“I won’t do it again.”
“I know you won’t,” Cain said. He forced his voice to soften. “You’re a good inspector. The best partner I’ve had. It was just a slip-up.”
Grassley nodded.
“I’ll be careful.”
They stepped off the elevator and started walking toward their shared office. The cubicle farm—the vast space between the elevators and the window offices—was a chaotic mess. The noon-to-eight shift was winding down; the night watch was coming on. Typewriters rattled beneath half-shouted conversations as one crew passed the baton to the next.
They went into their office and Cain shut the door.
“Unless you’re sitting in court, or alone with your girlfriend, never tell anyone but me the truth. Not when half that will do just as well.”
Grassley’s face locked up, processing that bit of advice.
“You’re telling me to lie.”
“It’s not your job to tell anyone what’s going on,” Cain said. “It’s your job to find out what just happened. You go to Vegas?”
“Vegas?”
“You want to know the other guy’s hand—it’s not ‘I’ll show you mine, you show me yours.’ You want to get anything, you bluff.”
“All right,” Grassley said. He looked at his watch.
“If you need to go home, then go. It’s late.”
Cain was so tired, his face was going numb. He watched Fonteroy’s tape again, the old man dying of cancer and feeling hell’s glow on the back of his neck. There were no answers on the tape, no details he hadn’t already seen.
He stood to leave. An orange sticker by the door reminded him to kill the lights. As he was reaching for the switch, he saw a white box on the filing cabinet. His name was handwritten across the broken trefoil of a biohazard symbol.
He took it back to his desk, pulled a pair of latex gloves from the drawer, and used a pocketknife to cut the seal. There was a handwritten note at the top. He pushed his glasses to his forehead and read it.
Inspector Cain,
Enclosed are samples from Jane Doe’s liver and fetus. I’ll do what I can, but you can do it faster through your own channels.
—Dr. Rachel Levy
Inside the box were two glass tubes, sealed with rubber stoppers. Each held a black lump smaller than a grain of rice. If he could find someone to foot the bill, he could hire an outside expert to run the toxicology. Fischer had the deepest pockets, but he didn’t want to tell her about the cadaver until he knew where it fit. He put the box in an overstuffed drawer of his filing cabinet, shut off the lights, and locked his office door.
13
SLIDING HIS KEY into the lock, he heard voices. A man speaking, Lucy laughing. He turned the bolt without making a sound, then rotated the handle and pressed the door carefully open until there was enough of a gap for him to slip inside.
“ . . . we get off the jet,” the man was saying, “and I don’t even know where we are. Montana? Colorado? They put us in a golf cart and drive us from the landing strip up to the house. This paved pathway—and you know those little solar garden lights? Forget those. They’ve got actual candles, in glass globes.”
“But you’ve got no idea?” Lucy asked. “At all?”
“Somewhere in the mountains. The air was cold. You breathe in, and it’s cold and thin, and there’s hint of wood smoke. There were streams nearby, and I could hear them.”
“How big was it?” Lucy asked. “The house they brought you to.”
“You’d think huge, right?” the man said, and by now Cain had placed Matt Redding’s voice. “But it was just a little cabin. A little hunting cabin, somewhere in the mountains. With a landing strip for a twin-engine jet. And they were all waiting for—”
Cain stepped into the dining room, and Matt stopped midsentence and stood. He’d been sitting opposite Lucy at her long walnut table. His glass was empty, and the bottle of wine next to it was half gone. Lucy had a glass of water. Cain looked to her and she answered him by tilting her right palm toward the ceiling. She didn’t know why Matt had come.
“Hey, Matt. What’s going on?” Cain said.
“I came over to see you,” he said. “And I brought you and Lucy a bottle of wine. Only you weren’t here, and I find out she won’t drink wine—”
“She told you why?”
“No, but I’m not stupid—and it’s great, Gavin.”
“Thanks.”
“Really,” Matt said. “You guys are going to be great.”
Cain checked to his left, saw that Lucy was still okay with this. They hadn’t told anyone except her psychiatrist, who still came three times a week. Then, at the shrink’s urging, Cain had found another doctor who was willing to make house calls. But the doctor couldn’t do everything in a house call, and they wanted to be safe. They’d talked about it, and she knew she’d have to do it, but they hadn’t settled on when or where.
In front of him, Matt held out the bottle of wine.
“So, she can’t,” Matt said. “I get that. But you can—unless it’s a solidarity thing.”
“Have some,” Lucy said. “He’s celebrating.”
“You sold the program?” Cain asked.
Matt nodded.
“For the kind of money you expected?”
“North of that,” Matt said. He poured wine into his glass and put the bottle down. “Way north.”
“I’ll get a glass.”
They talked for a while about the places Matt thought he might travel first: the Amalfi Coast, Santorini. Places Cain had never been, but he could picture them: water the color of lazurite, whitewashed houses clinging to the cliffs and catching the last of the day’s sunlight. There was only so much they could say, and they went through it all quickly. Then Cain sat looking at the wine in his half-empty glass.
“You didn’t just come to tell us you’re leaving.”
“I had another look at the photos. Highlighted some things I didn’t think to check the first time, and got a couple hits.” He glanced at Lucy. “It’s okay to talk here?”
“I’m okay if you’re okay,” Lucy said. She took Cain’s hand under the table.
Matt’s backpack was hanging from his chair. He opened it and brought out a tablet computer, setting it on the table between them. He switched it on, then opened a file. It was the first photograph, the girl in the Jean Patou dress, backed against a brick wall with her hands up to ward off the man with the camera. Lucy leaned across to look at it.
“This has to do with the mayor?” she asked.
“I hadn’t told him that,” Cain said. He looked at Matt. “You’ll keep a secret?”
“You know I will.”
“That photo came to Castelli’s office in an envelope. There were three others with it,” Cain said. He took them out of his briefcase and laid them out on the table next to Matt’s tablet. “And there was a note.”
“What does he want?” Lucy asked, when she was finished looking at each of the pictures. “Money?”
“Nothing so simple,” Cain said. “He wants Castelli to end it.”
“End what?”
“His life. With a gun to his head.”
Cain slid his copy of the note from its folder and put it on the table. Lucy read it, then pushed it across to Matt.
“What do you think the other eight show?” he asked, handing the note back.
Cain had some ideas about that. Castelli might be on the bed with the handcuffed, passed-out girl. The final shots might show the girl being stuffed on top of Christopher Hanley and sealed alive inside his casket. Cain couldn’t rule anything out, but he didn’t have enough to start speculating out loud.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Fair enough,” Matt said. He picked up his tablet and used his thumb and forefinger to zoom in until the picture showed the girl’s right wrist. “I didn’t run the bracelet the first time through.”
She wore a silver bangle, the metal worked in a honeyc
omb pattern. It had no lettering, no symbols of any kind. Just the silver, hexagonal cells that circled her wrist.
“It stands out,” Matt was saying. “So I figured it was worth a shot. It’s an Imogene Bass piece.”
“A what?”
“Imogene Bass—she’s a jewelry designer, in London. She was just getting started in 1985, and her stuff wasn’t all that expensive. That bracelet would’ve gone for thirty pounds. Today it’d be worth a lot more.”
“Where would she have gotten it?”
“Back then, there was just the one shop—in London. But check this out,” Matt said. He scrolled down the zoomed-in photograph until they could see the girl’s feet. She wore a pair of heels, open at the toe with a leather strap that came across the front of her ankle. “The computer’s less sure about these—a lot of shoes look alike, and there’s nothing that sets these off. But the result I’m getting is seventy percent sure these are Struttons.”
“That’s a shoe company?” Cain asked. He looked at Lucy.
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have—they were a small name, and they never got out of the U.K.,” Matt said. “They did mostly discount stuff. Cheap shoes, knockoffs.”
“So she got the shoes and the bracelet in the U.K.?” Cain asked.
“Yeah. And look at this.”
Matt swiped his screen to close the photograph. He opened a map and zoomed in to London, Cain quickly getting lost as the perspective fell closer to the ground. All he knew was that they were somewhere west of the river. The Thames, he remembered. He’d only been out of the country once, to El Salvador, to talk to a witness who wouldn’t touch a phone.
“This is 71 Victoria Street,” Matt said. “When Imogene Bass opened her showroom, in 1984, it was here.”
“Okay.”
“And then go one block around, into this alley,” Matt said, tracing his finger above the screen. “This is Strutton Ground. Their first shoe store was here. What do you think about that?”
Cain considered it.
“She must’ve lived there. If she’d been an American and gone to London as a tourist, I can see her buying the bracelet. It’s pretty enough. But why would a tourist go to London and buy a pair of cheap high-heels she could get at home?”
“Makes sense.”
“But here’s another question,” Cain said. “If she’s wearing a sixteen-thousand-dollar dress, why’s she going to put on a pair of thirty-dollar shoes?”
Lucy reached to the middle of the table and took the first and third photographs, so that she had two views of the dress. She held one close to her eyes, then the other. Then she stood with both of them, went to the dimmer switch, and turned up the overhead light. When she came back, she put the photographs on the table in front of Cain.
“This isn’t a sixteen-thousand-dollar dress,” she said. “I don’t know where you’re getting that.”
“But it is,” Matt said. “We saw it. It’s going for that much used. It’s a Jean Patou.”
Lucy shook her head.
“It’s not a Jean Patou—it just looks like one. And she didn’t buy it. She made it. This is a homemade dress.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I used to sew,” she said. She stood behind Cain, one hand on his shoulder and the other pointing to the photograph. “Look at the seams. Or here, the hem, where it turns out and you can see the inside. It’s top-stitched, with a machine. You can see the stitching from a mile away.”
Matt came around and stood on the other side of Cain so he could see.
“If this were really a couture dress, the hem would be pick-stitched—hand sewn so you couldn’t see anything,” Lucy said. “But it’s fit for her. See, here, going up her torso, the way it follows her, even when she’s putting her hands in the air? She didn’t get this off a rack. She measured herself, and then she made it. But she did it in a hurry.”
Cain put his hand on top of Lucy’s fingers. What a loss that she’d spent the last four years hiding in this house. Spending days at a time at the back of her closet, her chin on her knees and her arms crossed around her shins. He wondered, not for the first time, what would change in the next seven months.
“Then the shoes make sense,” Cain said.
“She wanted to look like a rich girl,” Lucy said. “She pulled it off, probably for less than a hundred dollars. Even the way she cut corners, it would’ve taken a long time.”
Cain thought about that. He let go of Lucy’s hand and stood up. In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water, not sure he wanted any more of Matt Redding’s wine. The girl in the photograph had wanted to look like something she wasn’t. Maybe she was also pretending to be someone she wasn’t. She’d come a long way to play that role. And it had gotten her killed.
14
HE WOKE AT four a.m., his phone vibrating on the bedside table, the screen lit up with Nagata’s name. He got his arm out from beneath Lucy’s neck, swung his legs onto the floor, and went for the door, phone in hand. Behind him, Lucy rolled over. He shut the door and answered the phone in the hallway, his voice barely a whisper.
“This is Inspector Cain,” he said. “What’s going on, Lieutenant?”
“How soon can you get to the mayor’s house?”
He looked at his watch, struggling to read it in the dark. “Thirty minutes. I can get there in thirty minutes.”
“Fifteen,” Nagata said. “Ten would be better.”
“Make it ten, then. What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here. Face to face. And bring your scene bag.”
“Shit.”
“That’s right,” Nagata said. “A whole world of it.”
“Dr. Levy’s on her way?”
“With a van full of crime scene techs.”
“Fischer knows?”
“Not yet. Get dressed and get up here. I’ve been calling you for half an hour.”
Cain drove north toward the Presidio, the city motionless beneath a heavy blanket of fog. He turned on his low beams and his wipers. When he got to Sea Cliff Avenue, he parked in front of the mayor’s house and looked around to see who else was there. Nagata’s car was in the driveway, and there was a white van from the medical examiner’s office next to it. Behind that, there was an ambulance. There were only two patrol cars on the street, and he guessed they’d been here all along, keeping watch on the house. There were no news vans yet, which meant that so far the department had managed to keep radio silence. There was a light coming from the back window of the ambulance, and that was the only light from any of the vehicles. No sirens, no rooftop flashers.
He got out of the car and went around to the trunk for the scene bag. It was so still and quiet that he could hear the surf breaking on the rocks beneath Castelli’s house. When the foghorn sounded, it felt like he was standing right above it on the bridge. The note was low and bone-shaking, and then at the end, the silence was empty.
“That was fast,” Nagata said. She came around the half-open gate and stood next to him on the sidewalk while he used a penlight to check the contents of his bag. “I didn’t really think you’d be here in ten minutes.”
“I was close.”
“I thought you lived in Daly City?”
“I was at my girlfriend’s place.”
It was too dark on the street to know if Nagata reacted to that at all. He stood, shouldering the scene bag’s nylon strap.
“I’ve kept everyone out,” Nagata said. “I haven’t even been in the room yet.”
“What’s in it?”
“Castelli.”
“What happened?”
“Mona Castelli called 911 at three a.m.,” Nagata said. They slipped through the opening in the gate, then came off the driveway and went along the wet path through the herb garden to reach the front door. “She’d just gotten home.”
“Where was she until three?”
“Down in Monterey. Charity fundraiser at the aquarium. It went unt
il midnight, then she stayed another hour talking to Meredith Miles.”
“Who’s that?”
“An actress. Or a singer. I forget which. I’ve got a list, everyone she talked to.”
“She drove there?” Cain asked.
The last he’d seen her, Mona Castelli couldn’t have driven down the block to the liquor store successfully. Getting to Monterey, and back again, was out of the question.
“She went in a car, but she wasn’t driving. She used a limo service.”
“Was she sober when you got here?”
“Not exactly.”
“Are we talking a little tipsy, or light-on-fire drunk?”
“Somewhere in between, maybe,” Nagata said. “She sounded like someone who’d been at a party till one in the morning, then maybe had another couple in the limo on the ride home.”
They’d been standing at the front door. Now Nagata took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket. She slipped them on, then pulled plastic covers over her shoes. Cain set down his scene bag and did the same.
“When did the limo pick her up?”
“Seven o’clock.”
“What’d she tell 911?” he asked.
Nagata pushed the door open and stepped into the house. There were lights in a few of the wall sconces, and farther back, the kitchen was well lit. But the entry hall was dark enough to hide anything. Cain flicked on his light and looked around. There was a wooden table next to the door. He saw a set of keys, a patent leather clutch. A half-finished martini.
“She said she went upstairs,” Nagata said. “She thought he’d be in bed, but he wasn’t. His study was locked, and he didn’t answer when she tapped on the door. She knew where he kept the spare key, so she got it. She found him behind his desk—she said it looked like he shot himself.”
“Where’s she now?”
“You saw the ambulance?”
Cain nodded.
“She’s in the back. They gave her a sedative.”
“Not too much, I hope.”
The Dark Room Page 11
