The Dark Room(73)

“Did you ever ask Harry about his tattoo?” Cain asked. “The Pi Kappa Kappa tattoo?”

“It was just something he got in college. A fraternity he joined for a while.”

“Just a while?”

“He quit. He said after a couple years of partying, he finally got to know the guys. And he didn’t like them.”

“What do you mean, he didn’t like them?” Cain asked.

“He said they scared him,” Mona said. “He said they were bad news.”

Cain caught Fischer’s eyes, and he knew they were both thinking the same thing. Angela Chun’s witness, the doctor up in Marin County, had said something similar. He’d told Chun that the Pi Kappa Kappa brothers had given him the creeps.

“Then why didn’t he get that tattoo removed?” Cain asked. “It’s not like he couldn’t afford it.”

“I don’t know,” Mona said. “I never asked.”

“About that cash,” Fischer said. “Does this room have a safe?”

“In the bedroom.”

“You’ll want to put it in there, probably.”

Fischer laid the briefcase down and opened it. She began lifting out the bundled bills, setting them on the coffee table. The field office in L.A. must have repackaged them after scanning the serial numbers. Now the stacks were held together with color-coded currency straps. There were twenty-two bundles, each holding ten thousand dollars. Fischer closed the briefcase and set it on the floor next to her chair.

“What is that?” Mona asked.

“Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

“And it was Harry’s?”

“He withdrew it from some of your banks last week,” Fischer said. “We don’t know why.”

“Neither do I.”

“These were joint accounts,” Fischer said. “Yours and his. And you’re in the will. So this is yours.”

“Okay.”

Fischer handed Mona a receipt. She must have had it written up by the same federal prosecutor she’d used for the last one.

“I need you to sign this, to acknowledge you received it from me. You can count the money first, if you want. We can wait.”

“I don’t need to count it.”

Fischer gave Mona a pen, and she sat up enough to scrawl a signature across the bottom of the page. Alexa watched from behind the rim of her glass. She had taken her phone and put it behind her.

“You don’t know why he took it out?” Cain asked. “No idea?”

“None.”

He took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He looked at it, reading through the list again, and then looked up. Mona and Alexa were watching him. He handed the sheet to Mona.

“This is a copy of a document we found in his safe,” Cain said. “With the cash.”

“Three addresses,” Mona said. “Some dates.”

“Those are banks in Chinatown,” Cain said. “Three banks in three days. Does that mean anything to you?”

Mona looked at the page again, her eyes flicking back and forth as she read the three entries. In his pocket, his phone began to ring again, and he ignored it.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I don’t know what it is.”

“But that’s Harry’s writing?”

“It’s his.”

Fischer stood up, the empty briefcase in her hand. She looked at the table.

“Put that in the safe,” she said. “Before you go to sleep tonight. And then tomorrow, go put it back in the bank.”

Mona nodded, but she wasn’t looking at Fischer. She leaned across to the bottle of Maker’s Mark and pulled the cork out. She poured herself a drink, then pushed the bottle toward her daughter.





26


HE WAS AT a red light behind the Century Theater on Mission Street, watching a crowd of moviegoers cross from the theater to the parking garage. The light turned green but the street was still blocked, and as he was waiting for the stragglers to make their way across, his phone rang again.

Nagata’s name lit the screen.

He’d forgotten her other calls, had been too focused on Mona’s answers and Alexa’s furtive interest in her phone. He answered on speaker and dropped the phone into the console between the seats.

“This is Cain.”

“And thank god,” she said. She was out of breath. Men were shouting in the background. “Where are you?”

“On Mission, going home.”

“Then I’ll wait for you here.”

“Where are you?”

“Standing in your apartment.”

“My apartment? In Daly City?”

“You don’t really live here, do you?” she said. “That’s why it’s half packed up.”

“What are you doing in my apartment, Lieutenant Nagata?”

“You didn’t answer your phone. So we thought—”

“What happened?”

“Grassley and Chun. About an hour ago, they—it looks like maybe they were seeing each other. That’s why we found them the way—”

“You’re not making any sense,” Cain said. He pulled to the curb next to the Hotel Pickwick. A barefooted man with a bottle of wine crossed the street in front of him and stood a second in his headlights to take a drink. “Start from the beginning.”