He was pretty cute, too. He’d mentioned to me more than once over the last three days that his time in Paris would be ending soon, that he’d be back at the Justice Department in D.C. by next summer.
I smiled at him, he smiled back at me, and I realized that these tiny little encounters and interactions and things, just things in life, were what I missed most.
Now that the court had adjourned, the cameras were flashing feverishly. I found it rather invasive, but at least the coverage of me had flip-flopped from negative to positive. And after everything I’d been through, having a few cameras in my face was like a walk in the park.
“It’s going to be like this for a little while,” I told Richie and Elena, as we began to navigate our way through the reporters and paparazzi.
“You deserve it, Mom,” Elena said. “They spent a year tearing you down as some bad person. Let them build you up for a while now that you’re a hero.”
I stopped and looked at Elena. Those weren’t words my eleven-year-old would have spoken, before I was arrested. But they were the words of the thirteen-year-old standing before me.
I had missed those crucial fifteen months, terrifying and confusing and exhilarating times that Elena had endured without her mother. I would make up for it as best I could now. If they wanted to stay in boarding school in Connecticut, that’s where I was going to move. If they wanted to return to Georgetown, so be it.
“Hero?” I laughed. “I’m no hero, kiddo. I’m just a survivor.”
Richie planted a kiss on my cheek. “You’re our hero, Mom,” he said.
It wouldn’t be the last time today that I smiled through tears.
CHAPTER 143
THE WALK THROUGH the basement of the Palais de Justice brought back a flood of emotions and memories so violent, so overwhelming, that I had to remind myself to breathe. I also had to remind myself of my newfound status. You’re free, Abbie, it wasn’t a dream. I would always equate France with my captivity, with my utter degradation, with a period of time when everything was stolen from me.
I will dream about this dungeon, about JRF, about my interrogation at DCRI—all of this—for the rest of my life. No matter how fiercely I scrub my teeth, I will always taste it. No matter how tightly I shut my eyes, I will always see it. No matter how low the temperature on the air-conditioning, I will always feel the rabid heat of cell 413.
The escort guard stopped at the cell. “Voulez-vous aller à l’intérieur?” he asked me.
I shook my head no. I would stay on this side of the cage.
Jeffrey was sitting on a bench that was fixed to the wall, hunched over, his elbows on his knees. His hair was greasy, his face unshaven, his white shirt stained with sweat at the armpits.
The last act that Colonel Bernard Durand performed before he resigned his post was arresting Jeffrey at the hotel where he was staying, near the U.S. Embassy. I’m told that Jeffrey took it bravely, that he handled himself well.
“We’re leaving today,” I said.
He nodded. “The kids didn’t come with you?”
“You couldn’t possibly expect them to.”
Jeffrey rubbed his hands together. He had to appreciate how terribly he’d betrayed his family. “This might sound pathetic, Abbie, but none of this was my idea. I went along with it. I did. But I didn’t come up with the idea, and I didn’t plan it or execute it. I went along for the ride. There’s a difference.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It does sound pathetic.”
He didn’t answer. He was totally and completely broken.
“You got your lawyer?” I asked.
He nodded. “He thinks we might be able to fight it. There’s not—not a lot of direct proof.”
That was probably true. Simon and Colton were dead, and Christien was still on the run. Simon and Colton had admitted to plenty on the tape that Durand had recorded, but Jeffrey hadn’t admitted to a thing. Clearly he knew about their involvement, but knowing they did something and being a part of it were two different things.
Damon Kodiak was under arrest for perjury. Thus far, at least as far as I knew, he wasn’t talking. But even if they could get him to talk, he’d already told me that he had no knowledge of Jeff’s involvement.
Ironic, I thought. Jeffrey’s incompetence and cowardice might ultimately be his saving grace.
“You’re going to deny you were part of the lookout at the harbor?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “What do you think I should do?”
“Hey, my name’s Abbie, not Dear Abby.”
For just a moment, Jeffrey’s face brightened. It was an old line of mine, back when we were dating, when we were madly in love and life was full of doors that were open, not closed.
“I still love you,” he said. For the first time, he turned and looked at me. “I never stopped. I know what I did. The affair. But I didn’t do that because I didn’t love you. I did it because I was afraid you’d stop loving me.”
I turned away. “I’m not going to do this, Jeffrey. You made a decision and you betrayed me. And then you made another decision and you betrayed me and your children. You stole their mother away! Don’t expect me to ever forgive you for that.”
A long silence hung between us. Maybe this is why I came here, to say these words to him, just one long-overdue scolding before I went back to America and rebooted my life. Or maybe there was a small part of me that simply wanted to see him behind bars.
“I know what you did,” he said. “The phone call from the new French president? My lawyer told me. That was…thank you, Abbie.”
I shrugged. “He asked me if there was anything he could do for me.”
“And you asked him to show me mercy,” he said. “I don’t deserve that.”
“No, you don’t.”
But he was still the father of my children. And if there was a possibility that the fracture between Jeffrey and the kids could ever heal, I had to try to make that happen. I was so tired of seeing things torn down and destroyed. I wanted to see things grow.
I moved quickly back through the claustrophobic hallway and chose the stairs over the elevator. I ran up and out of the Palais de Justice and kept running until I was crossing the bridge over the gorgeous Seine.
I wanted things to be better. And the first step was going home.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Daniel Morro of the Department of Homeland Security, currently assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Paris, for advice, insight, and observations on Paris and the French criminal justice system. He and his wife, Kathleen Morro, were incredibly gracious answering our questions and helping us explore the wonderful city of Paris.
Thank you to assistant U.S. attorney Laura Ingersoll, who served as the Department of Justice’s attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Paris, for spending many hours explaining the substantive and technical details of a French criminal trial. Arnaud Baleste, capitaine de police for the Brigade Criminelle in Paris, was very generous with his technical and practical observations about murder investigations in France. When necessary, this novel took some creative license on certain details, which should be attributed to the authors alone.
Thank you to the following for allowing a tour of the Dwight Correctional Center near Dwight, Illinois: David Eldridge, former chief of staff to the director of the Illinois Department of Corrections; Sharyn Elman, the department’s chief public information officer; and Sheryl Thompson, the warden at Dwight. Thank you for all the questions you answered and the insight you provided. Although a women’s prison in Illinois differs substantially from the fictional prison depicted in this novel, and none of the horrors depicted herein bear any relation to Dwight, the information provided was tremendously helpful.
THE WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB CHASES A MOVIE STAR WHO MIGHT BE A SERIAL KILLER.
FOR AN EXCERPT,
TURN THE PAGE.
I WAS AT MY desk when the 911 call came in at 7:20 and was relayed to the squad room by dispatcher May Hess, our se
lf-anointed “Queen of the Batphone.”
Hess told me, “A woman of few words called and reported two people dead at the Ellsworth Compound.
“She sounded for real,” Hess continued. “She said there were no intruders in the house and she was in no danger. Just ‘Two people are dead.’ Then she hung up. I called back, got an answering machine both times. I put out a call.”
I listened to the 911 tape. The caller had a British accent and sounded scared. In fact, the fear in her voice and whatever she wasn’t saying were more alarming than what she’d said.
Brady listened to the tape, then tagged me and my partner to take a run out to Pacific Heights.
“Just do the prelim,” he said. “I’ll assign a primary when you bring back a report.”
Yes, sir. Forthwith, sir.
At 7:35, Conklin braked our car in front of the Ellsworth Compound. Four cruisers had gotten there before us, and there was also a red double-decker bus parked parallel to the curb. A gang of maybe twenty tourists were taking pictures from behind barricades across the street.
I had known the Ellsworth Compound was on the historical house tour, but when Harry Chandler bought it for umpteen million dollars ten years ago, the compound went on the stargazing tour as well.
I got out of the car and approached Officer Ed Mooney, who was the first on the scene. He took out his notebook and said to me, “I got here at 7:10, spoke to the caretaker, Janet Worley, through the intercom. There’s the box, next to the gate. She said she was not in any danger and that the victims, two of them, were dead. ‘Definitely dead’ were her exact words.”
The uniformed cop continued, “Lieutenant Brady told me to cordon off a perimeter and to wait for you, Sergeant. He told me not to go into the house.”
“Has the ME been called?”
“Yes, ma’am. And CSU is on the way. I took some photos of the crowd.”
“Good job, Mooney.”
I looked at the mob, saw it was thickening. Cars were backing up on Vallejo, being detoured around Divisadero. Because of the backed-up traffic, a million tweets, and YouTube posts by tourists, the scene would be red-flagged by the press.
Death plus celebrity was a heady news combination. The media was going to train its brights on this house, and any law-enforcement errors would be documented in perpetuity.
I told Mooney to have a media liaison and a command post set up on Pierce, then I went to where Conklin was examining the front gate to the compound.
The wrought-iron gate was set into a ten-foot-high ivy-clad brick wall that gave the house total privacy from the street. The metalwork looked old enough to be original, and the lock had been recently forced. I saw fresh cuts in old iron.
“It was pried open with a metal tool, not a bolt cutter,” Conklin said.
Mooney had said there were two victims, “definitely dead.” Who were they? Was Harry Chandler involved?
Brady had assigned us to do the preliminary workup, meaning we had to determine where law enforcement and forensics could walk onto the scene without destroying evidence. We were charged with taking pictures, making sketches, and forming an opinion.
After that, we’d turn the scene over to the primary investigator on the case.
I gloved up and pushed at the gate, which swung open on well-oiled hinges. A stone walkway crossed a mossy grass lawn, led past a couple of flower beds, one on each side of the steps to the ornate front door.
The door showed no sign of forced entry. Conklin lifted the brass knocker and banged it.
I called out, “Janet Worley, this is the police.”
THE PETITE WOMAN who opened the door was white, late forties, five-three, 110 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, Ms. Worley?”
“Horribly, thank you.”
“It’s okay. We’re here now.”
Conklin is good with people, especially women. In fact, he’s known for it.
I always wanted to know everything at once 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, a wide and winding staircase to the upper floors to my right.
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 were cleaning the Ellsworth Place side of the house over the last three days.”
From the foyer, the house seemed gloomy, what you would expect from a relic of the Victorian age. Had we stepped into a Masterpiece Mystery! 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 passing time.
“Why did you call emergency?” Conklin asked.
Worley said, “I had better show you.”
We followed 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 and painted rainbows on the marble floors. We went through a restaurant-quality chef’s 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 my gaze followed Worley’s pointing finger to the brick patio fronting the backyard.
For a moment, my mind blanked. Because what I saw was frankly unbelievable.
Two severed heads, encircled by a loose wreath of chrysanthemum flowers, were 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 own shock reflected in his eyes.
“These heads are real, right?” I asked him.
“Real, and as the lady said, definitely dead.”
ADRENALINE BURNED THROUGH my bloodstream like flame. 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 twenties 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 face-up on the bricks in front of the heads and both had numbers written on them in ballpoint 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?
Where had these heads come from?
Why were they placed here in plain sight?
If this was homicide, where were the bodies?
I tore my gaze away from the heads to look into Janet Worley’s face. She covered her mouth with both hands and tears sprung from her eyes.
I saw a meltdown coming. I had to question her now.
“Tell us about it, Mrs. Worley. Who do these remains belong to? Where are the bodies?”
“Me? All I know is what I just told you. I’m the one who called the police.”
“Then who did this?”
“I have no idea. None at all.”
“You understand that lying would make you an accessory to the crime.” br />
“My God. I know nothing.”
Conklin said, “We need the names of everyone who has been inside this house since last Friday.”
“Of course, but it’s only been my husband, my daughter, and myself.”
“And Mr. Chandler?”
“Heavens, no. I haven’t seen him in three months.”
“Have you handled these heads or disturbed anything on the patio?”
“No, no, no. I opened the door to air out the room at about seven this morning. I saw this. I called my husband. Then I called 911.”
Janet Worley went inside the house, and Conklin and I were left to consider the nature of “this.”
Was it satanism? Terrorism? Drug-related homicide? Who were these victims? What had happened to them?
I wanted to start looking around, but Conklin and I had to stay on the bricks and focus on what we could see without contaminating evidence.
Brady had told us to “do the prelim.”
That was the job: scope out the crime and tell our lieutenant whether this was a double homicide or a freak show that should be handed off to Major Crimes.
“I don’t know what the hell we’re looking at,” I said to Conklin.
Truly, I’d never seen anything like it in my life.
About the Authors
JAMES PATTERSON has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer ever, according to Guinness World Records. Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977, James Patterson’s books have sold more than 240 million copies. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels, the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider. Mr. Patterson also writes the bestselling Women’s Murder Club novels, set in San Francisco, and the top-selling New York detective series of all time, featuring Detective Michael Bennett.