The Dark Room(34)

They waited until they were outside, across Polk Street from City Hall. There was a burned-out streetlight there, and they stood in the column of darkness beneath it and looked back to the mayor’s lighted windows above the entry portico.

“What’d she say?” Cain asked.

“That he told her to call. That she did it with his permission. I raked her back and forth, and she didn’t budge.”

“Then she’s lying,” Cain said. “Castelli, too. He didn’t tell her to call, and he doesn’t know who did. I threw him a line and he reached for it. He thinks it was some kid named Jackson.”

A shadow passed across the windows on the other side of the street. The mayor was pacing up there. If he had Melissa Montgomery with him, what would they be talking about? Each kept secrets from the other, but they probably shared a few too.

Mona Castelli certainly believed that.

“What do you think it means?” Fischer asked. “That she’d call without telling him.”

“It could be anything—she knew he wouldn’t call it in himself and wanted to protect him. She saw the pictures and got scared.”

“Jealous, maybe,” Fischer said. “You see them in the room together, you can’t help but think there’s something underneath. Not just a boss and his employee.”

“Or she’s angry—she sees those pictures and she starts thinking, ‘What kind of man gets himself into a thing like this?’?”

“Then we show up and take him by surprise,” Fischer said. “He’s seen the letter too, so he knows why we’re there. He knows that right away, but he doesn’t know who called. He plays it like he was waiting for us, like he asked someone to call. He’s got to, because what else is he going to say?”

“And what’s that say about him?” Cain asked. “That he didn’t call.”

“He knows who the girl is, and what happened to her.”

His phone began to vibrate, and he looked at the screen. Grassley. He put it away without answering it. He’d see Grassley face to face in five minutes, when he got to the morgue.

“You need a ride back to your office?” he asked. “I’m headed past it.”

“I can walk,” she said. “It’s a block and a half.”



There were voices coming from the main autopsy suite, three or four people in a back-and-forth murmur, words he couldn’t make out over the high-pitched whine of an oscillating autopsy saw. He went into the back office and found a Tyvek suit laid out, still damp inside from the sweat of the last person who’d worn it.

When he was dressed and had wiped menthol cream under his nostrils, he tightened the respirator mask and went into the suite. Grassley and Dr. Levy were at a center table with the girl’s corpse laid out in front of them. To their right, another team was cutting in to a whale of a man who looked as though he’d jumped from a high roof.

“Inspector Cain,” Dr. Levy said. “I’ll back up and start over.”

He stepped next to Grassley and looked down at the corpse. Dr. Levy had cut her open with a Y-incision that went through her sternum and down as far as her pubic bone.

“Your Jane Doe is a Caucasian female. A blonde. She stood five eight and would have weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, give or take five. She was healthy until she died—no chronic diseases, no obvious history of malnourishment. A twenty-year-old girl, nothing wrong with her at all.”

“How are you guessing the age?”

“Dental x-rays,” Dr. Levy said. “Her wisdom teeth were erupting. They would’ve just started bothering her.”

“I had mine out at twenty-five,” Cain said.

“That’s the back end of the range,” Dr. Levy answered. “The front end is seventeen. But in this girl, the pubic symphysis—the bone connecting the two sides of her pelvis, right above her vulva—it had a nice, billowy surface. That means she was an adult, but a very young one. Done growing, but not growing old.”

“Okay.”

“What I mean is, twenty’s an estimate. But it’s a good estimate. I could be off by two or three years.”

“Then she was twenty,” Cain said. “Give or take.”

“I did what I could, but her internal organs were fused together—inside, she looked like black tar. That’s what thirty years underground will do. A good casket, but no embalming. There’s not enough left of her lungs and airways to say if she died of asphyxiation. Her heart’s not giving anything up, either.”

“Can you say how she died?”

“What we’ve got are the scratches inside the casket lid, the matching splinters under her fingernails—and nothing else. No broken bones, no obvious cuts or stab wounds, no bullets showing up on the x-rays.”

Grassley was taking notes on a spiral-bound pad, writing as fast as he could to catch everything Dr. Levy said.

“What about toxicology?” Cain asked.

“It’ll take a month, maybe two,” Dr. Levy answered. She went to the back wall and selected a pair of forceps the size of kitchen tongs, then came back. “You know we have to send it out. Any kind of lab work, we have to send out.”

“I may not have a month.”

“Then you may want to look at getting a private source. What we have, in this office, is a two-month backlog. We’ve already called in all our favors.”