Primal Scream (41 page)

Vancouver

Monday, January 15

Gill Macbeth was about to knock on the closed door to Robert's office when suddenly it opened and was face to face with Nick.

"Gill."

"Nick."

"How's things?"

"Fine. And you?"

"Okay," he said.

"Good. See you around."

"Right."

"Well."

"Take care."

It's over
, said their eyes.

He went down the stairs.

She entered the office. And closed the door behinc her. And approached the desk.

DeClercq was seated behind a stack of files. Phone to his ear, he motioned her to a chair as he booke two reservations.

"Security still in effect? Good, we'll be there three."

Gill remained standing as he hung up.

"To what do I owe this visit?" Robert asked, br preoccupied.

"I came to ask you out for dinner tonight."

"Sorry," he said absently. "Prior plans."

"Tomorrow, then?" Frowning. "What about Nick?"

"Nick and I were right for each other for a while. That time has passed. We're moving on."

"Maybe."

"Maybe what?"

"Maybe I'll have dinner with you. Last time I was dating, we asked you out."

"We. You. Us. Times change," said Gill.

"Can't teach an old dog new tricks," he said.

She winked.

"Wanta bet?"

Gill was about to leave the office when suddenly the door opened after a knock and she was face to face with Anda Carlisle.

"Hi," said Anda.

"Hi," said Gill.

They say two things in life are certain: death and taxes.

In Vancouver, add rain to the list.

The last vestiges of snow were washed away by the rain that cleaned the car that carried them down Cambie Street, past Queen Elizabeth Park crowning Little Mountain and over False Creek to the downtown core, bounded west by Stanley Park against English Bay, bounded east by Chinatown, and bounded north by the harbor backed by mountain peaks.

As he drove, they talked.

"Dissociation, right?"

"Dissociation," she said.
"Remember when you asked me: 'If two killers are loose—the Headhunter here and the Decapitator north—how have different psychologies led to similar crimes?' The answer is both psychologies were the same."

Robert had passed her the class picture of native kids and missionaries shot at St. Sebastian Residential School.

"Dodd, like Spann, was a homophobe toward his sex. Reverend Noel saw to that. By dissociation Dodd, like Spann, created a
separate
killer for homosexual revenge on his sex. By switching sexes, Spann psychologically dissociated herself from homophobia, killing women as a psychotic heterosexual. By switching races, Dodd became a killer who could rape men, for it was Winterman Snow who wreaked revenge, not only for the abuse that drove Snow to suicide, but also for the abuse Dodd suffered at St. Sebastian."

"From Reverend Noel backed by Corporal Spann."

"From
white
men," Anda stressed. "Switching races distanced Dodd."

"And headhunting?"

"As I explained the first time we met, headhunting is a practice common to the history of all cultures. It is also a common mutilation among the insane, for the illness they suffer is focused on the head. Spann lived among Jivaro natives in Ecuador. Headhunting as fetish. Dodd lived among Tsimshian natives here. Headhunting as trophy."

"As a detective, I feel inferior to you," said the Mountie.

Anda laughed. "There's a joke psychiatrists share. 'I have at last isolated the cause of your inferiority complex. You are inferior.' "

Robert laughed, too.

The car turned north on Burrard Street toward the waterfront. Between the office towers looming on either side, they could see the peaks of the North Shore above Lonsdale Avenue, which Nick called home. Encircling his apartment was Bron Wren's hunting ground of twenty-five years ago. After crossing the foreshore railway tracks, DeClercq turned west on Coal Harbor Road toward Stanley Park, then angled north to stop the car beside a float-plane dock.

"I thought we were going to The Teahouse."

"Change of plans," he said. "A gourmet recommended a hard-to-get-to restaurant tucked away in a quiet cove on Mayne Island."

They walked through drizzle to the terminal, where Robert paid for two tickets on the three-thirty flight to the Gulf Islands.

"The departure lounge is there," the airline clerk said, pointing.

"Robert?"

"Yes?"

"How will we get back? Float planes don't fly once it's dark."

"Afraid I'm trying the old ploy of running out of gas?"

"Are you?"

"No. An RCMP launch is picking us up on its return from patrol."

"Good," said Anda. "Let's be up-front. I view this dinner as closing out the case, not the beginning of a new relationship. I like you. Platonically. But that is all" Disappointment registered on his face at the door to Departures.

"Ladies first," he said.

"How quaint," she replied.

Anda was about to enter when she was stopped by a security guard. The guard waved a metal detector in her hand. "Sorry," she said, "but we haven't been released from orders to search passengers for skyjackers to the north."

"Totem Lake," DeClercq explained behind her ear as the electronic wand swept down Carlisle's torso, making no sound until it passed over her groin, where it went as wild as a Geiger counter.

Buzz . . .

Buzz . . .

Buzz ...

We are puppets, Man in his pride, and Beauty fair in her flower;

Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand at a game . . . ?

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Puppets are people, and the way they play depends on how they are made and the way their strings are pulled.

—Catherine Reighard

Carlisle turned to find the Mountie holding out a photo of a girl.

"You changed your name, but you didn't change your face. Computer enhancing shows this picture is you. The photo is from an album kept by Bron Wren, along with a lock snipped from your hair. To trace the kids involved in the DSO hearing that sent Wren to prison for twenty-five years, Corporal Craven checked the
Gazette
in case some had changed their names to try to shed the person ruined by Wren.

"He found the new you.

"Craven came to see me just before you arrived for our date. He had the North Vancouver Detachment file on you, and told me how he sat in his apartment one night, reading the files on the six cases that went to court, when it struck him that he was surrounded by the scenes of crime:

"An Indian boy on the reserve along Burrard Inlet;

"Two brothers west by Mosquito Creek;

"A boy near the Upper Levels Highway to the north;

"And twin sisters by Grand Boulevard east of Lonsdale.

"Craven had our ViCLAS Section generate a map, and on it place the scenes of crime and Bron Wren's lair. The pin map showed Wren lived behind the twin sisters' home. His lust for the girls must have overpowered his fear of arrest, because he abandoned his buffer zone to attack the pair. He raped and sodomized each repeatedly while her sister was forced to watch. To ejaculate Wren cut a lock of hair, like the Krafft-Ebing fetishist
you
outlined to me.

"In court, both twins described flame tattoos that ' licked up Wren's belly from his groin.

"A month later, one twin killed herself, doused in lighter fluid she set aflame.

"The other twin was
you
."

Outside, the Beaver to the Gulf Islands roared in, I cutting its engine to glide to the dock. The passengers in the lounge prepared to depart.

"What was it you said about Ruryk the day we were alone in his office, where you were searching his files for evidence of kink? Psychiatry draws some doctors who seek to resolve
their own mental problems
, and at the same time puts them in a position of master-slave dominance over weak, crumbling minds? You were describing
you
, Anda. Not George Ruryk.
You
, not him, was shrink to the Shrink. The tape with Spann's monologue was from her therapy with you. The session that gave you a blueprint of her fantasy. A fantasy you then warped to your own ends.

"Spann was in a battle with Mother for control of her mind. If you have a problem with your head, best to see a shrink. So Katherine Spann consulted you, and you assumed the role of Mother in psychotherapy to exorcise the demon from her head. What was it? Primal therapy? A form of psychotherapy in which patients are encouraged to relive traumatic events, often screaming and crying, to achieve catharsis and the breakdown of psychological defenses? Did you set-decorate a dungeon in the cellar of your home to revive the 'original conditioning situation'? Spann's fetish was
the rings
, not shrinking the heads, so you pierced rings through your labia to play the role of Mother in the antecedent or 'fantasy phase' of a killing
you
had planned. Spann suffered attachment disorder, so you attached her to you, face nuzzled in the now loving, not menacing, maw of Mom's sex.
Scream, Sparky, scream
. Let it all out, as a prelude to sending her out to prove her love for you by raping and killing 'Dad' in the form of Bron Wren, as payback for what he did to you that made Mom hurt Spann as a child. As you put it: In the realm of madness, symbolism reigns. When the crime was going down, you were off somewhere for a perfect alibi.

"Puppet master.

"You knew the strings to pull.

"Wren owed you his life, not twenty-five years in jail. Did you spot him on the street—Ruryk's Gastown office was near his skid-road hotel—or did you stalk him for decades, waiting for parole? Whatever, you sent Spann after him, to abduct and rape in her lair on Finn Slough.

"To her, she was raping Dad.

"To you, it was Wren.

"Sometimes Spann heard the 'Voice,' and sometimes she heard you. Did you ask her to shrink Wren's head, or did she do that on her own? She was conditioned to shrink a head after a murder. Luckily, the Decapitator struck up north. Spann heard about it through the Force grapevine and told you before news of the beheading got out. With Wren missing, you knew we'd come searching for him, and once we suspected foul play, our list of prime suspects would encompass you. Your sister's suicide was a motive Wren's other victims didn't have. Knowing I was already her stand-in for Dad from the Headhunter case, did you have Spann mail Wren's shrunken head to me? Or did she do that on her own and you picked up on it? Knowing I'd link the head to the headless corpse at Totem Lake, and follow that red herring instead of linking it to Wren, you bought time to send your puppet out to kill again. To behead
random victims
we'd link to Wren because they were ambushed where his headless corpse was dumped. You thereby converted Wren to a random victim, too, instead of a I specific target linked to you.

"Serial killer.

"Random hunt.

"Four students dying to smudge your smoke screen.

"I wish I knew the role George Ruryk had in this. Was he kinked or not? I was wrong about Alfred Spann—how did you put it? Do you not feel as if you carry a separate 'sexual self around with you?—and lM could be wrong about him. Or was he also a victim of yours? Wrongly battered by a campus cocktail of erotomania and psychiatrist's fallacy, he set up practice on his own, and brought you in to bolster his reputation, providing you with the opportunity to induce a similar erotomania in one of his new patients. With George suspended, you took control of his practice to become— how'd you put it?—the busiest shrink in town.

"Very slick.

"Right place at the wrong time, you said.

"Right time, you meant.

"Working with George put you in a perfect position to deflect me. The first time we spoke about the fetish of the shrunken head, you postulated a male sewing his anus shut. When I returned with the photo of the rings in the burning tin, you knew I was closing in on Spann, so again you deflected me toward a male who used female heads as a masturbation aid. It gave you time to have your puppet kill Ruryk, while you set her up to be shot to death.

"What'd you tell her? Not to be taken alive? Shoot to kill if cornered by the RCMP? Whatever it was, Spann went out in a blaze, forcing me to gun down the puppet you controlled.

"Not only did you pull her strings, but you pulled mine. You brought me the tape you said Ruryk recorded with Spann, as—how'd you put it?—the final piece of the puzzle.

"The only loose end was to shut down my interest in you, so here we are on our first and last date, with me the puppet you plan to put on the shelf, while you secretly wear rings through your sex to experience the triumph of Nietzschean will to power, not a victim anymore, but master of existence, which no 'inferior' man can stop.

"Sorry, Anda, but I'm not fooled by the empress's new clothes.

"You have the arrogance of a psychopath. You feel nothing for anyone but yourself. As members of society, we return to it what it gave us in childhood. A scourge of our time is serial killers spawned by child abuse. Anda Carlisle, you're under arrest for the murders of Bron Wren, four students at UBC, and George Ruryk. It's my duty to inform you: you need not say anything, but anything you do say—"

"Where's the proof?"

"You're in Bron Wren's book of victims. Spann's on tape Unking rings like yours to the shrunken heads. By now I suspect you've dismantled the dungeon stage set in your cellar, but no way will you have destroyed the videotape. In the bomb shelter was a videocamera, used to record the rape and beheading of Wren. The tape was missing. It's in your possession. And a thorough search will turn it up. We'll have enough evidence to put to a jury."

Her lip curled.

"Sexist!" she hissed.

Her teeth bared.

"Misogynist!" she spat.

Her eyes narrowed.

"Pig!" she snarled with contempt. "Now do you have enough to believe Kipling got it right?
'The female of the spe
cies is more deadly than the mal
e'?"

"If feminism is about equality," he said, "females have the right to be as evil as males. Occam's razor: It is never useful to propound more theories than are
necessary
to explain a thing.
The female of the species is as deadly as the male.
I know a lot of
very
deadly men."