“Maker’s Mark,” Cain said.
“That’s right,” Henry said. “Now I remember.”
Castelli had appointed Henry, and then after things had gone south for Henry, he’d asked for his resignation. But Henry had been in Castelli’s orbit long enough that he would have seen the man drink.
“How loaded was he?” Cain asked.
“He’d had enough to do the job without the gun—it’s a wonder he was conscious to pull the trigger.”
“It’s a wonder,” Cain said. He looked at Fischer. “Isn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“And the last part?” Cain asked. “The DNA?”
“That tied it all together,” Henry said. “The samples you gave me—you had an entire family in the cooler. The mother, who suffocated in a casket. The father, who shot himself in the head. And their child—it was a girl, if you care—who died in the womb.”
“So it was his.”
“It was his.”
“You can write it up for me?”
“Sure, but what for? You can’t use it anywhere. And the labs you’re waiting on, they’ll tell you the same thing when they get around to it.”
“All right,” Cain said. He stood up, and so did Fischer. “Forget we came here.”
“I will, after I send you my bill.”
30
THEY ARRIVED AT the station an hour ahead of the autopsy, so he took Fischer up to the sixth floor, and they went into his office. Grassley had left a stack of files on his chair, and Cain put them on the floor so Fischer could sit.
“You’ve got a theory,” Fischer said. “You’ve known about the girl longer than me, so you’re a step ahead. Tell me a story that makes all of it fit.”
Cain swiveled toward the window and twisted the rod that worked the blinds, to shut out the gray daylight.
“It has to start with Castelli getting caught up with Pi Kappa Kappa,” Cain said. “By the time he was a pledge, they’d gone underground. They must have been into something.”
“The skin trade,” Fischer said. “Human traffic.”
“Maybe the girl was someone they wanted to punish. She broke a rule, she tried to break free. They made it into a party and took pictures.”
“But you’ve got to account for at least eight weeks between the rape and the burial,” Fischer said. “She was a couple months along with his baby. Unless the night in the pictures wasn’t his first time with her, or it was someone else in the shots.”
“Maybe he kept her chained to the bed for eight weeks. The DNA says it was his baby,” Cain said. “We’ve got a picture of a man raping her, and Melissa Montgomery—who’s seen him naked—couldn’t rule him out. So let’s say it was him, and let’s say he helped put her in the casket.”
“Okay.”
“Then he started worrying about it,” Cain said. “And he got especially worried after a different girl got away—the one MacDowell found in the alley behind the funeral home. Which meant the fire at the Grizzly Peak frat house was convenient. Everyone who died that night was probably there when the photographs got taken.”
“You think Castelli set that fire?”
“You asked me to tell a story that puts everything together,” Cain said. “That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t know if it’s true or not—it just fits.”
“Go on.”
“So Castelli gets on with his life. He goes to London and does some consulting. When his dad loses the ambassadorship, he comes back to California and gets his MBA. Things are looking up after that, and he’s in San Jose making real money.”
“And then Lester Fennimore comes along,” Fischer said. “His old frat brother.”
“Maybe he wants to talk to Castelli about the girl, or the fire.”
“Or both.”
“So Castelli agrees to meet him,” Cain said. “They want a quiet spot—Castle Rock State Park fits the bill. Especially after dark. But Castelli doesn’t go there to talk. He’s got his thirty-eight, and either he’s wearing gloves or he brought a rag to wipe everything down.”
“Then who’s the blackmailer?” Fischer asked. “And why now?”
“Well, it wasn’t really blackmail,” Cain said. “Castelli thought the same thing. They weren’t asking for money. They were pressuring him to kill himself—which might’ve just been cover for a plan to kill him. But what if before that, they’d been shaking him down for years?”
“The money in his safe,” Fischer said. “You think he was going to pay it to them. But then something changed, and they just wanted him dead.”
“What changed was me,” Cain said. “I got the exhumation order. And then the secret they’d been holding over him all this time was about to come into the open. They wanted Castelli dead before we could arrest him and make him talk.”
“But who are they?”
“If we’re right,” Cain said, “not everyone who knew about the pictures died in the Grizzly Peak fire. Lester Fennimore lived to the late 1990s. There could be others.”
“So you think it’s a Pi Kappa Kappa brother.”
Cain nodded.
“I think that’s what got Grassley killed, what put Chun in the hospital—she was out there, in Berkeley, asking about Pi Kappa Kappa. Someone got scared and decided to shut us down.”