Cast of Shadows - v4 (40 page)

“I am, I guess,” Barwick said. “Except I got myself a job at a real-life newspaper first. How’d you find me out?”

“I saw your byline in the paper this morning.”

“And how’d you know I’d be logging on before one o’clock?”

“I figured a TTL wouldn’t let a lunch break go by without getting in the game.”

“Yeah,” Sally said. “I’m always terrified the program will let my avatar walk into traffic, or slip in front of the El or something. I need to be controlling her as much as possible.”

“When I saw you at your desk, your avatar looked live, but you weren’t there. How is that possible?”

Shadow Sally smiled. “Ancient Shadow World secret. An old TTL trick.”

“I don’t really understand True-to-Life play,” Justin confessed. “You’re just putting her through the motions of your own existence.”

“More or less,” she said. “But that’s the closest thing I can get to understanding the way others see me. That’s the goal of the game, as far as I’m concerned. A lot of people play it in order to create an idealized version of themselves, but I want Shadow Sally to be as much like the real me as possible. Through her, I can get a better handle on who I really am.”

“I’ve never heard a TTL put it that way, exactly,” Justin typed. “That’s kind of cool. I think about that stuff a lot — who I am versus who I think I am versus who other people think I am.”

Sally said, “Interested in the existential mysteries of life? I guess that’s normal for a fifteen-year-old. I forget what it was like to be that age sometimes. Still trying to figure it all out. Wondering what grown-ups know that you don’t.”

“Save me the trouble,” Shadow Justin said. “What do grown-ups know?”

“Not a damn thing. But you have a jones for philosophy? That’s good.”

“Yeah, my mom got me started on that stuff when I was a kid,” Justin wrote.

“Your mother? Why?”

“I don’t know.” Justin typed quickly, not wanting to bring up his shrink and generally trying to steer the subject away from his own life. “I think it’s kind of funny that you’re a True-to-Lifer, though, given some of the conversations we’ve had.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the Wicker Man. I’ve been suggesting since we hooked up in Shadow World that he might be a TTL, a guy who mirrors his real-life killing online.”

“Yeah, so? You think I’m him?” She was kidding, Justin was pretty sure.

“No, I don’t think you’re him. But why do you find my theory so implausible, considering you’re a True-to-Lifer yourself?”

“Because there are so many other explanations that make more sense, Justin. The correct explanation is almost always the simplest one.”

“Occam’s Razor, I know,” Justin typed.

“Huh?”

“William of Occam. Fourteenth-century Franciscan monk.
The correct explanation is almost always the simplest one
. He said that.” Justin wondered if he was coming across like a know-it-all. He frequently did in real life.

“You’re full of surprises,” Sally said. “It’s hot in here.” Temperature in the game was metered on-screen, and characters were expected to act accordingly — remove clothes, drink liquids — or they would start to get tired. Eventually avatars could become dehydrated and need to go to a Shadow emergency room.

Justin didn’t want to talk about the broken thermostat. “But why is it more likely that the Shadow World murders, or the ones most similar to the Wicker Man killings at least, are being done by a copycat, when we know that a quarter of the folks in Shadow World are True-to-Lifers like you? Why not explore the possibility that the Wicker Man is a gamer and he’s killing in both worlds?”

“Because we have no evidence of that beyond your crazy imagination. And even if it were true, Justin, how would we prove it? The Wicker Man hasn’t left any physical evidence in the real world. On a computer network he’d be a total phantom. No fingerprints, no DNA, no blood evidence.” She paused, as if she were hesitant to say the next thing. “Plus there’s another reason.”

“What?”

“The Wicker Man’s victims are posed, postmortem. The bodies in Shadow World aren’t.”

“Some of them looked kind of posed,” Justin said.

“No, the real Wicker Man victims have their legs spread wide apart, and the left hand is covering their left breast. Every one of them,” Sally said. “The cops have asked to keep that out of the papers so they don’t run up against copycats.”

Justin was undeterred. “Maybe he’s doing it slightly different in the game. I just think it’s worth looking into. If we find out who’s killing these girls in Shadow World, it might lead us to the real-life killer.”

Sally’s avatar covered her mouth but no titles showed up on Justin’s screen to indicate she was laughing. Maybe she was yawning. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.” She said. “Is this what you came all the way down here for? To argue this all over again now that you’ve found out I’m a TTL?”

“I’m in school,” Justin typed. “I’m bored.”

“Smart guy like you, I’m not surprised.”

“I have to go to my next class soon. I should head for the train.”

“Yeah, and my lunch break’s about over.”

“Sally, tell me something before I split,” Justin wrote. “If I had gone downtown in real life and left you a message that I was waiting for you across the street, would you have shown up?” As he typed he realized it sounded flirtatious and, given his age, presumptuous. He didn’t care.

Shadow Sally reached across the table and touched him on the shoulder. “<
AGE INAPPROPRIATE
> right, I would,” she wrote, turning his empty bag of chips inside out. “A girl’s gotta eat.”

They would have been meaningless, forgettable syllables six weeks ago, but the name took on an instant taint of evil when he heard Dr. Moore say it. He fingered through the envelope of evidence, which featured it in bold type on every page.

Sam Coyne.

In Justin’s mind it was a name already as menacing, and as fascinating, as Bundy and Gacy and Speck.

Samuel Nathan Coyne. It needed the middle name to be official. For the highest dishonor.

“So what do we do?”

“I’m not sure,” Davis said.

“Let’s go to the cops,” Justin said. “We can explain what happened. Get a judge to order a sample of his DNA. If it matches mine they can charge him with Anna Kat’s murder.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Why not? Wasn’t that always your plan?”

“First of all, I doubt we have enough evidence here for a warrant. As soon as the sample of Coyne’s DNA left the police station, the chain of evidence was broken. The fact that his DNA matches yours, or even that it matches the original sample, if I still had it, would probably be inadmissible. Plus there’s the fact that when I created you — and you’re the only evidence that fingers him — I broke the law. Any good attorney, and Coyne would have a dozen of those, would have a field day. Coyne would go free, I’d probably go to prison for ten years, and
your
life would become a media freak show. You’d be the world-famous Killer Clone Boy of Chicago.”

Justin didn’t look up from the thin stack of paper and photographs. “I could handle that. Could you? Would you go to prison in order to catch him?” Davis shuddered at the matter-of-fact way the boy said it. Like it was a challenge. As if he were calling Davis out.
Now you’re not going to be a problem, are you? You’re not going to go yellow on me?
There in the car Davis realized he was afraid of Justin Finn, the boy made from an animal. But he was also in awe of him. He had poise. Intelligence. Charisma. Talking with him, it was nearly impossible to keep in mind that he was only a fifteen-year-old kid.

“At one point, yes, I would have been willing to do that, years ago,” said Davis, although he couldn’t remember if that was really true. “Now I don’t know. Could I do that to my wife? If it meant Coyne would go to prison, or worse, maybe. I’m not sure. But it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t do any good.”

Justin felt himself getting warm inside his coat and he cracked the window. The old trees of the park covered the car in a dappled shade. It had been pleasant all day, if a little cold, and the path was more crowded than it had been the last time they met. This discussion was more important than caution, however.

“I’ve been looking for that name for eighteen years,” Davis said. “Sam Coyne. I’ve done unimaginable things. Phil Canella and my first wife are both dead because of it. And now that I know, I’ve never felt more helpless. When I didn’t know who killed AK, I could imagine he was a miserable psychotic. I could imagine him suffering in some prison, or hospital. I could imagine him rotting in the ground. Burning in hell. Forced to confront the evil he committed. To pay for it. I could imagine the karmic scales had been balanced without my help. Honestly, it tortures me to know he’s been made partner in a thriving law practice. That he lives in an expensive condominium on the Gold Coast. That beautiful young women are probably lined up at his door.” Davis felt like he might cry, but he also felt detached and cold, like he did the night of Anna Kat’s murder. He didn’t cry over her body, and he didn’t cry now.

Justin said, “Dr. Moore, I’ve read a lot of books written by philosophers. Some of them, like Kierkegaard, are trying to figure out who we are, what makes one guy different from the next guy. Some want to know if there’s a God. Like Anselm or Augustine. Others — Hobbes, Hume — are trying to sort out right from wrong: what’s okay to do, what isn’t okay, and why. Every single one of them, in his own way, is trying to find out,
Why am I here?
” He clutched the envelope in the space between them. “Do you know how many get to hold the answer in their hands?”

Davis coughed, the spasm in his throat disguising his amazement. Justin was so much like an adult. Davis had expected something like empathy from him and instead got a lecture on metaphysics. “Come on, Justin. You’re more than that. More than some investigative tool. I was callous about bringing you into this world. I should have considered the consequences, the burden I’d be putting on you if you or anyone else ever found out, but I take responsibility for that. There’s nothing unique or odd about you, physically or metaphysically. You’re just a teenager — an extremely intelligent teenager, obviously — but a teenager like any other.” As was so often the case these days, Davis wasn’t sure he believed what he was saying.

Justin waved the envelope. “I am a teenager capable of horrible things, apparently.”

“We’re
all
capable of horrible things. Every one of us. If there’s anything you’ve proved in the first fifteen years of your life it’s that a man is more than just the sum of his chromosomes.”

Justin held Big Rob’s report out the window and turned it into and against the wind with the rolling motion of a conductor’s hand. “I can’t just let it go. I think we have a responsibility. A duty or something.”

Davis almost wished Justin would open his fingers and let the wind take the evidence somewhere into the park. Wished someone else would discover this $15,000 dossier on Sam Coyne and wonder who he is. What he had done. Wished it could be someone else’s duty. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said.

Justin said, “Dr. Moore, I believe that choices, all choices, are made for us. The weather, the time of day or night, our sexual needs, our survival needs, latitude and longitude, the collective will of the other six billion people on earth — these are the things that determine our fate. Maybe God works through them and maybe not. But when we pretend to exercise free will, when we make what we think are choices, we’re really just signing off on that which has been preordained by the universe. A hurricane has more choices than man.”

Justin leaned across the armrest that separated them. “When the right idea is
suggested,
by you or by me, it will already be inevitable.”

Another night at home and another night Davis was spending downstairs in the blue room. Alone. Joan noticed he’d started messing around down there right after she suggested they clean it out. It was predictable behavior in some ways. Getting older and averse to change, Davis felt the room was threatened and reasserted control over it. She’d had enough psych classes preparing for pediatrics to recognize that. Still, it was frustrating.
He
was frustrating.

Joan tried not to give much credence to the horrible thoughts that sometimes crept into her head. She doubted he was having an affair. He seemed distracted, though. Inattentive. They had once spent all the time together they could, but tonight she sat in the living room with a book that held only half her interest while he sat a floor away doing what? Working on his family tree? Playing solitaire? Playing Shadow World? She laughed at the thought of Davis Moore, computer gamer. Nevertheless, one of the women’s magazines that came to her office rated Shadow World as the third-biggest threat to marriage, behind money problems and poor sex. Money wasn’t an issue with them — her practice was thriving and Davis had been well off even before his public speaking fees started rolling in. As far as sex was concerned, Davis’s drive was healthy for his age and Joan was fulfilled. It certainly wasn’t anything they argued about.

Up from her chair and into the kitchen, Joan made herself a decaffeinated tea and pushed the house intercom to see if Davis was interested in a cup. He said no, pleasantly, with a thank you, but he didn’t say when he was coming up, either.

“Whatcha doin’ down there?” she asked.

“Fooling around,” he replied. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

Fooling around
. She knew it was silly, but those words weren’t the ones Joan wanted to hear.

Another animated alley on Shadow World Chicago’s North Side. This one was especially detailed, Barwick thought. She walked her avatar up to one of the walls until her nose was right against it. Every brick was different, flawed in its own way. She could see mortar breaking apart, and the faded color of old graffiti tags. Above her, the fire escape creaked from old age and dropped water on her shoulder. She wondered if programmers had done this in every alley, on every street, in every Shadow World town in the world. Or was it just this one? Was this alley special? Some sort of software beta test?