Jaclyn the Ripper (33 page)

“You have no idea. . . .” he managed. “You can't know. . . .”

“Show me,” she whispered.

Hands shaking, he took off his clothes, left them piled on the carpet and went to turn off the lights.

“No, no, no,” she said, blocking his path, “that will never do. I want to
see
you. . . . I want you to see me.” Her eyes never leaving his, she slowly began shedding her silk clothes, lavender giving way to perfect alabaster curves.

 

“Jesus,” he said when they were finished.

“No.” She laughed ironically.

“I mean, I just . . .” His voice trailed off. “I mean, my God. . . .”

“He's not here, either.”

“Huh?”

“It's just you and me, my sweet lieutenant,” she murmured, and sat up cross-legged beside him.

He looked off, the light in his eyes fading, and she was mildly jealous that his mind had gone somewhere else. She frowned petulantly. “What are you thinking?”

“I was wondering what time it was.”

She looked at him askance.

“I gotta go to work in the morning. God knows, I don't want to.”

“Yes, but you have a killer, a madman to catch.”

“I'll never nail him,” he said flatly. “I get feelings about cases. This is one of those.”

“So what will happen?”

“The media will get incredibly vicious, the brass will get tired of it, and I'll lose my job.”

“What a shame.”

“Yes and no.”

“What d'you mean?”

“Right now I don't really care. . . .” He grinned. “Not as long as you're here with me.”

She glanced down, noticed blood on the tan and green duvet, then found it on her fingertips and chuckled. She vaguely recalled digging her nails into his back and raking his sides. She tasted the blood and smiled. “Don't you hurt?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Perhaps we should call room service and order up a first-aid kit.”

He laughed. “Hey, how about some wine . . . ? Wine and a plate of fruit or something?”

“That would be nice.”

He reached for the phone.

“Vodka. . . . Have them bring some vodka, as well.”

 

After room service left, Casey hung a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door, and now—completely nude—they were having drinks at the round table by the window, Jaclyn feeding him wedges of apple between sips of vodka, gnawing playfully on his fingers when he popped a grape in her mouth. Despite their sex, she sensed he was close to a profound grief. She wondered:
Just how fragile is he? Jack never would've cared. He was never interested in partners beyond their ability to remind him of Penny and make him ejaculate, beyond the blood they spilled and the ease with which they gave up a kidney or some such pound of flesh. I suppose that my fascination with the good lieutenant means that I am
terminally female—at least in this future—because I truly care for him. Right now, revenge against a slut of a sister bores me. I have embraced art for art's sake. I am a dilettante, am I not?

Glibness aside, she frowned, poured herself more vodka. The thought of loving or caring for someone was making her nervous, so she changed the subject before it came up.

“Why did you become a detective?”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Me?”

“Yes, and skip the tiresome clichés, if you please.”

“Actually, I was attracted to crime.”

“Really?” she said, surprised.

“I wanted to figure out what makes people do it.”

She stared at him in disbelief. “And you have to look beyond passion, stupidity and/or self-interest?”

“Yes. I think you do.”

“Well, happy hunting.”

“Jaclyn . . .” he said softly.

He leaned across the table and ran his hand along her arm, but she pulled away and smiled coyly.

“Is adultery a crime?”

He took his hand away, chuckled. “Hey, I never said I wasn't a criminal.”

She laughed. “How refreshing.”

“What about you?”

“Meaculpa.”

They laughed together. He clinked glasses with her. They both drank and gazed at each other, smiling foolishly.

“You are something else, Mizz Jaclyn.”

“As are you,” she whispered.

A silence. Holland looked away, then came back to her.

“So when are you going back to the UK?”

She shrugged casually.

“Want to stay here for a while . . . ?” He spread his hands. “I mean, I'm gonna have to get a place. . . . You want to move in with me?”

“Oh, dear.” She put her hand to her mouth and averted her eyes.
She hadn't expected this, and felt a rush of emotion. She had nothing to balance it with, nothing to hang on to. No sweet memory from childhood, no prior loves, certainly nothing from Jack. She had wanted to avoid this tête-à-tête, and now she was terrified.

“Wait.” He was mortified. “I'm sorry. Forget I said anything.”

“No, no, darling.” She squeezed his hand. “It's just that—”

Her eyes brimmed with tears. She curled up in his lap.
Of course I want to live with you. I want to live and die with you. I want nothing more in this—or other worlds. You fill me up. My cup runneth over. Yet how can we do this? How can we go on when I am a fugitive from your God, from everything that you call good in the universe, when I am your absolute worst nightmare?

“What the hell's wrong?”

“Oh, shut up, Casey.”

He did.

“Don't you know? I hate myself because I'm falling in love with you!”

Laughter rumbled up from his belly. His tension crumbled. He stroked her hair. “I love you, too, my darling,” he murmured, “I love you, too.”

“More?” she whispered.

“More.”

 

They began again. They shifted, adjusted. They got it right and delicious. They harmonized. They lost control. They were one until that final moment when her raison d'être came roaring back and reminded her who she was and who she would always be.

Then:
Ah, my God, his
la petit mort.
And mine. Ours.

The knife.

Her hand had found it in her purse, and as they were finishing, she stabbed him in the back with such force that the blade came through his chest.

Once. Twice.

Bewildered, he gazed down at her, his mouth opening, forming words that were never spoken. He collapsed and twitched, blood coming from his mouth, dead on top on her. She wrapped her arms and
legs around him and didn't mind the blood from his chest pooling between them, running down her sides, soaking the bed. She cooed that innocent French lullaby from her long-lost music box. No longer did she hate being a woman. Casey Holland, may he rest in ecstasy, had taken away her emptiness.

She extricated herself from under him, stepped back and contemplated his corpse on the bloody duvet, studied it as a sculptor would a block of marble. Holland reminded her of Jack's dalliance in Firenze when he had compared himself to . . .
Of course. You thought of it at the bar when you had your first martini. Michelangelo's
David.

She rolled him onto his back, then with a wet face cloth cleaned the blood off his torso. She gazed at him, recalled their last moments together, shuddered with pleasure. She sighed, then lovingly took his penis in one hand, picked up her knife with the other.

“About time,” Amber growled.

H.G. saw her sitting in the entranceway, smiled and angled toward her, stopped short when he noticed her swollen eyes and chalk-white face. She looked terrible.

“I say, are you ill?”

“Please don't talk to me.”

Amber walked him through the check-in, a woman officer, pretty in blue, smiling professionally at the bogus Scotland Yard ID minted by Xerox. She gave him a visitor's badge and beeped them through the main door. In the homicide bay, he was about to ask Amber what was wrong, but she had her back to him and was speaking to the secretary. “We have an appointment with the lieutenant.”

“He's not in.”

H.G. turned to Amber and said low, “Since when do you take the morning off if you're a police lieutenant on a high-profile murder investigation?”

She shook her head. Then, rather than stand by the desk and incur suspicion from every detective that walked by, she led H.G. to the kitchen. A
large almond coffee cake was on the counter. She automatically handed him a paper plate, and he helped himself, muttering about the disposable nature of 2010. “Whatever happened to china?”

Except the cake and the smell of stale coffee was too much for Amber, and while H.G. was relishing his first bite, she threw up in the trash can and bolted for the ladies' room.

Astonished, he watched her go, then went on eating his coffee cake, his faith in twenty-first-century medicine somewhat sullied.
Obviously, they don't yet have pharmaceuticals to cure everything, and if she doesn't come back soon, I'll tell the secretary that she's in the loo rather indisposed.
The acrid smell from the trash can wafted past him. He wrinkled his nose, raised his eyebrows and was reminded of Joseph Conrad retching in Amy's flowers on more than one occasion after nights of heavy drinking. He chuckled.

In the corner, he saw a chrome and black monstrosity with blinking lights, this one labeled
AUTOMATIC COFFEE BEVERAGE BAR
, one's choice the mere push of a button away. He scanned offerings from espresso to nonfat latte with vanilla, but was put off by dirty milk and coffee stains in the dispenser. Instead, he made himself tea and, despite Lipton's in a Styrofoam cup, felt superior to these Yanks who drank from a “rocketship” of a machine that was filthy and smelled questionable. The coffee cake, however, was excellent, and he was on his second piece when Amber returned, looking considerably better.

“Are you all right, 'Dusa?”

Her jaw tight, she nodded and motioned him out of the kitchen. “We can talk to the sergeant.”

“I didn't realize you drank,” he said low, following her, a huge grin on his face.

She stopped short, turned and glared. If her cobalt eyes had been lasers, they would've cut his heart out.

 

Overwhelmed with phone calls, Sergeant Young didn't question H.G.'s credentials or wonder why a Scotland Yard detective had suddenly shown up at the West Division to help nail the Brentwood killer. H.G.'s
accent and demeanor were enough, and with no lieutenant, Sergeant Young needed all the help he could get. Amber had suggested they start with the Ripper's original file, and H.G. envisioned Scotland Yard moles digging through ancient files, then mailing the stuff days later. She had frowned impatiently and mentioned email, then changed her mind, realizing an email would go to her laptop, and she didn't want him screwing it up again. So she'd said, “Fax,” then spelled it out for him. F-a-c-s-i-m-i-l-e. Or: Fax.

As he was talking to Young, she sidled into Lieutenant Holland's empty office, called Scotland Yard and requested they fax their file on Jack the Ripper. She was transferred to public affairs and luckily someone was still in the office, though it was past six in London. The secretary complied, glad to be of assistance. Between publishers and film production companies, Amber hadn't been the first to ask.

“So you think we got a copycat killer going here?” Sergeant Young asked H.G.

“Yes.”

“Then what's this ‘REMEMBER ME?' all about?”

H.G. stared blankly.

“Oh, yeah, you haven't looked at the murder book.” Young told H.G. about the happy-face portraits and signatures the killer had left on his victims.

H.G. thought fast, spoke with a forced enthusiasm. “That fits perfectly, Sergeant. Obviously, our killer is so far gone he has assumed the identity of Jack the Ripper and wants everyone to know.”

“How does that help us?”

“There have been dozens of copycats, and I've researched them all,” H.G. went on with his lie, a modicum of British superiority in his tone. “Not only do they mimic the crimes what with their mockery of surgical techniques, but they also take painstaking measures to actually
look
like the Ripper. I should think that the refrain ‘REMEMBER ME?' helps us a great deal.”

Young gave him a hard, unblinking stare.

“Though I must admit,” H.G. backpedaled, “that my theory may seem far-fetched.”

“No, no,” said Young, “not at all.” He spread his hands. “We got open minds here.” His phone buzzed again. “I'm away from my desk!” he shouted out the door.

“It's Parker Center,” the secretary shouted back.

“Fuck,” he muttered, then shot H.G. a hapless grin. “I gotta take this.”

“Of course.” Wells stood.

“Grab the girl, Ms. Reeves, and do what you have to do.” He picked up the phone. “I'll catch up.”

 

Acting like he belonged, H.G. went down the main corridor in search of Amber, but heard curious sounds from an open door, its nameplate reading
TRAFFIC RESPONSE UNIT
. Inside, a technician was on a landline phone with a patrolman and as they talked an on-scene video with time code played on the technician's monitor: the patrolman's partner was hand-cuffing a man so drunk he could barely stand; behind them, the man's SUV had taken out a fire hydrant on Sunset Boulevard, and water fountained up high, rained on a strip mall.

“Captured,” said the technician, working his keyboard, “no pun intended. . . . Now gimme a shot of the breathalyzer, and we're done.”

Amazed, H.G. took a step inside. Across the room, another technician was watching a half-dozen screens showing live video of the freeways. He monotoned instructions into his headset, and occasionally, pressed keys on his computer, then flipped images on the screens. After a minute, he sensed H.G.'s presence and spun around in his chair.