The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “His fingernails are neatly clipped and clean. We’ve taken samples from each of them for DNA testing. He has three parallel scars on his right forearm. Each scar is approximately eight inches long, running from his elbow toward his wrist. Judging from the placement of his watch, decedent was likely left-handed—”

  Cain made a mental note to find out.

  “—so that these scars would be consistent with a prior incident of self-mutilation.”

  “A suicide attempt?” Fischer asked.

  “Or maybe just cutting,” Dr. Levy answered. She moved away from the microphone so that this would be off the record. “These scars—look at them. They’re decades old. Unless you find someone who knows the story, or luck into a medical record, it’d be hard to say.”

  Cain looked at Chun, and she nodded. She was still tracking down leads in Berkeley. Maybe one of her contacts would know something about the scars. Dr. Levy picked up a clipboard, which held the notes she’d taken in her first run on the external examination. She flipped a page, then went to the microphone.

  “Decedent has a tattoo on his right scapula. Greek—pi kappa kappa. Each letter’s an inch across. Dark green ink.”

  “How old is it?” Cain asked.

  Dr. Levy came away from the microphone again.

  “No idea. It’s not new—the edges aren’t sharp, and the color’s faded,” she said. “But think about it. It’s a frat tattoo. Who gets one of those except when they’re eighteen and pledging?”

  She lifted Castelli’s head and repositioned the block under the back of his neck. She put her left palm on his chin, then covered the back of that hand with her right. She bore down, her elbows straightening as she put her weight into him. As Castelli’s mouth opened, his jaw made a sound like a pencil snapping.

  “Powder burns on his palate and tongue,” she said. She was leaning over the mayor, a flashlight positioned against his bloody lower lip. “Entry wound at the anterior of the hard palate. It looks—”

  She put out her hand, snapping her fingers. Jim slipped her a pair of inside-diameter calipers. She gave the flashlight to him and he held it for her while she inserted the calipers and dialed the knob on the right to take the entry wound’s measurement.

  “—four-tenths of an inch. That’s consistent with a thirty-eight in soft tissue.”

  “All right,” Cain said. Where he was standing, he couldn’t see the entry wound at all. But he’d caught a little of the mayor’s shattered grin as Dr. Levy had opened his mouth. “What’s the story with his teeth?”

  “The chipping?” Dr. Levy asked. She pulled his bottom lip out, and ran her gloved finger over the broken teeth. “You see that, this kind of suicide. End of a pistol’s barrel has a raised sight. It’ll crack the hell out of your teeth when the gun kicks.”

  “The bottom teeth?” Grassley asked. “The sight’s on top.”

  “Most of your gun-in-the mouth guys,” she said, “they put it in upside down. What else are they going to do—pull the trigger with their thumbs? So when it kicks, the sight knocks out their bottom teeth.”

  Cain stepped back and nodded at the microphone.

  “What do you say, Rachel?” he said. “Gut instinct.”

  She reached up and turned the microphone off.

  “Suicide,” she said. “It’s easy, right? We’ve got gunshot residue on his hands. Powder burns and stippling inside his mouth. The body wasn’t moved, and the door was locked from the inside.”

  “Lean down and smell him,” Cain said.

  “What?”

  “Go on.”

  She bent back toward Castelli’s mouth, lowering her paper mask. He watched as she breathed through her nose.

  “Whiskey,” she said.

  “Kentucky bourbon,” Cain answered. “Single cask, hundred-twenty proof. And this is what—sixteen hours later?”

  Dr. Levy shrugged.

  “You can’t just accidentally shoot one of those old thirty-eights,” Cain said. “You have to put the hammer back before you pull the trigger, and there’s a hard pull on that.”

  “I’ve seen drunk suicides thread smaller needles,” Levy said. “They run hoses from their car exhaust into second-floor windows. They drive a hundred miles to the bridge, park, and walk to the middle of the span. So drunk they shouldn’t be able to stand. But when they’re ready to go, they go.”

  “So you’ll put suicide in the report,” Cain said.

  “We’ll see what we get back from toxicology. And we haven’t even opened him up yet.”

  She held out her hand and Jim Braun gave her an oscillating saw.

  20

  AT SIX O’clock, Cain was at Lori’s Diner with his three new partners. They were two to a side in a red vinyl booth, plates of pasta and home-style meatloaf on the table between them. Grassley poked at his potatoes. Next to him, Chun scrolled through her phone’s screen. She put it away, then pushed her plate aside.

  “Pi Kappa Kappa was a banned fraternity—it got kicked off the Cal campus in 1982, and dissolved nationwide in 1983.”

  “What for?” Fischer asked.

  “Three sophomore coeds died at a party.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “And drugs—but it was quaaludes, not Thrallinex,” Chun said. “It might’ve been easier to look the other way back then, but not when there’s three dead girls.”

  “He was a freshman in 1984,” Cain said. “Pi Kappa Kappa was already gone.”

  “Maybe it was unofficial,” Fischer said. “Unsanctioned.”

  “Did you see that online?” Cain asked Chun. “That they went underground?”

  “Nothing like that.” She gathered her things and slid from the booth, leaving enough cash on the table to cover her part of the check. “But I might find out tonight—I’m meeting a guy who knew Castelli back then. Says he knew him, anyway.”

  “Who?”

  “Dennis Herrington—a doctor up in Marin County. We’re meeting for coffee, and I’ll be late if I don’t get going.”

  “You’re meeting up there?” Cain asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Take Grassley if you want backup,” Cain said.

  “They don’t come safer than this guy—he’s a pediatrician,” Chun said. Cain took off his glasses to look at her, and she went on. “All right. Point taken—you never know. But he’ll talk more if it’s just me.”

  “Call me when you’re done.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  When she was gone, Cain turned to Grassley.

  “How about you?”

  “I met Frank Lee’s pharmacy guy—the professor at UCSF,” Grassley said. “But he didn’t have anything new. Thrallinex wasn’t common, but it wasn’t a unicorn. It’s not like only one doctor in the country prescribed it.”

  “So it’s a dead end.”

  “That angle, maybe. But maybe something will come of it.”

  He knew what Grassley was thinking. At least he hadn’t finished the thought aloud, with Fischer sitting at the table. Thrallinex might still be useful to tie the girl in the casket to the girl in the photo. If her liver samples showed metabolites of the drug, it would be a done deal, in Cain’s mind.

  “There’s still the dress. You could work on that.”

  “I’m on it,” Grassley said. “I’m swinging past the Academy of Art tonight at eight to talk to one of the fashion instructors there.”

  “Until then, come with us,” Cain said.

  “We got time to finish?”

  “If we start eating and quit talking.”

  Grassley pulled Angela Chun’s half-finished platter of linguini over and forked the pasta onto his plate.

  They came in a convoy of separate cars and parked alongside a fireplug on Polk, then hurried across the street in the rain and went up the steps to City Hall. Cain had tried Lucy again on the drive over, but there was still no answer. It had been light outside when he’d called from the morgue, but that w
as hours ago and now it was dark. There wasn’t much he could do now except steal away whenever he could to call again.

  “It’s locked,” Grassley said. He’d turned around, was watching Cain and Fischer as they climbed the last few steps.

  “Then knock.”

  Grassley pounded on the door with his knuckles. He’d been a patrolman for eight years in Stockton and an SFPD inspector for just a month. He still knew how to knock on a door like a beat cop.

  A contract security guard cracked the door, and Grassley glanced back at Fischer.

  “Show him your star,” Fischer said.

  “What happened to your guys?”

  “They were here for Castelli. No need for that now.”

  Cain and Grassley held their inspectors’ stars up for the guard to see. He opened the door for them and they stepped inside. They went beneath the rotunda and up the staircase, and found a pair of black-shirted patrolmen leaning against the doors to the mayoral suite. When Cain brought out his inspector’s star, they straightened up.

  “How long you been here?” Cain asked.

  One cop looked at his partner.

  “Since noon?”

  “Has anyone tried to get in here?”

  “Well—”

  “There was a woman. She was the only one.”

  “What woman?” Cain asked. “What was her name?”

  The officer on the left looked at his partner, who shook his head.

  “You didn’t ask her name?” Cain asked. “What’d she look like?”

  “Blonde?”

  “A dark blonde—almost a brunette.”

  “And a gray suit. Expensive.”

  “How old?” Cain asked.

  “Thirty.”

  Cain believed in cop instinct, but he didn’t think either of these men had much of it. If they’d been half awake, they would have gotten her name. Maybe it didn’t make a difference. They’d just described Melissa Montgomery.

  “Did she try to talk her way past?” Fischer asked.

  “Not after we told her Castelli was dead—then she went off in a hurry.”

  “You told her what, exactly?”

  “That he ate it—bullet through the head.”

  “All right,” Cain said. “Open it up. We need to go in.”

  They went around Castelli’s office turning on lights. Grassley had the video camera, recording everything. An empty glass sat on the desk’s edge. There was no paperwork in sight, no computer; the mayor must have used a laptop. They came behind the desk chair and Cain rolled it back. He switched on the shaded lamp, and the room took on a green glow.

  “What’s that smell?” Grassley asked. “Bourbon?”

  “Someone poured it in the trash,” Fischer said. She tapped the wastepaper basket with her foot. “Look.”

  “That was me,” Cain said. “Last night.”

  Fischer looked around, and he told her the story.

  “Get a rise out of him?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  Cain reached into the trash and found two empty cans of ginger ale and four lime wedges. There was a wadded napkin inside a can that had once held salted nuts. There were two peanuts left in the can.

  “Nice work if you can get it,” Grassley said. “Knock back some cocktails, have a couple peanuts. Run a city.”

  “Let’s bag it,” Cain said. “For all we know, someone else drank these before I came.”

  The last thing Cain pulled out was a folded piece of ruled notebook paper. It had been at the bottom of the trash, and was soaked with both bourbon and ginger ale. Cain gently unfolded it, taking his time. The edges were soft and stuck together, the paper ready to fall apart. When he had it open, he held it in one palm and pushed up his glasses to look at it.

  “Shit,” he said.

  There had been handwriting, but the black letters had run into illegible spirals, the ink spreading through the bourbon and separating into the spectrum of colors it held. What was left looked like a dark oil slick. There was one dry spot, on the bottom of the page. It was Harry J. Castelli Jr.’s signature, dated yesterday.

  “You think that was it?” Grassley asked. “The note?”

  “No way to tell. Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

  “We should find the pad he wrote it on,” Fischer said. “The notebook—whatever. Maybe there’s an impression on the page underneath.”

  “Check for it.”

  They started going through the desk drawers, and Fischer found a notebook straight off. The first page had been ripped out.

  “Here,” Cain said.

  He gave her the bourbon-obliterated page, and she held its left side against the notebook. The uneven edges matched like puzzle pieces. She set the wet paper on the desk and put the notebook under the lamp. The three of them leaned in and looked at the blank page that had been beneath the one Castelli ripped out.

  “There’s nothing,” Grassley said. “No imprints—right?”

  “Maybe the documents lab,” Cain said. “They could look at it with a microscope.”

  “Unless he ripped it out before he wrote on it—then we’ve got nothing,” Fischer said. She turned to Cain. “Melissa Montgomery might’ve been the last person to see him alive. But you’re a close second.”

  “I didn’t mean to dissolve his note, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “It’s not what I’m saying,” Fischer said. “I’m just curious about his mood—how’d he seem to you?”

  “The same as before,” Cain said. “He didn’t know anything. He hadn’t gotten more photos. This was all a hoax, some guy messing with him.”

  “That’s what he told you.”

  “And I knew he was lying, but I couldn’t shake him from his story.”

  “Was he drunk?” Fischer asked.

  “He was drinking,” Cain said. He looked around the office, breathed in the bourbon fumes, and remembered the old man’s growl. “A guy like him, there’s some ground to cover between drinking and drunk.”

  Fischer turned around to look at the office. She went over to the curtains and pulled them back, allowing in the dim hum of traffic on Polk Street.

  “Where’s he keep the liquor?” she asked.

  Cain pointed.

  “That cabinet.”

  Fischer went to it and opened the door. There were eight bottles of bourbon, a dozen other spirits. She started pulling out bottles and handing them to Cain. He set them on the floor. When he came up, she gave him an insulated steel ice bucket with the Palace Hotel’s insignia emblazoned on the lid.

  “Here we go,” she said. “We’ve got a safe.”

  Grassley came over with the camera and filmed inside the liquor cabinet. When he stepped back, Cain leaned in and looked. At the back of the deep cabinet, there was a hotel-style safe, no higher than a shoebox, but deep enough to hold legal documents without folding them. It had a digital keypad next to its steel handle.

  Cain dialed Melissa Montgomery on his cell, and she answered after the first ring.

  “Inspector?

  “Are you at home?”

  “You told me to be here,” she answered. “Where are you?

  “Standing in Castelli’s office, looking at the safe in the back of his liquor cabinet.”

  There was a long pause. He heard water running, maybe a bathtub filling. Then there was the unmistakable click and grind of a Zippo lighter. She breathed in, then out.

  “Eleven sixty-four.”

  “That’s the code?”

  “The last time I opened it.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Three months ago,” she said. “Is there anything else, Inspector Cain?”

  “Was Castelli left-handed?”

  “Yes,” she said, and hung up.

  Cain gave Fischer the code and she punched it in. Grassley filmed as she turned the handle and swung the door open.

  “All right,” she said. “Safe inventory. You getting this?”

  “You don’t have
to ask,” Grassley said.

  Fischer began to unload the safe, setting each item on the little shelf that had folded down when she opened the liquor cabinet doors. She set out fifteen envelopes, each thick with unbundled cash. Then came life insurance policies, a will, and a scrap of paper marked with Castelli’s scrawl. Cain picked that one up by its corner and studied it. The mayor had listed three Chinatown banks by their addresses. Next to each entry was a date—consecutive days within the last week.

  “I can just about guess what these are,” Fischer said. “The only question is whether it’s him and Melissa, or him and Mona.”

  Cain looked up. She was setting out five unmarked DVDs, each in a clear plastic jewel case.

  “We’ll give them to Computer Forensics,” Cain said. “Unless you want them.”

  “You take them,” Fischer said. “We’ll take the cash—we can run the serial numbers. If it’s dirty, and from a known source, we’ll want to know.”

  “That’s got to be—what?” Cain said. “A hundred thousand?”

  “More,” Fischer said. “I used to work bank robberies. That’s one seventy-five, two hundred.”

  “This is a city office. If it’s public money, we should find out before we take it.”

  “Call Melissa back,” Fischer said.

  Cain redialed, on speaker this time. They listened to the phone ring, five times, six times, before she picked up.

  “What now?”

  “Castelli’s safe—is that his personal stuff, or is there city property in it?”

  “If it’s in the safe, it’s personal. Harry did everything by the book.”

  “If we found cash, it’s not the city’s money?”

  “I said it’s personal,” Melissa answered. She hung up, and Cain put his phone away. Grassley and Fischer were each watching him.

  “Before we hand that off to you, we should get some kind of receipt, I guess.”

  Fischer checked her watch.

  “There’s a kid in the U.S. attorney’s office, just sitting on his hands,” she said. “I can get him here in an hour with the paperwork.”

  Cain looked at the stack of cash on the shelf. Giving it to Fischer felt wrong, but he knew it stood a better chance of disappearing if he gave it to his own department.