“You did just fine, Angela,” he whispered to her. “You got him high in the leg. He’s holed up somewhere, and he’s hurting worse than you.”
When he let go of her hand, her fingers stayed curled in the same position. He had to look at the flickering green line of her pulse on the EKG to be sure she wasn’t dead.
For a moment, in the crowded elevator heading down to the street level, he thought again of the shallow cuts on Grassley’s neck. The gunshot residue on Chun’s right hand, which meant the single .40 caliber round on the floor had come from her gun.
Something didn’t match. He was sure there was a flaw in his story. But once the elevator doors slid open and he’d followed Fischer through the main entrance of the hospital, out into a cold gray noon, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
“Where to now?” Fischer said.
He didn’t know. He wanted to go back to Yerba Buena Island, back to the safe room on the Coast Guard’s fenced-off lot. He wanted to put his arms around Lucy and spend all afternoon watching the wind stir up the bay. But he had to keep up the initiative. They had to keep moving, or they’d sink.
“Let’s go to Union Square,” Cain said. “I’ve got an idea.”
31
THEY PARKED IN the garage buried beneath Union Square, then came up to the street level and crossed Stockton. They followed the sidewalk past a narrow brick building, the façade of which carried the zigzag lattice of a fire escape, and then at the next door, they turned in to Britex Fabrics.
Grassley had been on his way here the last time Cain had spoken to him.
The door closed behind them, and they stood looking at bolts of silk and printed fabric stacked on racks and arranged on shelves. The store was deep, and occupied the entire four-story building. Cain thought there might be enough fabric in here to clothe every woman in the city. A salesperson came over. She looked past Cain at Fischer.
“May I help you find something?”
“Ask him,” Fischer said. “He’s the one looking.”
Cain already had out his phone. He gave it to the woman, and she looked at the photograph of Grassley. He was in his SFPD dress uniform, to the left of a U.S. flag. The woman handed the phone back.
“He was my partner,” Cain said. He put the phone in his pocket and then brought out his inspector’s star. “He came in here yesterday.”
“I remember him.”
“Did he talk to you?”
“He asked for the manager. I took him upstairs.”
“Is she up there now?”
“I’ll take you.”
They found the manager on the third floor. She was working with a younger woman to arrange a display of sewing notions.
“Susan?” the saleswoman said. “These officers are here to see you—I think it’s about yesterday.”
The woman stood up and turned around. She had salt-and-pepper hair and an easy smile. She shook Cain’s hand, then Fischer’s, and then took a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of her apron to look at the picture of Grassley.
“He came in yesterday,” she said. “He’d been talking to Martina Delaney, at the Academy of Art, and she sent him here.”
“What did he ask you?” Cain said.
“Is he in trouble? He said he was a policeman, and he showed me his badge.”
“He was my partner,” Cain said. “I talked to him before he came here, but I don’t know why he came.”
“You can’t ask him?”
Cain shook his head, and the woman’s easy smile disappeared.
“He asked me about a girl. He showed me a picture of her—you’ve seen it, I guess. The girl’s in a knockoff Jean Patou dress she made. She’s got her hands up in front of her, and she’s backed against a wall. She looks scared. It was a horrifying picture.”
“What did he ask you?”
“If I’d seen her before.”
“Had you?”
She nodded.
“This was my parents’ store. I’ve worked here for years. I remember her.”
“Do you remember all your customers?” Fischer asked.
“Of course not—that’d be impossible. But I remember her because she looked like Lauren Bacall, and she was very talented—one of the best I’d seen. And she had the loveliest accent.”
“What kind of accent?”
“English.”
“What did you know about her?” Cain asked.
“I didn’t know anything—I thought she was a housewife, or someone’s mistress. Maybe that sounds old fashioned now, but that’s what I thought. She didn’t have a wedding ring, I don’t think. Anyway, she was young, and must not have had anything to do but sew. She came in a lot for a little while—”
“You’re talking about 1985.”
“Somewhere in there—she came in a lot. She made four or five dresses. Some of them were couture copies. Some of them were her own designs. She’d show me sketches, and I’d help her pick out the right fabrics.”
“Did you know her name?”
“If I did, I’ve forgotten it.”
“And you figured she was a rich English girl, one with a lot of time on her hands?”
“I didn’t think she was rich, though your partner asked me the same thing.”
“What made you think she wasn’t wealthy?”
“She paid in cash and didn’t have a credit card. She’d pass up the best fabric and look for the sales. When she picked something for me to cut, she’d get exactly what she needed and not an inch more. No room for mistakes. Rich ladies who sew, they generally make a lot of mistakes.”
“Did you know where she lived, if she had a place in the city?”
“No idea.”
“Did she ever come in with anyone else?”
“Never.”
“What else did my partner ask you?”
“He said I should call him if I remembered anything else. He gave me his card, and I put it in my office.”
Cain took one of his own cards from behind his badge and handed it to her.
“Call this number instead.”
Fischer’s office, on the thirteenth floor of the Burton Building, looked across Golden Gate Avenue into the windows of the state office building. She had a narrow desk that was piled with paper. He didn’t know what kinds of cases she worked, what else she had going on aside from Castelli. He didn’t know if she was married or had a family, but he supposed she must have been alone, because she’d come alone to the safe house. He stood next to the window and looked at the potted jade plant she kept on the sill. She was in the rolling chair behind her desk, turning on her computer.
When she had a browser window open, he pulled out one of the guest chairs and sat.
“What now?” Fischer asked.
“We need to figure out if the British have a national missing persons clearinghouse,” Cain said.
Fischer did a search and the first link on the results page was what they wanted. The clearinghouse was called the U.K. Missing Persons Bureau. They didn’t bother searching the database of photographs. If she had been in it, Matt Redding would have found her. Instead, Fischer found a general email address.
“I think we should just attach the one photograph,” she said. “The first one. I’d rather hold back the rest.”
“So would I.”
“And I’m giving them your phone number. The body’s in your custody, so they should call you.”
“That’s fine.”
She typed for a moment, then let him read the message. Then she attached a scanned copy of the photograph and pressed send.
By two o’clock, a dull thump was growing in Cain’s head.
“I’ll get lunch,” Fischer said. “Nothing special. But I know a good place.”
“I don’t know.”
“You need it, Cain,” she said. “You mind walking?”
“That’s fine.”
They took the elevator down and went out into the early afternoon. He followed Fischer to a French-style
brasserie on the edge of Hayes Valley. It was packed and looked expensive, and Cain thought they’d have to wait for a table. Most of the Saturday-afternoon crowd in the converted corner house didn’t seem to be here on any kind of business. It wasn’t the sort of place Cain would have picked, and he was already turning to go, but then Fischer took his wrist and began leading them through the restaurant.
A waitress said hello, calling Fischer by her first name. Another waitress caught the swinging kitchen door and held it open for them.
The back of the restaurant was all stainless steel and flashes of flame from the line of chefs de partie. Fischer led them across the room, toward a massive man kneeling in front of a wooden case of Louvois grand cru champagne. He was holding a bottle up to the light, studying its label.
“Michael.”
He stood up and turned around, a single fluid motion, easy in spite of his bulk because everything on him was muscle. He took her hand and kissed her cheek, then nodded toward Cain.
“This is Gavin Cain,” she said. “The inspector I told you about.”
“Mr. Cain.”
He held out his hand and Cain shook it. It was like holding hands with a bench vise.
“This is Michael,” Fischer said. “My fiancé.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Can we sit at the kitchen table?” Fischer asked. “I told Cain I’d get him lunch.”
The kitchen table was wedged between a pair of high wine storage racks. The table itself was an old sherry cask, and there were no seats. They stood on either side of it, and Fischer’s fiancé served them. He offered them wine, and they turned it down and took water instead. Cain took the glass and held it against his forehead.
“I wanted to bring you somewhere nice,” Fischer said. “I don’t want you to feel like I left you hanging.”
“Hanging how?”
“I’ve got to be in D.C. tomorrow morning. I’m on a redeye tonight.”
“You can’t get out of it?”
“I tried.”
“It doesn’t have to do with our case?”
“If it did, I’d tell you. But it’s nothing to do with us. It’s about our office’s budget.”
“It’s bullshit, is what you’re saying.”
“The purest, uncut strain of bullshit,” Fischer said. “Which you can get only in D.C. I’ll be back on Tuesday.”
Michael brought them a loaf of bread and a saucer of olive oil to dip it in. Cain watched him go back to the kitchen, watched him come up behind one of the apprentice chefs and look over the kid’s shoulder.
“He’s your fiancé but you don’t live together?” Cain asked. “You didn’t bring anyone else to Yerba Buena.”
“Our relationship is a little bit complicated,” Fischer said. “But it makes sense to us.”
“What about Castelli?” Cain said. “Does that make sense?”
“I don’t know.”
“Before the autopsy, we were sitting in my office. I told you my theory of the case,” Cain said. “But I had to stop short.”
“You think someone killed him, but you can’t prove it because he was alone in the house,” Fischer said.
Cain nodded. He looked at the bread and the olive oil and watched the line of chefs. It all looked wonderful, but he had no appetite.
“He was locked in the study,” Cain said. “GSR on his right hand, his own thirty-eight next to him. And then there’s everything we got from the alarm company.”
“So maybe he shot himself,” Fischer said. “That doesn’t mean we’re not still looking for someone. The blackmailer’s out there, and he tried to close us down last night.”
“Say the last set of pictures showed him raping a girl—a girl we found buried alive, with his baby inside her. Say that’s true.”
“Okay.”
“And somebody knew about it, and sent him pictures and said: I’m going to tell.”
“Okay.”
“And then he shoots himself, because he knows he’s about to get caught. Is that even a crime?”
“What are you asking?”
“I’m asking, if that’s the story and it’s all true, then why would this person go out and kill Grassley, and maybe Chun, and try for me? What did he really do wrong? He threatened to expose a murderer. Castelli couldn’t handle the pressure, so he killed himself. This kid might not have done anything wrong, and he tries to kill three cops?”
“Maybe he was there, the night the pictures were taken.”
“The kid Chun and I saw running up California Street was barely in his twenties,” Cain said. He stepped back and let Michael put shallow bowls of soup on the sherry cask. “In 1985, he hadn’t even been born. Which is another big problem in our theory.”
“So maybe we’ve got our story all wrong, you’re saying.”
“Something doesn’t fit.”
“What do you want to do?”
Cain picked up his spoon and touched it to the soup. He set it back down without tasting the broth. He’d seen plenty of autopsies, had learned to act casually about them afterward. There were inspectors on Homicide Detail who’d go directly from the morgue to MoMo’s, across from the ballpark. They’d order rare New York strips and prove to each other just how undisturbed they were. Cain had done it too. He’d watched bodies disassembled with saws and pruning shears, every organ brought to a produce scale. And not an hour later, he’d eaten lunch.
But this morning he’d seen his partner on the steel table, Chun might not be far behind, and Lucy had spent the better part of last night hiding in a cabinet while a murderer tore her music room apart.
He put the spoon down and picked up a piece of the bread. He tore it in half and dipped it in the soup, then set it on the edge of the bowl. He checked the time and saw that Fischer was watching him. She put down her spoon and pushed the loaf of bread on its cutting board toward him. The look on her face was suddenly very kind, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for that.
“Think of it in terms of physics,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“We need to keep running forward so we can catch the guy. But to stay in motion, we need a certain amount of energy.”
“Okay.”
“So eat,” she said. “It’s not disrespecting Grassley. It’s just calories. That’s all this is.”
“Okay.”
He picked up his bread and dipped it back into his soup, and then he ate it.
32
Cain’s phone rang as they were leaving the restaurant. It was an unknown number with an East Bay area code. He answered it, using his left hand to shield the mouthpiece from the wind.
“Inspector Cain?” a man asked.
“Who’s this?”
“Officer Combs,” the man said. “You asked me to call if anyone tried to see Mrs. Castelli, if anything strange happened.”
“Where are you?”
“Back at the Palace Hotel,” Combs said. “She went for a walk, and now she’s in her room. It’s—I don’t know what it was, or what it means. But I figured you’d want to hear this.”
“Sit tight, Combs,” he said. “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
They found Officer Combs in his chair outside the top-floor elevator landing. He stood up when the doors parted. For this assignment, and at Cain’s request, he was in plainclothes. They suited him. Putting on the uniform every day wouldn’t be part of his ritual for much longer. There were openings on the Homicide Detail, and Cain needed people he could count on.
They shook hands, and Combs hesitated a moment before putting his hand on Cain’s shoulder.
“I heard about Inspector Grassley,” he said. “And I know Angela. We went through the academy together.”
“We saw her today.”
“She’ll be all right?”
“She’s a fighter,” Cain said. “More than you know.”
“The sonofabitch who did this—”
“I know.”
Cain led them to th
e main stairs and they went down to the first half-landing. They could still see the elevators, and there was no way anyone could go down the hall to Mona Castelli’s room without them seeing. But their voices wouldn’t carry under her door if they stood down here.
“They came out at noon,” Combs said. “Both of them—the daughter spent the night.”
“Where’d they go?”
“They took the elevator down. We used the stairs and beat them—”
“We?” Fischer asked.
“Officer Aguilar—she was assigned to watch Alexa.”
“Got it.”
“They split up in the lobby—no hugs, no words at all. They just went different ways. Aguilar followed the daughter, and I stuck with Mona.”
“Did she see you?” Cain asked.
“Not then. But she knows who I am, even without the uniform. And that’s important. I’m getting to that.”
“Go on.”
“Mrs. Castelli went into the Pied Piper. It was mostly empty, and she got a seat at the end of the bar. Back to the door, easy to watch. Three martinis in twenty minutes. Doubles, I think. She didn’t talk to anyone but the bartender.”
“Dedication,” Cain said. “Commitment.”
“She ought to be committed. She came out of there, and she wasn’t even staggering. I think she was walking straighter than when she went in.”
Above them, in the main hallway, a man in a hotel uniform walked past. He was balancing a room service tray on one hand and disappeared with it down the hallway toward Mona Castelli’s room. Cain went up the stairs until he could see to the end of the hall. The man was knocking on a door that wasn’t Mona Castelli’s.
Cain returned to the midlevel landing, and Combs continued.
“She left the hotel, and I followed her at a distance; she was headed up into Chinatown. She stopped outside the Cathay Orient Bank and took something out of her purse. She was holding it in her left hand when she went up the steps.”
The Cathay Orient was the only bank Cain knew of with a main branch open on Saturdays. It was also one of three banks listed on the piece of paper they’d found in Castelli’s office safe.
The Dark Room Page 25
