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“You should come with us,” Justin said after explaining the plan.
“No,” Davis said. “First of all, I’ve never played Shadow World. Second of all, we shouldn’t be seen together. Even inside a video game, and certainly not by a newspaper reporter.”
“Now you’re being paranoid,” Justin said. “Hell, the reporter is violating the restraining order, too. You should come.”
Davis thought the suggestion was silly, even as he noticed a white car stopped about fifty yards behind them in the spot where two park district paths intersected. It idled there for a few seconds and drove on.
“Maybe I am paranoid. But the restraining order includes all kinds of communication. I can’t come near you in a game any more than I’m supposed to approach you in real life or call you on the phone.” Justin measured the distance between their car seats with his eyes. Davis said, “You know what I mean. Computers leave a trail. A record. Besides, you haven’t convinced me Sam Coyne is the Wicker Man. I don’t see any reason to take the risk.”
“Which is why I’m going to follow him. For proof,” Justin said. “The Wicker Man killings stop, more or less, whenever Sam Coyne is spending a lot of time inside the game. And almost every night he plays, someone in the game dies. Coyne is blowing off steam in Shadow World. He’s able to control his urges in the real world by killing in the pretend one.”
“A stretch. You said yourself the correlation between the real murders and Shadow World murders was shaky.”
“There’s nothing exact about psychology. And we know he’s capable of it, Dr. Moore. He’s a brutal killer. We know that for a fact. How big a stretch is it to suggest AK isn’t the only girl he’s killed?”
That much is true, Davis admitted to himself. “Justin, you’re perfectly free to play your computer game however you want. I just don’t see the point of chasing Sam Coyne around some virtual version of Chicago. From the way you describe it to me, even if he is killing other characters in Shadow World, he’s not doing anything illegal. There’s nothing there we could go to the police with.”
“You’ve already said Coyne couldn’t be convicted for Anna Kat’s murder, even though we both know he did it,” Justin said. “Our only chance of nailing him is to catch him at some other crime. Sally Barwick is a real reporter. For the real Chicago Tribune. If I can convince her that Coyne is a killer, maybe she can get an actual investigation started.”
He continued, “The game is the safest place to poke around this guy’s life. If we’re caught following him or if we mess up or if we’re just plain wrong about him, it won’t matter. It’s only pretend. But there’s also a chance we’ll find out something we don’t know. Something we can use.” Justin could tell he wasn’t convincing him. “Look, Dr. Moore. Sally’s like you. She thinks I’m really pushing it, accusing Coyne of being the Wicker Man. But she’s also really into the game. She’s a True-to-Lifer. She lives as much in that world as she does in this one, and what happens in Shadow World is as important to her as what happens out here. She wants to catch the Shadow World thrill killer as much as she wants to stop the Wicker Man. If I can use that to get her curious about Sam Coyne, then what’s the harm?”
Davis said, “Just remember that coincidence is not evidence. I’m worried you’re just looking at two things you’re obsessed with and trying to make connections between them. The Wicker Man killings appear to be random. Coyne, on the other hand, knew Anna Kat. Or they were in the same class at school, anyway. She was strangled, and many of the Wicker Man victims were stabbed. I’ve seen practically every piece of evidence in the investigation of AK’s murder, and there’s not as much similarity as you might think.” He tapped his finger on the steering wheel. The boy was going through with this no matter what he said. “Look, your idea is a good one. Even if he isn’t the Wicker Man, Coyne must have done something else in the last fifteen years. Hurt another girl. An animal capable of that kind of violence doesn’t get a taste of it and just quit. So see if you can get Sally Barwick interested. Maybe something will turn up. But be careful.”
“I will.” Justin cleared his throat with an uncomfortable growl. “To tell you the truth, I like it that you’re worried about me.” It was one of many unsubtle cues Justin had given Davis since they’d become reacquainted, and he let a number of seconds pass before acknowledging it.
“Have you heard from your father lately?”
The passenger side lock thumped up and down a few times. “Nah. Three months probably. He’s got his own kids by Denise now and they’re more important to him. I’m a thousand miles away and he doesn’t think of me as his real kid anyhow.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“He’s practically said it to my face. I know he’s said it behind my back. To Mom, not that she’d bad-mouth him to me. It’s okay. Dad’s right. He had nothing to do with bringing me into the world. I don’t even think he wanted a kid in the first place. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re closer to being my father than he is. You’re the one who made me.”
Davis inhaled a whistling breath between clenched teeth. “No, Justin. I mean, I’m not comfortable with that-”
With a brooding kick, Justin tried to untangle the straps of the backpack between his feet. “Okay. But it’s true whether you’re comfortable with it or not. What do you think, I’m angry about it? Hell, no. Without you I wouldn’t be here. That’s cool. I mean, who else do I have for a father figure? Sam Coyne?” He chuckled sadly, the way people at a wake laugh at dark jokes. “That’s a fucked-up couple of parents: a revenge-mad doctor and a cold-blooded killer.”
Davis wanted to deny it even as he was tempted to scold Justin for swearing.
“I’ll see you here next week,” Justin said. “Hopefully, Sally and I will find out something by then.” He opened the door and tumbled out.
In the rearview mirror, Davis watched Justin disappear into the forest preserve, the hum of his electric bike diminishing between snowdrifts until it sounded like an electric razor on a shallow beard. With his window down, through the birdless silence, Davis heard a coed football game crunching in the snow, and smelled a dirty winter grill with fresh brats and burgers and vegetables on a kabob. He wasn’t the boy’s father. That was practically paragraph one in the cloning professional’s oath, or it would be if they had such a thing. Every seminar he ever attended had a lecture on that very topic. This job will make you feel a little bit like God, he heard a speaker say once. Don’t believe it for a second. We coax life into the world so that people can lead fuller, happier lives, but we don’t make life. It is the nature of life to propagate, and cloning is another evolutionary step in the history of human reproduction. We are only tools.
Davis had proved that was a lie. The physical process that brought Justin into the world was identical to that of every other clone. But the act of creation had taken place the moment he held Sam Coyne’s DNA in his hand and decided he would make the switch. Justin was not conceived in a lab or in the womb but in Davis’s mind. He existed because Davis had wanted him to, and what kind of being does that describe if not a god?
He didn’t feel like a god, though if he did, what obligation does God have to his creations? Any at all? God doesn’t always act like it. One way or the other he had a special obligation to Justin, and it was something like being a father to him, although not exactly.
He had an obligation to Anna Kat for certain, and on that score he was failing her. Again. Most nights he sat down in the blue room, among his old family files and eighteen years of cold evidence, sat there in the silence doing nothing. Pretending. As if just sitting in the chair where he once obsessed over her murder was the same as tracking down her killer. It reminded him of the way Jackie used to pray, in an indifferent and rehearsed whisper, as if the words meant something even if she didn’t believe them. Even if Justin were only chasing his own demons, the kid was doing more to find Anna Kat’s killer than he was. Davis thought, My God, what’s a fifteen-year-old doing with demons? and then he felt guilt in his stomach incubating like a virus. He pushed back against the headrest, listened as carefree voices converged from around the forest preserve, and he thought about suicide, about men who had parked along lonely roads like this one with a rubber tube attached to the exhaust pipe and looped in through the cracked window, the rest of the opening caulked shut with a towel. He tried to block out other thoughts for a minute, his eyes closed, imagining what it must be like for the terminally desperate in the final moments when their survival instinct surrenders to the lure of permanent sedation. It was a meditation he did, not often but sometimes, in places where he was truly alone. In the car it was always a rubber tube. In the bathroom it was
