Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Davis had a distant cousin (for lack of a more descriptive phrase) who had been an outlaw in Missouri. None of his dead relatives fascinated him more, although information on Will Denny’s life was hard to come by, and what there was of it was at best half legend. Even his exact position on the Moore family tree was in doubt. Denny sardonically referred to himself in letters as a filius populi, a legal euphemism literally meaning “son of the people,” and used by courts and churches and genealogists in place of the more colloquial “bastard.” Denny’s mother was Davis’s great-aunt several times over, but the name of his father was a mystery, and Davis had long conceded that the statute of limitations had run out on the solution.

Through persistence and the Internet, Davis found a collector in Saint Louis who owned a photo of Denny, taken toward the end of his life. The collector allowed Davis to copy it, and the grainy, glossy reproduction hung in a frame by the door in the basement office. Silver-haired Will Denny grinned out from his daguerreotype. He wore an expensive high-collared suit, a carefree old-timer of sixty years or so with plenty of money and the freedom to spend it on stud poker and liquor and whores. His hands were thick, and his face used and pale and friendly. Davis always imagined a boisterous crew of associates just outside the frame that day – hangers-on, apostles, some drunk. Denny posed with a black tie, a long rifle, a muscular dog, and a new hat hanging on the high back of his chair.

Staring at it these days, Davis found it difficult to embrace the romantic myths he once held about his outlaw cousin. Denny, a fugitive for most of his life, seemed to have too much in common now with the faceless beast who had swallowed Davis’s daughter.

He had often wondered what people in Will Denny’s time – good, moral people, not criminals – would think of the work Davis did at the clinic, if you could make them even imagine it.

But now he wondered what Denny would do, if a devil had done to his daughter what a devil had done to Anna Kat.

If you could make Denny even imagine it.

Eighteen months after the murder, the detective told Davis (still calling twice a week) that he could pick up Anna Kat’s things. “This doesn’t mean we’re giving up,” he said. “We have the evidence photographed, the DNA scanned. Phone ahead and we’ll have them ready.” Like a pizza, Davis thought.

“I don’t want to see them,” Jackie said.

“You don’t have to,” he told her.

“Will you burn the clothes?” He promised he would.

“Will they ever find him, Dave?” He shook his head, shrugged, and shook his head again.

He imagined a big room with rows of shelves holding boxes of carpet fibers and photos and handwriting samples and taped confessions, evidence enough to convict half the North Shore of something or other. He thought there would be a window and, behind it, a chunky and gray flatfoot who would spin a clipboard in front of him and bark, “Shine heah. By numbah fouwa.” Instead, he sat at the detective’s desk and the parcel was brought to him with condolences, wrapped in brown paper and tied with fraying twine.

He took it to his office at the clinic, closed the door, and cut the string with a pair of long-handled stainless steel surgical scissors. The brown postal paper flattened into a square in the center of his desk, and he put his hands on top of the pile of clothes, folded but unwashed. He picked up her blouse and examined the dried stains, both blood and the other kind. Her jeans had been knifed and torn from her body, ripped from the zipper through the crotch and halfway down the seams. Her panties were torn. Watch, ring, earrings, gold chain (broken), anklet. There were shoes, black and low-heeled, which they must have found near the body. With a shudder, Davis remembered those bare mannequin feet.

There was something else, too.

Inside one of the shoes: a small plastic vial, rubber-stoppered and sealed with tape. A narrow sticker ran down the side with Anna Kat’s name and a bar code and the letters UNSUB written in blue marker, along with numbers and notations Davis couldn’t decipher. “UNSUB,” he knew, stood for “unidentified subject,” which was the closest thing he had to a name for his enemy.

He recognized the contents, however, even in such a small quantity.

It was the milky-white fuel of his practice, swabbed and suctioned from inside his daughter’s body. A portion had been tested, no doubt – DNA mapped – and the excess stored here with the rest of the meager evidence. Surely they didn’t intend this to be mixed up in Anna Kat’s possessions. This stuff, for certain, did not belong to her.

“Fuckups,” Davis muttered.

He planned for a moment on returning to the police station and erupting at the detective. This is why you haven’t found him! You useless shits! He’s still out there while you fumble around your desk, wrapping up tubes of rapist left-behind and handing them out to the fathers of dead girls like Secret Santa presents!

The stuff in this tube, ordinarily in his workday so benign, had been a bludgeon used to attack his daughter, and his stomach could not have been more knotted if Davis had discovered a knife used to slit her throat. He had often thought of sperm and eggs – so carefully carted about the clinic, stored and cooled in antiseptic canisters – as being like plutonium: with power to be finessed and harnessed. The stuff in this tube, though, was weapons grade, and the monster that had wielded it remained smug and carefree.

There was more. A plastic Baggie with several short blond hairs torn out by the roots. These were also labeled UNSUB, presumably by a lab technician who had matched the DNA from the follicles to genetic markers in the semen. There were enough hairs to give Davis hope that AK had at least inflicted some pain, that she had ripped these from his scrotum with a violent yank of her fist.

Rubbing the Baggie between his fingers, Davis conjured a diabolical thought. And once the thought had been invented, once his contemplation had made such an awful thing possible, he understood his choices were not between acting and doing nothing, but between acting and intervening. By even imagining it, Davis had set the process in motion. Toppled the first domino.

He opened a heavy drawer in his credenza and tucked the vial and the plastic bag into the narrow space between the letter-sized hanging folders and the back wall of the cabinet.

In his head, the dominoes fell away from him, out of reach, collapsing into divergent branches with an accelerated tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

– 13 -

Justin Finn, nine pounds six ounces, was born on March 2 of the following year. Davis monitored the pregnancy with special care, and everything had gone almost as described in Martha’s worn copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. There was a scary moment, in month six, when the child was thought to be having seizures, but they never recurred. It was the only time between fertilization and birth that Davis thought he might be exposed. Baby Justin showed no evidence of brain damage or epilepsy, and after the Finns took their healthy child home, they sent Davis a box of cigars and a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Macallan.

The house on Stone fell into predictable measures of hostility and calm. Davis and Jackie were frequently cruel to each other, but never violent. They were often kind, but never loving. An appointment was made with a counselor but the day came and went and they both pretended it had slipped their minds.

“I’ll reschedule it,” said Jackie.

“I’ll do it,” said Davis, generously relieving her of responsibility when the phone call was never made.