The Dark Room(69)

24


THEY HAD LUNCH at the Western and then headed back to Stinson Beach. MacDowell made it halfway across the bridge before falling asleep; he stayed out until they rolled to a stop in his daughter’s driveway. Cain got out and helped MacDowell up the stairs.

At the landing, MacDowell shook his hand and let himself in to the little apartment. Cain stood a moment, looking out at the ocean. It was three o’clock, and there was no fog at all. The horizon was fifteen, twenty miles out, but he didn’t see any gray whales. Maybe they’d already gone south. He went back down to the car, wondering what the daughter was thinking, keeping a ninety-two-year-old man up a set of steps like that. Why not let him live in the main house? For that matter, why not let him have a book or two?

He backed out of the driveway and then called Lucy. She answered on the second ring.

“Gavin?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine—I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“I might take a walk again. Or a nap. I can’t decide.”

“Either sounds good.”

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“If it’s late, I’ll take a nap now. Then I’ll be awake when you get back.”

“Do that.”

“So you’ll be late, is what you’re saying.”

“I’ll be late.”



There was traffic coming back, and he didn’t reach his desk until five thirty. It was already dark. He called Grassley and got no answer, then tried Chun and got the same. There was a folder on his chair, routed upstairs from the ballistics lab. It was two inches thick. Most reports were just a single page. He went to the kitchenette for a cup of coffee, then came back and opened the report. It took him ten seconds to scan the first two pages, and by the end of them, he’d forgotten all about his coffee.

He flipped the page and kept reading, reaching for his phone without looking up. He left messages for Chun and Grassley, then remembered Fischer. She answered right away.

“Cain,” she said. She spoke in a hurried whisper. “I’m about to get on a plane—I’m coming back from L.A. The field office here is the best in the country at tracing currency, so I came down with Castelli’s cash. What’s up?”

“I’m sitting here looking at the ballistics report and you’re not going to believe it.”

“Try me.”

“You remember the bullet in the dictionary?”

“The perfect bullet.”

“They matched it to the gun. So then they ran it on the system, just to see. They got a hit.”

“You’re serious.”

“It’s linked to an unsolved homicide.”

“When?”

“October 15, 1998.”

“We’re talking about Castelli’s gun,” Fischer said. “The thirty-eight S and W that was under the desk.”

“That gun.”

“We know he owned it in 1998?”

“He registered it in 1991. Maybe when he inherited it.”

“Who was the victim?” Fischer asked. “And where was this?”

“I haven’t gotten there—but it’s all here.”

He thumbed the stack and saw handwritten notes, color photographs. A shot of tire tracks in dark mud. A red Cadillac in a dirt parking lot, tall trees behind it.

“You’ve got a hard copy?”

“Yeah.”

“Scan it and email me,” she said. “If you can do it in ten minutes, I’ll read it in the air.”

“All right.”

“Shit, Cain,” she said.

“I know.”

He hung up and took the report with him, still reading as he went through the cubicle farm to the copy room. He loaded the file into the feed tray and ran it through the scanner, then emailed it from his phone to Fischer. He went back to his office, ignoring the three people who said hello. He shut his door, then locked it.



The guy’s name was Lester Fennimore.

A state park ranger found his 1997 Cadillac Eldorado at midnight in a trailhead parking lot in Castle Rock State Park. Lester Fennimore was in the driver’s seat, his face resting on the steering wheel. He’d been shot six times in his right side, as if the shooter had been sitting in the passenger seat. It had rained at ten o’clock, and there were two sets of tire tracks in the parking lot. One was from the Cadillac coming in. The other must have been the shooter’s car. It had pulled up alongside the Cadillac, then backed out to leave.

Cain pulled up a map on his computer monitor. Castle Rock State Park was twenty-three miles from San Jose. In 1998, Castelli had been living down there, getting rich on startup stock options.

Cain’s phone rang and he grabbed it.

“This is Cain.”

“We might get cut off,” Fischer said. “I’m on board now.”

“You can talk?”

“Government flight, and all to myself. You saw the stuff on Fennimore?”

“Which part?”

“The interview with his widow, the background—he graduated from Cal in ’eighty-nine. So he was a freshman in ’eighty-five.”