Primal Scream (11 page)

Vancouver

The heart of skid road is two blocks east of Maple Tree Square, Gassy Jack's historical heart of the city. One block farther east is Chinatown. Back last century, when this was unhealthy swamp, the Chinese shared their alleys with whores. They still do.

Cruising these seedy streets in the rain to chance on a parking spot, Nick Craven wrestled with trouble in mind. Losing their unborn child in the aftermath of the Africa case had profoundly affected Gill, for it turned out that was her final chance at motherhood, having let her biological clock run down, too busy carving out her career in pathology to mind impatient time. And because Nick was motive for the ship being bombed, which dumped Gill in the ocean and ended her pregnancy, he suspected she subconsciously held him to blame.

Whatever the reason, he felt the chill.

At ViCLAS he had noticed how she looked at Robert DeClercq. There was a time when the same warmth had focused on him, for reasons Gill had expressed that first night they blubbed together in the hot tub out on the deck of her hillside home overlooking the city lights sparkling below:

Their toes played footsie under the water as Gill tilted back her head to catch the raindrops in her open mouth. The wind was blowing so fast the city was stripped of pollution. "Your turn. What do you want to know about me?" she asked.

"Why am I here? We're hardly two of a kind," said Nick.

"I'm bored by predictable men, and you puzzle me."

"I think I'm straightforward."

"Dream on, retro man. I see this old photograph in the paper of a 'Hell's Angel on a Harley' with a kiddie tucked under his arm, and I ask myself why a rebel like that risked death to save the girl."

"She was in the way and blocked my arm. That photo dates back almost two decades to my wild and wonderful teens."

"Why'd you become a cop?"

"To legally beat people up."

"Crack on the head, broken fingers, from the Tarot shoot-out? Joke's on you."

"My dad was a Mountie. And so was his dad. It all began when my great-grandfather won the V.C. at Rorke's Drift in the Zulu War."

"Is that why, gun blazing, you kicked in Tarot's door? I think you're addicted to danger and thrills."

"Don't see why that interests you."

"So I'm not puzzled later. The way you're going, odds are you'll end up on my slab. Glean the facts now, and I'll know why you died."

Nick laughed. "Spider woman. Madame Defarge."

Gill ran her foot up his submerged calf. "I'm not looking for ties. I'm looking for excitement. I want to whitewater-raft and skin-dive for treasure. I want to downhill race and
zoom on a chopper. I want someone wild to electrify me in bed."

"And I thought you lived to curl up with a good book."

Gill paddled across the tub and slithered up his chest. "Tell me your secret. What drives you?"

"My dad shot himself the day I was born, and I don't know why."

Well, he'd faced the answer to that after the ship bombing, and so doing had cost Gill their child and him her interest.
I'm not looking for ties. I'm looking for excitement
. She'd been up-front with him from the start, and it was his own damn fault he quickly tell head over heels in love with her.

They read the same books.

They love the same music.

And both are at the top of their forensic fields.

DeClercq lost a child.

So did she.

And Gill's seeking help to fill her depressed mind

with uplifting ideas. I'm physical He's mental. Passion versus reason.

Emotionally, the corporal
felt
like skid road. Nick spied a space on Cordova and parallel-parked the car. Bare head baptized by rain, he sloshed a block over to Hastings, drawn by the bass of perhaps the best bar song ever recorded: the Northern Pikes's "She Ain't Pretty (She Just Looks That Way)." always struck him as he neared The Corner—perhaps the junkiest mainline in North America, first stop for Triad heroin smuggled from Hong Kong—how many native Indians hit the skids. Disproportionately, they also filled the jails, a crime which explained to his mind what was happening up north at Totem Lake.

Realm of the five-dollar buzz cut, the two-dollar breakfast, the one-dollar glass of draft, and the twenty-five-cent peep show, the business district of skid road grew pawnshops, pom shops, strip bars, and scuzzy hotels. No hotel was scuzzier than the Hyakk— they hoped to siphon guests off the Hyatt downtown?—outside which three hookers strolled in crotch-cleaving shorts, and ambulance attendants wearing latex gloves pressed a nerve behind the ear of a wino slumped against the refuse bin to get a response, the young one shouting, "Hello, can you hear me?" A string-haired and hollow-eyed druggie harassed a uniformed cop for having jaywalked across Hastings, until the blue blew his cool and shoved the heckler against a wall and warned him to "Fuck off." "Who the fuck do you think you are?" String Hair yelled. "You think you're better than us 'cause you wear a gun?"

Nick entered The Hyakk.

Off the lobby was the Jugs Beer Parlor. It was unclear whether "Jugs" referred to pitchers on the tables or the stripper onstage. The ecdysiast grinding to "She Ain't Pretty" was pretty if your taste runs to balloon-boobed babes. The muff men bent close for gynecological detail, pushers and heavies seated behind with backs to the walls. Stubble, black leather, and Harley-Davidson T-shirts were in style. A native complained to the bartender his beer glass was cracked. The bartender poured a second draft, but only to the level of the one turned in. Two women came out of the John in a huff, complaining so many hypes were shooting up in the cubicles they couldn't take a pee. Hip-humping on a blanket to finish her bump and grind, the stripper stopped to frantically flick a bug from her skin and stomp it to death beneath her spiked heel.

The bookish clerk in the glass cage of the check-in counter was reading Virgil's
Aeneid
.

"It's a job," he said in answer to Craven's raised brow.

The Mountie flashed his badge. "Pass me the key to Bron Wren's room." "Got a warrant? The guy's got rights."

"His rights died with him." Stretching proof a tad to win the key: "You don't want to get in the way of us apprehending his killer unless you want lots of time to read."

The clerk shrugged and gave up the key. He buzzed the security door to a dim stairwell. Fidgeting beneath a video of two women engaged in oral sex, an effeminate cross-dresser asked, "You want anything?" as Nick passed through.

A tattered red carpet stinking of urine stepped up crooked stairs to the floor above. Expecting the worst, the Mountie found it in Room 110, the pathetic offering seedier than any he had encountered while undercover in the Third World. The ledge outside the grimy window was littered with garbage: needles, Big Mac containers, cig butts, condoms, and booze bottles. In summer there'd be a gagging stench and hordes of green flies.

Nick pulled on latex gloves to toss this dump. The gloves were more to protect him than forensic traces in the room.

The dump consisted of a naked bulb overhead, chair in front of a music stand that seemed out of place, bed with a purple blanket peppered with burn holes, garbage can fashioned from a Diversol pail, dingy pink curtains, and a threadbare blue carpet embedded with squished cockroaches. The towel by the basin looked as if it had doubled as a handkerchief.

The brush beside the basin contained shedded black hairs. The Mountie seized it so the lab could match the hairs with those of the shrunken head.

Nick stripped the lumpy bed of its blanket, sheet, and plastic pad.

No bedbugs that he could see.

And nothing under the mattress.

The desk, etched with the names of hookers who once had serviced the room, was missing a drawer.

Nick found nothing of interest in the drawers that 
remained. 

He pulled back the carpet and shook his head 
with disgust. 

Years of dirt swept under the rug puffed up in his 
face.

The floor beneath the music stand was crusted with spots. So was the torn cushion on the facing chair. The cop in Nick knew Bron Wren had masturbated here, with a jack-off aid on the stand.

Was the aid a book?

Magazine?

Photograph?

The Mountie searched for signs indicating a hidden cache.

The papered walls were patched here and there in a losing battle against peeling skin. Beside the chair a blood spray from spiking a vein decorated the covering, one curled corner of which was grimed with fingerprints front and back. Tugging the paper stretched chewing gum to expose a hole hollowed in the wall. Originally for a junky's outfit and stash of H, today the cache secreted a time-yellowed album.

The photo album obviously predated the pedophile's twenty-five-year jail term, and had been retrieved after his release.

The Polaroids inside the album were of naked young boys and girls.

Taped beside each photo was a lock of hair.

At dinnertime DeClercq's office served as a pizza parlor. Rounds of Siciliana, Napoletana, Arrabiata, and Marinara steamed on the horseshoe desk, filling the air with the fattening aromas of an Italian kitchen. Winter on the West Coast assailed the dark windows while those gathered for the brainstorm munched or sipped Starbucks coffee. Sleet had replaced the usual rain, as if Spann, George, and Dodd had dragged the snowfall at Totem Lake south to Vancouver behind the plane when they flew down Flint's body this afternoon. The sleet slipped over the panes like an army of white slugs.

DeClercq called the powwow to order while Chandler pinned morgue shots of Flint to the Strategy Wall. Eyes shifting warily from the chief to Gill and back, Craven sat tensely beside Macbeth on the minion chairs. Pumped from the shooting at Totem Lake and cramped too long in the plane, Spann and George paced the floor to work out stress and kinks.

Chitchat died.

"The Totem Lake crisis first," said DeClercq. "The escalation in violence has provoked some politicians to demand the Force relinquish control of the situation to the army. Hawks want the camp stormed. Doves don't want a Waco. Since many of the doomsday cultists are up here from the States, Commissioner Chartrand has transferred the case to Special X. We're no longer there as backup. Instead we call the shots.

A t
im
e bomb is ticking on my desk, so how do we respond?"

On the wall above his desk hung Sydney Hall's
The Last Great Council of the West
, painted for the London
Graphic
to convey the tour of the Northwest Territories by the Marquis of Lo
rn
e, the Canadian governor general, in 1881. In the picture the pith-hatted marquis sat in regal arrogance under a sun awning erected at Blackfoot Crossing, guarded by the Mounted Police, hand on sword, with feathered Indians squatting at his feet. The tour, complete with French chef and six servants, had been mounted to commemorate the fact that by Treaty Number 6, signed at Fort Carlton on August 23, 1876, the Cree and Assiniboine Indians had surrendered what is now Saskatchewan and part of Alberta, followed by Treaty Number 7, inked along the Bow River on September 22, 1877, by which the Blackfoot, Peigan, Blood, Sarcee, and Stoney tribes had given away what remained of Alberta. The tour, colonial history maintains, was of "special significance" to the Indians, for as thanks for handing over their priceless lands, they got to meet the G.G.'s wife, Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria, the Great White Mother herself.

What a deal!

Stony-faced, Ghost Keeper glanced at Sydney Hall's painting. DeClercq watched him intently from the corner of his eye, wondering what thoughts were flashing through the Cree's mind. Before Treaty 6 his people had had a thousand miles of prairie to roam. Because of the treaty George had been raised in a one-room shack on the cramped Duck Lake Reserve. The British Columbia Colony had dealt with the Indian question in a more cavalier way, grabbing native lands without the bother of a treaty. Here there was no legal theft paper to wave at Totem Lake faces, and that was what the standoff was all about. Changes hi Mounted policing had brought natives into the Force; then irony had pitted George against those of his people unwilling to bite the bullet over past wrongs.

Now—to add insult to injury—he had been forced to gun down one of his own.

So how George would respond to this escalation had paramount influence with DeClercq.

"The leaders of both factions in the standoff camp are dead, creating a vacuum waiting to be filled," said George. "Up for grabs is whether the Doomsdayers or the Sundancers gain control. The Dooms are on the war path. The Suns will listen to peace. So how we respond should make it hard to stay entrenched in the camp and easy to come out."

"The wild card is the cache of arms being smuggled in," said Spann. "If it gets through, word is the Dooms will be armed with mortars and missiles. From what went down this morning, they'll use them."

"So," summed up Chandler, "the question is: Should we storm the camp now for a preemptive strike, shedding blood almost certainly on both sides, or blockade Totem Lake as best we can and hope that shipment doesn't get through to raise the body count?" "Which response errs on the side of caution?" said DeClercq.

"Damned if I know," Chandler replied, "but you can bet the armchair strategists will second-guess us after the smoke clears."

"I favor Colin Powell's approach," said George—a comment that caused DeClercq, the military tactician in the powwow, to blink—" 'Overwhelming force, cautiously applied.' The key to success is the conservative use of wartime resources, which should be committed to maximum capacity. What worked for Desert Storm might avoid more tragedy here."

"Okay," said DeClercq. "We give peace a chance. We besiege Totem Lake with a daunting strangle of crushing force, and cut the rebels off from the outside world. A carrot-and-stick approach will be employed.

The stick is firepower unleashed only in self-defense, unless you—Zinc—order the rebels taken out. The carrot will be negotiations with the Sundancers, aimed at
spirituality
in their cause. We find a way for them to come out with pride. The Doomsdayers, however, we ignore. Henceforth, we refer to them as terrorists, and if they have criminal records, inform the media. We will control the flow of information about this crisis, and keep public focus on the criminal agenda."

"You want me north?" Chandler said.

"On the front line. If push comes to bloody shove, the call is yours. Set up a crisis-management team and bounce all communications with the Sundancers off Ghost Keeper and a Force psychologist.

"Bob"—he turned to the Cree—"you're second in command of the CMT. You have to live and work with your people after the standoff is over, so I want to absolve you of blame for making potentially unpopular decisions up north. I'm sending you there to investigate the case
within
the case. The search for the Decapitator is your command."

Spann frowned at losing the file she hoped was her passage to inspector and head of Administration here at Special X.

"Topic two," said DeClercq. "Winterman Snow. Where do we stand on linking the two headless bodies up north to him?"

Macbeth rose from her seat and approached the left half of DeClercq's Strategy Wall. The code name for the Totem Lake headhunter was
The Decapitator
, printed on a label above the collage. Displayed were two clusters of morgue photographs, one set catching the autopsy on Jed Vanderkop, the Idaho hunter frozen headless under Totem Lake falls, and the other set the Polaroids of Cy Flint that Chandler had just pinned up. Because both victims were American, the Decapitator case also belonged to Special X.

"Vanderkop died from an arrow to the heart. He was beheaded after death," said Gill, illustrating within the appropriate photo. "I found no semen in the rectum, but he was anally raped." Macbeth switched to the Polaroids of the new victim. "Though not yet dissected, my prelim exam of Flint confirmed his arm and leg were pierced by arrows; then he was beheaded while still alive. That is shown by active circulation bleeding into tissue around the cut margin." Her finger encircled the inner edge of the neck stump. "He, too, was anally raped, and again I found no semen." "It's gotta be the same killer," added Spann. "The arrow to Vanderkop's heart was an Easton XX75 2219. The shaft with olive drab cam, fletched with yellow plastic vanes, drove a Wasp three-bladed 130-grain chisel-point broadhead. The arrow that killed Vanderkop was key fact evidence, and the exact same type of arrow spiked Flint to the tree."

Key fact—or hold back—evidence refers to those details known only to the offender and a limited number of cops, held back from general knowledge and the media to assist in trapping the real killer during interviews or court proceedings.

"The beheadings are linked," George agreed, "and a prime suspect is Winterman Snow. Moses John— the Totem Lake spiritual leader—saw an archer bow-hunting above the falls just before the freeze. 'The white man' Kathy heard him describe fits the albino 'White Man' known as Winterman Snow. Dodd says north of Totem Lake is Snow's trap line. He's a lone wolf who lives off the land and only comes out, according to Dodd, to sell his furs. We found Flint dead on Snow's trap line, and recovered his skinned face and three others on a miniature totem in a sweat lodge."

"If the Decapitator is Winterman Snow, what do you see as his fantasy motive for homosexually raping, then hunting whites?" asked DeClercq.

"Snow's reasserting the red man in him through his crimes," said George. "That's why the
only
tobacco plug on the sweat lodge mound was red. The key to what fuels his revenge is the crucifix smeared on the floor of the cabin, to which he crucified a white man for anal rape, before releasing him naked into Snow's realm of snow to stalk and face-skin for a ritual totem. He's acting out what was done to him as a child, so surely the crucifix points to—

"Sexual abuse in a church-run residential school," completed DeClercq.

"That's where I'll begin," replied the Cree. "What I'm hunting is a white hater with a headhunter's trophy collection of skulls."

DeClercq approached the right half of his Strategy Wall as Macbeth resumed her seat. The smile she flashed him as they passed warmed the room, while Craven's eyes on the back of his head ran a paralyzing chill down his spine.

Robert's eye twitched.

Her look said she thought it a wink.

An image of Gill in bed shot through his unbridled id.

Whoa!
he thought.

Shrink
was the code name for the killer who'd mailed the shrunken head to Special X. The name was printed on the label above the second collage. "Topic three," said DeClercq, "is Shrink and Bron Wren. Though at first the two cases seemed to blend together, I now believe we're searching for
two
head-hunters, not one. The Decapitator up north and Shrink down here."

"I took hairs found on a brush in Bron Wren's room to the lab," said Craven. "Comparing them with those on the shrunken head produced a probable match. The tattoo and that make it safe to assume the head is his and not from up north."

"Vanderkop had pockmarked skin," said Macbeth. "So does one of the skinned faces on the totem found in the sweat lodge."

"The shrunken head was mailed when only Members of the Force knew about the headless body frozen under the falls. The three explanations are one killer, a leak in the ranks, or coincidence. If one killer, why change M.O. for Wren? Unless Wren was already dead and his head was pre-shrunk, a leak in the ranks wouldn't give a copycat enough time to mail the head for Friday's delivery. The main post office got back to me on chute cut-off times. If the headless body and bodiless head are coincidence, was Bron Wren a stranger-to-stranger victim of Shrink," asked Chandler, "or was he beheaded for a more personal reason?"

Feeling as if he and Macbeth had already cuckolded Nick, DeClercq steeled himself to face the corporal eye to eye.

"If the motive for killing Wren is personal," said DeClercq, "it follows from the album hidden in his room that the pedophile's killer might be a victim he abused as a child. I want you to vet the six kids involved in the DSO proceedings which put Wren away for twenty-five years, followed by those photographed in the album from whom he snipped locks of hair."

DeClercq requested that Spann stay behind as the powwow dispersed. He closed the door, then motioned her to one of the minion chairs, then circled behind the horseshoe desk to seat himself.

"Congratulations on your promotion, Inspector," he said. He smiled as elation registered in her eyes. "Due to expanding caseload, I'm restructuring Special X. The position Head of Administration is no more, and Head of Operations will be split in two. You will henceforth be head of Operations B and third in command of Special X, after Inspector Chandler—who will head Operations A—and me. The reason you're not going north is I want you in Vancouver. Because you and I are going to reopen the Headhunter file."