The House That Jack Built Read online

  Skeeter had a terrible feeling he would find himself dragged down the Britannia Gate eight days from now as part of the search teams, after all. He wondered briefly if a bullet would've been waiting for him, if he'd stayed to haul those heavy steamer trunks to Catlin's hotel? Skeeter sighed, then ran a hand through his hair. Why was it, going legit had turned into the hardest thing he'd ever tried to do? And considering his background, that was saying a lot.

  "Well," he muttered, "I guess I'll just have to play it by ear, won't I?"

  "That's the spirit!" Kit grinned. "Come on, Skeeter. Let's go find you a security squawky someplace, then maybe by the time we've done that, Ronnie's followup meeting with the senator will be over?"

  Skeeter managed a weak grin of gratitude. "Okay. Thanks."

  Wondering if he knew what he was doing, he followed Kit Carson's lead. Just go with Kit, he told himself, and tried not to think too closely about where the grizzled old scout would end up leading him. He was quite sure he did not want to find out.

  * * *

  Mary Jane Kelly was afraid of the man she'd come to visit. Black magic and demon worship and an appetite for the unholy . . .

  Marie Jeannette, as she'd been born, knew the whispers were not just hideous rumour, either, they were terrifying fact. He'd told her so, himself, on his many visits to the high-class West End house where she'd worked at the time, the one she'd been thrown out of shortly afterward for excessive drinking, a habit she'd picked up after becoming this particular gentleman's favorite.

  "A whore," he'd smiled down into her eyes, "is my ideal of the perfect unholy woman. A sower of immorality, a merchant of sin. A perfect vessel for wreaking the destruction of prudish social convention and absurd, medieval morals. Don't you agree, my dear?"

  Whatever the customer wants, had been her initial response to his blazing eyes and strange appetites. The fear had come later, when he whispered between savage thrusts, mouth half full of her left breast, "The Second Coming will bring a Great Year to its close . . . and the powers of hell will destroy all the weak and foolish lunacy Christians call goodness. And I . . ." he murmured darkly as he gave her a particularly hard pounding, excitement glittering in his eyes, "I worship those powers of hell. I shall rule upon this earth when the destruction sweeps away godliness and everything it stands for. I shall be the most powerful of men, preparing the way for the anti-Christ . . . Does this shock you, my dear? Or," he laughed and kissed her hard, "does it excite you?"

  Of all the men who'd paid to use her body, rich men who'd plied her with furs and beautiful clothes and trips to faraway, exotic places like Paris, East End costermongers reeking of gin and dead fish, violent louts who'd blacked her eye, afterwards, and the half-grown boys brought to a certain fancy West End address by their wealthy fathers to learn what to do with a woman, of all those many men, none frightened twenty-six-year-old Mary Kelly as deeply as Mr. Aleister Crowley.

  But Mary Jane Kelly had been living in fear so deep, she would almost rather have faced Satan, himself, than continue in this terror. So she had brought herself, quaking in her once-fine boots, to Satan's very doorstep, praying that Mr. Crowley's ambitions would cause him to find her plight interesting—and that his dark powers would help keep her alive. The butler who answered the door sniffed irritably, but allowed her to step out of the cold wind into a polished, gleaming hall to wait while he took her message to his master.

  Moments later, the butler was ushering her into a study whose bookcases were crowded with hundreds of ancient, mouldering books and manuscripts, and whose shelves were lined with items she decided queasily she didn't really wish to look at too closely. The only crucifix in the room was upside down. It hung above a lit, black candle.

  "Why, Mary Kelly, it is you! I've missed you enormously, my dear!"

  Mr. Crowley had not changed. He came around the desk, hands outstretched, and kissed her cheek, surrounded by a black aura of danger that set her quaking in her boots again. She could still remember gulping down whole bottles of gin, brandy, anything she could lay hands on, trying to forget what it had felt like, with this man in her. What am I doing here, God help me, I haven't any other choice, they'll kill me, else . . . and the baby, too, can't let 'em kill my baby . . .

  Pregnant, utterly penniless, Mary Kelly had nowhere else to turn.

  "Sit down, please." He ushered her to a chair, drawing another up close beside her. "What brings you here? Your hands are like ice, Mary, would you like a brandy to warm you?"

  "Please, yes . . ." Her voice was shaking as badly as her hands.

  He splashed brandy into a snifter, handed it to her, watched her gulp it down.

  "What can I do for you, then?"

  She lowered the empty glass to her threadbare lap. "I need . . . I'm in terrible trouble, you see, and I thought . . . I thought you might be interested in . . . the reason why."

  He tipped his head to one side, eyes merry. "If you're going to tell me I'm the father of whatever brat you might be carrying, I would point out it's been more than seven months, my dear, and you clearly are not seven months gone with child."

  Her face flamed. "No, it's not the baby, that's Joseph's, right enough, and he's been good to me. It's this . . ." She dug into her pocket, brought out the grimy sheets of foolscap which Joseph had brought home for her to translate, after buying them from Dark Annie. Poor Joe, he'd thought these hideous little letters would be their ticket to wealth. But Annie was dead, monstrously so, as was the woman she'd got them from, and after reading these letters, Mary was terrified that she would be next, she and whoever else had been insane enough to lay hands on one of these sordid little missives.

  He glanced at the writing, frowned. "This is in Welsh, is it not?"

  She nodded. "My man . . . he bought them, you see, from Annie, when she needed medicines, asked me to read them out for him. There were others . . ." Her voice had begun to shake again. "Annie had them from Polly and now they're both dead! Murdered and cut apart by this madman in Whitechapel!"

  Aleister Crowley was staring at her. "My dear," he said gently, "whatever is in these letters?"

  In a low, trembling voice, she told him. Word for word, she told him exactly what the letters said. And he saw it as quickly as she had done.

  "My God! Eddy? Collars and Cuffs? It must be . . ."

  She nodded. "Yes. It must be him. And the queen must have ordered all this hushed up, I can't think why else Polly Nichols would have been killed so horribly, or poor Annie Chapman, who was so sick, she could hardly stand up."

  Crowley began to laugh, very softly. "Victoria, order this done? Oh, no, my dear, the queen is entirely too good to condone what's been done by our friend the Whitechapel fiend. Oh, she's no fool, and if she knew about these," he tapped the letters in Mary's shaking hand, "she might well try to hush it all up. But order someone to cut the owners of the letters to pieces in the streets? No. She would not wish for that kind of publicity, for that sort of scrutiny. The police and the press are simply agog over our friend the Whitechapel Murderer. I must say," he chuckled, "quite a reputation, he's given himself, isn't it? This business must be driving the authorities mad. No, Victoria would never be stupid enough to generate that sort of publicity. Take my word for it, Mary dear, someone else is committing these murders. Someone close to Eddy, no doubt. Someone with a great deal to lose, should Eddy's indiscretions become public knowledge." He sat tapping his fingertips against the arm of his chair for long moments. "Well, now, this is quite an intriguing little mystery you've handed me, my dear. One presumes you want money?"

  She shook her head, bit her lip. "I . . . I don't want to be . . . next . . ."

  "Ah. Of course you don't."

  "I've got a baby coming," she got out in a rush, "and a man who wants to marry me, when he gets another job, even though he knows what I've been. Joseph's a good man, wants to take me off the streets, and he didn't know what this horrible little letter was when he bought it, he was just doing Annie a favor, becau
se she was so sick and needed the money for medicine . . ."

  He took her trembling hands in his own and patted them, brought them to his lips. Mary shuddered, fighting more terror than she'd ever known in her young life.

  "Here, now, no need for such hysteria, my dear. Of course you're frightened, but you've done exactly the right thing, coming to me for protection." He dried her wet face with his hands, brushed her heavy, strawberry-blonde hair back from her brow, planted a kiss there. "I'll take very good care of you, my dear. Just leave the letter with me, that's a good girl. I've a fair idea who might be profiting from these murders, knowing Eddy as I do, and the way certain men think. Yes, I'll take very good care of you, my dearest . . ."

  He was kissing her, unbuttoning her dress, sliding his hand up under her skirt.

  He gave her two whole crowns, after, worth half a pound sterling.

  Kissed her and told her to buy herself a lot of gin and a pretty new shawl and not to worry, he would see to it that she was never molested by whoever was hunting down Eddy's sordid little letters. When she left the house, pulling her threadbare shawl tightly about her shoulders against the cold bite of the wind, Mary Jane Kelly was trembling far harder than she'd been when she'd arrived an hour previously. What've I done, letting him do that horrible ritual over me, like that, when he was in me, what in God's name have I done?

  She bit her lip and started for home. Surely, anything was better than being cut into pieces and having her insides strewn across the ground? Surely it was? But she felt dirty and cold and unclean down to her soul, which she never had felt even when letting the meanest, dirtiest louts in the East End spend inside her. She brushed wetness from her eyes and pressed a hand against her belly, where a child was growing. Whatever else, she had to think about far more than just herself, now. Which was why she could have done nothing else, today.

  But, oh, God, she was so afraid.

  And Mr. Aleister Crowley frightened her only a little less terribly than the rest.

  * * *

  "Kit!"

  Kit Carson glanced around, peering into the nervous crowds thronging Commons, many of them wondering in shrill tones what would happen and would their vacations be cancelled and could they get a refund if Senator Caddrick closed down TT-86? He found Robert Li bearing down on him and smiled at his long-time friend.

  "Hi, Robert. What's up?"

  The antiquarian stared. "What's up? You are kidding, aren't you? Kit, are you out of your gate-addled mind? Skeeter Jackson, Neo Edo's house detective?"

  Kit chuckled. "Oh, that. Is that all?"

  His friend's expression altered to one of deep pity. "Oh, God, it's true. You have lost your mind."

  Kit's lips twitched. "Glad to know you think so highly of me, pal. No, I haven't lost my mind. But you—and just about every other 'eighty-sixer on station—have apparently lost your sense of fair play."

  Robert Li blinked, the fair skin of his maternal Scandinavian heritage at odds with features bequeathed him by a paternal Hong Kong Chinese grandfather. "Come again?"

  "Skeeter," Kit said gently, ticking off the points on his fingers. "One, that boy never rolled an 'eighty-sixer. Never. And if you'd think about it, you'd figure out why. Two, he hasn't been the same ever since that gawd-awful wager of his with Goldie went sour and Marcus ended up in chains down the Porta Romae. Three, Ianira trusted him implicitly. And Ianira Cassondra is no fool." Kit ran a hand through his thinning hair, unable to hide the grief mere thought of Ianira and her missing family brought. "That boy has damn near killed himself looking for them. Lost the only two honest jobs he could find on station doing it, too. And even then, he still didn't go back to picking pockets. The down-timers have been feeding him, Robert, because he hasn't had enough cash to buy a hot dog. So what's he been doing? Looking for a job nobody'll give him, tracking down terrorists in Shangri-La's basement, and arresting thirty-one small-time crooks in a single week. Without anybody asking him or paying him to do it. So yesterday, when he pulled Rachel Eisenstein out of that disaster at Primary, I decided it was high time somebody around here gave that kid a fair break. He's earned it. Especially with Caddrick likely to press charges for assaulting him, for God's sake. After what Caddrick did, roughing him up, that boy is gonna need all the help he can get."

  Robert Li closed his mouth. Blinked. "Good God," the antiquarian said softly. Then, slowly, "All right, I'll concede a point when I've been wrong. But you've gotta admit, it's unlikely as hell."

  Kit grinned. "Oh, sure it is. And that," he chuckled, "is why I'm having so much fun. What's that you've got with you?" He nodded at the sheet of paper his friend was carrying.

  "This? Oh, it's a flier on Jenna Caddrick and that terrorist who grabbed her, Noah Armstrong. Mike Benson's ordered a stationwide hunt, looking for any eyewitnesses who might remember seeing them. I was trying to find you, to ask if you'd seen one of these yet, when I heard the news about you hiring Skeeter."

  "No, I haven't seen it." Kit took the flier curiously, glancing at the photos, and ran down the brief descriptions. "I read about Cassie Tyrol. Damned shame."

  "What's a shame?" Skeeter's voice asked at Kit's elbow.

  He glanced up and took approving note of the security radio he'd sent Skeeter to obtain. "Good, you got the squawky. Cassie Tyrol is what's a shame. She was Senator Caddrick's sister-in-law, poor soul, can you imagine being related to that? Have you seen one of these yet?"

  Skeeter took the flier curiously. "No." He narrowed his eyes slightly. "Don't know why Caddrick thought this creep was me," he muttered, frowning at the photo of Armstrong. "Guy looks sorta familiar, though. Not sure why . . ." The former con artist's frown deepened slowly. Then, seemingly struck by inspiration, Skeeter dug into a pocket and came out with an ink pen. He started drawing over the top of the photograph, startling Robert Li into leaning forward.

  "What in the world are you doing?" the antiquarian asked.

  "Just an idea," Skeeter muttered. He was sketching in a drooping mustache, sideburns. The pen fairly flew across the page, sketching in a bandana, a sombrero pulled low . . .

  "My God," Kit whispered, recognizing the face taking shape. "It's Joey Tyrolin!"

  Robert started slightly, swinging his gaze up to meet Kit's. "Joey—? That drunk pistolero we saw the other week, headed to Denver? That was Noah Armstrong? We were that close to a murdering terrorist and didn't even know it?"

  Another resemblance clicked in Kit's mind. "Joey Tyrolin! Skeeter, you genius! By God, I knew I'd hit on a brilliant idea, hiring you! Jenna Caddrick's aunt's name was Cassie Tyrol. Jocasta Tyrol—Joey Tyrolin!"

  Skeeter wasn't smiling, however. In fact, he wasn't even standing beside them, any longer. He'd bolted through the crowd. He came back with another flier, one he'd ripped off the nearest concrete post. Kit had seen those fliers plastered up everywhere, with photos of the station's missing down-timers. Skeeter was sketching over Julius' photo. Skeeter's lips thinned to a grim line as he drew in long hair pulled back into a bun beneath a wide-brimmed calico bonnet. Then he held up the altered sketch of his missing young friend. "And this is the woman Joey Tyrolin tangled with at the Wild West ticket kiosk. The one Tyrolin's porter dropped a trunk on. I worked that gate departure, looking for some trace of Ianira and her family, and dammit, I didn't even recognize that boy!"

  Kit remembered the incident clearly. "You're right." He took the altered sketches and scowled down at them. "Miss Caddrick must have used the name Joey Tyrolin on that fake I.D. she bought in New York. And Armstrong simply appropriated the I.D. and her tickets. If Armstrong was in that departures line, you can bet Jenna Caddrick was, too."

  "Probably in one of the suitcases that porter dropped," Skeeter growled. "What I want to know is, how the hell did Julius get tangled up with terrorists? I know that boy. He wouldn't get involved in something like that, not without a damned good reason."

  Robert Li said slowly, "Those Ansar Majlis leaders you caught are denying it, but it's pretty clear they
paid Armstrong to hit Jenna Caddrick. So it's a good bet Armstrong masterminded the hit on Ianira, too. If I remember right, Julius disappeared about the same time her whole family vanished, didn't he? But surely the boy wouldn't have helped the Ansar Majlis voluntarily?"

  Kit glanced at Skeeter, reading murderous hatred in the younger man's eyes and the set of his jaw. The one-time con artist said through clenched teeth, "If Armstrong blackmailed him with a threat to Ianira's life, he would've done anything that pack of cutthroats demanded. And waited for a chance to slit their throats, later."

  A chill shivered its way up Kit's spine. This was a side of Skeeter he'd never witnessed, the side that had survived twelfth century Mongolia and the worst childhood any 'eighty-sixer on station could lay claim to. Slowly, Kit nodded agreement. "Yes, I think you're reading this situation very clearly, Skeeter. Julius would've done anything to save Ianira, if Armstrong had kidnapped her as well as Jenna Caddrick. Armstrong's pals in the Ansar Majlis might well have been holding the boy prisoner with Marcus and the girls, probably forced him to help them all escape the station. And my bet is, Armstrong sent at least one of his men down the Britannia with the fake I.D. Jenna Caddrick's roommate was supposed to use. Benny Catlin wasn't anything more than a decoy, to make us think her kidnappers had gone to London, when they planned to take her to Denver, all along."

  Robert Li swung his gaze from Kit back to Skeeter. "Okay," he grinned suddenly, "I'm convinced! Damned smart move is right, hiring this genius. Question is, what do we do now?"

  Kit eyed Skeeter narrowly. "How well do you ride a horse?"

  Skeeter Jackson's sudden, lethal grin blazed like a noonday sun. "If it's got hooves, I can ride it."

  "In that case, we visit Time Tours, Incorporated. Because your new boss just came out of retirement. It's been a while since I visited Denver."

  Robert Li's mouth dropped open. Then the antiquarian started laughing. "Oh, my God! Wait until word gets out! Goldie Morran, for one, may strangle from simple shock. Kit Carson and Skeeter Jackson, partners in crime? I just wish I could get away from the studio long enough to go with you!"