Michael Prescott: Riptide

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.

“Then she was wrong,” she said.

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.