Cast of Shadows - v4 (48 page)

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?

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 other 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?”

“No, I’m betting he will. I’m betting, in the course of the widely publicized civil trial and the ensuing high-profile police investigation, that we’ll discover evidence proving he’s a killer. The
Tribune
will get credit for capturing one of the most notorious serial murderers in American history, and your job will be saved in the process.”

“Sweetheart, if I went along with a stunt like that they’d have my office cleaned out before you could mix strawberries in your morning yogurt.”

“It’s risky, I know. But risky journalism wins awards.” She added, “And saves jobs.”

“It’ll be the newspaper world’s first posthumous rehire,” Malik said. “If the
Trib
’s lawyers don’t kill me, or that serial killer of yours doesn’t slit my throat, my wife will shoot me dead. We’re a newspaper, not a clearinghouse for personal vendettas.”

“So we’re just supposed to sit around and let a killer walk the streets?”

“What killer, Sally? It’s like I don’t even know you. Bring me evidence. Solid reporting. Show me this guy is who you say he is and not just a big jerk.”

“That’s what I’m
trying
to do. But he’s smart. He might have killed twenty people, and he hasn’t left any evidence behind yet. We have to smoke him out. Or smoke out someone close to him who might know the truth.”

“Fine. Bring me something besides anonymous sources.”

Sally inhaled a lungful of stale, recirculated air. “Coyne tried to break into my house, Stephen. While I was
inside.
There’s only one reason why he’d do that: because he suspects I’m on to him.”

“I trust your instincts, Sally,” Malik said. “Bring me an actual story and I’ll print it. But I won’t go to press on your theories and cross my fingers they’ll be proven true.”

At lunch, from her desk, Sally met Justin at the Shadow Billy Goat.

“It was worth a try,” Sally said. She didn’t tell him she knew he’d been regenerated from one of Sam Coyne’s cells —
almost like a plant clipping,
Sally thought in her most cynical moments. Justin would be horrified if he knew she’d found out, and after her confrontation with Coyne (which she had described to him minus that most important detail), her sudden change of heart on Justin’s Wicker Man theory needed no explanation.