“Thanks for coming,” Justin said. “This might be the closest we get to a celebration.” He threw his arms in the air. “Congratulations! We got the bastard.”
The spring surf licked the beach on the other side of the dunes. Across a hundred yards on either side of them, couples made out on blankets thrown over the wet sand at irregular intervals. Muffled shouting over a muffled stereo marked the epicenter of the graduation party at 415 Saint Paul Road, just steps from the water. It was unclear to Davis if it was being supervised by freethinking adults or if there were still parents so apathetic and stupid they would leave town the weekend of their kid’s graduation and expect him not to turn their home into a three-million-dollar frat house.
Davis said, “Should I be celebrating, Justin? Tell me.”
“Of course you should. Coyne’s been arrested and, according to the papers, already convicted. Quote: The trial, it seems, is almost a formality. ”
“What happened to your theory?”
“What do you mean?” Justin smiled in the manner of a comedian waiting for his audience to get his last joke.
“You said that when Coyne kills in Shadow World, he doesn’t feel the urge to kill as the Wicker Man. Didn’t Coyne just murder someone in the game a few weeks ago? The night he attacked Sally?”
“It’s an inexact science.” Justin smirked.
“It’s bullshit,” Davis said. “Your whole Wicker Man/Shadow World theory is bullshit.” He turned and pressed his shoe into the damp spring sand. His footprint made a detailed impression, outlining every tread and recess in his sole.
“I know what you did,” Davis said, and as he said it he knew the accusation could not be undone. That it would change things between them. The significance was not in the truth of the statement, and Davis would admit he had no evidence to support it. Indeed, before the idea occurred to him he never would have thought Justin capable of such a thing. Sure, he had read Justin’s psych reports, and once worried over missing dogs in the Finns’ neighborhood, and he and Joan had held endless discussions about what Justin might one day become (in her office and, more recently, across the low valley where their pillows met). Even so, they had never considered it anything but a remote possibility. Davis had never entertained the notion, not for a moment, that their darkest fears had become real.
But now he knew it to be true. The moment Martha Finn told Davis she suspected Justin was taking drugs, he began to accept it. Mothers know things about their sons. Justin wasn’t taking drugs, but there was something else profoundly wrong with him.
From the day Justin knocked on his door, he and the boy had been connected by a priori truths, not facts in evidence. It was true that Sam Coyne had killed Davis’s daughter. It also must be true that Coyne had killed others, in numbers impossible to figure. For the past year he and Justin had kept these awful truths between them, and their inability to share them with the world had felt like a penance to Davis. For being a selfish person. A bad husband and a mediocre father. Unmasking AK’s killer had once been something like his religion, but he became resigned to life as a monk, with silence in service of the truth being its own reward. The final secret he shared with Anna Kat would be the face and the name of her killer.
He hadn’t counted on Justin, however. The evangelist, determined to bring the word to the people at any cost.
“I was going to tell you,” Justin said.
“Bullshit,” Davis said again.
“Seriously. I considered that you might be happier if I didn’t. But I was going to tell you. Because we’re not done.”
“No, no, Justin,” Davis said. “We’re done. The only question is, how are we going to make things right?”
Justin laughed and shook his head. “You don’t think things are right? The man who killed your daughter is going to prison, probably for the rest of his life. Not for Anna Kat’s murder but-”
“Not even for a murder he committed.”
Justin climbed halfway up the dune and looked toward the lake, which he could make out in the darkness only by the tiny white foam of the soft breaks. “You know how we talked once that it might be possible for one self to exist simultaneously in two bodies? I felt him. When I was killing that girl, I felt Coyne. I understood him. I knew why he had to do it. Why the Wicker Man comes out. I understood what it means to have an urge beyond your control. To be a puppet in the hands of compulsion. I felt bad for her. I did. But once I started – I mean, there was this rush. Stopping it would have been like – like stopping an orgasm.”
Davis felt sick. He crouched in some tall grass.
“I’m sorry,” Justin said. “I know that’s hard for you to hear in those terms. But don’t you want to know everything? I don’t know why Coyne picked Anna Kat, but once he did, she had to die. It was inevitable, like an accident. Like a bolt of lightning. There was nothing either of them could have done to stop it. I thought you’d find that comforting.”
Davis couldn’t even conceive of the concept. “We have to – we have to go to the police.”
Justin slid back down the dune. “Now? What will that do? Set Coyne free? Put him back on the street? Put you in prison, probably for the rest of your life? Where’s the justice in that? For you? For AK? For your wife? For the parents of the dozens of people Sam Coyne has killed and will kill in the future if we set him free? Because I’m telling you. I felt it. He won’t stop.”
“Where’s the justice for Deirdre Thorson? What about her? What about her parents?”
Justin sniffed. “That’s why I said we aren’t done.” He had a glaze on his eyes, like Vaseline. “Dr. Moore, the reason I know Sam Coyne won’t stop killing is because now that I’ve killed, neither will I.” Justin picked up a handful of packed sand and crumbled through his fingers as he explained. And when he was done, Davis knew it would happen just as the boy said.
Justin at Seventeen