James Patterson: 11th hour

She said her name was Janet Worley, and I told her mine, showed her my badge, and introduced my partner, who asked her, “How are you doing, Mrs. Worley?”

“Horribly, thank you.”

“It’s okay. We’re here now,” Rich said.

Conklin is good with people, especially women. In fact, he’s known for it.

I wanted to learn everything at once, which was what always happened when I started working a case. I looked around the foyer as Conklin talked to Janet Worley and took notes. The entranceway was huge, with a twenty-foot-high ceiling and plaster moldings; to my right, a wide and winding staircase led to the upper floors.

Everything was tidy, not a rug fringe out of place.

Janet Worley was saying to Conklin, “My husband and I are just the caretakers, you understand. This house is thirty thousand square feet and we have a schedule. We’ve been cleaning the Ellsworth Place side of the house over the past three days.”

Looking through the foyer, I thought the house seemed gloomy, what you would expect from a relic of the Victorian age. Had we stepped into a Masterpiece Theatre episode? Was Agatha Christie lurking in the wings?

Behind me, Janet Worley was still talking to Conklin and she had his attention. I wanted to hear her out, but she was going the long way around the story and I felt the pressure of time passing.

“Why did you call emergency?” Conklin asked.

Worley said, “I had better show you.”

We followed behind the small woman, who took us through the foyer, past a library, and into a living area with an enormous stone fireplace and large-scale leather furniture. Sunlight passed through stained glass, painting rainbows on the marble floors. We went through a restaurant-quality kitchen and at last arrived at the back door.

Worley said, “We haven’t been in this part of the house since last Friday. Yes, that’s right, three days ago. I don’t know how long these have been here.”

She opened the door and I followed Worley’s pointing finger to the chrysanthemum-lined brick patio in the backyard.

For a moment, my mind blanked, because what I saw was frankly unbelievable.

On the patio were two severed heads encircled by a loose wreath of white chrysanthemum flowers.

They seemed to be looking up at me.

The sight was grisly and shocking, made for the cover of the National Enquirer. But this was no alien invasion story, and it was no Halloween prank.

Conklin turned to me, my shock reflected in his eyes.

“These heads are real, right?” I asked him.

“Real, and as the lady said, definitely dead.”

Adrenaline burned through my bloodstream like flame on a short fuse. What had happened here?

What in God’s name was I looking at?

The head to the right was the most horrific because it was reasonably fresh. It had belonged to a woman in her thirties with long brown hair and a stud piercing the left side of her nose. Her eyes were too cloudy to tell their color.

There was dirt in her hair that looked like garden soil, and maggots were working on the flesh, but enough of her features remained to get a likeness and possibly an ID.

The other head was a skull, just the bare cranium with the lower jaw attached and a full set of good teeth.

Two index cards lay faceup on the bricks in front of the heads and both had numbers written on them with a ball-point pen. The card in front of the skull read 104. The other card, the one in front of the more recently severed head, read 613.

What did the numbers mean?

Where had these heads come from?

Why were they placed here in plain sight?

If this was a homicide, where were the bodies?

I tore my gaze away from the heads to look into Janet Worley’s face. She covered her mouth with both hands and tears sprang to her eyes.

I saw a meltdown coming. I had to question her. Now.

“Who do these remains belong to? Where are the bodies? Tell us about it, Mrs. Worley.”

“Me? All I know is what I just told you. I’m the one who called the police.”

“Then who did this?”

“I have no idea. None at all.”

“You understand that lying would make you an accessory to the crime.”

“My God. I know nothing.”

Conklin said, “We need the names of everyone who has been inside this house since last Friday.”

“Of course, but it’s only been my husband, my daughter, and me.”

“And Mr. Chandler?”

“Heavens, no. I haven’t seen him in three months.”

“Have you handled these heads or disturbed anything on the patio?”

“No, no, no. I opened the door to air out the room at about seven this morning. I saw this. I called my husband. Then I called nine-one-one.”

Janet Worley went inside the house, and Conklin and I were left to consider the nature of “this.”

Was it Satanism? Terrorism? Drug-related homicide? Who were these victims? What had happened to them?

I wanted to start looking around, but Conklin and I had to stay on the bricks and focus on what we could see without contaminating evidence.

Brady had told us to do the prelim.

That was the job: scope out the crime and tell our lieutenant whether this was a double homicide or a freak show that should be handed off to Major Crimes.

“I don’t know what the hell we’re looking at,” I said to Conklin.

Truly, I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

The back garden was a dark, three-quarter-acre triangular plot that looked as though a slice of woodland had been dropped down in one piece behind the Ellsworth house.

The parcel was shadowed by buildings and mature trees, crossed with mulched paths, bounded by the house on one side and by two ten-foot-high brick walls that met at a toolshed at the farthest end of the garden.

Looking for entrances, I saw, in addition to the front gate with its broken lock, five doors that opened to the garden from the main house and a gate in the wall next to the toolshed.

“There’s a multipurpose tool,” Conklin said.

He was pointing to a shovel half hidden by a shrub, and beyond the shovel was a mound of soil and a hole dug in the dirt. The hole was about two feet across, the right size for potted chrysanthemums — and also just right for disembodied heads.

I saw a second hole, just visible from the far corner of the patio, and beside that hole was a rounded stone.

Now that I was looking for them, I saw other stones around the garden. Maybe they were decorative in a gnomish way, or maybe the stones were markers.

If the shovel had been used to break the lock, it would mean that whoever broke in knew where to look for the disembodied heads and had then exhumed them.

Did that mean that the intruder was the killer?

Or was he an accessory to whatever mayhem had taken place?

I took another look at the numbered index cards.

When a killer deliberately leaves a calling card, it’s a dare. Usually means he’s trying to show the cops that he’s smarter than they are. It’s playing a very risky game.

Here was the game board as I saw it: a large hidden garden, two severed heads wreathed with flowers, cryptic numbers on a matching pair of index cards.

Did the numbers indicate how many heads were in the garden? Could hundreds of skulls be in this place, perhaps stacked in holes, one on top of another?

Beyond the complete creepiness of the skull tableau, I didn’t have a sense of the meaning or intent of any of it, but we were just getting started and hadn’t yet scratched the surface.

I said to Conklin, “The quickest way is also the best.”

“Ground-penetrating radar,” he said, staring out into the garden.

“And cadaver dogs. We’ve got to dig this place up.”