This coffee shop, named Gimbel’s, had the best little chocolate pastries, airy French ones, which was why he was sitting at this window counter for the third straight day. No one thinks anything about it now, but later, when the girl behind the counter is being asked by the cops if she saw anyone or anything unusual lately, she’ll tell them, There was this guy in here for the last couple days and I’d never seen him before, and then they’ll show her a picture of Byron Bonavita and ask her if it could have been him, keeping in mind that this photo is over seven years old now, and she’ll say, Yeah it could have been this guy, maybe a couple years older and heavier, and the papers will run the Bonavita manhunt on its front page again tomorrow. It was all becoming so predictable.
An hour ago he had walked into the clinic across the street and asked for some literature. It was a cool northern California day and he could see why people paid a fortune in rent to live here. If it weren’t for the earthquakes and the fact that his job didn’t permit him to take a permanent address, he might think about moving here himself to enjoy the temperate bay climate and the French pastries. There would be other things to consider, however. Like his neighbors. There were like-minded folks in this part of the country, but you had to look hard to find them.
After the receptionist handed him a stack of information ( disinformation, he would prefer to call it), Mickey asked to use the rest room. Security was unusually lax here, probably because he’d never been to northern California before. They probably thought they were off Byron Bonavita’s radar. The bathroom smelled like alcohol and oranges. When he finished his business he washed his hands and walked out of the men’s room and across the street and ordered a coffee and a pastry and read some of the clinic literature. The brochures pictured happy families, unburdened of recent stresses, which might have included infertility or hereditary disease or just the unpredictable timing of bearing children the natural way or the inconvenience of adoption or all of the above.
Fifteen minutes ago, a nurse from the clinic had entered the shop and picked up an order of six coffees, which she must have phoned in. She did a double take when his eyes met hers. Maybe she had seen him in the clinic, or maybe she saw that he was reading the clinic’s brochures. It couldn’t have been so unusual for prospective patients to stop in the coffee shop after a visit to the clinic. The only way it might have gone pear-shaped, really, would have been if the nurse had conferred with the girl behind the counter and they had lumped their private observations together to make a suspicion, but the nurse didn’t do that. She gathered up her coffees in a cardboard box, checked the integrity of the lids, and rushed back to the clinic, crossing the four lanes ladder-style, one at a time, in stops and starts. Mickey’s carelessness wasn’t really carelessness after all, when you considered the remote chance that any person might put her two together with someone else’s two and come up with a conspiratorial four.
When Mickey finished his coffee he looked at his watch. It was later than he thought and he wished every town with a fertility clinic also had a place as nice as this coffee shop, where the pastry was so good and the time passed so quickly. He gathered up the brochures and folded them into the pocket of his green windbreaker. With a wave to the girl behind the counter – Holy shit, Officer, I sure do remember Byron Bonavita. He sat right there by the window, looking across at the clinic, and he even waved at me friendly-like when he left! – Mickey passed through the glass door into the sea-seasoned air that was just the right temperature and began the walk to his car, which he’d parked far enough away that he wouldn’t have any problems with fire engines and black-and-white traffic.
When the clinic men’s room exploded he was half a mile on, his back to the concussion, which sounded like a steel drum being struck inside a giant pillow. He turned with the others on the sidewalk, exchanged with them puzzled glances and What on earth s? Then after a pause he continued on to his car, where he looked like just another guy rushing home to the evening news to find out the source of that nasty black smoke in the distance.
– 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.
– 25 -
Joan had to stop watching the television police dramas she loved. She found herself empathizing with the bad guys.
Or feeling as guilty as them, anyway. She felt guilty all the time. And warm. Hot. She sweated through her days. Her nights were sleepless, her mornings unbearable. How she hated the mornings when the scenarios in her head all seemed so bleak. Public shame. Loss of her practice. Prison. Sure, on the cop shows, women’s prison didn’t
