by Stuart, Anne
She slammed down the phone, then stared at her trembling hands. Why hadn’t Adamson warned her? She didn’t usually read the paper, and when she did, she avoided anything to do with murders in general, and the Ripper in particular.
Adamson must have figured she was spooked enough, or maybe he hadn’t known about the article. The situation was macabre as it was without the world at large knowing her grim connection to the grisly murders. She pushed her hands through her thick hair, forcing herself to take a calming breath. Why did the Venice Ripper concentrate only on female prostitutes? Why couldn’t he decide to pay a little visit to a man named Damien? Where was a good serial killer when you needed one?
She shook her head, trying to clear the grim fantasy from her exhausted mind. Outside, she could hear the ever-present sound of the rain beating down on the two-story building she shared with a couple of starving actors. They were out of town, and she was alone. In the rain, with a killer on the loose. One who had a grotesque affinity for her.
She yanked out the telephone book and began leafing through it. There were more than a dozen Damiens, none of them with the initials J. R., and she was about to slam the thing shut in frustration when she tried the alternative spelling, only to find that a J. R. Damien lived within ten minutes of her house. In Venice, where the Ripper prowled.
She punched the numbers into the telephone before she could think twice about it, but of course all of California communicated by answering machine, and one clicked on after the first ring. A man’s voice, deep, harsh, cool, came over the line in a prerecorded message. Referring the caller to the Los Angeles Chronicle.
She slammed down the phone. It was the same Damien, all right, and there was no way she was going to get through the night without confronting him.
She sank down into the sofa, letting the waves of heat wash over her, and yet inside she felt cold as ice. Why wasn’t the constant heat warming, reassuring, comforting? Why did the very thickness of the sultry weather seem one more threat to her safety and well-being?
She closed her eyes for a moment. She hadn’t been sleeping well. It was no wonder, of course, with a killer on the loose, a killer who had a bizarre connection to her. Even though she’d tried to avoid the gruesome details, some had slipped through, overheard standing in line at the grocery store, presented as a counterpoint to dinner when she was working her waitress shift. Those details would crop up in the middle of the night, as she lay in her narrow bed, and she would wake up in a panic, her body covered with sweat, the white sheets tangled around her like a shroud.
The house creaked. It was cheaply built, made to house the influx of labor after World War II, and the walls were thin, the foundation was cracked and sagging, the windows loose in their frames. Jared and Frank were out of town—there was no one upstairs in their apartment, wandering around. Those weren’t footsteps overhead. No one was nearby, lurking, watching her, waiting for the right moment.
She pushed herself off the couch in a sudden panic. She didn’t want to check her doors and windows, making certain they were locked. To check them would be to admit that the fear existed, and to admit it was to give in to it.
She went through the motions. She ate a carton of raspberry yogurt, washed down with a fruit drink. She took a long, cool shower, dressing in an old pair of jeans and a faded tank top. She turned on the air conditioner, telling herself she should clear away the mess from the old mask, start a new one. A fairy princess, maybe. Or a political caricature. Maybe a wizard.
She stared at the ruined mask and knew she wasn’t going to do any such thing. It was already late, and the heavy rain continued outside, slapping against her window, but she wasn’t going to be sensible and stay put, curl up with a good book if she couldn’t work. She was going out to find J. R. Damien and give him a piece of her mind. Then maybe she would be able to rest.
HE KNEW WHO he was. The savior, the slasher, sent by God to wreak justice and revenge on the filth-ridden whores of Los Angeles. He’d come before, many, many times before, in different cities, different centuries, taken up residence in different mortal souls, but his mission had always been the same.
Sometimes they’d caught him. He’d been guillotined, hanged, drowned, shot. Other times he’d gotten away, his blood-lust slaked, leaving his host to live out a normal, peaceful life, with the memory of the bloody mission no more than a dream.
He came in many guises, and that was why they seldom caught him. That was why no one would catch him this time, unless he chose to let them. He became whoever he chose to be, his will so strong that people simply saw the image he projected, not the creature behind that illusion.
It was no wonder those idiot police couldn’t find him. How could they find an executioner who was a derelict one day, a teenage boy the next? A linen-suited businessman, then a middle-aged mother?
He stared down at his hands, his clever surgeon’s hands. He’d sent countless whores to their just reward—and it wouldn’t be long before his mission was complete. Then he could rest, retire back into normalcy, complacency, no one ever realizing the great work he’d done. Just as before.
This time, he thought, he might like to be a woman. It was easier sneaking up on them when he became a woman. The sluts had gotten skittish, wary, and he had to become even more clever when he lured them to an alleyway. Fast with the knife, cutting off their screams before someone could come to their rescue.
He hadn’t made a mistake yet. He wasn’t about to start. But this time, he thought he would like to be a woman, meting out justice to her own kind. And as he watched his hands, she admired the bright red of her highly polished fingernails.
Chapter Two
J. R. DAMIEN LEANED against the littered counter in his pocket-size kitchen, staring at the sagging cupboard doors without seeing them. The phone had been ringing all night—he’d stood there and listened as voices came through the answering machine, voices from his present, voices from his past, voices he could easily ignore. Just as he’d ignored the voice of his conscience.
Printing the article about the mask-maker had been an act of desperation. A despicable one—he knew that. The police had trusted him not to let out that particular piece of information, and Adamson had been calling on the half hour, fury vibrating in his cop’s voice as he tore him a new one for endangering the woman. Damien had ignored the messages.
He’d had no choice, and he had no guilt. As long as the Ripper continued, more women would die. The police were a bunch of bumbling fools—Adamson was the smartest of the lot, but even he was too damned decent to get very far in his search for an unstoppable killer.
Damien understood the plain, unpalatable truth that he couldn’t explain to anyone as matter-of-fact as Adamson. It was up to him to stop the Ripper. Up to him to catch him—in the act, if possible. Up to Damien to destroy him. He was the only one who could.
Because there was a very good chance that when he destroyed the Ripper, he would also destroy himself.
He slammed the cupboard door shut, but it bounced back open again with the kind of malicious contrariness Damien had grown used to. He wandered back out into the living room, wondering where amid the litter of paper and books and dirty dishes he’d left his cigarettes. He was smoking too much, and he didn’t give a damn. As long as he smoked, his hands were busy and he didn’t have to worry about what his hands had been doing. Or to whom they’d been doing it.
It was the damned nightmares. He didn’t believe in psychics, in shared memories, in any of the hocus-pocus bullshit that was so popular in California nowadays. He was a pragmatist, a practical man who believed only in what he could see, hear, touch and smell.
But in his dreams, he could see death. He could hear the screams of the women before they died. He could touch death, could feel the sticky heat of blood, and he could smell it, all around him.
He knew things no one sho
uld know. There was no explanation, no rational explanation, only one terrifying possibility that he wasn’t ready to face.
He’d just found his cigarettes when he heard someone at the door. The bell hadn’t worked for years, and he stood motionless, listening to the insistent pounding.
He moved slowly, barely opening the door a crack to stare out into the shadowed hallway. A strange woman stood there, and his sense of disappointment was almost overwhelming. From the moment he’d known someone was standing outside his apartment he’d had a bizarre feeling of destiny, the feeling that the answers to everything that had been tormenting him lay just beyond the heavy security door.
He’d thought, he’d hoped it would be the Ripper. But the woman standing there in the shadows wasn’t the killer. The man who’d butchered those prostitutes had an inordinate amount of strength, and there was no way a tall, slender creature like the one standing in his doorway could have wielded a postmortem knife so effectively.
He almost slammed the door shut. Almost. Something kept him from giving in to temptation—curiosity, maybe, or a sense of destiny. He stood peering through the small crack in the doorway, and wondered whether she was going to be the answer to all the questions that had been tormenting him. He doubted it.
SHE SHOULDN’T have come here. Lizzie’s fury had lasted the ten minutes it took her aging Toyota to get to this derelict building, but it had begun to fade by the time she stepped inside the littered front hall. It wasn’t locked, and the place looked as if it had only a handful of tenants. Damien was listed on the top floor, and she’d pressed the button. Nothing happened, so she pressed again.
She’d wanted to leave. It had been a stupid idea to come here in the first place, to storm into the night in a white-hot rage to confront a man who might very well be the killer himself. Alone at night, in the rain and darkness, she’d committed the unpardonably stupid act of exposing herself to someone who might be a monster. As the reality of the situation hit her panic fought to overtake her—but she refused to let it. Once she gave in to fear, it made her vulnerable, and there were all sorts of creatures who preyed on vulnerability, not the least of which was the Venice Ripper.
She wasn’t going to see the Ripper, she reminded herself sternly, squashing down her uneasiness. She was going to confront the Los Angeles reporter who’d put her life in danger for the sake of his by-line, and she knew just what she’d find. Some cynical, middle-aged Lou Grant clone, with clothes that were too young for him and an attitude.
The elevator still worked, though it moved with agonizing slowness and there was one lone light bulb in the hall. Whoever was peering out at her from behind that crack in the door wouldn’t get a very good look at her.
“Who the hell are you?” The voice in the dark was rough, raspy. Familiar. It was the voice on the answering machine.
“Don’t you know who I am?” she asked, vibrating with fury. “You ruin my life for the sake of your career, and you don’t even bother to find out who it is you’ve destroyed?”
“Spare me the melodrama,” the man said wearily. “As far as I know, I haven’t ruined anybody’s life for the last three hours. State your business and leave.”
“I’m Elizabeth Stride,” she said. “And since you were kind enough to furnish a serial killer with my name and photograph, not to mention a good inkling of my address, I think we could safely say that you’ve ruined my life.”
“Hell,” the man said. He hadn’t bothered to slide the security chain on. He opened the door. “You may as well come in.”
For a moment she didn’t move, surveying him warily. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. Her images of an over-age yuppie had vanished at the sight of the faded grandeur of his apartment. She’d been expecting some crusty, hard-drinking editor with a beer belly and a hangover. This man was the farthest thing from that cliché that she’d ever seen in her life.
He was too thin. His dark hair was too long—not trendy long, just shaggy and forgotten long. He needed a shave; he needed a decent meal; he needed two weeks of solid sleep. He looked at her out of those wary, haunted eyes and something deep inside her came achingly, painfully to life.
“You don’t look like a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter,” she said finally, stepping inside his apartment.
“Oh yeah?” he said, pushing the door closed behind her. “And what am I supposed to look like?”
“A yuppie,” she said, looking around her with barely concealed fascination. His apartment was cluttered, shabby, bordering on derelict, with stacks of paper and dirty dishes everywhere. The place smelled like stale cigarette, and rain, and despair, and she wanted to open the windows and let the night rain blow through. She didn’t move.
“I’m downwardly mobile,” he said, walking past her and flipping over some papers on his littered coffee table.
“I can tell. What is that?”
“None of your damned business. Trust me, you don’t want to look,” he said, flinging himself down on the sofa and stretching his long legs out in front of him. He gazed up at her, and there was a challenging look in his dark eyes. “As a matter of fact, they’re police photos of the Ripper’s latest victim. In color,” he added, obviously relishing the effect his words would have on her.
She swallowed, trying to appear unruffled. “Why did you do it?” she asked, looking around the cluttered room for a place to sit. She finally settled on one of the least-occupied chairs, perching in front of a pile of books.
There was no mistaking the look of momentary horror on his face. “Do what?” he asked warily.
“Run that article. The police were trying to keep it quiet about the masks and you promised them you wouldn’t say anything. Now that you’ve blown the one advantage they had it will be impossible to separate the loonies from the real leads. They could have copycat killers. Damn it, my masks could turn up on every corpse on the West Coast!” Her voice rose to an anxious pitch.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, reaching for his cigarettes, and she noticed with surprise that his long, elegant hands had a slight tremor. “You probably haven’t made enough masks in your lifetime for the number of people murdered in L.A. every day. You’ve just got enough for the Ripper.”
“And you.”
It startled him. He followed her gaze to the two masks hanging on the wall. She’d noticed them with an eerie sense of recognition the moment she’d walked in. They were two of her earlier ones, and two of her best. One was the face of a querulous old man, an oddly humorous mask that had always amused her. The other was a clown, with orange hair, bulbous nose, garish smile—and desperation in his curved cheeks. The fact that she approved of Damien’s choices made her even more uneasy.
“So the Ripper and I have something in common,” Damien said wearily. “I’m trying to find out what else.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m trying to find the Ripper. The police are doing a rotten job of it. The bodies pile up, and no one gets any closer to stopping him. About the only person who’s benefiting from all this is you. At least you’ve got a steady market for your masks. Hell, they’ll probably skyrocket after people read my article.”
She controlled herself with an effort. She was a physical person, given to hugs and extravagant gestures, but she had never been tempted to sock someone. Until now. “You’re a sick bastard,” she said, in a tight, angry voice.
“So they tell me. Listen, I’m sorry if I put you at risk. But I think you’re a fool if you underestimate the killer. He’s smart enough to know whose masks he was using. It wasn’t a random choice. He knows who made those masks, and he knows who and where you are.”
“Then why hasn’t he bothered me?”
He shrugged, taking his time lighting his unfiltered cigarette, blowing the smoke in a steady stream directly at her. “Beats me. I said he was sm
art, I didn’t say he was sane. My guess is, he’s not particularly interested in you. You’re not a prostitute, and your masks help him.”
“But why my masks? Why not someone else’s? I’m not the only mask-maker in the L.A. area.”
He stared at her. “Well,” he said measuredly, “they’re nice masks.”
“Stuff it,” she said sharply. “I don’t need compliments, I need the truth. You brought this out in the open for your own twisted reasons. You can damned well explain.”
“My reasons aren’t twisted. I want to find and stop the Ripper before he kills again. I’d consider that a fairly admirable purpose.” His tone was wryly cynical, belying his own noble words. “And I imagine the reason he chose your masks, apart from their artistic merit, is your name.”
“Lizzie?” she said, momentarily confused. “You think that means something?”
“No, sweetheart.” He was taking his time, and she couldn’t rid herself of the notion that he was playing with her. He took another puff of the cigarette, delaying it. “The original Jack the Ripper murdered five women for sure, possibly more. Those women were ugly middle-aged prostitutes, while our boy prefers ‘em younger and prettier. But the thought remains the same. Jack killed Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Polly Nichols and Mary Kelly. And a drunken forty-three-year-old prostitute named Elizabeth Stride.”
She was going to throw up. It probably wouldn’t disturb him, she thought—as a reporter he would have seen worse things. She swayed for a moment, and she wondered if she was going to do something as impossibly Victorian as fainting. He surged off the sagging couch, dropping his cigarette, and she felt those long, elegant hands on her, pushing her back down in the chair, shoving the books on the floor, pushing her head between her knees. “Take a deep breath,” he ordered in a remote voice.