11th Hour (Women's Murder Club 11)

“Yes,” he said. “How did she die?”

“We don’t know, not yet.”

“You have to tell me what you know.”

“Come sit down,” I said.

Dick Varick returned to his chair and leaned forward with his hands pressing hard on his knees, his eyes on mine.

I had been dreading this moment. How do you tell parents that their daughter’s head had been removed from her body — and that you don’t know how she was killed, by whom, or even the physical location of her body?

“Some human remains were disinterred at the Ellsworth compound.”

As soon as I mentioned the Ellsworth compound, Varick became agitated. He interrupted me to tell me what he’d read in the papers and to ask if Marilyn was one of the victims of that crime.

I told him what little I knew.

I asked, “Did Marilyn ever mention Harry Chandler?”

“No. Is he responsible? Did that miserable bastard —”

“I’m asking because her remains were found on his property. That’s all. Did Marilyn tell you or give you a sense that someone wanted to hurt her?”

“No, she said she was living with friends. Sergeant, I hardly knew my daughter when I saw her. All traces of the young woman I’d known and loved was gone. She was an addict. She wanted money for drugs. She didn’t even ask about her mother.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d like the names of the friends you spoke with when you were looking for her.”

“She was thirty-three,” Varick said, typing names and contact information into his iPhone. I gave him my e-mail address and he sent the list to me. “She wasn’t a teenager,” Varick said. “I couldn’t call the police and have her brought home.”

“I understand.”

“Do you want me to come and identify her?”

“Contact the medical examiner,” I said. I wrote down the phone number on the back of my card, and then Dick Varick walked me to his front door.

He looked years older than he had only half an hour before, shaken, hopeless, the father of a murdered child.

I got into my car and tried to contain my own feelings — but I couldn’t do it. I drove down the block and halfway up the next one before I pulled over, put my head down on the steering wheel, and sobbed.

Chapter 47

THERE WERE TWO newspapers outside my front door the next morning: the Chronicle, with its headlines about the G8 meeting and the San Francisco city budget, and the Post, with its sixty-four-point headline in thick black ink:

BODY COUNT AT THE HOUSE OF HEADS: 613 DEAD; 613 VICTIMS!

Story by Jason Blayney, of course.

I read the first couple of paragraphs despite the bile backing up in my throat and going all the way up to my eyes.

The Post has learned that the heads unearthed at the Ellsworth compound were accompanied by an index card with the number 613 written by hand.

As of six this morning, the SFPD crime lab is still working the site, and if the number is indicative of the total death toll, the disinterred heads retrieved so far are just the first of a large number of victims that could make this crime the work of the worst mass killer in history.

What crap! What total flaming bull-crap!

Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, who is the lead detective on this case, has not returned our calls …

I called Brady, left him a voicemail, and he called back while I was in the shower, naturally. He left a message saying he was heading into a meeting and that he’d see me at the press conference.