The Dark Room(62)

“You broke it off with him?”

“I told you already.”

“You told me you’d stopped. That it was only sometimes, but you’d stopped more than a year ago.”

“We stopped because I stopped it.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Right now, everything matters.”

“All right.” From her end of the line, a door opened and shut. Now he could hear wind. She must have stepped outside to have a more private conversation. He’d forgotten she lived with a roommate. “I broke it off because I’m not stupid. Because a married politician who fucks his chief of staff isn’t going anywhere, and if he didn’t go anywhere then neither would I.”

“That’s what you told him?”

“Yes.”

“And then he went up to his room and drank himself blind?”

“That was the last day of the conference for us. He didn’t leave his room again until it was time to go home.”

“Okay,” Cain said. “What about Mona?”

“What about her?”

“Could she match Castelli, drink for drink?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Melissa said. “I tried not to spend time around her. You can imagine why.”

“That’s all I’ve got for now.”

He hung up and pulled the lid from his second cup of coffee, then started on the folder of scene photos again. He thought about Melissa Montgomery’s story and where to fit it into everything else he’d learned. Castelli’s public image was armored and ironclad. Tall and fit, he’d lean on a podium and bully anyone who asked questions he didn’t like. He was rich, he was tough; his star was rising in the east. But his foundations couldn’t hold him. He could be knocked off-balance. He’d strayed from his wife and gotten dumped by his mistress, and he’d reacted to it by locking himself in a Beijing hotel suite and drinking. There was the image, and then there was the man—and the man was vulnerable.





22


HE SPOTTED CHUN and Grassley coming up the Embarcadero toward him, and he waited for them in the long morning shadows, too tired to move toward them and too cold to take his hands from his pockets and wave. He looked over his shoulder to check the clock at the top of the Ferry Building. He’d ask them to meet him at seven thirty. Ten minutes late wasn’t bad, considering the short-fused warning he’d given them.

“I didn’t call you last night,” Chun said once they’d reached him. “You told me to check in, and I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“You’re okay, so it’s nothing. How’d it go?”

“Pretty good. He told me—”

“Let’s get breakfast first,” Cain said. “It’s what we’re here for. We’ll find a quiet table.”



The only quiet place to eat in the Ferry Building turned out to be a bench on the seawall out back. They sat together, drinking their coffee and looking through the iron guardrail at Yerba Buena Island. The falling tide’s current ran against the wind, so that the bay’s dark water was disturbed with a steep-sided chop.

“They met the week before school started. This was their freshman orientation—August 1984,” Chun said. She bit the horned end off her croissant and swallowed it with a sip of her coffee. “They didn’t have classes together. Dennis Herrington was premed, a focused kid. Castelli, not so much. But they lived in the same apartment complex. Two doors down from each other.”

“They were friends?” Cain asked.

“They were friendly, but that didn’t last. How did he put it? Harry Castelli was a decent kid when they met. But then he started hanging around people who gave Dennis the creeps.”

“Pi Kappa Kappa,” Cain said.

“Castelli was pledging,” Chun said. “It was banned from campus, so everything was underground. It wasn’t a fraternity so much as a secret society. They partied at a house off Grizzly Peak Boulevard.”

“Herrington went?”

“Once, but they never invited him back. He didn’t know why—he just didn’t make the cut.”

“That was when?”

“Fall semester, their freshman year,” Chun said.

“This house where they partied,” he said. “Did he give you the address?”

“He did, but it’s not there anymore—it burned down in 1989,” Chun said. “Christmas 1989. I looked it up last night. The firemen found five bodies. Two were Berkeley students, and the other three they never identified.”

“Arson?”

“There were empty gas cans in the kitchen. It wasn’t just arson—it was premeditated homicide. The bodies were bound up with baling wire.”

“I remember that,” Cain said. He’d been in middle school, on the other side of the bay. He’d seen it on the news, read about it in his parents’ Chronicle all through Christmas break. “They never made any arrests. They didn’t even have a suspect.”

“None,” Chun said. She took another bite of her croissant and held her fingers over her mouth as she chewed it. “Herrington told me about the house—the thing was a mansion. Ten bedrooms, twelve baths. A pool, two hot tubs—one inside and one upstairs, on a balcony. There was a basement with a full bar. A library, a billiards room. Art on the walls, none of it crap.”