The Dark Room(39)

“But they took samples for the SEM lab?”

“Of course.”

That was good. It wasn’t easy to wash off gunshot residue. If Mrs. Castelli had shot a gun tonight and had somehow washed her hands well enough to evade the paramedics’ colorimetric field test, a scanning electron microscope would catch her when the lab got around to it. But the field tests were better than they used to be. They hardly missed anything, and that boded well for Mona Castelli.

“What about the daughter?” Cain asked. “Alexa—is she around?”

“No, she’s at her apartment. We haven’t told her yet.”

“All right,” Cain said. “His study’s upstairs?”

They were climbing now, the dark staircase wide enough for them to walk side by side.

“Up here. I haven’t been in, but she showed me the door.”

“You were the first to get here?” Cain asked. “She called 911, and then dispatch called you directly?”

“There was a directive—call me first if anything came up about him.”

“Who gave the order?”

“Castelli.”

“When?”

“The night he got the first note,” Nagata said.

“He was worried something would happen,” Cain said. “Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

They reached the top of the stairs, and Nagata led them down a hallway. The master bedroom was on one end, and Castelli’s study, accessed by a pair of book-matched mahogany doors, was at the other. An antique lever lock key protruded from the brass plate beneath the doorknob.

Nagata opened both doors and he stepped inside after her. The first thing he noticed was the sharp smell of cordite gun smoke, and under that, there was blood. He closed the doors and looked at the lock. There was no thumb lever. To lock it, even from the inside, you needed a key. He scanned the room but didn’t see one.

“She couldn’t open this when she came home, had to find a spare key?”

“That’s what she told 911.”

He pointed at the lock.

“Either there’s one in this room somewhere, or this is going to get complicated.”

They turned to face the study. Castelli’s car-size desk was parked in the middle of the room, so that sitting behind it, he would face whoever came through the door. His leather chair was empty. A pair of shaded lamps stood at the desk’s corners, casting interlocking circles on its surface. The rest of the study was in shadow.

Another step in, and his eyes began adjusting.

He saw the red-black splatter on the back wall and the bookcases. There was blood on the leather blotter, a wide smear of it that led to the far edge. He stepped around to follow it, and there was the mayor. After the shot, Castelli must have gone face-first into the desk. Gravity and slack muscles eased him from there to the floor.

Now he lay curled in a nearly fetal pose between the chair and the desk. There was a thick pool of blood on the rug underneath his head. Cain knelt without touching anything, and when he leaned close he could see a small exit wound far back on Castelli’s scalp, the black hair around it bloody and flecked with gray-red brain tissue.

He looked around. The gun lay to the right of the chair, partially under the desk. A snub-nosed revolver, maybe a .38. He didn’t touch it but leaned closer to see it. It was a Smith & Wesson, not a Model 10 but one of the earlier M&P jobs. A lot of wear around the barrel. An old gun, a family heirloom. Maybe Harry J. Castelli Sr. had worn it on his hip in West Berlin.

Nagata was at the end of the desk, watching him. He looked back at Castelli, the blood still wet and shiny under the man’s head.

“Did the paramedics come up?” he asked.

“No.”

“And you didn’t come in here?”

“No.”

He asked the next question as evenly as he could.

“No one’s checked him?”

“I thought . . . the scene.”

“The scene,” Cain said. “Sure.”

Without moving Castelli, he put two fingers on the man’s jugular. His skin was cool, and there was no pulse. He was right over the body now and could smell the alcohol rising up. When he tried to move Castelli’s jaw, it was locked tight. So was his neck. Blood had come out of his lips and run down his cheek to the rug. Cain didn’t see an entry wound anywhere. The gun must have been in Castelli’s mouth when it went off.

“Nothing? No heartbeat?”

He looked up at Nagata.

“Cold and stiff,” he said. “We’ll ask Dr. Levy, and she’ll tell us rigor in the neck usually takes two hours. Then she’ll walk that back and say it all depends on room temperature and a dozen other things. How long have you been here?”

“Not even an hour.”

“Then you’re good,” Cain said. “He was probably dead when you got here.”

“That’s good?”

“You’d rather explain to Mona Castelli why you kept the paramedics out when they could’ve done something?”

“Shit.”

“Forget it, Lieutenant,” Cain said. “Gunshot or not, you were in the clear—I’ve seen guys who drank enough to smell like this. They didn’t need a bullet to finish things off. They just dropped dead.”