Ripper by Isabel Allende
As he came out of the meeting, Petra Horr, who had been eavesdropping from her cubicle as usual, grabbed the deputy chief’s sleeve, pushed him behind the door, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the mouth.
“You told ’em! I’m so proud of you, boss!”
Bob was so stunned that he could think of no response before his assistant vanished like the little sprite she was. He stood pressed against the wall, savoring the cinnamon-gum taste of her kiss and a lingering feeling of warmth in his body.
Saturday, 31
The first person to be concerned by Indiana’s absence was Amanda. Knowing her mother’s habits better than anyone, she found it odd that Indiana had not come back for Friday-night dinner—a ritual that had been observed, with few exceptions, since Amanda first went to boarding school four years earlier. Mother and daughter looked forward all week to seeing each other on Friday—especially if Amanda was spending the weekend with her father. Without Alan Keller—who had rarely staked a claim on Indiana’s Friday nights, except during their trip to Turkey, or when he wanted to go to some special concert—Indiana had no reason not to be home for dinner. She would finish with her last patient, hop on her bike, and cycle up Broadway past the bars and the strip clubs, along Columbus Avenue, past the famous City Lights bookstore, home to the local beatniks, past the striking burnished copper facade of Francis Ford Coppola’s Sentinel Building, and down toward Portsmouth Square, on the edge of Chinatown, where the old men of the Chinese community gathered for tai chi or to bet on tabletop games, and from there over to the Transamerica Pyramid—an unmistakable feature of the San Francisco skyline. At this hour, the financial district was undergoing its evening transformation, as offices closed and bars began to open. Indiana would cycle under the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco to Berkeley, then past the new baseball stadium, by which time she was ten minutes from home. Sometimes she would stop off to buy something for dessert, but quickly got home and was ready to sit down and eat. Since Indiana was often late, and neither Amanda nor her grandfather could cook, Friday-night dinner relied either on pizza delivery or the kindness of Elsa Domínguez, who would often leave them something in the fridge. That Friday, Blake and Amanda waited until nine o’clock before they gave up and reheated a pizza, which by then was tough as cardboard.
“You think something’s happened to Mom?” murmured Amanda.
“She’ll be here. Your mother’s over thirty—it’s only normal that once in a while she should go out for a drink with her friends after a hard week’s work.”
“But she could have called! One of her so-called friends could have lent her a cell phone.”
Saturday dawned under an ocher sky, and spring setting out its stall in budding magnolia blossoms, with hummingbirds hovering like tiny helicopters between the fuchsias in the garden. Amanda woke with a jolt, feeling a foretaste of some disaster, and sat up in bed, shaking off the memory of a nightmare in which Alan Keller was trying to rip the arrow from his chest. A thin, golden ray slipped between the curtains to illuminate the room, and Save-the-Tuna was purring contentedly, curled into a ball on the pillow. The girl picked the cat up and buried her face in her warm belly, muttering an incantation to dispel the lingering images of her nightmare.
Barefoot and wearing one of her grandfather’s T-shirts for pajamas, she followed the smell of coffee and fresh toast through the house and padded into the kitchen to give the cat some milk and make a cup of hot chocolate. Blake was already there, watching the news in slippers and an old flannel robe, the same one he had worn seventeen years earlier, when his wife was still alive. Amanda deposited the cat in his lap and went up to the witch’s cave via the spiral staircase. A moment later she was back in the kitchen, loudly announcing that there was nobody in her mother’s bedroom, and the bed had not been slept in. It was the first time since Amanda and her grandfather could remember that Indiana had not come home without calling.
“Where could she have gone, Grandpa?”
“Don’t worry, Amanda. You get dressed, and I’ll drop you at your dad’s and then go to the clinic. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.”
But Blake could find no explanation. At noon, having checked all her usual haunts and called around to Indiana’s friends—including Doña Encarnación, whom he did not want to worry any more than was necessary, and the formidable Celeste Roko, who answered the phone in the middle of a massage only because she saw that the call was from the man she planned to marry—with no results, Blake Jackson finally called his ex-son-in-law and asked if he thought it was appropriate to get the police involved. Bob Martín suggested he wait a while—the police were not likely to send out a search party for a grown woman who had spent one night away from home—but he promised to put out some feelers and call if he heard anything. Both men were afraid that Indiana was with Ryan Miller. Knowing her the way they did, they could list a number of reasons why that fear was justified—from the unbridled compassion that might move her to shelter a fugitive from the law to her troubled heart, capable of making her pursue another love to replace the one she had just lost. The possibility that neither of them dared to consider yet was that she was with Miller against her will, a hostage. He guessed that if that was the case, they would find out soon—when the phone would ring and the kidnapper named his conditions. He realized that he was sweating.
Pedro’s secret cell phone vibrated in the pocket of his tracksuit pants while he was halfway through his daily four-mile run in Presidio Park, training for the triathlon he would have competed in with Ryan had things with his friend not become so complicated. Only two people could be calling him on this number: his fugitive friend, and Amanda Martín. He saw that it was the girl, changed direction, and carried on running until he got to the nearest Starbucks, where he bought a frappuccino—no substitute for a good maté, but useful for throwing anybody who might be following him off the scent—asked to borrow a cell phone from another customer, and called Amanda, who put her grandfather on the line. The conversation with Blake Jackson was just four words: Dolphin Club, forty minutes. Pedro trotted back to his car and drove to the Aquatic Park, where he was lucky enough to find a parking space, then walked nonchalantly into the clubhouse, his bag over his shoulder, as he did every Saturday.
Jackson took a cab to Ghirardelli Square, then walked to the club, mingling with the tourists and families out enjoying one of those magnificent spring days when the light over San Francisco bay is positively Mediterranean. Pedro was waiting for him in the dim lobby of the club, apparently studying the table on which the members of the Polar Bear Club kept track of the distance they had swum over the winter. He signaled to Blake, who followed him up to the cramped locker rooms on the second floor.
“Where’s my daughter?” Blake asked.
“Indiana? What makes you think I’d know?”
“She’s with Miller, I’m sure of it. She hasn’t come home since yesterday, and she hasn’t called either. This has never happened before—the only explanation is that she’s with him and hasn’t called because she’s trying to protect him. You know where Miller is hiding out—get a message to him from me.”
“I’ll give him a message if I can, but I could swear Indiana’s not with him.”
“Don’t swear anything, just talk to your friend. You’re aiding and abetting a fugitive—you’re guilty of perverting the course of justice. Tell Miller that if Indiana doesn’t call me by eight o’clock this evening, you’ll be the one to pay.”
“Don’t threaten me, Blake, I’m on your side.”
“Okay, all right,” the old man stammered, trying to hide the panicked choke in his voice. “Sorry, Pedro, I’m a little tense.”
“It’ll be difficult to talk to Miller—he’s constantly on the move—but I’ll try. Wait for my call, Blake. I’ll call you from a pay phone soon as I know something.”
Pedro led Blake down the hallway that connected the Dolphin to its rival, the South End Rowing Club, so that he could go out by a different
“They were together, so I got a chance to speak to Indiana. I told her I didn’t kill Keller—I admitted I punched him, and that I had to hide because of the evidence incriminating me.”
“What did she say?”
“That I didn’t owe her an explanation, because she had never doubted me, and she begged me to give myself up. Obviously, I said I couldn’t, and I made her promise not to turn me in. It wasn’t exactly the right time to talk about our relationship—Keller had only been dead a couple of hours—but I couldn’t help it. I told her I loved her, and that when everything was cleared up I was going to stop at nothing to win her back. But none of that matters now, Pedro. The important thing is to rescue her.”
“She’s only been gone a couple hours—”
“She’s in serious danger!”
“You think her disappearance is related to Keller’s death?”
“I know it, Pedro. And from the details of Keller’s murder, I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with the killer responsible for the other murders.”
“I don’t see the connection between Indiana and that serial killer.”
“Right now, Pedro, I don’t see it either, but believe me, it’s there. We have to find Indiana right away. Put me in touch with Amanda.”
“Amanda? The girl’s pretty shaken up with what’s happened, I don’t see how she can help you.”
“You will.”
April
Sunday, 1
The deputy chief, dressed in his gym clothes and with his daughter in tow—Amanda had refused to stay behind, and had brought Save-the-Tuna along in her basket—set out for North Beach. Though it was Sunday, and Bob knew his assistant had no obligation to work, he called Petra from the car, explained what had happened, and asked her to get the names and phone numbers of all the therapists who worked at the Holistic Clinic, of Indiana’s patients, and of Pedro Alarcón, all of which were on a list somewhere in the homicide detail. Ten minutes later he was double-parked in front of the Holistic Clinic with its green walls and murky yellowing windows. He found the front door open, since some of the therapists saw patients on weekends. Amanda had withdrawn into a childlike state, walking around with her head down, the hood of her parka pulled over her eyes, sucking her thumb, ready to cry at any moment. She followed the deputy chief up the two flights of stairs and scaled the ladder leading up to Matheus Pereira’s attic, to ask him for a master key to Indiana’s treatment room.
Matheus, who looked for all the world as though he had just got out of bed, answered the door naked apart from a frayed towel slung loosely around his waist to hide his private parts. His dreadlocks were as tangled as the snakes of Medusa, and he wore the vague expression of someone who has smoked something more interesting than tobacco and can’t quite recall what year it is. But his disheveled look did nothing to detract from his elegance. With his glinting eyes and full lips, he was all muscle and bone, as beautiful as a Cellini bronze.
The Brazilian’s rooftop shack would not have looked out of place in a Calcutta slum. Pereira had built it out of bric-a-brac by the same process he used to make his artwork. Nestling between the water tank and the fire escape on the flat roof, a jumble of cardboard, plastic, zinc sheets, and chipboard panels, the lean-to looked like a living organism. Inside, the floor was mostly bare concrete, with a jumble of linoleum scraps here and there and a few threadbare rugs. A warren of twisted spaces that served various functions, the place could be transformed at the drop of a hat by taking down a piece of oilcloth or moving a folding screen, or by reorganizing the boxes and crates that comprised most of the furniture. Bob decided on first look that it was an airless, filthy, and doubtless illegal hippie den, but deep down he had to admit that it had its charm. The daylight filtering through the plastic sheets gave it the feel of an aquarium. The large canvases streaked with primary colors, which looked so aggressive in the building’s foyer, took on a more childish aspect up in the attic; and the mess and grime that anywhere else would have been repellent could be accepted there as an artist’s caprice.
“Pull up your towel, Pereira,” Bob ordered. “You can see I’m here with my daughter.”
“Hey, Amanda,” the painter said, positioning himself to block his visitors’ view of a marijuana plantation behind a partition made of shower curtains.
Bob had already seen it, just as he had smelled the unmistakable pungent tang that suffused the attic, but he turned a blind eye; he was there to talk about other matters. He explained the reasons for his precipitous visit.
Pereira had spoken to Indiana as she was leaving on Friday afternoon, he said. “She told me she was going to meet some friends at the Rossini, then head home when there was less traffic.”
“She mention any of the friends’ names?”
“I don’t remember. Truth is, I wasn’t paying much attention,” Pereira replied vaguely. “She was the last one to leave the building. I locked the front door at eight. . . . Or it could have been nine.” It didn’t look like he was about to provide any useful information, perhaps suspecting that Indiana was involved in something and not wanting to make it easier for her ex-husband to find her.
But the deputy chief’s tone suggested it would be better to cooperate, or at least appear to, and sure enough he pulled on his trusty jeans, grabbed a bunch of keys, and led them to Treatment Room 8. He opened the door and, at the request of Bob, who did not know what he might find inside, waited with Amanda in the hallway. Everything in Indiana’s room was in perfect order: the towels in a pile, clean sheets on the massage table, the vials of essential oils, magnets, candles and incense, all ready to use on Monday, and the little plant the Brazilian had given her as a gift sitting on the windowsill, looking as if it had recently been watered. From out in the passageway Amanda, who could see the laptop on the reception table, asked her father if she could open it, as she knew the password. Explaining that she might smudge the fingerprints, Bob went down to his car to get a plastic bag and some gloves. Out in the street, he remembered Indiana’s bicycle and went round to the side of the building, where she usually locked it to a metal railing. With a shiver, he saw that the bicycle was chained up there. He tasted bile in his throat.
Danny D’Angelo was not on duty at the Café Rossini that day. Bob Martín questioned a few of the waitstaff, who weren’t sure whether they had seen Indiana; the place had been packed that Friday afternoon. He also passed around a photo of Indiana, which Amanda had on her cell phone, to the kitchen staff and the customers, who at that hour were enjoying their Italian coffee and the best pastries on North Beach. A few of the regulars recognized her, but they couldn’t remember seeing her on the previous Friday. Father and daughter were on the point of leaving when a man with reddish hair and rumpled clothing who’d been sitting at one of the tables at the back, jotting on a yellow notepad, approached them.
“May I ask why you’re looking for Indiana Jackson?” he asked.
“Do you know her?”
“You could say that, although we haven’t been introduced.”
“I’m
“Samuel Hamilton Jr., private detective.”
“Samuel Hamilton?” asked the deputy chief. “As in the famous detective from the Gordon novels?”
“He was my father. He wasn’t a detective, though, he was a reporter, and I fear the author rather exaggerated his skills. That was back in the 1960s. My old man passed away, but for many years he lived off the memory of his former glory—or his fictional glory, I should say.”
“What do you know about Indiana Jackson?”
“Plenty, Deputy Chief, including that she was married to you, and that she’s Amanda’s mother. Allow me to explain. Four years ago Alan Keller employed me to follow her. For my sins, a large portion of my income is provided by jealous spouses and partners who get suspicious—it’s the most tedious, distasteful aspect of my work. I couldn’t give Mr. Keller any useful information, and he suspended the surveillance, but every couple of months he would call me up again with another attack of jealousy. He was never convinced that Ms. Jackson was faithful.”
“Did you know that Alan Keller has been murdered?”
“Of course—it’s been all over the media. I’m sorry for Ms. Jackson—she loved him very much.”
“We’re looking for her now, Mr. Hamilton. She’s been missing since yesterday. It seems the last person to see her was a painter that lives at the Holistic Clinic.”
“Matheus Pereira.”
“That’s the guy. He says he saw her in the afternoon, that she came here to meet some friends. D’you know anything?”
“I wasn’t here yesterday, but I can give you a list of the friends that Ms. Jackson saw regularly in the last four years. I’ve got the information at my house—I live nearby.”