Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Shadow Sally stepped outside the police tape and threw the gum wrapper foil into a dumpster. “Heck,” she said. “I’m just doing my job.”

The whispered joke around the station was they made Ted Ambrose a sergeant, and then a lieutenant, because they felt sorry for him. Any one of two dozen detectives could have taken the first Wicker Man call, could have been stuck with all these unsolved murders. It was just too bad they had to get stuck on a good cop like Teddy.

He now supervised the Wicker Man task force, which handled the day-to-day investigation, and Ambrose still marked off milestones in his life according to their proximity to the Wicker victims. His mother passed away the day before the body of victim number three, Carol Jaffe, was found on the 1400 block of West Wabansia. His wife left the day before number seven, Pamela Ip, turned up in the parking lot of the 60622 post office. The last one, LeeAnn McTeer, was discovered over on State Street, more than ten blocks east of the Wicker Man’s comfort zone. Ambrose was certain McTeer was number twelve, however, because the killer had left the body in the same condition as all the others – stabbed and sexually posed – and also because Ambrose received word the day before that his daughter needed expensive braces for her teeth.

He sat in his office and stared at a painted cinder-block wall on which he had pasted connections between the Wicker Man victims and the suspects Ambrose still liked for the murders. Any individual who had ever been under suspicion in this investigation had been assigned a letter, but most of them had been cleared one way or another. Three names remained taped to his wall.

Suspect A was the deli worker, Armand Gutierrez. “The Butcher,” Ambrose nicknamed him for grins. Many of his colleagues had moved on from Gutierrez. The local media had all but acquitted him, and the FBI said he didn’t fit the profile. Ambrose wasn’t so sure.

Suspect F was Bryan Baker. “The Baker” was Ambrose’s departmental code name for the man. Baker was a cab driver who came to police attention because of some odd statements he had made to patrons in a tavern over the course of several weeks last summer. Baker was obsessed with the Wicker Man case, and he told anyone who would listen that he was acquainted with some of the girls. In fact, police were able to place three of the women in Baker’s cab in the year prior to each of their deaths (two had charged the fare on a credit card; a third had called the cab company to report a lost wallet). Unfortunately, that strange coincidence was all the evidence they had, and Ambrose frankly doubted the Baker was smart enough to be his man. Still, the cabbie remained on the board.

Then there was the most recent addition: Suspect M. Privately, Ambrose called him “the Candlestick Maker.”

He came to their attention through one of hundreds of anonymous tips phoned in to the Wicker Man hotline. The day of the call, Ambrose had sold his two-flat for twenty grand over asking price. A sign, he thought. This guy, the Candlestick Maker, set Ambrose’s famously instinctive guts churning. He was educated. Successful. Handsome. Smart. A real Ted Bundy type. The caller, an insomniac, said she had noticed him coming and going from his downtown condo at weird times, within hours of each of the last two killings. Not much to go on, but he fit the profile almost perfectly. Ambrose put his name on the wall and ordered his building on intermittent overnight surveillance.

Pressure to solve the case came in waves. Sometimes quiet months would slip past and the papers would speculate that the Wicker Man had moved away, or been picked up on some unrelated charge and was trapped in a jail cell downstate. Then another body would turn up and the heat would come down on Ambrose’s neck like desert sun. It never seemed to bother him. Even though the murders remained unsolved, most on the force agreed Teddy was the guy for the job, if only because he was so good at handling the mayor and the police superintendent.

At one of the Wicker Man press conferences, an ornery and sarcastic Ambrose gave a reply to a reporter’s question that since had been e-mailed to nearly every police district in the country. Some cops were said to have printed it out and framed it in their squad rooms. It was known as “the Ambrose Doctrine.”

“There are never any clues,” Ambrose said. “Murderers, rapists, and thieves never leave evidence. Why would they? Christ, if they left evidence, real evidence, we’d catch them in a day. Just pull up outside their house or apartment with a tactical team and a warrant and kick in the door and arrest them.

“In reality, the job of a detective is to empathize with the victim. You do that enough times, and listen to your gut, you’ll catch your share of bad guys.”

Justin at Fifteen

She decided to tell him on his birthday, more as an instrument of procrastination than ceremony. Maturity wasn’t an issue – Justin no doubt had been capable of digesting the news five years ago, when he built his own telescope and taught himself conversational Spanish. Martha half expected him to tell her he’d already figured it out. That would be a relief. It would be far better than the response she feared, which was disappointment and possibly anger. Stoic Justin had amazing self-control and she hadn’t seen him truly angry since he was a small child, but this might be the kind of news that could set him off. If not the news itself, the fact that she had been keeping secrets from him. If she waited any longer it might just make the inevitable tantrum even harder to control.

Not that she could take him in a confrontation even now. Justin had grown taller than she and no longer looked like the runt of his class. He had more friends now, oddball types, admittedly, but they weren’t all the same kind of oddballs. They were nerds and jocks and stoners and band kids who, for some reason, were all drawn to her son. He was more popular with girls than he had been, especially smart girls, but the fact that he was three years younger than everyone else in the senior class made him pretty much off limits as far as dating went. He had the kind of quiet charisma that would make him a star as an adult, she was convinced, but it was lost on all but a few of his high school peers.

He’ll show them, she thought. One day he’ll show them all what he’s made of.

He had opened his presents – mostly books Martha couldn’t read for three pages without falling asleep. Michel Foucault was his latest obsession, and she had found some fine used hardcovers. Justin didn’t enjoy paperbacks to nearly the same degree. He liked to grip a book with both hands, as if the knowledge were entering through his fingers instead of his eyes.

“There’s something you should know,” she said, and motioned for him to come off the floor and sit next to her on the couch, where she could grab his arms if they started to flail, or wrap her elbows around an ankle if he started to flee. Then she told him, without much preface but with a brief rationalization having to do with heredity (which she knew he understood) and with Huntington’s disease (which had taken his grandmother and which would probably take her someday), and in the end she said she hoped the news didn’t make him unhappy because a natural-born son wouldn’t have been him and it was him whom she loved, him she couldn’t imagine life without.

Justin wanted to know about the procedure: where had it been done, how had it been done, who else knew? Does Dr. Keith know? He asked about the donor and Martha explained that he was dead, but that he had been a good boy who lived out east and he had died in an accident when he was very young, but in death he had given three very important gifts – his eyes to a blind person, his liver to a sick person, and a single blood cell to your father and me so that we could have you.