The Dark Room(89)

He shut the door and answered the call. It was from a blocked number.

“Hello?”

“I’m calling for DI Gavin Cain.”

A man’s deep voice. He sounded older than Cain, in his sixties at least. And he had an English accent.

“DI?”

“Sorry—Detective Gavin Cain.”

“Inspector Cain,” he said. “This is San Francisco you’re calling.”

“All right.”

“Who is this?”

“You and the FBI agent, Fischer, sent an email to the Missing Persons Bureau. It found its way to me.”

Cain sat on the edge of the tub. When they’d sent the email to the U.K., they thought they might get a hit. But they’d never imagined it would come so quickly. It had taken just over twelve hours.

“You’re in the U.K.,” Cain said. He was covering his mouth with his hand, and whispering. “Scotland Yard? The Metropolitan Police?”

“I was with the Met back then, but now I’m somewhere else. I do the same sorts of things now as I did back then, but with a bigger budget,” the man said. “Which means I have more reasons to be careful. I’ll only have this conversation face to face. How soon can you come?”

“I don’t even know where you are.”

“London.”

“Or who you are.”

“I know who your girl is,” the man said. “Which is what matters. I can tell you her name. I can tell you why she was in San Francisco.”

Cain wished he could record the call, that he had the ability to trace it. But he was half awake and whispering in a bathroom, and he wasn’t even sure his phone had enough battery to finish the conversation. It was already making warning tones. It might die at any second.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want to bring her home,” the man said. “And I want to know what happened to her.”

“I’m not getting on a plane,” Cain said. “All I’ve got is a thirty-year-old dead body, is what you think. I can drop everything and go to London because you tell me to.”

“Look—”

“You’ve got no idea how much other shit is going on right now. No fucking idea. I am not getting on a plane. Sir.”

“It’s true—I’ve no idea,” the man said. “But if you want to know about the girl, I’m the man who can tell you.”

“You’re talking to me right now.”

“Not on the phone—if you’re keeping up with the papers, you must understand.”

“If you want to meet, then come here.”

“What I’m going to tell you, I can’t say in California.”

“Because I could arrest you.”

“And I can’t risk that.”

“Then think of a place where that’s off the table,” Cain said. “You can figure one out.”

The line was silent for nearly thirty seconds. When the man spoke again, his voice wasn’t nearly so confident.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said. “There’s an afternoon flight—”

Cain’s phone died. He sat on the tub and looked at its black screen.



Ten minutes later, he was in the Coast Guard café with his briefcase and the murder book. Fischer’s plane was probably coming down through the clouds, descending toward Washington. There was no way to contact her, and no way to reach the man from London. Instead, he poured a cup of coffee from the all-night urn and found a table close to a wall outlet. He took the phone’s charger from his briefcase and plugged it in, then opened the Grizzly Peak murder book and flipped a third of the way through it, to the autopsy reports.

There had been five men in the house, but only three of them had ever been identified. The medical examiner made those IDs with partial dental records, which matched three Berkeley juniors who’d gone missing. The other two bodies were older men, in their thirties or forties, but the medical examiner found nothing on them. There was no national database of dental records; those were only available if a family turned them over to the police and the police had uploaded them into a missing persons database. The conclusion was obvious. If these dead men had families, they weren’t especially concerned about finding them. At the time, in 1989, there’d been no DNA testing done. As John MacDowell had said, back then DNA was only for the celebrity cases. The headliners. But as far as Cain could tell, no one had ever gone back later and tried it.

That meant two of the bodies from the rubble had always been mystery men.

All five corpses were found with their hands bound behind their backs with heavy-gauge wire. There were possible gunshot wounds laterally across the men’s throats, but it was hard for the medical examiner to be sure. If there had been bullets, they’d passed through soft tissue and missed any bone. After the fire, there wasn’t much soft tissue left. It was all speculation from that point. The medical examiner found trace entry wounds, possible gunpowder stippling from a point-blank shot. He guessed the men had been shot, but that’s all it was: a guess. If he was right, then the killer’s intent was clear enough. Bind them so they couldn’t leave, and shoot out their throats so they couldn’t scream. The fire would take care of the rest.

He looked to his left. A Coast Guard enlistee carrying his breakfast on a tray was staring openly at the murder book. The page was a black-and-white photograph, a burnt corpse on an autopsy table. He closed the cover but kept his finger between the pages like a bookmark.