The Dark Room

by Jonathan Moore

  Maybe it had begun as part of her work. What better way to get close to Castelli than to take him to bed?

  It was hard for him to picture Harry Castelli as a young man. Particularly one who might have attracted a woman like Carolyn Stone. Cain only saw the gravel-voiced, bourbon-swilling politician. But Castelli must have been different then. At eighteen, he might have believed the slogans on his own campaign signs.

  Harry J. Castelli Sr. was a monster, but it was possible he’d shielded his son from the worst of his inclinations. That wasn’t so unusual. If the ambassador’s crimes had been merely financial, he might have brought his son inside the circle. But this wasn’t simply a matter of cooking the embassy’s books, or using the diplomatic pouch to move black market goods. He’d been trafficking girls and women so they could be raped on film and then disposed of. The ambassador was a man used to keeping secrets. He put on his tailored suits, and carried his calfskin briefcase, and no one around him would have seen the darkness.

  But it all came apart in 1985.

  A teenaged Harry left London for Berkeley. He’d never lived outside his father’s shadow, and at first, before he pledged Pi Kappa Kappa, he must have felt like the world was awash in light and air. Right away, he met Carolyn Stone. He was eighteen. His head must have ached with the future. Nothing about Carolyn would have struck him as strange. Not the ease of meeting her, not the strength of her immediate interest in him. He was an ambassador’s son; he was rich. He was hardwired to accept every blessing as his destiny. Of course he didn’t understand how extraordinary she was. Of course he didn’t understand how dangerous he was to her.

  Cain parked on the street at UCSF and walked up the hill toward the medical center. There was a momentum beneath him now, a groundswell tilting his feet and propelling him. He had put a name to the girl in the casket; he knew why she’d come to San Francisco. The only person he knew who could give him the rest was Angela Chun. If she would wake up, if she could talk to him for ten seconds, she could close the circle.

  He went through the main entrance and took the elevator up to the ICU, and stepped out into chaos. There were uniformed cops milling near the duty nurse. He didn’t recognize anyone until Nagata turned around.

  “I tried calling you,” she said.

  There were black streaks of mascara underneath Nagata’s eyes. Cain looked around the room again and saw three officers in a group huddle. Their arms around each other’s waists, their heads bowed.

  “What’s happening?” Cain asked.

  “There was a complication—they missed something, in the first surgery. They took her in for a second try. And they botched it.”

  “Botched it how?”

  “She’s gone, Cain.”

  “Just now?”

  Nagata nodded, and Cain looked across the hall. The door to Angela’s room stood open. There was no light inside. He walked in and sat in the chair by the empty bed. The room smelled of daisies and roses. No one had thrown away the bouquets yet. He hadn’t asked where she was, and Nagata hadn’t said. Maybe she was still on the operating table. Maybe they’d already zipped her in a bag and taken her down to the morgue. It didn’t matter, because Nagata was right. Angela was gone.

  Cain closed his eyes and pressed his thumbs into his temples.

  37

  FISCHER WAS WAITING on the curb outside the main terminal at SFO. While he brought them back into the city on 101, he told her about his meetings with Susan Fennimore and the man from Special Branch.

  “The guys in Washington lied to me,” Fischer said when Cain was finished. “They didn’t call me up there to look at a budget ledger. They wanted to tell me something about Castelli. Not the mayor, but his father. The ambassador.”

  “He was under investigation?”

  She nodded.

  “Short of the secretary of state, he had the highest position in U.S. diplomacy. Yet he was a wildcard. The Counterintelligence Division thought something was wrong, that he was selling secrets. But they could never prove anything.”

  “Did they know about the temporary passports?”

  “If they did, they didn’t tell me.”

  “Then they didn’t know about the girls, either.”

  “I don’t think so. But they might not have been telling me everything—counterintelligence guys are cagey. They sit in their dark offices and collect information, but they never share it.”

  “Why did they tell you?”

  “Maybe to nudge us to look at London connections—they didn’t know how far ahead of them you already were,” Fisher said.

  “We’re close now,” Cain said. “We need one or two more pieces, and then it’ll all make sense.”

  Cain parked at the valet stand at the Palace Hotel and they went inside to meet Officer Combs in the lobby. He led them down the long marble hallway, past the empty ballroom and to the Market Street doors. The bar was to the left, and Cain saw Mona Castelli sitting there, her back to the entrance.

  “She went out two hours ago,” Combs said. “She took a cab, but I called Officer Renton, and he beat her to the bank. He bumped into her going up the steps. Very casual, but then he acted like he just recognized her. ‘Aren’t you Mona Castelli?’ She turned around and got back in the cab—”

  “She’d asked it to wait?” Cain asked.

  “Yeah—and she got in, and had the driver take her back to the hotel.”

  “What was she carrying?” Fischer asked.

  “Just her handbag. The small one.”

  “Is Officer Aguilar still watching Alexa?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Anything going on there?”

  “She’s been staying in her studio. No visitors.”

  They left Combs and went out to the street. Curtains of mist blew down the street toward the bay, and there were clusters of smokers and homeless men huddled under all of the awnings.

  “What do you think?” Fischer asked.

  “It’s got to be a safe deposit box,” Cain said. “She’s got something in there and she wants to get it out. But she doesn’t want anyone to see her with it.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’ll need to find out,” Cain said. “You had that kid at the U.S. attorney’s office draft a receipt for Castelli’s cash. How good is he at writing search warrants?”

  “You want it coming from us?”

  “If it lands in front of a judge who’ll sign it, I’ll take it from anyone.”

  “It has to say what we expect to find,” Fischer said. “Even a friendly judge won’t sign an open-ended warrant.”

  “We’ll explain the note we found in Castelli’s safe. It had bank addresses, and dates. We’ll explain what Combs and Renton saw, the two times she tried to get to her box.”

  “Castelli’s note—you think he knew something about Mona. Knew that she was keeping something in a safe deposit box.”

  “I think he suspected. I think he wanted to find out. He wasn’t telling us anything about the blackmail notes because he wanted to do his own homework first. But he was nervous enough that he was withdrawing cash and stashing it in his office.”

  Fischer’s car was around the corner. Cain checked behind him for traffic, then stepped out into New Montgomery. From there he could see the brickwork side of Alexa’s building. He counted up the floors until he saw her windows. They were lit up, three bright panes above the latticework of an iron fire escape.

  Alexa stepped into view.

  She was nude, and she was tying her hair into a loose knot at the top of her head. When she finished, she cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed against the glass to look out. Cain turned his face away and stepped back to the sidewalk.

  Fischer’s kid at the U.S. attorney’s office was as fast as he was good. They met him at eight p.m. outside the district court. He came running down the front steps, tie flipped over his shoulder, and got into the backseat. He loosened his tie, opened his briefcase, and handed a signed and sealed search war
rant up to Cain.

  “Ryan Harding,” he said. “You’re Cain? Inspector Cain?”

  Cain reached around and shook the kid’s hand.

  “This is good to go?”

  “Tonight,” the kid said. “This second. I called the general counsel at Cathay Orient Bank and told her what I had. I said we’d come in the morning with fifty guys. SWAT jackets and rifles—scare the shit out of her customers, if that’s what she wants. Or she could let us in right now, after hours.”

  “All right,” Cain said. “I like it. Let’s go.”

  They came into Chinatown, moving at a walking pace through dense late-evening traffic. Regular taxis and pedicabs, families on foot walking half in the street because the sidewalks were too crowded.

  Fischer parked in a bus stop and put her law enforcement placard on the dash. They got out of the car and walked back to the Cathay Orient Bank, the only pedestrians in sight who weren’t hiding under black umbrellas. When they reached the bank, they went up the steps and found four people waiting between the carved stone columns. Two uniformed security guards stood near the bronze doors. A man in a brown suit came up to them.

  “I’m Warren Lee,” he said. “The vice president. This is Cindy Wang, our in-house counsel.”

  Cain shook the vice president’s hand and nodded to the lawyer. She was wearing a black dress and a three-strand pearl necklace. Ryan Harding’s call about the search warrant must have pulled her out of a dinner somewhere.

  “I’ll let us in—”

  “Let’s read the warrant first,” the lawyer said. She pointed to the papers in Ryan Harding’s hand. “Is that it?”

  He handed it to her and she stood on the top step, using the light from the phone screen to read the document. She checked the judge’s signature, and then she read through the entire thing again.

  “Is this my copy?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Go ahead and let us in, Warren,” she said. She folded the search warrant in half and put it in her purse. “Do we even know if this woman has a safe deposit box with us?”

  “She does,” the vice president said. “I looked it up when you called.”

  He stepped to the left of the door and lifted back the cover on a keypad and print reader. He punched in a code and then held his thumb over the scanner until the lights on the keys turned from red to green. Then he used a key to open the metal gates that covered the doors, and a second key to open the front door. He held it open and all seven of them stepped into the bank’s dark lobby. When the man closed the door and locked it, the only light came from an exit sign on the wall above the door.

  “She rented the box in 1998,” the vice president said. He had gone off through the dark, and then he hit a light switch. High above, in the arched marble ceiling, bulbs blinked on with hollow glassy clicks. “She’s had it ever since.”

  “Do you know what month she rented it?” Cain asked.

  “I think it was October. I can get you the signature card. It’ll have the exact date.”

  There was a long teller counter in the back of the room, and behind it, lit now by overhead spotlights, was the door to the vault.

  “You understand I need to document this,” the lawyer said. “Since you’re basically breaking into the safe and taking something that belongs to a customer.”

  “You didn’t call her, did you?” Fischer asked.

  Cain saw the vice president glance downward but didn’t catch what he said.

  “What was that?”

  “It’s policy,” the vice president said.

  “You tipped her off.”

  “On the phone, you didn’t say not to,” the lawyer said, looking at Ryan Harding. “I’ll need photographs of your badges and IDs.”

  She nodded at one of the security guards, who was holding a small video camera. “And this gentleman will film us. No objections?”

  “None,” Cain said. “But let’s do this. We haven’t got much time now.”

  He got out his badge and his driver’s license and held them side by side while the lawyer photographed them. While she was doing the same with Fischer, and then with Ryan Harding, Cain went to the counter and leaned on it to watch the vice president open the vault. He dialed the combination, then spun the polished steel spindle wheel. The round door, when he pulled it back, was a foot thick.

  Everyone moved into the vault now, stepping over the high threshold and then down a set of stone stairs to the polished concrete floor. There may have been other rooms in the back of the vault, but the doorway there was blocked off by a velvet rope hanging between two brass poles. The first room was where the safe deposit boxes were. Hundreds of them lined the walls on either side of the entrance.

  “It’s 1206,” the vice president said. “Here.”

  He took another set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the front panel. He pulled it open, then slid a steel drawer out of the wall and carried it to a high wooden table in the center of the vault. He set the drawer down and Cain and Fischer came next to him so they could see. It was a little larger than a shoebox. The guard with the video camera came around the other side, filming.

  The only thing in the drawer was a legal-size manila envelope.

  “May I?” Cain asked.

  “Go ahead,” Fischer said. “Let’s see.”

  Cain took a set of latex gloves from his coat pocket and pulled them on. He picked up the envelope and knew what was inside from its weight and stiffness. When he turned it over, the other side was speckled with brown-black stains.

  “Is that blood?” the vice president said. “Dried blood?”

  “Probably,” Cain said.

  He unwound the string clasp and opened the flap. He tilted the envelope, letting its contents slide out onto the table. There were a dozen black-and-white photographs and a small plastic canister with the negatives. The photographs that had come to Castelli with the blackmail notes were copies. These were the originals. The first print was one he knew well. Carolyn Stone was backed against the brick wall, her hands held up in fear. Cain set it to the side, going quickly through the first eight pictures because he’d seen them all before. The lawyer and the vice president hadn’t seen them, though, and he saw the way they each stepped back when he came to the rape.

  “Is this what you were looking for?” Cindy Wang asked.

  “It is.”

  He turned to the ninth photograph, one he hadn’t seen yet. It must have been taken in the preparation room at the Fonteroy Mortuary. Carolyn Stone was holding herself up, leaning over a steel undertaker’s table. She wore nothing but bruises, and her eyes were half closed. There was fresh blood on her lips. She held her left arm protectively across the front of her stomach.

  An open casket waited on the table behind her.

  “Jesus,” Fischer said. “They even photographed this.”

  Cain turned to the tenth photograph. Three men were manhandling Carolyn into the casket. They wore pantyhose over their heads to hide their faces. Two of them had her arms and shoulders, and a third was struggling with her legs. Her feet were a blur of motion. She had gone in kicking. Cain turned the picture over. The eleventh photograph showed the men pushing the casket lid down. One of Carolyn’s hands was visible through the crack. Part of her face rose into the last light she would ever see, her mouth open in a scream.

  In the twelfth photograph, it was all over.

  The casket was closed. There was a small metal plaque on the lid, engraved with Christopher Hanley’s name. The dates of his birth and death. Cain turned the photograph over. There was handwriting on the back, in faded pencil.

  Harry,

  We’ll need to talk about this, and agree on a price. You have a young wife who doesn’t know, and that’s worth something, isn’t it?

  If they dig her up, they’ll find out about the baby. And if they find that, they’ll find you.

  —L.F.

  Cain eased everything back into the envelope and looked up.
>
  “We need to go,” he said to Fischer. “Right now.”

  38

  Cain’s phone rang as they were getting into Fischer’s car. He answered it, standing on the sidewalk, covering his free ear with his palm so that he could hear over the street noise.

  “Inspector Cain? It’s Officer Combs.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “They’re on the move—both of them. Mona got in a taxi a minute ago, and Officer Aguilar just called me. Alexa did the same.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the Palace—but I lost her. I thought she was heading out on foot, but she jumped in a cab before I knew what was happening.”

  “All right.”

  “She had a bag with her this time. A shopping bag, but I don’t know what was in it.”

  Cain hung up and got in the car.

  They had to take Ryan Harding back to the federal building, and then they sat in Fischer’s car and looked at the rain in the headlights.

  “You knew the photographs would be in there,” Fischer said.

  “I guessed it—Castelli didn’t have anything to do with his dad’s snuff videos, and didn’t rape Carolyn Stone. He didn’t know she was an undercover cop. She was just a girl he met in college—his girlfriend, he thought. But his frat brothers must have found out about her, and they killed her.”

  “I’m following you so far, but what about Lester Fennimore?”

  “He had the pictures—he might have taken some of them, and he might have been in some of them. He had the tattoo. He crawled out of the Grizzly Peak fire and lived, but by 1998 he’d hit hard times. He’d lost his job, and he needed cash. He knew Castelli was in Silicon Valley, raking it in.”

  “So he decided to blackmail Castelli, in 1998. That’s what you’re saying. It could be Castelli in the pictures, and that was Fennimore’s angle. You can’t tell it isn’t Castelli—even Melissa Montgomery, who’d slept with him, wasn’t sure.”