Two index cards lay faceup on the bricks in front of the heads and both had numbers written on them with a ball-point pen. The card in front of the skull read 104. The other card, the one in front of the more recently severed head, read 613.
What did the numbers mean?
Where had these heads come from?
Why were they placed here in plain sight?
If this was a homicide, where were the bodies?
I tore my gaze away from the heads to look into Janet Worley’s face. She covered her mouth with both hands and tears sprang to her eyes.
I saw a meltdown coming. I had to question her. Now.
“Who do these remains belong to? Where are the bodies? Tell us about it, Mrs. Worley.”
“Me? All I know is what I just told you. I’m the one who called the police.”
“Then who did this?”
“I have no idea. None at all.”
“You understand that lying would make you an accessory to the crime.”
“My God. I know nothing.”
Conklin said, “We need the names of everyone who has been inside this house since last Friday.”
“Of course, but it’s only been my husband, my daughter, and me.”
“And Mr. Chandler?”
“Heavens, no. I haven’t seen him in three months.”
“Have you handled these heads or disturbed anything on the patio?”
“No, no, no. I opened the door to air out the room at about seven this morning. I saw this. I called my husband. Then I called nine-one-one.”
Janet Worley went inside the house, and Conklin and I were left to consider the nature of “this.”
Was it Satanism? Terrorism? Drug-related homicide? Who were these victims? What had happened to them?
I wanted to start looking around, but Conklin and I had to stay on the bricks and focus on what we could see without contaminating evidence.
Brady had told us to do the prelim.
That was the job: scope out the crime and tell our lieutenant whether this was a double homicide or a freak show that should be handed off to Major Crimes.
“I don’t know what the hell we’re looking at,” I said to Conklin.
Truly, I’d never seen anything like it in my life.
Chapter 8
THE BACK GARDEN was a dark, three-quarter-acre triangular plot that looked as though a slice of woodland had been dropped down in one piece behind the Ellsworth house.
The parcel was shadowed by buildings and mature trees, crossed with mulched paths, bounded by the house on one side and by two ten-foot-high brick walls that met at a toolshed at the farthest end of the garden.
Looking for entrances, I saw, in addition to the front gate with its broken lock, five doors that opened to the garden from the main house and a gate in the wall next to the toolshed.
“There’s a multipurpose tool,” Conklin said.
He was pointing to a shovel half hidden by a shrub, and beyond the shovel was a mound of soil and a hole dug in the dirt. The hole was about two feet across, the right size for potted chrysanthemums — and also just right for disembodied heads.
I saw a second hole, just visible from the far corner of the patio, and beside that hole was a rounded stone.
Now that I was looking for them, I saw other stones around the garden. Maybe they were decorative in a gnomish way, or maybe the stones were markers.
If the shovel had been used to break the lock, it would mean that whoever broke in knew where to look for the disembodied heads and had then exhumed them.
Did that mean that the intruder was the killer?
Or was he an accessory to whatever mayhem had taken place?
I took another look at the numbered index cards.
When a killer deliberately leaves a calling card, it’s a dare. Usually means he’s trying to show the cops that he’s smarter than they are. It’s playing a very risky game.
Here was the game board as I saw it: a large hidden garden, two severed heads wreathed with flowers, cryptic numbers on a matching pair of index cards.
Did the numbers indicate how many heads were in the garden? Could hundreds of skulls be in this place, perhaps stacked in holes, one on top of another?
Beyond the complete creepiness of the skull tableau, I didn’t have a sense of the meaning or intent of any of it, but we were just getting started and hadn’t yet scratched the surface.
I said to Conklin, “The quickest way is also the best.”
“Ground-penetrating radar,” he said, staring out into the garden.
“And cadaver dogs. We’ve got to dig this place up.”
Chapter 9
WE MET NIGEL WORLEY in the kitchen of the Ellsworth house.
At six three, he was a full foot taller than his wife and had almost a hundred and fifty bloated pounds on her too. His face was puffy. Looked to me like he was a heavy drinker, and I noticed that he had rough dark-stained hands. He answered only questions directed specifically to him, and when he spoke, it was to a place in the air between Conklin and me.
Mr. Worley had no theories about the severed heads, and his tone was hostile. But he had to make a statement on the record. We gave him no choice. The Worleys were witnesses and they were also the only suspects we had.
We put on the siren and drove the English couple from their residence back to the Hall.
While Conklin interviewed Nigel Worley, I sat across from Janet Worley in the smaller of our two interrogation rooms. Brady paced unseen behind the glass.
Brady had already told me that he was unhappy with how our day was turning out. In his opinion, the Ellsworth case was a tar pit, and Conklin and I were going to get sucked under. He needed us to work the vigilante-cop case, and he wanted us to work it now.
I understood his concerns, but I’d seen the severed head of a woman who’d been alive a week ago. She was a Jane Doe, and because we didn’t know her name, she was about to get an official case number and a spot on a refrigerated shelf in the city morgue.
The camera in the corner of the interview room rolled tape as Janet Worley told me that she and Nigel had come to the United States from England ten years before and that they had been working for Harry Chandler since he bought the compound.
She said that she’d “adored” the Chandlers and were shocked and heartbroken when Mrs. Chandler disappeared. The Worleys had stayed on at the compound when Mr. Chandler went on trial, in part because their daughter loved living there and still did.
“Nicole is with Fish and Wildlife,” Janet told me. “She hasn’t been home all weekend. She’s a biologist, you know. Off on some animal rescue mission in the wilderness, I expect. I haven’t been able to reach her on the phone.”
Janet Worley thought Nicole would be returning home that evening but said they never knew her movements for sure.
“She’s twenty-six, you understand. She leads her own life.”
“Explain to me about the buildings on Ellsworth Place, the ones that look to be part of the compound.”
“They were servants’ quarters originally, then over the years they became apartments. Mr. Chandler owns them all,” said Janet Worley, “but he’s been moving the tenants out. There are very few occupants now.”
Janet Worley told me that Nicole lived in number 2 Ellsworth, that Mr. Chandler’s driver lived in number 4, and that the other two buildings were vacant.
I strained Worley’s statement for inconsistencies, watched her body language, and I thought she was being truthful. I asked her to write down names and phone numbers of the Chandler staff living on Ellsworth Place, and while she did that, I went out of the room and compared notes with Conklin.
Nigel Worley had told Conklin the same story Janet had told me. He’d said that no one had a grudge against him, his wife, or his daughter and that Mr. Chandler hadn’t received any hate calls or letters at the compound.
Nigel Worley, like his wife, insisted that he had no idea who could have put the severed heads on the
patio and that he had never before seen the victim with the long brown hair.
If we were to believe them, the Worleys had been together virtually every minute of the last ten years and could vouch for each other’s whereabouts over the weekend in question.
I was frustrated but tried not to show it.
How could Brady expect me to leave our Jane Doe and that naked skull unidentified? How could I put this case down without solving it?
I couldn’t.
Chapter 10
I KNOCKED ON Brady’s open office door. He waved me in and told me to sit down.
I knew this office very well. It had once been mine, but I had given up the job of lieutenant so that I could do detective work full-time instead of watchdogging time sheets and writing reports.
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 he
ads 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.”
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