Cast of Shadows - v4 (13 page)

“I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation.”

“Have you told anybody about this? Pete? Gregor? Anyone?” He meant the source of Justin’s DNA, and he was sure she hadn’t. “You can’t, Joan. You know you can’t. Forget about you and me for a second. Forget about the horrible thing you think I’ve done, about the breach of ethics and the lack of controls and all that bullshit. Think about Justin.”

“I
am
thinking about Justin,” she said. “I’m thinking about this poor little boy you just decided one day to carve out of a monster.”

That was a little melodramatic, Davis thought, although he might have put it the same way if the situation were reversed. “Fine. So you turn me in and Justin’s parents find out who their son really is? What will that do? To him? To the Finn family? Let’s say they prosecute me and the story makes the news —
Mad doctor clones daughter’s killer!
— and that guy, that monster, whoever he is, out there, that guy realizes there’s a living, growing, three-dimensional composite of himself that could, eventually, point the finger at him. You don’t think he’s going to do something about that? Christ, you might as well kill Justin yourself.”

That was unfair, Davis thought, but necessary. He watched the helplessness inside her build like steam in a kettle. Her face looked pressurized, her insides rusted shut like a forgotten metal box at the bottom of the ocean. Flush. She began to shake.

“We can protect him, Joan.
The two of us
. We can protect him with a secret.”

They sat together for a half hour or more, saying little, a contract between them drafted in the silence. When a nurse knocked on the door to alert Joan to an arrived patient, she nodded at her, nodded at Davis, and loped toward the exam room.

This spot was probably too close but Mickey was tired, tired of years on the road, of napping in his car and sleeping in cheap motels and crashing in the homes of strange “friends of the cause” whom he didn’t entirely trust. When you’re tired you get careless, and he supposed sitting in this chair was exactly that, but screw it. He’d earned the right to take a few chances. Earned the right by accomplishing so much and not getting caught. He and Byron Bonavita.

Byron was probably dead, rotting away peacefully and undetected high in some Blue Ridge Mountain tree house, Mickey supposed, although only he and a few others in the Hands of God guessed as much. The FBI now suspected Byron in twenty-six clone-clinic killings, but Mickey had done all but five of them. Byron Bonavita might have been famous, but in truth he wasn’t prolific. He was a bogeyman made out of government incompetence and fed like a casserole to the starving and witless media.

Mickey the Gerund enjoyed his freedom, but in the moments when he was most honest with himself, he resented the credit Byron got for his work. Of course, the victims were the point here, not the perpetrator, but wouldn’t it be better for the cause if the public weren’t able to pin the killings on a single lone-wolf radical? If they thought there was more than one Byron Blakely Bonavita out there taking a courageous stand against the evils of humanism and science and technology, wouldn’t they be forced to confront the issue of cloning, to take a stand, to say I’m for this or against it and here’s why? Wouldn’t some senator or congressman or even president have to stand before the people and say,
While I deplore the tactics used by groups like the Hands of God, their actions represent a strong popular sentiment in this country that something must be done about immoral acts being committed in our name by doctors and scientists all across this great land of ours,
et cetera, and then democracy could do much faster what Mickey and, at one time, Byron were doing oh-so-slowly, on a case-by-case basis.

That’s why Mickey started mixing things up. He still shot the occasional doctor when the situation called for it, but more and more he was using other tactics. He cut the brake line on a Lexus once, and poisoned a bottle of water with arsenic and slipped it into a clinic fridge. Neither of those were kills, but the point was the same. There had been a few that had been even more personal. In addition to the twenty-one dead, Mickey had wounded more than thirty, many of them patients and secretaries and support staff. He took credit for eleven retirement cross-outs on Harold Devereaux’s Web site, and in some ways those were better than kills. There was something extremely satisfying when a clone doctor cried uncle. It was like a man repenting, although the doctors were never contrite, always issuing a statement instead that claimed they were doing it for the safety and security of their family, et cetera. That was part of Mickey’s job, too — intimidating the wife or husband and their kids with threatening letters and e-mails and phone calls. Occasionally he’d get close enough to whisper in some kid’s ear. No one appreciated how diverse and effective his tactics had been. That was the price of success for a covert soldier, he told himself.

This coffee shop, named Gimbel’s, had the best little chocolate pastries, airy French ones, which was why he was sitting at this window counter for the third straight day. No one thinks anything about it now, but later, when the girl behind the counter is being asked by the cops if she saw anyone or anything unusual lately, she’ll tell them,
There was this guy in here for the last couple days and I’d never seen him before,
and then they’ll show her a picture of Byron Bonavita and ask her if it could have been him, keeping in mind that this photo is over seven years old now, and she’ll say,
Yeah it could have been this guy, maybe a couple years older and heavier,
and the papers will run the Bonavita manhunt on its front page again tomorrow. It was all becoming so predictable.

An hour ago he had walked into the clinic across the street and asked for some literature. It was a cool northern California day and he could see why people paid a fortune in rent to live here. If it weren’t for the earthquakes and the fact that his job didn’t permit him to take a permanent address, he might think about moving here himself to enjoy the temperate bay climate and the French pastries. There would be other things to consider, however. Like his neighbors. There were like-minded folks in this part of the country, but you had to look hard to find them.

After the receptionist handed him a stack of information (
disinformation,
he would prefer to call it), Mickey asked to use the rest room. Security was unusually lax here, probably because he’d never been to northern California before. They probably thought they were off Byron Bonavita’s radar. The bathroom smelled like alcohol and oranges. When he finished his business he washed his hands and walked out of the men’s room and across the street and ordered a coffee and a pastry and read some of the clinic literature. The brochures pictured happy families, unburdened of recent stresses, which might have included infertility or hereditary disease or just the unpredictable timing of bearing children the natural way or the inconvenience of adoption or all of the above.

Fifteen minutes ago, a nurse from the clinic had entered the shop and picked up an order of six coffees, which she must have phoned in. She did a double take when his eyes met hers. Maybe she had seen him in the clinic, or maybe she saw that he was reading the clinic’s brochures. It couldn’t have been so unusual for prospective patients to stop in the coffee shop after a visit to the clinic. The only way it might have gone pear-shaped, really, would have been if the nurse had conferred with the girl behind the counter and they had lumped their private observations together to make a suspicion, but the nurse didn’t do that. She gathered up her coffees in a cardboard box, checked the integrity of the lids, and rushed back to the clinic, crossing the four lanes ladder-style, one at a time, in stops and starts. Mickey’s carelessness wasn’t really carelessness after all, when you considered the remote chance that any person might put her two together with someone else’s two and come up with a conspiratorial four.

When Mickey finished his coffee he looked at his watch. It was later than he thought and he wished every town with a fertility clinic also had a place as nice as this coffee shop, where the pastry was so good and the time passed so quickly. He gathered up the brochures and folded them into the pocket of his green windbreaker. With a wave to the girl behind the counter —
Holy shit, Officer, I sure do remember Byron Bonavita. He sat right there by the window, looking across at the clinic, and he even waved at me friendly-like when he left!
— Mickey passed through the glass door into the sea-seasoned air that was just the right temperature and began the walk to his car, which he’d parked far enough away that he wouldn’t have any problems with fire engines and black-and-white traffic.

When the clinic men’s room exploded he was half a mile on, his back to the concussion, which sounded like a steel drum being struck inside a giant pillow. He turned with the others on the sidewalk, exchanged with them puzzled glances and
What on earth
s? Then after a pause he continued on to his car, where he looked like just another guy rushing home to the evening news to find out the source of that nasty black smoke in the distance.

After three weeks with the new software and the soccer-field photographs of Justin, Davis had produced fifty-four different composite sketches, each using a different set of variables. Working from the police profile of the perpetrator, Davis assumed the killer had been younger than thirty-five, so he made a series that imagined Justin at twenty, another at thirty, and another group at forty. The oldest ones were grotesquely unreal, with features more appropriate to Australopithecus, so he discarded them.

The others he taped to the walls of his basement room, over and between the names of his relatives. There was nothing here he could be sure of yet. No reason to choose any of these faces over the others. There were a few patterns emerging, however, in the shape of the eyelids, in the width of the mouth, and in the curves about the lobes of the ears. Davis had very little confidence in the hair. He had no way to know how long the killer kept it, how he styled it, or even if he still had it on his head at all.

He spent nights in this room memorizing these faces, and in his thoughts they were a team, a gang, a mob, a cult. Thirty-six individuals each responsible for his daughter’s death. The devil goes by different names, and this monster had many heads.

This was a problem. How could he know which of these faces to hate? How could he feel anything like a catharsis when he wasn’t sure at which countenance he should be directing his rage? He hadn’t closed a chapter of his life the way he’d hoped; he’d opened the file on another mystery. The name of AK’s killer was still an unanswerable fill-in-the-blank, but his face was now a maddening multiple choice.

As he studied them, conversed with them, spent time inside their imaginary heads, he found one that seemed especially cruel. Especially soulless. He threw the others in a drawer and consulted only this one, spending long hours in the blue room with it, imagining the sketch to be real. For three weeks, as the autumn turned gray and cold, Davis tried to convince himself it was the face of his enemy. Tried to converse with it. To understand it. To accept it. That was the long-sought goal, after all, wasn’t it? Acceptance?

He couldn’t do it. Not with so many doubts. This couldn’t be why he risked his career. Why he now risked Joan’s career. For a few dozen lines drawn and colored and shaded by a computer program and chosen by him arbitrarily — for what reason? Because this is how Davis expected him to look? Bald. Snarling. Empty inside. Odds were good the guy didn’t look like that at all. Joan had been raped because her attacker didn’t look like the sort of guy who would attack her. AK wasn’t naïve. Some nut had tried to kill her own father, after all. Her deranged murderer most likely didn’t look so deranged.

Davis sorted again through the three dozen sketches, this time pulling out not the ones that looked evil, but the ones that looked real. Familiar. Unthreatening. He narrowed them down to four.

He exported the pictures to Web-friendly files and then uploaded them to a list of crime-fighting Internet sites. Without revealing his name, he pleaded for any information about these men, or any man who resembled them. He was counting on a break from a stranger.

He didn’t offer too many details, not his name or the town where he lived or the specifics of the case. Using the handle JusticeForAK, he said he was a loving father and that he believed one of these men was his daughter’s killer, a man he was anxious to meet face-to-face. His open call sounded anguished and menacing and hinted at vigilantism, which was the tone he hoped to set. The people who would recognize a murderer might not be on speaking terms with the law, he reasoned, and if he ever found the man he was looking for, Davis couldn’t go to the cops, anyway.

He had been foolish to believe otherwise, but he understood now that the only way he could ever know the face of Anna Kat’s killer would be to put himself in the same room with him.

What he would do then, he couldn’t even guess.

Joan had to stop watching the television police dramas she loved. She found herself empathizing with the bad guys.

Or feeling as guilty as them, anyway. She felt guilty all the time. And warm. Hot. She sweated through her days. Her nights were sleepless, her mornings unbearable. How she hated the mornings when the scenarios in her head all seemed so bleak. Public shame. Loss of her practice. Prison. Sure, on the cop shows, women’s prison didn’t seem as frightening as men’s prison. But still… she was a
criminal
now. There was no changing that. Even if she were never a suspect, she would always be a fugitive.

A seven-minute walk from her condo to the beach. It wasn’t
getting
cold anymore, it
was
cold, especially after dark, but people were still here, walking north and south along the waterline. Older couples — empty-nesters — and because it was Friday, teens. Underdressed high school kids with their hands in each other’s back pockets. Rollerbladers. Desperate dogs and their owners, home late. Northwestern students up the shore a few miles from campus for who knows why, sneaking beers, tossing Frisbees.