The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  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?”

  “Sometimes it’s like walking on water,” Cain said. “You move fast or you sink.”

  “Seriously, Cain. You okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m keeping ahead of it. Can I ask you a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “When you’re done with the house, send in a cleaning service and put the bill on my desk.”

  “Nagata will pay for it.”

  “Either way, put it on my desk.”

  “All right,” Frank said. “Now, let me tell you what I’ve got. You were right about the guy. He jumped your girlfriend’s fence, and he made it to Cabrillo and jacked a car. Oakland PD found it about two a.m.”

  “The driver?”

  “In the trunk.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “How’s this your fault?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The driver was a retired school principal. Seventy-five years old. He lived on Twenty-Fourth Avenue. He was two blocks from home.”

  “But the kid ditched the car in Oakland?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “Saint Augustine’s, on Alcatraz Avenue. There’s a parking lot next to the church.”

  Cain drew a map of Oakland in his mind, found Alcatraz Avenue and followed it east. Past Shattuck, past Telegraph, until he pulled to a mental stop in front of the church.

  “That’s practically in Berkeley.”

  “What’s that mean to you?” Frank said.

  “Maybe nothing,” Cain said. “But we’ve got a theory about Castelli. There’s a connection to a frat that got kicked off the Cal campus in the eighties. Pi Kappa Kappa—you heard of it?”

  “Never.”

  “Castelli pledged it—but only after it went underground.”

  Frank took his time before answering, the wind blowing unimpeded across his receiver.

  “And the kid who killed Grassley jacked a car and dropped it in Oakland,” he finally said. “Right on the edge of Berkeley. Close enough to limp home, maybe. That’s what you’re thinking. That there’s still a chapter, and he’s a member.”

  “Or maybe it’s nothing.”

  “You want me to follow up while you’re gone?”

  “If you can—but watch your back.”

  “After I heard about Grassley and Chun? I strapped on my ankle piece,” Frank said. “I haven’t done that since my first year in plainclothes.”

  Cain said goodbye and hung up. He didn’t want to tell Frank what he thought about the ankle holster. Two guns wouldn’t see behind him any more than one. He checked his rearview mirror, then took a left on Fulton. The rest of the way to Yerba Buena was a straight shot east, the sun finally lighting up the sky ahead of him. All at once, the clouds were pink and orange. But he knew in ten minutes the color would be gone and everything would be gray again.

  He came along the walkway and fit his key into the barrack door, taking care to enter their room without waking her. He put his things down on the desk and sat in the chair. He’d left a voicemail for Fischer and now, when he checked his phone, he saw that she’d responded with a text.

  Do you want to wait for some backup?

  The answer, of course, was no. He wasn’t sure what would happen, either in Mendocino or when the man from London called again. But he wasn’t waiting for anything. From the beginning, they’d all understood that without the girl’s name, they had nothing. Until they knew who she was, everything else was under a shroud. Who buried her, and why. What Castelli was hiding, and whether he’d been paying someone for years. He was breaking the protocols now, leaving town to see a witness without giving his lieutenant a heads-up; moving toward a meeting with the man in London without filing any reports.

  But following the rules would only matter if this case went to trial and he had to testify, and he knew it would never get that far. Not after what they did to Grassley and Chun, and not after Lucy had to hide in her own house. This wasn’t going to finish in a courtroom. It would end with bullets, with a body in the morgue and a board of inquiry. Cain didn’t care if they ruled it a good shooting.

  He picked up his phone and answered Fischer’s text. When he looked up, Lucy was awake and watching him. He saw her eyes shift to the desk, to the duffel bag he’d packed.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone,” he said. “It’s bad enough you to have to stay here. But if I’m out of town, it’s even worse. I want to bring you with me.”

  “Where?”

  “North,” he said. “Up the coast, to Mendocino. We’ll stay in a bed and breakfast.”

  “But you’ll be working.”

  “I’ll be talking to someone,” he said. “You can stay in the room, or go for a walk around the town if you’re up for it. Can you do it?”

  She looked around the little room. The dingy carpet, the dented walls. Then she pushed back the covers and got out of bed, one hand holding her stomach beneath the navel.

  “I’d been getting ready for this. You know I have been.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to be the way I was.”

  “It’ll be easier if we’re somewhere nice. A couple more days, and then you can go home. Frank Lee’s going to get it cleaned.”

  “But will it be safe?”

  “A couple more days, and it’ll be safe.”

  “You’re getting closer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then give me five minutes.”

  In the time he’d known Lucy, and especially in the last few months, he’d thought a lot about all the things they’d never done. All the things they might never do. They’d never taken a walk together, or a drive along the coast. They’d never gone to a friend’s house for dinner, never walked into a restaurant together. She’d never held his hand when the lights went down in a movie at a theater, never shouted into his ear to be heard in a club. They survived all right without all those things, their relationship unconstrained within the walls of her house. She played the piano and they read books aloud to each other, and they cooked meals with groceries from her delivery service or ate takeout that he brought from the places she missed the most.

  But he regretted
everything that had been closed off, and he knew that she did too. He’d seen her standing in the upstairs rooms, where the windows were high enough to look out across some of the other rooftops, into the foreclosed distance. Even her posture spoke of something missing. He had thought she was probably ready for it, had guessed about her secret excursions. But now she was getting it all at once, like jumping from a cliff above deep water. No choice at all about the outcome after her feet left the ground.

  They were in Fischer’s car, Lucy in the passenger seat and Cain behind the wheel. They’d passed through the city and now they were on the bridge, the Marin Headlands rising ahead of them.

  “This is the last one,” he said. “I have to finish. But after it’s done, then so am I.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That we can go anywhere. We can do anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re staying here for me,” Cain said. “Since we met, that’s what you’ve been doing. But that’s never been fair. So after this, I’m done. We can go wherever you want.”

  “Gavin—”

  “You had that offer in Lausanne. We could go there.”

  “If it’s still open,” she said. “And what would you do in Lausanne? What would you do if you didn’t do this?”

  “Whatever it took.”

  She took her hand from his knee and pivoted sideways in her seat, leaning against the door handle as she studied his face.

  “Let me think about it,” she said.

  34

  LUCY HAD GONE into Ashbury Heights Elementary one day four years ago to talk to the students about music. She wasn’t a teacher there, didn’t belong in the school at all except that she’d been asked by a friend of a friend to come and give a presentation. It was Career Day; she was supposed to talk about the places she’d traveled, the concerts she’d played. How she had walked alone onto the stages of Europe’s greatest halls, had looked up past the lights and met the eyes of kings and queens. But it didn’t go like that. Half an hour after she’d stepped inside the school, another man had followed. He wasn’t from the city; he had no connections to the school or the children inside it. He had two pistols in his jacket pockets and a backpack full of ammunition. Five minutes later, Lucy was the only adult survivor. Her career as a pianist was at an end. But in four years of exile, giving piano lessons in the home that had become both a refuge and a prison, she hadn’t forgotten the world she’d known.

  “What’s the name of the hotel?” she asked.

  “It’s just a bed and breakfast.”

  “Is it the Palisades?”

  “No—I just found it online.”

  “Did you pay already?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let me have your phone.”

  He dug it from his pocket and handed it to her, watching in glances as he steered through the curves. The coastal highway was narrow, and on the left the cliffs dropped all the way down to the ocean. But he could see that Lucy was searching the Internet, and soon she put the phone to her ear.

  “It’s still there,” she said to him. “So I’m changing us.”

  “All right.”

  “You’ll like it.”

  Then she was on the line with the desk clerk at the Palisades, and Cain was thinking how easy it would have been to do this months ago. He could have just made the reservation and packed her bag. He could have held her hand going down the front steps to the car, and now, looking at her sitting there, he knew she would have done it gladly. But this wasn’t the right way. Now they were running away from the man who’d broken into her house, and Cain was working on a case. He should have brought her for the simple sake of going. It would have been so easy, and yet he’d never thought of it.

  After they turned in to the driveway and came through the screen of redwood trees that hid the Palisades from the road, Cain saw the place and couldn’t believe he’d never heard of it. It looked like a California robber baron’s idea of a castle. A wild and tangled rose garden grew in the sloped lawn, and the house towered at the top of a low rise. Cain pulled under the porte cochère before parking and getting out, leaning back to look up at the building’s stone turrets. He counted seven chimneys and forty windows. The air was scented with roses and wet bark, with the ocean’s tang and the sweet tinge of wood smoke. They went up the stairs and opened the front door, then crossed a Persian carpet the size of a basketball court. Lucy trailed her finger along the keyboard of a Steinway as she went to the front desk and rang the bell.

  An old man came out and glanced at Cain a moment before turning back to Lucy. His black bow tie was hand-knotted, and his green wool cardigan looked as old as the house.

  “You’re Miss Bolet?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Lucy Bolet,” the man said, taking his time as he spoke her name, letting it rest in the air between them as he pulled at his memory. “You stayed with us before. Five years ago—or was it six?”

  “Five and change.”

  “Will you play?” he asked, nodding toward the Steinway. “A lot of us remember when you were here before. To hear you play again—that would really be something.”

  “Has it been tuned?”

  “Last week.”

  “This evening, then. Before dinner.”

  “I’ll put out word.”

  “Just in the hotel,” Lucy said. “Not around town.”

  “Of course,” the man said. And then, in a much quieter voice, he added, “I heard what happened. I prayed for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you coming back now?”

  “Coming back?” Lucy asked. She seemed to consider the different meanings. “Yes—I think so.”

  She reached into her purse, but Cain stepped to her side.

  “Let me.”

  In the room, they set their bags on the bed, then went across to the window and opened the curtains. They were looking down on the rose garden. Between the trees, at the far edge of the lawn, they could see the Pacific, blue water and white foam out to the horizon.

  “Now what?” Lucy asked, just as Cain’s phone rang.

  The caller’s number was blocked, and Cain answered, reflexively cupping his hand over his mouth.

  “Is this Cain?”

  “Yes.”

  The caller had an English accent, but his voice was decades too smooth to be the man who’d contacted Cain this morning.

  “Tomorrow at noon,” the man said. “He’ll be here, waiting for you.”

  “Where?”

  “The British consulate general,” the man said. “Bring your passport and leave your gun.”

  The man hung up, and Cain stood looking at his phone. It would take a well-connected man to set up a meeting in the British consulate. And he’d chosen the location well. Foreign consulates were the only places in the city off-limits to Cain. He would have to come unarmed, and would lose all of his jurisdiction when he stepped through the door.

  “Are you all right?” Lucy asked.

  “Fine,” he said. They would have to check out tomorrow so that he could get back to the city in time for the meeting. He would have to find another hotel in the city where Lucy could stay.

  There was a stone fireplace facing the bed. Kindling and logs were stacked nearby in a pair of wicker baskets. “Do you want me to light that before I go?”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll be back before dinner.”

  She pulled the ottoman over to the fireplace and sat down to watch as the flames crackled up through the dry kindling and into the split oak logs. She had a book in her lap, its jacket flap tucked into the page where she’d left off.

  By three in the afternoon, he was driving again. Back through the village of Mendocino, and then east, into the wooded foothills. After he turned off the paved road, he followed a set of mud and gravel ruts for five miles, and then his phone told him he’d arrived. The driveway was so overgrown that if not for the heavy chain blocking the entrance, he mi
ght have overlooked it altogether. Past the chain, the driveway curved up a hill and disappeared into the redwood trees. He parked against a mossy embankment and walked to the chain. It was rusted down its length, each end locked around a tree. One of the locks was pitted with corrosion and covered with green lichen; the other showed bright brass around the keyhole.

  He stepped over the chain and went up the driveway, reaching into his coat to unsnap the strap on the top of his holster. He had no idea what Susan Fennimore had been doing up here these last ten years.

  When he came to the end of the driveway, there was a clearing. A red pickup truck was parked under a wood-shake roof, and next to that was the cabin. He didn’t make it across the clearing before the front door opened and Susan stepped halfway out. She kept her left hand inside the house, and Cain supposed she was holding a rifle or a shotgun.

  “What do you want?”

  “To ask you a few questions, about your former husband.”

  “Lester or Malcolm?”

  “Lester.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Inspector Cain, with the SFPD.”

  He reached into his jacket, slowly, not taking his eyes from her. He took out his badge and held it up.

  “Lester got himself killed in Santa Clara. We lived in Walnut Creek. How does the SFPD have anything to do with that?”

  “The gun that shot him turned up in another crime scene.”

  He took another ten steps toward the house. Susan looked to be about forty-five. She had dark blond hair, hints of gray at the roots. Her eyes were focused and clear. She was wearing a chambray shirt and blue jeans, a pair of doeskin work gloves in her hip pocket. On the porch next to her front door was a pair of mud-covered rubber galoshes. Gardening tools were leaning against the wood plank wall. There weren’t any flowers or vegetable plots in the clearing around the cabin, but he’d seen the satellite picture before coming out here. He knew that farther back in the woods behind the cabin, there was another structure. He figured it must be a greenhouse, but he wasn’t here to investigate what she might be growing there.