Ripper

  The clock on the deputy chief’s wall was a relic from the 1940s that the homicide detail kept for historic reasons, and for its unswerving Swiss accuracy. Bob Martín, who had hung it opposite his desk alongside some photographs of Mexican singers—among them his father with his group of mariachis—could feel his blood pressure rising as the metal hands marked out the passing seconds. If Amanda was right, and she almost certainly was, he had until Friday night to find Indiana alive—just two days and a few hours. His daughter had persuaded him that finding her mother would also mean catching the vicious psychopath that was loose in their city, although he could not figure out the link between Indiana and that murderer.

  At 9:00 a.m. he received a call from Samuel Hamilton, who the day before had gone about comparing the list of friends from Indiana’s laptop with his own. At 9:05 the deputy chief put on his jacket, ordered Petra Horr to follow him, got in a patrol car, and headed for North Beach.

  At the Holistic Clinic, everybody had already seen the photograph of Indiana Jackson on the television or in the papers. Some of her colleagues were discussing this in the hall on the second floor, by the door to Treatment Room 8, which was sealed off with yellow police tape. Petra Horr stayed with them, taking down their details, while the deputy chief sprinted up to the third floor and leaped nimbly up the ladder that led to the roof terrace. Instead of knocking on the dilapidated door, he kicked it open and went right up to Matheus Pereira’s bed, snorting angrily. Pereira was lying in his clothes, with his boots on, sleeping the deep sleep of his peace pipe. The painter woke up in midair, with Bob Martín shaking him like a rag doll in his football player’s hands.

  “Tell me who Indiana left with on Friday!”

  “I already told you everything I know . . . ,” said Pereira, still half asleep.

  “You want to spend the next ten years behind bars for selling narcotics?” the deputy chief hissed, inches from Pereira’s face.

  “She left with a woman—I don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her around here a couple times.”

  “Give me a description.”

  “If you let me go, I can draw her.”

  He picked up a piece of charcoal, and a few minutes later handed the deputy chief a portrait of the Russian babushka.

  “You jerking me around, you piece of shit?” Martín roared.

  “That’s her, I swear to you.”

  “She called Carol Underwater?” asked the deputy chief. That was the name Samuel Hamilton had given him—it didn’t appear in Indiana’s e-mails, which Petra had copied before the computer was stashed with the rest of the evidence.

  “Yeah”—Pereira nodded—“I’m pretty sure she’s called Carol. She’s friends with Indiana. They left together—I was downstairs in the hallway, and I saw them go out.”

  “Did they say anything to you?”

  “Carol told me they were headed to the movies.”

  Martín went down to the second floor and handed the drawing around to the tenants of the clinic. A few confirmed they had seen the woman with Indiana from time to time. Yumiko Sato added that Carol Underwater had cancer and had lost her hair during her chemotherapy, which explained the scarf over the Russian peasant’s head.

  When he got to his office, the deputy chief tacked Pereira’s sketch to a bulletin board across from his desk, where he had laid out any other information that might help him in the search for the Wolf and Indiana. Keeping it in sight all the time like that, he was bound to think of something. He knew that in the past a surfeit of evidence and a tight deadline for solving a case had stopped him thinking clearly. And this time it made him sink even deeper into anxiety. He felt like a surgeon forced to perform a risky operation on a loved one: Indiana’s life was hanging on his skill. At the same time he trusted his hunter’s instinct—the part of his brain that allowed him to detect invisible clues, guess where his prey had been and where it would go next, come to conclusions that had no strict logic but were almost always right. The display board helped him make connections between different aspects of the investigation, but more than anything it kindled in him that hunter’s instinct.

  Since Amanda first started talking about a serial killer, Bob Martín had met a number of times with forensic psychologists from his department to look over similar cases from the last twenty years, especially in California. This sort of systematic killing was not spontaneous behavior: it was a response to fantasies that been incubating for years until something triggered a decision to act. Some were out to punish gay people or prostitutes, others driven by racial hatred or some other fanaticism; but the Wolf’s victims were so disparate that they seemed to have been chosen at random. He wondered what beliefs, what kind of image of himself, the Wolf had—whether he saw himself as victim or executioner. We are all heroes in our own stories. What was the Wolf’s story? To catch him, the deputy chief would have to think like the Wolf. He would have to become him.

  At midday Petra Horr came to tell him that she couldn’t find a single piece of evidence that Carol Underwater had ever existed. There was no driver’s license, vehicle, property, credit card, bank account, phone number, or employment history under that name, and she wasn’t registered as a cancer patient in any hospital or clinic in the San Francisco Bay area or the counties around it. It could be that whoever had access to the laptop to upload the wolf video had deleted the relevant e-mails, or that the two had only ever communicated by phone. As they hadn’t found Indiana’s cell phone, Bob Martín applied for a warrant to force the phone company to trace calls from the number, something that would take a day to process. For now, Carol Underwater, who so many people had seen in recent months, was a ghost.

  Nobody troubled to tell Celeste Roko that Indiana had disappeared. She only found out several days later, when she got a hysterical phone call from her friend Encarnación Martín, who had already been to pray to Saint Jude about finding her daughter-in-law. “Didn’t you see Indiana on the television? My poor little Amanda! You’ve no idea how much it’s affected her! The girl’s a nervous wreck, she thinks her mom was kidnapped by some wolf-man.”

  Celeste, who a few weeks earlier had seen Ryan Miller’s photograph on the television, showed up at the Personal Crimes Division determined to speak with the deputy chief. When Petra Horr tried to stop her, Celeste had her against the wall with a single shove. Petra had a lot of respect for astrology, so she stopped short of using her martial arts to hold her back. Celeste burst into Bob Martín’s office, brandishing a folder that contained two star charts that she had just done and a comparative reading of the two. She explained to him that in all her years studying the stars, and human psychology through the works of Carl Gustav Jung, she had never seen two people so psychically compatible as Indiana Jackson and Ryan Miller. They had been together in previous lives, she said, had even been mother and son recently, and were destined to come together and split apart again and again until they could resolve their psychic and spiritual conflict. In this present incarnation, they had a precious opportunity to break that cycle.

  “Well, whaddaya know!” snarled Bob, furious at the interruption.

  “It’s true. I’m telling you for your own good, Bob, because if Indiana and Ryan have escaped together, which must be what’s happened, because it’s written in the constellations, and you try and separate them, you’ll mess up your karma big-time.”

  “Fuck my karma!” Bob yelled, beside himself. “I’m trying to do my job, and you come and disturb me with this bullshit. Indiana didn’t run off with Miller—the Wolf kidnapped her!”

  Celeste was stunned. For the first time in years, she didn’t know what to say. When she had managed to rally herself a little, she put the star charts back in the folder, picked up her crocodile-skin handbag, and took a few shaky steps backward on her stiletto heels.

  “I don’t suppose you’d happen to know what this wolf-man’s star sign is, would you?” she asked timidly from the doorway.

  Open your eyes, Indi, and try and pay atten
tion to what I’m telling you. Look, this driver’s license from 1985 is the only existing photograph of my mother. If there were others, she destroyed them: she was very careful about her privacy. There are no photos of me before I was eleven, either. Everybody looks like a criminal on their driver’s license, and this one’s just as bad: my mom looks sloppy and fat, even though she wasn’t. It’s true she was carrying a couple extra pounds around that time, but she never had this lunatic’s face, and she was always turned out impeccably, not a single hair out of place. She was obsessive about that, and her work demanded it anyway. The habits she drilled into me have been my guiding principles in life: cleanliness, exercise, healthy food, no smoking or drinking. When I was a little girl I couldn’t go out and play sports like other children, I had to stay in the house; but she taught me the benefits of gymnastics, and that’s still the first thing I do when I wake up. You’ll need to do a bit of exercise soon yourself, Indiana, you ought to move around. But we’re going to wait until your bleeding has stopped and you feel a little more yourself.

  I had the best mother a person could ask for. She was utterly devoted to me: she adored me, looked after me, protected me. What would have become of me without that saint of a woman? She was both mother and father to me. At night, after we’d eaten and gone over my assignments, she’d read me a story and we’d pray. Then she would dress me for bed, kiss me on the forehead, and tell me I was her darling little girl. In the mornings, before she left for work, she would show me what I had to study, and give me a tight hug good-bye, as though she was afraid we’d never see each other again. If I didn’t cry, she’d give me some candy. I’ll come back soon, sweetie, be good. Don’t open the door to anybody, pick up the phone, or make any noise, because the neighbors have already started to mutter about us—you know how mean people are. The security measures were for my own good, as there was so much danger out there, so much violence and crime, so many accidents I might have, so many germs to catch. Trust no one: that’s what she taught me. And the days were long. I don’t remember how I made the hours pass in my first few years—I think she would leave me in a playpen or tie me to the furniture with rope, like a dog on a leash, so that I wouldn’t hurt myself. She always left toys and food within easy reach. Later, when I was older, she didn’t need to. I learned to keep myself occupied. By the time I was six or seven, when she was out, I’d clean the apartment and do the laundry, but I never cooked; she was afraid I would cut or burn myself. I’d watch TV and play too, but first I would do my homework. My mom was a good teacher, and I learned fast; that’s why, when I finally went to school, I was better prepared than the other kids. But that came later.

  Do you want to know how long you’ve been here, Indi? Just five days and six nights, which in the span of a human life is nothing at all, especially if you’ve spent them asleep. I had to put diapers on you. It was better that you slept at first, because the alternative would have been to keep you in a hood and handcuffs like you were at Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. They know how to do things in the military. The hood is suffocating, people have gone mad wearing those—and the handcuffs are painful, they make your hands swell up and your fingers go purple. The metal gets embedded in the skin, and the wounds can get infected. In other words, it’s a mess. You’re in no state to put up with any of that, and I don’t intend to make you suffer more than I have to; but you have to cooperate with me and behave yourself. It’s for your own good.

  So, I was telling you about Mama. People said she was paranoid, that she had a persecution complex, and that that was why she kept me locked in the house, why we were always on the run. But it’s not true: Mama had good reasons to do what she did. I used to love those journeys: the gas stations, the diners we’d stop at, the never-ending highways, the changing landscape. Some nights we’d sleep in motels, other times we’d camp. We were free as birds! We’d set off without a plan, stopping in whatever town we liked. We’d stay there for a while, setting up as best we could with the money we had, in a room at first and then moving into something nicer if she found work. I didn’t care where we ended up—all rooms looked the same. My mother always got work. She was well paid and well organized, didn’t spend much, and saved it all up—so she’d always be prepared when we needed to head off somewhere else.

  At that moment, the Ripper players were opening new lines of investigation. The games master had updated them with every detail of the police operation, the latest mystery being Carol Underwater, to whom Amanda owed nothing less than her precious Save-the-Tuna.

  “I thought it was interesting that a formal complaint was made against Richard Ashton for child abuse in 1997, and another against Ed Staton in 1998,” said Amanda. “I sent my henchman to make some inquiries.”

  “The deputy chief’s up to his neck in it, so I didn’t want to bother him, but Jezebel’s got access to all kinds of information, and she helped me. I don’t know how you do it, Jezebel—you must be an expert hacker, a real digital pirate—”

  “Does this have something to do with the present discussion, Hench?” asked Esmeralda.

  “Apologies. The games master thought there was a link between the two complaints, and with Jezebel’s help we were able to confirm that there is. And there’s a connection with the judge, Rachel Rosen. Both complaints were brought to juvenile court by a social worker, and both were about the same kid, a Lee Galespi.”

  “What do we know about him?” Esmeralda asked.

  “That he was an orphan,” said Denise West in her role as Jezebel, reading from the piece of paper given to her by Ryan. “He went through a number of institutional settings, but he struggled in all of them. He was a difficult child—diagnosed with depression, paranoid fantasies, incapable of socializing. He was assigned to Richard Ashton’s care, and Ashton treated him for a while, but the social worker made a complaint against Ashton for using electroshock therapy. Galespi was a shy kid—traumatized, and constantly bullied by the cruel kids in his school. There are always a few of those brutes around. At the age of fifteen he was accused of starting a fire in a school bathroom, while the kids bullying him were inside. Nobody was hurt, but Galespi was sent to a reform school.”

  “And I take it it was Rachel Rosen who sentenced him,” said Sherlock, “and that the reform school was Boys’ Camp in Arizona, where Ed Staton worked.”

  “You guessed it,” replied Jezebel. “And the same social worker made a complaint against Ed Staton for sexually abusing Lee Galespi, but Rosen didn’t take him out of Boys’ Camp.”

  “Can we talk with the social worker?” asked Esmeralda.

  “Her name is Angelique Larson,” Jezebel told them. “Retired, lives in Alaska, where she got a job as a teacher.”

  “Well, there is such a thing as the telephone,” the games master intoned. “Hench, get that woman’s number.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Jezebel. “I’ve already got it.”

  “Excellent—why don’t we call her?” Esmeralda asked.

  “Because she’s not going to answer questions from a bunch of kids like us,” warned Colonel Paddington. “If the police called, that would be a different matter.”

  “It can’t hurt to try,” said Abatha. “Who’s gonna step up?”

  “I would, but I think Grandpa’s voice—I mean, Kabel’s voice—would be more convincing. Go ahead, Hench, call her and tell her you’re the police. Try and sound like you got some authority.”

  Blake Jackson was reluctant to pose as a police officer, as he thought it might be illegal, so he introduced himself as a writer—which was only a half lie; he was starting to get serious about fulfilling his lifelong dream and becoming a novelist. Angelique Larson turned out to be such an openhearted, kind woman that Hench regretted deceiving her, but by then it was too late to turn back. She remembered Lee Galespi well; he’d been in her charge for a number of years, and his case was one of the most interesting of her career. She talked with Blake Jackson for a full thirty-five minutes, telling him ever
ything she knew about Lee Galespi. She hadn’t heard from him since 2006, but up to that time they had always been in touch around Christmas. Angelique and Blake were like good friends by the time they put the phone down; he could call her again whenever he wanted, she said, and wished him luck with his novel.

  Angelique Larson remembered every detail of her first encounter with Lee Galespi, and often turned it over in her mind—that child had come to represent the sum of her work, with all of its frustrations, punctuated with rare moments of satisfaction. Hundreds of poor souls like Galespi would be rescued from some horrible situation by Child Protective Services, only to come back again in an even worse state—more damaged, less hopeful, and more withdrawn every time—until they turned eighteen, lost what scant protection they had received, and were thrown out on the street. For Angelique, all those children merged with Galespi, and they passed through the same stages: shyness, distress, grief, a terror that slowly transformed into rage and rebellion, and then finally a sort of coldness or cynicism. At that point there was nothing anybody could do—you had to say good-bye to them, but it felt like you were throwing them to the lions.

  Larson explained to Blake that in the summer of 1993, a woman had a heart attack at a bus stop. During the commotion it caused in the street, before the police and an ambulance could get there, somebody stole her purse. She was admitted to San Francisco General Hospital without any papers, unconscious, and in a critical state. The woman was in a coma for three weeks before dying of a second major cardiac arrest. The police arrived shortly after and identified her as Marion Galespi, sixty-one years old, a shift nurse at the Laguna Honda Hospital and resident of Daly City, to the south of San Francisco. Two officers presented themselves at her address, a modest block of low-income housing. When nobody answered the door, they brought in a locksmith, who couldn’t open it because it was bolted twice from the inside. Some of her neighbors came out into the corridor to see what was going on, and that’s when they learned how their neighbor had died. They hadn’t missed her, they said; Marion Galespi had only been in the building a few months and wasn’t the friendly type. In fact, she hardly said hello when she shared the elevator with someone. One of the bystanders asked where the girl was, explaining that a daughter lived there too, but nobody had ever seen her because she never went out. Her mother used to say that the girl was mentally handicapped and had a skin disorder that was aggravated by sunlight, so she was homeschooled. She was shy and obedient, and sat quietly at home while her mother went to work.