twenty-seven

It was one o’clock when Jennifer boarded the elevator with Maura and descended to the parking garage.

“Heading home?” Jennifer asked. They had taken separate cars to Hollywood. It wasn’t safe to leave a vehicle parked in Dogtown for too long.

Maura shook her head without answering. She had said little since Sirk’s outburst.

Jennifer tried to get the conversation started. “Got plans?”

“I’m going downtown.” Maura looked away. “Business stuff.”

She seemed to be hiding something, but Jennifer couldn’t imagine what.

They got off at the garage level. A few steps from the elevator, Maura stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what?”

“For hooking you up with Harrison. I didn’t know—I never saw that side of him—”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. But I’ll make it up to you.”

“How?”

“Never mind. I just will. And you need to call the cops.”

“So far I have nothing but suspicions.”

“So report your suspicions.”

“Not yet.”

“Damn. You are the stubborn one.” Unexpectedly she gave Jennifer a hug. “Take care of yourself, kiddo. And remember, there are wolves in the woods.”

Jennifer watched her walk away, her flat-soled shoes echoing on the concrete floor. In the past, she’d resented Maura for abandoning Richard. It had never occurred to her that Maura was the aggrieved party. And she had stayed quiet about Richard’s transgressions, preferring not to sully his image in the eyes of his sister. There was nobility in her tactfulness, and simple kindness that was rare anywhere—perhaps especially so in Los Angeles, a city with a warm climate and a cold heart.

She arrived home by two P.M. and went immediately to the back of the house. Her laptop had been left on; so far there had been no reply by Abberline to her instant message. It wasn’t her highest priority now.

What she’d seen when she looked at Sirk’s news clippings was more than a hunch, less than proof. But the proof might be waiting here, in her study.

She took out the loose pages of her notes from the meeting with Sandra Price. She arranged the four crimes—two homicides, one assault, one disappearance—in chronological order, then wrote three lists.

First, the Ripper’s five initial victims in London.

Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols

Annie Chapman

Elizabeth Stride

Catharine Eddowes

Mary Jane Kelly

Then four of the missing women in Venice a hundred years ago.

Marianne Sorenson

Annette Thurmond

Kathleen Wright

Mary Hatton

Finally, the local women who had been attacked or who had disappeared within the past eighteen months.

Mary Ellison—eighteen months ago

Ann Powell—twelve months ago

Elizabeth Custer—seven months ago

Chatty Cathy—three months ago

The first victim in each sequence was Mary Ann, Marianne, or Mary. The second was Annie, Annette, or Ann. The third was Elizabeth Stride in 1888 and Elizabeth Custer recently; there was no corresponding name in the old news accounts Sirk’s people had dug up, but that point in the chronology matched the reported disappearances of “three or four” anonymous women of low repute. One of them could easily have been Elizabeth or Liz or Beth.

Fourth came Catharine or Kathleen or Cathy. Fifth, Mary Jane in 1888, Mary in 1911. There hadn’t been a fifth homicide in the newest series. Not yet.

The police wouldn’t have seen it, of course—not in the early 1900s, and not today. In neither instance would they have been looking for the parallels.

According to his diary, Hare had not known his victims’ names in London until after the fact. But once in Venice, years older, he must have recreated the glories of his youth, deliberately targeting women with the same—or similar—names. As a lark? More likely, it was a message for the future, a code to be deciphered. He hadn’t wanted his work to be uncredited and unappreciated for all time. He must have hoped that someone, someday, would see the pattern—perhaps after finding the crypt and the diary, his secret time capsule.

If so, she was doing only what he had wanted her to do. She was his puppet, her strings pulled by a dead man.

She wondered if the Devil’s Henchman had repeated the pattern. Somehow she would find the details. But even if that case didn’t fit, it made no difference. The new killer—the nameless modern-day Ripper—was clearly emulating his forebear. And no one would guess. No one would see.

Richard would have counted on that.

It had to be Richard. Who else could it be?

Sirk was right about the parallels between the Ripper case and the Devil’s Henchman murders. The diary was the connection. It linked Aldrich Silence to the Ripper. It implied a taste for blood that had persisted across generations—and persisted today.

She had uncovered an ongoing series of murders committed by her own brother.

In London, Hare left his victims in the open; in Venice, he hid them in a cellar. The first method brought him notoriety but advertised his activities to the police. The second method allowed him to keep a low profile, but cheated him of the fame he thought he deserved. Richard had found a third way. Some victims were found, while others went missing. His approach varied so the crimes could not be linked.

He had learned from his father’s mistakes, which had made Aldrich a suspect and driven him to suicide. Richard, it seemed, would outdo his father. Perhaps he meant to outdo Jack himself.

He had always been ambitious. Always proud of his cleverness, his brains.

Her head hurt. It was all too much. She was caught up in a sequence of events driving her to a conclusion she hated—caught in a riptide that was entangling her in her brother’s crimes, as surely as another current had borne Marilyn Diaz into the fishing lines under the Venice Pier.

Ever since finding the bodies and reading the diary, she had been rationalizing, fearful of reaching this moment. Now that she had, she was faced with a choice. She could turn Richard over to the police, and let him go to prison or maybe die.

Or she could do...nothing.

Run away, leave the city, leave the state—and let him go on killing.

Impossible. She couldn’t do that. Or could she? The people he murdered...she didn’t know them. She owed them nothing. She owed Richard—she touched her arm—everything.

Maybe she could let him go. His victims were only strangers. And he...

“He’s family,” she whispered, eyes shut against tears.

Her laptop pinged, announcing an instant message.

She gathered herself. Opened the dialogue box. It was Abberline, responding to the message she’d sent this morning. The trap she’d laid.

I decided I was being unfair, she’d written. So I put some digital pix online. Part of my doc. I can send you a link.

His reply glimmered on the screen: I am eager to see it.

“I’ll bet you are,” she said.

From memory she entered an URL she’d used before—a dummy link, a Web address that went nowhere.

For ten dollars a month, she subscribed to a tracking service that could pinpoint the origin of e-mails and instant messages. Instant messages did not carry routing information, and e-mails could have their routing info disguised or removed. But the sender could be tricked into revealing his location by opening a dummy link maintained by the tracking service. As soon as he clicked on the link, his IP address would be sent to their servers. Once the IP address was known, his whereabouts could be determined—sometimes only within a certain ZIP code, but other times narrowed down to a city block or even a particular building.