Cast of Shadows - v4 (34 page)

The body had fallen facedown by the front left tire of an old sedan. There was a lot of blood in an oval pool underneath her that dispersed in red canals under the car. Her clothes were soaked in it.

Justin turned to the reporter. “Sally,” he said, “what do we know?”

Twelve months ago, three years after their last photo session, Sally Barwick, Justin Finn’s first crush, made contact with his avatar outside his Shadow World school. She couldn’t contact him in real life, she said, because his mother still had a restraining order forbidding it. Sally was even afraid to come to Justin’s Shadow World home, in case Martha played the game. Sally told him she was sorry about the photos. Sorry she had been disloyal. She always thought he was a special kid. She thought about him often.

Justin was too embarrassed to have his avatar say it, but he still thought about her, as well.

She explained that her character had worked her way up to crime reporter for the Shadow
Chicago Tribune
. They traded theories about the real-life Wicker Man. Sally invited him to his first virtual midnight crime scene. Since then, they had met (behind Martha’s back) about twice a month over the corpse of a dead avatar in a Shadow Chicago alley.

“Justin, hi,” Shadow Barwick said. “Her name is Lindsay. Stabbed in the gut. Found by a couple of voyeurs about two hours ago. No witnesses. No murder weapon.”

Justin looked under the car. “Does this remind you of anything?” There was no one else within earshot so he dispensed with the formality of addressing her by name.

“What?”

“Three weeks ago. Shadow State Street. Blonde. Stabbed.”

“Yeah, her and about a hundred others,” Sally said. “This is just another thrill kill. Probably a teenager showing off for his buds.”

“You know what else I can’t help thinking about?” Justin said. “Something else this reminds me of?”

“What?”

“Not in here. Out there.”

“Don’t say it.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

“You got Wicker Man on the brain, little man.”

“You don’t think it’s weird? There are a lot of similarities.”

Barwick waved her pen in the air. “Okay, so it’s a copycat. You get a lot of those. A year before you joined the game they found a crazy guy in the Shadow suburbs with a couple dozen avatars buried in his crawl space. Some high school kid thought it’d be a laugh to be John Wayne Gacy for a few weeks. What an <
AGE INAPPROPRIATE
>.”

“I have a theory,” Justin said. “Wanna hear it?”

“Sure. Why not?” Sally said.

“I think the Wicker Man has some outlet for his anger. That’s how he can go so long without killing sometimes.”

Leaning against the car, Shadow Barwick said, “Oh, <
AGE INAPPROPRIATE
>! That’s crazy. You think the guy who did this is a True-to-Lifer?” Sally pointed at the lifeless avatar. “A serial killer in real life who’s also a serial killer in the game?”

“I’ve been charting the dates of the Wicker Man murders against the dates of similar murders here in the game,” Justin said.

“And?”

“Well, I haven’t figured out an exact pattern yet, but there are some interesting coincidences…”

“That’s all they are, Justin. Coincidences.” The police tech shooed Barwick’s hand from the car. She yawned and offered Justin a stick of gum from her bag. Sally unsheathed a second one for herself. “This here is just teenage boys messing around. Playing a sick game their conscience won’t let them play in reality.”

“Yeah?” Justin asked. “If you’re so sure there’s nothing to these killings, how come I see you taking detailed notes at every one?”

Shadow Sally stepped outside the police tape and threw the gum wrapper foil into a dumpster. “Heck,” she said. “I’m just doing my job.”

The whispered joke around the station was they made Ted Ambrose a sergeant, and then a lieutenant, because they felt sorry for him. Any one of two dozen detectives could have taken the first Wicker Man call, could have been stuck with all these unsolved murders. It was just too bad they had to get stuck on a good cop like Teddy.

He now supervised the Wicker Man task force, which handled the day-to-day investigation, and Ambrose still marked off milestones in his life according to their proximity to the Wicker victims. His mother passed away the day before the body of victim number three, Carol Jaffe, was found on the 1400 block of West Wabansia. His wife left the day before number seven, Pamela Ip, turned up in the parking lot of the 60622 post office. The last one, LeeAnn McTeer, was discovered over on State Street, more than ten blocks east of the Wicker Man’s comfort zone. Ambrose was certain McTeer was number twelve, however, because the killer had left the body in the same condition as all the others — stabbed and sexually posed — and also because Ambrose received word the day before that his daughter needed expensive braces for her teeth.

He sat in his office and stared at a painted cinder-block wall on which he had pasted connections between the Wicker Man victims and the suspects Ambrose still liked for the murders. Any individual who had ever been under suspicion in this investigation had been assigned a letter, but most of them had been cleared one way or another. Three names remained taped to his wall.

Suspect A was the deli worker, Armand Gutierrez. “The Butcher,” Ambrose nicknamed him for grins. Many of his colleagues had moved on from Gutierrez. The local media had all but acquitted him, and the FBI said he didn’t fit the profile. Ambrose wasn’t so sure.

Suspect F was Bryan Baker. “The Baker” was Ambrose’s departmental code name for the man. Baker was a cab driver who came to police attention because of some odd statements he had made to patrons in a tavern over the course of several weeks last summer. Baker was obsessed with the Wicker Man case, and he told anyone who would listen that he was acquainted with some of the girls. In fact, police were able to place three of the women in Baker’s cab in the year prior to each of their deaths (two had charged the fare on a credit card; a third had called the cab company to report a lost wallet). Unfortunately, that strange coincidence was all the evidence they had, and Ambrose frankly doubted the Baker was smart enough to be his man. Still, the cabbie remained on the board.

Then there was the most recent addition: Suspect M. Privately, Ambrose called him “the Candlestick Maker.”

He came to their attention through one of hundreds of anonymous tips phoned in to the Wicker Man hotline. The day of the call, Ambrose had sold his two-flat for twenty grand over asking price. A sign, he thought. This guy, the Candlestick Maker, set Ambrose’s famously instinctive guts churning. He was educated. Successful. Handsome. Smart. A real Ted Bundy type. The caller, an insomniac, said she had noticed him coming and going from his downtown condo at weird times, within hours of each of the last two killings. Not much to go on, but he fit the profile almost perfectly. Ambrose put his name on the wall and ordered his building on intermittent overnight surveillance.

Pressure to solve the case came in waves. Sometimes quiet months would slip past and the papers would speculate that the Wicker Man had moved away, or been picked up on some unrelated charge and was trapped in a jail cell downstate. Then another body would turn up and the heat would come down on Ambrose’s neck like desert sun. It never seemed to bother him. Even though the murders remained unsolved, most on the force agreed Teddy was the guy for the job, if only because he was so good at handling the mayor and the police superintendent.

At one of the Wicker Man press conferences, an ornery and sarcastic Ambrose gave a reply to a reporter’s question that since had been e-mailed to nearly every police district in the country. Some cops were said to have printed it out and framed it in their squad rooms. It was known as “the Ambrose Doctrine.”

“There are
never
any clues,” Ambrose said. “Murderers, rapists, and thieves
never
leave evidence. Why would they? Christ, if they left evidence,
real evidence,
we’d catch them in a day. Just pull up outside their house or apartment with a tactical team and a warrant and kick in the door and arrest them.

“In reality, the job of a detective is to empathize with the victim. You do that enough times, and listen to your gut, you’ll catch your share of bad guys.”

She decided to tell him on his birthday, more as an instrument of procrastination than ceremony. Maturity wasn’t an issue — Justin no doubt had been capable of digesting the news five years ago, when he built his own telescope and taught himself conversational Spanish. Martha half expected him to tell her he’d already figured it out. That would be a relief. It would be far better than the response she feared, which was disappointment and possibly anger. Stoic Justin had amazing self-control and she hadn’t seen him truly angry since he was a small child, but this might be the kind of news that could set him off. If not the news itself, the fact that she had been keeping secrets from him. If she waited any longer it might just make the inevitable tantrum even harder to control.

Not that she could take him in a confrontation even now. Justin had grown taller than she and no longer looked like the runt of his class. He had more friends now, oddball types, admittedly, but they weren’t all the same kind of oddballs. They were nerds and jocks and stoners and band kids who, for some reason, were all drawn to her son. He was more popular with girls than he had been, especially smart girls, but the fact that he was three years younger than everyone else in the senior class made him pretty much off limits as far as dating went. He had the kind of quiet charisma that would make him a star as an adult, she was convinced, but it was lost on all but a few of his high school peers.

He’ll show them, she thought. One day he’ll show them all what he’s made of.

He had opened his presents — mostly books Martha couldn’t read for three pages without falling asleep. Michel Foucault was his latest obsession, and she had found some fine used hardcovers. Justin didn’t enjoy paperbacks to nearly the same degree. He liked to grip a book with both hands, as if the knowledge were entering through his fingers instead of his eyes.

“There’s something you should know,” she said, and motioned for him to come off the floor and sit next to her on the couch, where she could grab his arms if they started to flail, or wrap her elbows around an ankle if he started to flee. Then she told him, without much preface but with a brief rationalization having to do with heredity (which she knew he understood) and with Huntington’s disease (which had taken his grandmother and which would probably take her someday), and in the end she said she hoped the news didn’t make him unhappy because a natural-born son wouldn’t have been him and it was him whom she loved, him she couldn’t imagine life without.

Justin wanted to know about the procedure: where had it been done, how had it been done, who else knew?
Does Dr. Keith know?
He asked about the donor and Martha explained that he was dead, but that he had been a good boy who lived out east and he had died in an accident when he was very young, but in death he had given three very important gifts —
his eyes to a blind person, his liver to a sick person, and a single blood cell to your father and me so that we could have you.

Justin could tell she was nervous, and he calmed her. He wasn’t upset. He was glad that she had told him. Did his father know she was going to tell him today?
He did? Well, it’s no surprise he didn’t want to be here for this, either.
They laughed. She cried a little. Never worry about telling me the truth, he told her, and she promised she wouldn’t. Never again.

It wasn’t the whole truth, and at the time Justin assumed his mother knew, as he did, that the story was a lie. Soon, he would find out differently and he would hate himself for mistaking her for a coconspirator. Even now, wondering if she was holding something back, he loved her for telling him. For giving him on his birthday the thing he had been searching for in all of those gift-wrapped books.

In New York, being a liberal didn’t mean putting a target on your back.

When he took the job as managing editor of the
Chicago Tribune,
Stephen Malik knew the publisher was using him. The
Tribune
had long been a Republican paper in a Democratic town, and he understood the editorial page would always try to preach to its conservative suburban base. Malik was brought in to answer charges from city readers (and supporters of the current governor) that the news division had a right-wing bias as well. Malik’s liberal credentials gave the
Trib
some cover. And of course, Malik knew, his presence provided them with a convenient fall guy if things ever went wrong.

Beginning in June, boy had they.

The frayed end that unraveled it all was a story on an anti-cloning protest in front of the Dirksen Federal Building. The protesters — or more accurately, advocates — were expressing their support for the Buckley-Rice Anti-Cloning Act. Written by a young and promising reporter named Scott Harmon, the article estimated the size of the crowd at around 150, and described in detail the signs and the banners they carried:
STOP THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL
.
MAN CAN CLONE A BODY BUT ONLY GOD CAN CLONE A SOUL
.
CLONING
=
SIN
. Harmon also quoted a small group of
counter-protesters. “These people are just afraid of progress,” said one, identified as Cameron Straub. “They’re ignorant.” Another young man, a Naperville resident named Denny Dreyfus, claimed to be a clone himself, as well as a Catholic: “I feel like [the protesters] are denying me my humanity,” he said. “It’s like they’re telling me I’m not human. That I’m an affront to God.”