11th hour

Chapter 104

Dr. Andrea Shaw came to the waiting room just before the sun came up. She was a small woman with a sweet expression and wavy silver hair.

She said to Yuki, “Jackson is going to be okay. He’s asking for you.”

Yuki’s face brightened. It was as if all the stars had come out at once and the sun and moon had done the tango together just for her.

She hugged the doctor almost off her feet, then she hugged me, making tears jump out of my eyes.

“Go to him. Go,” I said.

A few hours and a change of clothes later, I was at my desk in the Homicide squad room. I would be subbing for Brady until he was back on the job. All the phone lines were ringing at once, but when I saw Claire’s name come up on the caller ID, I stabbed the button, didn’t wait for her to say hello.

“Brady’s condition is stable,” I told her. “Randall is still critical. No change.”

“Man, that’s great news about Brady. Listen, I’ve got something for you, girlfriend. I’ve got faces on those heads from the trophy garden.”

The wind went right out of me.

I blinked stupidly long enough for Claire to repeat herself, and then I got it. Ann Perlmutter had done the facial reconstructions. With faces, we might be able to ID the Ellsworth compound skulls.

“Have you run the images through missing persons?”

“There are six heads here, Lindsay. And I’ve got only one pair of eyes, one pair of hands.”

“I’m on it.”

Within an hour, Cindy, Yuki, Claire, and I each had at least one Jane Doe disk. Cindy was at home; Yuki worked from her laptop inside Brady’s hospital room. Claire was downstairs at her desk, and I was at mine. The Women’s Murder Club was connected by a mission and our shared network.

I booted up the disk and stared at Jane Doe EC 2 as she came on my screen. She was pretty, with short, dark hair, arched brows, and full lips. I pressed Next and saw that Dr. Perlmutter had provided variations on this depiction of my Jane Doe to account for the artistry and guesswork that had gone into creating the image.

She’d made it easy for us.

But matching virtual images to real people was still an enormous job with plenty of room for error.

We ran the 3D images through NamUs, the Doe Network, the SF missing-persons databases, and the FBI criminal database. Matches came up.

It was amazing, almost magical.

Claire got the first hit: Jane Doe EC 1 was Lina Rupert from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Cindy’s match was to Margaret Shubert from Toronto. The other four victims appeared to be missing persons from Chicago, New York, Omaha, and Tokyo.

We four shared the pictures in a Windows Cloud and chatted together in a dialogue box on the screen. Comparing notes took very little time. The victims were of all ages, the youngest only eighteen, the oldest forty-eight.

The victims weren’t criminals, and none of them was local.

Apart from their burial ground, what did these six women have in common? What had brought them together in a homemade boneyard in Pacific Heights?