The Dark Room(58)

“How long you been here?” Cain asked.

One cop looked at his partner.

“Since noon?”

“Has anyone tried to get in here?”

“Well—”

“There was a woman. She was the only one.”

“What woman?” Cain asked. “What was her name?”

The officer on the left looked at his partner, who shook his head.

“You didn’t ask her name?” Cain asked. “What’d she look like?”

“Blonde?”

“A dark blonde—almost a brunette.”

“And a gray suit. Expensive.”

“How old?” Cain asked.

“Thirty.”

Cain believed in cop instinct, but he didn’t think either of these men had much of it. If they’d been half awake, they would have gotten her name. Maybe it didn’t make a difference. They’d just described Melissa Montgomery.

“Did she try to talk her way past?” Fischer asked.

“Not after we told her Castelli was dead—then she went off in a hurry.”

“You told her what, exactly?”

“That he ate it—bullet through the head.”

“All right,” Cain said. “Open it up. We need to go in.”



They went around Castelli’s office turning on lights. Grassley had the video camera, recording everything. An empty glass sat on the desk’s edge. There was no paperwork in sight, no computer; the mayor must have used a laptop. They came behind the desk chair and Cain rolled it back. He switched on the shaded lamp, and the room took on a green glow.

“What’s that smell?” Grassley asked. “Bourbon?”

“Someone poured it in the trash,” Fischer said. She tapped the wastepaper basket with her foot. “Look.”

“That was me,” Cain said. “Last night.”

Fischer looked around, and he told her the story.

“Get a rise out of him?” she asked.

“Not really.”

Cain reached into the trash and found two empty cans of ginger ale and four lime wedges. There was a wadded napkin inside a can that had once held salted nuts. There were two peanuts left in the can.

“Nice work if you can get it,” Grassley said. “Knock back some cocktails, have a couple peanuts. Run a city.”

“Let’s bag it,” Cain said. “For all we know, someone else drank these before I came.”

The last thing Cain pulled out was a folded piece of ruled notebook paper. It had been at the bottom of the trash, and was soaked with both bourbon and ginger ale. Cain gently unfolded it, taking his time. The edges were soft and stuck together, the paper ready to fall apart. When he had it open, he held it in one palm and pushed up his glasses to look at it.

“Shit,” he said.

There had been handwriting, but the black letters had run into illegible spirals, the ink spreading through the bourbon and separating into the spectrum of colors it held. What was left looked like a dark oil slick. There was one dry spot, on the bottom of the page. It was Harry J. Castelli Jr.’s signature, dated yesterday.

“You think that was it?” Grassley asked. “The note?”

“No way to tell. Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

“We should find the pad he wrote it on,” Fischer said. “The notebook—whatever. Maybe there’s an impression on the page underneath.”

“Check for it.”

They started going through the desk drawers, and Fischer found a notebook straight off. The first page had been ripped out.

“Here,” Cain said.

He gave her the bourbon-obliterated page, and she held its left side against the notebook. The uneven edges matched like puzzle pieces. She set the wet paper on the desk and put the notebook under the lamp. The three of them leaned in and looked at the blank page that had been beneath the one Castelli ripped out.

“There’s nothing,” Grassley said. “No imprints—right?”

“Maybe the documents lab,” Cain said. “They could look at it with a microscope.”

“Unless he ripped it out before he wrote on it—then we’ve got nothing,” Fischer said. She turned to Cain. “Melissa Montgomery might’ve been the last person to see him alive. But you’re a close second.”

“I didn’t mean to dissolve his note, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“It’s not what I’m saying,” Fischer said. “I’m just curious about his mood—how’d he seem to you?”

“The same as before,” Cain said. “He didn’t know anything. He hadn’t gotten more photos. This was all a hoax, some guy messing with him.”

“That’s what he told you.”

“And I knew he was lying, but I couldn’t shake him from his story.”

“Was he drunk?” Fischer asked.

“He was drinking,” Cain said. He looked around the office, breathed in the bourbon fumes, and remembered the old man’s growl. “A guy like him, there’s some ground to cover between drinking and drunk.”

Fischer turned around to look at the office. She went over to the curtains and pulled them back, allowing in the dim hum of traffic on Polk Street.