their clothes, he turned without a word and left.
Greene moved in with a fellow DA until he found a gloomy furnished apartment. He' d loved his wife so much that he blamed himself for her betrayal. The divorce was over in a flash. Debbie got the house, most of their savings and everything else she wanted because Mike would not fight. After the divorce, Mike tried to concentrate on his job, but he was so depressed that his work suffered. His supervisor recommended a leave of absence. Mike had never been out of California except for his honeymoon in Hawaii and a vacation or two in Mexico. He sold his car and bought a ticket to London.
Six months in Europe, which included a brief fling with a lovely Israeli tourist, gave Mike some perspective. He decided that Debbie's extracurricular sexcapades were not his fault and that it was time to get on with his life. A friend in the Multnomah County district attorney's office set up a job interview. Now Mike lived in a condo near the Broadway Bridge, across the Willamette River from the Rose Garden, where the Trailblazers played.
As Greene walked from the Justice Center to the Multnomah County courthouse after Justine Castle's arraignment, he fantasized about showering, eating a light meal and going to sleep on the flannel sheets of his king-size bed. That dream went up in smoke when he found Sean McCarthy waiting for him in the reception area of the district attorney's office, his nose buried in a book.
A cop who reads Steinbeck, Greene said. Can't that get you fired?
McCarthy looked up, amused. He was just as gaunt as he had been four years before, but his red hair was thinner.
How you doing, Mike?
Dreadful. If I don't get some sleep soon, you're going to be investigating my demise.
McCarthy marked his place in The Grapes of Wrath and followed Greene through a waist-high gate and down a narrow hall to Mike's small office. A poster advertising last year's Mount Hood Jazz Festival adorned one wall. It showed a tenor sax superimposed on the snow-covered mountain. Mike had sat in for a set with a local trio during the festival. A chess set decorated a credenza that ran under Greene's window. The deputy district attorney was studying a variation of the king's Indian defense in his spare time, and the position reached by white after thirteen moves was displayed on the board.
Sean McCarthy took a chair opposite Mike's desk. Greene closed the door to his office and slumped in his chair.
About four years ago a doctor named Vincent Cardoni was accused of torturing several victims in a house in Milton County. That was your case, right?
It was a Milton County case, but I assisted, McCarthy answered.
Frank Jaffe represented Cardoni. His daughter, Amanda, is representing Justine Castle, Cardoni's ex-wife, in a case with several similarities to the old case. Amanda thinks her client has been set up by Cardoni.
Cardoni is dead.
That's what Alex DeVore said, but Amanda says that no body was ever found.
That's true.
So ... ?
McCarthy was quiet for a moment. How similar are the crime scenes?
Amanda says they're almost identical.
Really. Identical how?
Greene found the crime scene photographs and handed them to McCarthy. The detective shuffled through them slowly. He kept one picture and set the stack down on Greene's desk.
What do you think? the deputy DA asked.
McCarthy turned over the picture he was holding. It showed the half-filled coffee mug that had been found on the drain board in the farmhouse kitchen.
Did the lab find Justine Castle's fingerprints on this mug? McCarthy asked.
Greene nodded. They were on a scalpel with the blood of one of the victims on it, too.
That really bothers me.
Why?
We found more or less the same thing in the house in Milton County four years ago. The press knew about the scalpel, but we never told them about the coffee mug.
What about the motion to suppress?
A list of the items seized was submitted, but there was no mention that prints were found on any of them.
So you think that someone who knew about the mug set up Justine Castle?
Or she poured herself some coffee while she was working. A year or so after Cardoni disappeared I had a drink with Frank Jaffe. At one point the conversation turned to the Cardoni case. Frank told me that Justine Castle had given the coffee mug to Cardoni as a present and Cardoni claimed the mug had been stolen from his office at St. Francis. Cardoni thought that Justine Castle had used the mug and the scalpel to set him up.
Chapter 40
The weather front that had bedeviled Oregon for the past week was attacking again. Sheet after sheet of heavy rain bombarded Amanda's car. Even with the wipers on full, the visibility was so poor that Amanda counted herself lucky when she spotted the gap in the fence that bordered the farm. As soon as she turned onto the driveway the car started hitting puddles and potholes. Rain pounded the roof. Amanda's high beams raked the darkness, illuminating trees and shrubs before spotlighting the yellow crime scene tape that stretched across the door to the farmhouse.
Amanda shut off the engine and sat listening to the rain. She had convinced herself that she would know if Cardoni had created both chambers of horror simply by walking through the farmhouse. Now that she was here, the idea sounded ridiculous. Amanda turned on the interior light and took another look at the pictures that Mike Greene had given her. One showed the graveyard surrounded by trees and far from the boundaries of the property: a place that would be hard to find accidentally. She flipped to the next shot. Three bodies, all showing marks of torture, lay stretched out on a ground sheet. A tarp had been erected over them to keep the corpses as dry as possible. A close-up of a female victim showed the abuse the frail body had taken in the days before she died.
Another set of photographs showed the interior of the farmhouse. Amanda shuffled quickly past the close-ups of the body in the basement. One long look when she first saw the photos had been enough. She reviewed the other pictures before realizing that she was stalling. Amanda grabbed a flashlight and ran through the rain until she reached the overhang that covered the front door. She ripped away the bright yellow tape and walked inside.
Amanda played the beam of her flashlight over the entryway and the living room. They were as bare and sparsely furnished as the house in Milton County had been. Amanda found the bedroom. The police had left the furniture after dusting it for prints and scouring it for trace evidence, but they had taken the books and the journal from the bookcase. Amanda tried to imagine the killer sitting in the armchair and thumbing through the manuals in preparation for the next torture session. What type of monster could coldly plan the ritual degradation of another human being?
Amanda walked back through the living room to the kitchen. Outside, the wind gusted, rattling the shutters and skittering across the roof. Amanda felt a flutter in her stomach when she turned the knob of the basement door and looked into the dark space below. She flicked a light switch, and a bare bulb lit the lower part of the basement stairs. An oil-burning furnace stood in one corner. In another corner a rectangular patch of floor, cleaner than the area surrounding it, told her where the mattress had lain before forensics had removed it. She saw holes in the wall where the manacles had been secured; these too had been moved to the crime lab. Then she noticed the crudely mortared concrete wall that divided the basement in half.
The wall looked as if it had been constructed by a do-it-yourselfer from a how-to book. Amanda descended the stairs and peered through an opening that led into a dark space where the light from the 40-watt bulb barely reached. Amanda turned on her flashlight and shone it through the doorway. The operating table was there. Above it was another bulb. Amanda pulled the string attached to it, and the light illuminated a space bare except for the operating table. Everything else from the room had gone to the crime lab. Suddenly she flashed on an image of Mary Sandowski's tearstained face, and a wave of nausea surged through her. She shut her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. There was no way that she could prove it, but there was absolutely no doubt. The person who had turned the mountain cabin into a place of horror had been at work here.
Amanda circled the table. Fingerprint powder darkened the steel legs. She knelt down and saw a dark brown
