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.
Chapter 107
While Brady recovered from his injuries, I was in charge of the Homicide squad, so I mustered a caravan of law enforcement officers and called in the CSU.
Conklin flatly refused to stay in his bed when this was going down. I picked him up on the corner of Kirkham and Funston, then drove to the Ellsworth compound with my injured partner in the seat beside me.
I pulled up to the iron gate, and Clapper’s van arrived and parked right behind me. I ordered cruisers to close off the triangle of streets surrounding the compound, then six of us mounted the wide front steps to the main house.
I dropped the brass knocker on the strike plate, and Janet Worley opened the door and saw half a dozen cops and the dapper Clapper standing in front of her. She gripped the collar of her starched white shirt, fear flashing across her face.
“We’re executing a search warrant, Mrs. Worley,” I said, handing it to her.
“You’ve already searched — ”
“We’re doing it again.”
“All right, then. Come in.”
“We need to see your husband,” Conklin said.
“He’s working upstairs. He was in a good mood.”
Conklin, Clapper, three crime scene investigators, and I walked through the front entrance and, under Charlie’s direction, filed through the enormous old house.
I was standing in the middle of the large foyer with Janet when Nigel Worley came down the stairs with his fulminating anger. He scowled at me and asked, “What’s this about?”
“It’s about premeditated murder, Mr. Worley. Inspector Conklin will keep you and your wife company in the kitchen.”
“Bugger that. I’ve got work to do.”
“Thank you. We appreciate your cooperation.”
Conklin corralled the Worleys and I headed down to the basement, where I found Clapper and a couple of techs opening their scene kits, getting to work.
The overhead lights were on, but they weren’t bright enough to illuminate all the corners of this vast space.
Still, neither clutter nor gloom deterred us.
We worked the room going from east to west, parallel to Vallejo Street, doing an eyeball search and using ALS wands to pick up signs of organic trace. CSU techs who had been deployed upstairs trickled down to the basement and joined us in the subterranean vault as the hours unfurled behind us like the cars of a night train.
I was wondering if we had been wrong in assuming that this basement was the scene of multiple homicides when, at around five in the evening, we reached the southernmost basement wall. Cartons of books and crates of empty wine bottles were stacked to the ceiling against the brick and timber.
I was behind Clapper when he shouted, “Awww, shit. How did I miss this?”
I stepped to Clapper’s side and saw that the ceiling-high crates only appeared to be touching the wall; it was clever fakery. There was a narrow gap behind the cartons, and an old sliding door on an overhead track was mounted on the actual wall.
Clapper gave the door a shove and it slid open, revealing the entrance to another basement room, this one running southwest to northeast, parallel to Ellsworth Place.
There was free access between the basement of the main house and the one in 2 Ellsworth Place.
A person could move from one to the other without being seen.
Chapter 108
I hit the light switch in the connecting basement room and took in the surroundings as CSIs shot pictures.
The basement under number 2 was about forty feet across, thirty feet deep, with a dirt floor and a brick ceiling. To my immediate left was a large, sunken cistern about ten feet wide, no doubt used by previous owners of this house to collect rainwater through downspouts from the roof.
To my right was the furnace and the pump, and on the far side of the room, against the eastern wall, were modern appliances: a freezer, a washer, and a clothes dryer. Shelving banked the walls and held a typical assortment of basement junk, paint cans, and tools.
Charlie Clapper examined the cistern and after a moment said, “There’s a ladder going down about seven feet and there’s a drain in the bottom of this thing. Turn off the lights, if you would, Lindsay.”
I flipped the switch and Clapper sprayed the inside of the cistern with luminol, then turned on his ALS wand.
He whistled through his teeth and said, “You should see this.”
When Charlie said you should see something, it usually meant You should see something awful.
The interior of the cistern was bright with a phosphorescent glow, the effect of black light on blood. A great amount of blood had been spilled in that well, probably washed down with the hose hanging over the lip of the cistern. But the evidence of a bloodbath remained high on the walls and ringed the bottom drain.
Images came to me, the faces of the seven women who might have been murdered and dismembered in this vat.
I turned to Clapper, but he had started working the walls, spraying luminol as his assistant followed him with the ALS wand. There was so much blood evidence, spatter and splash and handprints on everything.
Clapper turned the lights back on and as I looked around, I saw something on one of the shelves that dropped another piece of the puzzle into place.
I crossed the floor and took a good close look at a cordless ripsaw resting next to a carton of old medicine bottles. I called to the CSI with a camera and asked him to take shots of the saw.
Claire had told me that the victims had been decapitated with a ripsaw, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to think the saw on the shelf had been used in those procedures. No black light was needed. I could see darkened blood on the blade and reddish smears on the handle.
