The Dark Room(105)

“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.”