Текст книги "Riptide"

Автор книги: Michael Prescott

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

thirty-two

Maura lived in a condo on Windward Avenue. It was a security building, and Casey didn’t have a key. A helpful tenant let them in.

The apartment was on the second floor at the end of a hallway lit by green-shaded lamps in brass sconces. Jennifer had walked this hall many times, but her knees had never trembled the way they did now, as she followed Draper, Casey, and the two patrolmen who’d come from the hotel.

Casey rang Maura’s doorbell and rapped on the door. No answer. He tested the knob.

“Unlocked,” he said, then pulled his hand away. His palm was marked with a purplish stain.

Blood.

Jennifer knew then. The world seemed to drop away, and she felt a sudden unreal detachment, as if she were observing someone else’s life.

“Stay outside,” Draper warned. It took her a moment to realize he was talking to her.

Casey pushed open the door and stepped in, followed by Draper and the uniformed cops. Jennifer, standing in the hall, heard a gasp, and a voice saying, “Jesus,” two or three times.

Slowly she approached the doorway. No one tried to stop her. No one was paying her any attention. The four men stood and stared, immobile, at whatever lay in the apartment.

She crossed the threshold and looked for herself.

At first she couldn’t react. Like the cops, she was shocked into passivity. The scene before her wasn’t anything real. It was impossible to take in, impossible to process. A shock cut in a movie. Or a picture in a book. A photograph, grainy, black-and-white...

She thought of that, and she knew what this was. It was the rented flat in Miller’s Court. It was the room in the East River Hotel. It was Mary Kelly. It was Carrie Brown.

What the Ripper had done to those women, her brother had done to Maura Lowell. The same frenzied obliteration, the same horrific disfigurement. He had carved her open and emptied her out, leaving pieces of her strewn around the living room—hunks of bloody tissue.

Maura lay sprawled on the sofa. Her head rested on a pillow which had been white and now was burgundy. There was no expression on her face, because there was no face. Her breasts, which she flaunted for the benefit of the surfer busboy only two nights ago, had been slashed off. The skin had been peeled from one arm, the arm that had flaunted the bracelet. Her clothes had been ribboned by the killer’s knife, their tatters falling among the glistening ropes of her intestines which had unspooled across the carpet in a lake of blood.

“God...” whispered a small shocked voice, her own.

Draper turned. “I told you to stay out.”

She barely heard him. She was looking at one pale hand that lay palm up, the fingers open as if in surrender.

Then Draper’s arm was around her shoulders, and he was guiding her into the hall. “You need to get out of here.”

“I don’t want to leave her alone,” she said stupidly.

“She’s not alone. We’re with her.”

“She doesn’t know you.”

“It’ll be all right, Jen.”

Neither his words nor her own made any sense.

“Richard couldn’t to do this.” She shook her head, insisting on denial. “He couldn’t.”

“You need to sit down.”

She didn’t know why he was saying this, except that her legs felt suddenly weak. She allowed to Draper to ease her to a sitting position against the wall of the corridor.

“Couldn’t,” she said again, though she knew the word was a lie.

Draper knelt beside her. “We need to find him. Right now. Do you have any idea where he might go?”

“No.”

“Think.”

“I have thought about it. It’s all I’ve thought about. He could be anyplace local. Anyplace at all.”

“Okay. We’ll find him.” He started to rise.

“He saved me,” she whispered.

“What?”

“He came and found me, and he got me help. I’m alive only because of him. Because of my brother.”

“I understand.”

He didn’t, of course. Neither did she.

No one could understand.

thirty-three

That had been close. He’d never thought the persistent little bitch would spot him in the crowd, much less give chase. After what had happened in the library, he would have thought she’d show more sense.

He still wasn’t sure how she’d noticed him. He’d been wearing his cloak of invisibility. That was how he thought of the hooded sweatshirt with the long, loose, baggy sleeves. The garment covered his head and hands, made him a faceless thing—like Abberline, or like old Jack. Of course an observer might still see his face up close, but that was the wonder of it. No one ever got close. They saw him in his hood, bopping to the music in his head, and they assumed he was crazy. No one made eye contact with a crazy person. No one wanted to see him, or even to acknowledge his existence. In his cloak of invisibility he was anonymous, blending with his surroundings as seamlessly as a chameleon, safe from any threat.

But she had seen him. Almost caught him, too.

What was worse, in the chase he’d dropped his souvenir. He’d wanted it. Maura had died so nicely, and the aftermath had been so fine. He never danced, not anymore, but in her living room, awash in the slippery muck, he had danced like a shaman, danced naked, as Jack himself must have danced in Mary Kelly’s flat.

Mary then. Maura now. Perfect.

He wished now that he had disemboweled the others. It would not have been practical, given the circumstances—outdoors, in public places, where anyone might come along. And it would have set the authorities on his trail much sooner. Yes, there were sound logical and logistical reasons not to have done it, but irrationally he wished he had, because—well, because it was so goddamned much fun.

Jennifer would never understand that kind of fun. She had no soul, that one.

But she did have courage. To come after him, into the stacks, was bold enough. To pursue again, even after her ordeal in the supply closet...

He almost respected her for it. But he respected no one. Except Edward Hare.

He didn’t underestimate her, though. That was why he’d burned the family papers, torching them methodically in the flaming pyre of a metal wastebasket. There was information in those papers that might have helped a clever, crafty, sly little trollop like her.

He burned it all, the entire contents of the file cabinet, with one exception. He kept a newspaper clipping from a few years ago, a yellowed scrap torn from a local rag. Under the small black-and-white photo ran the caption: “Local Realtor Maura Lowell and Dr. Richard Silence were among the attendees at the Venice Historical Society’s charity ball.”

Two smiling faces. A long time ago.

The scrap of newspaper had gone into his pocket, but all the rest had been fed to the flames. A shrewd move. It had bought him time. But now the hounds were baying. His revels were nearly done.

One more adventure, one more ritual of predation and purgation, was all he would be allowed.

Until now he had paid homage to his ancestor, re-creating the crimes as closely as he dared. Parallel names, similar locations. But he was through with all that. His last murder would be his original creation. His days as an apprentice were over. Now he was a full-fledged master of his art, ready to carve his magnum opus and emblazon his signature across an appalled world.

It would be Jennifer, of course. Who else could it be?

He would take her and he would kill her, but in this one case he would do it slowly. It would not be a dissection, but a vivisection. She would be alive and aware as he turned her inside out and sliced and diced her and left her obscenely exposed. She would feel it, every last plunge of the knife, every excision of her vital parts, until the glorious climax when he wrested the seat of life itself from her chest and left her lifeless and hollow.

He had lost Maura’s bracelet, but soon he would have a new and better token.

Soon he would have Jennifer’s heart.

1904

Hare sat at the bar, nursing a drink and a toothache. The ache throbbed in his lower jaw and progressed like a hot wire up his cheek and into his ear. He would have to see a dentist. The prospect worried him. They were butchers, dentists.

The toothache had put him in a foul frame of mind, and a night in Chinatown had done nothing to improve his humor. For two hours he had played chuck-a-luck in a back room of this saloon, losing steadily, feeling the slow escalation of his wrath. The damnable rice eaters took his money with nary a word. How he hated them, with their skullcaps and pigtails, their mocking faces, their air of inscrutable superiority.

Even so, he found himself spending much of his time in their company. Of late he had not been sleeping well, and he had taken to exploring the nocturnal dives of Los Angeles, most often in Chinatown, where liquor flowed at fifteen cents a glass and fan-tan, pie gow, and chuck-a-luck could divert a restless man.

For patrons of establishments like this one, there were other diversions in the form of porcelain-skinned harlots, graceful as geishas, eager to please. Hare never partook of their services. He had, however, slaughtered two of them, some months apart. Though he left both bodies in the street, cunningly dissected and readily found, neither crime made the papers. The police had made few inroads here, and the locals preferred to keep such matters quiet.

He finished his drink and ordered another, communicating in curt gestures. The new drink was poured. He sipped it, tasting its fire and watching a blank-faced opium fiend drift past. Not one of the coolies; this was a white man. He had the blank stare and pallid countenance of an undead creature, Mr. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, perhaps. Hare knew he was in no position to cast aspersions. He himself had become a vampire of sorts, haunting the darkest corners of the night.

He wondered if he had lost his immortal soul, or indeed if he’d ever had a soul to lose. He was agnostic about such things. But suppose a life after this one did await him. How would he be received? Would he be honored as a saint for his holy work of purification, or condemned to everlasting punishment for the suffering he had inflicted? Would he stand in judgment before God—or before the harlots he’d suppressed?

These were strange thoughts, unnatural. He was not ordinarily so pensive. He must be well in his cups to muse this way. Best to be getting home to his loving wife. The thought made him grimace as he rose unsteadily and made his way out of the bar into a street lined with red lanterns.

A few steps down the street, he became aware of voices in the gloom. He paused, wary, but it was only a whore and her john standing at the entrance to an alley, one of countless side passageways that ramified the district.

Ordinarily the Chinese whores plied their trade in bordellos, but sometimes a man with money in his pocket would hire one as an escort, roving from one saloon or dog-fight pit to another, finally consummating the deal in a bed or back alley. The two ladies of joy Hare killed had been returning from excursions of that kind.

As Hare watched, the girl reached for the man with a pleading gesture. He shook her off and finished buttoning his trousers. “You’re no use to me,” he snapped. “Good riddance and be glad I don’t have you whipped!” She clung to him. He shook her loose and stalked off.

“You all right, miss?” Hare inquired.

The girl spun at the sound of his voice, then stood trembling.

He came closer. “Everything all right?”

She nodded.

“Not very nice, the way that fellow treated you. I’ll be more of a gentleman, I promise.”

Her eyes were large. “You...pay?”

Hare produced a billfold, still retaining a few dollars he hadn’t lost to the pigtails. “I’ll pay plenty. You give me a good ride, yes?”

She held out her hand. Suddenly she was all business. “Pay first.”

He peeled off a bill and pressed it into her palm. Her fingers closed over it like a trap.

She pointed down the street. “House.”

“No house. Right here.” He gestured toward the alley.

Her mouth tipped downward. “No.”

“Yes.” He dangled another bill in front of her.

With a sigh she acquiesced. He gave her the bill, then led her into the alley. Trash moldered in the far corners, rustling with rats. Hare recalled hearing that Chinamen ate rodents. If so, this passage could supply a veritable banquet.

The whore lifted her dress over her hips. Deftly he stepped behind her, the knife in his hand, and with one stroke he parted her throat.

In his London outings he strangled his victims, but as his finesse with the knife improved, he had learned to cut a throat so skillfully that no blood would touch him. It was all a matter of taking the victim by surprise.

She made a strangled sound, an attempted scream that never rose higher than her severed windpipe. A bright splash of blood decorated the alley wall, the dirty pavement, but Hare, strategically positioned at her back, was left unsoiled. The arterial spray geysered briefly, then slowed to a dribble as her heart gave out. She went limp in his arms.

No one had seen or heard. He could take his time with her, unsex her wholly, explore her inmost parts.

He lowered her to the ground and knelt, throwing back her skirt. He was surprised to see she wore an undergarment of some kind. Most whores did not. Looking closer, he saw that it was no garment, merely a wadded rag, stuffed inside her private parts like a cork in a bottle. He pulled at it, and it came free, clotted with blood. For a baffled moment he wondered how a wound to her throat could have made her bleed down there. But of course it couldn’t have. This was menstrual blood.

He knew something of a woman’s tidal changes, though the subject was never discussed in polite society. Vaguely he knew that Maddie wore some such garment as this for a few days each month. Naturally he had not laid eyes on her in that condition. He was careful never to see his wife in any state of undress, a practice greatly simplified by their separate bedrooms.

Now he understood why the john hadn’t wanted this one. Having discovered she was bleeding, he’d given her the brush-off. Normally a whore would not proffer her services when she was bloody, but this one must have needed the money more than most.

Curious, he unfolded the rag for a better look at what it contained.

So much blood.

The blood of her reproductive parts, the blood that would nourish new life in the womb. Her lifeblood, far more so than her heart’s blood, because this was the seedbed of the race.

A mother’s blood.

He allowed himself to touch it, feel its wetness. It tingled on his fingers’ ends.

His dreams came back to him, the dreams that started it all. In the summer of ’88 he was plagued by dreams of dark red blood spurting like ichor from between women’s thighs, dousing him, staining his hands....

On impulse he lathered his hands with the rag, swabbing the rich scarlet elixir over his fingers and knuckles and palms. He poked inside her and his fingers came out steeped in blood. He inhaled its odor. Life in its chemical essence. The mystery of creation, the secret power of the female. Nutritive, generative, miraculous.

He knelt for a long time, hands dripping, the knife forgotten on the pavement. Finally he roused himself, aware of a brightening, the arrival of dawn.

He looked at his hands, coated in gore. A line of Shakespeare recurred to him: And almost thence my nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

Quickly he wiped his hands on her clothes, recovered his knife, and escaped from the alley, having left her body intact and undefiled.

A few blocks away he caught a Red Car trolley. He headed north, then east, changing cars more than once. In South Pasadena he got off and completed his journey on foot. The sun was up, and no doubt his wife had risen with it.

They lived in a rented house, a situation that was merely temporary. Business reversals had delayed his acquisition of a home of their own. For the moment the little bungalow with its two bedrooms and its small garden would have to do. Maddie seemed pleased with it, even if she was pleased with nothing else.

He reached the house and entered through the front door. In the kitchen he found Maddie frying eggs on the stove. She glanced at him, her face registering a mixture of regret and contempt.

“Out tomcatting again,” she said. It was not a question.

He stopped a few feet away. He stared in silent fascination until she turned.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Are you bleeding?”

“What did you say?”

“Is it your time of the month?”

“You can’t ask such a thing. It’s horrid.”

“Just tell me.”

“I certainly will not.” She turned back to her eggs on the stove. “The very idea. You must be sotted, as usual—”

He seized her from behind, as he had seized the Chinese whore, and tilted up her head so her eyes stared into his.

“Are you?”

She hitched in a gasp. “Yes, if you must know.”

It was what he wanted to hear. What he had hoped for, fairly prayed for, throughout his ride home.

He threw her to the floor, straddling her, unhooking her nightgown, his fingers fumbling until in frustration he tore the damned thing off. He removed the sanitary towel she wore in lieu of a rag and cast it aside, smelling blood, the intoxicating odor of it, the scent of birth and life.

She chattered in hysteria. “My God, what are you doing, what are you doing—”

“Taking you,” he grunted, “as my wife.”

He thrust inside, his manhood spearing her. She cried out, a sound that was very nearly a scream, and he shot his hot seed in a surge of painful pleasure that left him spent.

He pulled free. She trembled all over, dazed and scared.

“There,” he said with satisfaction. “Now we’re joined in holy union.”

His toothache, he observed, had entirely disappeared.

thirty-four

Jennifer stood in a corner, her eyes closed against the bedlam around her, aware of nothing but pain.

With the building manager’s cooperation, a vacant apartment two doors down from Maura’s unit had been commandeered as a command post and now hosted a swarm of cops, uniformed and plainclothes. Forensic technicians worked the crime scene. The assistant district attorney had shown up, and a pathologist was on the way. The captain of the Pacific Area station was here, as was his overboss, the commander of Operations-West.

Arriving personnel were logged in by a patrol officer posted at the elevator. As residents drifted home from work, they were intercepted by detectives in the lobby and questioned. The tenants on Maura’s floor had been kept away from their homes for the time being.

Everything was being handled according to procedure. She might have found some reassurance in that fact. At other crime scenes, she would listen to the chatter of police radios and take comfort in the imposition of order on chaos. Death had struck, but life went on. That was what she would tell herself. She didn’t believe it now.

A memory came to her, Maura’s voice calling her “kiddo,” the word as sharp and clear as if it had been spoken in her ear.

She’d suffered other shocks and traumas, but none of them had been like this. Whatever loss she had endured, she’d always felt she could recover.

Not this time. This time she was numb to the point of catatonia. She felt as if she’d died along with Maura, and what was left of her was only a shell, a hollow vessel. She thought of the glass jars that tumbled off her mantel during the earthquake. She was like that—shattered, in pieces—and there was no one to sweep up the mess.

Distantly she told herself to get it together. She couldn’t be out of action, relegated to the sidelines while Richard’s fate was decided. The words sounded right, but she couldn’t make them real. She was worn out. She was done.

“I don’t think we want to go public yet.” That was Casey, his voice rising over the babble of conversation.

He was arguing with a man she didn’t recognize. She tuned in to the discussion and gathered that it concerned the possible release of Richard’s photo to the media. The other man wanted the photo shown on the late TV news. Maybe an alert viewer would call in a tip. Casey didn’t agree. They would have to set up a telephone hotline. They would be deluged with false sightings. It would be a waste of resources.

“The public needs to be involved,” the other man insisted.

They’re already involved, Jennifer thought. They’re getting killed.

She turned away. Two days ago the prospect of Richard’s photo on the news would have reduced her to tears. She was past all that.

Catch me when you can, he’d told her.

She hadn’t caught him. But others would. He would be arrested, or he would die resisting arrest. Then the whole story would come out. Their family’s history. Their father’s crimes. Edward Hare. Everything.

How long before the spotlight transfixed her in its glare? Possibly she was the only person in Los Angeles who’d never wanted to be famous. Soon she would be. Nothing would ever be the same, but somehow she just didn't care.

A loud voice attracted her attention. Someone was asking how Richard had gotten inside the building when the lobby doors were locked. It was a fair question. None of the residents would have opened the door for a street person. But people were always finding ways around security doors. Maybe a tenant had failed to close it completely, or had propped it open with a rock while unloading his car.

“Fifty-one-fifty,” the loud man kept saying. “The fuckin’ guy is fifty-one-fifty.” It took her a moment to remember that 5150 was LAPD radio code for mental case.

Yes, she thought, he’s fifty-one-fifty, all right.

She stepped out of the room, into the hallway, to escape the din of voices. The hall was empty. The door to Maura’s apartment remained open, but she refused to look in that direction.

Lightning flashed at the edge of her vision. She wondered if it was raining outside. No, it wasn’t lightning, only bursts of illumination from a flashbulb—the evidence-team photographer snapping photos of the crime scene.

Draper was still in the apartment, supervising the evidence search. There was talk of bringing in Homicide Special from downtown, but for now he was primary on the case. She didn’t know if he wanted to be. Maybe he would be glad to be rid of it. And rid of her.

She heard the rhythmic clunk of leg braces and looked up to see Dr. Parkinson plodding down the hall.

“Dr. Silence.” He blinked at her. “What are you doing here?”

“The deceased”—it felt surreal to refer to Maura that way—“was a friend of mine.”

“I’m very sorry.” He stood there for a moment, not knowing what to say. She found herself appreciating his mute sympathy more than any words of consolation. “Very sorry,” he said again, moving past her into the condo.

Looking after him, she got an unwanted glimpse of the horror on the living room sofa, still in plain sight. Her brother’s work.

They had been so close to catching him. He must have returned to the hotel only a few minutes after their arrival. Seeing the police out front, he had watched from the crowd, trusting his disguise to preserve his anonymity.

Probably he’d come straight from the murder scene. Somehow he had managed to avoid being spattered with blood. Some writers theorized that Jack stripped naked before commencing the postmortem mutilation of Mary Kelly.

Mary. An M name. Like Maura.

The pattern continued. Richard’s fifth kill in L.A. paralleled the Ripper’s fifth victim in London.

Was that why Maura was chosen? Because of a stupid, meaningless coincidence? Richard knew where she lived. He could have picked her simply because she was convenient.

“Jennifer.”

She turned. Casey was there. She managed a smile. “What, I’m not Half-Pint, or Small Change, or Pixie?”

“Not tonight,” he said soberly. “I’m headed over to the station. I’d like you to come along.”

“What for?”

“So you can give me a full statement. We need you to go over the whole story from the beginning.”

“I can do that here.”

“No, you can’t. This place is a zoo. And it’s only going to get worse. We, uh, we have word the media’s on the way.”

“Oh.”

“Once this hits TV...”

“I know.”

“Let’s get going, then.”

They got out before the first TV crew arrived. Jennifer caught sight of a KABC truck rounding the corner just as Casey pulled away. She had watched the news on many nights, feeling vaguely guilty as she snatched voyeuristic glimpses of other people’s tragedies. Now the rest of the city would be watching her.

The ride to the station house was brief and quiet. The only words were the crackling transmissions on the cruiser’s radio. As Casey turned into the parking lot, Jennifer asked, “Shouldn’t you be off-duty by now?”

“Guess I’ll put in some overtime. I can use it.”

“Sure, you’re just in it for the money.”

He shut off the engine. They sat in the sudden stillness.

“He’ll get help now,” Casey said.

“Unless he gets killed first.”

“My people are professionals. They’ll make every effort to see he isn’t hurt. And once he’s off the street, no one else will be hurt, either.”

He opened the door, but she made no move to unbuckle her seatbelt.

“I should have come to you sooner,” she said.

“Before the library? You still weren’t sure.”

“I was sure enough.”

“Without proof, we might not have listened.”

“I’d have made you listen.”

“You can’t blame yourself.”

“Yes, I can. I was trying to protect him. And now this has happened. And it’s my fault.”

“No one would ever say that.”

She lowered her head. “I’m saying it.”