Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

The detective asked about the person who wrote in her Frankenstein book. “Oh, yeah. Steven Church. One day, months later, we’re playing this coed softball game in gym. Steven’s playing first base and AK hits a grounder to short. She’s thrown out by two steps, but as she crosses first base she takes off her helmet and swings it around – whap! – knocks him right in the back of the head. He went face-first into the dirt and AK acted like it was an accident – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry – but a few of us knew. And she never said anything about it and Steven never gave her any trouble after that. She was always real protective of her pop.”

Davis smiled for the millionth time at the thought that AK was the one looking after him instead of the other way around. Given how helpless he had been searching for her killer, that was no doubt true.

Where had he heard that name before, Steven Church? There had been a Natalie Church, a nasty woman, who used to show her face at the occasional protest in front of the clinic, shouting hackneyed slogans at his patients (Hey hey! Ho ho! Genetic research has got to go!). He assumed Steven was her kid. If Davis hadn’t stopped reading these files fifteen years ago, and had come across this story, he would have checked Church out as a potential suspect. The police apparently had the same idea because on the last page of the statement someone had written in pen (before it was photocopied), Church’s alibi checks. He and his parents were in Saint Pete.

The cops were doing something, at least, Davis thought. He tossed Bill’s statement back and fished for another one.

Libby Carlisle. Libby he knew well. She and Anna Kat played together on the volleyball team. Libby had slept over here at the house on Stone dozens of times. He would hear them giggling late into the night, sometimes whispering into the phone with a network of conspirators who were spending the night in the homes of other girls.

The nocturnal back-and-forth between AK and Libby could get loud (the intensity of teenagers’ conversations, like the intensity of an old Borg-McEnroe tennis match, increased with every volley), but Jackie usually slept through it with some soundproof combination of antidepressants and liquor. Lying in the dark, Davis wondered if a responsible father should knock on his daughter’s door and break it up. Order them to bed. He never did. Instead he would eavesdrop, and although the girls were too many rooms away for him to make out the content of any conversation, the happy notes of his daughter’s voice were informative enough.

Libby’s statement was long, and Davis flipped the pages with his thumb, starting with the last one. Because he knew Libby, and because she no doubt held many of Anna Kat’s confidences, he felt as if reading it too closely might constitute a betrayal of sorts. But it was also Libby’s tightness with AK that gave the statement promise. If AK knew Sam Coyne, so did Libby.

The first time through, he just missed it. Maybe he was looking specifically for the word “Coyne,” the big capital C and the single descender from the y, like a lowercase letter stretching its arms and legs. He turned the pages more deliberately the second time.

Libby said, “AK and I went to the mall on Monday. She had a night home with her mom on Tuesday. Wednesday night we took the train downtown with Dennis and Sam and this friend of Dennis’s who goes to Madison.”

That was it. The only mention in over a hundred pages of transcript. Could this Sam be Sam Coyne? It had to be. Were many parents naming their kids Samuel thirty-five years ago? He couldn’t remember. It had been his business, bringing little boys into the world, and yet he couldn’t remember how many of them had been named Sam. The detective interviewing Libby hadn’t even asked for their last names. Sam who? Jesus Christ, Libby had given them the name of the killer and the cop didn’t even have the sense to ask what his last name was. What kind of an investigation was this? A botched one, but he already knew that.

Davis threw the rest of the bound statements back into the filing cabinet and went upstairs to AK’s old room. For years it had remained almost as Anna Kat left it, not for sentimental reasons but because Davis had no stomach for the day’s work it would take to pull everything out. Jackie would sit in here sometimes and mourn in her own way. When he married Joan, she turned it into a guest room. They never discussed it. She just did it herself and he didn’t object.

Some of AK’s things were still here, though. On a bookshelf were four years of yearbooks, including the one that had been delivered to the house after she died. Every margin on every page was covered with anguished eulogies and melodramatic farewells from teenagers dealing with the death of one of their own for the first time. There were song lyrics, lots of song lyrics, and drawings of flowers, and even sketches of Anna Kat, some of them skillfully done.

Laying it flat on the bed and kneeling beside it, Davis examined the senior class row by row. He found Sam Coyne easily: handsome, smug, wearing a novelty tie with a cartoon cat. He looked so much like Justin. Exactly like Justin, but with a crew cut. A shiver went through him, top to bottom. This was the last face to see his baby alive, and it was Justin’s face.

Coyne was the only senior named Sam. There were three boys named Dennis in her class. Among the underclassmen he discovered four more Dennises and one other Sam. But he hadn’t thought about girls. Turning to the index now, he came across six Samanthas, three of them in the senior class. Libby could have been talking about a Samantha, and when he looked for their pictures, a couple of the girls looked familiar.

Absently he started reading through the messages inscribed to her. They ranged from sentimental (“Parting is all we know of heaven / And all we need of hell”) to cruel (“Have a nice summer!”). How odd friendship is between teens, Davis thought. So intense. Every acquaintance is as close as a lover. Every minor slight an act of betrayal. The loss of a peer unthinkable.

The last two pages, left blank by the printer, were black-and-blue with ballpoint ink, irregular blocks of words covering the spread like a quilt. Davis rotated the binding, reading messages from less concise members of the Northwood East senior class. One of them, a poem – or more likely, song lyrics – froze the book in his hands:

They can’t hurt you now

It doesn’t matter what they say

You can still feel anger across the grave

But it was fun anyway

Sam

He read it again. And a third time.

A confession. Maybe.

The handwriting was precise, but it was definitely a boy’s – no teenaged Samantha would print with such bold, angular confidence. The words were not written hastily, but deliberately copied. The margins were careful and even. The strokes almost carved into the page.

You can still feel anger across the grave / But it was fun anyway. The words drilled into his heart and uncorked a gusher of rage. He was still trying to hurt her, still taking pleasure in her pain. Laughing. Taunting. Missing her only because he wasn’t done torturing her.

I’ll bury you, Coyne, he thought, his fingers on the front cover’s raised letters – ANNA KAT MOORE. I was so long without a child, I forgot I was a father. I got comfortable. I lost sight of you. I forgot what you did to her. Forgot that I wasn’t supposed to let you have the last word.

Davis thought, I’ll show you her anger.

“Do you even have your learner’s permit?” Shadow Barwick asked.

“No.”

“God.”

“Relax,” Justin said into his headset. “It’s like playing a video game. In fact, we are playing a video game. Remember.”