11th hour wmc-11 Page 20

  Yuki considered telling the woman that she was a nurse but went with the truth.

  “I’m Yuki Castellano. I’m with Jackson.”

  “With him? What do you mean?”

  “We’re significant lovers,” Yuki said.

  The long silence was underscored by Brady’s loud breathing.

  Yuki said, “He’s doing well, Jennifer. He’s sleeping, but he’s going to be okay. I’ll tell him that you called.”

  Yuki dropped the receiver into the cradle, looked at it for a moment as if it were a porcupine. Then she upended it and turned off the ringer.

  She said hello to the actual nurse who came in to attend to Brady, and then Yuki went back to her laptop and her Jane Doe EC 5, a young woman Yuki had identified as Hoshi Yamaguchi.

  Yuki had already begun her research on Hoshi; she’d learned that she had been twenty years old when last seen. She had been going to school in Tokyo, was a student of history and fine art, and she disappeared while on vacation to the USA four years ago.

  A family member had put up a website for Hoshi. There was a large portrait of Hoshi on the page. The next photo was of Hoshi ice-skating with her sister. The two were wearing leggings and matching blue puffy jackets, and they were holding hands.

  Yuki could read some Japanese and was able to translate the caption under the photo.

  Have you seen my sister?

  Yuki opened a link and found messages from Hoshi’s friends listed in chronological order. The first notes were to Hoshi, asking her to write. Subsequent messages pleaded for anyone who had seen Hoshi to respond.

  There was a link to the police reports and reward postings, and there was a section devoted to more pictures of Hoshi.

  What had happened to this lovely young woman? Why had she been killed? And damn it, how had her head come to be buried in San Francisco?

  Yuki was about to send a message to the girls when she noticed a link at the bottom of the photo section. It was marked, in Japanese, Last message from Hoshi.

  Yuki clicked on the link and a video window opened on her computer. A young woman’s voice narrated in English as the camera panned Vallejo Street.

  “Kendra, this is a very old street in San Francisco and this is the Ellsworth compound, one of the first houses built here,” the voice said. “Sometime you have to come from New York and see it because you would love it. This house survived the great fire of San Francisco and I’ve been told it holds many secrets.”

  The picture jiggled, as if the camera was changing hands, and then the narrator came into focus; she was posing in front of a brick wall with a wrought-iron gate.

  The speaker was Hoshi Yamaguchi, there was no doubt in Yuki’s mind.

  Hoshi spoke to the camera using a playful entertainment-TV voice.

  “The famous movie star Harry Chandler lived here for ten years and has been accused of murdering his wife. I’ve been told that he didn’t do it. And I believe it, because you know I love Mr. Chandler.”

  The very cute Hoshi hugged herself and mugged for the camera. Then she said, “I’m going to take pictures of his house before I send this to you. Hold on, Kendra.”

  Then Hoshi said, “Thank you,” and reached out and took back her camera. Whoever had been holding it ducked and put a hand up to block the picture. There was a break in the video. Apparently, the camera had been shut off.

  Then the video continued with more of Hoshi’s narrative and pictures of the outside of the house as seen through the iron gate. Hoshi said, “Bye for now, Kendra. See you online.”

  And the film was over.

  Yuki hit the Replay button and watched the video once more, this time knowing that Hoshi had never seen her friend Kendra again, either online or in person. Yuki was pretty sure that Hoshi Yamaguchi had visited the Ellsworth compound on the last day of her life.

  Chapter 106

  Yuki posted the video of Hoshi Yamaguchi and I watched it run. There was the girl standing in front of the brick wall on Vallejo Street, a flash of a red tour bus at the curb.

  One of the victims had been alive and present at the scene of the crime. As I watched the little homemade movie, my eyes teared up and my heart went giddyap.

  Yeah. I was having some kind of heart attack, but it wasn’t fatal. I felt maybe, just maybe, this freaking case was going to break.

  Graceland, I typed into the dialogue box. Neverland.

  Yuki typed back, Wut do u mean?

  I wrote, Did all the victims go on the historic-house tour?

  Yuki replied, I’ll call the tour company now.

  Claire wrote: Questions. If Hoshi was killed at the compound, were all of the women killed there? Where did the killings happen? Where are the bodies?

  I watched the video again, this time pausing at the frames where Hoshi’s camera changed hands. There was a close-up of Hoshi’s neck and I saw that she was wearing a necklace with an amethyst pendant. The stone was set in a gold bezel. I wanted to yell, Rich! Look at this. I’ve seen this necklace. We have it in evidence. It was buried with one of the heads.

  My partner wasn’t there.

  I sent him an e-mail to keep him in the loop, then dropped an imaginary glass dome over my desk so no one in the squad room would interrupt me.

  Shooting a video of Hoshi Yamaguchi didn’t make anyone a killer. Assuming that the victims had all been tourists, assuming they’d all been killed at the compound, Claire’s questions were good ones. Where had the murders taken place? Where were the bodies?

  I opened my browser and searched for architectural plans of the Ellsworth compound. I found what I was looking for in the San Francisco Historical Society archives.

  There were reams of old drawings on file, drafts of blueprints and renderings of the house in progress: all of its floors, the basement, the garden, and the plans for the row of servants’ quarters on Ellsworth Place.

  I put the drawings up for my group to examine, and while Yuki researched the Historic House Tour bus company, Cindy, Claire, and I studied the plans for the house that had been designed by Drake Ellsworth and his architect back in 1893.

  Claire put her cursor on the drawing of the basement, a large room that ran under the entire main house.

  You could kill cattle in a room this big, she wrote.

  I had been in that basement with Charlie Clapper. There were several generations of boilers and pumps in that vast space, devices replaced by successive pieces of modern machinery but not removed.

  We’d looked in the small rooms off the basement. One was filled with furniture. Another had once been a pantry.

  Clapper’s team had been all over that underground warren with cutting-edge equipment and had found no blood, no tools, no evidence of a chop shop.

  Now I needed CSU to go over the whole house again.

  Chapter 107

  While Brady recovered from his injuries, I was in charge of the Homicide squad, so I mustered a caravan of law enforcement officers and called in the CSU.

  Conklin flatly refused to stay in his bed when this was going down. I picked him up on the corner of Kirkham and Funston, then drove to the Ellsworth compound with my injured partner in the seat beside me.

  I pulled up to the iron gate, and Clapper’s van arrived and parked right behind me. I ordered cruisers to close off the triangle of streets surrounding the compound, then six of us mounted the wide front steps to the main house.

  I dropped the brass knocker on the strike plate, and Janet Worley opened the door and saw half a dozen cops and the dapper Clapper standing in front of her. She gripped the collar of her starched white shirt, fear flashing across her face.

  “We’re executing a search warrant, Mrs. Worley,” I said, handing it to her.

  “You’ve already searched — ”

  “We’re doing it again.”

  “All right, then. Come in.”

  “We need to see your husband,” Conklin said.

  “He’s working upstairs. He was in a good mood.”


  Conklin, Clapper, three crime scene investigators, and I walked through the front entrance and, under Charlie’s direction, filed through the enormous old house.

  I was standing in the middle of the large foyer with Janet when Nigel Worley came down the stairs with his fulminating anger. He scowled at me and asked, “What’s this about?”

  “It’s about premeditated murder, Mr. Worley. Inspector Conklin will keep you and your wife company in the kitchen.”

  “Bugger that. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Thank you. We appreciate your cooperation.”

  Conklin corralled the Worleys and I headed down to the basement, where I found Clapper and a couple of techs opening their scene kits, getting to work.

  The overhead lights were on, but they weren’t bright enough to illuminate all the corners of this vast space.

  Still, neither clutter nor gloom deterred us.

  We worked the room going from east to west, parallel to Vallejo Street, doing an eyeball search and using ALS wands to pick up signs of organic trace. CSU techs who had been deployed upstairs trickled down to the basement and joined us in the subterranean vault as the hours unfurled behind us like the cars of a night train.

  I was wondering if we had been wrong in assuming that this basement was the scene of multiple homicides when, at around five in the evening, we reached the southernmost basement wall. Cartons of books and crates of empty wine bottles were stacked to the ceiling against the brick and timber.

  I was behind Clapper when he shouted, “Awww, shit. How did I miss this?”

  I stepped to Clapper’s side and saw that the ceiling-high crates only appeared to be touching the wall; it was clever fakery. There was a narrow gap behind the cartons, and an old sliding door on an overhead track was mounted on the actual wall.

  Clapper gave the door a shove and it slid open, revealing the entrance to another basement room, this one running southwest to northeast, parallel to Ellsworth Place.

  There was free access between the basement of the main house and the one in 2 Ellsworth Place.

  A person could move from one to the other without being seen.

  Chapter 108

  I hit the light switch in the connecting basement room and took in the surroundings as CSIs shot pictures.

  The basement under number 2 was about forty feet across, thirty feet deep, with a dirt floor and a brick ceiling. To my immediate left was a large, sunken cistern about ten feet wide, no doubt used by previous owners of this house to collect rainwater through downspouts from the roof.

  To my right was the furnace and the pump, and on the far side of the room, against the eastern wall, were modern appliances: a freezer, a washer, and a clothes dryer. Shelving banked the walls and held a typical assortment of basement junk, paint cans, and tools.

  Charlie Clapper examined the cistern and after a moment said, “There’s a ladder going down about seven feet and there’s a drain in the bottom of this thing. Turn off the lights, if you would, Lindsay.”

  I flipped the switch and Clapper sprayed the inside of the cistern with luminol, then turned on his ALS wand.

  He whistled through his teeth and said, “You should see this.”

  When Charlie said you should see something, it usually meant You should see something awful.

  The interior of the cistern was bright with a phosphorescent glow, the effect of black light on blood. A great amount of blood had been spilled in that well, probably washed down with the hose hanging over the lip of the cistern. But the evidence of a bloodbath remained high on the walls and ringed the bottom drain.

  Images came to me, the faces of the seven women who might have been murdered and dismembered in this vat.

  I turned to Clapper, but he had started working the walls, spraying luminol as his assistant followed him with the ALS wand. There was so much blood evidence, spatter and splash and handprints on everything.

  Clapper turned the lights back on and as I looked around, I saw something on one of the shelves that dropped another piece of the puzzle into place.

  I crossed the floor and took a good close look at a cordless ripsaw resting next to a carton of old medicine bottles. I called to the CSI with a camera and asked him to take shots of the saw.

  Claire had told me that the victims had been decapitated with a ripsaw, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to think the saw on the shelf had been used in those procedures. No black light was needed. I could see darkened blood on the blade and reddish smears on the handle.

  Clapper rummaged in the box of medicine bottles.

  “Lindsay, here’s something you should see.”

  Another something I should see. I felt the floor roll. Clapper said, “You okay?”

  I was okay. But my baby onboard was having some trouble with this crime scene.

  “What have you got?”

  He called over the tech to shoot pictures of the contents of the box, then pulled out two items that were photographed as well.

  The first item was a stun gun.

  The second was a sixteen-ounce brown bottle labeled SODIUM PENTOBARBITAL.

  “This is a barbiturate,” he said. “Vets use it to euthanize large animals.”

  I grabbed Clapper’s arm to steady myself.

  The vivacious and compassionate Nicole Worley worked with wildlife rescue. She could have swiped a bottle of this stuff if she wanted to. And I was pretty sure she’d know how to put animals down.

  Chapter 109

  I called Conklin and filled him in as I raced up the stairs to the main floor of the house. I found my partner sitting with Janet Worley at the round table in the kitchen, empty teacups and a plate of crumbs in front of them. Janet’s face was pale and pinched.

  Nigel Worley was missing.

  “Nigel took a swing at me. Any other day, I would have clocked him,” Conklin said.

  “He’s under arrest?”

  “For his own good.”

  I said to Janet, “Where’s Nicole?”

  “You don’t have the right — ”

  “I don’t need your permission, Mrs. Worley. Where is she?”

  Conklin and I followed Janet up the main stairs of the house, boards creaking under our feet. I was thinking about Nicole Worley, the self-possessed young woman who worked for the good of animals and lectured to tourists about the history of the Ellsworth compound.

  When we reached the sixth floor, Janet opened the first door on the left, the door closest to the back of the house.

  The room smelled of floral sachet, an old-lady smell. I flipped on the light switches, expecting to see Nicole in the bed or in a chair. But the room was empty, and it looked like it had been empty for years. The bed was crisply made. There were no personal items on the dresser or on the nightstand.

  “What’s this room, Janet?”

  “Follow me. It’s this way,” she said, throwing a lightning bolt of a stare in my direction.

  She turned and headed toward a small closet door in the corner of the bedroom where the ceiling slanted under the eaves. Janet opened the door, pushed aside clothing on a rod, then stooped to enter a hidden Alice-in-Wonderland doorway.

  The door led to a tunnel that ran under the eaves. I turned on my flashlight and continued behind Janet Worley’s crouched form until the tunnel opened into another hallway, one with a staircase leading down and three doors off the landing.

  I knew where we were.

  This was the top floor of 2 Ellsworth Place, another concealed access point between the main house and the servants’ quarters around the corner.

  Janet pointed to the door and said, “This is Nicole’s room. I doubt that she’s here.”

  I pulled my gun as Janet knocked.

  “Nicole. Are you here, darling?”

  No sound came from within.

  I reached around Janet Worley and tried the knob. The door was locked from the inside. I said, “Rich. Give it a try.”

  I pulled Janet Worley aside and said, “Stay here in the hal
lway.”

  Then Conklin kicked in the door.

  Chapter 110

  Nicole was wearing black up to her chin.

  She had wedged herself between her bed and the window, propped her elbows up on the mattress, and was holding a large kitchen knife in front of her with both hands.

  She was pointing that knife at us.

  Her heart-shaped face no longer looked angelic. Her features were locked in a crazy stare and her hair was damp with sweat. Her green eyes were blank as stagnant pools.

  She looked absolutely feral.

  Nicole was twenty-six, but her room had gotten stuck in a teen-theme time warp. The walls were painted with vertical stripes in three shades of green. The spread and curtains were the same colors in a polka-dot print.

  There were pictures of Harry Chandler all around the room, including a life-size cutout on the wall and a black-and-white headshot on the dresser mirror inscribed To Nicole, XOXO, Harry.

  Nicole said in a deep voice, almost a growl, “Don’t come any closer, you bitches. I’m not afraid to use this. And I’m not afraid to jump.”

  The room had two exits: the door behind me and the window behind Nicole. From what I could see, Nicole didn’t have a direct view of the house and garden. But the oblique view took in the back of the Ellsworth house, the brick patio, and a wedge of the garden where heads had been buried.

  My eyes went back to Nicole, who was still facing us down from behind her mattress. She seemed irrational. And I didn’t like the options she had given us.

  My partner stepped forward.

  He wasn’t holding a weapon and his left arm was strapped across his chest. If there’d ever been a time for the Conklin charm factor, this was it.

  “Nobody wants to hurt you, Nicole. We don’t want any trouble. None at all.”

  “I’m in charge here,” Nicole said. “I make all the decisions.”

  “You’re only in charge of what you do,” Conklin said. “So I want you to move very slowly. Put the knife down.”