Riptide

“Neither do I,” Jennifer said, thinking of Abberline.

thirty-eight

Ocean Front Walk was a mad whirl. The crowd was larger than before. The wide concrete strip was packed with performers, spectators, vendors, beggars, scam artists, crazies.

Jennifer trailed Draper as he elbowed his way into the crush of bodies. Music blared from T-shirt shops and record stores. A folk guitarist competed with the din, wailing about riding the blue train. A fire eater plunged flaming shish kebabs down his throat. Jennifer looked away, the image bringing back the memory of her burning house. It must be ashes now.

They kept going, moving north. They passed a team of jugglers tossing knives. A midget on rollerblades. A man on stilts, dressed like a tree, shouting about global warming. An African drumming ensemble. An old man and his equally old dog, both riding skateboards. A harlequin figure, his costume festooned with jangling bells.

They were nearing a searchlight that illuminated a stream of giant bubbles rising toward the sky when a homeless man lurched out of the crowd. “Open-heart surgery!” he was yelling. He lifted his shirt to expose a mass of bandages. Jennifer pulled away before he could ask for money, and he disappeared in the swirl of people.

Moving on. An immensely fat woman tap-danced to a beat banged out by a monkey on a snare drum. A man in an Uncle Sam suit handed out fliers. Teens played a pickup basketball game under the lights. An inebriate of indeterminate sex threw up into a garbage can, then reared back and let loose a coyote howl.

Lights and noise and craziness, an insane carnival.

The C.A.S.T. headquarters lay just ahead, its banner visible above a faded storefront. The lights in the front windows were on and the door was open, but there was no movement inside.

Jennifer’s view was blocked for a moment by a band of aging hippies in troubadour getups, and then they had streamed past, and at the door of the office she spotted a figure in a hooded sweatshirt.

He’d appeared out of nowhere. He might be entering or leaving-she couldn’t tell.

Draper broke into a sprint, drawing his gun.

Parkinson turned. Saw them.

Then he was running in the familiar awkward lope, his shoes pounding the concrete.

They gave chase. Parkinson weaved through the crowd, knocking down a man on a unicycle, sidestepping a crowd of sullen teenagers.

A big man in a Malcolm X shirt obstructed Draper’s progress. Draper pushed him aside, and the man pushed back, shouting, “What the fuck?” Draper showed him his gun. The guy backed off.

And Parkinson was gone.

“Where’d he go?” Draper yelled.

Jennifer, panting at his side, shook her head.

Draper started running again, Jennifer behind him, trying to keep pace. The crowd thinned. Shops and vendors’ stalls gave way to decrepit apartment buildings lining the landward side of the promenade.

Draper stopped at a break in the row of buildings, peering down an alley.

Parkinson must have gone in there. It was the only exit.

“This time,” Draper hissed, “you stay back.”

He stepped into the alley and took out a pocket flashlight. The beam explored the passageway, long and narrow, bracketed by windowless brick walls. Along one wall stood clumps of oleander and trash bins overflowing with debris. The opposite wall was lined with rusted bicycle parts and corrugated boxes. At the far end a chicken- wire fence screened off a parking lot.

Parkinson could have scaled the fence, if he had the strength. Or he might be concealed inside a trash bin or among the cardboard boxes.

Jennifer watched Draper creep down the middle of the alley, his flash ticking from side to side, and for a surreal moment he wasn’t an LAPD officer anymore. He was a bobby in Jack the Ripper’s London, exploring one of Whitechapel’s back lanes with his bull’s-eye lantern. He was the constable who’d come across Frances Coles in February of 1891, arriving so soon after the killer had done his work that he could hear Jack’s retreating footsteps. He was Inspector Abberline hunting Edward Hare in the sooty labyrinth of East End, where life was cheaper than gin.

So little had changed. Even the victims’ names were nearly the same.

Draper was halfway down the alley. There was no movement but his steady forward progress, no sound but his footfalls on asphalt.

His flashlight swept the ground along the rear fence, where some sort of tarpaulin lay discarded. The tarp was not flat against the ground. It bulged in irregular places.

Parkinson could be underneath.

Draper paused, the flashlight beam picking out the tarp only for a moment before traveling on. If his quarry was there, Draper didn’t want him to know he’d been discovered.

Jennifer stood on the threshold of the alley, watching Draper’s slow advance, thinking of constables in the East End, and Hare on the prowl, and prostitutes unsexed and gutted, their throats cut as they were grabbed from behind….

From behind.

Her gaze shifted to the nearest trash bin, and she saw a rustle of oleander.

“Behind you!” she screamed.

Draper spun in a crouch as Parkinson emerged from the shrubbery.

A single gunshot slapped the alley walls in a volley of percussive echoes. She didn’t know which man had fired until Parkinson fell.

Draper approached him and kicked his gun away, then rolled Parkinson onto his back, exposing a red gash in his throat. His breath came in bubbling wheezes.

Jennifer stepped into the alley. She stared at Parkinson, his face still bloody where she had gouged him, his neck a broken stalk. She smelled the copper-penny scent of blood. Draper applied pressure to the wound, an empty gesture. Parkinson lay unmoving except for the heave of his chest and a faint fluttering motion of his right hand. He was reaching for his shoe-no, his pants leg.

Three paces, and she knelt beside him, grasping his wrist. She rolled up the trouser leg and found a knife strapped to his shin. Carefully she extracted it. The blade was dark with crusted blood. Maura’s blood.

She stood. Parkinson looked up at her. His mouth twisted in a grimace of pure malice, then relaxed. Even the effort of hating her was too much for him now.

“Evidence,” she said to Draper, handing him the knife.

“Thanks.” He set down the knife out of Parkinson’s reach, then got on the radio, requesting medical attention. When he was through, he replaced his hand on Parkinson’s neck, maintaining pressure.

“How long till an ambulance gets here?” Jennifer asked.

“Four or five minutes.”

“Will he make it that long?”

“That long? Yes.” The unspoken addendum was, But not much longer.

“I’m going to check on Sandra.”

“You may not like what you find.”

“I know.’

She retraced her steps, wending through the crowd. She still didn’t know if Parkinson had been about to enter the C.A.S.T. office or had just left. The difference was slight enough, but it was the difference between life and death for Sandra Price.

She arrived at the door, still open. She reassured herself that he hadn’t had time to do to Sandra what he’d done in Maura’s condo.

Whatever lay inside, it wouldn’t be as bad as that.