Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

DNA, they said, didn’t lie.

When Lieutenant Ambrose took the stand he was grilled by the defense about Armand Gutierrez, the original suspect in the Wicker Man case. He was also asked about Suspect M, the Candlestick Maker: a wealthy commodities broker named Francis Caleb Stasio. Isn’t it true, Lieutenant, that right up until the very hour your men burst into Sam Coyne’s apartment and brought him in shackles to Area Five headquarters for questioning, you believed with all your heart Francis Stasio was the Wicker Man?

Ambrose had to admit that Stasio had been his best suspect before the murder of Deirdre Thorson. He wasn’t asked what changed his mind.

And didn’t Mr. Stasio leave the country shortly after the arrest of Mr. Coyne? Ambrose said Mr. Stasio was free to travel wherever he wanted.

Sally Barwick took the stand as well. Isn’t it true, Ms. Barwick, that you had a personal dispute with the defendant? That you have not named your alleged “source” within the police department? That you have received an advance worth several hundred thousand dollars for a book about the Wicker Man case?

Sally admitted it all, but the judge refused to compel her to give up her sources. As the prosecution pointed out in chambers, the DNA proved Ms. Barwick’s allegations. The identity of the person who initially provided her with the tip was irrelevant.

Coyne’s attorneys (there were five of them) brought out the details of almost a dozen murders in Chicago, Aurora, Milwaukee, and Madison, each having been committed since Coyne had been arrested and denied bail. The judge also permitted expert witnesses to testify to the facts of six killings that had taken place in Seattle while Coyne was in custody. “Maybe the Wicker Man has moved on to Seattle,” one of Coyne’s attorneys said in his closing argument. “Maybe he has taken the opportunity provided by my client’s arrest to flee the country. Maybe he’s still here in Chicago. I don’t know for certain. What I do know for certain is that it is reasonable for you to doubt that Sam Coyne is the Wicker Man.” Prosecutors dismissed the more recent murders as copycats. Once all the details of the Wicker Man case had become public, Ted Ambrose explained, specifically the way the bodies had been arranged by the killer postmortem, similarities between the crime scenes became irrelevant.

As the jury deliberated, prosecutors offered a surprise deal. If Coyne would plead guilty to the murder of Deirdre Thorson – the one count where the evidence was rock-solid – they’d drop the other charges, and the death penalty with them. Sam’s lawyers begged him to take it. They had danced around the DNA evidence, tried to confuse the jury with probabilities and statistics, but no one on the defense team believed they’d been convincing. Every year it became harder to fool a jury about DNA. With genetic therapy leading to miracle cures, and cloned children filling out youth soccer rosters, people understood the concept now. DNA didn’t lie.

“But it is lying,” Sam insisted during courthouse press conferences. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t kill Deirdre Thorson, or any of those girls.” Observers and television pundits agreed that Coyne sounded sincere.

Nevertheless, after six days, the jury found Coyne guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to die by lethal injection.

In the motel room, Justin kicked the sheet away and sat cross-legged on the bed. His chest and his feet were bare. His jeans were unbuttoned, revealing just the thin, logoed waistband of his white briefs. He examined the machine as Davis assembled it.

“Yellow, green, then red,” he said. “Hello, old bean, you’re dead.”

Davis removed the phone and the digital alarm clock and the heavy lamp from the nightstand. Watching Justin on the sidelines of his field of vision, Davis tried to reconcile Justin’s relaxed and indifferent pose with what the boy was about to do. Last night, awake in bed next to slumbering Joan, and again in the car on the way here, he had rehearsed a speech designed to talk Justin out of this. This isn’t necessary, he would tell him. Of course, he knew Justin would say the fact that it’s unnecessary is also what makes it right. And Davis recognized that although he could not want this for Justin, he selfishly wanted Justin to want it for himself.

Davis sat on the hard mattress with his back to Justin. “If you want to make it look like an overdose, then why don’t you just overdose?”

“Overdosing is hard. It’s like killing yourself with a hammer.” The boy laughed into Davis’s back and his mildewed breath stung through Davis’s cotton shirt. “You still haven’t figured it out. You still don’t know why I need to do this, and yet you’re still here. That’s you. Loyal. Reliable. Just like a real dad. Just the way I want it.”

“It’s not the way I want it,” Davis said. “Explain it to me. Convince me this is what you want.”

Justin put his hand on Davis’s shoulder and spun him gently onto the mattress so his polished black wing tips rested on the starchy pillowcases and he propped his weight awkwardly on his arms at the foot of the bed. They were facing each other now in a way that, to Davis, felt inappropriately casual. Executions should have a formality to them, he thought. A formality befitting their finality.

“I don’t want to commit suicide,” Justin said. “There’s no justice when a bad man goes out on his own terms. Deirdre Thorson needs someone to avenge her. Just as AK did.”

“But Justin, these are your terms,” Davis said, dodging the opportunity to tell Justin he wasn’t a bad man. “I’m here because you asked me to be. As much as I hate what you’ve become, if you changed your mind right now, I’d pack all this up and leave.” That was true. What he’d do next, he had no idea.

Justin said, “I have to do this. And I need you to do it because you want me dead.”

“It’s not true.”

“Yeah, it is.” Justin picked up the IV attached to Davis’s death machine and pressed the capped point of it into his palm, stopping himself before he broke the skin. “We caught Coyne. He’ll get a needle in his arm, even if it’s not anytime soon. But you’re angry and you’re sad at the lengths I had to go to, to get him. Measures you were unwilling to take. And now I’m a liability to you. I am evidence of your crime, your seventeen-year-old crime, in the same way that I was evidence of Coyne’s. The only way you can put all this behind you, all the pain from the last twenty years, is if I’m dead. And the only way Deirdre Thorson can have justice is if somebody kills me. Somebody who wants me dead.”

“You don’t have to die. You could go to prison.”

“Would it have been good enough for Anna Kat if Coyne got thirty-five to life?” Davis didn’t answer. “Ten years from now the state’d just put a needle in my arm, anyway, with a lot less dignity and a lot more agony and a lot more shame for my mom. Not to mention that they’d put you in prison with me. That ain’t right.” With a finger he touched the metal skeleton and its poisonous plastic organs. “Set up this scary death thingy and everyone gets what they want. Everyone gets what they deserve.”

“Not me,” Davis said softly, putting his feet on the floor again.

“But you don’t have to be in a hurry,” Justin said. Davis expelled a quiet laugh.

They talked for another hour. About books. About philosophy. About the chemicals in the plastic bags and what they did. How long it would be between the time he fell asleep and the time his heart stopped, and how long after his heart stopped before he was dead.

“If they do an autopsy they’ll catch this,” Davis warned, his conscience still pushing him half-heartedly to act as if he cared. “They’ll know it wasn’t heroin.”