He came to their attention through one of hundreds of anonymous tips phoned in to the Wicker Man hotline. The day of the call, Ambrose had sold his two-flat for twenty grand over asking price. A sign, he thought. This guy, the Candlestick Maker, set Ambrose’s famously instinctive guts churning. He was educated. Successful. Handsome. Smart. A real Ted Bundy type. The caller, an insomniac, said she had noticed him coming and going from his downtown condo at weird times, within hours of each of the last two killings. Not much to go on, but he fit the profile almost perfectly. Ambrose put his name on the wall and ordered his building on intermittent overnight surveillance.
Pressure to solve the case came in waves. Sometimes quiet months would slip past and the papers would speculate that the Wicker Man had moved away, or been picked up on some unrelated charge and was trapped in a jail cell downstate. Then another body would turn up and the heat would come down on Ambrose’s neck like desert sun. It never seemed to bother him. Even though the murders remained unsolved, most on the force agreed Teddy was the guy for the job, if only because he was so good at handling the mayor and the police superintendent.
At one of the Wicker Man press conferences, an ornery and sarcastic Ambrose gave a reply to a reporter’s question that since had been e-mailed to nearly every police district in the country. Some cops were said to have printed it out and framed it in their squad rooms. It was known as “the Ambrose Doctrine.”
“There are never any clues,” Ambrose said. “Murderers, rapists, and thieves never leave evidence. Why would they? Christ, if they left evidence, real evidence, we’d catch them in a day. Just pull up outside their house or apartment with a tactical team and a warrant and kick in the door and arrest them.
“In reality, the job of a detective is to empathize with the victim. You do that enough times, and listen to your gut, you’ll catch your share of bad guys.”
Justin at Fifteen
– 58 -
She decided to tell him on his birthday, more as an instrument of procrastination than ceremony. Maturity wasn’t an issue – Justin no doubt had been capable of digesting the news five years ago, when he built his own telescope and taught himself conversational Spanish. Martha half expected him to tell her he’d already figured it out. That would be a relief. It would be far better than the response she feared, which was disappointment and possibly anger. Stoic Justin had amazing self-control and she hadn’t seen him truly angry since he was a small child, but this might be the kind of news that could set him off. If not the news itself, the fact that she had been keeping secrets from him. If she waited any longer it might just make the inevitable tantrum even harder to control.
Not that she could take him in a confrontation even now. Justin had grown taller than she and no longer looked like the runt of his class. He had more friends now, oddball types, admittedly, but they weren’t all the same kind of oddballs. They were nerds and jocks and stoners and band kids who, for some reason, were all drawn to her son. He was more popular with girls than he had been, especially smart girls, but the fact that he was three years younger than everyone else in the senior class made him pretty much off limits as far as dating went. He had the kind of quiet charisma that would make him a star as an adult, she was convinced, but it was lost on all but a few of his high school peers.
He’ll show them, she thought. One day he’ll show them all what he’s made of.
He had opened his presents – mostly books Martha couldn’t read for three pages without falling asleep. Michel Foucault was his latest obsession, and she had found some fine used hardcovers. Justin didn’t enjoy paperbacks to nearly the same degree. He liked to grip a book with both hands, as if the knowledge were entering through his fingers instead of his eyes.
“There’s something you should know,” she said, and motioned for him to come off the floor and sit next to her on the couch, where she could grab his arms if they started to flail, or wrap her elbows around an ankle if he started to flee. Then she told him, without much preface but with a brief rationalization having to do with heredity (which she knew he understood) and with Huntington’s disease (which had taken his grandmother and which would probably take her someday), and in the end she said she hoped the news didn’t make him unhappy because a natural-born son wouldn’t have been him and it was him whom she loved, him she couldn’t imagine life without.
Justin wanted to know about the procedure: where had it been done, how had it been done, who else knew? Does Dr. Keith know? He asked about the donor and Martha explained that he was dead, but that he had been a good boy who lived out east and he had died in an accident when he was very young, but in death he had given three very important gifts – his eyes to a blind person, his liver to a sick person, and a single blood cell to your father and me so that we could have you.
Justin could tell she was nervous, and he calmed her. He wasn’t upset. He was glad that she had told him. Did his father know she was going to tell him today? He did? Well, it’s no surprise he didn’t want to be here for this, either. They laughed. She cried a little. Never worry about telling me the truth, he told her, and she promised she wouldn’t. Never again.
It wasn’t the whole truth, and at the time Justin assumed his mother knew, as he did, that the story was a lie. Soon, he would find out differently and he would hate himself for mistaking her for a coconspirator. Even now, wondering if she was holding something back, he loved her for telling him. For giving him on his birthday the thing he had been searching for in all of those gift-wrapped books.
– 59 -
In New York, being a liberal didn’t mean putting a target on your back.
When he took the job as managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, Stephen Malik knew the publisher was using him. The Tribune had long been a Republican paper in a Democratic town, and he understood the editorial page would always try to preach to its conservative suburban base. Malik was brought in to answer charges from city readers (and supporters of the current governor) that the news division had a right-wing bias as well. Malik’s liberal credentials gave the Trib some cover. And of course, Malik knew, his presence provided them with a convenient fall guy if things ever went wrong.
Beginning in June, boy had they.
The frayed end that unraveled it all was a story on an anti-cloning protest in front of the Dirksen Federal Building. The protesters – or more accurately, advocates – were expressing their support for the Buckley-Rice Anti-Cloning Act. Written by a young and promising reporter named Scott Harmon, the article estimated the size of the crowd at around 150, and described in detail the signs and the banners they carried: STOP THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL. MAN CAN CLONE A BODY BUT ONLY GOD CAN CLONE A SOUL. CLONING = SIN. Harmon also quoted a small group of counter-protesters. “These people are just afraid of progress,” said one, identified as Cameron Straub. “They’re ignorant.” Another young man, a Naperville resident named Denny Dreyfus, claimed to be a clone himself, as well as a Catholic: “I feel like [the protesters] are denying me my humanity,” he said. “It’s like they’re telling me I’m not human. That I’m an affront to God.”
A freelance writer living in Wrigleyville took an interest in the second quote. His name was also Denny Dreyfus, and he began working on a feature story about this clone who shared his name. He thought he could sell it to Chicago magazine, for which he’d written several articles in the past.
There was a problem, however. He couldn’t locate the other Denny Dreyfus. Not in Naperville or anywhere else in Illinois. He tried looking for Cameron Straub, thinking the two might be friends. He couldn’t find anyone by that name at all.
When an e-mail query from Dreyfus the writer arrived at Stephen Malik’s desk, he felt ice against his spine. He remembered that story. He remembered looking at an early draft of it and wondering how it got past the Metro editor in the shape it was in. It hadn’t a single quote from pro-cloning counter-protestors. There must have been at least some of them making noise at a protest that size. Word came back that Harmon had interviewed several but didn’t think the quotes were that strong. “I don’t care,” Malik said. “Get the other point of view in there somehow.” The next version had the quotes from Denny Dreyfus and Cameron Straub.
