James Patterson - 11th hour

“We’re only hours away from nailing you to the wall, Nicole. But if you confess before we lock this case up, you could avoid the death penalty.”

“Really.”

Her voice was resigned. She twisted up her hair, kept her hands on her head, leaned back in the chair, and looked at the ceiling. She was beat. And so were we.

I got up, righted Nicole’s chair so that the force of the legs hitting the floor made her head jounce. I sat back down across from her.

“Look at me, Nicole.”

She shook her head.

“Then listen to me. Harry Chandler wants to know what happened to his wife and to the seven other women you killed. He’ll pay your attorney’s fees if you confess to all of it. There is no limit to how much he’ll spend on an attorney to represent you.”

I got up, opened the door, and Harry Chandler came in. He was big, imposing, and he looked straight at Nicole.

He said, “It’s a good deal and it’s your choice. Top-dog attorney, top-drawer law firm to negotiate your sentence — or you can deny everything and get whatever kind of lawyer you can afford.”

Nicole said, “Do you care about me, Harry?” She lifted her arms up to Chandler, but he backed away and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Nicole wailed, a wordless, keening cry.

Then she wiped her face with the sleeves of her turtleneck and said in an uninflected voice, “I need aspirin. I want to make a statement.”

It was a new day, a Friday to be exact, and Yuki, Claire, Cindy, and I were all gathered in Jackson Brady’s office.

Cindy plugged in her laptop, checked the power light, got ready for her just deserts.

“Start talking, Lindsay,” she said as she opened a new file. “What happened after Nicole spoke to Harry Chandler?”

“Well, she got a great lawyer, Francine Bloom, beautiful woman. Wore a three-thousand-dollar Armani suit, Ferragamos — ”

“Lindsay! Stop fooling around.”

Claire, Yuki, and I laughed. It was a nervous, almost giddy reaction to enormous relief.

The bloody fingerprints under the freezer lid had been smudged. The stab wounds in the body parts and the stun-gun wounds were inconclusive. And Janet Worley wouldn’t turn on her daughter.

Maybe Nicole would have been convicted anyway, but it wouldn’t have been a sure thing. Nicole’s confession slammed the house-of-heads case closed.

Yuki and Claire knew it all, and now Cindy deserved the whole scoop and nothing but the scoop.

I told Cindy that we weren’t laughing at her; we were just relieved. “Nicole confessed to killing the seven women whose heads were buried at the Ellsworth compound. And she confessed to killing Cecily Chandler too.”

“Oh. My. God. But why?”

“Because Harry Chandler gave her a good deal. And because she believed we had incontrovertible evidence.”

Cindy said, “I meant why did she kill Cecily? ”

“This is Nicole’s story, you understand. She was only sixteen when Janet and Harry got involved. Harry dumped Janet, and Nicole wanted to avenge her mother. Her idea of justice was to strangle Cecily one dark night in the garden. Take that, Harry.”

“And what did she do with the body?”

“Dragged Cecily into the basement and then went to her mother for help.”

“So Janet was part of this?” Cindy asked, fingers doing the cha-cha on her keyboard.

“Janet and Nicole sawed Cecily’s body into pieces, bagged and froze the parts. Then they drove up north to Modoc National Forest.”

“That’s, what? A six-hour drive? They buried her body in the wilderness?”

“Nicole says that they put the wrapped parts in the backseat under a tarp. When they got to a good deserted section of road, they stopped the car every hundred yards and walked into the woods with a package for the animals to eat,” I told my friend. “So Janet was involved in covering up Cecily’s murder. She did it for Nicole, but actually she was protecting her entire family.

“According to Nicole, that was the only time she involved her mother.”

“Meanwhile, Harry went on trial for Cecily’s murder,” Yuki said.

“Right,” I said, “and with the spotlight on him and her own involvement in this crime Harry didn’t commit, Nicole fixated on Harry.

“Janet and Nigel stayed on as caretakers and lived in the main house ‘so the place wouldn’t go cold,’ as Janet said, and Nicole eventually took up residence in number two.

“By then, she had a degree in biology, a driver’s license, unrequited love for Harry, and recurring fantasies about killing again.”

Cindy told me to hang on a minute, which I did, and then she said, “So, the victims come from many parts of the world. They were all on a house tour, maybe self-guided tours.”

“Exactly. Every now and then a tourist, a Harry Chandler fan, presented Nicole with an opportunity to relive her first murder,” I said. “She knew which ones were unlikely to be reported missing right away, and Nicole told us that she liked petite dark-haired women who reminded her of Cecily.”

Claire said, “What she’d do is take them down to the basement on a pretext of showing them some of Harry’s personal trophies, and they were easy enough to kill. A zap with a stun gun from behind, then a knife across the throat.”

Yuki said, “She got the disposal part down to near perfection. Then, thank God, she got lazy.”

“Lazy, but not crazy,” I said. “Nicole knows right from wrong. You know what she said to me when I took her to jail? ‘Tell my mom to be happy for me. I retired at the top of my game.’”

The Women’s Murder Club was going for a ride in my Explorer on our way to a long overdue reckoning. I was behind the wheel and Cindy was behind me, leaning over the seat divider, breathing down my neck.

We headed up Seventh at a good clip, crossed Market, passed the Civic Center BART, then turned left on McAllister.

I slowed the car and stopped at the light. There was a pack of unmarked cars parked in front of the Asian Art Museum, across the street from the Abby Hotel. Just as promised.

The Abby Hotel was a peach-colored six-story Victorian building with white trim, a brown awning over the entrance, and a fire escape zigzagging up the front of the building.

It stood in all its shabby elegance across the street from the Asian Art Museum, two blocks from City Hall. The homeless roamed this part of McAllister freely, but it was also the hub of government and legal activity.

Now, at noon, the streets and sidewalks were filled with suited men and women from the courts carrying briefcases or pulling luggage trolleys, their heads bent to their iPhones.

I parked in front of the hotel, and the girls and I got out of my car. I showed my badge to the doorman, a gnarled-looking boozer somewhere between his late fifties and early seventies. It looked to me as though the last time he’d had his uniform cleaned was — never.

Then I bent at the window of an unmarked car to talk to Lieutenant Meile from Vice. He was working off his guilty conscience by giving us a tip and following up by providing all hands on deck.

He gave me a room number, said, “History tells us he’ll be in there for another twenty minutes.”

Two cops from Vice, Billy Fried and Johnny Rizzo, got out of the unmarked and joined me and the girls on the sidewalk.

The six of us entered the Abby’s scruffy, mildewed lobby; we passed on the rickety metal elevator car and instead took the fire stairs to the third floor.

Vice took the lead. Fried rapped on the door while Rizzo took a stance on the other side of the doorway, holding his gun in a two-fisted grip.

Fried said, “Open the door. This is the SFPD.”