four months, a slap on the wrist considering the full menu of their options.

  When the suspension was up, however, he didn’t return to the clinic. The Chicago dailies lost interest in him after Ricky Weiss was sentenced, but the stalking charges against him became front-page news in the suburban papers. That brought him notoriety, and not just the shaming kind he expected. People sympathized with him. He had lost his daughter and his wife, and for the love of God he’d been shot himself by a religious zealot, and maybe he had crossed some ethical lines with his mysterious “study” of Justin, but no one suggested he’d been a danger to the boy, no one except for Martha Finn in her restraining order (which remained in place until Justin was eighteen).

  In place of his practice, Davis accepted generous fees to speak at seminars and dinners and fund-raisers. He became a regular pundit on the Sunday television roundtables as the violence at fertility clinics became more intense and the ethics of cloning were debated with increased frequency on the front pages of newsweeklies. At the age of fifty-six and with no patients of his own, Dr. Davis Moore had become cloning’s most distinguished spokesperson.

  Of course, he cou
ld never admit publicly the real reasons he quit his practice. For one, he was exhausted, weary of the violence that had now taken four of his close friends in the profession, and too tired to cope with new clinic security – the armed guards, the gated parking garage, the metal detectors, the name badges, the bomb-sniffing dogs, the drills, the threats, the bimonthly evacuations and the subsequent “all clear’s.” Even here at the conference uniformed guards stood by the exits, making and remaking every attendee, memorizing faces, and quantifying risk.

  Davis also felt guilty. Guilt over the bodies of Anna Kat and Jackie and even Phil Canella, whom he never even met. Guilt over the trauma he’d caused the Finn family. Guilt over Justin, a boy who never should have been, and guilt over Eric Lundquist’s discarded DNA, the blueprint of a boy who should have been but never was.

  The conference was sponsored by the California Association of Libertarian Scientists. Traditionally, they lobbied Congress on any issue related to “researcher rights,” but over the past year, as the anti-cloners in Washington gained support (up to forty-three percent in some polls), CALS had become almost exclusively a cloning advocacy group.

  “Our guest tonight has made many sacrifices in the name of science,” began the introduction from a Berkeley-educated medical doctor named Poonwalla. “He has been persecuted, prosecuted, and has even taken a bullet for the causes all of us in this room hold dear. But you can’t keep a good man down, especially a good man who has right-thinking, free people like you on his side. Ladies and gentleman, from Chicago, Dr. Davis Moore.”