Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Justin was usually dressed in his best clothes and posed in some seasonal setting. There were prop pumpkins and footballs in the autumn and straw hats and wheelbarrows in the spring. There were Christmas poses and red-white-and-blue-themed photos for the Fourth of July.

If she had given more consideration to the other files she found, the illustrations of the strange man, and noted the similarity between their labels and the labels on the little boy’s photos, she might not have leaped to the conclusions she did. Instead, sitting at her husband’s desk in his basement room, Jackie assembled the pieces as best she could, and then she began to cry.

An hour later, when Phil Canella’s cell number appeared on her caller ID, Jackie felt numbing heat up her neck and over her scalp, as she did when a doctor returned with test results. This world of mercenaries, of money traded for information, was foreign to her, but she had to admit it felt good to have secrets, and although her current state of constant anxiety was unpleasant, it was at least a respite from the everydayness of depression.

She hushed the ringing phone with a press of her glossy thumbnail. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Moore,” he said. Jackie could hear activity in the background. Music, voices, glassware, doors opening and closing. A bar. Canella, who had as little self-consciousness as any man Jackie had ever met, seemed unconcerned that others would be wondering about his business. Listening in. Watching him. She found this odd for a man in the business of other people’s business. She was certain paranoia would be a collateral effect.

“Well?” Jackie said, settling on just the edge of her living room couch.

“Your husband and Dr. Burton flew in to Lincoln, and drove to a tiny little town, not even a town, really, called Brixton. They took a tour of the elementary school.”

“The elementary school?” Jackie was distressed by this, though she didn’t know why.

She heard Canella turn a page in his pocket notebook. “After that I followed them to a diner where they met a local guy. A fellow named Richard Weiss.” He checked again. “Ricky. Does that name ring a bell?”

“No,” Jackie said to Canella as she heard a bartender approach.

Canella’s voice became muffled but through the hand he had placed over the phone, she heard him order a beer. “Didn’t think so. He’s a golf course greenskeeper, apparently. Anyway, they talked long enough to order coffee, but not long enough to drink it. Then they drove back to the Marriott in Lincoln. Dinner. Drinks at the bar.” He paused for false effect. “Then they turned in.”

Jackie inhaled a deep breath and let it out in a wheeze. “Don’t dance around it, Mr. Canella.”

“Well, Mrs. Moore, it’s not just dancing. I can only give you the facts I know. They had separate rooms, but adjoining ones. The maid said both beds had been slept in, and she told me there was no, uh, physical – physical – evidence of sexual contact.”

“He could have used a condom, though,” she said, sharpening the words as she said them.

“Yeah. He could have done. There were no condoms in the trash in either room, however.”

“He might have taken it with him. Disposed of it elsewhere.”

“Yes,” Canella admitted, pausing. Jackie heard the thud of a full glass settling on a bar top. “That would be an unusual level of caution, though.”

“But not unprecedented?”

“In my experience, ma’am, nothing is unprecedented.”

Jackie said, “So you aren’t certain if they are sleeping together?”

“I’m not trying to give you hope, Mrs. Moore, if that’s what you’re looking for. From where I sit this doesn’t look much different than most of my stakeouts. I happen to know that Joan Burton kept this trip secret from her coworkers, her friends, her parents. The list of things people keep secret from their friends and family – and especially their wives – is short and consistent.”

“She didn’t tell anyone? And you know this how?”

“The Lincoln tickets were bought with cash. As you know, Dr. Moore purchased an additional ticket on his credit card – a ticket that went unused – to Boston, where there is a pediatrics conference this week. That’s someone covering his tracks, I’d say. Deception.”

He took a loud slurp of his beverage and Jackie could hear it go all the way down in an audible gulp. “Your husband and Dr. Burton were up to something, Mrs. Moore. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, something means sex. I don’t know about your particular circumstances, but ordinarily the people who hire me already know their spouses are cheating. They want me to get evidence for a divorce proceeding. They want leverage in a custody battle. They want revenge. If that’s what you want, I’m afraid I haven’t found anything that couldn’t be explained away or refuted by a half-decent divorce attorney.

“If you’re looking for encouraging news, I’d say that East Jesus, Nebraska, is not a popular place for romantic getaways. Dr. Moore may or may not be sleeping with Joan Burton, but regardless, there’s something else going on. I’m sure there was something other than the old-fashioned mess-around that brought them to Brixton. What it is, I don’t know at this point.”

Jackie stood and began pacing the Persian carpet. “Maybe he’s preparing to leave me. Maybe he and Joan really are planning to move to – to East Jesus – because they’ll be too embarrassed to stick around here after everyone finds out what they’ve done to me.”

“I can’t say, Mrs. Moore.”

“There’s something else,” she said. “Something new. I don’t know if it’s related or not.” She told him about the strange sketch of a man she found on Davis’s computer and about the photos of the boy. What could they mean? Is it possible Davis has another child, a boy with another woman? When their daughter was taken from them, could Davis have started an entirely new family without her? In Nebraska?

“If you want me to pursue this further, Mrs. Moore, you can e-mail that stuff to me here at the hotel. I’ll try to check it out.”

“And if I do want to pursue this? What will it cost to find out what Davis was doing in Brixton?”

“I’m in Lincoln now. It’ll mean going back to Brixton. You have my rate. Expenses would be about the same. Figure the same as I quoted you before.” Jackie felt her willingness to pay being sized up over the phone. “Maybe a little more, depending on how easily the information turns up.”

For once, Jackie was grateful Davis had surrendered the household bills – and the joint checking account – to her. She could write a check from their joint account for five, ten, even fifteen thousand and he wouldn’t know.

“Do it,” she said. “Go do it.”

That night, after Davis returned from his trip and offered some sketchy details of the conference in Boston, Jackie did her best to keep contempt on her half of the bed. It had been months – years, to be honest – since Davis had touched her sincerely. They made love on occasion, but only selfishly, when it happened that both of them so needed another’s touch that the sex occurred like a spontaneous chemical reaction, perfunctorily, naturally, not always unpleasantly, but never as an expression of love, either. In the years since they’d been married, Jackie had never thought of sex as a physical need, but since AK had died, she began to see it differently, and their infrequent coupling gave the marriage a license that had allowed it to survive.

If Davis were sleeping with Joan, their fragile understanding would end.

And Jackie had already decided that it would never end with divorce.

Phil Canella knew that most people didn’t listen much or look much, and when they did look and listen, they didn’t pay attention, and even when they did pay attention, when they did see or hear something they shouldn’t, they never gave it a second thought. They never attached any significance to the man in the alley, the woman at the bar, the bump in the attic, the click on the phone, the murmur in the engine, the tap at the window, the car on the street, the sourness in the scotch.