11th Hour (Women's Murder Club 11)

“He’s worked in the department long enough to get a hate-on for dealers.”

“Yeah.”

I crumpled my coffee container, dunked it into the trash, answered my ringing phone.

I hoped the call was from Joe; it wasn’t, but it was almost as good. Claire was calling.

“Got a couple of minutes for me, girlfriend?”

Chapter 28

I SAID TO Conklin, “Claire wants to see me. If she had nothing on the heads, she would’ve said so on the phone, right?”

“We’ve got an interview in a few minutes, Linds.”

“I’ll be right back.”

I jogged down the stairs to the lobby, stiff-armed the back door, and trotted along the breezeway to the ME’s office.

I found my BFF in the chill of the morgue. Her lab coat with the butterfly appliqué on the breast pocket was buttoned up to her neck and she was wearing sweatpants under that.

“Summertime” was playing loudly on the radio, the San Francisco Symphony’s version. Claire’s husband, Edmund, plays cello in the orchestra.

“Dr. Perlmutter just sent me a status report,” Claire shouted. She turned down the volume.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, what’d she say?”

“Here’s what you want to know,” Claire said. “None of those skulls belonged to Cecily Chandler.”

“Not that I’m doubting you, but what did she say exactly?”

“Cecily Chandler had A-one perfect teeth,” Claire told me. “And not all of them were homegrown. Her dental records do not match the dentistry in any of the skulls.”

I felt let down.

I hadn’t been as certain as the supermarket tabloids were that Harry Chandler murdered his wife, but if Cecily Chandler’s head had been discovered in Chandler’s garden, I would have been more convinced that he was our killer.

I said to Claire, “Well, it only means that Chandler didn’t bury his wife’s head in the garden. Doesn’t mean he’s off the hook for the others, right? Any other news from the doctor?”

“There was no trauma to any of the skulls.”

“So you still don’t know causes of death.”

“That’s correct.”

My best friend held up a finger and said, “So, I’ve been working on the head of our Jane Doe in the cooler. I made a maggot milk shake.”

“Wonderful. I hope you’ll give me your recipe.”

“Maggots, like all animals, are what they eat. If Jane here was poisoned or drugged, the tox screen on the milk shake would reveal that. So I put some squirmers into the blender and sent that out to the lab. Hoping for something, Linds. I was hoping for arsenic. Instead, we found benzoylecgonine, a metabolite of cocaine.”

“So you’re saying Jane Doe was a drug user.”

“Yep, but there wasn’t so much that it would’ve been fatal, so —”

“So all we know is that Jane Doe did drugs.”

“We’re not done yet. Dr. Perlmutter is working up those skulls for facial identification. We’ll have something soon.”