Riptide (2 page)

When he looked back at the bed, he saw something only half-human amid the sheets.

Blood was everywhere, gouts of it, drenching the mattress, staining his hands and wrists.

And there was still the foreigner to be dispatched.

Unless a better alternative presented itself.

Hare’s knife lay on the floor. He did not retrieve it. He sat naked on the bed, formulating a plan.

Then carefully he wiped himself clean on the foreigner’s shirt and trouser legs. When he was done, it was the blond man who reeked of blood.

Hare dressed, then left the room. Of course he could not stay the night. He must find lodging elsewhere. The doors to the street would be locked at midnight. After that, the foreigner would be trapped in the hotel, unable to leave without the assistance of the night porter. His bloody clothes would shout for attention. Mary or some other minion would eye him shrewdly: “Whose blood is that, mister?” Imagine the blond ape struggling to answer in his pidgin English, his rude face flashing fear. The room would be entered, the knife and its victim found. The case was open-and-shut.

It was best that way. Best if the crime could be solved this very night. The authorities would not inquire too closely if a scapegoat lay conveniently to hand.

At a few minutes to midnight Hare descended the stairs. The office on the first-floor landing was fortuitously unoccupied, but the tavern on the lobby level was more crowded and boisterous than before. He avoided it, slipping down an adjacent corridor to an outside door. He crossed Water Street and walked along Catherine Slip, keeping clear of the street lights.

one

She had been in the water for less than twelve hours, but already the fish had begun to feed. Men in wetsuits gently cut her loose from the snarl of fishing lines, separating her from the piling. As she bobbed to the surface, her head fell back, exposing her face to the sun.

The plastic bag was still tied in place, ribboned with kelp, a caul pasted to her features. Her eyes bulged, bloodshot with petechial hemorrhages. Her swollen tongue lay against the plastic like a purple snake.

High above the water, Jennifer Silence stood on the Venice Fishing Pier, hands in the pockets of the nylon windbreaker that beat against her chest.

Beside her, Draper said, “I don’t know why you had to see this.”

“I had to see
her
.”

“Seen enough?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll take you to her house.”

*** 

The house was a Craftsman bungalow on Centinela Avenue in Mar Vista. Three black-and-whites were slant-parked on the street outside. No coroner’s van, no SID unit—not yet. Draper had brought her in before the house had been processed.

A uniformed Pacific Area cop guarded the front door, the radio on his hip chattering unintelligibly. Down the hall, in the dining area, there were more uniforms, laughing and joking, their joviality somehow obscene after what Jennifer had seen in the water.

Draper led her into the bedroom at the rear of the cottage. The room had been vandalized. The desktop computer—a Mac, she noted—lay in pieces on the carpet. The mirror over the dresser was spider-webbed with cracks. Chairs were overturned, hanging plants yanked off their ceiling hooks and strewn around the floor, trailing dirt-encrusted roots. A bookcase had been pulled down, scattering its contents—not many books, mostly CDs and videos and a couple of snapshots in metal frames.

On another tabletop lay a spray of porcelain pieces from smashed figurines. Enough recognizable parts remained to identify the figures as owls. On the floor was a larger owl in carved ironwood, and another one chiseled out of some dark green stone.

The many owls’ wide watchful eyes stared up at her in speechless inquiry. They must have been watching last night, when the occupant of this house died on the bathroom floor.

Jennifer knew how it happened. The woman was in bed when the intruder entered the premises. She awoke, hearing a noise. She reached for the bedside phone—now off the hook—but the telco line had been cut outside the house.

She must have known she was in trouble then. She left the bed and tried to reach the bathroom, hoping to lock herself inside. The bed sheets tripped her up, and she fell sprawling. She kicked free and propelled herself onto the bathroom tiles—cheap linoleum, yellowing with age, their corners curling up. She grabbed a towel rack and tried to rise, dislodging the rack from the wall.

Then he was on top of her and she had no chance.

Straddling her, pinning her down and restraining her flailing arms, he slipped the plastic bag over her head and twisted it tight, until the air in the bag was gone.

He trashed the room after that, a senseless show of dominance or rage. Then he carried her out of the bungalow and drove her to the beach.

All this took place sometime last night or early this morning—late Monday or early Tuesday, March 3 or 4. Even in L.A., the nights were cold in March, and her neighbors’ windows were shut. Nobody heard a thing.

Jennifer stood unmoving for a long moment, feeling nothing but emptiness—and a need to make things right.

“Any idea where he dumped her?” she asked.

“Could have been anywhere. He might have thrown her off Santa Monica Pier, or off a boat, or just tossed her into the surf at the shoreline. Around midnight the tide was going out. He was probably hoping she’d be carried out to sea.”

“Why wasn’t she?”

“Got caught in a riptide. It pulled her south to the Venice Pier. You saw those tangled fishing lines. People get their lines snarled and have to cut them off the reel. The lines stay wrapped around the pilings. She got fouled up in them, and someone spotted her this morning.”

Jennifer thought of the woman in the water. She had worn flower-patterned pajamas, light blue, silky. Her feet were bare, the neatly pedicured toenails painted cherry red.

Marilyn Diaz. Insurance agent. Divorced, no kids. Thirty-four years old.

Four years older than I am, Jennifer thought.

Draper stepped closer. She looked up at him. At six feet, he stood a good ten inches taller than her diminutive self. People called him the prince of darkness, a tribute to his saturnine countenance, his dark swept-back hair.

“Thanks for getting there so quickly,” Draper said. “Though it really wasn’t necessary for you to come at all.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“Because it’s always true.”

He was looking around the room, his face impassive. He never displayed emotion at a crime scene. He gave an impression of detachment verging on indifference. But once, she had caught him lifting a small silver crucifix from under his shirt collar and giving it a surreptitious kiss. She knew then that he cared more than he let on.

“I still don’t see why you wanted to be there,” he added. “Or here, for that matter.”

“You know how I work, Roy. I need to see where she lived,
how
she lived. I need to find out who she was.”

“And what have you learned?”

She liked owls, Jennifer thought. “She was neat, well organized, well groomed. She had family.” Her finger pointed out the framed snapshots from the bookcase. “Not much of a reader, more into movies and music. Probably spent a lot of evenings curled up with a DVD. I think she was attractive, though it’s hard to tell now.”

“Is any of that helpful?”

“I don’t know what may be helpful. I deal in intuition. It’s not an exact science.”

“That’s for sure.” Draper said it with too much asperity.

“For somebody who’s got such doubts about my abilities, you sure do make a habit of calling me in.”

“You’ve given us a couple of leads,” he conceded.

“More than a couple.”

“A couple that panned out. A couple that didn’t.”

“Like I said, not an exact science.”

“And like I said, that’s for damn sure.”

“You didn’t say
damn
.”

“I was thinking it.”

“Care to guess what word I’m thinking of now?”

“I’m pretty sure I know. See? I can be intuitive, too.”

She gave up and asked how the intruder had gained access.

“Broke a side window, reached in, unlatched the door.”

“The breaking window is probably what woke her. If she’d run for the front door instead of grabbing the phone —”

“Wouldn’t have made any difference. He was in position to intercept her if she left the room.”

“Do you suppose he knew that?”

“You mean did he know the layout? Had he been in the house before? No idea. Maybe your voodoo science will tell us.”

She wasn’t crazy about the voodoo comment, but she let it go. Draper had a way of pushing her buttons. She wasn’t sure what that was all about. At times she wondered if maybe he was interested in her. But he’d never said anything, and he didn’t strike her as shy.

Unless he was gun-shy—burned once too often, afraid to touch the stove for fear it was still hot. It was possible. There was an odd tension between them that was not entirely disagreeable, like the flutter of discomfort she felt on a first date, a nervous self-awareness. She wondered what a real first date with Roy Draper would be like.

“She lived alone,” Jennifer said, not phrasing it as a question because the truth of it was obvious.

“A lot of people do.” Something in Draper’s voice told her it was more than a general observation.

“I know I do. How about you, Roy?”

“Me? Yeah, I’m flying solo now.”

“Divorced?” She’d never asked.

“No, but I was in a long-term relationship. It ended. Obviously. Or I wouldn’t be alone.” The words were spoken lightly but sounded sad.

“How long were you with her?”

“Three years.”

“When did it go south?”

“Last November. November seventeenth. I still have the date marked on my calendar. Never turned the page. How’s that for the perfect metaphor of a guy who can’t get on with his life?”

“You’ll move on eventually.”

“So they tell me…. I don’t know how we started talking about this.”

She knew he was embarrassed, and she also knew her hot-stove theory was correct. Maybe one of these days he’d work up the nerve to touch the burners again.

“I’m guessing there’s a reason you brought me in,” she said.

“When we went through the bills and junk mail on her dining table, we found something. Original’s being tested for prints. This is a copy.”

He removed a single folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. One side was covered from top to bottom by a handwritten message in a spidery, minuscule script. The note was unsigned.

She glanced at the document long enough to ascertain that it was unmistakably a threat message. “Nothing on the back?”

“Nope.”

“Not even a scratch mark, a smudge? Because even the most trivial—”

“There’s nothing, Jen. This is it.”

“Was there an envelope?”

“If there was, we haven’t found it.”

“Go through her trash? Sorry. Of course you did.”

“Nothing in the garbage. I don’t think she would have thrown out an envelope anyway. Anybody who’s ever watched
CSI
knows you don’t destroy evidence.”

“There may not have been an envelope. The note didn’t have to be mailed. It could have been pushed through her mail slot or left on her windshield. Obviously she didn’t report it, or you would already know how it got to her.”

“There’s no record of any report.”

“That’s odd, don’t you think? A person gets a message like this, the first thing you’d expect them to do is call the police.”

Draper shrugged. “My guess is, she thought it was something she could deal with on her own.”

Jennifer thought of the white, staring face with its clear plastic mask.

two

Jennifer made it back to her house in Venice in twenty minutes, catching only green lights. She felt fine as she unlocked the door, and she continued to feel fine as she crossed the living room and went past the kitchen and down the rear hall into the powder room, where she leaned over, eyes closed, and threw up into the sink.

The bloodshot eyes under plastic...the swollen mass of her tongue...

She retched again, dry heaving because luckily she’d had little breakfast and there was nothing left in her gut.

She never got used to it, and it took its toll on her. Her friend Maura was always telling her to pack it in, get a nice, safe private practice, stop going to crime scenes and traumatizing herself. Sensible advice, but she wouldn’t listen.

Cupping her hands under the spigot, she splashed cold water on her face. The sting, hard as a slap, centered her.