THE PETITE WOMAN who opened the door was white, late forties, five three, one hundred and ten pounds, wearing leggings under a floral-print smock. Her expression was strained and her mascara was smudged under her eyes. Her nails were bitten to the finger pads.
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.”
Chapter 7
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?