Текст книги "Riptide"

Автор книги: Michael Prescott

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

two

Jennifer made it back to her house in Venice in twenty minutes, catching only green lights. She felt fine as she unlocked the door, and she continued to feel fine as she crossed the living room and went past the kitchen and down the rear hall into the powder room, where she leaned over, eyes closed, and threw up into the sink.

The bloodshot eyes under plastic...the swollen mass of her tongue...

She retched again, dry heaving because luckily she’d had little breakfast and there was nothing left in her gut.

She never got used to it, and it took its toll on her. Her friend Maura was always telling her to pack it in, get a nice, safe private practice, stop going to crime scenes and traumatizing herself. Sensible advice, but she wouldn’t listen.

Cupping her hands under the spigot, she splashed cold water on her face. The sting, hard as a slap, centered her.

When she raised her head, she saw her reflection in the mirror, a pale ghost image framed in wheat-colored hair. In January she’d turned thirty, but she looked younger. She had a child’s face with a child’s large eyes. She expended a lot of energy making people treat her as a grownup. Maybe that was one reason she wouldn't walk away from her job.

Leaving the bathroom, she deposited the photocopied threat message in her study, a small businesslike room overlooking a backyard garden in need of tending. There had been a tool shed in the backyard once, many years ago. Her mother had removed it and planted flowers on the ground where it stood. She tended those flowers until the day she died.

Jennifer had grown up in this house and knew every squeaky floorboard. It was a Queen Anne Victorian, tall and narrow, two stories of cedar oak shingles and gingerbread trim topped by a high gable and slanted roof. The house was planted on a narrow lot edged by a tangle of sweet pea vines and a low hedge resembling a hunk of moldy cheese.

The House of Silence. That was how she had always thought of it, because of the long, tense silences of her childhood.

It had gone up in 1908, at the start of Venice’s prosperity. After a long decline, the district had now entered a new, affluent phase, in which old homes were purchased as seven-figure teardowns. Real estate developers were constantly after her, but she refused to sell. The house had been built by her great-grandfather and handed down through the generations. With her parents dead, it was her last link to her family.

Besides Richard, of course.

She wondered how much longer she could hold out. The cost of living was rising, and her income wasn’t keeping up. She would stay as long as she could, and not just out of family loyalty. She loved the sea, the wet breeze and misty mornings, the cheerful chaos of the Venice boardwalk, and she loved the old house for its faded, funky charm, its narrow hallways and strange angles.

Upstairs she stripped, then stood in the shower and ran the water hot until the old pipes were banging. Steam rose, white and scalding. The water cascaded over her, burning the last traces of the crime scene off her body.

The hot water ran out abruptly, replaced by a chilly downpour. Damn water heater.

She toweled her hair dry in the bedroom. The high stained glass windows over her bed gave the room an aura of sanctity that was somewhat offset by the montage of erotic 1920s postcards on the wall.

From her closet she grabbed a pair of baggy woolen pajama bottoms she wore as pants, and a peach blouse two sizes too big. Like every shirt she owned, the blouse had long sleeves that concealed the four-inch rope of scar tissue on her left forearm.

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she heard raucous barking from across the street. The nasty Rottweiler owned by her newest neighbors, penned in a side yard.

She glanced out the front window and saw the dog at the gate, gnashing its teeth. A few yards away, a child no older than five was approaching cautiously, but not cautiously enough.

Then she was out the door, sprinting barefoot across the street.

The kid—a boy, she could see that now—waggled his fingers at the dog in a friendly greeting. The Rottweiler retreated a couple of steps and stopped barking, but Jennifer knew this was only a feint, a ruse to disarm the victim.

The boy extended one hand to pet the doggie. He had just begun to insert his hand between the wrought-iron twinings of the gate when Jennifer reached him. She yanked him back, and the Rottweiler, cheated of its prey, launched itself at the gate, barking and snapping ferociously.

The gate shook under the dog’s weight as the fanged head thrust between the bars, white teeth gleaming.

The boy started to cry.

Jennifer held him. “It’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

When the boy was calm, she knelt by him and asked if his mommy or daddy was around. Mutely he pointed to the house.

She took him by the hand and led him to the front door, which hung ajar. She rang the bell and waited until a heavyset housekeeper appeared.

The woman saw the little boy and broke into a flurry of excited recriminations. Jennifer didn’t speak Spanish, but she got the idea. The boy was her son, and he had wandered off without permission.

He went inside, running past his mother to escape further chastisement. The housekeeper looked at Jennifer with a grateful smile. “He was cause trouble?” she asked in halting English.

“No,” Jennifer lied. “No trouble. I just thought he shouldn’t be out on his own.”

She crossed the street, returning home. It was the first time she had ever rung that doorbell. She had no idea who owned the new house. She had never seen them, only their vehicles going in and out of the three-car garage.

As recently as ten years ago, everyone on the street knew each other. Now almost all her old neighbors were gone. The new arrivals hid behind fences and multiple locks. There was a new unfriendliness in the neighborhood. More wealth—but less joy.

She wondered if that was true everywhere.

three

By two o’clock she was ensconced in her study, bending over an anonymous letter from a man with murder on his mind.

When she was at work, there was nothing else, no outside world, no past or future, only the white examination table and the sheet of lined paper in the glow of the full-spectrum lamp.

Though the message was unpunctuated, badly spelled, without margins or paragraph breaks, it conveyed the writer’s thoughts quite effectively.

I am going to hunt you down bitch & take you out it will hurt don’t make plans for the futur you wont be around long ennough for it to matter...

And much more in that vein.

Immediately she pegged the writer as male. Women used intensifiers—“I am so angry...you are such a good friend”—and emotive language, laden with “I feel” statements. They qualified their remarks, even in the heat of strong emotion. No such markers were present in the note on her examination table.

It wasn’t difficult to isolate the letter’s key motifs. The most obvious was resentment of the victim for her superiority.

even perfect people die...maybe everrybody wants you but I only want you dead...before you die I will spit in your perfect face

She wondered if he actually did spit in her face when he killed her. It might be possible to do a DNA test. The plastic bag could have protected the evidence even after the body went into the water. She made a note of it.

His fixation on her appearance suggested that he regarded his own looks as inadequate. It also strongly suggested a sexual obsession with the victim, an impression reinforced by other language.

I pity you bitch I feel sorry for you beccause I know whats coming & its coming down hard

It didn't take a psychology degree to see the repetition of the word coming and its proximity to the word hard.

There was a second motif—rejection.

Your not going to walk away, he warned, perhaps recalling a time when she had in fact walked away from him. Youll be humiliated no pride & youll begg me for mercy.

He wanted to humiliate her—probably because she’d humiliated him by rebuffing his advances. I am going to hunt you down bitch & take you out... Yeah, he had wanted to take her out, all right. Whoever wrote this letter had made an attempt—probably an inept attempt—to initiate a relationship. She had said no. Now he wanted to strike back.

And what were the odds that somebody who misspelled simple words like future and everybody and even beg would have no trouble spelling humiliated? Or that such a person would have the know-how to use an ampersand?

He was smarter and better educated than he wanted to let on. Playing dumb was harder than it looked.

Smile while you can, he wrote, beccause soon I am going to make mona lisa moan. An uneducated person would not think naturally of Mona Lisa or perform an alliterative play on Mona and moan.

The other motif in the letter was the writer’s proximity to the victim. You can feel death breatheing down youre neck...up close & personal...

One passage combined all three motifs.

did I get your attention? are you scared? you think your safe in youre perfect world youre plastic bubble but its nearly time for the bubble to burst closer to the end than you think

The last words could be an unconscious confession, his way of saying, “I am closer to you than you think.” He might live near her or work in the same office.

Another phrase stood out: its nearly time for the bubble to burst. An expression that might occur to someone in the financial or real estate markets.

Marilyn Diaz had been an insurance agent. Had she worked in an office complex with Realtors, stockbrokers?

Jennifer sat back in her chair, notepad in hand. She jotted down her conclusions.

•  Market-oriented business, financial/realty

•  Lived or worked near victim

•  Educated, intelligent

•  Sense of inadequacy about physical appearance

•  Unsuccessful attempt at a sexual advance

That was what she knew about him. And he was, of course, dangerous. Marilyn Diaz might not have realized it, but the signs were there.

He had disguised his handwriting, as evidenced by the telltale shakiness of his script. Concealing his identity suggested foresight and planning. And he had made no specific threat. People whose plans for revenge went no further than daydreams would share their fantasies. The ones who were more serious kept the details to themselves.

He had, however, left inadvertent hints of how he planned to do it. He’d written of looking into her face as she died, of death breathing down her back. The constellation of images—face to face, neck, breathing—suggested he had already been thinking of the plastic bag, the slow asphyxiation. He’d meant to choke her to death while he stared into her eyes.

When he broke the window—when Marilyn heard him coming down the hall—she must have known it was the man who’d written the note. She must have known he had come to kill her.

I am going to hunt you down bitch & take you out…

He might have left no clues at the scene. He might have hoped the surf would wash off any trace evidence on the body. But in this note he’d given away much more than he realized.

She could put the police on this man’s scent. Most people would never know it. Her testimony would not be permitted at his trial. Her analysis, which still had no legal standing, could not be submitted as evidence. But it could be used to develop leads. And when he was in prison, he would know that his own words had locked him up for life.

That was the power of the work she did. It was more than document analysis. Officially, her role was special psychological consultant to various law enforcement agencies throughout the Los Angeles area.

Her skill was psycholinguistic analysis. She read between the lines.

Psycholinguistics could yield data on the writer’s background and education, the books and magazines he read, the work he did. But another kind of information was embedded in a text. Self-image, private obsessions, hidden fears and hopes.

She remembered the exact moment when she first understood the process. She was in a crowded bar with a college boyfriend named Sean, complaining that she had to shout to be heard. Abruptly it occurred to her that she wasn’t concerned about the ambient noise. Her actual complaint was that Sean couldn’t hear her, ever. He was too self-involved to listen. She hadn’t been consciously aware of the problem. But her unconscious mind knew—and found a way to communicate the message. To shout it, in fact.

That night she reread her journal and found the same message repeated again and again. Her subliminal mind had been sending out a distress signal for weeks, but her conscious mind, busy with rationalizations and denial, hadn’t grasped it.

The realization gave her a creepy feeling, as if she had discovered a second personality cohabiting her body. For a while, she was reluctant to pursue the idea. But when she read about the cutting-edge discipline of psycholinguistics in her psych classes, she was hooked.

The unconscious, she learned, was wiser than the conscious mind. It expressed truths that conscious thought tried to hide, truths that emerged as coded messages, a series of red flags. The “red thread,” it was called. Like Einstein’s God, the unconscious was subtle but not malicious. Its secrets could be teased out, if a reader had the skill to follow the red thread.

Some cops appreciated her contribution. Some didn’t. Most, like Roy Draper, utilized her insights while remaining skeptical of her methods. Resistance, she thought, arose mainly because people didn’t want to believe that they revealed themselves with everything they said and wrote. What she did was too much like mind reading—a scary prospect for people who wanted to keep secrets.

And everybody had secrets. She touched her left arm, feeling the scar beneath her sleeve. Everybody.

Her arm began to shake. She watched it, bewildered. Then she became aware that the examination table was shaking, too.

The whole damn room was shaking.

A wrenching jolt slammed the table to the left, knocking the lamp askew. Her chair pivoted under her. Somewhere nearby came the tinkle of breaking glass. Her UV light, which could reveal erasures and scratched-out words, had fallen.

“Hell,” she muttered. The lighting element was expensive and a pain to replace.

The table lurched again with a prolonged burp of its legs against the hardwood floor. Car alarms, jostled by the quake, began a clangor of honks and whoops on the street.

And then it was over. The last of the tremors passed away, rolling underneath the house like a slow comber spending itself on the beach. She sat and listened as the car alarms hit their automatic cutoffs one by one. Then there was stillness.

Slowly she released a breath. Though she had grown up in Los Angeles, she had never gotten used to earthquakes. It wasn’t a fear of being crushed under debris. It was more basic than that.

Whenever she felt the shifting of tectonic plates, she couldn’t escape the feeling that some primordial evil had just shuddered forth from the bowels of the earth.

four

The house was still standing. Jennifer verified as much with a walk-through of the ground floor.

Her power was on. Ditto her phone. In the living room her collection of sea glass, the product of years of studious beach-combing, had been dislodged from the fireplace mantle, dropping like hailstones onto the flagstone apron. The jars holding her treasures had shattered, but the sea glass itself—broken glassware from shipwrecks, tumbled and sanded smooth by wave action—appeared undamaged.

The photos lining the wall of the stairwell had been jostled from their hooks. They lay scattered on the steps. For an instant she was back in Marilyn Diaz’s bedroom, looking at the framed snapshots on the floor.

From the streets came the distant wail of a siren. Fire engine or ambulance. In quakes, gas mains broke and people had heart attacks. A second siren arose, competing with the first.

Upstairs she found two fallen lamps in the bedroom and a thin but worrisome crack snaking up the plaster wall. The view from the deck revealed a few red roof tiles strewn in the backyard. Her power had failed momentarily, and the display screen of her DVR was blinking.

She went downstairs, tuned the kitchen TV to Channel 4—her cable hadn’t gone out—and watched enough of the coverage to learn that the quake was a relatively minor 5.2 on the Richter scale. Preliminary reports indicated that Venice received the worst of the shaking. The newscasters reminded viewers to check for gas leaks. Jennifer sniffed. No sour smell.

She wondered if she should look in on her neighbors. But she didn’t know any of them.

One thing she could do was call Richard. She was reaching for the phone when she remembered the cellar.

Cellars were rare in southern California, except in older homes. In the early 1900s Venice had been populated largely by transplants from the Midwest, people who grew up with storm cellars and fruit cellars. They wanted the kind of houses they were used to.

The entry to the cellar was a trapdoor in the floor of the pantry, next to the kitchen. Kneeling, she grasped the handle and pulled it open. On the underside of the trapdoor was a dead bolt that could secure the cellar from the inside. She had never understood why anyone would feel the need to do that.

A stairway plunged into darkness. When she flicked the light switch at the top of the stairs, nothing happened. The bulb in the ceiling had burned out. She hadn’t known. The cellar was musty and claustrophobic, and she hadn’t been down there in years.

From the kitchen she retrieved a flashlight, then returned to the trapdoor and angled the beam down the stairs. The cone of light picked out a brick wall wreathed in cobwebs and a concrete floor strewn with dead insects. No damage was visible from this vantage point.

She descended the creaking stairs, inhaling the odor of mildew. At the bottom she let her eyesight adjust to the dimness, then stepped forward into the gloom. Dry beetles crackled under her shoes.

Slowly she fanned the flashlight beam over the grimy walls and along a ceiling crisscrossed with exposed plumbing pipes. The room measured nine by thirteen feet, and the ceiling was uncomfortably low. It occurred to her that an aftershock could take place at any time, and underground would be the worst place to be.

At the center of the cellar, she turned in a slow pivot, her flashlight coming to rest on the wall below the staircase.

Part of the wall had crumbled, the old bricks tumbling out to expose a dark cavity three feet wide.

Here was genuine damage, which she couldn’t afford. Like most Angelenos she had no earthquake insurance, trusting that the Big One would hold off for her lifetime.

She played the beam along the underside of the staircase, wondering if she should be worried about the stairs collapsing under her when she went back up. But they looked secure enough. It was only the wall that had failed, and not much of the wall, at that. Possibly she wasn’t looking at more than a minor repair job.

She moved closer to the wall. Something was inside. Something yellowish, whorled in cobwebs, a strangely complicated assemblage of shapes. Straight lines and curves and acute angles...

Bones.

That was what she saw. Not the small bones of vermin. These were human remains. A human skeleton, entombed in the wall.

She didn’t react in any particular way. The reality of what she was seeing was too difficult to process.

Her flashlight picked out a jawless skull, the eye sockets strangely white, not hollow, as if cloudy eyeballs still occupied the holes. There were no eyes, of course, only layers of gossamer spinnings from a succession of insects who had cocooned in the sockets.

Eerie, though—how the eyes seemed to watch her. How the milky strands of webbing reflected the flashlight’s glow.

She felt her first twitch of panic. She jerked the flashlight away from the skull, letting the beam fall elsewhere inside the cavity.

Another pair of eyes.

Two skeletons.

Suddenly it seemed important to make no sudden moves. She was on the brink of a precipice. She must tread with care.

She guided the flashlight to the left and came across a third skull and a fourth. Behind those, there were others. How many in all? She couldn’t tell. A half dozen, at least. Interred here, in the cellar under her house.

Somebody had broken a hole in the wall and dug out an earthen cavity about two feet deep, then deposited the remains and sealed them inside. Probably the reconstructed portion hadn’t been as strong as the original, so it had failed when the rest of the cellar had held up.

She counted six skulls. There might be more. She couldn’t be certain. The bones were disarticulated, disarranged. A spoils heap.

The bones were mottled in mold. Some had crumbled into whitish gray powder. They were old. Decades old.

She didn’t know if her great-grandfather was the original owner of the house. But if he was…

Then someone in her family had done this.