Cast of Shadows - v4 (54 page)

Then Justin’s right arm began to feel warm.

The heat radiated out from the needle under his skin and burned beneath his flesh, up toward his shoulder and down toward his fingertips. Justin turned slowly to look at his arm, certain it would be aflame. He couldn’t move it. It was like a heavy, fiery log attached to his body. The top of his head was numb. It felt as if all his blond hairs were standing on the ends of their itchy follicles. He drew a labored breath, but his lungs were rewarded little for it. He turned again, not to look at Davis, but to look at the machine.

The green lever had been flipped. Davis had pressed it while Justin was talking.

Justin’s face puckered. There was nothing for him to do. His left arm was suspended over the edge of the bed and if he could keep it elevated, keep it from falling, keep it from releasing the red lever and the gusher of potassium chloride it held back, he could survive.

But he knew that he couldn’t.

Davis saw shock in Justin’s face, the recognition that the undoable had been done to him. Even as the thiopental relaxed the muscles in his cheeks and around his eyes, there was still enough involuntary response to react to the horror of what was happening. Justin struggled to turn his head again, and when he met Davis’s gaze he forced a crazy, euphoric smile, as if helplessness were a drug to him — like killing, a nonreplicable high.

When it was done, Davis returned every item he came with to the blue duffel bag, crossed each one off a list he had written on a piece of paper folded down to about three inches square, and stuffed the list in his shirt pocket so he’d remember to destroy it later. He wiped down the chairs and the tables and the doorknobs and even Justin’s wrist, which he had held momentarily when looking at the veins in the boy’s arms, before he had snapped on his gloves.

He put on a baseball cap and sunglasses, not much of a disguise but, like the SPF 15 he rubbed on in the sun, it was
something.
When he was home he would destroy everything he wore today — his clothes, his hat, even his boots — in case someone tried to match fiber evidence he’d left behind. He had shed parts of him here, certainly, hairs and skin and traces of vomit in the bathroom, but he hoped they would be lost among the detritus of previous occupants, poor housekeeping being as effective a cover as antiseptic. And who knows, maybe Justin was right. Maybe the cops didn’t look too hard when the answer seemed so obvious at the scene. He hoped so. They hadn’t looked too hard in Northwood twenty years ago when faced with the death of a girl the same age.

No one below seemed to notice as he traversed the second-story concrete walkway, and no one peeked from behind the thick gold curtains or the identical aqua doors as he peeled the surgical gloves away from his hands and stuffed them into his bag. His car was in a self-park garage a few blocks away.

Going back to the hours he’d spent with cadavers in medical school, Davis had always felt a kind of comfort in corpses, their lifelessness a sign that we are more than a sum of our organs and tissue and blood. More than cells in some magical combination. It seemed apparent to him that whatever it is that makes us human individuals is absent in a corpse, and according to the laws of conservation must still be present somewhere else. That was the closest thing he still had to metaphysical religion, but he believed it sincerely.

As he stared at Justin’s freshly dead body, moments before he walked out the door, the old rule didn’t seem to apply. Justin seemed as lifelike as ever, his left arm nearly touching the floor, his head cocked off the pillow, drool pooling in the corner of his mouth. Whether Justin was still inside or had never been there to begin with, he couldn’t know. Justin promised Davis he’d feel exhilarated for taking a life, but he didn’t. Even now, he felt worse for having conceived Justin than he did for killing him, and he thought that feeling curious. Not right. Unless maybe creating Justin and destroying him were the beginning and the end of the same act, and the destroying had just been easier.

He didn’t feel nothing, though, and per Justin’s caution he knew that was a good sign.

Instead of nothing he felt relief.

The white sign ran the length of Harold Devereaux’s front porch, with vinyl letters pressed on in black:

Soldiers for Christ / Hands of God Picnic Social

A half dozen men and women sat in chairs or stood against the wood siding, using the sign to shield their eyes from the late-morning sun. Twenty or so children played about, some on the swing set, some out in the old barn, a few in the house, where they were stepped over and patted by elders with paper plates full of watermelon and hot dogs and cold pasta salad. A band played under a yawning oak tree — guitar, bass, keys, and drums in an incompetent punk formation both too old and too young for this crowd. Their lyrics were political and radically conservative, antigovernment, anti-immigrant, and, of course, anti-cloning. Hardly anyone was paying attention.

In the yard behind the house a man in a clerical collar sat at a bleached picnic table and gestured crazily as he spoke, his hands shooting out from his body like yo-yo tricks, always coming back to rest on the redwood tabletop before flinging themselves again to make this or that point. He was Reverend Garner McGill, the founder and “chief executive minister” of Soldiers for Christ, a nationwide organization that claimed more than 250,000 members (although to qualify for membership all one had to do was agree to receive the free Soldiers for Christ newsletter six times a year). Fifty of the more devoted members of the organization had come down for a weekend of joint meetings with the smaller and lesser-known Hands of God, a summit Harold had conceived and arranged himself. The purpose was social first and strategic second, Harold said, although privately he worried the Hands of God had lost direction since Mickey’s retirement, and he thought perhaps a merger of the two groups might revitalize the HoG and radicalize the SFC, changing both for the better.

The Soldiers for Christ was the country’s best-known religious anti-cloning group. Reverend McGill was known and despised in every fertility clinic in the nation. He had friends on Capitol Hill and had even spent the night in the White House during a previous administration. His sermons could fill revival tents for a month or basketball arenas for a week. More and more he chose the latter.

The Hands of God, however, remained obscure, occasionally mailing press releases about clinics and research facilities with especially heinous practices (according to them) or statements concerning the status of anti-cloning legislation in Washington. They claimed about forty members in their Ohio church, and had a mailing list of some five thousand. Because of threatening letters bearing its name, the government labeled the Hands of God a suspected terrorist organization, although the group officially denied having anything to do with terror and the feds had never pressed charges. Five of the thirteen founding members were here, the others having passed away or moved on. They didn’t talk about their real work. Not in public.

Harold Devereaux’s farm wasn’t public.

“How many on the list are his?” Reverend McGill was saying to Harold, who sat across from him. “I mean really. I always figured Byron Bonavita was an urban myth or something. He never had any affiliation with
us,
and I never met anyone who knew him. I think the feds always knew he was dead and kept pinning the killings on Bonavita because it was less embarrassing to say they couldn’t find him than admit they didn’t even know the real fellow’s name.” Words spilled out of McGill in a high-pitched Georgia drawl, but his laugh was loud and low and rhythmic, like Santa, only
heh! heh! heh!
instead of
ho! ho! ho!

Harold wiped his hands low on his cream-colored wide-collared silk shirt, on the hips, where the sweat and the grit wouldn’t show so much. He was listening but his eyes scanned the yard behind McGill in a slow sweep. People had broken up into fours and fives on chairs or stumps or other temporary seating. He knew most of these people through the Web site and chat rooms and virtual anti-cloning meetings conducted in Shadow World. He knew only a handful of them by their faces, however.

Mickey the Gerund had his fingers two knuckles into the mulch around the tall decorative grasses at the corner of Harold’s main house. He hadn’t been much of a gardener when he was young, but in all those years on the road, driving past miles of wilderness and irrigated pasture and landscaped yards and potted medians, fertilizer and seedlings became part of his fantasy life. He began watching gardening shows on the motel televisions and reading up on shrubs and flowers and trees and grasses and dirt. Since retiring, he spent most of his time about the grounds of the Hands of God church, tending to the lawn and the beds of tulips and the small plot of vegetables. The other members of the church thought he deserved a quiet retirement, and they enjoyed the fresh vegetables and the respectable appearance that Mickey’s labors afforded.

This afternoon at Harold’s, Mickey was sifting through the gardens trying to deduce what brand of plant food Harold used to such great effect in hot weather. He knew if he asked, Harold wouldn’t know. Harold had a landscaper, no doubt, and the landscaper was hired by Harold’s pretty wife. Mickey was also digging with his hands in order to look occupied. He really didn’t want a bunch of strangers asking him about his days on the road. Mickey may have longed for a garden in those days, but never human contact. He had been a traveling monk, a man alone with God, and he still believed that other people were only obstacles standing between him and the Lord.

“Hey, Mickey!” Harold shouted. “Come here! I want you to meet someone!”

Exhaling, Mickey stood slowly and turned to see what horror Harold had planned for him. An overweight Baptist grandma from Arkansas who’d baked him purple-frosted Jesus cookies? A teenaged HoG wannabe who would burst into tears if his mommy gave him two cross words but who was convinced that it was his destiny to execute gynecologists? Evangelical parents who wanted him to lay his hands on their colicky tot? He’d met all of those just since he’d arrived last night. If this many people knew him by sight, he considered it a miracle he wasn’t sitting on death row.

As he drew closer he saw it was Garner McGill. He knew the man, though they had never met face-to-face. McGill was the anti-cloning generalissimo who cheered the Hands of God from the sidelines but who, despite calling himself a “soldier,” didn’t have the balls to tell his quarter million followers what was
really
required to be a member of God’s army.
You’ll never hear Reverend McGill say you can’t fight evil with petitions and bullhorns,
Mickey often said at private meetings back in Ohio.
God’s enemies will be defeated at the end of a gun and McGill knows it, but he doesn’t want the rifle in his own hands.

“Have you two met?” Harold asked. “Reverend McGill? Mickey Fanning?”

They shook.

“This is a
pleasure,
a real pleasure,” McGill said. “Mr. Fanning, I don’t have to tell you how important your personal ministry has been to the cause of righteous men. The Lord smiles upon your work, and He celebrates your sacrifice in the service of your faith.”

Mickey nodded.
What a load of crap.
“Reverend,” he said. He sat down next to Harold and in his periphery he could see other Soldiers for Christ wandering over. He scooted to his right, hogging the rest of the bench so no one could claim a seat on either side of him.

Harold said, “The reverend and I were just talking about the list.”

“Yuh,” Mickey said, grabbing a potato chip between two fingers and plunging it deep into the dip, nearly to the tips of his soiled fingers.

“The reverend was wondering — and to tell you the truth, I started to wonder, myself — exactly how many of those red lines were yours.”

Mickey shrugged. “Lots of them. Almost all of them, I suppose, one way or another.”

“All of them?” Reverend McGill said. “Not really.”

“You got a copy with you?” Mickey asked.

Harold did, in his pocket. He unfolded it, six pages stapled together, and he set it in the middle of the table. Eight or nine Soldiers for Christ surrounded the picnic table, none daring to squeeze in on the bench, and leaned in to get a look at the infamous list. They’d all seen it on the Internet, but here they were sharing it with three legendary figures of the anti-cloning movement: Reverend McGill, Harold Devereaux, and Mickey Fanning. They’d all heard stories about Mickey’s dedication and coldness of heart, about how he’d circumcised himself with a razor blade and a bottle of aspirin, about how he’d killed dozens of doctors and scientists. They just weren’t sure which or how many of these tales they should believe.

From behind his ear Mickey produced a pencil, which he had used to dig about in Harold’s garden. He wiped soil from the lead in the margins of the first page and began putting marks next to the names.

Heads leaned forward all around as Mickey methodically checked off the names of dead and retired doctors. Dr. Andrea Ali, Dr. Jim Baggio, Dr. Phillip Byner, Dr. Thomas Curry… In places, he claimed eight or nine in a row before skipping one with the tip of his lead. On more than one of those streaks, a lanky bearded kid, no more than twenty, whispered a “Whoa. Dude.”

When he turned the last page over he had marked 87 names without a word. He flipped the list right side up and pushed it to the center of the table. The gathering of Christ’s soldiers burst into chatter. Mickey slapped the back of his neck and examined his palm. Three bloody mosquitoes had been flattened there with one blow.

“Let me see that,” Harold said, pulling the list toward him with a skeptical chuckle. He turned the first page. “Here. What about this one? You claim Jon Kucza was one of yours. Jon Kucza died of a heart attack.”

“Nicotine overdose,” Mickey corrected. “I slipped it into his coffee grounds. He was already on the patch. Never tasted it.”