Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“No.”

“Why not?”

Rick Weiss hurled himself into the back of a kitchen chair and its legs belched against the linoleum. “He’s an asshole. An asshole that’s trying to rip us off.” He slapped the underside of the table with his knees.

“But it’s him, right? Jimmy Spears? Jimmy’s the guy he’s looking for?”

“Of course it’s Jimmy,” Rick said. “A rich judge like him don’t come all this way just to say no thanks. He could’ve done that on the computer.” He pushed aside the mail in dull number 10 envelopes and opened up the September 20 Sports Illustrated, paging through it without glimpsing a single photo or headline. Peg, his wife, sat down across from him, her pale face lined and worried, but not yet betraying that she had already run up a six-thousand-dollar debt with Visa that she had planned on paying with the bounty on Jimmy Spears’s head.

“Then why won’t he pay?” Peg squealed.

“Asshole,” Rick said.

“Asshole!” Peg said.

“Fucking crooked judge!” Rick said.

Every Saturday night, Ricky and Peg watched a TV show that profiled bank robbers and murderers and molesters on the lam, and twice they phoned in tips that, privately, they knew to be thin as 20-weight oil. When Peg came across the composite Davis had created at a crime stoppers Web site, however, she was certain they were clutching a pot of gold with both hands.

“Who does this look like to you?” Peg had asked that day, handing him the printout.

“Hell,” Rick said, curious, having not yet read the vague paragraph Davis had written to accompany his query. “That’s Jimmy.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Sure as shit.”

Jimmy Spears had been in Rick’s class, two years ahead of Peg. Rick was in a different social circle than Jimmy – shop/wrestling/chewing, as opposed to AP English/football/smoking – but Rick always thought Jimmy was a good guy. Since Jimmy’s appearance in the Rose Bowl, every between-classes encounter Rick had once shared with Jimmy in the Brixton High School hallway had been embellished into a hilarious buddy story to entertain the Thursday night crew at Millie’s Tap Room on Pioneer Street.

When he saw Jimmy’s face on that piece of paper, however, Rick conjured a new fantasy, one that would pay him and Peg $25,000. After exchanging e-mails with tips@justiceforak. com, after the visit to Brixton had been arranged, Rick could imagine a five-figure balance on every ATM receipt.

“I fucking gave that judge Jimmy Spears. Whatever the fuck Jimmy did to him, I handed that boy, my friend, over on a golden platter, and now he’s gonna screw me. You just watch. Next week, Jimmy will get arrested or he’ll show up dead. Dead’s my bet.” He shook his finger at Peg. “Yeah. That’s why Forak’s so secretive. He’s gonna kill the sonofabitch.”

“Oh damn,” Peg said. “You think?”

Rick nodded. “Remember these words: Jimmy Spears will show up deader’n a doornail. It’ll be in all the papers.” His voice had gone quiet. Conspiratorial.

“Jesus,” Peg said. “And then we’ll turn Forak in, yeah?”

“Yeah, we will,” Rick nodded. “No, we’ll do better than that. We’ll go to the papers.”

Giddiness and love pushed a flat smile across Peg’s face. “Yeah.”

Rick picked up the magazine and turned the cover to face her.

“Sports Illustrated,” Rick said. “ They’ll pay us twenty-five grand.”

“You think?”

“Hell, that’s a fraction of what those swimsuit models make. We’ll sell more copies than them. This guy, the judge, and the lady who’re looking for Jimmy. He’s a smart sonofabitch. Nice clothes. And he’s got connections, all respectable and shit. He’s gonna kill Jimmy and he’d get away with it, too. But you and me, we’re gonna crack the case. Sports Illustrated will get the scoop. We’ll get the money. Be on Dateline NBC. Maybe Oprah. Jenny. Ricki. All that shit.”

“Fa-a-a-amous,” Peg cackled, and twisted in her chair.

“Fame and fortune, hon. Fame and fortune.”

Jackie Moore had been a high school beauty, a college cheerleader, a public relations executive, a stay-at-home mother, an active volunteer, a lonely suburbanite, an ignored and indifferent wife, a psychiatric inpatient, and an untreated alcoholic. As she approached fifty, the only roles she still recalled with affection were the first, the last, and motherhood. Of those three, there was only one she could still claim.

Sometimes she slept during the day, more as an escape from the light than anything resembling rest. The shades in the house were almost always drawn. Davis either preferred it that way, too, or didn’t notice.

She rarely used her husband’s computer, but this morning she sat at his desk in the blue room with a Tanqueray and tonic, staring at the screen. Soon her fingers were snooping mindlessly across the keys. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find – perhaps naked photos of Joan Burton. She snorted at the thought. Davis would never be so obvious. Or tacky. She scanned through a year’s worth of e-mail. Nothing. Only a handful of messages exchanged between them. All work-related.

Snooping through the nested folders and directories, however, she found something she couldn’t explain. Dozens and dozens of files – Christ, hundreds! – each containing an illustration of a man’s face. The pictures were almost photo-realistic, but there was something not quite right about each of them. The dimensionality was wrong, the shadowing too severe, and the broad areas of uniform skin color not quite accurate. They had the look of a sophisticated police sketch in that they resembled a human being, but could never be mistaken for a real picture of one.

The file names were dated (going back five years or so) and then lettered for versions. The later ones looked better than the older ones. And in the later files, the versions were more similar, with the differences being mostly in the hairstyle or the age. In some, the man looked to be about twenty, in others, ten or fifteen years older. Clearly, they were all supposed to be the same person, though. Variations on the same traits and hair and eyes. Each head was the same shape, more or less, and although this seemed to have more to do with the software that had done the illustrating, the eyes had the same tired, indifferent, three-quarter stare. If every person drawn by a machine can be said to look “detached,” this fellow seemed especially so.

She also found many digital photos of a young boy. When she clicked through the first few, a dense and knobbed mass formed in her stomach. Her suspicions of his affair with Joan forgotten, she now worried that her husband was involved in something unthinkable.

Jackie supposed one might find photos of all kinds on a middle-aged man’s computer: posed porn stars in impossible positions, dressed in costumes or populating plywood fantasy environments, hands caressing their artificial secondary sex characteristics. She didn’t understand the static visual mechanics that turned men on, and allowed herself to be amused when she caught Davis’s eyes lingering on a sexy advertisement, or staring unsubtly at photos of swimsuit models, which appeared incongruously in sports magazines and catalogs. But these pictures, chaste and darling, of a young boy she did not know, a young boy who, along with his parents, was almost certainly unaware that his image occupied pixels and bytes on a suburban doctor’s home computer, gave her chills.

As she opened more and more of the files, however, her fear became puzzlement.

Each picture showed the same blond-haired boy. Like the adult composites (and typical of Davis), each file was labeled with the name Justin, a number between three and eight (roughly corresponding to the boy’s age, Jackie thought), and a letter. Not only were the pictures not salacious, most of them were adorable.