“Richard, I know you’re in there. It’s Jennifer. Open up.”
She kept on banging until she was convinced he wasn’t home. He could be anywhere. But the manager said he often went to the cemetery in the morning. It wasn’t far.
She parked on a side street and walked through the gateway, past a sign half obscured by dripping foliage. Traffic hummed on the Santa Monica Freeway, immediately to the north. A homeless man wheeled a shopping cart past the mausoleum, his head bent low.
No one else was in sight. She spent a long moment looking in every direction, but saw no sign of Richard.
There wasn’t any reason to linger. Still, she made her way farther into the graveyard.
Woodlawn Cemetery dated to the early 1800s. Buried here was Venice’s founder, Abbot Kinney, a tobacco mogul who patterned the town after its namesake, complete with Italianate palazzos and sixteen miles of canals navigated by gondolas. “Venice-of-America” was meant to be a cultural showcase, but the public wanted carnivals, roller coasters, and sideshow attractions, and Venice became “the Coney Island of the Pacific.” In the Depression most of the canals were filled in and paved over. Only six were spared. Now they had been dredged and reclaimed, and with amazing speed Venice was being transformed into something close to what Kinney intended—a pleasure garden for a moneyed elite.
Jennifer went past rows of Gothic headstones into a section reserved for bronze plaques set in the earth. Two of the plaques marked the places where her mother and father lay.
Marjorie Ellen Silence. Aldrich Graham Silence.
She rarely came here. Now that she stood over the graves, she wasn’t sure what to do. Say a prayer? She didn’t know any. She contented herself with a whispered, “Rest in peace.” Not the most original sentiment, but she meant it. There had not been much peace for her parents. Aldrich was shattered by mental illness. His suicide left Marjorie an emotional wreck, prone to insomnia and crying jags. She could be a harsh disciplinarian. She and Richard quarreled constantly. Jennifer sometimes thought Marjorie saw too much of Aldrich in her son, and the recognition pained her. Or did it scare her?
Richard was too young to escape the House of Silence. Jennifer was not. She partied nightly. Venice in the early ’90s was still “the sewer by the sea,” as locals called it. No McMansions back then, only decaying buildings and dry canals lined with trash. Drugs were everywhere. At fifteen she was doing coke and speed. At sixteen she ran away from home—for good, she thought.
A girlfriend drove her to San Francisco. They were going to live in Haight-Ashbury in a shared apartment. Or so they assumed until they learned what the rent was like. Her friend ran out on her a few days later, taking the car. Jennifer was alone. She could call home, but she was too scared and too stubborn. She ate at a soup kitchen, cadged dollar bills in public parks. She found a place to live—the utility room in a shopping center, where she could sneak in and out without being seen by the custodial staff. Or perhaps they did see her, but let her stay out of pity. After two months of this, she was a ragged, dirty, emaciated mess.
Then she was raped.
She never knew who did it. On a rainy evening he ambushed her beneath an overpass. It was dark, and she was scared and crying as he jerked down her pants and put himself in her. His cock was flaccid, and he barely got off. He blamed her for struggling too much. He had a knife. She remembered the hot wire of pain along her left arm, then the splash of his sneakers as he ran away.
He’d opened her arm almost from elbow to wrist, a long red slit, oozing blood. She pulled up her pants and applied pressure to her arm, trying to stanch the flow. It didn’t work. She hid inside the mall till closing time, then found a pay phone. With her last few coins she called home. Richard answered. She didn’t know what to say, except that she was in bad shape and she didn’t think she’d be coming back. “I love you,” she said. “Tell Mom I’m sorry.” She hung up while he was asking where she was.
Then she found the utility room and crawled inside to die.
She bled out slowly. The wound was long but not deep. There was time to call for an ambulance, but she didn’t want an ambulance. After the E.R. patched her up, they would reunite her with her mother. She couldn’t go back. It was easier to die.
But she didn’t die, and she had Richard to thank for it.
She blinked, coming out of these memories. Slowly she turned away from the graves and headed back to her car. A folded flyer, a menu for a Thai restaurant, was wedged beneath the wiper blades. Something made her open it. Written across it in a brisk angular hand were six words, all in capitals.
I KNOW YOU HAVE MY BOOK.
She felt nothing at first, only numb unreality, as if the flyer were a figment in a dream. The numbness lasted just long enough for her to identify it as a defense mechanism against shock. With that thought, she snapped out of it.
She jerked around, looking everywhere at once, but whoever had left the note was gone. Or out of sight—hiding, watching her.
Her breath was coming hard and fast, and there was a funny weakness in her knees. She fumbled the car key out of her pocket and got the driver’s door open and slipped behind the wheel. She pulled the door shut, locking it.
The note shook in her hand. Over and over she read those same six words. They shouted at her.
But did they shout in Richard’s voice?
fourteen
She arrived home at 9:30, after picking up a replacement bulb for her UV lamp. Her message machine was blinking; Draper had called to say that he and a pathologist would be at the house at eleven to examine the human remains. She wondered why he hadn’t tried her cell, then realized she’d set it on vibrate during her dinner with Maura and had forgotten to change it back. It must have been buzzing away in her glove compartment.
There was still an hour and a half until his arrival. She installed the bulb, switched on the UV light, and studied the flyleaf pasted to the diary’s inside front cover. The signature, if there was one, failed to fluoresce; it remained hidden under a thick coat of black ink.
There was another test she could try. Sometimes concealed ink would emit infrared light when UV light was used as an exciter source. The technique was called IR fluorescence.
She got out her digital camera and fitted the lens adapter with an infrared filter. With the camera mounted on a tripod, she took a time exposure of the flyleaf. She transferred the purple-red image to her laptop and converted it to grayscale.
Success. The technique had brought out the canceled writing.
It was a signature, neatly written in a steady hand: Edward Hare.
Since the early pages of the diary had been removed, she guessed that Hare had begun the journal with no expectation that it would contain anything incriminating. When his thoughts had turned in a criminal direction, he must have torn out the initial pages and obliterated his signature.
It was probably his real name, then. Not an alias.
And not her great-grandfather’s name. She should have felt relieved about that, but the diarist had written that he was traveling to America under an assumed name. That name might have been Graham Silence.
Silence—an appropriate name for a man keeping secrets.
She flipped through the indexes of her Ripper books but found no mention of Edward Hare. Next stop, the Internet. She typed “Jack the Ripper and Edward Hare” into a search engine. No hits.
The name “Edward Hare” alone brought up a few hundred hits, but nothing that seemed relevant.
“Jack the Ripper” on its own brought up nearly two million pages. Scrolling through the first twenty, she found a site called Ripperwalk, billed as “a comprehensive guide to Ripperology.” She searched the site for “Edward Hare” without success.
A large part of Ripperwalk was devoted to message boards. She created an account, using the screen name Jeneratrix, and started a thread titled “Possible Suspect: Edward Hare?”
Is anyone familiar with a possible suspect in the Ripper murders n
amed Edward Hare? He lived in London during the appropriate time period and may also have spent time in the United States. I believe he was a teacher at a boys’ school. Any information would be appreciated.
She posted the message and went offline. It was a long shot, but she had nothing to lose.
Then she turned to the paper left on her windshield.
She didn’t want to deal with it. But she had to.
She spread out the note on the examination table. She’d already observed the angular writing, slanted forty degrees from the vertical. Extreme angularity was a sign of aggression.
The note was written in haste. The words were slashed into the flyer, almost spilling off the right-hand side. The characters were printed entirely in uppercase, large and narrow, irregularly spaced. The writer had been bearing down hard. Heavy pressure could indicate an antisocial personality defined by power and control issues. The period at the end of the sentence was pounded into the paper, dimpling the other side.
Speed. Emotional intensity. Anger. A demand to be heard.
The writing implement had been a ballpoint pen. Black ink. The writer hadn’t planned to jot down the note, or he would have brought his own paper. It had been an impulse, prompted by the availability of the flyer. All he’d needed was a pen, and lots of people carried pens.
The size of the letters represented a demand for attention. The varying size and spacing of the words also held meaning. The words I and my were larger than the rest, and my was widely distanced from the words on either side. Egocentrism, narcissism. I, me, mine were the center of the writer’s life. Well, that only narrowed it down to everybody in L.A.
Some graphologists believed narrow letters were indicative of a criminal personality. She didn’t necessarily endorse that view, but she did find the tall, steeply sloped characters suggestive of an agitated mind.
There was little roundness in the writing. Even letters like w and u had been rendered in crisp straight lines, harsh and angular. The lines were slashed into the paper in quick, angry strokes, like the cuts of a knife.
The choice to write the note in capital letters could suggest prudence on the writer’s part. It would be impossible to compare the note to any ordinary handwriting. A decision to disguise his identity argued for consciousness of guilt.
She pushed her chair back from the table and took in the note as a whole. It consisted of two lines:
I KNOW YOU
HAVE MY BOOK.
Although it was one statement, the first three words could be separated from the rest. I know you suggested a personal relationship. Either the writer desired to create the impression of closeness, even intimacy, or he actually was close to her. Richard was always saying he was smarter than his sister. He liked to play mind games. This might be one more.
The second line, have my book, placed a strong emphasis on possessiveness. He could have written found my book or are hiding my book, but he’d used the word have. That was his focus.
And it was my book. The diary purportedly belonged to Jack the Ripper. So what did the writer mean by the word my? Did he think he was Jack the Ripper? Or did he mean that, as a descendant of Jack the Ripper, he was entitled to the book?
Richard had inherited the family papers. The diary could be said to belong to him.
Except he didn’t know about the diary. No one did.
No one.
It was five minutes to eleven. She filed the note, closed her laptop, and put the diary back into its tin, securing the clasp. The book had survived for a long time in that container, and she was prepared to leave it there a little longer.
She almost placed the box with her other papers but hesitated. If Richard—or someone—was aware of the diary, she might be better off hiding it. After a moment’s thought she carried it into the pantry and placed it on a shelf behind a row of spray cleaners.
She was waiting on the porch when Draper arrived. He greeted her briskly, saying that the pathologist was following him in his own vehicle. She led him inside.
“I’ve never been here,” he said, looking around. “But I guess you knew that.”
“Is it everything you expected it to be?”
“I didn’t have any particular expectations. But the place suits you. It’s...reserved.”
“You should see my bedroom.” She was thinking of her collage of erotic antique postcards. Then she realized how it sounded. “Um, you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Just that it might not be what you expect. Not that you expect anything...” This was not going well.
He rescued her with a change of subject. “I got your e-mail. You may have given us some usable leads.”
“Don’t thank me.”
“I won’t—unless the leads pan out.”
“Maybe not even then.”
“Maybe not.” He was smiling.
“So who are you looking at?” she asked.
“Certain people.”
“Now who’s being reserved?”
“Being reserved is a good thing. It’s a sign of maturity. Toddlers and criminals never hold back.”
“This is California, Roy. No one’s supposed to hold back.”
“That’s what makes the two of us so unusual.”
She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him that she, at least, did not hold back. Then she thought of the tin in the pantry.
She was cautious. She kept things to herself. Her years of stifled communication in the House of Silence had taught her to be wary, self-contained.
And he was the same way. Yesterday when he’d opened up about his failed relationship, it had been a rare moment, a risk.
If he could take a risk, so could she. She could ask him out. At the very least she’d prove she wasn’t quite as reserved as he thought.
“You never did tell me her name,” she said.
“Whose name?”
“The woman you were with for three years.”
“Diana.”
“Was she reserved?”
“Just the opposite. That was the problem. She and I wanted different things. She wanted...excitement. Fun.”
“You don’t like fun?”
“I like catching bad guys.”
“There’s more to life than work.”
“Is there?”
“Well, there ought to be.” She took a breath. “You know, would it be crazy if—”
The telephone rang, and the moment was lost.
“I’ll take it in the kitchen,” she said, worried that it might be Maura calling for an update on the case. “You can let the ME in.”
She answered the phone and heard a cultured baritone. “Good morning. This is Harrison Sirk.”
“Oh. Hello, Mr. Sirk.”
“Maura Lowell put me in touch with you. You’re looking into some darker aspects of the history of Venice, I understand.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m happy to be of service. Is it convenient for you to drop by my house? Say, this afternoon? If you’re free, that is.”
“I’m surprised you’re free.”
“I have nothing on schedule but my usual Roman orgy of unbridled debauchery, which I am happy to postpone if I may render a service to a lady. A different kind of service, let me add.”
She jotted down his address on the whiteboard in the kitchen, promising to be there at two.
“Excellent. I look forward to a stimulating conversation on a subject of mutual interest.”
“So you’re interested in Venice’s history, too?”
“That wasn’t the subject I had in mind.”
“What was it, then?”
“Why, Jack the Ripper, of course.”
“Maura told you that?”
“Not at all. She didn’t say a thing.”
“Then how—”
But he had already hung up.
fifteen
She was halfway down the cellar stairs when she heard Casey’s voice from below. He must
have accompanied the ME. As the watch commander, he had every right to be here. Still, she felt annoyed with him, though she wasn’t sure why.
Draper stood by the crypt, flashlight in hand. Casey was next to him, while a man in civilian clothes, down on his knees, peered into the hole.
“You know Sergeant Wilkes, of course,” Draper said.
Casey tossed off a wave, but he wasn’t smiling. She had a feeling he was still angry about yesterday’s argument.
Draper added with a nod at the kneeling man, “And this is Dr. Alan Parkinson. We’re lucky to have him. It’s supposed to be his day off.”
“When the sergeant told me what he’d seen down here”—Parkinson spoke in a high, thin voice—“I had to take a look. Something like this doesn’t come along very often.”
He sounded excited, and though Jennifer understood his curiosity, she couldn’t help resenting him for it.
She looked past him, into the sepulcher. They were still there, of course—the bones of the dead. A few small skittering bugs played in the flashlight’s glow.
“You know what they say about L.A.,” Casey deadpanned. “Everybody’s got a few skeletons in the closet.”
Draper looked at him. “You’ve been waiting to use that line.”
“Well, yeah.”
Draper took out a pocket camera and snapped some photos, the flashbulb illuminating the remains.
“Are you calling in SID?” Jennifer asked him. The criminalists of the Scientific Investigation Division didn’t work as many cases in real life as they did on TV, but a multiple murder ought to ensure their participation.
“Only if this turns out to be a crime scene.”
“You mean, it might be a family burial plot or something?”
“No chance of that,” Parkinson said. “These are homicide victims. Look here.” He fingered the tip of a humerus bone. “See that angular fracture? That’s a tool mark. He cut them at the joints.”
“They were dismembered?”
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