Текст книги "Riptide"

Автор книги: Michael Prescott

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

seven

The buzz of the doorbell brought her back. She put down the stack of photos and opened the door.

Casey Wilkes stood there, a blue-uniformed figure nearly blocking the view of the black-and-white squad car parked at a hydrant. That was one advantage of being a cop; he never got a ticket. And as a sergeant, he typically rode alone.

“You okay?” he asked.

“They’re dead people, Casey. They’re not going to hurt me.”

He stepped inside, instantly dominating her space without even trying. He wore all his gear—Sam Browne belt with its holstered service pistol and baton; portable radio; handcuffs clinking as he walked. She was always amazed at how much stuff a patrol cop had on, the sheer weight of it, like a suit of chain mail.

For all that, he was lithe, not bulky. His training routine, he’d told her, focused on aerobic conditioning; he had the lean, toned physique of a swimmer. No paunch, no baby fat, nothing soft about him except his wispy blondish hair.

He glanced around the living room. “Where’s the cellar?”

“Over there. But—”

“I’ll check it out.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Stop telling me what I don’t have to do.”

He strode to the trapdoor, which she’d left open. He stepped onto the stairs and tried the light switch.

“Bulb’s dead,” she said.

He gave her a look. “Good home maintenance skills, Silence.”

“Unlike one of us, I’m a white-collar professional, Wilkes.”

He pulled out his flashlight, one of the small rubber models that had replaced the bulky steel MagLites of earlier years. As he proceeded down the stairs, she knelt behind him and put her foot on the topmost tread. He looked back. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Downstairs with you.”

“You need a second look at these bad boys?”

“Not really.”

“So stay put. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

“Did you just say jiffy?”

“I have a prodigious vocabulary. It’s one of my many appealing qualities that you’ve so far failed to detect.”

“Me and everybody else.”

“You’re just full of snappy comebacks today, aren’t you, Munchkin?” He reached the bottom of the stairs and disappeared.

“Don’t call me Munchkin,” she said after him.

She’d met Casey at one of Draper’s crime scenes while he was commanding the day watch. He was thirty-four, brash, and approximately as good-looking as he believed himself to be. He’d asked her out; she’d demurred. On subsequent occasions when they’d run into each other, this ritual was repeated. Their relationship had developed a peculiar dynamic—he was always on the make, she was always brushing him off. She’d made her lack of interest clear enough, but out of some combination of stubbornness and masochism he refused to be deterred.

An uncomfortably long period of time had passed with no sound from below. “You all right down there?” she called.

His voice came back to her. “Right as rain. I’ve confirmed one fact, at least. They’re definitely dead.”

“What gave it away, the lack of flesh tones or the lack of flesh?”

“And I don’t think they were buried in any sort of family crypt.”

“Why not?”

He appeared at the base of the staircase. “Because in a proper burial, the corpse isn’t naked. I didn’t see any clothes, did you?”

“Clothes can disintegrate over time.”

“In a damp environment.” He climbed the stairs, angling his flashlight downward so it wouldn’t blind her. “That wall cavity is nice and dry. Besides, even if the fabric disintegrated, there would be buttons, zippers.” He emerged from the cellar and got to his feet. “And shoes,” he added.

“Shoes. Right.”

“There aren’t any shoes, Short Round. Which suggests to me that this wasn’t a formal burial. And there’s another thing.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear it. And don’t call me Short Round.”

He stepped a little too close to her. She smelled chili dogs on his breath. She moved back, though the smell wasn’t bad. Onions and beans.

“The bones are all mixed up together. Bits and pieces. These people weren’t laid out neatly side by side. They were tossed in there, one on top of the other.”

“Maybe there was an epidemic...or an accident. Something where there were a lot of fatalities, and the bodies had to be buried quickly.” She knew she was reaching even as she said it.

He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles one at a time, the pops reminding her of cartilage, of bone.

“If it was an epidemic,” he said, “the remains would have been burned, not buried. And if it was a disaster, like a quake, there would have been time afterwards for a proper disposal of the bodies.” He cracked the last knuckle. “Health codes in the olden days might not have been what they are now, but I doubt anybody would be allowed to inter a bunch of dead bodies in a fruit cellar. Society frowns on that kind of thing.”

“I guess you’re right. Which means they were...” She didn’t want to say murdered.

“Yeah. That’s what it means. Hey, why the long face? You didn’t do it.”

“This house has been in my family a long time.”

He saw where she was going. “How long?” he asked in a softer tone.

“Forever. My great-grandfather lived here. He may have been the original owner. But we don’t have any records that go back that far.” Or at least, she didn’t have the records. Richard might.

Casey frowned. “Well...let’s not go jumping to any conclusions.”

“It looks like the conclusions are jumping to us.”

“There may be some perfectly innocent explanation.”

“Any suggestions as to what it might be?”

“Let’s wait till we know more. Traffic stops and drug busts I can handle. DBs are someone else’s job.”

Dead bodies. DBs. She wished he hadn’t put it like that. It objectified the victims, made them less than persons.

He shifted his balance, the cuffs on his belt tinkling. “Is there any history of, um, criminal activity in your family?”

She didn’t answer immediately. “No.”

“Why the hesitation?”

She was thinking there was a history of mental illness. But she didn’t want to tell him so. “We’re not a family of criminals,” she said brusquely.

“I didn’t say—”

“Nobody in my family had anything to do with this.”

His hands went up. “All right, I hear you.”

“No, you don’t hear me. You never hear me. I told you it wasn’t necessary for you to come over. You’re here, anyway. I told you it wasn’t necessary to look in the cellar. You looked. And now you’re telling me things—”

“That you don’t want to know.”

She turned away, her shoulders stiff. “I’m keeping you from your job, Sergeant.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I do.”

“Right. You do.” He walked to the front door. “I’ll have someone over here as soon as possible. A detective and an ME. What with the quake, it won’t be right away. Everything’s all fouled up. Roads, phone lines, you name it.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Tomorrow, probably. We can get them here tomorrow.”

“Great.”

“Problem?”

“I guess I’m not crazy about having a bunch of dead people in my cellar overnight.”

“You can bunk at my place. I have a foldout couch—not that we’d need it.”

“I’d rather sleep with the skeletons.”

“Ouch. That’s a wicked tongue you’ve got there, Mini-Me. Okay, enjoy your night in a haunted house. And don’t touch anything down there, don’t disturb the remains—”

“I was planning to take out the skulls and make them into Halloween lanterns. Not a good idea?”

“I would take a pass on that. At least until the ME has had a look.” He stepped outside with a parting wave. “See you.”

“Hey, Casey?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t call me Mini-Me.”

She watched him return to his squad car and drive away. She wondered, not for the first time, exactly why she kept sending him signals to back off. Maybe because he really didn’t hear her. Didn’t listen. Refused to take her seriously. Like Sean, her college beau.

Still, she still liked him. His persistence was comically ingratiating. The truth was, she didn’t know what the hell she wanted. Some psychologist she was. She could read the minds of strangers, but not her own.

In the pantry, the trapdoor was still open. She almost shut it, and then Richard’s voice came back to her: You can’t even stand the sight of blood.

It wasn’t blood. It was a cadaver...

A body under a sheet, wheeled in on a gurney. She remembered how the wheels squeaked on the tile floor. The instructor whisked off the sheet, revealing the body of an old man, spindly and gnarled, tufts of white clinging to his sunken chest. A cadaver for dissection.

She was chosen to make the first incision. Probably the prof saw how nervous she was, blanched with fear. He might have found it amusing to hand her the scalpel.

She stood over the dead man, unable to depress the blade into the waxy flesh. Finally she handed back the scalpel and left the room.

The next day she gave up her pursuit of an MD and shifted her sights to psychology.

There was no reason for her to be ashamed of the episode. But she was. She came from a family of doctors. Her grandfather, father, and brother had practiced medicine. She’d wanted to be the first woman in the family to do likewise. And it still bugged her that she hadn’t stayed in the room with the dead man.

Well, she had been in rooms with dead people since then. She had been to crime scenes. She had seen Marilyn Diaz pulled from the water.

She wouldn’t be scared off by a bunch of rotting bones.

Flashlight in hand, she descended into the cellar. At least now she had an explanation for the dead bolt on the underside of the trapdoor. Whoever interred these bodies made sure he wouldn’t be disturbed in his work.

She reached the scatter of fallen bricks and, kneeling, peered at the nest of skeletons. The floor of the burial chamber was loose sandy soil. The back wall was a sandstone outcrop. She scanned the crypt with her flashlight and saw small scuttling things among the bones. Their black carapaces gleamed like shards of onyx.

Nothing to fear. No reason to be creeped out.

She tracked one beetle as hurried over the mound. A small obstruction blocked its path, and it skittered to one side.

The obstruction was something silver, metallic. Nearly invisible, a fleck of metal in the dirt.

She reached in, stretching her arm over the bone pile, and touched the thing. The metal was smooth, rusted in spots. It extended under the soil. Something was buried there.

Deliberately buried? She didn’t think so. It appeared as if loose dirt had cascaded down from the roof of the crypt, dislodged by today’s quake or any of the seismic events of the past century, or just the slow passage of time.

She swept away some of the dirt, exposing more of the metal surface. Her fingers brushed against something sharp. A corner.

Carefully she cleaned off the rest of it. The thing was a rectangle, ten inches square.

The lid of a tin box.

She probed the dirt until she found a handle, like the handle of a lunch bucket.

Casey had told her not to disturb the scene. But the tin intrigued her.

She tested its weight, lifting it by the handle. Not heavy. She could remove it without disrupting the remains.

She pulled a little harder, and the lid popped up. A rusted clasp on the front had opened.

She couldn’t resist the temptation to look inside. Probably a bad idea—Pandora’s box, and all that. She did it anyway, angling the flashlight to reveal the tin’s contents.

What she saw was a book. Frayed black covers. Faint smell of mold.

Paper deteriorated rapidly when stored in adverse conditions, but the tin had kept the book safe from vermin, sealed away from visible light and airborne pollutants. The crypt would be cool year round, and the space was dry enough to inhibit excessive mold formation. The box itself would have prevented too many mold spores from settling on the book and foxing its pages.

She looked more closely at the volume. Embossed in gilt Gothic on the front cover was the word Journal.

She knew then that she had to examine it.

Lowering the lid, she put both hands around the tin and lifted it free. It was crusted in earth, dragging clumps of loose soil and a single black beetle that fell off the bottom and scuttled away.

A diary, left with the dead. Hidden away for years, read by no one—except the ghosts interred with their bones.

eight

In her study, she placed the box on the examination table and lifted out the diary. Her hands trembled a little.

The book was ready to fall apart. The binding was badly cracked. The covers were calfskin, black, dry, stiff with age. Other than the gilt word Journal there was no lettering on the front cover, and no decoration except a band of silver running down the spine. Some of the silver had flaked away.

The leaves of the book had yellowed with age. Their edges were brittle, breaking off in powdery fragments. A few starbursts of gray mold mottled the edges of the pages, but the fungus did not appear to have made further inroads.

Carefully she opened the book. On the flyleaf pasted to the inside front cover was a heavy horizontal smear of ink. Something had been written there—an inscription or a signature, perhaps—and then blacked out. Once she got a replacement light fixture for her UV lamp, she might be able to fluoresce the hidden writing.

She turned past the flyleaf. Handwritten notes stretched neatly across the unlined paper. The entries, neither signed nor dated, were written in a neat, scholarly hand, with ornate Victorian flourishes. She estimated there were sixty pages in all. The early pages were missing, having fallen out or been torn loose, and the diary now began in the middle of a sentence.

—of my strange dreams lately. Dreams of blood. More precisely of women’s blood rushing out from between their legs and bathing my bare hands. Ghastly images. I wake in a fever. I shiver as though with ague. What is worst of all, the women all have the same face. It is Kitty's face. She haunts me.

Elaborate diction, rendered in meticulous copperplate, though with a paucity of punctuation. The writer seemed averse to commas, perhaps a sign of a racing mind.

I have taken to drink in the evenings. Without a touch of spirits, sleep eludes me. I fear to sleep, fear the dreams. The women who are Kitty with their bleeding female parts. It must be the onset of cerebral disease. I see a dread prevision of myself in a lunatic asylum, a jabbering maniac. This I fear above all.

Kitty is to blame. I feel certain of it. She infected my soul, planted an evil germ. Perhaps it is her revenge on me, her curse. But this too is madness.

The dreams have not visited me for some time but now they start again. It is because of the incident last Friday. The fallen woman in the street. She so much resembled Kitty from afar. I was certain it was she. Only when I drew near did I apprehend my mistake.

Yet how could I have been so self-deceived? Kitty is no whore. Whatever else she may be, she is above suspicion in that respect.

Dare not sleep. Perambulate all night. In my rooms at first, but later in the streets. Thrice I've been accosted by harlots. Each time I was briefly persuaded the woman’s face was Kitty's.

Perhaps I should not have broken off with her. Perhaps I should have proceeded with arrangements. She would now be my bride, and I would not be hounded by phantoms and phantasies.

Can not rid myself of these horrors. They harry me incessantly. There is a permanent shudder in my blood, a finger of ice running always along my spine. I live with a perpetual smothering anguish. I fear the night. I endure the day.

Wisp has noted my condition. The fool believes I merely need to quicken my circulation with activities outside the school. He has no inkling of my nocturnal torments.

Difficult to maintain mental concentration on my classes. As always surrounded by fools. Despicable creatures. People speak of the innocence of children but it is not innocence, rather it is the bovine blankness of stockyard animals. I hate them all, their oily faces, their pink hands. They plague me, squealing for the sow’s teats.

He had nicknames for the children.

Vole was especially stupid today, fumbling through his Virgil like an illiterate farm boy. Weed and Splotch did no better. Arma virumque cano—Splotch thought it was something about a dog. Cano not canis you blind fool. Weasel got it right but I cannot abide his obsequious fawning as if to translate a few verses ex tempore would earn my eternal gratitude. I did not make Feeble translate at all, there’s no point, even the sport of seeing him fail has grown tedious.

He was a schoolteacher, obviously. All his students seemed to be male. An all-boys school?

The headmaster was the man nicknamed Wisp. He flitted in and out of the entries, a perpetual nuisance to the diarist. But then, everyone was a nuisance to him, “a plague and a contention” as he wrote. The diarist hated everybody—students, employers, colleagues, people he passed on the streets.

His seething hostility perhaps found expression in his bloody dreams. If so, the imagery of violence was intimately bound up in his mind with the symbolism of sex. Possibly it was his struggle to avoid facing the full implications of the dreams that caused them to return night after night. He did not want to admit that he could have fantasies of violence. He did not want to unleash the killer inside.

But the killer was there. The writer needed only to unlock the door to his deepest urges. In the next entry he had found the key.

I know now why I see her face in my dreams and in the streets. It is a message to me, flashed as if by semaphore. An intuition of the truth.

To-night as I walked the streets, I came upon her lodgings. I felt I must see her at once, despite the lateness of the hour. I pounded on the door until a woman answered, Amelia her roommate. I enquired after Kitty. Amelia amazed me by saying Kitty was not at home. She was not expected back at any particular time. No purpose would be served if I were to wait.

What decent woman would be out and about in the dead of night?

I saw it then. I saw her true nature, and how narrowly I had escaped disaster.

She is a whore. She walks the streets at night, taking coins from eager customers. She sells herself for the price of a pint, shameless as an alley cat.

I see now that in my heart I always knew. It was why I threw her over. At the time I had no clear conception of my motives. Now all is clear.

She was whoring even then, behind my back. She and Amelia also. Their virginal modesty is a sham. They are as chaste as goats. Pure as ditch water. Clean as soot.

In his paranoia and delusion he had misinterpreted the roommate's understandable reluctance to let him enter. Most likely Kitty had been there all along, and Amelia was simply covering for her. But he couldn't see the obvious truth.

His next entry explored his epiphany. The neat penmanship of earlier passages was gone. Now she saw many of the distinguishing traits of criminal handwriting. Dot grinding, the deep indentation of periods and similar shapes produced by jabbing pen into paper. Variable pressure, as the writer at times allowed his pen to flow lightly, then abruptly bore down. Extreme angularity, the script slanting hard to the right. Harpoons—fishhook-shaped strokes originating well below the baseline.

The stroke analysis suggested an explosive personality, boiling with rage.

I find my mind so crowded with thoughts—strange new linkages of ideas all unifying into a comprehensive overview. I see—everything. The world is a sump of vice and filth, women lowering themselves like beasts, men sharing their degradation–illness and debauchery! Pestilence and pollution! We are fleshly things. What is the female? What gives her this power? The blood in her which is her life. They are called the weaker sex, the gentle sex—a lie! If they are so weak why do they rule us with their cunts?

We’re told it is conscience that distinguishes Mankind from lower animals. A sanctimonious lie. Conscience is but a weakness imbued in us by those who would control us. Remember poor Augustine: ’Give me chastity and continence but not yet!’ Conscience places the natural man at war with himself, his hardy spirit made impotent by social doctrine, strait-jacketed. Meantime what of the men who break free? They are made to wear actual strait jackets, confined to hospitals, shut up in cages.

Can not keep it to myself. It is my calling, my mission.

The others won’t know—no one will know. It will be my secret. My private undertaking ha ha there’s a good word. I am the undertaker indeed. I will give the penny-a-liners something to write about and the public some better entertainment than Mr Mansfield’s play.

Absurd that a worthless piece of baggage like Kitty should have got me thinking clearly for the first time in my life. Or had I worked it out already without knowing? Like Moliere’s middle-class gentleman who spoke prose without realising, have I been dreaming murders my whole life long all unaware? Those continental alienists are right, the mind is a fascinating instrument, we shall never plumb its depths.

I am laughing. It is all so comical, a fever dream, brain fever as the doctors call it—but I need no doctor. It is humanity that ails and I am to provide the succour.

Whirling thoughts, weird associative leaps, unfocused hostility.

Schizophrenia. That was where the clues pointed. He might have been experiencing his first psychotic break. If so, he’d been no older than his mid-twenties. An Englishman—that much was obvious from Britishisms like penny-a-liner, as well as spellings like succour.

Her great-grandfather, Graham Silence, had immigrated from England to America sometime in the late nineteenth century. And schizophrenia ran in the family.

To-night I do it. There will be no backing down. If I am a man I write my next entry in blood.

She felt a slow chill move through her, as though these words had been whispered in her ear, not set down in writing by a man long dead. She found herself touching the long rope of scar tissue beneath her shirt sleeve.

The next undated entry recorded a kill.

Deed is done. Dead is done. Dead is deed, deed is death—indeed.

My thirsty knife swallowed up her life.

I’m a rhymer and a two-timer.

I make verse—and worse.

And laughter...after!

I must maintain my self-possession. But it is all so hilarious and wonderful. I had not expected—I hadn’t guessed—there was not much blood, the creature was nearly dead before I cut her throat—tilted her head away from me so I wouldn’t be splashed—got none on me, not a drop. Not then. But unsexing her—messy work. Much blood. I drained her dry, every drop. Blood is life. All her power, all her life washing my hands as in my dreams. I left her hollow as a gourd.

So damnably easy. I had thought it would be hard but she put up no struggle, merely twitched and shook as I squeezed her neck from behind. A thousand times I’ve imagined what could go wrong, every miscue and disaster but my imaginings were airy foolishness. I could kill a dozen a night and no one would ever spot me. Maybe I will kill a dozen next time. I am so eager to start again, my knife’s so sharp, it cuts so well and makes no sound. Opening her up—like slicing gabardine. I can still feel the warmth of her insides as the folds of flesh parted. Could’ve toasted cheese in that heat. A bit of her—how would she taste? She smelled good inside like stew.

She drew a breath. She realized she was shaking.

Was it poor Kitty he'd murdered, or Amelia? She almost didn’t want to know.

The entry that followed was brief and factual, and it surprised her.

Written up in the papers today. Mary Ann Nichols was her name. Called Polly by friends.

So he hadn't targeted his fiancée or her roommate. He had gone after a stranger.

In the following pages he entertained himself by mocking the police—“such tremendous fools, such splendid jackanapes.”

Halfway through the diary, she turned a page and saw a string of unpunctuated, uncapitalized words, scrawled in a feverish hand.

claimed another whore

Below it lay an irregular rust-colored blot and a second spidery line of script.

fresh out of whitechapel a few drops from my knife

It came together for her like a door slamming. England, Whitechapel, blood, knife, whores.

Jennifer looked up slowly.

It was just possible that the diary in her hands was written by Jack the Ripper.