The Dark Room(20)

“You know where he mailed it?”

“We pulled the MICT photographs, found the letter, then looked at the twenty pieces on either side. Most of those had return addresses, all in North Beach. So at seven this morning, we went knocking on doors. We woke up a lady on Chestnut Street, showed her a photo of the envelope she’d mailed—birthday money for her grandson, she said. And she dropped it in the blue box at Bay and Stockton.”

“Did you—”

“We had a fingerprint team at the box in fifteen minutes. Right now, we’ve got agents running down prints from everyone we know about who mailed a letter from that site. But that’s a long shot, the prints.”

“If he wore gloves and used a sponge when he did the letter, he would’ve used them when he mailed it,” Nagata said.

“That’s what we think,” Fischer answered. “But we’ve got to check—and we’re also fanning through the neighborhood, looking for cameras.”

“Bay and Stockton,” Cain said. “That’s residential. Pretty quiet.”

“Right. There aren’t any storefronts, but we’re looking for webcams, private security systems. At least two hundred apartment windows look down on that intersection.”

“Another long shot,” Cain said.

“But it’s like I said—we’ve got to check. Turn every stone.”

“Where are you on the enemy list?” Cain asked.

“It’s progressing,” she said. “A man like Castelli—let’s just say he’s got as many enemies as friends.”

“Anybody stand out?”

“Like I said, it’s progressing.” Her eyes cut to Nagata, and Cain wasn’t sure if his lieutenant noticed or not. She was busy taking notes. “I’ll let you know when we find something.”

“All right.”

He wondered what had happened that Fischer already distrusted Nagata. Maybe Fischer distrusted everyone, as a way to save time.

“What about you?” Nagata said to Cain. She underlined something on her spiral pad. “What have you found?”

“The woman in the photos, she died in 1985,” Cain said. “She came in wearing a sixteen-thousand-dollar Jean Patou dress, was force-fed an incapacitating dose of Thrallinex, and disappeared. The guy who brought her was probably driving a 1984 Cadillac Eldorado.”

Agent Fischer was staring at him, waiting for him to go on. But he didn’t say what he thought had happened next. That they’d put her back in the Cadillac and driven her to the mortuary. Someone had gone inside and handed John Fonteroy an envelope, then told him to step out back and have a smoke. They’d have had to bring her in quickly, because Christopher Hanley’s family would’ve been milling around out front. She hadn’t been gagged and she hadn’t been bound, so they must have been confident they could control her. That she wouldn’t scream or fight back until after they forced her on top of Christopher Hanley and closed the casket. The last light a narrowing crack, and then nothing but blackness for thirty years.

He couldn’t prove any of that yet, but that wasn’t the only reason he kept it back. He might have trusted Agent Fischer with it, but he didn’t think Nagata would go five minutes before she reported it to Castelli. Agent Fischer must have been thinking the same thing when she dodged his question about the enemy lists.

“You went to see Matthew Redding, didn’t you?” Nagata said.

“This morning.”

“Explain how you know all that,” Fischer said. “And who’s this guy Redding?”





8


THERE WAS A flagpole in the Castellis’ front yard, the gold-trimmed San Francisco ensign showing a phoenix rising from a ring of flames. Cain looked at it, and then beyond at the Spanish-style house that clung to the sea cliffs above China Beach. He’d checked in with the patrolmen stationed on the lower portion of the street before coming the rest of the way up. A squad car parked next to a fire hydrant, keeping out of sight of the house, so they wouldn’t alarm anyone.

Cain looked the place over as he walked up the driveway. It was a good thing Castelli had made some money in Silicon Valley before the crash. The only thing Cain knew for sure about real estate was that he didn’t have any, but he did know Castelli couldn’t have picked up a house like this on a politician’s pay. There must have been twenty rooms in the place.

He stepped off the brick driveway and followed a path lined with waist-high rosemary bushes to the front door. Everything was wet and cold, and smelled of the ocean and the pine bark mulch that was spread through the flower beds. He rang the bell and listened to the heavy chimes echo inside the house.

Castelli’s daughter, a dark-eyed nineteen-year-old, opened the door. Alexa Castelli. The patrolmen down the street had plenty to say about her, and now he understood why. She was using one hand to keep a bath towel wrapped across her chest, and the other to hold her wet hair in a pile atop her head. Steam rose from the back of her bare neck.

“You’re the cop.”

“Your mother’s here?”

“She’s in the back, waiting,” Alexa said. She opened the door the rest of the way. “We’ve never had a detective come and see us.”

She let go of her hair and shook it out, so that the dark pile fanned across her shoulders. Rivulets of bath water ran past the rise of her clavicles and then down her chest to the towel.