11th hour

Chapter 106

Yuki posted the video of Hoshi Yamaguchi and I watched it run. There was the girl standing in front of the brick wall on Vallejo Street, a flash of a red tour bus at the curb.

One of the victims had been alive and present at the scene of the crime. As I watched the little homemade movie, my eyes teared up and my heart went giddyap.

Yeah. I was having some kind of heart attack, but it wasn’t fatal. I felt maybe, just maybe, this freaking case was going to break.

Graceland, I typed into the dialogue box. Neverland.

Yuki typed back, Wut do u mean?

I wrote, Did all the victims go on the historic-house tour?

Yuki replied, I’ll call the tour company now.

Claire wrote: Questions. If Hoshi was killed at the compound, were all of the women killed there? Where did the killings happen? Where are the bodies?

I watched the video again, this time pausing at the frames where Hoshi’s camera changed hands. There was a close-up of Hoshi’s neck and I saw that she was wearing a necklace with an amethyst pendant. The stone was set in a gold bezel. I wanted to yell, Rich! Look at this. I’ve seen this necklace. We have it in evidence. It was buried with one of the heads.

My partner wasn’t there.

I sent him an e-mail to keep him in the loop, then dropped an imaginary glass dome over my desk so no one in the squad room would interrupt me.

Shooting a video of Hoshi Yamaguchi didn’t make anyone a killer. Assuming that the victims had all been tourists, assuming they’d all been killed at the compound, Claire’s questions were good ones. Where had the murders taken place? Where were the bodies?

I opened my browser and searched for architectural plans of the Ellsworth compound. I found what I was looking for in the San Francisco Historical Society archives.

There were reams of old drawings on file, drafts of blueprints and renderings of the house in progress: all of its floors, the basement, the garden, and the plans for the row of servants’ quarters on Ellsworth Place.

I put the drawings up for my group to examine, and while Yuki researched the Historic House Tour bus company, Cindy, Claire, and I studied the plans for the house that had been designed by Drake Ellsworth and his architect back in 1893.

Claire put her cursor on the drawing of the basement, a large room that ran under the entire main house.

You could kill cattle in a room this big, she wrote.

I had been in that basement with Charlie Clapper. There were several generations of boilers and pumps in that vast space, devices replaced by successive pieces of modern machinery but not removed.

We’d looked in the small rooms off the basement. One was filled with furniture. Another had once been a pantry.

Clapper’s team had been all over that underground warren with cutting-edge equipment and had found no blood, no tools, no evidence of a chop shop.

Now I needed CSU to go over the whole house again.