11th Hour

by James Patterson

  I thought he would hurt her; I really did.

  Then I saw them together.

  I pictured them now at a lawn party, first tossing footballs, then Brady carrying Yuki around slung over his shoulder. He was sweet with her. And she made him laugh. They brought out the best in each other and that counted in his favor.

  I hadn’t forgotten that he was only legally separated from his wife, who still lived in the Sunshine State. I hadn’t forgotten that he was my superior officer or that I didn’t like his rough management style.

  And I certainly hadn’t forgotten that he’d accused Warren Jacobi of being Revenge. He was going to have to take that back for sure. I hoped to hell he lived to do it.

  I looked up when Dr. Boyd Miller came into the hallway outside the waiting room. He was thirty, bald, thin-lipped. He did not look warm and fuzzy. He did not look like he was bringing good news.

  “Is Mrs. Brady here?” he asked.

  “I’m his girlfriend,” Yuki said. “He’s with me.”

  “He’s my commanding officer,” I said. “I was on the scene when he was shot. What’s his condition?”

  I expected that Miller was going to say that he could speak only to Brady’s immediate family. I didn’t think either Yuki or I could handle that.

  “We successfully repaired the damage to his femoral artery,” he said. “His lung is going to be fine. He has two broken ribs and there’s not much we can do about that. He’s on his way to the ICU now. I’m optimistic,” Dr. Miller said. “But officially his condition is guarded.”

  “Can I see him?” Yuki asked. “I have to see him.”

  “Not yet. I’ll let you know when it’s okay.”

  It was just about five in the morning when Yuki was told she could look at Brady through the glass.

  When she came back to the waiting room, her expression was soft. She sat down next to me, squeezed my hand.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Yuki said. “My mom told me that he’s going to be fine. And she likes him now. She said, ‘Brady very good man.’”

  I nodded, said, “That’s great.”

  I had to accept that Yuki thought that her dead mother spoke to her. Maybe she did.

  “I think your mom is usually right,” I said.

  “Good, because she also said that you should go home now, Lindsay, and get some sleep.”

  Chapter 103

  CLAIRE TURNED HER car into the lot on Harriet Street, parked in the space with her name stenciled on the asphalt. It was after ten in the morning, the first time in a year that she’d been late for work.

  The reception room of the Medical Examiner’s Office was churning; the new girl with big brown eyes was at the desk juggling the constantly ringing phones. Messengers came and went. Cops milled around, waiting for bullets and other forensic material to take out to the lab.

  Claire waved at the receptionist, went through the glass door to her office, hung her coat and voluminous bag on a rack in the corner, and sat down at her desk.

  She was dialing Lindsay when the brown-eyed girl knocked on the door and opened it. She came toward Claire with a flat package in her hands.

  “This just came, Dr. Washburn. It’s marked urgent.”

  Claire took the package, looked at the return address. It was from Ann Perlmutter, the forensic anthropologist at UC Santa Cruz.

  Claire sliced open the package with a scalpel and found six disks, each in its own case. And there was a letter from Dr. Perlmutter.

  Sorry this took so long, Claire.

  Call me if you have questions.

  Ann

  Claire inserted one of the disks into her computer’s DVD drive. A picture of a woman appeared on the screen, so lifelike it could have been a photograph — but it was a computer-generated 3D facial reconstruction of one of the skulls from the Ellsworth compound case.

  This 3D-imaging technique was a kind of miracle, and Claire knew how much time, skill, and artistry had gone into creating this likeness.

  A 3D representation had been made of each skull by a laser scanner that utilized light, mirrors, and sensors to capture the image and generate a wire-frame matrix. Information from CT scans of living persons was added, and the sophisticated software program distorted reference points on the 3D skull to correspond with points on a reference CT scan, creating a facial shape for each skull.

  The six bare skulls that had been exhumed from the Ellsworth garden had faces now. These representations could not be 100 percent accurate — but they would be close.

  The face on Claire’s screen had been labeled JANE DOE EC 1. The woman had rounded eyes, a wide forehead, a small nose, and long, wavy hair.

  In real life, Jane Doe EC 1 had had a family, and soon, Claire hoped, she would have a name.

  Chapter 104

  DR. ANDREA SHAW CAME TO the waiting room just before the sun came up. She was a small woman with a sweet expression and wavy silver hair.

  She said to Yuki, “Jackson is going to be okay. He’s asking for you.”

  Yuki’s face brightened. It was as if all the stars had come out at once and the sun and moon had done the tango together just for her.

  She hugged the doctor almost off her feet, then she hugged me, making tears jump out of my eyes.

  “Go to him. Go,” I said.

  A few hours and a change of clothes later, I was at my desk in the Homicide squad room. I would be subbing for Brady until he was back on the job. All the phone lines were ringing at once, but when I saw Claire’s name come up on the caller ID, I stabbed the button, didn’t wait for her to say hello.

  “Brady’s condition is stable,” I told her. “Randall is still critical. No change.”

  “Man, that’s great news about Brady. Listen, I’ve got something for you, girlfriend. I’ve got faces on those heads from the trophy garden.”

  The wind went right out of me.

  I blinked stupidly long enough for Claire to repeat herself, and then I got it. Ann Perlmutter had done the facial reconstructions. With faces, we might be able to ID the Ellsworth compound skulls.

  “Have you run the images through missing persons?”

  “There are six heads here, Lindsay. And I’ve got only one pair of eyes, one pair of hands.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Within an hour, Cindy, Yuki, Claire, and I each had at least one Jane Doe disk. Cindy was at home; Yuki worked from her laptop inside Brady’s hospital room. Claire was downstairs at her desk, and I was at mine. The Women’s Murder Club was connected by a mission and our shared network.

  I booted up the disk and stared at Jane Doe EC 2 as she came on my screen. She was pretty, with short, dark hair, arched brows, and full lips. I pressed Next and saw that Dr. Perlmutter had provided variations on this depiction of my Jane Doe to account for the artistry and guesswork that had gone into creating the image.

  She’d made it easy for us.

  But matching virtual images to real people was still an enormous job with plenty of room for error.

  We ran the 3D images through NamUs, the Doe Network, the SF missing-persons databases, and the FBI criminal database. Matches came up.

  It was amazing, almost magical.

  Claire got the first hit: Jane Doe EC 1 was Lina Rupert from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Cindy’s match was to Margaret Shubert from Toronto. The other four victims appeared to be missing persons from Chicago, New York, Omaha, and Tokyo.

  We four shared the pictures in a Windows Cloud and chatted together in a dialogue box on the screen. Comparing notes took very little time. The victims were of all ages, the youngest only eighteen, the oldest forty-eight.

  The victims weren’t criminals, and none of them was local.

  Apart from their burial ground, what did these six women have in common? What had brought them together in a homemade boneyard in Pacific Heights?

  Chapter 105

  YUKI WAS SITTING in the enormous chair in Brady’s hospital room. He had woken up for a moment, long enough to
give her a lazy “Hiiii … Yu … ki.”

  He told her he was enjoying the drugs and then fell asleep again.

  The phone rang after that. It was a woman who said she was Jennifer Brady, Jackson’s wife.

  “Who is this?” she’d asked.

  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.

&nbs
p; “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.