He lay on the other side of the room. His hand was still reaching for the .40 caliber automatic that he must have used to shoot Mona. But while Mona had died with a single shot to the chest, this kid was riddled. His shirt and jeans were soaked in blood. He’d been shot in the hip, the groin, and both shoulders. Twice in the stomach. The wall behind him was bloody and punched up with bullet holes. Spackled with bone and blood, with small bits of fabric from the boy’s clothes.
Cain went across the room and knelt next to him, as Alexa must have done, when she put the gun to his temple and fired the last shot. His brain was fanned out on the carpet, but Cain ignored that. He was looking at the kid, putting the pieces back together and patching the holes, trying to picture him alive. He was long and lean, this kid. Built to run. And kneeling there, Cain recognized him.
He’d posed nude for Alexa. There had been half a dozen paintings of him hanging in her studio. The kid on China Beach, sitting on the rocks. The kid on Alexa’s bed, face-down and arms dangling toward the floor. When Cain had gone to Grassley’s autopsy, he’d seen the parallel cuts on the side of his partner’s neck. Now he understood what had bothered him about those. He’d assumed Grassley and Chun were attacked because Chun had been asking questions about Pi Kappa Kappa in Berkeley. But that had been wrong. This kid had seen Grassley in the Academy of Art, going into professors’ offices and asking questions. Grassley had just been there to ask about the dress, but the kid wouldn’t have known that. He’d followed Grassley to his car, had sat behind the driver’s seat with a knife on his neck. It was Chun’s bad luck that she was waiting for Grassley in his bedroom.
“Is that Grassley’s gun?” Fischer asked.
He looked around. She was standing behind him.
“Or Angela’s. I’m not sure.”
She offered her hand and helped him back to his feet.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m good,” he said.
“We saw him,” Fischer said.
“What?”
“In the coffee shop, by Alexa’s studio. We were having coffee with Melissa Montgomery, and he was right next to us.”
Cain closed his eyes and pictured it. Melissa had given him the envelope, the new set of pictures and the second blackmail note. Get Cain, Castelli had told her. Maybe he’d been ready to come clean, to tell them who Carolyn was. To say what he suspected about his wife. But there hadn’t been time for it. His life had run out that same night. Right here, in this room.
“He was by the window,” Cain said. “The tall kid, listening to music on his headphones.”
“That’s right.”
“He was watching us the whole time—maybe they all were.”
“Alexa must have called him after her mom got the call from the bank,” Fischer said. “He knew it was over. He told them to come here. Whatever excuse he gave, what he really wanted was to have them in the same place. They were the only ones who could point to him.”
Cain looked around the study again. Mona Castelli’s fresh blood was splashed across the dried stains from her husband’s murder. Their marriage had been dead from the day she’d opened Lester Fennimore’s envelope. But if she’d just confronted her husband instead of Fennimore, it might have all been different.
“Where are you going?” Fischer asked.
“Outside for a second,” Cain said. “I need some air. I’ll call Nagata. We need the ME, the CSI team. We need the photographers—everything.”
“Okay.”
He left her in the study and went downstairs. Castelli had died because his wife despised him, because she never knew the truth and hadn’t tried to learn it. She’d spent nineteen years believing what Lester Fennimore had put in her mind. She thought she was sleeping next to a rapist, and she was fine with that as long as he kept bringing in money.
Cain didn’t like it, but he could live with it.
It was Grassley and Chun that he couldn’t stand. It was the fact that the dead kid upstairs had smashed into Lucy’s house, and only luck had kept him from killing her.
He stood in the kitchen and steadied himself. Upstairs, he’d told Fischer that he was going to call Nagata. But he didn’t get out his phone. Instead he went toward the rear of the house, through the den and into the sunroom. There was a sliding glass door here that led out to the cliff steps. He wasn’t surprised when it slid back easily. It hadn’t been locked. He looked at the handle and saw a single, bloody fingerprint.
Later, he would think that this was the moment that he should have called upstairs, that he should have stopped and asked for backup. He’d chided Chun for this kind of thing. It’s the guys who rush in without looking who always get killed, he’d told her. But he wasn’t thinking about backup, wasn’t thinking about the fact that he wasn’t carrying his gun. Maybe that’s how it happened to everyone else. He thought he saw a trail, and he wanted to follow it.