The Dark Room(70)

“So they might have known each other?”

“Oh, they definitely knew each other. Go to the autopsy photos. The third one.”

Cain dug into the documents, flipping through pages of interview notes and laboratory reports until he came to the autopsy. The first photograph showed Lester Fennimore on the steel table. He lay naked on his back, eyes open in dead surprise. Four gunshot wounds were scattered on the right side of his chest. A fifth bullet had smashed his jaw and come out through his left cheek. Cain turned the page. There was a close-up of Fennimore’s face. He’d probably been a handsome man. Short dark hair and green eyes. There were healed scars on his left ear and on his throat, but they didn’t detract from him overall.

He turned the page. The coroner had turned Fennimore over to photograph his back. There was another bullet wound in his spine. It must have been the last shot, fired after he’d fallen into the steering wheel.

“You get to it?”

“Yeah, I see it,” Cain said.

He was looking at a tattoo on Lester Fennimore’s right shoulder. Each Greek letter was an inch across. The artist had inked them vertically, following the inside edge of Fennimore’s scapula.



Π

Κ

Κ





“He was Pi Kappa Kappa,” Fischer said. “They were frat brothers.”

Cain stared at the dead man’s tattoo. He fumbled for his briefcase, clicked it open, and took out his copy of the blackmailer’s second set of photographs. The man on top of the girl had never shown his face to the camera. There was just his back. Broad shoulders and short, dark hair. The tattoo trailing his shoulder blade. It could have been Castelli; it could have been Lester Fennimore.

“Yesterday, Chun came up with something,” he said. “Fennimore isn’t the only Pi Kappa Kappa who got killed—there were five others in 1989.”

“What?”

He told her about the house on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, the arson and the five bodies that’d been found in the rubble. By now, Chun should have copied Berkeley PD’s murder book on the case. If there was a file on Pi Kappa Kappa, she’d have that, too.

“What do you think?” Cain asked.

From her end of the line, he could hear the whine of the jet’s engines. She thought about it for so long that he thought he’d lost her.

“I think this is bigger than we thought,” she finally said. “It goes deeper than we thought. We need to find that girl.”

“I know it,” Cain said. “I’m working on it.”

He was pretty sure the girl was in a freezer, seven floors beneath him. Henry Newcomb might be able to point the way by tomorrow, and if he did, then he would have to consider coming clean to Fischer about what he’d found.

“What about the money?” he asked. “What’d you find?”

“It was nothing,” Fischer said. “No idea what he meant to do with it, but he’d withdrawn it from his savings account last week. His and Mona’s.”

“What bank?” Cain asked.

There was a pause while Fischer went into her notes.

“Chase, on McAllister and Van Ness. Right across from City Hall.”

“That wasn’t on the list.”

“Which list?”

“In the safe, with the cash—we found a scrap of paper with the names and addresses of banks. But they were all in Chinatown. If he took the cash out of Chase, we still don’t know what the list was for.”

“Maybe it’s where he was going to put it,” Fischer said.

“Either way, we’ll have to give it back to Mona Castelli,” Cain said. “It’s hers unless you’ve got a reason we need to hold on to it.”

“We give it back—there aren’t any grounds for civil forfeiture, and we know the money came out of their joint account. But think what else you want to ask her when we do it,” Fischer said. “I land in an hour.”

“I’ll meet you in her lobby.”

“Fine.”

He hung up and turned back to the report. Lester Fennimore. Shot to death by Castelli’s gun sometime after ten o’clock on June 28, 1998. He was sitting in his red Cadillac Eldorado on the loneliest stretch of Skyline Boulevard in Santa Cruz County. Cain looked at the photographs. The car in the lot, rain puddled up in the tire tracks. A measuring tape in the mud, showing the width of the wheelbase. The driver’s-side window, blood spattered and punctured by the bullet that had gone through Fennimore’s cheek.

An investigator had interviewed Fennimore’s wife. Cain scanned the handwritten notes. They lived in Walnut Creek; their daughter had just turned two. Mrs. Fennimore couldn’t explain what her husband had been doing in Castle Rock State Park, seventy miles from their house. He’d just lost his job. There was nowhere he had to be, no one he had to meet. She’d gone to bed at eight o’clock, and he’d been home. Sitting in the living room, drinking a beer and watching TV. He must have left as soon as she’d gone to sleep and driven south in a hurry. There was no time in the chronology for any detours, for any aimless wandering. He’d arrived in the trailhead parking lot before ten, before the rain. The dirt under the Cadillac was dry. He’d been waiting in the parking lot for his killer. He was there on business secret enough that he’d kept it from his wife.