Warren Jacobi had been my partner back then.
Ten years older than me, with many more years on the street, Jacobi had good reasons to move into this corner office when I left it. He didn’t want to work the street anymore. He wanted more access to the top, less sprinting through dark alleys. He had taken over from me and gotten the squad running like a fine watch, and soon he was promoted to chief, leaving the lieutenant’s job vacant again.
That was ten months ago.
Jackson Brady, who had recently transferred from Miami PD, had asked for the promotion and gotten it, along with the small glass-walled office with a window looking out on the James Lick Freeway.
Applying the whip was nasty work, but someone had to do it. Brady was doing fine.
“I need a minute,” I told Brady now.
“Good. That’s all the time I’ve got.”
“I want to run the Ellsworth case as primary,” I said. “It’s going to be a bear, but I’m into it. I can handle both Ellsworth and the vigilante cop if I work with Conklin and another team.”
Brady got up from behind the desk, closed the door, sat back down, and gave me his hard blue-eyed stare, full-bore.
“There’s something you have to know about the vigilante cop, Boxer. He’s not shooting just dirtbags. His last victim, Chaz Smith, was working undercover.”
“I’m sorry. Say that again.”
“Chaz Smith was a cop.”
Brady told me his theory: a cop who worked in the Hall of Justice had gotten fed up with due process and decided to go it alone, but he had screwed up more than he knew when he took out Chaz Smith.
“Smith was running a big operation for Narcotics,” Brady told me. “And he had other cops working for him down the line. We have to protect those cops, and we have to bring this vigilante down. No room for failure. No excuses.”
“I have to tell Conklin.”
“Where is he?”
“Driving Harry Chandler’s caretakers to a hotel.”
“You can tell him,” Brady said, “and I’m willing to give you a shot working both cases, Boxer. But if one of them has to take a backseat, I’ll tell you right now, it’s going to be your house of heads.”
“I hear you.”
“Make sure you do. This vigilante is not only a cop, he’s a cop killer. He murdered one of us.”
Chapter 11
I spent the day working both cases.
I’d ransacked the missing-persons databases for a match to our long-haired Jane Doe. After that, Brady and I checked names of cops who had access to the property-room floor and compared those cops’ time sheets with the times drug dealers had been killed with one of our vouchered-and-stolen. 22s.
The list of cops was very long and Brady was still working on the project when I left him.
I got back to the Ellsworth compound as the sun was setting, flying pink flags over the bay. TV satellite vans were double-parked along Vallejo, their engines running and their lights on. Talking heads were using the compound as a backdrop for their on-air reports.
Reporters shouted my name as I went through a gap in the barricade. A lot of our local media knew me. One of them was my close friend Cindy Thomas, who called me on my phone.
I didn’t pick up. I couldn’t talk to Cindy right now.
Conklin came toward me, then walked me back through the front gate.
“It’s been crazy,” he said. “I’ve become the go-to person. The press is barking and I don’t have a bone to throw them. Brian Williams called me. How’d he get my number?”
“No kidding. NBC Nightly News Brian Williams? What did you tell him?”
“Ongoing case. No comment at this time. Call Media Relations.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, and ‘I love your work.’”
I laughed.
Conklin said, “But seriously, Lindsay, if we don’t give Cindy something newsworthy, my home life is going to suck. She was on the scene before we were, you know?”
“Hey, here’s news: Brady gave us the green light. This is officially our case now.”
The Ellsworth garden had been transformed while I was out. An evidence tent had been set up just off the patio, rolls of brown paper had been unfurled over pathways, and a grid of crime scene tape had been stretched across the garden.
I saw several new holes. Soil had been piled on tarps, and halogen lights were on. But even with the halogens, there wouldn’t be enough light to work the scene once the sun had set; the forensics team would have to quit for the night so that evidence didn’t get lost or trampled.
God help us if it rained.
Chapter 12
I found my best friend, chief medical examiner Dr. Claire Washburn, inside the tent wearing a size 16 bunny suit and booties, what she called a full-body condom with a zipper.
She greeted me, said, “Fine mess we have here, girlfriend. No, don’t hug me. And don’t touch anything. We’re trying to hermetically seal whatever kind of crime scene this freaking obscenity is.”
She kissed the air next to my cheek, then stepped aside so I could see her worktable.
Four heads were lined up, three of them as clean as the proverbial whistle, and as the head numbered 104.
The fourth skull showed some traces of scalp.
“The hounds just got another hit,” Claire told me. “Another skull. Of the six I’ve examined so far, all were severed with a ripsaw.”
The tent flap opened and Charlie Clapper came inside. Man, I was glad to see the chief of the Crime Scene Unit. Clapper is a former homicide cop, my friend, and SFPD’s own Gil Grissom. He was as dapper as anyone could possibly be in a bunny suit, and I could see comb marks in his hair.
Clapper was carrying a heavy brown paper bag that he handed to Claire, and he held a small glassine bag in his gloved fist.
“Hey, Lindsay. I hear Brady tossed you this hot potato.”
“I self-tossed it. It’s either work the case or lie awake wishing I were working it.”
“I feel the same way. Don’t try to take this once-in-a-lifetime mind-bender away from me. It’s mine. Hey, I’ve got something here for us to ponder.”
“Hit me with it.”
“I found blood in one of the holes, made me think that was our fresh Jane Doe’s grave. If I’m right, this necklace was probably hers.”
He held the baggie up to the light.
“A trinket,” he said. “A necklace. But no neck to hang it on.”
The necklace was made of glass beads on a waxed string with a cheap metal clasp, the kind of costume jewelry commonly found at street fairs. What made this one special was that Jane Doe had handled it. There was a slim chance we might be able to lift her fingerprints from the beads.
Maybe her killer had left DNA on them too.
Charlie Clapper was saying, “I found other doodads. This one,” he said, holding up a baggie. “It’s a pendant. Could be an amethyst set in a gold bezel. The rest of the artifacts have been moldering in the ground too long for me to say what they are or to get anything off them.
“But they are trophies, wouldn’t you say?”
A lightbulb went on in my mind. I was finally getting the picture.
“What if the heads are the trophies?” I said to Clapper. “I think this place is a trophy garden.”
Chapter 13
That night we all met in Claire’s domain, the Medical Examiner’s Office, which is right behind the Hall of Justice.
All four of us — Claire, Cindy, Yuki, and me — sat around the large round table Claire used as a desk, ready for a four-way brainstorming meeting of what Cindy had dubbed the Women’s Murder Club.
Normally when we meet to talk about a case, we worry about Cindy reporting something she isn’t supposed to know. If you forget to say “Off the record,” your words could be tomorrow’s headline. But tonight I was more worried about Yuki.
Yuki is an assistant DA and I knew anything we said was off the record — but was it off the pillow?
Yuki was dating Jackson Brady.
Yuki was sleeping with my boss.
I said, “Don’t tell Lieutenant Wonderful, okay? He wouldn’t like this.”
“I hear you,” Yuki said, grinning at me. She patted my arm. She promised nothing.
Claire turned up the lights, passed out bottles of water, told us that the six skulls were in paper bags to prevent condensation and that the long-haired Jane Doe’s remains were in the cooler so that the soft tissue didn’t decompose further.
Claire said, “I’m going to give all seven heads a thorough exam in the morning, but I also hired a forensic anthropologist to consult. Dr. Ann Perlmutter from UC Santa Cruz. You’ve heard of her. She was a special consultant identifying bodies in mass graves in Afghanistan. If anyone can work up identifiable faces on bald skulls, Ann can.”
“How long will that take?” I asked.
Claire shrugged. “Days or weeks. Meanwhile we’ll work with Jane Doe’s face. Photoshop her a little bit. Put her on our website.”
“I can create a Facebook page for her,” said Cindy.
“Not yet,” I said, trying to rein in Cindy’s racehorse tendencies. “Give us a chance to ID her in real life, keep her parents from finding out that she’s dead by seeing her page on the Web.”
I told Cindy and Yuki about the numbers 104 and 613, showed them a photocopy of the index cards we’d found with the first two heads. No numbers had been found with the other heads.
“So, two numbers only. Maybe it’s a game,” said Yuki.
“So you think the killer is into Sudoku?” I said.
“You’re funny,” Yuki said, giving me a soft punch in the arm.
“But you said there were no numbers with any of the other remains,” Claire said.
“To me that means whoever dug up the heads left the numbers,” I said. “These are two distinct acts — burying and exhuming. They may have been done by different people.”
Cindy had been tapping keys on her laptop.
“I just ran the numbers through Google. Came up with a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem related to backyard burials. For instance, I’ve got numbers of committees on radiation, department numbers at European universities.”
“Gotta be some kind of code,” Yuki said.
“Maybe it’s an archive number,” I offered. “The head-and-flower tableau was set up almost like an exhibit.”
“Let me run with this part of the puzzle,” Cindy said. “I’ll let you know what I find, and what do you say, Linds? I have first dibs on the story if I find out what the numbers mean?”
“If you actually find something we can use.”
“Right.”
“I’ll have to clear it before you run it.”
“Of course. My usual penalty for being friends with you guys.”
“Okay,” I said to Cindy. “The numbers are yours.”
“Biggest issue for me,” Claire said, “is that we have no bodies. Without bodies, we may never be able to determine causes of death.”
“Well, at least it’s seven bodies we need to find, not six hundred and thirteen,” Yuki said.
“Not six hundred and thirteen so far,” said Claire. “There are many more backyards in Pacific Heights.”
We groaned as one.
It was raining when I ran out the back door of Claire’s office to my car. Reporters were in the parking lot waiting for me, calling my name.
I got into my car, started up the engine, turned on the lights and the sirens, and pulled out onto Harriet Street.
No bones, ladies and gentlemen of the press. I have no bones to throw you at all.
Chapter 14
I was still thinking about the six skulls in sealed paper bags and the young Jane Doe’s head in the cooler when I opened the door to our apartment on Lake Street. Martha, my border collie and pal of many years, whimpered and tore across the floor, then threw her full weight against me, almost knocking me down.
“Yes, I do love you,” I said, bending to let her wash my chin, giving her a big hug.
I called out, “Joe. Your elderly primigravida has arrived.”
Claire had told me that elderly primigravida meant “a woman over thirty-five who is pregnant for the first time,” and it was a quaint and unflattering term that I usually found just hilarious.
Joe called back, and when I rounded the corner, I saw him standing between piles of books and papers, wearing pajama bottoms, a phone pressed to his ear.
He dialed down the volume on the eleven o’clock news and gave me a one-armed hug, then said into the phone, “Sorry. I’m here. Okay, sure. Tomorrow works for me.”
He clicked off, kissed me, asked, “Did you eat dinner?”
“Not really.”
“Come to the kitchen. I’m going to heat up some soup for my baby. And for my old lady too.”
“Har-har. Who were you talking to on the phone?”
“Old boys’ network. Top secret,” he said melodramatically. “I have to fly to DC tomorrow for a few days. Cash flow for the Molinari family.”
“Okayyy. Yay for cash flow. What kind of soup?”
It was tortellini en brodo with baby peas served up in a heavy white bowl. I went to work on the soup and after a minute, I held up the bowl and said, “More, please.”
Between bites, I told my husband about the house of heads, which was what the Ellsworth compound would inevitably be called from that day forward.
“It was indescribable, Joe. Heads, two of them set up on the back patio. A display of some sort, like an art installation, but no bodies. There was no sign of mayhem. No disturbance in the garden except for the two holes the heads had been in. Then CSU exhumed five more heads, just clean skulls. Honestly, I don’t know what the hell we’re looking at.”
I told Joe about the numbers 104 and 613 handwritten on a pair of index cards.
“Cindy is running the numbers. So far we know that six-one-three is an area code in Ottawa. Lots of radio stations start with one hundred and four. Put the two numbers together and you get a real estate listing for a three-bedroom house in Colorado. What a lead, hmmm?”
“Ten-four,” he said. “Radio call signal meaning ‘I acknowledge you. Copy that.’”
“Hmmm. And six-thirteen?”
“June thirteenth?”
“Uh-huh. The ides of June. Very helpful.”
Joe brought a big bowl of pralines and ice cream to the counter. We faced off with clashing spoons, then had a race to the bottom. I captured the last bite, put down my spoon, held up my arms in victory, and said, “Yessss.”
“I let you win, big mama.”
“Sure you did.”
I winked at him, took the bowl and the spoons to the sink, and asked Joe, “So, what’s your gut take on my case?”
“Apart from the obvious conclusion that a psycho did it,” said my blue-eyed, dark-haired husband, “here are my top three questions: What’s the connection between the skulls and the Ellsworth place? What do the victims have in common? And does Harry Chandler have anything to do with those heads?”
“And the numbers? A tally? A scorecard?”
“It’s a mystery to me.”
“One of our Jane Does is relatively fresh. If we can ID her, maybe the numbers won’t matter.”
Four hours later, I woke up in bed next to Joe with the remains of a nightmare in my mind, something Wes Craven could have created. There had been a pyramid of skulls heaped up in a dark garden, hundreds of them, and they were surrounded by a garland of flowers.
What did it mean?
I still didn’t have a clue.
Chapter 15
By seven, I was awake for good, this time with a mug of milky coffee and my open laptop. I zipped through my e-mail fast but stopped deleting junk when I saw two Google alerts for SFPD.
The alerts were linked to the San Francisco Post, and the front-page story was headlined “Revenge vs. the SFPD.”
My stomach clenched when I saw the byline.
I started reading Blayney’s account of Chaz Smith’s murder. Chaz Smith, a known top-tier drug dealer, was assassinated Sunday afternoon in the men’s room at the Morton Academy of Music during their annual spring recital. The academy, located on California Street, was packed with parents and students during the shooting. Smith has been under investigation by the SFPD for the past three years but because of the closing of the city’s corrupt drug lab, he has never gone on trial. According to a source who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity, Chaz Smith’s assassin “demonstrated professional skills in the killing of this drug dealer. It was a very slick hit.” Smith is the fourth high-level drug dealer who has been executed in this manner. In the opinion of this reporter, a professional do-good hit man is cleaning up the mess that the SFPD can’t rub out. That’s why I call this killer Revenge — and given the size of the mess that needs to be cleaned, he could just be getting started…
He’d said it himself: “In the opinion of this reporter.” It was a phrase that meant “I’m not actually reporting. I’m telling a story.”
And his “story” was a slam against the SFPD.
The Delete button was right under my index finger, but instead of sending the article to the recycle bin, I opened the link to the second story, headlined “Death at the Ellsworth Compound?”
Right under the headline was a photo showing Conklin and me going in through the compound’s tall front gate.
My heart rate kicked up as I read Blayney’s report; he said that Homicide had been called to a disturbance at the famous Ellsworth compound, owned by Harry Chandler.
Blayney gave the context of the story by telling his readers about the SFPD’s dismal rate of unsolved homicides.
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