She’d led him to the music room. As soon as she sat down, she began to play, swaying in the current of cold air rushing through the windows. It was nothing he’d heard before, played in a way he’d never seen. Maybe this was something she saved for herself. In the quietest stanzas, the Golden Gate’s foghorn rattled low through the windows. He thought of the path it took, that sound, traveling over the Presidio and down the long avenues, a mile and a half or more to reach them.
She’d gone on and on, one piece after another. Debussy. Chopin, and Brahms. Clementi. He didn’t think of getting up, of disturbing her. The music held him in place.
“Are you pregnant?” he said, at last.
He thought she’d stopped, but she hadn’t. He knew the answer to his question, but he needed to hear it from her. But she didn’t say a word that night. She just nodded, and didn’t miss a note.
He came to sit on the bench next to her, as her students did when she was showing them something new, her hands folded on top of theirs. Two bodies, and four hands, coming together to find one song.
He’d never wanted her more than he had right then.
In the closet, he stood to go. He kissed the top of her head and she looked up at him.
“Hey,” she said. “Did you want me to save you a blintie?”
“Now you’re just making fun of me.”
“But do you?”
“You have them,” he said. “I told Grassley I’d buy him dinner.”
“Then you have to do better than that,” she said. “Before you go, I mean. The top of my head, that’s nothing.”
He knelt down next to her, slipping his fingers into her hair. She lifted her face to his, and he kissed her the right way. It didn’t matter if they were in the bed, or pressed against the kitchen counter, or on the floor in the back of her closet. The instant they came together, there was nothing else. Maybe that’s what he’d been fleeing.
Jesus, he thought. This woman.
This fiercely brave, and totally fucked-up, perfectly wonderful Lucy.
Half an hour later, he was at the China Beach parking lot. It was late January. Four thirty in the afternoon, and dusk was already closing out the sky. He got out of the car and put on his jacket, then walked down the concrete ramp that switched back and forth to the beach. The surf was running out of the north, and it curled and boomed into the sloped dark sand. He stepped off the pavement and onto the beach and followed the shoreline toward Castelli’s house. To his left, across the water, the Golden Gate Bridge came in and out of the weather.
He slowed a moment when he first picked out her silhouette, and then went up to meet her. She was standing on a promontory of rock, the surf breaking on either side of her.
“Good,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
She was barefoot but still in the gingham dress she’d worn that afternoon. It couldn’t have been very warm, and was already sticking to her thighs and stomach where it had gotten wet in the windblown spray. From down here, in the last of the light, he could see the path she must have followed to reach this spot. A winding boardwalk clung to the cliff’s face beneath her parents’ house. It descended from her mother’s sunroom, then zigzagged to the tide pools a hundred feet beneath. A few lights glowed through the windows, but it was one of the darker houses on the cliff.
“Your mom and dad up there?”
“Just my mom, and she’s getting ready to go out,” Alexa said.
“That’s normal?”
“Normally, she’d be passed out. But tonight she’s hosting a thing in Monterey.”
“You wanted to tell me something?”
“You said a girl disappeared, in 1985.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Alexa asked. “Which part don’t you know?”
“What do you know about her?”
“Nothing.”
He started toward the walkway, his back to her.
“Mr. Cain, wait.”
He turned around, and she was lifting up a black plastic bag that had been near her feet. She’d weighted it with a rock so the wind wouldn’t take it.
“I found this,” she said. “When I was little. He probably thought the maids threw it out—but it was me, and I had it hidden.”
“Show me.”
She put it behind her back.
“The girl from 1985—she was a blonde?”
Cain nodded.
“And she would’ve been a good model,” Alexa said. “Fine features, beautiful lines.”
“What’s in the bag?”
She ran her free hand up the bodice of her dress, cupping herself.
“Full figured, up here,” Alexa said. Then she touched her face. “And all the right angles, here. A face you want to see. A face you can’t stop seeing.”
Now she kissed her fingertip.
“Perfect lips,” she said. “Full and soft.”
“What’s in the bag, Alexa?”
“Am I right about her?”
“Yes.”
She handed him the bag, and he pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph. He took out his flashlight, and there she was: the woman from the photographs he’d first seen in Castelli’s office. She was handcuffed to the bed, wearing nothing but a pair of dark-colored panties. This wasn’t a picture he’d seen before, but it must have come from the same roll of film as the first four. The differences were obvious. There was no number in the corner. The woman was in the same position, but the angle was slightly different. The photographer had moved around to the end of the bed. Cain slipped his glasses off and held the glossy print close enough to study it carefully. It had the same subtle distortions as the others, everything warped just a little bit.
“You found this where?”
“In his study.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten.”
“It wasn’t just sitting out,” Cain said. He switched off his light and put it away. “He wouldn’t leave this in plain sight.”
“It was under his desk. Upside down, on the floor.”
“Why did you take it?”
“Why wouldn’t I take it?” she asked. “Look at it. It’s wrong. It scared me—and attracted me, too. I wanted to know more.”
“After you took it, did he ever say anything to you about it?”
“Of course not.”
“But he must’ve asked if you’d been in his study.”
“Never.”
“He was normal, that day and the next few?”
“That day, he’d gone to Washington—to his apartment in D.C. I didn’t see him for two months. By then I was back in school, and I’d mostly forgotten about it. I’d found other things to do.”
“He’d left that day?”
“That morning.”
“What’d you think, when you found it? The first thing you thought.”
Alexa looked up at the sky, used one fingertip to trace her throat.
“That he’d dropped it when he was packing his briefcase,” she said. “It slid under the desk and he didn’t see it.”
“That’s what you thought then? When you were ten years old?”
“Then, and now, Mr. Cain,” Alexa said.
“The desk, how many drawers does it have?”
“Four,” she said, right away. “The big one’s on the bottom right.”
“Are they locked?”
“Just the one—the big one.”
“You’d never seen inside it?”
“Not then, and not now, either.”
“He still has the desk?”
“In his study,” Alexa said. “Upstairs.”
“Does he lock the room?”
“Not so much anymore.”
“But back then?”
“More often—but I knew where he kept the key.”
“Where?”
“His medicine cabinet,” she said. Again, there was no pause at all. “Behind the Clive Christian cologne.”
Cain wondered if it was possible to k
eep a secret from your own child.
“Why had you gone into his study?”
Her finger had traced down from her throat to the neckline of her dress.
“He had a Playboy collection in there, on the bookshelves. The old issues, from the fifties—you know the ones. I didn’t read them for the articles.”
“You didn’t—what?”
“Marilyn Monroe. Jayne Mansfield. Yvette Vickers—I wanted to see what a woman looked like.”
She reached behind her neck and undid something on her dress, then opened it from the back and slipped out of it. It only took her a second, and then it was hanging around her waist. She splayed her fingers into her hair and arched her back, presenting her bare breasts to him.
“Miss Castelli.”
She closed her eyes, turned her face toward the nearly dark sky.
“Yes?”
“Cover up.”
She dropped her hands to her hips, thumbs under the waistline of her hanging dress, and opened her eyes as if she’d just been struck with the greatest idea she’d ever had.
“Let’s go swimming!”
“No.”
“You don’t need a suit on this beach. Especially not at night.”
She pushed the dress off her hips, then flicked it at him with a kick of her toes. He stepped aside and it brushed past his face. He heard it hit the wet sand behind him.
“The water’s so cold, it makes you feel every part of yourself. You know—I mean, you know for certain—that you’re alive. You could dive under, when the water’s this cold, and breathe it in. You wouldn’t even know you’d drowned.”
“I’m keeping this,” Cain said. He put the photograph back into the plastic bag. “We’ll finish this conversation. Probably in an interrogation room.”
“Swim with me, Gavin Cain.”
“Good evening, Miss Castelli.”
He walked along the sand and then caught the concrete path up the hill to his car. He didn’t look back to see if she’d gone in the water.
10
“THAT WAS IT,” Cain said. “The last straw.”
He slid the fifth photograph onto the table, next to the other four. He’d told it to them chronologically, starting with Lieutenant Nagata’s call while he was at the exhumation in El Carmelo.
“I mean, keep in mind she answered the door in a towel. She’d known I was coming and she was waiting for me like that. Don’t forget that. And then for some reason, I still went and met her on the beach.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I shouldn’t have gone down there to begin with. But when Carmen Sternwood tossed her dress and asked me to go skinny-dipping, I finally got it. I took this, and I left.”
“Wait,” Grassley said. “Who’s Carmen Sternwood?”
“An actress,” Chun said. She looked from Grassley to Cain. “Right?”
“Never mind.”
“Rebel Without a Cause,” Grassley said. “The one with Cary Grant. Way before my time.”
Cain shook his head. They’d be here all night, if he tried getting into that.
They were in a booth at the Western, on Fillmore Street. Their table was on the diner side of the business, but they could hear a loud game of darts from the dubiously legal bar in the building’s back half. Both the bar and the restaurant were cop hangouts, and that was the only reason the building wasn’t posted and padlocked.
“What else did Levy get from the autopsy?” Cain asked.
“So far, not much,” Grassley said. He picked up his iced tea and made a face when he sipped it. He sniffed the rim of his glass, then checked the cuff of his sport coat.
“It stays with you,” Cain said. “It’s probably your imagination. But if you can smell it tomorrow . . . You got a good dry cleaner?”
Grassley shrugged out of his jacket, folded it roughly, and then put it on the bench behind him.
“She won’t start cutting until tomorrow,” Grassley said.
“She finished the surface examination?”
“What she could. It’s just—when they lifted the woman out, a lot of her skin was stuck to the kid’s suit. I don’t remember exactly what the doc said.”
“It’s hard to examine the surface when the surface isn’t there,” Chun said.
“That’s it.”
“There weren’t any entry wounds? No ligature marks?” Cain asked. “Tell me what she saw.”
“Nothing that changed her mind.”
“The woman went in alive,” Cain said. “Dr. Levy still thinks that.”
“She found wooden splinters in the woman’s fingertips,” Chun said. “I saw her pull them out.”
“How long were you there?”
“Just for the last part,” she said. She tilted her head toward Grassley. “He called, and I came as soon as I could.”
“There’s one thing I have to clear up,” Cain said, “before we go any further.”
“I’ve got time,” Chun said.
“But it’s off the books. A lot of overtime that’s not getting paid, because you can’t even request it.”
Chun glanced sideways at Grassley, who looked away.
“Yeah,” she said to Cain. “Okay. It’s fine.”
“Same,” Grassley said. “But I’m on this anyway—the girl in the coffin is my case. And if I’m on my own because Nagata put you on a blackmail note, she can’t say no if I bring Angela in. So everyone gets paid.”
“That might work,” Cain said. “Just watch how you talk about it, especially at the division meetings. We’ll be able to move fast and quiet if Nagata doesn’t connect the cases.”
“Moving fast is good,” Chun said. “But where are we going?”
“We’ll split it up. The goal’s to tie Castelli to the photos . . . You live in the East Bay, right?”
“Oakland.”
“Then Berkeley’s your new pastime. Castelli was there in ’eighty-five. Maybe some of his friends are still in the area, or you can track them. Find out what kinds of things they were into.”
“And the car—I won’t forget the Eldorado.”
Cain hadn’t worked with Angela Chun before today. But her reputation in the Homicide Detail was solid.
“Castelli didn’t meet his wife until ’ninety-seven,” Cain said. “So find out who he was seeing back then. We’ll want to talk to her. Or them.”
“Understood.”
“But use a soft touch,” Cain said. “Some of these people might still be his friends. You don’t want them picking up the phone.”
“What about me?” Grassley asked.
“The pills and the dress,” Cain said. “You know what I want?”
“For the pills—you remember Frank Lee talked to that guy at UCSF’s pharmacy program? He’d drawn an OD in the Ritz and wanted some background on all the shit they found in the guy’s bags?”
“I remember,” Cain said. “That came up in the roundtable.”
“Frank liked the guy, said he was pretty good. He might know how Thrallinex was being prescribed, what the doctors were doing with it. I’ll start there and see where it goes.”
“Okay,” Cain said. It was what he would have done. “And the dress?”
“Back to school again,” Grassley said. “There’s got to be a fashion program at the Academy of Art. That’s all I can think of—find someone who’s plugged in to that kind of thing and ask where you would’ve gone to get that dress.”
Cain glanced at Chun.
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “There’s nothing like that in my closet.”
“I just wondered if you had anything to add to Grassley’s plan.”
She looked at her phone’s screen, then switched it off.
“Sixteen thousand for a used dress seems pretty steep,” she said. “You wouldn’t buy something like that off the rack.”
“But they’re selling one online.”
“Used,” Chun said. “When they’re new, dresses like that, you get them made for
you. So it’s not like you’re looking for a department store clerk who remembers taking the girl to a fitting room with a couple different sizes to try on.”
“Who am I looking for?” Grassley asked.
“I don’t know—there’d have been people who measured her for it. They might’ve sat down with her a couple times to look at fabrics, to go through style books. If she was a regular customer, they might’ve come out to her. Otherwise, she probably did it in Paris.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Vogue.”
Grassley looked at Cain.
“Maybe she should take the dress and I should canvas Berkeley.”
“I like it the way we have it,” Cain said.
He’d already decided that Angela Chun would do a better job in Berkeley, which was the more sensitive task. But he didn’t want to explain that to either of them.
“What’ll you be doing?” Grassley asked.
“What Dr. Levy said I should do—find some of the old guys and talk to them.”
“That’s why you wanted to meet here.”
Cain nodded. Even if there weren’t retired cops drinking in the bar, there’d be a few guys close enough to pulling the pin that they’d remember the ones Cain really wanted to see. All he needed was a name, and he could take it from there. He turned when he heard a swirl of noise from the kitchen. The waitress backed through the swinging door, pushing it open with her shoulders. She crossed to their booth and set down three plates.
“You’re Inspector Cain?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“And you’re parked outside, on Fillmore?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Somebody called the kitchen just now. They left a note on your windshield. They said you had to go get it right now, before someone comes along and takes it.”
“They?” Cain asked.
“He—it’s loud back there, and it was loud wherever he was. But it was a man.”
Cain looked at Grassley.
“Follow her to the kitchen and see if you can get the number.” He slid out of his seat and looked down at Chun. “Inspector, you come with me.”
At a run, they reached his car in less than a minute. The manila envelope was tucked under the windshield wiper on the driver’s side. The glass was beaded from an earlier rain, but the envelope was still dry.
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