Cast Of Shadows

– 24 -

After three weeks with the new software and the soccer-field photographs of Justin, Davis had produced fifty-four different composite sketches, each using a different set of variables. Working from the police profile of the perpetrator, Davis assumed the killer had been younger than thirty-five, so he made a series that imagined Justin at twenty, another at thirty, and another group at forty. The oldest ones were grotesquely unreal, with features more appropriate to Australopithecus, so he discarded them.

The others he taped to the walls of his basement room, over and between the names of his relatives. There was nothing here he could be sure of yet. No reason to choose any of these faces over the others. There were a few patterns emerging, however, in the shape of the eyelids, in the width of the mouth, and in the curves about the lobes of the ears. Davis had very little confidence in the hair. He had no way to know how long the killer kept it, how he styled it, or even if he still had it on his head at all.

He spent nights in this room memorizing these faces, and in his thoughts they were a team, a gang, a mob, a cult. Thirty-six individuals each responsible for his daughter’s death. The devil goes by different names, and this monster had many heads.

This was a problem. How could he know which of these faces to hate? How could he feel anything like a catharsis when he wasn’t sure at which countenance he should be directing his rage? He hadn’t closed a chapter of his life the way he’d hoped; he’d opened the file on another mystery. The name of AK’s killer was still an unanswerable fill-in-the-blank, but his face was now a maddening multiple choice.

As he studied them, conversed with them, spent time inside their imaginary heads, he found one that seemed especially cruel. Especially soulless. He threw the others in a drawer and consulted only this one, spending long hours in the blue room with it, imagining the sketch to be real. For three weeks, as the autumn turned gray and cold, Davis tried to convince himself it was the face of his enemy. Tried to converse with it. To understand it. To accept it. That was the long-sought goal, after all, wasn’t it? Acceptance?

He couldn’t do it. Not with so many doubts. This couldn’t be why he risked his career. Why he now risked Joan’s career. For a few dozen lines drawn and colored and shaded by a computer program and chosen by him arbitrarily – for what reason? Because this is how Davis expected him to look? Bald. Snarling. Empty inside. Odds were good the guy didn’t look like that at all. Joan had been raped because her attacker didn’t look like the sort of guy who would attack her. AK wasn’t naive. Some nut had tried to kill her own father, after all. Her deranged murderer most likely didn’t look so deranged.

Davis sorted again through the three dozen sketches, this time pulling out not the ones that looked evil, but the ones that looked real. Familiar. Unthreatening. He narrowed them down to four.

He exported the pictures to Web-friendly files and then uploaded them to a list of crime-fighting Internet sites. Without revealing his name, he pleaded for any information about these men, or any man who resembled them. He was counting on a break from a stranger.

He didn’t offer too many details, not his name or the town where he lived or the specifics of the case. Using the handle JusticeForAK, he said he was a loving father and that he believed one of these men was his daughter’s killer, a man he was anxious to meet face-to-face. His open call sounded anguished and menacing and hinted at vigilantism, which was the tone he hoped to set. The people who would recognize a murderer might not be on speaking terms with the law, he reasoned, and if he ever found the man he was looking for, Davis couldn’t go to the cops, anyway.

He had been foolish to believe otherwise, but he understood now that the only way he could ever know the face of Anna Kat’s killer would be to put himself in the same room with him.

What he would do then, he couldn’t even guess.