Cast of Shadows - v4 (6 page)

The detective was polite each morning when he called, and Davis feigned patience each morning when the detective, after small talk, confessed to having no leads. Well, not zero leads, exactly: a profile had been made of the attacker. The police believed he was white and fair-skinned. They had some general idea about his size, based on the placement of the bruises and the force exerted on her arm, breaking it in two, but that ruled out only the unusually short and the freakishly tall. They did not think he was obese, according to their reconstruction of the rape itself. He may or may not have been someone Anna Kat knew — probably not, because if she had been expecting someone that night, she might have told somebody, but then again, who can say? The medical examiner said the injuries were consistent with rape, but could not comment on whether the state’s attorney would include sexual assault along with the murder charge when police apprehended a suspect. When Davis expressed outrage after that information had appeared in the paper, the detective settled him down and assured him that when a beaten, broken, strangled girl has fresh semen inside her, that’s a rape in the cops’ book, no matter what the M.E. says; and then he apologized for putting it that way, for being so goddamn insensitive, and then Davis had to reassure the detective. That’s all right. He didn’t want them to be sensitive. He wanted the police to be as angry and raw as he was. The detective understood that the Moores wanted a resolution. “We know you want closure, Dr. Moore, and so do we,” he said. “Some of these cases take time.”

Often, the police told the Moores, a friend of the victim will think aloud during questioning:
It’s probably nothing, you know, but there’s this strange guy who was always hanging around…
This time, none of Anna Kat’s friends could offer even a cynical theory. Fingerprints were too plentiful to be useful (“Everyone in town has had their palms on that countertop,” the detective said), and the police were sure the perpetrator had worn gloves anyway, by the thickness of the bruises on her wrists and neck. Daniel Kinney, Anna Kat’s off-again boyfriend, was questioned three times. He was appropriately distraught and cooperative, submitting to a blood test and bringing his parents, but never a lawyer. Interviews with Northwood students continued.

Blond hairs were found at the scene, and police had determined they belonged to the killer by comparing the DNA to his semen. With no suspect sharing those same microscopic markers, however, the evidence was an answer to an unasked question. A proof without hypothesis. Before or during the rape, she had been beaten. During or possibly after the rape, she had been strangled. One arm and both legs were broken. Seven hundred forty-nine dollars were missing from a pair of registers, and there might have been some clothes gone from the racks. (The embarrassed store manager wasn’t sure about that, inventory being something of a mess, but it’s possible that a few pocket tees were taken. Extra large. The police noted this in their profile.)

Northwood panicked for a few weeks. The bakery, True Value, Coffee Nook, the fruit stand, two ice cream parlors, six restaurants, three hairdressers, and two dozen or so other shops, including the Gap, of course (but not the White Hen), began closing at sundown. More spouses met their partners at the train, their cars in long queues parallel to the tracks each night. The cops put in for overtime, and the town borrowed officers from Glencoe. If you were under eighteen, you were home before curfew. The Chicago and Milwaukee TV stations made camp for a while on Main Street (news producers determined that Oak Street, where the Gap shared the block with a carpet store, a parking lot, and a funeral home, didn’t provide enough “visual interest” and chose to shoot stand-ups around the corner, where there was more pedestrian traffic and overall “quaintness”), but there turns out to be a limit to the number of nights you can report that there is, as yet, nothing to report, and TV crews disappeared as a group the day a Northwestern basketball player collapsed and died of an aneurysm during practice.

The old routine returned in time. By spring, Anna Kat might not have been forgotten — what with the softball team wearing the “AK” patch, the special appointment of Debbie Fuller to fill the vacancy of student council secretary, and the three-page, full-color yearbook dedication all keeping her top of mind around campus — but Northwood became unafraid again. A horrible alien had killed on its streets; Northwood had been shattered, and the people made repairs. The town grieved and, like the alien, moved on.

Davis prescribed his wife too many pills. When he felt like taking some himself, which was often, he would remove a few capsules from the brown bottle in her bathroom, rub the scar on his belly, and chase the pills with scotch. The bottle’s cap boasted cruelly of a mechanism that could keep his child safe. Sometimes he’d sit on the toilet, rolling a crystal rocks glass between his hands, and wonder if he and Jackie were addicts yet, one day deciding it was okay if they were.

Jackie hardly laughed these days. Davis, always reticent, was noticeably more so. “We never make love anymore,” Jackie said one night across a cold chicken dinner and supermarket wine (the good stuff from their cellar having been depleted and never replaced). Davis agreed.

Old and strictly observed habits enabled them to go days without talking: Davis locked the doors at night and rose from bed first in the morning; Jackie paid the household bills; Davis curbed the garbage and recyclables early Monday before work; Jackie shopped for groceries on Wednesday; Davis kept the tanks in both cars more than a quarter full; Jackie picked up the laundry and dry cleaning twice a week and changed the sheets every Thursday.

Sometimes when they did speak, frequently drunk or numbed, the words came out in cruel, irretrievable bunches:

God, Jackie, is that really a lot to ask? Do I ever ask you for anything? I expect so goddamn little and you can’t even give me that!

You don’t ask for a thing, Davis. You don’t ask for anything, and you don’t give me anything. Honestly, it’s not human to live this way!

Northwood’s senior class president, a thinnish boy named Mark Campagna, came to the house with Anna Kat’s yearbook, or the yearbook she’d ordered anyway, with her name embossed on the cover in gold. Mark explained how he’d passed it around to every kid in the class, and they’d all signed, every single one. He’d made sure of that, even sat at a folding table outside the cafeteria every fifth period for a week and hunted down the kids he’d missed in the hallways between classes. Davis and Jackie thanked him and meant it, but Davis wasn’t ready to read a book filled with sentimental teen angst and melodrama, so he put it on the shelf next to her underclassman yearbooks and they promised each other they’d read it on her birthday next year. Jackie read every word the following day.

Then, just as the winter was ending, Jackie’s behavior went off-axle. No doubt there were many factors besides Anna Kat’s death that snapped her, including her family history and the long, cold winter. These didn’t help, in any case. Returning from work one evening, walking from the garage in the lengthening daylight, Davis noticed her digging in the backyard. After watching a minute, he saw she had already turned over most of the sod in the back, leaving two large rectangles of soil with a narrow walkway of grass separating them. She had to have been up to this for days.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Digging,” Jackie said, not unpleasantly.

Over the next month, she planted obsessively. Flowers and vegetables and even small trees filled the rectangles. To Davis, there seemed no order to it, but clearly there was in her mind. She had an electrician install a floodlight over the back deck, and before bed she would sit at the window in their room and stare down attentively, hand at her chin, as if the backyard were a giant chessboard. Sometimes she seemed pleased, but more often it made her despondent. “No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!” she’d cry, punching herself just above the knee. Davis would ask her what was wrong and she’d be unable to say. He’d suggest, gently, that she should see a therapist if the garden was causing her so much stress. Then she’d seem all right for a couple of days, hardly mentioning the garden. Then she’d be back in the mud, in her black, knee-high pullover boots and her thick, striped gloves and her sunglasses and baseball cap.

In May, she dug it all up and started over, transferring the plants she could save and basically creating a mirror image of the original, flipping the entire thing on the axis of grass in the middle. Ultimately, she found this configuration even more offensive, and she dug it up again in July and again in September, and on the morning of the first, unexpected frost in early November, Davis found her on the kitchen floor, arms around her knees, sobbing.

The psychiatrist (too late for a psychologist, Davis said) prescribed antidepressants and they seemed to help through the winter. She still seemed cold to Davis, but of course she could have been exacting retribution for the weeks and months he had ignored her when she was calling out to him in the semaphore of odd behavior.

Just before Christmas, almost a year after Anna Kat had been taken from them, Davis asked the detective if the police would return their daughter’s things when they no longer needed them for evidence. Later, wondering why he asked, he supposed he felt helpless, maddened by the investigative inertia.
For God’s sake, somebody, do something! Pull Anna Kat’s clothes from the evidence room! Examine the bloodstains. Maybe for ten minutes, you’ll be thinking about her.

Jackie’s therapist suggested she return to the garden in the spring. Her attitude toward it would be some measure of her improvement, a yardstick by which the doctor could adjust the dose as well as the combinations of medicine, psychiatric pharmacology being an inexact science, she told them (Davis managed to hold back a sarcastic reply). Jackie still spent most of her days there, but she seemed to enjoy it. June came and went and she hadn’t replanted even a single bulb.

In his basement office, Davis kept binders and files with notes about his family history. At the Kane County flea market he bought an old library card catalog for $325 (haggled down from $380), and he flipped over the yellowed bibliographic three-by-fives, filling the blank backs of the cards with information about twenty-seven hundred close and distant relatives. Davis had ancestors fighting in every war back to the Revolution, and long-ago uncles who farmed six of the thirteen colonies. He had a grandfather’s grandparents who traveled the world by chartered sail, and great-great-great-greats who never dared a day’s walk from the pile of dirty blankets in which they’d been born. He had relations in silent movies, aunts who’d written children’s books, and in this room he made connections between them — lines drawn from every twice-removed to every in-law to every stepdaughter and illegitimate son. Six different branches of his family tree grew like ivy across the blue walls, and in their comforting shade he trapped himself for hours and hours and hours. More than that since AK’s murder.

Davis had a distant cousin (for lack of a more descriptive phrase) who had been an outlaw in Missouri. None of his dead relatives fascinated him more, although information on Will Denny’s life was hard to come by, and what there was of it was at best half legend. Even his exact position on the Moore family tree was in doubt. Denny sardonically referred to himself in letters as a
filius populi,
a legal euphemism literally meaning “son of the people,” and used by courts and churches and genealogists in place of the more colloquial “bastard.” Denny’s mother was Davis’s great-aunt several times over, but the name of his father was a mystery, and Davis had long conceded that the statute of limitations had run out on the solution.

Through persistence and the Internet, Davis found a collector in Saint Louis who owned a photo of Denny, taken toward the end of his life. The collector allowed Davis to copy it, and the grainy, glossy reproduction hung in a frame by the door in the basement office. Silver-haired Will Denny grinned out from his daguerreotype. He wore an expensive high-collared suit, a carefree old-timer of sixty years or so with plenty of money and the freedom to spend it on stud poker and liquor and whores. His hands were thick, and his face used and pale and friendly. Davis always imagined a boisterous crew of associates just outside the frame that day — hangers-on, apostles, some drunk. Denny posed with a black tie, a long rifle, a muscular dog, and a new hat hanging on the high back of his chair.

Staring at it these days, Davis found it difficult to embrace the romantic myths he once held about his outlaw cousin. Denny, a fugitive for most of his life, seemed to have too much in common now with the faceless beast who had swallowed Davis’s daughter.

He had often wondered what people in Will Denny’s time — good, moral people, not criminals — would think of the work Davis did at the clinic, if you could make them even imagine it.

But now he wondered what Denny would do, if a devil had done to his daughter what a devil had done to Anna Kat.

If you could make Denny even imagine it.

Eighteen months after the murder, the detective told Davis (still calling twice a week) that he could pick up Anna Kat’s things. “This doesn’t mean we’re giving up,” he said. “We have the evidence photographed, the DNA scanned. Phone ahead and we’ll have them ready.” Like a pizza, Davis thought.

“I don’t want to see them,” Jackie said.

“You don’t have to,” he told her.

“Will you burn the clothes?” He promised he would.

“Will they ever find him, Dave?” He shook his head, shrugged, and shook his head again.

He imagined a big room with rows of shelves holding boxes of carpet fibers and photos and handwriting samples and taped confessions, evidence enough to convict half the North Shore of something or other. He thought there would be a window and, behind it, a chunky and gray flatfoot who would spin a clipboard in front of him and bark, “Shine heah. By numbah fouwa.” Instead, he sat at the detective’s desk and the parcel was brought to him with condolences, wrapped in brown paper and tied with fraying twine.