The Dark Room(67)

When he looked like he was fading, Cain brought them back to Geary and parked in front of a vacant storefront sandwiched between a coffee shop and a used appliance dealer.

“One more, and then lunch,” Cain said. “You remember this?”

“Not ringing any bells.”

“In ’eighty-five, it was a funeral home,” Cain prompted.

MacDowell looked around. He studied the storefronts on the other side of the street, looked in the window of the coffee shop.

“Fonteroy’s,” MacDowell said. “Sure.”

“You ever hear anything about it?”

“Fonteroy’s?”

“That’s right.”

“Pull up. Past the coffee shop.”

Cain left the parking spot and went ahead three spaces. MacDowell waved his hand, signaling to stop. There was nowhere to park, so Cain stayed in the lane and put on his hazard lights. They were looking up an alley that accessed the space behind the buildings. A row of grime-coated dumpsters sat beneath the fire escapes.

“I was doing a Saturday shift. Around noon. It’s quiet in the station. Pretty much just me and my partner, catching up on paperwork. There was the desk officer, falling asleep over the sports section.”

“What year is this?”

MacDowell looked at the ceiling.

“I was one year from pulling the pin,” he said. “So this is 1989.”

“Okay,” Cain said. He tried not to sound disappointed. In 1989, John Fonteroy had been gone for four years. He’d put his wife and daughter in the family car the day of Christopher Hanley’s funeral, lit out of the city, and never come back.

“The desk officer gets a call from dispatch. Someone saw a 647b—that’s still the dispatch code for a hooker?”

“Yeah.”

“So someone saw a 647b running up the sidewalk here.”

“That’s not so unusual,” Cain said.

“But this lady was buck naked, and screaming.”

“That’s different.”

Cain looked back up the sidewalk. It was about a hundred feet to what used to be the front door of Fonteroy’s.

“We’d been typing all morning. In ’eighty-nine, in the Richmond station, we were still using typewriters and carbon paper. We hadn’t gotten a decent run in a while, and this was just around the corner. So we got in our car and came over.”

“You found her?”

“It took some poking around—she was hiding behind the dumpsters. Small, like a mouse, and way back there in the alley. Naked as a baby and drugged out of her skull. Pretty girl, though. Blond and good-looking. And holding a scalpel with blood on the blade.”

“What’d you do?”

“My partner tackled her, and I got the scalpel. Then we put a blanket around her and brought her to the car. And don’t get any ideas. This was right after all the problems with the vice squad in North Beach. So we did it by the book—got on the radio, said we were transporting a female.”

“Then you gave your odometer reading,” Cain said.

“That’s still in the manual?”

“Same deal,” Cain said. “No wandering around when you’ve got a lady in the back.”

“Absolutely no wandering. We took her to the emergency room at UCSF. Gave our odometer again when we got there. Two miles—no detours.”

“And her story was what?”

“We never figured it out,” MacDowell said. “The caller said she was a 647b, but she wasn’t anyone we knew. She was a foreigner. European, I guess. Latvian, Estonian. Something like that. They had to get a translator, but even then we couldn’t make sense of it.”

“She was drugged?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” MacDowell said. “She had red welts when we picked her up, and by the time we got her to the hospital, they’d turned to bruises. Handprints on her wrists, her neck.”

“She was that drugged, and someone saw her running?”

“Her motor skills weren’t impaired,” MacDowell said. “She could run, she could swing that blade. She nearly kicked out the car window.”

“But what?”

“It was her mind that was gone. She didn’t know her name, what year it was. She was scared out of her skin—clawing at herself. But she didn’t know what she was scared of. Whatever she’d taken, it wiped her mind clean.”

“They do a rape exam?”

“First thing—but it was inconclusive. If you’d gotten this today, you’d have checked under her fingernails, see if she fought back and got a piece of him. But we were just getting into DNA back then, and it was only being used in the big cases. The headliners.”

“How long was she at the hospital?”

“It took her a day and half just to come down from the drugs—”

Cain started to ask a question but MacDowell waved it away and answered it.

“—they never figured out what it was. She slept a lot. When she was awake, they’d call me and I’d come with the translator and try to talk.”

“And nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“She didn’t remember, or she didn’t want to say?”