“And Fennimore had a wildcard,” Cain said.
“Which was what?”
“He knew Carolyn Stone was pregnant, that it was Castelli’s baby. She probably told him, begging for her life. They didn’t have DNA testing in 1985, but they did in 1998. He would’ve known about it.”
“But why did Mona have the pictures?”
“Because however Fennimore sent the note to Castelli, Mona found it first. She’d just dropped out of Stanford and married him. She was pregnant with Alexa. And she comes home one day and finds this.”
“It was her at Castle Rock State Park,” Fischer said. “She shot Fennimore with Castelli’s gun. But why did she hold on to the pictures? Why not destroy them? Or confront her husband, if she thought he’d raped a girl?”
“Because he was on the upswing,” Cain said. “He was getting rich, going places. The pictures were insurance, in case things stopped going so well.”
Fischer had her hands on the wheel. She was looking through the windshield, her eyes flicking back and forth as she sorted through the details. He saw that she agreed with him, that she knew he’d put the facts together the only way they’d fit.
“She knew Christopher Hanley’s name from the plaque on the casket—it was in the photo,” Fischer said. “All she had to do was find the grave and then keep tabs on it—an exhumation order is a public document, so she was watching for that.”
“Which, by now, she could have done online,” Cain said. “She just had to set up an alert on the court’s electronic docket.”
“And when she saw that you got one, it was now or never,” Fischer said. “Carolyn Stone was coming out of the ground, and if Castelli’s DNA was in a database, it’d only be a matter of time before we connected him to her. It would have been the end of him.”
Cain nodded. That was exactly what he thought.
“So she decided to cash out while she was still ahead. Hound him into suicide, and collect.”
“But she must have had an accomplice.”
“We’ll get that out of her when we pick her up,” he said. He thought about it for a moment. If Mona and Alexa were both on the move at the same time, there was one place they’d probably want to go. “Let’s go up to Sea Cliff Avenue.”
Then he did what he always did when he knew he was about to make an arrest. He patted the left side of his jacket, to check his gun.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Nothing—I left my weapon in Lucy’s hotel. I couldn’t take it to the consulate.”
“Do you want to go get it?”
“There’s no time. Let’s just go.”
They parked down the street and walked up to the house. Upstairs, in the study, the curtains were open and the lights were on. Through the brightly lit windows, they could see see the bookcases along the far wall. They went along the steppingstones, through the herb garden, to reach the front door. Cain was about to knock, but Fischer grabbed his wrist. She pointed at the door, and then, when his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw why. It wasn’t completely shut. He pushed it with his fingers and it swung open.
They stood looking into the dark entry hall. The house was completely silent, until Cain called into it.
“Mona Castelli?”
They waited for an answer, but there was none.
“Do you smell that?” Fischer asked.
Cain nodded. It was wafting out the front door, now that they’d opened it. Cordite smoke was biting and unmistakable. Fischer drew her gun. She held it in both hands, pointed at the ground.
“Stay behind me,” she whispered.
She stepped into the house and he followed her. They checked in both downstairs bathrooms and the empty kitchen. Then the den and the library. They looked in the sunroom, where Cain had sat with Mona Castelli the first time he’d met her. The silver martini pitcher was still on the glass table.
They came back toward the front of the house and went upstairs. The master bedroom was massive, but everything was in its place. The bed was made. Everything in the closets was either folded or hung. The next bedroom they entered must have been Alexa’s. There was a cherry wood easel, and a mirror on a wooden stand. Nude self-portraits crowded the walls, arranged in a chronological progression. In every portrait, Alexa stood reflected in the mirror, a brush in her right hand as she studied herself. She was patient, observant, and her favorite subject was herself. But looking from one painting to the next, Cain understood something else. She was damaged beyond repair, and had been from the very beginning.
When they backed out of the room, they went down the hall to the study. Cain tried the door and found it unlocked. He pushed it open, and they stood in the doorway looking.
“Oh, shit,” Fischer said.
It was all either of them said for a long moment.
Mona Castelli was on the floor in front of the desk. She had come to her death wearing a white blouse and dark jeans. The blouse was soaked in blood; the bullet had hit the center of her sternum, between her breasts. A perfect heart shot. She might have been dead before she hit the carpet.
The young man who’d shot her hadn’t gone so easily.
He lay on the other side of the room. His hand was still reaching for the .40 caliber automatic that he must have used to shoot Mona. But while Mona had died with a single shot to the chest, this kid was riddled. His shirt and jeans were soaked in blood. He’d been shot in the hip, the groin, and both shoulders. Twice in the stomach. The wall behind him was bloody and punched up with bullet holes. Spackled with bone and blood, with small bits of fabric from the boy’s clothes.
Cain went across the room and knelt next to him, as Alexa must have done, when she put the gun to his temple and fired the last shot. His brain was fanned out on the carpet, but Cain ignored that. He was looking at the kid, putting the pieces back together and patching the holes, trying to picture him alive. He was long and lean, this kid. Built to run. And kneeling there, Cain recognized him.
He’d posed nude for Alexa. There had been half a dozen paintings of him hanging in her studio. The kid on China Beach, sitting on the rocks. The kid on Alexa’s bed, face-down and arms dangling toward the floor. When Cain had gone to Grassley’s autopsy, he’d seen the parallel cuts on the side of his partner’s neck. Now he understood what had bothered him about those. He’d assumed Grassley and Chun were attacked because Chun had been asking questions about Pi Kappa Kappa in Berkeley. But that had been wrong. This kid had seen Grassley in the Academy of Art, going into professors’ offices and asking questions. Grassley had just been there to ask about the dress, but the kid wouldn’t have known that. He’d followed Grassley to his car, had sat behind the driver’s seat with a knife on his neck. It was Chun’s bad luck that she was waiting for Grassley in his bedroom.
“Is that Grassley’s gun?” Fischer asked.
He looked around. She was standing behind him.
“Or Angela’s. I’m not sure.”
She offered her hand and helped him back to his feet.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m good,” he said.
“We saw him,” Fischer said.
“What?”
“In the coffee shop, by Alexa’s studio. We were having coffee with Melissa Montgomery, and he was right next to us.”
Cain closed his eyes and pictured it. Melissa had given him the envelope, the new set of pictures and the second blackmail note. Get Cain, Castelli had told her. Maybe he’d been ready to come clean, to tell them who Carolyn was. To say what he suspected about his wife. But there hadn’t been time for it. His life had run out that same night. Right here, in this room.
“He was by the window,” Cain said. “The tall kid, listening to music on his headphones.”
“That’s right.”
“He was watching us the whole time—maybe they all were.”
“Alexa must have called him after her mom got the call from the bank,” Fischer said. “He knew it was over. He told them to come here.
Whatever excuse he gave, what he really wanted was to have them in the same place. They were the only ones who could point to him.”
Cain looked around the study again. Mona Castelli’s fresh blood was splashed across the dried stains from her husband’s murder. Their marriage had been dead from the day she’d opened Lester Fennimore’s envelope. But if she’d just confronted her husband instead of Fennimore, it might have all been different.
“Where are you going?” Fischer asked.
“Outside for a second,” Cain said. “I need some air. I’ll call Nagata. We need the ME, the CSI team. We need the photographers—everything.”
“Okay.”
He left her in the study and went downstairs. Castelli had died because his wife despised him, because she never knew the truth and hadn’t tried to learn it. She’d spent nineteen years believing what Lester Fennimore had put in her mind. She thought she was sleeping next to a rapist, and she was fine with that as long as he kept bringing in money.
Cain didn’t like it, but he could live with it.
It was Grassley and Chun that he couldn’t stand. It was the fact that the dead kid upstairs had smashed into Lucy’s house, and only luck had kept him from killing her.
He stood in the kitchen and steadied himself. Upstairs, he’d told Fischer that he was going to call Nagata. But he didn’t get out his phone. Instead he went toward the rear of the house, through the den and into the sunroom. There was a sliding glass door here that led out to the cliff steps. He wasn’t surprised when it slid back easily. It hadn’t been locked. He looked at the handle and saw a single, bloody fingerprint.
Later, he would think that this was the moment that he should have called upstairs, that he should have stopped and asked for backup. He’d chided Chun for this kind of thing. It’s the guys who rush in without looking who always get killed, he’d told her. But he wasn’t thinking about backup, wasn’t thinking about the fact that he wasn’t carrying his gun. Maybe that’s how it happened to everyone else. He thought he saw a trail, and he wanted to follow it.
The bridge’s foghorn greeted him when he stepped outside, and then there was the wind and the sound of the ocean from down below. The wooden steps were soaked and slippery. He walked down them carefully, holding the handrail and feeling his way around the corners where the shadows were so dark that he couldn’t see his feet. It was a long, zigzagging descent to the beach. He could smell the wet sand and the seaweed, and then he reached the beach and there was just enough light from the cloud-covered moon that he could make out fresh footsteps. He followed them, the tracks skirting the edge of the tide pools and sticking to the soft sand. He came to a print that was in clean, hard-packed sand and he knelt to look at it.
She was barefoot.
He stood up and looked along the empty length of China Beach, then saw her silhouette on the promontory of rock where he’d spoken to her before. He walked the rest of the way to her and stopped when she turned around to face him.
She was wearing another of her gingham dresses, the thin fabric printed with black and white checks, and splattered from the neckline down with blood. There was blood on her face and blood on her bare arms. She held a pistol off to her right side, pointing it at the ground and not at him.
“Don’t come any closer, Inspector Cain.”
“All right.”
“I shot him,” she said. “He shot my mom, so I had to. It’s not like I had a choice, did I?”
“Sure,” he said.
He took another step toward her, and this time she raised the gun.
“Not any closer.”
“All right,” Cain said. He wanted to keep her talking to him, wanted her to lower the gun. “Did he shoot your father, too? Was it his idea?”
“My father was a rapist,” she said. “He killed a girl. Him, and his friends. They took pictures of her, and then they buried her alive.”
“Your mom told you that. But it’s not true.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “I’ve seen the pictures. She showed them to me when I was ten.”
“You didn’t find them in his study. She showed you.”
“She needed me to know.”
“She’d been planning this for nine years,” Cain said.
“At least.”
Cain tried not to look back along the beach, or up the cliff to the house. Fischer didn’t know he was down here. She thought he was standing in the front yard, on the phone with his lieutenant.
“You didn’t answer—did your boyfriend shoot your father?”
Alexa came a step toward him, then another two. Now he could reach out and grab her if he wanted to. Tackle her onto the rocks and rip the gun from her hand, if she didn’t shoot him first. She must have known the danger, but she took another step. She was daring herself to do it. Proving that she could. She’d already shot one person tonight. A second wouldn’t be any harder. She lowered the gun, and he understood what she was doing. Now she was daring him.
“Yes,” she said. She was close enough now that she had to look up at him. “He shot my father.”
“Your mom let him into the house when she left to go to Monterey,” Cain said. “She came out, and he went in. The door only opened once. When your father got home, he made him drink bourbon. Made him swallow pills, and then he put the gun in his mouth.”
“Yes.”
“When your mom came home, he left the house when she opened the front door. That’s how you did it. That’s how you beat the alarm log.”
“Yes.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“I knew he’d do it if I asked him to—he’d killed a boy when he was thirteen. They said that was an accident too. Two kids in a garage, playing with a gun. Someone’s finger slips on the trigger. But he wondered if it was really an accident, what he did. If maybe, deep down, he just wanted to see what would happen. So when he said he’d do anything for me, I knew he would.”
“What happened to the money?”
She flicked her eyes to the right. He turned carefully to look, not wanting to let her out of his sight. There was a shopping bag on the beach, fifty feet away. She’d set it down past the high tide line.
“Was it always just about the money?” Cain asked.
“It was always about him. Getting rid of him.”
“Did you know he was withdrawing cash and stashing it?”
Alexa nodded. She was holding the gun one-handed, her index finger curled tightly on the trigger. He wondered how many bullets were left in the magazine. She’d used plenty upstairs, on her boyfriend.
“But he had it all wrong. We weren’t going to take the money and run away from him. We were going to stay right here. He was the one who was going to leave.”
With her free hand, she reached behind her neck. She raised the gun again and kept it pointed at his stomach as she undid the tie on her dress. She’d stripped naked in front of him nearly every time he’d seen her. He didn’t see why this time had to be any different.
“You should have come swimming with me that night,” Alexa said. “That was your chance. I’m not inviting you again.”
She pulled her dress off and took a step backward to be free of it. It lay in a circle on the rocks between them.
“Your girlfriend is Lucy Bolet. The pianist. The one who saved all the children.”
“Yes.”
“You would have come swimming with me, except you have her.”
“Miss Castelli—”
“You’ll never know what it would have been like now. You’ll just have to imagine it.”
She backed up to the end of the rock. A wave broke behind her, an eruption of bright foam and dark water that exploded upward around her and left her soaked. White water streamed off the rock and back into the ocean, and she stood looking at him. She hadn’t even moved. She used her free hand to sweep the water from her breasts, from her stomach.
Then she raised the gun and aimed it at him.
“You’re a good man. You hav
e a good girlfriend. I would have been like her, if I’d had a chance like she did. Saving all those kids—a hero, but still so delicate.”
“Alexa.”
“I liked getting to know you,” she said. “Goodbye, Inspector Cain.”
He thought she would fire. He was bracing for it, stuck on his feet instead of diving for the sand. But she didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, in a single clean motion, she turned and dove into the black water. It was a perfect dive, long practiced from this same rock. Her fingertips broke the surface ahead of her, and then the whole slender length of her body disappeared without a sound or a splash.
Cain ran to the edge of the rock in time to be knocked on his back by another breaking wave. He scrabbled backward on his hands and his feet, then got to his knees. He stared into the dark.
Ten yards out, she surfaced.
She was swimming face-down, her feet a white blur. She was heading away from the shore, out to sea. She went up the face of an approaching wave, then disappeared down its back. In ten seconds, the wave crashed against the rock. When it was gone, just foam running back into the water, he’d lost her.
He called to her for a minute, but there was no answer. There was the wind, and the foghorn’s low note, and the waves breaking on the beach. He took out his phone and felt it. It had been in an inside pocket and was mostly dry. He hit the button and the screen lit up. But for a long moment, he couldn’t think of anyone to dial.
He stared out into the dark and called her name.
Acknowledgments
I might never have written this book had it not been for a series of conversations involving my agent, Alice Martell, and my editors, Naomi Gibbs and Bill Massey. I owe each of them the greatest of thanks. In February of 2015, I had submitted a manuscript for a novel called The Night Market. Everyone was excited about the book, but Alice, Naomi, and Bill agreed that before The Night Market is published in 2018, I needed to tell another story. What I ended up with is The Dark Room, which serves as the center panel in a triptych of San Francisco’s nighttime scenery.
Once again, Dawn Barbour and her colleagues at the Sausalito Police Department were extremely helpful on police procedure and investigative techniques. Steve Goodenow, the private investigator I have used for years in my legal practice, helped me understand the tools that can be used to search for missing persons. Nathaniel Boyer, MD, came through with arcane medical knowledge, as always.
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