Michael Prescott - Riptide

Casey rang Maura’s doorbell and rapped on the door. No answer. He tested the knob.

“Unlocked,” he said, then pulled his hand away. His palm was marked with a purplish stain.

Blood.

Jennifer knew then. The world seemed to drop away, and she felt a sudden unreal detachment, as if she were observing someone else’s life.

“Stay outside,” Draper warned. It took her a moment to realize he was talking to her.

Casey pushed open the door and stepped in, followed by Draper and the uniformed cops. Jennifer, standing in the hall, heard a gasp, and a voice saying, “Jesus,” two or three times.

Slowly she approached the doorway. No one tried to stop her. No one was paying her any attention. The four men stood and stared, immobile, at whatever lay in the apartment.

She crossed the threshold and looked for herself.

At first she couldn’t react. Like the cops, she was shocked into passivity. The scene before her wasn’t anything real. It was impossible to take in, impossible to process. A shock cut in a movie. Or a picture in a book. A photograph, grainy, black-and-white…

She thought of that, and she knew what this was. It was the rented flat in Miller’s Court. It was the room in the East River Hotel. It was Mary Kelly. It was Carrie Brown.

What the Ripper had done to those women, her brother had done to Maura Lowell. The same frenzied obliteration, the same horrific disfigurement. He had carved her open and emptied her out, leaving pieces of her strewn around the living room-hunks of bloody tissue.

Maura lay sprawled on the sofa. Her head rested on a pillow which had been white and now was burgundy. There was no expression on her face, because there was no face. Her breasts, which she flaunted for the benefit of the surfer busboy only two nights ago, had been slashed off. The skin had been peeled from one arm, the arm that had flaunted the bracelet. Her clothes had been ribboned by the killer’s knife, their tatters falling among the glistening ropes of her intestines which had unspooled across the carpet in a lake of blood.

“God…” whispered a small shocked voice, her own.

Draper turned. “I told you to stay out .”

She barely heard him. She was looking at one pale hand that lay palm up, the fingers open as if in surrender.

Then Draper’s arm was around her shoulders, and he was guiding her into the hall. “You need to get out of here.”

“I don’t want to leave her alone,” she said stupidly.

“She’s not alone. We’re with her.”

“She doesn’t know you.”

“It’ll be all right, Jen.”

Neither his words nor her own made any sense.

“Richard couldn’t to do this.” She shook her head, insisting on denial. “He couldn’t .”

“You need to sit down.”

She didn’t know why he was saying this, except that her legs felt suddenly weak. She allowed to Draper to ease her to a sitting position against the wall of the corridor.

“Couldn’t,” she said again, though she knew the word was a lie.

Draper knelt beside her. “We need to find him. Right now . Do you have any idea where he might go?”

“No.”

“Think.”

“I have thought about it. It’s all I’ve thought about. He could be anyplace local. Anyplace at all.”

“Okay. We’ll find him.” He started to rise.

“He saved me,” she whispered.

“What?”

“He came and found me, and he got me help. I’m alive only because of him. Because of my brother.”

“I understand.”

He didn’t, of course. Neither did she.

No one could understand.

That had been close. He’d never thought the persistent little bitch would spot him in the crowd, much less give chase. After what had happened in the library, he would have thought she’d show more sense.

He still wasn’t sure how she’d noticed him. He’d been wearing his cloak of invisibility. That was how he thought of the hooded sweatshirt with the long, loose, baggy sleeves. The garment covered his head and hands, made him a faceless thing-like Abberline, or like old Jack. Of course an observer might still see his face up close, but that was the wonder of it. No one ever got close. They saw him in his hood, bopping to the music in his head, and they assumed he was crazy. No one made eye contact with a crazy person. No one wanted to see him, or even to acknowledge his existence. In his cloak of invisibility he was anonymous, blending with his surroundings as seamlessly as a chameleon, safe from any threat.

But she had seen him. Almost caught him, too.

What was worse, in the chase he’d dropped his souvenir. He’d wanted it. Maura had died so nicely, and the aftermath had been so fine. He never danced, not anymore, but in her living room, awash in the slippery muck, he had danced like a shaman, danced naked, as Jack himself must have danced in Mary Kelly’s flat.

Mary then. Maura now. Perfect.

He wished now that he had disemboweled the others. It would not have been practical, given the circumstances-outdoors, in public places, where anyone might come along. And it would have set the authorities on his trail much sooner. Yes, there were sound logical and logistical reasons not to have done it, but irrationally he wished he had, because-well, because it was so goddamned much fun .

Jennifer would never understand that kind of fun. She had no soul, that one.

But she did have courage. To come after him, into the stacks, was bold enough. To pursue again, even after her ordeal in the supply closet…

He almost respected her for it. But he respected no one. Except Edward Hare.

He didn’t underestimate her, though. That was why he’d burned the family papers, torching them methodically in the flaming pyre of a metal wastebasket. There was information in those papers that might have helped a clever, crafty, sly little trollop like her.

He burned it all, the entire contents of the file cabinet, with one exception. He kept a newspaper clipping from a few years ago, a yellowed scrap torn from a local rag. Under the small black-and-white photo ran the caption: “Local Realtor Maura Lowell and Dr. Richard Silence were among the attendees at the Venice Historical Society’s charity ball.”

Two smiling faces. A long time ago.

The scrap of newspaper had gone into his pocket, but all the rest had been fed to the flames. A shrewd move. It had bought him time. But now the hounds were baying. His revels were nearly done.

One more adventure, one more ritual of predation and purgation, was all he would be allowed.

Until now he had paid homage to his ancestor, re-creating the crimes as closely as he dared. Parallel names, similar locations. But he was through with all that. His last murder would be his original creation. His days as an apprentice were over. Now he was a full-fledged master of his art, ready to carve his magnum opus and emblazon his signature across an appalled world.

It would be Jennifer, of course. Who else could it be?

He would take her and he would kill her, but in this one case he would do it slowly. It would not be a dissection, but a vivisection. She would be alive and aware as he turned her inside out and sliced and diced her and left her obscenely exposed. She would feel it, every last plunge of the knife, every excision of her vital parts, until the glorious climax when he wrested the seat of life itself from her chest and left her lifeless and hollow.

He had lost Maura’s bracelet, but soon he would have a new and better token.

Soon he would have Jennifer’s heart.

Hare sat at the bar, nursing a drink and a toothache. The ache throbbed in his lower jaw and progressed like a hot wire up his cheek and into his ear. He would have to see a dentist. The prospect worried him. They were butchers, dentists.