Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“This is insane, Davis,” Joan said quietly. “Insane. What did you think you were going to do with this child?”

“I’m not going to do a thing with him, Joan. He’s going to enjoy his life and I’m going to wait for him to grow up.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll be able to look into the face of AK’s killer.”

“He won’t be her killer,” Joan said.

“No, no, he won’t. But I’ll know what he looks like.”

“Is that important?”

“It was,” he said. “Yeah, it still is.”

“You’ll be arrested, if they find out what you did.”

“Maybe.”

“ I’ll be arrested, unless I go to the committee with this right now.”

Davis made a quarter turn in his chair. From the beginning this was the part that had troubled him most. Of course, he had hoped Martha Finn would choose Dr. Burton as her son’s pediatrician because he wanted to keep the boy close. It was always likely he’d have to involve Joan down the line and he had never come to terms with it, even now, as he was about to bully her into keeping her mouth shut. “You never wondered what you’d be capable of if you ever again came face-to-face with the asshole who attacked you?”

“I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation.”

“Have you told anybody about this? Pete? Gregor? Anyone?” He meant the source of Justin’s DNA, and he was sure she hadn’t. “You can’t, Joan. You know you can’t. Forget about you and me for a second. Forget about the horrible thing you think I’ve done, about the breach of ethics and the lack of controls and all that bullshit. Think about Justin.”

“I am thinking about Justin,” she said. “I’m thinking about this poor little boy you just decided one day to carve out of a monster.”

That was a little melodramatic, Davis thought, although he might have put it the same way if the situation were reversed. “Fine. So you turn me in and Justin’s parents find out who their son really is? What will that do? To him? To the Finn family? Let’s say they prosecute me and the story makes the news – Mad doctor clones daughter’s killer! – and that guy, that monster, whoever he is, out there, that guy realizes there’s a living, growing, three-dimensional composite of himself that could, eventually, point the finger at him. You don’t think he’s going to do something about that? Christ, you might as well kill Justin yourself.”

That was unfair, Davis thought, but necessary. He watched the helplessness inside her build like steam in a kettle. Her face looked pressurized, her insides rusted shut like a forgotten metal box at the bottom of the ocean. Flush. She began to shake.

“We can protect him, Joan. The two of us. We can protect him with a secret.”

They sat together for a half hour or more, saying little, a contract between them drafted in the silence. When a nurse knocked on the door to alert Joan to an arrived patient, she nodded at her, nodded at Davis, and loped toward the exam room.

This spot was probably too close but Mickey was tired, tired of years on the road, of napping in his car and sleeping in cheap motels and crashing in the homes of strange “friends of the cause” whom he didn’t entirely trust. When you’re tired you get careless, and he supposed sitting in this chair was exactly that, but screw it. He’d earned the right to take a few chances. Earned the right by accomplishing so much and not getting caught. He and Byron Bonavita.

Byron was probably dead, rotting away peacefully and undetected high in some Blue Ridge Mountain tree house, Mickey supposed, although only he and a few others in the Hands of God guessed as much. The FBI now suspected Byron in twenty-six clone-clinic killings, but Mickey had done all but five of them. Byron Bonavita might have been famous, but in truth he wasn’t prolific. He was a bogeyman made out of government incompetence and fed like a casserole to the starving and witless media.

Mickey the Gerund enjoyed his freedom, but in the moments when he was most honest with himself, he resented the credit Byron got for his work. Of course, the victims were the point here, not the perpetrator, but wouldn’t it be better for the cause if the public weren’t able to pin the killings on a single lone-wolf radical? If they thought there was more than one Byron Blakely Bonavita out there taking a courageous stand against the evils of humanism and science and technology, wouldn’t they be forced to confront the issue of cloning, to take a stand, to say I’m for this or against it and here’s why? Wouldn’t some senator or congressman or even president have to stand before the people and say, While I deplore the tactics used by groups like the Hands of God, their actions represent a strong popular sentiment in this country that something must be done about immoral acts being committed in our name by doctors and scientists all across this great land of ours, et cetera, and then democracy could do much faster what Mickey and, at one time, Byron were doing oh-so-slowly, on a case-by-case basis.

That’s why Mickey started mixing things up. He still shot the occasional doctor when the situation called for it, but more and more he was using other tactics. He cut the brake line on a Lexus once, and poisoned a bottle of water with arsenic and slipped it into a clinic fridge. Neither of those were kills, but the point was the same. There had been a few that had been even more personal. In addition to the twenty-one dead, Mickey had wounded more than thirty, many of them patients and secretaries and support staff. He took credit for eleven retirement cross-outs on Harold Devereaux’s Web site, and in some ways those were better than kills. There was something extremely satisfying when a clone doctor cried uncle. It was like a man repenting, although the doctors were never contrite, always issuing a statement instead that claimed they were doing it for the safety and security of their family, et cetera. That was part of Mickey’s job, too – intimidating the wife or husband and their kids with threatening letters and e-mails and phone calls. Occasionally he’d get close enough to whisper in some kid’s ear. No one appreciated how diverse and effective his tactics had been. That was the price of success for a covert soldier, he told himself.

This coffee shop, named Gimbel’s, had the best little chocolate pastries, airy French ones, which was why he was sitting at this window counter for the third straight day. No one thinks anything about it now, but later, when the girl behind the counter is being asked by the cops if she saw anyone or anything unusual lately, she’ll tell them, There was this guy in here for the last couple days and I’d never seen him before, and then they’ll show her a picture of Byron Bonavita and ask her if it could have been him, keeping in mind that this photo is over seven years old now, and she’ll say, Yeah it could have been this guy, maybe a couple years older and heavier, and the papers will run the Bonavita manhunt on its front page again tomorrow. It was all becoming so predictable.

An hour ago he had walked into the clinic across the street and asked for some literature. It was a cool northern California day and he could see why people paid a fortune in rent to live here. If it weren’t for the earthquakes and the fact that his job didn’t permit him to take a permanent address, he might think about moving here himself to enjoy the temperate bay climate and the French pastries. There would be other things to consider, however. Like his neighbors. There were like-minded folks in this part of the country, but you had to look hard to find them.

After the receptionist handed him a stack of information ( disinformation, he would prefer to call it), Mickey asked to use the rest room. Security was unusually lax here, probably because he’d never been to northern California before. They probably thought they were off Byron Bonavita’s radar. The bathroom smelled like alcohol and oranges. When he finished his business he washed his hands and walked out of the men’s room and across the street and ordered a coffee and a pastry and read some of the clinic literature. The brochures pictured happy families, unburdened of recent stresses, which might have included infertility or hereditary disease or just the unpredictable timing of bearing children the natural way or the inconvenience of adoption or all of the above.