Ripper

  “So’s Carol. C’mon, anyone can see that.”

  “A man?” yelped Amanda. “Mom didn’t realize, and neither did we.”

  “Really? I thought Indi knew. Your mom’s away with the fairies half the time, honey, she never notices a thing. Hang on, I’ve got a photo of Carol that Lulu Gardner took. You know Lulu—I’m sure you’ve seen her around, a kooky old broad, goes round taking photos of people in North Beach.”

  Danny rushed off to the kitchen and reappeared a minute later with a color Polaroid of Indiana and Carol sitting at a table by the window, Danny himself crouching next to them.

  “Transvestism is a subtle art,” Danny explained. “Some men, when they cross-dress, can look hotter than a supermodel, but that’s rare, and usually it’s obvious. Carol isn’t trying to look stunning; she just wants to feel feminine. She deliberately chooses frumpy, old-fashioned clothes because they hide her body better. Anyone can dress like a dog. Oops! Sorry, shouldn’t be so bitchy about someone with cancer. Though strangely, that sort of helps, because you can forgive the fright wigs and the hideous scarves she wears. Or maybe she hasn’t got cancer at all; maybe that’s just part of her role as a woman, or maybe she does it for the sympathy. . . . There’s a name for that, when people pretend to be ill. . . .”

  “Münchausen syndrome,” said Blake, who, being a pharmacist, had seen it all.

  “That’s it! The difficult thing when you’re trans is changing your voice, because men have thicker vocal cords than women. That’s why Carol always talked in a whisper.”

  “Mom thought it was something to do with the chemotherapy.”

  “Oh please! It’s a trick of the trade—TVs all try to sound like Jackie Kennedy, God rest her.”

  “The guy in the photo has blue eyes, but Carol’s eyes are brown,” said Amanda.

  “Right—I’ve no idea why she wears those mud-brown contacts, they look awful. They make her eyes bulge.”

  “Have you seen Carol lately?”

  “Actually, now you ask, I haven’t seen her for a couple days. But next time she’s here, I’ll tell her to call you.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be coming back, Danny.”

  I haven’t dressed like a woman for a long time, Indiana, and I did it just for you, to gain your trust. I needed to get close to Martín—I needed details of the investigation, because what little they feed the media is usually inaccurate—and I knew you could help me with that. You and Bob make a strange pair of divorcees; very few couples who are still married get along as well as you two. But that wasn’t the only reason; I was hoping you’d grow to love me, to depend on me. Have you never noticed that you don’t have any female friends? Almost all your friends are men, like that cripple soldier; you needed a girlfriend. The cancer was an inspiration, you have to admit—you were so desperate to help me that you let your guard down. How could anyone be suspicious of some poor thing with terminal cancer? It was easy to pump you for information, but it never occurred to me that your daughter would prove useful too; if I believed in luck, I’d say she was a godsend, but I prefer to believe that my plan paid off. On the pretext of finding out how she was getting on with Save-the-Tuna—what a stupid name for a pet—I visited your daughter a couple of times, and sometimes we’d talk on the phone. I was always careful, so as not to alarm you, but I’d talk to her about Ripper, and she’d fill me in on everything she’d found out. She had no idea the favor she was doing me.

  Grandfather and granddaughter rushed from the Café Rossini to the Personal Crimes Division with the photo of Carol Underwater Danny had given them. Amanda was so panicked at the thought of how much this person knew about her mother that she could barely speak, so it was left to Blake to explain to Bob Martín that Carol and Lee Galespi were the same person. The deputy chief urgently summoned his team and the two criminal psychologists in the department, and called Samuel Hamilton, who showed up fifteen minutes later. Everything pointed to Lee Galespi being guilty of the killings, as well as of kidnapping Indiana. They worked out that although Galespi had been brooding for years on getting revenge on the people who had abused and mistreated him, he had not decided to act until Angelique Larson sowed doubt in his mind that Marion Galespi—the only person who had ever truly loved him—was not his mother. He traced his biological parents, and when he finally found them, he realized that his misfortunes had begun the day he was born. It was at this point that he quit his job and cut himself off from his friends. Lee Galespi officially disappeared and spent several years preparing for what he believed was an act of justice: ridding the world of these depraved human beings so they could never vent their rage on another child. He lived frugally and had saved some money, so he was able to support himself until he had achieved his goal, spending his every waking hour planning the murders—from acquiring the drugs and the guns to learning how to kill and leave no forensic evidence.

  “Galespi disappeared off the face of the earth and reappeared a year ago to kill Ed Staton,” explain the deputy chief.

  “By which time he was Carol Underwater,” Blake chimed in.

  “I don’t think he committed the crimes using a female persona,” suggested one of the psychologists. “As a child, Marion Galespi drummed into him the idea that ‘girls are good and boys are evil.’ It’s likely he committed the crimes under his male identity.”

  “Then why did he pass himself off as a woman?”

  “It’s difficult to know. Perhaps he’s a transvestite.”

  “Maybe he only did it so he could befriend Indiana,” said Blake. “Carol Underwater—aka Lee Galespi—was obsessed with my daughter. I’m pretty sure that it was Lee, dressed as Carol, who sent her the magazine in which she saw Alan Keller with another woman and broke off their relationship.”

  “Revenge is the motive in all of the killings, except Keller’s.”

  “It’s the same killer, just a different motive,” ventured the other psychologist. “He killed Keller because he was jealous.”

  Blake explained that Indiana trusted Carol and had told her all about her private life. How sometimes Carol/Lee would sit around in the waiting room while Indiana was with a patient. She would have had every opportunity to access her computer, read her e-mails, see her diary, and plant the S&M videos and the video of the wolf.

  “I saw them together often at the Café Rossini,” Samuel Hamilton interjected. “On Thursday, March eighth, Indiana must have told Carol that she was having dinner with Alan Keller in San Francisco—after all, she told her most things about her life. Carol/Lee had all afternoon to go to Napa, gain access to the house, lace the two glasses with cyanide, then hide somewhere, wait for him to get back, and, once he was dead, shoot the arrow into him.”

  “But she couldn’t have known that Ryan Miller would show up to talk to Keller,” said Amanda. “She probably saw him, or at least heard him from wherever she was hiding.”

  “How do you know when Miller went to the house?” asked her father, who for three weeks now had suspected that his daughter was hiding something from him; perhaps the time had come to tap her cell phone and her laptop.

  “Simple logic,” Blake cut in quickly. “When Miller got there, Keller was still alive; they argued, Miller punched him and then left, leaving his prints everywhere. Very convenient for the killer. Then Keller drank the poisoned water and died. But I don’t understand why the killer shot an arrow into the corpse.”

  “For Lee Galespi, this was another execution,” explained one of the psychologists. “Alan Keller had harmed him, had stolen Indiana from him and therefore had to pay. The arrow through the heart is an obvious message: Cupid as executioner. Just as sodomizing Ed Staton with the baseball bat was a reference to what the man had done to him at Boys’ Camp, and burning the Constantes to the fact that they’d burned him with cigarettes when he wet the bed.”

  “Matheus Pereira was the last person to see Indiana and Carol together on Friday afternoon,” said Hamilton. “I went to talk to Pereira because I’ve
had something going round and round in my head.”

  “What’s that?” asked the deputy chief.

  “Carol told Matheus that they were going to the movies, but according to Mr. Jackson here, Indiana always ate dinner at home on Friday nights.”

  “So she could see Amanda when she got back from school,” said Blake Jackson. “Hamilton’s right—Indi would never have gone to the movies on a Friday night.”

  “Indiana is tall and heavily built,” said the deputy chief. “Carol couldn’t have taken her against her will.”

  “Unless she gave her something to make her compliant and submissive,” said Hamilton. “I’m talking about a date-rape drug. It didn’t strike Pereira as unusual seeing the two of them together, but when I mentioned the possibility that Indiana might have been drugged, he confirmed that she had seemed a bit out of it, that she didn’t respond when he said hello, and that Carol was holding her by the arm and leading her.”

  By eleven fifteen everyone was tired and hungry, but no one thought of sleeping or eating. Amanda did not need to look at the clock on the wall of her father’s office, having trained herself over two years to be able to tell the time: her mother had a little over twenty-four hours left to live.

  Ryan did not get any sleep that night either: he was glued to his computer, looking for some thread he could pull to unravel the tangle of riddles he was faced with. The programs he used for work gave him access to any data in the world, from the most secret to the most trivial. In a matter of seconds he could find out what had been said at the latest meeting of the directors of ExxonMobil, PetroChina, and Saudi Aramco, or today’s lunch menu for the members of the Bolshoi Ballet. The problem was not finding answers; it was knowing which questions to ask.

  Denise West had sacrificed one of her chickens to make a delicious fricassee, which she had left in the kitchen with a loaf of whole-wheat bread to see him through the night. “Good luck, kid,” she said as she kissed him on the forehead, and Ryan blushed—though he had been living here for two weeks, he was not used to these spontaneous displays of affection. The days were warm now as spring approached, but the nights were still cold, and the sudden shifts of temperature made all the boards in the house creak like the joints of an arthritic old woman. The only sources of heat were the living room fireplace and a gas heater Denise trailed with her from room to room. Accustomed to his freezing loft, Ryan did not need it. Denise went to bed, leaving him still staring at his computer screen, Attila at his feet. Since the dog could only be exercised on Denise’s four acres lest he attract attention, he had gained some weight and, living with two house dogs and several cats for the first time in his harsh life, begun to smile and wag his tail like a common pet.

  At two in the morning Ryan polished off the chicken stew, sharing it with the dog. He’d tried to do his Qigong exercises but couldn’t focus. His mind was racing, and he couldn’t think clearly; any attempt at reasoning things out was interrupted by images of Indiana. His skin was burning up, and he felt like screaming, like pounding on the walls. He had to do something—he needed instructions, orders, a tangible enemy. This silent, senseless waiting was worse than the thunderous roar of battle.

  “I need to calm down, Attila. The state I’m in, I’m no use to anyone.” Overwhelmed by the idea of failure, he slumped onto the sofa and forced himself to rest. He tried to breathe the way Indiana had taught him, focusing on every breath, using the techniques he had learned from his Qigong master. Twenty minutes passed, and still he could not sleep.

  And then, in the reddish glow of the fire’s dying embers, he saw two figures: a girl of about ten and a young boy she was holding by the hand. Ryan froze. He did not blink, did not dare to breathe, for fear of startling them. How long the vision lasted it was impossible to say, perhaps only a few seconds, but it was as real as if the children had traveled from Afghanistan to visit him. On previous occasions they had appeared to him as he had seen them in 2006, in the heat of battle, cowering in a trench, a little girl of four clutching a baby; but that night in Denise West’s house he saw not ghosts from the past, but the children themselves—Sharbat and her brother, as they were now, six years later. When the figures withdrew with their usual discretion, the soldier felt as though his heart was finally free from the vise in which it had been trapped for the past six years, and he began sobbing with relief, with gratitude that Sharbat and her brother were still alive. They had survived the horrors of war and the pain of being orphaned, and they were waiting for him, calling to him. Silently, he promised them that he would come as soon as he had finished his last mission as a Navy SEAL: rescuing the only woman he would ever love.

  Sleep caught up with Ryan a moment later, and he dozed off, his cheeks still wet with tears.

  I hope you can forgive me for deceiving you in my role as Carol—as I said earlier, it was a whim, I meant no harm by it. All I wanted was to be closer to you. More than once I thought you’d realized that Carol was a man and simply accepted the situation, the way you accept most things, but the truth is that you were never interested in looking at me, in really getting to know me. To you it was a superficial friendship, but to me it was as important as my mission.

  As I’m sure you understand, Indiana, disposing of Ed Staton, the Farkases, the Constantes, Richard Ashton, and Rachel Rosen could not go unnoticed: it was important that the public understand. I could have killed them and made their deaths look accidental—no one would have bothered to investigate, and I would have had no reason to worry—but from the very first, my intention was to send a message to perverted individuals like them who have no right to live in society. It had to be absolutely clear that my victims had been tried, sentenced to death, and executed. I succeeded—though there was a moment with the Farkases when it almost failed; the police didn’t analyze the contents of the bottle of gin, even though I left it there deliberately. I only just found out that your ex-husband was the one who discovered that the liquor was drugged. Three months later! That should tell you how incompetent the police are.

  It was a crucial part of my plan that the murders get maximum news coverage and terrify anyone with a guilty conscience, but journalists are lazy—and the public is indifferent. I needed to find a way of attracting media attention. Then, last September, a month before the first killing, the execution of Ed Staton, I saw Celeste Roko doing her daily horoscope on television. She’s a great performer, you have to hand it to her. She managed to convince me, and I don’t believe in astrology; her show really deserves its popularity. It occurred to me that I could use Celeste Roko to drum up the publicity my mission needed, so I sent her five short messages, announcing that there would be a bloodbath in San Francisco. I assume she discounted the first message as a joke, the second as the work of a madman, but when the messages kept coming, she would have paid attention—if she’s as professional as she claims—and studied the heavenly bodies.

  You have to understand, Indiana, that suggestion is a very powerful tool. Madame Roko gazed at the stars and saw what she expected to see: evidence of the bloodbath I had foretold in my letters. And so, of course, she found that evidence, the same way that when you read your horoscope, you always find something true. The predictions are so vague that people who believe, like you, can interpret them to mean anything they want. Perhaps Madame Roko had seen the prophecy scrawled in blood across the sky and decided to warn the public, just as I hoped. Okay, Indiana, for the sake of argument I’ll admit it might not have happened that way. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Perhaps my mission truly was decided by the position of the planets. In which case it was fated from the moment I was born. It was inevitable; I am only fulfilling my destiny. We’ll never know, will we?

  Friday, 6

  At four in the morning, when Amanda had finally dozed off on her grandfather’s bed, covered with his jacket, and with Save-the-Tuna sleeping on the pillow, the cell phone Blake Jackson had prized from her hand and set down on the nightstand rang. Blake, who could not sleep and
was sitting in the darkness watching the minutes pass on the luminous digital clock, gave a start, initially in the wild hope that it was Indiana, that his daughter was free, and a second later panicked that it would be bad news.

  Sherlock Holmes had to repeat his name before Blake realized who it was. This was something that had never happened: one of the unspoken rules of Ripper was that there was no independent contact between the players.

  “It’s Sherlock Holmes,” yelled the boy in Reno. “I need to talk to the games master.”

  “This is Kabel. What’s up?”

  Hearing her grandfather’s voice, Amanda woke up and took the phone from him.

  “Master, I’ve got a lead,” said Sherlock.

  “What is it?” Amanda was completely awake now.

  “I found out something that might be important: farkas means ‘wolf’ in Hungarian.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard. I was looking up the word for ‘wolf’ in various languages, and discovered that in Hungarian, it’s farkas.”

  “That doesn’t help us find out where my mom is.”

  “No, but it means that the killer adopted the wolf as a symbol because he’s related to Sharon and Joe Farkas. He had to know them before he murdered Ed Staton, because he left the sign of the wolf—farkas—at every crime scene.”

  “Thanks, Sherlock. I hope it turns out to be useful.”

  “Good night, master.”

  “Good night? This is the worst night of my life!”

  After she hung up, Amanda and her grandfather considered this new piece of information.

  “What was the name of the little boy the Farkases lost?” asked Amanda, who was so scared now her teeth were chattering.

  “Come on, sweetie, calm down and try to get some sleep. You’ve already done more than enough—we need to leave it to the police now.”

  “Do you remember his name or not?” Amanda shrieked.