11th Hour (Women's Murder Club 11)

I stepped to Clapper’s side and saw that the ceiling-high crates only appeared to be touching the wall; it was clever fakery. There was a narrow gap behind the cartons, and an old sliding door on an overhead track was mounted on the actual wall.

Clapper gave the door a shove and it slid open, revealing the entrance to another basement room, this one running southwest to northeast, parallel to Ellsworth Place.

There was free access between the basement of the main house and the one in 2 Ellsworth Place.

A person could move from one to the other without being seen.

Chapter 108

I HIT THE light switch in the connecting basement room and took in the surroundings as CSIs shot pictures.

The basement under number 2 was about forty feet across, thirty feet deep, with a dirt floor and a brick ceiling. To my immediate left was a large, sunken cistern about ten feet wide, no doubt used by previous owners of this house to collect rainwater through downspouts from the roof.

To my right was the furnace and the pump, and on the far side of the room, against the eastern wall, were modern appliances: a freezer, a washer, and a clothes dryer. Shelving banked the walls and held a typical assortment of basement junk, paint cans, and tools.

Charlie Clapper examined the cistern and after a moment said, “There’s a ladder going down about seven feet and there’s a drain in the bottom of this thing. Turn off the lights, if you would, Lindsay.”

I flipped the switch and Clapper sprayed the inside of the cistern with luminol, then turned on his ALS wand.

He whistled through his teeth and said, “You should see this.”

When Charlie said you should see something, it usually meant You should see something awful.

The interior of the cistern was bright with a phosphorescent glow, the effect of black light on blood. A great amount of blood had been spilled in that well, probably washed down with the hose hanging over the lip of the cistern. But the evidence of a bloodbath remained high on the walls and ringed the bottom drain.

Images came to me, the faces of the seven women who might have been murdered and dismembered in this vat.

I turned to Clapper, but he had started working the walls, spraying luminol as his assistant followed him with the ALS wand. There was so much blood evidence, spatter and splash and handprints on everything.

Clapper turned the lights back on and as I looked around, I saw something on one of the shelves that dropped another piece of the puzzle into place.

I crossed the floor and took a good close look at a cordless ripsaw resting next to a carton of old medicine bottles. I called to the CSI with a camera and asked him to take shots of the saw.

Claire had told me that the victims had been decapitated with a ripsaw, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to think the saw on the shelf had been used in those procedures. No black light was needed. I could see darkened blood on the blade and reddish smears on the handle.

Clapper rummaged in the box of medicine bottles.

“Lindsay, here’s something you should see.”

Another something I should see. I felt the floor roll. Clapper said, “You okay?”

I was okay. But my baby onboard was having some trouble with this crime scene.

“What have you got?”

He called over the tech to shoot pictures of the contents of the box, then pulled out two items that were photographed as well.

The first item was a stun gun.

The second was a sixteen-ounce brown bottle labeled SODIUM PENTOBARBITAL.

“This is a barbiturate,” he said. “Vets use it to euthanize large animals.”

I grabbed Clapper’s arm to steady myself.

The vivacious and compassionate Nicole Worley worked with wildlife rescue. She could have swiped a bottle of this stuff if she wanted to. And I was pretty sure she’d know how to put animals down.

Chapter 109