The Dark Room(27)

“An actress,” Chun said. She looked from Grassley to Cain. “Right?”

“Never mind.”

“Rebel Without a Cause,” Grassley said. “The one with Cary Grant. Way before my time.”

Cain shook his head. They’d be here all night, if he tried getting into that.

They were in a booth at the Western, on Fillmore Street. Their table was on the diner side of the business, but they could hear a loud game of darts from the dubiously legal bar in the building’s back half. Both the bar and the restaurant were cop hangouts, and that was the only reason the building wasn’t posted and padlocked.

“What else did Levy get from the autopsy?” Cain asked.

“So far, not much,” Grassley said. He picked up his iced tea and made a face when he sipped it. He sniffed the rim of his glass, then checked the cuff of his sport coat.

“It stays with you,” Cain said. “It’s probably your imagination. But if you can smell it tomorrow . . . You got a good dry cleaner?”

Grassley shrugged out of his jacket, folded it roughly, and then put it on the bench behind him.

“She won’t start cutting until tomorrow,” Grassley said.

“She finished the surface examination?”

“What she could. It’s just—when they lifted the woman out, a lot of her skin was stuck to the kid’s suit. I don’t remember exactly what the doc said.”

“It’s hard to examine the surface when the surface isn’t there,” Chun said.

“That’s it.”

“There weren’t any entry wounds? No ligature marks?” Cain asked. “Tell me what she saw.”

“Nothing that changed her mind.”

“The woman went in alive,” Cain said. “Dr. Levy still thinks that.”

“She found wooden splinters in the woman’s fingertips,” Chun said. “I saw her pull them out.”

“How long were you there?”

“Just for the last part,” she said. She tilted her head toward Grassley. “He called, and I came as soon as I could.”

“There’s one thing I have to clear up,” Cain said, “before we go any further.”

“I’ve got time,” Chun said.

“But it’s off the books. A lot of overtime that’s not getting paid, because you can’t even request it.”

Chun glanced sideways at Grassley, who looked away.

“Yeah,” she said to Cain. “Okay. It’s fine.”

“Same,” Grassley said. “But I’m on this anyway—the girl in the coffin is my case. And if I’m on my own because Nagata put you on a blackmail note, she can’t say no if I bring Angela in. So everyone gets paid.”

“That might work,” Cain said. “Just watch how you talk about it, especially at the division meetings. We’ll be able to move fast and quiet if Nagata doesn’t connect the cases.”

“Moving fast is good,” Chun said. “But where are we going?”

“We’ll split it up. The goal’s to tie Castelli to the photos . . . You live in the East Bay, right?”

“Oakland.”

“Then Berkeley’s your new pastime. Castelli was there in ’eighty-five. Maybe some of his friends are still in the area, or you can track them. Find out what kinds of things they were into.”

“And the car—I won’t forget the Eldorado.”

Cain hadn’t worked with Angela Chun before today. But her reputation in the Homicide Detail was solid.

“Castelli didn’t meet his wife until ’ninety-seven,” Cain said. “So find out who he was seeing back then. We’ll want to talk to her. Or them.”

“Understood.”

“But use a soft touch,” Cain said. “Some of these people might still be his friends. You don’t want them picking up the phone.”

“What about me?” Grassley asked.

“The pills and the dress,” Cain said. “You know what I want?”

“For the pills—you remember Frank Lee talked to that guy at UCSF’s pharmacy program? He’d drawn an OD in the Ritz and wanted some background on all the shit they found in the guy’s bags?”

“I remember,” Cain said. “That came up in the roundtable.”

“Frank liked the guy, said he was pretty good. He might know how Thrallinex was being prescribed, what the doctors were doing with it. I’ll start there and see where it goes.”

“Okay,” Cain said. It was what he would have done. “And the dress?”

“Back to school again,” Grassley said. “There’s got to be a fashion program at the Academy of Art. That’s all I can think of—find someone who’s plugged in to that kind of thing and ask where you would’ve gone to get that dress.”

Cain glanced at Chun.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “There’s nothing like that in my closet.”

“I just wondered if you had anything to add to Grassley’s plan.”

She looked at her phone’s screen, then switched it off.

“Sixteen thousand for a used dress seems pretty steep,” she said. “You wouldn’t buy something like that off the rack.”