Cast Of Shadows

by Kevin Guilfoile

  Davis had proved that was a lie. The physical process that brought Justin into the world was identical to that of every other clone. But the act of creation had taken place the moment he held Sam Coyne’s DNA in his hand and decided he would make the switch. Justin was not conceived in a lab or in the womb but in Davis’s mind. He existed because Davis had wanted him to, and what kind of being does that describe if not a god?

  He didn’t feel like a god, though if he did, what obligation does God have to his creations? Any at all? God doesn’t always act like it. One way or the other he had a special obligation to Justin, and it was something like being a father to him, although not exactly.

  He had an obligation to Anna Kat for certain, and on that score he was failing her. Again. Most nights he sat down in the blue room, among his old family files and eighteen years of cold evidence, sat there in the silence doing nothing. Pretending. As if just sitting in the chair where he once obsessed over her murder was the same as tracking down her killer. It reminded him of the way Jackie used to pray, in an indifferent and rehearsed whisper, as if the words meant something even if she didn’t believe them. Even if Justin were only chasing his own demons, the kid was doing more to find Anna Kat’s killer than he was. Davis thought, My God, what’s a fifteen-year-old doing with demons? and then he felt guilt in his stomach incubating like a virus. He pushed back against the headrest, listened as carefree voices converged from around the forest preserve, and he thought about suicide, about men who had parked along lonely roads like this one with a rubber tube attached to the exhaust pipe and looped in through the cracked window, the rest of the opening caulked shut with a towel. He tried to block out other thoughts for a minute, his eyes closed, imagining what it must be like for the terminally desperate in the final moments when their survival instinct surrenders to the lure of permanent sedation. It was a meditation he did, not often but sometimes, in places where he was truly alone. In the car it was always a rubber tube. In the bathroom it was razor blades. In the blue room it was a gun. The instruments were location specific but his imagined last words were always the same.

  “I’m sorry, Jackie,” he whispered. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”

  – 74 -

  The back door opened and closed, and Martha heard a pair of boots clunking to the kitchen floor, and she felt a teenaged body displacing air as it moved through the house, and when it climbed the stairs to its bedroom every sock-footed step seemed to be lying to her.

  She learned this during her divorce: when a person you love is lying to you, everything they do or say is a lie until they confess it. Even a nominally true statement – “I want raisin bran for breakfast” – is still a lie because it takes the place of the truth. Small truths, told between lies, are just part of the cover-up.

  These many years later, Martha remembered how normal her life with Terry had been during the months in which he’d carried on with his seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a-year glorified secretary. She suspected he was cheating, knew it in her gut, and yet those were happy days for her somehow. Sally Barwick had been lying to her then, too. So much of her life at the time had been a fiction, and yet she remembered it fondly, like a favorite novel. She could almost understand the appeal of a game like Shadow World.

  Sadly, that brand of happiness eluded her now. She was wiser and more mature, and it was her son who was lying. Those were the differences, she supposed. Plus, she distrusted Davis Moore. Hated him even. That made the current situation unbearable. When her husband started having an affair with Denise Keene, Martha didn’t even know the little slut existed. Dr. Moore, on the other hand, was taunting her through notes in her son’s blue jeans.

  When a two-thirty appointment canceled on her that afternoon, Martha thought she would call and see if Sara could sneak her in a few days early. She hated the way her hair was growing out, and had done as many blunt scissor repairs on her bangs as she was able. Midway through dialing, however, she changed her mind and decided to follow her son home from school.

  A long bike path led from the umbrella-shaped bike-battery dock, past the athletic fields, and through a narrow gate in the chain-link surrounding the school grounds. Martha idled her cream Sable about fifty feet away and watched a hundred or more kids walk and ride out onto the sidewalk on Copes Street. The radio played an old rock song, from before her time even, and she hummed nervously along with it, even though the singer’s angst over love lost reminded her of the last days of her marriage.

  Her son appeared at last, bundled in his jacket, his backpack as big as a Sherpa’s. A few weeks ago, when there was real snow on the ground, he’d have been walking or taking the bus. She resisted the temptation to shift out of park and followed him instead with her eyes. If he was going home he would take a left onto Delaware, she thought. When he didn’t, she wondered if he was headed for a friend’s house and why they weren’t walking with him.

  The slow-speed chase that followed was ridiculous, she knew. Several times she pulled over to the curb and pretended to be lost or looking for something under the seat so an irate driver could pass. Three cars behind him in the turn lane at a light, she was afraid he had spotted her. He made a left, accelerating through a narrow opening between oncoming cars, and by the time she passed through the intersection, he was gone.

  Driving through an area with no houses and thick old-growth trees close to the shoulder on either side, Martha wondered where he could have gone. There was little out this way but commercial real estate – office parks and fast-food joints. She was more and more certain Justin was on his way to a meeting with Davis Moore, but unless she happened to see his bike parked somewhere, she was sunk.

  A quarter mile past the red-and-white sign marking the entrance, she figured it out: the forest preserve. He’d turned into the forest preserve.

  Usually a strict disciple of driving etiquette, Martha made a blind three-point turn on the narrow road and reversed direction toward the blacktopped drive that wound through the preserve. There was hardly anyone here on a Thursday in winter, but high school students made use of the grounds all year round, for smoking or drinking or necking or, she hoped not to discover, holding secret meetings with a creepy doctor who’d been charged with stalking them when they were small children.

  Martha stopped the car. What if Justin wasn’t here to meet Davis Moore? What if Justin really had come to the woods for smoking or drinking or necking? How embarrassed she’d be if he discovered her spying on his ordinary teen mischief. She sickened at the thought of Davis Moore and his experiments (or studies or whatever he had called them in his deposition) and lurched the car forward again. No one said being a parent wouldn’t be embarrassing.

  The black SUV was parked halfway down a dead end. Martha might not have seen it except that the evenings were short and cold and Moore had no doubt left the engine running for the heat. Against the dimming horizon, she could see the curls of exhaust and the red glow of his taillights, and next to it, in the cold, matted grass, Justin’s silver bike. She could see broad streaks of white on the back of the older man’s head in the driver’s seat. Justin was turned toward him, his profile recognizable in silhouette.

  With her car angled across the only exit, they were trapped up the road, but what would be the point of approaching? She still couldn’t confront them without unpredictable repercussions from Justin, and despite the satisfaction of seeing the ever more prominent Davis Moore, the darling of libertarians and television magazine programs, explaining himself in front of a judge and hiding his lying face from the news cameras, she knew she couldn’t just march up to the car and start screaming at them both. When her husband abandoned her, she had at least been a party to the action. She’d had a lawyer. Some input into the dissolution. She realized that unlike a spouse, a parent was helpless in this situation. A teenager can walk out on his mother without ever leaving the house.

  She let up on the brake, coasted down the road, and drove home to wait for her son.

  – 7
5 -

  Locking and chaining his bedroom door and staring gravely into its white-painted paneling, Justin let a discontented noise expire softly in his throat. Adults. They worry so much. They have much to worry about, of course, but he worried enough for all of them. Didn’t they understand that’s why he was sent here? Why he was brought here? Sent here or brought here, he wasn’t sure which, but it didn’t much matter one way or the other. His responsibility was the same: to wonder, to worry, to act.

  Dr. Moore was a mess. Poor guy almost had his life back together before Justin knocked on his door, but what did he expect? These things were decided long ago. Very long ago. Nothing is decided when it happens.

  He felt bad for his mother. It would be hard on her when it all came out. She had done nothing to deserve the pain. She only wanted a son, presumably one without a destiny, but she had no choice in the one she got.

  On his bed, his hand feeling around inside his backpack, Justin gripped a leathery pouch with a zipper. Retail stores used them to make cash bank deposits, and hip teens now used them for tools and school supplies and allergy medicines and computer discs and PDAs.

  And stuff.

  His mother had been at the park today. He’d seen her car in the rearview mirror. So now she knows he’s been seeing Moore. That was a problem. Not a fatal one, but it was another challenge. Whether the challenges were sent here or brought here, that again didn’t matter much.

  Justin unzipped the pouch and dumped its contents on the bed. Cloudy crystals tumbled from a plastic Baggie. A lighter, a spoon.

  He turned on the radio and after he had prepared the syringe he injected its contents into a kitchen sponge and placed the sponge in a plastic bag for anonymous disposal later. From a week of this ritual, the Baggie, the syringe, the spoon all looked well used, coated in black and white residue. He capped the needle, returned everything but the sponge to the leather pouch, and hid the pouch behind a row of books on his nightstand shelf.

  – 76 -

  Another late night alone in the blue room. Joan was upstairs reading a book. She mentioned to him that even with her busy schedule at the clinic, she was averaging almost three thick novels a week these days. She had to go to the library almost as often as the supermarket. He understood what she was getting at but pretended it went over his head.

  Davis knew there were files in here he had never examined thoroughly. Hell, there were thousands of them. Even with the dedication to the task he once possessed, he had performed a kind of triage, deciding which folders held the most promising information and attending to them first and most often. He remembered a box he’d picked up from the police station just months after AK was killed. Jackie was in their bedroom with a highball glass and a Dick Francis hardcover. He carted the box downstairs and set it on the card table in the blue room, removing the reports one at a time from within. These were witness statements from Anna Kat’s friends, and after scanning just a few of the thirty or more reports, he knew they’d be too painful to read. As the detectives had warned him, none of the girls seemed to know anything about the night of the murder. Instead they filled investigators’ notebooks with tearful eulogies and stories illustrating their love for AK. What a good friend she had been. How much promise her life held. How sad and different their lives would be without her. Now, though, if he could go through them once more, he wondered if he’d find that any of them had mentioned Sam Coyne, if any could help him connect the dots between the killer and his daughter.

  He picked a report at random. Janis Metz. The name was unfamiliar. To investigators, Janis claimed to have been a friend of Anna Kat’s since the eighth grade, but by the time they were seniors in high school, they weren’t as close as they had once been. “We were still friendly,” Janis said. “We just kind of drifted into different crowds.” Janis had lots of stories about AK, and flipping through the transcript it was obvious that her eagerness to tell them was not matched by the patience of the detective conducting the interview. Several times he hinted that she should wrap things up, only to have her respond with another tale of Anna Kat’s beneficence.

  “There was this boy, Mark,” began one such anecdote, “and he really liked AK. He followed her around like a little puppy dog. Mark was one of the supersmart kids, kind of shy, he’s going to Stanford in the fall. These interviews aren’t going to be in the newspaper or anything, are they?” The detective assured her they would not be. “Anyway, in ninth grade Mark finally got up the nerve to ask AK to go roller-skating, and she told him she didn’t think of him in that way, and the poor guy was just crushed. But she stood in the hall and talked to him for, like, twenty minutes after she rejected him, and asked him about his family and his classes and stuff. He was on the debate team and a few months later she went to one of his matches or games or debate things, whatever you call them, and in the spring she nominated him to be class president. I mean, they were little things, but she let him know that he didn’t have to be embarrassed. That they could still be friends, you know? Even though they’d never be close friends. That was really cool. I would have been, like, afraid that the guy would start stalking me or something. Not AK. She didn’t care what clique you were in or how cool you were. She liked everybody.”

  Davis felt a pinching sensation in his nose, the prelude to a tear. He felt pride and love – and loss, too, but in manageable amounts. He skimmed the rest of the interview quickly for Coyne’s name and, not finding it, reached into the stack and grabbed another one.

  Bill Hilkevitch. Davis remembered him. He was one of AK’s “guy friends,” to be differentiated from her boyfriends. He liked Bill. Smart. Genuine. Polite. Bill had spoken at Anna Kat’s funeral, eloquently, until he had to stop and cry, which was a kind of eloquence in itself.

  “Anna Kat used to get a little grief from a few of the other kids about her dad,” Bill told the police sergeant. “I’m not saying that any of these kids, you know, killed her or anything, it was nothing like that, and it actually died down a lot after her father was shot, but it was still there. I remember – it was like tenth grade, I think – and we were reading Frankenstein in English class and somebody grabbed her book and wrote something on the title page. The full title of the book is something like Frankenstein, Prometheus Unbound. This guy had crossed out ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and written ‘Davis Moore, M.D.’ underneath it.”

  At this point the detective asked who or what Prometheus was. “Prometheus,” Bill explained. “In Greek mythology. He was the guy who took all mankind’s troubles – you know, diseases and whatnot – and put them in a box. Eventually Pandora opens it and life sucks forever after. He also stole fire from the gods and gave it to the mortals. The thing this guy wrote, Dr. Moore’s name, it doesn’t even make sense. The guy who wrote it was just copying what he’d heard his parents say or something. You know, that clones are like Frankenstein monsters. That’s what the anti-cloners are always saying. It’s stupid, but a lot of people think that way.

  “At school right now there are only two kids who are out as clones. They say that at a school our size, it’s probably more like thirty, but most families keep it a secret. It’s not a surprise because the two kids, the clones, they get a lot of shit. Even though one of them’s, like, this super athlete. He’s a freshman and already on the varsity soccer team. The rumor is his cell donor was a big-time college football player or something, although that could be a load of crap. Anyway, he’s going to be a huge star at the school and it doesn’t matter. A lot of kids treat him like he’s got a disease or something. He used to be really depressed all the time. But AK always finds those guys – or she did, anyway – found them in the hallway or after school, asking them to volunteer for this or that or to come to her volleyball games. That was the funny thing. She was the kind of girl who could ask you to do her a favor, like work the charity car wash on a Saturday morning, and you felt so good because she asked you. It was like she was doing something for you. And it wasn’t just guys that felt that way, you kn
ow. It wasn’t just because she was cute. Girls liked her, too.”

  The detective asked about the person who wrote in her Frankenstein book. “Oh, yeah. Steven Church. One day, months later, we’re playing this coed softball game in gym. Steven’s playing first base and AK hits a grounder to short. She’s thrown out by two steps, but as she crosses first base she takes off her helmet and swings it around – whap! – knocks him right in the back of the head. He went face-first into the dirt and AK acted like it was an accident – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry – but a few of us knew. And she never said anything about it and Steven never gave her any trouble after that. She was always real protective of her pop.”

  Davis smiled for the millionth time at the thought that AK was the one looking after him instead of the other way around. Given how helpless he had been searching for her killer, that was no doubt true.

  Where had he heard that name before, Steven Church? There had been a Natalie Church, a nasty woman, who used to show her face at the occasional protest in front of the clinic, shouting hackneyed slogans at his patients (Hey hey! Ho ho! Genetic research has got to go!). He assumed Steven was her kid. If Davis hadn’t stopped reading these files fifteen years ago, and had come across this story, he would have checked Church out as a potential suspect. The police apparently had the same idea because on the last page of the statement someone had written in pen (before it was photocopied), Church’s alibi checks. He and his parents were in Saint Pete.