The Dark Room(107)

“What happened to the money?”

She flicked her eyes to the right. He turned carefully to look, not wanting to let her out of his sight. There was a shopping bag on the beach, fifty feet away. She’d set it down past the high tide line.

“Was it always just about the money?” Cain asked.

“It was always about him. Getting rid of him.”

“Did you know he was withdrawing cash and stashing it?”

Alexa nodded. She was holding the gun one-handed, her index finger curled tightly on the trigger. He wondered how many bullets were left in the magazine. She’d used plenty upstairs, on her boyfriend.

“But he had it all wrong. We weren’t going to take the money and run away from him. We were going to stay right here. He was the one who was going to leave.”

With her free hand, she reached behind her neck. She raised the gun again and kept it pointed at his stomach as she undid the tie on her dress. She’d stripped naked in front of him nearly every time he’d seen her. He didn’t see why this time had to be any different.

“You should have come swimming with me that night,” Alexa said. “That was your chance. I’m not inviting you again.”

She pulled her dress off and took a step backward to be free of it. It lay in a circle on the rocks between them.

“Your girlfriend is Lucy Bolet. The pianist. The one who saved all the children.”

“Yes.”

“You would have come swimming with me, except you have her.”

“Miss Castelli—”

“You’ll never know what it would have been like now. You’ll just have to imagine it.”

She backed up to the end of the rock. A wave broke behind her, an eruption of bright foam and dark water that exploded upward around her and left her soaked. White water streamed off the rock and back into the ocean, and she stood looking at him. She hadn’t even moved. She used her free hand to sweep the water from her breasts, from her stomach.

Then she raised the gun and aimed it at him.

“You’re a good man. You have a good girlfriend. I would have been like her, if I’d had a chance like she did. Saving all those kids—a hero, but still so delicate.”

“Alexa.”

“I liked getting to know you,” she said. “Goodbye, Inspector Cain.”

He thought she would fire. He was bracing for it, stuck on his feet instead of diving for the sand. But she didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, in a single clean motion, she turned and dove into the black water. It was a perfect dive, long practiced from this same rock. Her fingertips broke the surface ahead of her, and then the whole slender length of her body disappeared without a sound or a splash.

Cain ran to the edge of the rock in time to be knocked on his back by another breaking wave. He scrabbled backward on his hands and his feet, then got to his knees. He stared into the dark.

Ten yards out, she surfaced.

She was swimming face-down, her feet a white blur. She was heading away from the shore, out to sea. She went up the face of an approaching wave, then disappeared down its back. In ten seconds, the wave crashed against the rock. When it was gone, just foam running back into the water, he’d lost her.

He called to her for a minute, but there was no answer. There was the wind, and the foghorn’s low note, and the waves breaking on the beach. He took out his phone and felt it. It had been in an inside pocket and was mostly dry. He hit the button and the screen lit up. But for a long moment, he couldn’t think of anyone to dial.

He stared out into the dark and called her name.





Acknowledgments


I might never have written this book had it not been for a series of conversations involving my agent, Alice Martell, and my editors, Naomi Gibbs and Bill Massey. I owe each of them the greatest of thanks. In February of 2015, I had submitted a manuscript for a novel called The Night Market. Everyone was excited about the book, but Alice, Naomi, and Bill agreed that before The Night Market is published in 2018, I needed to tell another story. What I ended up with is The Dark Room, which serves as the center panel in a triptych of San Francisco’s nighttime scenery.

Once again, Dawn Barbour and her colleagues at the Sausalito Police Department were extremely helpful on police procedure and investigative techniques. Steve Goodenow, the private investigator I have used for years in my legal practice, helped me understand the tools that can be used to search for missing persons. Nathaniel Boyer, MD, came through with arcane medical knowledge, as always.

And finally there was my wife, Maria Wang. While I was writing The Dark Room, she was teaching me about the most important things of all. I hope some of those lessons made it into the book unscathed.





One


AFTER HE CHECKED in and got up to his room, Caleb stood in front of the full-length mirror screwed to the bathroom door and looked at his forehead. In the back of the cab he’d stopped the bleeding by pressing his shirt cuff against the cut, but there were still tiny slivers of glass lodged under his skin from the tumbler she’d thrown. He picked them out with his fingernail and dropped them on the carpet.

Then the blood started again: a thin runner that dropped between his eyes and split on the rise of his nose to descend in twin tracks toward the corners of his mouth. He looked at that a moment, the blood on his face and the bruise just getting started on his forehead, and then he went to the sink and wet one of the washcloths. He wrung it out and wiped the blood off, then went and sat on the floor with his back against the closet door. The little blades of broken glass glittered in the weave of the red carpet.