Cody McFadyen - Shadow Man

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Cody

Mcfadyen

NEW YORK TO RONTO LONDON SYDNEY AUCKLAND

A Bantam Book / June 2006

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2006 by Cody Mcfadyen

Book design by Lynn Newmark

Bantam is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mcfadyen, Cody.

Shadow man / Cody Mcfadyen.

p. cm.

eISBN-13: 978-0-553-90262-4

eISBN-10: 0-553-90262-8

1. Government investigatorsFiction. 2. Women detectivesFiction. 3. Serial murderersFiction. I. Title.

PS3613.C438S53 2006

813'.6dc22

2005054590

www.bantamdell.com

v1.0

To my parents, for encouraging me to take the road lesstraveled. To my daughter, for giving me the gift offatherhood. To my wife, for her unshakable belief, herunending inspiration, her eternal love.

Warm thanks to Diane OConnell for her editorial advice and for her endless encouragement; Frederica Friedman for her invaluable editorial advice; Liza and Havis Dawson for their tireless work on my behalf, including some great editorial assistance and just a thousand other things; Bill Massey, my editor at Bantam; Nick Sayers, my editor at Hodder; Chandler Crawford for her always able and amazing foreign representation; to my wife, family, and friends for supporting me in my desire to write. A final special acknowledgment to Stephen King for the book On Writing. It made a difference, and helped tip the scales from thinking about writing to actually doing the deed.

I

I HAVE ONE of the dreams. There are only three; two are beautiful, one is violent, but all of them leave me shivering and alone. The one I have tonight is about my husband. It goes something like this:

I could say he kissed my neck, and leave it like that, simplicity. But that would be a lie, in the most basic way that the word was created to mean.

It would be more truthful to say that I yearned for him to kiss my neck, with every molecule of my being, with every last, burning inch of me, and that when he did, his lips were the lips of an angel, sent from heaven to answer my fevered prayers.

I was seventeen then, and so was he. It was a time when there was no blandness or darkness. There was only passion, sharp edges, and a light that burned so hard it hurt the soul.

He leaned forward in the darkness of the movie theater and ( Oh God) he hesitated for just a moment and ( Oh God) I quivered on a precipice but pretended to be calm, and Oh God Oh God Oh God he kissed my neck, and it was heaven, and I knew right then and there that I would be with him forever.

He was my one. Most people, I know, never find their one. They read about it, dream about it, or scoff at the idea. But I found mine, I found

C O D Y M C F A D Y E N

him when I was seventeen, and I never let him go, not even the day he lay dying in my arms, not even when death ripped him from me as I screamed, not even now.

Gods name these days means suffering: Oh God Oh God Oh GodI miss him so.

I wake with the ghost of that kiss on my flushed seventeen-year-old skin, and realize that I am not seventeen, and that he has stopped aging at all. Death has preserved him at the age of thirty-five, forever. To me, he is always seventeen years old, always leaning forward, always brushing my neck in that perfect moment. I reach over to the spot he should be sleeping in, and I am pierced with a pain so sudden and blinding that I pray as I shiver, pray for death and an end to pain. But of course, I go on breathing, and soon, the pain lessens.

I miss everything about him being in my life. Not just the good things. I miss his flaws as achingly as I miss the beautiful parts of him. I miss his impatience, his anger. I miss the patronizing look he would give me sometimes when I was mad at him. I miss being annoyed by the fact that hed always forget to fill the gas tank, leaving it near empty when I was ready to go somewhere.

This is the thing, I think often, that never occurs to you when you consider what it would be like to lose someone you love. That you would miss not just the flowers and kisses, but the totality of the experience. You miss the failures and little evils with as much desperation as you miss being held in the middle of the night. I wish he were here now, and I was kissing him. I wish he were here now, and I was betraying him. Either would be fine, so fine, as long as he was here. People ask sometimes, when they get up the courage, what its like to lose someone you love. I tell them its hard, and leave it at that. I could tell them that its a crucifixion of the heart. I could say that most days after, I screamed without stopping, even as I moved through the city, even with my mouth closed, even though I didnt make a sound. I could tell them I have this dream, every night, and lose him again, every morning.

But, hey, why ruin their day? So I tell them its hard. That usually seems to satisfy them.

This is just one of the dreams, and it gets me out of bed, shaking. S H A D O W M A N

I stare at the empty room, and then turn to the mirror. I have learned to hate mirrors. Some would say that this is normal. That all of us do this, put ourselves under the microscope of self-reflection and focus on the flaws. Beautiful women create fret and worry lines by looking for those very things. Teenage girls with beautiful eyes and figures to die for weep because their hair is the wrong color, or they think their nose is too big. The price of judging ourselves through others eyes, one of the curses of the human race. And I agree.

But most people dont see what I see when I look into the mirror. When I look at myself, what I see is this:

I have a jagged scar, approximately one half inch wide, that begins in the middle of my forehead at my hairline. It shoots straight down, then turns at a near perfect ninety degree angle to the left. I have no left eyebrow; the scar has taken its place. It crosses my temple, where it then makes a lazy loop-de-loop down my cheek. It rips over toward my nose, crosses the bridge of it just barely, and then turns back, slicing in a diagonal across my left nostril and zooming one final time past my jawline, down my neck, ending at my collarbone. Its quite an effect. If you look at me in right profile only, everything looks normal. You have to stare at me straight on to get the full picture. Everyone looks in a mirror at least once a day, or sees their reflection in the eyes of others. And they know what to expect. They know what they will see, what will be seen. I no longer see what I expect to see. I have the reflection of a stranger, staring out of a mask I cant take off. When I stand naked in front of the mirror, as I am now, I can see the rest of it. I have what can only be called a necklace of cigar-sized circular scars, going from under one side of my collarbone to the other. More of the same traverse my breasts, go down across my sternum and stomach, ending just above my pubic hair. The scars are cigar-sized because a cigar is what made them. If you can put all of that aside, things look pretty good. Im small, four foot ten inches tall. Im not skinny, but I am in shape. My husband used to call it a lush figure. After my mind, heart, and soul, he used to say, he married me for my mouth-sized boobs and my heart-shaped ass. I have long, thick, dark, curly hair that hangs down to just above said ass.