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.
Chapter 8
The back garden was a dark, three-quarter-acre triangular plot that looked as though a slice of woodland had been dropped down in one piece behind the Ellsworth house.
The parcel was shadowed by buildings and mature trees, crossed with mulched paths, bounded by the house on one side and by two ten-foot-high brick walls that met at a toolshed at the farthest end of the garden.
Looking for entrances, I saw, in addition to the front gate with its broken lock, five doors that opened to the garden from the main house and a gate in the wall next to the toolshed.
“There’s a multipurpose tool,” Conklin said.
He was pointing to a shovel half hidden by a shrub, and beyond the shovel was a mound of soil and a hole dug in the dirt. The hole was about two feet across, the right size for potted chrysanthemums — and also just right for disembodied heads.
I saw a second hole, just visible from the far corner of the patio, and beside that hole was a rounded stone.
Now that I was looking for them, I saw other stones around the garden. Maybe they were decorative in a gnomish way, or maybe the stones were markers.