James Patterson - 11th hour

LaMetta Wynn sat back in her seat. She seemed to be thinking about that, then she said, “You’re the homicide detectives, so help me to understand. If Harry Chandler is the killer, why would he bury his victims’ heads in his own backyard?”

“I guess you’re assuming that killers are logical,” I said. I pulled out the drawing of Jane Doe, a drawing that was getting rumpled from handling.

Wynn got a glimpse, then seized the drawing from my hand.

“I know her,” she said. “I know this woman. Is she one of the people who was killed?”

“Yes. Who is she?”

“Her name is Marilyn. Varick, I think. She lives on the streets. Occasionally she sleeps in a doorway.

“I’ve given her spare change. She comes from Oregon,” said LaMetta Wynn. “I didn’t get into any long conversations with her. I mostly brought her soup.”

“Did Harry Chandler know her?”

“Impossible. He couldn’t have. And I want to be perfectly clear. I know Harry Chandler well. He isn’t a violent man. He’s a scamp, but, apart from breaking hearts, he’d never hurt anyone.”

Conklin and I took the fifteen-minute drive to the yacht club. I wanted my partner’s opinion of Harry Chandler. And I wanted to see Chandler’s face when I showed him the drawing of the girl whose head had been unearthed from his garden.

As before, Chandler was sitting in a deck chair at the foot of his gangway when we arrived. He had a big smile for me, shook Conklin’s hand, and said, “I hope you have some news for me.”

“We do, Mr. Chandler.”

“Come aboard,” he said.

I think Conklin’s jaw dropped a little bit when Chandler showed us to the sitting room on the aft deck. I guess my jaw had dropped the same way when I saw it the day before.

I said, “Mr. Chandler, the remains found in your garden were all examined, and none of them are a match to Cecily Chandler.”

“Oh, thank you, Sergeant,” he said, his expression full of relief. “I don’t think I was ready to hear that she’d been buried in the backyard all these years.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.