James Patterson - 11th hour

I called Conklin and filled him in as I raced up the stairs to the main floor of the house. I found my partner sitting with Janet Worley at the round table in the kitchen, empty teacups and a plate of crumbs in front of them. Janet’s face was pale and pinched.

Nigel Worley was missing.

“Nigel took a swing at me. Any other day, I would have clocked him,” Conklin said.

“He’s under arrest?”

“For his own good.”

I said to Janet, “Where’s Nicole?”

“You don’t have the right — ”

“I don’t need your permission, Mrs. Worley. Where is she?”

Conklin and I followed Janet up the main stairs of the house, boards creaking under our feet. I was thinking about Nicole Worley, the self-possessed young woman who worked for the good of animals and lectured to tourists about the history of the Ellsworth compound.

When we reached the sixth floor, Janet opened the first door on the left, the door closest to the back of the house.

The room smelled of floral sachet, an old-lady smell. I flipped on the light switches, expecting to see Nicole in the bed or in a chair. But the room was empty, and it looked like it had been empty for years. The bed was crisply made. There were no personal items on the dresser or on the nightstand.

“What’s this room, Janet?”

“Follow me. It’s this way,” she said, throwing a lightning bolt of a stare in my direction.

She turned and headed toward a small closet door in the corner of the bedroom where the ceiling slanted under the eaves. Janet opened the door, pushed aside clothing on a rod, then stooped to enter a hidden Alice-in-Wonderland doorway.

The door led to a tunnel that ran under the eaves. I turned on my flashlight and continued behind Janet Worley’s crouched form until the tunnel opened into another hallway, one with a staircase leading down and three doors off the landing.

I knew where we were.

This was the top floor of 2 Ellsworth Place, another concealed access point between the main house and the servants’ quarters around the corner.

Janet pointed to the door and said, “This is Nicole’s room. I doubt that she’s here.”

I pulled my gun as Janet knocked.

“Nicole. Are you here, darling?”

No sound came from within.

I reached around Janet Worley and tried the knob. The door was locked from the inside. I said, “Rich. Give it a try.”

I pulled Janet Worley aside and said, “Stay here in the hallway.”

Then Conklin kicked in the door.

Nicole was wearing black up to her chin.

She had wedged herself between her bed and the window, propped her elbows up on the mattress, and was holding a large kitchen knife in front of her with both hands.

She was pointing that knife at us.

Her heart-shaped face no longer looked angelic. Her features were locked in a crazy stare and her hair was damp with sweat. Her green eyes were blank as stagnant pools.

She looked absolutely feral.

Nicole was twenty-six, but her room had gotten stuck in a teen-theme time warp. The walls were painted with vertical stripes in three shades of green. The spread and curtains were the same colors in a polka-dot print.

There were pictures of Harry Chandler all around the room, including a life-size cutout on the wall and a black-and-white headshot on the dresser mirror inscribed To Nicole, XOXO, Harry.

Nicole said in a deep voice, almost a growl, “Don’t come any closer, you bitches. I’m not afraid to use this. And I’m not afraid to jump.”

The room had two exits: the door behind me and the window behind Nicole. From what I could see, Nicole didn’t have a direct view of the house and garden. But the oblique view took in the back of the Ellsworth house, the brick patio, and a wedge of the garden where heads had been buried.

My eyes went back to Nicole, who was still facing us down from behind her mattress. She seemed irrational. And I didn’t like the options she had given us.

My partner stepped forward.

He wasn’t holding a weapon and his left arm was strapped across his chest. If there’d ever been a time for the Conklin charm factor, this was it.

“Nobody wants to hurt you, Nicole. We don’t want any trouble. None at all.”

“I’m in charge here,” Nicole said. “I make all the decisions.”

“You’re only in charge of what you do,” Conklin said. “So I want you to move very slowly. Put the knife down.”

She laughed, a hysterical yip.

“So you can do what? Shoot me. I’ll put the knife down when you back out of my room.”

With that, Nicole lunged.

Conklin sidestepped and stood between me and Nicole. I didn’t have a shot. I didn’t have a shot.

Conklin reached across the bed and grabbed Nicole by her thick dark hair; he pulled her across the bed and onto the floor. He stepped on her right hand and yelled, “Drop it!” until the knife was lying on the ground.

He kicked the knife away, and then, Nicole’s hair still wrapped around his hand, he forced the woman to her feet.

Janet was screaming, “Stop! Nicole didn’t do anything. It was me. I killed all those women. It was me. It was me.”

The shrieking was about to take off the top of my head. I cuffed Nicole as her mother pleaded, “You have got this wrong. I’m the one. It’s me.”

Nicole was regaining her equanimity. She said, “Mom, stop the hysterics. They’ve got nothing on you, and they’ve got nothing on me.”

I said, “Nicole Worley, you’re under arrest on suspicion of murder.”

I stepped behind Janet, told her to put her hands behind her back. I cuffed and arrested her too, read both of them their rights.

I said, “Mrs. Worley, we’ve got plenty of murder charges to go around. So no fighting for credit, okay?”

Nicole was laughing, but I didn’t find her amusing. She was one of the scariest people I’d met in my life.

Conklin took charge of Janet, and I gave Nicole a shove toward the door.

I was desperate to get her alone in the box.

Claire was in the basement of number 2, standing with Clapper in front of the chest-type freezer. They’d been staring at it for at least a full minute. She said, “What are you waiting for, Charlie? Christmas?”

“It was Christmas for someone. See how nicely the presents are wrapped?”

When the condensation blew off, Claire could clearly see that the freezer was packed to the brim with body parts. There was no order, no organization. Parts had been loaded into the chest helter-skelter, all loosely wrapped in plastic.

Clapper said, “I’m going to be the first to state the obvious. This killer had no respect for the dead.”

“What brass to leave all of this right here in an unlocked chest. I just hope we’ve got proof positive of whodunit in here. I’m praying.”

“We’re going over this freezer for prints as soon as you’re done here. There will be prints. I can almost see them with my naked eyes. We’ll swab for DNA too.

“And listen, Claire,” Clapper added, “you’re not going to like this, but we need to know how many bodies we’ve got here. So can you go through it here? Count the pieces?”

It was better to load the freezer onto a flatbed truck and then take it and its contents back to the lab. But if counting pieces was a priority, it had to be done.

Claire turned to her assistant and said, “Bunny. We’re going to do a five hundred series.”

“Like this was a plane crash or something like that,” Bunny said.

“Right. Disaster numbering system. You know how it goes?”

“Sequential numbers from five hundred up.”

“Right. So that all of these individual parts are logged in one file.”