“You’re doing good work, Combs.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said. He started toward the living room to collect Mona Castelli but turned back to Cain when he thought of something else. He dropped his voice so it wouldn’t leave the kitchen. “I think they know something. But they didn’t tell me.”
“What makes you think that?”
“They were in the study, talking to each other. Looking at the computer and whispering.”
“All right, Officer. We’ll check it out.”
16
THEY STEPPED INTO the backyard through a sliding glass door and found the Petrovics sitting in a pair of wet redwood deck chairs beneath a canvas awning. The fabric overhead was sodden with rain, big drops beading up on the underside and running toward the edges, where it ran in streams onto the grass and onto the low rock wall at the cliff’s edge. Beyond that was an empty gray void, booming with the sound of waves breaking on the rocks below them. The foghorn growled, low and long. A ship, invisible out in the Pacific, answered.
Roger Petrovic climbed out of his chair, brushing rainwater from his fleece vest with the back of his hand. He stood a head taller than Cain. White beard and close-cropped hair, the muscles in his bare forearms like coiled hemp ropes. His wife was shorter and lithe. Her tanned face was framed by brown hair, parted down the middle. Roger took the badge that Cain handed him, looking at it for a moment before passing it to his wife. He did the same with Fischer’s.
“I talked to Officer Combs, inside,” Cain said. “He said you were both awake and heard the shot.”
Dana handed the badges back. She glanced up at her husband, and he nodded to her.
“We heard,” she said.
Roger looked at the glass door. Cain had closed it after they stepped out, and from the backyard it was impossible to see into the house. The glass was glazed, mirrorlike.
“Mrs. Castelli’s gone?” Roger asked. “Your officer took her away?”
Cain had no trouble reading the tone.
He wasn’t worried about Mona Castelli; he only wanted to know if he could have his living room back. It wasn’t surprising. Just look at them: you couldn’t find two people more different from the Castellis. Not on this street, anyway. But Cain knew Mrs. Petrovic had come out this morning, had talked her way past the cop in the driveway to tell the paramedics that Mona Castelli could wait in their house.
Whatever differences they had, the neighbors had some kind of relationship.
“She’s out of your hair,” Cain said. “Couple nights in a hotel—after that, I don’t know.”
Mr. Petrovic relaxed his arms from across his chest. His wife took his hand.
“We’ll sit in the kitchen,” she said to Cain. “You’re cold. Agent Fischer, too.”
“Your officer probably drank all the coffee,” Roger said. “Worrying if that woman would choke on her puke.”
“Roger.”
“You should’ve seen her—passed out on our sofa and snoring like a bum in a drunk tank.”
“You’ve never been in a drunk tank,” Dana said.
“It’s all right.” He held her hand close to his chest as he led them across the soaked lawn to the house. “I’m just glad she’s gone.”
While making sure Mona Castelli didn’t die like a rock star on Roger Petrovic’s couch, Officer Combs hadn’t drunk much of the coffee at all. There was still enough in the pot to fill four mugs. They sat at the maple-topped island bar in the kitchen, and Roger Petrovic waited for Cain and Fischer to get out their notepads and flip to fresh pages.
“We were up later than usual,” he began. “We’d had friends for dinner—you need their names?”
“If I do, we’ll circle back,” Cain said.
“They left at eleven,” Dana said.
Fischer penciled the time into her spiral pad, then spoke while scrolling through something on her phone.
“You’re sure about the time?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I flipped on the TV when they left,” Dana said. She pointed at a small flat screen on the wall near the refrigerator. “The news was just coming on. The eleven o’clock news. I listened to it while we cleaned up.”
“How long did that take?”
“Half an hour,” Roger said. “Give or take.”
“So it was about eleven thirty,” Dana said. “And we were turning out the lights downstairs, about to go out to bed. And I looked out the window there, by the breakfast nook, and I saw the moon.”
“A third-quarter moon,” Roger said. “It rises at noon and sets at midnight.”
“You knew that already, or you looked it up?” Fischer asked.
“I looked it up this morning. We’d put it together, what we heard. So I knew we’d need to know the time.”
“All right,” Cain said. “Go on.”
Dana took her husband’s hand again.
“It was so clear,” she said. “It had been foggy all night, and then it got clear. So I called him down and poured us each a glass of wine—the bottle was already open, what we didn’t finish at dinner. We put on our jackets and went outside to sit on the chairs—”