James Patterson - 11th hour

“It was a brilliant week,” she said. “Zipping down to Monterey, docking at the marina there. Kicking off the boat shoes, putting on heels and a witchy black dress — oh my. Dancing with Harry.”

Pause for an exchange of moony grins and hand-clasping. Okay. They were believably in love.

“We signed in with the harbormasters at stopovers, of course,” Chandler said to me. “And lots of people saw us. If you still need more of an alibi.”

I was thinking about Chandler’s remarks of a few minutes before, that he’d been “wondering” if his wife’s remains were among those that had been dug up in his garden. I wondered too, and I was equally interested in the woman whose head had been separated from her shoulders with a ripsaw about a week ago.

Had a body dump been part of the Chandler coastal cruise?

I had no warrant and no probable cause to search Chandler’s yacht, so an eyeball search of the premises might be my only opportunity to check out the floating home as a possible crime scene.

“I’ll take that list of stopovers,” I said. “And I’m really dying to see the rest of this yacht.”

Harry and Kaye showed me around the four-cabin luxury craft. It was House Beautiful marine style, everything enviably top of the line, and not a throw pillow out of place.

The boat was fast, and the alibis could have been manufactured, but I strained to find a reason why Harry Chandler would come back to San Francisco during his cruise, dig up a couple of skulls, and then leave them with a cryptic message in his backyard.

It would be crazy, and I didn’t see any crazy in Harry Chandler.

I complimented the couple on the boat, and before the conversation could devolve into chitchat, I said that I’d be going and gave Chandler my card.

Chandler said, “I’ll walk you out.”

I started down the gangway and this time Chandler’s hand on my back was firmer, more forceful. I stepped away and turned to give Chandler a questioning look.

“You’re like a butterfly,” Harry Chandler told me, fixing his gray searchlight eyes on mine, “with steel wings.”

I was taken aback for three or four reasons I could have spat out right away. Had Harry Chandler’s crazy just surfaced?

What had Nigel Worley told me?

Harry Chandler would like you.

I said, “I hope you’re not coming on to me, Mr. Chandler. Because when a suspect in a murder investigation hits on a cop, you know what I think? He’s desperate. And he’s trying to hide something.”

Chandler said, “You actually think of me as a suspect, Sergeant?”

“You haven’t been excluded.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”

I said sharply, “Stay anchored. If I were you, I wouldn’t draw attention to myself by leaving town.”

Jason Blayney moved purposefully through the large open space with the supersize bar and the high ceiling, the main room of the yacht club.

The reporter was twenty-seven years old, an average-to-nice-looking guy, and, along with his more intellectual talents, he had a trick left arm. When he was a kid, he had learned how to pop his shoulder so that it looked deformed, and this little sleight of arm gave him an edge in certain situations.

Right now, for instance, the arm made the security guy decide not to confront him. Blayney said, “How ya doing? I’m with the O’Briens. Mind if I use the bathroom?”

Guard said, “Sure,” and pointed the way.

Blayney went to the men’s room, washed his hands, finger-combed his hair, and straightened the camera hanging from his neck.

Then he left the club through the back door that opened onto the wide deck fronting the marina. He was imagining the smoking interview he was about to have with Harry Chandler.

Blayney had grown up in Chicago, and after graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, he had gotten off to a fast start at the LA bureau of the New York Times. Six months ago, he got the offer from the San Francisco Post to aggressively report on crime, and he’d moved up the coast and into a job that fit him like the cover of darkness.

Now he had a prominent platform to do whatever it took to crush the Chronicle ’s dominance in crime reportage and establish himself as a player on the national stage.

Today, Blayney was as stoked as he’d ever been in his life. Yesterday’s ruckus at the Chandler house was the start of a monster story that had legs up to the moon. He’d flattered a traffic cop and gotten a tip, and as far as he knew, he was the first journalist to learn that several heads had been dug up at the Ellsworth compound.

By itself, this information was tremendous on every level, and he was just getting started.

A half hour ago, Blayney had followed Lindsay Boxer from the Ellsworth compound. As soon as she got into her car, he’d been sure that she was going to the yacht club to interview Harry Chandler.

He took his time, and as he headed into the marina, Blayney saw Boxer leaving the slip where Chandler’s boat was docked. Her head was down, her blond hair hanging in front of her eyes as she talked on her phone. Blayney thought of Lindsay Boxer as a character in his story; she was a good cop, but what really got him going was that she was emotional. If he dogged her, she would react and probably lead him into the heart of the story. She could be the heroine or the screwup on both of her active cases. He really didn’t care which.

Either way, Lindsay Boxer had taken him to Harry Chandler.

He took a couple of pictures, but she didn’t notice him.

“Nice one, Sergeant,” he said quietly. “I think you made the front page.”

Blayney immediately recognized the man heading up the gangway to his yacht wearing denim and walking with a swagger. It was a thrill to actually put his eyes on the actor in real time, real size, the man whose face had been ubiquitous on Court TV for almost two years, a guy who possibly had killed his wife and gotten away with it.

Blayney wanted an interview with Chandler as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. He pointed his camera and took another couple of shots, then called out, “Mr. Chandler.”

Chandler turned to face him, taking a solid stance on the dock. His hands were curled into fists.

“Yes?”

Blayney opened the unlocked metal gate, said, “Mr. Chandler, I’m Jason Blayney, with the San Francisco Post. I’d like to talk to you.”

“You’re a reporter?”

“How do you do, sir? Mr. Chandler, I’m wondering if you can tell me what’s going on at your house on Vallejo? I’d like to be your advocate, Mr. Chandler. Help you get your side of the story out — ”

“Get off this dock. This is private property.”

Chandler pulled his phone out of his hip pocket, called a number, and said, “This is Harry Chandler. I need security.”

“What I’ve heard is that a number of human skulls have been exhumed from your backyard, Mr. Chandler. Would you care to make a comment?”

Chandler said, “Don’t point that camera at me. I have no comment on or off the record, you get me?”

Blayney moved closer to show that he wasn’t backing down. “Did you kill your wife ten years ago, Mr. Chandler? Did you bury her in your garden? Are any of your past girlfriends buried there too, sir?”

Chandler reached out and grabbed Blayney by the front of his shirt and back-walked him to the edge of the dock. Holding the reporter, Chandler almost pushed Blayney off, then jerked him back to safety, looked down at the collapsed shoulder, and said, “Don’t ever come here again.”

“You’re acting like you have something to hide, Mr. Chandler,” Blayney said, stumbling and pressing forward at the same time.