The Dark Room(100)

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.

“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.

Maybe it had begun as part of her work. What better way to get close to Castelli than to take him to bed?

It was hard for him to picture Harry Castelli as a young man. Particularly one who might have attracted a woman like Carolyn Stone. Cain only saw the gravel-voiced, bourbon-swilling politician. But Castelli must have been different then. At eighteen, he might have believed the slogans on his own campaign signs.