“You didn’t see what it was?” Fischer asked. “What she had in her hand?”
Combs shook his head.
“I was on the other side of the street,” he said. “I’d been hanging back. But not far enough. Before she went in, she stood in the open door and looked back the way she came. Then she checked the other side of the street.”
“She wanted to see if she’d been followed,” Cain said.
“And she saw me. Her eyes locked on mine, and it took her a second to recognize me. But as soon as she did, she let go of the door. Whatever was in her hand, she put it back in her purse. She went down the steps and walked back to the hotel.”
“How big was the purse?”
“Small. You could fit a checkbook, maybe some keys. That’s it.”
“You’re talking about a clutch,” Fischer said. “That’s what she had?”
“A clutch—yeah.”
“What about her clothes?” Fischer asked. “Were they bulky? Pockets?”
“Everything she wears is skin tight.”
“And she’s been in the room since?”
“She came back from the bank, and she hasn’t left.”
“All right,” Fischer said. “What about the daughter?”
“Officer Aguilar followed her to the apartment. Alexa’s been up there since noon, and Aguilar’s at the coffee shop across the street, where she can see the door.”
Cain looked at Fischer and she flicked her eyes toward the elevators. There wasn’t much more they could get here, unless they went down the hall and knocked on Mona Castelli’s door. But it wasn’t time for that yet; they didn’t have enough to work with. The only thing to do was lie back and wait. And watch.
“You did a good job, Officer Combs,” Cain said. “Keep it up. Follow her when she goes out. Don’t be overt, but if she looks around, make sure she sees you.”
“I think I get it.”
“When you back people into corners, you don’t know what they’ll do,” Cain said. “So watch her, but watch yourself. You know what happened to Grassley.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who’s your relief?”
Combs listed the other officers and their shifts, and they went through the same for Aguilar. Cain told him to call each of the others to pass along the word. They were to follow Mona and Alexa Castelli from the shadows, but step into view if either woman looked for a tail. Let them wonder how many eyes were watching them, how many ears were listening when they spoke. Then Cain asked for three more names, reliable patrol officers who could track Melissa Montgomery. A shared house on a residential street in Noe Valley might be harder to watch than a hotel room or a downtown condo. But a good officer would come up with something.
They came out of the hotel and got in Fischer’s car, which was parked at the valet stand along New Montgomery. They had to wait for a taxi to finish loading in front of them, and while they were sitting in the cold car, Cain felt the double pulse of an incoming text vibrate in his pocket.
Found Chun’s car on Alabama St., one block from Grassley’s apt. No forced entry, no blood. Some stuff in the trunk that bears on your case. Left copies on your chair.
After he read it, he passed the phone to Fischer.
“Who’s this from?”
“Frank Lee.”
“Got it,” she said.
She put the car into gear and steered onto New Montgomery, past Alexa’s apartment. In a moment, they drove by the coffee shop and Cain got a glimpse of a woman who might have been Aguilar. Then they were passing the front of Alexa’s condo, the double-height windows spilling light onto the wet sidewalk, the cut-crystal chandelier glittering. Her school was on the left. Grassley had been lucky that the fashion professor had sent him to Britex. They’d gotten some valuable information from the manager. But Cain wished he hadn’t sent Chun alone to Berkeley, that he’d gotten Grassley to go with her. He had no idea who she’d been talking to, where she’d gone after the police station.
And he was still bothered by the shallow cuts on Grassley’s neck; his car abandoned in front of Lucy’s house, the driver’s seat soaked in blood.
“We’re missing something,” Cain said.
“I know.” She turned right onto Mission. “We’ll work it out.”
“She had two hundred thousand in cash in her room, and she went to a bank but didn’t bring it.”
“We’ll work it out, Cain.”
The Hall of Justice was dark when they came to it, and there was a crowd out front. Cain caught the story in snippets of conversation as they passed the knots of office workers waiting on the sidewalk: a flooded utility tunnel, a shorted electrical main. The backup generators were offline, again. A young woman in a white lab coat said, “If the stiffs thaw out, it’ll reek for ten blocks.”
He led Fischer past the out-of-commission metal detectors, holding his badge up for the guards. An even bigger crowd had gathered in front of the nonfunctional elevators. He turned to the fire stairs and pushed the door open. Battery-powered emergency lamps gave a dull red light, reminding Cain of dark rooms. Maybe the Pi Kappa Kappa brothers had shot and developed the film without leaving the mansion. The brick wall in the first photograph could have been in the basement. He wondered what other prints they had developed, where all those images had gone.
They came out on the sixth floor and then crossed the cubicle farm to his office. On Cain’s chair were two copies of the Grizzly Peak murder book from the Berkeley Police Department—the files Frank Lee had found in Chun’s trunk. Cain set them side by side on his desk and flipped through them to be sure they were the same. Then he gave one of them to Fischer.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Yerba Buena?’
“She doesn’t have a phone. I hate to be gone so long with no way to check in.”
They parked in the half-empty lot and looked through the windshield at the Coast Guard outpost. The buildings were low and squat, hunkering against the rain. As they watched, the streetlights began to blink on, one and then another.
“You’re going to the airport tonight?”
“Midnight.”
“In this car?”
“Shit,” Fischer said. “I forgot about that.”
Cain’s car was parked outside Lucy’s house, unless the city had towed it. He wasn’t sure if he’d left it parked in front of a neighbor’s driveway. At the time, it hadn’t mattered.
“I can take a cab tomorrow, or have a patrolman come out and get me.”
“Forget it—use this one,” she said. She took the keys from the ignition and handed them to him. “Michael can take me to the airport.”
“You’re sure?”
“Just don’t drive it on the sidewalk. I saw what you did to yours.”
They got out of the car and walked through the rain to the barracks.
He found Lucy on the desk chair, which she’d moved to the window. A wool blanket covered her shoulders. She didn’t turn around when he came in, and it wasn’t until he was by her side that he realized she was asleep. He put his briefcase and his copy of the murder book on the desk, then sat down on the end of the bed and took off his shoes. He removed his jacket and unholstered his gun. After he’d unloaded it and put it into the drawer, Lucy stirred and turned to him.
“Did you get him?”
“Not yet.”
“When?”
“I don’t know,” he said. The room was so small that he could reach out and put his hands on her shoulders without getting off the bed. “Have you eaten anything today?”
“I went to the café.”
“Do you need dinner?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, regretting it before the words were out of his mouth.
They hadn’t gotten in many fights, but questions like this were a good way to start. It was obvious what was wrong. She got off the chair and came around to the other side of the bed. She sat with her back against the headboard, the blanke
t still wrapped around her. When he put his hand on her leg, she immediately bent her knee to get away from his touch.
“It’s only been one day,” she said. “And everyone is very nice. But I hate it here, Gavin.”
“I know.”
“Promise me you’ll fix this,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“I promise.”
“Take your briefcase and your binder, and work in the café. You can read in there without bothering me.”
“Okay.”
“It’s cold war cuisine, seven nights a week. Tonight you get Salisbury steak and carrot salad. With raisins.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, and regretted asking that, too.
She looked at him, her hands folded on the gentle rise in her belly.
“I just want to sleep until I can go home,” she said. “Or anywhere. Anywhere but here.”
33
HE WAS IN bed next to Lucy, on top of the covers and still wearing his clothes. He was half awake, thinking of getting out of bed and driving into the city to begin again, but not sure what good that would do. It was four thirty in the morning when his phone began vibrating in his pants pocket. The long, sustained pulses of an incoming call. He got out of the bed and went quickly to the bathroom.
He shut the door and answered the call. It was from a blocked number.
“Hello?”
“I’m calling for DI Gavin Cain.”
A man’s deep voice. He sounded older than Cain, in his sixties at least. And he had an English accent.
“DI?”
“Sorry—Detective Gavin Cain.”
“Inspector Cain,” he said. “This is San Francisco you’re calling.”
“All right.”
“Who is this?”
“You and the FBI agent, Fischer, sent an email to the Missing Persons Bureau. It found its way to me.”
Cain sat on the edge of the tub. When they’d sent the email to the U.K., they thought they might get a hit. But they’d never imagined it would come so quickly. It had taken just over twelve hours.
“You’re in the U.K.,” Cain said. He was covering his mouth with his hand, and whispering. “Scotland Yard? The Metropolitan Police?”
“I was with the Met back then, but now I’m somewhere else. I do the same sorts of things now as I did back then, but with a bigger budget,” the man said. “Which means I have more reasons to be careful. I’ll only have this conversation face to face. How soon can you come?”
“I don’t even know where you are.”
“London.”
“Or who you are.”
“I know who your girl is,” the man said. “Which is what matters. I can tell you her name. I can tell you why she was in San Francisco.”
Cain wished he could record the call, that he had the ability to trace it. But he was half awake and whispering in a bathroom, and he wasn’t even sure his phone had enough battery to finish the conversation. It was already making warning tones. It might die at any second.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want to bring her home,” the man said. “And I want to know what happened to her.”
“I’m not getting on a plane,” Cain said. “All I’ve got is a thirty-year-old dead body, is what you think. I can drop everything and go to London because you tell me to.”
“Look—”
“You’ve got no idea how much other shit is going on right now. No fucking idea. I am not getting on a plane. Sir.”
“It’s true—I’ve no idea,” the man said. “But if you want to know about the girl, I’m the man who can tell you.”
“You’re talking to me right now.”
“Not on the phone—if you’re keeping up with the papers, you must understand.”
“If you want to meet, then come here.”
“What I’m going to tell you, I can’t say in California.”
“Because I could arrest you.”
“And I can’t risk that.”
“Then think of a place where that’s off the table,” Cain said. “You can figure one out.”
The line was silent for nearly thirty seconds. When the man spoke again, his voice wasn’t nearly so confident.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said. “There’s an afternoon flight—”
Cain’s phone died. He sat on the tub and looked at its black screen.
Ten minutes later, he was in the Coast Guard café with his briefcase and the murder book. Fischer’s plane was probably coming down through the clouds, descending toward Washington. There was no way to contact her, and no way to reach the man from London. Instead, he poured a cup of coffee from the all-night urn and found a table close to a wall outlet. He took the phone’s charger from his briefcase and plugged it in, then opened the Grizzly Peak murder book and flipped a third of the way through it, to the autopsy reports.
There had been five men in the house, but only three of them had ever been identified. The medical examiner made those IDs with partial dental records, which matched three Berkeley juniors who’d gone missing. The other two bodies were older men, in their thirties or forties, but the medical examiner found nothing on them. There was no national database of dental records; those were only available if a family turned them over to the police and the police had uploaded them into a missing persons database. The conclusion was obvious. If these dead men had families, they weren’t especially concerned about finding them. At the time, in 1989, there’d been no DNA testing done. As John MacDowell had said, back then DNA was only for the celebrity cases. The headliners. But as far as Cain could tell, no one had ever gone back later and tried it.
That meant two of the bodies from the rubble had always been mystery men.
All five corpses were found with their hands bound behind their backs with heavy-gauge wire. There were possible gunshot wounds laterally across the men’s throats, but it was hard for the medical examiner to be sure. If there had been bullets, they’d passed through soft tissue and missed any bone. After the fire, there wasn’t much soft tissue left. It was all speculation from that point. The medical examiner found trace entry wounds, possible gunpowder stippling from a point-blank shot. He guessed the men had been shot, but that’s all it was: a guess. If he was right, then the killer’s intent was clear enough. Bind them so they couldn’t leave, and shoot out their throats so they couldn’t scream. The fire would take care of the rest.
He looked to his left. A Coast Guard enlistee carrying his breakfast on a tray was staring openly at the murder book. The page was a black-and-white photograph, a burnt corpse on an autopsy table. He closed the cover but kept his finger between the pages like a bookmark.
“Sorry, sir. Caught my eye.”
“These do that.”
He opened the binder again and tried to catch hold of his thoughts before he lost them. Castelli hadn’t registered his gun until 1991, two years after the Grizzly Peak fire. But even if he’d owned the gun then, there was no consistency with the way Lester Fennimore had died. That had been wild, indiscriminate shooting. The shooter had fired all six shots, striking Fennimore’s face and torso. That was blind firing. All the hallmarks of fear and panic. The man who’d set the Grizzly Peak fire was more calculating. He’d taken the time to bind his victims, had shot each one only once. It made no sense that someone who could kill five people so methodically in 1989 would make such a mess of a single murder in 1998.
There had to be two different shooters. He poured a packet of powdered creamer into his coffee and drank the first few sips without thinking much of anything. Sometimes a blank mind had the space to make a leap, as though it needed the room to get a running start.
Lester Fennimore.
Something about him, something Cain had seen the first night he’d learned the man’s name, sitting in his half-dark office and talking to Fischer as she flew out of Los Angeles. He took the ballistics report out of his briefcase, the one with Fennimore’s autopsy attached. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for but k
new exactly which picture he needed. It was the initial headshot, from the shoulders up. He flipped through the report until he found it, and then he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and held the page close so that he could study it.
After a minute, he was sure he knew what he was looking at, but he went to the text anyway. He found the coroner’s surface examination. He usually just skimmed these, because they were routine. This time, he read it word for word, and three-quarters of the way through, the coroner verified what the picture clearly showed.
. . . there are matching scars on either side of the laryngeal prominence. Each scar is a circular indentation, approximately 1/4 inch in diameter, consistent with a well-healed previous gunshot wound. Decedent’s left ear is lightly deformed with scarification consistent with an old burn. Decedent’s medical records do not reflect having ever sought treatment for either a burn or a gunshot. Contacted following the autopsy, the decedent’s widow did not know the origin of these scars. However, she confirmed to this examiner that her husband could not speak above a whisper.
These were healed wounds. This examiner concludes that neither the damage to the voice box, nor the burns on the left ear, contributed in any way . . .
Maybe the Santa Cruz County Coroner was convinced the old scars had nothing to do with Lester Fennimore’s murder, but Cain wasn’t so sure. The man had a Pi Kappa Kappa tattoo on his shoulder, a bullet hole through his larynx, and a half-burned left ear. He’d died in a Cadillac Eldorado, a few model years down the line from the one someone had driven to the English girl’s rape. In 1989, he’d crawled out of the Grizzly Peak fire with his throat shot out, and he’d been a marked man ever since.
By now Cain’s phone was charged enough to use. He went to the SFPD’s secure server and ran a trace on Lester Fennimore’s widow. Her social security number was in the prior investigator’s notes, and with a lead like that, it didn’t take long to find her. She had moved out of Walnut Creek and into a house outside of Mendocino. He found the place on a satellite map and zoomed in on it, but the image was no good. There was just a blur deep in the woods along the North Fork of the Albion River. He wondered how much she’d be willing to tell him about Lester.
The Dark Room Page 26
