11th Hour

by James Patterson

  “See?” I said, holding up my badge. “I’m a cop. She’s my deputy dog.”

  “Okay. She’s a drug sniffer, I guess. I shouldn’t touch her, right? Kinda cute, isn’t she? Should I bring her some water? Sparkling or flat?”

  I had my first grin of the week, then had another when I saw Claire waiting for me at a table at the back of the long, narrow garden enclosed by ivy-covered walls.

  I hugged her. She hugged me. I just couldn’t get enough of that hug. When we finally broke apart, Claire bent and kissed Martha on the nose, making my little pal all waggle-tailed and squirmy. Martha really hearts Claire.

  We sat at the nice long table in the corner of the patio, and Claire moved her newspapers out of the way — but not quick enough.

  “Hey, let me see those.”

  I read the headlines.

  The Post: “Another revenge killing at Zeus,” by Jason Blayney. The Chronicle: “Suspect held in House of Heads mystery,” by Cindy Thomas.

  “It’s true: you can run but you can’t hide.” I handed the papers back to Claire, who said, “So what’s the latest with you and Joe?”

  “You go first, butterfly. I can’t talk until after I’ve had hot chocolate and gingerbread pancakes.”

  “I haven’t been to bed,” Claire said. “Can you tell?” Now that she mentioned it, I realized that she was wearing scrubs.

  I said, “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Where should I start? Yesterday, seven p.m. We’ve got a full house, of course. Among my other patients, I’ve got a seventeen-year-old boy on the table. Contact muzzle stamp on his temple and soot in the entrance wound. It’s a clear suicide, but his parents aren’t accepting it. Everything I say, they come back with ‘No, Davey would never do that.’”

  “The doors show any signs of a break-in?”

  “I asked the same thing. They said, ‘No, but maybe someone came in through the window.’ He’s got GSR on his hands, Lindsay. I took a sample for testing, just to be safe, but the windows are locked from the inside. It’s obvious and it’s heartbreaking — and then, here comes Mr. Dickenson.

  “He’s got a history of high blood pressure; he starts to feel lethargic and blacks out. His wife gets him to the hospital, and he’s two minutes from a CT scan, which would confirm he’s having a stroke, but no, he codes in the hallway.

  “So now Mr. Dickenson is coming in through the back door of the morgue and I have to do an autopsy he wouldn’t have needed if he’d coded two minutes later. Meanwhile, Davey’s family won’t leave, still insisting that their son was murdered.”

  We took a time-out to order breakfast from our waitress, then Claire picked up where she’d left off.

  “So, I do Mr. Dickenson’s post. I can find nothing wrong with his brain. Hey, where’s the stroke? So I keep going. He didn’t get hit with a stroke. I find a dissecting aortic aneurysm. See, I learned something. Again. Never jump to conclusions.

  “About then, midnight or so, Edmund calls. Rosie is running a really high fever. I say, ‘Take her to the hospital. Go. Now,’ and before I hang up with him, here come new patients through the ambulance bay. Two cars in a head-on collision on Henry, both drivers are DOA.”

  Claire’s phone buzzed on the table and spun like a june bug on its back. She looked at the faceplate, shut off the ringer.

  “How’s Rosie?” I asked as the waitress brought our coffee.

  “She’s fine. Temperature back to normal. Edmund said she’s sleeping now. Both of us panicked, and that’s what you do when you have a little one — as you are about to find out, girlfriend. After the check, I’m outta here, and I’m not going back to work anytime soon. Swear to God. Now, sweetie. Talk to me about Joe.”

  I put down my coffee cup, said to my friend, “He’s called me a hundred times and apparently he’s sleeping in his car, sometimes right outside the apartment. I haven’t said a word to him since I found out about his girlfriend. Not one fucking word.”

  Book Four

  IN FROM THE COLD

  Chapter 93

  I’D JUST HUNG Martha’s leash on the coatrack and kicked off my shoes when the intercom buzzed. I looked at the video screen showing the foyer and saw T. Lawrence Oliver downstairs in the entranceway looking into the camera’s eye.

  I was expecting him, but he was early.

  “Be right down,” I said into the speaker.

  A shiny black BMW was at the curb, and Oliver was holding open the back door. Harry Chandler dipped his head so that he could see me, said, “Please get in, Lindsay.”

  I got in and Harry told Tommy Oliver to step out and take a long walk around the block, give the two of us a chance to talk.

  I leaned back in the leather seat and said, “Thanks for coming, Harry.”

  “It’s okay. I wanted to tell you about Connie Kerr in person. I don’t know if I should put up bail for her or not,” he said.

  “Bail isn’t an issue — yet. Connie isn’t under arrest. We’re holding her as a material witness and if we can’t file charges against her by tomorrow afternoon, she walks. Do you want to file any charges?”

  “No. I can’t do that to her. I spent eighteen months in the clink while awaiting trial. Incarceration made a deep impression on me.”

  Chandler told me about his long-ago short-term romance with Connie and said that she had always seemed fragile to him. Crazy — maybe. A killer — no, he didn’t see it. I told Chandler that I appreciated his help, said good-bye, and got out of the car as Tommy Oliver got back into the driver’s seat.

  I was deep in thought and had just put my key into the downstairs lock when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I whipped around, ready to throw a punch or lash out with a kick to the knee.

  It was Joe.

  I stared at Joe; no mugger could have made my heart beat faster. My brain was instantly thrown into shock and confusion. I saw Joe, my husband, the man I love.

  And I was simultaneously hit with a current of revulsion.

  I know I looked as though I could kill, and that must have been why Joe said, “Lindsay, it’s me, it’s me. Take it easy. Let’s talk, okay?”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “I have plenty to say to you, damn it. You’re all wrong about this, Linds, and you have to stop shutting me out.”

  I was flooded with images of June Freundorfer looking into Joe’s face, and I felt deeply wounded all over again. I had trusted Joe with everything. I was having his baby. I was making a family with him for keeps — and then this. I had never felt so betrayed by anyone in my life. I had to get away from him. I couldn’t stand to look at him for another moment.

  I put both my hands out and shoved him away. He took a step back; I turned the key and opened the door slightly. I wedged myself through the narrow space and slammed the door shut.

  I darted for the elevator, and before the doors even closed, my phone started ringing. I ignored my cell and I ignored the landline that was ringing when I walked into the apartment.

  Both phones went quiet, then the landline rang again, and I checked the caller ID.

  I picked up the phone in the kitchen, said hello to my partner.

  “Sure, Richie. I’ll meet you there.”

  Chapter 94

  CONSTANCE KERR SAT with Conklin and me in a very small room at County Jail Number 2 on Seventh Street, only a couple of blocks from the Hall. Connie looked pitiful in her orange jumpsuit, her blondish-gray hair frizzed around her head like Frankenstein’s bride’s.

  “This is a terrible place,” she said. “Horrid. The screaming. The language. It’s too much.”

  I felt bad for her. I really did.

  “What did you want to tell me?” Conklin asked her.

  “I have to get out of here,” she said to my partner. “Tell me what I have to say to get out of here.”

  “Tell us what you know about those heads, Connie, and this time let’s get on the path to truth. I’ll get you started,” I said. She switched her eyes to me as
though she’d just realized I was there.

  “I’ve spoken to Harry Chandler.”

  “Yes? How is Harry?”

  “He says you were never his girlfriend.”

  Her laugh was the small feeble cousin of the long guffaws she’d let out previously.

  “He says you stalked him, Connie, stalked him for years.”

  “No.”

  “So he can’t be a character reference for you, I’m sorry, and he said he wouldn’t be surprised if you’d killed his wife.”

  “Oh, no, no, he can’t be serious.”

  “It’s all serious. This is a homicide investigation.”

  I had her attention now, and I knew when to shut up.

  I folded my hands and watched Connie Kerr think it all through, how she could go from being a trespasser to being a murder suspect with a movie star willing to testify against her.

  “I did see someone in the garden,” she blurted out.

  “Don’t make anything up,” Conklin said.

  “It’s true. I spied on the garden. It’s black as a damned soul in there at night, but every once in a silver moon, I’d see someone doing nighttime gardening — with a shovel. It looked more like a shadow than an actual person. The shadow would bury something, then put down a rock to mark the spot.”

  Tears spurted, made tracks down her cheeks.

  “I did suspect foul play, but I couldn’t tell anyone. I was afraid Harry would put me out on the street. Although I did want to know what was buried under those stones.

  “That’s why I did what I did.”

  “What did you do exactly?” Conklin asked.

  “One night, when the lights were out in the house … Excuse me, I need to blow my nose.”

  I had a packet of tissues in my jacket pocket; I gave them to Connie, waited for her to speak again.

  “I took my hammer and went around to the front gate and I broke the lock,” she said. “Mercy. That’s breaking and entering.”

  Conklin and I just kept up a steady gaze.

  “I knew where the gardener kept his tools,” Connie said. “So I went around back to where the walls meet and there’s the toolshed. It wasn’t locked.”

  “Okay.”

  “I borrowed a shovel and gardening gloves and went to one of the stones — and I dug a hole. I didn’t have to go very deep.

  “I found that old skull, and when I brushed it off, an idea came to me. That’s how it happens when you write, you know. Sometimes an idea just arrives fully dressed when you didn’t even know it was there.”

  Connie Kerr seemed sane to me. Cracked, yes; loony enough to dig up skulls in a garden while thinking she was creating fiction. But I wasn’t picking up stark raving cuckoo. And I wasn’t feeling her as a murderer.

  “What happened after you dug up that skull, Connie?”

  “Well. I dug up another one.”

  Chapter 95

  CONNIE DABBED AT her eyes with a wad of tissues and continued her story.

  “The second head was bad,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting it to be — to have — hell. I didn’t expect it to be so disgusting. I was coming up with my plan, though, and I just told myself to have courage. I thought of it as forensic archaeology.”

  “Appropriate term,” I said.

  “You think so?”

  I said, “Yes,” not adding that in this situation, the correct term for her activity was evidence tampering.

  Connie went on to say that she’d placed the “horrid remains” on the patio, returned to get the first skull, and then the idea took full form.

  “I went back to my place and got a pair of index cards. I had a cool idea, very dramatic, but I was scared going back to the garden,” she said.

  “I was thinking that I was now wandering into the area of premeditation. But I couldn’t stop. I was on a roll. The chrysanthemums were so white. So I plucked some and I made a wreath. I laid it around the heads,” Connie Kerr said, making a wide circle with her arms. “It looked very good. After I finished the wreath, I started to feel better. In fact, I felt elated.”

  “You were excited.”

  “Yes, that’s it. I was excited and my wheels were turning. I wanted to draw attention to the victims, you see. I wrote numbers on the index cards. I knew the numbers would make these heads into a big story. And I did a clever thing.”

  “Those numbers are a code.”

  “You’re warm.” Coy smile from Connie.

  “Numerology,” I said. “The number six.”

  “Aren’t you smart!” she said. She clapped her hands together, and for a moment the woman who had pirouetted around her small apartment was back.

  “So you wanted the police to find you?”

  “Yes! I wanted the police to find the killer and I wanted to be the heroine who helped solve the case. I wanted good realistic details for my book. I’m calling it Eleventh Hour, because the crime is solved at the last moment. But I never expected to be charged.”

  “So that’s your story, Connie? You did forensic archaeology, left some false clues for the police that led to your door.”

  “I’ve committed crimes, haven’t I?”

  I nodded. I wanted her to be afraid, but truthfully she wasn’t guilty of much. Trespassing. Falsifying evidence. It wasn’t illegal not to call the police to report a crime.

  “See, I am cooperating,” she said. “I didn’t even get a lawyer. Can’t you help me, please?”

  “Who was the so-called night gardener?” Conklin asked.

  “I don’t know. I was peeking through a curtain sixty feet above the ground. It was always dark. I would tell you if I could.”

  “How do you get your food?” I asked.

  “Nicole leaves it for me on the back steps. She’s that lovely girl who lives next door.”

  “I’ll look into getting you released,” Conklin said. “But if we can do it, you can’t leave your house.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m quite the homebody,” Constance Kerr said, “and, you know, I’ve got a lot of writing to do.”

  Chapter 96

  WILL RANDALL SAT on the side of his bed and sent a text message to Jimmy Lesko. He used a disposable phone and identified himself as Buck Barry, one of Lesko’s private customers, a cautious man with an impressive drug habit.

  The confirmation from Lesko came rocketing back, and the meeting was set for eleven that night; a transfer of cash for coke on a dodgy street in the Lower Haight.

  It wouldn’t be the transfer Jimmy Lesko was expecting.

  Will closed the phone, leaned over, and kissed Becky. He whispered that he loved her, left an envelope on the night table describing Chaz Smith’s double-dealing drug operation and how Smith had profited from being a cop. Then Will turned off the light.

  He went to Link’s room and stood over the bed watching his son’s jerking, restless sleep.

  His sweet boy.

  Link should have been at Notre Dame now, on a scholarship. Should have been going out with girls. Should have been a lot of things he wasn’t and would never be, in a world of things he would never do.

  Will kissed Link’s forehead, then went downstairs to the main floor and opened the door to the girls’ room. There were handmade quilts on the beds and a mural of a pastoral countryside painted on the cream-colored walls.

  He picked stuffed animals off the floor, tucked them into Mandy’s bed, kissed her, then kissed her twin, Sara. Sara stirred and opened her eyes.

  “I was flying, Daddy.”

  “Like a bird? Or like a plane?”

  “Like a rock-et.”

  “Was it fun?”

  “So fun. I’m going to go back now …”

  Will covered Sara’s shoulders with her quilt, said, “Have a safe flight, sweetheart,” then went to the boys’ room across the hall.

  The hamster was running on the endless track of his wheel. The two goldfish stared at him, almost motionless in the stream of bubbles coming up from the little ceramic diver at the bottom
of the bowl.

  Willie was asleep on his stomach, but Sam was awake and he grabbed Will’s hand and wouldn’t let go.

  Will smiled at his boy, sat down on the bed beside him. “What, son? What can I do for you?”

  “Are you going out?”

  “Yeah, the car’s gas tank is empty and I don’t want to stop tomorrow when I’m on the way to work. Rush hour, you know?”

  “Will you get me something?”

  “If I can.”

  “A motorcycle. A Harley. Black one.”

  “No problem.”

  “Really?”

  “What about a peanut butter granola bar instead?”

  “Sure,” said Sam. “That’ll be okay.”

  The kid was a born negotiator.

  “Go to sleep now,” Will said to his boy. “It’s late.”

  Will kissed his youngest son, went down the hallway, and stopped to speak with Charlie, who was in his La-Z-Boy watching the news.

  “Is that you, Hiram?”

  “It’s Will, Charlie. Becky’s husband. I want to give you something.”

  “Sure, what is it?”

  “You need a good shake.”

  “Ahhh-hah-hah.” Charlie laughed as Will leaned in and grabbed his father-in-law by both shoulders and shook him gently. Will said, “You’re a good man, Charlie Bean. I’ll see you later.”

  “That’s fine, Hiram. I’ll wait up for you.”

  Taking the stairs down to the garage, Will thought about what was coming that night. He took his jacket off the hook, put it on, then got the gun out of a toolbox near the pyramid of paint cans. He wrapped the gun in a plastic bag, stuck it inside his jacket pocket. Then he grabbed a flashlight and left the house by the back door.

  Will knew cops would be watching Becky’s car on Golden Gate Avenue so he stayed on the deeply shadowed side of the street. There was an unmarked car at the corner of Scott, two guys in the front seat.

  Will kept his head down and walked past it, kept going south another couple of blocks until he saw the silver Chevy Impala, probably a 2006 model.

  The door was unlocked and Will got in, shutting off the dome light. It took him about five minutes by flashlight to remove the ignition plate and hot-wire the car, but the engine started right up and there was fuel in the tank.