“Hold up,” Cain said. “Let’s do this the right way.”
He used his key fob to pop the trunk, then unzipped his crime scene bag and put on a pair of latex gloves. He handed a plastic evidence bag to Chun. Then they went back to the front of the car and Cain slipped the envelope from beneath the arm of the windshield wiper.
“More photos?” Chun asked.
“It’s too light.”
The flap was held closed with a piece of red thread wrapped in a figure-eight around a pair of thin plastic buttons. He unwound it, then eased the envelope open and looked inside. There was just a single sheet of thin typewriter paper, folded in half. Cain took it out and opened it, holding it so Inspector Chun could read alongside him. In his pocket, his phone began to vibrate, but he ignored it.
Cain:
If he hasn’t called you already, then he’s hiding them. And if he’s hiding them, he must not like what he sees. Ask him what he did to her.
Maybe you should ask yourself some questions too. Like, why even look for me? He’s the one that did it; I’m just reminding him.
—A FRIEND
Cain turned the page over, but the back was blank. He tilted the open envelope up to the streetlight and looked inside again.
“Empty?” Chun asked.
He nodded, then put the note and envelope into Chun’s evidence bag. Now he pulled out his phone, checked the missed call, and tapped Grassley’s name to call him back.
“Buddy,” he said. “What’d you find?”
“The phone didn’t have caller ID, so I star-sixty-nined it and got the number.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a pay phone, in the Elite Café.”
Cain turned around, then stepped into the street. One block down, on the other side of the intersection with California, the Elite’s neon-traced sign flickered through the canopies of the Chinese banyans that lined this section of Fillmore.
“The waitress,” Cain said. He was scanning the sidewalks on both sides of the street. There were a lot of shadows here, the streetlights no match for the trees. “She’s sure it was a man?”
“She’s sure.”
“She took the call, not someone else?”
“It was her. Then she got our plates and came out,” Grassley said. “This is three minutes ago—max.”
“Thanks, Grassley.” He hung up and turned to Chun, then pointed at the café’s sign. “The guy called from up there.”
“The Elite?”
Cain nodded.
“Let’s go—watch this side of the street and I’ll take the other.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Anything.”
“That narrows it.”
They jogged to the corner and crossed the street without waiting for the light. The guy must have planned this for a while, if he already had a note typed out. Otherwise, he would’ve handwritten it on a scrap of paper. So the note was planned, but maybe the call was a sudden decision. He couldn’t have known where Cain was going, couldn’t have planned for a pay phone within a block of the car. And if he’d started acting on impulse instead of on carefully thought-out plans, maybe he’d make a mistake.
On the other side of the street, a man came out of the Elite Café and tucked himself into the recess of a dark storefront two doors down. There was a point of light when he drew on a cigarette.
“Cain?”
Angela Chun was tugging at his elbow, whispering.
“What?” He didn’t take his eyes off the smoking man.
“That man—” She turned him so that he was looking back toward the intersection.
A man had slipped past them on the sidewalk, but Cain hadn’t paid him any attention because he was focused on the other side of the street. Now he just saw the tall man’s back. Charcoal gray running jacket, matching pants. His hands were in his pockets, his head down as he strode away from them.
“That’s our guy,” Inspector Chun whispered. “I think.”
The man couldn’t have heard her, but at her words he set off at a sprint. The traffic signal was against him, but that didn’t seem to matter. He dove through two directions of traffic, dancing sideways along the center line as a panel truck brushed past close enough that he had to duck its side mirror.
Then they were racing after him, coming off the curb and into the street without even looking. An eastbound BMW skidded sideways and laid on its horn. Chun reached into her jacket and came out with her badge, and the driver let up on the horn as they skirted past his front bumper. As they threaded through the westbound traffic, they spotted the man a hundred feet ahead of them. With each step, he increased his lead. Tall and thin, this guy. Built to run.
“SFPD!” Cain yelled. “Stop!”
Instead, the man found even more speed. They were following him up a hill, the man moving in a straight line, an easy target. It would have been a simple thing to end this with a bullet, but there was no justification for it. It’d be a bad shooting, and Cain knew it.
Near the hill’s top, the man grabbed on to the corner of a shingle-sided row-house and hooked out of sight into the alley that ran alongside it. That changed everything. They couldn’t confirm he was an unarmed suspect anymore, fleeing in plain sight; he could be waiting around any corner now, with anything in his hands.
Now was the time to draw his gun. Next to him, Chun did the same. He stopped running before they reached the alley, holding out his left arm to block Chun from running past its mouth. He nodded at the cedar-shake wall of the row-house, and she stood against it, close to the corner. She held the evidence bag in one hand, her gun in the other, its muzzle pointed at the sidewalk a few feet in front of her. Its illuminated sights glowed softly in the dark, three points of dull green. She looked at him.
“Ready?” she asked.
She didn’t sound like she’d just raced through traffic and sprinted up a hill. He took a breath before he answered.
“Wait,” he said.
“For what?”
He tried to remember her age. Ten years younger, maybe. That would put her at twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Young, sure. But she ought to know why he’d paused at this corner.
“Guys who run into something without looking first, those are the ones who get killed,” he said. “That’s not us.”
“He’s . . . the guy’s—”
“I know it,” Cain said.
He stepped to the right and dropped to one knee, looking down the alley’s length over the barrel of his gun. There were dumpsters at the fence blocking the far end. To the right, a medical building. Its ground level was a parking lot. Twenty spots, max, and maybe half of them taken. A gateway opened to a set of stairs that led up to the cross street.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“It’s no good.”
The guy might have run all the way down the alley, then climbed onto a dumpster to vault the fence. Or he might have dodged right, under the medical building, and taken the gate out. Then again, he might be behind any one of the parked cars, waiting for Cain and Chun to step a little closer.
“What do we do?” Chun said.
Cain stood up and holstered his gun, waited for Chun to do the same. He wasn’t even sure why they’d been chasing the man in the first place, except that he’d run. That wasn’t a good enough reason to keep going.
“We’ll go find Grassley,” he said.
“That’s it?”
“You’re not getting shot for Harry Castelli,” Cain said. “That’s the first thing.”
“And the second?”
“I told Grassley I’d buy him dinner. If we don’t get back, he’ll get stuck with the bill.”
Angela Chun went past him and stood at the entrance to the alley. She looked down it, toward the chainlink fence and the dumpsters. Then she turned to study the parking lot beneath the medical building, her eyes flicking to each car, to all of the shadow-heavy corners.
“All right,” she said. “If there’s nothing
else we can do.”
11
ON THE WALK back down the hill to Fillmore Street, he asked Angela Chun how she’d known. He’d seen the man briefly from the back, and then they were running and the only thing that had mattered was the chase. Now he couldn’t even say for sure the color of the man’s hair. He’d been tall and fast, and that was all Cain knew.
“It wasn’t anything, really,” she was saying. “It was just the way he looked at me and then looked away.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“If there’d been shots fired, if he’d been hit by that truck while we were chasing him, we’d have to face a board of inquiry. What would you have said then?”
“He ran.”
“But you knew it was him before he ran.”
“I knew,” she said.
They reached the bottom of the hill and turned onto Fillmore. She didn’t say anything else until they’d gone half a block. Then she stopped, next to Cain’s car, and touched his elbow to turn him.
“He didn’t look at me the way a man looks at me. Even if it’s just for a second—a half second—most men do it. They don’t even know it, maybe, but they do. It’s like an appraisal, their eyes flicking up and down. It looks like a blink, but it’s not.”
They started walking again, the Western’s yellow-lit sign blinking in front of them like the marquee at an old playhouse.
“And what did he do, if it wasn’t that?” Cain asked.
“The opposite of it—maybe what we do, on the receiving end. He curled up inside himself. He turned sideways and tried to slide by. You think I could explain that to a board of inquiry?”
“They’re usually a bunch of old men, those boards.”
“Then I guess it’s good we didn’t shoot him,” she said. “But you believe me?”
“Sure,” Cain said. “He ran. Did you get a look at him at all?”
“Not really.”
“Young?” Cain asked. “He ran like he was young.”
“Nineteen, twenty. White. Shortish hair.”
“What else?”
“He was tall—but you saw that. What do you think, six foot three?”
“At least.”
“I could sit next to him on BART for an hour and not know it was him.”
“He must be working for somebody,” Cain said. “Don’t you think?”
“Why?”
“Not many kids that age give a shit about the mayor. And anyway, this is about something that happened in 1985. If he was alive back then, he was in diapers. So he’s working for somebody.”
They reached the Western. He opened the door for her and they went back inside.
At six thirty, he gave the waitress his credit card and watched Grassley walk out with Chun. When the waitress came back, she slid into the booth opposite him.
“I asked around,” she said.
“Anything?”
He’d asked her to get him the names of any retired cops who’d worked out of the Richmond station.
“John MacDowell’s the guy you want, but he’s not here.”
“You got a number?”
“He doesn’t have a phone,” she said. She handed him a slip of paper. “Next best thing—I found out where he lives.”
“You should be cop.”
“Maybe it rubs off.”
The address was north of the city, in Stinson Beach. That wasn’t the first place he’d go looking for a retired homicide inspector. The SRO hotels in the Tenderloin would be a good start for the ones who’d washed out badly. Not-quite-beachfront Florida condos if they’d hung on to their marriages and guarded their pensions.
Stinson Beach, though. That was another financial planet.
“How’s he a regular?” Cain asked. “He’s all the way up there.”
“It’s been a couple years. He used to be a regular. He moved in with family, is what I heard.”
“How old is he?”
“Last I saw, plenty.”
“All right,” he said. He put the paper in his pocket. “This is a huge help.”
“It’s nothing,” she answered. “When you work at the Western, that’s just how it goes.”
This time, he got to the Burton Building a few minutes early. Instead of going in, he leaned against the side of his car and called Karen Fischer.
“Inspector Cain?”
“Are you sitting with my lieutenant?”
“She’s here, but I stepped out.”
“You tell her it was me?”
“No.”
He’d read her the right way, this FBI agent. She had good instincts.
“I’m out front. Can you meet me?”
“What is this?”
“I want to tell you something, and I don’t want it going straight to the mayor.”
“Give me one minute to get down.”
He hung up and went around to the front of the building. Fischer came through the glass doors soon after, paused long enough to contemplate the rain, and then walked into it to join Cain. She folded her arms together beneath the lapels of her suit jacket.
“I need to see Castelli,” Cain said. “Right now. Can you set it up?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“Why you want to see him.”
“Come with me.”
He started walking back to his car, not looking to see if she’d follow. When he reached it, he went to the passenger side and opened the door for her. Once she was in, he came around the front and sat in the driver’s seat. He switched on the dome light, then put Alexa Castelli’s photograph on Fischer’s lap.
“I got this from the mayor’s nineteen-year-old daughter,” he said. “She stole it from his study when she was ten.”
Fischer looked at it without touching it.
“It’s a different shot,” she said. “A different angle. We haven’t seen this one.”
“But she’s the same person,” Cain said. “The woman we saw, in Castelli’s four pictures.”
He told her about meeting Mona Castelli at her cliff-top house. The interview with her, and then the strange encounter with Alexa on China Beach. He put the note on top of the photograph and told her about the call at the Western, how he’d chased the man until he’d disappeared. He tread carefully as he described this. Chun and Grassley didn’t need to come up. And he didn’t say a word about the corpse in the 850 Bryant morgue.
When he was done, he took the photograph and the note back.
“Now you understand,” he said. “I don’t want him getting special warnings.”
“You think she’d do that. Your lieutenant.”
“You read her the same way. When we met in the supervisors’ chambers, I saw it. You don’t trust her.”
“She’s the one who insisted on these meetings,” Fischer said. “I didn’t think there was any point, except one.”
“To keep an eye on you.”
“That’s right.”
“Who actually called you—the mayor, or his staff?”
“His chief of staff. Melissa Montgomery. We got involved, and then he wanted SFPD in too, so he called Nagata.”
“Miss Montgomery called you on her own, or with his blessing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t we find that out?” Cain said.
Agent Fischer was looking out the window. Across the street, a man in a colorless overcoat pushed a shopping cart through the black puddles. A small child, wrapped in a raincoat, slept among the soaked paper grocery bags. A man going home from the store, or a man with nowhere to go? It was a toss-up, Cain decided. It could go either way. Or an altogether different story might fit the evidence even better. Cain watched the back of the FBI agent’s head and waited for her to answer him.
“Wait here,” she finally said. She turned back to him. “I need five minutes to set this up—while you’ve got Castelli, I’ll pull Montgomery off into a corner.”
“You know where he is?”
“Except when he’s at home, we’re watching him.”
“Who’s watching him at home?”
“Your guys.”
“And you’re okay if we leave Nagata sitting?”
“Someone can brief her on what we’ve learned knocking on doors in North Beach,” she said. “Which is nothing, but it’ll take an hour. After you talk to Castelli, you can tell her whatever you want.”
“That should go well.”
“Stay out of trouble,” she said. She opened the door. “I might like working with you.”
“Yeah—you, too.”
She got out of the car and ran through the slanting rain to her building’s entrance.
City Hall’s front door was locked.
The gilded balcony above them didn’t hang out far enough to block the runoff falling from above. After trying the handle, Fischer hammered on the wood with her fist. An FBI agent opened the door, looked past Fischer, and stared at Cain, waiting.
“This is Inspector Cain,” Fischer said. “With SFPD. Castelli should’ve heard we’re coming.”
The agent stepped back and let them in. They crossed the empty rotunda, Cain’s wet shoes squeaking on the freshly polished stone. They went up the staircase and opened the door to the mayoral suite without knocking. Melissa Montgomery was waiting for them behind the receptionist’s desk. She stood when they entered, smoothing the lapels of her light gray suit.
“He’s back there?” Fischer asked.
“He’s waiting,” she said. “He was ready to go home.”
“That’s great,” Fischer said. She took Melissa Montgomery’s wrist and put her other hand on the small of the younger woman’s back. She moved her toward the exit. “We’ll give Inspector Cain some space, in case they have to raise their voices.”
“But—”
“But nothing,” Fischer said. “You and I can talk out here.”
They stepped out of the office and closed the door. Cain crossed the red carpeted reception area, knocked once on the door to the inner office, and pushed through without waiting for an answer.
The Dark Room Page 9
