The Dark Room(19)

“But the inside?”

“Maybe.”

Cain leaned over the casket again. Driving up here, he’d almost talked himself into believing that if he found a second corpse in this casket, she’d be wearing the rotten remains of a Jean Patou cocktail dress. That there’d be a jeweled pin in there somewhere, and a set of handcuffs. What were the odds that on the same day he was asked to track down a woman from a 1985 photograph, he’d find a woman in a 1985 coffin? She had the right color hair, and polish on her toenails. But none of that proved a thing.

There was only one way to check that he could think of, but it was a long shot. She wasn’t handcuffed, and she’d gone into the coffin lively enough to rip up the lining and claw into the lid. If it was her, a long time must have passed between the last photograph and the moment they put her in the box. Long enough, anyway, for the drugs to wear off.

“Can you have a lab run toxicology on her?”

“I can run it,” Dr. Levy said. “I don’t know what I’ll find. And you know our backlog. It’ll take months. If I gave you samples, you could get a private lab. It’d be faster.”

“Just run it and see.”

“It’d help if I knew what you were looking for—this long, the drugs won’t be there, but maybe their decomposition products will be.”

“Tell the lab to look for everything. But especially Thrallinex.”

“You know something you’re not telling me?”

“I don’t know anything yet,” Cain said. He turned to Grassley. “Get that team in here. I’ve got to go.”



Cain found a meter on Turk Street, directly behind the federal building. His phone rang as he was unbuckling his seat belt. It wasn’t a number he recognized, but he took the call.

“This is Inspector Cain.”

“It took me longer than you wanted, but I did it.”

The caller was a woman. Late twenties or early thirties, her voice either very professional or extremely distrustful. Or maybe both, he thought, once it clicked and he realized who she was.

“Melissa Montgomery,” Cain said.

“Yes, and I don’t have long. They’ll be at the house at two o’clock. They’ll be waiting for you.”

“It’s got to be me and them,” Cain said. “The wife and the daughter. Castelli doesn’t get to sit in.”

“He won’t get in your way. I’ve got him booked through eight o’clock.”

“Did you tell him where I’m going?”

“It might have slipped my mind,” she said, and hung up. All business, this woman. If she felt anything at all about what she was telling him, Cain hadn’t heard it.

His phone rang again before he made it out of the car. Grassley this time. He sat back down and answered.

“What’s going on?”

“The techs are going over the casket. The good one, the guy you like, he’s in charge.”

“Where are you? You should be there.”

“Christ, Cain—I’m watching from the other side of the room,” Grassley said. He was keeping his voice low so that no one would hear their conversation.

“You want to know why I asked about the Thrallinex.”

“If I’m working this, I need to know what you know. You can’t keep all the cards.”

“You’re right,” Cain said. He stepped out of the car and shut the door. “What Nagata’s got me on, and what we’ve got in the morgue—they might be two sides of the same thing. It’s just a hunch, but it feels right.”

“You’ll bring me in?”

“Not officially,” Cain said. “But let’s do this—I’m already late for my meeting. And I’ve got an interview at two. So stay with the body, and get as much as you can from Dr. Levy. I’ll buy you dinner at the Western, at five. Bring Inspector Chun, if you can find her.”

“You think I’ll want to eat after this?”

“Up to you,” Cain said. “If you don’t, I save money.”

He hung up, went through the federal building’s glass doors, and handed his badge to the guard at the security checkpoint.



Lieutenant Nagata and Special Agent Fischer were waiting for him in a windowless conference room on the thirteenth floor. The walls were battleship gray, and the wooden table was so pitted, it might have been used as a chopping block. The contractors who had redone the rest of the place must have missed this room. But someone had brought in an urn of coffee, and it smelled like it had been brewed that day. Cain poured himself a cup and then sat next to his boss, across from Fischer.

“I’ll start,” Fischer said. He liked the way she got right into it. “We rode herd on the guys at the lab, got them to expedite. But it’s like we thought—no prints anywhere, no DNA on the flap. Whoever mailed the letter wore gloves, used a sponge instead of licking the envelope.”

“You said you had other resources?”

“I’m getting there,” Fischer said. “Since the anthrax attacks—2001, we’re talking—the Post Office has a program called Mail Isolation Control and Tracking. You’re familiar?”

“No,” Cain said. Nagata shook her head.

“The system, it photographs every piece of mail that comes in, in the order it’s received. So if you get a letter and you don’t know where it came from, you can go to the MICT database and look at every letter that got processed just before and after.”