Cast Of Shadows

– 95 -

Cheap cardboard boxes in the old basement blue room were stacked to the ceiling along two adjacent walls. Files and papers and binders and tapes and discs. Witness statements, police reports, autopsy findings, crime scene photos. They still had more to box up, lots more, and Joan, in cuffed blue jeans and a white sleeveless shirt, surveyed the remains and had a hard time believing it had all fit in this room. Twenty years of wondering and waiting, puzzling and praying were recorded on these pages, and just like that Davis was throwing it all away.

“It’s over,” he told her the night Sam Coyne was delivered to death row in orange prison scrubs and chains that shackled his wrists to his waist and his ankles to each other. “I want it all out.”

Joan walked over to the chair where he was sitting and creased herself into his lap. “Do you mean it? All of it?”

He wrapped his old and freckled arms around her like a safety bar on a carnival ride. “All of it,” he said. “Every page, every index card, every crackpot theory I scribbled on a memo pad, every computer sketch, every staple, every paper clip, I want it out on the curb. I’ll call somebody to haul it away.”

“To burn it?”

“Yes!” he said. “To burn it!”

They would pack it up together and it would take an entire weekend, not that the weekends were that different from the weekdays anymore, or wouldn’t be when all the bad memories were turned to char and ash and her husband was one hundred percent hers. She would retire too, in the fall, after her patients had the chance to find new doctors. And though, at forty-nine, every month seemed shorter than the last one, the autumn seemed ages away, as far away as summer seemed to a ten-year-old at Christmas. Joan passed the time by dreaming up ways they could use the room once it was emptied.

“An art studio,” she said. “We could take up painting together.”

“I like it,” he said.

“Or an exercise room.”

“We walk.”

“But in the winter…”

“That’s true.”

“We could buy a pool table.”

He laughed. “I’ve never seen you shoot pool.”

“You could teach me.”

“I used to be good…”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“…in med school.”

“So prove it,” she said.

He also ordered her to haul away his family files, the one ton or so of paper and cardboard and old photographs that connected him to Will Denny and Anna Kat and everyone else on his family tree. “Call the historical society,” he said. “The Newberry Library. The Mormons. Maybe they’ll want it. I don’t care anymore. Don’t need it anymore.” Joan was delighted.

A dozen times in the last few months she had marveled out loud at the word “trial,” saying how apt it was, not just for the defendant but for everyone with a relationship to the Coyne case. The detectives seemed to age on the stand. The state’s attorney lost thirty pounds, and the papers speculated that the beef-eating people of the state of Illinois might balk now at electing someone so thin and sickly to be their governor. Joan was nauseated every morning, the ordeal being as close to a pregnancy as she would have, and at the end of gestation her discomfort would be over, and a life – twin lives, actually, Davis’s and hers – would be born again.

She filled a box to overflowing and forced the flaps shut, knowing her work didn’t have to be pretty. The boxes with handles were for the convenience of burly hired men who would come to cart it all away on Monday. What a wonder of a day that will be! How big this room will look, empty except for possibilities!

Joan assembled a new box and taped its bottom and reached for a file drawer to empty into it. These documents were old, nearly as old as Anna Kat’s murder, yellowed and torn into tabs where pages had protruded at the top and their edges had been slammed and buffeted by the opening and closing of the drawer. Between them Davis had slipped data discs written in ancient formats, and she wondered if you could even find a computer to read them anymore. She tossed a half dozen into the box and they landed with a dull, plastic splat.

From the back of the drawer Joan retrieved a brown folder belted shut with a stale rubber band. The contents were pristine. Barely handled. I wonder if Davis even looked at these, she thought. They appeared to be witness statements from Anna Kat’s friends, taken by the police in the days and weeks after her murder, and every one of a dozen was bound on the left margin with black wire, like a school report. Scanning the interviews, Joan understood why Davis might not have read them. They were emotional, devastating, punctuated with sentimental reminiscences and long tangents about trips the girls had taken with AK, or funny things she had said, or selfless acts she’d performed on their behalf. Little of it seemed pertinent to the investigation, and all of it would have been tough for him to read.

One would have been more difficult than the rest.

It stood out because of a note attached to the cover with brittle tape. It was scribbled from one detective to another:

Ken -

This kid’s alibi checks out – he was with his parents at the time of the girl’s death. Keep this info from the Moores for now. No reason to put them through it. If we get a suspect, I’ll deal with it then.

Mike

Joan looked around the room. Davis had gone upstairs for something. She had been half listening when he told her what. “Honey, have you seen this?” she called to him.

She heard his footsteps maneuver to the top of the stairs. “Seen what?”

“This thing,” she said, distracted now, turning the first page and seeing, as a tremor of horror moved through her torso, as a spasm of bad feeling shook sweat from her pores, that what she held in her hands was an interview with seventeen-year-old Sam Coyne.

“Down in a minute,” she heard him say.

Joan began to read, absorbing just a few lines at a time before she was compelled to turn the page.

ML: Several people saw you at the Gap the day Anna Katherine was killed.

SC: Yeah, I was there.

ML: Were you having a relationship with her?

SC: What, like officially?

ML: Yeah. Officially.

SC: We were just messing around. Just sex and stuff. It was no big deal.

ML: Did you have intercourse with her that day?

SC: Yeah. In one of the dressing rooms.

ML: And then?

SC: And then I went home.

Another page:

SC: She was a freak. I guess I am too. We had fun. But we kept it a secret.

ML: Why?

SC: I don’t know. It wasn’t anything exclusive. I see other girls. She’s got this boyfriend, Dan. He was sort of her boyfriend but she wasn’t really into him. She had a dangerous side he didn’t understand. Anyway, we didn’t want people talking. I was seeing other girls and I think she was embarrassed.

ML: Embarrassed?

SC: I think she wished she could be the kind of person who didn’t want to be with a guy like me. But she did want to be with me. We did it all the time: in school, at her house, at my house, at work. The more dangerous, the better. She just didn’t want anyone else to know.

And another:

ML: Did you see anyone else in the Gap that day?

SC: There were lots of people.

ML: No one suspicious?

SC: Nah.

ML: No one who looked like they didn’t belong there?

SC: I guess I’m not sure what that means, but no.

Joan closed the report. She had a vision of Davis’s eyes when he read it. Of the tears. The blindness. The anger. The phone call to the police. You knew all along there hadn’t been a rape! You never told me! The original detectives all retired now. The cheap boxes unpacked. The file cabinets filled and reorganized. A new computer at the desk, one with more power and speed. Late nights reassessing all the evidence with fresh and wizened eyes. Wondering how he could have missed this. What else he could have missed. The guilt. The sleepless nights. The new passion. The fury. The madness. Rededicating his life to the capture of a new nameless, faceless killer. A killer still out there. A killer still laughing, still pleasuring himself twenty years later with thoughts of the day he killed Davis Moore’s little girl. Vengeance. Coldness. And Justin. Poor Justin. His sad life for nothing. A boy who never should have been born again into this world. Who was miserable because of it, right up until the day he died of an overdose. How to cope with that? The responsibility. The culpability. And not just Justin, but Jackie. His first wife. Troubled Jackie. Hadn’t her husband’s obsession pushed Jackie beyond her limits? His obsession and this goddamn conspiracy, which Joan had once been a part of? Hadn’t it driven Jackie to her death? And wasn’t Joan at fault, too? Hadn’t she covered for Davis? Abetted him? Loved him? Flown to Brixton with him? And Phil Canella? Dead for nothing. For a mistake. An assumption. A misunderstanding. A file, a single file among thousands, unread. Davis’s feet on the stairs.

Davis’s feet on the stairs.

Joan shuffled Sam Coyne’s statement into the middle of the stack and tossed the whole lot into the open box. Coyne was still a killer, wasn’t he, even if he hadn’t killed AK? He killed Deirdre Thorson and those other girls. She piled another layer of paper on top without investigating its provenance, covering the lost witness statements like thin frosting over a cake.

Davis appeared in the doorway with a glass of pale pulpy liquid for each of them, garnished with wedges of fresh lemon. “Have I seen what?”

“Nothing,” Joan said. She took the lemonade. He smiled at her. He sighed.

“What a mess,” Davis said.

And his wife, who loved him dearly, entombed the contents of each box with long strips of brown tape.