Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Alice smiled. “And what are your other lives like?”

“Well, in at least one of them, I have a boyfriend,” joked Sally, thinking of both dreamy Eric Lundquist and precocious Shadow Justin. “No, seriously, one goal of a True-to-Lifer is to have no secrets. Or no secrets from yourself, anyway.”

Eyebrow raised, Alice said, “So on this book tour, will you be revealing the identity of the Conductor? Maybe here in this interview?” She chuckled hopefully.

“The Conductor” was Sally’s name in the book for her mysterious police informant, called that because of his insistence on meeting her aboard a tourist trolley that circulated through downtown.

“No, no,” Sally said, reaching for her wine. “I promised I’d never do that.”

Barwick suspected there were many cops who knew the Conductor was a fiction. They would never say so, however, as they would also have to admit that Sam Coyne had never been one of their suspects. It was better for Ambrose and the superintendent and the mayor to say nothing and have the public assume they had been hot on Coyne’s trail when the story broke. If Barwick didn’t want to reveal her nonexistent source, that was just fine with City Hall.

Nowhere in the book was the name Justin Finn.

Before Justin had moved out west to spend time with his father, he and Sally met in Shadow World one last time to make certain they could keep each other’s secrets.

“You’re going to be okay, living with this? The way it played out?” Shadow Justin asked. They were sitting on a short wall along North Avenue Beach, watching fit and young avatars play volleyball.

Sally said, “Sometimes you need to perpetuate a lie to preserve the truth, like burning trees to save the forest, or hunting deer to save the herd. Sam Coyne killed Dierdre Thorson. He is the Wicker Man. That’s not a lie. If people knew about you, it would muddy the waters, make the truth of that statement unclear. Coyne’s lawyers would say that if two people have the Wicker Man’s DNA, that casts doubt on their client’s guilt.” She watched real-looking waves break around a handful of swimming avatars. “But you and I know only one of those two people is a killer.”

Shadow Justin nodded.

They stood up to leave but lingered on the sand for a moment. Sally pulled him to her, the face of Justin’s avatar so close it filled her screen. They kissed clumsily – she doubted he had ever kissed a Shadow World girl – and they walked away, Justin to the north, to the suburbs, and Sally back into the city.

The Cincinnati sun ducked from behind a white cloud and quickly warmed Sally’s dark cheeks. The after-work crowd was arriving, and as the volume of background noise increased, drinks and appetizers appeared by the trayful from behind the bar.

Alice said, “Forgive this question, I’m not a gamer. What is Shadow Sally Barwick doing just this moment? Is she sitting here with some version of me? In some version of this restaurant?”

“She really is in Shadow Cincinnati,” Sally said. “She’s also promoting a book about Sam Coyne: The Shadow Chicago Thrill Killer. ”

Shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare, Barwick was momentarily envious of her on-screen alter ego, who had undoubtedly written a book with fewer fictions than Sally was capable of writing in real life.

Decades of irregular stains had turned the thin gold carpet six different shades of pistachio. The place smelled something horrible, too. Given the nature of what must have taken place between mostly illicit lovers in this room (and other rooms like it at the Lawrence amp; Lake Shore Mayflower Motel), Davis would have been surprised to hear the windows had ever been cracked open or the thick gold curtains ever drawn. Who knows why Justin chose this neighborhood? It was one of hundreds in the city where they could walk anonymously in the street, and one of dozens where the neighbors wouldn’t raise an eyebrow or a ruckus if they noticed a teenaged boy and a middle-aged man entering the same motel room an hour apart.

An opened pack of cigarettes and a lighter and a leather belt and an emptied syringe were arranged carefully around a Coke can (cut in two, with the bottom of it blackened and turned upside down) on a small, round table. Justin was flat in bed, covered with a sheet, watching an old sitcom on television. One of the characters had a catchphrase – “That’s my Jimmy!” – which he blurted out in a shrill Southern frequency that tickled Davis’s brain as it decayed against his eardrums.

“One last party?” Davis said, pointing to the syringe. He was careful not to touch it, conscious of everything in the room he laid hands on. He would wipe it all down when it was over, but that wasn’t a license to be careless.

Justin rolled onto his left side and pulled the sheet up to his neck. He looked like he’d either been jarred awake or hadn’t been sleeping at all. “The cops will tell my mom it was an overdose. I left my room at my dad’s place looking like a crack house. She’ll think I ran away because of drugs. That will be better for her. Better for you.”

Davis sighed. “So, last year. Your mother told me you were doing drugs. She thought I was giving them to you. But you weren’t really buying drugs at all, were you?”

“Oh, I was buying them,” Justin said. “I put them all over my room. Everywhere but in my arm. I mean, I tried it once, but I didn’t have time for that crap. Too much to do.” He added, “Too little time.”

Davis set a blue duffel down on the corner of the bed and began emptying its contents – thick plastic bags the size of large burritos and filled with clear liquid; more rubber tubes; a rectangular metal contraption, shaped like a small coat rack, with a heavy base, hooks along the top, and three crude levers at the bottom that looked like little teeter-totters.

“Is that it?” Justin said, leaning forward, asking a dumb question because he knew Davis would be glad for it, glad for the attempt at conversation, which had been so hard over the last few days and was especially hard now.

Welded together by Davis himself, the machine was unsophisticated. The bags hung from the hooks and were attached to the rubber tubes with valves, which were attached to the levers. The tubes converged at another valve and ended with an intravenous needle, which would be inserted into a vein in Justin’s right forearm. Around Justin’s left wrist, Davis would affix a plastic strap attached to a wire. With his left hand, Justin would start the process by pressing the yellow lever, beginning an IV saline drip. When he was ready, he’d press the green lever for thiopental. Within a few minutes, he would be lost in a deep coma. When he fell asleep, his arm would drop below the side of the bed and the weight of it would activate the third, red lever, sending him a lethal dose of potassium chloride, the same chemical the state of Illinois, after his appeals had expired, would order into the veins of Sam Coyne.

The trial had been long but unsuspenseful. The case against Coyne had been solid, especially with regard to Deirdre Thorson’s murder. The prosecution cherry-picked four of the Wicker Man murders and convicted him on those, as well, based on the similarities in the crime scenes and Coyne’s inability to provide alibis years after the fact. Dozens of women testified to the ways Coyne associated violence and sex. Several came forward after his arrest to say Coyne had attempted to assault them. One of those women had been Martha Finn.

The defense tried to cast doubt on the DNA evidence, insisting their client hadn’t been anywhere near North and the Kennedy that night. He’d been playing a video game, alone in his apartment, and Shadow World records showed, in fact, that he had been logged on at the time. To the prosecution, however, this looked like premeditation. An attempt to establish an alibi before the fact.