The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “This is a copy of a document we found in his safe,” Cain said. “With the cash.”

  “Three addresses,” Mona said. “Some dates.”

  “Those are banks in Chinatown,” Cain said. “Three banks in three days. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Mona looked at the page again, her eyes flicking back and forth as she read the three entries. In his pocket, his phone began to ring again, and he ignored it.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I don’t know what it is.”

  “But that’s Harry’s writing?”

  “It’s his.”

  Fischer stood up, the empty briefcase in her hand. She looked at the table.

  “Put that in the safe,” she said. “Before you go to sleep tonight. And then tomorrow, go put it back in the bank.”

  Mona nodded, but she wasn’t looking at Fischer. She leaned across to the bottle of Maker’s Mark and pulled the cork out. She poured herself a drink, then pushed the bottle toward her daughter.

  26

  HE WAS AT a red light behind the Century Theater on Mission Street, watching a crowd of moviegoers cross from the theater to the parking garage. The light turned green but the street was still blocked, and as he was waiting for the stragglers to make their way across, his phone rang again.

  Nagata’s name lit the screen.

  He’d forgotten her other calls, had been too focused on Mona’s answers and Alexa’s furtive interest in her phone. He answered on speaker and dropped the phone into the console between the seats.

  “This is Cain.”

  “And thank god,” she said. She was out of breath. Men were shouting in the background. “Where are you?”

  “On Mission, going home.”

  “Then I’ll wait for you here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Standing in your apartment.”

  “My apartment? In Daly City?”

  “You don’t really live here, do you?” she said. “That’s why it’s half packed up.”

  “What are you doing in my apartment, Lieutenant Nagata?”

  “You didn’t answer your phone. So we thought—”

  “What happened?”

  “Grassley and Chun. About an hour ago, they—it looks like maybe they were seeing each other. That’s why we found them the way—”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Cain said. He pulled to the curb next to the Hotel Pickwick. A barefooted man with a bottle of wine crossed the street in front of him and stood a second in his headlights to take a drink. “Start from the beginning.”

  “Chun called 911,” Nagata said. “An hour ago. She could barely talk. She called from Grassley’s place. She only got out two words, and then she passed out. Help Cain. That’s it. The EMTs got there before us. The front door was open, so they went up the stairs—”

  “Jesus, Nagata.”

  “You think I don’t know?” she snapped. “You think I’m just Castelli’s hack, and I don’t get it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s got to be the Castelli case,” Nagata said. Calmer now, or trying hard to be. “It’s the only one you were both on. We figure he followed one of them, then went inside and got both.”

  Cain took the phone from his ear and looked around.

  The barefoot wino was crossing the intersection again, ducking through the traffic, attracted like a moth to the Chronicle building’s white glow. He held the bottle by its neck, waving it over his head. Chun had called 911 but had passed out. His partner had been there but hadn’t gotten on the line when she dropped the receiver. Cain was cold all over, and dizzy. He had to check the speedometer to make sure the car wasn’t moving.

  “Grassley?” he asked.

  “There wasn’t anything they could do. For Chun, maybe. They took her to UCSF. All they’d say is there’s a chance.”

  “What happened?”

  “It wasn’t a gun,” Nagata said. “A knife, for sure. And something else—a bat, a hammer. We don’t know yet. This just happened, and we’ve been looking for you.”

  Ahead of him, an endless line of headlights came down Mission Street. He was falling, waiting to land. Trying to understand Nagata’s words. Grassley was gone, and Chun was barely hanging on at UCSF. Someone had left her for dead, but she’d saved just enough of herself to make it to the phone. Her attacker must have been in a hurry. He had somewhere else to be, was so desperate to get there that he didn’t stay around to see if Chun was finished.

  “Cain?” Nagata asked. “Cain, did I lose you?”

  There’d been a note on his windshield, a phone call to the restaurant’s kitchen. They’d chased the tall kid up California Street, then lost him in the alley behind the Sutter Health medical building. There was only one way the kid could have known where to be with the note. He’d been following Cain all day. But Cain hadn’t been to his apartment in Daly City that day, or any day since the first blackmail letter arrived. He’d been at Lucy’s house. The tall kid had seen all that.

  Cain dropped the car into first gear and peeled through the red light, pressing his hand on his horn, clearing the intersection without even checking for cross traffic.

  “Cain?” Nagata was shouting. “Cain, what’s going on?”

  “If he’d been following me,” Cain said, “he wouldn’t know about my place. He’d know about Lucy’s.”

  “Lucy’s your girlfriend.”

  “She’s on Twenty-Second Avenue,” Cain said. “Between Fulton and Cabrillo.”

  He gave her the address, then slowed as he approached the next intersection. There was nothing coming up Sixth toward him, so he accelerated into the right turn. Whatever Nagata said next was lost to the engine. It was two blocks before he let off the gas, and then he was rolling toward Market at fifty miles an hour, his foot hovering above the brake but not touching it.

  “Cain?”

  “You got her address?” he said. “You’re coming, with your guys?”

  “I’m coming—but, Cain?”

  “Say it.”

  “I remember that place; we went there. It’s Lucy Bolet, isn’t it? You started dating Lucy Bolet. The pianist, the one who was inside Ashbury Heights Elementary.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, shit, Cain,” she said. “We’re coming.”

  “I’ll be there first,” he said. “When you get there, I’ll be inside.”

  “Cain—”

  He reached to the phone and hung up. Cain shot across Market, the gas pedal flat to the floor. He didn’t even hear the sound of the horns until he was through the intersection, coming into the Tenderloin on Taylor Street at fifty miles an hour.

  There was a standstill ahead, a bus stuck in the intersection. The driver stood behind the bus, looking up at the overhead catenary cables. He’d already set out a pair of red flares. Cain was three cars back. He switched on the LED flashers hidden behind his car’s grille and laid his hand on the horn. Then he turned onto the sidewalk, no concern at all for his car’s side-view mirrors and door panels, or for the city’s newly planted trees. Their two-inch trunks, held upright with staked wires, went beneath his front bumper one at a time until he came off the curb and crossed the intersection in the pedestrian walk. He saw one of his hubcaps spin away like a lost coin.

  If he was driving like everything depended on it, it was because it did.

  Cain stopped opposite Lucy’s house, his car pointed downhill. He’d coasted the last block with the engine off, his headlights killed. He pulled the parking brake and stepped out, leaving the door open so there’d be no sound of it closing. He’d had sixty-two blocks, racing in the dark, to work it out. He’d sent Chun to Berkeley this morning to copy the murder book on the Pi Kappa Kappa fire, to find out what else she could about the underground brotherhood. That was before he’d even known about the unsolved murder of Lester Fennimore.

  Now the Pi Kappa Kappa lead was the hottest thing he had going, but it was also the most dangerous. Chun might ha
ve run into any number of people today, asking about the fraternity and the fire. She’d have been talking to desk sergeants and detectives in two police departments. She might have gone to the university to see if the dean of students kept a file. Cain didn’t know where she’d been or who she’d seen, but he had to consider this: Someone didn’t like the questions she’d been asking. Somebody waited until she was gone, and then picked up the phone and made a call.

  He crossed the street with his gun drawn, pausing at the steps that led up to Lucy’s porch. Her front door was ajar. Blood was tracked on every other step leading up to it. There were treaded footprints, but he couldn’t tell if they were coming or going. Every room of the house facing the street was dark.

  Five soundless steps to the porch, the gun in both hands.

  He came to the door and slipped sideways through it, then took a breath and looked down. There was blood on the floor, smears of it every four feet. He could hear sirens in the distance now. Nagata was coming with her men, but they were still twenty blocks away. He followed the blood. It tracked through the house to the music room. The French doors stood open, and there was sheet music spread across the floor. The man had stepped on it, had bloodied the score.

  Cain went back to the front and climbed the stairs. There was blood there, too. Chun or Grassley must have fought. One of them must have managed a shot, or gotten the knife and used it to open up the guy’s leg. Now his right shoe was full of blood, and he was tracking it everywhere he went. At the upstairs landing, the prints went back and forth down the hallway. In and out of the bedrooms, the bathroom.

  The master bedroom was lit by the streetlamp outside. A long bar of light angled through the gap in the curtains and fell across the floor. The bed was unmade. The closet door was open. There was blood beneath the window, a small pool of it. He must have stood there a while, looking down at the street.

  Maybe she had gone out, had been on one of her exploratory walks. He knelt at the foot of the bed and shone his flashlight underneath it. All he saw was the bare floor, the molding along the back wall under the head of their bed.

  “Lucy?”

  He stood and went to the closet. Outside, the sirens were getting louder. They were coming down Fulton, a deep phalanx of patrol cars racing toward him. He flicked on the closet light.

  “Lucy?”

  With his free hand, he checked behind the hanging clothes, the long dresses and the heavy coats. He felt nothing but the cedar-planked wall. He turned off the light, then left the bedroom and went down the hall. He cleared the empty guest bedroom and his closet. The third bedroom, which faced out over the back garden, was empty.

  If she hadn’t been on a walk, and if she wasn’t in the house now, there was only one possibility. But he couldn’t think about that yet. He wouldn’t let himself until he finished checking the house.

  Coming into the bathroom, he immediately felt a change in temperature. It was warmer in here, and he could smell the bath water. He switched on his flashlight again. The tub was full, steam still rising from it. There was a bottle of shampoo floating on the water’s surface. The floor was wet and the white bathmat was stained red.

  She hadn’t been on a walk.

  She’d been in the bath, and he’d come in on her. He had shoved through the door and found her, here, where she was the most vulnerable, where—

  “Gavin?”

  It was just a whisper, from behind him. He turned around. Now he was facing the sink, the mirror behind it so fogged up from the bathwater that his own image was just a blur. Everything that had been on the counter around the basin had been knocked to the floor. There was blood on the wall, blood on the hand towel hanging in the chrome ring by the door.

  But the voice had come from inside the room.

  He crouched at the cabinet beneath the sink and pulled the two doors open. He wouldn’t have thought Lucy could fit in here. Yet there she was, curled behind the sink’s U-bend drain.

  She blinked against the flashlight beam, then reached for his hand.

  He holstered his gun. She was naked, and still wet from the bath. But there was no blood on her at all. She reached for his hand, squeezing his fingers so hard it hurt.

  “Gavin—is he gone?”

  “You can come out of there,” he said. “But stay in this room.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Lucy—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  He let go of her hand and got his phone. Nagata answered on the first ring. He already knew where she was. The sirens were right outside the house.

  27

  HE TURNED ON the porch light and stood outside at the top of the steps with his badge in his left hand as the line of patrol cars came down the hill and stopped in front of the house. Nagata came out first. Eight other officers followed her. There was Frank Lee, from the Homicide Detail, and the rest of them were patrol officers he didn’t recognize. None of them had his gun drawn, which meant Nagata must have gotten on the radio as soon as she’d hung up with him.

  “There’s blood,” a young cop said.

  “I see it,” she said. “Wait down here.”

  She came up the stairs, avoiding the bloody footprints, and stood with Cain near the door. She looked into the house, then at Cain.

  “She’s upstairs,” he said. “In the bathroom. Hiding under the sink where I found her.”

  “She’s lucky,” Nagata said. “That’s twice now.”

  “I’m not taking another chance with her,” Cain said. “Not like this. She can’t live this way. Have your men check the whole thing again. I still haven’t gone in the basement or the garage.”

  He started to go back into the house.

  “Cain—”

  “We’ll talk in the living room,” Cain said. “You and Frank and me.”

  But before he talked to Nagata, he went upstairs. He took clothes from her closet and brought them into the bathroom. He shut the door, then rolled up the bloody bath mat and set it aside. He used the ruined hand towel to clean up the rest of the blood from the wall and the countertop, and then he sat down in front of the cabinet and opened the doors.

  Lucy looked out at him, her eyes the color of wet slate.

  “I’ll help you out of there,” he said.

  She reached for his hand and he helped lift her from behind the drainpipe and out of the cabinet. He pulled her onto his lap and reached into the cabinet again for a clean towel to put around her. She was shivering with cold or fear, and her skin was covered in goose bumps.

  “He wasn’t looking for you,” Cain said. “He was looking for me.”

  She put her arms around him and held him tightly.

  “This won’t happen again,” he said. “I promise you that.”

  “What do we do?” she whispered. “We can’t stay here, can we?”

  “We can’t. We won’t.”

  “I saw him,” she said. “Through the crack in the doors.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was tall. And hurt. Bleeding all down his leg.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “He was too tall,” she said. She was whispering into the side of his neck. “He stood right here. He was throwing things. I saw his hand—the only skin I saw. He was white. I thought he’d open the cabinet and find me. I was sure he’d find me.”

  He held on to her, not wanting to press her with any more questions, but knowing he had to.

  “Did it sound like it was just the one guy, or did he have someone else?”

  “Just one.”

  If there had been two, they would have talked to each other, and she would have heard them. And even if they hadn’t talked, their footsteps would have given them away.

  “How long between when he left and when I came home?”

  “Not long,” she said.

  He waited for her to go on, for her to play the memory back and answer his question with precision. She had a perfect sense of time and cadence, knew the length of every note
and every rest. At the Ashbury Heights Elementary trial, she had taken the stand before Matt Redding, and Cain had been sitting at the prosecution’s table, watching. The cross-examination turned on her ability to recall the timing of shots in a span of five minutes. How long had she spent kneeling under the stairs, using her body to shield the twenty children she’d silently gathered and rushed into that crawlspace? When, exactly, did she put her hand over the crying boy’s mouth, clamping so hard to silence him that his lips bled onto her palm and he passed out in her arms?

  Lucy was tapping her finger against his back, measuring her time in the dark.

  “He left and went down the stairs,” Lucy said. “And then you came in. Two and a half minutes.”

  From downstairs, Nagata’s men began to call out as they’d cleared the basement and the garage. Through the bathroom window, Cain heard another officer in the back garden. The blood tracked out the basement door, through the flower beds, and over the back fence. Then Nagata was on the radio, asking for backup, every available unit. She wanted to saturate the avenues, go door-to-door. She needed a CHP helicopter to sweep from above with a searchlight; someone needed to bring dogs.

  Cain held Lucy back from him so he could see her face.

  “Can you get dressed?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got to talk to Nagata,” Cain said. “I want you to pack a bag. Whatever you need.”

  “For how long?”

  “A week, to start.”

  She nodded, then used his shoulders to push herself up.

  When he came downstairs, Fischer was sitting at the dining room table with Nagata and Frank Lee. A department photographer was setting up lights in the music room to take pictures of the blood-stamped sheet music spread across the floor. Sumida came in the front door, nodded to Cain, and led a team of three technicians down to the basement. Red and blue lights pulsed through the open door and the windows. There was probably half a liter of blood in the house and outside. Plenty for CSI to work with, but they wouldn’t get anywhere if the tall kid’s DNA hadn’t already been uploaded to a searchable database.