The Dark Room(75)

Now the Pi Kappa Kappa lead was the hottest thing he had going, but it was also the most dangerous. Chun might have run into any number of people today, asking about the fraternity and the fire. She’d have been talking to desk sergeants and detectives in two police departments. She might have gone to the university to see if the dean of students kept a file. Cain didn’t know where she’d been or who she’d seen, but he had to consider this: Someone didn’t like the questions she’d been asking. Somebody waited until she was gone, and then picked up the phone and made a call.

He crossed the street with his gun drawn, pausing at the steps that led up to Lucy’s porch. Her front door was ajar. Blood was tracked on every other step leading up to it. There were treaded footprints, but he couldn’t tell if they were coming or going. Every room of the house facing the street was dark.

Five soundless steps to the porch, the gun in both hands.

He came to the door and slipped sideways through it, then took a breath and looked down. There was blood on the floor, smears of it every four feet. He could hear sirens in the distance now. Nagata was coming with her men, but they were still twenty blocks away. He followed the blood. It tracked through the house to the music room. The French doors stood open, and there was sheet music spread across the floor. The man had stepped on it, had bloodied the score.

Cain went back to the front and climbed the stairs. There was blood there, too. Chun or Grassley must have fought. One of them must have managed a shot, or gotten the knife and used it to open up the guy’s leg. Now his right shoe was full of blood, and he was tracking it everywhere he went. At the upstairs landing, the prints went back and forth down the hallway. In and out of the bedrooms, the bathroom.

The master bedroom was lit by the streetlamp outside. A long bar of light angled through the gap in the curtains and fell across the floor. The bed was unmade. The closet door was open. There was blood beneath the window, a small pool of it. He must have stood there a while, looking down at the street.

Maybe she had gone out, had been on one of her exploratory walks. He knelt at the foot of the bed and shone his flashlight underneath it. All he saw was the bare floor, the molding along the back wall under the head of their bed.

“Lucy?”

He stood and went to the closet. Outside, the sirens were getting louder. They were coming down Fulton, a deep phalanx of patrol cars racing toward him. He flicked on the closet light.

“Lucy?”

With his free hand, he checked behind the hanging clothes, the long dresses and the heavy coats. He felt nothing but the cedar-planked wall. He turned off the light, then left the bedroom and went down the hall. He cleared the empty guest bedroom and his closet. The third bedroom, which faced out over the back garden, was empty.

If she hadn’t been on a walk, and if she wasn’t in the house now, there was only one possibility. But he couldn’t think about that yet. He wouldn’t let himself until he finished checking the house.

Coming into the bathroom, he immediately felt a change in temperature. It was warmer in here, and he could smell the bath water. He switched on his flashlight again. The tub was full, steam still rising from it. There was a bottle of shampoo floating on the water’s surface. The floor was wet and the white bathmat was stained red.

She hadn’t been on a walk.

She’d been in the bath, and he’d come in on her. He had shoved through the door and found her, here, where she was the most vulnerable, where— “Gavin?”

It was just a whisper, from behind him. He turned around. Now he was facing the sink, the mirror behind it so fogged up from the bathwater that his own image was just a blur. Everything that had been on the counter around the basin had been knocked to the floor. There was blood on the wall, blood on the hand towel hanging in the chrome ring by the door.

But the voice had come from inside the room.

He crouched at the cabinet beneath the sink and pulled the two doors open. He wouldn’t have thought Lucy could fit in here. Yet there she was, curled behind the sink’s U-bend drain.

She blinked against the flashlight beam, then reached for his hand.

He holstered his gun. She was naked, and still wet from the bath. But there was no blood on her at all. She reached for his hand, squeezing his fingers so hard it hurt.

“Gavin—is he gone?”

“You can come out of there,” he said. “But stay in this room.”

She didn’t move.

“Lucy—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He let go of her hand and got his phone. Nagata answered on the first ring. He already knew where she was. The sirens were right outside the house.





27


HE TURNED ON the porch light and stood outside at the top of the steps with his badge in his left hand as the line of patrol cars came down the hill and stopped in front of the house. Nagata came out first. Eight other officers followed her. There was Frank Lee, from the Homicide Detail, and the rest of them were patrol officers he didn’t recognize. None of them had his gun drawn, which meant Nagata must have gotten on the radio as soon as she’d hung up with him.

“There’s blood,” a young cop said.

“I see it,” she said. “Wait down here.”

She came up the stairs, avoiding the bloody footprints, and stood with Cain near the door. She looked into the house, then at Cain.