The Dark Room(83)

“How’d they get there?”

“Hold a blade against your arm sometime. Press down, but don’t pull it back and forth. We’re not talking about a slicing wound.”

Fischer asked the next question for Cain.

“If a right-handed man was standing behind him, holding a knife on his neck—threatening, waving the blade around and then putting it back—you’d get marks like this?”

“Yes.”

“It was a hostage situation,” Fischer said. “Maybe even a standoff. Chun had the gun, and the guy had Grassley.”

“That must be it,” Frank said. He wrote something else in his notebook. “That’s what happened.”

“Can I start again?” Dr. Levy asked.

Cain nodded to Dr. Braun, and he hit the wall switch to resume the recording. Dr. Levy continued her surface examination, but Cain wasn’t paying attention anymore. There was something about the pressure wounds he didn’t like. They didn’t make sense, didn’t fit some piece of the story he’d been telling Fischer.

He was sure that he’d just hit on something important. But that kind of certainty never lasted long.

“Cain?” Fischer said. “Did you hear her?”

“What?”

“Back up,” she whispered. “She’s going to open him up now.”

He looked at her, not understanding at first. He was too far away from this, grasping too hard at the solution he thought he’d glimpsed. Then he saw Dr. Levy standing over Grassley with the autopsy saw, and he understood. He wasn’t wearing any protective gear. No lab coat over his suit, no safety glasses, no mask. They didn’t want him standing here when Dr. Levy put the blade against Grassley’s navel and started cutting.



When it was over, he went with Nagata and Fischer and they sat on a smoking bench that faced a chainlink fence and the San Francisco County Jail. None of them smoked, but that didn’t matter. They just needed to sit. A strong wind funneled between the jail and the Hall of Justice, and it carried a hard spatter of rain. That didn’t matter either.

“I’d like to go see Chun,” Cain said. “Can you get me in?”

“She’s not out of it yet.”

“But can you get me in?”

“I can try,” Nagata said.

“That’s all I want.”



Mount Sutro loomed behind the UCSF Medical Center, its radio tower cutting through the low clouds that were piling against the heights. They rode the elevator up to the intensive care unit, and Fischer hung back with Cain while Nagata talked to the nurse at the triage desk.

“Three minutes,” Nagata said when she came back. “And just you.”

“All right.”

Cain crossed the hall to Chun’s room and opened the door. She lay on an angled bed. There were intravenous tubes running into a port on her forearm, oxygen tubes in her nose. Catheter lines ran from beneath the blue sheets, and he saw a urine bag hanging from the end of the bed, its contents the color of weak coffee. Her face and head were bandaged, and it looked like half her hair had been shaved off so the doctors could examine her head wound. There was a line of staples and sutures from her left ear to the base of her throat. The vascular surgeon must have gone through the existing knife wounds to repair her damaged carotid artery.

Cain pulled up a chair and sat next to her. He opened his briefcase and took the gunshot residue field kit he’d brought from his office. He opened the package and put on the gloves that were inside it, then ripped open the cotton swab’s foil envelope.

“You hang in there, Angela,” he said. “We need you back.”

He took her right hand and gently swabbed it, getting the webbing between her thumb and forefinger and the backs of her knuckles. He opened the plastic box and put the swab in, and squeezed the ampule of reactive agent, feeling the thin glass break inside the plastic dropper. He dripped the reactant onto the cotton and then closed the box. He held Angela’s hand and waited for the swab to develop. Her skin was cold and there was no reaction at all to his touch. It wasn’t like touching a sleeping woman. He thought of the photographs of the drugged girl, the shape she’d taken after the Thrallinex took her.

When he looked through the lensed lid again a moment later, he saw the fine blue specks that had appeared on the surface of the swab, and he knew what they meant.

“You did just fine, Angela,” he whispered to her. “You got him high in the leg. He’s holed up somewhere, and he’s hurting worse than you.”

When he let go of her hand, her fingers stayed curled in the same position. He had to look at the flickering green line of her pulse on the EKG to be sure she wasn’t dead.



For a moment, in the crowded elevator heading down to the street level, he thought again of the shallow cuts on Grassley’s neck. The gunshot residue on Chun’s right hand, which meant the single .40 caliber round on the floor had come from her gun.

Something didn’t match. He was sure there was a flaw in his story. But once the elevator doors slid open and he’d followed Fischer through the main entrance of the hospital, out into a cold gray noon, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

“Where to now?” Fischer said.

He didn’t know. He wanted to go back to Yerba Buena Island, back to the safe room on the Coast Guard’s fenced-off lot. He wanted to put his arms around Lucy and spend all afternoon watching the wind stir up the bay. But he had to keep up the initiative. They had to keep moving, or they’d sink.