Bed of Nails (4 page)

“If you’re chosen.”

“How will you know that?”

“The card you just picked. If you’re chosen, your significator will be the Hanged Man.”

Folie à deux is the form of psychosis in which delusional ideas are shared by two people in close association. Mental illness transfers from one to the other like a sexually transmitted disease. What the Ripper and the Goth were doing tonight was essentially mind-fucking, the smell of rancid madness now oozing from both partners.

“Turn over the card.”

The Goth obeyed.

What stared up at them from the table was this:

“The Hanged Man,” said the Goth.

“You
are
chosen.”

“Now will you give me the key to the occult realm?”

“Yes, if you swear in return that you’ll shed blood for me.”

“Whose blood?”

“Do you swear?”

“I swear,” confirmed the Goth.

The Ripper nodded. “I want you to kill a cop.”

North Vancouver, British Columbia

November 3 (Two days later)

Inspector Zinc Chandler of Special X—the Special External Section of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—was fishing his regimental badge from his plainclothes jacket pocket to flash at the uniformed constable standing guard at this end of the hotel corridor, when the young Asian woman said, “I recognize you, sir. You’ll find Sergeant Kidd in the room.”

There was no need for her to indicate which room. Halfway along this hall on the middle floor of the Lions Gate, those who made murder their business—the coroner and the cleanup crew from the body removal service—kibitzed in front of a doorjamb that had been dusted with fingerprint powder while Ident forensic techs finished combing the crime scene beyond that threshold.

“Chandler,” the coroner enthused on spotting Zinc. “A crucifixion is one for the memoirs, eh?”

The coroner was a ruddy-faced boozer in a gravy-stained suit who emitted an aura of strong cologne mixed with wintergreen breath mints used to mask the odor of Scotch. A jolly fellow known for his gallows humor, the coroner was on the cusp of retirement. No doubt the memoirs he mentioned were already in the works, Zinc thought.

“A crucifixion?” Chandler asked.

“So I’m told.”

“You’ve not been in?”

“Too cramped. Too many cooks, old boy.”

Zinc peeked in through the door frame but couldn’t see the corpse. Just the black sergeant and two techs in “bunny suits”—disposable white coveralls with hoods and full foot coverage so that the crime site wouldn’t be contaminated—vacuuming for hairs and fibers.

“You’re thinking Easter, right?”

“Huh?” said Chandler, turning his attention back to the coroner.

“Easter’s more appropriate than Halloween.”

“Oh, you mean Jesus on the cross?”

“Right, Easter’s the proper time for crucifixion. Unless, of course, the crucifix is upside down.”

“Is it?” Chandler asked.

The coroner nodded, licking his lips as if it were time to wet his whistle again.

One of the techs spied Zinc and called out, “Suits are in the bag by the door, Inspector. We’re through with that half of the room. No need to avoid the path of contamination.”

Fetching the Ident bag from beside the hinges, Zinc removed a bunny suit and began to pull it on.

“It reminds me of that myth from the trenches in the First World War,” the coroner said. “The rumor emerged from the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. A Canadian sergeant, the story goes, was found nailed to a barn door with German bayonets through his hands and feet. The details changed with each retelling. He was nailed to a house. He was nailed to a tree. He was tied up with rope. He was tied up with wire. Nothing mattered but the image of crucifixion. In a Christian era, what better propaganda? A Hunnish enemy had mocked Christ’s agony on the cross. When the rumor spread to New York, Yanks began enlisting even though they weren’t in the war. And heaven help the Kraut who fell into our hands. After the crucified soldier, Canucks got a bad rep for abusing POWs.”

“I’ve seen that image,” Zinc said.

“
Canada’s Golgotha.
A sculptor cast the myth in bronze after the war. In it, the soldier hangs crucified in his great coat as Germans mock him from below like Romans did Christ. The rendition outraged postwar Germans, and they demanded that we prove the atrocity really occurred. When we couldn’t, the offending sculpture was crated up and stored away for fifty years.”

“It’s like that guy in Wyoming,” said one of the undertakers from body removal.

“What guy?” the coroner asked, shifting his attention to an anecdote that he could include in his memoirs. Out came pen and notebook to jot the salient details.

“It was in the paper a few years ago. Some rednecks in Wyoming, or one of those cowboy states, abducted a young gay man and drove him out onto the prairies. They pistol-whipped him until his skull caved in, then left him lashed to a fence for eighteen hours to freeze to death. How many murders are there annually in the States? How many gays endure hate crimes every year? Few of those make the news, but that one caused a fuss. Politicians fronting the Christian right had to cope with the martyr image of a gay, who supposedly sinned against God’s law, being crucified on a fence.”

The coroner smiled as he scribbled notes. “Crucifixion carries baggage.”

On that note, Zinc turned and crossed the threshold. A short entry hall with a bathroom on the left expanded into a wide room overlooking the front street. The last words Zinc caught from the coroner were “Find out if this vic was gay.”

The trouble with a rumor is that it distorts the facts. Zinc had no idea what crime-scene hearsay had spawned the image of crucifixion in the old boy’s mind, but there were problems with bringing this reality into line with that description.

The entrance to Vancouver’s harbor is dubbed the Lions Gate. It takes that name from two North Shore mountain peaks, which are called the Lions because they resemble a pair of crouching cats. In pioneer times, lumber equaled money, so a skid road slid logs down the mountainside to the harborfront village of Lonsdale, which was basically a few shacks around a rickety dock. The passing years upgraded the skid road into Lonsdale Avenue and transformed the village of Lonsdale into North Vancouver. Befitting its new status as a world-class city, North Van needed a decent hotel, so the Lions Gate was constructed on Lower Lonsdale.

Recently, the heritage hotel had been refurbished to meet the party vices of Hollywood North. Thanks to a worthless Canadian dollar, filming was frantic on the North Shore. High rollers from L.A. would blow into town and head straight to the Lounge Lizard bar on the ground floor of the Lions Gate. There, they could score blow to snort up their addicted snouts, then, should one of the high-class hookers who hung out around the bar catch their fancy, they could rent a room upstairs to get blown or to high-roll around in the hay.

A room like this.

The room was actually two rooms converted into one. The central support was a T-beam from the days when it was common for local mills to churn out timber thirty inches in diameter and seventy feet long without a single knot. Standing alone, the flanking wall gone, it looked like the cross on which Christ was crucified. The beam, however, wasn’t upside down, so it didn’t qualify as an inverted crucifix. Only the victim hung in reverse, his naked body dangling from the cross-arm of the T by a rope cinched around his right ankle. His left leg was bent so it crossed behind his right thigh, and it had been tied in place to hold it there. Crucifixion requires outstretched arms, but this man’s wrists were cuffed together at the small of his back. The only connection with what was done to Christ was the crown of thorns that trickled blood from the victim’s brow. But on closer inspection, that too was exposed as a distortion, for what Zinc saw when he squatted beside the body—careful to avoid the blood pooling around the cross—was that the thorns were actually a nimbus of nails hammered into the dead man’s skull.

This wasn’t a crucifixion.

It was an
occult
symbol.

A symbol just as powerful to those who believe in Magick.

“The Hanged Man,” Zinc said.

“Yep,” Sergeant Kidd agreed, joining him near the strung-up body.

“The coroner said he was crucified.”

“I’m probably to blame. I told him the vic was tied upside down to a T-cross.”

“Rumors,” scoffed the inspector.

The black Mountie nodded. “I never believe them. As often as not, the best ones turn out to be bogus.”

It occurred to Zinc that he had heard a rumor about Rachel Kidd and a cross of another kind. Not about the sergeant herself, but about her father.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights era, Rachel had been a fetus in her mother’s womb on the night that four Klansmen in ghostlike sheets and pointed hoods grabbed her dad. They drove him to a deserted field and lit a burning cross, then, having staked him to the ground at the foot of the fiery symbol, the racists castrated the screaming man with a razor blade. According to the rumor, they passed his severed testicles around in a paper cup so each could raise the hem of his hood to spit on the bloody trophies. The cops who’d investigated were Klansmen too, so that’s why the Kidds had moved to the Pacific Northwest, where Rachel eventually donned red serge and became the first black promoted up the Mounted’s ranks.

Tall, lithe, and lean, the sergeant was currently posted to North Van GIS, the homicide squad of the local detachment. A body found at the foot of the Lions fell within Kidd’s jurisdiction, but the hierarchy of command was such that a murder with leads outside the country might be usurped by Special X. Protocol had demanded that Rachel place a courtesy call to Zinc’s unit, the Special External Section at RCMP H.Q. across the harbor.

“The vic’s from L.A.,” she said, crouching beside the inspector.

“Name?”

“Cardoza. Romeo Cardoza.”

“You’re kidding? Who the hell would name their kid Romeo?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Cardoza?”

“Very funny.”

“Mind if I ask a question, sir?” Rachel asked.

“No.”

“Who would name their kid Zinc?”

Chandler’s natural steel-gray hair had been that color since birth. Its metallic tint gave rise to his name. Six-foot-two and almost two hundred pounds, Zinc had a physique muscled from hard work on the family farm in Saskatchewan during his youth and workouts since. Rugged and sharp-featured, his face was hard and gaunt, his good looks marred by the strain of fighting back from two serious wounds: a bullet to the head while hunting a killer named Cutthroat in Hong Kong, and a knife to the back on Deadman’s Island to stop a psychotic who thought he was Jack the Ripper.

“You’re sure you want to ask that question, Corporal?”

“Yes,” said Rachel.

“You’re
quite
sure, Constable?”

“On second thought …”

The Mounties shared a laugh, then, all kidding aside, the two got down to work.

“L.A., you said?” Zinc asked.

“Yeah, a movie producer. He flew in yesterday afternoon on Air Canada.”

“Staying here?”

“Uh-uh. The Hyatt over town. No one
stays
here. The Lions Gate is where you score … in more ways than one.”

“Sex? Drugs?”

“Down in the bar. The rock-’n’-roll’s up here. Rock in the form of cocaine. Roll in the form of fucking.”

“What brought Romeo to Vancouver?”

“Money problems. His studio’s shooting a film up here that’s way over budget.”

“Title?” Zinc asked.

“Bed of Nails.”

The beam from which the hanged man hung was halfway across the double room. The techs had finished with the half at the inspector’s back and were now searching the half beyond the beam for clues. They had cleared an area around the path of contamination to the queen-size bed against the far wall. There, while Zinc and Rachel squatted near the suspended corpse, Dr. Gillian Macbeth, the forensic pathologist, examined the state of the bedding.
“Bed of Nails,”
Gill echoed, waving Zinc toward her. “Fitting title. Get a look at this.”

The room took on a definite chill as both Mounties approached the bed. Sandwiched between the women, Zinc watched his breath condense in imaginary puffs. There was no love lost between Rachel and Gill, and that, more than anything, explained why the coroner was cowering out in the hall. These two had issues, as yet unresolved. Macbeth was an attractive surgeon on the gray side of forty. Having spent her fertile years building a successful career, she’d taken a stab at motherhood as her bio clock ran down. The father-to-be was a corporal with Special X, who Kidd had mistakenly arrested for the murder of his mother. That freed the actual killer to plant a bomb on the cruise ship that sailed the Mounties off into the sunset for their Red Serge Ball. The explosion had hurled Gill into a cruel aborting sea, and—
tick … tock … tick
—her bio clock ran out. Zinc’s girlfriend, Alexis Hunt, wrote a book about the case. In print, Gill had challenged Rachel’s competence as a cop, and Kidd was convinced that had damaged her career. It was all the two could do to be outwardly civil to each other, while daggers thrown by their scornful eyes whizzed over Chandler’s shoulders.

“Here’s where it happened,” Gill said, indicating the rumpled bed. “See the hammer? And the extra nails?”

The bloody tools flanked the gore-spattered pillow.

“That wad looks like a gag.”

“Likely stuffed in his mouth. To silence him while they hammered the nails into his brain.”

“They?” Zinc said.

“Two killers would be my bet. The base of his penis and his anus are both chafed raw.”

“A two-on-one?”

“That’s how I see it.”

“A female in front and a male behind?”

“Or two males, front and back, to form a daisy chain.”

“Or two females,” Rachel interjected. “One laying him while the other reamed him with a dildo.”

“Semen?”

“Just his. On his flaccid penis. They likely used condoms for safe sex and to capture DNA,” Gill said.

“Find any safes?”

“No,” said Rachel.

“Tidy killers.”

“Hip to forensics.”

“Short nails,” Zinc said, eyeing the pillow spikes.

The pathologist nodded. “The nails are short for a slow death. Just long enough to punch through the skull and pierce his brain. Judging from the blood sprays, they moved around. I think the nails were hammered in while the three had sex.”

Zinc conjured up the crime in his mind’s eye. High-rolling Romeo flies in from Hollywood. He taxis from the airport to the Hyatt Regency downtown, and later proceeds across the Lions Gate Bridge to the Lions Gate hotel, here on the North Shore. Why? To meet someone connected with the troubled
Bed of Nails?
Or was it to score some action?

“Find any drugs?” he asked.

“Yeah, over here.”

The answer came from one of the techs examining a table by the front windows.