“I remember, like, three months ago, the police said they had a suspect and this guy with a bad mustache was all over the TV, but they never arrested him and then I never heard anything more about it. What happened to him?”
Justin grimaced. “That’s been a major embarrassment for the police. The suspect’s name was Armand Gutierrez, and he was connected to two of the female victims. One had been in a ballroom-dancing class with him at the Discovery Center and another was a regular customer at the grocery store where he worked. Investigators thought it was just too big a coincidence, and so everything about him seemed suspicious after that. He had some kind of weird porn collection – nothing illegal, but it piqued the interest of the cops who searched his apartment. He was also a butcher in an Italian deli, and one of the male victims had been carved up brutally with a big knife. The police have been under intense pressure from City Hall to solve the case, and they leaked his name to the press last October in order to get some good news out there before the mayoral election. But Gutierrez had alibis for almost every night a body was found, and they just couldn’t make the case. Some cops still think he’s the killer, but the state’s attorney and the FBI have pretty much written Gutierrez off. He’s suing the city, by the way, and will probably make out with a bundle.”
“You mentioned the FBI.” A popular boy the kids all called Foo didn’t wait for Justin to call on him. “Do they have a, you know, what do you call that, where they look at the crime scenes and they write up what they think the killer is like-”
“A profile, ” Justin said. “Yeah, they believe he’s a white male, between the ages of twenty-five and forty- five, highly intelligent, if not educated, probably lives in Wicker Park or Ukrainian Village, or at least on the North or Near West Side. He’s shown incredible restraint – being able to go months, it appears, without killing anyone. The FBI believes this means that he is either in a highly supervised situation – that is, he’s institutionalized in some way, perhaps in a treatment facility or a halfway house, and his opportunities are somehow limited – or that he leaves the city for long stretches of time, or that he’s killed many more people than we know and has just done a better job of hiding their bodies.”
Ms. Eberlein, who was sitting in Justin’s usual chair, raised her hand. “You’ve obviously spent some time with this subject. Which of those scenarios do you think is most likely?”
Justin was standing behind a portable lectern that had been set up on Ms. Eberlein’s metal desk and he ducked his head modestly, as if he were looking for something among the notes in front of him. “None of them, actually.” He smiled. “I think he leads a pretty normal life – he might even be very successful, given that everyone agrees he is intelligent – and that he has another way of blowing off steam. Whatever it is that compels him to kill, he has another way of sublimating” – scoffing from somewhere, as if to say no fourteen-year-old would use that word if they weren’t just showing off – “his desire. Maybe he has an aggressive hobby, like boxing. Or maybe he’s into sadomasochism” – outright laughter – “and he’s able to get his kicks in nonlethal ways. But every once in a while, something just builds up inside him and he can’t help himself. He has to kill.”
Ms. Eberlein raised her eyebrows and whistled. “I think you’d make a pretty good FBI profiler yourself, Justin. It sounds like you’ve really gotten inside this guy’s head.” For better or worse, she thought to herself.
The bell rang and the students offered up lazy applause, and Justin smiled at Ms. Eberlein and switched places with her long enough to retrieve his books from under his chair. As the students bottlenecked at the door, she shouted the names of tomorrow’s presenters after their backs and opened her black vinyl grade book, where she wrote next to Justin’s name, “Creepy. A+.”
– 55 -
The panoramic cityscape through the window of Sam Coyne’s apartment was like a Realist painting on the days and nights when fog or rain or snow didn’t entirely obscure the view. However, on blustery days, which were common, even the pleated flannel curtains had more depth than the flat gray haze of the Chicago sky.
This night the air had clarity worthy of the pricey window-washing service Sam hired as a redundancy to his own fastidiousness. The empty skyscrapers glowed at twenty percent of their maximum wattage, lighting floor upon floor of unoccupied space. From thirty-nine stories up, the Lake Michigan shoreline was discernible only as an imaginary line separating the fluorescent city grid from the black void of the water. Sam loved how empty Lake Michigan was at night, loved the depth of its nothingness, and earlier this night, when he’d turned a twenty-six- year-old Leo Burnett art director onto her hands and knees, he made sure with the push of his hips and the pull of his hands that she could see the same blackness in the lake that he saw, and he could tell from her response – her narrow pelvis tight against his thighs, and the base of her skull pressing against the heel of his palm – that she was like him, that she recognized the blackness inside her was the blackness of nature, the blackness inside every one of us.
Sam slid out of bed and the sleeping girl spread her arm dreamily across the sheet to fill the divot in the mattress he’d left behind. He slipped down the hall to a guest room he’d converted into an office and opened his laptop. The screen brightened at his touch, as if it were glad to see him.
He clicked an icon for Shadow World and the game loaded, unspooling copyright notices and legalese and an animated intro, which he skipped after only a few frames. Recognizing him, and noting the time, the screen revealed an aerial shot of Chicago at night, the point of view soaring in off the lake and between buildings heading north. The game was plugged in to the National Weather Service so the Chicago on-screen was enjoying the same cloudless weather as the real city outside. In a matter of seconds Sam could see the steel-and-glass exterior of his own building, and then up, up, up thirty-nine stories to Sam’s home-office window. The on-screen point of view then entered the apartment as if the glass in the window had dissolved like sugar candy.
Sam donned a headset and manipulated the POV until it was identical to the one from his desk. He walked his avatar down the hall and looked in on the sleeping woman in his bed, his gaming persona, naturally, being as promiscuous as he was in real life. He had Shadow Sam go to the walk-in closet and put on a pair of khaki cargo pants and a black turtleneck. Shadow Sam walked quietly from the bedroom to the kitchen. He opened a drawer and removed a long knife, which he wrapped in a dish towel and placed in one of his roomy side pockets. He left the apartment and took the elevator to the garage and found his BMW in its assigned spot (his Shadow car had been stolen once, but it had been insured). He drove north along Shadow Lake Shore Drive. There was little traffic and he rolled the top back. The speedometer on his dash was frozen at sixty miles per hour, about fifteen over the speed limit. In his earpiece, the car hummed through the whistling night air. An old pink eyesore of a building appeared on the horizon and as he passed it he remembered reading that its real owners had managed to have its landmark status revoked and planned its demolition for later in the week. Sam wondered how up to speed the Shadow World coders could be and made a note to have Shadow Sam drive this way on Friday to see if the pink building were still part of the game.
He exited LSD at Fullerton and drove west, away from the lake. The white moon disappeared into the canopy of tall buildings and trees in Lincoln Park. He turned northwest on Lincoln and passed a bar called the York, which had a 4 a.m. license. He circled, found a parking spot, and walked back to the bar. The inventory panel on his screen reminded him of the contents of his pocket: one wallet, $300, one knife, one dish towel.
The York was crowded but a couple abandoned their seats at the bar, and Shadow Sam took one. He ordered a beer, left a fifty on the counter, and turned around to scope the room. Youngsters, hipsters, a desegregated mix of straight and gay. A pair of girls danced together to the jukebox Rolling Stones. They were both blonde and shapely and pretty in a cartoon way, as most everyone was in the game, save the True-to-Lifers. Sam took pride in the fact that his icon looked a lot like him. In fact, last year, when he was stuck in a gymless Saint Louis hotel and gained five pounds in a week, he updated his avatar with the extra weight. That kind of honesty was unusual among gamers.
He watched the girls dance for a while, their hips swaying and arms lifting in a repeatable programmed loop based loosely on the hustle, and then he asked if he could buy them drinks. He stood up and offered them his chair as well as the stool next to it. The bartender made more change from what remained of the fifty.
Their names were Donna and Lindsay. No one handed out his or her last name in Shadow World, except the hard-core True-to-Lifers or people looking to start a relationship. He said he was Sam.
“Lindsay, that’s a nice dress,” he said into the headset microphone. According to conversation protocol, gamers used the name of the person being addressed when there was more than one person within listening
