Riptide Read Free Page A

about. At times she wondered if maybe he was interested in her. But he’d never said anything, and he didn’t strike her as shy.
    Unless he was gun-shy—burned once too often, afraid to touch the stove for fear it was still hot. It was possible. There was an odd tension between them that was not entirely disagreeable, like the flutter of discomfort she felt on a first date, a nervous self-awareness. She wondered what a real first date with Roy Draper would be like.
    “She lived alone,” Jennifer said, not phrasing it as a question because the truth of it was obvious.
    “A lot of people do.” Something in Draper’s voice told her it was more than a general observation.
    “I know I do. How about you, Roy?”
    “Me? Yeah, I’m flying solo now.”
    “Divorced?” She’d never asked.
    “No, but I was in a long-term relationship. It ended. Obviously. Or I wouldn’t be alone.” The words were spoken lightly but sounded sad.
    “How long were you with her?”
    “Three years.”
    “When did it go south?”
    “Last November. November seventeenth. I still have the date marked on my calendar. Never turned the page. How’s that for the perfect metaphor of a guy who can’t get on with his life?”
    “You’ll move on eventually.”
    “So they tell me…. I don’t know how we started talking about this.”
    She knew he was embarrassed, and she also knew her hot-stove theory was correct. Maybe one of these days he’d work up the nerve to touch the burners again.
    “I’m guessing there’s a reason you brought me in,” she said.
    “When we went through the bills and junk mail on her dining table, we found something. Original’s being tested for prints. This is a copy.”
    He removed a single folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. One side was covered from top to bottom by a handwritten message in a spidery, minuscule script. The note was unsigned.
    She glanced at the document long enough to ascertain that it was unmistakably a threat message. “Nothing on the back?”
    “Nope.”
    “Not even a scratch mark, a smudge? Because even the most trivial—”
    “There’s nothing, Jen. This is it.”
    “Was there an envelope?”
    “If there was, we haven’t found it.”
    “Go through her trash? Sorry. Of course you did.”
    “Nothing in the garbage. I don’t think she would have thrown out an envelope anyway. Anybody who’s ever watched CSI knows you don’t destroy evidence.”
    “There may not have been an envelope. The note didn’t have to be mailed. It could have been pushed through her mail slot or left on her windshield. Obviously she didn’t report it, or you would already know how it got to her.”
    “There’s no record of any report.”
    “That’s odd, don’t you think? A person gets a message like this, the first thing you’d expect them to do is call the police.”
    Draper shrugged. “My guess is, she thought it was something she could deal with on her own.”
    Jennifer thought of the white, staring face with its clear plastic mask.

    “Then she was wrong,” she said.

 
     
     
    two
     
    Jennifer made it back to her house in Venice in twenty minutes, catching only green lights. She felt fine as she unlocked the door, and she continued to feel fine as she crossed the living room and went past the kitchen and down the rear hall into the powder room, where she leaned over, eyes closed, and threw up into the sink.
    The bloodshot eyes under plastic...the swollen mass of her tongue...
    She retched again, dry heaving because luckily she’d had little breakfast and there was nothing left in her gut.
    She never got used to it, and it took its toll on her. Her friend Maura was always telling her to pack it in, get a nice, safe private practice, stop going to crime scenes and traumatizing herself. Sensible advice, but she wouldn’t listen.
    Cupping her hands under the spigot, she splashed cold water on her face. The sting, hard as a slap, centered her.
    When she raised her