They didn’t move the body until well past lunchtime. The techs came in with their tripods and their can lights, and they took photographs and used lasers to shoot measurements and calculate angles. A guy from ballistics got up on a ladder and burrowed into the high back wall, eventually finding the lethal bullet buried and smashed in a two-by-six heart pine stud. When the same man pulled out the dictionary and flipped it open, the nearly intact bullet fell out of the M section. It had punched through the spine, had gone almost all the way through the book, but had stopped just before the fore edge.
The man bagged it, then showed it to Cain and Fischer.
“Good ballistics off this one,” he said. “The other—not so much. You send a piece of lead through two sides of a skull, then into a piece of wood, it gets pretty smashed up.”
Cain looked around. The study was cluttered with numbered yellow signs, a hundred and seventy of them, marking the location of each piece of evidence. The photographers were moving from one to the next, taking their time to frame each shot. Dr. Levy and two assistant medical examiners rolled Castelli over and lifted him into a body bag. They’d already swabbed his hands and bagged them, and the colorimetric GSR test was developing on the edge of the desk.
“Hang on,” Cain said. “I need to check something.”
He stepped away from Fischer and the ballistics man, nodded a greeting to Dr. Levy, and knelt next to her at the body bag.
“I’m taking something out of his pocket—a key,” Cain said. “All right?”
“Bring it back. If it’s on the body, it stays on the body until we get to Bryant Street.”
“I’m not even leaving the room.”
Cain reached into Castelli’s right pocket and found the key. He pulled it out and showed it to Dr. Levy, then to Fischer. Then he crossed to the study’s door and put the key in the lock. He twisted it, and the deadbolt slid out. He turned it the same way, another half rotation, and the deadbolt disappeared.
What did that prove?
Castelli could have come into the study, could have locked the door with the key and put it back in his pocket. Then he must have crossed the room to the credenza, where he put down his wallet and phone. After that, he opened a fresh bottle of bourbon and sat down to the serious business of drinking nine-tenths of it. There was just the one glass. But if there’d been someone else in here, a shooter, that person wouldn’t very well have left his glass sitting on the desk.
Cain came back to the body bag and slipped the key into Castelli’s pocket. Kneeling there, he helped position the stiffened body so Rachel Levy’s assistants could zip the bag closed.
“When you do the blood alcohol test, can you determine how much he had to drink?” Cain asked.
“Sure.”
“I mean, you can be pretty precise about it? Whether he drank the whole bottle himself, or if he had company helping him?”
“I can’t do that,” Dr. Levy said. “We don’t know when he started, how fast he was drinking. He’d be metabolizing it while he went.”
“He was with me at seven o’clock,” Cain said. “And he was dead by three. Does that help?”
“A little. I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
She picked up the GSR test and showed it to Cain. The circular fiberglass swab was speckled with tiny blue dots.
Cain stood up.
“Agent Fischer?”
“I see it.”
“Positive gunshot residue,” Dr. Levy said.
Cain nodded and looked around the room. Soon, the CSI team would start bagging everything. They’d load the bags into boxes and haul them off. It would take a moving truck to get it all—the books and the magazines, the rug that had soaked up Castelli’s blood until it was black with it, the sawn-out chunk of old-growth pine that had caught his bullet. The bottles, the tumbler, the contents of the bathroom.
Next to him, Agent Fischer was putting her phone away. She took Cain’s elbow.
“That was the patrolman, next door,” she said. “Mona Castelli’s coming out of it. She can talk to us.”
“All right.”
Cain checked faces in the now crowded room until he recognized the man he wanted. He went to him, a technician from the Crime Scene Investigation unit. Cain wasn’t sure of Sumida’s first name, wasn’t sure they would recognize each other if they passed on the street. They only knew each other from crime scenes.
“Agent Fischer and I have to step next door,” Cain said. “You okay if I leave you in charge?”
“Sure.”
“You know what to do?”
“Bag it and tag it,” Sumida said. “And don’t fuck it up.”
“Good deal.”