James Patterson - 11th hour

We met Nigel Worley in the kitchen of the Ellsworth house.

At six three, he was a full foot taller than his wife and had almost a hundred and fifty bloated pounds on her too. His face was puffy. Looked to me like he was a heavy drinker, and I noticed that he had rough dark-stained hands. He answered only questions directed specifically to him, and when he spoke, it was to a place in the air between Conklin and me.

Mr. Worley had no theories about the severed heads, and his tone was hostile. But he had to make a statement on the record. We gave him no choice. The Worleys were witnesses and they were also the only suspects we had.

We put on the siren and drove the English couple from their residence back to the Hall.

While Conklin interviewed Nigel Worley, I sat across from Janet Worley in the smaller of our two interrogation rooms. Brady paced unseen behind the glass.

Brady had already told me that he was unhappy with how our day was turning out. In his opinion, the Ellsworth case was a tar pit, and Conklin and I were going to get sucked under. He needed us to work the vigilante-cop case, and he wanted us to work it now.

I understood his concerns, but I’d seen the severed head of a woman who’d been alive a week ago. She was a Jane Doe, and because we didn’t know her name, she was about to get an official case number and a spot on a refrigerated shelf in the city morgue.

The camera in the corner of the interview room rolled tape as Janet Worley told me that she and Nigel had come to the United States from England ten years before and that they had been working for Harry Chandler since he bought the compound.

She said that she’d “adored” the Chandlers and were shocked and heartbroken when Mrs. Chandler disappeared. The Worleys had stayed on at the compound when Mr. Chandler went on trial, in part because their daughter loved living there and still did.

“Nicole is with Fish and Wildlife,” Janet told me. “She hasn’t been home all weekend. She’s a biologist, you know. Off on some animal rescue mission in the wilderness, I expect. I haven’t been able to reach her on the phone.”

Janet Worley thought Nicole would be returning home that evening but said they never knew her movements for sure.

“She’s twenty-six, you understand. She leads her own life.”

“Explain to me about the buildings on Ellsworth Place, the ones that look to be part of the compound.”

“They were servants’ quarters originally, then over the years they became apartments. Mr. Chandler owns them all,” said Janet Worley, “but he’s been moving the tenants out. There are very few occupants now.”

Janet Worley told me that Nicole lived in number 2 Ellsworth, that Mr. Chandler’s driver lived in number 4, and that the other two buildings were vacant.

I strained Worley’s statement for inconsistencies, watched her body language, and I thought she was being truthful. I asked her to write down names and phone numbers of the Chandler staff living on Ellsworth Place, and while she did that, I went out of the room and compared notes with Conklin.

Nigel Worley had told Conklin the same story Janet had told me. He’d said that no one had a grudge against him, his wife, or his daughter and that Mr. Chandler hadn’t received any hate calls or letters at the compound.

Nigel Worley, like his wife, insisted that he had no idea who could have put the severed heads on the patio and that he had never before seen the victim with the long brown hair.

If we were to believe them, the Worleys had been together virtually every minute of the last ten years and could vouch for each other’s whereabouts over the weekend in question.

I was frustrated but tried not to show it.

How could Brady expect me to leave our Jane Doe and that naked skull unidentified? How could I put this case down without solving it?

I couldn’t.

I knocked on Brady’s open office door. He waved me in and told me to sit down.

I knew this office very well. It had once been mine, but I had given up the job of lieutenant so that I could do detective work full-time instead of watchdogging time sheets and writing reports.

Warren Jacobi had been my partner back then.

Ten years older than me, with many more years on the street, Jacobi had good reasons to move into this corner office when I left it. He didn’t want to work the street anymore. He wanted more access to the top, less sprinting through dark alleys. He had taken over from me and gotten the squad running like a fine watch, and soon he was promoted to chief, leaving the lieutenant’s job vacant again.

That was ten months ago.

Jackson Brady, who had recently transferred from Miami PD, had asked for the promotion and gotten it, along with the small glass-walled office with a window looking out on the James Lick Freeway.

Applying the whip was nasty work, but someone had to do it. Brady was doing fine.

“I need a minute,” I told Brady now.

“Good. That’s all the time I’ve got.”

“I want to run the Ellsworth case as primary,” I said. “It’s going to be a bear, but I’m into it. I can handle both Ellsworth and the vigilante cop if I work with Conklin and another team.”

Brady got up from behind the desk, closed the door, sat back down, and gave me his hard blue-eyed stare, full-bore.

“There’s something you have to know about the vigilante cop, Boxer. He’s not shooting just dirtbags. His last victim, Chaz Smith, was working undercover.”

“I’m sorry. Say that again.”

“Chaz Smith was a cop.”

Brady told me his theory: a cop who worked in the Hall of Justice had gotten fed up with due process and decided to go it alone, but he had screwed up more than he knew when he took out Chaz Smith.

“Smith was running a big operation for Narcotics,” Brady told me. “And he had other cops working for him down the line. We have to protect those cops, and we have to bring this vigilante down. No room for failure. No excuses.”

“I have to tell Conklin.”

“Where is he?”

“Driving Harry Chandler’s caretakers to a hotel.”

“You can tell him,” Brady said, “and I’m willing to give you a shot working both cases, Boxer. But if one of them has to take a backseat, I’ll tell you right now, it’s going to be your house of heads.”

“I hear you.”

“Make sure you do. This vigilante is not only a cop, he’s a cop killer. He murdered one of us.”

I spent the day working both cases.

I’d ransacked the missing-persons databases for a match to our long-haired Jane Doe. After that, Brady and I checked names of cops who had access to the property-room floor and compared those cops’ time sheets with the times drug dealers had been killed with one of our vouchered-and-stolen. 22s.

The list of cops was very long and Brady was still working on the project when I left him.

I got back to the Ellsworth compound as the sun was setting, flying pink flags over the bay. TV satellite vans were double-parked along Vallejo, their engines running and their lights on. Talking heads were using the compound as a backdrop for their on-air reports.

Reporters shouted my name as I went through a gap in the barricade. A lot of our local media knew me. One of them was my close friend Cindy Thomas, who called me on my phone.

I didn’t pick up. I couldn’t talk to Cindy right now.

Conklin came toward me, then walked me back through the front gate.

“It’s been crazy,” he said. “I’ve become the go-to person. The press is barking and I don’t have a bone to throw them. Brian Williams called me. How’d he get my number?”