Cast of Shadows - v4 (18 page)

“That’s what
I
thought.”

“Sure as shit.”

Jimmy Spears had been in Rick’s class, two years ahead of Peg. Rick was in a different social circle than Jimmy — shop/wrestling/chewing, as opposed to AP English/football/smoking — but Rick always thought Jimmy was a good guy. Since Jimmy’s appearance in the Rose Bowl, every between-classes encounter Rick had once shared with Jimmy in the Brixton High School hallway had been embellished into a hilarious buddy story to entertain the Thursday night crew at Millie’s Tap Room on Pioneer Street.

When he saw Jimmy’s face on that piece of paper, however, Rick conjured a new fantasy, one that would pay him and Peg $25,000. After exchanging e-mails with [email protected], after the visit to Brixton had been arranged, Rick could imagine a five-figure balance on every ATM receipt.

“I fucking
gave
that judge Jimmy Spears. Whatever the fuck Jimmy did to him, I handed that boy,
my friend,
over on a golden platter, and now he’s gonna screw me. You just watch. Next week, Jimmy will get arrested or he’ll show up dead. Dead’s my bet.” He shook his finger at Peg. “Yeah. That’s why Forak’s so secretive. He’s gonna kill the sonofabitch.”

“Oh damn,” Peg said. “You think?”

Rick nodded. “Remember these words: Jimmy Spears will show up deader’n a doornail. It’ll be in all the papers.” His voice had gone quiet. Conspiratorial.

“Jesus,” Peg said. “And then we’ll turn Forak in, yeah?”

“Yeah, we will,” Rick nodded. “No, we’ll do better than that. We’ll go to the papers.”

Giddiness and love pushed a flat smile across Peg’s face. “Yeah.”

Rick picked up the magazine and turned the cover to face her.

“Sports Illustrated,”
Rick said. “
They’ll
pay us twenty-five grand.”

“You think?”

“Hell, that’s a fraction of what those swimsuit models make. We’ll sell more copies than them. This guy, the judge, and the lady who’re looking for Jimmy. He’s a smart sonofabitch. Nice clothes. And he’s got connections, all respectable and shit. He’s gonna kill Jimmy and he’d get away with it, too. But you and me, we’re gonna crack the case.
Sports Illustrated
will get the scoop. We’ll get the money. Be on
Dateline NBC
. Maybe Oprah. Jenny. Ricki. All that shit.”

“Fa-a-a-amous,” Peg cackled, and twisted in her chair.

“Fame and fortune, hon. Fame and fortune.”

Jackie Moore had been a high school beauty, a college cheerleader, a public relations executive, a stay-at-home mother, an active volunteer, a lonely suburbanite, an ignored and indifferent wife, a psychiatric inpatient, and an untreated alcoholic. As she approached fifty, the only roles she still recalled with affection were the first, the last, and motherhood. Of those three, there was only one she could still claim.

Sometimes she slept during the day, more as an escape from the light than anything resembling rest. The shades in the house were almost always drawn. Davis either preferred it that way, too, or didn’t notice.

She rarely used her husband’s computer, but this morning she sat at his desk in the blue room with a Tanqueray and tonic, staring at the screen. Soon her fingers were snooping mindlessly across the keys. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find — perhaps naked photos of Joan Burton. She snorted at the thought. Davis would never be so obvious. Or tacky. She scanned through a year’s worth of e-mail. Nothing. Only a handful of messages exchanged between them. All work-related.

Snooping through the nested folders and directories, however, she found something she couldn’t explain. Dozens and dozens of files —
Christ, hundreds!
— each containing an illustration of a man’s face. The pictures were almost photo-realistic, but there was something not quite right about each of them. The dimensionality was wrong, the shadowing too severe, and the broad areas of uniform skin color not quite accurate. They had the look of a sophisticated police sketch in that they resembled a human being, but could never be mistaken for a real picture of one.

The file names were dated (going back five years or so) and then lettered for versions. The later ones looked better than the older ones. And in the later files, the versions were more similar, with the differences being mostly in the hairstyle or the age. In some, the man looked to be about twenty, in others, ten or fifteen years older. Clearly, they were all supposed to be the same person, though. Variations on the same traits and hair and eyes. Each head was the same shape, more or less, and although this seemed to have more to do with the software that had done the illustrating, the eyes had the same tired, indifferent, three-quarter stare. If every person drawn by a machine can be said to look “detached,” this fellow seemed especially so.

She also found many digital photos of a young boy. When she clicked through the first few, a dense and knobbed mass formed in her stomach. Her suspicions of his affair with Joan forgotten, she now worried that her husband was involved in something unthinkable.

Jackie supposed one might find photos of all kinds on a middle-aged man’s computer: posed porn stars in impossible positions, dressed in costumes or populating plywood fantasy environments, hands caressing their artificial secondary sex characteristics. She didn’t understand the static visual mechanics that turned men on, and allowed herself to be amused when she caught Davis’s eyes lingering on a sexy advertisement, or staring unsubtly at photos of swimsuit models, which appeared incongruously in sports magazines and catalogs. But these pictures, chaste and darling, of a young boy she did not know, a young boy who, along with his parents, was almost certainly unaware that his image occupied pixels and bytes on a suburban doctor’s home computer, gave her chills.

As she opened more and more of the files, however, her fear became puzzlement.

Each picture showed the same blond-haired boy. Like the adult composites (and typical of Davis), each file was labeled with the name Justin, a number between three and eight (roughly corresponding to the boy’s age, Jackie thought), and a letter. Not only were the pictures not salacious, most of them were adorable.

Justin was usually dressed in his best clothes and posed in some seasonal setting. There were prop pumpkins and footballs in the autumn and straw hats and wheelbarrows in the spring. There were Christmas poses and red-white-and-blue-themed photos for the Fourth of July.

If she had given more consideration to the other files she found, the illustrations of the strange man, and noted the similarity between their labels and the labels on the little boy’s photos, she might not have leaped to the conclusions she did. Instead, sitting at her husband’s desk in his basement room, Jackie assembled the pieces as best she could, and then she began to cry.

An hour later, when Phil Canella’s cell number appeared on her caller ID, Jackie felt numbing heat up her neck and over her scalp, as she did when a doctor returned with test results. This world of mercenaries, of money traded for information, was foreign to her, but she had to admit it felt good to have secrets, and although her current state of constant anxiety was unpleasant, it was at least a respite from the everydayness of depression.

She hushed the ringing phone with a press of her glossy thumbnail. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Moore,” he said. Jackie could hear activity in the background. Music, voices, glassware, doors opening and closing. A bar. Canella, who had as little self-consciousness as any man Jackie had ever met, seemed unconcerned that others would be wondering about his business. Listening in. Watching him. She found this odd for a man in the business of other people’s business. She was certain paranoia would be a collateral effect.

“Well?” Jackie said, settling on just the edge of her living room couch.

“Your husband and Dr. Burton flew in to Lincoln, and drove to a tiny little town, not even a town, really, called Brixton. They took a tour of the elementary school.”

“The elementary school?” Jackie was distressed by this, though she didn’t know why.

She heard Canella turn a page in his pocket notebook. “After that I followed them to a diner where they met a local guy. A fellow named Richard Weiss.” He checked again. “Ricky. Does that name ring a bell?”

“No,” Jackie said to Canella as she heard a bartender approach.

Canella’s voice became muffled but through the hand he had placed over the phone, she heard him order a beer. “Didn’t think so. He’s a golf course greenskeeper, apparently. Anyway, they talked long enough to order coffee, but not long enough to drink it. Then they drove back to the Marriott in Lincoln. Dinner. Drinks at the bar.” He paused for false effect. “Then they turned in.”

Jackie inhaled a deep breath and let it out in a wheeze. “Don’t dance around it, Mr. Canella.”

“Well, Mrs. Moore, it’s not just dancing. I can only give you the facts I know. They had separate rooms, but adjoining ones. The maid said both beds had been slept in, and she told me there was no, uh, physical —
physical
— evidence of sexual contact.”

“He could have used a condom, though,” she said, sharpening the words as she said them.

“Yeah. He could have done. There were no condoms in the trash in either room, however.”

“He might have taken it with him. Disposed of it elsewhere.”

“Yes,” Canella admitted, pausing. Jackie heard the thud of a full glass settling on a bar top. “That would be an unusual level of caution, though.”

“But not unprecedented?”

“In my experience, ma’am, nothing is unprecedented.”

Jackie said, “So you aren’t certain if they are sleeping together?”

“I’m not trying to give you hope, Mrs. Moore, if that’s what you’re looking for. From where I sit this doesn’t look much different than most of my stakeouts. I happen to know that Joan Burton kept this trip secret from her coworkers, her friends, her parents. The list of things people keep secret from their friends and family — and especially their wives — is short and consistent.”

“She didn’t tell
anyone
? And you know this how?”

“The Lincoln tickets were bought with cash. As you know, Dr. Moore purchased an additional ticket on his credit card — a ticket that went unused — to Boston, where there is a pediatrics conference this week. That’s someone covering his tracks, I’d say. Deception.”

He took a loud slurp of his beverage and Jackie could hear it go all the way down in an audible gulp. “Your husband and Dr. Burton were up to something, Mrs. Moore. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred,
something
means sex. I don’t know about your particular circumstances, but ordinarily the people who hire me already know their spouses are cheating. They want me to get evidence for a divorce proceeding. They want leverage in a custody battle. They want revenge. If that’s what you want, I’m afraid I haven’t found anything that couldn’t be explained away or refuted by a half-decent divorce attorney.

“If you’re looking for encouraging news, I’d say that East Jesus, Nebraska, is not a popular place for romantic getaways. Dr. Moore may or may not be sleeping with Joan Burton, but regardless, there’s something else going on. I’m sure there was something other than the old-fashioned mess-around that brought them to Brixton. What it is, I don’t know at this point.”

Jackie stood and began pacing the Persian carpet. “Maybe he’s preparing to leave me. Maybe he and Joan really are planning to move to — to East Jesus — because they’ll be too embarrassed to stick around here after everyone finds out what they’ve done to me.”

“I can’t say, Mrs. Moore.”

“There’s something else,” she said. “Something new. I don’t know if it’s related or not.” She told him about the strange sketch of a man she found on Davis’s computer and about the photos of the boy. What could they mean? Is it possible Davis has another child, a boy with another woman? When their daughter was taken from them, could Davis have started an entirely new family without her? In Nebraska?

“If you want me to pursue this further, Mrs. Moore, you can e-mail that stuff to me here at the hotel. I’ll try to check it out.”

“And if I do want to pursue this? What will it cost to find out what Davis was doing in Brixton?”

“I’m in Lincoln now. It’ll mean going back to Brixton. You have my rate. Expenses would be about the same. Figure the same as I quoted you before.” Jackie felt her willingness to pay being sized up over the phone. “Maybe a little more, depending on how easily the information turns up.”

For once, Jackie was grateful Davis had surrendered the household bills — and the joint checking account — to her. She could write a check from their joint account for five, ten, even fifteen thousand and he wouldn’t know.

“Do it,” she said. “Go do it.”

That night, after Davis returned from his trip and offered some sketchy details of the conference in Boston, Jackie did her best to keep contempt on her half of the bed. It had been months — years, to be honest — since Davis had touched her sincerely. They made love on occasion, but only selfishly, when it happened that both of them so needed another’s touch that the sex occurred like a spontaneous chemical reaction, perfunctorily, naturally, not always unpleasantly, but never as an expression of love, either. In the years since they’d been married, Jackie had never thought of sex as a physical need, but since AK had died, she began to see it differently, and their infrequent coupling gave the marriage a license that had allowed it to survive.

If Davis were sleeping with Joan, their fragile understanding would end.

And Jackie had already decided that it would never end with divorce.

Phil Canella knew that most people didn’t listen much or look much, and when they did look and listen, they didn’t pay attention, and even when they did pay attention, when they did see or hear something they shouldn’t, they never gave it a second thought. They never attached any significance to the man in the alley, the woman at the bar, the bump in the attic, the click on the phone, the murmur in the engine, the tap at the window, the car on the street, the sourness in the scotch.