Bed of Nails (12 page)

“That’s possible.”

“Because the house is a shrine?”

“It might be to a copycat. To a Bundy clone.”

“Is that why you stated, ‘Sooner or later, something was bound to happen at that house’?”

“Lies become urban myths by capturing imaginations.”

“You walk Murphy”—the dog barked expectantly—“every night,” said Stein. “Have you spotted anyone suspicious near Ted Bundy’s house?”

“No,” said Gebhardt. “But the bus went by yesterday afternoon.”

“What bus?”

“Spooky Seattle Tours. They’re the ones trying to spread the bogus myth. What they tell passengers to spice up their tours is that at one point during Ted Bundy’s stay in the Twelfth Avenue house, he had the heads of four women lined up on the mantel. How did he do that when the room he rented didn’t even have a fireplace?”

The detective and the M.E. left Mac to tie up loose ends with Murphy and Gebhardt while they went to look at the head. The knot of blues around the crime scene moved aside to let Stein and Ruthless Ruth through. As the two approached the stake that had been stuck in the muddy ground behind the bush at the southwest corner of Ted Bundy’s house, Ralph connected what he saw to a conversation he’d had with another cop during his convalescence from his two broken ankles.

The head mounted upside down on the stake belonged to a man. The stake was buried deep in the crown of the skull, but not so deep that it protruded through the raw flesh of the severed neck, which the driving rain had washed so clean of blood that the vertebra above the cut and the mess of tubes truncated by the blade were clearly visible in the pool of light cast by several flashlights.

Ruth crouched on her haunches, gathering in her coat flaps to keep them out of the mire.

“It could be a Christian crazy,” she said.

Ralph squatted beside her. “So it seems. That ring of nails driven into his skull resembles a crown of thorns.”

Coquitlam

What caused Zinc to recollect this particular memory of Alexis Hunt was the laughter echoing out of Minnekhada Lodge from the enraptured male Mounties gathered around Mad Dog’s wife, the ex-hooker Brittany Starr. Standing alone where the overhead awning protected him from the downpour that splattered the open veranda, the inspector recalled that noon a year and a half ago when he and Stan the Accountant had joked with another humorous hooker, Moaning Mona, at the Lions Gate. Between that midday laugh-fest in the hotel bar and Zinc’s return that night to question Gord and Joey, the pimp and the hooker who’d rumbled off to die in the high-speed chase, the Mountie had gone home for dinner with the now lost love of his life. Erasing the past seventeen months, Zinc’s mind traveled back …

“What’s for dinner?” Zinc asked, sniffing the aroma of exotic cuisine as he entered the kitchen of the Kits Point house that he and Alex shared in central Vancouver.

“Eloi,” Alex said, referring to the human prey of the cannibalistic Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine.
She was stirring a pot of something that bubbled and let off delicious steam.

“Mmm, my favorite,” Zinc replied, kissing her cheek and hugging her from one side. “Is it female?” he asked as a morsel of succulent meat bobbed to the surface. “If so, serve me a breast or a thigh.”

“You pig!” Alex scolded, threatening him with the spoon.

“Hey,
you
chose the menu. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, expect cooking Eloi for dinner to bring out the cannibal in me.”

“The cannibal’s okay. It’s the sexist I abhor.”

“Blame Mona.”

“Mona who?”

“Moaning Mona,” said Zinc.

Alex rolled her eyes. “It goes from bad to worse. Who’s Moaning Mona? Do I want to know?”

“Mona’s a hooker.”

“I
never
would have guessed. When’d you meet her?”

“Today. In a bar.”

“Great,” said Alex, and she rolled her big blues again. “I spend the day slaving over a hot stove to cook my beau something special, and he spends the day hanging out in a bar with hookers.”

“Are you jealous?”

“In your wildest dreams.”

The kitchen table was cluttered with books, scribbled notes, and a pair of DVDs. Both were films of
The Time Machine
—the 1960 George Pal version and the 2002 remake by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells. Picking up one of the movies, Zinc read the back: “Rod Taylor stars as a young scientist whose ingenious machine propels him to a civilization thoroughly devitalized by war. Humanity has been reduced to a colorless passive race, the Eloi, who are held in the thrall of loathsome mutants known as Morlocks.”

“Remember that?” Alex asked, stirring the pot of “Eloi.”

“You bet,” Zinc said. “One of my favorite stories.”

“What do you remember most?”

“The Morlocks, of course. Such ugly, white-haired creatures, with glowing eyes and mouths pegged with crooked teeth.”

“It’s a fine dichotomy,” Alex said. “The Eloi, a gentle, ineffective people, seem to have descended from us. They do no work and appear to spend their days in the Eden of the surface world in amorous dalliances and other pleasures of the flesh.”

“You mean like me and Mona?”

“Careful, Zinc. I’m the one preparing the curry. Wells describes the insipid Eloi as having blond hair and finely chiseled features. Theirs is a Dresden china prettiness.”

“That’s Mona.”

Alex twisted her face in a snarl. “The Morlocks, on the other hand, are a sinister, savage race of mutants who dwell underground. From time to time, they seize Eloi from the surface world and haul them off to work in their subterranean caves.”

“I know the story, Alex.”

“But do you know where I’m going with it?”

Zinc shook his head. “I’m afraid to ask.”

“The Morlocks, as Wells describes them, have bleached hair, pale and chinless faces, and large, lidless, pinkish-gray eyes. He says they are nauseatingly inhuman, and they dwell in the darkness of their world of eternal night because they are blind and helpless in daylight.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Zinc teased.

“When the Morlocks steal the Time Machine and drag it into their lair, the Time Traveler must descend down one of their wells. He barely escapes from their clutching hands up a narrow ventilation shaft. That’s when Wells’s hero is shaken by the memory of meat that he saw in the underworld.”

“Eloi meat,” said Zinc. “The Morlocks are cannibals.”

“Well?” asked Alex, crossing from the stove to sweep her arm in a wide arc over the table.

“You’re writing another book?”

“My, you’re a good detective.”

“Got a title?”

“Uh-huh.
You Are What You Eat.
”

“A cookbook,” Zinc said. “A nice change from true crime. That’s why you’re in the kitchen. To get in the mood.”

“Ah, but
what
am I cooking?”

“Uh-oh,” said Zinc.

“
You Are What You Eat: Cannibal Killers.
That’s the full title.”

“And
The Time Machine?
”

“That’s the motif. The Eloi are content to dance away their golden days with fatalistic pleasure, while the Morlocks see them as fatted cattle—as merely a source of food.”

“That’s how you’ll frame the book?”

“We’re Eloi, with Morlocks among us. The difference is that my time machine goes into the past.”

“How far?” Zinc asked.

“At least half a million years, to the days of
Homo erectus. Erectus
—the hominid that evolved into us—enjoyed supping on the brains of his fellow cavemen.”

“I’m hungry,” Zinc said.

“Eloi?” Alex asked. Returning to the stove, she spooned a morsel of meat from the curry and held it out for him to taste. “See if this whets your appetite.”

“Mmm. Good.”

“Eloi and Morlocks. A good theme, don’t you think? Wells’s novel provides a grotesque reminder that the taboo urge to feast upon human meat lurks just beneath the surface of the comforting illusion that we have evolved into modern creatures who live a supposedly civilized life.”

“Hannibal the Cannibal?”

“Precisely,” said Alex. “Of all the horrors we associate with serial killers, cannibalism strikes us as the worst. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s favorite meal is human liver served with fava beans and a nice Chianti. That’s why he’s become the icon of the genre.”

“So what’s on your menu?”

“The
real
thing,” Alex replied.

Crossing to the table, the cook rummaged among the notes spread across its surface until she found a list of nations and names scrawled in her almost-illegible hand. “Here,” she said, holding it out so the Mountie could read:

Britain:

Jack the Ripper

David Harker

Germany:

Fritz Haarmann, “the Butcher of Hanover”

Georg Grossmann

Karl Denke

Joachim Kroll, “the Ruhr Hunter”

France:

Nicolas Claux

Issei Sagawa

America:

Albert Fish, “the Moon Maniac”

Ed Gein, “the Plainfield Ghoul” (?)

Edmund Kemper, “the Co-Ed Killer”

Lucas and Toole (?)

Stanley Dean Baker

Daniel Rakowitz

Albert Fentress

Arthur Shawcross

Gary Heidnik

Jeffrey Dahmer, “the Milwaukee Monster”

Russia:

Andrei Chikatilo, “the Mad Beast”

Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev, “Metal Fang”

Canada:

Dale Merle Nelson (?)

 

“Good lord,” said Zinc. “That many?”

“I’m still working on it. The list is under construction.”

“Jack the Ripper. There’s no escape from him.”

“We may not know who Jack was, but we know his predilections. We have the famous ‘From Hell’ letter accompanied by a human kidney, with the taunt ‘Tother piece I fried and ate.’ And we have organs missing from three of the Ripper’s victims: Annie Chapman’s uterus, Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney and womb, Mary Jane Kelly’s heart. He removed them for some reason. To eat is the likeliest answer.”

“Jack the Cannibal. Who’s David Harker?”

“A modern Brit. He strangled a woman with her tights when he got bored during sex. He chopped off her head and limbs, sliced skinned flesh from her thigh, and cooked it with pasta and cheese. Tattooed on his scalp were the words ‘subhuman’ and ‘disorder.’”

“When was that?”

“1999.”

“Four Germans, huh?”

“Shows how hard their nation was shaken by the First World War. Many turned to Nazism. Three to cannibalism. Haarmann may have butchered as many as fifty young refugees who flooded into Hanover after the war. He lured each starving boy home from the train station with the promise of a meal, then attacked him like a werewolf, chewing at his throat. Death resulted from his almost biting off each head, an act that gave Haarmann a sexual climax. Later, he butchered the body and disposed of the leftover flesh as black-market beef. His near downfall was a dissatisfied customer who complained to police about the quality of his ‘steaks.’ The analyst, however, pronounced it was pork! So Haarmann was able to continue his nefarious trade.”

“Selling ‘the other white meat’?”

“Georg Grossmann, just after the war, ground fifty or more plump young women he met at the Berlin train station into sausage meat, which he sold the following day, on the same platform, as frankfurters. When he was arrested by police, Grossmann was butchering a trussed-up woman in his apartment.”

“Sausages scare me,” the Mountie said. “You never know what’s in them.”

“Karl Denke was an innkeeper in Silesia. He killed and consumed at least thirty of his lodgers. He chopped them up, ate certain parts right away, and pickled the rest in tubs of brine for later feasts. He confessed that for three years he’d eaten nothing but human flesh.”

“And Joachim Kroll?”

“Germany’s modern cannibal. Between 1955 and 1976, he choked and raped fourteen females in the Ruhr. If the flesh was tender, he would cut steaks from their buttocks and thighs. Kroll was a lavatory attendant by trade, so it’s ironic that he got caught because he plugged the toilet in his apartment building with guts: the internal organs of a four-year-old girl. In Kroll’s flat, where he lived with a harem of rubber sex dolls, the police found plastic bags full of flesh in the deep freeze and, bubbling in a saucepan on the stove, a stew made out of the girl’s hand, with potatoes and carrots.”

“Two Frenchman?”

“One, in fact,” said Alex. “Claux was a mortician who ate strips of flesh cut from the muscles of cadavers in a hospital morgue. He used to prowl graveyards and dig up fresh corpses to drink the blood mixed with human ashes and protein powder. Sagawa was a Japanese living in Paris who ate a Dutch woman. He said her flesh tasted like raw tuna. That’s a sushi I don’t want to try.”

“Albert Fish was the old man who ate that young girl?”

“Grace Budd. In New York, in 1928. He turned her ‘meat’—as he called it—into a cannibal stew, complete with carrots, onions, and bacon strips. He spent the next nine days locked away in his room, savoring his dreadful meal and masturbating compulsively. Fish made the mistake of writing a letter to Grace Budd’s parents, describing in sickening detail what he had done to their daughter. On arresting him in 1934, police found a collection of newspaper clippings about Fritz Haarmann, ‘the Butcher of Hanover.’ No one knows how many children Fish killed and ate during his travels through twenty-three states.”

“As I recall,” Zinc said, “when Sing Sing Prison tried to fry him in the electric chair, he short-circuited his execution because he’d inserted a phalanx of needles into his groin.”

“Twenty-nine, I believe. He’s the oldest man put to death in New York State.”

“Ed Gein we all know. The man behind
Psycho.
”

“And
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
And
The Silence of the Lambs.
”

“Busy Ed. Why the question mark?”

“One respected author thinks he wasn’t a cannibal.”

“And you, Alex?”

“Before his first grave-robbing, Gein confessed, he’d been reading adventure stories of headhunters and cannibals. Psychotically fixated on his dead mother, he kept her room like a shrine. The headless and gutted corpses of the women he butchered were hung upside down from a rafter like dressed-out game. Inside his shambles of a house, police found soup bowls made from skulls, chairs upholstered with human skin, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted on a wall like hunting trophies, and a ‘mammary vest’ flayed from the torso of a woman, which Gein would wear to pretend he was his mother. In a frying pan on the stove was a human heart. Since he draped himself in female flesh, I find it hard to swallow—no pun intended—that he didn’t try to ingest Mother too.”