from his own shooting that some days he wondered if it hadn’t happened in a TV movie.
The doorbell rang and Davis thought about not answering it. It was likely a package delivery that could just as well be left on the porch, or a neighborhood petition he didn’t want to sign. It could be kids from the middle school selling candy or candles in support of some band trip. He wasn’t against band trips, but he wasn’t exactly in favor of answering the door right now either, of interrupting his idle time. He was sitting by an open window, however, and his head must have been visible from the walk. After living at the same address for nearly three decades, he didn’t want to be known as the crazy old man who never answers his door. He stood up, flattening the paperback on an end table.
The boy had grown in six years and was so unlike a boy now. He was less than a hand shorter than Davis, and his long, blond curls danced above his head like spiraling Chinese kites in the light breeze. Muscles had started to assert themselves on his arms under a layer of fine hair. There were a few pink scars on his hands. He wore a silver chain around his neck. Something that one day would have to be shaved loitered under his nostrils and lips. His face was breaking out around his eyes and hairline, and he had a prominent red-and-white pimple at the end of his nose. He wore a two-toned button-down short-sleeve shirt, loose khakis, and sandals, the uniform of teen indifference.
“Dr. Moore,” was all he said.
Davis fought the dryness in his mouth by working the glands under his tongue, and he wondered what sort of trick this could be. He wondered who could be trying to fool him like this and what they expected him to do. He needed to know so he could do the opposite. Davis looked past the boy for some sign of his mother, scanning up and down the street for the red car she used to drive.
“What do you want, Justin? You shouldn’t be here.” He said it loudly in case someone was nearby, or in case Justin’s broad pockets had been fitted with a microphone.
“I wanted to ask you some questions,” he said, then sensing Davis’s reluctance, added, “I’d be in big trouble too if my mom knew I was here. I ditched a couple periods from school. But this is important.”
Davis was certain he was making a mistake, but waved the boy inside for the same reason all people do the wrong thing: the wrong thing is irresistible.
Justin paused in the foyer, polite and uncomfortable, weight on his right foot while his left sneaker dragged invisible half circles against the hardwood. Davis gestured toward the living room and followed him inside. The boy sat on the edge of the couch, knees pinned at angles to the coffee table as if black ink might ooze from the backs of his thighs if his legs came in contact with the cushions. Davis drew the front shade.
“Just a minute,” he told Justin. Davis picked up the cordless phone in the next room and dialed Joan. Her last appointment was at two-thirty and she had said something about stopping for groceries on the way home. She would flip if she knew Justin had been in the house.
“Hon,” he said, “could you pick me up some potting soil, and also some of that shampoo you bought last month? Yeah, that’s the one. Sorry, I should have put it on your list. Thanks. Love you.” That would add two stops to her route. He figured they had about forty-five minutes.
“It must be important for you to risk coming here,” Davis said, ignoring the minutes-long gap since Justin last spoke at the door. “What can I do for you?”
“Mom told me,” Justin said. He looked eager, and although he had trouble sitting still, Davis identified his jitters as a symptom of his age: a lack of comfort with his mutating body, fatigue from the pains that came to his growing legs and arms and spine at night. It wasn’t nervousness. Coming here was an act of confidence, in fact. Defiance. Justin’s eyes challenged Davis to be as daring. Though uninvited, Justin had risked something by showing himself here, and he expected Davis to risk something in return.
Not yet decided on what he could afford to wager, Davis decided to play it dumb. “What did she tell you?”
“She told me where I came from.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She told me I’m a clone.”
“Yes?”
“She told me I’m the clone of a kid from New York named Eric Lundquist.”
“Okay.”
“Is it true?”
Davis smiled. “I’m not allowed to say.”
“You’re not a practicing physician anymore,” Justin said, stumbling over the word “physician.” Davis winced, thinking suddenly of the fires and the lost pets and the fog of concerns and guilt Joan had raised eight years ago, which had long burned off in the sunny joy of the present. He was surprised to find himself frightened, not of what might happen if he was caught violating the restraining order, but frightened of Justin himself. He couldn’t pin down exactly why. “What can they do to you?” Justin asked.
“Lots,” Davis said without elaborating. “When did your mom tell you?”
“About six months ago.”
Davis subtracted in his head. “Let me guess. Your birthday?” Justin nodded. “They always do it on a birthday. That must be in one of the books or something. Okay, your mother explained things to you, but you still want to hear them from me. Why? Do you think she would lie to you?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
“I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s wrong. There’s a difference.”
Again, Davis considered that Martha Finn was putting him up to this. Or the cops. Maybe someone suspected. Maybe someone wanted him to do prison this time. “Why do you think she’s wrong?”
“Because I saw him,” Justin said. The boy leaned back now in a low slouch, his head on top of the cushions, staring at the light fixture in the ceiling, his arms crossed in front of him and his hands clasped the wrong way around, pinkies out, resting between his legs.
Arteries up and down Davis’s body pumped two parts adrenaline to one part plasma, the way they had when he’d received the last promising lead in Anna Kat’s murder via e-mail from Ricky Weiss. That had ended in the worst way he could have imagined. Davis tried to slow it all down, saying nothing for a long time. The boy seemed fine with that, even closing his eyes as though a nap were coming before a thought fired across a synapse in his brain and he blinked awake, eyes on the ceiling, waiting.
“Where?” Davis said finally. “Where did you see him?”
“Nuh-uh,” Justin said. He sat up straight, as if his waist were a hinge, and leaned until his head was closer to Davis’s chair than Davis’s own knees. “I tell you stuff. You tell me stuff.”
Christ, what did this kid know? How could he have seen AK’s killer? Forget that, how could he have identified him? Understood what he was looking at? Was it someone from Northwood? Had the monster been so close all along? He couldn’t let Justin out the door now, not without reaching some sort of understanding. Whatever the kid knows, it might be enough to put Davis in prison for ten years. Still, he had to know. After everything Davis had gambled, how could he not play this hand out? And if he had to trust anyone, why not Justin, who was as much his child as he was Martha and Terry Finn’s? If not for Davis, this particular arrangement of carbon and neurons and blond hair and curiosity would never have existed.
“Tell me what you want to know,” Davis said.
Justin stood up and walked around the coffee table, sprawling across the carpet at Davis’s feet. He twisted his torso, and his spine cracked like a roll of caps. He rested his head on an elbow. “You’re not supposed to make clones from living people.”
“That’s right.”
“But you did.”
“I did.”
“You could go to jail for that.”
“You’re right.”
“It must have been important.”
“It was.”
“So tell me.”
“I will,” Davis said. “But I just confessed a secret to you. Something serious. I’d like something in return
