Page 32 of Secrets in the Dark
He had a few days to wander. Of course, his second event needed to occur next week. He couldn’t maintain the exact locations—the original Jack would have had to change, had there been cameras and surveillance back in his day.
But sticking close to the time pattern? Yes, he could do that.
He smiled, thinking about what was to come. Ripper’s second victim. He’d already picked her out. She’d been loud, laughing with her friends in the bar, flirting and then cutting men short with humiliating ease when they responded. Whore. Yes, she was perfect. Of course, he knew where she was staying and what she was doing. He was following her social media as his current identity. She was a tourist, and she had looked at him with interest. Of course, for now, he was keeping his distance, carefully making sure that they made eye contact, that she knew that he was interested...
When the time came, she’d know just how interested.
He relished the concept of his next murder! Yes. He would mimic the murder of Annie Chapman to a T. Two slashes to the throat, deep enough to cause striations to bone. Bits of her uterus and bladder taken away. Intestines set above her shoulders... Her pills, bits of items from her life left around her as well. He’d seen the pictures. He’d read all that the medical reports on her death had contained. Now, Annie had been killed sometime, they believed, between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. He hadn’t quite figured out yet how to pull off his murder at that hour...
But he would. And if not... Well, he was prepared to make sure that the victim, as discovered, would appear just the same. And then...
What they called “the double event!” Liz Stride and Catherine Eddowes.
Last...the Mary Kelly murder. And that victim was planned as well. He stared at the house where she slept right now. He knew where she was while she and her comrades went crazy, not knowing how to find him. Stop him.
And she...
Young and beautiful. She would be his finale. She had been Dante’s obsession. And when he competed this initial quest, becoming king of the Rippers with his very special Mary Kelly victim, he would not just be a king, he would be emperor of the world...
He’d have finished what Dante had coveted. Indeed, he would steal every title from Dante, and he would be the true ruler of all.
Six
“This is so frustrating!” Della murmured.
“What?” Mason asked, pouring cereal into a bowl in the kitchen of their Whitechapel rental. “You mean having a name for a man who might be the most viable suspect out there? Oh! Or having had him—and lost him?”
Della looked up at him. “Frustrating—no known address. No paper trail. How does anyone go through life with no paper trail? No credit cards. Whatever phone he is using—if he is using a phone—is a burner phone.”
Mason brought his food to the table where she had been staring at her computer screen. “He learned from amaster, remember? Stephan Dante knew how to become friends with criminals, visiting them in prisons, learning where they had stashed money, learning how to find the best creators of false IDs—and while he wouldn’t have given away all his connections, he probably set his followers up with connections to money and false IDs. But remember this—we did get Dante. And we will find his followers, too.”
“All right, so going back. There’s a lot to determine. Dante didn’t kill the girls who had been killed in London. Someone did. Those murders were committed with instructions from Dante, but now our latest murder has been committed by this person determined to be the best Jack the Ripper ever. But he’s like Dante. He’s arrogant and confident. So, here’s the question. Is the person who committed this latest murder the same person who committed the vampire murders? And, is he the person we stopped as he flirted with an American tourist, or someone else entirely? Are there two murderers or is just one person responsible?”
“Isabelle Ainsley, a local girl, was found on the banks of the Thames like a Sleeping Beauty, and Leslie Bracken, an American tourist, was found in the same condition. And there was also Colleen Denton. But Stephan Dante denied committing those murders while gleefully confessing to the others that were committed in his blood-draining vampire mode. But we know that he trained others and...”
He paused, shaking his head.
“What?” Della asked softly.
“It’s terrifying, really. That Dante could find followers. That there are that many sick people out there, eager to be apprentices to a serial killer.”
“Terrifying and worse. This killer intends to outdo Dante. But like Dante, he knows how to change his appearance, like a chameleon. Like Dante, he seems to know how to get friendly with imprisoned thieves—and find access to stashes of stolen cash and IDs and...everything it seems that he needs. Or they need. I was thinking that—”
“We need to go back to the beginning?” Mason asked.
She nodded. “We need Sean and Edmund to help us. If we go back to the beginning, we’ll go over every little bit of information available on the twosleeping beautyvictims. We’ll look into every possible witness and we’ll speak to the people who discovered them and check to see if Forensics discovered anything at all at the sites.”
Della nodded and shook her head. “And while we’re doing that—”
“Della, we can’t stop every bad thing that might happen. Because, I believe, in law enforcement we discover that the greatest possible monster living on earth might well be the human being. Most creatures hunt and kill to survive while some men—and women, most thankfully, a small percentage of both—are wired neurologically different than most in that they delight in deviously planning bloodshed and murder. We can’t stop it all—we can only strive to do our best to swim through the mire to discover the monsters as quickly as possible.”
Della nodded. “I know. But—”
“If this fellow follows Ripperology, we have several days before another murder.”
“Right,” Della murmured. “So! Let’s get on it.”
“May I finish my cornflakes?”
