The Dark Room(90)

“Sorry, sir. Caught my eye.”

“These do that.”

He opened the binder again and tried to catch hold of his thoughts before he lost them. Castelli hadn’t registered his gun until 1991, two years after the Grizzly Peak fire. But even if he’d owned the gun then, there was no consistency with the way Lester Fennimore had died. That had been wild, indiscriminate shooting. The shooter had fired all six shots, striking Fennimore’s face and torso. That was blind firing. All the hallmarks of fear and panic. The man who’d set the Grizzly Peak fire was more calculating. He’d taken the time to bind his victims, had shot each one only once. It made no sense that someone who could kill five people so methodically in 1989 would make such a mess of a single murder in 1998.

There had to be two different shooters. He poured a packet of powdered creamer into his coffee and drank the first few sips without thinking much of anything. Sometimes a blank mind had the space to make a leap, as though it needed the room to get a running start.

Lester Fennimore.

Something about him, something Cain had seen the first night he’d learned the man’s name, sitting in his half-dark office and talking to Fischer as she flew out of Los Angeles. He took the ballistics report out of his briefcase, the one with Fennimore’s autopsy attached. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for but knew exactly which picture he needed. It was the initial headshot, from the shoulders up. He flipped through the report until he found it, and then he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and held the page close so that he could study it.

After a minute, he was sure he knew what he was looking at, but he went to the text anyway. He found the coroner’s surface examination. He usually just skimmed these, because they were routine. This time, he read it word for word, and three-quarters of the way through, the coroner verified what the picture clearly showed.



. . . there are matching scars on either side of the laryngeal prominence. Each scar is a circular indentation, approximately 1/4 inch in diameter, consistent with a well-healed previous gunshot wound. Decedent’s left ear is lightly deformed with scarification consistent with an old burn. Decedent’s medical records do not reflect having ever sought treatment for either a burn or a gunshot. Contacted following the autopsy, the decedent’s widow did not know the origin of these scars. However, she confirmed to this examiner that her husband could not speak above a whisper.

These were healed wounds. This examiner concludes that neither the damage to the voice box, nor the burns on the left ear, contributed in any way . . .





Maybe the Santa Cruz County Coroner was convinced the old scars had nothing to do with Lester Fennimore’s murder, but Cain wasn’t so sure. The man had a Pi Kappa Kappa tattoo on his shoulder, a bullet hole through his larynx, and a half-burned left ear. He’d died in a Cadillac Eldorado, a few model years down the line from the one someone had driven to the English girl’s rape. In 1989, he’d crawled out of the Grizzly Peak fire with his throat shot out, and he’d been a marked man ever since.

By now Cain’s phone was charged enough to use. He went to the SFPD’s secure server and ran a trace on Lester Fennimore’s widow. Her social security number was in the prior investigator’s notes, and with a lead like that, it didn’t take long to find her. She had moved out of Walnut Creek and into a house outside of Mendocino. He found the place on a satellite map and zoomed in on it, but the image was no good. There was just a blur deep in the woods along the North Fork of the Albion River. He wondered how much she’d be willing to tell him about Lester.



He put the key in the ignition and started the engine, then drove Fischer’s car over to the guard booth. He nodded to the man inside, went over the one-way traffic spikes, and then wound through Yerba Buena’s predawn darkness to reach the bridge. It took twenty minutes to get from Yerba Buena to his apartment in Daly City; most of the city was asleep at this time on a Sunday morning.

Nagata must have gotten the landlady to unlock his front door, or one of the men with her knew his way around a set of picking tools, because the jamb wasn’t splintered and the lock slid back without catching. He went in and looked around, and couldn’t tell that Nagata had been in here two nights ago with a squad of men. There were half-packed boxes on the floor. All the clothes were out of the closet and piled on the bed in folded stacks. He stripped off his suit and dropped it in a box, then put on a fresher one. He threw another two changes into a duffel bag before he left again.

He got in Fischer’s car and drove back to the Coast Guard station, and on the way over he called Frank Lee. It was six in the morning, but Frank was awake.

“Gavin, how’re you doing?”

“Holding up.”

“What about Angela?”

“I saw her yesterday—have you been there?”

“Not yet.”

Frank was breathing hard, and wherever he was, it was windy. Cain guessed he’d caught him in the middle of a morning jog.

“Listen,” Cain said. “I’m going to leave town today. There are a couple people in Marin I want to talk to. If I find anything that helps with Grassley and Chun, I’ll call you first. But I think this is just Castelli.”

“Okay.”

“If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow morning, call Agent Fischer.”

“You okay, Cain?”