Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Locking and chaining his bedroom door and staring gravely into its white-painted paneling, Justin let a discontented noise expire softly in his throat. Adults. They worry so much. They have much to worry about, of course, but he worried enough for all of them. Didn’t they understand that’s why he was sent here? Why he was brought here? Sent here or brought here, he wasn’t sure which, but it didn’t much matter one way or the other. His responsibility was the same: to wonder, to worry, to act.

Dr. Moore was a mess. Poor guy almost had his life back together before Justin knocked on his door, but what did he expect? These things were decided long ago. Very long ago. Nothing is decided when it happens.

He felt bad for his mother. It would be hard on her when it all came out. She had done nothing to deserve the pain. She only wanted a son, presumably one without a destiny, but she had no choice in the one she got.

On his bed, his hand feeling around inside his backpack, Justin gripped a leathery pouch with a zipper. Retail stores used them to make cash bank deposits, and hip teens now used them for tools and school supplies and allergy medicines and computer discs and PDAs.

And stuff.

His mother had been at the park today. He’d seen her car in the rearview mirror. So now she knows he’s been seeing Moore. That was a problem. Not a fatal one, but it was another challenge. Whether the challenges were sent here or brought here, that again didn’t matter much.

Justin unzipped the pouch and dumped its contents on the bed. Cloudy crystals tumbled from a plastic Baggie. A lighter, a spoon.

He turned on the radio and after he had prepared the syringe he injected its contents into a kitchen sponge and placed the sponge in a plastic bag for anonymous disposal later. From a week of this ritual, the Baggie, the syringe, the spoon all looked well used, coated in black and white residue. He capped the needle, returned everything but the sponge to the leather pouch, and hid the pouch behind a row of books on his nightstand shelf.

Another late night alone in the blue room. Joan was upstairs reading a book. She mentioned to him that even with her busy schedule at the clinic, she was averaging almost three thick novels a week these days. She had to go to the library almost as often as the supermarket. He understood what she was getting at but pretended it went over his head.

Davis knew there were files in here he had never examined thoroughly. Hell, there were thousands of them. Even with the dedication to the task he once possessed, he had performed a kind of triage, deciding which folders held the most promising information and attending to them first and most often. He remembered a box he’d picked up from the police station just months after AK was killed. Jackie was in their bedroom with a highball glass and a Dick Francis hardcover. He carted the box downstairs and set it on the card table in the blue room, removing the reports one at a time from within. These were witness statements from Anna Kat’s friends, and after scanning just a few of the thirty or more reports, he knew they’d be too painful to read. As the detectives had warned him, none of the girls seemed to know anything about the night of the murder. Instead they filled investigators’ notebooks with tearful eulogies and stories illustrating their love for AK. What a good friend she had been. How much promise her life held. How sad and different their lives would be without her. Now, though, if he could go through them once more, he wondered if he’d find that any of them had mentioned Sam Coyne, if any could help him connect the dots between the killer and his daughter.

He picked a report at random. Janis Metz. The name was unfamiliar. To investigators, Janis claimed to have been a friend of Anna Kat’s since the eighth grade, but by the time they were seniors in high school, they weren’t as close as they had once been. “We were still friendly,” Janis said. “We just kind of drifted into different crowds.” Janis had lots of stories about AK, and flipping through the transcript it was obvious that her eagerness to tell them was not matched by the patience of the detective conducting the interview. Several times he hinted that she should wrap things up, only to have her respond with another tale of Anna Kat’s beneficence.

“There was this boy, Mark,” began one such anecdote, “and he really liked AK. He followed her around like a little puppy dog. Mark was one of the supersmart kids, kind of shy, he’s going to Stanford in the fall. These interviews aren’t going to be in the newspaper or anything, are they?” The detective assured her they would not be. “Anyway, in ninth grade Mark finally got up the nerve to ask AK to go roller-skating, and she told him she didn’t think of him in that way, and the poor guy was just crushed. But she stood in the hall and talked to him for, like, twenty minutes after she rejected him, and asked him about his family and his classes and stuff. He was on the debate team and a few months later she went to one of his matches or games or debate things, whatever you call them, and in the spring she nominated him to be class president. I mean, they were little things, but she let him know that he didn’t have to be embarrassed. That they could still be friends, you know? Even though they’d never be close friends. That was really cool. I would have been, like, afraid that the guy would start stalking me or something. Not AK. She didn’t care what clique you were in or how cool you were. She liked everybody.”

Davis felt a pinching sensation in his nose, the prelude to a tear. He felt pride and love – and loss, too, but in manageable amounts. He skimmed the rest of the interview quickly for Coyne’s name and, not finding it, reached into the stack and grabbed another one.

Bill Hilkevitch. Davis remembered him. He was one of AK’s “guy friends,” to be differentiated from her boyfriends. He liked Bill. Smart. Genuine. Polite. Bill had spoken at Anna Kat’s funeral, eloquently, until he had to stop and cry, which was a kind of eloquence in itself.

“Anna Kat used to get a little grief from a few of the other kids about her dad,” Bill told the police sergeant. “I’m not saying that any of these kids, you know, killed her or anything, it was nothing like that, and it actually died down a lot after her father was shot, but it was still there. I remember – it was like tenth grade, I think – and we were reading Frankenstein in English class and somebody grabbed her book and wrote something on the title page. The full title of the book is something like Frankenstein, Prometheus Unbound. This guy had crossed out ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and written ‘Davis Moore, M.D.’ underneath it.”

At this point the detective asked who or what Prometheus was. “Prometheus,” Bill explained. “In Greek mythology. He was the guy who took all mankind’s troubles – you know, diseases and whatnot – and put them in a box. Eventually Pandora opens it and life sucks forever after. He also stole fire from the gods and gave it to the mortals. The thing this guy wrote, Dr. Moore’s name, it doesn’t even make sense. The guy who wrote it was just copying what he’d heard his parents say or something. You know, that clones are like Frankenstein monsters. That’s what the anti-cloners are always saying. It’s stupid, but a lot of people think that way.

“At school right now there are only two kids who are out as clones. They say that at a school our size, it’s probably more like thirty, but most families keep it a secret. It’s not a surprise because the two kids, the clones, they get a lot of shit. Even though one of them’s, like, this super athlete. He’s a freshman and already on the varsity soccer team. The rumor is his cell donor was a big-time college football player or something, although that could be a load of crap. Anyway, he’s going to be a huge star at the school and it doesn’t matter. A lot of kids treat him like he’s got a disease or something. He used to be really depressed all the time. But AK always finds those guys – or she did, anyway – found them in the hallway or after school, asking them to volunteer for this or that or to come to her volleyball games. That was the funny thing. She was the kind of girl who could ask you to do her a favor, like work the charity car wash on a Saturday morning, and you felt so good because she asked you. It was like she was doing something for you. And it wasn’t just guys that felt that way, you know. It wasn’t just because she was cute. Girls liked her, too.”