Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

The next day he called Philly’s old buddy Tony Dee at Mozzarell. “Tony, how’d you like to do me favor? For old times’ sake. For Phil Canella’s sake.”

Tony Dee laughed. “What you want?”

“How far back do your reservation books go?”

“I got ’em all the way back to the day I opened,” Tony said.

“And credit card records?”

“The same. My accountant says I should get rid of ’em. What do you think?”

“I think you should toss ’em,” Biggie said. “But only after I get a good look.”

On the bench in the middle of the roundabout Big Rob kissed the sides of a strawberry ice cream cone and pinned an envelope under his left thigh to protect it from the cool autumn breeze. He waited about five minutes before Davis Moore appeared. He also had an ice cream cone. Vanilla.

“Hey, we had the same idea,” Biggie said, waving his napkin around as a stand-in for his devoured cone. Davis sat down and they didn’t look at each other or say anything right away, as if they had no business, as if this meeting were only chance, just a couple of men deciding to get in one last ice cream before the weather turned cold. Big Rob’s clients always acted like this. Secretive. Paranoid. He guessed they saw characters in their position act this way on television, and most people had no other frame of reference for the detective business. Biggie always indulged them.

“His name is Sam Coyne,” Big Rob said. Davis looked puzzled. “Coyne. Cash. You said it was something like Cash, so I connected the dots.”

“How do you know it’s him?”

Big Rob pulled the summary page of the Moore file out of the envelope and read from it. “Samuel Coyne. Grew up in Northwood. Parents still live here. He was recently named partner at the law firm Ginsburg and Addams. Leases a tricked-out BMW, always black. Has a reputation among his adversaries and peers for being a ruthless sonofabitch, and among his female coworkers for being both a slut and into the rough stuff. No criminal record. Six years ago – that’s in the time frame you specified – he dined here at Northwood’s finest restaurant, Mozzarell. Ordered the expensive wine.”

“Was he with Martha Finn?”

“Reservation was for two.”

“That doesn’t prove anything. His parents live here.”

“You’re right,” Big Rob said.

“Do you have a photo?”

“I do.” Big Rob reached again into the envelope and retrieved an original of the photograph that had appeared in Northwood Life. He’d paid a twenty-three-year-old copy editor fifty bucks for it so Moore wouldn’t think he was charging him 15K for clipping articles out of the local paper.

Davis stared at it and nodded, and the empty, narrow bottom of his cone scratched the sides of his throat as he swallowed it nearly whole. “You’re right. It’s him.” There followed an uncertain pause. Biggie knew it as the transition when the detective’s responsibility became the client’s. Except for an inheritance case here and there and the really messed-up revenge divorces, no one who hired him really wanted to hear the information he provided. Biggie was the finder of bad news, and now that it was his, Davis Moore was going to have to figure out what to do with it.

“Dr. Moore,” Big Rob said, “if you don’t mind me asking, and please don’t tell me if it’s something I don’t wanna know, but what are you gonna do to this guy?”

Davis took the envelope and began examining the rest of the contents for himself. “Nothing. Probably.”

“I only ask because of Ricky Weiss. When he thought your man here was Jimmy Spears, he said you were gonna kill the guy. That’s why he said he killed Philly. He was scared of you.”

“Ricky’s the killer,” Davis said. “Not me.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figure, too. But if I find myself on a witness stand at somebody’s future murder trial, I want to be able to say that I asked. That my conscience is clean. Within reason, I mean.”

“You did, and it is,” Davis said. “Shall we get your money?”

The two of them walked to Lake Shore Bank, where Davis had opened up an account fifteen years ago to finance his investigation into Anna Kat’s death. He had kept a slush fund here to hide traveling expenses, as well as a reserve of reward money, from Jackie. He never closed the account and meant to tell Joan about it several times, but he never did. For a while he thought he might use it to surprise her with a trip or a car or a spectacular piece of jewelry. The current balance was $56,533.21.

It took about half an hour for the manager to fill out the paperwork and get all the necessary approvals for a cashier’s check of that size. Big Rob and Davis waited wordlessly in a small cubed office belonging to an account manager, who brought them coffee and an assortment of cookies on a small plate. Despite the odd half walls surrounding them, on which the gray carpet from the floor seemed to be crawling toward the ceiling like ivy, voices in this place, with its high ceilings and broad tiles and marble counters and hushed tones, would carry.

When it arrived, Biggie folded one of the easiest checks of his career under his green windbreaker and into the pocket of his short-sleeved dress shirt, and they walked out the west-facing front door into the early evening, where the sun shot rays parallel to the ground and directly into their eyes. Big Rob put on his sunglasses and held out his hand to indicate the close of the deal.

“There’s one more thing in there I didn’t tell you about,” Biggie said as his fingers wrapped around the doctor’s palm. “You’ll read it yourself when you go through that file, but I wanted to say it.” He set his left hand on Davis’s shoulder and put his mouth close to the man’s ear, but he didn’t whisper. This wasn’t so much a secret as a confidence: “Coyne and your daughter were in the same class at Northwood East.”

Davis watched the detective walk away. He didn’t know how he should feel, nor could he diagnose the pain in his stomach. He had an envelope with a name and a photograph, and he’d thought it would make him happy to know the truth at last, but it made him anxious, not glad. Anna Kat had been murdered by someone she knew. Perhaps even a friend. The last thing she would have felt was not just horror and pain, but betrayal as well.

It had been thirteen weeks since Justin received his last Shadow World news alert. Eight killings in four months, and then nothing. No stabbed or strangled avatars discarded in the alleys or in the back rooms of bars or in dirty Lincoln Avenue motel rooms. Justin hadn’t played the game at all in two months except to check in on his avatar and to celebrate his Shadow mother’s birthday.

Tuesday morning, dressed for school in jeans and a black T-shirt, he poured dry cereal in a bowl and pawed through the mess of bills and home magazines and catalogs on the kitchen counter.

“What are you looking for, hon?” Martha asked.

“The paper,” Justin mumbled.

“The Tempo section is on the table there,” she said.

Justin kept shoving aside piles of old paper. “Nuh-uh. The front page.”

Martha sighed. “You shouldn’t read this stuff. You get so worked up.” She opened a baseboard cabinet where she kept the big pots and removed the folded Tribune section. “But I guess I can’t keep it from you. The radio, the television, the Internet. God knows what you talk about in school.”

Justin sat down and flattened the paper on the table. The headline read: DAMEN AVENUE DEATH

Cops say woman, 23, could be first Wicker Man victim in six months

Justin read the story quickly. She was found behind a French restaurant. Strangled and stabbed. Raped. Body left in the rain. No prints, no DNA. Police guessed time of death was between 2 and 4 a.m. Justin agreed: it was the Wicker Man, all right.