Cast Of Shadows

by Kevin Guilfoile

  “At night it gets quiet and I try to think, and then I also try to keep track of my thoughts,” Justin said. “It’s like if I can figure out what I was thinking just before the thought I’m having now, and how it’s connected to the thought before that and the thought before that and the thought before that, at the end of it I’ll be able to find the real me.” Davis noticed how different Justin appeared even just a few days removed from the meeting at his house. The breezy morning had swept his mess of hair into an unruly pile. He had as many pimples as before, but they seemed rearranged, melting away in some places and reappearing in others. He continued, “We’re not made up of our thoughts, you know, even though that’s the only way most of us can approach the question of identity. I am the one who makes the thoughts, and that’s who I’m looking for at night: the thinker, separated from his thoughts.”

  The dog and the woman were just visible now. She made a throwing motion, a fake apparently, and the dog didn’t fall for it. When the woman threw a ball for real, the dog bounded away and the woman disappeared after him, around a bend in the road.

  Justin looked out his window, squeaking a finger against it as if trying to remove something on the other side of the glass. “What if everything about Mr. Cash and me is exactly the same except for our thoughts?” Justin asked. “I mean, our DNA is the same, our appearance is the same. What if we also have the same thinker? What if at the very core of it, our thinker, our self, is exactly the same? What if we are the same person, thinking different thoughts?”

  “Honestly, Justin, I don’t know. Would you say the same thing about twins? Or identical triplets? Do you think they might be one person split into three different bodies?”

  Justin smiled and sought out Davis’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “That would really be something, wouldn’t it? I mean, why can’t a person exist more than once? Physicists theorize that time travel must be possible. That you and I could go back to the meeting we had at your house and watch ourselves talking. That would require two versions of each of us coexisting but acting independently. Millions of people believe in reincarnation. Is it such a stretch to believe that a person could live more than one life at the same time, with the individual selves not even aware of each other?”

  Davis twisted his hands on the leather bands wrapped around the wheel until he felt worms of grit forming in the friction against his skin. “I don’t want to change the subject, but maybe this is related, somehow.” He reached for an envelope in the backseat and pulled out the old computer sketch of AK’s killer. The one Ricky Weiss had identified as Jimmy Spears. “What do you think about this? Does this look anything like Mr. Cash?”

  Justin stared at the paper for a long time. He whistled through clenched teeth and paused and whistled again. “Little bit, yeah,” he said finally. “A lot, actually. Where did you get this?”

  “I got it from you. Years ago.”

  Justin let Davis know with uncurious silence that he understood. “That business with the football player? And the dead guy in Nebraska?” Davis nodded. The boy unzipped his backpack and took out a pen. “Can I?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Justin made a desk on his lap with a textbook and a magazine and began to draw careful lines on the sketch. The hairstyle changed, cut shorter now. He added sideburns and widened the eyebrows. He gave depth to the eyes with a few shadowing strokes, and performed similar surgery on the chin, narrowing it, making Mr. Cash thinner. Davis marveled how a few lines of ink drawn by a living hand (and not a computer) made the sketch seem more realistic. More alive. More like the boy sitting next to him.

  “There,” Justin said. “I can see me in there now. That’s Cash.”

  Davis took the paper and angled it away from him into light refracted through the windshield. He had spent untold hours with this face, but was only now seeing it as an actual person as opposed to an abstract idea – a person to be found, to be confronted, to be feared. It gave him a chill and he wondered what it would be like to be this close to the real thing.

  “So how do we find him?” Justin said.

  “There’s no chance you could get any more info out of your mom?”

  Justin made a noise with his lips like air leaking from a basketball. “No way. She’s never mentioned it since that night. I think she’s hoping I repressed it or something. If I bring it up now she’ll get my shrink involved, and her shrink, too. She’ll freak.”

  “No good,” Davis agreed. “We can’t let her suspect.”

  “Yeah. She finds out about this she’ll have my butt grounded and your butt thrown in jail.”

  “Probably. I’m going to work on this a little. I used a detective agency a few years ago…” He stopped.

  Justin giggled. “Gold Badge? The one that hired Sally Barwick to take the pictures of me? My mom’s got a restraining order against them, too.” He reached into his backpack and pulled out a notebook. He paged through it, looking for something among the class notes and elaborate ink doodles. “This is the guy Sally used to work for. His office is downtown. Mr. Cash lived in the city, remember?” He wrote something and tore off a page corner.

  Davis stuffed the paper in his pocket. “You still talk to Sally Barwick? What is she doing these days?”

  Justin shrugged. “Dunno.”

  Davis didn’t press him on it. He really didn’t care. “Do you ride your bike to school every day?”

  “Until it gets too cold.”

  “When I find something out, I’ll put a white piece of paper in an upstairs window of my house. The one on the far right as you’re looking at it. Ride by in the morning from now on and if you see it, call me on my cell. And don’t use your own phone. If your mother sees my number on your bill it’s all over.”

  “Right,” Justin said. He checked his bag to make sure it was zipped tight and opened the passenger door.

  “Justin,” Davis said. The boy stuck both feet on the ground where the pavement surrendered to the wild grass and leaned back into the cab. “That stuff you said, about the self, about the thinker separate from his thoughts. One self occupying two bodies…”

  The boy blushed. “That’s just stuff I kick around. I’m embarrassed to talk about it with people I know, so when I get a few minutes with a stranger…”

  “Well, you’re a smart young man,” Davis said. For some reason the words had a difficult time coming out of his mouth. His eyes rinsed themselves and his nose went numb. He started to say he was proud of him but realized how stupid and wrong that would sound.

  Justin shrugged and squinted in a manner that fell just short of being modest. “Yeah, smart,” he said. “That’s gonna make me a real bastard to catch.”

  – 64 -

  Big Rob’s tiny Ogden Avenue office hadn’t been altered in even small ways since he quit the force and started taking on clients. The walls had the same rose tint. The furniture, two decades out of date when he opened up shop, was now approaching the forty-year mark and was nearly but not quite retro chic. The carpet was industrial-grade, the kind they used in department stores, and along well-traveled routes he had treated the periodic coffee stains with dish soap and a damp cloth. Surrounded by dust, an old CPD bowling trophy stood on a filing cabinet like a statue anchored in concrete.

  “Dr. Moore,” Big Rob said. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

  “Really?”

  Biggie nodded. “I hardly know you and yet I feel like we’ve been through some traumatic events together.”

  “Phil Canella was your friend, I understand,” Davis Moore said.

  “He was. And I’m very sorry about your late wife.”

  Davis nodded, thankful that such business could be dispensed of quickly. “I’m looking for a man. I don’t know much about him. But I need you to get me his name and to tell me where he lives.”

  Biggie held up a hand and stood from behind his desk. Although there wasn’t room for a man his size to walk freely in this office, when he was with a client he liked to be
on his feet. It felt like exercise. “Who are we looking for?”

  Davis took a small notebook from his pocket. He had written down pages of thoughts and notions since meeting Justin in the forest preserve three days ago, and he had done his best to filter the speculation from the facts. “His last name could be Cash, or something similar. He grew up around Northwood – was probably living there eighteen years ago, and one or both of his parents might still live on the North Shore. He likely has some history of violence against women, although I can’t say if he has a record or not. He has money – he’s possibly a doctor or a lawyer or a banker or an entrepreneur – and he probably drives an expensive European car. As of six years ago, he was living in the city of Chicago.” He paused while he decided if the next piece of information would be helpful. “Around the same time, he went on a single date with Martha Finn.”

  Biggie groaned and pointed at Davis. “Gold Badge hired my assistant, on your behalf, to take pictures of her son. Mrs. Finn has a restraining order against Sally now. She has a restraining order against you, too. I read that in the paper.”

  “That’s fine. I don’t want anyone to bother her.”

  Big Rob looked out the window, deciding how he was going to live with the regrets that were already taking shape in his head. Christ. “What else do you know?”

  Davis turned to a pair of notes he’d made after contemplating the things Justin said in the car. “As a child he might have been fascinated with fire, or connected to the disappearance of animals or pets. He’ll be extremely intelligent. Probably much smarter than you or me.”

  “Great,” Biggie said. “A psycho, in other words. And a genius. What is he, like a mad scientist or something?” He chuckled.

  Davis opened his briefcase and pulled out the sketch. “Finally, he looks like this. Or he did until recently.”

  Big Rob pulled the paper across his desk, touching it only at the edges. “I know this picture. Philly had it when he died.” He looked into Davis Moore’s eyes for signs of truthfulness.

  “My wife found it on my computer and sent it to him, thinking it might be related to” – he wasn’t sure how to put this – “her case. It’s been refined a little since then.”

  Big Rob held it up in front of his face, blocking the sight line to his client. “Philly died over this face.” He forced an impassive expression onto his eyes and lips and set the sketch down, fixing his gaze again on Davis.

  Biggie told Davis his fee. “And you’ll pay my expenses in the meantime?”

  “I will.” Davis unfolded cash from his pocket. Biggie sighed and accepted the money without counting it.

  – 65 -

  The sheets on Justin’s bed hadn’t been changed in a week and a half, and Martha felt terrible about that. She had been showing four houses a day, many of them for the same client, a young woman (just married to an older doctor) who had convinced her husband they needed a suburban house with a yard and a playroom and a big kitchen more than they needed a downtown apartment with a view of the lake. “If he thinks I’m going to raise kids in the city just so he can be close to his Gold Coast mistresses, he’s nuts,” she told Martha. The woman confessed she knew about her husband’s Gold Coast mistresses because until recently she had been one of them.

  For a boy’s room, Justin’s was unusually tidy. He spent a few minutes at the end of every day organizing, arranging his books at alphabetical attention, blowing the dust from his computer keyboard, coordinating his clothes for the following morning. Although he never showed signs of fatigue, she couldn’t imagine how he had time for sleep, between school, his own independent study, his fastidiousness, and the hours he spent playing that blasted computer game. She had read an article about how thousands of kids (and adults, too) spent so much time playing Shadow World they had become indifferent to, if not outright neglectful of, their own, real lives. Extracurricular and athletic team enrollment were both down dramatically in high schools across the country, and many educators claimed, credibly, that Shadow World was to blame. It made sense: just in Northwood, Martha personally knew of three – three! – marriages that had broken up because one spouse had left the other for someone they’d met in Shadow World. At least Terry left Martha for his personal assistant. There was something almost old-fashioned about that.

  Not everyone agreed the game was entirely bad for kids, though. Some psychologists claimed teens who experimented with adult scenarios in Shadow World were better prepared for college and the pressures of leaving home. They were said to be confident, less risk averse, and more likely to be content once they entered the working world. Never having played the game herself, Martha was skeptical about such claims, but it was easier to believe them than to try taking the game away from her son (or her son away from the game), so she chose to have faith.

  Martha pulled the dirty sheets from the mattress and aired out the clean ones, measuring the sides of the fitted sheet and folding the corners of the top sheet. Then she reassembled blanket and comforter and pillowcases, trying to be as neat about it as her son would be. He never complained but Martha had caught him more than once remaking the bed after she had done it, to his mind, in a substandard way.

  She had sorted the laundry and carried her own clothes into the master bedroom (compared to where she slept, Justin spent his nights in a biological clean room). Two weeks’ worth of his shirts, jeans, and underwear, washed and dried in a morning-long marathon, filled three round laundry baskets, and she set about putting them away in their proper places. Blue jeans needed to be folded and stacked on the second shelf from the bottom in his closet. Shirts hung on plastic hangers, never metal. Blue socks had a different drawer than black socks. Underwear should be rolled instead of folded. Again, he never complained to her or threw a tantrum over it, but she knew he’d redo it if she didn’t get it exactly right.

  At the bottom of the laundry basket she found three bleached-and-dried one-dollar bills. She must not have checked all the pockets before she threw his pants in the washer. Worried she might have ruined something important – a homework assignment or a pretty girl’s phone number – and not above using that concern as an excuse to snoop, Martha began feeling inside Justin’s pockets. She found two more ones and a five in the first four pairs and set the money on his dresser. In the fifth, her hand felt something curious: paper, wrinkled and warped in the agitated soapy water and spin cycle, the size of a business card. She pulled it out. The name printed on it didn’t even register with her at first without the “M.D.” behind it.

  Anger wasn’t the word for what pulsed through her. Outrage was closer. Or just rage. She wondered where Moore had approached him. For how long had they been meeting? What does that sonofabitch want with my son, and why won’t he leave us alone? She wanted to call her lawyer, but knew he’d start the clock at $350 an hour. She wanted to call the police, but knew the first thing they’d ask was whether she had ascertained all the facts. Have you talked to your son, ma’am? It’s not a violation of the restraining order for your son to be carrying around a piece of paper with Davis Moore’s name and number. The truth was she couldn’t ask Justin. She was too scared. He hadn’t said a cross word to her in over four years, but he still frightened her. A mother knows her son, even if he received none of her DNA. A mother knows what her son is capable of. Every time he quietly redid the bedding or refolded his jeans, Martha imagined the pressure building inside his head and inside his heart, pressing against his skull and his ribs, whistling in his ears. Sooner or later it would need to be released.

  But as long as she could keep Justin close, as long as her boy studied and played under her roof and under her eyes, as long as she remained interested and up to date with his friends and his hobbies, she could guide and control and protect him.

  And hope for the best.

  Martha grabbed a piece of paper from Justin’s printer and wrote down Davis Moore’s private phone number and e-mail address, and she returned the card to Justin’s pocket.

&
nbsp; – 66 -

  In the middle of downtown Northwood was a roundabout where six streets intersected, and in the middle of the roundabout was a small park with a half dozen benches, each perpendicular to one of the streets, and in the middle of the park was a statue of a soldier, erected after World War I but understood to commemorate Northwood veterans from all the military conflicts since, including the most recent mini and proxy wars in Asia and Africa. Parades on Memorial Day and Veterans Day and the Fourth of July always ended here, which made good sense for both symbolism and downtown business.

  Big Rob and Davis had made an appointment to meet in the middle of the roundabout, it being a sunny weekday and close to the bank where Davis needed to withdraw the detective’s fee.

  Big Rob had spent three weeks tracking down the mysterious Mr. Cash – starting with Chicago and Northwood phone books, then widening his search to online databases he subscribed to for just this purpose. He worked the professional organizations – the bar association, the futures exchange – and found a few Cashes, but none that matched the few facts he had about the man. Big Rob called a friend on the force and got access to recent domestic complaints and sexual assaults, and he checked area luxury-car dealers. If the guy’s name was Cash, the pool of suspects was too small, and if it was just something similar, the pool of suspects might as well be infinite.

  The break came when Big Rob wasn’t even looking for it.

  “Fum ducking luck,” Big Rob said to himself.

  He had collected several months of back issues of Northwood Life, which seemed to exist only to print the names of as many residents as possible in every edition. He was scanning them inattentively on a Friday afternoon (but mostly using them to catch Ho Hos crumbs before they reached the floor) when he found a paragraph announcing that Sam Coyne, a graduate of Northwood East and the son of Northwood residents James and Alicia Coyne, had been named a partner at the downtown law firm of Ginsburg and Addams. The name didn’t trip any neurons in Big Rob’s head, but when he saw the photo of Sam Coyne, he bit his tongue. The picture in the paper was a professional business portrait. Sam was handsome, in his thirties, and blond. His suit fit precisely and he looked healthy underneath it. And the face was nearly the same face Big Rob had taped to the top of his desk twenty days ago. “Cash. Cash. Coyne,” Biggie mumbled to himself. “Christ, it’s gotta be.”