Cast of Shadows - v4 (26 page)

Chicago newspapers covered the arrest of Richard Weiss, but Philly had no family in the area to add local interest, so ongoing coverage consisted mostly of Metro section wire stories and an occasional update on the sports page. Citing “anonymous sources close to the investigation,” a suburban paper, the
Daily Herald,
named Davis as the Chicago doctor purged from the indictment. The other papers followed, with the
Sun-Times
also naming Joan Burton as “Dr. Moore’s associate,” hinting that she was the alleged mistress Phil Canella had been trying to expose. Davis’s attorney, Graham Mendelsohn, noting his client had lost his own daughter to murder, his wife to depression and suicide, and had himself been the victim of an assassin’s bullet, refused comment. The local press didn’t pursue the Moore angle aggressively, but that could change, Graham told Davis, if he were called to testify.

“It could change dramatically, depending on what you have to tell them,” Graham said.

“I understand,” Davis said.

“Is there anything you want to tell
me,
at this point?”

Davis said there was not.

On the day the assistant district attorney from Carlton County, Nebraska, traveled to Northwood to take statements from Drs. Moore and Burton, around the time she and two other attorneys from her staff were landing at O’Hare, Davis and Joan met in his office to chatter nervously about the appointment.

“What have we decided?” Joan asked, lying on a stiff brown couch that was hardly ever used. “We’re going to have to tell them, aren’t we?”

“Are we?”

“Goddamnit, Davis, they’ll be here in an hour.”

Davis rubbed his knuckles into his eyes and sighed. “What are they really going to ask us? They’re going to want to know how we came in contact with Ricky Weiss. I’ll tell them I’ve been trying for years to find the man who murdered my daughter. Weiss e-mailed me because he thought he had identified the sketch I’d posted on the Internet. You and I went to Brixton to check it out and we told him he was wrong. My wife hired that detective to follow us down there. I wasn’t even aware of it until the police told me, weeks after Jackie had died. That’s the extent of our connection to the case.”

“They’ll want to know where you got the sketch.”

“I drew it on a computer.”

Joan adopted an interrogator’s tone. “Really, Dr. Moore? Based on what?”

Davis had practiced this lie. “Based on the profile created by police during their investigation into AK’s death.”

As herself now: “They’ll want to know if we were having an affair.”

The truth again. “We weren’t.”

“And the photos you had taken of Justin?”

Davis nodded. “I handed over everything I had to police. I told them I was collecting data for a longitudinal study of a young patient.”

“Oh, Davis. Really. A secret study?”

“I didn’t want the parents to bias the results,” Davis said. “You didn’t know about it, either. I asked you to help me find AK’s killer and that was the end of your involvement. They’ll probably assume we were sleeping together. They won’t suspect our trip to Brixton had anything to do with Justin.”

“You’ll take a hit for this secret study crap. The Board of Oversight—”

“Yeah, and I’ll take the hit alone.”

“I don’t want to lie.”

“I’d never ask you to.”

He wanted to go to the couch. To hold her. He didn’t. Several times since his wife’s death, Davis had considered advancing his relationship with Joan to something beyond colleague and coconspirator, but each time he decided he couldn’t. It wasn’t that it was too soon — although he mourned Jackie, he hadn’t felt like a husband to her in years. It just never felt right. It hadn’t been right that night in Lincoln, and it hadn’t been right a dozen times since. Today, with a prosecutor headed to his office to ask them point-blank why they were making clandestine trips to Brixton, Nebraska, it still wasn’t right.

His love for her, all by itself, wasn’t enough to make it right.

Twenty years ago, when Sam Coyne was ten, downtown Northwood was a poorly zoned collection of vacuum-repair stores, coin shops, a discount furrier, a used book store, and a handful of eateries (including a few second-tier chains) all claiming to grill “the North Shore’s Best Hamburger.” Northwood’s homes were as old and stately as the neighboring suburbs, but its zip code was less prestigious and its public services reliant on property, rather than sales, tax. If any of its residents needed a birthday gift or a nice meal, they got it in the city or at the malls in Skokie and Gurnee.

Then came revitalization. Almost in unison, Chicago suburbs began reimagining themselves as self-contained communities. Tax breaks were offered; boutiques and clothing stores and fine restaurants gobbled them up. Within five years Northwood had a face-lift and the kind of prestige that its residents — many of them had bought homes here as a compromise when they realized they couldn’t afford the neighboring towns — always coveted.

Tony Dee, a Chicago chef who had bounced for ten years between Taylor Street’s three-star Italian restaurants, opened Mozzarell here with the following simple calculus: low taxes plus low rent plus high incomes. On a Saturday night these days, there were as many Mercedes leaving the city to dine in Northwood as there were BMWs headed in the opposite direction, and Mozzarell was one of the toughest reservations. Despite Sam’s usual desire to impress dates with one of his downtown culinary discoveries, he had asked Martha to meet him here because he guessed (rightly) she’d find it pleasantly upscale and also because he knew she’d save money on a babysitter if he brought her home before eleven, a consideration he made sure to mention when she had called him. That’s right, he reminded himself. She called
him.

The salads arrived and Martha had just finished describing all the places she had lived. “Then Terry and I moved to Northwood shortly after all this stuff went in, I guess. I never saw it the way it used to be.”

“What a shit hole,” Sam said, and then sputtered a quick apology that he didn’t wait for her to accept. “It’s nice now, but I hated this town when I was a kid.”

“I guess we all resent the place where we grew up,” she said. “Because it reminds us of all the stupid stuff we wish we could do over again.”

“You sell real estate now, though?”

Martha tipped her head to the left and back, a sideways nod that was something of a tic and often imitated in fun by people who knew her well. “Yeah. I made out pretty well with the alimony, but it’s still not enough with a boy in the house. Not if you don’t want to deprive him, anyway, and he shouldn’t have to suffer because his dad is a, well, you know. It’s a good time to be selling homes in Northwood, though. The market is tight here. Let me know if you ever decide you want to move back home.”

Sam made a sarcastic face. A scenario such as you describe, the face said, is highly unlikely. “How about you?” he asked. “Where do you come from?”

That’s sort of a funny way to put it, Martha thought.
Where do you come from?
It reminded her of the questions — the nonstop, vaguely existential questions — that Justin was always putting to her. “South suburbs,” she said.

“Huh,” Sam said. He’d hardly ever been south of Thirty-fifth Street, where the Sox play, but he’d seen a concert or two at the outdoor theater in Tinley Park. “So… Terry… what did he do?”

“Futures trader. The whole LaSalle Street thing, you know. Make a ton of money one year and try not to spend it all before the market turns against you the next. He did okay.”

“Where is he now?”

“New Mexico. He’s remarried.”

“Hunh. You’d think he’d want to stay closer to Justin and all.”

“Yeah, you’d think.” She smiled and then looked down at her salad, a sign she didn’t want to talk about her ex-husband anymore.

Obliging, Sam offered, “You said you wanted to ask me about something.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And please tell me if I’m out of line.”

“Not at all. Please,” he said.

“You know the murder trial in Nebraska? The one where the victim was a private detective from here?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I’m sort of… involved,” Martha mumbled.

“Why? What do you mean?”

Her reply wasn’t really an answer. “I’m on both the prosecution and defense lists of potential witnesses.”

“You’re kidding. Why?”

Martha told the story of Sally Barwick’s friendship and betrayal. How the photos of her boy ended up in the dead private eye’s possession via the wife of her former physician, Dr. Davis Moore. “Terry and I had some trouble getting pregnant,” she explained. “We went to New Tech and Dr. Moore helped us conceive Justin.”

Sam paused and drew a breath through his nose until he was certain he’d locked in a vaguely concerned but otherwise unreadable expression. “What’s Moore’s connection to all this?”

“I haven’t gotten much from the defense attorney — he said he might not even call me — but the district attorney’s office has been a little more helpful. From what they can piece together about his defense, this guy, the defendant, Ricky Weiss, he claims Dr. Moore sent Phil Canella to kill him.”

Sam paused, pretending to chew his veal. He wanted to be careful not to let on how much he knew about Moore. She was apt to start asking a lot of questions and he was in no mood to keep track of his lies tonight. “The news accounts haven’t been real clear, but you can sort of piece it together. Some crazy story about a football player murdering the doctor’s daughter, right?”

“Right. Moore says that’s not true, but the D.A. tells me Moore had hired a detective agency in Gurnee, and
they
had hired Sally to take pictures of my son for him. Lots of them over five years. I
only
knew Sally as a photographer and I had her take photos of Justin a couple times a year. You know, for family.”

Dr. Davis Moore, pedophile?
Sam thought. If this gossip were true it would be more delicious than the meal. “
Jesus
. Are you kidding? What did the doctor want the pictures for?”

“I don’t know. Moore apparently says it was for some sort of study he was doing, a fertility study, but the D.A. isn’t really buying it.”

“That’s creepy. Are they looking into it anymore?”

“They say it’s not part of their theory of the case.”

“And what
is
their theory?”

“Well, Sally was some sort of freelancer. It’s not clear she even knew the pictures of Justin were going to Dr. Moore. But Phil Canella was working a case for Dr. Moore’s
wife
. She thought he was cheating on her, apparently, and I guess Dr. Moore and Dr. Burton had gone to Brixton to meet with Ricky Weiss, and Canella followed him there to spy on them for Mrs. Moore.”

“And he runs into Ricky Weiss and he’s a paranoid freak and he blows the dude away,” Sam said. “I got that much from the
Tribune
.”

“Anyway, the D.A. thinks maybe the defense is going to bring in these pictures of Justin as evidence. They’re going to throw all of these bizarre connections at the jury and hope that they buy the conspiracy theory Weiss is floating.”

“It sounds like there
are
a lot of coincidences,” Sam said.

“It gets worse,” Martha whispered, leaning forward and hunching down below an invisible blind that might shield them from the eyes of other diners. “Terry and I hired a detective agency six years ago. Not North Shore. One based downtown. One of Terry’s buddies from the pit had used them.”

“What did you need a private eye for?”

She dismissed the relevance of the question with a wave of her hand. “It was a — a genealogy project. Just going through birth records back east, looking for one of Terry’s lost ancestors. But guess who they sent for the job?”

“Sally? Now you’re just making the shit up.”

She nodded. “It’s all true. But I didn’t know. I never met her back then.”

“Unbelievable. Have you been deposed yet?”

“No, and the D.A. says I probably won’t be unless they decide to call me, and even then it might be at the last minute. If that happens, I was hoping you’d help prepare me for it. Not as a favor. I mean I’d pay you.”

Sam frowned and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Don’t worry about it. Is there some reason you think you might need a lawyer?”

She closed her eyes, her lashes long enough, it seemed to Sam, to graze her cheeks. “I’m just confused. Feeling a little betrayed. A little embarrassed that I ended up as a tangential player in a weird Nebraska murder. I’m just feeling really cautious right now.”

“I can recommend a criminal lawyer if you’d be more comfortable…”

“No, I don’t think it’ll get that serious,” she said. “I’m just nervous. This isn’t the easiest thing to talk about.”

“It’s so fucked up,” Sam said, wondering if he should have cursed like that, but then again, he decided it was a ridiculous thing to be sensitive about, considering what he had planned for Martha later. He became conscious of the silence in the impolite wake of his comment and filled it with a casual remark. He thought it best to tell a little bit of the truth. “I think I went to high school with Davis Moore’s daughter.”

Unsurprised, Martha said, “The D.A. from Nebraska said he wasn’t certain Dr. Moore had done anything illegal with regard to the photos. He didn’t have jurisdiction, in any case.”

This was getting interesting, Sam thought. He remembered how much Anna Kat had craved her father’s approval. How difficult she said it was for her to get his attention. “Illegal? Maybe. Maybe not. It sounds a lot like stalking to me. Invasion of privacy. Exploitation of a minor. You might think about pressing charges. That could help pave the way for a civil suit.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Whatever he was up to, it was sleazy. He was your doctor. A doctor who betrayed you. Nine juries out of ten would fall all over themselves just to stick it to him.”

She blushed. “I can’t tell you how upset I’ve been over it. I can’t imagine what he would want pictures of Justin for unless it was something—” She shivered.