“No.”
“Well, then.”
“I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s wrong. There’s a difference.”
Again, Davis considered that Martha Finn was putting him up to this. Or the cops. Maybe someone suspected. Maybe someone wanted him to do prison this time. “Why do you think she’s wrong?”
“Because I saw him,” Justin said. The boy leaned back now in a low slouch, his head on top of the cushions, staring at the light fixture in the ceiling, his arms crossed in front of him and his hands clasped the wrong way around, pinkies out, resting between his legs.
Arteries up and down Davis’s body pumped two parts adrenaline to one part plasma, the way they had when he’d received the last promising lead in Anna Kat’s murder via e-mail from Ricky Weiss. That had ended in the worst way he could have imagined. Davis tried to slow it all down, saying nothing for a long time. The boy seemed fine with that, even closing his eyes as though a nap were coming before a thought fired across a synapse in his brain and he blinked awake, eyes on the ceiling, waiting.
“Where?” Davis said finally. “Where did you see him?”
“Nuh-uh,” Justin said. He sat up straight, as if his waist were a hinge, and leaned until his head was closer to Davis’s chair than Davis’s own knees. “I tell you stuff. You tell me stuff.”
Christ, what did this kid know? How could he have seen AK’s killer? Forget that, how could he have identified him? Understood what he was looking at? Was it someone from Northwood? Had the monster been so close all along? He couldn’t let Justin out the door now, not without reaching some sort of understanding. Whatever the kid knows, it might be enough to put Davis in prison for ten years. Still, he had to know. After everything Davis had gambled, how could he not play this hand out? And if he had to trust anyone, why not Justin, who was as much his child as he was Martha and Terry Finn’s? If not for Davis, this particular arrangement of carbon and neurons and blond hair and curiosity would never have existed.
“Tell me what you want to know,” Davis said.
Justin stood up and walked around the coffee table, sprawling across the carpet at Davis’s feet. He twisted his torso, and his spine cracked like a roll of caps. He rested his head on an elbow. “You’re not supposed to make clones from living people.”
“That’s right.”
“But you did.”
“I did.”
“You could go to jail for that.”
“You’re right.”
“It must have been important.”
“It was.”
“So tell me.”
“I will,” Davis said. “But I just confessed a secret to you. Something serious. I’d like something in return now.”
“That’s fair.”
“Where did you see him?”
Justin paused, but didn’t seem reluctant. It was as if he had to play back a recording in his mind before he knew he could get it right. “He attacked my mother.”
“Shit!” Davis cursed with a reflexive gasp. “Is she all right?”
Justin nodded with a sneer that seemed inspired by equal amounts anger and guilt. “Yeah. She’s okay.”
“When did this happen?”
“Six years ago,” Justin said. “Right before she filed the lawsuit against you.” Davis considered that. “Just a coincidence, though. Now, who is he?”
“You don’t know?” The questioned betrayed disappointment, and that seemed to confuse the boy.
“I want to know what you know first.”
Davis nodded, asking himself if he needed more than an hour from Joan, if he should call with another errand before she returned from the office to find her husband and the Finn boy trading information like distrustful double agents. “He attacked my daughter.”
“Is she okay?” Justin asked.
“No,” Davis said. “She’s not.”
The story came out in a long exhale, and Justin seemed shocked by none of it. He listened and nodded and looked concerned. At other times he appeared relieved and even excited. He never interrupted. He allowed Davis to describe, to explain, to rationalize, to apologize. He seemed so sympathetic, so non-judgemental, Davis thought he could have cried in front of the boy, and almost did, twice.
“I feel bad,” Justin said when Davis was through and they had both thought silently on it for a few minutes. “I feel bad I don’t have more answers for you.” He sighed. “I can’t remember his name. It was like money or something. Mr. Cash, maybe? I think he lived in the city. I think he used to live in Northwood. Or his parents did.”
“His parents live here now?”
“They did six years ago. His mom introduced him to my mom. They talked but I wasn’t really paying attention. I remember everybody was saying he looked like me. When he was a kid, anyways.”
“What else?”
“He and my mom went to dinner one night. I thought I heard something after they came home and I went downstairs. I just saw the end of it. I think he tried to rape her, although she never said, exactly. My mom was crying. She kicked him out and he walked past me and I really looked at him this time, looked him in the face, in a way that I hadn’t done when we met in the store. It was like, you know how you look at an old picture of yourself and you don’t look like that anymore, and you don’t spend that much time looking at yourself in the first place, but still you just know the face in the picture is you? Right away. That’s what it felt like. Looking at him.”
“Do you think he saw the same thing you did? Do you think he saw himself in you?”
Justin picked at the carpet with his fingers. “I don’t know. I doubt it. He just wanted to get the hell out of there.”
“Does your mother have any idea?”
“Nuh-uh. Like I said, she thinks my donor was Eric Lundquist.”
Davis wanted to believe it. “Are you positive it was him? The guy who hurt your mom? He is your donor?”
Justin’s head bobbed with a barely perceptible motion, more like a vibration than a nod. “Oh, yeah, shit!” he said. “There’s another thing.” He pushed himself to his feet and lifted his shirt up over his head, turning his back to Davis. Davis stood up too and Justin turned his head, looking down over his shoulder, his shirt twisted around his forearms. “That.”
“What?” Davis leaned back and scouted the white plane of the boy’s backside. “What? The birthmark?” Davis put his hand very near it but never touched the boy’s skin. It was shaped like the top of a teakettle and disappeared under Justin’s belt. “He had this?”
“Exactly like it,” Justin said. “Right in that spot.”
“Jesus Christ,” Davis whispered.
Three rooms away, the back door opened and Joan shouted, “Hi, Dave!”
“Jesus Christ!” he said again. “You need to go now. But we need to keep talking. Saturday?”
“Yeah, I can do Saturday. Where?”
“I don’t know.” He heard Joan’s footsteps leaving the kitchen and pushed Justin toward the front door as the boy struggled to get his shirt back on. Davis took a card out of his wallet. “This is my cell phone. Call it tomorrow. I’ll figure it out.” Justin snatched the card and ducked out the door without saying good-bye.
“Who was that?” Joan had entered the foyer. He couldn’t tell what she’d seen.
“Hmm? A kid selling candles. For a band trip.”
“You ordered one?” Joan asked.
Davis realized he had his wallet in his hand. “Two,” he said. “They’re going to Saint Louis.” Christ, he hadn’t warned Justin, hadn’t told him not to tell anyone, hadn’t told him he might be in danger if this Cash fellow put together the same pieces Justin had. Now that he had run out the door, there was no way of telling him. Not without violating the restraining order or involving a third person.
Joan waved a bottle of shampoo and walked into the living room. She leaned over to shut out the draft coming through the window and picked up the open copy of Time of Death. “I’ve read tha
t,” she said, handing it to Davis without a review. He took another card from his wallet and used it to mark his place before setting it down again.
– 61 -
Just as she was leaving private investigation and starting a new life, Sally, like millions of others, became immersed in Shadow World. The depth of the digital creation was fascinating to her. Every time she discovered a new spot in the game – a restaurant, a thrift store, a car wash – she sought it out on the real streets of Chicago and was always amazed when she found its twin. If she faced disappointment in the real world, she could usually find same-day redemption on her computer. The new duality of her life was both exciting and comforting, and her days were now divided almost equally – nine hours in the world, nine hours in the game, six hours sleeping.
Although they remained physically apart for more than three years, grown-up Justin never stopped visiting Sally in her dreams. The mornings after such meetings she felt invigorated but a little woozy, often unsure of what had been said, what intimacies had been exchanged. That sensation was almost always followed by sadness. Martha had been Sally’s friend, but she found it was Justin she missed most. Not the real, flesh-and-blood boy almost twenty years her junior, but, as Justin/Eric himself once put it, the idea of him. No real man would ever measure up. Now that they were friends again in Shadow World, she could actually get to know Justin, the ideal Justin, separated from his teenaged body.
It was getting so Sally was almost looking forward to a fresh Shadow World murder.
– 62 -
Female secretaries, paralegals, and summer interns at Ginsburg and Addams shared a regular appointment. Law firm politics stratified employees into sections and subsections – those with a law degree and those without, those with testes and those without – and so the workers who fell into both of the without groups, thrown together by sexism and caste, met informally once a week for happy hour at a bar called Martin’s (frequently called Martini’s, in an ongoing, unfunny joke). Once together and half full of gin and vermouth, they explored other things they had in common – the weather, fear of the Wicker Man, vacations, men, and horror stories about a senior associate named Sam Coyne.
Coyne had parallel reputations in a number of categories, all of them bad. He was a cruel boss, an overly competitive softball player, an arrogant negotiator, and a strange, selfish, and violent lover. Stories regarding the last of these were usually told in the gossipy fashion of urban legends, and these stories were repeated often as the staff turned over, month by month. In fact, if the gathering at Martin’s included, on average, a dozen young women, three of them had probably slept with Sam Coyne (or performed an act other than intercourse most people would count as sex, or had started such an act and not completed it because of something he said or did, or had tried to stop but felt compelled to see it through because of alleged physical or psychological coercion on Coyne’s part). In most cases, these women never told their coworkers of their own involvement, but instead passed along embellished accounts of the events with the names of long-gone Ginsburg and Addams employees substituted for their own. Occasionally, one of the women would get drunk enough and fess up to a tryst with Coyne. Such a person would earn head-of-the-table honors at Martin’s and would be pressed for explicit details. At the very least, she’d be expected to comment on the most notorious Sam Coyne rumor of all, that the handsome young attorney who specialized in mergers and acquisitions had a cock like the grip on a tennis racket, and a woman in the know would always confirm this by contorting her mouth into a wide oval and holding her hands apart at an exaggerated length, and a soprano-pitched roar would go up from that corner of the bar and martinis would be ordered by the tray.
Some Sam Coyne stories had sober endings (and even more dubious attribution) and they drew a different reaction. There was Nancy, who had to cover her bruised arms and legs for an entire month; Jenny, who discovered the handcuffs and the crazy leather masks in his closet and also discovered that she was kind of into it; Carrie, who felt degraded kneeling in front of Coyne in a downtown parking garage while he pulled her hair and growled commands down at her like she was in some sort of perverse puppy school; and there were multiple stories of former Ginsburg and Addams employees, usually girls right out of schools in Missouri or Indiana, who’d been briefly imprisoned by Coyne in his car or his apartment and forced to perform on him while being verbally and physically abused. The women with tenure traded legends of raped paralegals paid to shut up and sexually harassed secretaries bullied into silence – “sexual harassment harassment,” they called it. Sam Coyne was handsome like a movie star, smart like a politician, mean like a jungle cat, and hung like a bell tower, and men with that combination, the Friday night cynics at Martin’s agreed, can get away with just about anything.
Sam knew the women talked about him. He heard them whispering sometimes in the break room, or caught the new ones searching his slacks surreptitiously for some topographical evidence of his infamous attribute. It didn’t bother him. He even worked it into his come-on when he found him-self drawn to a new girl, when he saw some darkness in her eyes, some clue in the way she dressed, some unexpected piercing, or the faint arc of a buried tattoo. “What do they say about me?” he’d ask in the late hours of overtime when one of the newbies volunteered to stay late and help him with copying or filing or whatever she could do. “Nothing,” the new girl would say, looking at him with her big eyelids at their apex and her mouth turned down in a determined attempt to appear naive. He’d say, “Half of it isn’t true, you know,” which would make her blush, betraying the fact that, yes, they did talk about him, and much of it was juicy and even shocking, and then he’d say, “Does that disappoint you?” and the girl would say, if she were mature beyond her years, “It depends on which half, ” and that’s when he knew he’d have her in his bed or on his desk or in the copy room or in his car (or on his car), depending on the mood and circumstances and whether or not this one would lose her nerve at the last minute, like too many of them did.
– 63 -
Davis met Justin in the forest preserve, on a narrow road between the dog park and the picnic area. No one drove this bit much except to fish a tiny stream about a quarter mile ahead, and in the middle of the day it seemed as safe a place as any for a secret and illegal midday conference between a man and a teenaged boy.
Through the open window of his SUV, Davis heard the spritzing of a bicycle tire on wet pavement, and catching Justin’s attention in the rearview mirror, he waved him around to the passenger side. Justin ditched his bike in the tall grass by the door, and when he climbed in, throwing his backpack on the floor mat, Davis offered him a Pepsi. Davis felt a little bit dirty: the two of them in the front seat, the bike on its side by the road, the kid’s pant cuffs wet from the ride, the Pepsi, which felt like some sort of lure. He considered how happy he’d been just a week ago and how bad he felt at this moment – how his stomach seemed like it would be knotted now for the foreseeable future – and told himself this was surely a mistake. But an overlapping thought assured him there was no choice here, really. He couldn’t conceive of a future in which he didn’t follow up on all the boy knew. He couldn’t tell Justin to forget it. He couldn’t ignore him. This wasn’t about options anymore, or right or wrong, or vengeance or justice or the word that used to get thrown around after AK’s death: closure. Davis knew that he and the boy had only one path beneath their feet and they would follow it until it stopped, and Davis would spend the remainder of his life in whatever place they ended up.
“I forgot to tell you,” Davis said. “You can’t tell anyone else about this. If this guy ‘Mr. Cash’ found out who you were, I think you might be in danger.”
“I thought of that,” Justin said, pausing to expunge a carbonated belch. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Can you remember anything else about this guy?”
Justin’s lips were severely chapped, and the skin around his mouth was red and irritated in a wide circ
le. It looked like he’d applied lipstick on a roller coaster. “Lived in the city. Looked like he worked out. Good-looking, of course.” Justin patted himself ironically on the chest, then stopped, recalling something new. “He drove a nice car. European, like a Porsche, or maybe a Beamer or Mercedes. It might have been a convertible.”
“He could be driving anything now,” Davis said. “Still, expensive car. He’s probably a professional. That’s something of a surprise.”
“What, you had this guy figured for a maniac? A psycho?”
“After what he did to my little girl? Yeah.” He realized too late the question was a trap.
“So how’d you expect I would turn out?” Justin said. “Did you figure I’d come up the same way?”
Davis sighed. “There are a lot of things that make a man’s character, Justin. Very little is predetermined.”
“Is that why you kept such close tabs on me? Why you were stalking me?” He seemed to be using the language of the lawsuit deliberately, to put Davis on edge. “ ’Cause you were worried?”
“A little bit.”
Davis hadn’t turned the radio off, only dialed the volume down to practically nothing. Justin turned it back up until a melody was recognizable – Brahms, Violin Concerto in D Major, Davis noted to himself. Justin made a face and turned it to a top-forty station.
“So I was what?” Justin asked. “Some tool in your investigation? Like an artist’s sketch. Something like that?”
“I guess you could see it that way.”
“But if you had given my mother that Eric kid’s DNA like you were supposed to, she’d have had a different boy. Not just me in a different body but a different consciousness altogether. Another self. I wouldn’t exist at all.”
“I guess not. I really don’t know how it works, Justin.” Davis was staring down the road through the spotted windshield. A dog, its face low to the ground, following a scent, emerged from the woods and made a circle in the road. A woman in her twenties followed with an unattached leash folded in her hand and fired off a series of rhetorical doggie questions – What is it? What you got? Where you going? – before the pair headed down toward the stream.
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