The Dark Room(102)

“She’s been staying in her studio. No visitors.”

They left Combs and went out to the street. Curtains of mist blew down the street toward the bay, and there were clusters of smokers and homeless men huddled under all of the awnings.

“What do you think?” Fischer asked.

“It’s got to be a safe deposit box,” Cain said. “She’s got something in there and she wants to get it out. But she doesn’t want anyone to see her with it.”

“What is it?”

“We’ll need to find out,” Cain said. “You had that kid at the U.S. attorney’s office draft a receipt for Castelli’s cash. How good is he at writing search warrants?”

“You want it coming from us?”

“If it lands in front of a judge who’ll sign it, I’ll take it from anyone.”

“It has to say what we expect to find,” Fischer said. “Even a friendly judge won’t sign an open-ended warrant.”

“We’ll explain the note we found in Castelli’s safe. It had bank addresses, and dates. We’ll explain what Combs and Renton saw, the two times she tried to get to her box.”

“Castelli’s note—you think he knew something about Mona. Knew that she was keeping something in a safe deposit box.”

“I think he suspected. I think he wanted to find out. He wasn’t telling us anything about the blackmail notes because he wanted to do his own homework first. But he was nervous enough that he was withdrawing cash and stashing it in his office.”

Fischer’s car was around the corner. Cain checked behind him for traffic, then stepped out into New Montgomery. From there he could see the brickwork side of Alexa’s building. He counted up the floors until he saw her windows. They were lit up, three bright panes above the latticework of an iron fire escape.

Alexa stepped into view.

She was nude, and she was tying her hair into a loose knot at the top of her head. When she finished, she cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed against the glass to look out. Cain turned his face away and stepped back to the sidewalk.



Fischer’s kid at the U.S. attorney’s office was as fast as he was good. They met him at eight p.m. outside the district court. He came running down the front steps, tie flipped over his shoulder, and got into the backseat. He loosened his tie, opened his briefcase, and handed a signed and sealed search warrant up to Cain.

“Ryan Harding,” he said. “You’re Cain? Inspector Cain?”

Cain reached around and shook the kid’s hand.

“This is good to go?”

“Tonight,” the kid said. “This second. I called the general counsel at Cathay Orient Bank and told her what I had. I said we’d come in the morning with fifty guys. SWAT jackets and rifles—scare the shit out of her customers, if that’s what she wants. Or she could let us in right now, after hours.”

“All right,” Cain said. “I like it. Let’s go.”



They came into Chinatown, moving at a walking pace through dense late-evening traffic. Regular taxis and pedicabs, families on foot walking half in the street because the sidewalks were too crowded.

Fischer parked in a bus stop and put her law enforcement placard on the dash. They got out of the car and walked back to the Cathay Orient Bank, the only pedestrians in sight who weren’t hiding under black umbrellas. When they reached the bank, they went up the steps and found four people waiting between the carved stone columns. Two uniformed security guards stood near the bronze doors. A man in a brown suit came up to them.

“I’m Warren Lee,” he said. “The vice president. This is Cindy Wang, our in-house counsel.”

Cain shook the vice president’s hand and nodded to the lawyer. She was wearing a black dress and a three-strand pearl necklace. Ryan Harding’s call about the search warrant must have pulled her out of a dinner somewhere.

“I’ll let us in—”

“Let’s read the warrant first,” the lawyer said. She pointed to the papers in Ryan Harding’s hand. “Is that it?”

He handed it to her and she stood on the top step, using the light from the phone screen to read the document. She checked the judge’s signature, and then she read through the entire thing again.

“Is this my copy?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go ahead and let us in, Warren,” she said. She folded the search warrant in half and put it in her purse. “Do we even know if this woman has a safe deposit box with us?”

“She does,” the vice president said. “I looked it up when you called.”

He stepped to the left of the door and lifted back the cover on a keypad and print reader. He punched in a code and then held his thumb over the scanner until the lights on the keys turned from red to green. Then he used a key to open the metal gates that covered the doors, and a second key to open the front door. He held it open and all seven of them stepped into the bank’s dark lobby. When the man closed the door and locked it, the only light came from an exit sign on the wall above the door.

“She rented the box in 1998,” the vice president said. He had gone off through the dark, and then he hit a light switch. High above, in the arched marble ceiling, bulbs blinked on with hollow glassy clicks. “She’s had it ever since.”