Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“Of course you should. Coyne’s been arrested and, according to the papers, already convicted. Quote: The trial, it seems, is almost a formality. ”

“What happened to your theory?”

“What do you mean?” Justin smiled in the manner of a comedian waiting for his audience to get his last joke.

“You said that when Coyne kills in Shadow World, he doesn’t feel the urge to kill as the Wicker Man. Didn’t Coyne just murder someone in the game a few weeks ago? The night he attacked Sally?”

“It’s an inexact science.” Justin smirked.

“It’s bullshit,” Davis said. “Your whole Wicker Man/Shadow World theory is bullshit.” He turned and pressed his shoe into the damp spring sand. His footprint made a detailed impression, outlining every tread and recess in his sole.

“I know what you did,” Davis said, and as he said it he knew the accusation could not be undone. That it would change things between them. The significance was not in the truth of the statement, and Davis would admit he had no evidence to support it. Indeed, before the idea occurred to him he never would have thought Justin capable of such a thing. Sure, he had read Justin’s psych reports, and once worried over missing dogs in the Finns’ neighborhood, and he and Joan had held endless discussions about what Justin might one day become (in her office and, more recently, across the low valley where their pillows met). Even so, they had never considered it anything but a remote possibility. Davis had never entertained the notion, not for a moment, that their darkest fears had become real.

But now he knew it to be true. The moment Martha Finn told Davis she suspected Justin was taking drugs, he began to accept it. Mothers know things about their sons. Justin wasn’t taking drugs, but there was something else profoundly wrong with him.

From the day Justin knocked on his door, he and the boy had been connected by a priori truths, not facts in evidence. It was true that Sam Coyne had killed Davis’s daughter. It also must be true that Coyne had killed others, in numbers impossible to figure. For the past year he and Justin had kept these awful truths between them, and their inability to share them with the world had felt like a penance to Davis. For being a selfish person. A bad husband and a mediocre father. Unmasking AK’s killer had once been something like his religion, but he became resigned to life as a monk, with silence in service of the truth being its own reward. The final secret he shared with Anna Kat would be the face and the name of her killer.

He hadn’t counted on Justin, however. The evangelist, determined to bring the word to the people at any cost.

“I was going to tell you,” Justin said.

“Bullshit,” Davis said again.

“Seriously. I considered that you might be happier if I didn’t. But I was going to tell you. Because we’re not done.”

“No, no, Justin,” Davis said. “We’re done. The only question is, how are we going to make things right?”

Justin laughed and shook his head. “You don’t think things are right? The man who killed your daughter is going to prison, probably for the rest of his life. Not for Anna Kat’s murder but-”

“Not even for a murder he committed.”

Justin climbed halfway up the dune and looked toward the lake, which he could make out in the darkness only by the tiny white foam of the soft breaks. “You know how we talked once that it might be possible for one self to exist simultaneously in two bodies? I felt him. When I was killing that girl, I felt Coyne. I understood him. I knew why he had to do it. Why the Wicker Man comes out. I understood what it means to have an urge beyond your control. To be a puppet in the hands of compulsion. I felt bad for her. I did. But once I started – I mean, there was this rush. Stopping it would have been like – like stopping an orgasm.”

Davis felt sick. He crouched in some tall grass.

“I’m sorry,” Justin said. “I know that’s hard for you to hear in those terms. But don’t you want to know everything? I don’t know why Coyne picked Anna Kat, but once he did, she had to die. It was inevitable, like an accident. Like a bolt of lightning. There was nothing either of them could have done to stop it. I thought you’d find that comforting.”

Davis couldn’t even conceive of the concept. “We have to – we have to go to the police.”

Justin slid back down the dune. “Now? What will that do? Set Coyne free? Put him back on the street? Put you in prison, probably for the rest of your life? Where’s the justice in that? For you? For AK? For your wife? For the parents of the dozens of people Sam Coyne has killed and will kill in the future if we set him free? Because I’m telling you. I felt it. He won’t stop.”

“Where’s the justice for Deirdre Thorson? What about her? What about her parents?”

Justin sniffed. “That’s why I said we aren’t done.” He had a glaze on his eyes, like Vaseline. “Dr. Moore, the reason I know Sam Coyne won’t stop killing is because now that I’ve killed, neither will I.” Justin picked up a handful of packed sand and crumbled through his fingers as he explained. And when he was done, Davis knew it would happen just as the boy said.

Justin at Seventeen

Writing is the pursuit of truth, Barwick supposed, but the whole truth was outside her purview. Big Rob had preached that, and it applied to journalism as well as investigation. Both disciplines were about identifying facts that will lead to understanding, and withholding facts that will lead to confusion. She remembered a conversation she once had with a war correspondent just returned from front lines two continents away. “I could have filed a story every day about the good things that were happening there,” he said. “About the schools that were opening and the hospitals being rebuilt and the valleys being repopulated. About women in Parliament and the growing economy and the long-term hope of a new nation. I could have filed a story every day that would have painted a real rosy picture, and it all would have been one hundred percent true. But to my eyes, things weren’t going well, so I served the truth by focusing on the car bombings and the assassinations and the political corruption and the religious feuds. That was the real story, and it was my obligation to tell it even at the expense of lesser truths. Hell, in fifteen column inches you couldn’t tell the whole truth about a lost kitten.”

Over afternoon sandwiches and white wine, on a broad mahogany deck alongside the Ohio River, Sally answered questions from a mousy young reporter from the Cincinnati Inquirer. Sally’s just-published book, In the Sights of the Wicker Man: The Unmasking of America’s Most Feared Serial Killer, sat on the table between their dishes.

“Why do you think he did it?” asked the reporter, whose name was Alice. “Why do you think Sam Coyne killed?”

“I don’t know,” Barwick said. “Compulsion, I guess. But he was rational, too. He took the time both to pose the bodies and to cover up his crimes, and when he came after me it was only because I threatened to expose him. He didn’t become a killer because he was desperate. He became desperate because he had so much to lose by getting caught.”

“That’s one of the most compelling things about your book,” Alice said. “Coyne led so many different lives – respectable lawyer, loyal son, sex addict – and those were just the ones he lived publicly… ”

“Right.”

“…and then he was a sexual predator, a murderer, and most of these lives he replicated one way or another inside Shadow World.”

Sally said, “That was the fascinating thing for me in writing this story. As a Shadow World True-to-Lifer, I was very aware of the ways in which we all lead multiple lives. I think for Sam Coyne this became a pathology.”