Cast Of Shadows Read online

  “That’s unusual,” Barwick said.

  “For a girl? It sure is. Eric saw one or two girls in college. No one serious enough to bring home. Don and I met a gal down in Ithaca once, when we picked him up. She was Indian – you know, from Asia. I can’t remember her name. It was hard to pronounce.”

  “That’s okay.”

  The photos preserved the boys’ lives in more or less equal amounts. For the older ones, however, there were recent pics with their current families, posed shots with the wife and kids in their living rooms and nearby parks. Eric’s gallery ended the summer before his senior year, when he was about twenty.

  One of the pictures showed Eric sitting high in his white painted chair at Lynde Lake. His head was turned over his right shoulder, toward the camera, and he was making a saluting gesture with his hand. Barwick guessed he was about eighteen here. Happy. Invincible.

  “Hunh,” Barwick said, accidentally out loud.

  “What’s that?” Mrs. Lundquist asked.

  “Oh. Well. Hmm. Did Eric ever have any surgery?”

  “You mean was he hurt? No. Never before his accident. Not a day in the hospital.”

  “Not even elective work?”

  “You mean plastic surgery?” Mrs. Lundquist looked amused. “Gosh, no.”

  “Hunh,” Barwick said again.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” she said. “He was a beautiful son.”

  “You’re a dear,” Mrs. Lundquist said, and after eating a single M amp;M, she started to tell Barwick about the time in sixth grade when Eric slept all night in a closet to hide from 7 a.m. clarinet lessons.

  – 18 -

  Years ago, Davis had tried to get Jackie interested in her own family history, but even talking about it bored her. “I’m much more interested in my family present, ” she said, one of thousands of unsubtle jabs she had leveled over the years at his eighty-hour office schedule.

  Working from some old photographs and letters Jackie inherited from her mother, Davis constructed an incomplete chart of her clan going back five generations, and presented it to her in a frame one Mother’s Day. Jackie said she liked it and hung it in a spare bedroom where she kept her treadmill and her sewing and craft supplies. When Anna Kat assembled a seventh-grade project on her ancestors (basically cribbing years of her father’s work inside a slim decorative binder), she used her mother’s chart as a demonstration piece to explain the terms and techniques of genealogy and received an A from her teacher. Shortly after AK died, perhaps as soon as the day after, Jackie took the chart down and Davis hadn’t seen or asked about it since. He understood why looking at it was so difficult; he felt pain as well as pleasure these days when he sorted through his own family files. Those manila folders and index cards represented real lives to him, just as the files in his office, with the names of cloned boys and girls, represented children who were now loving and being loved. The difference with the files at home was that many of his relatives no longer existed outside of his little blue room. When he pulled a card on his great-great-uncle Vic and updated his date of birth or his social security number, he was certain to be the only living person who thought about long-dead Vic that day. There was sadness to that – bitter-sweetness – but such simple and melancholy tributes to the dead were also satisfying. He didn’t look forward to the day when he could think about Anna Kat and not be hurt by her memory.

  “Did you ever consider it?” she asked him. It was late and they had been drinking wine and reading to themselves. Jackie had started a conversation and Davis had faked his way through it but now realized he didn’t know what they were talking about.

  “Consider what?”

  “Cloning her.”

  “AK?”

  “Of course, AK.”

  Davis gave her a crazed look. “No. Absolutely not. It’s illegal, for one thing.” That was an absurd comment, a cruel thing to say, given the secret he kept from her, and he knew that, now that he had made such an excuse, she would never forgive him if she discovered the truth.

  “Not seriously, I guess,” Jackie said. “It’s just, I wonder what it would be like to have her back. Even as a baby. To give her another shot at life. To give us another shot at keeping her safe.”

  “It wouldn’t be her,” Davis said.

  “Would that matter?”

  “Yes,” Davis said.

  Jackie closed her book, and her voice became softer, which it did when she was angry or sad or nervous. “You act like a cloned child isn’t real. That would surprise a lot of people if they heard you say it.”

  “She’s real to the new family. To people who knew the original, she wouldn’t be real at all. To them, she’s a doppelganger. A smudged copy. A ghost with no memory. Would AK be AK without that scar across her knuckles? The one she got learning to ride a bike? If she had fillings in different teeth? If she were a swimmer instead of a setter? Afraid of heights instead of spiders? If she liked English better than math?” Jackie turned flush and Davis held out his arm, but he couldn’t reach her chair and so he suspended his hand, palm up, in the air between them. “I know what you’re thinking. That all these years later there’s still this… this absence, and the desire to fill it with something can be overwhelming. But to certain people clones can be like projections of the originals – abstract figures, actors on film, a cast of shadows. If we had another little girl walking around this house inside a shell that looked like AK, wouldn’t that only make the void blacker?”

  Jackie started to cry and Davis joined her, but he didn’t go to her and she didn’t come to him.

  – 19 -

  Big Rob’s office was so tiny he couldn’t clear the space between either side of his desk and the wall without sliding through hip-first. Sally Barwick sat in a foam-padded aluminum chair with torn vinyl upholstery. If she stretched a muscled leg out in front of her, her red shoe would have hit Big Rob’s metal desk before it straightened. She could tilt her head back on her long brown neck and knock on the wall behind her, and Big Rob, from his chair, could do the same to the opposite wall. Phil Canella’s lanky body was wedged between a filing cabinet and the wall, the only other human-sized space in the room. Philly, like Big Rob a former cop turned private investigator, had driven down from the northern suburbs on a case. Just dropped in to say hi.

  Barwick held up a three-sided section of sandwich from the Ogden Avenue Deli, one flight down. The thick, striated layers of meat and lettuce and tomato and toast made it difficult to bite no matter how many angles she tried.

  “It’s not him,” she said after managing a mouthful of bread with some mayo and turkey.

  “How do you know?” Big Rob asked.

  “The Finn kid has a birthmark. Eric Lundquist did not.”

  “So what does that prove?”

  “They’re clones, Biggie. Genetic duplicates.”

  “What do you know about clones, Barwick? I mean really. You some kind of expert all of a sudden?”

  “It’s common knowledge. Read Time magazine. Go hire a doctor, an expert or whatever, and ask him if you want.”

  “I’m not hiring a doctor, Barwick. The Finns are already paid up. I’m not going back to them to get money for an opinion, and I’m not paying some doc out of my pocket.”

  “Take my word for it, then.”

  His cheeks filled with corned beef, Big Rob waved an inch-thick red folder over his head. “I don’t need your word for it. I got eight months of diligence here that says Lundquist’s the guy, and I’m not going back to the Finns and telling them that it’s suddenly a whodunit.”

  “Okay. So what do you want?”

  “I want you to give me the discs and sign off on your interview with the old lady. Based on the work we’ve done just following the paper (solid detective work, by the way – congratulations), the Finns already think Eric Lundquist’s their guy, and if we hand over the interview they’ll get exactly what they want: a biography of their son’s cell donor.”

&nbs
p; “Except Eric Lundquist’s not their son’s cell donor.”

  “Says you. These people are chasing a phantom, anyway. This Lundquist fellow, the clone donor or whatever, no matter what, he ain’t the same person as their kid. You got your nature, and then you got your nurture, and so forth. So what if you’re right? Whatever curiosity they got, you’ve got the stuff that can satisfy them.”

  Sally said, “If Lundquist’s not the donor, don’t you want to know who is? Something stinks here, Biggie. We might be on to a huge scandal here. Woodward and Bernstein shit. Don’t you want to know why all the paperwork, all the medical records, point to Lundquist as the cell donor, but the two kids don’t look alike? Why the Finn kid has a birthmark that Eric Lundquist never had?”

  “I want to know everything my customer wants to know. No more. Right, Philly?” His friend nodded. “The customer wants to know about Eric Lundquist.”

  Barwick took a pair of audio discs from her bag and slid them across Big Rob’s immaculate desk. “I’ve already transcribed the relevant sections.”

  Big Rob tagged Canella with a frustrated look. “Let me tell you something, Sals,” Philly said. “We’re in the business of providing answers, not truth. When a woman hires us to follow her no-good husband, we follow him and take pictures. If her man’s got a good reason for being with his personal assistant at a Lincoln Avenue motel, that’s not our say-so.”

  Biggie added, “In the Finn case, we followed the evidence and we did good work. The client will be happy. We should be happy.”

  Barwick stuffed the check in the pocket of her denim shirt. “You’ll call me with the next job?”

  “Yeah, Sally. Next week. I got a rich geezer on the Gold Coast maybe messing with his grandson’s babysitter. Evening surveillance. Real sick stuff. You’ll like it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t get down on yourself. You’re just starting out, but you did terrific work here. That ‘oral history’ thing is classic. And crap, how many times do we get a chance to make a client happy? Most of our jobs end in divorce or a lawsuit.”

  “You’re a wide man, Biggie.”

  “You mean wise man, hon.” But he knew what she meant.

  Home in Andersonville, north of Wrigley, by the lake, Barwick cooled off by rinsing her shallow Afro in the sink and read the same page of a paperback novel six times before going to bed. Asleep, she dreamed she was sitting on the beach at Lynde Lake with Justin Finn, grown to a man of eighteen or so. His face looked like Eric Lundquist’s. On his back was the kettle-shaped birthmark. He took her hand and let her slide it up and down the sides of his hairless, powerful legs.

  “No worries,” Justin said. “You’ve got a job. But I’ve got a job, too.”

  “Can I help?” Sally asked him.

  “Shhh,” Justin said, and then they were off the beach and in the front room of Mrs. Lundquist’s house with the knickknacks and the M amp;M’s. Justin touched her cheek, and he walked out the door into the snow.

  Justin at Five

  – 20 -

  Before Jackie stopped pretending she knew her husband well enough to properly shop for him, she bought him a new home computer for his birthday (the one he had, obsolete three times over, was hardly used). She thought it might help Davis with his hobby, which devoured nearly all his free time now. At least she assumed he was still working on his family project down there; she passed by the blue room only on the way to the laundry and back or into the unfinished crawl space where she stored many of her gardening tools.

  Davis connected the wires, plugged in the peripherals, and started to input the history of his dead family, but it felt like starting over to him. The special reports and hyperlinked organization offered by the computer seemed redundant, and not better than the paper system he’d spent years refining. However, he found it useful for research on the Internet (research he had been doing previously in spare moments at work), and for an occasional hand of virtual bridge. He and Jackie used to play two Saturdays a month with Walter and Nancy Hirschberg, but they’d fazed out the regular game around the time of Jackie’s breakdown, and Davis hadn’t partnered with his wife over an actual deck of cards in more than seven years.

  On a Sunday afternoon, while he was listening to the Cubs and Cards on WGN and skimming Internet message boards for info about an elusive great-uncle on his mother’s side, a software advertisement snared his attention.

  THINK IT’S FUN LOOKING INTO YOUR FAMILY’S PAST? NOW TRY GAZING INTO YOUR FAMILY’S FUTURE WITH SIX BRIDGES SOFTWARE’S NEW FACEFORGER 6.0!

  He clicked through to the Six Bridges Web site and read only a few paragraphs on the product before confessing his Visa number to the company’s secure server. He was given a password and downloaded the program and manual to his computer.

  He installed the software and experimented with scans of Anna Kat as a baby. He ran the program through trial after trial, aging her to seventeen after entering dozens of variables: Will the subject be a drinker? A smoker? How much? Will the subject spend time outdoors? In the sun? Unprotected? How much? In one week, he had a result good enough to print. Davis held the paper next to a photo taken of AK the Christmas before she was killed. It wasn’t perfect – the eyes weren’t quite right – but it was pretty damn close. Any friend of hers would recognize it as AK for certain.

  The following day he purchased a digital camera at an electronics store and rescheduled two appointments to free up the afternoon. The street where the Finns lived curved east of their home, and Davis parked his car on the other side of the bend, where he still had a good view of the front door and driveway. He waited there, the engine running, listening to public radio. Hours passed with no sign of Martha or Justin. He dozed briefly. Around five-thirty, a Mercedes sedan pulled into the driveway. Terry Finn, home from the office. Alone.

  In the past year Davis had started to feel foolish and guilty about Justin, and if it hadn’t been for the boy’s regular checkups with Joan, he’d have tried to forget about him altogether. What had he been thinking? Temporary insanity was the only way he could rationalize it, and in doing so he actually felt some empathy for his wife’s history of emotional illness. It would be another ten or more years before Justin even remotely resembled AK’s killer, and her killer would be ten or more years older as well. Possibly even an old man. In all likelihood, they’d be impossible to match by sight, even if he could get them in the same room. He was playing a game of catch-up he would never win. And what if the Finns moved away? How had he planned to keep track of the boy then? It shamed him to think that he had started such a radical experiment without giving two serious thoughts to any of it.

  Of course, logic had never been a constant in his equation. Only in his most dreamlike fantasies had he expected to use Justin as a means to capture AK’s murderer. Even if Justin grew up, and Davis or someone else recognized the face, how would he explain it to the police? What would he have to offer as proof? Certainly not his reputation as a respected physician, which would be shattered the instant he confessed to such an insane plot.

  All Davis longed for on the day he exchanged the stuff in his credenza with Eric Lundquist’s DNA was a chance to look into the eyes of his daughter’s murderer. Or, in Justin’s case, a simulacrum of his daughter’s murderer. Over the past year, the day when he could satisfy that desire had begun to seem more and more remote. The new software had fanned those smoldering embers again. If he could just get a good photo of the kid, he could plug a dozen variables into the machine, find the face he’d been searching for, and extinguish this latent compulsion once and for all. Davis could finally accept Anna Kat’s murder, Justin Finn could live a healthy life unaware of the machinations that had created him, and Jackie could have her husband back whole. Their marriage had been strained since AK’s death and hyper extended since Jackie’s breakdown. Their latest bout of conjoined misery had been the result of his neglect, not her instability, and Davis was convinced he could make her happy again. Once he stopped to
rturing himself, he could stop torturing his wife.

  When it became clear the Finns had retired for the evening, however, he realized none of this would happen tonight.

  He waited until Saturday morning to try again. After half an hour Terry, Martha, and Justin pulled away in a Chevy minivan and he followed at a conservative distance. They drove less than a mile, parking the car in the moderate bustle of downtown Northwood, and Davis found an angled spot on the street about half a block away. He followed them into Starbucks.

  The coffee shop was packed from rear to window, and when the door shut it trapped Davis inside with the fresh-brewed aromas. There were half a dozen people here he knew. He should have set up across the street and tried to sneak a picture from there when the family walked out, but now that he was in, he couldn’t turn around and leave.

  “Hi, Dr. Moore,” Libby Carlisle said to him. Libby had a stout athlete’s build with thick, strong legs, and her hair was kinky and rust-colored. She wasn’t pretty, but her toothy smile reminded Davis of a famous actress and so he found her looks compelling by association. Libby had been a friend of AK’s. At one time, maybe her best friend. Davis hadn’t seen her since the funeral.

  “Hi, Libby,” said Davis. Positioned by the only exit, he was certain the Finns couldn’t escape. “What are you doing home?”

  “I’m married now, in case you didn’t know,” she said, patting the handle of the baby stroller at her side. “Thom and I moved back here about six months ago. Weird, isn’t it? When you’re in high school all you want to do is get the heck out of town. Then something always pulls you back.” She wasn’t at all self-conscious about the loss they both shared and Davis appreciated that. Talking with AK’s old friends was usually an exhausting chore.

  “Yeah. Funny,” Davis said.

  “Say hi to Mrs. Moore,” said Libby, backing out the door, pulling her child behind her.