James Patterson - 11th hour

I used Yuki’s phone and got him on the first try. I stopped short of begging, but I was extra nice. At first.

Chandler said, “Why should I let you track your gum-shoes through my property again?”

“Mr. Chandler, it’s no accident that those heads were buried in your backyard. Someone wants you to be tried for murder again. But until we find that someone, you’re our primary suspect. Do you understand?”

The fog frizzed my hair as Conklin, Cindy, and I huddled together on Ellsworth Place. The street was short and narrow, kind of romantic, and unusual in that it met up with Pierce at one end, Green on the other, forming a right triangle.

The west side of Ellsworth was lined with newer houses in various styles. The houses across the street, the ones that were part of the Ellsworth compound, were all no-frills brick, built as servants’ quarters in the late 1890s at the same time the main house was constructed. I could almost hear the sound of horses pulling buggies up the street.

While I gazed around, Conklin tightened the straps on Cindy’s Kevlar vest, helped her into an SFPD windbreaker.

I waited until Cindy was cinched up, then gave her a summary of Harry Chandler’s minor houses.

“Nicole Worley, the caretakers’ daughter, lives in number two. She’s in her midtwenties, works in animal rescue. Stays here to keep an eye on her folks. Harry’s driver, T. Lawrence Oliver, lives in number four, rent free. It’s an employment perk. Numbers six and eight had tenants at one time but are empty now.”

Conklin added, “Three of these houses don’t have any windows facing the garden in back; one of them has a single window facing it. Number six. When I was in the garden the first time, I noticed that window. Nicole Worley told me that the building was boarded up. If someone is squatting there, he could be our perp.”

As we talked, the fine mist turned to rain.

We discussed who was going to do what. Conklin asked Cindy to get back into the car until we could clear the scene. She reluctantly agreed, then Conklin and I went up the steps to the front door.

I knocked, Conklin called out, and then I rapped on the door with the tarnished brass knocker. When no one answered, Conklin tried turning the knob, but it was frozen solid, the door possibly bolted from the inside.

After a few words with Cindy through the car window, we headed for the backyard and bushwhacked through the waist-high weeds and thistles that had grown thickly between numbers 4 and 6.

The rear aspect of the brick houses was forbidding. Each blind, windowless wall had a back door and a set of steps descending from it, and only a few feet in front of those steps was the looming ten-foot-high brick wall that blocked the view of the garden.

The back doors of 6 and 8 were boarded up, but as I neared number 6, I noticed that weeds had been pulled from around the steps and thrown off to the side. I poked around a little more, saw that the sheet of plywood at the door wasn’t nailed to the frame. It was simply leaning against it.

“Someone’s been in and out of here recently,” I said.

Conklin went up the steps and pulled the plywood away from the door, then banged on the door with his fist.

“Police. Open up,” Conklin said. “Or we’re coming in.”

No sooner had Conklin opened the door than I heard someone coming through the weeds behind me. I whipped around to see Cindy, her chin stuck out, rain streaming off her face.

“I need to be here. I can’t cover this story from the car.”

“This story could be nothing,” I hissed to my bulldog friend. “Despite your breaking the da Vinci code, this could be an empty house and a dead end — ”

“I know.”

“- or it could be dangerous,” I said.

“I’ll watch my step.”

“Could be a gang of crackheads living in here.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gone into a crack house. Anyway, you’re both armed.”

It was futile, but I looked at my partner and said, “Please tell her, Rich.”

He put up his hands. “Not me.”

“If anything happens to you,” I said to Cindy, “Rich and I are going to be fired. Me first, of course. And then we’re both going to hate ourselves forever.”

Cindy laughed. “Give me a break.”

This was Cindy: no gun, no training, no official status, and yet the only way to stop her was to get a circus elephant to sit on her chest.

I wasn’t kidding about the consequences of letting Cindy into the house, but I was done arguing. Conklin pulled his gun and went in through the doorway. I let Cindy follow him and I brought up the rear.

The hallway was lit by the dull light coming in through the open back door. There was a narrow wooden staircase just ahead of us, and the floor above us was dark.

Conklin and I turned on our flashlights and began to climb. The stairwell was clean, odor-free, and I didn’t see graffiti, rags, needles, or any sign of squatters or druggies. In fact, it looked as though it had recently been swept.

We kept moving onward and upward, and when we got to the third-floor landing, I heard the faintest of sounds.

“What’s that?” I whispered.

“Beethoven,” said Cindy. “Sixth Symphony.”

“How do you know that?”

“Sixth. Get it? Another six. And this particular symphony — I think it’s about gardens. Don’t you hate it when I’m right?” she said, grinning.

I said, “Shhh. Keep your eyes open.”

We rounded the next flight, and the next, the music getting louder as we climbed. We came to the sixth-floor landing and faced the three doors on that level.

One was marked F, for front, I assumed. One was marked WASHROOM, and the third door had a note taped under the letter R, for rear.

Conklin shone his light on the door and I moved in so that I could read the handwritten notice: Genius at Work. Do Not Disturb.

I’m not superstitious, but seriously, there were too many sixes in this deal. Number 6 Ellsworth, Beethoven’s Sixth, and now the trail of sixes that ended on the sixth floor.

Six-six-six was an unlucky number, right? So what kind of nightmare was this “genius at work”?

I put Cindy behind me as Conklin knocked on the door and said, “Open up. This is the police.”

The music was turned off, then heavy footsteps came toward the threshold. A dark eye stared through the peephole.

A chain rattled and the doorknob turned, and then, standing in the doorway, actually filling it, was a very tall white woman, maybe six two, apparently unarmed. She was wearing a long and well-worn black velvet skirt and a knit gray top with batwing sleeves. Her gray-blond hair was twisted up in a topknot. She smiled broadly.

“Oh, hello! I know who you are. I’m Connie Kerr. Come in.”

I think maybe my mouth actually dropped open. I knew her. I didn’t know her personally, but about twenty years ago, Constance Kerr had been a kind of celebrity on the pro tennis circuit. She’d been a lanky girl with a powerful serve and a very long stride.

Conklin said his name and mine, introduced Cindy Thomas without identifying her role in this escapade, and all three of us stepped into Constance Kerr’s home.

It was a garret, a hidey-hole under the eaves of this Victorian house. The room had odd angles, and a closet and a small kitchen had been sectioned out of the ten-by-twelve-foot room. A fold-out bed was put up against the center of the longest wall, and there was a desk under the one window. A laptop computer was open on the desk and a three-foot-high stack of yellow manuscript boxes stood on the floor.

A heavy gray blanket was affixed to the top of the window frame and hung down over the glass, making a dense, light-blocking curtain.