could celebrate with cigars on the first tee. “There is bad news, right?”
Graham nodded. “Martha Finn is pressing charges against you with the Lake County D.A. for stalking her son. I negotiated a voluntary surrender at noon tomorrow. They won’t announce it ahead of time. There won’t be a perp walk. That should keep it off the television news, anyway. The daily papers will probably bury it in the eighth ’graph of the Weiss story.”
The room around Davis tilted and shook like a cheap carnival ride. “Jesus Christ!”
Graham opened his briefcase and pulled out a stack of papers prepared just that morning by a paralegal. “Relax. Relax. We can look over the sentencing guidelines, the precedents. You’ll make bail at the arraignment, we’ll plead it to a misdemeanor, there’ll be a small fine, community service. I don’t expect the legal ramifications to be that bad.”
“Not bad?” Davis shrieked. He stood and hustled across the room to shut the door. “What about my practice? My medical license?”
“I scheduled a conference call at one-thirty with a firm in D.C. that’s more in tune with the medical ethics side. You’ll have to cancel our tee time, I’m afraid.”
“God. What a mess,” Davis said, falling back into his chair.
“Don’t worry. We’ll clean it up. But I think you should start today by finally telling me the real reason you bought all those pictures of Justin Finn.”
Davis shook his head. “Like I’ve told you many times, the last being at dinner Thursday, I can’t tell you. It was an experiment. Beyond that…”
The attorney leaned back in the leather chair and under his shifting weight it made a sound like an old record scratching. “Is the boy yours?”
“Justin?” Davis nearly snickered. “No. He’s not mine.” He tried to determine how little he’d have to confess. “In fact, he’s a clone.”
A thin brow tented over Graham’s left eye. “If that’s out there, the daily papers just became more interested in this story, especially the tabs. What’s special about him?”
“Nothing. He’s a healthy nine-year-old boy, conceived like dozens of others in this clinic.”
“But you don’t take the same interest in all your cloned children.”
“None of the other children I’ve cloned live a mile and a half from my door. Graham, you were sitting in the room when I answered all of this in my deposition for the Weiss trial.”
“She didn’t ask that many questions, frankly, and we were able to dodge most of the tough ones due to confidentiality laws. It’s a good thing you were never cross-examined. When you plea this out, and that’s my recommendation since you’ve already expressed a reluctance to testify about this matter publicly, you’ll have to stand before the judge and elocute. Say exactly what you did. I’d rather not hear the whole story for the first time at your sentencing.”
“All right,” Davis said. He had, after all, considered that it might come to this someday. “I had a theory I was trying to prove through Justin. Or I have one.”
“What theory is that?”
“That cloned children are even more like contemporaneous twins than we’ve imagined. That they share personality traits, interests, abilities, even when raised in a radically different environment. I was hoping to put together a longitudinal study following Justin’s development through childhood and compare it to the development of his cell donor.”
“Aren’t there other doctors, psychologists, doing the same thing?”
“Lots.”
“All with the parents’ permission, though.”
“That’s why they’re flawed. If Martha Finn knew what I was doing, she’d start to get curious about Justin’s donor. She’d ask a lot of questions. More importantly, it might affect the way she raised Justin.”
Footsteps thumped in the hall outside and Graham worried for a moment that they were talking too loudly. “Well, I have three things to say about that. First, you’ve made her very angry. Second, I don’t think you can hide behind scientific method with a story about half-assed secret research, and third, did you know that when the boy was three years old, Martha Finn and her now ex-husband hired a private investigator to track down Justin’s cell donor?”
Davis brought a hand to his face. He hadn’t shaved today and he’d noticed earlier, in the washroom, that more of his whiskers were coming in gray. He kneaded the woolly hairs with his fingers. “I didn’t,” he said, now fearing his attorney knew more than he had allowed. “What did they find out?”
Graham opened his briefcase again and removed a folder with a summary of discovery from the Weiss case. He flipped through it to a highlighted section. “Eric Lundquist. Syracuse, New York.”
“There you go,” Davis said. “Eric Lundquist. I wish I had known they knew about him. I’d have canceled the study. It would have saved me a lot of sneaking around.”
“If it had kept you from sneaking around the Finn boy, it would have saved you more than that,” Graham said.
“I suppose that’s true.”
“I just want you to know that I can’t help you suborn perjury,” Graham said.
“Then I won’t ask you to,” Davis said. “But you think I should plea it out?”
“If this is as good as your story gets? Yes.”
“Dammit,” Davis said. “Okay. But I want to make it a condition of the agreement that they won’t pursue Joan or anyone else here at the clinic. Joan was helping me with the other thing, in Brixton, helping me look for AK’s killer, but she had nothing to do with Justin. This is all on me.”
“We’ll ask,” Graham said. “If they believe you’re being honest with them, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Do you believe I’m being honest with you?” Davis asked.
“I’m your lawyer,” Graham said. “Believing you is the best I can do.”
– 49 -
Unprotected from the assault of cold rain that seemed to materialize from nothing in the yellow domes of streetlights above his head, Detective Teddy Ambrose walked around the blue apartment dumpster and felt his insides twist: everything above the equator of his navel clockwise, everything below it in the opposite direction.
He tried to remember what his life had been like yesterday, just hours ago, before this shift began. His wife was pregnant with their second, but they hadn’t told anyone; the two of them glowed from their shared happy secret. If he could finagle a way around the department’s residency requirements, they were thinking about renting out the two-flat he’d inherited from his parents and moving to a bungalow in the suburbs. In the meantime, he and another cop, a guy he’d been through academy with, were ready with the down payment on a boat in Belmont Harbor.
Yesterday, as he’d driven up Grand Avenue toward Area Five headquarters, through the wet curtains of an all-day storm, he’d thought of the dozen closed murders he had credited to his name. He had so few open cases he had been likely to draw the next call. That was fine with him. Bring it on. His luck had been amazing of late: the pregnant teen who turned in her ex for clubbing his brother with an anchor and dumping his body in the lake; the hit-and-run who’d left just about the most costly paint flecks in the history of painted Porsches on the victim’s artificial leg; the carpenter who abandoned a screwdriver engraved with his own initials in the eye socket of his wife’s lover. The night before at Dante’s Tavern, Ambrose had boasted to his fellow cops that there was a point at which luck had to be considered destiny, and the number of cases Ambrose and his partner, Ian Cook, had sent to the D.A. in the last six months was surely on the verge of qualifying.
“You’ll jinx us.” Ian laughed.
The phone rang at 1:47 this morning with word of a female body discovered under a dumpster in a North Avenue alley. And when the evidence technician met their car with an umbrella and recounted the meager evidence at the scene, his partner spat angrily into a garbage can.
“You jinxed us, Brosie. I told ya you’d jinx us.”
