Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“Dammit,” Davis said. “Okay. But I want to make it a condition of the agreement that they won’t pursue Joan or anyone else here at the clinic. Joan was helping me with the other thing, in Brixton, helping me look for AK’s killer, but she had nothing to do with Justin. This is all on me.”

“We’ll ask,” Graham said. “If they believe you’re being honest with them, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Do you believe I’m being honest with you?” Davis asked.

“I’m your lawyer,” Graham said. “Believing you is the best I can do.”

Unprotected from the assault of cold rain that seemed to materialize from nothing in the yellow domes of streetlights above his head, Detective Teddy Ambrose walked around the blue apartment dumpster and felt his insides twist: everything above the equator of his navel clockwise, everything below it in the opposite direction.

He tried to remember what his life had been like yesterday, just hours ago, before this shift began. His wife was pregnant with their second, but they hadn’t told anyone; the two of them glowed from their shared happy secret. If he could finagle a way around the department’s residency requirements, they were thinking about renting out the two-flat he’d inherited from his parents and moving to a bungalow in the suburbs. In the meantime, he and another cop, a guy he’d been through academy with, were ready with the down payment on a boat in Belmont Harbor.

Yesterday, as he’d driven up Grand Avenue toward Area Five headquarters, through the wet curtains of an all-day storm, he’d thought of the dozen closed murders he had credited to his name. He had so few open cases he had been likely to draw the next call. That was fine with him. Bring it on. His luck had been amazing of late: the pregnant teen who turned in her ex for clubbing his brother with an anchor and dumping his body in the lake; the hit-and-run who’d left just about the most costly paint flecks in the history of painted Porsches on the victim’s artificial leg; the carpenter who abandoned a screwdriver engraved with his own initials in the eye socket of his wife’s lover. The night before at Dante’s Tavern, Ambrose had boasted to his fellow cops that there was a point at which luck had to be considered destiny, and the number of cases Ambrose and his partner, Ian Cook, had sent to the D.A. in the last six months was surely on the verge of qualifying.

“You’ll jinx us.” Ian laughed.

The phone rang at 1:47 this morning with word of a female body discovered under a dumpster in a North Avenue alley. And when the evidence technician met their car with an umbrella and recounted the meager evidence at the scene, his partner spat angrily into a garbage can.

“You jinxed us, Brosie. I told ya you’d jinx us.”

Ambrose knelt beside the dumpster and turned his head. The victim’s hand was brown and stiff and cupped as if it were a wax demonstration for the proper fingering of a two-seam fastball. The hand was at the end of a brown arm and the arm disappeared behind the wheeled coaster of the dumpster. Still in a crouch, Ambrose took two sliding steps away and flattened his body, stomach down, against the wet concrete, letting the beam of his flashlight follow his panning eyes. The brown arm was connected to a shoulder, and the shoulder was connected to a torso, and at the top of it all was a head. A blue-and-tan dress had been torn almost from her body. There was something unnatural about the pose.

The concrete was raised in the middle of the alley, and the whole area sloped slightly to the east. A river of rainwater washed around the body, carrying away blood and hair and transferred skin cells and depositing them in a drain twenty yards on, along with Ambrose’s near-perfect clearance record.

“A fucking whodunit.” Ian scowled as his partner pushed himself to his feet and brushed pebbles from his dark blue slicker. “An honest-to-Jesus whodunit.”

“We don’t know that, man,” Ambrose said in his least assuring tone. They would find out who this girl was and if she had a husband or a boyfriend. If she was messed up with drugs. They would talk to her friends. Find out where she’d last been seen. But even if those queries presented them with a good suspect, say an asshole boyfriend with a weak alibi and a history of threatening behavior, the assistant state’s attorney wouldn’t be happy about the lack of physical evidence. Crime scene technicians had become expert at collecting even the smallest traces of DNA, and juries had become accustomed to seeing a genetic comparison between the perpetrator and the accused. Defense attorneys routinely cited a lack of DNA evidence as constituting reasonable doubt all by itself. Frequently juries agreed. The increasingly sophisticated science of DNA made the dumb criminals easier to catch and the smart ones (or the lucky ones) that much harder.

Reading his own twisted guts, Ambrose worried this case might be on his desk for a long, long time.

Martha never pressed charges against Sam Coyne for attacking her. The only person with whom she discussed the incident in detail was a therapist she began seeing a month or so after. The therapist helped her some, and she always had felt that the therapy mandated by cloning regulations had helped Justin, and so, as she entered her mid-thirties, she began to think even her father could have benefited from a few sessions with an understanding professional. She directed her anger at Davis Moore instead, and tried to forget that the idea of suing him had originated with Coyne. She found a different lawyer to help her through it, of course.

By now, Justin was devouring the works of great philosophers in the least turgid English translations. His impatience in class had brought Martha to the school for a dozen or more teacher conferences, and his irritability (coupled with his obvious intelligence) eventually pushed his third-grade teacher into a conspiracy with the school’s fourth-grade teachers, and the result was a joint recommendation that Justin skip ahead.

He didn’t attract more friends in the fifth grade, of course. The older kids thought him an even bigger geek than the third-graders had, but none of this seemed to bother Justin. He received excellent grades in every class and even excelled in gym when the physical skills being rehearsed weren’t the team kind. He proved outstanding in gymnastics and he was faster than all but three or four of the older boys, which earned him a certain amount of respect. He was a bit smaller than most of his new classmates, but he was growing at an advanced rate and didn’t appear so out of place in the class pictures. Throughout the first semester of the fifth-grade experiment, Martha was certain she’d made the right decision.

Justin stepped off the bus every afternoon dragging a bag heavy with books, but his broadening back was able to manage the burden. When Martha unzipped it one evening looking for evidence to lodge a complaint over the mountain of homework being assigned, she discovered only a few slim textbooks. The rest were books Justin was reading on his own: not philosophy, to her surprise, but true crime.

In his room, under his bed, she found more books on Bundy and Berkowitz, Starkweather and Speck. Even Charles Ng, whose name, unappealingly, caused Martha to think of her mother. Shaken, she gathered them in her arms, a dozen or so volumes, and brought them to the kitchen table.

“Where did you get these?” she asked.

Justin seemed surprised at the accusing tone. “A boy in my class. James. I’m only borrowing them.” He said this as if he feared theft were her only concern. “His parents read them.”

“Justin,” Martha said, choosing words with care, not wanting to sound worried or judgmental, “why do you want to read these horrible books?”