shelf.
– 76 -
Another late night alone in the blue room. Joan was upstairs reading a book. She mentioned to him that even with her busy schedule at the clinic, she was averaging almost three thick novels a week these days. She had to go to the library almost as often as the supermarket. He understood what she was getting at but pretended it went over his head.
Davis knew there were files in here he had never examined thoroughly. Hell, there were thousands of them. Even with the dedication to the task he once possessed, he had performed a kind of triage, deciding which folders held the most promising information and attending to them first and most often. He remembered a box he’d picked up from the police station just months after AK was killed. Jackie was in their bedroom with a highball glass and a Dick Francis hardcover. He carted the box downstairs and set it on the card table in the blue room, removing the reports one at a time from within. These were witness statements from Anna Kat’s friends, and after scanning just a few of the thirty or more reports, he knew they’d be too painful to read. As the detectives had warned him, none of the girls seemed to know anything about the night of the murder. Instead they filled investigators’ notebooks with tearful eulogies and stories illustrating their love for AK. What a good friend she had been. How much promise her life held. How sad and different their lives would be without her. Now, though, if he could go through them once more, he wondered if he’d find that any of them had mentioned Sam Coyne, if any could help him connect the dots between the killer and his daughter.
He picked a report at random. Janis Metz. The name was unfamiliar. To investigators, Janis claimed to have been a friend of Anna Kat’s since the eighth grade, but by the time they were seniors in high school, they weren’t as close as they had once been. “We were still friendly,” Janis said. “We just kind of drifted into different crowds.” Janis had lots of stories about AK, and flipping through the transcript it was obvious that her eagerness to tell them was not matched by the patience of the detective conducting the interview. Several times he hinted that she should wrap things up, only to have her respond with another tale of Anna Kat’s beneficence.
“There was this boy, Mark,” began one such anecdote, “and he really liked AK. He followed her around like a little puppy dog. Mark was one of the supersmart kids, kind of shy, he’s going to Stanford in the fall. These interviews aren’t going to be in the newspaper or anything, are they?” The detective assured her they would not be. “Anyway, in ninth grade Mark finally got up the nerve to ask AK to go roller-skating, and she told him she didn’t think of him in that way, and the poor guy was just crushed. But she stood in the hall and talked to him for, like, twenty minutes after she rejected him, and asked him about his family and his classes and stuff. He was on the debate team and a few months later she went to one of his matches or games or debate things, whatever you call them, and in the spring she nominated him to be class president. I mean, they were little things, but she let him know that he didn’t have to be embarrassed. That they could still be friends, you know? Even though they’d never be close friends. That was really cool. I would have been, like, afraid that the guy would start stalking me or something. Not AK. She didn’t care what clique you were in or how cool you were. She liked everybody.”
Davis felt a pinching sensation in his nose, the prelude to a tear. He felt pride and love – and loss, too, but in manageable amounts. He skimmed the rest of the interview quickly for Coyne’s name and, not finding it, reached into the stack and grabbed another one.
Bill Hilkevitch. Davis remembered him. He was one of AK’s “guy friends,” to be differentiated from her boyfriends. He liked Bill. Smart. Genuine. Polite. Bill had spoken at Anna Kat’s funeral, eloquently, until he had to stop and cry, which was a kind of eloquence in itself.
“Anna Kat used to get a little grief from a few of the other kids about her dad,” Bill told the police sergeant. “I’m not saying that any of these kids, you know, killed her or anything, it was nothing like that, and it actually died down a lot after her father was shot, but it was still there. I remember – it was like tenth grade, I think – and we were reading Frankenstein in English class and somebody grabbed her book and wrote something on the title page. The full title of the book is something like Frankenstein, Prometheus Unbound. This guy had crossed out ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and written ‘Davis Moore, M.D.’ underneath it.”
At this point the detective asked who or what Prometheus was. “Prometheus,” Bill explained. “In Greek mythology. He was the guy who took all mankind’s troubles – you know, diseases and whatnot – and put them in a box. Eventually Pandora opens it and life sucks forever after. He also stole fire from the gods and gave it to the mortals. The thing this guy wrote, Dr. Moore’s name, it doesn’t even make sense. The guy who wrote it was just copying what he’d heard his parents say or something. You know, that clones are like Frankenstein monsters. That’s what the anti-cloners are always saying. It’s stupid, but a lot of people think that way.
“At school right now there are only two kids who are out as clones. They say that at a school our size, it’s probably more like thirty, but most families keep it a secret. It’s not a surprise because the two kids, the clones, they get a lot of shit. Even though one of them’s, like, this super athlete. He’s a freshman and already on the varsity soccer team. The rumor is his cell donor was a big-time college football player or something, although that could be a load of crap. Anyway, he’s going to be a huge star at the school and it doesn’t matter. A lot of kids treat him like he’s got a disease or something. He used to be really depressed all the time. But AK always finds those guys – or she did, anyway – found them in the hallway or after school, asking them to volunteer for this or that or to come to her volleyball games. That was the funny thing. She was the kind of girl who could ask you to do her a favor, like work the charity car wash on a Saturday morning, and you felt so good because she asked you. It was like she was doing something for you. And it wasn’t just guys that felt that way, you know. It wasn’t just because she was cute. Girls liked her, too.”
The detective asked about the person who wrote in her Frankenstein book. “Oh, yeah. Steven Church. One day, months later, we’re playing this coed softball game in gym. Steven’s playing first base and AK hits a grounder to short. She’s thrown out by two steps, but as she crosses first base she takes off her helmet and swings it around – whap! – knocks him right in the back of the head. He went face-first into the dirt and AK acted like it was an accident – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry – but a few of us knew. And she never said anything about it and Steven never gave her any trouble after that. She was always real protective of her pop.”
Davis smiled for the millionth time at the thought that AK was the one looking after him instead of the other way around. Given how helpless he had been searching for her killer, that was no doubt true.
Where had he heard that name before, Steven Church? There had been a Natalie Church, a nasty woman, who used to show her face at the occasional protest in front of the clinic, shouting hackneyed slogans at his patients (Hey hey! Ho ho! Genetic research has got to go!). He assumed Steven was her kid. If Davis hadn’t stopped reading these files fifteen years ago, and had come across this story, he would have checked Church out as a potential suspect. The police apparently had the same idea because on the last page of the statement someone had written in pen (before it was photocopied), Church’s alibi checks. He and his parents were in Saint Pete.
The cops were doing something, at least, Davis thought. He tossed Bill’s statement back and fished for another one.
Libby Carlisle. Libby he knew well. She and Anna Kat played together on the volleyball team. Libby had slept over here at the house on Stone dozens of times. He would hear them giggling late into the night, sometimes whispering into the phone with a network of conspirators who were spending the night in the homes of other girls.
The nocturnal back-and-forth between AK and Libby could get loud (the intensity of teenagers’ conversations, like the intensity of an old Borg-McEnroe tennis match, increased with every volley), but Jackie usually slept through it with some soundproof combination of antidepressants and liquor. Lying in the dark, Davis wondered if a responsible father should knock on his daughter’s door and break it up. Order them to bed. He never did. Instead he would eavesdrop, and although the girls were too many rooms away for him to make out the content of any conversation, the happy notes of his daughter’s voice were informative enough.
Libby’s statement was long, and Davis flipped the pages with his thumb, starting with the last one. Because he knew Libby, and because she no doubt held many of Anna Kat’s confidences, he felt as if reading it too closely might constitute a betrayal of sorts. But it was also Libby’s tightness with AK that gave the statement promise. If AK knew Sam Coyne, so did Libby.
The first time through, he just missed it. Maybe he was looking specifically for the word “Coyne,” the big
