Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“A child,” the reverend said finally. “My God, a child.”

“Unintended consequences. The greater good,” Mickey said. “By all accounts, Moore became obsessed with his daughter’s murder. His wife eventually committed suicide with a handful of pills. Another man was killed in some crazy accident involving Moore in Oklahoma or Nebraska someplace. The wheels were coming off his chassis. He finally had enough. He quit.

“This is the part of your work that you have refused to see, Reverend. This is what happens on the front lines of war. That night in the store, with my hand on the Moore girl’s throat, I could have backed away. If I had, my entire mission, my entire twenty-year mission, would have been compromised before it began. There would have been no pressure on the cloners and the experimenters, the Frankensteins and Mengeles of modern science. There would have been no fear. No surrender. You wouldn’t be sitting here, preparing your speech, waiting for the coming day when you can claim victory on the cable news networks.

“Over the years there have been other times when so-called innocents died at my hand. These were people who got in the way. Collateral damage, the U.S. military calls it. But the Lord never again asked me to make a decision like the one I made that night in Chicago. I believe the Lord tested me that day, the way He tested Abraham. Only, the Lord never stopped my hand because the Lord knew what was to occur in the wake of that girl’s death. For Him, the all-knowing, there are no unintended consequences; there is only the greater good.

“You looked horrified when I described to you the death of Anna Katherine Moore, and you should have. It was a horrible thing. She was a pretty girl, with much promise, no doubt. She had dreams and plans and people who loved her. I took all of that away with a squeeze of this hand. You should know, then, that it did not make me glad to do it. The boy she had sex with that night took pleasure in her pain, but I did not. Nor did I take pleasure in the deaths of any of the doctors on Harold Devereaux’s list. I killed because I was called upon to kill by God, and despite that holy mission, every murder I committed under its charter was a sin. I fully expect to be sent to hell for them without the ultimate gift of God’s grace. If he condemns me to hellfire, I will accept that mission without anger, because there is honor in doing as He bids, even if what He wishes for you is eternal suffering and everlasting shame.

“As for you, Reverend McGill, you have rejoiced in my acts, and yet you feel that you have not sinned because it was not you who pulled the triggers, who set the bombs, who crushed the Moore girl’s larynx. But it is God who has called all of us to this task.” Mickey clutched the list in his right hand and collapsed it into his fist. “I did not choose to kill Dr. Ali, or Dr. Denby, or Dr. Friedman, I was put to the task, as you were put to yours. I have given my whole life to it. I have sacrificed for the sake of mankind, so that His will may be done. I don’t know why I was chosen, but I think it’s entirely possible that the Lord does not send innocents to hell for the sake of the greater good, but rather chooses sinners, like me, and asks them to commit sins on His behalf.

“You see, the Lord expresses himself in paradoxes. Do you know what a paradox is, Reverend McGill? A paradox is both itself and its opposite at the same time. By definition it can exist only by the will of God. I believe the modern-day saints and the modern-day martyrs are examples of these paradoxes. Because in the war you and I are fighting, the war against contemporary secularism, you won’t find the saints sitting at the right hand of God. You will find the true saint, the true martyr, in the depths of hell. Because he will have given not just his life for the good of his fellow man, but he will have sacrificed his eternal soul.”

By the time Mickey had finished, the entire grown-up faction of the Soldiers for Christ/Hands of God picnic social had gathered around the redwood table, probably sixty people in all, and even the ones who had come late, even the ones who had heard only the end, even the ones who had arrived for the end but who couldn’t make out the intent of Mickey’s low, measured tones, realized something significant had happened. The worst gossips among them had their mouths stunned shut, and whispered inquiries about the event that just happened were repelled with hostile glares. Harold Devereaux stared at a black knot in the center plank of the table. Away from them, the children sat in a wide circle and played a game – duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, GOOSE! Mickey the Gerund had said everything he was going to say for the evening, and everything he felt he might say for very long while.

Reverend McGill, unable to cry aloud, put his head in his hands and squeezed his palms against his eyelids, hoping to stop anything inside him from leaking out.

Cheap cardboard boxes in the old basement blue room were stacked to the ceiling along two adjacent walls. Files and papers and binders and tapes and discs. Witness statements, police reports, autopsy findings, crime scene photos. They still had more to box up, lots more, and Joan, in cuffed blue jeans and a white sleeveless shirt, surveyed the remains and had a hard time believing it had all fit in this room. Twenty years of wondering and waiting, puzzling and praying were recorded on these pages, and just like that Davis was throwing it all away.

“It’s over,” he told her the night Sam Coyne was delivered to death row in orange prison scrubs and chains that shackled his wrists to his waist and his ankles to each other. “I want it all out.”

Joan walked over to the chair where he was sitting and creased herself into his lap. “Do you mean it? All of it?”

He wrapped his old and freckled arms around her like a safety bar on a carnival ride. “All of it,” he said. “Every page, every index card, every crackpot theory I scribbled on a memo pad, every computer sketch, every staple, every paper clip, I want it out on the curb. I’ll call somebody to haul it away.”

“To burn it?”

“Yes!” he said. “To burn it!”

They would pack it up together and it would take an entire weekend, not that the weekends were that different from the weekdays anymore, or wouldn’t be when all the bad memories were turned to char and ash and her husband was one hundred percent hers. She would retire too, in the fall, after her patients had the chance to find new doctors. And though, at forty-nine, every month seemed shorter than the last one, the autumn seemed ages away, as far away as summer seemed to a ten-year-old at Christmas. Joan passed the time by dreaming up ways they could use the room once it was emptied.

“An art studio,” she said. “We could take up painting together.”

“I like it,” he said.

“Or an exercise room.”

“We walk.”

“But in the winter…”

“That’s true.”

“We could buy a pool table.”

He laughed. “I’ve never seen you shoot pool.”

“You could teach me.”

“I used to be good…”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“…in med school.”

“So prove it,” she said.

He also ordered her to haul away his family files, the one ton or so of paper and cardboard and old photographs that connected him to Will Denny and Anna Kat and everyone else on his family tree. “Call the historical society,” he said. “The Newberry Library. The Mormons. Maybe they’ll want it. I don’t care anymore. Don’t need it anymore.” Joan was delighted.

A dozen times in the last few months she had marveled out loud at the word “trial,” saying how apt it was, not just for the defendant but for everyone with a relationship to the Coyne case. The detectives seemed to age on the stand. The state’s attorney lost thirty pounds, and the papers speculated that the beef-eating people of the state of Illinois might balk now at electing someone so thin and sickly to be their governor. Joan was nauseated every morning, the ordeal being as close to a pregnancy as she would have, and at the end of gestation her discomfort would be over, and a life – twin lives, actually, Davis’s and hers – would be born again.