The Dark Room(76)

“She’s upstairs,” he said. “In the bathroom. Hiding under the sink where I found her.”

“She’s lucky,” Nagata said. “That’s twice now.”

“I’m not taking another chance with her,” Cain said. “Not like this. She can’t live this way. Have your men check the whole thing again. I still haven’t gone in the basement or the garage.”

He started to go back into the house.

“Cain—”

“We’ll talk in the living room,” Cain said. “You and Frank and me.”

But before he talked to Nagata, he went upstairs. He took clothes from her closet and brought them into the bathroom. He shut the door, then rolled up the bloody bath mat and set it aside. He used the ruined hand towel to clean up the rest of the blood from the wall and the countertop, and then he sat down in front of the cabinet and opened the doors.

Lucy looked out at him, her eyes the color of wet slate.

“I’ll help you out of there,” he said.

She reached for his hand and he helped lift her from behind the drainpipe and out of the cabinet. He pulled her onto his lap and reached into the cabinet again for a clean towel to put around her. She was shivering with cold or fear, and her skin was covered in goose bumps.

“He wasn’t looking for you,” Cain said. “He was looking for me.”

She put her arms around him and held him tightly.

“This won’t happen again,” he said. “I promise you that.”

“What do we do?” she whispered. “We can’t stay here, can we?”

“We can’t. We won’t.”

“I saw him,” she said. “Through the crack in the doors.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was tall. And hurt. Bleeding all down his leg.”

“Did you see his face?”

“He was too tall,” she said. She was whispering into the side of his neck. “He stood right here. He was throwing things. I saw his hand—the only skin I saw. He was white. I thought he’d open the cabinet and find me. I was sure he’d find me.”

He held on to her, not wanting to press her with any more questions, but knowing he had to.

“Did it sound like it was just the one guy, or did he have someone else?”

“Just one.”

If there had been two, they would have talked to each other, and she would have heard them. And even if they hadn’t talked, their footsteps would have given them away.

“How long between when he left and when I came home?”

“Not long,” she said.

He waited for her to go on, for her to play the memory back and answer his question with precision. She had a perfect sense of time and cadence, knew the length of every note and every rest. At the Ashbury Heights Elementary trial, she had taken the stand before Matt Redding, and Cain had been sitting at the prosecution’s table, watching. The cross-examination turned on her ability to recall the timing of shots in a span of five minutes. How long had she spent kneeling under the stairs, using her body to shield the twenty children she’d silently gathered and rushed into that crawlspace? When, exactly, did she put her hand over the crying boy’s mouth, clamping so hard to silence him that his lips bled onto her palm and he passed out in her arms?

Lucy was tapping her finger against his back, measuring her time in the dark.

“He left and went down the stairs,” Lucy said. “And then you came in. Two and a half minutes.”

From downstairs, Nagata’s men began to call out as they’d cleared the basement and the garage. Through the bathroom window, Cain heard another officer in the back garden. The blood tracked out the basement door, through the flower beds, and over the back fence. Then Nagata was on the radio, asking for backup, every available unit. She wanted to saturate the avenues, go door-to-door. She needed a CHP helicopter to sweep from above with a searchlight; someone needed to bring dogs.

Cain held Lucy back from him so he could see her face.

“Can you get dressed?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got to talk to Nagata,” Cain said. “I want you to pack a bag. Whatever you need.”

“For how long?”

“A week, to start.”

She nodded, then used his shoulders to push herself up.



When he came downstairs, Fischer was sitting at the dining room table with Nagata and Frank Lee. A department photographer was setting up lights in the music room to take pictures of the blood-stamped sheet music spread across the floor. Sumida came in the front door, nodded to Cain, and led a team of three technicians down to the basement. Red and blue lights pulsed through the open door and the windows. There was probably half a liter of blood in the house and outside. Plenty for CSI to work with, but they wouldn’t get anywhere if the tall kid’s DNA hadn’t already been uploaded to a searchable database.

Cain pulled out the chair across from Nagata and sat.

“Who shot him—Chun or Grassley?”

“We don’t know,” she said.

“How is it possible you don’t know that?”

“Because he took their weapons,” Nagata said. “There was one forty-caliber casing in the bedroom. So one of them got off a shot, but we don’t know which.”