The Dark Room(35)

She leaned over the corpse and used the forceps to pull back the skin and underlying tissue at the young woman’s pelvis. The skin was leathery, the muscles underneath black and shrunken. Dr. Levy took a scalpel from the table and used the blunt side of its blade to gingerly pry open a slit she’d previously cut.

“This is her uterus,” Dr. Levy said.

Cain came a little closer and tried to make it out. It all looked the same to him, an undifferentiated mass of dark tissue. He’d stood in this room often enough to know his way around the inside of a cadaver. But not one like this.

“She was pregnant,” Levy said, gesturing to a pea-size lump. “I’d say she was eight weeks along. Not much more than that.”

“Would she have shown?” Cain asked.

He’d stepped back from the table. To his right, the assistant medical examiner had finally put away her oscillating saw. Now the only noise came from the hooded ventilation fans above each table.

“Probably not,” Dr. Levy said.

“Was there anything else?” he asked.

“The rest can go in my report,” Dr. Levy said. “I just wanted to show you this. I’ll preserve the fetus—freeze it, for whatever that’s worth now.”

“We’ll get DNA?” Grassley asked, the first thing he’d said since Cain had arrived.

“It’ll be fragmentary, but you’ll get it.”

Grassley looked at Cain.

“The father,” he said. “We’ll find out if he’s the father.”

“Who?” Dr. Levy asked.

“We’re not there yet,” Cain said. He took Grassley’s elbow. “Thanks for walking us through it, Doctor.”

“Anytime,” she said. “There’s a box in your office. I set it there an hour ago, before I knew you were coming. You’ll want to pick it up.”



They weren’t alone until they got into the elevator on the way to the sixth floor.

“Cain—”

“If you’d said Harry Castelli, I’d have pulled out my gun and kneecapped you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Everybody talks,” Cain said. “You say something to Levy in the morgue, and she’ll bring it up at the next homicide roundtable. Or she’ll mention it to her buddy in there, Dr. Braun. Some lab tech overhears, figures it’s worth fifty bucks if he knows a reporter.”

“Cain—”

“And everyone down there knows a reporter—some asshole already called Christopher Hanley’s mother and told her what we found in his casket. You think they’ll just sit on this?”

“I won’t do it again.”

“I know you won’t,” Cain said. He forced his voice to soften. “You’re a good inspector. The best partner I’ve had. It was just a slip-up.”

Grassley nodded.

“I’ll be careful.”

They stepped off the elevator and started walking toward their shared office. The cubicle farm—the vast space between the elevators and the window offices—was a chaotic mess. The noon-to-eight shift was winding down; the night watch was coming on. Typewriters rattled beneath half-shouted conversations as one crew passed the baton to the next.

They went into their office and Cain shut the door.

“Unless you’re sitting in court, or alone with your girlfriend, never tell anyone but me the truth. Not when half that will do just as well.”

Grassley’s face locked up, processing that bit of advice.

“You’re telling me to lie.”

“It’s not your job to tell anyone what’s going on,” Cain said. “It’s your job to find out what just happened. You go to Vegas?”

“Vegas?”

“You want to know the other guy’s hand—it’s not ‘I’ll show you mine, you show me yours.’ You want to get anything, you bluff.”

“All right,” Grassley said. He looked at his watch.

“If you need to go home, then go. It’s late.”



Cain was so tired, his face was going numb. He watched Fonteroy’s tape again, the old man dying of cancer and feeling hell’s glow on the back of his neck. There were no answers on the tape, no details he hadn’t already seen.

He stood to leave. An orange sticker by the door reminded him to kill the lights. As he was reaching for the switch, he saw a white box on the filing cabinet. His name was handwritten across the broken trefoil of a biohazard symbol.

He took it back to his desk, pulled a pair of latex gloves from the drawer, and used a pocketknife to cut the seal. There was a handwritten note at the top. He pushed his glasses to his forehead and read it.



Inspector Cain,

Enclosed are samples from Jane Doe’s liver and fetus. I’ll do what I can, but you can do it faster through your own channels.

—Dr. Rachel Levy





Inside the box were two glass tubes, sealed with rubber stoppers. Each held a black lump smaller than a grain of rice. If he could find someone to foot the bill, he could hire an outside expert to run the toxicology. Fischer had the deepest pockets, but he didn’t want to tell her about the cadaver until he knew where it fit. He put the box in an overstuffed drawer of his filing cabinet, shut off the lights, and locked his office door.