Riptide

forty

The House of Silence burned to the ground.

Jennifer spent much of the next day sifting the ashes in search of salvageable remains. She found little. Her Prius had been ruined, her family heirlooms and mementos erased from existence. Her collection of sea glass was gone, too. None of that mattered. The house had held on to her for too long. Now she was free.

In its death throes the house had collapsed into the cellar, destroying the crypt, cremating Edward Hare’s victims. Only a few blackened teeth survived.

“And the diary?” Jennifer asked Draper as they dined in a Santa Monica restaurant that night, safely away from the TV reporters.

Draper shrugged. “It wasn’t in Parkinson’s car or on his person. He may have left it in the house to burn. It would only have incriminated him by implicating his ancestor.”

“Without the diary…”

“There’s no way to prove he was a blood relation of Jack the Ripper, or that Jack was ever in Venice-or even in America, for that matter. Of course, Parkinson's personal effects provide plenty of evidence that he was obsessed with the Ripper case. We found more than two hundred books on the Ripper in his house, and he’d been visiting the Ripperwalk site, and others like it, for years. But that in itself proves nothing.”

“So before he started killing, Parkinson could have been just an ordinary guy with an interest in Jack the Ripper?”

“Not quite. We know his father was the Devil’s Henchman. And Parkinson knew it too. In the house there were…souvenirs from the case, hand-me-downs.” He saw her questioning gaze and waved his hand. “It’s not something to discuss while we’re eating. Believe me.”

“Okay.” She thought of Catharine Eddowes’ kidney. Suddenly her liver pate seemed less appetizing. “I guess we’ll never know why he did it. Or how he framed Richard so perfectly.”

“We can make a pretty fair guess about Richard, at least. Let’s say Parkinson knows, from family lore, that his ancestor Edward Hare left a cache of bodies and a diary somewhere in Venice. What he doesn't know is the exact location. Then he hears about the discovery in your cellar. He makes sure he’s the one who processes the remains. He looks for the diary. Remember how he noticed some of the dirt had been disturbed?”

“Yes. I pretended I didn’t know anything about it.”

“But he suspected you were lying-and that, as a document analyst, you couldn’t resist the temptation to study the book. He must have watched your house early that morning and followed you to the cemetery. He left the note on your car to test your reaction. He couldn't have been a hundred percent sure until he saw your message on the Ripperwalk site. The reference to Edward Hare confirmed his suspicions. He knew you were the only one who could know that name-and only if you had the book."

"And he also knew about my brother, because the subject came up when we were in the cellar. So he tracked down Richard…”

“And spied on him. Richard was paranoid to begin with, and when he realized he was being watched, it spooked him. He left his apartment and went on the run, convinced he was being stalked."

Jennifer nodded. It wouldn't have taken much to set Richard off. Once he was out of his apartment, Parkinson must have picked the lock and burned the files. In the cellar she'd mentioned that Richard had kept the family papers, and that they might include a record of when Graham Silence purchased the house. Parkinson would have wanted to destroy that evidence, if it existed.

In going though the files, he must have found a record of Richard's library card number and the associated PIN. That was how he’d logged on to the system using Richard's ID.

“I guess,” she said, “it was just a coincidence that Richard and Parkinson were at the library at the same time.”

"No, I don't think so. Remember, there were library books in Richard's apartment, which Parkinson would have seen. He knew Richard liked to hang out there. Parkinson needed an untraceable public computer to download the file you said you’d put online, and he probably chose the Santa Monica Library because there was a good chance Richard would be there. And because he could use Richard's log-on info to cement the frame-up."

She thought of her brother, already panicking in the certainty-correct for once-that someone was out to get him. Then he spotted his pursuer in the library. He fled into the stacks, and when Jennifer came after him, he was convinced she was part of the plot.

She wondered if Parkinson had already chosen Maura as his next victim. He could have found some reference to Maura in Richard's files. Getting into her building would have been no problem. He needed only to identify himself as a police consultant, and Maura would have buzzed him in.

"You're very quiet," Draper said.

She realized she'd been picking at her food, lost in thought. Without looking up, she asked, “Did he have any children?”

“No. Never married. No offspring.”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“He was an only child. The last of the line, Jen. Edward Hare died with him.”

“He must have known about the Ripper connection since he was a boy. But he didn’t act on it until eighteen months ago. Any idea why?”

“We’ve looked at his medical records. He was diagnosed with MS six years ago, but only began to develop seriously debilitating symptoms within the last two years. It looks like his illness was the trigger. He realized it was now or never. Whenever the disease was in remission, he would strike.”

“His illness alone, and even his family background, wouldn't account for his hostility to women.”

“From what we've learned, he had only one serious relationship with a woman, years ago. They were planning to get married. Then he broke it off. He seems to have found out she was unfaithful, or at least he thought she was.”

Like Hare, she thought, and poor blameless Kitty.

“The shrinks say his failed relationship could have turned him against women in general.” Draper shrugged. “That's their theory, anyway. Who knows?”

“You don’t trust shrinks?” she said, smiling.

“Some of them are okay.”

“Any in particular?”

“The pretty ones.”

“Well, aren’t you the smooth talker.”

“I’m very suave. Get used to it.”

“It may take a little time.”

“You’ll have all the time you need.”

She fiddled with her fork, watching the tines catch the light. “It still doesn’t explain why he did it. What motivated him.”

“Did Edward Hare’s diary explain his motives?”

“Not really. It was kind of a power trip combined with a moral mission. Unleashing his animal instincts while purging the world of vice. But I don’t know if any of that was the real reason.”

“What was it, then?”

She let the fork drop. “I think the son of a bitch just enjoyed it. I think he was having fun.”

“And that may be as good an explanation for Parkinson as any. He got to fool the whole department-people he worked with every day. We all felt sorry for him because of his illness, and secretly he was laughing at us. He was the one in the know, and the rest of us were in the dark.”

“How about now? Who’s in the know?”

Draper didn’t follow. “Everybody knows Parkinson was the killer-”

“But they don’t know he was Jack’s great-grandson. They don’t know about the diary or all the rest of it, do they?”

He got it now. “The only ones who know, or ever knew, are you, me, Casey, Parkinson, and Maura.”

“And now there’s no proof.”

“True. But you could tell your story anyway. Some people will believe you. Harrison Sirk probably would. He could get a book deal out of it, cut you in on the profits. Or…”

“Yes?”

“Not every case has to be solved. The world has done without a solution to the Ripper murders for better than a hundred years.”

She thought about this throughout the next few weeks, as March bled into April. She was living in a residential hotel in Marina del Rey and visiting Richard daily at St. John’s Hospital, where he was undergoing mandatory psychiatric treatment. Forced to take his meds, he had regained a measure of lucidity. He was eating regularly and gaining weight. He would never be the man he was, but she hadn’t lied when she said he could have a new start. And maybe someday he could be moved to a halfway house and resume something close to a normal life. Maybe.

Casey was back on the job. If it bothered him that she was seeing Draper, he kept it to himself.

Only once did he mention the fire. “I heard what you did for me,” he said in a serious tone. “Trying to get me out, rather than saving yourself. That was a standup thing to do.”

“The smoke clouded my brain. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“That’s it, Pocket-Size. Keep messing with me.”

“It’s what I do. And don’t call me Pocket-Size.”

Media interest in the case was intense for a few days, then predictably died down. Harrison Sirk tried to buttonhole her at Maura’s memorial service. Jennifer told him to fuck off.

Draper arrested his prime suspect in the murder of Marilyn Diaz. A search of the man’s house turned up a rough draft of the threat message. He confessed. His motive was just what Jennifer had predicted. He had made advances and had been rebuffed. It was such a little thing, but large enough to end a woman’s life.

A real estate agent from Maura’s office told Jennifer that her parcel of land was worth one and a half million dollars. Jennifer put it on the market. She just might buy the bungalow in the Valley that Maura had always talked about.

For now, she was still near the sea. She walked on the beach one April evening and thought one last time about Draper’s words. He was right. There was no need to tell the world about the diary, no need to reopen the case and refocus the media’s cameras on her family. No need to revisit the past. The past was dead. It was dust and ashes. To cling to it was to die inside. Life moved on.

When the sun was gone and the sky was deep purple fading to black, she walked out onto Venice pier. At the end of the pier, she reached into her tote bag and brought out a rusty tin box.

Parkinson had indeed left the diary in the house to burn, but the box had protected it. The pages, though scorched, were readable. She had found it in her salvage hunt and had told no one, not even Draper. Probably it wasn’t good to start off their relationship with a lie, even if only a lie of omission. But he was a cop, and he might insist that the diary be booked into evidence, and then the whole story would come out.

Alone on the pier, Jennifer leaned over the railing and dropped the tin straight down, well away from the pilings with their tangled fishing lines. It hit the water with a splash, bobbed on the waves, and drifted away into the dark. Perhaps it would be carried out to sea, or perhaps, like Marilyn Diaz, it would be caught in a riptide and returned shoreward. She would let time and chance decide.

She hoped, though, that it would be lost in the ocean’s distant depths. Not every case had to be solved, as Draper said. Let Jack the Ripper remain a mystery. Let him be remembered not as what he was, not as Edward Hare with his motherless childhood and his lurid dreams of blood, but as what the world wanted him to be-a tall man in a top hat and black cloak, striding down an alley, retreating forever into the fog.