The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “That used to be a church,” MacDowell said. “I’m talking ’seventy-nine. A storefront operation, Jim Jones type of shit. We got the call in July. Coldest Sunday I can remember. And rain—you’ve never seen rain like it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Middle of the sermon, a man walks in that front door, already has his gun out. He plugs the reverend in the forehead. One shot. He steps back out, puts the gun in his waistband, and goes into the bar like nothing happened.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Time we show up, he’s on his third beer,” MacDowell said. “They used to have Pabst on draft. I sit down next to him, casual as anything, and take his gun off him. He doesn’t mind a bit. He asks if I want a drink, and I figure what the hell. So I pass his gun to my partner and the two of us have a beer. My partner’s standing behind him with a gun in each hand.”

  “Why’d he do it?”

  “He used to have the reverend over for dinner. He had a fifteen-year-old daughter. You can see where this is going.”

  “She was pregnant?”

  “Twins, it turned out.”

  “What’d he get?”

  “Twenty,” MacDowell said. “In Folsom. Funny thing was, he turned into a preacher. Ordained, all that.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “I lost track,” MacDowell said. He was still looking at the bar. “Half the guys we arrested, they were all right. You know?”

  “Sure.”

  “Kind of guys you could sit down with, have a beer. It wouldn’t seem that far out of line. But that was the only time I actually did.”

  Cain checked his side-view mirror, then pulled back into the right lane. A few blocks later, they stopped again in front of a faded yellow house. In ’82 it had been an unlicensed daycare. Ten, fifteen kids under the age of two. Upstairs there was a workshop where eight naked women sat around a long table. Each woman had a metric laboratory scale, a box of glassine bags, and a brick of heroin. There were two televisions in the house. One upstairs and one downstairs. When MacDowell and his partner came in, everyone was watching Sesame Street. The kids, the women, the three guards with guns.

  Cain drove off again, and they started looking for the scene of a triple homicide MacDowell had caught in ’77 but couldn’t find it. They looked for twenty minutes, MacDowell shaking his head at every turn, looking at the streets that no longer made any sense to him. The old houses had been cut up into new apartments, and the old apartment buildings gutted and turned into massive single-family homes. A complete inversion of the world MacDowell had known.

  When he looked like he was fading, Cain brought them back to Geary and parked in front of a vacant storefront sandwiched between a coffee shop and a used appliance dealer.

  “One more, and then lunch,” Cain said. “You remember this?”

  “Not ringing any bells.”

  “In ’eighty-five, it was a funeral home,” Cain prompted.

  MacDowell looked around. He studied the storefronts on the other side of the street, looked in the window of the coffee shop.

  “Fonteroy’s,” MacDowell said. “Sure.”

  “You ever hear anything about it?”

  “Fonteroy’s?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Pull up. Past the coffee shop.”

  Cain left the parking spot and went ahead three spaces. MacDowell waved his hand, signaling to stop. There was nowhere to park, so Cain stayed in the lane and put on his hazard lights. They were looking up an alley that accessed the space behind the buildings. A row of grime-coated dumpsters sat beneath the fire escapes.

  “I was doing a Saturday shift. Around noon. It’s quiet in the station. Pretty much just me and my partner, catching up on paperwork. There was the desk officer, falling asleep over the sports section.”

  “What year is this?”

  MacDowell looked at the ceiling.

  “I was one year from pulling the pin,” he said. “So this is 1989.”

  “Okay,” Cain said. He tried not to sound disappointed. In 1989, John Fonteroy had been gone for four years. He’d put his wife and daughter in the family car the day of Christopher Hanley’s funeral, lit out of the city, and never come back.

  “The desk officer gets a call from dispatch. Someone saw a 647b—that’s still the dispatch code for a hooker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So someone saw a 647b running up the sidewalk here.”

  “That’s not so unusual,” Cain said.

  “But this lady was buck naked, and screaming.”

  “That’s different.”

  Cain looked back up the sidewalk. It was about a hundred feet to what used to be the front door of Fonteroy’s.

  “We’d been typing all morning. In ’eighty-nine, in the Richmond station, we were still using typewriters and carbon paper. We hadn’t gotten a decent run in a while, and this was just around the corner. So we got in our car and came over.”

  “You found her?”

  “It took some poking around—she was hiding behind the dumpsters. Small, like a mouse, and way back there in the alley. Naked as a baby and drugged out of her skull. Pretty girl, though. Blond and good-looking. And holding a scalpel with blood on the blade.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “My partner tackled her, and I got the scalpel. Then we put a blanket around her and brought her to the car. And don’t get any ideas. This was right after all the problems with the vice squad in North Beach. So we did it by the book—got on the radio, said we were transporting a female.”

  “Then you gave your odometer reading,” Cain said.

  “That’s still in the manual?”

  “Same deal,” Cain said. “No wandering around when you’ve got a lady in the back.”

  “Absolutely no wandering. We took her to the emergency room at UCSF. Gave our odometer again when we got there. Two miles—no detours.”

  “And her story was what?”

  “We never figured it out,” MacDowell said. “The caller said she was a 647b, but she wasn’t anyone we knew. She was a foreigner. European, I guess. Latvian, Estonian. Something like that. They had to get a translator, but even then we couldn’t make sense of it.”

  “She was drugged?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” MacDowell said. “She had red welts when we picked her up, and by the time we got her to the hospital, they’d turned to bruises. Handprints on her wrists, her neck.”

  “She was that drugged, and someone saw her running?”

  “Her motor skills weren’t impaired,” MacDowell said. “She could run, she could swing that blade. She nearly kicked out the car window.”

  “But what?”

  “It was her mind that was gone. She didn’t know her name, what year it was. She was scared out of her skin—clawing at herself. But she didn’t know what she was scared of. Whatever she’d taken, it wiped her mind clean.”

  “They do a rape exam?”

  “First thing—but it was inconclusive. If you’d gotten this today, you’d have checked under her fingernails, see if she fought back and got a piece of him. But we were just getting into DNA back then, and it was only being used in the big cases. The headliners.”

  “How long was she at the hospital?”

  “It took her a day and half just to come down from the drugs—”

  Cain started to ask a question but MacDowell waved it away and answered it.

  “—they never figured out what it was. She slept a lot. When she was awake, they’d call me and I’d come with the translator and try to talk.”

  “And nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “She didn’t remember, or she didn’t want to say?”

  “I don’t know,” MacDowell said. “Both, maybe. First the one, and then after the drugs wore off, she knew enough not to talk.”

  “What’d you think?”

  “What else was there to think?” MacDowell asked. “She’d had a close call. She was lucky. We fig
ure she jumped out of a moving car, took off down the street.”

  But Cain knew she hadn’t come from a moving car. She’d come from the funeral home. One of her captors must have turned his back just long enough for her to grab something. There would have been plenty of blades in a mortuary’s back room. If the men hadn’t chased her down and dragged her back, hadn’t shot her down on the sidewalk, then she must have known how to use the scalpel. MacDowell had said it was bloody.

  “What happened to her?” Cain asked. “You must’ve kept tabs.”

  “Middle of the night, she got up and walked out of UCSF. Nothing but a hospital gown. An EMT out front saw her go but didn’t think to stop her. I was so pissed, I would’ve charged him with something if I could’ve. Negligence. Criminal stupidity.”

  “And that was that.”

  “That’s right,” MacDowell said. “Case closed.”

  “You canvassed the area?”

  “Sure, but no one saw where she came from. That’s why we figured a car. One second there’s nothing, and the next second, there’s a naked woman running to the alley.”

  Cain looked back toward the vacant storefront. Maybe she’d jumped out of a moving car. But it was also possible she’d come sprinting out the front door of the funeral home. The years didn’t match up, but the story fit too well.

  “In ’eighty-nine, what was that?” Cain asked. He pointed out the back window. “It wasn’t Fonteroy’s anymore. That closed in ’eighty-five.”

  “After Fonteroy took off, it was empty awhile, and then it was the Eternity Chapel. Another funeral parlor—because what else was the landlord going to do with it? Once a place gets set up for that, that’s it.”

  “Who ran it?”

  “I don’t know—I never had any trouble with him.”

  “But you knew Fonteroy.”

  “Guy had a record as long as your arm. Fonteroy wasn’t even his real name. It was Finnegan. He used to drive getaway cars on bank jobs. He trained as an undertaker at San Quentin. We used to roll past in the seventies and drop in, just to make sure he was still straight.”

  Cain tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, thinking it through. If someone had been looking for a funeral director willing to take cash and look the other way, Fonteroy was the obvious choice. If he’d been in San Quentin for bank jobs, he’d have a reputation. But if MacDowell’s nude woman in 1989 had anything to do with the funeral home, then maybe Fonteroy’s disappearance hadn’t stopped the casket program. Maybe it only slowed it down for a few months, until Eternity Chapel moved in.

  “This is why you wanted to talk to me?” MacDowell asked. “Fonteroy?”

  “I’ll tell you over lunch,” he said. “But on the way, I’ve got to make a call.”

  He turned off the flashers and started driving again, debating whether to call Chun or Grassley. Chun was better at digging up records, but she was busier. Grassley just had the dress. Cain dialed Grassley and put the call on speaker.

  “Cain?”

  “You somewhere you can talk?”

  “I’m in Union Square—”

  “I thought you were seeing the fashion professor at the Academy of Art.”

  “I wrapped that up, and she told me to go talk to someone at Britex—this fabric store at Geary and Stockton. It’s complicated.”

  “Is it a lead, or a goose chase? Because I got something else for you to work on.”

  “Let me go in here and see what I can learn.”

  “All right,” Cain said. “When you wrap that up, see what you can find out about Eternity Chapel.”

  “What’s Eternity Chapel?”

  “What Fonteroy’s turned into—the landlord rented the building to another funeral home after Fonteroy took off. I want the name of the proprietor.”

  “How do I find that?”

  “However you want,” Cain answered. Maybe he should have called Chun after all. “If it was me, I’d start by finding out who owned the building. Then you ask for a copy of the lease. Or you could check the mortuary licenses. The tax records. Take your pick.”

  “You got it.”

  Cain hung up and looked at MacDowell. The old man was watching through the windshield, hands on his knees.

  “Green partner?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Either they catch on in the first year, or they don’t.”

  “He’ll do okay.”

  He turned on Fillmore and parked down the street from the Western. When he got out, he realized he was in the same parking spot he’d had when Castelli’s blackmailer left a note on his windshield. He turned around, checking the area. There were a pair of bent-back women, MacDowell’s age or older. One of them was pushing a collapsible grocery cart. MacDowell was on the sidewalk, watching him.

  “Someone following you?”

  “You never know.”

  24

  THEY HAD LUNCH at the Western and then headed back to Stinson Beach. MacDowell made it halfway across the bridge before falling asleep; he stayed out until they rolled to a stop in his daughter’s driveway. Cain got out and helped MacDowell up the stairs.

  At the landing, MacDowell shook his hand and let himself in to the little apartment. Cain stood a moment, looking out at the ocean. It was three o’clock, and there was no fog at all. The horizon was fifteen, twenty miles out, but he didn’t see any gray whales. Maybe they’d already gone south. He went back down to the car, wondering what the daughter was thinking, keeping a ninety-two-year-old man up a set of steps like that. Why not let him live in the main house? For that matter, why not let him have a book or two?

  He backed out of the driveway and then called Lucy. She answered on the second ring.

  “Gavin?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine—I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “I might take a walk again. Or a nap. I can’t decide.”

  “Either sounds good.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If it’s late, I’ll take a nap now. Then I’ll be awake when you get back.”

  “Do that.”

  “So you’ll be late, is what you’re saying.”

  “I’ll be late.”

  There was traffic coming back, and he didn’t reach his desk until five thirty. It was already dark. He called Grassley and got no answer, then tried Chun and got the same. There was a folder on his chair, routed upstairs from the ballistics lab. It was two inches thick. Most reports were just a single page. He went to the kitchenette for a cup of coffee, then came back and opened the report. It took him ten seconds to scan the first two pages, and by the end of them, he’d forgotten all about his coffee.

  He flipped the page and kept reading, reaching for his phone without looking up. He left messages for Chun and Grassley, then remembered Fischer. She answered right away.

  “Cain,” she said. She spoke in a hurried whisper. “I’m about to get on a plane—I’m coming back from L.A. The field office here is the best in the country at tracing currency, so I came down with Castelli’s cash. What’s up?”

  “I’m sitting here looking at the ballistics report and you’re not going to believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  “You remember the bullet in the dictionary?”

  “The perfect bullet.”

  “They matched it to the gun. So then they ran it on the system, just to see. They got a hit.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “It’s linked to an unsolved homicide.”

  “When?”

  “October 15, 1998.”

  “We’re talking about Castelli’s gun,” Fischer said. “The thirty-eight S and W that was under the desk.”

  “That gun.”

  “We know he owned it in 1998?”

  “He registered it in 1991. Maybe when he inherited it.”

  “Who was the victim?” Fischer asked. “And where was this?”

  “I haven’t gotten there—but i
t’s all here.”

  He thumbed the stack and saw handwritten notes, color photographs. A shot of tire tracks in dark mud. A red Cadillac in a dirt parking lot, tall trees behind it.

  “You’ve got a hard copy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Scan it and email me,” she said. “If you can do it in ten minutes, I’ll read it in the air.”

  “All right.”

  “Shit, Cain,” she said.

  “I know.”

  He hung up and took the report with him, still reading as he went through the cubicle farm to the copy room. He loaded the file into the feed tray and ran it through the scanner, then emailed it from his phone to Fischer. He went back to his office, ignoring the three people who said hello. He shut his door, then locked it.

  The guy’s name was Lester Fennimore.

  A state park ranger found his 1997 Cadillac Eldorado at midnight in a trailhead parking lot in Castle Rock State Park. Lester Fennimore was in the driver’s seat, his face resting on the steering wheel. He’d been shot six times in his right side, as if the shooter had been sitting in the passenger seat. It had rained at ten o’clock, and there were two sets of tire tracks in the parking lot. One was from the Cadillac coming in. The other must have been the shooter’s car. It had pulled up alongside the Cadillac, then backed out to leave.

  Cain pulled up a map on his computer monitor. Castle Rock State Park was twenty-three miles from San Jose. In 1998, Castelli had been living down there, getting rich on startup stock options.

  Cain’s phone rang and he grabbed it.

  “This is Cain.”

  “We might get cut off,” Fischer said. “I’m on board now.”

  “You can talk?”

  “Government flight, and all to myself. You saw the stuff on Fennimore?”

  “Which part?”

  “The interview with his widow, the background—he graduated from Cal in ’eighty-nine. So he was a freshman in ’eighty-five.”

  “So they might have known each other?”

  “Oh, they definitely knew each other. Go to the autopsy photos. The third one.”