The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “What were you doing?”

  The man took the photograph from the table and put it back into the envelope. He had strong-looking hands, but they were trembling. Age, maybe, or a recent stroke. He was doing everything he could to hide it, but his hands were a tell.

  “What do you know about Harry J. Castelli?” the old man asked.

  “He died this week,” Cain said. “I was one of the last two people to see him alive.”

  “Not the son. I’m talking about the father. What do you know about him?”

  “He was the ambassador.”

  “What else have you turned up about him?”

  “I haven’t been focused on the father. He hasn’t come up at all.”

  “He’s gone now, or you could sit him down and ask him. He died in ’ninety-one. In Thailand.”

  “Ask him what?”

  “Let me put it this way—I flew in here yesterday afternoon, came through immigration, and got my passport stamped. To go home, I’d do the same thing in reverse. But what would I do if I lost my passport today? What then?”

  “You’d come here,” Cain said. “To your consulate. They’d issue a temporary passport.”

  “And I might not even miss my plane,” the old man said. “Because they can print a temporary passport onsite. Right here in San Francisco.”

  “It’s not going to do me any good if you talk in circles,” Cain said.

  “Harry Castelli Sr., your ambassador, could have done the same thing. And once he set someone up with a temporary passport, she’d be a U.S. citizen as far as immigration is concerned—whatever nationality she’d had when she woke up that morning, it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Castelli was issuing false passports?” Cain asked. “We’re talking about the ambassador to the U.K., issuing false passports.”

  “Temporary passports. But that’s not how we got into it. We weren’t investigating passport fraud—it wasn’t our jurisdiction, however broad a view we might have had on that subject. We were looking into missing girls. And then one thing led to another.”

  “How many missing girls?”

  “Twenty-two,” the old man said. He hadn’t paused to think about it. He had the number right there, because it had been weighing on him for thirty years. “Immigrants, mostly. Eastern Europeans, Russians. The youngest was seventeen and the oldest was twenty-six.”

  “Immigrants, but living in London?”

  “In London, or near it,” the man said. “This was the early eighties. We didn’t have computers like we do now. No program crosschecking the files, flagging related cases. Which meant that back then, these things could go on and on. Like a coal fire, underground—by the time you notice, it’s out of control. It took a sharp young man in Missing Persons to put it together.”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter. A man saw the pattern and brought it to me. In every instance, the young woman had been gone for weeks before the families came to us. Months, sometimes. Because the girls had said they’d got jobs. That they had to move away to start.”

  “What kind of jobs?”

  This time, the man did pause.

  “We don’t know what they were promised,” he said. “But we know what they got.”

  He opened the envelope again and set a flash memory drive on the table next to Cain’s saucer.

  “You won’t want to watch this,” he said. “But you’ll probably have to.”

  “What is it?”

  “You might not have ever thought about this. But it’s obvious, once you start looking into it—back then, after VCRs but before the Internet, there was a lot of money in a certain kind of video.”

  “You’re talking about pornography.”

  “That word covers a lot of ground. There’s plenty that’s fairly mundane, but then there’s the rest of the spectrum. So many needs to suit, fantasies people can’t say out loud. Everything from simple meanness to open brutality. And here’s another thing you probably never wanted to think about. On the worst of those films—the dark end, so to speak—what you see on the screen isn’t acting. It isn’t consensual.”

  “Then what is it?” Cain asked.

  “It’s rape. It’s murder. And it’s real.”

  “It’s Carolyn Stone on this?”

  He was holding out the flash drive. But the old man shook his head.

  “It’s an Estonian girl. Katarina Vesik.”

  “Who?”

  “She was an immigrant, from Tallinn. Her family came over in ’eighty-two, when she was sixteen. She wanted to model, so she was hanging around the agencies, the fashion shops. Trying to get into parties, trying to get noticed. Someone noticed her, I suppose—she went missing in September. Her brother brought us the tape in February of ’eighty-four. There was no telling how long he’d had it, no guessing how he’d come by it—and we worked him hard.”

  “But you must have had a hunch.”

  “We thought he ordered it from a magazine ad. Or he got it in exchange for something in his own collection—which he would have tossed out before coming to us. We thought he would’ve liked it just fine, the video, except it was his little sister. And it seems like they kept her for a while, made a few others.”

  “You saw other videos?” Cain asked.

  “Never—but in this one, she’s half starved. Wounds, all over her, that are weeks old. Some of them almost healed.”

  “Jesus,” Cain said.

  “We said that too. The state she was in—you know it must have taken the brother a while to put it together. He might’ve watched it two or three times.”

  Cain looked out the wall and saw the strange symmetry in the way everything had presented itself. The Met and the SFPD had each come into this case because of videos that had landed on their laps. The brother and his snuff-porn tape, John Fonteroy and his dying confession. In the end, the cancerous undertaker hadn’t been able to say what he’d really seen. What he’d been a part of for so long. The guilt was too great to look the camera in its eye and say that he’d seen Carolyn Stone go into the casket alive. He knew how many had come before her and could only guess how many would follow.

  “After he came in with the tape—at least we understood what we were looking at. What we had on our hands.”

  “This was before you knew about the temporary passports. Before you had any connection to Castelli,” Cain said.

  “Well before,” the man said. “Making the connection was old-fashioned police work. Interviewing the girls’ friends, their closest confidantes. None of them had ever talked about who had hired them, how they’d found their new job. But one of girls rang her friend from Heathrow. She had a temporary U.S. passport, is what she said. She was getting on a flight to San Francisco. Then she hung up and no one heard a word from her again—except the men who bought the video, if hers was the sort where they made her talk.”

  Now the man was opening his envelope again. He brought out a folded sheet of paper and laid it on the table. When he unfolded it, Cain could see that this was old paper. Tattered at the corners, slightly yellowed by the decades in a hanging file somewhere. The man turned it around and slid it across. It was a photocopy of Carolyn Stone’s U.K. passport.

  “We made a decision, inside Special Branch. We were already doing the undercover work in other groups—we had an officer who took it so far that he married an animal rights activist, had a baby with her. All so he could report on her, on her friends. Around Special Branch, we all thought that was a good piece of work. We weren’t thinking. So this, the missing girls and the videos, was an easy decision. Until we started seeing links to Castelli.

  “Because he was the ambassador,” Cain said. “That made it more complicated.”

  “Until we thought what it could mean. What if we had something on him? Something so terrible that if we came to him and asked a favor, he couldn’t say no?”

  “You meant to blackmail him.”

  The man looked at Cain, considering that. Then he nodded
.

  “We sent Carolyn to San Francisco, on a student visa. She enrolled in the University of California.”

  “You picked her because she looked young. And because she fit the type.”

  “Also because she was very good. Top of her class at Hendon,” he said. “She went over in the autumn of 1984, so that she enrolled in the son’s year. She managed to sit next to him in a French class.”

  “Her job was to get close to the son?”

  “And the fraternity, too. You know about Pi Kappa Kappa?”

  “I know.”

  “That was an insular brotherhood. And secretive. We knew Castelli Sr. had been a member, and that he’d put his son in touch before packing him off to university. Carolyn had to be patient before she could get anything out of him.”

  “Was she reporting to you?” Cain asked.

  “Daily, when it was safe.”

  “When’s the last time you heard from her?”

  “July seventeen, 1985.”

  “That’s when they killed her,” Cain said. “They buried Christopher Hanley that day, and she was in the casket.”

  It was almost a comforting thought. She couldn’t have suffered more than twenty-four hours.

  “What did she report that day?”

  “Nothing much. It was a phone call, and she talked to me. The son was back in town that day. Classes ended in June, and he’d spent most of the summer in London. We kept her in Berkeley to watch the fraternity, because we could put people on the son. But many of those kids were on holiday—it was a slow summer for her.”

  “And she spent her downtime sewing, didn’t she?” Cain asked.

  The man arched one gray eyebrow above the frame of his tortoiseshell glasses.

  “She did like to sew. That wasn’t in her reports. It was in her file—she had to list her pastimes on a form when she applied. After she disappeared, I went over everything a thousand times. How did you know?”

  “The photograph of her,” Cain said. “She’d made the dress she was wearing. And she was very good.”

  The man thought about that, taking the new information and comparing it with what he already knew.

  “There’d have been times she would have needed to be striking. To stand out, more than she already did,” the man said. “Some of the older Pi Kappa Kappa men moved in high circles. But there was no budget for that sort of thing. She had to make it work with what she had.”

  There was a rush of noise from the hallway, and then it was quiet again. The man was staring at the backs of his hands on the table and never looked up.

  “Was it any use sending her? Did she get anything, before she disappeared?” Cain asked.

  “Not much. She was there just under a year. Two girls disappeared while she was there. She never saw them on the other side, never saw any of the Pi Kappa Kappa brothers with them. But she logged the activity, and when we went back and compared it against the last day the girls had been seen, there were anomalies—five of the core group dropped out of sight, and she didn’t see them again for two weeks.”

  “They’d taken the girls somewhere to make the film.”

  “The films, yes.”

  “Did she connect Castelli to it?” Cain asked. “Was he one of the five who disappeared?”

  “No.”

  “Could it be possible that the ambassador was part of it, but not the son—not Harry Castelli Jr.?”

  “Anything was possible,” the man said. “But we hadn’t proved anything yet.”

  “Were you her only point of contact with Special Branch?”

  “Yes.”

  “So her reports—they weren’t just business. She would have told you other things. How she was holding up. Whether she was scared, lonely. That kind of thing.”

  “She talked about quitting,” the man said. He had tented his fingers in front his forehead. He used his thumbs to rub against his white eyebrows. “She said she was tired and didn’t know if she could keep going. I had to plead with her to stay on.”

  “She wanted to come home?”

  “Quite the opposite, in fact—she talked about staying there but dropping the mission.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “She lost her taste for it, is what I think—what she was doing, it bothered her somehow.”

  Cain thought about the methods Special Branch had condoned. Infiltrations through sexual relationships. Maybe she’d bought into it and that was how she got in trouble. Or maybe it was why she wanted to quit.

  “If she had met someone—if she’d become involved romantically, is what I’m talking about—would she have told you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she have anyone back in England?”

  “Anyone how?”

  “A boyfriend, a fiancé.”

  “There was a man she was seeing when she was at the police college. We saw that when we did background on her. But that didn’t go far. It was over before she left for the States.”

  “Before she disappeared, did she tell you she was pregnant?”

  “What?”

  “She was in her first trimester. She’d have been starting to show, but only just.”

  The old man’s fingers caught hold of the table’s edge, flexing as he steadied himself.

  “She’d been on the assignment for a year by then,” he said.

  “So it happened while she was here.”

  “She never said anything.”

  “Would she have, if she’d known?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you okay?”

  The old man shook his head, but Cain had no way to gauge what any of this meant to him—whether it was one mistake among many, a career painted with errors, or something that stood alone. It was clear that Carolyn Stone was important to this man. He’d taken a risk, sending her without protection to infiltrate men who were infinitely more dangerous than he’d imagined. Losing her had carried a price, and he was still paying it.

  “It took us a long while to get another officer in place. We were waiting to see if Carolyn might turn up. We made quiet inquiries—there was only so much we could do. And meanwhile, the disappearances went on and on. Four more years of them.”

  “And then you sent another officer.”

  “In 1989. Another woman, but a little older. We thought she was better trained. We may have been wrong about that.”

  Earlier, the man had said that after 1989, Special Branch knew Carolyn Stone had probably been buried alive. Now Cain understood how they’d reached that conclusion.

  “I talked to a retired homicide inspector on Friday. In 1989, he picked up a naked woman running down an alley behind Eternity Chapel. She was drugged—she could move, but she couldn’t think straight, and couldn’t speak. He got her to a hospital, and then she disappeared. She was your officer, wasn’t she?”

  “She was.”

  “So then she knew. She had proof—who they were and what they were doing. What did she do next?”

  The old man waited a long time until he answered. He looked at the street outside, watched the office workers with their black umbrellas. He looked at Cain and didn’t blink.

  “She dropped out of sight too. We never saw her again, but we think we know what she did.”

  “You’re talking about the Grizzly Peak fire. Five bodies, a bullet through each man’s trachea.”

  “If that was her, she did it on her own. We didn’t order it.”

  “But you didn’t particularly mind, either,” Cain said. “You didn’t pick up the phone.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “And that was the end for you?” Cain asked. “When you heard about the fire, you ended the investigation.”

  “After the fire, the girls stopped disappearing.”

  “And you never tied Harry Castelli Jr. to anything at all?”

  “Just the father,” the man said. “His son was clean.”

  The man stood, but left his hat on the table.

&nbs
p; “Carolyn had a sister, and she’s still in London. I’ll have someone at the Met contact you through the normal channels with a DNA sample.”

  “If the lab says they’re sisters, we’ll release her to the family.”

  The man put on his hat now and came around to open the door.

  “We’re done here, I think.”

  36

  OUTSIDE THE CONSULATE, he sat in Fischer’s car and watched the front door. He’d never gotten the man’s name, but that might not matter. He had a photograph of Carolyn Stone and a memory stick with a snuff film on it. He took out his phone and turned it back on. There was a missed call from Nagata, but it was Officer Combs he needed to talk to. He called the patrolman’s cell.

  “Combs—where are you?”

  “The Palace.”

  “What’s your status?”

  Combs gave his report in a low whisper. He had just taken over a double shift watching Mona Castelli. Since coming back from the Cathay Orient bank on Saturday afternoon, she hadn’t taken a step outside the hotel’s walls. She’d left her room three times on Sunday, but only to visit the Pied Piper. She drank her martinis and talked to no one. She’d had no visitors except the man who carried in her room service trays. It was early in the afternoon. Her day hadn’t even begun yet, and probably wouldn’t for a few more hours. Mona Castelli didn’t strike Combs as an early riser.

  Cain hung up and pocketed his phone.

  In front of him, there was a swarm of yellow cabs. A crowd of pedestrians, invisible beneath the protection of their umbrellas, crossed the intersection. He saw the old man among them, slipping through the rain like a knife blade until he disappeared down the escalator of Montgomery Street Station. Cain wondered if there was other business for the man here, or if he’d come only for Carolyn Stone.

  He drove west, listening to the wiper blades, trying to put everything together. One fact stood above all the others. When Carolyn Stone died, she was carrying Castelli’s child. She had spoken to her handler in Special Branch right up to the day of her murder. Not once, in over a year of undercover work, had she ever singled out Castelli as a criminal. Most likely, she’d gone to his bed without force.