The Dark Room(43)

“Beats me.”

Cain rose and looked around the room. There, high on the back wall and surrounded by a shotgun pattern of blood droplets, was a bullet hole in the wooden molding. After it came out the back of Castelli’s head it had gone there. That was good. If it had been a little to the right, it would have gone through the window and they’d never have found it.

“What are you looking for?” Fischer asked.

“Another bullet hole—if he fired two rounds, where’d the other one go?”

Fischer pulled herself out from beneath the desk and knelt next to him. They scanned the ceiling, then the back wall.

“There,” she said. “Bookshelf, bottom row. The American Heritage Dictionary.”

Cain went to the shelf and knelt there. The dictionary was a thick, hardbound volume. The bullet had gone into its spine.

“Good eyes.”

Fischer came over. Neither of them touched the book. Cain was making fast mental notes, everything he needed to say to the photographers.

“Why two shots?” she said.

“You saw the gun,” Cain said. “It’s prewar, don’t you think? An antique. If it was an heirloom, maybe he’d never shot it. Ammunition as old as the gun—ballistics will tell us.”

“So he fires one off to see if it works. Then he swivels around, downs a drink or ten. The last thing he swallows is the barrel.”

“That’s about it.”

“It’s weird.”

“You’ve seen a suicide that wasn’t?” Cain asked.

She didn’t answer right away. Probably, in the FBI, they had better things to do than run out to every dead body that got called in. He thought of the calls he’d been on, just in the last month. Suicide, death by drunken misadventure. Bag the evidence, haul the body to the ME. Write the report and forget it—except this time, the corpse on the rug was Harry Castelli.

“Do you want to swab his hands now, or leave it for the ME?” Fischer asked.

“Dr. Levy can do it.”

“You trust her?”

“Yes.”

She looked down at Castelli’s hands. There was dried blood spackled across both sets of his knuckles.

“Three feet,” Fischer said. “That’s how far it goes.”

“What’s that?”

“Fifteen years ago, when Sandia Labs did the gunshot residue experiments, they could pick up traces on anyone within three feet of a shooter. Residue on your hands, it doesn’t mean you were holding the gun.”

Cain knew that. If Rachel Levy pulled a positive swab off Castelli’s hands, it could mean anything. To build a case, no piece of evidence was conclusive. Everything came with its own uncertainties. The only thing to do was keep going, to gather all you could and plot every point. You had to hope the line pointed in one direction, that any other explanation became an unreasonable doubt.

“There’s a medicine cabinet behind the sink,” Cain said. “Prescription drugs, but I don’t think he got them from a doctor. Nothing over the top, but maybe worth checking out.”

“Something your toxicologist can do. Make sure he gets the bottles and samples them. The pills might be different from what the labels say. Also, his browser history—you need to get computer forensics on that.”

“Our toxicology lab isn’t up and running,” Cain said.

“Send it out, then,” Fischer said. “A private lab.”

“You can’t help?”

“I can send things to our lab. I can’t move you ahead in line.”

“I keep hearing that.”

“You ready to bring them in, get going for real?”

“I’ll go get them,” Cain said.

Dr. Levy and the vanload of techs from the crime scene unit were still sitting in the driveway. He went to get them, and Karen Fischer followed him out. He liked that she didn’t stay in the room by herself, that she didn’t need him to say anything. They both understood how much better it would be, testifying that no, the only person who’d ever been alone with the body had been Mona Castelli.



They didn’t move the body until well past lunchtime. The techs came in with their tripods and their can lights, and they took photographs and used lasers to shoot measurements and calculate angles. A guy from ballistics got up on a ladder and burrowed into the high back wall, eventually finding the lethal bullet buried and smashed in a two-by-six heart pine stud. When the same man pulled out the dictionary and flipped it open, the nearly intact bullet fell out of the M section. It had punched through the spine, had gone almost all the way through the book, but had stopped just before the fore edge.

The man bagged it, then showed it to Cain and Fischer.

“Good ballistics off this one,” he said. “The other—not so much. You send a piece of lead through two sides of a skull, then into a piece of wood, it gets pretty smashed up.”

Cain looked around. The study was cluttered with numbered yellow signs, a hundred and seventy of them, marking the location of each piece of evidence. The photographers were moving from one to the next, taking their time to frame each shot. Dr. Levy and two assistant medical examiners rolled Castelli over and lifted him into a body bag. They’d already swabbed his hands and bagged them, and the colorimetric GSR test was developing on the edge of the desk.