Lieutenant Nagata and Special Agent Fischer were waiting for him in a windowless conference room on the thirteenth floor. The walls were battleship gray, and the wooden table was so pitted, it might have been used as a chopping block. The contractors who had redone the rest of the place must have missed this room. But someone had brought in an urn of coffee, and it smelled like it had been brewed that day. Cain poured himself a cup and then sat next to his boss, across from Fischer.
“I’ll start,” Fischer said. He liked the way she got right into it. “We rode herd on the guys at the lab, got them to expedite. But it’s like we thought—no prints anywhere, no DNA on the flap. Whoever mailed the letter wore gloves, used a sponge instead of licking the envelope.”
“You said you had other resources?”
“I’m getting there,” Fischer said. “Since the anthrax attacks—2001, we’re talking—the Post Office has a program called Mail Isolation Control and Tracking. You’re familiar?”
“No,” Cain said. Nagata shook her head.
“The system, it photographs every piece of mail that comes in, in the order it’s received. So if you get a letter and you don’t know where it came from, you can go to the MICT database and look at every letter that got processed just before and after.”
“You know where he mailed it?”
“We pulled the MICT photographs, found the letter, then looked at the twenty pieces on either side. Most of those had return addresses, all in North Beach. So at seven this morning, we went knocking on doors. We woke up a lady on Chestnut Street, showed her a photo of the envelope she’d mailed—birthday money for her grandson, she said. And she dropped it in the blue box at Bay and Stockton.”
“Did you—”
“We had a fingerprint team at the box in fifteen minutes. Right now, we’ve got agents running down prints from everyone we know about who mailed a letter from that site. But that’s a long shot, the prints.”
“If he wore gloves and used a sponge when he did the letter, he would’ve used them when he mailed it,” Nagata said.
“That’s what we think,” Fischer answered. “But we’ve got to check—and we’re also fanning through the neighborhood, looking for cameras.”
“Bay and Stockton,” Cain said. “That’s residential. Pretty quiet.”
“Right. There aren’t any storefronts, but we’re looking for webcams, private security systems. At least two hundred apartment windows look down on that intersection.”
“Another long shot,” Cain said.
“But it’s like I said—we’ve got to check. Turn every stone.”
“Where are you on the enemy list?” Cain asked.
“It’s progressing,” she said. “A man like Castelli—let’s just say he’s got as many enemies as friends.”
“Anybody stand out?”
“Like I said, it’s progressing.” Her eyes cut to Nagata, and Cain wasn’t sure if his lieutenant noticed or not. She was busy taking notes. “I’ll let you know when we find something.”
“All right.”
He wondered what had happened that Fischer already distrusted Nagata. Maybe Fischer distrusted everyone, as a way to save time.
“What about you?” Nagata said to Cain. She underlined something on her spiral pad. “What have you found?”
“The woman in the photos, she died in 1985,” Cain said. “She came in wearing a sixteen-thousand-dollar Jean Patou dress, was force-fed an incapacitating dose of Thrallinex, and disappeared. The guy who brought her was probably driving a 1984 Cadillac Eldorado.”
Agent Fischer was staring at him, waiting for him to go on. But he didn’t say what he thought had happened next. That they’d put her back in the Cadillac and driven her to the mortuary. Someone had gone inside and handed John Fonteroy an envelope, then told him to step out back and have a smoke. They’d have had to bring her in quickly, because Christopher Hanley’s family would’ve been milling around out front. She hadn’t been gagged and she hadn’t been bound, so they must have been confident they could control her. That she wouldn’t scream or fight back until after they forced her on top of Christopher Hanley and closed the casket. The last light a narrowing crack, and then nothing but blackness for thirty years.
He couldn’t prove any of that yet, but that wasn’t the only reason he kept it back. He might have trusted Agent Fischer with it, but he didn’t think Nagata would go five minutes before she reported it to Castelli. Agent Fischer must have been thinking the same thing when she dodged his question about the enemy lists.
“You went to see Matthew Redding, didn’t you?” Nagata said.
“This morning.”
“Explain how you know all that,” Fischer said. “And who’s this guy Redding?”
8