Riptide (39 page)

“And now there’s no proof.”

“True. But you could tell your story anyway. Some people will believe you. Harrison Sirk probably would. He could get a book deal out of it, cut you in on the profits. Or...”

“Yes?”

“Not every case has to be solved. The world has done without a solution to the Ripper murders for better than a hundred years.”

She thought about this throughout the next few weeks, as March bled into April. She was living in a residential hotel in Marina del Rey and visiting Richard daily at St. John’s Hospital, where he was undergoing mandatory psychiatric treatment. Forced to take his meds, he had regained a measure of lucidity. He was eating regularly and gaining weight. He would never be the man he was, but she hadn’t lied when she said he could have a new start. And maybe someday he could be moved to a halfway house and resume something close to a normal life. Maybe.

Casey was back on the job. If it bothered him that she was seeing Draper, he kept it to himself.

Only once did he mention the fire. “I heard what you did for me,” he said in a serious tone. “Trying to get me out, rather than saving yourself. That was a standup thing to do.”

“The smoke clouded my brain. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“That’s it, Pocket-Size. Keep messing with me.”

“It’s what I do. And don’t call me Pocket-Size.”

Media interest in the case was intense for a few days, then predictably died down. Harrison Sirk tried to buttonhole her at Maura’s memorial service. Jennifer told him to fuck off.

Draper arrested his prime suspect in the murder of Marilyn Diaz. A search of the man’s house turned up a rough draft of the threat message. He confessed. His motive was just what Jennifer had predicted. He had made advances and had been rebuffed. It was such a little thing, but large enough to end a woman’s life.

A real estate agent from Maura’s office told Jennifer that her parcel of land was worth one and a half million dollars. Jennifer put it on the market. She just might buy the bungalow in the Valley that Maura had always talked about.

For now, she was still near the sea. She walked on the beach one April evening and thought one last time about Draper’s words. He was right. There was no need to tell the world about the diary, no need to reopen the case and refocus the media’s cameras on her family. No need to revisit the past. The past was dead. It was dust and ashes. To cling to it was to die inside. Life moved on.

When the sun was gone and the sky was deep purple fading to black, she walked out onto Venice pier. At the end of the pier, she reached into her tote bag and brought out a rusty tin box.

Parkinson had indeed left the diary in the house to burn, but the box had protected it. The pages, though scorched, were readable. She had found it in her salvage hunt and had told no one, not even Draper. Probably it wasn’t good to start off their relationship with a lie, even if only a lie of omission. But he was a cop, and he might insist that the diary be booked into evidence, and then the whole story would come out.

Alone on the pier, Jennifer leaned over the railing and dropped the tin straight down, well away from the pilings with their tangled fishing lines. It hit the water with a splash, bobbed on the waves, and drifted away into the dark. Perhaps it would be carried out to sea, or perhaps, like Marilyn Diaz, it would be caught in a riptide and returned shoreward. She would let time and chance decide.

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Diana Ross for her excellent proof-reading, Margaret Falk for her advice and encouragement, and Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich for their indefatigable efforts to find the book a commercial publisher. It’s not their fault that the fiction end of the book business is in sorry shape these days. Like many other authors, I found it necessary to self-publish, an approach that is likely to become even more common in coming years.

As always, I invite readers to visit my Web site at
www.michaelprescott.net
.

Riptide
required more research than any of my other books. Some of my principal sources are listed in the collection of Ripper books purchased by Jennifer in Chapter 10.

Other valuable sources of information on the Whitechapel Fiend were the Casebook website,
www.casebook.org
(archived contents available on DVD); John Douglass and Mark Olshaker,
The Cases that Haunt Us
; Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey,
Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer
;
and Ivor Edwards,
Jack the Ripper’s Black Magic Rituals
.

Details on the Carrie Brown case were found in R. Michael Gordon,
The American Murders of Jack the Ripper
;
Michael Conlon’s and Wolf Vanderlinden’s articles and message-board posts at casebook.org; and Wolf Vanderlinden, “The New York Affair, Part III,” in
Ripper Notes: America Looks at Jack the Ripper,
July 2004 (sold through Amazon.com).

General historical background was supplied by D.J. Leighton,
Montague Druitt: Portrait of a Contender
; Martin A. Danahay & Alex Chisholm (eds),
Jekyll & Hyde Dramatized
;
Erik Larson,
The Devil in the White City
; Dan Kurzman,
Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906
; George Garrigues’s website
Los Angeles in the 1900s
(apparently no longer online); the Los Angeles Chinatown Business Council,
www.chinatownla.com
; and the Westland Network Web site on history of Venice,
www.westland.net/venice/history.htm
.

For psycholinguistics, I consulted two books by Andrew G. Hodges,
Who Will Speak for JonBenet?
and
The Deeper Intelligence
, as well as Katharine Ramsland, “Literary Forensics,”
www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/forensics/literary/1.html
.

One book that came to my attention as I was doing the final revisions on
Riptide
was
The Secret of Prisoner 1167
, by the late James Tully. In a carefully researched presentation, Tully argues that an escaped homicidal maniac named James Kelly was the Ripper. Whether or not this is true, it’s interesting to note that Kelly left England after the killings and traveled extensively in the United States, venturing as far west as Los Angeles.

COPYRIGHT PAGE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

RIPTIDE

Copyright © 2010 by Douglas Borton.

Cover design by Michael Prescott.

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-1-4536-4048-7

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

First Printing.

To order additional copies of this book, please visit
www.michaelprescott.net
.