Riptide (3 page)

When she raised her head, she saw her reflection in the mirror, a pale ghost image framed in wheat-colored hair. In January she’d turned thirty, but she looked younger. She had a child’s face with a child’s large eyes. She expended a lot of energy making people treat her as a grownup. Maybe that was one reason she wouldn't walk away from her job.

Leaving the bathroom, she deposited the photocopied threat message in her study, a small businesslike room overlooking a backyard garden in need of tending. There had been a tool shed in the backyard once, many years ago. Her mother had removed it and planted flowers on the ground where it stood. She tended those flowers until the day she died.

Jennifer had grown up in this house and knew every squeaky floorboard. It was a Queen Anne Victorian, tall and narrow, two stories of cedar oak shingles and gingerbread trim topped by a high gable and slanted roof. The house was planted on a narrow lot edged by a tangle of sweet pea vines and a low hedge resembling a hunk of moldy cheese.

The House of Silence. That was how she had always thought of it, because of the long, tense silences of her childhood.

It had gone up in 1908, at the start of Venice’s prosperity. After a long decline, the district had now entered a new, affluent phase, in which old homes were purchased as seven-figure teardowns. Real estate developers were constantly after her, but she refused to sell. The house had been built by her great-grandfather and handed down through the generations. With her parents dead, it was her last link to her family.

Besides Richard, of course.

She wondered how much longer she could hold out. The cost of living was rising, and her income wasn’t keeping up. She would stay as long as she could, and not just out of family loyalty. She loved the sea, the wet breeze and misty mornings, the cheerful chaos of the Venice boardwalk, and she loved the old house for its faded, funky charm, its narrow hallways and strange angles.

Upstairs she stripped, then stood in the shower and ran the water hot until the old pipes were banging. Steam rose, white and scalding. The water cascaded over her, burning the last traces of the crime scene off her body.

The hot water ran out abruptly, replaced by a chilly downpour. Damn water heater.

She toweled her hair dry in the bedroom. The high stained glass windows over her bed gave the room an aura of sanctity that was somewhat offset by the montage of erotic 1920s postcards on the wall.

From her closet she grabbed a pair of baggy woolen pajama bottoms she wore as pants, and a peach blouse two sizes too big. Like every shirt she owned, the blouse had long sleeves that concealed the four-inch rope of scar tissue on her left forearm.

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she heard raucous barking from across the street. The nasty Rottweiler owned by her newest neighbors, penned in a side yard.

She glanced out the front window and saw the dog at the gate, gnashing its teeth. A few yards away, a child no older than five was approaching cautiously, but not cautiously enough.

Then she was out the door, sprinting barefoot across the street.

The kid—a boy, she could see that now—waggled his fingers at the dog in a friendly greeting. The Rottweiler retreated a couple of steps and stopped barking, but Jennifer knew this was only a feint, a ruse to disarm the victim.

The boy extended one hand to pet the doggie. He had just begun to insert his hand between the wrought-iron twinings of the gate when Jennifer reached him. She yanked him back, and the Rottweiler, cheated of its prey, launched itself at the gate, barking and snapping ferociously.

The gate shook under the dog’s weight as the fanged head thrust between the bars, white teeth gleaming.

The boy started to cry.

Jennifer held him. “It’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

When the boy was calm, she knelt by him and asked if his mommy or daddy was around. Mutely he pointed to the house.

She took him by the hand and led him to the front door, which hung ajar. She rang the bell and waited until a heavyset housekeeper appeared.

The woman saw the little boy and broke into a flurry of excited recriminations. Jennifer didn’t speak Spanish, but she got the idea. The boy was her son, and he had wandered off without permission.

He went inside, running past his mother to escape further chastisement. The housekeeper looked at Jennifer with a grateful smile. “He was cause trouble?” she asked in halting English.

“No,” Jennifer lied. “No trouble. I just thought he shouldn’t be out on his own.”

She crossed the street, returning home. It was the first time she had ever rung that doorbell. She had no idea who owned the new house. She had never seen them, only their vehicles going in and out of the three-car garage.

As recently as ten years ago, everyone on the street knew each other. Now almost all her old neighbors were gone. The new arrivals hid behind fences and multiple locks. There was a new unfriendliness in the neighborhood. More wealth—but less joy.

three

By two o’clock she was ensconced in her study, bending over an anonymous letter from a man with murder on his mind.

When she was at work, there was nothing else, no outside world, no past or future, only the white examination table and the sheet of lined paper in the glow of the full-spectrum lamp.

Though the message was unpunctuated, badly spelled, without margins or paragraph breaks, it conveyed the writer’s thoughts quite effectively.

I am going to hunt you down bitch & take you out it will hurt don’t make plans for the futur you wont be around long ennough for it to matter...

And much more in that vein.

Immediately she pegged the writer as male. Women used intensifiers—“I am
so
angry...you are
such
a good friend”—and emotive language, laden with “I feel” statements. They qualified their remarks, even in the heat of strong emotion. No such markers were present in the note on her examination table.

It wasn’t difficult to isolate the letter’s key motifs. The most obvious was resentment of the victim for her superiority.

even perfect people die...maybe everrybody wants you but I only want you dead...before you die I will spit in your perfect face

She wondered if he actually did spit in her face when he killed her. It might be possible to do a DNA test. The plastic bag could have protected the evidence even after the body went into the water. She made a note of it.

His fixation on her appearance suggested that he regarded his own looks as inadequate. It also strongly suggested a sexual obsession with the victim, an impression reinforced by other language.

I pity you bitch I feel sorry for you beccause I know whats coming & its coming down hard

It didn't take a psychology degree to see the repetition of the word
coming
and its proximity to the word
hard.

There was a second motif—rejection.

Your not going to walk away,
he warned, perhaps recalling a time when she had in fact walked away from him.
Youll be humiliated no pride & youll begg me for mercy.

He wanted to humiliate her—probably because she’d humiliated him by rebuffing his advances.
I am going to hunt you down bitch & take you out
... Yeah, he had wanted to take her out, all right. Whoever wrote this letter had made an attempt—probably an inept attempt—to initiate a relationship. She had said no. Now he wanted to strike back.

And what were the odds that somebody who misspelled simple words like
future
and
everybody
and even
beg
would have no trouble spelling
humiliated
? Or that such a person would have the know-how to use an ampersand?

He was smarter and better educated than he wanted to let on. Playing dumb was harder than it looked.

Smile while you can,
he wrote,
beccause soon I am going to make mona lisa moan.
An uneducated person would not think naturally of Mona Lisa or perform an alliterative play on
Mona
and
moan
.

The other motif in the letter was the writer’s proximity to the victim.
You can feel death breatheing down youre neck...up close & personal...

One passage combined all three motifs.

did I get your attention? are you scared? you think your safe in youre perfect world youre plastic bubble but its nearly time for the bubble to burst closer to the end than you think

The last words could be an unconscious confession, his way of saying, “I am closer to you than you think.” He might live near her or work in the same office.

Another phrase stood out:
its nearly time for the bubble to burst
. An expression that might occur to someone in the financial or real estate markets.

Marilyn Diaz had been an insurance agent. Had she worked in an office complex with Realtors, stockbrokers?

Jennifer sat back in her chair, notepad in hand. She jotted down her conclusions.

That was what she knew about him. And he was, of course, dangerous. Marilyn Diaz might not have realized it, but the signs were there.

He had disguised his handwriting, as evidenced by the telltale shakiness of his script. Concealing his identity suggested foresight and planning. And he had made no specific threat. People whose plans for revenge went no further than daydreams would share their fantasies. The ones who were more serious kept the details to themselves.

He had, however, left inadvertent hints of how he planned to do it. He’d written of looking into her face as she died, of death breathing down her back. The constellation of images—face to face, neck, breathing—suggested he had already been thinking of the plastic bag, the slow asphyxiation. He’d meant to choke her to death while he stared into her eyes.

When he broke the window—when Marilyn heard him coming down the hall—she must have known it was the man who’d written the note. She must have known he had come to kill her.

I am going to hunt you down bitch & take you out…

He might have left no clues at the scene. He might have hoped the surf would wash off any trace evidence on the body. But in this note he’d given away much more than he realized.

She could put the police on this man’s scent. Most people would never know it. Her testimony would not be permitted at his trial. Her analysis, which still had no legal standing, could not be submitted as evidence. But it could be used to develop leads. And when he was in prison, he would know that his own words had locked him up for life.

That was the power of the work she did. It was more than document analysis. Officially, her role was special psychological consultant to various law enforcement agencies throughout the Los Angeles area.

Her skill was psycholinguistic analysis. She read between the lines.

Psycholinguistics could yield data on the writer’s background and education, the books and magazines he read, the work he did. But another kind of information was embedded in a text. Self-image, private obsessions, hidden fears and hopes.

She remembered the exact moment when she first understood the process. She was in a crowded bar with a college boyfriend named Sean, complaining that she had to shout to be heard. Abruptly it occurred to her that she wasn’t concerned about the ambient noise. Her actual complaint was that Sean couldn’t hear her,
ever
. He was too self-involved to listen. She hadn’t been consciously aware of the problem. But her unconscious mind knew—and found a way to communicate the message. To shout it, in fact.

That night she reread her journal and found the same message repeated again and again. Her subliminal mind had been sending out a distress signal for weeks, but her conscious mind, busy with rationalizations and denial, hadn’t grasped it.

The realization gave her a creepy feeling, as if she had discovered a second personality cohabiting her body. For a while, she was reluctant to pursue the idea. But when she read about the cutting-edge discipline of psycholinguistics in her psych classes, she was hooked.

The unconscious, she learned, was wiser than the conscious mind. It expressed truths that conscious thought tried to hide, truths that emerged as coded messages, a series of red flags. The “red thread,” it was called. Like Einstein’s God, the unconscious was subtle but not malicious. Its secrets could be teased out, if a reader had the skill to follow the red thread.