The Dark Room(18)

“From here on.”

“All right.”

Cain popped the seals off and put them into a zip bag while Grassley filmed him.

“Okay,” Dr. Levy said, when he was finished. “Let’s lift this lid. You’re at the head, and I’m at the foot. The hinges might be a little stiff.”

The lid swung up ninety degrees, and the smell that wafted up with it had reaching hands and an implacable grip. Cain stepped around and took a place next to Grassley. Dr. Levy was on the other side of him, and Jim and the lab tech left their autopsy and came to look inside.

“Oh, Christ, do you see that?” Grassley whispered. “Do you see it?”





7


“We see it,” Dr. Levy said. She pointed at the inside of the lid. “Here—and here.”

At some point in its three decades underground, the casket’s lid liner had fallen apart. The yellowed silk had dropped away from its padded underlayment, detaching completely from the lid. Now it lay atop the corpses like a shroud. There were rips and holes near its top, and through one of the larger ones, Cain could see a jawbone, all its teeth still set. The silk covered everything else.

No one reached to remove the shroud, because they were still looking at the inside of the casket’s lid. Where the wood was visible through the shredded padding, the scratch marks were clear.

“Is that—Are you getting that?” Cain asked.

“I’m getting it,” Grassley said.

“Wait,” Dr. Levy said. “Wait a minute.”

She went to one of the drawers and returned with a pair of tweezers. Carver stepped aside to give her space. She leaned over the casket and delicately plucked something from between the wood-planked lid and the polyester batting. When she turned, with the object in the tweezers’ grasp, Jim wordlessly held out a plastic sample tube. Cain couldn’t see what she was gripping, but after she dropped it into the sample container, she took it and held it for the camera.

“This is a fingernail,” she said. Looking into the lens, putting it on the record. “Dark green polish that chipped off and stuck to the wood. It was embedded in the coffin lid.”

“It was a woman, and she was alive when she went in,” Cain said. “They put her in there, on top of Christopher Hanley, and buried her alive.”

“It looks that way, but—” She turned toward Grassley, who had backed up to the wall and was leaning against it. “Are you okay, Inspector?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Grassley said. “I just need a minute.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Dr. Levy said. “You need air.”

“Here,” the lab tech said. “I’ll shoot it.”

“Don’t turn it off,” Cain said. “It has to be one shot.”

“I’ve got it.”

The technician took the camera from Grassley and went up to the casket. Cain stood next to him, and then Grassley came reluctantly to his right. They all looked down together as Dr. Levy and Jim pulled off the silken shroud.



Cain hadn’t been able to find any records about Christopher Hanley, and didn’t know anything about the kid until he and the assistant DA were sitting in Marjorie Hanley’s breakfast nook in Napa. She poured them each a cup of coffee and told them her son had died of AIDS. He was seventeen years old. He’d spent most of the last year of his life on a hospital bed set up in the living room. They’d lived in the Haight then. From his bed, he’d been able to look across Buena Vista Avenue at the park. In the beginning, when he wasn’t strong enough to get in and out on his own, she’d needed her husband’s help to lift him into the bed. At the end, she lifted him out of the bed and carried him from the house herself. He weighed just eighty pounds.

Now, standing over Christopher’s casket and looking down, one hand pressed to his respirator to keep it tight, Cain thought how tight a fit it must have been. Even with the kid shrunken down to nothing, when they pushed the woman in on top of him and shut the lid on her, there would have hardly been room for her to move.

She must have run out of air quickly. Ten minutes. Less, even: in her frenzy to escape, she’d have burned through the oxygen in a hurry. She’d clawed through the liner and the padding, had dug her nails deep into the wooden lid. Her hands were frozen beside her face. Her skin was black and purple, her features completely indistinguishable. Her teeth were intact, visible because her jaw hung open. That was something they could go on, if she had dental records in a database somewhere.

She had blond hair, and had gone into the coffin naked. Underneath her, Christopher Hanley wore what was left of a white suit.

“How come he’s in better shape than her?” Cain asked. “You can make out his face.”

“He was embalmed,” Dr. Levy said. “She wasn’t, if she went in alive. He might look even better if he hadn’t spent thirty years underneath her.”

“I’m getting a crime scene team in here,” Cain said. “I don’t want you to do anything else until they’re here.”

Dr. Levy looked up at him.

“Fingerprints?”

“That’s right.”

“Anything on the outside, that’s all gone. Thirty years in the dirt, no way.”