The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “Okay.”

  “Most of the time, Castelli played without a shirt. Even when it was cold.”

  “The tattoo,” Grassley said. “Herrington knew about it?”

  Chun nodded.

  “The first time he saw it, it was still fresh—raw and red. That was around spring break.”

  “You’re talking 1985?” Cain asked. “Their freshman year?”

  “March, freshman year.”

  “What about the scars on his forearms? Did you ask about those?”

  “That was the other thing,” Chun said. “Herrington said they weren’t there until the fall semester sophomore year. He saw them when they were moving back in, at the end of the summer. They hadn’t healed yet.”

  Cain had been buzzing on the usual blend of exhaustion and caffeine. Now there was something else in the mix. It was the feeling he got when a piece of the path in front of him suddenly resolved itself and became clear. Castelli had the tattoo inked onto his shoulder blade in the spring of 1985. The girl had gone into Christopher Hanley’s casket on July 17, 1985. Sometime during the summer, Castelli had tried to open up his forearm with a razor blade.

  “What’ve you got today?” Cain asked her.

  “I take the stand at nine. I’m testifying in the Conroy trial.”

  “That might go all day,” Cain said. “But if it doesn’t—if you get out early—you know what to do?”

  “Go back to Berkeley, to the police department,” she said. “Copy the murder book from the Grizzly Peak fire.”

  “And see if there’s a file on Pi Kappa Kappa. If the Berkeley PD didn’t keep one, university police might have. You could ask around, see if the deans know anything.” He turned to Grassley. “What about you?”

  “I missed the fashion professor,” Grassley said. “Last night, she was gone by the time I showed. She’s got office hours this morning.”

  “That’s at the building on New Montgomery?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep an eye out for Alexa Castelli. She lives across the street, and her mom’s staying in the Palace Hotel.”

  “If I see them, then what?”

  “Just keep an eye.”

  “The dress, I figure it’s a dead end anyway.”

  “But you never know,” Cain said. “And if you spot the daughter, stay out of sight. Don’t approach her, and whatever you do, don’t find yourself in a room alone with her.”

  “That’s trouble I don’t need,” Grassley said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Cain stood up and stretched his arms behind his back, joining his fingers together and working his shoulders against the stiffness. “Call me if you learn anything. That goes for both of you.”

  He walked to his car and sat for a moment before hitting the ignition. From the parking space, he was looking head-on into the traffic coming up the Embarcadero. The bridge was above everything, gray steel hovering over the last of the city before reaching across the water. It was raining again, and most of the cars used their headlights. The drought was done, at least here. Now it rained all the time, while the central valley baked under clouds of dust. He thought sometimes that the city inhabited a different earth, that if the sky ever cleared enough to see the stars, they would be unrecognizable. Uncharted constellations, the long tails of nameless comets.

  The city’s labs were backed up, and that was choking his investigation. He’d made arrangements to address that. Dr. Henry Newcomb had been the chief medical examiner until a few days after Christmas, when he’d been forced to resign. A case of his had turned out badly for the city, and at the end of it there’d been no one left but Henry to take the blame. He’d been at loose ends when Cain called—no job and no prospect of one, and happy to take anything. Cain hit the ignition and put the car into gear.

  A black swan and a single cygnet were gliding near the edge of the lake facing the Palace of Fine Arts, but paddled to the deeper water near the middle when Cain shut his car door and went to get the Styrofoam cooler from his trunk. He stood on the sidewalk with the cooler under one arm, watching the swan and the rotunda’s reflection on the rain-dimpled water.

  “Cain?”

  He turned around. Dr. Newcomb was wearing khakis and an old Yale sweatshirt. He had a black umbrella tucked under one arm. Cain had never seen him in street clothes. Either he’d been dressed for an autopsy, or he’d been in a suit, testifying.

  “Henry.”

  He shifted the cooler to his other arm and shook Henry Newcomb’s hand. Then they headed out across the wet grass and stepped onto a footpath that wound around the lake.

  “I wouldn’t have bothered you if I had a choice,” Cain said. “I’m in a bind.”

  “You’re not worried about bothering me,” Henry said. “Admit it.”

  “I’m not that worried.”

  “You think I’ll taint everything I touch.”

  “You can’t testify,” Cain said. “Try seeing it from my perspective.”

  It was raining again, but Henry didn’t open his umbrella. They walked through the stone columns and then beneath the semi-shelter of the open rotunda.

  “You can’t testify,” Cain said. “But maybe you can steer me in the right direction. My hands are tied until I get the lab results, and I can’t wait six weeks. I need to move now.”

  “I don’t have a lab.”

  “But you know people. If no one will do you a favor, you could rent time in one. I read about that.”

  “Rent time with what budget? The city’s?”

  “Not the city—the FBI,” Cain said. “This case, I’m working it with them.”

  Henry motioned to the cooler, and Cain handed it to him.

  “It’s Castelli, isn’t it?”

  It surprised him that Henry knew. He’d imagined the former medical examiner holed up in his house, the papers piling up outside his front door and the TV unplugged. But he’d picked up the phone on the second ring when Cain called, and he’d agreed to meet right away. He just didn’t want to do it in his house. He didn’t want to upset his wife.

  “Dr. Levy gave me a full set,” Cain said. “Liver, blood, urine. You’ve got ten cc’s of fluid from each eye. A slice of his heart, even.”

  Henry knelt and put the cooler on the polished stone floor. He opened the lid and removed the two ice packs. Beneath them were the glass sample tubes, each sealed with a black rubber stopper. Henry sorted through them, reading the labels. He got to the last two and looked up.

  “What are these?” he asked. “Who’s Jane Doe?”

  “We opened a casket from the cemetery in El Carmelo. There was a second body—a young woman. We don’t know who she was or why she’s in there.”

  “This is something separate?” Henry asked. “Or connected to Castelli?”

  Cain shook his head.

  “What you’ve got are two samples. One’s a piece of her liver. Run the toxicology, tell me what was in her system when she died. I’ve got a hunch, but I want to see what you find out before I get into it.”

  “And the other?” Henry held up the sample tube. “What’s this?”

  “That’s a piece of the fetus,” Cain said. “She was in her first trimester. If there’s a link to Castelli, you’re holding it.”

  Henry turned the sample tube to the light and looked at the tiny slice of fetal tissue.

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Thirty years. She was buried alive in the eighties,” Cain said. “Can you do it?”

  “You want me to do what?” Henry asked. “See if he’s the father?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sequencing it would be hard—a lot of the DNA would be destroyed. But paternity shouldn’t be much trouble.”

  Henry loaded the samples back into the cooler, put cold packs on top of them, and closed the lid. He stood up, and Cain followed him across the rotunda to the path that picked up on the other side.

  “How long will you need?”

  “Give me tod
ay to get a lab,” Henry said. “Tonight to do the work. If they can’t make time for me at Stanford, I can call Slade Ulrich at UCSF. If I can get in there, I’ll be able to do it all pretty quickly.”

  They came out from beneath the protection of the columns, and back into the rain. The black swan and its cygnet were nosing through the leaves on the bank nearby. Cain wondered about the lone offspring. Swans came in clutches of three. Something must have killed the others. A loose dog, a kid with a mean streak. They reached the curve in the path that took them closest to the bank, and the swan saw them. She raised herself up and spread her wings.

  They both looked at her, her flight feathers flashing white as she made her threat display. Henry began to walk again. He still hadn’t opened his umbrella, and it was raining harder now. They were both soaking wet, the water running down Cain’s leather jacket and soaking his pants at the thighs. Henry was so tall that Cain practically had to jog to keep up.

  When they reached Baker Street again, they stopped alongside Cain’s car.

  “They took a pregnant woman and buried her alive?” Henry asked. “Someone really did that?”

  “She clawed at the casket lid, ripped her fingernails out.”

  “You have to catch him, Cain.”

  “We’ll see. I’ll need your report before I can do much of anything.”

  Henry nodded and walked away. He crossed the street and went through the rain. Cain shook the water from his jacket and got into his car. He turned on the wipers, then the heater. By the time he looked up again, Henry Newcomb was gone.

  23

  HE CUT THROUGH the Presidio, then crossed out of San Francisco and into Marin on the Golden Gate Bridge, hardly any traffic to slow him at this hour. The lanes coming into the city were backed up for miles, a thousand pairs of headlights in an endless blur. It took him forty-five minutes to get to John MacDowell’s house in Stinson Beach, most of that on the narrow curves of Shoreline Highway. Crossing the Marin Headlands, he caught glimpses of the Pacific beneath its broken blanket of fog, and then after Muir Beach, the ocean was clear out to the horizon.

  MacDowell lived on Seadrift Avenue, out near the end of a private peninsula. Cain stopped at the security booth and rolled down his window. He leaned out to hand the guard his inspector’s star, but the man raised the gate and waved him through. He drove up the peninsula, a low spit of sand just feet above the surf, scanning the street numbers. Most of the houses here were designed to take up the entire buildable space of their lots, pressed too close together for Cain to see the ocean beyond. There were sprawling low bungalows built of redwood, and columned concrete monstrosities, and stucco houses in the Spanish style, with tiered tile roofs and ironwork on the upstairs balconies.

  The house where MacDowell lived was a modern box, built of unvarnished wood and glass. There was a detached garage, and above that a guest apartment.

  Cain pulled into the driveway and checked his phone for messages, then got out and looked around. The garage had a rolling door with five square windows set in it. He went up to the middle one and cupped his hands around his eyes to look inside. There was nothing but a tool bench, though he could tell from the stains on the concrete floor that usually there were two cars here.

  Around the side of the garage there was a wooden staircase that led to a little deck with a view over the roof of the main house out to the beach. He stood a moment with his hands on the rail, wondering how a retired cop found his way to a place like this. It wasn’t the main house, but the view was probably better. The waves broke in a long line down the beach, the water here unsettled and broken by currents.

  “The right time of year, you can see whales out there.”

  There was a rocking chair in the far corner of the deck, up against the apartment wall, and in it there was an old man who was much smaller than he once had been. His back was bent and his skin hung off him in wrinkled folds where the flesh beneath it had evaporated. There was a blanket folded on his lap and a cup of coffee on the small table next to him. He had been so still, and tucked so far back into the corner, that Cain hadn’t noticed him. The waitress at the Western had said John MacDowell moved in with family, but that was probably too strong a term. He was just a guest passing through. This was his next to last stop.

  “Gray whales, I guess,” the man said. “Going north in the winter and south in the summer.”

  “I didn’t see you there.”

  “I try to keep out of the way,” the man said. “I try to blend.”

  Cain took out his badge again and handed it over. The man looked at it and gave it back.

  “You’re Inspector MacDowell?”

  “Retired,” he said. “Obviously.”

  “Gavin Cain.”

  They shook hands and MacDowell slowly stood up.

  “We might as well go inside,” he said. He picked up his mug in a hand that looked like it was made of knotted wood. “If you came to talk about one of my old cases, we’ll want to be out of this wind.”

  He opened the French doors and they stepped into the apartment’s main room. It was polished and spare. There was a glass-topped coffee table with a piece of sun-silvered driftwood in the middle of it. A pair of low white couches on either side of the table. The kitchen had a sit-in dining nook at a bay window that looked out at the ocean. Everything smelled of lemon oil and fresh laundry.

  The man saw Cain’s gaze and shook his head.

  “I’m learning Spanish from my daughter’s housekeeper,” he said. “People say old dogs and new tricks, and all that. I don’t disagree—but I’ve got to talk to somebody, don’t I?”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Which case did you want to talk about?”

  “It’s not an old case,” Cain said. “Not exactly.”

  He looked around the room again. There was no television, no radio. There were no bookshelves. There weren’t even any magazines on the coffee table. Maybe all those things were in the bedroom, but Cain didn’t think so. He’d found the old man sitting on the porch, staring at the waves. It was all he had to do unless it was a cleaning day.

  “What is it, then?”

  “Do you have time?” Cain asked. “I mean—you’re not busy today?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “If you take a ride with me, I’ll buy you lunch. You can show me around your old neighborhood.”

  “My old neighborhood,” MacDowell said. “Not where I lived, but where I patrolled.”

  “You remember it?”

  “The Richmond?” He set his blanket on the counter and poured his coffee down the sink. “I put in my twenty on patrol, took a week off, and put in another twenty-five as an inspector. Both tours in the Richmond. From the beach, east to Divisadero—sixty-five blocks long and twenty-two wide. I could tell you stories.”

  “That’s what I want,” Cain said. “Stories. What about lunch at the Western?”

  “I’ll get my coat.”

  Coming back across the bridge, the city growing in front of them, MacDowell sat up a little straighter. He hadn’t spoken since they’d gotten onto the freeway.

  “I’d come down more if I still had a car,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Every day, maybe,” he said. “This is my town.”

  “Who took the car?”

  “My daughter. Her husband.”

  “Why?” Cain asked. “You’re what—eighty, eighty-one?”

  “Ninety-two.”

  He looked like he was a hundred and fifty, like he could tell a credible story about riding into Mexico with the cavalry, looking for signs of Pancho Villa. He’d put on a camelhair coat with plaid patches at the elbows, and wore an SFPD ball cap that he’d probably picked up when Cain was in grade school.

  “But your eyes are okay,” Cain said. “I see you looking at things.”

  “Most of the time, sure,” MacDowell said. “My eyes were never the problem. But I drive out, and sometimes I get lost. They think my brain’s a scra
mbled egg—my daughter, I mean. And my son-in-law. But it’s not my brain, either. It’s the map in my head—it’s thirty years past its expiration date. I was getting lost on my own street. I didn’t recognize the houses anymore.”

  “You look for a landmark and it’s not there.”

  “They used to be there,” MacDowell said. “All the houses, the buildings. The people who lived in them.”

  “Sure.”

  “Summertime, they ate their dinners in the backyards and they got it on upstairs with the windows open. They raised children, had fights. But most of the time it was happily ever after. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “It’s still that way.”

  “It’s how it was for me. But then sometimes they killed each other and we’d come to pick through the wreckage. You know that, too. What you don’t know is that the world isn’t pausing for you. It just goes on. You don’t own anything—it all belongs to time.”

  “You remember 1985?”

  “Like yesterday,” he said. “Better than yesterday.”

  “Now you’re just messing with me.”

  “You wish,” MacDowell asked. “That was the year I turned sixty. My daughter married, my wife passed. Five years left till I pulled the pin. The kids on the squad called me the old man. You believe that? I’ve been an old man almost as long as you’ve been alive. I could tell you stories.”

  They came off the bridge and Cain drove them to the Richmond, MacDowell’s old neighborhood.

  “We’ll go down Geary to get to the Western,” Cain said. “You can tell me some stories on the way.”

  “Pull over here,” MacDowell said. “Four blocks, and I finally recognize something.”

  Cain turned to the curb and parked alongside a fire hydrant. MacDowell was looking through the driver’s-side window, at the buildings on the other side of the street. There was a row house, a catastrophe of green-painted redwood. It had been a bar as long as Cain could remember. Next door was a low red house, the sign above the sidewalk mostly in Korean. The English at the bottom said CHARCOAL BARBECUE. Its windows were caked in decades of soot. To the right of that was a single-story stucco building with a dark glass door. No sign out front, and no windows. Aside from the door, the only thing on the front wall was the rusted mechanical bell of a burglar alarm.