The Dark Room(98)

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. A man saw the pattern and brought it to me. In every instance, the young woman had been gone for weeks before the families came to us. Months, sometimes. Because the girls had said they’d got jobs. That they had to move away to start.”

“What kind of jobs?”

This time, the man did pause.

“We don’t know what they were promised,” he said. “But we know what they got.”

He opened the envelope again and set a flash memory drive on the table next to Cain’s saucer.

“You won’t want to watch this,” he said. “But you’ll probably have to.”

“What is it?”

“You might not have ever thought about this. But it’s obvious, once you start looking into it—back then, after VCRs but before the Internet, there was a lot of money in a certain kind of video.”

“You’re talking about pornography.”

“That word covers a lot of ground. There’s plenty that’s fairly mundane, but then there’s the rest of the spectrum. So many needs to suit, fantasies people can’t say out loud. Everything from simple meanness to open brutality. And here’s another thing you probably never wanted to think about. On the worst of those films—the dark end, so to speak—what you see on the screen isn’t acting. It isn’t consensual.”

“Then what is it?” Cain asked.

“It’s rape. It’s murder. And it’s real.”

“It’s Carolyn Stone on this?”

He was holding out the flash drive. But the old man shook his head.

“It’s an Estonian girl. Katarina Vesik.”

“Who?”

“She was an immigrant, from Tallinn. Her family came over in ’eighty-two, when she was sixteen. She wanted to model, so she was hanging around the agencies, the fashion shops. Trying to get into parties, trying to get noticed. Someone noticed her, I suppose—she went missing in September. Her brother brought us the tape in February of ’eighty-four. There was no telling how long he’d had it, no guessing how he’d come by it—and we worked him hard.”

“But you must have had a hunch.”

“We thought he ordered it from a magazine ad. Or he got it in exchange for something in his own collection—which he would have tossed out before coming to us. We thought he would’ve liked it just fine, the video, except it was his little sister. And it seems like they kept her for a while, made a few others.”

“You saw other videos?” Cain asked.

“Never—but in this one, she’s half starved. Wounds, all over her, that are weeks old. Some of them almost healed.”

“Jesus,” Cain said.

“We said that too. The state she was in—you know it must have taken the brother a while to put it together. He might’ve watched it two or three times.”

Cain looked out the wall and saw the strange symmetry in the way everything had presented itself. The Met and the SFPD had each come into this case because of videos that had landed on their laps. The brother and his snuff-porn tape, John Fonteroy and his dying confession. In the end, the cancerous undertaker hadn’t been able to say what he’d really seen. What he’d been a part of for so long. The guilt was too great to look the camera in its eye and say that he’d seen Carolyn Stone go into the casket alive. He knew how many had come before her and could only guess how many would follow.

“After he came in with the tape—at least we understood what we were looking at. What we had on our hands.”

“This was before you knew about the temporary passports. Before you had any connection to Castelli,” Cain said.

“Well before,” the man said. “Making the connection was old-fashioned police work. Interviewing the girls’ friends, their closest confidantes. None of them had ever talked about who had hired them, how they’d found their new job. But one of girls rang her friend from Heathrow. She had a temporary U.S. passport, is what she said. She was getting on a flight to San Francisco. Then she hung up and no one heard a word from her again—except the men who bought the video, if hers was the sort where they made her talk.”

Now the man was opening his envelope again. He brought out a folded sheet of paper and laid it on the table. When he unfolded it, Cain could see that this was old paper. Tattered at the corners, slightly yellowed by the decades in a hanging file somewhere. The man turned it around and slid it across. It was a photocopy of Carolyn Stone’s U.K. passport.

“We made a decision, inside Special Branch. We were already doing the undercover work in other groups—we had an officer who took it so far that he married an animal rights activist, had a baby with her. All so he could report on her, on her friends. Around Special Branch, we all thought that was a good piece of work. We weren’t thinking. So this, the missing girls and the videos, was an easy decision. Until we started seeing links to Castelli.

“Because he was the ambassador,” Cain said. “That made it more complicated.”

“Until we thought what it could mean. What if we had something on him? Something so terrible that if we came to him and asked a favor, he couldn’t say no?”

“You meant to blackmail him.”

The man looked at Cain, considering that. Then he nodded.