Jaclyn the Ripper (6 page)

Her cell jangled.

Lieutenant Holland was on the phone telling her to come back and pick up her stuff. He'd scheduled a strategy meeting at the office after lunch and wanted “everybody's theories about the crime,” the subtext being that he'd already run fingerprints, footprints and trace evidence through the NCIS database and had come up with nothing.

“Was I wrong about the chromosomes?”

“No.” He hung up.

She smiled, vindicated.

When she got back to the crime scene, her colleagues had already left, replaced by coroner's deputies, their sardonic humor echoing in the rotunda. She tuned them out, packed up and wheeled her kit down the steps of the arrival plaza to her car. She paused thoughtfully. The car annoyed her. It was a used bone-white Mercury Milan with the usual stuff including iPod and GPS, but the longer she drove it, the more indifferent she became. It was just another modern appliance, and right now, she hated it for that. She wanted a world with personality, a world with sensibilities.

So—desiring one more taste of what must have been a glorious past—she put her stuff in the trunk, then went back through the rotunda and along the long, empty courtyard, appreciating the sound from the fountains, melodies that blocked the ugly roar from the 405 less than a mile away. She went inside the West Pavilion, gathered herself, stood in silence before the
H. G. WELLS—A MAN BEFORE HIS TIME
banner, half-wishing she'd been born in the nineteenth century. A sigh, and then she strolled inside. Ignoring the rope barriers, she touched red-leather original editions atop display cases that held manuscripts and “picshuas.” Aside from his books, articles and inventions, Wells habitually drew crude cartoons that were droll, witty commentaries on little moments in life deserving of some sort of recognition before becoming history obscura.

As she passed
The Utopia
in the center gallery, she gave it a patronizing smile, yet didn't go inside, not interested in failed inventions, though she gave Wells credit for trying. She paused before a giant photograph over the archway to the gallery and studied the man. In a six-by-six-foot heavy metal frame, Wells appeared larger than life; he was quite the handsome author at twenty-nine, smiling and looking off at some “significance,” his dark eyes twinkling mischievously above a bushy mustache. Yet he seemed filled with self-importance, and she liked him better in a smaller display of photographs. At forty-five, he still had the dark hair and mustache, the same disarming smile, but his face was thicker and not so angular. Above all, he seemed both wise
and accessible. He had a father's face and was actually looking at the photographer as if sharing an intimate moment.

Suddenly, the world went white.

Amber gasped and staggered back, threw her hands out to protect herself. Blinded, she lurched into a display case, felt its glass top, then its side as she eased herself down to the floor and wondered what had happened. Had a bomb hit the Getty? There hadn't been an explosion—it was more like everything had been erased. She grabbed her cell phone and was trying to find the right keys for 911 when her vision returned. Relieved, she glanced in all directions. Nothing had changed. Everything was as—No. everything was not the same.

A blue glow from the center gallery flickered on the arches in the pavilion, then quickly faded. Astonished, she was slowly getting up when she heard someone running across the lobby. She saw a man in a dark, Edwardian-style suit who looked like he'd stepped out of a period-piece English movie. The man hit the door at full speed, disappeared outside.

No. It's not possible. That didn't just happen.

Did it?

H. G. Wells stopped short on the museum courtyard, struck by its simple, clean beauty, its fountains and celebration of water as an art form, its graceful Mexican cypress trees. Then he sagged against the travertine stone of the West Pavilion, realizing with horror that he was in broad daylight. He pulled out his pocket watch; it read 9:48
A.M.
, confirming that something had gone terribly wrong. He had set the Destination Indicator for 12:01
A.M.
—the same time that Amy had arrived—and here it was morning instead of night and over nine hours later. Granted, there was no absolute time in a universe without boundaries, but to arrive that far beyond one's destination was preposterous, especially after a journey of a mere 104 years.
Perhaps leap years confused the autoclock. No matter. I'll have to fix the blasted thing. Yes, but what about Amy?
He hadn't seen a blood trail leading away from the machine, which meant she must have bandaged her wound properly and was all right. He squared his shoulders and started back inside to check the calibration on the Destination Indicator, then heard voices and turned. Security guards were at the other end of the courtyard. He flattened himself against the building, looked behind him, saw stairs. He went down two at a time, not certain if the guards had
seen him or how he would explain himself. On the second landing, he paused to catch his breath and automatically felt his pockets, making sure he hadn't forgotten Amy's purse or the special key. He had no desire to be lost in a year he knew nothing about, that before had existed only in his imagination.

His hands were greasy from putting the bicycle lock back on the central gearing wheel. He wiped them off on his trousers, glanced up at slate-gray skies. Aside from the stone and glass complex, the immense sculptured space that surrounded him, he could have been in London, but for a strange, persistent roar that came from beyond the museum. It could have been a river, but wasn't; it was so loud it drowned out a soft breeze through the trees. He vaguely recognized the sound from 1979, envisioned a stampede of motor cars nearby, hoped he was wrong.

Where am I? More important, where is Amy . . . ? Hopefully, she has found a modern doctor who has waved some enlightened machine over her wound and instantly sealed it.

He glanced warily behind him, then descended the stairs to a lawn, took a path through trees to a giant, circular garden that resembled an amphitheater featuring concentric circles of flowers in its center. He wondered if he were in some symmetrical Stonehenge, was soon lost on another path through exotic bushes, flowers and trees, bridges over brooks that played melodies with water, and nothing was sharp or angular. Like the stone-and-glass creation behind him, the garden was an homage to the curve, and he continued on, filled with joy to find himself amid such futuristic beauty and solitude. It settled over his ragged psyche and soothed him, and despite the absence of Amy, his spirits soared.
No Philistines, no twenty-first-century technowizards of war and alienation could have created this remarkable environment. Only enlightened artists and architects have held sway here. New men, citizens of the world who have discovered a way to harness the technology that mocked and almost killed yours truly thirty-one years ago. How marvelous. An enormous, sprawling museum that stands as a shrine to the possibilities of the human condition.

A nasty, mechanical growl shattered his reverie.

He turned and stepped back under a giant tree fern. A squat brown
figure in dirty clothes topped by goggles and a sweat-stained cap with “L.A.” on it worn backward came down the walkway blowing leaves, the greasy engine on his back making him resemble a creature from Jules Verne. Only when the figure stopped and idled the blower to let him pass did Wells realize that he was actually human and not some worker-android. He stepped forward and shouted over the popping of the engine.

“My good man, do you have the time?”

The man shook his head, shrugged and grinned.

“Do you know what day it is?”

The man lifted his goggles.
“No hablo.”

Exasperated, H.G. spoke louder still—as if volume somehow increased comprehension. “DO—YOU—KNOW—WHERE—I—AM—?”

“No hablo.”

The man detoured around Wells, continued down the walkway, his blower once again at flank speed.

H.G. frowned. He considered himself cosmopolitan in that he was fluent in French, could speak Italian and hold his own in a German or Russian restaurant, but he'd never had the time or inclination to learn Spanish. Perhaps it was the Moorish influence on the Iberians? He stopped abruptly; his eyebrows rose.

“My God, am I in Mexico?”

Concerned, he started uphill, hurried to get away from the annoying sound of the blower, asked himself why this worker—if indeed he was Mexican—needed to waste his time with mindless tasks.
If they can design such a wonderful space, why not engineer Mother Nature so that she need not shed leaves at all?
He looked behind him. The man was zigzagging across the lawn now, wielding his blower as if it were a broadsword and he were fighting some invisible foe.

Bewildered, H.G. left the garden, climbed yet another flight of stairs, and emerged before the museum restaurant. He was relieved its signs were in English, noticed a row of newspaper racks similar to those he had seen in 1979 and squinted through the plastic: “
The Los Angeles Times
. June 20, 2010. Sunday edition. Westside.” He didn't bother with the headlines.

So I'm in Los Angeles, am I?

His breath whooshed out in a distinctive rush, a habit begun when he was a student at the Normal School of Science, an expression of wonder at knowledge or discovery. At first his classmates had thought it funny, then came to rely on H.G.'s “whooshes” for their own discoveries.

He skirted the restaurant and descended to the arrival plaza, staying close to the walls, in the shadows. TV news vans were double-parked in front of police cars, and camera crews straggled in and out of the rotunda. Wells had seen this in 1979 as well, and figured a special event must be going on inside which would explain why this spectacular monument to twenty-first-century man was closed. The ribbons of yellow tape waving in the breeze didn't register. In fact, after his haphazard tour of this wonderful museum and garden, Wells was so enthused about the future, so glad he'd come, so proud that perhaps he hadn't been wrong about mankind, it never occurred to him that this “special event” was the scene of a particularly vicious crime, committed by a psychopath from his own time.

He considered Amy. Her parents lived in San Francisco—if they were still alive—so more than likely that was where he would find her. Since she was from the twentieth century, he wasn't worried about her ability to function in this world. She'd been gone for only thirty-one years. He was more concerned about himself and how he would in fact get to San Francisco.

For lack of an alternative, he started walking, but paused on the other side of the arrival plaza at an empty information booth and learned that the space-age complex before him was the J. Paul Getty Museum. He was about to take a brochure when he saw the tram. Enthralled, he half-ran to the Upper Station, boarded the lead car and hunted for an ignition switch—as in the motorcars he'd admired in 1979—thinking that one quick turn would engage the tram's engine and move him down the hill. He hadn't realized that the tram was pilotless, like a “people mover” from one of his “scientific romances.” Nor had he seen the operator behind the tinted glass windows of the station wondering what in hell he was doing.

Amber had.

As the operator came out the station door intent on removing Wells from the tram, Amber stopped him with her police ID.

“We're part of the investigation.”

“Oh.”

“Start the tram.”

“Okay.”

Amber swung onto the last car, perched on a seat and watched an alert and eager Wells through the glass windows. The tram clicked twice, then glided silently downhill as if on air, and she clutched the seat bars, jittery with excitement, enthralled with this
gentleman
who had stepped out of a time machine, of all impossible things. She was going to go wherever he was going, and was strangely liberated. If nothing else, she felt alive and schoolgirl-happy again, that hard edge from police work packed away with her field kit. Lieutenant Holland's strategy meeting was the farthest thing from her mind.

They approached the Lower Station. Amber's face hurt from smiling, but she couldn't stop even if she wanted to. This was her first ride on the Getty tram, and she would always remember it as her portal to the universe. This ride was taking her away from the mundane, the ugly and mean of her everyday life. This ride was lifting her into a world of impossible possibilities. For her, the first time on the Getty tram was pure magic.

Uncomfortable in an overstuffed chair, the woman ate the first of two scones between sips of tea, unaware of lingering masculine stares, not yet realizing that one man had taken a table nearby so he could undress her with his eyes while pretending to read a newspaper. She was famished, and if Teresa Cruz's money hadn't bought her the scones, she would have eaten the little security guard's kidney.