The Dark Room(82)

“Okay.”

“Then he started worrying about it,” Cain said. “And he got especially worried after a different girl got away—the one MacDowell found in the alley behind the funeral home. Which meant the fire at the Grizzly Peak frat house was convenient. Everyone who died that night was probably there when the photographs got taken.”

“You think Castelli set that fire?”

“You asked me to tell a story that puts everything together,” Cain said. “That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t know if it’s true or not—it just fits.”

“Go on.”

“So Castelli gets on with his life. He goes to London and does some consulting. When his dad loses the ambassadorship, he comes back to California and gets his MBA. Things are looking up after that, and he’s in San Jose making real money.”

“And then Lester Fennimore comes along,” Fischer said. “His old frat brother.”

“Maybe he wants to talk to Castelli about the girl, or the fire.”

“Or both.”

“So Castelli agrees to meet him,” Cain said. “They want a quiet spot—Castle Rock State Park fits the bill. Especially after dark. But Castelli doesn’t go there to talk. He’s got his thirty-eight, and either he’s wearing gloves or he brought a rag to wipe everything down.”

“Then who’s the blackmailer?” Fischer asked. “And why now?”

“Well, it wasn’t really blackmail,” Cain said. “Castelli thought the same thing. They weren’t asking for money. They were pressuring him to kill himself—which might’ve just been cover for a plan to kill him. But what if before that, they’d been shaking him down for years?”

“The money in his safe,” Fischer said. “You think he was going to pay it to them. But then something changed, and they just wanted him dead.”

“What changed was me,” Cain said. “I got the exhumation order. And then the secret they’d been holding over him all this time was about to come into the open. They wanted Castelli dead before we could arrest him and make him talk.”

“But who are they?”

“If we’re right,” Cain said, “not everyone who knew about the pictures died in the Grizzly Peak fire. Lester Fennimore lived to the late 1990s. There could be others.”

“So you think it’s a Pi Kappa Kappa brother.”

Cain nodded.

“I think that’s what got Grassley killed, what put Chun in the hospital—she was out there, in Berkeley, asking about Pi Kappa Kappa. Someone got scared and decided to shut us down.”



At nine o’clock, they buzzed into the secure area behind the reception desk in the ME suite, and soon he was standing next to Rachel Levy in front of a portable cold storage chamber, a quad unit that held four bodies. The door on the top right was Grassley’s compartment. Cain looked behind him and nodded to Nagata. Then he took the evidence key from Dr. Levy and unlocked the chamber. He opened the door and rolled the cadaver tray out on its sliders. He and Jim Braun took the head, and Dr. Levy and Frank Lee took the feet. They moved Grassley’s tray onto the cart and rolled him into the autopsy suite.

Cain stood back with Nagata and Fischer and watched Dr. Braun pull the sheet off. The natural instinct, the human impulse, would be to turn away from the sight of his dead friend. But when the sheet came off, Cain didn’t even let himself blink.

Grassley was naked, his skin pale with death. His mouth was open and his tongue bulged out, as if he’d been choking for air as he died. His throat was cut from ear to ear, a toothless second mouth that opened beneath his chin. One of the morgue assistants had washed the body already, and the only blood was around the wound itself. The edges were clean, the layers of tissue visible. Cain didn’t need Dr. Levy to tell him that it had been an unusually sharp blade.

Next to him, Lieutenant Nagata took his hand, gripping it hard. He pressed back, and didn’t let go, but never took his eyes from Grassley. Dr. Levy was speaking into her hanging microphone, but he wasn’t listening. He looked at Grassley’s hands. There were no cuts or bruises on the knuckles, no blade slashes on his forearms or outer wrists. He hadn’t thrown any punches, hadn’t picked up a defensive wound fending off the knife. But on the right side of his neck, and on his shoulder, there were dozens of small cuts. Most of them had barely gone deep enough to draw blood.

Cain let go of Nagata’s hand and stepped around so that he was standing behind Grassley’s head.

“What are these?” he said, interrupting Dr. Levy’s narration of the surface examination.

She stepped back, then nodded at Jim Braun. He hit a switch on the wall, which paused the recorder.

“What were you pointing to?”

Cain pointed again at the clusters of blade marks on Grassley’s neck. Frank Lee came around and studied the cuts. He wrote something in his notebook, then flipped the page.

“These aren’t from a fight. They’re too shallow,” Frank Lee said. “And look at them—they’re parallel. All the blade marks are side by side.”

Grassley was Frank’s case now. They would pursue their investigations separately, and if they came together and landed on the same person, so much the better.

“Superficial pressure cuts,” Dr. Levy said.