The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  “I’m not going to ask about anything but Lester,” Cain said. “Can I come up to the porch?”

  She leaned back into the cabin and he heard her set something down. Then she came out, empty-handed, and closed the door behind her. There were a few wooden chairs at one end of the porch and she sat in one, pulling the gloves from her pocket and setting them on her knee. Cain came up the steps and took the other chair, angling it so that he could sit facing her. He had a notebook and pen with him but didn’t take them out.

  “I saw the investigator’s notes, from 1998,” Cain said. “You and Lester had a daughter?”

  “Cari.”

  “Now she’s what—twenty-one, twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-two. She’s at Humboldt State.”

  “She was two when Lester was killed,” Cain said. “And he’d just lost his job?”

  “That’s right. I wasn’t working either.”

  “So things weren’t easy.”

  “Desperate would be a good word. You’ve got a toddler. You have a mortgage. Two car payments to make.”

  “What did he do—before he lost his job, what did he do?”

  “He was a software engineer.”

  “So he was looking for jobs in Silicon Valley?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did he say where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “He had a bachelor’s in computer science from Cal, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is that where you met him?”

  She shook her head.

  “We met after college.”

  “Did you know anything about his friends in college? His frat brothers?”

  “I knew he was in a fraternity. He had the tattoo.”

  “Did he tell you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ask?”

  “I guess I might have.”

  “But what? He changed the subject? Went silent?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about the burn on his ear and the scar on his throat?”

  “There was a fire in his dorm,” Susan said. “He was asleep when it started. He made it out, but some of the other kids didn’t.”

  “That’s what he told you?”

  She nodded.

  “He spoke in a whisper—is that right?”

  “He said—” She paused and looked at her lap, her eyebrows pressing toward each other. “He was stumbling down a staircase. There was smoke. He fell and he hit something and crushed his throat. That was just a story? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What crime scene was it, where you found the gun? Or can’t you say?”

  “It made the paper this week. I can tell you that,” Cain said. He watched her face for recognition, but when there wasn’t any, he moved on. “When Lester was shot, he was in a red Cadillac Eldorado. Had he always been an Eldorado man?”

  Now Susan smiled, some memory lighting upon her face.

  “I made fun of him for that. I couldn’t decide what he looked like more, driving those cars of his—a retiree, headed down to the VFW for steak night? Or was it a pimp? He hated that, me making fun of him. He’d always had Eldorados. His grandfather gave him one when he turned sixteen.”

  “So he had one in college.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was Lester a good man?”

  “I thought so at the time. As far as husbands go, as far as fathers go, I didn’t have anything to compare him to.”

  “And later?”

  “Later on, the comparison didn’t help him.”

  “Do you still have any pictures of him?”

  “I’ve got one box. It’s in a box of his things. I kept it for Cari, in case she ever wanted to know about her dad. She looked through it, but she never kept anything. She latched on to Malcolm when I married him.”

  “Where’s Malcolm now?”

  “He had a heart attack, ten years ago. He was older than me.”

  “The box with Lester’s things—may I look through it?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” Cain said, honestly.

  “I’ll give it to you,” she said. “You can keep it. But then I need to get back to work.”

  She went into the cabin, and he sat looking at the gardening tools lined up by the door. Maybe she was just growing hothouse tomatoes back there, selling them at farmers’ markets for a little cash on the side. Maybe Malcolm had left her with enough money to put Cari Fennimore through Humboldt State. He’d told her that he was only here to ask questions about Lester. Prying into her greenhouse wasn’t part of the deal.

  She came out holding a cardboard file box. She set it on the porch rail, next to the steps.

  “I forgot your name,” she said. “Mr. Detective.”

  “It’s Cain,” he said. He came over and handed her his card. “Gavin Cain. If I find something, and we know what happened to Lester, do you want me to come and tell you?”

  She took her time thinking about that. Lester must not have stacked up well against Malcolm at all.

  “All right,” she said. “That would be fine.”

  He put the box into the backseat, pushed it over, and then climbed in next to it. He took off the lid and set it in the foot well, then leaned over to look in while he put on his gloves. Lester Fennimore must have been a heavy smoker. Twenty years on, and his things still smelled like an ashtray. He pulled out a black fabric bag first, its opening cinched closed with a pull string. He knew what was in it from the weight and the shape, and when he loosened the string and reached into the bag, he wasn’t surprised to be holding a Nikon single lens reflex camera. It was an F3, a film model, and it was fitted with a good lens. He checked the back and turned the gears to advance the frame, but didn’t think there was any film inside. He opened the back and saw that the camera was empty.

  There was a photograph of Lester as an eight- or nine-year-old kid. He was standing near a creek. Big smile, bowl-cut hair, a rainbow trout in his hands. There was a diploma from UC Berkeley, rolled up in a cardboard tube. An engraved pewter whiskey flask, but not the one from the blackmail photographs. He found a baseball cap with the name of some high school Cain had never heard of, a pocketknife with a polished teak handle, a Seiko watch that hadn’t ticked in two decades, a little plastic box with half a dozen hand-tied fishing flies, a Zippo lighter engraved L.R.F. in cursive script.

  And then, at the bottom, a stack of faux-leather daily planners, each one embossed on the front, in gold leaf, with the year it covered. Cain took them out and looked through them. He had the last decade of Lester Fennimore’s life, his daily schedule from 1988 to 1998.

  He took the top book and flipped to June 28, the day Lester was shot. The page was blank. If Lester had any appointments that day, he’d decided not to write them down. Cain began flipping backward. On the twenty-sixth, Lester had gone to an interview at SUN Microsystems, in Santa Clara. He had a dental appointment on June twenty-second, but that was scratched out. Maybe he’d scheduled it before he lost his job, then canceled it to save money. Two days before that, he’d driven down to San Jose for an interview. There wasn’t a company name, but there was an address. Cain got out his phone and looked it up.

  The address in Fennimore’s planner had been the corporate headquarters of NavSoft.

  Cain set the planner on his knees and looked out the window, tapping his knuckle against the glass as he thought. On June 20, 1998, Harry Castelli was the vice president of NavSoft. Fennimore came down for an interview, but didn’t get the job. There was no way to know if the frat brothers saw each other that day. But eight days later, Fennimore drove back through San Jose in the dark on his way to a rendezvous at Castle Rock State Park. By ten o’clock that night, he was dead, six bullets from Castelli’s Smith and Wesson scattered through him.

  Maybe Lester hadn’t gotten the job but while he was inside Castelli’s c
ompany, he’d thought of another way to make money. He and Susan were desperate by then. A mortgage and two cars. A toddler to feed. Cain put the books back in the box and then fit the lid over the top. He got out of the backseat and came up to the driver’s door. The sun was getting low now, and these roads were no good in the dark.

  35

  CAIN CAME UP the steps of the Palisades, balancing Lester Fennimore’s box under his left arm. He paused before he opened the front door, looking through the cut-crystal window at the small crowd gathered in the lobby. He pushed the door open and stepped inside. There were thirty people in the room, most of them in varying degrees of evening attire. Cain spotted the desk clerk. He’d shed his green cardigan in favor of an evening jacket. A waiter came through a door, carrying a tray of champagne flutes above his right shoulder.

  “—and then she didn’t leave the house for four years,” a woman was saying. “This—”

  “Champagne, sir?”

  “Sure.”

  Cain took the glass and moved toward the center of the room. There was a single light above the piano. Then Lucy came down the steps. She paused on the landing, looking at the crowd. She wore a simple dress made of black jersey, and she was barefoot. She had tied her hair into a knot at the back of her head, and wore no makeup and no jewelry. The room went still when she appeared, thirty pairs of eyes on her. She nodded at the crowd, and then she came the rest of the way down the steps and crossed to the piano.

  “—it was in 2010,” the desk clerk was whispering to a group behind Cain. “At the Royal Albert Hall, in London. That was the last time. Until tonight.”

  Lucy pulled out the piano bench, sat down, and ran her fingers silently along the tops of the keys. She had no sheet music, but that didn’t matter. She drew a breath and the crowd went silent, and then she bent toward the keyboard, her eyes closed.

  “Liszt,” the desk clerk whispered, when Lucy had made it through the first few bars.

  “Oh my god,” an old man breathed, as Lucy took off into a long run of notes, right hand only, her left hand curled in her lap.

  And then there was nothing, except for the music.

  They ate dinner at a low table set up in front of their fireplace.

  “I’m always this way, after,” she said. Their plates were empty now, and Cain was finishing his beer. The waiter had brought a glass of mineral water for her, but she hadn’t touched it.

  “What way?”

  “Rattled,” she said. “Quiet.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not because it was the first time back. It’s because it was like any other time.”

  “That’s good,” Cain said.

  “You probably know the feeling even better than I do,” she answered. “You’re under the lights all the time. Every eye in the house on you, waiting for you to make a mistake. And if you do, it really matters. So that when you’re done for the day, you’re quiet. It takes you a while to decide that you’re okay. That you didn’t make any mistakes.”

  He took a sip of his beer and watched her in the firelight.

  “But you’re not going to do that,” she said. “Make mistakes.”

  “No,” he answered.

  At eleven the next morning, he checked her into the Marriott at Union Square. He went with her up to the eighth floor, watching the lobby shrink away as the glass elevator rose upward. There were people in the third-floor bar, but no one was watching the elevators. No one had followed them back from Mendocino, either. In the room, he slipped off his shoulder holster and locked his gun in the safe.

  “Will you be okay?” he asked.

  “I still have my book.”

  “They’ll probably take my phone at the consulate. If you need me—”

  “I’ll be okay,” Lucy said. She wrapped her arms around herself and looked out the arched window. “What do you think he wants to say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you have a hunch,” she said. “You always do.”

  He looked at the gray sky, at the traffic moving down Post Street toward the square.

  “He sounded like a man who wanted to confess.”

  “Confess what?”

  “I don’t know,” Cain said. “But he feels guilty about something. I’m sure about that.”

  “And you think it’s safe to meet him?”

  “It’s in a consulate. And they must know I told people—”

  “Fischer, you mean. You told her.”

  “—so they’d be crazy to do anything.”

  “All right,” she said.

  They both knew there were plenty of crazy people. Neither of them had to say it to the other. But there were a thousand times as many people who were perfectly decent. The odds were with him on this.

  The day had been getting darker since dawn, and the next wave of rain was almost here. He stood in a thinning lunch-hour crowd near the corner of Sansome and Sutter. The consulate’s marble columns were stained dark with water. Nearby, a young tourist couple held their cell phones at arm’s length, taking a few last photos of themselves before they fled the weather.

  “You look just like your picture,” a man said. “Maybe we should go inside before the rain comes, eh?”

  Cain turned around. The man facing him was a few years into his seventies. He wore a dark cashmere overcoat that was unbuttoned enough to show the crimson knot of his tie. His brimmed black hat was pulled low over his brow.

  “Too conspicuous to do this on the street?” Cain asked him.

  “Obviously,” the man said, and Cain knew his voice. It was the refined baritone he’d heard on the first call. “And the weather. Mostly the weather.”

  They looked together up the street. A wall of storm clouds was advancing along Sutter, a cold whiteout. Everything behind it was already gone.

  “You didn’t fly here just to give me all the answers,” Cain said. “You have your own agenda. Tell me about that first.”

  “I want to know how she died,” the man said. “That’s the first thing. I want to know what happened.”

  Now the first rain came with the wind, big and icy drops that speckled the pavement around them. They could play games with each other and get soaked. Or they could get to the point and move on.

  “She was buried alive.”

  “On top of a corpse—in another man’s casket?”

  “You’re not guessing. You know that.”

  “It’s what we were afraid of,” the man said. His paused to loosen his tie, as though the knot had been the thing blocking his throat. “After everything that happened in ’eighty-nine, we guessed it. But we didn’t want to believe.”

  “You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?”

  “I had everything to do with it—I sent her, and I shouldn’t have.”

  “You said the first thing you wanted was to know what happened,” Cain said. “What’s the second?”

  “The body. I want to bring her home.”

  Cain looked at him. This choked-up old man in his cashmere overcoat, the rain already soaking into it.

  “Let’s go, then,” Cain said. “Show me in.”

  The heavy rain arrived as they were coming into the consulate’s security lobby. Even when the door closed behind them, they could hear it hitting the bulletproof glass. A guard checked Cain’s passport against a list on his clipboard, then took Cain’s phone and put it in a drawer. Cain went through the metal detector, and the guard met him on the other side with a visitor’s badge.

  His host had sidestepped the security station and was waiting next to a steel door. He opened it with a key card and held it for Cain.

  “How much do you know about the Metropolitan Police?”

  “Nothing,” Cain said. He was looking down a short hallway. There was a door on each side, a slate-gray concrete wall at the end. A CCTV camera, mounted near the ceiling, watched him. “It’s the London police, but it’s got a mandate that goes beyond the city. It’s got a building called Scotlan
d Yard. That’s it.”

  “There’ve been articles about Special Branch,” the man said. He stepped around Cain and opened the door on the right. “Some of the things we did back in the eighties—did you see those?”

  “No.”

  “The undercover operations? The infiltrations of animal rights groups?”

  Now they were in a windowless conference room. The man sat down, elbows on the table. Cain pulled out a chair and sat facing him.

  “You’re saying this has to do with animal rights?”

  “It’s nothing to do with that,” the man said. “I’m giving you background. People know about the animal rights groups, but it went beyond that. Far beyond that.”

  “Undercover operations. Infiltrations.”

  “Yes.”

  Yesterday morning, on the phone, the man had hinted that he’d moved on from Special Branch to something even more secretive. He looked the part, with his fine coat and his weary face.

  “You were running agents, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was one of them.”

  “She wasn’t an agent. She was an officer of the Metropolitan Police, Special Branch. She was in California on an undercover assignment.”

  The man reached into his coat and brought out a slim envelope. He opened the flap and slid out a three-by-five photograph, then put it on the table. Cain bent forward to look at it. The young woman wore a cadet uniform, and looked into the camera with the thinnest of smiles. She stood next to a Union Jack, hands at her sides. The plaque on the wall behind her said HENDON POLICE COLLEGE. Cain turned the photograph over. On the back, in a neat pencil script, was a name.

  Carolyn Stone.

  She was the girl from the photographs. There was no doubt of it, unless she had a twin sister. He turned to the old man.

  “You sent a London police officer undercover to San Francisco,” he said. “Did you follow any of the protocols?”

  “It was too sensitive. Only three people in Special Branch knew what we were doing. There was way too much of that, back then. Special Branch confused itself for another agency.”