Casey turned to her. “Like hell you are.”
“I may need to talk to him. If he tries to resist, I may be able to talk him down.”
“You think this is a movie? In real life we don’t bring in the suspect’s sister to get through to him. You’re staying here. End of discussion.”
He motioned to one of the patrolmen, a lanky kid with P2 stripes.
“Sullivan. You and Hanes are posted outside. One in front, one in back. Watch the exits. Anybody tries getting out through a window, grab him. We’ll give you periodic updates on tac five. Otherwise we’ll stay off the air as much as possible, and you do the same. And keep an eye on Miss Silence here. She is not to enter the hotel.”
Jennifer bristled. “You don’t need to treat me like a child.”
Casey ignored her. “Cox, Jorgensen, we’re going in.”
Sullivan sent his partner around to the rear and took up a position where he could watch the lobby door. Casey and Draper led the other two patrol officers up the steps.
“We don’t know what this mope is carrying,” Casey said to the uniforms. “If he resists, light him up.” He indicated the taser carried by one of the men, who nodded.
“Lot of trouble just to roust a bum,” one of the cops groused.
Jennifer felt a flash of anger that anyone would refer to Richard that way. Then she remembered that he was something much worse.
Casey produced a set of keys, one of which unlocked the hotel’s front door. It wasn’t unusual for cops to have master keys to buildings in a high-crime district.
“Watch your six,” Casey said.
The men entered, the door closing behind them. Jennifer moved close to Sullivan, listening to updates on the tactical frequency. In the ground-floor windows she saw movement. The police were checking one room at a time.
Casey’s voice crackled over Sullivan’s radio. “First floor clear. Heading up.”
She surveyed the scene. Maura and other civic boosters might talk about Venice’s comeback, but there was no sign of it here. Shopping-card people and zoned-out addicts wandered the street and adjacent alleys, scrounging in trash cans. Rap music throbbed from the coffee shop in a steady stream of expletives. Next door to the café was a tattoo parlor, and beyond it was an S & M shop, its storefront windows displaying nude mannequins in bondage poses. An abandoned movie theater completed the row of buildings, the letters on its marquee spelling out Goodbye Cruel World.
The concrete promenade called Ocean Front Walk was bustling with even more activity than usual for a warm Friday evening. The overflow from the boardwalk was swelling the crowd of lookie-loos. She wished no one were watching. She didn’t want Richard’s arrest to be a public spectacle. But of course everything in his life would soon be public knowledge, fodder for the 24-hour news channels and the tabloids.
“We’re on the second floor,” Casey reported. “Found a squatter. Not our guy. We’re sending him down to the lobby and proceeding to the third floor.”
She couldn’t endure just waiting. To distract herself, she scanned the crowd. She saw a drag queen in a feather boa, a shirtless guy with a swastika tattoo on his chest, a pair of tourists with fidgety children. A stoner grooving to his iPod. An obese woman with a faded T-shirt stretched taut across her boobs, bearing the slogan Meat is Murder. At the back of the crowd, a nervous figure in a hooded gray sweatshirt, swaying rhythmically.
“Hotel’s clear.” Casey’s voice on the radio. “I want Officer Sullivan to bring Jennifer Silence to meet us on the fourth floor. We think we found the room the suspect was using. Maybe she can confirm that the items in the room belong to him.”
Sullivan escorted her inside the Fortezza. The lobby was dark except for Sullivan’s flashlight. The beam passed over a ragged man clutching a backpack and looking lost. The squatter from the second floor.
At the foot of the staircase, Jennifer saw an old poster captured in the wavering circle of light. Hot salt water in every room as a therapeutic bonus, the sign boasted. Every amenity available in Venice-of-America, birthplace of the American Renaissance.
That was a long time ago.
They climbed the stairs. The banisters were grimed with filth, and there was a bad smell coming from the carpeted treads.
“You shouldn’t have to be in here,” Sullivan said with quiet solicitude.
“I’ve been in worse places.” She was thinking of the utility room in San Francisco.
The odor was worse in the fourth floor hallway, a potpourri of mildew and urine. They passed a row of doors, the room numbers written in black Magic Marker. Halfway down the corridor they found Draper and Casey in one of the rooms. The door had been forced—no great trick, given the cheap lock and wobbly frame.
Jennifer stopped just inside the doorway. She’d thought the Dogtown apartment was bad, but it was a luxury suite compared to this nasty hole. The bed lay against a wall, near a window looking out on a fire escape. A glance into the bathroom revealed an unflushed toilet and a shower stall without a curtain or shower head. The room reeked of trapped body odor.
This was what he’d been reduced to. She wanted to cry.
“Is the stuff his?” Casey asked, reminding her why she was here.
Sullivan handed over his flashlight. She examined the items left behind in the room. On a rickety chair lay a library book about the Illuminati and Freemasons. Conspiracy theories. She flipped through it and found copious underlining and spidery marginal notes. Richard’s handwriting, she thought.
On the bureau, a dilapidated antique that listed drunkenly, she found a few other items. Some candy bars. One of the wanted posters put out by C.A.S.T., ripped off a utility pole or fence, the suspect’s computer-generated face slashed out.
And heartbreakingly, or perhaps ominously, a Polaroid of their father, the colors long ago faded to purple. In the picture, Aldrich Silence was smiling, but there was something strange about his eyes, something indefinable but wrong.
“They’re his things,” she said.
Draper seemed unsurprised. “This was the only room that showed signs of occupancy, other than the one the squatter was using.”
She looked around her. “It’s so awful,” she said softly, speaking mostly to herself.
***
The daylight was nearly gone by the time she left the hotel with Draper and Casey. The crowd of onlookers had thinned. But the drag queen was still there, and the stoner with the iPod, and the person in the hooded sweatshirt, almost lost to sight in the gathering dusk.
She paused, focusing on that sweatshirt. She had seen it before.
Sandra Price’s rally, in the gymnasium. The nervous figure rocking in a distant corner of the bleachers.
Richard had attended that event. In disguise. He’d told her so.
Casey was saying something, possibly to her, possibly to Draper. She didn’t hear it. His voice was far away, and all around her was an unnatural quiet, like the stillness in the streets after the earthquake.
She took a step toward the onlookers, walking slowly, her arms at her sides, her head lowered, sending every body-language signal of disinterest. The hooded figure didn’t move, didn’t react.
She remembered Sandra Price saying that an unknown person in a hood had been spotted near one of the crime scenes. It must be the disguise Richard used when he went trolling for victims, or when he spied on her.
As he was doing now.
She entered the crowd, slipping past a large man with a porn-star mustache and a skinny kid fingering a GameBoy. Still the hooded figure hadn’t stirred. She threaded among the spectators, closing in. The face beneath the hood was invisible, a shadow face. She thought of Abberline’s avatar, the faceless man.
She was less than ten feet away when the figure broke into a run.
“Richard!” she screamed. “Stop!”
She ran in pursuit.
He covered ground awkwardly in an ungainly loping stride. Though he had a head start, she thought she could catch him. Th
en he veered onto the wide concrete strip of the boardwalk and cut past startled pedestrians, racing north. She followed, but in the sudden crush of people she lost sight of him. A banner was strung along the shop fronts: March Festival. That was why the crowd was so heavy—one of the numerous open-air events sponsored by the city.
She glimpsed him once, the gray hood bobbing in the sea of heads.
Behind her, Casey appeared. “It’s him,” she gasped, pointing. “Gray sweatshirt.”
Casey gave chase. People darted out of his way, opening a path for a cop in uniform, and she had a momentary hope that he might catch up with his quarry.
Then he stopped. He reached down for something crumpled on the ground. As she ran up to him, she saw that it was the gray sweatshirt. He’d shed it as he ran.
She scanned the promenade in the sunset’s dimming afterglow. Richard had vanished.
“You’re sure it was him?” Casey asked.
She nodded.
He keyed his radio and reported that the subject had been seen outside the building. “Last seen northbound on foot on Ocean Front Walk. Too many peds—I lost him in the crowd.”
Draper ran up as Casey asked dispatch to request all available Pacific units in the vicinity to proceed to Sunset and Speedway.
“You think they’ll get him?” she asked Draper.
He shook his head. “Too many places he can run. Side streets, alleys, the beach, other red-tagged buildings...”
She nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right.”
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
She turned and saw a teenager with pierced lips, pierced nostrils, pierced eyebrows, and a surprisingly respectful expression.
“That guy you were chasing dropped this.” He handed her a bracelet. “What’d he do, boost it off you?”
She stared at the object, catching a gleam of copper and turquoise. She didn’t answer.
“Jennifer?” Draper asked.
She looked at the teenager. “Thanks,” she managed to say. “Thanks very much.”
Casey was watching her now. “Is it yours?”
She shook her head. Couldn’t speak.
“Talk to us, Jen,” Draper said.
“It’s not mine. It belongs—it belongs to Maura. Maura Lowell.”
“The woman he used to go out with?”
“Yes.”
Casey shifted his weight. “Maybe he stole it from her, back when they were seeing each other.”
“No. She just got it. She was wearing it this morning. There’s no way Richard could have this.”
No one spoke for a moment.
“You told us she’s a friend of yours,” Draper said, his voice low.
Jennifer nodded, still staring at the bracelet, unable to look away. “My best friend,” she whispered, realizing it only now.
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. M
aura 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.
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