Riptide (38 page)

“The deeds were famous, but my role in them has never been known. You are the first and only one to learn of my past.”

The boy ran his fingers over the diary’s black calfskin cover. “Were you...a pirate?”

“Not a pirate, lad. Something much better. I was old Red Jack.”

“Your name’s not Jack.”

“No, that was only a nickname I bestowed upon myself. Have you heard of Jack the Ripper, boy?”

The solemn eyes widened with startlement and something like fear. “The one who killed ladies and...cut them into bits?”

“You know of him, then. You know his legend.”

“Yes.”

“I am he.”

The boy stood speechless. “But he was wicked,” he said finally.

“That’s only what some people say. The truth of the matter is altogether different. It was a public good, ridding the world of fallen women. Of
all
women. They are harlots and temptresses, all of them.”

“Not Mother.”

“Yes, even she.”

He shook his head. “No.”

Hare felt a stab of frustration. But he reminded himself that the boy was young, the teaching difficult. “Even your mother,” he said slowly. “She cannot help it. Vice is inborn in her.”

“I don’t believe you.” Sudden tears stood in the boy’s eyes. “You’re telling tales to frighten me.”

The sight of tears maddened Hare. To cry was unmanly. The boy had been coddled excessively.

“These are no tales.” He snatched the child’s hand. “I’ll show you.”

He pulled his son under the staircase, where the crypt in the cellar wall lay exposed in the lamp’s flickering glow.

His six beauties were piled inside, their limbs severed from their trunks. Those on the bottom had rotted, their delicate skin shrinking into mummified folds. Those near the top were more fresh. The latest one showed almost no signs of decay. She might have been a wax figure, disassembled for storage. The pink was still in her cheeks.

“See?” Hare said, the word echoing in the cellar’s confines, a shout of triumph.

The boy screamed and would have run, had Hare not clutched his hand in a firm grip.

It was the scream that dismayed Hare most of all. Tears could be dried, doubts could be answered, but such spontaneous revulsion and terror might prove impervious to persuasion.

“They can’t hurt you,” Hare snapped. “They’re dead and gone.”

Another scream, this one trailing into infantile sobs.

“You’re a damn coward.” Hare pronounced the words like a verdict. “You’re a weakling. You’re no better than a woman.” It was the final insult.

“Let me go.” The boy tugged at his father’s hand. “Let me
go
!”

“This is your legacy. Your destiny. You cannot escape it. You must embrace it.”

“Let me go, Papa,
please
!”

“I offer you greatness. I offer you a chance to change the world.”

The boy hung his head and wept.

Hare spoke to him for a long time. He told him of his London adventures and of his travels. He told him that he had once been Edward Hare, though now he bore another name, a made-up name of his own choosing. He told him that someday he would understand the awful responsibility he had inherited, the opportunities it afforded, and the price it would exact.

The boy listened, but he did not understand. Terror remained stamped on his face, the threat of more tears looming in his eyes.

“I have been an agent of purification,” Hare concluded. “And when you are old enough, you will recommence my work.”

The boy looked away in stubborn denial. “I’ll never be mad like you.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Blood will tell. You are more like me than you know.”

“Never,” the boy repeated.

Finally Hare extracted a promise from him to tell no one, not even Mother. And he let him go. The boy scampered up the stairs, leaving the diary behind.

Hare sighed. He had done his best. But the boy was too young. Had the illness not come on so fast...had he been granted another five years...

Perhaps on his twelfth birthday the boy would have understood. Or perhaps the case was forever hopeless. There might be too much of his mother in him. Too much of her thin and tainted blood.

He passed some little time thumbing through his diary, remembering the first days of his calling, days he commemorated in his last six kills. Although his role in these most recent murders must remain hidden, someday the clues might be deciphered and proper credit given. A hundred years from now, or more. He would not be forgotten. And possibly his son would come around. He himself had been twenty-eight before he felt the stirrings of his missionary impulses. Given time, the lad might follow in his footsteps, and his son after him.

At last he shut the tin, securing the clasp, and planted it in the loose earth of the crypt. It would be here for his son to find, should the desire seize him. If not, it might yet come to light by another’s efforts.

Someday.

He closed up the wall, stacking the bricks and troweling the mortar. He worked for a long time, sealing away the bodies and the book.

Finished, he mounted the stairs. He was weary. He needed rest. Rest from all his labors. Rest forevermore.

In the backyard the lad was playing with his little red wagon. Hare stood at the window, watching, until the child felt his stare and looked at him.

Fear flickered in the young face, but only for a moment. Tentatively, tremulously, the boy smiled.

forty

The House of Silence burned to the ground.

Jennifer spent much of the next day sifting the ashes in search of salvageable remains. She found little. Her Prius had been ruined, her family heirlooms and mementos erased from existence. Her collection of sea glass was gone, too. None of that mattered. The house had held on to her for too long. Now she was free.

In its death throes the house had collapsed into the cellar, destroying the crypt, cremating Edward Hare’s victims. Only a few blackened teeth survived.

“And the diary?” Jennifer asked Draper as they dined in a Santa Monica restaurant that night, safely away from the TV reporters.

Draper shrugged. “It wasn’t in Parkinson’s car or on his person. He may have left it in the house to burn. It would only have incriminated him by implicating his ancestor.”

“Without the diary...”

“There’s no way to prove he was a blood relation of Jack the Ripper, or that Jack was ever in Venice—or even in America, for that matter. Of course, Parkinson's personal effects provide plenty of evidence that he was obsessed with the Ripper case. We found more than two hundred books on the Ripper in his house, and he’d been visiting the Ripperwalk site, and others like it, for years. But that in itself proves nothing.”

“So before he started killing, Parkinson could have been just an ordinary guy with an interest in Jack the Ripper?”

“Not quite. We know his father was the Devil’s Henchman. And Parkinson knew it too. In the house there were...souvenirs from the case, hand-me-downs.” He saw her questioning gaze and waved his hand. “It’s not something to discuss while we’re eating. Believe me.”

“Okay.” She thought of Catharine Eddowes’ kidney. Suddenly her liver pâté seemed less appetizing. “I guess we’ll never know why he did it. Or how he framed Richard so perfectly.”

“We can make a pretty fair guess about Richard, at least. Let’s say Parkinson knows, from family lore, that his ancestor Edward Hare left a cache of bodies and a diary somewhere in Venice. What he doesn't know is the exact location. Then he hears about the discovery in your cellar. He makes sure he’s the one who processes the remains. He looks for the diary. Remember how he noticed some of the dirt had been disturbed?”

“Yes. I pretended I didn’t know anything about it.”

“But he suspected you were lying—and that, as a document analyst, you couldn’t resist the temptation to study the book. He must have watched your house early that morning and followed you to the cemetery. He left the note on your car to test your reaction. He couldn't have been a hundred percent sure until he saw your message on the Ripperwalk site. The reference to Edward Hare confirmed his suspicions. He knew you were the only one who could know that name—and only if you had the book."

"And he also knew about my brother, because the subject came up when we were in the cellar. So he tracked down Richard...”

“And spied on him. Richard was paranoid to begin with, and when he realized he was being watched, it spooked him. He left his apartment and went on the run, convinced he was being stalked."

Jennifer nodded. It wouldn't have taken much to set Richard off. Once he was out of his apartment, Parkinson must have picked the lock and burned the files. In the cellar she'd mentioned that Richard had kept the family papers, and that they might include a record of when Graham Silence purchased the house. Parkinson would have wanted to destroy that evidence, if it existed.

In going though the files, he must have found a record of Richard's library card number and the associated PIN. That was how he’d logged on to the system using Richard's ID.

“I guess,” she said, “it was just a coincidence that Richard and Parkinson were at the library at the same time.”

"No, I don't think so. Remember, there were library books in Richard's apartment, which Parkinson would have seen. He knew Richard liked to hang out there. Parkinson needed an untraceable public computer to download the file you said you’d put online, and he probably chose the Santa Monica Library because there was a good chance Richard would be there. And because he could use Richard's log-on info to cement the frame-up."

She thought of her brother, already panicking in the certainty—correct for once—that someone was out to get him. Then he spotted his pursuer in the library. He fled into the stacks, and when Jennifer came after him, he was convinced she was part of the plot.

She wondered if Parkinson had already chosen Maura as his next victim. He could have found some reference to Maura in Richard's files. Getting into her building would have been no problem. He needed only to identify himself as a police consultant, and Maura would have buzzed him in.

"You're very quiet," Draper said.

She realized she'd been picking at her food, lost in thought. Without looking up, she asked, “Did he have any children?”

“No. Never married. No offspring.”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“He was an only child. The last of the line, Jen. Edward Hare died with him.”

“He must have known about the Ripper connection since he was a boy. But he didn’t act on it until eighteen months ago. Any idea why?”

“We’ve looked at his medical records. He was diagnosed with MS six years ago, but only began to develop seriously debilitating symptoms within the last two years. It looks like his illness was the trigger. He realized it was now or never. Whenever the disease was in remission, he would strike.”

“His illness alone, and even his family background, wouldn't account for his hostility to women.”

“From what we've learned, he had only one serious relationship with a woman, years ago. They were planning to get married. Then he broke it off. He seems to have found out she was unfaithful, or at least he thought she was.”

Like Hare, she thought, and poor blameless Kitty.

“The shrinks say his failed relationship could have turned him against women in general.” Draper shrugged. “That's their theory, anyway. Who knows?”

“You don’t trust shrinks?” she said, smiling.

“Some of them are okay.”

“Any in particular?”

“The pretty ones.”

“Well, aren’t you the smooth talker.”

“I’m very suave. Get used to it.”

“It may take a little time.”

“You’ll have all the time you need.”

She fiddled with her fork, watching the tines catch the light. “It still doesn’t explain why he did it. What motivated him.”

“Did Edward Hare’s diary explain his motives?”

“Not really. It was kind of a power trip combined with a moral mission. Unleashing his animal instincts while purging the world of vice. But I don’t know if any of that was the real reason.”

“What was it, then?”

She let the fork drop. “I think the son of a bitch just enjoyed it. I think he was having fun.”

“And that may be as good an explanation for Parkinson as any. He got to fool the whole department—people he worked with every day. We all felt sorry for him because of his illness, and secretly he was laughing at us. He was the one in the know, and the rest of us were in the dark.”

“How about now? Who’s in the know?”

Draper didn’t follow. “Everybody knows Parkinson was the killer—”

“But they don’t know he was Jack’s great-grandson. They don’t know about the diary or all the rest of it, do they?”

He got it now. “The only ones who know, or ever knew, are you, me, Casey, Parkinson, and Maura.”