Jaclyn the Ripper (5 page)

A dim ambience from the casement windows lit his way back to the machine. He climbed up, stood in the cabin door. The control panel, its switches and dials appeared as new as when first installed; the brass fixtures gleamed as if polished yesterday; the stainless-steel Rotator Control—the eastward position sent one to the future, the westward to the past—would move easily. In 2010, the brass would be green with age, and the Rotator Control quite possibly rusted and stuck. Coming back through time, however,
The Utopia
rejuvenated itself, a phenomenon that still baffled him. No matter. As a motorcar mechanic might say, the old girl still had some years left on her. He glanced down, chuckled with surprise.

“Silly girl.”

Amy had left her purse by the cabin chair.

He swung inside and settled himself in the chair. It wasn't as big as he remembered it. He smiled ruefully.
The chair is exactly the same as it was thirteen years ago. It's the pilot's backside that has gotten larger.
Sheepish, he read the Destination Indicator: year, 2010; month, June; day, 20; time, 12:01
A.M.
Usually, Amy was in bed long before midnight, so he had no clue what had possessed her to go to that wee hour. Maybe fear. Theoretically, he would arrive with reassurances while she was still in the vicinity wondering what in the world she had done. Yet he made no move. Though not one to trust intuition, he felt that something was seriously wrong and looked for a sign. He gasped.

Blood was on the floor.

Barely discernible in the dim light, it looked like a trail of shiny black paint.
Amy. My God, what have you done to yourself?
Hurriedly, he pulled the medical kit from under the chair. Other than himself, Amy was the only one who knew it was there, and, yes, she had opened it. The blood must be hers. A sterile bandage and roll of gauze were
gone; the tincture of iodine had been opened. She had probably cut herself in a rush to get out of the machine. Muttering, he cleaned up the blood with a piece of gauze, then realized he was procrastinating again.
Good Lord, man, go get her!

He strapped himself in the chair, turned the key and engaged the switches, listened gloomily to the engine's characteristic hum as it warmed—familiar like a Mozart melody once heard, never forgotten. He shoved the Accelerator Helm Lever forward until it locked in the flank position. As the engine whined and the machine began spinning, he suddenly recalled why he had put the lock on the central gearing wheel in the first place. It was so that man could not play God—as he had done in 1979. Yet here he was on his way again, his beloved wife already a casualty of an unfamiliar future.

A crystalline flash.

He felt himself melting, merging with the flux, lifted out of 1906 and sent rocketing along the fourth dimension. He realized a split second too late why man—at least this one—shouldn't play at the supernatural.

He didn't believe in God.

Now West LAPD crime scene technicians were in the men's room off the Getty's rotunda, working in that electric atmosphere that comes with an unusual murder destined for headlines. They moved in concert, their movements stiff and robotic, a ballet typical of their century and the megacity they served. Yet in their midst, one stood out, her hair glossy black under fluorescents, her tailored blue lab coat a cut above the dirty white worn by her colleagues.

Amber Reeves was speaking softly into a tiny HD video camera as she panned down the body of Teresa Cruz and tried to avoid the lead forensic photographer. Behind her, fingerprint technicians methodically dusted and lifted latent prints from the bathroom stalls while lower-level criminalists bagged broken glass from the mirror. The photographer had powdered the traffic area between the corpse and the door, then side-lit the dozens of footprints that had emerged and flagged off the ambient top light so the impressions would photographically separate from the floor. He had mounted his old Nikon F2 on a tripod—digital cameras didn't work for footprints—and was moving back for a wide angle just as Amber bent down for a tight shot of the jagged hole in Teresa's side. The photographer backed into her, knocking them both off-balance.

“Jesus.” He turned and frowned at her, then went back to his camera and lined up a shot almost parallel to the floor.

“Amber.”

She glanced away. Lieutenant Casey Holland was in the doorway—thick, stolid and definitely not handsome in Sunday-morning sweats. She liked him better in suits, crisp shirts and ties. He motioned her out of the room.

“Morning.” She gave him her patented warm smile.

“What's up with this?” He gestured at her video camera.

She shrugged, thought of a bunch of excuses, but offered none—she hated to sound lame. Besides, they'd always been honest with each other. “I picked it up at Samy's.”

“Yeah?” Casey nodded at the photographer, lifted his eyebrows. “Well, Rogers there thinks you're going for his job.”

“Oookay. And I'd want to spend my time shooting footprints because . . . ?”

“It's a stop along the way.”

She blushed and looked down. The lieutenant was uncanny. He could sense ambition almost as fast as he could solve crimes and invariably used it to his advantage.

“Shouldn't you be in there taking DNA samples?”

“I really don't think the killer left trace evidence behind.”

“You're a psychic now?”

“C'mon, Lieutenant, the blood is all hers.”

“A splatter expert, as well.”

She blushed again. “Besides—”

“I know, Amber. She wasn't raped, and we're getting two weeks worth of fingerprints.”

She was already going for her backpack and the field kit inside. As she came back to the doorway, he added, “Try for epidermal traces from where he strangled her.”

“Okay, okay.”

“And stay out of my face.” He patted her on the ass, a friendly gesture in that no sexual tension existed between them. Yes, he appreciated her
curvaceous body, her panache and joie de vivre, but he was happily married with two kids and had made a point of telling her that when she'd taken the job a year ago so that they
could
work together. He also insulated her from the others. They knew she was a superior technician and resented her for it. They knew that while they were doomed to crime scenes and corpses, she would quickly rise above their ghoulish toil to a better life.

She had no such confidence in herself.

Lieutenant Holland frowned at her, gestured curtly with his head. She nodded back, eased into the bathroom, gave Rogers a wide berth, kneeled by the corpse and went to work.

 

Dutifully, Amber took DNA samples from Teresa Cruz's bruised neck, under her fingernails, from some of the curiously bare footprints Rogers had already photographed, and just to satisfy the lieutenant, added samples of blood as well. She frowned petulantly, not convinced that she had anything more than biochemical trash for the circular file back at the lab, and moved on. She followed the killer's escape route—now luminous with powder—from the bathroom to the emergency exit and the stone path that ended at a six-foot wall, the expanse fenced with phosphorescent homicide tape. She went up the ladder marked “LAPD,” observed the technicians combing the lawn and bushes beyond, then studied the dent in the hedgerow where the killer had fallen. At first, she saw only leaves and broken branches—nothing out of the ordinary—then pushed down on the hedgerow as if a body had landed on it. A dark-red speck caught her eye—dried blood on a broken twig that the techs fanning out down the hill had obviously missed. Grinning triumphantly, she bagged it and hurried back to her field kit.

On an LAPD field table, she hooked up her laptop to the portable lab's TMC-2000a which tested for DNA, arranged the samples and began the tedious process. While waiting, she overheard Lieutenant Holland interviewing the security guard, Peterson, on a concrete bench next to the water fountain.

“. . . we couldn't find her,” said Peterson, “and I was having problems in the room. One monitor went down and then they all went down. Like dominoes.”

“I'll want the disks,” said Holland.

Peterson nodded. “Anyway, Cedric called me on the walkie—he's all shook—and I'm going down to take a look, and I saw this guy, and I yelled, but he was like
gone
, you know?”

“What did he look like?”

“I dunno. Like anybody. But he was in the shadows, so, you know.” Peterson shrugged.

“What was he wearing?”

“Baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans, I think. I'm not sure.”

“You aware that he had on the deceased's street clothes?”

“Huh?” Peterson was flabbergasted. “You gotta be kidding. I mean, why would he do that? What happened to his clothes?”

“We're still looking.” The lieutenant made a note. “Any paintings missing? Museum pieces? Stuff like that?”

“No, sir, not so far.” Peterson looked down thoughtfully, then back at Holland. “Did he really cut out her kidney?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.”

“You from here, Peterson?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, that's what wackos do in this town. They wanna make the six o'clock news. Everybody in L.A. wants to be a fucking star. . . .” He handed Peterson his card, gave him a long, blank look. “Call me before you go anywhere, okay?”

Forty minutes after the lieutenant was done with Peterson, Amber was checking her results for the third time, not fathoming what the DNA program was telling her about the blood sample she had taken from the hedgerow. Determining the karyotypes had been a piece of cake, but then she had seen something abnormal with the sex-determining chromosomes 46. They were neither clearly XX nor XY, but looked more like those of a botched Klinefelter's syndrome: Most cells appeared to be XXY; but a few seemed to be XYY and a few even appeared to be an impossible
XXYY. The only thing for certain was that none of the cells was clearly XX or XY, and that the Y chromosomes were so weak that they might as well have not been there at all. She wasn't sure what to do next, and was starting to be annoyed with herself for feeling helpless, when Holland's shadow loomed over the laptop screen from behind her.

“You milking it, or what?”

“No, I'm not milking it.”

“That machine's supposed to be fast.”

“It is fast.”

“So then what've you got?” he said. “A Hispanic male suspect roughly the same size as the victim. Maybe a relative, right?”

“I don't know.”

He frowned impatiently and muttered unintelligibly. Blushing, she worked the keyboard and brought up all three inconclusive test results on a split screen.

“All the other tests were normal,” she added.

“What other tests?”

“The victim's blood.”

“Why would you test her blood?”

“For comparison,” she said, her face growing hot.

“Then you corrupted the perp's sample,” he said bluntly, “the only one we had.”

“I did not!”

“You corrupted the damn sample!”

“I most certainly did—”

“Amber,” he interrupted. “Go count to ten.”

She got up from the chair and backed away, angry and surprised. He had never talked to her like that before.

“Take a break,” he said, then sat down and began running the procedures himself. “Go soak up some grace and beauty.”

She started off.

“Put on some lipstick, too.”

“Screw you,” she said under her breath.

The farther away Amber got from the crime scene—sans lab coat and latex gloves—the more relaxed she became, and by the time she'd wandered through quiet rooms of Renaissance, then Restoration art, she was in a gentle, reflective mood, musing ironically about this, her first trip to the Getty, thanks to a brutal murder.
I've forgotten. My God, I've forgotten grace and beauty.
She wiped away sudden tears. Before the police, she had been an innocent soul, a bright-eyed summa cum laude graduate from UCLA with a degree in English literature. But rather than go on for her Ph.D., she opted to support her mother, who had just lost her job as a salesclerk, couldn't get another one and was too young for Social Security—not that she could have lived on Social Security. So Amber had taken a down-and-dirty master's program in criminalistics because she could make fifty grand a year right out of the gate working for the LAPD. Once financially stable, she'd figured, she could go back to the history and literature she loved, yet she hadn't counted on the hard, cynical edge to her personality that a year with the police had given her—or her desire to escape it. Then—from a page out of Dickens—her mother had gotten lung cancer. Four months later she was dead, leaving Amber a legacy of unpaid medical bills: a dismal, unavoidable reason to go on working.

She sat down on a bench amid dreamy pastels by French impressionists and went on crying, thankful that the murder had closed the museum, and she was alone right now. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed her books, the poetry and art, the blossoming creativity of the Edwardian Age, that genteel, lingering romance from another century, wistful in her mind. She wiped her eyes, thought it colossally unfair that she'd become a user-friendly tech who had to analyze acts of violence and their desecrated victims to make a living.