James Patterson - 11th hour

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 turned 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.”

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.

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.”