Cast of Shadows - v4 (49 page)

“Yep,” Justin said.

“We’ve got to catch Coyne in the act, somehow. In real life this time. I think it’s the only way.”

“I graduate in a couple weeks,” Justin said. “I’ll have some time after that. Maybe stake him out for real. I’m getting my license this summer, too.”

Barwick said, “You’re graduating? I had no idea. Congratulations. Where are you going to school next year?”

“I’m not. Taking a year off. My grades and SATs are good enough to get me in just about anywhere I want. But I’m too young for college.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Read,” Justin said. “The stuff I want to read. Not the books they give you in school. Maybe go see my dad.”

Sally tried to remember those late-night conversations through the computer and across the car seat outside Coyne’s Shadow apartment. “In New Mexico, right?”

“Right. Spend some time thinking about who I am. Who I’m supposed to be. What I’m supposed to do. I need to pursue that. This other stuff — school — gets in the way.”

“What? You mean, like,
find yourself
?” She couldn’t disguise a laugh.

“Something like that.”

“I don’t know that we’re
supposed
to do anything, Justin. Except be.”

“Maybe
you’re
not,” he said.

Barwick couldn’t tell if the remark was meant to be insulting or if it was just self-absorbed. She decided generously on the latter.

Back in his office, with a day’s worth of stories and assignments to approve, Malik began looking up everything he could on Samuel Coyne of Ginsburg and Addams. He found pictures of the man in a tux at charity dinners, and some for-the-record denials on behalf of his clients in the business page archives. He looked a little bit like a handsome asshole. Not at all like a killer. But then, what’s a killer look like before you know he’s killed? Coyne didn’t look like a murderer, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t one. Only that Malik had been unconvinced.

The Wicker Man,
he thought.
Is there any way she could be right?

Alone at home, Martha opened a bottle of expensive Cabernet she’d grown tired of saving. She poured wine into a deep glass up to the widest part of the bowl and let it sit on the kitchen table until the surface became still, staring into and through it as if it were a ruby crystal ball. Finding no answers there, she grabbed the glass by the stem, painted the back of her tongue with the Cab, and closed her eyes.

Justin was out. For the third time this week. Some nights he didn’t come home. There were things she knew, things she suspected, things she feared, and almost nothing she could talk about with him.

It was after nine o’clock and he could be anywhere. He didn’t have a car and his bike was still here, but his friends — what friends he had — were older and most had their own cars, fast cars with poor safety ratings. Plus, there were enough places to find trouble within a few minutes’ walk. The least of which was not the home of Dr. Davis Moore, just six suburban blocks away.

Her things had been disappearing. Jewelry and cash from her bedroom. Never-used silver from the dining room. Gasoline from the car. Decaying boxes from the attic packed with cut-glass bowls and not-very-valuable art. She could never tell when he had taken stuff, or prove it, or even be confident enough in his guilt to confront him. Or maybe she was confident but too frightened. Frightened of what he might do. Might do to her if she accused him.

When at school or out at night God knows where, he always locked his bedroom door. When she and Terry had moved in, before Justin was even born, the previous owner had handed them a set of keys. Every doorknob in the house had a cheap lock in the knob, installed there by the paranoid old man who had built the place, she explained. They never used the keys, but kept them in a kitchen drawer just in case someone locked themselves out of a room by accident (which was easy to do if you pushed and twisted the knob just right when closing the door behind you). Justin had taken the key to his room about four months ago and now used it every day.

Every night after he left she wandered down the hall past his room on the way to hers and checked to see if it might be open. She told herself even if she ever found it unlocked she would never go inside, but she never got a chance to test that kind of discipline. Every time Martha set her hand on the knob it felt welded in place.

Martha frequently asked him to let her in to clean, but every time she asked, Justin added another task to his routine. He changed his own sheets every week now, or almost. He washed his windows inside and out every two weeks. He dusted. Once he even unhooked the drapes and piled them in the hall to be dry cleaned. All to prove there was no need for her to be in there. Ever.

This night the doorknob turned. Martha didn’t consider the promise she’d made to herself. She didn’t hesitate.

The bed was unmade. Drawers hung open from bureaus. Dirty laundry spilled from the closet. The air was sour and a remaindered odor stung her nose, becoming more intense when she neared the bed. A rounded pile of garbage topped the trash can like a snow cone and then multiplied into freestanding piles around the room. Martha stepped through it slowly and reluctantly, like she was wading through a basement flooded with sewage to reach the fuse box.

This was all recent. He had given her a glimpse of his room from the hall about a month ago, an eyeball inspection he had allowed in order to get her off his back. It had appeared spotless. How he could have made a mess this big in such a short time, Martha had no idea.

She wanted to open a window, but thought better of leaving evidence she had been here. Just look for it and get out, she told herself. She wasn’t sure what
it
was, except that it was anything she didn’t want to find.

If Martha Finn had been an overly suspicious woman, and Lord knows by this stage in her life she had reason to be, something would have struck her as staged about the whole thing. The unlocked door. The filthy room. The ease with which she was able to find
it,
sitting on top of his nightstand, the Baggie even open. Translucent yellow rocks spilling onto the dark grain of the tabletop like hard candy. A curious collection of homemade devices. She could only imagine the manner in which they had been used, in combination with a lighter and spoon. But used they were. She didn’t touch them.

She shut the door as she left, leaving it unlocked, the way she’d found it, walked to her room, and cried.

When he joined the force, the hardest thing for Ambrose to get used to was the discomfiting juxtaposition of violence and food. The disgusting details of this job never let up, even for meals.

As he did many mornings, Ambrose stared at the cinder-block wall, mulling over the Wicker Man case and eating a roach-coach egg-and-sausage biscuit. He was frustrated. Frustrated that he knew little more about Suspect M, the Candlestick Maker, than he did the week that tip had come in. The task force didn’t have the resources to put a citizen on round-the-clock surveillance based only on the whim of a single lieutenant, and his men didn’t share his certainty with regard to this suspect. Plus, the guy was a moderately prominent figure in the city. Not a household name, but a frequent guest at charity auctions and balls. He no doubt had lots of friends — probably even a few on LaSalle Street. These people could make life for Ambrose extremely difficult if the Candlestick Maker knew he was being watched.

I could do it myself, Ambrose thought.
I could chase him down on my own time.
He thought about Clint Eastwood movies. Dirty Harry. A cop who could operate outside procedure because his instincts were always right. What else did Ambrose have to do with his spare time? Nothing, when his kids weren’t visiting. And he had to shake things up. This couldn’t go on indefinitely. The next time there was a body, the terrorized people of Chicago weren’t going to tolerate a cute speech and a shrug from the leader of the Wicker Man task force. No, he was going back on the street. Solve this case himself. Some reporter would probably write a book about it.
The Candlestick Maker
would make a good title for a true-crime book. The idea seemed smarter to him the more he thought about it.

Looking up through the window in his office door, he could see activity in the squad room. Cops were on the phone. Other cops were running for their cars. Ambrose had turned the ringer off his phone so he could think, and now it blinked at him furiously. He watched Detective DuPree stop himself on the way to the door and reverse directions. DuPree opened the door to Ambrose’s office and said between breaths:

“Lieutenant. We got a witness.”

Malik spent most of most days in the conference room, meeting with management, meeting with department editors, meeting with his staff. The sight of gray paint, the sound of squeaky chairs, the smell of people sweating in unventilated rooms was usually enough to make him drowsy as soon as the door closed behind him. Not today.

“I got the gist on TV,” Malik said to the three reporters who worked the Wicker Man beat. “But tell me anyway.”

Sally said, “Five o’clock this morning. Woman walking her dog along Division near the expressway. Sees a man in a hooded sweatshirt standing over a body in the alley. She said he was
hovering
over it. He had a towel in his hand—”

“It was raining, yes?”

Lynn Bellingham said, “It had been storming earlier, but by the time the woman took her dog out, the rain had subsided a bit.”

“What else?”

“Man in sweatshirt hears her coming, looks at her briefly, then runs off. She holds her dog back. Struggles over to the body. Sees the dead girl. Calls police on her cell. The body was both strangled and stabbed. Sexual assault. Posed. It has all the earmarks.”

“The victim?”

“Prostitute, apparently. They haven’t released her name if they know it.”

“And the best news?”

“Blood besides the victim’s,
and
semen. Cops are guessing the dog walker interrupted his cleanup. That and the rain let up.”

“Good golly.”

“Torriero, the police spokesman, was practically giddy.”

“Suspects?”

“The witness didn’t get a good look except to say the attacker was white. But Ambrose himself came out to say they’d be running the DNA against the database and hoped to have a suspect by the end of the week. Put himself right on the line and said it.”

“All right,” Malik said. “Give me the cops’ side straight, get me an interview with the witness, and give me a feature on Teddy Ambrose. He’s been on the Wicker Man from the beginning. And I want good pics of the cops working the crime scene. Not that blurry, unframed bullshit we got last time.”

Roles were assigned and accepted. Reporters dispersed. Sally remained.

“What?” Malik asked.

She shut the door. “We’re going to miss it.”

“Miss what?”

“The exclusive.”

“Tell me.”

“Why do you think Ambrose is putting his ass on the line, promising a suspect in three days?”

Malik turned a chair around in front of him and sat in it wrong way out, resting his forearms across the backrest. “Because he’s been on this case for too many years and he’s a little overenthusiastic. Also, the conventional wisdom has to be that this guy’s been picked up for a felony before, and his DNA would be in the system.”

“No,” Barwick said. “He’s putting his ass on the line because they already have a suspect and they’re just waiting for the DNA to confirm it.”

Malik understood. “Your stalker.”

“Right.”

“That’s a leap,” Malik said. “Ambrose is getting a lot of pressure to name a suspect, and that statement takes the heat off him for a few days and puts it on his detectives. It’s political arm-twisting. The odds that this asshole’s in the database just makes it a good gamble for him.”

Sally’s hand disappeared into her hair. “Stephen, this is the way it’s going to happen. On Friday, or possibly Thursday if they don’t want the best get of their careers stuck in Saturday’s paper, the police are going to announce that Sam Coyne is their suspect in this latest killing. They won’t mention the Wicker Man, but it will be obvious to everyone because the cops don’t hold press conferences every time they find a dead hooker. If he hasn’t fled the country, they’ll arrest him, but they won’t charge him because Coyne’s DNA isn’t in the system. He’s never been arrested in his life. I checked. They’ll take his blood, and when it matches, they’ll try to connect him to the other murders.”

“If you say so.”

“But we know Coyne’s the guy
right now.
And we’re the only ones who know it. We should run it in tomorrow’s paper. If we wait for the cops to announce it, the
Trib
’ll be just another white ass in the weekend gang bang.”

A few weeks ago, Malik had reconsidered his opinion that Sally Barwick had potential to be an excellent reporter. Now he was reconsidering again. Sally had potential to be a
great
reporter. A great reporter is aggressive, ambitious, and takes huge personal risks. She had that in her, and he didn’t. That was why Malik himself had been only a decent reporter, and why he was a failure as an editor besides.

“Say we run it. What’s your story?”

“That an ongoing
Tribune
investigation of the Wicker Man murders had been pointing toward Sam Coyne for several weeks. That an analysis of his gaming patterns had revealed a correlation between his copycat activities in the game and the real-life murders. That a police source confirmed Coyne had been on the investigators’ short list for some time, and that once DNA tests come back, there is a high probability they will confirm Coyne is their killer.”

“I thought you said they didn’t have Coyne’s DNA.”

She shrugged. “They’ll subpoena him, ask him to submit to a blood test, and if he refuses, they’ll know they have their man. Besides, there are plenty of places to get a person’s DNA. Coffee cups, a hairbrush. They’ll make a match. I’d just rather do it first.”