THEY PARKED ON Bay Street and looked across at Henry Newcomb’s house. There were no lights burning in the living room, but above it, one window on the top floor was lit. It must have been a kid’s bedroom. The master suite would likely be in the back, overlooking the garden.
They got out of the car and crossed the street, then climbed the narrow steps up to Henry’s front door. Cain skipped the doorbell and used his fist. Knocking like a beat cop, like Grassley. They waited and listened, and then they heard light feet running down the stairs. The door opened four inches and stopped on its chain.
A pair of small boys’ faces looked out from the level of the doorknob. One of them was hyperalert, studying Cain with interest. The other was shy and wary.
“Who are you?” the curious one asked.
Cain took his inspector’s star and held it for the boy to see.
“Gavin Cain, SFPD,” he said. “I’m here to see your father.”
“His father, not mine,” the boy said. “This is David Newcomb. I’m his friend, Ross Carver. I don’t live here.”
Henry’s son looked out and said nothing. Then he withdrew from the cracked door and went away. He called out softly from the foot of the stairs.
“Dad?”
When he didn’t get an answer, he climbed out of sight and called again.
“Do you like being a cop?” the other boy asked Cain.
“It’s okay.”
“That’s what I’m going to do,” the boy said. “When I’m old. I think it looks better than just okay.”
“You want to catch the bad guys.”
“Or shoot them.”
“It’s a lot of paperwork, shooting them,” Cain said. “So it’s better just to catch them.”
“Did you ever have to shoot a guy?”
“Once,” Cain said.
He looked through the crack in the door, behind the boy. Henry’s son was still upstairs, and he thought he could hear Henry and his wife speaking with their child.
“Did he die?” the boy asked, and Cain turned back to him.
“He was fine,” Cain said. He was going to leave it at that, but both the boy and Fischer were watching him, waiting for him to explain. “I shot him in the leg and the arm. Twice in the arm.”
“On purpose?” the boy asked.
Cain nodded. “I wanted to arrest him.”
“What did he do?”
“Why did I shoot him? Or what did he do after I shot him?”
“Both.”
“He was a very bad guy,” Cain said. This was now the longest conversation he’d ever had on this topic outside of a courtroom. But he didn’t mind. It was good practice, talking to a kid about things like this. “He’d walked into a school, the man I shot. He went in so he could hurt a bunch of kids. And five of the teachers. And then he left before we could catch him. It took us four years to figure out who he was and track him down.”
The man had done a lot more than hurt the children and the teachers at Ashbury Heights. He’d been shooting to kill. And afterward, when he’d run out of bullets, he’d walked through a shattered window and across the playground. He’d hopped a low chainlink fence and then disappeared. The original inspectors hadn’t gotten anywhere, and the worst crime in the city’s memory landed on Cain’s desk as a cold case. He’d taken the grainy security footage to Menlo Park and met Matt Redding in his threadbare office. In less than a week, he was knocking on Lucy’s door with Nagata, the district attorney, and a picture of the guy cuffed to a hospital bed.
But he didn’t need to go into all that with this kid, this aspiring homicide inspector.
“You got him, though,” the boy said. “You finally found him, and you shot him.”
“That’s right.”
“And what did he do?”
“He cried out, fell down. He tried to grab his gun off the floor, but before he could, I rolled him over and cuffed him.”
“That’s what I want to do,” the boy said. “Just like that.”
Henry finally came down and sent the boys back upstairs, and Cain heard a television turn on up there. Then the three of them sat down in the living room. Henry was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe, and his hair stuck out above his ears. He hadn’t shaved in at least three days.
“I haven’t written it up yet,” he said. “It was a late night.”
“You got time in a lab.”
“I did. I started with the girl,” Henry said. “You wanted to know what she had in her system when she died. You ever heard of a drug called Thrallinex? It came off the market before it ever made much of a name for itself.”
Fischer looked at Cain.
“It’s what you were looking for,” Henry said. “Isn’t it?”
“They took a picture of her, before she went into the coffin. They were about to force-feed her a dozen tablets of Thrallinex, the ten-milligram pills. Does that sound about right?”
“It fits.”
“What about Castelli?”
“That was a lot easier. If he hadn’t shot himself, he might’ve died from the alcohol and the zolpidem tartrate—”
“Zolpidem what?” Fischer asked.
“—otherwise known as Ambien,” Henry said. He looked at Cain. “What was it he liked to drink?”