Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Davis met Justin in the forest preserve, on a narrow road between the dog park and the picnic area. No one drove this bit much except to fish a tiny stream about a quarter mile ahead, and in the middle of the day it seemed as safe a place as any for a secret and illegal midday conference between a man and a teenaged boy.

Through the open window of his SUV, Davis heard the spritzing of a bicycle tire on wet pavement, and catching Justin’s attention in the rearview mirror, he waved him around to the passenger side. Justin ditched his bike in the tall grass by the door, and when he climbed in, throwing his backpack on the floor mat, Davis offered him a Pepsi. Davis felt a little bit dirty: the two of them in the front seat, the bike on its side by the road, the kid’s pant cuffs wet from the ride, the Pepsi, which felt like some sort of lure. He considered how happy he’d been just a week ago and how bad he felt at this moment – how his stomach seemed like it would be knotted now for the foreseeable future – and told himself this was surely a mistake. But an overlapping thought assured him there was no choice here, really. He couldn’t conceive of a future in which he didn’t follow up on all the boy knew. He couldn’t tell Justin to forget it. He couldn’t ignore him. This wasn’t about options anymore, or right or wrong, or vengeance or justice or the word that used to get thrown around after AK’s death: closure. Davis knew that he and the boy had only one path beneath their feet and they would follow it until it stopped, and Davis would spend the remainder of his life in whatever place they ended up.

“I forgot to tell you,” Davis said. “You can’t tell anyone else about this. If this guy ‘Mr. Cash’ found out who you were, I think you might be in danger.”

“I thought of that,” Justin said, pausing to expunge a carbonated belch. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Can you remember anything else about this guy?”

Justin’s lips were severely chapped, and the skin around his mouth was red and irritated in a wide circle. It looked like he’d applied lipstick on a roller coaster. “Lived in the city. Looked like he worked out. Good-looking, of course.” Justin patted himself ironically on the chest, then stopped, recalling something new. “He drove a nice car. European, like a Porsche, or maybe a Beamer or Mercedes. It might have been a convertible.”

“He could be driving anything now,” Davis said. “Still, expensive car. He’s probably a professional. That’s something of a surprise.”

“What, you had this guy figured for a maniac? A psycho?”

“After what he did to my little girl? Yeah.” He realized too late the question was a trap.

“So how’d you expect I would turn out?” Justin said. “Did you figure I’d come up the same way?”

Davis sighed. “There are a lot of things that make a man’s character, Justin. Very little is predetermined.”

“Is that why you kept such close tabs on me? Why you were stalking me?” He seemed to be using the language of the lawsuit deliberately, to put Davis on edge. “ ’Cause you were worried?”

“A little bit.”

Davis hadn’t turned the radio off, only dialed the volume down to practically nothing. Justin turned it back up until a melody was recognizable – Brahms, Violin Concerto in D Major, Davis noted to himself. Justin made a face and turned it to a top-forty station.

“So I was what?” Justin asked. “Some tool in your investigation? Like an artist’s sketch. Something like that?”

“I guess you could see it that way.”

“But if you had given my mother that Eric kid’s DNA like you were supposed to, she’d have had a different boy. Not just me in a different body but a different consciousness altogether. Another self. I wouldn’t exist at all.”

“I guess not. I really don’t know how it works, Justin.” Davis was staring down the road through the spotted windshield. A dog, its face low to the ground, following a scent, emerged from the woods and made a circle in the road. A woman in her twenties followed with an unattached leash folded in her hand and fired off a series of rhetorical doggie questions – What is it? What you got? Where you going? – before the pair headed down toward the stream.

“At night it gets quiet and I try to think, and then I also try to keep track of my thoughts,” Justin said. “It’s like if I can figure out what I was thinking just before the thought I’m having now, and how it’s connected to the thought before that and the thought before that and the thought before that, at the end of it I’ll be able to find the real me.” Davis noticed how different Justin appeared even just a few days removed from the meeting at his house. The breezy morning had swept his mess of hair into an unruly pile. He had as many pimples as before, but they seemed rearranged, melting away in some places and reappearing in others. He continued, “We’re not made up of our thoughts, you know, even though that’s the only way most of us can approach the question of identity. I am the one who makes the thoughts, and that’s who I’m looking for at night: the thinker, separated from his thoughts.”

The dog and the woman were just visible now. She made a throwing motion, a fake apparently, and the dog didn’t fall for it. When the woman threw a ball for real, the dog bounded away and the woman disappeared after him, around a bend in the road.

Justin looked out his window, squeaking a finger against it as if trying to remove something on the other side of the glass. “What if everything about Mr. Cash and me is exactly the same except for our thoughts?” Justin asked. “I mean, our DNA is the same, our appearance is the same. What if we also have the same thinker? What if at the very core of it, our thinker, our self, is exactly the same? What if we are the same person, thinking different thoughts?”

“Honestly, Justin, I don’t know. Would you say the same thing about twins? Or identical triplets? Do you think they might be one person split into three different bodies?”

Justin smiled and sought out Davis’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “That would really be something, wouldn’t it? I mean, why can’t a person exist more than once? Physicists theorize that time travel must be possible. That you and I could go back to the meeting we had at your house and watch ourselves talking. That would require two versions of each of us coexisting but acting independently. Millions of people believe in reincarnation. Is it such a stretch to believe that a person could live more than one life at the same time, with the individual selves not even aware of each other?”

Davis twisted his hands on the leather bands wrapped around the wheel until he felt worms of grit forming in the friction against his skin. “I don’t want to change the subject, but maybe this is related, somehow.” He reached for an envelope in the backseat and pulled out the old computer sketch of AK’s killer. The one Ricky Weiss had identified as Jimmy Spears. “What do you think about this? Does this look anything like Mr. Cash?”

Justin stared at the paper for a long time. He whistled through clenched teeth and paused and whistled again. “Little bit, yeah,” he said finally. “A lot, actually. Where did you get this?”

“I got it from you. Years ago.”

Justin let Davis know with uncurious silence that he understood. “That business with the football player? And the dead guy in Nebraska?” Davis nodded. The boy unzipped his backpack and took out a pen. “Can I?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Justin made a desk on his lap with a textbook and a magazine and began to draw careful lines on the sketch. The hairstyle changed, cut shorter now. He added sideburns and widened the eyebrows. He gave depth to the eyes with a few shadowing strokes, and performed similar surgery on the chin, narrowing it, making Mr. Cash thinner. Davis marveled how a few lines of ink drawn by a living hand (and not a computer) made the sketch seem more realistic. More alive. More like the boy sitting next to him.