“If it was locked, and he was gone, would you go in?”
“But he wasn’t gone, Mr. Cain—his car was in the driveway. That’s why I went in. I couldn’t find him, but his car was there, and his study door was locked. Harry Castelli doesn’t take long walks on the beach. He’s not that kind of man. If his car’s home, then he’s in the house.”
“Okay,” Cain said. He looked at Fischer. It was her turn for a while, if she wanted it.
“Mrs. Castelli,” Fischer said. “I’m Special Agent Karen Fischer, with the FBI.”
“The FBI?”
“We’re looking into this too.”
“Okay.”
“After you found Harry, what was the first phone call you made?”
“To 911.”
“And you made that on your cell?”
Mona Castelli nodded. She opened the purse on the floor next to her and took out a phone. She put it on the coffee table, then flipped to the call log.
“May I?” Fischer asked.
She leaned across and looked at the phone, then showed it to Cain. The call to 911 had gone out at 3:03. It was the last call she’d made or received. The next closest thing on the log was a short outgoing call at 11:05 p.m. Yesterday evening, when she was supposed to have been down in Monterey.
Fischer handed the phone back.
“What’s this one at 11:05? Short call, lasted five seconds. There wasn’t a name in your contacts list. Whose number was that?”
Mona Castelli looked at her phone screen. Her face scrunched up.
“I think that’s Meredith Miles.”
“The actress?” Fischer said.
“The actress. She was at the fundraiser. She asked for my number, but I didn’t know it—I was—I’d been—”
“Drinking,” Cain said.
Mona Castelli nodded.
“So she used your phone to call hers,” Fischer said. “Is that it?”
“It didn’t seem important. It’s not important.” She looked at Cain. “When will it be all right to use my house again?”
“You’ll be in a hotel the next couple of days.”
“I’ll need to get some things.”
“Tell me what you want, and where I can find it. I’d rather you not go in.”
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll just go to a store.”
Cain resisted looking at Fischer to see how she was reacting to that. She was too good of an investigator to show anything on her face, and of course it might not mean anything at all. Mona Castelli had just lost her husband. She was in shock, humming with the tail end of the lorazepam injected by the paramedics. If none of this had happened, she would have been in bed until sunset, sleeping off the gin.
“I have one more question,” Cain said. “You understand I have to ask it.”
“Okay.”
“Did your husband have life insurance?”
She shook her head, then nodded. She seemed to consider another sip of her coffee but never reached for the mug.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sure he would. Probably something on top of whatever the city had for him. He doesn’t believe in skimping.”
“Who’d know?”
“Who do you think?” she asked. “Melissa Montgomery has all of that. If you go to his office, I’m sure she’ll be able to show you where it is.”
“Okay,” Cain said. He looked at Fischer. “Did you have anything else?”
“No.”
“The officer here will drive you to a hotel,” Cain said. “He can take you to a shop, too.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the kid said. “Happy to.”
“Just a hotel,” Mona said. “The Palace—Harry and I always stayed at the Palace in between moves.”
“You know where that is?” Cain asked the patrol officer.
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Go ahead and take her.”
“Yes, sir—but can I have a word first, Inspector?”
The kid led Cain to the kitchen, then gestured through the window of the breakfast nook to the tiny backyard. Fischer shadowed them, standing close enough to overhear the officer without losing sight of Mona Castelli.
“You should talk to them,” he told Cain. “The people who own this house. The Petrovics. Roger and Dana. They were home when it happened—they heard the shot.”
Cain read the name tag on the man’s shirt pocket.
“You’re doing good work, Combs.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said. He started toward the living room to collect Mona Castelli but turned back to Cain when he thought of something else. He dropped his voice so it wouldn’t leave the kitchen. “I think they know something. But they didn’t tell me.”
“What makes you think that?”
“They were in the study, talking to each other. Looking at the computer and whispering.”
“All right, Officer. We’ll check it out.”
16
THEY STEPPED INTO the backyard through a sliding glass door and found the Petrovics sitting in a pair of wet redwood deck chairs beneath a canvas awning. The fabric overhead was sodden with rain, big drops beading up on the underside and running toward the edges, where it ran in streams onto the grass and onto the low rock wall at the cliff’s edge. Beyond that was an empty gray void, booming with the sound of waves breaking on the rocks below them. The foghorn growled, low and long. A ship, invisible out in the Pacific, answered.
Roger Petrovic climbed out of his chair, brushing rainwater from his fleece vest with the back of his hand. He stood a head taller than Cain. White beard and close-cropped hair, the muscles in his bare forearms like coiled hemp ropes. His wife was shorter and lithe. Her tanned face was framed by brown hair, parted down the middle. Roger took the badge that Cain handed him, looking at it for a moment before passing it to his wife. He did the same with Fischer’s.
“I talked to Officer Combs, inside,” Cain said. “He said you were both awake and heard the shot.”
Dana handed the badges back. She glanced up at her husband, and he nodded to her.
“We heard,” she said.
Roger looked at the glass door. Cain had closed it after they stepped out, and from the backyard it was impossible to see into the house. The glass was glazed, mirrorlike.
“Mrs. Castelli’s gone?” Roger asked. “Your officer took her away?”
Cain had no trouble reading the tone.
He wasn’t worried about Mona Castelli; he only wanted to know if he could have his living room back. It wasn’t surprising. Just look at them: you couldn’t find two people more different from the Castellis. Not on this street, anyway. But Cain knew Mrs. Petrovic had come out this morning, had talked her way past the cop in the driveway to tell the paramedics that Mona Castelli could wait in their house.
Whatever differences they had, the neighbors had some kind of relationship.
“She’s out of your hair,” Cain said. “Couple nights in a hotel—after that, I don’t know.”
Mr. Petrovic relaxed his arms from across his chest. His wife took his hand.
“We’ll sit in the kitchen,” she said to Cain. “You’re cold. Agent Fischer, too.”
“Your officer probably drank all the coffee,” Roger said. “Worrying if that woman would choke on her puke.”
“Roger.”
“You should’ve seen her—passed out on our sofa and snoring like a bum in a drunk tank.”
“You’ve never been in a drunk tank,” Dana said.
“It’s all right.” He held her hand close to his chest as he led them across the soaked lawn to the house. “I’m just glad she’s gone.”
While making sure Mona Castelli didn’t die like a rock star on Roger Petrovic’s couch, Officer Combs hadn’t drunk much of the coffee at all. There was still enough in the pot to fill four mugs. They sat at the maple-topped island bar in the kitchen, and Roger Petrovic waited for Cain and Fischer to get out their notepads and flip to fresh pages.
“We were up later
than usual,” he began. “We’d had friends for dinner—you need their names?”
“If I do, we’ll circle back,” Cain said.
“They left at eleven,” Dana said.
Fischer penciled the time into her spiral pad, then spoke while scrolling through something on her phone.
“You’re sure about the time?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I flipped on the TV when they left,” Dana said. She pointed at a small flat screen on the wall near the refrigerator. “The news was just coming on. The eleven o’clock news. I listened to it while we cleaned up.”
“How long did that take?”
“Half an hour,” Roger said. “Give or take.”
“So it was about eleven thirty,” Dana said. “And we were turning out the lights downstairs, about to go out to bed. And I looked out the window there, by the breakfast nook, and I saw the moon.”
“A third-quarter moon,” Roger said. “It rises at noon and sets at midnight.”
“You knew that already, or you looked it up?” Fischer asked.
“I looked it up this morning. We’d put it together, what we heard. So I knew we’d need to know the time.”
“All right,” Cain said. “Go on.”
Dana took her husband’s hand again.
“It was so clear,” she said. “It had been foggy all night, and then it got clear. So I called him down and poured us each a glass of wine—the bottle was already open, what we didn’t finish at dinner. We put on our jackets and went outside to sit on the chairs—”
“Where you found us just now.”
“He knows that—and we had our glass of wine and watched the moon set past the horizon. It was too beautiful to leave—”
“About midnight,” Roger said.
“—and right after the last of the light was gone, we heard the gunshots.”
“How many shots?” Fischer asked.
“Two,” Roger said. “The first one, and then maybe a minute later, the second.”
“You’re sure it was a minute?”
“It wasn’t like this,” he said, and snapped his fingers twice, quickly. “There was a pause. Maybe a minute, maybe two.”
“Could you tell where they came from?” Fischer asked.
“Castelli’s house.”
He pointed out the kitchen window at the broad stucco side of his neighbor’s house. A low redwood fence, overgrown with ivy, separated their yards.
“That direction, at least,” Dana said. “If you asked me, at the time, did I think it came from the house? Not really.”
“The two shots, did they sound like the same gun?” Cain asked.
The Petrovics looked at each other.
“I wouldn’t know about that—we didn’t even know it was a gun,” Dana said. “There were two bangs. They could have been anything.”
“A car backfiring,” Roger said. “Somebody slamming a door.”
“Did you get up and look around?”
“We sat another minute,” she said. “And then we went to bed. We didn’t think about it until we woke up—”
“—and saw the morgue van and the patrol cars,” Roger finished.
Cain looked at Fischer. The Petrovics were as solid as eyewitnesses came. They’d had some wine, sure, but they could pin their story to actual times based on a measurable event. Now he and Fischer knew when the shots were fired. But Officer Combs suspected they knew something else. He might be a kid, but Cain had learned when to trust a cop’s intuition. He bet Fischer had too.
She turned back to the Petrovics.
“Before you went to bed,” she asked, “did you see anyone come out of the Castellis’ house?”
“No,” Roger said.
“A strange car in the driveway, or parked out front?”
Roger looked at his wife, and she shook her head.
“How about lights going on or off?” Fischer asked.
“Other sounds from the house, maybe,” Cain added. “Something besides gunshots.”
“None we noticed,” Roger said.
“Upstairs, we have blinds on the windows,” Dana said. “Double-paned glass. In the bedroom, we wouldn’t have noticed anything—but, tell them, Roger. What we were talking about.”
Roger Petrovic nodded.
“We didn’t see anything. But I can tell you when the doors opened and closed—the Castellis’ doors, I mean. You’re probably supposed to get a subpoena. A search warrant. But I can show you now, and we can paper it later.”
“What are you talking about?” Cain asked.
“Get me my laptop, hon.”
Dana slid off her chair and went away, and Roger turned back to them.
“You’ve heard of Watchmen Alarm?”
Sure he had. Watchmen Alarm stickers were plastered on windows and doorways all over the nicer parts of town. Neat metal signs in well-kept lawns. Sleek white SUVs, the side panels painted with the Watchmen shield, rolled through the avenues.
“That’s us,” Roger said. “I started it thirty years ago. The old story—a garage in Palo Alto, a trip to Fry’s, and a dream.”
“And my teaching salary,” Dana said, coming back from the study with a computer. “Don’t forget that.”
“The Castellis are clients?”
Roger reached out to take the laptop from Dana. She sat next to him.
“After the election,” Roger said. “They’d been with another company, but Mona wanted an upgrade. Top of the line. Door and window sensors, in-room motion detectors, outside cameras, motion lights—and remote monitoring.”
“You’re talking about monitoring system activity,” Fischer said. “Tracking the sensors from your central office.”
“The Watchmen,” Roger said, and now Cain recognized his voice from the radio spots. “We have an eye everything.”
“You keep a log?”
“Show them, Roger,” Dana said. She looked at them. “We downloaded it from the server today, while Mona was sleeping.”
Roger turned his laptop so Cain and Fischer could see the screen, then moved his stool to their side of the bar.
“Here it is, top row,” he said. “Mona Castelli went out yesterday evening, right?”
“To a fundraiser in Monterey,” Cain said.
“So this is her, leaving.”
Roger used his finger to underline the first entry in a spreadsheet labeled Recent Activity—Last 250 Events. The top row said, Front Door—Opened—7:02 p.m. The next row down read, System Armed (M.C.)—7:03 p.m.
“She stepped outside just after seven,” Cain said. “That’s when her car came. The next entry, she sets the alarm, right?”
“That’s it.”
“What’s the M.C. stand for?”
“Mona Castelli—they’ve got an app on their phones, each of them. It’s part of the package. They can arm or disarm the house from anywhere. But if the system interacts with a phone, it knows who it’s dealing with. And keeps it in the log.”
Cain pictured Mona Castelli, getting ready to go out.
Here she is, 7:02 p.m., waiting inside the house. Pacing around, a martini in her hand. Through the window, she sees the car rolling up. She puts on her jacket and grabs her purse. Sets the drink on the table by the door and goes out to the front porch, phone in hand. The door clicks shut behind her; she swipes her phone as she walks to the car. She arms the system as her driver gets out and helps her into the backseat. She either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that she’s leaving a record.
It all fit with what he’d heard. He looked at the next two entries.
Front Door—Opened—10:35 p.m.
System Disarmed (H.C.)—10:36 p.m.
“Why did Castelli open the door first, and then turn off the alarm?” Fischer asked. “How would that work?”
“Maybe he didn’t know it was armed,” Roger said.
“Castelli’s initials are on the log—if he disarmed the alarm from the control panel and not his phone, how d
oes the system know it was him?”
“It’s got a thumbprint reader. It couldn’t have been anyone but him.”
Cain looked at the screen. Based on the log, after Castelli had come home, the house had been quiet for nearly five hours. The system didn’t log gunshots, didn’t record the slack thump of a body collapsing from the desk to the rug. By midnight, Castelli was dead. But was the house actually quiet the whole time? No one had come in or out. No door swung open, no window slid up. Nothing triggered the laser trip lines protecting the backyard and the cliff stairs. Each point in the system had a status bar, and everything was quiet.
The next entry was at 2:58 a.m., when the front door opened. It had to be Mona Castelli, because her car had dropped her off somewhere close to three.
Cain let it play out in his mind: She comes into the entry hall, dropping her keys and purse on the table near the door. Stumbling to the kitchen, she pours another drink. She wanders upstairs with it, looking for her husband. The bedroom’s empty. The doors to all the bathrooms are standing open, and the lights are off. She tries the study door, but it’s locked. She knocks and there’s no answer.
The next log entry was at 3:22 a.m. The front door opened. Cain watched that, too: Nagata steps inside, catching Mona. She’d opened the door, but now she can barely stand up. In eight minutes, Nagata will start calling Cain. First she tries to get the story. What happened? Where’s Harry? She checks the house and sees the study door, the spare key jutting from the heavy antique lock. She doesn’t go in.
Cain looked at Fischer.
“What do you think?”
“I think you better throw a search warrant together, unless Mr. Petrovic wants to burn a disk right now.”
“Bring the paper,” Roger said. “There’s a privacy clause in all the contracts. No information released unless compelled by a court.”
“All right,” Cain said. It was only one o’clock. “You going to be here all day, or should we serve your office?”
“Here’s good—I know what you want.”
“I might need till four o’clock,” Cain said.
“I’ll be here.”
17
AFTER LEAVING THE Petrovics’, they’d gone briefly back into Castelli’s study. Sumida’s team hadn’t finished photographing it yet, and the evidence was still in place. While Fischer called Melissa Montgomery to get Alexa’s address, Cain gave Sumida his keys and asked him to have someone drive his car back to Bryant Street and leave it there. He looked out the blood-speckled window at the street below. There were mobile news vans everywhere, telescoping antennas rising like masts along the street. Greenberg had been sworn in at City Hall, and the CSI vans were still in Castelli’s driveway. It had only been a matter of time. He could even hear a helicopter, maybe the Channel 2 NewsChopper. Whatever it was, it had been circling awhile now, invisible above the inversion layer, waiting for the fog to clear so that it could shoot something for the evening news.
The Dark Room Page 14
