Riptide

three

By two o’clock she was ensconced in her study, bending over an anonymous letter from a man with murder on his mind.

When she was at work, there was nothing else, no outside world, no past or future, only the white examination table and the sheet of lined paper in the glow of the full-spectrum lamp.

Though the message was unpunctuated, badly spelled, without margins or paragraph breaks, it conveyed the writer’s thoughts quite effectively.

I am going to hunt you down bitch amp; take you out it will hurt don’t make plans for the futur you wont be around long ennough for it to matter…

And much more in that vein.

Immediately she pegged the writer as male. Women used intensifiers-“I am so angry…you are such a good friend”-and emotive language, laden with “I feel” statements. They qualified their remarks, even in the heat of strong emotion. No such markers were present in the note on her examination table.

It wasn’t difficult to isolate the letter’s key motifs. The most obvious was resentment of the victim for her superiority.

even perfect people die…maybe everrybody wants you but I only want you dead…before you die I will spit in your perfect face

She wondered if he actually did spit in her face when he killed her. It might be possible to do a DNA test. The plastic bag could have protected the evidence even after the body went into the water. She made a note of it.

His fixation on her appearance suggested that he regarded his own looks as inadequate. It also strongly suggested a sexual obsession with the victim, an impression reinforced by other language.

I pity you bitch I feel sorry for you beccause I know whats coming amp; its coming down hard

It didn't take a psychology degree to see the repetition of the word coming and its proximity to the word hard.

There was a second motif-rejection.

Your not going to walk away, he warned, perhaps recalling a time when she had in fact walked away from him. Youll be humiliated no pride amp; youll begg me for mercy.

He wanted to humiliate her-probably because she’d humiliated him by rebuffing his advances. I am going to hunt you down bitch amp; take you out… Yeah, he had wanted to take her out, all right. Whoever wrote this letter had made an attempt-probably an inept attempt-to initiate a relationship. She had said no. Now he wanted to strike back.

And what were the odds that somebody who misspelled simple words like future and everybody and even beg would have no trouble spelling humiliated? Or that such a person would have the know-how to use an ampersand?

He was smarter and better educated than he wanted to let on. Playing dumb was harder than it looked.

Smile while you can, he wrote, beccause soon I am going to make mona lisa moan. An uneducated person would not think naturally of Mona Lisa or perform an alliterative play on Mona and moan.

The other motif in the letter was the writer’s proximity to the victim. You can feel death breatheing down youre neck…up close amp; personal…

One passage combined all three motifs.

did I get your attention? are you scared? you think your safe in youre perfect world youre plastic bubble but its nearly time for the bubble to burst closer to the end than you think

The last words could be an unconscious confession, his way of saying, “I am closer to you than you think.” He might live near her or work in the same office.

Another phrase stood out: its nearly time for the bubble to burst. An expression that might occur to someone in the financial or real estate markets.

Marilyn Diaz had been an insurance agent. Had she worked in an office complex with Realtors, stockbrokers?

Jennifer sat back in her chair, notepad in hand. She jotted down her conclusions.

• Market-oriented business, financial/realty

• Lived or worked near victim

• Educated, intelligent

• Sense of inadequacy about physical appearance

• Unsuccessful attempt at a sexual advance

That was what she knew about him. And he was, of course, dangerous. Marilyn Diaz might not have realized it, but the signs were there.

He had disguised his handwriting, as evidenced by the telltale shakiness of his script. Concealing his identity suggested foresight and planning. And he had made no specific threat. People whose plans for revenge went no further than daydreams would share their fantasies. The ones who were more serious kept the details to themselves.

He had, however, left inadvertent hints of how he planned to do it. He’d written of looking into her face as she died, of death breathing down her back. The constellation of images-face to face, neck, breathing-suggested he had already been thinking of the plastic bag, the slow asphyxiation. He’d meant to choke her to death while he stared into her eyes.

When he broke the window-when Marilyn heard him coming down the hall-she must have known it was the man who’d written the note. She must have known he had come to kill her.

I am going to hunt you down bitch amp; take you out…

He might have left no clues at the scene. He might have hoped the surf would wash off any trace evidence on the body. But in this note he’d given away much more than he realized.

She could put the police on this man’s scent. Most people would never know it. Her testimony would not be permitted at his trial. Her analysis, which still had no legal standing, could not be submitted as evidence. But it could be used to develop leads. And when he was in prison, he would know that his own words had locked him up for life.

That was the power of the work she did. It was more than document analysis. Officially, her role was special psychological consultant to various law enforcement agencies throughout the Los Angeles area.

Her skill was psycholinguistic analysis. She read between the lines.

Psycholinguistics could yield data on the writer’s background and education, the books and magazines he read, the work he did. But another kind of information was embedded in a text. Self-image, private obsessions, hidden fears and hopes.

She remembered the exact moment when she first understood the process. She was in a crowded bar with a college boyfriend named Sean, complaining that she had to shout to be heard. Abruptly it occurred to her that she wasn’t concerned about the ambient noise. Her actual complaint was that Sean couldn’t hear her, ever. He was too self-involved to listen. She hadn’t been consciously aware of the problem. But her unconscious mind knew-and found a way to communicate the message. To shout it, in fact.

That night she reread her journal and found the same message repeated again and again. Her subliminal mind had been sending out a distress signal for weeks, but her conscious mind, busy with rationalizations and denial, hadn’t grasped it.

The realization gave her a creepy feeling, as if she had discovered a second personality cohabiting her body. For a while, she was reluctant to pursue the idea. But when she read about the cutting-edge discipline of psycholinguistics in her psych classes, she was hooked.

The unconscious, she learned, was wiser than the conscious mind. It expressed truths that conscious thought tried to hide, truths that emerged as coded messages, a series of red flags. The “red thread,” it was called. Like Einstein’s God, the unconscious was subtle but not malicious. Its secrets could be teased out, if a reader had the skill to follow the red thread.

Some cops appreciated her contribution. Some didn’t. Most, like Roy Draper, utilized her insights while remaining skeptical of her methods. Resistance, she thought, arose mainly because people didn’t want to believe that they revealed themselves with everything they said and wrote. What she did was too much like mind reading-a scary prospect for people who wanted to keep secrets.

And everybody had secrets. She touched her left arm, feeling the scar beneath her sleeve. Everybody.

Her arm began to shake. She watched it, bewildered. Then she became aware that the examination table was shaking, too.

The whole damn room was shaking.

A wrenching jolt slammed the table to the left, knocking the lamp askew. Her chair pivoted under her. Somewhere nearby came the tinkle of breaking glass. Her UV light, which could reveal erasures and scratched-out words, had fallen.

“Hell,” she muttered. The lighting element was expensive and a pain to replace.

The table lurched again with a prolonged burp of its legs against the hardwood floor. Car alarms, jostled by the quake, began a clangor of honks and whoops on the street.

And then it was over. The last of the tremors passed away, rolling underneath the house like a slow comber spending itself on the beach. She sat and listened as the car alarms hit their automatic cutoffs one by one. Then there was stillness.

Slowly she released a breath. Though she had grown up in Los Angeles, she had never gotten used to earthquakes. It wasn’t a fear of being crushed under debris. It was more basic than that.

Whenever she felt the shifting of tectonic plates, she couldn’t escape the feeling that some primordial evil had just shuddered forth from the bowels of the earth.