by Jill Jones
“He isn’t a stranger, Mother. He’s a detective I met in London. He’s here to help on the case and got stuck with the…uh…bodyguard assignment. As for the robe, I was just…taking a nap,” she added, stretching the truth.
She explained about the murder in London, leaving out the parts about the killer being a Jack the Ripper copycat, and that he’d sent her a body part, and that he’d already struck again a number of times in the U.S. “I think that the killer was a young man named Billy Ray who was at the Sherlockian symposium. But the FBI has yet to locate him. Until he’s found, they want me to stay away from my apartment. Mr. Blake and the agent at the head of the lane are just insurance against anything happening.”
“Oh, Victoria, that’s just horrible. I couldn’t bear it if…” She broke off, and Victoria knew exactly what her mother was thinking. They’d already lost one daughter to violent crime…
“Nothing is going to happen to me, Mother.” She hoped she sounded reassuring. “That’s why we’re taking all these precautions.”
Barbara reached into her purse, drew out a tissue, and wiped her eye dramatically. “I wish you would give up this FBI nonsense. A nice girl like you does not need to be chasing around after the scum of the earth. And those men you work with aren’t of your class, Victoria. They’re as hard as the criminals they go after. Let them run with the rats in the gutters. You get out of it.”
Victoria’s temper threatened to erupt. Her mother had never even met Mike Mosier or any of the others in their unit. They were nice people. Most of them were family men and women. But Barbara was prejudiced against a stereotype and did not care to know the truth, so there was no sense in pursuing it.
“What would I do if I quit, Mother?” she snapped. “Go back to law school so I could join Dad’s law firm and run with the rats above ground?”
“You mind your mouth, young lady.”
“Mother, I’m thirty-three years old. Quit trying to run my life.” She knew her mother meant well, but Victoria was sick of this same old diatribe that surfaced every time they were together. That’s why she rarely went home anymore.
Suddenly, she got the feeling that someone was watching them and turned to see Jonathan at the head of the stairs. He was fully dressed, thank God, but he looked sexier than ever in his jeans and a blazer. She hoped she could manage to pretend he was nothing to her other than a bodyguard, but her mother would have to be blind and a damned fool not to suspect that something else was going on between her daughter and Jonathan Blake.
“Come on down,” she said, waving her hand. “I want you to meet my mother.” He approached, and she noted a curious, almost hurt look on his face. What had he overheard? “Mother, this is Detective Inspector Jonathan Blake of Scotland Yard. Mr. Blake, this is my mother, Barbara Thomas.”
They shook hands politely, but she could almost feel the frost in the air.
“Scotland Yard?” her mother said. “Aren’t you a long way from home?”
“Yes, Mrs. Thomas,” Jonathan replied, his tone distant and professional. “I’m working on this case with Victoria because the first murder took place on my side of the pond.”
“First murder? Have there been others?”
“Not that we can pin on this kid,” Victoria broke in hastily, giving Jonathan a warning look. She didn’t want to alarm her mother even more. “Like I said, we want to stop him before there are any more. Jonathan…uh…Mr. Blake came back to the States with me to help us with the case. He’s a forensic expert.”
Barbara looked from Jonathan to Victoria and back again. “I wish you would talk some sense into my daughter, Mr. Blake,” she said. “Victoria has no business being in such a dangerous occupation.”
“Mother…”
“Or running with the rats in the gutters,” Jonathan replied evenly, not taking his eyes off the woman with champagne blond hair and immaculately manicured nails.
“I see you understand me perfectly, Mr. Blake. Such a nice young man.” She turned to her daughter, who wanted to go through the floor. “You listen to him, Victoria, if you won’t listen to me.” She looked at her watch. “I must run along now or I’ll miss cocktail hour at the club. Take care of her, Mr. Blake. Her father and I would be very unhappy if anything were to go amiss with her life. After all, she’s all we have now.”
Jonathan watched as Barbara Thomas climbed behind the wheel of her honey-colored Mercedes, his stomach in a knot. He had barely been able to greet the woman in a civilized manner, for he’d clearly heard her opinion of law enforcement types. Like himself.
Hard. Like criminals. Not of her class.
The irony of it was that she was right, at least about one thing. He was not of Victoria’s class. The encounter served as a reality check. He knew that Victoria did not share her mother’s prejudice, but she came from the same mold nonetheless. He looked around the lovely old cottage that was nothing more to these people than a playhouse and wondered what kind of mansion the Thomases must claim as their primary residence.
He was flattered that Victoria had found him sexually appealing, but he felt sure her attraction ended there. What else did he have to offer her? An austere flat in London and a detective inspector’s pay? He had a rather substantial sum set aside in savings, but nothing to match the wealth of these people.
What a bloody idiot he was. He should never have let things progress so far between them. He didn’t know if he could backpedal now, distance himself from her emotionally. But if he didn’t, he could see that heartbreak was headed his way like a fast train.
“I suppose we ought to give Mosier a call,” he said brusquely, looking at his watch. “He said he’d telephone with any new developments, but I’m accustomed to checking in from time to time when I’m in the field.”
Victoria still stood at the front door, her back to him, looking out of the glass panes at her mother’s retreating car.
“Don’t let her get to you, Jonathan. She doesn’t mean to be insulting. She has no idea how truly rude she just was.”
He wasn’t sure what to say. He’d met people like Barbara Thomas before, and he had no use for them. But she was Victoria’s mother. “Don’t apologize, Victoria. I’m not thin-skinned.”
Neither was he stupid. He knew beyond certainty that if by some miracle he and Victoria managed more than a brief relationship, Barbara Thomas would never accept him. He didn’t think he was imagining things when she’d warned him not to let anything happen to her daughter.
She didn’t want Jonathan Blake to happen to her daughter.
Victoria turned to him, her face grave. “I’m sorry anyway. Mother often embarrasses me.” She looked down at her robe. “Guess she sort of ruined the naked picnic, didn’t she? I ought to get dressed.”
She came to him and stood on tiptoe to give him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “Call Mike. Tell him we can come in any time he needs us. I’m feeling much better since my nap, and frankly, I’m getting antsy to be back on the job.”
Jonathan watched her hurry up the stairs, feeling more desolate than he ever had in his life. Victoria’s mother had put everything into perspective for him, and obviously for Victoria as well, for in those few moments, she had changed, stiffened, grown more distant. She was suddenly all business once again, as she had been the first day he met her.
Perhaps it was just as well. It would give him a chance to regroup emotionally. He hoped Mosier would ask them to come in right away. He would gladly spell some other weary agent.
Otherwise, it was going to be a long night.
Chapter Nineteen
London
One October, 1888
My beloved Prince departed shortly after we returned to my quarters last night, pleading a headache and general malaise. His is a tender constitution, and I am sick with fear that he might suffer some illness after our hunt in the rain. He promised to return soon, and I pray he does. I began these hunts to recapture Eddy’s love, but now I find I am myself a prisoner of the bloodlust. With
each hunt, I seem increasingly driven toward another.
Earlier, possessed by a desire to learn first-hand what effect our work had on the public, I dressed as the consummate gentlemen I am and took a stroll into the East End. The havoc was a sight to behold. I was accosted at every turn by constables, uniformed and not, who warned me to leave the area immediately, saying it was not a fit place for a gentlemen such as myself.
The whole of the East End is in turmoil. People are panicked and the police struck dumb by the killer’s boldness and invisibility. Their confusion warms my heart, and I left, scarcely able to contain my glee. But I have not seen my first little note published anywhere, and have heard no one refer to the homicidal maniac as Jack the Ripper. It would make the game far more interesting if the reporters called us by name. To that end, before returning home, I posted a second message, to wit:
I wasnt codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. Had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper
Surely they will not ignore these messages, but then, the police are a curious lot. It almost seems as if they do not want to catch the killer.
At ten o’clock on Friday morning, a group of solemn-faced men and women convened in a large conference room in the NCAVC headquarters at Quantico. They had come from the cities in which the killer had struck during his lightning blitz of murders in the past week. They were investigators with local law enforcement agencies and the FBI’s field profilers. They joined the Special Agents at Quantico with one purpose in mind—to find the killer and stop his bloody rampage.
Victoria took a seat between Jonathan and Mike Mosier. In spite of the grim business before them, she was glad to be here, glad to have other things to occupy her mind than the personal doubts that had tormented her most of the night.
She didn’t know exactly why, but something about her relationship with Jonathan had shifted with her mother’s intrusion. Although they had been quietly friendly during the course of the evening, the passion that had flared so easily between them seemed to have disappeared. Why? What had transpired in those few moments to so drastically change things? Did Jonathan dislike Barbara Thomas so much he would let that come between them? She couldn’t imagine it. Was it something she had said or done?
She tried to focus her attention on the business at hand, but her mind kept going back over the events of the previous afternoon, seeking answers. She had known their time together would come to an end, but she had not thought it would end like this. In her mind, it was to have been a tearful farewell at the airport and a gradual slipping away over time. She had never imagined their affair would simply die on the vine.
Mike Mosier opened the meeting by thanking the law enforcement officers who had responded so efficiently to the crisis. “By entering the data on the murders into the national computer network and sending it immediately to VICAP, you enabled our analysts to spot the similarities between these crimes at once. Not long ago, getting this kind of result would have taken weeks, not days. With luck, by the end of today’s meeting, we’ll have a profile of this killer and some suggestions for proactive intervention that will help this task force capture the bastard.”
Victoria had earlier explained to Jonathan that VICAP was the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, designed to be a clearing house for information on crimes committed in various parts of the country. VICAP analysts made computer comparisons of all the cases submitted by local law enforcement agencies, and as in this instance, were often able to find matches between crimes committed in different locales. By linking the disparate agencies, VICAP facilitated communication and cooperation among them, often resulting in the quick resolution of the crimes.
“Let’s get down to business,” Mike said, and called on the investigator from Chicago to make the first presentation. He distributed photos and the crime scene report, along with the notes he’d made at the autopsy. “The victim was twenty-nine years old. Name: Candace Malone. Occupation: Part-time fundraiser for a local charity. Her father told us she had no need for any other pursuit. Apparently she lived off the income from investments he’d made for her. She’d gone to the opera alone, as she had recently broken up with a long-time boyfriend. We’ve checked him out. He was out of town the night of the murder.
“The autopsy showed the cause of death was manual strangulation. She was not sexually assaulted. We believe she was killed near where her car was parked, and that the killer then drove her car to the park at the edge of the city and finished his work there. Other than the victim’s blood, the car was clean—no fingerprints except the victim’s. Forensic is still working on it, but so far, we haven’t found any foreign fabrics, hair, blood or semen.”
Victoria studied the grisly photos while she listened to the discussion about the Chicago killing. Oddly, she was able to somewhat detach from the horror of it when it came to her work as a profiler. Staring at the pictures, she tried to visualize what had happened that night, and when it came her turn, she shared her thoughts with the others.
“Despite the fact that there was no sexual assault,” she said, “this is a sexually motivated murder perpetrated by a highly organized killer. Because he is so organized, I would say this is not his first murder, but he is still in the early phases of his career. I’m certain he did not plan to drive her car from the city to the park, but rather that it was a decision based on the situation at the moment. For whatever reason, strangling her didn’t sufficiently gratify him. Otherwise, he would have left her on the street. But the strangulation did not fulfill his fantasy. This creep gets off on the mutilation, not the murder. His need was so strong that he put himself at considerable risk by taking her body to the park, because he hadn’t planned a safe getaway.”
“He must have walked back to the murder site to pick up his own vehicle,” Mike Mosier interjected. “I doubt he would have risked taking public transportation. His clothes must have been bloodstained.”
“If he had a vehicle. It could be that he had a room in a hotel near the murder site. Maybe somebody saw him come in that night but hasn’t come forward,” she said to the members of the Chicago team. “It’s a long shot, but you might try checking around the hotels in the area. My guess is this guy has the money to stay in nice places. He wouldn’t be caught dead in a Holiday Inn.”
The investigators from Kansas City were up next. Their story was similar.
Natalie Jenkins had been a younger victim than Candace Malone. Barely twenty, she was a beauty queen, reigning for a day over a celebrity bar-b-que cook-off. Her father was a state senator, her mother head of the Women’s League. Natalie was in college, studying finance. Her nude body, or what remained of it, was found by a creek in a wooded area near the site where the event had been held. Stuck into the ground next to it was a long metal pike onto which various internal organs had been skewered. From the lack of defense or restraint marks on the body, the Kansas City investigators believed she had willingly accompanied the killer to the murder site.
The victim in Phoenix was thirty-three. Shelley Langham was a model, and the daughter of a wealthy family. The killer had become bolder, for he had committed the crime in a relatively open area at a time when the nearby country club was filled with people. “He’s getting better,” Mike commented. “Faster. More confident. Therefore more daring.”
“Let’s hope he gets overconfident,” Victoria remarked. “That’s when he’ll start making mistakes.
The first sign that the killer was doing exactly that came from the Seattle police. “He got a little sloppy this time. We found bloody footprints on the dock. We’re hoping that we can find a match for the shoe.”
Victoria leaned forward. It wasn’t much in the way of forensic evidence, but it was the first the killer had left for them. She listened carefully as the man went on.
&
nbsp; “The imprint left by the soles of the shoes was that of a common type of boat shoe, brand name Topsider, approximately size ten. We took the fiancé in for questioning. He wears a size nine and a half and presented us with his own sets of boat shoes. No match, but that doesn’t prove anything. He probably deep-sixed the shoes somewhere we’ll never find them.”
Victoria hoped they did find the shoes. But she knew when they did, they wouldn’t belong to the fiancé.
It was nearing noon by the time they had listened to the presentations of all the visiting investigators, and one thing had become crystal clear to Victoria. This killer was not only brutal, he had a warped sense of humor about his work. His MO had changed slightly from victim to victim, but his signature—some sort of twisted joke relating to each crime—was stronger than ever. So far, the police had managed to keep this aspect of the killings from the media, but it was only a matter of time until some creative reporter figured it out and broke the story. Then, the Ripper copycat would become known as the most sensational serial killer of all time.
Which was what he wanted most.
The door opened and a grim-faced man entered the room, bearing a computer printout. “This just came in from the Boulder P.D.,” he said, handing it to Mosier.
Victoria’s stomach clenched. She knew without being told the killer had struck again. Without thinking, she reached for Jonathan’s hand.
Jonathan was startled when he felt Victoria’s touch. She had remained distant since her mother’s visit, and he had not encouraged her to be otherwise, even though their evening had been awkward. It was better to start easing away from what he considered to be an impossible situation before it destroyed him. But now, feeling her pulse and the warmth of her hand, he lost the control he’d struggled so hard to maintain for the past eighteen hours. He squeezed her hand, and she returned the squeeze, but without looking at him.
