Speeding through wide gaps between early-morning reverse commuters, Justin got his avatar home before dawn. He gave his Shadow mother a ridiculous story about going for an early-morning jog, then shut down the game and hopped into his real bed. It was almost time to get dressed for school. He removed his sweatshirt and his pants and pushed them down to the foot of the bed with his feet.
He heard the phone peal down the hall. His mother hushed it on the fourth ring and a moment later rapped on his door.
“Justin?” Martha Finn called.
“Yuh?” he said with manufactured grogginess.
“It’s for you. It’s a girl.”
Justin wondered if Sally had the guts to call here. If her name would show up on caller ID. If his mother would recognize her voice all these years later. He rolled out of bed and unlocked the door and opened it just enough to slip his hand through the crack. He gripped the phone and pulled it back inside, shutting the door behind him.
“Sally,” he whispered, even though his mother might have the extension to her ear.
Silence.
“Are you okay? What happened? Where’s Coyne?”
Nothing.
It occurred to Justin that it might not be Sally on the other end. It might be Coyne. But how would he know who Justin was? Or where to find his number? Sally and Justin had never spoken outside Shadow World, not since he was a kid anyway.
“Sally, are you all right?” he asked again.
“I’m fine,” Sally said finally. “The police came. He’s gone.”
“Thank God.”
Neither one of them said anything more for at least a minute. Justin couldn’t explain the awkwardness. Despite their close friendship in Shadow World, it was almost as if they were strangers in real life.
“Anyway,” Sally said.
“Anyway,” Justin said. “I’ll meet you in the game later. After school. We’ll talk then. You’ll tell me everything.”
“All right. Good,” Sally said, and then, before she hung up, “Wait a minute, Justin…”
“What?”
Another long silence. A sigh over the phone. “Nothing. No. I mean…” It sounded to Justin like she was crying. She said, “Happy Birthday.”
Justin at Sixteen
– 82 -
These stones had been brought to America on ships from Egypt, and the tomb reconstructed here inside the Field Museum years and years ago, Davis noticed, when you could still pull a stunt like that. The exhibit twisted along narrow hallways and opened into small chambers where ancient artifacts were displayed alongside reproductions and bits of history unfolded on metal plaques. Twenty-three actual mummies were the main attraction, though, a graphic demonstration that no resting place is ever final.
Sally Barwick had asked to meet him here, in a small, dark room with two old urns and some re-created hieroglyphs. She was comfortable here. It was a place in the real world she could go when she couldn’t escape to the game. And it was important this conversation be private.
Unpressed, yesterday’s dress hung from her body in unsightly relief, creases and wrinkles charting imaginary glacial topography across the fabric. Barwick said, “Justin knows, doesn’t he? He knows he was cloned from Sam Coyne, not Eric Lundquist.”
“Yes,” Davis said. “How did you figure it out?”
She could have told him it was the eyes. That Sam Coyne’s eyes were the same eyes she had photographed when Justin was a child. They were the eyes that romanced her in her dreams. “What did Coyne do?” she asked instead. “Justin said he did something terrible. A long time ago.”
Davis sat on a small bench and she took a seat beside him. “He killed my daughter.”
An icy fright radiated from Barwick’s stomach to her scalp and to her hands and feet. She felt like an investigator again, felt the rush of the end of a case. This one had been open for thirteen years, since she’d turned the stiff pages of the photo album in Mrs. Lundquist’s living room. “You cloned him from the evidence.” She realized she felt burdened with the answer. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. “Why didn’t you go to the police with that? Or the newspapers?”
“Let’s see,” Davis said, sadly. “Because what I did was illegal? Because I’d go to prison? Because the evidence is totally inadmissible. Because Coyne would go free.” He was embarrassed. About to be exposed. A headache was forming above his ears. Sally Barwick was being pleasant enough – calm even, considering what she’d just discovered. Still, this felt like an interrogation.
“Why does Justin think Coyne’s the Wicker Man?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I haven’t shared his… his enthusiasm for that theory. I think Justin’s desperately looking for connections between things. He has trouble accepting the existence of coincidences. In his mind, our world is frustratingly disconnected.”
“I thought Justin was crazy, too,” Sally said. “Not after last night, though.”
“What happened?”
“I saw Coyne kill a girl. Slice her up. Let her bleed out.”
“What? Where?” Then he understood. “In Shadow World. That’s not the same, is it?”
Barwick didn’t feel like explaining the True-to-Life aesthetic. “He also came after me. In real life. He came to my house to kill me.”
“ Jesus! What happened?”
“I called the police.”
Davis became excited. His face turned hopeful. “So they have him? He’s been arrested?”
Barwick shook her head. “He told the cops it was a misunderstanding. That he was just playing a game and that he came to my house to try to explain what I had witnessed on-screen. They couldn’t hold him.”
“Goddamn,” Davis whispered. “He’ll just come again, won’t he? Are you safe?”
“I filed a restraining order against him,” she said.
“Means little,” Davis said.
She knew that. The fact that they’d both been meeting with Justin (although Sally only met him in Shadow World) was an illustration of that. “I want to tell the cops,” Sally said. “I think Justin’s right. I think Coyne might be the Wicker Man.”
“They’ll laugh at you.”
A couple walking through the exhibit paused in the chamber where Sally and Davis were talking. Uncomfortable in the sudden silence, they pointed quickly at the urns and moved on.
“What about this?” Barwick said. “Let me tell your story. Write a feature for the Sunday Trib magazine. We’ll expose him. There’ll be a cry for an investigation. Coyne will never survive the scrutiny.”
Davis snorted. “Neither will I. I’ll be locked up for the rest of my life.”
“I’ll make the story as sympathetic as possible.”
Once more, Davis asked himself how much he would sacrifice in pursuit of AK’s killer. “It’s not only me. There’s another life that would be ruined.”
“Justin,” Sally said.
He nodded. “It’s bad enough for people, especially kids, when they’re just outed as clones,” Davis said. “If it became public that Justin was cloned from a killer, his life would become a freak show. He’d never get it back.”
Sally was thinking. Coyne knows where I work. Where I live. She was thinking that as long as he was out there, it would be virtually impossible to sleep in her apartment. She was thinking the offices of Ginsburg and
