“Nice,” she said.
She went back to what she’d been doing, and Cain stepped into Castelli’s private bathroom. Marble tile, silk wallpaper with a fleur-de-lis print. Everything made of metal was gold plated. The faucet fixtures, the wall lamps. Even the toilet’s flush handle. He knelt and opened the cabinet under the sink. Cleaning supplies in a plastic bucket, a big bottle of bleach. Rolls of tissue paper. Folded washcloths in a wicker basket. He closed the cabinet and stood. The mirror behind the basin swung out on hidden hinges. Castelli must have had another medicine cabinet in his master bedroom—he wouldn’t hide the spare key to his study in a room that could only be accessed from the study. So this was his second medicine cabinet, maybe a more private one.
Cain looked through the medications. Viagra and Ambien. Wellbutrin. Tramadol. He checked that last one with his phone—a painkiller, some kind of lightweight opiate. None of the pill bottles had Castelli’s name or any kind of prescription information. He might have been buying them online. One of those pharmacies from Canada, from Tijuana. That made sense. A man with Castelli’s ambitions might not want to walk into his doctor’s office and describe the symptoms that would lead to any of these prescriptions.
“Inspector Cain?” He leaned out of the bathroom. Agent Fischer was still half under the desk. “Come here a minute.”
He went over, stepping around the mess on the rug until he was kneeling next to her. She hadn’t moved the gun, but she was leaning close to it. Even with the track lights on, it was far enough under the desk to be in the shadows. She lit it up with her flashlight.
“What am I looking at?” Cain asked.
The gun lay on its side, and they were looking down its blue-black barrel. The rifling looked worn down, and he thought again about how old it must have been.
“Look at the cylinder, the chamber just to the right of the barrel.”
He looked and saw it.
“It’s empty,” he said. There were flat-nosed, metal-jacketed bullets in the other three visible chambers. The view into the bottom chamber was blocked by the trigger assembly, the view into the top was blocked by the barrel.
“That’s a double-action S and W,” Fischer said. “So if he shot himself, there’d be an empty shell in the chamber under the firing pin. The cylinder wouldn’t rotate unless he pulled the trigger again. So the empty chamber on the right, that’s something else.”
“The gun was fired twice, is what you’re saying.”
“You keep a revolver?”
“Just an automatic.”
“But still—when you fire a round, what do you do? Walk around one short?” Fischer asked. “Or do you reload?”
“I reload.”
“If he kept this gun sitting in a drawer, he wouldn’t leave an empty chamber. What’s the point of that?”
“Beats me.”
Cain rose and looked around the room. There, high on the back wall and surrounded by a shotgun pattern of blood droplets, was a bullet hole in the wooden molding. After it came out the back of Castelli’s head it had gone there. That was good. If it had been a little to the right, it would have gone through the window and they’d never have found it.
“What are you looking for?” Fischer asked.
“Another bullet hole—if he fired two rounds, where’d the other one go?”
Fischer pulled herself out from beneath the desk and knelt next to him. They scanned the ceiling, then the back wall.
“There,” she said. “Bookshelf, bottom row. The American Heritage Dictionary.”
Cain went to the shelf and knelt there. The dictionary was a thick, hardbound volume. The bullet had gone into its spine.
“Good eyes.”
Fischer came over. Neither of them touched the book. Cain was making fast mental notes, everything he needed to say to the photographers.
“Why two shots?” she said.
“You saw the gun,” Cain said. “It’s prewar, don’t you think? An antique. If it was an heirloom, maybe he’d never shot it. Ammunition as old as the gun—ballistics will tell us.”
“So he fires one off to see if it works. Then he swivels around, downs a drink or ten. The last thing he swallows is the barrel.”
“That’s about it.”
“It’s weird.”
“You’ve seen a suicide that wasn’t?” Cain asked.
She didn’t answer right away. Probably, in the FBI, they had better things to do than run out to every dead body that got called in. He thought of the calls he’d been on, just in the last month. Suicide, death by drunken misadventure. Bag the evidence, haul the body to the ME. Write the report and forget it—except this time, the corpse on the rug was Harry Castelli.
“Do you want to swab his hands now, or leave it for the ME?” Fischer asked.
“Dr. Levy can do it.”
“You trust her?”
“Yes.”
She looked down at Castelli’s hands. There was dried blood spackled across both sets of his knuckles.
“Three feet,” Fischer said. “That’s how far it goes.”
“What’s that?”
“Fifteen years ago, when Sandia Labs did the gunshot residue experiments, they could pick up traces on anyone within three feet of a shooter. Residue on your hands, it doesn’t mean you were holding the gun.”
Cain knew that. If Rachel Levy pulled a positive swab off Castelli’s hands, it could mean anything. To build a case, no piece of evidence was conclusive. Everything came with its own uncertainties. The only thing to do was keep going, to gather all you could and plot every point. You had to hope the line pointed in one direction, that any other explanation became an unreasonable doubt.
“There’s a medicine cabinet behind the sink,” Cain said. “Prescription drugs, but I don’t think he got them from a doctor. Nothing over the top, but maybe worth checking out.”
“Something your toxicologist can do. Make sure he gets the bottles and samples them. The pills might be different from what the labels say. Also, his browser history—you need to get computer forensics on that.”
“Our toxicology lab isn’t up and running,” Cain said.
“Send it out, then,” Fischer said. “A private lab.”
“You can’t help?”
“I can send things to our lab. I can’t move you ahead in line.”
“I keep hearing that.”
“You ready to bring them in, get going for real?”
“I’ll go get them,” Cain said.
Dr. Levy and the vanload of techs from the crime scene unit were still sitting in the driveway. He went to get them, and Karen Fischer followed him out. He liked that she didn’t stay in the room by herself, that she didn’t need him to say anything. They both understood how much better it would be, testifying that no, the only person who’d ever been alone with the body had been Mona Castelli.
They didn’t move the body until well past lunchtime. The techs came in with their tripods and their can lights, and they took photographs and used lasers to shoot measurements and calculate angles. A guy from ballistics got up on a ladder and burrowed into the high back wall, eventually finding the lethal bullet buried and smashed in a two-by-six heart pine stud. When the same man pulled out the dictionary and flipped it open, the nearly intact bullet fell out of the M section. It had punched through the spine, had gone almost all the way through the book, but had stopped just before the fore edge.
The man bagged it, then showed it to Cain and Fischer.
“Good ballistics off this one,” he said. “The other—not so much. You send a piece of lead through two sides of a skull, then into a piece of wood, it gets pretty smashed up.”
Cain looked around. The study was cluttered with numbered yellow signs, a hundred and seventy of them, marking the location of each piece of evidence. The photographers were moving from one to the next, taking their time to frame each shot. Dr. Levy and two assistant medical examiners rolled Castelli over and lifted him into a body bag. They’d alre
ady swabbed his hands and bagged them, and the colorimetric GSR test was developing on the edge of the desk.
“Hang on,” Cain said. “I need to check something.”
He stepped away from Fischer and the ballistics man, nodded a greeting to Dr. Levy, and knelt next to her at the body bag.
“I’m taking something out of his pocket—a key,” Cain said. “All right?”
“Bring it back. If it’s on the body, it stays on the body until we get to Bryant Street.”
“I’m not even leaving the room.”
Cain reached into Castelli’s right pocket and found the key. He pulled it out and showed it to Dr. Levy, then to Fischer. Then he crossed to the study’s door and put the key in the lock. He twisted it, and the deadbolt slid out. He turned it the same way, another half rotation, and the deadbolt disappeared.
What did that prove?
Castelli could have come into the study, could have locked the door with the key and put it back in his pocket. Then he must have crossed the room to the credenza, where he put down his wallet and phone. After that, he opened a fresh bottle of bourbon and sat down to the serious business of drinking nine-tenths of it. There was just the one glass. But if there’d been someone else in here, a shooter, that person wouldn’t very well have left his glass sitting on the desk.
Cain came back to the body bag and slipped the key into Castelli’s pocket. Kneeling there, he helped position the stiffened body so Rachel Levy’s assistants could zip the bag closed.
“When you do the blood alcohol test, can you determine how much he had to drink?” Cain asked.
“Sure.”
“I mean, you can be pretty precise about it? Whether he drank the whole bottle himself, or if he had company helping him?”
“I can’t do that,” Dr. Levy said. “We don’t know when he started, how fast he was drinking. He’d be metabolizing it while he went.”
“He was with me at seven o’clock,” Cain said. “And he was dead by three. Does that help?”
“A little. I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
She picked up the GSR test and showed it to Cain. The circular fiberglass swab was speckled with tiny blue dots.
Cain stood up.
“Agent Fischer?”
“I see it.”
“Positive gunshot residue,” Dr. Levy said.
Cain nodded and looked around the room. Soon, the CSI team would start bagging everything. They’d load the bags into boxes and haul them off. It would take a moving truck to get it all—the books and the magazines, the rug that had soaked up Castelli’s blood until it was black with it, the sawn-out chunk of old-growth pine that had caught his bullet. The bottles, the tumbler, the contents of the bathroom.
Next to him, Agent Fischer was putting her phone away. She took Cain’s elbow.
“That was the patrolman, next door,” she said. “Mona Castelli’s coming out of it. She can talk to us.”
“All right.”
Cain checked faces in the now crowded room until he recognized the man he wanted. He went to him, a technician from the Crime Scene Investigation unit. Cain wasn’t sure of Sumida’s first name, wasn’t sure they would recognize each other if they passed on the street. They only knew each other from crime scenes.
“Agent Fischer and I have to step next door,” Cain said. “You okay if I leave you in charge?”
“Sure.”
“You know what to do?”
“Bag it and tag it,” Sumida said. “And don’t fuck it up.”
“Good deal.”
He found Fischer waiting for him by the stairs. They went down together, then crossed the foyer and went out. The early afternoon was dark gray, the cold air a relief. He’d been in the study too long. Blood drying on the walls and Castelli, unrefrigerated, on the floor. Mist drifted up Sea Cliff Avenue and sifted through the jasmine flowers that lined the walk next door.
Mona Castelli had gone next door when the ambulance left. The neighbors had taken her in, had walked her to a couch. They’d also let in a patrolman, whose instructions from Cain were straightforward: Watch the widow Castelli. Keep her in sight. And if she tries to take a drink, put a stop to it.
The young officer met them at the front door.
“Sir—ma’am—she’s just waking up.”
“And the people who live here?”
“Sitting outside, to give you space. Make yourself at home, is what the husband said.”
“Did she have anything to drink?”
“Coffee, ten minutes ago.”
“No brandy in it, anything like that?”
“No sir. I saw them make it.”
“All right. Let’s go see her.”
“You want me to wait out front?”
Cain took a better look of the patrolman. A young kid. Nineteen, twenty. But he seemed sharp enough.
“Sit in. You might learn something,” Cain said. “A third witness can’t hurt.”
“Yes, sir.”
The neighbors’ living room wasn’t half as nice as the Castellis’. Cain supposed everything ran on a graduated scale, even the extravagant wealth on Sea Cliff Avenue. They sat down in overstuffed white leather chairs opposite the matching couch where Mona Castelli lay. Her coffee mug was on a glass table next to her. It was still full.
“Have you told Alexa yet?” she asked. “Inspector Cain—have you told my daughter?”
She hadn’t opened her eyes yet.
“No, ma’am. We haven’t told her. Have you?”
“I can’t bear to.”
“Do you want me to?” Cain asked.
Mona sat up. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned her forehead against her hands.
“Will you do it for me?” she asked. “Would that be okay?”
“All right.”
There was no reason to tell her he preferred it that way. It was always better to see a family member’s initial reaction.
“Do you know where she lives?” she asked. “I don’t remember the address. I just know how to get there. It’s on Montgomery—New Montgomery.”
“I’ll call Melissa and get it from her,” Cain said. “I can go see Alexa after we finish up here.”
Mona reached for her coffee. Her hands weren’t steady, but she didn’t spill any. She took a long sip, then put the mug down.
“I need to ask you a few questions,” Cain said.
“All right.”
“And just so you know, I’m recording this.”
He set his phone on the coffee table between them.
“That’s fine.”
“Did Harry own any guns?”
“Yes, one. A pistol. A revolver.”
“Where’d he get it?”
“I don’t know. He’d always had it. It was his grandfather’s. Or maybe it had been his grandfather’s brother’s.”
“The gun we’re talking about, his grandfather’s revolver, is the one that was next to him under the desk?”
“I didn’t see it under the desk. I didn’t look under the desk—I saw him, and all the blood, and I got out.”
“You told 911 he’d shot himself, but you didn’t see the gun?”
She shook her head.
“I could smell the smoke—and the blood everywhere. The wall, the ceiling.”
“You didn’t touch him?”
“He was dead!”
“He was dead,” Cain said. “Okay. So you didn’t touch him.”
“I didn’t.”
“This gun, where did he keep it?”
“In his study? I don’t know. I hadn’t seen it for years. He isn’t a gun person. He just happened to have that gun.”
“Did he ever shoot it, that you know of? Take it to a range, and practice?”
“I never even saw him touch it.”
“How did you know about it?”
She was using her thumbs to massage her temples now. Her frosted hair hung around her face and brushed back and forth against her knees.
“I mov
ed in with Harry when I was nineteen. Sea Cliff House, next door, is the fifth—no, the sixth house we’ve had since then. Six times, I’ve packed his stuff. Six times, I’ve unpacked it.”
“He’s not secretive about anything in his study? He let you pack it, each time?”
“You mean the Playboys?” Mona asked. She looked up, and her eyes were so red, she might have just stumbled clear of a forest fire. “Those belonged to his father. I already told you—there’s nothing about Harry you can’t find online.”
She’d told him that, but she’d also hinted what she thought about her husband and Melissa Montgomery. Cain had checked online, but even the political gossip blogs had come up clean. So either Mona was wrong, or Harry Castelli wasn’t such an open book after all.
“Was he depressed?”
“Not Harry. He’s driven. Confident.”
“But he was taking Wellbutrin.”
“Not Harry.”
“Trouble sleeping?”
“None.”
“Any other trouble in bed?”
“What are you—Are you serious?” she asked. “He wasn’t impotent, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”
“But no problems, ever, with sleeping? Or anything else?”
She took her time thinking about it. Her thumbs were still on her temples, rubbing and circling.
“In the last five or six days, he’d been worried about something. I didn’t know what, and then you came to see me, that first time. So I thought, maybe he’s worried about that. But of course he didn’t say anything to me.”
“You knocked on the study door, and it was locked.”
“That’s right.”
“You took the spare key and opened the door.”
This time, when she looked up, her eyes were more focused. Maybe it was because of the questions, or maybe she’d just begun to wake up.
“I told the woman cop that already. Your boss. We were downstairs, and she called you and told you to come.”
“Was the study door usually locked?”
“Sometimes.”
“When he was in it, or when he was gone?”
“When he was gone. He’d never locked himself in.”
The Dark Room Page 13
