The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “For the record, neither seal’s been touched,” he said. “Zoom in, get that.”

  “If anyone had messed with that thing,” Jim said, “it wouldn’t have hissed. That’s a solid casket.”

  “Thank you, Jim,” Dr. Levy said. “We’d like a clean tape from here on.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “From here on.”

  “All right.”

  Cain popped the seals off and put them into a zip bag while Grassley filmed him.

  “Okay,” Dr. Levy said, when he was finished. “Let’s lift this lid. You’re at the head, and I’m at the foot. The hinges might be a little stiff.”

  The lid swung up ninety degrees, and the smell that wafted up with it had reaching hands and an implacable grip. Cain stepped around and took a place next to Grassley. Dr. Levy was on the other side of him, and Jim and the lab tech left their autopsy and came to look inside.

  “Oh, Christ, do you see that?” Grassley whispered. “Do you see it?”

  7

  “We see it,” Dr. Levy said. She pointed at the inside of the lid. “Here—and here.”

  At some point in its three decades underground, the casket’s lid liner had fallen apart. The yellowed silk had dropped away from its padded underlayment, detaching completely from the lid. Now it lay atop the corpses like a shroud. There were rips and holes near its top, and through one of the larger ones, Cain could see a jawbone, all its teeth still set. The silk covered everything else.

  No one reached to remove the shroud, because they were still looking at the inside of the casket’s lid. Where the wood was visible through the shredded padding, the scratch marks were clear.

  “Is that—Are you getting that?” Cain asked.

  “I’m getting it,” Grassley said.

  “Wait,” Dr. Levy said. “Wait a minute.”

  She went to one of the drawers and returned with a pair of tweezers. Carver stepped aside to give her space. She leaned over the casket and delicately plucked something from between the wood-planked lid and the polyester batting. When she turned, with the object in the tweezers’ grasp, Jim wordlessly held out a plastic sample tube. Cain couldn’t see what she was gripping, but after she dropped it into the sample container, she took it and held it for the camera.

  “This is a fingernail,” she said. Looking into the lens, putting it on the record. “Dark green polish that chipped off and stuck to the wood. It was embedded in the coffin lid.”

  “It was a woman, and she was alive when she went in,” Cain said. “They put her in there, on top of Christopher Hanley, and buried her alive.”

  “It looks that way, but—” She turned toward Grassley, who had backed up to the wall and was leaning against it. “Are you okay, Inspector?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Grassley said. “I just need a minute.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Dr. Levy said. “You need air.”

  “Here,” the lab tech said. “I’ll shoot it.”

  “Don’t turn it off,” Cain said. “It has to be one shot.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  The technician took the camera from Grassley and went up to the casket. Cain stood next to him, and then Grassley came reluctantly to his right. They all looked down together as Dr. Levy and Jim pulled off the silken shroud.

  Cain hadn’t been able to find any records about Christopher Hanley, and didn’t know anything about the kid until he and the assistant DA were sitting in Marjorie Hanley’s breakfast nook in Napa. She poured them each a cup of coffee and told them her son had died of AIDS. He was seventeen years old. He’d spent most of the last year of his life on a hospital bed set up in the living room. They’d lived in the Haight then. From his bed, he’d been able to look across Buena Vista Avenue at the park. In the beginning, when he wasn’t strong enough to get in and out on his own, she’d needed her husband’s help to lift him into the bed. At the end, she lifted him out of the bed and carried him from the house herself. He weighed just eighty pounds.

  Now, standing over Christopher’s casket and looking down, one hand pressed to his respirator to keep it tight, Cain thought how tight a fit it must have been. Even with the kid shrunken down to nothing, when they pushed the woman in on top of him and shut the lid on her, there would have hardly been room for her to move.

  She must have run out of air quickly. Ten minutes. Less, even: in her frenzy to escape, she’d have burned through the oxygen in a hurry. She’d clawed through the liner and the padding, had dug her nails deep into the wooden lid. Her hands were frozen beside her face. Her skin was black and purple, her features completely indistinguishable. Her teeth were intact, visible because her jaw hung open. That was something they could go on, if she had dental records in a database somewhere.

  She had blond hair, and had gone into the coffin naked. Underneath her, Christopher Hanley wore what was left of a white suit.

  “How come he’s in better shape than her?” Cain asked. “You can make out his face.”

  “He was embalmed,” Dr. Levy said. “She wasn’t, if she went in alive. He might look even better if he hadn’t spent thirty years underneath her.”

  “I’m getting a crime scene team in here,” Cain said. “I don’t want you to do anything else until they’re here.”

  Dr. Levy looked up at him.

  “Fingerprints?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Anything on the outside, that’s all gone. Thirty years in the dirt, no way.”

  “But the inside?”

  “Maybe.”

  Cain leaned over the casket again. Driving up here, he’d almost talked himself into believing that if he found a second corpse in this casket, she’d be wearing the rotten remains of a Jean Patou cocktail dress. That there’d be a jeweled pin in there somewhere, and a set of handcuffs. What were the odds that on the same day he was asked to track down a woman from a 1985 photograph, he’d find a woman in a 1985 coffin? She had the right color hair, and polish on her toenails. But none of that proved a thing.

  There was only one way to check that he could think of, but it was a long shot. She wasn’t handcuffed, and she’d gone into the coffin lively enough to rip up the lining and claw into the lid. If it was her, a long time must have passed between the last photograph and the moment they put her in the box. Long enough, anyway, for the drugs to wear off.

  “Can you have a lab run toxicology on her?”

  “I can run it,” Dr. Levy said. “I don’t know what I’ll find. And you know our backlog. It’ll take months. If I gave you samples, you could get a private lab. It’d be faster.”

  “Just run it and see.”

  “It’d help if I knew what you were looking for—this long, the drugs won’t be there, but maybe their decomposition products will be.”

  “Tell the lab to look for everything. But especially Thrallinex.”

  “You know something you’re not telling me?”

  “I don’t know anything yet,” Cain said. He turned to Grassley. “Get that team in here. I’ve got to go.”

  Cain found a meter on Turk Street, directly behind the federal building. His phone rang as he was unbuckling his seat belt. It wasn’t a number he recognized, but he took the call.

  “This is Inspector Cain.”

  “It took me longer than you wanted, but I did it.”

  The caller was a woman. Late twenties or early thirties, her voice either very professional or extremely distrustful. Or maybe both, he thought, once it clicked and he realized who she was.

  “Melissa Montgomery,” Cain said.

  “Yes, and I don’t have long. They’ll be at the house at two o’clock. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  “It’s got to be me and them,” Cain said. “The wife and the daughter. Castelli doesn’t get to sit in.”

  “He won’t get in your way. I’ve got him booked through eight o’clock.”

  “Did you tell him where I’m going?”

  “It might have slipped my mind,”
she said, and hung up. All business, this woman. If she felt anything at all about what she was telling him, Cain hadn’t heard it.

  His phone rang again before he made it out of the car. Grassley this time. He sat back down and answered.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The techs are going over the casket. The good one, the guy you like, he’s in charge.”

  “Where are you? You should be there.”

  “Christ, Cain—I’m watching from the other side of the room,” Grassley said. He was keeping his voice low so that no one would hear their conversation.

  “You want to know why I asked about the Thrallinex.”

  “If I’m working this, I need to know what you know. You can’t keep all the cards.”

  “You’re right,” Cain said. He stepped out of the car and shut the door. “What Nagata’s got me on, and what we’ve got in the morgue—they might be two sides of the same thing. It’s just a hunch, but it feels right.”

  “You’ll bring me in?”

  “Not officially,” Cain said. “But let’s do this—I’m already late for my meeting. And I’ve got an interview at two. So stay with the body, and get as much as you can from Dr. Levy. I’ll buy you dinner at the Western, at five. Bring Inspector Chun, if you can find her.”

  “You think I’ll want to eat after this?”

  “Up to you,” Cain said. “If you don’t, I save money.”

  He hung up, went through the federal building’s glass doors, and handed his badge to the guard at the security checkpoint.

  Lieutenant Nagata and Special Agent Fischer were waiting for him in a windowless conference room on the thirteenth floor. The walls were battleship gray, and the wooden table was so pitted, it might have been used as a chopping block. The contractors who had redone the rest of the place must have missed this room. But someone had brought in an urn of coffee, and it smelled like it had been brewed that day. Cain poured himself a cup and then sat next to his boss, across from Fischer.

  “I’ll start,” Fischer said. He liked the way she got right into it. “We rode herd on the guys at the lab, got them to expedite. But it’s like we thought—no prints anywhere, no DNA on the flap. Whoever mailed the letter wore gloves, used a sponge instead of licking the envelope.”

  “You said you had other resources?”

  “I’m getting there,” Fischer said. “Since the anthrax attacks—2001, we’re talking—the Post Office has a program called Mail Isolation Control and Tracking. You’re familiar?”

  “No,” Cain said. Nagata shook her head.

  “The system, it photographs every piece of mail that comes in, in the order it’s received. So if you get a letter and you don’t know where it came from, you can go to the MICT database and look at every letter that got processed just before and after.”

  “You know where he mailed it?”

  “We pulled the MICT photographs, found the letter, then looked at the twenty pieces on either side. Most of those had return addresses, all in North Beach. So at seven this morning, we went knocking on doors. We woke up a lady on Chestnut Street, showed her a photo of the envelope she’d mailed—birthday money for her grandson, she said. And she dropped it in the blue box at Bay and Stockton.”

  “Did you—”

  “We had a fingerprint team at the box in fifteen minutes. Right now, we’ve got agents running down prints from everyone we know about who mailed a letter from that site. But that’s a long shot, the prints.”

  “If he wore gloves and used a sponge when he did the letter, he would’ve used them when he mailed it,” Nagata said.

  “That’s what we think,” Fischer answered. “But we’ve got to check—and we’re also fanning through the neighborhood, looking for cameras.”

  “Bay and Stockton,” Cain said. “That’s residential. Pretty quiet.”

  “Right. There aren’t any storefronts, but we’re looking for webcams, private security systems. At least two hundred apartment windows look down on that intersection.”

  “Another long shot,” Cain said.

  “But it’s like I said—we’ve got to check. Turn every stone.”

  “Where are you on the enemy list?” Cain asked.

  “It’s progressing,” she said. “A man like Castelli—let’s just say he’s got as many enemies as friends.”

  “Anybody stand out?”

  “Like I said, it’s progressing.” Her eyes cut to Nagata, and Cain wasn’t sure if his lieutenant noticed or not. She was busy taking notes. “I’ll let you know when we find something.”

  “All right.”

  He wondered what had happened that Fischer already distrusted Nagata. Maybe Fischer distrusted everyone, as a way to save time.

  “What about you?” Nagata said to Cain. She underlined something on her spiral pad. “What have you found?”

  “The woman in the photos, she died in 1985,” Cain said. “She came in wearing a sixteen-thousand-dollar Jean Patou dress, was force-fed an incapacitating dose of Thrallinex, and disappeared. The guy who brought her was probably driving a 1984 Cadillac Eldorado.”

  Agent Fischer was staring at him, waiting for him to go on. But he didn’t say what he thought had happened next. That they’d put her back in the Cadillac and driven her to the mortuary. Someone had gone inside and handed John Fonteroy an envelope, then told him to step out back and have a smoke. They’d have had to bring her in quickly, because Christopher Hanley’s family would’ve been milling around out front. She hadn’t been gagged and she hadn’t been bound, so they must have been confident they could control her. That she wouldn’t scream or fight back until after they forced her on top of Christopher Hanley and closed the casket. The last light a narrowing crack, and then nothing but blackness for thirty years.

  He couldn’t prove any of that yet, but that wasn’t the only reason he kept it back. He might have trusted Agent Fischer with it, but he didn’t think Nagata would go five minutes before she reported it to Castelli. Agent Fischer must have been thinking the same thing when she dodged his question about the enemy lists.

  “You went to see Matthew Redding, didn’t you?” Nagata said.

  “This morning.”

  “Explain how you know all that,” Fischer said. “And who’s this guy Redding?”

  8

  THERE WAS A flagpole in the Castellis’ front yard, the gold-trimmed San Francisco ensign showing a phoenix rising from a ring of flames. Cain looked at it, and then beyond at the Spanish-style house that clung to the sea cliffs above China Beach. He’d checked in with the patrolmen stationed on the lower portion of the street before coming the rest of the way up. A squad car parked next to a fire hydrant, keeping out of sight of the house, so they wouldn’t alarm anyone.

  Cain looked the place over as he walked up the driveway. It was a good thing Castelli had made some money in Silicon Valley before the crash. The only thing Cain knew for sure about real estate was that he didn’t have any, but he did know Castelli couldn’t have picked up a house like this on a politician’s pay. There must have been twenty rooms in the place.

  He stepped off the brick driveway and followed a path lined with waist-high rosemary bushes to the front door. Everything was wet and cold, and smelled of the ocean and the pine bark mulch that was spread through the flower beds. He rang the bell and listened to the heavy chimes echo inside the house.

  Castelli’s daughter, a dark-eyed nineteen-year-old, opened the door. Alexa Castelli. The patrolmen down the street had plenty to say about her, and now he understood why. She was using one hand to keep a bath towel wrapped across her chest, and the other to hold her wet hair in a pile atop her head. Steam rose from the back of her bare neck.

  “You’re the cop.”

  “Your mother’s here?”

  “She’s in the back, waiting,” Alexa said. She opened the door the rest of the way. “We’ve never had a detective come and see us.”

  She let go of her hair and shook it out, so that the dark pile fanne
d across her shoulders. Rivulets of bath water ran past the rise of her clavicles and then down her chest to the towel.

  “Why don’t you go get dressed?” Cain said. “And I’ll start with your mom.”

  “Why don’t I?”

  She didn’t sound the least bit interested in putting on clothes. But she turned and went back across the Saltillo tile floor, leaving small wet prints behind her. Cain waited until she was out of sight, and then he stepped inside and closed the door after himself. The only sound was a bathtub draining.

  “Mrs. Castelli?” he called. “Mona Castelli?”

  “Back here.”

  He crossed the entry hall and entered a room that didn’t seem to have any purpose except to be large. The carpet underfoot was thick and white. He was probably supposed to take off his shoes, but he didn’t. Mona Castelli was nowhere to be seen.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I’m in the sunroom.”

  He wandered through more of the house—a vast stone and stainless-steel kitchen, a den, a humidor larger than Lucy’s bathroom—and then he found a tiled staircase that led down to a glass-walled room at the cliff’s edge.

  Mona Castelli was perched on a pair of floral print cushions on a wrought-iron chair. There was a round table in front of her with a silver pitcher atop. She was balancing a martini glass between two fingers, her nails painted like the insides of polished shells.

  “You’re Cain?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sit down,” she said.

  He sat opposite her. He could smell the gin and vermouth when she spoke. She had frosted highlights in her auburn hair, and a carefully made-up face. It was cold in here, the wind and mist beating against the glass behind her. She wore a fur-trimmed cashmere shawl, but it did nothing to hide her figure. She looked ten years younger than she probably was, but as far as Cain was concerned, nothing would hide the fact that she was drinking a pitcher of martinis alone at two on a weekday afternoon.

  “You met my daughter already, I assume.”

  “Yes. I’ll talk to her after.”

  “When she answered the door, was she dressed?”