Michael Prescott - Riptide

“Hotel’s clear.” Casey’s voice on the radio. “I want Officer Sullivan to bring Jennifer Silence to meet us on the fourth floor. We think we found the room the suspect was using. Maybe she can confirm that the items in the room belong to him.”

Sullivan escorted her inside the Fortezza. The lobby was dark except for Sullivan’s flashlight. The beam passed over a ragged man clutching a backpack and looking lost. The squatter from the second floor.

At the foot of the staircase, Jennifer saw an old poster captured in the wavering circle of light. Hot salt water in every room as a therapeutic bonus , the sign boasted. Every amenity available in Venice-of-America, birthplace of the American Renaissance.

That was a long time ago.

They climbed the stairs. The banisters were grimed with filth, and there was a bad smell coming from the carpeted treads.

“You shouldn’t have to be in here,” Sullivan said with quiet solicitude.

“I’ve been in worse places.” She was thinking of the utility room in San Francisco.

The odor was worse in the fourth floor hallway, a potpourri of mildew and urine. They passed a row of doors, the room numbers written in black Magic Marker. Halfway down the corridor they found Draper and Casey in one of the rooms. The door had been forced-no great trick, given the cheap lock and wobbly frame.

Jennifer stopped just inside the doorway. She’d thought the Dogtown apartment was bad, but it was a luxury suite compared to this nasty hole. The bed lay against a wall, near a window looking out on a fire escape. A glance into the bathroom revealed an unflushed toilet and a shower stall without a curtain or shower head. The room reeked of trapped body odor.

This was what he’d been reduced to. She wanted to cry.

“Is the stuff his?” Casey asked, reminding her why she was here.

Sullivan handed over his flashlight. She examined the items left behind in the room. On a rickety chair lay a library book about the Illuminati and Freemasons. Conspiracy theories. She flipped through it and found copious underlining and spidery marginal notes. Richard’s handwriting, she thought.

On the bureau, a dilapidated antique that listed drunkenly, she found a few other items. Some candy bars. One of the wanted posters put out by C.A.S.T., ripped off a utility pole or fence, the suspect’s computer-generated face slashed out.

And heartbreakingly, or perhaps ominously, a Polaroid of their father, the colors long ago faded to purple. In the picture, Aldrich Silence was smiling, but there was something strange about his eyes, something indefinable but wrong.

“They’re his things,” she said.

Draper seemed unsurprised. “This was the only room that showed signs of occupancy, other than the one the squatter was using.”

She looked around her. “It’s so awful,” she said softly, speaking mostly to herself.

The daylight was nearly gone by the time she left the hotel with Draper and Casey. The crowd of onlookers had thinned. But the drag queen was still there, and the stoner with the iPod, and the person in the hooded sweatshirt, almost lost to sight in the gathering dusk.

She paused, focusing on that sweatshirt. She had seen it before.

Sandra Price’s rally, in the gymnasium. The nervous figure rocking in a distant corner of the bleachers.

Richard had attended that event. In disguise. He’d told her so.

Casey was saying something, possibly to her, possibly to Draper. She didn’t hear it. His voice was far away, and all around her was an unnatural quiet, like the stillness in the streets after the earthquake.

She took a step toward the onlookers, walking slowly, her arms at her sides, her head lowered, sending every body-language signal of disinterest. The hooded figure didn’t move, didn’t react.

She remembered Sandra Price saying that an unknown person in a hood had been spotted near one of the crime scenes. It must be the disguise Richard used when he went trolling for victims, or when he spied on her.

As he was doing now.

She entered the crowd, slipping past a large man with a porn-star mustache and a skinny kid fingering a GameBoy. Still the hooded figure hadn’t stirred. She threaded among the spectators, closing in. The face beneath the hood was invisible, a shadow face. She thought of Abberline’s avatar, the faceless man.

She was less than ten feet away when the figure broke into a run.

“Richard!” she screamed. “Stop!”

She ran in pursuit.

He covered ground awkwardly in an ungainly loping stride. Though he had a head start, she thought she could catch him. Then he veered onto the wide concrete strip of the boardwalk and cut past startled pedestrians, racing north. She followed, but in the sudden crush of people she lost sight of him. A banner was strung along the shop fronts: March Festival. That was why the crowd was so heavy-one of the numerous open-air events sponsored by the city.

She glimpsed him once, the gray hood bobbing in the sea of heads.

Behind her, Casey appeared. “It’s him,” she gasped, pointing. “Gray sweatshirt.”

Casey gave chase. People darted out of his way, opening a path for a cop in uniform, and she had a momentary hope that he might catch up with his quarry.

Then he stopped. He reached down for something crumpled on the ground. As she ran up to him, she saw that it was the gray sweatshirt. He’d shed it as he ran.

She scanned the promenade in the sunset’s dimming afterglow. Richard had vanished.

“You’re sure it was him?” Casey asked.

She nodded.

He keyed his radio and reported that the subject had been seen outside the building. “Last seen northbound on foot on Ocean Front Walk. Too many peds-I lost him in the crowd.”

Draper ran up as Casey asked dispatch to request all available Pacific units in the vicinity to proceed to Sunset and Speedway.

“You think they’ll get him?” she asked Draper.

He shook his head. “Too many places he can run. Side streets, alleys, the beach, other red-tagged buildings…”

She nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right.”

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

She turned and saw a teenager with pierced lips, pierced nostrils, pierced eyebrows, and a surprisingly respectful expression.

“That guy you were chasing dropped this.” He handed her a bracelet. “What’d he do, boost it off you?”

She stared at the object, catching a gleam of copper and turquoise. She didn’t answer.

“Jennifer?” Draper asked.

She looked at the teenager. “Thanks,” she managed to say. “Thanks very much.”

Casey was watching her now. “Is it yours?”

She shook her head. Couldn’t speak.

“Talk to us, Jen,” Draper said.

“It’s not mine. It belongs-it belongs to Maura. Maura Lowell.”

“The woman he used to go out with?”

“Yes.”

Casey shifted his weight. “Maybe he stole it from her, back when they were seeing each other.”

“No. She just got it. She was wearing it this morning. There’s no way Richard could have this.”

No one spoke for a moment.

“You told us she’s a friend of yours,” Draper said, his voice low.

Jennifer nodded, still staring at the bracelet, unable to look away. “My best friend,” she whispered, realizing it only now.

Maura lived in a condo on Windward Avenue. It was a security building, and Casey didn’t have a key. A helpful tenant let them in.

The apartment was on the second floor at the end of a hallway lit by green-shaded lamps in brass sconces. Jennifer had walked this hall many times, but her knees had never trembled the way they did now, as she followed Draper, Casey, and the two patrolmen who’d come from the hotel.