The Dark Room(64)

“I wouldn’t have bothered you if I had a choice,” Cain said. “I’m in a bind.”

“You’re not worried about bothering me,” Henry said. “Admit it.”

“I’m not that worried.”

“You think I’ll taint everything I touch.”

“You can’t testify,” Cain said. “Try seeing it from my perspective.”

It was raining again, but Henry didn’t open his umbrella. They walked through the stone columns and then beneath the semi-shelter of the open rotunda.

“You can’t testify,” Cain said. “But maybe you can steer me in the right direction. My hands are tied until I get the lab results, and I can’t wait six weeks. I need to move now.”

“I don’t have a lab.”

“But you know people. If no one will do you a favor, you could rent time in one. I read about that.”

“Rent time with what budget? The city’s?”

“Not the city—the FBI,” Cain said. “This case, I’m working it with them.”

Henry motioned to the cooler, and Cain handed it to him.

“It’s Castelli, isn’t it?”

It surprised him that Henry knew. He’d imagined the former medical examiner holed up in his house, the papers piling up outside his front door and the TV unplugged. But he’d picked up the phone on the second ring when Cain called, and he’d agreed to meet right away. He just didn’t want to do it in his house. He didn’t want to upset his wife.

“Dr. Levy gave me a full set,” Cain said. “Liver, blood, urine. You’ve got ten cc’s of fluid from each eye. A slice of his heart, even.”

Henry knelt and put the cooler on the polished stone floor. He opened the lid and removed the two ice packs. Beneath them were the glass sample tubes, each sealed with a black rubber stopper. Henry sorted through them, reading the labels. He got to the last two and looked up.

“What are these?” he asked. “Who’s Jane Doe?”

“We opened a casket from the cemetery in El Carmelo. There was a second body—a young woman. We don’t know who she was or why she’s in there.”

“This is something separate?” Henry asked. “Or connected to Castelli?”

Cain shook his head.

“What you’ve got are two samples. One’s a piece of her liver. Run the toxicology, tell me what was in her system when she died. I’ve got a hunch, but I want to see what you find out before I get into it.”

“And the other?” Henry held up the sample tube. “What’s this?”

“That’s a piece of the fetus,” Cain said. “She was in her first trimester. If there’s a link to Castelli, you’re holding it.”

Henry turned the sample tube to the light and looked at the tiny slice of fetal tissue.

“How long ago was this?”

“Thirty years. She was buried alive in the eighties,” Cain said. “Can you do it?”

“You want me to do what?” Henry asked. “See if he’s the father?”

“That’s right.”

“Sequencing it would be hard—a lot of the DNA would be destroyed. But paternity shouldn’t be much trouble.”

Henry loaded the samples back into the cooler, put cold packs on top of them, and closed the lid. He stood up, and Cain followed him across the rotunda to the path that picked up on the other side.

“How long will you need?”

“Give me today to get a lab,” Henry said. “Tonight to do the work. If they can’t make time for me at Stanford, I can call Slade Ulrich at UCSF. If I can get in there, I’ll be able to do it all pretty quickly.”

They came out from beneath the protection of the columns, and back into the rain. The black swan and its cygnet were nosing through the leaves on the bank nearby. Cain wondered about the lone offspring. Swans came in clutches of three. Something must have killed the others. A loose dog, a kid with a mean streak. They reached the curve in the path that took them closest to the bank, and the swan saw them. She raised herself up and spread her wings.

They both looked at her, her flight feathers flashing white as she made her threat display. Henry began to walk again. He still hadn’t opened his umbrella, and it was raining harder now. They were both soaking wet, the water running down Cain’s leather jacket and soaking his pants at the thighs. Henry was so tall that Cain practically had to jog to keep up.

When they reached Baker Street again, they stopped alongside Cain’s car.

“They took a pregnant woman and buried her alive?” Henry asked. “Someone really did that?”

“She clawed at the casket lid, ripped her fingernails out.”

“You have to catch him, Cain.”

“We’ll see. I’ll need your report before I can do much of anything.”

Henry nodded and walked away. He crossed the street and went through the rain. Cain shook the water from his jacket and got into his car. He turned on the wipers, then the heater. By the time he looked up again, Henry Newcomb was gone.





23


HE CUT THROUGH the Presidio, then crossed out of San Francisco and into Marin on the Golden Gate Bridge, hardly any traffic to slow him at this hour. The lanes coming into the city were backed up for miles, a thousand pairs of headlights in an endless blur. It took him forty-five minutes to get to John MacDowell’s house in Stinson Beach, most of that on the narrow curves of Shoreline Highway. Crossing the Marin Headlands, he caught glimpses of the Pacific beneath its broken blanket of fog, and then after Muir Beach, the ocean was clear out to the horizon.