The Jekyll Revelation Read online

  I could suddenly see how Henley had risen to the top of his profession so quickly, despite the many obstacles life had thrown in his path. He was as brisk and unrelenting as a tornado.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  “You know what that jeep was worth?” Ellen Latham was saying, and though Rafe was tempted to reply About fifty bucks, he didn’t. “And do you know how strapped we are for funds these days?”

  “I do.”

  “I’ve pulled the vehicle maintenance records—it was given a complete overhaul just two years ago and deemed perfectly safe.”

  “A lot can happen in two years, especially if you’re driving off-road in the canyons.”

  “And now it’s sitting under what, ten or twelve feet of water?”

  “The brakes were gone,” Rafe said, in as neutral a voice as he could. More than once since the accident, it had occurred to him that the brakes might not have simply malfunctioned; maybe they’d been tampered with by Roy. But without a vehicular autopsy, as it were, it was all just speculation—and speculation that would open up other questions that he did not want to address at all. “We’re lucky to have escaped in one piece,” he volunteered.

  “Oh yes, and then there’s that,” Latham said, leaning back in her chair and blowing out a sigh of disgust. “Twice you take out a trainee, Heidi Graff, and twice you bring her back more dead than alive.”

  “She’s okay,” Rafe said. “Scared—we both were—but she was safely out of the jeep before it started to sink.”

  “You make that sound like an achievement, not a near disaster.”

  In a way, it was—the jeep had seemed to hang in the air longer than expected, before plunging headfirst into the black lake. It bobbed on the surface, water running in on all sides, as Rafe quickly reached over to unfasten Heidi’s seat belt. She was in shock, and he had to reach across her, unlock her door, and push it open as far as he could; from that angle, it wasn’t easy. Once he saw her crawling out, against the tide of rushing water, he fumbled at his own restraints and only got them loose as the jeep took on so much weight that the hood dipped down like an arrow and the whole car rapidly submerged. Pushing against his own door, he found it was too late to get it open—the pressure of the water was too great—and holding his breath, he’d had to wriggle out the open window, his backpack hastily looped over one shoulder. By the eerie glow of the headlights that were still on, he kicked toward the surface.

  They were only fifteen or twenty feet from the bank. Grasping hold of Heidi’s arm, he dragged her away from the sinking jeep and the suction of its descent, and toward the land. Wiping the brackish water from his eyes with the sodden sleeve of his shirt, he thought he saw someone waiting along the brush line to assist them. Someone down on all fours, perhaps urging them on, reaching out a helping hand.

  He was reminded of that sensation he’d had of being followed, tracked, in their escape from the meth lab.

  But if that was Roy, or Axel, waiting on the shore, they’d be better off treading water till dawn.

  For a moment, he hesitated, Heidi sputtering and flailing, before the image resolved itself into something else—something even more dreadful and unexpected.

  A pair of watchful eyes stared balefully from behind the broken branches and dead leaves. Its head was down and weaving slowly from side to side; its shoulders were swallowed up in the darkness. Letting go of Heidi’s arm, he reached down to unbuckle his holster and remove his Smith & Wesson. He raised it, streaming water, above the surface, into full view, and clicked off the safety, but would it work at all after being underwater?

  “Get out of here!” he shouted at whatever, or whoever, was lurking behind the shrubs. “That, or I’ll shoot!”

  There was no reply.

  “You hear me?”

  Praying the gun would function, he aimed at a pale clump of beech trees, pressed the trigger, and a shot—crisp and sharp and loud—echoed around the canyon.

  Something bolted—big and dark and hard to discern—from the brush, and off into the night. If it was the wolf whose tracks he’d seen before, it was even bigger and huskier than he’d imagined.

  But at least he’d frightened it off, and Heidi had gotten control of herself enough to strike out for the shore on her own. On all fours she clambered onto the bank and then flattened herself against the dirt, panting. He crawled up beside her, but kept his head up, surveying the surrounding area. There was no sign of movement, and when he turned back toward the lake, all he saw was a froth of bubbles, faintly illuminated by the headlights, miraculously still functioning, from the bottom of the lake.

  And then they, too, went out.

  “The car you’ve got now,” Latham was saying—a beaten-up old Land Rover, abandoned and then impounded by the Kanan Road firehouse—“you can keep using for the time being.” The fireman who’d helped him pry open the strongbox with the journal inside had driven it over that morning.

  “It looks like a piece of shit,” the firefighter had said, alluding to the faded purple paint and the Lakers decals adorning the car’s dented fenders, “but it runs okay.”

  Rafe had stuck his head in through the open window, and quickly withdrawn it.

  “Yeah,” the fireman had laughed. “It smells like old bong water, but if you drive with the windows open, you get used to it.”

  “Unfortunately,” Latham was saying, her lacquered nails flipping through another stack of official forms, “you didn’t get a field sobriety test done last night, or even before coming in today.”

  “What, you think I was drunk?”

  She shrugged. “Stoned, maybe. I’m pretty sensitive to smells, and you’re giving off an odor now.”

  “If I am, it’s because the car I’m driving was previously used as an ashtray.”

  “If you say so. But a clean test would have helped a lot when the whole report, including the loss of the jeep, is kicked upstairs.”

  Rafe had thought they were already upstairs, on the top floor of the building with the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles all around them, so she plainly meant it figuratively. The bureaucracy went up and up and up forever, and he was acutely aware that as an environmental science officer he was considered a lowly field hand, and one who had increasingly become a nuisance.

  “Take these,” she said, handing him a couple of preprinted forms on colored paper, “to the lab annex on your way out.”

  They were orders for a blood draw. “You’re joking.”

  “Better late than never.” Glancing at the wall clock, she said, “They close at five thirty, so hurry.”

  She put her head down to signal the end of the meeting, and Rafe picked up his backpack from the floor, noticing, with some satisfaction, that it had left grit on the otherwise spotless linoleum. It would probably be as close to the canyons as Latham would ever get.

  As for the lab annex, he could barely remember where it was. The only time he’d been there was when he’d first been hired: state employees in every department had to have the routine tests done. He now got in barely under the wire, and while he watched his blood fill the syringes, he couldn’t help but reflect on the pages of the journal that he had been reading. Blood ran through the narrative like a mountain stream. Awful experimental procedures in Swiss clinics, murders in the back alleys of London. The whole story so far read like one of Stevenson’s novels, but unlike a novel, Rafe could not be sure it would come to any satisfactory conclusion. Nor, it was clear, did the famous author himself. Maybe that—in addition to the writer’s obvious sympathy for animals—was why Rafe felt such a close, and growing, connection. Strange as it was, he felt like he and Stevenson would have gotten along great.

  10 September, 1888

  A terrible night. Coughing, sweats, disturbing dreams. My Brownies brought me nothing but ghastly images from my past—the empty chairs in the Belvédère dining room, toboggans shooting down the mountain with the dead aboard, the sack hurtling through
the train window, though in the dream, it contained not the head of the wolf, but that of the dead steward Yannick.

  ‘I told you not to go with Henley,’ Fanny said, offering no sympathy when I stepped into our back garden to catch a bit of vagrant sun on my face. The heat spell had finally snapped, and autumnal weather was on its way. ‘He only wants to monopolise your time, and you cannot afford it.’

  In no mood for debate, I slumped into a lawn chair. The back garden was the one place to which I could repair to commune with a tiny portion of nature, a sanctuary protected from unwelcome intruders, and unstained by ink and paper.

  ‘And it’s no wonder you had nightmares. Seeing all of that blood and gore.’

  I had told her some, though hardly all, of what I had seen the day before, and though she professed annoyance at my having gone, I sensed that there was also in her a good bit of envy. Fanny has a strong stomach and is as curious as ten cats.

  She was planting some vegetables now, bent over, her hands in the dirt and her skirts tied back to be out of the way. With her black hair and tawny skin, it was not hard to imagine her as a squaw in some Indian village; I know that was how Henley saw her.

  ‘Did you see Lloyd inside?’

  ‘No.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve got Henley and Lloyd’s got Randolph Desmond. Bad influences all ’round.’

  ‘I thought you liked Desmond. He’s an aristocrat.’

  ‘He’s a dissolute character, and I’m afraid he’s teaching Lloyd all the wrong lessons.’

  ‘Lloyd is a quick study in that regard.’

  ‘I won’t have you criticizing my boy.’

  ‘He’s a young man now, in case you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘Stop it, Louis.’

  Ah, I had forgotten the unwritten laws of our union. I put it down to my not being fully awake yet.

  Straightening, she put her hands to the small of her back and stretched. ‘Back in Sacramento, I had the best garden in town. So many tomatoes that we had to make ketchup out of most of them.’ Surveying the sky, which was already clouding over again, she said, ‘But to grow tomatoes, you need sun, and in London, sunshine is sorely lacking.’ She brushed some frizzled black hairs from her brow. ‘I’m going in to wake up Lloyd. Do you want anything?’

  ‘Can you send out a pot of coffee?’

  ‘I’ll tell her to make it strong.’

  At the back of the garden, no bigger than a badminton court, a pair of doves were cooing atop the iron gate. A cool breeze stirred the branches of the elm tree. I closed my eyes and tried to turn my thoughts to the manuscript still on my desk. But stubbornly, they would have their own way. It was the mention of ketchup, I think, trifling as that might seem. It conjured up the red, red scene I had encountered at the morgue.

  Not much more than a brick shed, and incongruously located beside a children’s playground, the workhouse mortuary was a stage set from Hell. I had barely stepped inside, behind Inspector Abberline and Henley, when I was confronted with bowls of blood and tin trays on which various organs, so violated and dissected that they were unrecognizable, were displayed, and on the long table in the centre of the room, the body of Annie Chapman, split open from the breast to the groin. Hovering over her, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his smock stiff with dried blood, stood a white-haired man with a pair of spectacles at the end of his nose. He glanced up at our intrusion and asked, in a perfectly congenial manner, ‘And who might our guests be, Frederick?’

  Abberline introduced us, and at the mention of my name, the doctor said, ‘Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.’

  ‘You have read “Treasure Island.”’

  ‘Among other things you have written. I’d shake hands properly, but as you can see . . .’ He gestured at the carnage on the table.

  He was as matter-of-fact as a cobbler turning a shoe on the lathe.

  ‘So, what can you tell me?’ Abberline asked.

  ‘I can tell you that this poor lass was not long for this world, regardless.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Take a look at those lungs,’ he said, lifting his chin towards a basin of mottled organs on a side table. ‘Riddled with tuberculosis. No doubt spread to the membranes of the brain by now. She hadn’t more than a few months at best.’

  Henley, a man who had spent more time in amputation wards than anyone but Doctor Phillips, was unfazed, but I confess my stomach was taking several unwanted backflips. How, I wondered, would my own ravaged lungs look in comparison?

  ‘For that matter,’ Dr Phillips said, ‘she didn’t die from the severing of her carotid artery, either.’

  ‘From the stab wounds to the abdomen, then?’ Abberline hazarded.

  ‘She was suffocated first,’ the doctor said, turning her head towards us. It was a grisly sight—her eyes closed, but her mouth open, and the tongue, black and swollen, protruding from between the teeth. ‘He must have choked her to death, or at least to unconsciousness, first. A blessing, of sorts.’

  Henley made a note of it, which he firmly underlined in his note pad.

  ‘Then he proceeded, in a rather deliberate and, I must say, efficient manner, not only to cut the intestines from the abdominal wall, but to remove from the pelvis the uterus and its appendages, along with the upper section of the vagina and most of the posterior section of the bladder.’

  Abberline surveyed the various containers of blood and flesh and said, ‘That’s all this, then?’

  ‘Quite the contrary. All of those viscera are missing.’

  ‘What do you mean, missing?’

  ‘He must have taken them with him.’

  We all three remained silent, assimilating this additional horror, while Dr Phillips repositioned her head to face upward and said, ‘Only a man with some considerable degree of anatomical knowledge could have accomplished all this without doing any damage to the rectum or the cervix uteri or other organs, and under such dangerous and exigent circumstances. Done properly, the task would take a surgeon a good hour, but from the information I’ve been provided, the killer could not have been about his work for anything more than ten or fifteen minutes.’ There was a grudging note of respect in his voice. ‘It’s not some raving lunatic you are looking for, Inspector. It’s a man of cool and deliberate temperament, given to episodes, such as this, when his mania overwhelms him. The ferocity is fuelled by the long-suppressed urge to commit violence, and specifically upon women—that much is plain from the concentration on the generative organs. In short, there is a method to his madness.’

  ‘I won’t be shedding any tears for him, Doctor,’ Abberline said.

  ‘No, nor should you,’ Phillips replied. ‘I did not mean to suggest it.’

  ‘But if that’s true,’ Henley put in, ‘what’s to stop him?’

  ‘Nothing, I fear. Unless and until he is caught red-handed, his mania will continue to erupt in acts of savagery. Even this murder’, he said, ‘is a step up, a more wanton act, than the previous one. He will only grow bolder, and bloodier, with each success.’

  Henley’s pencil was scribbling as fast as it could travel.

  ‘So you think he’s going to strike again?’ Abberline said.

  ‘I am a physician of the body, not the mind,’ Phillips replied, ‘but if my many years of practice have taught me one thing, it’s that the two are inextricably entwined. Wicked thoughts can lead to wicked deeds, and wicked deeds can, in turn, poison the mind further. The man who has committed these murders is a dog chasing his own tail. He’ll never catch it, try as he might, so you must catch him.’

  ‘Easier said than done,’ the detective muttered.

  ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ Dr Phillips said, adjusting the glasses on his nose with a blood-besmirched knuckle. ‘I wish you much luck—and speed.’ And with that he went back to his sawing and stitching.

  I could not gulp the air outside fast enough. Henley was fishing a fresh pencil from the pocket of his shirt, and Inspector Abberline, pensivel
y stroking his mutton chops, looked as if his thoughts were a million miles away. My own were right there, swarming in my head like a hornet’s nest. The doctor’s words had struck home with me; no one knew better than I did that the maladies of the body affected the thoughts and dreams and very behaviour, or that those dark turns of mind, with which I had long been afflicted, could wreak havoc of their own. The elixir alone—the flasks securely secreted in the cabinet of my study upstairs—could alter the balance of both spirit and skin in the time it took to swallow.

  ‘I see there’s no cream for the coffee,’ I heard now, though not, as expected, from Mrs Chandler. I opened my eyes to see Lloyd placing the tray upon the wrought-iron table beside my chair. ‘Should I have some sent out?’

  ‘Not for me.’

  ‘Mother said you should eat something, too,’ he said, taking a seat and starting to fill the two cups. ‘The garden’s nice, now that it’s not so hot. Maybe I should try writing out here.’

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  By the time Rafe had finished with the blood draw, he had just enough time and energy to fight his way through the rush-hour traffic to Mar Vista and say good night to Lucy at the group home. Evangelina had given her a new roommate, Amber, a teenage girl who was apparently so traumatized by whatever had happened to her that she barely spoke or looked you in the eye. Rafe did his best, but his uniform seemed to scare her; she probably thought she was about to be shuttled off to yet some other shelter or foster home. He remembered the feeling well, and was quick to compliment her on the Miley Cyrus pictures she’d taped to the wall above her bunk.

  “Look what I’ve put up!” Lucy said, unwilling to concede any more of his attention, and he saw that she had posted a newspaper picture of a coyote loping along the side of a backyard swimming pool filled with inflatable toys. “And look at what it says underneath,” she exclaimed, pointing to the caption. Rafe had to lean in to read it: Coyote goes for a swim in Mar Vista.

  “It was only like two blocks away!” Lucy exclaimed. “Was it one of yours?”