It had probably gone to print and been on the stands before Dr. Levy even made her first cut. Cain pulled the paper over and held the front page to the firelight so that he could read the story. There were no official sources; everything was anonymous. But enough people had seen Castelli where he’d fallen that the two reporters were able to paint a clear picture of the scene. They even had two crucial facts that Cain would never have allowed out. The mayor’s hands had field-tested positive for gunshot residue, and Mona Castelli’s hands were clean.
The one thing missing was a reason—not even a guess at one. The Examiner’s reporters hadn’t written a word about the blackmail notes or the photographs. Either they didn’t know about them or they were waiting until they got a little more.
Cain set the paper down and leaned his head back until it rested against Lucy’s shins. After a while, he felt her hand reach out of the blanket and stroke the top of his head. He took her fingers and held them against the side of his neck.
“Should we go up to bed?” he asked. “It’d be more comfortable.”
“All right.”
She didn’t move to get up, though. He turned around to look at her and saw the fire’s glow reflected in her eyes.
“Where’d you find the wood?”
“In the park, under the eucalyptuses. And in the redwood grove,” she said. “Fallen branches—nothing thicker than my wrist. I broke them over my knee and put them in a bag.”
“They must’ve been wet,” Cain said. “All this rain today.”
“I had to use two newspapers to get them going.”
“How long were you out?”
“Four hours,” she said. “Five, maybe. I wasn’t feeling good. I thought a walk would help. I read in the book that I’m supposed to walk. But it was so cold, I thought a fire would be nice.”
“They’ve helped before—the walks, I mean?”
“You knew?”
“I’d guessed.”
“Is it okay?”
He wasn’t sure if she meant the walks or how she hadn’t said anything about them.
“I think it’s great,” Cain said.
“Okay.” She sat up and pulled the blanket around her shoulders like a shawl. “It’ll be cold upstairs—you should’ve seen it down here when the fire was going, when it was really going.”
She started for the stairs and he followed her.
“I’m sorry I missed it—that I was so late.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “I saw the paper so I knew where you were.”
“Still.”
“Did they get it right?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably they did.”
Now they were going down the hall. There weren’t any lights, but it didn’t matter. He was close enough behind her that he could feel the warmth coming from beneath her blanket. He undressed at the foot of the bed. Lucy dropped her blanket and then took off her T-shirt, the high school one she usually slept in. She came up to him and he ran his hands gently along her clavicles and down her chest— “Careful, Gavin,” she whispered. She always whispered when they were this close. “I’m sore.”
“I’ll be careful—I’m always careful with you.”
“I know you are.”
—and then his fingers were tracing down her ribs to her stomach, finding the curve that was just beginning to swell from beneath her navel. It was too small to see, this bump. But with his hands, he’d know her body blindfolded. He didn’t need to see it to know the ways she’d grown. She put her hands on his and pressed them gently to her skin.
“Do you remember how we got here?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you do that again?”
“Of course I can.”
Cain was back in the office by four a.m. He’d stopped at a café on the drive down and picked up two large coffees, and now the paper cups were scalding his hands. He set them on the desk, then picked up the folder on his chair. It was two inches thick and had a routing memo stapled to the outside from the SFPD printing shop—the photos from Castelli’s house.
He took the lid off the first of the coffees and sat down to study the photographs. After a while, he got out a notebook and started writing, wanting to record the things that weren’t in the pictures but were still in his memory. The way the room had smelled when he walked into it—a mixture of spent cordite and drying blood. Closer to Castelli, there’d been an almost visible haze of bourbon fumes, the angel’s share rising from his pores.
If he’d put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, what had he been thinking in that last second? The girl, clawing at the coffin lid in the dark? Or maybe he’d only been thinking of himself. He’d seen the second set of photographs; he must have known he couldn’t escape what was coming for him. He would have kept tabs on her grave, would have known about the exhumation order.