The Dark Room(106)

“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.”