Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“Just trust me on this. Save your job. This is a good paper. I’ll land on my feet somewhere. And wherever that is, if you’re interested, you’ll have a job. No matter what. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe it’ll be a city with even more sicko murders than this one.”

“One can hope,” she said darkly.

“But the rest of this crap doesn’t have anything to do with you. And I don’t want it to. That’s an order, or whatever.”

“An order, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, maybe it won’t come to that.”

“Maybe not,” he allowed. “Things change. Before it all comes down, maybe you’ll break open the Wicker Man case and win a Pulitzer. Make me look good.” He didn’t smile this time, either.

She left without making any promises. Malik tapped his computer keyboard to retrieve a dozen e-mails, all received while Barwick was sitting in his office. She could be a lot of things in this business, he thought to himself, a columnist or an editor. When she first came to the Tribune she said she wanted to be a journalist because she liked having an audience but hated crowds. That made Malik laugh. She could be anything she wanted to be.

He wondered what kind of person she was in the game.

Davis sat in a big leather chair by the front window in the big house on Stone Avenue, reading a paperback called Time of Death. It was about a convicted murderer named Hughes whose appeals have been exhausted. His execution date is set. At midnight. He knows the precise second at which he is going to die and he finds the burden of that knowledge unbearable. Through another prisoner, Hughes hires a third con, one whose identity is unknown to him, to kill Hughes at some random date before his execution. This uncertainty makes Hughes happy – so happy he can no longer accept dying. So he tries to foil his own exercise-yard assassination.

It was a silly book and Davis was hypnotized by it, reading the first two hundred pages in just a few hours. Improbable novels like this – sci-fi, thrillers, mysteries – had been his weakness as a teenager, when he read two or three of them a week. He always kept a book with him back then and never let a minute of idle time pass without bending back the shiny cover and holding it with one hand in front of his face. He read at breakfast, on the bus, between periods, at lunch, during his breaks at the hardware store, and even while riding his bike.

He read less and less for pleasure as he got older and various obsessions held his dwindling free time hostage. In med school it was fly-fishing, although he did more practice casting in a park near his apartment than he did wading in Wisconsin streams. In his early thirties he took up track driving – with an inheritance check he paid off his student loans and purchased a BMW coupe – and he rented time on the raceway in Joliet. As AK grew older and Jackie grew sicker, he sold the Beamer and immersed himself in genealogy, trying to define himself with the sum of his ancestors, tunneling for hours through birth and death records in the windowless blue room. Genealogy was shunted in the search for AK’s killer, and the search for AK’s killer was abandoned for fear of going to prison.

The obsessions, one after another, had been a symptom of depression. He understood that now. A happy person looks forward to a few moments of boredom now and then, but for an unhappy person, idle time is intolerable. The unhappy mind is congested with regrets and guilt and situations out of its control and the unstoppable unfolding of worst-case scenarios. Fly rods and race cars and note cards covered with family history became occupying forces in his head, dispersing unpleasant thoughts, outlawing unwanted concerns.

Since he and Joan married, the old stresses had largely disappeared. Potential disasters and subconscious dreads were still players in the politics of his imagination, but only as disorganized, discredited third parties. The files in the blue room, both older ones relating to his family and the more recent boxes filled with leads in AK’s murder, hadn’t been opened in more than four years, and Joan talked about converting the space into a studio so they could take up painting together when she retired. With more free time to enjoy than at any other time in his life, idleness had now become its own reward. He treasured hours that passed with no deadlines or duties or responsibilities. Time to sit by the big window on Stone and read all the terrible and exciting books he’d missed in the last forty years. AK’s memory was with him at all times, but it no longer haunted him, and he felt so removed from his own shooting that some days he wondered if it hadn’t happened in a TV movie.

The doorbell rang and Davis thought about not answering it. It was likely a package delivery that could just as well be left on the porch, or a neighborhood petition he didn’t want to sign. It could be kids from the middle school selling candy or candles in support of some band trip. He wasn’t against band trips, but he wasn’t exactly in favor of answering the door right now either, of interrupting his idle time. He was sitting by an open window, however, and his head must have been visible from the walk. After living at the same address for nearly three decades, he didn’t want to be known as the crazy old man who never answers his door. He stood up, flattening the paperback on an end table.

The boy had grown in six years and was so unlike a boy now. He was less than a hand shorter than Davis, and his long, blond curls danced above his head like spiraling Chinese kites in the light breeze. Muscles had started to assert themselves on his arms under a layer of fine hair. There were a few pink scars on his hands. He wore a silver chain around his neck. Something that one day would have to be shaved loitered under his nostrils and lips. His face was breaking out around his eyes and hairline, and he had a prominent red-and-white pimple at the end of his nose. He wore a two-toned button-down short-sleeve shirt, loose khakis, and sandals, the uniform of teen indifference.

“Dr. Moore,” was all he said.

Davis fought the dryness in his mouth by working the glands under his tongue, and he wondered what sort of trick this could be. He wondered who could be trying to fool him like this and what they expected him to do. He needed to know so he could do the opposite. Davis looked past the boy for some sign of his mother, scanning up and down the street for the red car she used to drive.

“What do you want, Justin? You shouldn’t be here.” He said it loudly in case someone was nearby, or in case Justin’s broad pockets had been fitted with a microphone.

“I wanted to ask you some questions,” he said, then sensing Davis’s reluctance, added, “I’d be in big trouble too if my mom knew I was here. I ditched a couple periods from school. But this is important.”

Davis was certain he was making a mistake, but waved the boy inside for the same reason all people do the wrong thing: the wrong thing is irresistible.

Justin paused in the foyer, polite and uncomfortable, weight on his right foot while his left sneaker dragged invisible half circles against the hardwood. Davis gestured toward the living room and followed him inside. The boy sat on the edge of the couch, knees pinned at angles to the coffee table as if black ink might ooze from the backs of his thighs if his legs came in contact with the cushions. Davis drew the front shade.

“Just a minute,” he told Justin. Davis picked up the cordless phone in the next room and dialed Joan. Her last appointment was at two-thirty and she had said something about stopping for groceries on the way home. She would flip if she knew Justin had been in the house.

“Hon,” he said, “could you pick me up some potting soil, and also some of that shampoo you bought last month? Yeah, that’s the one. Sorry, I should have put it on your list. Thanks. Love you.” That would add two stops to her route. He figured they had about forty-five minutes.