Jaclyn the Ripper (17 page)

“Who said this was just a passade?”

Blushing crimson, she put her hand to her mouth, mortified by her words, then was glad that she'd spoken them. And when he turned to her with an incredulous look, she surprised him with a gentle kiss, smiled happily when he didn't resist, then kissed him full on the mouth, not letting go until she heard the flight attendant announcing the final approach and the landing gear shuddering down beneath the plane.

Finally, H.G. pushed away, glanced anxiously at the other passengers, but none of them had noticed 'Dusa's assault, and if they had, they didn't seem to care.

“No worries,” she whispered in his ear and smiled. “I can be cool.”

He raised his eyebrows quizzically, asking for a translation.

“Amy doesn't have to know.”

He gazed morosely out the window, watching the runway rising to
meet them, and felt the aircraft gently touch down, the experience ruined by the close proximity of Amber. He wondered how he could possibly extricate himself from her and retain her as a guide through 2010 at the same time.

Nothing came to him, nothing at all.

Lieutenant Casey Holland pushed his chair away from the trio of flat-screen monitors that bracketed his desk and turned to the window. He'd just looked at the surveillance tapes from the Getty, and they confirmed what Peterson, the security guard, had said in his interview. One camera had gone out at 12:03
A.M.
, and then they had all “whited out” at 4:53
A.M.

Sergeant Young had followed up with their video technicians, but they couldn't find anything wrong. An expert from the home office in New Jersey was flying out to take a look, and the tapes had been emailed to the FBI. So all they had right now were two clips from other cameras: Teresa Cruz running up the courtyard, the image marred by a faint red glow, and that same red glow in the rotunda. Once again, the technicians had no clue. Not that it mattered. In the men's room where the murder had taken place there were no surveillance cameras. Holland gazed at the walls, frustrated, angry with himself.

It was the case—but it wasn't the case.

He couldn't shake the image of Jaclyn Smythe that hung like gossamer lace in his mind. Sure, he'd lusted in his heart for beautiful women—what man hadn't?—but this pull went beyond that, and he
couldn't fathom it. He wondered if it was love, then frowned darkly and was disgusted. He wanted to keep his mind clean and good for Cheryl and the kids, yet he'd just spent hours looking at missing-persons databases for this strange woman—even calling the SFPD when he should have been working harder on the Brentwood killings.

Yes, he'd looked at the tapes, yes, he'd beefed up patrols and had three detectives following up on “sightings” of the killer, but he wasn't past square one. He still hadn't been able to locate Heather Trattner. He had called her cell seven times, had gotten voice mail and left messages. He'd had the GPS people try to track her phone, but no such luck.
Somebody has to tell the poor woman she's got a dead husband
.

He thought of Amber Reeves and missed her.
One classy chick, one good technician. She brings light and color—she brings life to a crime scene, which is ironic as hell. She ain't no detective, though
. She'd left a message suggesting that the Brentwood murderer was a Jack the Ripper copycat, overlooking the fact that the Ripper did hookers, and there weren't a lot of them in Brentwood. Whether the psychopath was copying somebody or not didn't alter the bleak reality that he was out there on the hunt and wanting to make fools of the West L.A. Division. Maybe that's what REMEMBER ME? on the body was all about. The killer bragging about his unsolved murders in the past. Holland made a note to coordinate with the cold-case people downtown. Right now, he didn't have the time or inclination.

Some hikers had just found another body in Will Rogers Park, this one arranged like Venus de Milo with another happy face drawn in blood on the torso. A crime-beat reporter friend from the L.A.
Times
had called earlier saying that they were going to do a page-three story headlined “Portrait of the Artist as a Serial Killer.”

Holland sighed. The Jane Doe hadn't yet been identified; for all he knew, the body parts could have come from more than one victim. Sure, they'd eventually find out. The lab would do their thing and chase dental records, but he wasn't holding his breath. About all he could hope for was someone would report the woman missing and then identify the head. He shuddered, repulsed.

He glanced at the case files on his desk, then a stack of magazines.
On top was the latest
Scientific American
, its dark-red cover featuring in-depth stories on skin and stem-cell research, and the battle of the sexes in terms of DNA and chromosomes, but he already knew he'd never have time to read them.
I should've gone to law school
.

His cell phone rang.

“This is Holland.”

“Hey, Lieutenant, it's Sergeant Young. . . . We got the perp.”

 

One of Sergeant Young's routine gimmicks was to nail perps by using cell phones the old-fashioned way. If, say, a killer had stolen his victim's cell, and the phone didn't have GPS technology or the killer had turned it off, Young would wait a day or so—until he figured the killer was feeling invincible—then call the number and track the phone. In this case, Albert Grattan had answered Michael Trattner's cell, and they nailed him behind a strip mall off Bundy.

When Holland walked in the interview room, he was hit by Grattan's stench and knew that the dude was a homeless junkie, yet that didn't mean he wasn't capable of murder. Grattan immediately started whining that he'd found the phone in a trash can at Starbucks—hey, finders keepers, losers weepers, what the fuck's so against the law about answering a cell phone? Holland listened stoically to Grattan's sad, pathetic story of how he'd once been a college professor, then had been hounded out of academia because the maintenance people didn't like him sleeping in his office, or some such nonsense. The lieutenant asked Grattan if he'd mind drawing a happy face, and Grattan replied, fuck, no, man, whatever gets me out of the gulag.

Holland gave Grattan paper and crayons, then watched him attempt a half-dozen, but with each one, Grattan's hand went off-track and drew meth-addled happy faces that looked like flattened raisins. He knew then that Grattan was not their man, yet told Sergeant Young to hold him and run DNA tests just to be certain. Holland headed back to his office, Jaclyn Smythe dancing in his brain again, this time doing a striptease. He blushed, felt guilty. He detoured into the detectives' squad bay for a cup of lousy coffee.

“Lieutenant Holland?” came the secretary's voice over the speakerphone when he was finally back in his office.

“If it's TV or the
Times
, send 'em to voice mail.”

She laughed. “Actually, it's Sergeant Ron Esposito from the SFPD.”

Holland brightened, picked up the phone, exchanged pleasantries and a touch of shoptalk with Esposito, then explained why he'd called in the first place. In a San Francisco missing-persons database, he had discovered that Amy Catherine Robbins had abruptly disappeared in late November or early December, 1979, thanks to an official missing-persons report filed by her parents on December 10 when she hadn't shown up for a family reunion. He wondered why Jaclyn Smythe's family wanted her to track down someone after an absence of thirty years or so, but figured they must have their reasons, and he sure as hell wasn't going to question her for something as harmless as an old friend. So he had called the detective who had taken the original report, but an officer in the SFPD missing-persons department said that the detective had since passed away and referred him to Ron Esposito.

After bringing Esposito up to speed, Holland asked if Esposito could email a copy of the original report down.

A long, static-filled pause.

“Hey, Ron, you still there?”

“Yeah, I'm still here.” He laughed. “Life sure as hell gets serendipitous when you're a cop, you know?”

“I dunno, but okay.”

“We're talking about Amy Catherine Robbins, right?”

“Right.”

“She disappeared almost thirty-one years ago, right?” “Right.”

“Well, her parents called me this morning to tell me that she'd finally come home.”

“This is home,” Amber announced.

H.G. closed the door behind him, surprised there was no foyer and that the living room was so small and crowded. Behind the far wall was a narrow kitchen and a breakfast nook, and to his right a hallway led to the one bedroom and bath. The threadbare sofa and chairs too big for the room reminded him of his salad days at Mornington Crescent when, given a scientific epiphany, he had discovered how to harness dark energy and had built his time machine. That was before he had editors eager to publish his articles and Frederick Macmillan asking for his books. He wondered how he had survived and if he could do it all over again or would end up a draper's apprentice as he'd started out. The pursuit of science had been his escape.

Thank God for science. Thank God for his mentor, the brilliant T. H. Huxley. Thank God for his own stubborn naïveté and unbridled optimism. Then he frowned.
Yet, if we do blow ourselves up, if our planet does indeed implode into a black hole millions of years before its time, does any of that matter?

“What do you think?” Smiling, she interrupted his thoughts, spread her arms and twirled.

“Cozy.” Grateful for the distraction, he glanced out the window over the breakfast nook at a narrow alley that separated her building from other, identical buildings. “Quite cozy.”

“Are you all right now?”

“I'm fine, thank you.”

Not true. After she had kissed him on the plane, he had maintained a discreet distance. Now he was annoyed that he'd had no time to stop and investigate this new world, that his curiosity in 2010 was now a luxury. He had gone to the loo at the terminal to get away from her so he could think clearly, but even his ludicrous imitation of Auguste Rodin's “The Thinker” couldn't free his mind. Zipping up his trousers, he'd noticed that his pocket watch had fallen to the floor. It had read 12:17
P.M.
, Monday. He'd been in the future for more than twenty-four hours, Amy was still missing, and he had accomplished nothing other than getting himself mixed up with a needy young woman.

They had taken a cab back to the Getty, picked up Amber's motor car and gone to her apartment in Ocean Park—only because it was a convenient place to work. He hadn't even bothered to tinker with the miscellany in her Mercury Milan, preferring to stare out the window seeing nothing, wondering about Amy. About Leslie John Stephenson.

Now in Amber's apartment, he stared at her laptop in its case, yet was actually reluctant to make the leap of faith into this electronic crystal ball of a computer until he understood it more fully. Alas, he didn't have that luxury, either. He said, “Shall we go back to work?”

“Whatever,” she murmured. She set up her laptop on the kitchen table, turned suddenly. “You know, about what happened on the plane—”

He held up a hand, stopped her. “Please. . . . You mustn't take it personally. You're a beautiful girl, but I have obligations.”

“I know all that, but I'm not asking—”

“ 'Dusa, if you don't leave me alone . . .” He decided to overstate his case, hoping to make an impression. “If you don't leave me alone, I'm going to do something I'll regret and wreck both our lives.”

She looked down and blushed.

“Besides, once you get to know me, you'll discover that I'm not the
most decent chap you'll ever meet.” He grinned, tried to make light of it. “Just ask the critics at the London
Times
.”

“But—”

“No more.”

Except Amber wasn't finished, wasn't about to be silenced. She couldn't get over that kiss on the plane—the moment had actually been more intimate than being in bed with him the night before, and somewhere between that kiss and right now she had decided that she was in love. Yes, she knew it was insane, that at best he was some flesh-and-blood version of a virtual reality, and she was acting like a science fiction groupie, but it didn't matter. Nor did it matter that she'd known him for only a day and a half. Like most new lovers, she didn't consider what came next or how they could possibly make a life; she didn't consider Amy; she didn't consider their different worlds or centuries; that they had little in common in this reality was of no consequence, either. It never occurred to her not to follow her heart.

“Can we get on with this?” he said patiently.

She stopped, then touched his face, found his eyes and let her hand rest on his neck. “D'you guys have sex . . . ? You and Amy?”