Ripper

  “Sadist!” shouted a woman at another table.

  Jennifer, still lucid despite being deeply upset, called back over her shoulder, “If only that were true, ma’am!”

  Ryan managed to bundle Jennifer into a taxi. As he was running off in the opposite direction, he heard a torrent of threats and curses through the car window. He thought he caught Indiana Jackson’s name, and wondered how Jennifer even knew of her existence. It must have been by Chinese horoscope, because he had never mentioned her.

  Waiting at the door of the Cuore d’Italia with Ryan and Pedro, Attila sat, wearing the service dog vest that meant he was admitted everywhere. Ryan had adopted the dog because he was a war veteran, but he did not need a service dog; he simply liked the company. Indiana was surprised to see her daughter greet the Navy SEAL and his Uruguayan friend with a kiss on the cheek before sitting down between them at the table. Attila excitedly took in Indiana’s floral scent, but sat between Ryan and Amanda, who scratched his scars distractedly while she studied the menu. She was one of the few people unfazed by Attila’s titanium teeth and his disfigured, wolflike appearance.

  Indiana, who had never gotten her figure back since having Amanda, but who didn’t care about carrying a couple of extra pounds here or there, ordered Caesar salad, gnocchi with osso buco, and poached pears; Blake ordered a simple seafood linguini. Ryan, who was sensible about his diet, chose the grilled sole, while Pedro opted for the biggest filet steak on the menu, even though he knew it could never be as good as a steak from his own country. Amanda, who considered meat to be simply a hunk of dead animal and found vegetables boring, ordered three desserts, a Coke, and some napkins to blow her nose with, because she still had a terrible cold.

  “You check out that stuff for me, Kabel?” she asked.

  “I’m getting there, Amanda, but what do you say we eat before we chat about corpses?”

  “I’m not saying we should talk while we’re eating, but you can fill me in between courses.”

  “Fill you in about what?” asked Indiana.

  “The Constante murders, Mom,” said Amanda, sneaking Attila a piece of bread under the table.

  “Whose murder?”

  “I’ve told you like a thousand times, but you don’t listen to me.”

  “Amanda, don’t feed Attila,” Ryan warned her. “It’s important that he only eats what I give him, so he doesn’t get poisoned.”

  “Who’d wanna poison him? Don’t be paranoid, dude.”

  “Listen to me. The US government spent twenty-six thousand dollars training Attila, so don’t go spoiling him. Anyway, what have these murders got to do with you?”

  “That’s what I was wondering.” Indiana sighed. “I don’t see why my daughter is researching dead people we didn’t know.”

  “Me and Kabel have been conducting an investigation into the death of Ed Staton, the guy who had a baseball bat shoved up his—”

  “Amanda!” her mother cut in.

  “What? It’s not like it’s some secret, it’s all over the Internet. Anyway, that was back in October. Now we’re doing the Constantes, a couple murdered in November.”

  “Not to mention the psychiatrist who was killed on Tuesday,” Blake added.

  “Jesus Christ, Dad!” Indiana objected. “Why are you encouraging her? This obsession is dangerous!”

  “There’s nothing dangerous about it, it’s an experiment,” said her father. “Your daughter is single-handedly putting astrology to the test.”

  “It’s not just me,” Amanda said. “You’re involved in this too, and Esmeralda, Sir Edmond Paddington, and Abatha and Sherlock.”

  “Who are they?” asked Pedro, who had been savoring his beef with intense concentration, oblivious to the table talk.

  “They’re the kids from Ripper, the role-playing game,” Blake told him. “I’m Kabel, servant to the games master.”

  “You’re not a servant, you’re my henchman. You carry out my orders.”

  “That’s what a servant does, Amanda,” her grandfather pointed out.

  “Counting the Ed Staton murder in October, the Constantes in November, and the psychiatrist on Tuesday, there have only been four deaths that are out of the ordinary since my godmother made her prediction,” Amanda explained. “Statistically, it’s hardly a bloodbath. We need some more murders.”

  “How many more, exactly?” Pedro asked.

  “At least four or five.”

  “You’re not supposed to take astrology literally, Amanda,” said Indiana. “You have to interpret its messages.”

  “I suppose for Celeste Roko, astrology is an intuitive tool,” suggested Pedro, “like a pendulum is for a hypnotist.”

  “Well, my godmother doesn’t see it as a pendulum. To her, astrology is an exact science. But if she’s right, it would mean that people born in the same place at the same time—let’s say a state hospital in New York or in Calcutta, where lots of babies can be born simultaneously—would all have exactly the same fate.”

  “Life is a mystery, sweetie,” Indiana parried, sopping up olive oil with a piece of bread. “We can’t simply dismiss everything we can’t explain or control!”

  “You’re so gullible, Mom. You believe in aromatherapy, and in magnet therapy—you even believe in that homeopathic hogwash your ventriloquist friend practices.”

  “Veterinarian, not ventriloquist,” her mother corrected.

  “Whatever. . . . Homeopathy is like dissolving two aspirin in the Pacific and prescribing fifteen drops to a patient. So come on, Kabel, give me details. What do we know about the psychiatrist?”

  “Not much yet. I’m still focusing on the Constantes.”

  While Indiana and Ryan whispered to each other, Amanda interrogated her grandfather—a grilling that Pedro Alarcón, who seemed fascinated by the game Amanda had described, followed closely. More excited now, Blake Jackson pulled the sheaf of notes from his briefcase and laid it out on the table, apologizing for not having made as much progress as he should have. The henchman was a little tied up at the pharmacy—this being flu season—but he had collected almost everything about the Constantes that had so far appeared in the media, and he had to persuade Bob Martín—who still called him his father-in-law, and who couldn’t say no to him—to let him comb through the police files, including those that were not publicly available. He handed Amanda a couple of pages outlining the conclusions of the forensics report, and another page summarizing what he had coaxed out of the detectives assigned to the case, two of Bob’s fellow officers that he had known for years.

  “Neither Staton nor the Constantes defended themselves,” he told his granddaughter.

  “What about the psychiatrist?”

  “Looks like he didn’t either. The Constantes were already sedated with Xanax when the heroin was injected,” he explained. “Xanax is used to treat anxiety, and depending on the dose, it can cause drowsiness, lethargy, and amnesia.”

  “So they were asleep?”

  “Your father thinks so.”

  “If the murderer has access to Xanax, it could be a doctor, a nurse—even a pharmacist, like you.”

  “Not necessarily. Anyone can get hold of a prescription or buy it on the black market. Every time my place has been turned over, it’s always to steal medications like Xanax. Some people buy it online. Let’s face it, if you can buy a semiautomatic or bomb-making equipment on the Internet, you can sure get yourself some Xanax.”

  “Are there any suspects?” asked the Uruguayan.

  “Michael Constante was a nasty piece of work,” Blake explained. “A week before he died, he got into an argument that turned into a brawl with someone called Brian Turner, an electrician from his Alcoholics Anonymous group. The police have Turner in their sights because he’s got a checkered past: a lot of petty crime, one felony charge—he did three years inside. He’s thirty-two and unemployed.”

  “Any history of violence?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. Then again, he attacked Michael
Constante with a bottle. It took a couple of people to pull him off.”

  “Any idea of the reason for the fight?”

  “Michael accused Turner of chasing after his wife, Doris. It’s pretty hard to credit, since Doris was fourteen years older than Turner and exceptionally ugly.”

  “No accounting for taste . . . ,” muttered Pedro.

  “The Constantes’ bodies were branded postmortem,” Amanda said to him.

  “How did they work out that it happened after they were dead?”

  “They can tell from the lividity of the skin,” explained Blake. “Live flesh reacts differently. It looks like they were burned using the small blowtorch that was found in the bathroom.”

  “What are those miniature blowtorches used for, anyway?” asked Amanda, shoveling down her third dessert.

  “For cooking,” replied her grandfather. “Someone probably used one on that crème brûlée you’re eating—they use it to caramelize the sugar. You can buy them from kitchen supply stores for between twenty-five and forty dollars. Not that I’ve ever used one—you know I’m no cook. And it seems weird that the Constantes would have had one. There was nothing in their kitchen except junk food—I can’t imagine them eating crème brûlée. The blowtorch was practically new.”

  “How do you know?” the girl asked.

  “Well, the butane canister was nearly empty, but the metal casing looked new. Personally, I don’t think it belonged to the Constantes.”

  “The killer could have brought it with him, like he brought the syringes,” said Amanda. “Didn’t you say they found some bottle of liquor in the fridge?”

  “Yeah. Someone must have given it to the Constantes, though you’d have to be pretty dumb to give liquor to a recovering alcoholic.”

  “What was it?”

  “Vodka or brandy or something from Serbia. You can’t buy it here—I asked around, and nobody’s heard of it.”

  At the mention of Serbia, Ryan’s ears pricked up. He explained that he and SEAL Team Six had served in the Balkans, and that Serbian rakija was more toxic than turpentine.

  “What was the brand?” he asked.

  “It didn’t say in the report. What does it matter?”

  “Everything matters, Kabel! Find out,” Amanda ordered.

  “I guess you want the make of the syringes and the blowtorch, too,” said Blake, “and maybe the toilet paper while I’m at it.”

  “Precisely, Hench. And don’t go getting sidetracked.”

  Sunday, 15

  Alan Keller came from a family that for more than a century had exerted considerable influence in San Francisco, principally through its wealth, but also through its standing and its social connections—since nowadays the only money that mattered was in the hands of computing and finance billionaires. Historically, the Keller family had been important donors to the Democratic Party at each election, partly out of political conviction, partly as a networking opportunity, giving them access to people without whom it would be very difficult to succeed in this city. Alan was the third child of Philip and Flora Keller, a couple of nonagenarians who regularly appeared in the society pages—two slightly senile old mummies who seemed determined to live forever. Alan’s siblings, Mark and Lucille, managed the family’s assets, sidelining their younger brother, whom they considered the artist of the family, since he was the only one capable of appreciating abstract art and atonal music.

  Alan had never worked a day in his life. He had studied art history, published scholarly articles in specialist magazines, and occasionally acted as an adviser to private collectors and museum curators. He’d had a string of brief affairs but never married, and he had no need to worry about contributing to the planet’s overpopulation; since his sperm count was low to the point of nonexistence, he didn’t need a vasectomy. Notionally, he preferred breeding horses to breeding children, though he did not do so—as he informed Indiana shortly after they met, it was an expensive hobby. He planned to leave his inheritance to the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, he added, assuming there would be any money left after he died, since he liked to live life without worrying about how much he spent. This was not quite true, though: Alan was forced to think about his expenses, since they invariably exceeded his income—as his siblings pointed out every time they saw him.

  His complete lack of business acumen drew jokes from his friends and criticism from his family. He gambled on unrealistic business ventures, like the vineyard in Napa that he had bought on a whim after taking a hot air balloon ride over Burgundy. He was something of a connoisseur, and the wine business was booming, but he knew nothing about the basics of the industry. What few bottles his winery managed to produce went unnoticed in the small, fiercely competitive world of winemaking. Besides, he was forced to rely on vineyard managers who were not entirely trustworthy.

  He was proud of his estate, whose hacienda-style house, ringed with rosebushes, housed his collection of Latin American art, which ranged from Inca figures in terra-cotta and stone, dubiously acquired in Peru, to a couple of medium-size paintings by Fernando Botero. Everything else was stored in the family house in Woodside. Keller was an obsessive collector; he was prepared to travel halfway around the world to get his hands on a unique piece of porcelain or Chinese jade—though he rarely needed to, as he had a network of buyers to do it for him.

  He lived in the country mansion his grandfather had built back when Woodside was in the heart of the countryside, long before it became a haven for Silicon Valley billionaires in the 1990s. The villa looked imposing from the outside, but inside it was crumbling into ruin—nobody had bothered to give it a lick of paint or replace the plumbing in more than forty years. Alan was keen to sell, since the land was extremely valuable, but his parents, who actually owned the property, clung to it for reasons he did not understand, given that they never visited. Though Alan wished his parents a long and happy life, he could not help but calculate how much more comfortable his situation would be if Philip and Flora Keller were to die. When the house was eventually sold and he got his share—or when he inherited—he planned to buy a loft apartment in San Francisco, something more convenient for a society bachelor like him than this ramshackle country pile, where he could not even invite people around for cocktails without worrying that a rat might scurry between their feet.

  Indiana had not been to the Woodside house or the Napa vineyard; Alan had not thought to take her there, and she was too embarrassed to ask. She assumed that, when the time came, he would take the initiative. Whenever the subject was mentioned, Amanda would say that Alan was obviously ashamed of her mother, and that she hated the idea of having that man as her stepfather. Indiana ignored these comments. Her daughter was too young to appreciate Alan Keller’s qualities: his sense of humor, his sophistication, his style. And she was not about to tell her daughter that he was also an expert lover: Amanda still thought her parents were asexual, like amoebas. The girl had to admit that, in spite of his age, Alan was still a good-looking man. He reminded her of that British actor with the perfect hair and the perfect manners who had been caught with a prostitute in a car in Los Angeles, and whose name she could never remember because he hadn’t starred in any vampire films.

  Thanks to her lover, Indiana had been to Istanbul, and was learning to appreciate fine dining, art, music, and old black-and-white movies. She even watched foreign films—though Alan had to explain them to her because she could never read the subtitles in time. He was funny and charming, he never seemed irritated when people mistook him for her father, and he gave her the freedom, the time, and the space she needed to devote to her family and her work. He opened up new horizons, and he was a wonderfully attentive companion, always eager to please her, to pay her a compliment. Any other woman might have wondered why he did not include her in his social circle and why she had never been introduced to any of the Keller clan; but Indiana, who did not have a malicious bone in her body, put it down to the twenty-two-year age-gap between them. She assumed that
Alan, who was always considerate, simply wanted to spare her the tedium of spending time with people much older than she, and that he felt out of place with her younger friends.

  “By the time you’re sixty, Keller will be an old man of eighty-two with a pacemaker and Alzheimer’s,” Amanda pointed out. But Indiana trusted to the future: it was just as likely that in his eighties Alan would still be young at heart, and that she would be the one suffering from heart disease and senile dementia. Life was full of little ironies, she thought: better to enjoy what you have than focus on some uncertain future.

  Until now, Alan’s relationship with Indiana had been spared any serious drama, sheltered as it was from the weight of routine and from the curiosity of others. In recent months, however, there had been complications in his finances, and problems with his health that disrupted his life and this easygoing relationship. He took a certain pride in his incompetence in dealing with money, because it set him apart from the rest of his family, but he could not continue to overlook his poor investments, the losses incurred by his vineyard, the plummeting value of his stocks and shares, and the fact that there was less capital tied up in his art collection than he had imagined. He had just found out that his collection of jade was neither as antique nor as valuable as he had been led to believe. To make matters worse, his annual medical checkup had indicated that he might have prostate cancer, leaving him on tenterhooks for five days until his urologist finally delivered him from his agony by doing a second set of blood tests. The medical lab was eventually forced to admit that they had mixed up his first test results with those of another patient. He had just turned fifty-five, and the worries about his health and his virility that had disappeared when he had met Indiana were coming back to haunt him. He felt depressed. He had achieved nothing in his life that might merit mention in an epitaph. He had frittered away two-thirds of it already, and was counting off the years until he became just like his father. The very thought of his physical and mental decline terrified him.