Cast Of Shadows Read online

  Old and strictly observed habits enabled them to go days without talking: Davis locked the doors at night and rose from bed first in the morning; Jackie paid the household bills; Davis curbed the garbage and recyclables early Monday before work; Jackie shopped for groceries on Wednesday; Davis kept the tanks in both cars more than a quarter full; Jackie picked up the laundry and dry cleaning twice a week and changed the sheets every Thursday.

  Sometimes when they did speak, frequently drunk or numbed, the words came out in cruel, irretrievable bunches:

  God, Jackie, is that really a lot to ask? Do I ever ask you for anything? I expect so goddamn little and you can’t even give me that!

  You don’t ask for a thing, Davis. You don’t ask for anything, and you don’t give me anything. Honestly, it’s not human to live this way!

  Northwood’s senior class president, a thinnish boy named Mark Campagna, came to the house with Anna Kat’s yearbook, or the yearbook she’d ordered anyway, with her name embossed on the cover in gold. Mark explained how he’d passed it around to every kid in the class, and they’d all signed, every single one. He’d made sure of that, even sat at a folding table outside the cafeteria every fifth period for a week and hunted down the kids he’d missed in the hallways between classes. Davis and Jackie thanked him and meant it, but Davis wasn’t ready to read a book filled with sentimental teen angst and melodrama, so he put it on the shelf next to her underclassman yearbooks and they promised each other they’d read it on her birthday next year. Jackie read every word the following day.

  Then, just as the winter was ending, Jackie’s behavior went off-axle. No doubt there were many factors besides Anna Kat’s death that snapped her, including her family history and the long, cold winter. These didn’t help, in any case. Returning from work one evening, walking from the garage in the lengthening daylight, Davis noticed her digging in the backyard. After watching a minute, he saw she had already turned over most of the sod in the back, leaving two large rectangles of soil with a narrow walkway of grass separating them. She had to have been up to this for days.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Digging,” Jackie said, not unpleasantly.

  Over the next month, she planted obsessively. Flowers and vegetables and even small trees filled the rectangles. To Davis, there seemed no order to it, but clearly there was in her mind. She had an electrician install a floodlight over the back deck, and before bed she would sit at the window in their room and stare down attentively, hand at her chin, as if the backyard were a giant chessboard. Sometimes she seemed pleased, but more often it made her despondent. “No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!” she’d cry, punching herself just above the knee. Davis would ask her what was wrong and she’d be unable to say. He’d suggest, gently, that she should see a therapist if the garden was causing her so much stress. Then she’d seem all right for a couple of days, hardly mentioning the garden. Then she’d be back in the mud, in her black, knee-high pullover boots and her thick, striped gloves and her sunglasses and baseball cap.

  In May, she dug it all up and started over, transferring the plants she could save and basically creating a mirror image of the original, flipping the entire thing on the axis of grass in the middle. Ultimately, she found this configuration even more offensive, and she dug it up again in July and again in September, and on the morning of the first, unexpected frost in early November, Davis found her on the kitchen floor, arms around her knees, sobbing.

  The psychiatrist (too late for a psychologist, Davis said) prescribed antidepressants and they seemed to help through the winter. She still seemed cold to Davis, but of course she could have been exacting retribution for the weeks and months he had ignored her when she was calling out to him in the semaphore of odd behavior.

  Just before Christmas, almost a year after Anna Kat had been taken from them, Davis asked the detective if the police would return their daughter’s things when they no longer needed them for evidence. Later, wondering why he asked, he supposed he felt helpless, maddened by the investigative inertia. For God’s sake, somebody, do something! Pull Anna Kat’s clothes from the evidence room! Examine the bloodstains. Maybe for ten minutes, you’ll be thinking about her.

  Jackie’s therapist suggested she return to the garden in the spring. Her attitude toward it would be some measure of her improvement, a yardstick by which the doctor could adjust the dose as well as the combinations of medicine, psychiatric pharmacology being an inexact science, she told them (Davis managed to hold back a sarcastic reply). Jackie still spent most of her days there, but she seemed to enjoy it. June came and went and she hadn’t replanted even a single bulb.

  In his basement office, Davis kept binders and files with notes about his family history. At the Kane County flea market he bought an old library card catalog for $325 (haggled down from $380), and he flipped over the yellowed bibliographic three-by-fives, filling the blank backs of the cards with information about twenty-seven hundred close and distant relatives. Davis had ancestors fighting in every war back to the Revolution, and long-ago uncles who farmed six of the thirteen colonies. He had a grandfather’s grandparents who traveled the world by chartered sail, and great-great-great-greats who never dared a day’s walk from the pile of dirty blankets in which they’d been born. He had relations in silent movies, aunts who’d written children’s books, and in this room he made connections between them – lines drawn from every twice-removed to every in-law to every stepdaughter and illegitimate son. Six different branches of his family tree grew like ivy across the blue walls, and in their comforting shade he trapped himself for hours and hours and hours. More than that since AK’s murder.

  Davis had a distant cousin (for lack of a more descriptive phrase) who had been an outlaw in Missouri. None of his dead relatives fascinated him more, although information on Will Denny’s life was hard to come by, and what there was of it was at best half legend. Even his exact position on the Moore family tree was in doubt. Denny sardonically referred to himself in letters as a filius populi, a legal euphemism literally meaning “son of the people,” and used by courts and churches and genealogists in place of the more colloquial “bastard.” Denny’s mother was Davis’s great-aunt several times over, but the name of his father was a mystery, and Davis had long conceded that the statute of limitations had run out on the solution.

  Through persistence and the Internet, Davis found a collector in Saint Louis who owned a photo of Denny, taken toward the end of his life. The collector allowed Davis to copy it, and the grainy, glossy reproduction hung in a frame by the door in the basement office. Silver-haired Will Denny grinned out from his daguerreotype. He wore an expensive high-collared suit, a carefree old-timer of sixty years or so with plenty of money and the freedom to spend it on stud poker and liquor and whores. His hands were thick, and his face used and pale and friendly. Davis always imagined a boisterous crew of associates just outside the frame that day – hangers-on, apostles, some drunk. Denny posed with a black tie, a long rifle, a muscular dog, and a new hat hanging on the high back of his chair.

  Staring at it these days, Davis found it difficult to embrace the romantic myths he once held about his outlaw cousin. Denny, a fugitive for most of his life, seemed to have too much in common now with the faceless beast who had swallowed Davis’s daughter.

  He had often wondered what people in Will Denny’s time – good, moral people, not criminals – would think of the work Davis did at the clinic, if you could make them even imagine it.

  But now he wondered what Denny would do, if a devil had done to his daughter what a devil had done to Anna Kat.

  If you could make Denny even imagine it.

  – 12 -

  Eighteen months after the murder, the detective told Davis (still calling twice a week) that he could pick up Anna Kat’s things. “This doesn’t mean we’re giving up,” he said. “We have the evidence photographed, the DNA scanned. Phone ahead and we’ll have them ready.” Like a pizza, Davis thought.r />
  “I don’t want to see them,” Jackie said.

  “You don’t have to,” he told her.

  “Will you burn the clothes?” He promised he would.

  “Will they ever find him, Dave?” He shook his head, shrugged, and shook his head again.

  He imagined a big room with rows of shelves holding boxes of carpet fibers and photos and handwriting samples and taped confessions, evidence enough to convict half the North Shore of something or other. He thought there would be a window and, behind it, a chunky and gray flatfoot who would spin a clipboard in front of him and bark, “Shine heah. By numbah fouwa.” Instead, he sat at the detective’s desk and the parcel was brought to him with condolences, wrapped in brown paper and tied with fraying twine.

  He took it to his office at the clinic, closed the door, and cut the string with a pair of long-handled stainless steel surgical scissors. The brown postal paper flattened into a square in the center of his desk, and he put his hands on top of the pile of clothes, folded but unwashed. He picked up her blouse and examined the dried stains, both blood and the other kind. Her jeans had been knifed and torn from her body, ripped from the zipper through the crotch and halfway down the seams. Her panties were torn. Watch, ring, earrings, gold chain (broken), anklet. There were shoes, black and low-heeled, which they must have found near the body. With a shudder, Davis remembered those bare mannequin feet.

  There was something else, too.

  Inside one of the shoes: a small plastic vial, rubber-stoppered and sealed with tape. A narrow sticker ran down the side with Anna Kat’s name and a bar code and the letters UNSUB written in blue marker, along with numbers and notations Davis couldn’t decipher. “UNSUB,” he knew, stood for “unidentified subject,” which was the closest thing he had to a name for his enemy.

  He recognized the contents, however, even in such a small quantity.

  It was the milky-white fuel of his practice, swabbed and suctioned from inside his daughter’s body. A portion had been tested, no doubt – DNA mapped – and the excess stored here with the rest of the meager evidence. Surely they didn’t intend this to be mixed up in Anna Kat’s possessions. This stuff, for certain, did not belong to her.

  “Fuckups,” Davis muttered.

  He planned for a moment on returning to the police station and erupting at the detective. This is why you haven’t found him! You useless shits! He’s still out there while you fumble around your desk, wrapping up tubes of rapist left-behind and handing them out to the fathers of dead girls like Secret Santa presents!

  The stuff in this tube, ordinarily in his workday so benign, had been a bludgeon used to attack his daughter, and his stomach could not have been more knotted if Davis had discovered a knife used to slit her throat. He had often thought of sperm and eggs – so carefully carted about the clinic, stored and cooled in antiseptic canisters – as being like plutonium: with power to be finessed and harnessed. The stuff in this tube, though, was weapons grade, and the monster that had wielded it remained smug and carefree.

  There was more. A plastic Baggie with several short blond hairs torn out by the roots. These were also labeled UNSUB, presumably by a lab technician who had matched the DNA from the follicles to genetic markers in the semen. There were enough hairs to give Davis hope that AK had at least inflicted some pain, that she had ripped these from his scrotum with a violent yank of her fist.

  Rubbing the Baggie between his fingers, Davis conjured a diabolical thought. And once the thought had been invented, once his contemplation had made such an awful thing possible, he understood his choices were not between acting and doing nothing, but between acting and intervening. By even imagining it, Davis had set the process in motion. Toppled the first domino.

  He opened a heavy drawer in his credenza and tucked the vial and the plastic bag into the narrow space between the letter-sized hanging folders and the back wall of the cabinet.

  In his head, the dominoes fell away from him, out of reach, collapsing into divergent branches with an accelerated tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

  – 13 -

  Justin Finn, nine pounds six ounces, was born on March 2 of the following year. Davis monitored the pregnancy with special care, and everything had gone almost as described in Martha’s worn copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. There was a scary moment, in month six, when the child was thought to be having seizures, but they never recurred. It was the only time between fertilization and birth that Davis thought he might be exposed. Baby Justin showed no evidence of brain damage or epilepsy, and after the Finns took their healthy child home, they sent Davis a box of cigars and a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Macallan.

  The house on Stone fell into predictable measures of hostility and calm. Davis and Jackie were frequently cruel to each other, but never violent. They were often kind, but never loving. An appointment was made with a counselor but the day came and went and they both pretended it had slipped their minds.

  “I’ll reschedule it,” said Jackie.

  “I’ll do it,” said Davis, generously relieving her of responsibility when the phone call was never made.

  In the third month of the Finn pregnancy, Jackie had left to spend time with her sister in Seattle. “Just for a visit,” she said. Davis wondered if it was possible their marriage could end this way, without a declaration, but with Jackie on a holiday from which she never returned. He didn’t always send the things she asked for – clothes and shoes, mostly – and she hardly ever asked for them twice. Jackie continued to fill the prescriptions he sent each month, along with a generous check.

  In Jackie’s absence, Davis avoided social, or even casual, conversation with Joan Burton. It had been fine for him to admire Dr. Burton, even to fantasize about her when he could be certain nothing would happen. Throughout his marriage, especially when Anna Kat was alive, Davis knew he was no more likely to enter into an affair than he was apt to find himself training for a moon mission, or playing fiddle in a bluegrass band. He wasn’t a cheater, therefore it was not possible that he could cheat. With Jackie away and their marriage undergoing an unstated dissolution, he could no longer say a relationship with Joan was impossible. He feared the moment, perhaps during a weekday lunch at Rossini’s, when their pupils might fix and the dominoes in his head would start toppling again: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

  Jackie returned just before Christmas as if that had been her intention all along. She and Davis fell back into their marriage of few words. Davis restarted the small talk with Joan, even buying her a weekday lunch at Rossini’s.

  Anna Kat had been dead for three years.

  Justin at One

  – 14 -

  Every spring on the Northwood Garden Walk, a guide from the historical society described the process contractors followed when building a new home within town limits. An ordinance prohibited construction of any new house if a computer in the assessor’s office found it to be “in excess of fifteen percent similar” to an existing house. To gain approval, the architect’s drawings were scanned and the locations of rooms, sizes of door frames, and placements of stairs were checked against every home in town. Minutes later, a number emerged with recommended changes ensuring the unique nature of each Northwood residence.

  The Finns’ gigantic Victorian-style home had scored 1.3 percent on the assessor’s scale. No alterations necessary. Spanning two generous lots, it was much larger than it looked from the sidewalk, with much of the interior space hidden in turns and angles not visible on the outside unless seen from overhead. Terry hired a pilot and a photographer to fly over the neighborhood and snap such a picture so he could show it to befuddled friends who marveled at the roominess inside. “It’s like Dr. Who’s Tardis,” Terry liked to say. Martha still didn’t know what he meant by that, despite his attempts to explain. She laughed and called him “geek.”

  Davis parked across the street, having passed by it once, lost in thought, wondering if this was a good idea, to violate the see-without-being-se
en policy he had maintained since Justin’s birth. He palmed the toy, which Jackie had been kind enough to intercept and wrap when she saw him heading out the door with it.

  “What’s so special about this boy?” she asked.

  “They’re all special,” he replied, and she casually added this to the list of secrets he kept from her.

  “Dr. Moore,” Martha Finn said when the door was open only a crack. “What a surprise! We must have the healthiest house on the block today between the two of you.”

  “The two of us?” Davis wondered quietly before noticing Dr. Burton in the living room across the foyer. He took a long, stiff step inside and Martha shut the door. “Hello, Joan,” he said.

  Joan tilted her head and her new black bob angled away from her face as if the part in her hair were a hinge. “Davis!” she said. “What are you doing here?” She recognized right away how condescending that was and regretted it. “I mean…”

  “I always like to pay our kids a visit on their first birthday,” he lied. He had made such calls occasionally over the years, but never since Joan had joined the practice. She let it pass.

  “Thank you so much.” Martha, short and thin, all residual signs of pregnancy burned away power-walking, took the toy truck (a little advanced for Justin, she’d tell her husband later, but nice) wrapped in shiny red paper. “Can I get you something to drink? Terry’s at the store getting some things for the party later.”

  “Party?” Joan asked, kneeling down to watch Justin pick at the wrapping of her gift, a developmental contraption of letters and cubes and zoo animals and plastic rings, each deliberately too big for a trachea. “How fun.”

  “Mostly our friends, of course, not his,” Martha said. “Wine and mimosas. Fruit and cheese platters. Too much talk about work and baseball.”