The Dark Room(81)

The man had done a lot more than hurt the children and the teachers at Ashbury Heights. He’d been shooting to kill. And afterward, when he’d run out of bullets, he’d walked through a shattered window and across the playground. He’d hopped a low chainlink fence and then disappeared. The original inspectors hadn’t gotten anywhere, and the worst crime in the city’s memory landed on Cain’s desk as a cold case. He’d taken the grainy security footage to Menlo Park and met Matt Redding in his threadbare office. In less than a week, he was knocking on Lucy’s door with Nagata, the district attorney, and a picture of the guy cuffed to a hospital bed.

But he didn’t need to go into all that with this kid, this aspiring homicide inspector.

“You got him, though,” the boy said. “You finally found him, and you shot him.”

“That’s right.”

“And what did he do?”

“He cried out, fell down. He tried to grab his gun off the floor, but before he could, I rolled him over and cuffed him.”

“That’s what I want to do,” the boy said. “Just like that.”



Henry finally came down and sent the boys back upstairs, and Cain heard a television turn on up there. Then the three of them sat down in the living room. Henry was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe, and his hair stuck out above his ears. He hadn’t shaved in at least three days.

“I haven’t written it up yet,” he said. “It was a late night.”

“You got time in a lab.”

“I did. I started with the girl,” Henry said. “You wanted to know what she had in her system when she died. You ever heard of a drug called Thrallinex? It came off the market before it ever made much of a name for itself.”

Fischer looked at Cain.

“It’s what you were looking for,” Henry said. “Isn’t it?”

“They took a picture of her, before she went into the coffin. They were about to force-feed her a dozen tablets of Thrallinex, the ten-milligram pills. Does that sound about right?”

“It fits.”

“What about Castelli?”

“That was a lot easier. If he hadn’t shot himself, he might’ve died from the alcohol and the zolpidem tartrate—”

“Zolpidem what?” Fischer asked.

“—otherwise known as Ambien,” Henry said. He looked at Cain. “What was it he liked to drink?”

“Maker’s Mark,” Cain said.

“That’s right,” Henry said. “Now I remember.”

Castelli had appointed Henry, and then after things had gone south for Henry, he’d asked for his resignation. But Henry had been in Castelli’s orbit long enough that he would have seen the man drink.

“How loaded was he?” Cain asked.

“He’d had enough to do the job without the gun—it’s a wonder he was conscious to pull the trigger.”

“It’s a wonder,” Cain said. He looked at Fischer. “Isn’t it?”

“Sure.”

“And the last part?” Cain asked. “The DNA?”

“That tied it all together,” Henry said. “The samples you gave me—you had an entire family in the cooler. The mother, who suffocated in a casket. The father, who shot himself in the head. And their child—it was a girl, if you care—who died in the womb.”

“So it was his.”

“It was his.”

“You can write it up for me?”

“Sure, but what for? You can’t use it anywhere. And the labs you’re waiting on, they’ll tell you the same thing when they get around to it.”

“All right,” Cain said. He stood up, and so did Fischer. “Forget we came here.”

“I will, after I send you my bill.”





30


THEY ARRIVED AT the station an hour ahead of the autopsy, so he took Fischer up to the sixth floor, and they went into his office. Grassley had left a stack of files on his chair, and Cain put them on the floor so Fischer could sit.

“You’ve got a theory,” Fischer said. “You’ve known about the girl longer than me, so you’re a step ahead. Tell me a story that makes all of it fit.”

Cain swiveled toward the window and twisted the rod that worked the blinds, to shut out the gray daylight.

“It has to start with Castelli getting caught up with Pi Kappa Kappa,” Cain said. “By the time he was a pledge, they’d gone underground. They must have been into something.”

“The skin trade,” Fischer said. “Human traffic.”

“Maybe the girl was someone they wanted to punish. She broke a rule, she tried to break free. They made it into a party and took pictures.”

“But you’ve got to account for at least eight weeks between the rape and the burial,” Fischer said. “She was a couple months along with his baby. Unless the night in the pictures wasn’t his first time with her, or it was someone else in the shots.”

“Maybe he kept her chained to the bed for eight weeks. The DNA says it was his baby,” Cain said. “We’ve got a picture of a man raping her, and Melissa Montgomery—who’s seen him naked—couldn’t rule him out. So let’s say it was him, and let’s say he helped put her in the casket.”