“But what would be on the body?” Fischer asked. “Thirty years underground, what would connect him?”
He looked over at Fischer. He’d forgotten how much he’d kept back from her.
“She was pregnant.”
“You think it’s his.”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
She sped up and steered around the curving ramp until they merged onto the bridge. Then the city was stretched out in front of them, the steep hills and the lights glittering against a dark dawn.
29
THEY PARKED ON Bay Street and looked across at Henry Newcomb’s house. There were no lights burning in the living room, but above it, one window on the top floor was lit. It must have been a kid’s bedroom. The master suite would likely be in the back, overlooking the garden.
They got out of the car and crossed the street, then climbed the narrow steps up to Henry’s front door. Cain skipped the doorbell and used his fist. Knocking like a beat cop, like Grassley. They waited and listened, and then they heard light feet running down the stairs. The door opened four inches and stopped on its chain.
A pair of small boys’ faces looked out from the level of the doorknob. One of them was hyperalert, studying Cain with interest. The other was shy and wary.
“Who are you?” the curious one asked.
Cain took his inspector’s star and held it for the boy to see.
“Gavin Cain, SFPD,” he said. “I’m here to see your father.”
“His father, not mine,” the boy said. “This is David Newcomb. I’m his friend, Ross Carver. I don’t live here.”
Henry’s son looked out and said nothing. Then he withdrew from the cracked door and went away. He called out softly from the foot of the stairs.
“Dad?”
When he didn’t get an answer, he climbed out of sight and called again.
“Do you like being a cop?” the other boy asked Cain.
“It’s okay.”
“That’s what I’m going to do,” the boy said. “When I’m old. I think it looks better than just okay.”
“You want to catch the bad guys.”
“Or shoot them.”
“It’s a lot of paperwork, shooting them,” Cain said. “So it’s better just to catch them.”
“Did you ever have to shoot a guy?”
“Once,” Cain said.
He looked through the crack in the door, behind the boy. Henry’s son was still upstairs, and he thought he could hear Henry and his wife speaking with their child.
“Did he die?” the boy asked, and Cain turned back to him.
“He was fine,” Cain said. He was going to leave it at that, but both the boy and Fischer were watching him, waiting for him to explain. “I shot him in the leg and the arm. Twice in the arm.”
“On purpose?” the boy asked.
Cain nodded. “I wanted to arrest him.”
“What did he do?”
“Why did I shoot him? Or what did he do after I shot him?”
“Both.”
“He was a very bad guy,” Cain said. This was now the longest conversation he’d ever had on this topic outside of a courtroom. But he didn’t mind. It was good practice, talking to a kid about things like this. “He’d walked into a school, the man I shot. He went in so he could hurt a bunch of kids. And five of the teachers. And then he left before we could catch him. It took us four years to figure out who he was and track him down.”
The man had done a lot more than hurt the children and the teachers at Ashbury Heights. He’d been shooting to kill. And afterward, when he’d run out of bullets, he’d walked through a shattered window and across the playground. He’d hopped a low chainlink fence and then disappeared. The original inspectors hadn’t gotten anywhere, and the worst crime in the city’s memory landed on Cain’s desk as a cold case. He’d taken the grainy security footage to Menlo Park and met Matt Redding in his threadbare office. In less than a week, he was knocking on Lucy’s door with Nagata, the district attorney, and a picture of the guy cuffed to a hospital bed.
But he didn’t need to go into all that with this kid, this aspiring homicide inspector.
“You got him, though,” the boy said. “You finally found him, and you shot him.”
“That’s right.”
“And what did he do?”
“He cried out, fell down. He tried to grab his gun off the floor, but before he could, I rolled him over and cuffed him.”
“That’s what I want to do,” the boy said. “Just like that.”
Henry finally came down and sent the boys back upstairs, and Cain heard a television turn on up there. Then the three of them sat down in the living room. Henry was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe, and his hair stuck out above his ears. He hadn’t shaved in at least three days.
“I haven’t written it up yet,” he said. “It was a late night.”
“You got time in a lab.”
“I did. I started with the girl,” Henry said. “You wanted to know what she had in her system when she died. You ever heard of a drug called Thrallinex? It came off the market before it ever made much of a name for itself.”
Fischer looked at Cain.
“It’s what you were looking for,” Henry said. “Isn’t it?”
“They took a picture of her, before she went into the coffin. They were about to force-feed her a dozen tablets of Thrallinex, the ten-milligram pills. Does that sound about right?”
“It fits.”
“What about Castelli?”
“That was a lot easier. If he hadn’t shot himself, he might’ve died from the alcohol and the zolpidem tartrate—”
“Zolpidem what?” Fischer asked.
“—otherwise known as Ambien,” Henry said. He looked at Cain. “What was it he liked to drink?”
“Maker’s Mark,” Cain said.
“That’s right,” Henry said. “Now I remember.”
Castelli had appointed Henry, and then after things had gone south for Henry, he’d asked for his resignation. But Henry had been in Castelli’s orbit long enough that he would have seen the man drink.
“How loaded was he?” Cain asked.
“He’d had enough to do the job without the gun—it’s a wonder he was conscious to pull the trigger.”
“It’s a wonder,” Cain said. He looked at Fischer. “Isn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“And the last part?” Cain asked. “The DNA?”
“That tied it all together,” Henry said. “The samples you gave me—you had an entire family in the cooler. The mother, who suffocated in a casket. The father, who shot himself in the head. And their child—it was a girl, if you care—who died in the womb.”
“So it was his.”
“It was his.”
“You can write it up for me?”
“Sure, but what for? You can’t use it anywhere. And the labs you’re waiting on, they’ll tell you the same thing when they get around to it.”
“All right,” Cain said. He stood up, and so did Fischer. “Forget we came here.”
“I will, after I send you my bill.”
30
THEY ARRIVED AT the station an hour ahead of the autopsy, so he took Fischer up to the sixth floor, and they went into his office. Grassley had left a stack of files on his chair, and Cain put them on the floor so Fischer could sit.
“You’ve got a theory,” Fischer said. “You’ve known about the girl longer than me, so you’re a step ahead. Tell me a story that makes all of it fit.”
Cain swiveled toward the window and twisted the rod that worked the blinds, to shut out the gray daylight.
“It has to start with Castelli getting caught up with Pi Kappa Kappa,” Cain said. “By the time he was a pledge, they’d gone underground. They must have been into something.”
“The skin trade,” Fischer said. “Human traffic.”
“Maybe the girl was someone they wanted to punish. She broke a rule, she tried to break free.
They made it into a party and took pictures.”
“But you’ve got to account for at least eight weeks between the rape and the burial,” Fischer said. “She was a couple months along with his baby. Unless the night in the pictures wasn’t his first time with her, or it was someone else in the shots.”
“Maybe he kept her chained to the bed for eight weeks. The DNA says it was his baby,” Cain said. “We’ve got a picture of a man raping her, and Melissa Montgomery—who’s seen him naked—couldn’t rule him out. So let’s say it was him, and let’s say he helped put her in the casket.”
“Okay.”
“Then he started worrying about it,” Cain said. “And he got especially worried after a different girl got away—the one MacDowell found in the alley behind the funeral home. Which meant the fire at the Grizzly Peak frat house was convenient. Everyone who died that night was probably there when the photographs got taken.”
“You think Castelli set that fire?”
“You asked me to tell a story that puts everything together,” Cain said. “That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t know if it’s true or not—it just fits.”
“Go on.”
“So Castelli gets on with his life. He goes to London and does some consulting. When his dad loses the ambassadorship, he comes back to California and gets his MBA. Things are looking up after that, and he’s in San Jose making real money.”
“And then Lester Fennimore comes along,” Fischer said. “His old frat brother.”
“Maybe he wants to talk to Castelli about the girl, or the fire.”
“Or both.”
“So Castelli agrees to meet him,” Cain said. “They want a quiet spot—Castle Rock State Park fits the bill. Especially after dark. But Castelli doesn’t go there to talk. He’s got his thirty-eight, and either he’s wearing gloves or he brought a rag to wipe everything down.”
“Then who’s the blackmailer?” Fischer asked. “And why now?”
“Well, it wasn’t really blackmail,” Cain said. “Castelli thought the same thing. They weren’t asking for money. They were pressuring him to kill himself—which might’ve just been cover for a plan to kill him. But what if before that, they’d been shaking him down for years?”
“The money in his safe,” Fischer said. “You think he was going to pay it to them. But then something changed, and they just wanted him dead.”
“What changed was me,” Cain said. “I got the exhumation order. And then the secret they’d been holding over him all this time was about to come into the open. They wanted Castelli dead before we could arrest him and make him talk.”
“But who are they?”
“If we’re right,” Cain said, “not everyone who knew about the pictures died in the Grizzly Peak fire. Lester Fennimore lived to the late 1990s. There could be others.”
“So you think it’s a Pi Kappa Kappa brother.”
Cain nodded.
“I think that’s what got Grassley killed, what put Chun in the hospital—she was out there, in Berkeley, asking about Pi Kappa Kappa. Someone got scared and decided to shut us down.”
At nine o’clock, they buzzed into the secure area behind the reception desk in the ME suite, and soon he was standing next to Rachel Levy in front of a portable cold storage chamber, a quad unit that held four bodies. The door on the top right was Grassley’s compartment. Cain looked behind him and nodded to Nagata. Then he took the evidence key from Dr. Levy and unlocked the chamber. He opened the door and rolled the cadaver tray out on its sliders. He and Jim Braun took the head, and Dr. Levy and Frank Lee took the feet. They moved Grassley’s tray onto the cart and rolled him into the autopsy suite.
Cain stood back with Nagata and Fischer and watched Dr. Braun pull the sheet off. The natural instinct, the human impulse, would be to turn away from the sight of his dead friend. But when the sheet came off, Cain didn’t even let himself blink.
Grassley was naked, his skin pale with death. His mouth was open and his tongue bulged out, as if he’d been choking for air as he died. His throat was cut from ear to ear, a toothless second mouth that opened beneath his chin. One of the morgue assistants had washed the body already, and the only blood was around the wound itself. The edges were clean, the layers of tissue visible. Cain didn’t need Dr. Levy to tell him that it had been an unusually sharp blade.
Next to him, Lieutenant Nagata took his hand, gripping it hard. He pressed back, and didn’t let go, but never took his eyes from Grassley. Dr. Levy was speaking into her hanging microphone, but he wasn’t listening. He looked at Grassley’s hands. There were no cuts or bruises on the knuckles, no blade slashes on his forearms or outer wrists. He hadn’t thrown any punches, hadn’t picked up a defensive wound fending off the knife. But on the right side of his neck, and on his shoulder, there were dozens of small cuts. Most of them had barely gone deep enough to draw blood.
Cain let go of Nagata’s hand and stepped around so that he was standing behind Grassley’s head.
“What are these?” he said, interrupting Dr. Levy’s narration of the surface examination.
She stepped back, then nodded at Jim Braun. He hit a switch on the wall, which paused the recorder.
“What were you pointing to?”
Cain pointed again at the clusters of blade marks on Grassley’s neck. Frank Lee came around and studied the cuts. He wrote something in his notebook, then flipped the page.
“These aren’t from a fight. They’re too shallow,” Frank Lee said. “And look at them—they’re parallel. All the blade marks are side by side.”
Grassley was Frank’s case now. They would pursue their investigations separately, and if they came together and landed on the same person, so much the better.
“Superficial pressure cuts,” Dr. Levy said.
“How’d they get there?”
“Hold a blade against your arm sometime. Press down, but don’t pull it back and forth. We’re not talking about a slicing wound.”
Fischer asked the next question for Cain.
“If a right-handed man was standing behind him, holding a knife on his neck—threatening, waving the blade around and then putting it back—you’d get marks like this?”
“Yes.”
“It was a hostage situation,” Fischer said. “Maybe even a standoff. Chun had the gun, and the guy had Grassley.”
“That must be it,” Frank said. He wrote something else in his notebook. “That’s what happened.”
“Can I start again?” Dr. Levy asked.
Cain nodded to Dr. Braun, and he hit the wall switch to resume the recording. Dr. Levy continued her surface examination, but Cain wasn’t paying attention anymore. There was something about the pressure wounds he didn’t like. They didn’t make sense, didn’t fit some piece of the story he’d been telling Fischer.
He was sure that he’d just hit on something important. But that kind of certainty never lasted long.
“Cain?” Fischer said. “Did you hear her?”
“What?”
“Back up,” she whispered. “She’s going to open him up now.”
He looked at her, not understanding at first. He was too far away from this, grasping too hard at the solution he thought he’d glimpsed. Then he saw Dr. Levy standing over Grassley with the autopsy saw, and he understood. He wasn’t wearing any protective gear. No lab coat over his suit, no safety glasses, no mask. They didn’t want him standing here when Dr. Levy put the blade against Grassley’s navel and started cutting.
When it was over, he went with Nagata and Fischer and they sat on a smoking bench that faced a chainlink fence and the San Francisco County Jail. None of them smoked, but that didn’t matter. They just needed to sit. A strong wind funneled between the jail and the Hall of Justice, and it carried a hard spatter of rain. That didn’t matter either.
“I’d like to go see Chun,” Cain said. “Can you get me in?”
“She’s not out of it yet.”
“But can you get me in?”
&
nbsp; “I can try,” Nagata said.
“That’s all I want.”
Mount Sutro loomed behind the UCSF Medical Center, its radio tower cutting through the low clouds that were piling against the heights. They rode the elevator up to the intensive care unit, and Fischer hung back with Cain while Nagata talked to the nurse at the triage desk.
“Three minutes,” Nagata said when she came back. “And just you.”
“All right.”
Cain crossed the hall to Chun’s room and opened the door. She lay on an angled bed. There were intravenous tubes running into a port on her forearm, oxygen tubes in her nose. Catheter lines ran from beneath the blue sheets, and he saw a urine bag hanging from the end of the bed, its contents the color of weak coffee. Her face and head were bandaged, and it looked like half her hair had been shaved off so the doctors could examine her head wound. There was a line of staples and sutures from her left ear to the base of her throat. The vascular surgeon must have gone through the existing knife wounds to repair her damaged carotid artery.
Cain pulled up a chair and sat next to her. He opened his briefcase and took the gunshot residue field kit he’d brought from his office. He opened the package and put on the gloves that were inside it, then ripped open the cotton swab’s foil envelope.
“You hang in there, Angela,” he said. “We need you back.”
He took her right hand and gently swabbed it, getting the webbing between her thumb and forefinger and the backs of her knuckles. He opened the plastic box and put the swab in, and squeezed the ampule of reactive agent, feeling the thin glass break inside the plastic dropper. He dripped the reactant onto the cotton and then closed the box. He held Angela’s hand and waited for the swab to develop. Her skin was cold and there was no reaction at all to his touch. It wasn’t like touching a sleeping woman. He thought of the photographs of the drugged girl, the shape she’d taken after the Thrallinex took her.
When he looked through the lensed lid again a moment later, he saw the fine blue specks that had appeared on the surface of the swab, and he knew what they meant.
The Dark Room Page 24
