The Dark Room(9)

4


THE PATROLMAN LEFT him in front of the Hall of Justice at four in the morning. It took him five minutes to pass through security, get a cup of coffee, and reach the sixth-floor office he shared with Grassley. He shut the door behind him, then sat in his chair and looked at his name, written backward, on the frosted-glass window. He took a sip of his coffee and then put the cup on the desk. It was still too hot to drink. They hadn’t painted Grassley’s name on the window yet, but his old partner’s name had been scraped off.

He logged in to his computer, then pulled up the SFPD’s public webpage and clicked through to the gallery of missing persons. There were twelve on the main page, and another thirty in the archives. Half of them could be ruled out right away. He wasn’t looking for a man. And none of the women were anything close to the pictures he’d seen in Castelli’s office. From the missing persons gallery, he went to the collection of unsolved homicides—known victims killed by unknown assailants. There were forty-seven, going back to 1991. He clicked through each picture and dismissed them all.

The last stop was the medical examiner’s website, where he scrolled through the thumbnails of unidentified corpses. Bodies pulled from the alleys behind the Tenderloin’s SRO hotels; bodies drifting back and forth between the pylons along the Embarcadero. Most of them were men, and every one of them looked homeless. Some of the pictures were pencil drawings, and Cain knew they were just approximations. The sketch artist, sitting seven floors below him in the basement, could only guess what their faces might have looked like. A week in the water, a month in a trash pile, and there wasn’t much left.

He hadn’t expected this to be easy. But he’d learned early on that you had to exhaust the simplest options before you committed to anything else. He looked at his watch. His contact in Menlo Park wouldn’t be awake for another four hours. He sent him a text, asking if he could come down. He wouldn’t get any closer to finding the woman until Matt Redding answered. Lucy was surely asleep. But Grassley might be back by now.

He dialed his partner’s number, and Grassley answered after three rings.

“Cain—where are you?”

“Sitting in our office.”

“I got here thirty, forty-five minutes ago.”

“You’re in the morgue?” Cain asked. “Have they started?”

“Shit, Gavin,” Grassley answered. “I’m all by myself. The ME’s not coming in till ten thirty.”

“What about the techs, the ones you rode back with?”

“Those guys? They went home.”

“You’re just sitting with the casket?”

“That’s what you wanted.”

“You’re all right, Grassley,” Cain said. “You know that?”

“They brought it in. They wouldn’t open it without the ME, and I didn’t ask them to. But they put it on the x-ray table. I figured no harm doing that.”

“You figured right.”

“They took the shot, put it up on the screen. Then they took off. Left me looking at it.”

“They locked up and left you?”

“You should come down here,” Grassley said. “See what I’m seeing.”

“Okay.”

“I mean,” Grassley said, “I think I know what it is, but I’m not sure. We never saw this shit where I came from.”

“Grassley—are you okay?”

“This is fucked up.”

Cain left the office and started walking to the elevator. In the three weeks they’d been partners, Grassley had been game for anything. Not that they’d seen much so far, but he’d put up a calm front. A couple shootings, a partial dismemberment.

He’d never heard Grassley sound like this.

“I’m on my way,” Cain said.

“I don’t know about this shit, is all I’m saying.”

“Give me a minute.”

He reached the elevator and hit the button. The car was already there. At this hour,the Hall of Justice was dead. The elevator hadn’t been called away since he’d ridden it up from the lobby.

“I’m about to lose you,” Cain said. “I’ll be right down.”

He hung up and got in the car, then hit the button for the basement.



Cain tapped on the locked door to the medical examiner’s suite of underground offices. The door pushed open and Grassley stepped out of the shadows.

“The lights,” Grassley said. “I can’t turn them back on. Maybe they got a key card, something like that.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Cain still had his flashlight. He took it out, switched it on, and stepped inside. Grassley let the door close behind him and then turned on his own light.

“It’s over here.”

Cain had never been here in the dark. The office used to be open twenty-four hours a day, but it was running short-staffed now.

They went into the main autopsy room.

The stainless-steel tables stood out in their lights and cast stilted shadows up the wall. There was the long sink. Above it, another familiar sight: the hanging-basket produce scales, used to weigh internal organs. Cain let his light slide along the particleboard back wall, where the black-bladed cutting tools hung from hooks like the display in a pawnshop. The cutting shears were from gardening stores; the cleavers from Chinatown shops. There was a hacksaw no different from the one in a plumber’s truck, except for what it had done.