The Dark Room(74)

“Chun called 911,” Nagata said. “An hour ago. She could barely talk. She called from Grassley’s place. She only got out two words, and then she passed out. Help Cain. That’s it. The EMTs got there before us. The front door was open, so they went up the stairs—”

“Jesus, Nagata.”

“You think I don’t know?” she snapped. “You think I’m just Castelli’s hack, and I don’t get it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s got to be the Castelli case,” Nagata said. Calmer now, or trying hard to be. “It’s the only one you were both on. We figure he followed one of them, then went inside and got both.”

Cain took the phone from his ear and looked around.

The barefoot wino was crossing the intersection again, ducking through the traffic, attracted like a moth to the Chronicle building’s white glow. He held the bottle by its neck, waving it over his head. Chun had called 911 but had passed out. His partner had been there but hadn’t gotten on the line when she dropped the receiver. Cain was cold all over, and dizzy. He had to check the speedometer to make sure the car wasn’t moving.

“Grassley?” he asked.

“There wasn’t anything they could do. For Chun, maybe. They took her to UCSF. All they’d say is there’s a chance.”

“What happened?”

“It wasn’t a gun,” Nagata said. “A knife, for sure. And something else—a bat, a hammer. We don’t know yet. This just happened, and we’ve been looking for you.”

Ahead of him, an endless line of headlights came down Mission Street. He was falling, waiting to land. Trying to understand Nagata’s words. Grassley was gone, and Chun was barely hanging on at UCSF. Someone had left her for dead, but she’d saved just enough of herself to make it to the phone. Her attacker must have been in a hurry. He had somewhere else to be, was so desperate to get there that he didn’t stay around to see if Chun was finished.

“Cain?” Nagata asked. “Cain, did I lose you?”

There’d been a note on his windshield, a phone call to the restaurant’s kitchen. They’d chased the tall kid up California Street, then lost him in the alley behind the Sutter Health medical building. There was only one way the kid could have known where to be with the note. He’d been following Cain all day. But Cain hadn’t been to his apartment in Daly City that day, or any day since the first blackmail letter arrived. He’d been at Lucy’s house. The tall kid had seen all that.

Cain dropped the car into first gear and peeled through the red light, pressing his hand on his horn, clearing the intersection without even checking for cross traffic.

“Cain?” Nagata was shouting. “Cain, what’s going on?”

“If he’d been following me,” Cain said, “he wouldn’t know about my place. He’d know about Lucy’s.”

“Lucy’s your girlfriend.”

“She’s on Twenty-Second Avenue,” Cain said. “Between Fulton and Cabrillo.”

He gave her the address, then slowed as he approached the next intersection. There was nothing coming up Sixth toward him, so he accelerated into the right turn. Whatever Nagata said next was lost to the engine. It was two blocks before he let off the gas, and then he was rolling toward Market at fifty miles an hour, his foot hovering above the brake but not touching it.

“Cain?”

“You got her address?” he said. “You’re coming, with your guys?”

“I’m coming—but, Cain?”

“Say it.”

“I remember that place; we went there. It’s Lucy Bolet, isn’t it? You started dating Lucy Bolet. The pianist, the one who was inside Ashbury Heights Elementary.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, shit, Cain,” she said. “We’re coming.”

“I’ll be there first,” he said. “When you get there, I’ll be inside.”

“Cain—”

He reached to the phone and hung up. Cain shot across Market, the gas pedal flat to the floor. He didn’t even hear the sound of the horns until he was through the intersection, coming into the Tenderloin on Taylor Street at fifty miles an hour.

There was a standstill ahead, a bus stuck in the intersection. The driver stood behind the bus, looking up at the overhead catenary cables. He’d already set out a pair of red flares. Cain was three cars back. He switched on the LED flashers hidden behind his car’s grille and laid his hand on the horn. Then he turned onto the sidewalk, no concern at all for his car’s side-view mirrors and door panels, or for the city’s newly planted trees. Their two-inch trunks, held upright with staked wires, went beneath his front bumper one at a time until he came off the curb and crossed the intersection in the pedestrian walk. He saw one of his hubcaps spin away like a lost coin.

If he was driving like everything depended on it, it was because it did.



Cain stopped opposite Lucy’s house, his car pointed downhill. He’d coasted the last block with the engine off, his headlights killed. He pulled the parking brake and stepped out, leaving the door open so there’d be no sound of it closing. He’d had sixty-two blocks, racing in the dark, to work it out. He’d sent Chun to Berkeley this morning to copy the murder book on the Pi Kappa Kappa fire, to find out what else she could about the underground brotherhood. That was before he’d even known about the unsolved murder of Lester Fennimore.