Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Unpressed, yesterday’s dress hung from her body in unsightly relief, creases and wrinkles charting imaginary glacial topography across the fabric. Barwick said, “Justin knows, doesn’t he? He knows he was cloned from Sam Coyne, not Eric Lundquist.”

“Yes,” Davis said. “How did you figure it out?”

She could have told him it was the eyes. That Sam Coyne’s eyes were the same eyes she had photographed when Justin was a child. They were the eyes that romanced her in her dreams. “What did Coyne do?” she asked instead. “Justin said he did something terrible. A long time ago.”

Davis sat on a small bench and she took a seat beside him. “He killed my daughter.”

An icy fright radiated from Barwick’s stomach to her scalp and to her hands and feet. She felt like an investigator again, felt the rush of the end of a case. This one had been open for thirteen years, since she’d turned the stiff pages of the photo album in Mrs. Lundquist’s living room. “You cloned him from the evidence.” She realized she felt burdened with the answer. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. “Why didn’t you go to the police with that? Or the newspapers?”

“Let’s see,” Davis said, sadly. “Because what I did was illegal? Because I’d go to prison? Because the evidence is totally inadmissible. Because Coyne would go free.” He was embarrassed. About to be exposed. A headache was forming above his ears. Sally Barwick was being pleasant enough – calm even, considering what she’d just discovered. Still, this felt like an interrogation.

“Why does Justin think Coyne’s the Wicker Man?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I haven’t shared his… his enthusiasm for that theory. I think Justin’s desperately looking for connections between things. He has trouble accepting the existence of coincidences. In his mind, our world is frustratingly disconnected.”

“I thought Justin was crazy, too,” Sally said. “Not after last night, though.”

“What happened?”

“I saw Coyne kill a girl. Slice her up. Let her bleed out.”

“What? Where?” Then he understood. “In Shadow World. That’s not the same, is it?”

Barwick didn’t feel like explaining the True-to-Life aesthetic. “He also came after me. In real life. He came to my house to kill me.”

“ Jesus! What happened?”

“I called the police.”

Davis became excited. His face turned hopeful. “So they have him? He’s been arrested?”

Barwick shook her head. “He told the cops it was a misunderstanding. That he was just playing a game and that he came to my house to try to explain what I had witnessed on-screen. They couldn’t hold him.”

“Goddamn,” Davis whispered. “He’ll just come again, won’t he? Are you safe?”

“I filed a restraining order against him,” she said.

“Means little,” Davis said.

She knew that. The fact that they’d both been meeting with Justin (although Sally only met him in Shadow World) was an illustration of that. “I want to tell the cops,” Sally said. “I think Justin’s right. I think Coyne might be the Wicker Man.”

“They’ll laugh at you.”

A couple walking through the exhibit paused in the chamber where Sally and Davis were talking. Uncomfortable in the sudden silence, they pointed quickly at the urns and moved on.

“What about this?” Barwick said. “Let me tell your story. Write a feature for the Sunday Trib magazine. We’ll expose him. There’ll be a cry for an investigation. Coyne will never survive the scrutiny.”

Davis snorted. “Neither will I. I’ll be locked up for the rest of my life.”

“I’ll make the story as sympathetic as possible.”

Once more, Davis asked himself how much he would sacrifice in pursuit of AK’s killer. “It’s not only me. There’s another life that would be ruined.”

“Justin,” Sally said.

He nodded. “It’s bad enough for people, especially kids, when they’re just outed as clones,” Davis said. “If it became public that Justin was cloned from a killer, his life would become a freak show. He’d never get it back.”

Sally was thinking. Coyne knows where I work. Where I live. She was thinking that as long as he was out there, it would be virtually impossible to sleep in her apartment. She was thinking the offices of Ginsburg and Addams were only three blocks from Tribune Tower. She was thinking her life would be lived from now on in almost constant fear. “No matter how I feel about Justin, given what I know, I can’t do nothing. Coyne needs to be exposed. The Wicker Man has to be caught. He’s killed dozens of people. He’ll kill dozens more.”

“I can’t tell you what to do,” Davis said. “Coyne is still a killer, whether you believe he’s the Wicker Man or not.”

Barwick looked up at the hieroglyphs etched into stone above the doorway. She couldn’t know how they translated. She thought of the nearly forgotten son of a pharaoh who’d been buried in this tomb, uprooted, transported, put on display in a New World city, a world that wasn’t discovered for more than a thousand years after his death. What kind of a person was he? What kind of a friend? A son? A father? Did anyone care? Those tourists passing through – did they consider at all what kind of a man he was? If they didn’t, what was the point of this monument? What was the point of remembering a life that was no longer of any consequence?

By the skin of my teeth.

That was the phrase Stephen Malik had been using in reply when sympathetic friends and colleagues asked him how he was holding up, or whether he was hanging on, or if, as of that day, he still had a job at the Tribune. He’d been saying it for so long, in fact, that it had ceased to be an honest answer. If it was true one was holding up or hanging on or keeping one’s job by the skin of one’s teeth, it’s assumed one could not do so indefinitely. In Malik’s case, however, everyone agreed that his era at the Tribune was in its final hours. A Web site dedicated to journalism gossip had a regular feature called “Malik Watch.” Several times a week, it published an anonymous quote from inside the newsroom detailing a grievance against the managing editor, or a rumor about his replacement. Unidentified sources spied the Tribune publisher courting candidates for the job at pricey restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami.

But still he remained. He remained although he’d run out of excuses he could sell even to himself. Maybe I really am the wrong man for this job, he thought. He was ready to leave. He had rehearsed his farewell newsroom speech, decided on a graceful, gracious exit with nothing but kind words for the filthy saboteurs upstairs who had recruited him and then plotted against him. He and his wife had discussed retirement in the north, Wisconsin or maybe the Upper Peninsula, to a small town with a weekly paper, because seeing a daily on his doorstep every morning would be painful for a time. He had once loved this business so much.

It was amid such an atmosphere, on a sunny spring day, that he found Sally Barwick lurking outside his office. He invited her in and shut the door.

“Stephen, I’ve been keeping something from you. From everyone here.”

He expected she was going to tell him about her gaming. It was something, at this point in his free fall, that he couldn’t care less about. “What’s that?”

“I’ve been working on a story for a couple months. I haven’t told you or anyone else about it. Now it’s almost got me killed.”

Not what he thought. “Are you talking about this business with the lawyer? The creep who was stalking you?”

She considered the accuracy of that statement. “Actually, I was sort of stalking him. At first, anyway.”