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Harry Chandler was exonerated.

  He had kept the Ellsworth compound as an investment while he lived on a yacht at a country club marina a few miles away.

  Cindy had seen Chandler a couple of times at big social events and benefits. Looking at a man who had made so many famous films, you couldn’t know if he was a killer or if he just played one on the big screen.

  Now, blowing hard from her run, Cindy walked the last hundred yards to the front entrance of the Ellsworth compound, saw that it had already been cordoned off by uniformed officers.

  There was a crowd in front of the gate, tourists who had clearly come off a red bus marked STAR HOME TOURS.

  Cindy went up to a cop she knew, Joe Sorbera, and asked him what was going on.

  “You don’t want to get me in trouble, Cindy. Do you? Because you know I can’t tell you anything.”

  A young man wearing a Boston University sweatshirt came up next to Cindy and said, “Chandler thought he’d get away with it again.”

  Cindy introduced herself to the BU guy, said that she was a reporter, and asked the tourist to speak into her camera phone.

  “The case of Cecily Chandler is a perfect example of how privileged people get over on the system,” the young man said. “Harry Chandler had a famous defense attorney for a lawyer, a slick talker who probably played tennis with the judge.”

  Cindy shut off her phone, said, “Thanks,” then muttered to herself, “for less than nothing.”

  A Channel Two news truck was turning onto Vallejo as two uniformed cops put out wooden barricades to block it.

  Walking backward, Cindy tried again to get information from Sorbera.

  “Can’t you give me something, Joe, anything? I can quote you or keep you off the record, whatever you want. Please. Any detail will do.”

  “Stand back, Cindy. Thatta girl. Thank you.”

  Officer Sorbera stretched out his arms and corralled the crowd behind a barricade, letting the unmarked car Richie was driving go through.

  Chapter 5

  I was at my desk when the 911 call came in at 7:20 and was relayed to the squad room by dispatcher May Hess, our self-anointed Queen of the Batphone.

  Hess told me, “A woman of few words called and reported two people dead at the Ellsworth compound.

  “She sounded for real,” Hess continued. “She said there were no intruders in the house and she was in no danger. Just ‘Two people are dead.’ Then she hung up. I called back twice but got an answering machine both times. I put out a call.”

  I listened to the 911 tape. The caller had a British accent and sounded scared. In fact, the fear in her voice and whatever she wasn’t saying were more alarming than what she said.

  Brady listened to the tape, then tagged me and my partner to take a run out to Pacific Heights.

  “Just do the prelim,” he said. “I’ll assign a primary when you bring back a report.”

  Yes, sir. Forthwith, sir.

  At 7:35 a.m., Conklin braked our car in front of the Ellsworth compound. Four cruisers had gotten there before us and there was also a red double-decker bus parked parallel to the curb. A gang of maybe twenty tourists were taking pictures from behind barricades across the street.

  I had known the Ellsworth compound was on the historic-house tour, but I guess when Harry Chandler bought it for umpteen million dollars ten years ago, the compound went on the stargazing tour as well.

  I got out of the car and approached Officer Joe Sorbera, who had been the first on the scene. He took out his notebook and said to me, “I got here at seven ten, spoke to Janet Worley, the caretaker, through the intercom. There’s the box next to the gate. She said she was not in any danger and that the victims, two of them, were dead. Definitely dead were her exact words.”

  The uniformed cop continued. “Lieutenant Brady told me to cordon off a perimeter and to wait for you, Sergeant. He told me not to go into the house.”

  “Has the ME been called?”

  “Yes, ma’am. And CSU is on the way. I took some photos of the crowd.”

  “Good job, Sorbera.”

  I looked at the mob, saw it was thickening. Cars were backed up on Vallejo and were being detoured around Divisadero. Because of the traffic, and a million Tweets and YouTube posts by tourists, the scene would be red-flagged by the press.

  Death plus celebrity was a heady news combination. The media was going to train its brights on this house, and any law enforcement errors would be documented for posterity.

  I told Sorbera to set up a media liaison and a command post on Pierce, then I went to where Conklin was examining the front gate to the compound.

  The wrought-iron gate was set into a ten-foot-high ivy-clad brick wall that gave the house total privacy from the street. The metalwork looked old enough to be original, and the lock had recently been forced. I saw fresh cuts in old iron.

  “It was pried open with a metal tool, not a bolt cutter,” Conklin said.

  Joe Sorbera said there were two victims, definitely dead. Who were they? Was Harry Chandler involved?

  Brady had assigned us to do the preliminary workup, meaning we had to determine where law enforcement and forensics could walk on the scene without destroying evidence. We were charged with taking pictures, making sketches, and forming an opinion.

  After that, we’d turn the scene over to the primary investigator on the case.

  I gloved up and pushed at the gate, which swung open on well-oiled hinges. A stone walkway crossed a mossy grass lawn and led past a couple of flower beds, one on each side of the steps, to the ornate front door.

  The door showed no sign of forced entry. Conklin lifted the brass door knocker, banged it against the strike plate.

  I called out, “Janet Worley, this is the police.”

  Chapter 6

  The petite woman who opened the door was white, late forties, five three, one hundred and ten pounds, wearing leggings under a floral-print smock. Her expression was strained and her mascara was smudged under her eyes. Her nails were bitten to the finger pads.

  She said her name was Janet Worley, and I told her mine, showed her my badge, and introduced my partner, who asked her, “How are you doing, Mrs. Worley?”

  “Horribly, thank you.”

  “It’s okay. We’re here now,” Rich said.

  Conklin is good with people, especially women. In fact, he’s known for it.

  I wanted to learn everything at once, which was what always happened when I started working a case. I looked around the foyer as Conklin talked to Janet Worley and took notes. The entranceway was huge, with a twenty-foot-high ceiling and plaster moldings; to my right, a wide and winding staircase led to the upper floors.

  Everything was tidy, not a rug fringe out of place.

  Janet Worley was saying to Conklin, “My husband and I are just the caretakers, you understand. This house is thirty thousand square feet and we have a schedule. We’ve been cleaning the Ellsworth Place side of the house over the past three days.”

  Looking through the foyer, I thought the house seemed gloomy, what you would expect from a relic of the Victorian age. Had we stepped into a Masterpiece Theatre episode? Was Agatha Christie lurking in the wings?

  Behind me, Janet Worley was still talking to Conklin and she had his attention. I wanted to hear her out, but she was going the long way around the story and I felt the pressure of time passing.

  “Why did you call emergency?” Conklin asked.

  Worley said, “I had better show you.”

  We followed behind the small woman, who took us through the foyer, past a library, and into a living area with an enormous stone fireplace and large-scale leather furniture. Sunlight passed through stained glass, painting rainbows on the marble floors. We went through a restaurant-quality kitchen and at last arrived at the back door.

  Worley said, “We haven’t been in this part of the house since last Friday. Yes, that’s right, three days ago. I don’t know how long these have been here.”

  She
opened the door and I followed Worley’s pointing finger to the chrysanthemum-lined brick patio in the backyard.

  For a moment, my mind blanked, because what I saw was frankly unbelievable.

  On the patio were two severed heads encircled by a loose wreath of white chrysanthemum flowers.

  They seemed to be looking up at me.

  The sight was grisly and shocking, made for the cover of the National Enquirer. But this was no alien invasion story, and it was no Halloween prank.

  Conklin turned to me, my shock reflected in his eyes.

  “These heads are real, right?” I asked him.

  “Real, and as the lady said, definitely dead.”

  Chapter 7

  Adrenaline burned through my bloodstream like flame on a short fuse. What had happened here?

  What in God’s name was I looking at?

  The head to the right was the most horrific because it was reasonably fresh. It had belonged to a woman in her thirties with long brown hair and a stud piercing the left side of her nose. Her eyes were too cloudy to tell their color.

  There was dirt in her hair that looked like garden soil, and maggots were working on the flesh, but enough of her features remained to get a likeness and possibly an ID.

  The other head was a skull, just the bare cranium with the lower jaw attached and a full set of good teeth.

  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 m
ission 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.