11th hour

Chapter 45

I sat by the indoor swimming pool in a lovely modern house in San Rafael, nineteen miles north of San Francisco. The walls were glass and the morning sun made beautiful swirling patterns in the water. An English springer spaniel slept in a dog bed, his legs running in a dream.

Richard and Virginia Varick were a handsome couple in their sixties, dressed in tennis shorts and sweaters. Mrs. Varick couldn’t sit still. Her husband leaned back in a metal-frame webbed chair and looked at me suspiciously.

I thought he knew why I had come.

When I first saw Jane Doe’s remains, I thought that once we knew who she was, the rest of the puzzle would fall into place; we’d learn the nature of the crimes and the motive, and from there we’d have a good shot at figuring out who had killed her and the others.

Now, as I sat with the Varicks, my only thought was that I was about to shatter the final happy moment in their lives.

“When was the last time you spoke with your daughter?”

“Is Marilyn in trouble?” Virginia Varick asked me.

“I’m not sure, Mrs. Varick. Could you look at this drawing?”

I had printed out a clean copy of the sketch that had been drawn from the partially decomposed head of Jane Doe. I handed it to Mrs. Varick.

“Who is this person?” she asked me.

“Does she resemble your daughter?” I asked. “She doesn’t look anything like my daughter. Why? Who is she? I thought you had news of Marilyn. Don’t you? Dick? I don’t understand.”

She handed the sketch to her husband, who held it with both hands, then drew back from it, turned it over, and put it facedown on the table in front of him.

“Mrs. Varick, this is a drawing of an unidentified woman whose remains were found a few days ago in San Francisco. I’m sorry to have to bring this sad news to you — ”

“Don’t worry, it’s not my daughter,” Mrs. Varick said, her voice getting high. “Wait here. I’ll show you my daughter.”

Virginia Varick left the room, and I said to her husband, “When was the last time you saw Marilyn?”

“We haven’t seen her in two years.”

“And why is that?”

“She didn’t want to see us,” Dick Varick told me. He was clasping his hands tightly together. His knuckles were white, his complexion gray. “I think she was doing drugs. She called from time to time and my wife and I would talk to her for ten or fifteen minutes, although Ginny and I did most of the talking.

“Marilyn said she was fine. And she asked us not to try to find her. We looked for her anyway, but she’d gone underground. None of her old friends had seen her or knew where she lived.”

I said, “Did something happen at about the time she stopped seeing you? An incident or trauma?”

“Nothing that I know of,” Varick said to me.

“I need something of hers that might contain her DNA. Hairbrush, toothbrush. Maybe a hat.”

“We don’t have anything like that. She never lived here.”

Virginia Varick returned to the room carrying an enormous blue-leather-bound scrapbook. She sat on a footstool, opened the book, and turned it so that I could see the pages.

I recognized many of the photos, but others were new to me; family photos with her parents, her dog, boyfriends, all of which made me wonder how it was that no one had identified her when the Chronicle had run the sketch.

Had Marilyn changed so much?

Was the sketch a poor likeness of Marilyn Varick?

Or had Harry Chandler’s assistant been wrong when she identified the person in this sketch as Marilyn Varick?

I scrutinized the photos Ginny Varick showed me, and I was convinced they were of the same person as the one in the drawing. Virginia Varick just didn’t want to face the truth.

“She was a beautiful young woman,” I said.

The anguished woman stood up and snarled at me, “Don’t say was. She is a beautiful woman. I told you, whoever this person is, she’s not my Marilyn.”