James Patterson - 11th hour

Was he depressed?

Was he angry?

Did getting shot on Larkin Street by a drug user constitute motive to go on a killing spree?

According to Brady, it did.

“Are you listening to me, Boxer?”

“I’m sorry. No. What did you say?”

“I said, if anyone can talk him in, it’s the two of you. I’ll tell you where to be and when. That’s all.”

At just after 6:00 p.m. Revenge was standing at the counter at Peet’s waiting for take-out coffee for his drive home.

Someone had left the Post behind and he read the front-page story about the shooting outside the projects. Despite the overheated writing about the deaths of the three dirtbag drug dealers, it was clear that the cops had nothing on the shooter except the gun he’d tossed into the car, the gun that had been used to take out Chaz Smith.

There were no prints on that gun, and there was no way to link it or anything else to him.

The primary on the case was Lindsay Boxer. He had met Boxer a couple of times back in the day. She was a hands-on homicide cop, maybe gifted, and certainly tenacious. But smart and dogged could only help you so much when you didn’t have a clue.

Martina, the girl behind the counter, took cash from an old man with a limp, said, “Thank you. Come back soon.”

She closed the cash drawer, dropped the small change into a cup, and exhaled a long sigh.

Revenge knew that Martina was depressed about her pending divorce. Although she laughed it off, called it “losing a hundred and seventy-five pounds,” Martina was obviously heartsick.

She put on a brave face for him and said of the front-page story, “That’s something, isn’t it?”

She poured hot coffee into a cardboard coffee cup, leaving two inches at the top for milk, the way he liked it. “Some kind of vigilante is killing drug dealers. Have you heard about him? He’s called Revenge.”

“Just reading about it now,” he said. “I don’t read the paper all that often.”

“But you do watch TV, right? One of the guys Revenge killed was a big-deal undercover cop, and his wife is going to be on TV tonight. With Katie Couric.”

“No kidding. Well, maybe I’ll watch it then.”

He smiled at the waitress, poured milk into the cup, and capped it. He left four dollars on the counter, told Martina to take care, and went out into the strip mall.

He got into his vehicle and called his wife, told her he’d be home in half an hour; did she need him to pick up anything?

“No, thanks. We’re good, sweetie,” she said.

Revenge hung up and had just started the engine when he saw something that almost snapped his head back. It was Raoul Fernandez, a scumbag drug dealer who was moving up in his world from small-timer selling teenths in the hood to distributor with young kids doing the dealing for him.

While Revenge was with the DEA task force, he’d looked for evidence against this ugly piece of work. Fernandez was cagey and elusive, and after serving two years for dealing, he had been released.

That should never have happened. Now Revenge watched Fernandez lock up his sporty little Mercedes and head across the parking lot toward the Safeway.

The strip mall was busy. Revenge had just been seen by Martina and everyone who’d been in Peet’s. He knew he ought to let Fernandez go. He should drive home to his family, just drive away.

But fuck it. He might not get this chance again.

Revenge got his gun out of the glove box and stepped out of his car. He walked past the Mercedes and followed a dozen yards behind the drug dealer, his gun pressed against his leg.

Fernandez might have heard something, or maybe he just had a sixth sense; the dealer turned toward Revenge, and he had a gun in his hand.

Revenge felt his heart rate spike.

The voice inside his head was saying, This was a mistake. This is where I go down. I guess I want it to happen. Today.

Conklin and I stood with Charlie Clapper on the bricks behind the Ellsworth compound watching CSU pack up their gear. The garden was pocked with holes and heaped with mounds of dirt; it looked as if a hundred woodchucks on crack had run amok there.

Still, no additional heads or any other body parts had been found. There was no new evidence of any kind.

I was struck again by how twisted this case was, how unusual in every way.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, a homicide investigation revolves around a body and a scene where the crime actually took place.

You’ve got an assortment of material to work with: clothing, blood, fingerprints, hard evidence that can tell you who the victim was, what caused his death, and possibly when the victim died. You can even compare a photograph of the victim with the DMV’s database and most of the time can come up with a name.

Or you start with a missing-person report and you work the case from the other side. You start with dental records, maybe DNA, a list of friends, coworkers, phone numbers, the time the missing person was last seen.

All we had were holes, piles of dirt, unidentified remains, and a list of suspects that barely made the needle jump.

We couldn’t even say for sure that the seven victims had died from homicidal violence. Maybe they had all died of natural causes and their heads were brought to the site for burial.

All we knew for certain was that whoever buried those heads had access to the garden behind the Ellsworth compound over a period of perhaps ten years or more.

As we waited for the forensic anthropologist to complete her measurements and run the data through software that could put virtual features on bare skulls, we could do nothing but hope for a lucky break or — please, God — a confession.

Now Clapper unzipped his coveralls, stripped off his gloves, and sighed.

“We’ve sifted every square foot of this place. We’ve got everything there is to get. Those artifacts we pulled out of the graves were clean. No prints. No DNA. Just doodads.”

“If we identify the victims, the doodads may mean something to the families,” I said.

Clapper said, “Okay, then. I gotta get out of here. My wife is expecting me home for dinner, first time this week.”

I felt deflated and frustrated. I was about to suggest to Conklin that we go to the firing range and put a lot of holes in some paper targets when Brady’s phone reached out and connected with mine.

“Boxer, there’s been a shooting. Looks like another one of these freaking Revenge killings. That son of a bitch. Is Conklin with you? Good. You two go to Potrero Center. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

Potrero center was on Sixteenth and Bryant, a modern strip mall of wall-to-wall retail stores: Office Depot, Safeway, Jamba Juice, and more. A stone wall with a metal rail on top enclosed the vast parking lot that was nearly always packed.

The sun was going down when we drove between the stone pillars on Sixteenth and identified ourselves to the uniformed cops at the entrance. I asked for the name of the first officer, then Conklin parked our car near the dozen or so squad cars right inside the gates.

We headed toward the yellow tape at the perimeter, and as we worked our way through the shifting crowd, I saw fear and anger on the faces of shoppers. Clearly, they’d been told that no one could leave the lot without giving a statement, and the handful of officers on the scene were just starting a process that could go long into the night.

The first officer was Mike Degano, a young guy who had been a block away when the call came over his radio. He wanted to help, had the look of a patrolman who aspired to work homicide.

Degano pointed to a late-model black Mercedes XL, said to us, “That’s probably the DB’s car. He had a Mercedes key ring in his hand when he went down. Car is registered to Raoul Fernandez. I ran his name. He has a record for assault and for possession with intent. Spent a couple of years at Folsom, released in 2010. Wait’ll you see this.”