The doorknob shook. “Please, if we could just talk for a few minutes.”
“Not a chance. I saw what you did to that girl in the garage.”
“But…” he said. “That was just a game. Sally. Miss Barwick. I was playing. We all were.”
She took another step toward the door. It was thick and heavy. Mahogany or something. It was the first thing she’d loved about this house and she was never more thankful for it than now. She wondered if he had the balls or the sense of drama to crash through a window. They were five feet above the ground outside and he’d have a tough time climbing through. She’d get a few swings at his hands with the bat before he hoisted himself up, anyway. “That’s sick,” she said. “And I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t believe me?” Coyne seemed puzzled. “Hell, you saw…” He was recalling something. “You’re a TTL, aren’t you? I checked it out. You write for both Tribune s. Shadow and real.”
Checked it out? How did he do that so fast? In the middle of the night?
“I know it must have been scary for you. In the garage. I didn’t know. If I’d known you were a True-to-Lifer I wouldn’t have come on so strong.”
Come on so strong? Jesus.
“Why did you do it?”
“Kill the blonde?”
Incredible. “Yes, kill the blonde.”
Pause. “I don’t know… It’s a game. Look, I want to talk to you because, well, maybe we can work something out. I’m an attorney.”
“So?”
“So, you’re writing an article, aren’t you? For the Shadow Tribune or the real one, or both? Whatever it is you’re going to write about me, there would be certain things that would be, obviously, embarrassing if they were to get out.”
No kidding. “How many other girls have you killed?”
He sighed. It was an odd and frightening sound, Sally thought. The discontented sigh of a serial killer. “This isn’t an interview, Miss Barwick. Not unless you can guarantee my name will stay out of the paper with regard to tonight’s incident.”
Barwick placed her hands and her right ear against the door. Where were the cops? “I can’t guarantee anything, Mr. Coyne.”
“You have to let me give my side of the story, then, at least,” Coyne said. He was just beyond the door, his head only inches away from hers.
Sally thought about his offer. An interview. An interview with the Wicker Man. To expose him. Capture him. When the police arrive, the opportunity will have vanished. She checked the chain to make sure it was secure. She put her hand on the knob. This is what it means to take risks for your career, she thought. She turned and pulled the door open until the six-inch chain stopped it. Coyne leaned from the other side, expecting to be let in the house. He wrapped his fingers around the door and pulled his face into the opening between the door and the molding. “Miss Barwick?” he said.
Face-to-face at last, she looked him in the eyes.
And as the short, loud braaaap and blue-and-red lights of a police car pulled to the curb, she got the answer she’d been pursuing for nearly thirteen years.
– 81 -
With no word from Sally after five minutes, Justin called the police from his cell phone. The emergency dispatcher told him a car was on its way to her address. Justin ran a search on his computer for Sally’s number and dialed. No answer. He left a breathless message.
After half an hour with no sign that Sally had returned to the game, Justin discharged her from Shadow Stroger Hospital and drove her back to her Shadow condo. Periodically he tried to start a discussion just to see if he could see some sign of the real Sally. Although her avatar hadn’t gone entirely lethargic from her absence, she showed no signs of warmth toward him, either. Shadow Sally thanked Justin politely and perfunctorily and let herself in with her key.
Speeding through wide gaps between early-morning reverse commuters, Justin got his avatar home before dawn. He gave his Shadow mother a ridiculous story about going for an early-morning jog, then shut down the game and hopped into his real bed. It was almost time to get dressed for school. He removed his sweatshirt and his pants and pushed them down to the foot of the bed with his feet.
He heard the phone peal down the hall. His mother hushed it on the fourth ring and a moment later rapped on his door.
“Justin?” Martha Finn called.
“Yuh?” he said with manufactured grogginess.
“It’s for you. It’s a girl.”
Justin wondered if Sally had the guts to call here. If her name would show up on caller ID. If his mother would recognize her voice all these years later. He rolled out of bed and unlocked the door and opened it just enough to slip his hand through the crack. He gripped the phone and pulled it back inside, shutting the door behind him.
“Sally,” he whispered, even though his mother might have the extension to her ear.
Silence.
“Are you okay? What happened? Where’s Coyne?”
Nothing.
It occurred to Justin that it might not be Sally on the other end. It might be Coyne. But how would he know who Justin was? Or where to find his number? Sally and Justin had never spoken outside Shadow World, not since he was a kid anyway.
“Sally, are you all right?” he asked again.
“I’m fine,” Sally said finally. “The police came. He’s gone.”
“Thank God.”
Neither one of them said anything more for at least a minute. Justin couldn’t explain the awkwardness. Despite their close friendship in Shadow World, it was almost as if they were strangers in real life.
“Anyway,” Sally said.
“Anyway,” Justin said. “I’ll meet you in the game later. After school. We’ll talk then. You’ll tell me everything.”
“All right. Good,” Sally said, and then, before she hung up, “Wait a minute, Justin…”
“What?”
Another long silence. A sigh over the phone. “Nothing. No. I mean…” It sounded to Justin like she was crying. She said, “Happy Birthday.”
Justin at Sixteen
– 82 -
These stones had been brought to America on ships from Egypt, and the tomb reconstructed here inside the Field Museum years and years ago, Davis noticed, when you could still pull a stunt like that. The exhibit twisted along narrow hallways and opened into small chambers where ancient artifacts were displayed alongside reproductions and bits of history unfolded on metal plaques. Twenty-three actual mummies were the main attraction, though, a graphic demonstration that no resting place is ever final.
Sally Barwick had asked to meet him here, in a small, dark room with two old urns and some re-created hieroglyphs. She was comfortable here. It was a place in the real world she could go when she couldn’t escape to the game. And it was important this conversation be private.
Unpressed, yesterday’s dress hung from her body in unsightly relief, creases and wrinkles charting imaginary glacial topography across the fabric. Barwick said, “Justin knows, doesn’t he? He knows he was cloned from Sam Coyne, not Eric Lundquist.”
“Yes,” Davis said. “How did you figure it out?”
She could have told him it was the eyes. That Sam Coyne’s eyes were the same eyes she had photographed when Justin was a child. They were the eyes that romanced her in her dreams. “What did Coyne do?” she asked instead. “Justin said he did something terrible. A long time ago.”
Davis sat on a small bench and she took a seat beside him. “He killed my daughter.”
An icy fright radiated from Barwick’s stomach to her scalp and to her hands and feet. She felt like an investigator again, felt the rush of the end of a case. This one had been open for thirteen years, since she’d turned the stiff pages of the photo album in Mrs. Lundquist’s living room. “You cloned him from the evidence.” She realized she felt burdened with the answer. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. “Why didn’t you go to the police with that? Or the newspapers?”
“Let’s see,�
�� Davis said, sadly. “Because what I did was illegal? Because I’d go to prison? Because the evidence is totally inadmissible. Because Coyne would go free.” He was embarrassed. About to be exposed. A headache was forming above his ears. Sally Barwick was being pleasant enough – calm even, considering what she’d just discovered. Still, this felt like an interrogation.
“Why does Justin think Coyne’s the Wicker Man?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I haven’t shared his… his enthusiasm for that theory. I think Justin’s desperately looking for connections between things. He has trouble accepting the existence of coincidences. In his mind, our world is frustratingly disconnected.”
“I thought Justin was crazy, too,” Sally said. “Not after last night, though.”
“What happened?”
“I saw Coyne kill a girl. Slice her up. Let her bleed out.”
“What? Where?” Then he understood. “In Shadow World. That’s not the same, is it?”
Barwick didn’t feel like explaining the True-to-Life aesthetic. “He also came after me. In real life. He came to my house to kill me.”
“ Jesus! What happened?”
“I called the police.”
Davis became excited. His face turned hopeful. “So they have him? He’s been arrested?”
Barwick shook her head. “He told the cops it was a misunderstanding. That he was just playing a game and that he came to my house to try to explain what I had witnessed on-screen. They couldn’t hold him.”
“Goddamn,” Davis whispered. “He’ll just come again, won’t he? Are you safe?”
“I filed a restraining order against him,” she said.
“Means little,” Davis said.
She knew that. The fact that they’d both been meeting with Justin (although Sally only met him in Shadow World) was an illustration of that. “I want to tell the cops,” Sally said. “I think Justin’s right. I think Coyne might be the Wicker Man.”
“They’ll laugh at you.”
A couple walking through the exhibit paused in the chamber where Sally and Davis were talking. Uncomfortable in the sudden silence, they pointed quickly at the urns and moved on.
“What about this?” Barwick said. “Let me tell your story. Write a feature for the Sunday Trib magazine. We’ll expose him. There’ll be a cry for an investigation. Coyne will never survive the scrutiny.”
Davis snorted. “Neither will I. I’ll be locked up for the rest of my life.”
“I’ll make the story as sympathetic as possible.”
Once more, Davis asked himself how much he would sacrifice in pursuit of AK’s killer. “It’s not only me. There’s another life that would be ruined.”
“Justin,” Sally said.
He nodded. “It’s bad enough for people, especially kids, when they’re just outed as clones,” Davis said. “If it became public that Justin was cloned from a killer, his life would become a freak show. He’d never get it back.”
Sally was thinking. Coyne knows where I work. Where I live. She was thinking that as long as he was out there, it would be virtually impossible to sleep in her apartment. She was thinking the offices of Ginsburg and Addams were only three blocks from Tribune Tower. She was thinking her life would be lived from now on in almost constant fear. “No matter how I feel about Justin, given what I know, I can’t do nothing. Coyne needs to be exposed. The Wicker Man has to be caught. He’s killed dozens of people. He’ll kill dozens more.”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” Davis said. “Coyne is still a killer, whether you believe he’s the Wicker Man or not.”
Barwick looked up at the hieroglyphs etched into stone above the doorway. She couldn’t know how they translated. She thought of the nearly forgotten son of a pharaoh who’d been buried in this tomb, uprooted, transported, put on display in a New World city, a world that wasn’t discovered for more than a thousand years after his death. What kind of a person was he? What kind of a friend? A son? A father? Did anyone care? Those tourists passing through – did they consider at all what kind of a man he was? If they didn’t, what was the point of this monument? What was the point of remembering a life that was no longer of any consequence?
– 83 -
By the skin of my teeth.
That was the phrase Stephen Malik had been using in reply when sympathetic friends and colleagues asked him how he was holding up, or whether he was hanging on, or if, as of that day, he still had a job at the Tribune. He’d been saying it for so long, in fact, that it had ceased to be an honest answer. If it was true one was holding up or hanging on or keeping one’s job by the skin of one’s teeth, it’s assumed one could not do so indefinitely. In Malik’s case, however, everyone agreed that his era at the Tribune was in its final hours. A Web site dedicated to journalism gossip had a regular feature called “Malik Watch.” Several times a week, it published an anonymous quote from inside the newsroom detailing a grievance against the managing editor, or a rumor about his replacement. Unidentified sources spied the Tribune publisher courting candidates for the job at pricey restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami.
But still he remained. He remained although he’d run out of excuses he could sell even to himself. Maybe I really am the wrong man for this job, he thought. He was ready to leave. He had rehearsed his farewell newsroom speech, decided on a graceful, gracious exit with nothing but kind words for the filthy saboteurs upstairs who had recruited him and then plotted against him. He and his wife had discussed retirement in the north, Wisconsin or maybe the Upper Peninsula, to a small town with a weekly paper, because seeing a daily on his doorstep every morning would be painful for a time. He had once loved this business so much.
It was amid such an atmosphere, on a sunny spring day, that he found Sally Barwick lurking outside his office. He invited her in and shut the door.
“Stephen, I’ve been keeping something from you. From everyone here.”
He expected she was going to tell him about her gaming. It was something, at this point in his free fall, that he couldn’t care less about. “What’s that?”
“I’ve been working on a story for a couple months. I haven’t told you or anyone else about it. Now it’s almost got me killed.”
Not what he thought. “Are you talking about this business with the lawyer? The creep who was stalking you?”
She considered the accuracy of that statement. “Actually, I was sort of stalking him. At first, anyway.”
“What? This Coyne guy? The one you took out the restraining order against?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you talking about?”
Fidgeting, Sally realized she was sitting in the chair she hated, the most uncomfortable chair on the 400 block of North Michigan Avenue, and she wondered why she hadn’t chosen another of the three in this office. “Sam Coyne attacked me because I’ve been trying to prove he’s the Wicker Man.”
“Jesus, Barwick.” He snickered because it had to be a joke.
“I’m serious.”
For a moment, Malik’s own troubles seemed not worth worrying about.
Sally began describing her case, trying to flatten her voice so the parts that were true sounded as sincere as the parts that weren’t. “I received an anonymous tip about six months ago. The caller said I should look into Sam Coyne. He didn’t say why. I did, and I didn’t find anything, but I did notice he was a gamer. Like me.”
“Shadow World?”
“Right.”
“When I didn’t run anything about him in the paper, my tipster called back. He said to check out Sam Coyne inside the game. So I did.”
“You were investigating Coyne’s life, inside a video game? How would you do that?”
“Same way you’d investigate him out here. Shadow World has records, and sources, and streets and alleyways.”
“So what did you find?”
“That Coyne is a killer.”
“Inside the game?”
“Right. He kills oth
er players in the game, all female, and in ways remarkably similar to the Wicker Man.”
Malik had a bad feeling, the kind he usually had right before he had to fire someone. “Which is sick, but not illegal.”
“But then I checked Coyne’s killing in the game against the Wicker Man’s killings out here.”
“And?”
“When Coyne is killing in Shadow World, it’s like the Wicker Man doesn’t even exist out here. All quiet.” This wasn’t exactly true, of course, but Sally didn’t want to go into Justin’s theories explaining the anomalies in his chart.
“Proves nothing.”
“True. So I called a cop I know from the Wicker beat, a detective in homicide, and I casually dropped Coyne’s name.”
“What did he give you?”
“A long, long silence.”
“So you still got nothing.”
“So I call him every day for two weeks. And he tells me, way off the record, that Coyne is a person of interest in the Wicker investigation.”
“Along with how many other interesting persons?”
“God, I don’t know, Stephen. None that also turned up in an independent investigation by the city’s top newspaper.”
“What do you want to do?”
“What do you think? I want to run with the story.”
“With what story, Sals?” He moved his hand in the air, typesetting a mock front page. “Reporter Accuses Man She Has Personal Beef with of Being Infamous Serial Killer.”
“It’s a good thing you don’t write headlines,” she said with a friendly snort. “And I’m not accusing him because he attacked me, he attacked me because I accused him. I want to run with the story that Sam Coyne is a suspect in the Wicker Man killings.”
This is a joke, Malik thought. “With all the problems I’ve got, what makes you think I want to take on the entire partnership of Ginsburg and Addams in a libel suit?”
“It’s only libel if I’m wrong about Coyne. And I’m not wrong.”
“So you actually think he won’t sue?”
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