Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“It must be important for you to risk coming here,” Davis said, ignoring the minutes-long gap since Justin last spoke at the door. “What can I do for you?”

“Mom told me,” Justin said. He looked eager, and although he had trouble sitting still, Davis identified his jitters as a symptom of his age: a lack of comfort with his mutating body, fatigue from the pains that came to his growing legs and arms and spine at night. It wasn’t nervousness. Coming here was an act of confidence, in fact. Defiance. Justin’s eyes challenged Davis to be as daring. Though uninvited, Justin had risked something by showing himself here, and he expected Davis to risk something in return.

Not yet decided on what he could afford to wager, Davis decided to play it dumb. “What did she tell you?”

“She told me where I came from.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She told me I’m a clone.”

“Yes?”

“She told me I’m the clone of a kid from New York named Eric Lundquist.”

“Okay.”

“Is it true?”

Davis smiled. “I’m not allowed to say.”

“You’re not a practicing physician anymore,” Justin said, stumbling over the word “physician.” Davis winced, thinking suddenly of the fires and the lost pets and the fog of concerns and guilt Joan had raised eight years ago, which had long burned off in the sunny joy of the present. He was surprised to find himself frightened, not of what might happen if he was caught violating the restraining order, but frightened of Justin himself. He couldn’t pin down exactly why. “What can they do to you?” Justin asked.

“Lots,” Davis said without elaborating. “When did your mom tell you?”

“About six months ago.”

Davis subtracted in his head. “Let me guess. Your birthday?” Justin nodded. “They always do it on a birthday. That must be in one of the books or something. Okay, your mother explained things to you, but you still want to hear them from me. Why? Do you think she would lie to you?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

“I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s wrong. There’s a difference.”

Again, Davis considered that Martha Finn was putting him up to this. Or the cops. Maybe someone suspected. Maybe someone wanted him to do prison this time. “Why do you think she’s wrong?”

“Because I saw him,” Justin said. The boy leaned back now in a low slouch, his head on top of the cushions, staring at the light fixture in the ceiling, his arms crossed in front of him and his hands clasped the wrong way around, pinkies out, resting between his legs.

Arteries up and down Davis’s body pumped two parts adrenaline to one part plasma, the way they had when he’d received the last promising lead in Anna Kat’s murder via e-mail from Ricky Weiss. That had ended in the worst way he could have imagined. Davis tried to slow it all down, saying nothing for a long time. The boy seemed fine with that, even closing his eyes as though a nap were coming before a thought fired across a synapse in his brain and he blinked awake, eyes on the ceiling, waiting.

“Where?” Davis said finally. “Where did you see him?”

“Nuh-uh,” Justin said. He sat up straight, as if his waist were a hinge, and leaned until his head was closer to Davis’s chair than Davis’s own knees. “I tell you stuff. You tell me stuff.”

Christ, what did this kid know? How could he have seen AK’s killer? Forget that, how could he have identified him? Understood what he was looking at? Was it someone from Northwood? Had the monster been so close all along? He couldn’t let Justin out the door now, not without reaching some sort of understanding. Whatever the kid knows, it might be enough to put Davis in prison for ten years. Still, he had to know. After everything Davis had gambled, how could he not play this hand out? And if he had to trust anyone, why not Justin, who was as much his child as he was Martha and Terry Finn’s? If not for Davis, this particular arrangement of carbon and neurons and blond hair and curiosity would never have existed.

“Tell me what you want to know,” Davis said.

Justin stood up and walked around the coffee table, sprawling across the carpet at Davis’s feet. He twisted his torso, and his spine cracked like a roll of caps. He rested his head on an elbow. “You’re not supposed to make clones from living people.”

“That’s right.”

“But you did.”

“I did.”

“You could go to jail for that.”

“You’re right.”

“It must have been important.”

“It was.”

“So tell me.”

“I will,” Davis said. “But I just confessed a secret to you. Something serious. I’d like something in return now.”

“That’s fair.”

“Where did you see him?”

Justin paused, but didn’t seem reluctant. It was as if he had to play back a recording in his mind before he knew he could get it right. “He attacked my mother.”

“Shit!” Davis cursed with a reflexive gasp. “Is she all right?”

Justin nodded with a sneer that seemed inspired by equal amounts anger and guilt. “Yeah. She’s okay.”

“When did this happen?”

“Six years ago,” Justin said. “Right before she filed the lawsuit against you.” Davis considered that. “Just a coincidence, though. Now, who is he?”

“You don’t know?” The questioned betrayed disappointment, and that seemed to confuse the boy.

“I want to know what you know first.”

Davis nodded, asking himself if he needed more than an hour from Joan, if he should call with another errand before she returned from the office to find her husband and the Finn boy trading information like distrustful double agents. “He attacked my daughter.”

“Is she okay?” Justin asked.

“No,” Davis said. “She’s not.”

The story came out in a long exhale, and Justin seemed shocked by none of it. He listened and nodded and looked concerned. At other times he appeared relieved and even excited. He never interrupted. He allowed Davis to describe, to explain, to rationalize, to apologize. He seemed so sympathetic, so non-judgemental, Davis thought he could have cried in front of the boy, and almost did, twice.

“I feel bad,” Justin said when Davis was through and they had both thought silently on it for a few minutes. “I feel bad I don’t have more answers for you.” He sighed. “I can’t remember his name. It was like money or something. Mr. Cash, maybe? I think he lived in the city. I think he used to live in Northwood. Or his parents did.”

“His parents live here now?”

“They did six years ago. His mom introduced him to my mom. They talked but I wasn’t really paying attention. I remember everybody was saying he looked like me. When he was a kid, anyways.”

“What else?”

“He and my mom went to dinner one night. I thought I heard something after they came home and I went downstairs. I just saw the end of it. I think he tried to rape her, although she never said, exactly. My mom was crying. She kicked him out and he walked past me and I really looked at him this time, looked him in the face, in a way that I hadn’t done when we met in the store. It was like, you know how you look at an old picture of yourself and you don’t look like that anymore, and you don’t spend that much time looking at yourself in the first place, but still you just know the face in the picture is you? Right away. That’s what it felt like. Looking at him.”

“Do you think he saw the same thing you did? Do you think he saw himself in you?”

Justin picked at the carpet with his fingers. “I don’t know. I doubt it. He just wanted to get the hell out of there.”

“Does your mother have any idea?”

“Nuh-uh. Like I said, she thinks my donor was Eric Lundquist.”