Cast of Shadows - v4 (43 page)

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.

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 know. 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.

The cops were doing something, at least, Davis thought. He tossed Bill’s statement back and fished for another one.

Libby Carlisle. Libby he knew well. She and Anna Kat played together on the volleyball team. Libby had slept over here at the house on Stone dozens of times. He would hear them giggling late into the night, sometimes whispering into the phone with a network of conspirators who were spending the night in the homes of other girls.

The nocturnal back-and-forth between AK and Libby could get loud (the intensity of teenagers’ conversations, like the intensity of an old Borg-McEnroe tennis match, increased with every volley), but Jackie usually slept through it with some soundproof combination of antidepressants and liquor. Lying in the dark, Davis wondered if a responsible father should knock on his daughter’s door and break it up. Order them to bed. He never did. Instead he would eavesdrop, and although the girls were too many rooms away for him to make out the content of any conversation, the happy notes of his daughter’s voice were informative enough.

Libby’s statement was long, and Davis flipped the pages with his thumb, starting with the last one. Because he knew Libby, and because she no doubt held many of Anna Kat’s confidences, he felt as if reading it too closely might constitute a betrayal of sorts. But it was also Libby’s tightness with AK that gave the statement promise. If AK knew Sam Coyne, so did Libby.

The first time through, he just missed it. Maybe he was looking specifically for the word “Coyne,” the big capital
C
and the single descender from the
y,
like a lowercase letter stretching its arms and legs. He turned the pages more deliberately the second time.

Libby said, “AK and I went to the mall on Monday. She had a night home with her mom on Tuesday. Wednesday night we took the train downtown with Dennis and Sam and this friend of Dennis’s who goes to Madison.”

That was it. The only mention in over a hundred pages of transcript. Could this Sam be Sam Coyne? It had to be. Were many parents naming their kids Samuel thirty-five years ago? He couldn’t remember. It had been his business, bringing little boys into the world, and yet he couldn’t remember how many of them had been named Sam. The detective interviewing Libby hadn’t even asked for their last names. Sam
who
? Jesus Christ, Libby had given them the name of the killer and the cop didn’t even have the sense to ask what his last name was. What kind of an investigation was this? A botched one, but he already knew that.

Davis threw the rest of the bound statements back into the filing cabinet and went upstairs to AK’s old room. For years it had remained almost as Anna Kat left it, not for sentimental reasons but because Davis had no stomach for the day’s work it would take to pull everything out. Jackie would sit in here sometimes and mourn in her own way. When he married Joan, she turned it into a guest room. They never discussed it. She just did it herself and he didn’t object.

Some of AK’s things were still here, though. On a bookshelf were four years of yearbooks, including the one that had been delivered to the house after she died. Every margin on every page was covered with anguished eulogies and melodramatic farewells from teenagers dealing with the death of one of their own for the first time. There were song lyrics, lots of song lyrics, and drawings of flowers, and even sketches of Anna Kat, some of them skillfully done.

Laying it flat on the bed and kneeling beside it, Davis examined the senior class row by row. He found Sam Coyne easily: handsome, smug, wearing a novelty tie with a cartoon cat. He looked so much like Justin. Exactly like Justin, but with a crew cut. A shiver went through him, top to bottom. This was the last face to see his baby alive, and it was Justin’s face.

Coyne was the only senior named Sam. There were three boys named Dennis in her class. Among the underclassmen he discovered four more Dennises and one other Sam. But he hadn’t thought about girls. Turning to the index now, he came across six Samanthas, three of them in the senior class. Libby could have been talking about a Samantha, and when he looked for their pictures, a couple of the girls looked familiar.

Absently he started reading through the messages inscribed to her. They ranged from sentimental (“Parting is all we know of heaven / And all we need of hell”) to cruel (“Have a nice summer!”). How odd friendship is between teens, Davis thought. So intense. Every acquaintance is as close as a lover. Every minor slight an act of betrayal. The loss of a peer unthinkable.

The last two pages, left blank by the printer, were black-and-blue with ballpoint ink, irregular blocks of words covering the spread like a quilt. Davis rotated the binding, reading messages from less concise members of the Northwood East senior class. One of them, a poem — or more likely, song lyrics — froze the book in his hands: