The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “That’s what I told them. She’ll be able to talk when we’re ready for her.”

  “Did you do a GSR swab?” Cain asked. “Can we rule her out as the shooter?”

  “The paramedics did it,” Nagata said. “It came out negative.”

  “But they took samples for the SEM lab?”

  “Of course.”

  That was good. It wasn’t easy to wash off gunshot residue. If Mrs. Castelli had shot a gun tonight and had somehow washed her hands well enough to evade the paramedics’ colorimetric field test, a scanning electron microscope would catch her when the lab got around to it. But the field tests were better than they used to be. They hardly missed anything, and that boded well for Mona Castelli.

  “What about the daughter?” Cain asked. “Alexa—is she around?”

  “No, she’s at her apartment. We haven’t told her yet.”

  “All right,” Cain said. “His study’s upstairs?”

  They were climbing now, the dark staircase wide enough for them to walk side by side.

  “Up here. I haven’t been in, but she showed me the door.”

  “You were the first to get here?” Cain asked. “She called 911, and then dispatch called you directly?”

  “There was a directive—call me first if anything came up about him.”

  “Who gave the order?”

  “Castelli.”

  “When?”

  “The night he got the first note,” Nagata said.

  “He was worried something would happen,” Cain said. “Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They reached the top of the stairs, and Nagata led them down a hallway. The master bedroom was on one end, and Castelli’s study, accessed by a pair of book-matched mahogany doors, was at the other. An antique lever lock key protruded from the brass plate beneath the doorknob.

  Nagata opened both doors and he stepped inside after her. The first thing he noticed was the sharp smell of cordite gun smoke, and under that, there was blood. He closed the doors and looked at the lock. There was no thumb lever. To lock it, even from the inside, you needed a key. He scanned the room but didn’t see one.

  “She couldn’t open this when she came home, had to find a spare key?”

  “That’s what she told 911.”

  He pointed at the lock.

  “Either there’s one in this room somewhere, or this is going to get complicated.”

  They turned to face the study. Castelli’s car-size desk was parked in the middle of the room, so that sitting behind it, he would face whoever came through the door. His leather chair was empty. A pair of shaded lamps stood at the desk’s corners, casting interlocking circles on its surface. The rest of the study was in shadow.

  Another step in, and his eyes began adjusting.

  He saw the red-black splatter on the back wall and the bookcases. There was blood on the leather blotter, a wide smear of it that led to the far edge. He stepped around to follow it, and there was the mayor. After the shot, Castelli must have gone face-first into the desk. Gravity and slack muscles eased him from there to the floor.

  Now he lay curled in a nearly fetal pose between the chair and the desk. There was a thick pool of blood on the rug underneath his head. Cain knelt without touching anything, and when he leaned close he could see a small exit wound far back on Castelli’s scalp, the black hair around it bloody and flecked with gray-red brain tissue.

  He looked around. The gun lay to the right of the chair, partially under the desk. A snub-nosed revolver, maybe a .38. He didn’t touch it but leaned closer to see it. It was a Smith & Wesson, not a Model 10 but one of the earlier M&P jobs. A lot of wear around the barrel. An old gun, a family heirloom. Maybe Harry J. Castelli Sr. had worn it on his hip in West Berlin.

  Nagata was at the end of the desk, watching him. He looked back at Castelli, the blood still wet and shiny under the man’s head.

  “Did the paramedics come up?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t come in here?”

  “No.”

  He asked the next question as evenly as he could.

  “No one’s checked him?”

  “I thought . . . the scene.”

  “The scene,” Cain said. “Sure.”

  Without moving Castelli, he put two fingers on the man’s jugular. His skin was cool, and there was no pulse. He was right over the body now and could smell the alcohol rising up. When he tried to move Castelli’s jaw, it was locked tight. So was his neck. Blood had come out of his lips and run down his cheek to the rug. Cain didn’t see an entry wound anywhere. The gun must have been in Castelli’s mouth when it went off.

  “Nothing? No heartbeat?”

  He looked up at Nagata.

  “Cold and stiff,” he said. “We’ll ask Dr. Levy, and she’ll tell us rigor in the neck usually takes two hours. Then she’ll walk that back and say it all depends on room temperature and a dozen other things. How long have you been here?”

  “Not even an hour.”

  “Then you’re good,” Cain said. “He was probably dead when you got here.”

  “That’s good?”

  “You’d rather explain to Mona Castelli why you kept the paramedics out when they could’ve done something?”

  “Shit.”

  “Forget it, Lieutenant,” Cain said. “Gunshot or not, you were in the clear—I’ve seen guys who drank enough to smell like this. They didn’t need a bullet to finish things off. They just dropped dead.”

  “I’ll call up Dr. Levy.”

  “Not yet,” Cain said. “Before the world starts walking through, I want to see the rest of the room.”

  Kneeling over Castelli, he patted him down. He was wearing the same striped shirt and blue tie he’d been wearing ten hours ago in City Hall, when Cain confronted him. His suit jacket was missing but could be anywhere.

  The shadows were too heavy. Underneath the desk was like a cave. He looked up. Track lights ran along the ceiling and pointed to the bookshelves.

  “See if you can find a switch for those,” Cain said. “We need more light.”

  He turned back to Castelli and patted down his trouser pockets. It was hard to feel inside the right pocket. Castelli lay curled on that side. But Cain felt the distinct shape of an antique lever lock key beneath the gabardine fabric. He didn’t move the body, and he didn’t try to take the key out. That would all come later, after the crime scene photographers were finished.

  Above him, the lights came on. One bulb went out immediately. A droplet of blood must have splattered there, cracking the thin glass when it heated. He stepped over Castelli’s legs to look at the desktop.

  “There’s a key in his right pocket,” Cain said.

  “All right.”

  “After we move him, we’ll get it out and test it. Make sure it locks that door.”

  On the desk, a near-empty bottle of bourbon stood next to a crystal tumbler. Farther from the bottle, there was a red wax seal, like the one Castelli had cut from a fresh bottle at City Hall. So Castelli hadn’t poured a drop from this bottle until he sat down tonight, opened it, and got started.

  Cain pointed it out to Nagata.

  “We’ll tag it and bag it,” he said. “The bottle and the glass—all of this.”

  He knelt again, mindful of the blood on the rug, and opened each of the drawers.

  “Five dollars there’s a nickel-plated folding knife in here.”

  “What?”

  “Bingo.”

  The knife was in the first drawer he opened. He eased out the blade and saw the red wax caught in its serrations. He put the knife down. The drawer Alexa had described was locked, but it only took Cain a moment to find the key underneath a pencil tray in the slim center drawer.

  “What are you doing?” Nagata asked.

  “Checking for a note.”

  “A suicide note.”

  “That’d be nice,” Cain said. “But maybe he didn’t put a bow on it. If h
e’s got the next set of photos, they might have come with a note.”

  “He said this whole thing was a hoax.”

  “People say a lot of things.”

  Cain unlocked the drawer, then rolled it open. There were two more bottles of bourbon, their seals uncut. Castelli must have had his own delivery truck. He pictured an entire fleet of them, riding all night on the highways between San Francisco and Kentucky. Next to the bottles, there was a foot-high stack of Playboy magazines. Each was stored inside a separate plastic collector’s sleeve. Cain lifted the magazines to look beneath them, but there was nothing. A couple of loose coins, the pennies that find their way into all drawers and never come out. One of them was from 1983, the other from 1997. And, as far as the locked drawer went, that was all.

  “I’m putting this all back the way I found it,” Cain said. “We’ll photograph it in place, then bag it.”

  “Fine.”

  “He might’ve left it in City Hall,” Cain said. “In his office there. Did you post a guard?”

  “I didn’t think—”

  “Call now and get some guys. We don’t want any staff going into his office. Not even the reception area.”

  “All right.”

  “We’ll search that after we finish here.”

  Nagata left the room to make the call. It didn’t surprise him how easy it was, taking this over, telling her what to do. She’d never run a homicide investigation. She’d been looking to him for direction since they came upstairs. While she was gone, Cain checked out the bookshelves behind the desk. History, organized by geography. The top shelf was California: San Francisco on the left, and everything else on the right. The middle five shelves covered the rest of the world, by continent. General reference on the bottom shelf. It was surprising, the breadth of Castelli’s interests. Cain wouldn’t have pegged him as a serious reader of anything beyond bourbon labels and men’s club brochures. Behind him, Nagata hung up.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you check the credenza over there—see if there’s a note.”

  He was still holding the stack of Playboys. He knelt again and began putting them back into the drawer, one at a time. The first issue was December 1953. On the cover, Marilyn Monroe raised her bare left arm and smiled with her eyes half closed. He knew the centerfold in that one, the famous shot of Marilyn curled up on some kind of red cushion. The pages looked well thumbed. Alexa had come in here as a girl to borrow these, to sneak them off to her room, where she could study the photographs in private. They couldn’t have been in this drawer back then. They must have been out on the shelves, because the drawer had been locked and she said she didn’t know what was in it. He did wonder how much he should be relying on anything Alexa said. And he wondered what Castelli kept in here ten years ago. The gun, maybe.

  “No note,” Nagata said from the other side of the room. “His phone. His wallet, too.”

  He came around the desk to the credenza, where Nagata was standing in front of a shallow marble bowl. Castelli’s phone and wallet lay there. Nagata reached down and picked up the phone, moving her thumb over the button to turn it on.

  “Stop,” Cain said.

  “There could be a note—maybe something in his last emails.”

  “So we call the Computer Forensics Unit and leave it for them.”

  He pointed to the bowl, but Nagata didn’t put the phone down. She wasn’t like Chun or Grassley. She hadn’t made lieutenant because she was a good investigator. She’d worked on Castelli’s campaign, had helped him get the police union’s endorsement. He’d returned the favor. Simple as that, but now all her future promotions were dead under a desk.

  “Picture yourself on the witness stand,” Cain said. “The lawyer’s leaning over the rail, right in your face. He knows you were Castelli’s friend. He knows you used the phone. He’s just asked your credentials as a computer expert. What do you say?”

  She put the phone back in the bowl.

  “Forget it—we’ll leave it for CFU.”

  “Good,” Cain said. “They’ll give us a printout and a report. They’re usually pretty quick.”

  He picked up the wallet and flipped through it. It was thin. Two credit cards and a driver’s license. No cash and no receipts.

  There was a sound from downstairs, the front door clicking open. Footsteps, and voices from the entry hall.

  “Who’s that?” Cain asked.

  “No idea.”

  Cain went to the window behind the desk. Both the curtains and the exposed rectangle of glass were flecked with blood. He looked down to the driveway. A black town car was parked behind the ambulance, and a patrol car was blocking the end of the driveway. A sedan, brown in the streetlight but maybe maroon by day, was parked across the street.

  “Who else did you call?”

  “The people who needed to know,” Nagata said.

  “Come on,” Cain said, going for the door. “The whole house could be a crime scene, and your VIPs are about to trash it.”

  They regrouped outside the front door, a loose circle of five. Agent Fischer stood next to Cain, and on her right was the chief of police, using a handkerchief to mop the rain from his bald head. Next to him was Katherine Greenberg. Until today, she’d been the president of the board of supervisors. By lunchtime, she’d be sworn in as mayor. Cain tried to read Nagata’s face but couldn’t.

  “He’s dead?” Greenberg asked Cain. “Inspector—you saw him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I heard it was a suicide?”

  “He shot himself,” Nagata said. “The gun’s—”

  “He’s been shot,” Cain said. “We don’t know which gun shot him. It’s too early to say he shot himself. Right now, we can’t even say it was a bullet that killed him.”

  “You’re saying this could be a murder?” Greenberg asked.

  “Until we complete the investigation, it could be anything. You know about the letter and the photos?”

  “Chief Larson briefed me.”

  “In the car, on the way over—that was the first time I told her,” the chief said to Cain. The chief had never spoken a word to Cain, and now here he was, squeezing his hands together and explaining himself. “Not before this morning.”

  “The letter’s a complication we can’t ignore,” Cain said. He looked at Agent Fischer and she nodded back at him: Go on. “And we can’t investigate this in the normal course.”

  “What are you telling me?” Greenberg asked.

  Her hair was held in a neat bun by a tortoiseshell clip, and she wore a hint of makeup. The rain beaded and glistened like amber on her beige overcoat. Of the five people crowded around the front door’s entry light, she was the only one who looked halfway awake, who had dressed properly for the weather. Was she quick about getting ready, or was she already awake when the call came? It might not mean anything if she’d been up, but then again, it might be everything.

  “I’m requesting a special assignment to investigate this death,” Cain said. “Agent Fischer and I can run it, and we’ll bring in a pair of inspectors from SFPD—Grassley and Chun. We’re an independent team with no oversight from you, from the SFPD, or the FBI. We don’t report anything to anybody until we’re done. Or until we’re about to kick down a door.”

  “Kick down a door?”

  “Make an arrest,” Fischer said. “And he’s right—we need to be independent.”

  “This is for political cover?” Greenberg asked. “I don’t go for that. That was Castelli’s way.”

  “It’s not political cover,” Cain said. “It’s tactical. It’s necessary, in a thing like this.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “He’s being polite,” Fischer said. No one here signed her paychecks. “He means until we know who wrote the letter, our suspects include any of Castelli’s enemies. And anyone who stood to benefit from his death. We don’t want those people looking over our shoulder.”

  “Now, come on,�
�� Chief Lawson said. But Greenberg stopped him with a hand on his chest.

  “She’s right. Inspector Cain, too. I wasn’t a Castelli fan, and lately neither were you. We can’t put our hands on this.”

  Chief Lawson shook his head but didn’t respond.

  “I think we’re done here,” Greenberg said. “I’ll leave it to you and Agent Fischer. The chief and I are going to be busy today. And I’m sure Lieutenant Nagata has other business.”

  “Thank you,” Cain said. “Your Honor.”

  Greenberg shook her head.

  “I don’t take the oath until ten o’clock,” she said. “This is your investigation. But the city’s resources are yours—the ME’s office, the labs. If you need warm bodies to knock on doors—”

  “I’ll get what I need.”

  She reached to shake his hand, then seemed to change her mind. Instead, she went back down the stone-lined path. She and the chief had come in his car, and now his driver was opening the rear doors for them. Nagata went to her own car without saying another word to anyone.

  Cain supposed she might come back to the Homicide Detail at least once, to clean out her desk. She wasn’t the best lieutenant he’d ever had, but there could be worse. At least she knew her limitations. He put that out of his mind and turned to Fischer.

  “Your bosses will be okay with this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who called you?” Cain said. “Nagata?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I was worried she’d try to keep it in-house.”

  “She seemed reluctant,” Fischer said. “I guess I know why.”

  “You got gloves and shoe covers?”

  Fischer patted her purse.

  “Let’s go—I’d like to look the room over before the CSI stampede. If that’s okay.”

  15

  BACK IN THE study, he brought Fischer to look at the mayor where he lay beneath the desk. She got down close to him, her knees in the same imprints Cain had left five minutes ago in the rug’s deep pile. She felt Castelli’s jugular and tested the movement of his jaw. She pulled out a penlight and began to search under the desk.

  Cain went to the far wall of the study.

  There was a door he hadn’t noticed on his first brief look around the room. With a light push, one of the hardwood panels slid sideways, opening to a private bathroom. Fischer leaned around the desk at the sound.