The Dark Room(10)

Then they came to the x-ray room. It was off in a corner, separated from the rest of the room by a heavy, lead-plated partition. Even here there were drains on the floor, and Cain watched a half-dozen cockroaches scurry across the tiles to reach them as he and Grassley approached with their lights. The casket sat on a table beneath the ceiling-mounted x-ray. Cain could smell it. The scents of fresh earth, of rotting wood, rode above the morgue’s background stench.

“Here,” Grassley said.

He’d stopped in front of the x-ray’s control desk. Cain’s light moved across a dark computer screen. Grassley tapped the keyboard, and the screen came to life.

“Look at this,” Grassley said.

Cain rolled the chair back and sat down. He took off his glasses, then leaned close to the screen. It showed an x-ray image of the casket, taken from above. He could see the casket’s elongated outline, could see the sharp white spikes of the screws and nails holding it together. The interior was a jumble of ghostly white bones. The image made no sense. Either the focus was off or there was some kind of doubling effect in the x-ray.

“You see it?” Grassley said. “You get it?”

“There are too many bones.”

“The guy—he was really onto something, wasn’t he?”

“I guess so.”

“What now?”

“We seal it, sign it, and go home.”

“That’s it?”

“For now,” Cain said. “You’ll be here at ten thirty, when the ME gets in. You’ll have to watch.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll make it if I can,” Cain said. “But I don’t know.”

“What’s she got you working on?”

“She didn’t tell you?” Cain asked.

“She didn’t give me anything.”

“Then I better not say.”

Cain looked at the x-ray again, then stood and went back toward the morgue’s work areas. It didn’t take him long to find a roll of tamper-evident seal tape. He plucked a permanent marker from a pencil jar on someone’s desk, then went back to the x-ray room. The casket overhung the table on each end. There’d be enough room to run the tape all the way around it, so that after he and Grassley signed it, it would be impossible to open without breaking the seal.

“Here,” Cain said. “Let’s find a roll of paper towels. We need to wipe some of this dirt off. The tape’s got to stick.”



His coffee was still warm when he got back to his office. By then, he wasn’t sure he wanted it. But he took a sip anyway and then went to the filing cabinet. Three weeks ago he’d put a TV on top of the cabinet and hooked it up to a JVC camcorder he’d found in a thrift shop.

Cain unlocked the filing cabinet and took out the tape. He’d watched it first by himself, and then he’d played it for Grassley. They’d brought in Lieutenant Nagata, and she gave her blessing to show it to an assistant district attorney. Cain and the ADA had copied the file onto a CD, had submitted it to the Superior Court of Monterey County with their application for an order of disinterment. Before that, they’d gone up to Napa to see Chris Hanley’s mother. They didn’t show her the tape. They hinted at what was on it, but that was all. She let them come back later in the afternoon, with a notary, so that she could sign the affidavit supporting their application.

Now he put the original tape into the camcorder, turned on the TV, and played it. He leaned back against his desk’s front edge and watched. He’d seen it two dozen times, but it still transfixed him.



In the beginning, the first twenty seconds, there was white snow. And then, with the suddenness of a finger snap, the image appeared.

The old man sat in a leather-bound recliner chair. There was an IV stand beside him, some kind of apparatus on the floor next to it. The light was all fluorescent. The wall behind the chair was painted pistachio green. The man was stone bald, and an oxygen tube dipped past his ear on its way to his nostrils. Cain had taken a still image of this opening shot, had shown it around the sixth floor. Half a dozen people told him he was looking at a chemotherapy administration room.

“My name—my real name—is John Fonteroy,” the man said. He was looking into the camera. Tubes disappeared into the turquoise hospital gown he wore. “I owned the Fonteroy Mortuary, on Geary Boulevard, in San Francisco.”

He gave his old address and his social security number.

He reached to the table next to him, picked up a cup of water. There was a flexible straw in it. He drew it into his mouth and took a tiny sip. Then he put the cup back and looked to the camera again.

“I’m about to die,” he said. “And this is my confession.”

Now, an offscreen voice cut in. A woman’s voice. She spoke with a light midwestern twang, but they’d never figured out who she was. They hadn’t located the hospital where Fonteroy was sitting, hadn’t tracked down where he’d gone after running away from his mortuary. They didn’t know what name he’d been using since he’d fled the city, what name he’d used to check into the hospital.

“Tell them who you’re talking to.”

“I’m talking to you,” the old man said. “My lawyer.”

“You’re telling me this because you want to?”