Jaclyn the Ripper (36 page)

Jaclyn was talking to Amy about something called “hip-hop,” waving her hands over her head, and H.G. noticed the bandage on her wrist.

“What happened?” he said curiously.

“I locked myself out of the house,” she said, “and had to break the glass to get in.” She laughed. “Obviously, I'd never succeed as a burglar.”

“You have a house here?”

“Not really,” she said confidentially. “I'm house-sitting for my cousin who has gone off on a cruise. . . . Lucky bird.”

“How long are you staying?”

“Oh, dear, I'm not really sure.” She chuckled and blushed. “You see, I've met someone. . . .”

“Oh, how wonderful!” Amy cried. “You should call him! We could have a drink later on.”

“I'm sorry to say that he has a prior engagement.”

“Too bad,” said Amy.

“So I guess I'm stranded here. . . . What a place to be stranded, enh? We could do worse, couldn't we?” She turned to H.G. “When are you going back?”

“We're not certain, either,” he responded.

“I was rather hoping for a little side trip,” said Jaclyn. “Maybe to Las Vegas.”

“Oh?”

“You do know what they call it,” she said insinuatingly, “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“No, I didn't know,” he said flatly.

“Your lack of enthusiasm is astounding,” she joked. “Would you prefer the nineteenth century?” She giggled and Amy joined in. “Would you?”

Now, what brought that on?
He glanced at his new clothes.
Am I so obviously out of place here?
He arched his eyebrows at Jaclyn.
What is it about her, anyway. . . ?
“Actually, there is quite a bit to be said for the Edwardian Age,” he postulated.

“The Edwardian Age,” she said slowly, as if trying out a new phrase. “Tell me about the Edwardian Age.”

“You went to school, didn't you?” he said dryly.

“Are you afraid of your own opinions?”

“All right,” he said, annoyed. “After the Queen died, we were blessed with a sense of freedom. Optimism. Compassion. Progressive thinking.” As he spoke, he thought of innumerable exceptions to what he was saying. “And romance, of course.”

“Ah, yes.” Jaclyn nodded, bemused. “They threw off the shackles of
Queen Victoria, didn't they? Bully for them.” She leaned over the table provocatively, her breasts stretching the gray camisole. “And do you share your distant relative's politics?”

Surprised, he stared at her.
Is she baiting me?

“His views on morality? Feminism . . . ? Sexual freedom?”

Uncertain by the turn in the conversation, Amy looked away, but her husband rose to the occasion.

“Yes, I do,” he replied. He glanced at Amy. “In theory, of course.”

“Then you must be appalled by the scourge of AIDS,” Jaclyn said blithely, “for how can people, shall we say, enjoy a stranger's company if they must fear contracting a horrible disease that will not only kill them, but infect their children, as well?”

“They take precautions,” he said stubbornly.

“I, on the other hand, happen to believe that AIDS is God's way of controlling the population—not to mention his selection of the species. I mean, if medical science is so bent on curing all the tried-and-true diseases, what else is God going to do?”

“I don't believe in God.”

“Ah. . . . What a shame.” She sighed. “Satan, perhaps?”

“Must we?” said Amy. “I say, this is all so ghastly. . . . Can't we talk about something else?”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” said Jaclyn, placing a hand on Amy's arm.

“Why don't we have dessert?” said Amy, smiling again.

“Yes. What a grand idea.”

“And then—before you go—you must come up. The suites here are heavenly.”

Suddenly, the maître d' appeared, smiled at the ladies, then turned and gave H.G. a confidential nod. “I'm sorry to bother you, sir, but you have a phone call.”

Room 317 at the Holiday Inn Express stank of blood and sex. The table was littered with wadded napkins, bits of fruit and glasses of stale vodka. The lieutenant's clothes and shoes were strewn about the room as if he had undressed in stages or if someone had helped him. Either way, it was helter-skelter.

In death, Casey Holland was bloated and bluish, his eyes closed, his face slack, yet frozen in a curious little smile. He'd been spread-eagled on the bed, its pillows and duvet—now stiff with blood—arranged beneath him as if he were royalty. Deep love scratches curved from his back and up his sides as if he'd been held by a creature with giant claws. The happy face on his torso was a collage: the eyes were severed pinky fingers; the nose was in fact Holland's nose, surgically made smaller, cuter; the mouth was his filleted penis curved into a smile. Carved around the happy face in small, delicate letters: “I love you and I miss you I love you and I miss you I love you and I miss you.” The killer hadn't bothered with “REMEMBER ME?”

Now the coroner's people were making a bottleneck of the doorway as technicians tried to come and go. Rogers was still shooting Lieutenant Holland's corpse, his lights creating an obstacle course for everybody
else, but Sergeant Young didn't seem to mind. In fact, none of the confusion bothered him. He had found the lieutenant's phone. Sitting at the table where his evidence people had bagged the fruit and vodka glasses, he scrolled to the last number Holland had called, took out his own phone and speed-dialed Verizon special services.

“Salvatore Arenas, may I help you?”

“Hey, Sal, how you doing tonight?”

“Jesus, Sarge, don't you ever go home?”

“No reason to.”

“What, no wife, no dog?”

“Wives fuck your buds, and dogs get hit by cars.”

Sal laughed nervously “You know, you're one—”

“—cynical son of a bitch, I know. The day you can tell me something that I ain't already heard is the day we go for beers.”

“You're gonna die alone, Sarge.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You
are
.”

“Until then, I need a GPS location on a number. Three-one-zero area code.”

“Go ahead.”

 

Outside in the corridor, a pale and shaken Amber Reeves tried yet another number and waited as it rang and rang. Nearby, the manager explained to detectives: The guest had only paid for one night. The maid hadn't cleaned his room because of the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign. The guest didn't answer repeated calls to his cell or the phone in the room, so faced with an overbooking, the manager himself had finally gone in the room, saw the body and called 911.

After twelve rings, the automatic voice mail for H.G.'s suite picked up. Amber swore under her breath, hung up, then tried the Robbins home. Voice mail there, too.

She hugged herself and stared at the phone.
He's gotta be someplace.
She thought furiously, then dialed 411.

“God, you're hard to get ahold of!” Amber complained.

“ 'Dusa, I'm in the middle of dinner.” H.G. had been directed to a house phone in the lobby. “Am I not allowed to eat?”

“The lieutenant's been murdered!” she interrupted.

He slumped in a chair. “Good Lord.”

“You're wrong about your Jack the Ripper, Bertie,” she added, her voice quaking. “The Brentwood killer is a woman.”

A silence.

“Impossible,” he finally said. “Someone else must've killed him.”

“No. . . . I just ran the DNA. I ran it twice and it was like another botched Klinefelter's syndrome. . . . The same as before.”

Stunned, he only half-listened as she described Room 317 and the gruesome happy face that was on Holland's belly with sentiments around its perimeter as if the killer had carved a totem on a tree. H.G.'s brain had hopscotched to the articles he had read in the
Scientific American
, and it came to him in a horrible rush.

Amy's blood on the cabin floor.

Amy's blood was fresh on the cabin floor when the time machine
traveled to infinity, fresh with her stems cells, fresh with her X chromosomes and genetic material. When Leslie John Stephenson was vaporized during the trip back to 2010, his Y chromosome had been replaced by a more dominant, full-blown X chromosome so that he was reconstituted as a woman.

Wait. Traces of Amy's blood were still on the floor when I traveled here. Why am I still a man?
He closed his eyes, massaged the bridge of his nose.
Because all chromosomes are not created equal.

Obviously, Stephenson had a pitifully weak Y chromosome due to a latent nondisjunction of two X chromosomes that he had been carrying with him all his life.
That definitely would have been a pebble in his genetic shoe. That would explain why 'Dusa's DNA tests failed. And—after all these years—that would explain Jack the Ripper's murderous psychiatric pathology.

His breath whooshed out. The end result was that a physically normal, XX woman with a latent Y chromosome who was as deadly as she was beautiful had arrived in the time machine early that Sunday morning.

“Bertie, are you still there . . . ?”

“Jaclyn Smythe is Jack the Ripper,” he said hollowly.

He slammed the phone down, bolted up from the chair, raced back to the restaurant, angling past knots of guests, jostling the rich and famous, then stopped suddenly in the foyer, his path blocked by the maître d'.

“I'm sorry, sir, but they left a few minutes ago.” The maître d' handed him the bill. “Would you like me to put the charges on your room?”

“Where did they go!” H.G. demanded.

The maître d' shrugged sadly. “I am sorry, sir, but they did not say. Maybe you can call them?”

H.G. was gone.

 

He lurched into the elevator, punching the button over and over as if that would make it go faster. “Who in the bloody hell would've thought—” he said to the walls, then shook his head.
It wasn't a reformulation error—it was more like a transduction error. Obviously, Fate has been laughing at me ever since I arrived.

He got off on the fifth floor, leaned against the wall, struggled to control his rising panic.
If you give in to your rage, you will fail, and this, this Jaclyn—this transmogrification from hell—will be gleefully cutting you up alongside Amy.
He took deep breaths, and his mind became lucid again. Amy probably hadn't been harmed, he figured. Jaclyn wanted the special key, and just as the Ripper had proposed a trade thirty-one years ago, he was certain that Jaclyn would do the same.

He fished for the Beretta in his coat pocket, took it out, hefted it and was surprised it made him feel so much more capable—more reasonable, even. Coolly, he made sure that a round was in the chamber, flicked off the safety. Very gingerly, he slid it in his trousers.
God forbid that I should shoot myself.

He started down the hallway for the cul-de-sac.

 

He slid the plastic key in the lock, held his breath and pulled it out quickly. The door to his suite unlocked with a click. He slowly pushed it open and heard faint, giddy laughter from the living room over the white noise of traffic which meant the French doors were open, and they were probably having a drink on the balcony. He stepped into the foyer and closed the door behind him so it wouldn't slam shut in a draft. He crept closer and listened again. Jaclyn was complimenting the port Amy had opened, remarking that it was far superior to the claret her friends usually served in London. H.G. wasn't sure if she already knew he was in the room and was saying that to mock him or if it was merely coincidental.

He slipped his hand around the Beretta in his pocket, took a breath and strode in the living room. He was ready for their surprise and tried to act nonchalant. “Ah. You mustn't have heard me come in.”

If I can separate them. If I can possibly separate them.

He nodded at the bar. “Jaclyn, would you mind pouring me a glass of that wonderful port?” He turned to Amy, said with a businesslike tone, “Amy, I must speak with you in the other room.” He inclined his head and started out of the living room. “You don't mind, do you?”

“She does mind, I'm sorry to say.”

He heard the brief struggle, spun around with the Beretta in his hand, but was too late.

His ploy hadn't worked.

Jaclyn had a fist in Amy's hair and the blade of her knife laid across Amy's throat. Wide-eyed, Amy was frozen in terror, standing on tiptoes as if that would stop the knife from cutting further into her flesh.

“I trust we can cooperate?” Jaclyn said to them both.

H.G. nodded slowly, yet aimed his pistol at Jaclyn anyway, squinting through his glasses. She was half-hidden behind Amy.

“To begin with, I believe we had this conversation roughly thirty years ago,” Jaclyn said ironically, “though it seems like yesterday, hmmm?”

“You want the special key,” H.G. said slowly.

“Brilliant, Wells,” she said scornfully, “absolutely top-drawer.”

“Go to hell.”

“Ah, but I've already been, my dear boy. . . . I've already been, and I have no wish to return.”

“I give you the special key, and you release Amy.”

Jaclyn tittered with laughter. “You've learned your lines!”

“I have your word?”

“As a lady—or a gentleman.” She smiled wickedly. “Whichever you prefer.”

He transferred the Beretta to his left hand, dug the special key out of his pocket with his right. “Let Amy go, and I'll toss you the key.”

“No, no, Wells.” She feigned impatience. “You've forgotten how we do this. It's the other way round.”

He took a step closer, drew a bead on Jaclyn, was actually pulling the trigger when she ducked behind Amy again.