The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “I’ll need to know a good time to drop by your house.”

  “What?”

  “Your wife, your daughter—I’ll be interviewing them.”

  “You’re not doing that. You’re not going anywhere near them.”

  “I get an assignment,” Cain said, “and I do it. I don’t ask permission.”

  “Inspector—”

  “And so we’re clear? I run my investigations. I see anyone, I ask anything. And there’s no interference from the top down. I’ll set something up with your staff.”

  He opened the door and stepped into the reception lounge. A woman in a charcoal skirt and matching jacket was waiting at the threshold, balancing a tablet computer on the stack of documents in her arms. She stepped back too quickly when Cain came out and nearly tripped. When she’d caught her balance again, he recognized her. He’d seen her standing with the mayor on television. Until tonight, he’d never put a name to her face.

  “You’re Melissa Montgomery,” Cain said. “The mayor’s chief of staff.”

  “I’m not sure I got your name.”

  He took a business card from his badge holder, but her hands were too full to take it. He set it on top of her tablet’s screen.

  “Gavin Cain. Call in about an hour,” he said. “We’ll set it up.”

  “Set what up?”

  “Let’s not pretend you weren’t listening,” Cain said. “Just get a time and call me.”

  He stepped around her and went out.

  Lieutenant Nagata was leaning against the brass and iron railing at the top of the grand staircase. She pushed off it as he came toward her, and then they stood in the shadows of the marble columns. She looked at the manila folder in his hand.

  “How’d it go?”

  “It was an honor, Lieutenant,” he said. “A pleasure and a privilege. It reinforced everything I already thought about him.”

  “Cain.”

  “He’s an alcoholic, and a liar.”

  “Are you finished?”

  “He’s an empty suit, and he’s soft. You see his hands?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “You want me to find the girl.”

  “The FBI’s got the rest,” Nagata said. “We just have to find her, see where that leads. Can you do it?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “You don’t have to vote for him next year.”

  “He might not be in a position to run.”

  She took his elbow.

  “Come on—she’s waiting.”

  When they reached the staircase, instead of leading him down the steps to the rotunda, she guided him to the left. Another patrolman was guarding the entrance to the Board of Supervisors’ chambers. He pulled back the door as they approached.

  “This is our headquarters,” Nagata said. They stepped into the antechamber. “But just for tonight. Tomorrow we’re getting a conference room.”

  “In City Hall?”

  “In the Burton Building. The thirteenth floor.”

  “We need a headquarters in the FBI office?”

  They stopped before opening the second set of doors to the main room. Nagata gestured at the folder in Cain’s hand.

  “We work it until it’s done,” Nagata said. “We have one priority and it’s this.”

  “I’ve got other cases, things that won’t wait.”

  “That’s why we brought in Grassley.”

  “We don’t even know what this is,” Cain said. “My others—I’ve got bodies in the morgue. Grassley’s good, but he’s never worked a homicide on his own.”

  “We’re talking about the mayor. That’s the whole discussion, right there.”

  She opened the second oak door and they stepped into the main chamber. A wooden rail cut the room in half, separating the supervisors’ tables from the rows of benches in the public gallery. A woman was sitting in one of the supervisors’ seats, and otherwise, the chamber was empty. He and Nagata came down the aisle under the dim chandeliers, opened the gate, and came through it. Agent Fischer was typing something on her phone and didn’t look up until she was done. Then she stood and shook Cain’s hand.

  “Karen Fischer,” she said. “I’ve heard good things about you.”

  “Okay.”

  She pointed at the table opposite her, and they all sat. He guessed Fischer was a year or two older than him. She had a bit of gray in her short hair, and, unlike Castelli, she wasn’t trying to hide it with dye. The checkered grip of her service weapon was visible under her suit jacket.

  She looked at Nagata and then at Cain.

  “You know why we’re here? You talked to Castelli?”

  “Yes,” Nagata said.

  Cain just nodded.

  “We’re tracing the letter—”

  “I never saw the envelope,” Cain said. “Castelli gave it to you?”

  “Not him, but his staff—and we’re putting everything we have into tracking it. It was postmarked from North Beach, no return address.”

  “You can follow it past that?”

  “If the lab doesn’t find prints or DNA, we have—let’s just say, other resources. And by lunch tomorrow we’ll have backgrounds on the names we get from Castelli’s staff. The enemy lists.”

  “Lieutenant Nagata says I’m supposed to look for the woman.”

  “Finding her—we see that as more of a local law enforcement issue.”

  “You don’t know she’s local.”

  “You don’t know she’s not,” Fischer said. “And it’s moot, anyway.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The mayor,” Lieutenant Nagata said. “He wanted you. He insisted.”

  “He wanted his police to have a part,” Fischer said.

  “It took him five minutes before he told me how to do my job,” Cain said. “If you think he brought me in to look over your shoulder—”

  “I don’t, Inspector Cain,” Fischer said. “We’ll work just fine together. You and I will, anyway.”

  “All right.”

  “We don’t know if the woman’s local or not,” Fischer said. “We don’t know if she’s a coconspirator, an actress hired to play a role, or something else.”

  “A victim.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Fischer said. “One you’ll have to check.”

  “I’m doing this on my own?”

  “On your own. We’ll meet twice a day,” Fischer said. “At noon and at seven p.m. If I find anything that could help you, I’ll give it to you. Nothing held back. I expect the same from you.”

  “You can count on it,” Nagata said.

  “You have the letter and the photographs,” Fischer said to Cain. “You’ll need to show them to people. I know that. But try to be discreet. You’re looking for the woman—that’s all.”

  Cain nodded.

  “We’ll want to keep this as quiet as we can. We don’t want to telegraph every move we make, or he might move up his timetable. Whoever did this, he’ll be watching for anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Like a police helicopter landing on Civic Center Plaza at two in the morning?”

  “Things like that,” Fischer said. She looked at Nagata. “Starting now, we’ll want to avoid things like that.”

  “That was the mayor’s call.”

  “But he’s not running this investigation, is he?” Fischer said to Nagata. Then she turned to Cain. “Our next meeting’s in nine hours. Hopefully you’ll have something by then.”

  4

  THE PATROLMAN LEFT him in front of the Hall of Justice at four in the morning. It took him five minutes to pass through security, get a cup of coffee, and reach the sixth-floor office he shared with Grassley. He shut the door behind him, then sat in his chair and looked at his name, written backward, on the frosted-glass window. He took a sip of his coffee and then put the cup on the desk. It was still too hot to drink. They hadn’t painted Grassley’s name on the window yet, but his old partner’s name had been scraped off.

  He logg
ed in to his computer, then pulled up the SFPD’s public webpage and clicked through to the gallery of missing persons. There were twelve on the main page, and another thirty in the archives. Half of them could be ruled out right away. He wasn’t looking for a man. And none of the women were anything close to the pictures he’d seen in Castelli’s office. From the missing persons gallery, he went to the collection of unsolved homicides—known victims killed by unknown assailants. There were forty-seven, going back to 1991. He clicked through each picture and dismissed them all.

  The last stop was the medical examiner’s website, where he scrolled through the thumbnails of unidentified corpses. Bodies pulled from the alleys behind the Tenderloin’s SRO hotels; bodies drifting back and forth between the pylons along the Embarcadero. Most of them were men, and every one of them looked homeless. Some of the pictures were pencil drawings, and Cain knew they were just approximations. The sketch artist, sitting seven floors below him in the basement, could only guess what their faces might have looked like. A week in the water, a month in a trash pile, and there wasn’t much left.

  He hadn’t expected this to be easy. But he’d learned early on that you had to exhaust the simplest options before you committed to anything else. He looked at his watch. His contact in Menlo Park wouldn’t be awake for another four hours. He sent him a text, asking if he could come down. He wouldn’t get any closer to finding the woman until Matt Redding answered. Lucy was surely asleep. But Grassley might be back by now.

  He dialed his partner’s number, and Grassley answered after three rings.

  “Cain—where are you?”

  “Sitting in our office.”

  “I got here thirty, forty-five minutes ago.”

  “You’re in the morgue?” Cain asked. “Have they started?”

  “Shit, Gavin,” Grassley answered. “I’m all by myself. The ME’s not coming in till ten thirty.”

  “What about the techs, the ones you rode back with?”

  “Those guys? They went home.”

  “You’re just sitting with the casket?”

  “That’s what you wanted.”

  “You’re all right, Grassley,” Cain said. “You know that?”

  “They brought it in. They wouldn’t open it without the ME, and I didn’t ask them to. But they put it on the x-ray table. I figured no harm doing that.”

  “You figured right.”

  “They took the shot, put it up on the screen. Then they took off. Left me looking at it.”

  “They locked up and left you?”

  “You should come down here,” Grassley said. “See what I’m seeing.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean,” Grassley said, “I think I know what it is, but I’m not sure. We never saw this shit where I came from.”

  “Grassley—are you okay?”

  “This is fucked up.”

  Cain left the office and started walking to the elevator. In the three weeks they’d been partners, Grassley had been game for anything. Not that they’d seen much so far, but he’d put up a calm front. A couple shootings, a partial dismemberment.

  He’d never heard Grassley sound like this.

  “I’m on my way,” Cain said.

  “I don’t know about this shit, is all I’m saying.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  He reached the elevator and hit the button. The car was already there. At this hour,the Hall of Justice was dead. The elevator hadn’t been called away since he’d ridden it up from the lobby.

  “I’m about to lose you,” Cain said. “I’ll be right down.”

  He hung up and got in the car, then hit the button for the basement.

  Cain tapped on the locked door to the medical examiner’s suite of underground offices. The door pushed open and Grassley stepped out of the shadows.

  “The lights,” Grassley said. “I can’t turn them back on. Maybe they got a key card, something like that.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Cain still had his flashlight. He took it out, switched it on, and stepped inside. Grassley let the door close behind him and then turned on his own light.

  “It’s over here.”

  Cain had never been here in the dark. The office used to be open twenty-four hours a day, but it was running short-staffed now.

  They went into the main autopsy room.

  The stainless-steel tables stood out in their lights and cast stilted shadows up the wall. There was the long sink. Above it, another familiar sight: the hanging-basket produce scales, used to weigh internal organs. Cain let his light slide along the particleboard back wall, where the black-bladed cutting tools hung from hooks like the display in a pawnshop. The cutting shears were from gardening stores; the cleavers from Chinatown shops. There was a hacksaw no different from the one in a plumber’s truck, except for what it had done.

  Then they came to the x-ray room. It was off in a corner, separated from the rest of the room by a heavy, lead-plated partition. Even here there were drains on the floor, and Cain watched a half-dozen cockroaches scurry across the tiles to reach them as he and Grassley approached with their lights. The casket sat on a table beneath the ceiling-mounted x-ray. Cain could smell it. The scents of fresh earth, of rotting wood, rode above the morgue’s background stench.

  “Here,” Grassley said.

  He’d stopped in front of the x-ray’s control desk. Cain’s light moved across a dark computer screen. Grassley tapped the keyboard, and the screen came to life.

  “Look at this,” Grassley said.

  Cain rolled the chair back and sat down. He took off his glasses, then leaned close to the screen. It showed an x-ray image of the casket, taken from above. He could see the casket’s elongated outline, could see the sharp white spikes of the screws and nails holding it together. The interior was a jumble of ghostly white bones. The image made no sense. Either the focus was off or there was some kind of doubling effect in the x-ray.

  “You see it?” Grassley said. “You get it?”

  “There are too many bones.”

  “The guy—he was really onto something, wasn’t he?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What now?”

  “We seal it, sign it, and go home.”

  “That’s it?”

  “For now,” Cain said. “You’ll be here at ten thirty, when the ME gets in. You’ll have to watch.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll make it if I can,” Cain said. “But I don’t know.”

  “What’s she got you working on?”

  “She didn’t tell you?” Cain asked.

  “She didn’t give me anything.”

  “Then I better not say.”

  Cain looked at the x-ray again, then stood and went back toward the morgue’s work areas. It didn’t take him long to find a roll of tamper-evident seal tape. He plucked a permanent marker from a pencil jar on someone’s desk, then went back to the x-ray room. The casket overhung the table on each end. There’d be enough room to run the tape all the way around it, so that after he and Grassley signed it, it would be impossible to open without breaking the seal.

  “Here,” Cain said. “Let’s find a roll of paper towels. We need to wipe some of this dirt off. The tape’s got to stick.”

  His coffee was still warm when he got back to his office. By then, he wasn’t sure he wanted it. But he took a sip anyway and then went to the filing cabinet. Three weeks ago he’d put a TV on top of the cabinet and hooked it up to a JVC camcorder he’d found in a thrift shop.

  Cain unlocked the filing cabinet and took out the tape. He’d watched it first by himself, and then he’d played it for Grassley. They’d brought in Lieutenant Nagata, and she gave her blessing to show it to an assistant district attorney. Cain and the ADA had copied the file onto a CD, had submitted it to the Superior Court of Monterey County with their application for an order of disinterment. Before that, they’d gone up to Napa to see Chris Hanley’s mother. They didn’t show her the tape
. They hinted at what was on it, but that was all. She let them come back later in the afternoon, with a notary, so that she could sign the affidavit supporting their application.

  Now he put the original tape into the camcorder, turned on the TV, and played it. He leaned back against his desk’s front edge and watched. He’d seen it two dozen times, but it still transfixed him.

  In the beginning, the first twenty seconds, there was white snow. And then, with the suddenness of a finger snap, the image appeared.

  The old man sat in a leather-bound recliner chair. There was an IV stand beside him, some kind of apparatus on the floor next to it. The light was all fluorescent. The wall behind the chair was painted pistachio green. The man was stone bald, and an oxygen tube dipped past his ear on its way to his nostrils. Cain had taken a still image of this opening shot, had shown it around the sixth floor. Half a dozen people told him he was looking at a chemotherapy administration room.

  “My name—my real name—is John Fonteroy,” the man said. He was looking into the camera. Tubes disappeared into the turquoise hospital gown he wore. “I owned the Fonteroy Mortuary, on Geary Boulevard, in San Francisco.”

  He gave his old address and his social security number.

  He reached to the table next to him, picked up a cup of water. There was a flexible straw in it. He drew it into his mouth and took a tiny sip. Then he put the cup back and looked to the camera again.

  “I’m about to die,” he said. “And this is my confession.”

  Now, an offscreen voice cut in. A woman’s voice. She spoke with a light midwestern twang, but they’d never figured out who she was. They hadn’t located the hospital where Fonteroy was sitting, hadn’t tracked down where he’d gone after running away from his mortuary. They didn’t know what name he’d been using since he’d fled the city, what name he’d used to check into the hospital.

  “Tell them who you’re talking to.”

  “I’m talking to you,” the old man said. “My lawyer.”

  “You’re telling me this because you want to?”

  “Yes.”

  The tape had arrived in a plain envelope, postmarked from Chicago O’Hare. When Cain opened it, there was a handwritten note on white cardstock.