11th hour wmc-11 Page 9

“But this woman was buried in your garden,” I said. I unfolded the drawing of Marilyn Varick and showed it to Chandler.

  He took the paper, looked it over. I stopped breathing for the time it took him to scan that drawing. Then Chandler looked up at me.

  “She was killed and her head was buried in the garden?”

  “That’s right. Do you recognize her?”

  “Not at all. I’m sorry. Sorry that she’s dead. Sorry I can’t help.”

  I returned the drawing to the inside pocket of my blazer. I had seen nothing in his face that told me Chandler was lying.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “Are you involved with Janet Worley?”

  “Now? No, and not for at least ten years. Why would you ask me that?”

  “But at one time, you were intimately involved.”

  “We had a couple of trysts, that’s all,” Chandler told us. “She was very pretty and delightful, and we both knew it was just for fun. I was in love with my wife.”

  I didn’t like a definition of love that included trysts with someone else while you were living with your beloved spouse.

  I thought about how Worley had spoken disparagingly of Chandler’s womanizing while crashing stove parts in the kitchen. He had made his accusations sound personal. In fact, Janet had left the room.

  The people we had spoken with said that Nigel was brutish, that he didn’t have a flair for fine details. But if he was involved in the murder and in digging up those heads, maybe he hadn’t been working alone.

  Chandler was saying, “Janet is a fine person. I care about her. I don’t love her, but I really do care about her. Until I met Kaye, I hadn’t been in love since Cecily disappeared.

  “You know why I still live in San Francisco when I could live anywhere in the world? Because maybe Cece wasn’t murdered. Maybe she was abducted. Or maybe she just wanted to get away from me. Maybe she’ll come home, and if she does, I’ll be waiting for her.”

  Conklin and I left Chandler on the Cecily. As we walked across the dock toward the parking lot, my partner said to me, “Janet Worley has been holding out on us.”

  “Just spitballing now, but try this on for size,” I said. “Say Nigel Worley does the killings because he’s angry that his wife had an affair, plus he’s crazy. Janet goes along with it. And she’s the one who does the decorating with numbers and flowers.”

  “And they put the heads on the back step? Why?”

  “Because it makes Harry Chandler a suspect. If he gets accused of murder again, then maybe this time, he doesn’t get off.”

  “All because of a fling ten years ago.”

  “Maybe neither Janet nor Nigel got over the insult,” I said. “Maybe hatred of Harry Chandler is what keeps those two together.”

  Chapter 44

  “I’ve got her,” I said to Conklin.

  He looked up from his computer.

  “Marilyn Varick,” I said. “Google shows a dozen pages on her. She was something special about five years ago.”

  Our former Jane Doe had saturated the local surfer news and blogs. Many of the articles about her had photos of her in a Speedo standing next to her surfboard, and there were links to YouTube. I clicked on one, played a video of Marilyn riding enormous waves at Pillar Point.

  I turned the monitor so Rich could see.

  “Jane Doe was a surfer,” I said. “A champion.”

  Rich had been doing his own research as I looked up Marilyn Varick on the Web. He said, “She’s got priors for possession, loitering, panhandling, all in the last two years. She was always picked up in Pacific Heights. I guess that was her home base.”

  “LaMetta Wynn said that she was sleeping in doorways. LaMetta gave her money. Maybe other people did too,” I said to Rich. “Our drawing doesn’t look much like these younger pictures of her in real life. It’s like comparing a plum to a prune.”

  I did a search for Marilyn Varick on Facebook, found more beauty shots of a graceful young woman daring the waves off Ocean Beach, but she hadn’t updated her page in two years.

  “Something happened to her a couple of years ago,” I said. “She dropped out.”

  Rich said, “Wynn said there was no way Harry Chandler knew Marilyn Varick. Chandler also said that he didn’t know her. But then we have Nigel Worley saying Chandler had a wide range of types. Maybe a pretty surfer girl would have been one of those types.”

  “Speculating now,” I said. “Say Chandler meets her, dates her, breaks her heart. Marilyn goes downhill. Starts living on the street near Chandler’s house.”

  “She’s not in missing persons,” Richie said. “But she’s got parents living in San Rafael.”

  “Someone’s got to do the notification,” I said.

  “It’s my turn,” said Rich.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “I want to.”

  Chapter 45

  I sat by the indoor swimming pool in a lovely modern house in San Rafael, nineteen miles north of San Francisco. The walls were glass and the morning sun made beautiful swirling patterns in the water. An English springer spaniel slept in a dog bed, his legs running in a dream.

  Richard and Virginia Varick were a handsome couple in their sixties, dressed in tennis shorts and sweaters. Mrs. Varick couldn’t sit still. Her husband leaned back in a metal-frame webbed chair and looked at me suspiciously.

  I thought he knew why I had come.

  When I first saw Jane Doe’s remains, I thought that once we knew who she was, the rest of the puzzle would fall into place; we’d learn the nature of the crimes and the motive, and from there we’d have a good shot at figuring out who had killed her and the others.

  Now, as I sat with the Varicks, my only thought was that I was about to shatter the final happy moment in their lives.

  “When was the last time you spoke with your daughter?”

  “Is Marilyn in trouble?” Virginia Varick asked me.

  “I’m not sure, Mrs. Varick. Could you look at this drawing?”

  I had printed out a clean copy of the sketch that had been drawn from the partially decomposed head of Jane Doe. I handed it to Mrs. Varick.

  “Who is this person?” she asked me.

  “Does she resemble your daughter?” I asked. “She doesn’t look anything like my daughter. Why? Who is she? I thought you had news of Marilyn. Don’t you? Dick? I don’t understand.”

  She handed the sketch to her husband, who held it with both hands, then drew back from it, turned it over, and put it facedown on the table in front of him.

  “Mrs. Varick, this is a drawing of an unidentified woman whose remains were found a few days ago in San Francisco. I’m sorry to have to bring this sad news to you — ”

  “Don’t worry, it’s not my daughter,” Mrs. Varick said, her voice getting high. “Wait here. I’ll show you my daughter.”

  Virginia Varick left the room, and I said to her husband, “When was the last time you saw Marilyn?”

  “We haven’t seen her in two years.”

  “And why is that?”

  “She didn’t want to see us,” Dick Varick told me. He was clasping his hands tightly together. His knuckles were white, his complexion gray. “I think she was doing drugs. She called from time to time and my wife and I would talk to her for ten or fifteen minutes, although Ginny and I did most of the talking.

  “Marilyn said she was fine. And she asked us not to try to find her. We looked for her anyway, but she’d gone underground. None of her old friends had seen her or knew where she lived.”

  I said, “Did something happen at about the time she stopped seeing you? An incident or trauma?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Varick said to me.

  “I need something of hers that might contain her DNA. Hairbrush, toothbrush. Maybe a hat.”

  “We don’t have anything like that. She never lived here.”

  Virginia Varick returned to the room carrying an enormous blue-leather-bound scrapbook. She sat on a footstool, opened the book, and t
urned it so that I could see the pages.

  I recognized many of the photos, but others were new to me; family photos with her parents, her dog, boyfriends, all of which made me wonder how it was that no one had identified her when the Chronicle had run the sketch.

  Had Marilyn changed so much?

  Was the sketch a poor likeness of Marilyn Varick?

  Or had Harry Chandler’s assistant been wrong when she identified the person in this sketch as Marilyn Varick?

  I scrutinized the photos Ginny Varick showed me, and I was convinced they were of the same person as the one in the drawing. Virginia Varick just didn’t want to face the truth.

  “She was a beautiful young woman,” I said.

  The anguished woman stood up and snarled at me, “Don’t say was. She is a beautiful woman. I told you, whoever this person is, she’s not my Marilyn.”

  Chapter 46

  Dick Varick reached out for his wife, but she drew away. He said, “Ginny, you haven’t seen Marilyn in a long time. Listen, I brought her some money about eight months ago. She didn’t want me to tell you.”

  “You saw her? And you didn’t tell me?”

  “She was in bad shape, dear. She was high and talking crazy. She wouldn’t come home. I pleaded with her, but she wouldn’t let me get her any help. She said all she needed was a loan. I gave her a thousand bucks. She called us twice after that, so I knew she was okay.”

  Ginny Varick put her hands to her mouth and then ran from the room.

  Dick Varick stood, jammed his hands into his pants pockets, and walked to one of the glass walls. He looked out at the Japanese maples and the sharp shadows they cast across the back lawn. Then he turned to face me.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you about not having seen her. I didn’t want to tell Ginny. And now I have, in the worst possible way.”

  “So this drawing is of Marilyn?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “How did she die?”

  “We don’t know, not yet.”

  “You have to tell me what you know.”

  “Come sit down,” I said.

  Dick Varick returned to his chair and leaned forward with his hands pressing hard on his knees, his eyes on mine.

  I had been dreading this moment. How do you tell parents that their daughter’s head had been removed from her body — and that you don’t know how she was killed, by whom, or even the physical location of her body?

  “Some human remains were disinterred at the Ellsworth compound.”

  As soon as I mentioned the Ellsworth compound, Varick became agitated. He interrupted me to tell me what he’d read in the papers and to ask if Marilyn was one of the victims of that crime.

  I told him what little I knew.

  I asked, “Did Marilyn ever mention Harry Chandler?”

  “No. Is he responsible? Did that miserable bastard — ”

  “I’m asking because her remains were found on his property. That’s all. Did Marilyn tell you or give you a sense that someone wanted to hurt her?”

  “No, she said she was living with friends. Sergeant, I hardly knew my daughter when I saw her. All traces of the young woman I’d known and loved was gone. She was an addict. She wanted money for drugs. She didn’t even ask about her mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d like the names of the friends you spoke with when you were looking for her.”

  “She was thirty-three,” Varick said, typing names and contact information into his iPhone. I gave him my e-mail address and he sent the list to me. “She wasn’t a teenager,” Varick said. “I couldn’t call the police and have her brought home.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you want me to come and identify her?”

  “Contact the medical examiner,” I said. I wrote down the phone number on the back of my card, and then Dick Varick walked me to his front door.

  He looked years older than he had only half an hour before, shaken, hopeless, the father of a murdered child.

  I got into my car and tried to contain my own feelings — but I couldn’t do it. I drove down the block and halfway up the next one before I pulled over, put my head down on the steering wheel, and sobbed.

  Chapter 47

  There were two newspapers outside my front door the next morning: the Chronicle, with its headlines about the G8 meeting and the San Francisco city budget, and the Post, with its sixty-

  four-point headline in thick black ink: BODY COUNT AT THE HOUSE OF HEADS: 613 DEAD; 613 VICTIMS!

  Story by Jason Blayney, of course.

  I read the first couple of paragraphs despite the bile backing up in my throat and going all the way up to my eyes.

  The Post has learned that the heads unearthed at the Ellsworth compound were accompanied by an index card with the number 613 written by hand. As of six this morning, the SFPD crime lab is still working the site, and if the number is indicative of the total death toll, the disinterred heads retrieved so far are just the first of a large number of victims that could make this crime the work of the worst mass killer in history.

  What crap! What total flaming bull-crap!

  Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, who is the lead detective on this case, has not returned our calls…

  I called Brady, left him a voicemail, and he called back while I was in the shower, naturally. He left a message saying he was heading into a meeting and that he’d see me at the press conference.

  “City Hall, room two hundred,” his voice told me. “Don’t be late.”

  I dressed a little above my pay grade, buffed my shoes, and even put on lipstick. I kissed my dog good-bye and when I got into my car, I called Cindy and told her to meet me outside City Hall.

  I drove to Van Ness, parked in an underground lot on McAllister, then walked across Civic Center Plaza. I knew I was putting myself at risk. But I owed Cindy a break.

  I saw her standing under a linden tree thumbing on her BlackBerry. I called out to her and she put her phone away and came toward me, her blue eyes frisking my expression for clues.

  I gave her a hug and she hugged me back.

  We walked together through the park toward the formidable and impressive beaux arts building where the mayor’s office was located and where much of the city’s business was conducted.

  “Here’s the deal. I’m an anonymous source,” I said. “Seven heads were disinterred from the Ellsworth garden. All were female, buried at different times over approximately a ten-year span. Those numbers that were written on index cards — ”

  “One hundred and four and six thirteen. I can say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the identity of that Jane Doe whose picture we ran yesterday?”

  “Her name was Marilyn Varick, age thirty-three, unemployed, former surfing champion. Good enough?”

  “Excellent. Thank you, Linds.”

  We went up the steps to the imposing entrance to City Hall. I squeezed Cindy’s arm, then stepped away from her and headed into the rotunda.

  The press conference was about to start.

  Chapter 48

  Room 200 at City Hall is arranged like a courtroom. There’s the dais and the built-in wooden chairs, then a railing that sets the audience apart from the main action. The walls are painted cream, and there are video screens so that even those in the back of the room can see you sweat.

  I stood on the dais and watched the gallery fill with press. Cindy took a seat in the third row and immediately bent her head over her laptop.

  When the rear doors closed, the mayor stepped forward, adjusted the mike, greeted the press. Then he filled them in on an OIS, an officer involved in a shooting, that had happened last night in the Mission.

  He played a 911 tape, then showed a dash-cam video of a man running at the cops with a sword, refusing to back away until he was finally, fatally, gunned down.

  There was a brief silence in room 200, then hands shot up. The mayor fielded questions about the shooting, then took questions about the SFPD, specificall
y about the crime rate and why so many crimes were unsolved.

  When the mayor had had enough, he introduced Lieutenant Jackson Brady and left the stage.

  Brady advanced to the podium with his crib sheet and, holding it rigidly in front of him, began his prepared remarks.

  “Three known drug dealers were shot last night on Schwerin Street and their car was set on fire. The men were dead when the fire started and the blaze pretty much obliterated all forensic evidence.”

  Brady listed the victims’ names and said that the police were looking for the shooter; he said that the preliminary ballistics tests of the slugs found in the dead men’s bodies showed they were a match to the ones removed from the body of drug dealer Chaz Smith.

  “We still have no leads to the shooter’s identity, but he does have a pattern. His victims are all drug dealers. The investigation is on the front burner. And that’s all I have for you now.”

  Hands went up like an acre of beans sprouting in time-lapse photography, but Brady ignored them and said, “Sergeant Boxer will brief you on the case involving the remains at the Ellsworth place. Sergeant?”

  And then he took a place to my right and all I could do was step forward.

  Chapter 49

  I can give a speech when I have to, but I’d rather be on slops for a week than face the media in a formal setting. Fifty or sixty pairs of eyes focused on me as I took the microphone.

  I said, “Good morning,” then got into it.

  “Monday morning, two skulls were discovered at the back door of the main house in the Ellsworth compound. These skulls were unearthed by a person or persons unknown who dug them out of the back garden and may have gotten onto the property by breaking the lock on the front gate. Along with the two skulls were two index cards with the hand-printed numbers one hundred and four and six thirteen.”

  Someone shouted, “That’s for the number of heads that were buried, right?”

  “No,” I said. “We have no reason to believe that there are hundreds of heads. CSU has disinterred seven heads from the Ellsworth compound, all female, all unidentified, but we are working with forensics on attaching names to these victims and should have news later this week.”