Primal Scream (6 page)

Vancouver

Saturday, January 6

Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq returned home a day early from his vacation in France, riding the bus before sunrise this morning from Domfront to Flers, and then the train to chug three hours east to Montparnasse station, and then the Metro to snake underground to St. Michel-Notre Dame, and then the RER sixteen miles north to Charles de Gaulle Airport, there to board Air Canada Flight 881 to Toronto, with a two-hour stopover between planes, then on to Flight 147 to Vancouver, arriving at 5:09 in the afternoon, actually two in the morning plus jet lag his time, and here took a cab through Vancouver rain to his office at Special X, where the shrunken head sat on his desk.

"Grueling trip?" Zinc Chandler asked as DeClercq dropped his suitcase just inside the door and shucked his raincoat.

"Except for the half hour of
Mr. Bean
crossing the Atlantic."

"Is Katt peeved to lose a day?" inquired Gill Macbeth, craning her neck to see if the teenager was standing in the hall. The pathologist sat on this side of his desk with the head blocked from view behind her.

"It worked out well," said DeClercq as he hung his coat on the stand. "We parted in Toronto, where she took a flight to Boston. She'll spend the time with her mom, then fly back for school."

"Corrine's living Stateside?"

"On and off. She purchased a mansion to redecorate in Boston this summer. Katt will work with her and get to know that city, and Corrine doesn't have to pull up roots."

"So everyone's happy?"

"Most of all me. How Corrine handled this mess is class all the way. I think Katt harbors the fantasy one day I'll marry her mom."

The mess DeClercq referred to was a mess indeed. A situation pregnant with tragedy for all involved. After Katt had been rescued from Deadman's Island—father unknown and mother one of the Ripper's victims—she had become the daughter death stole from him. Katt was his replacement for Jane. But then he discovered Luna wasn't her mother after all, having kidnapped Katt as a baby from Corrine in Boston, before smuggling her into Canada to raise as her own. DeClercq called Corrine, who wanted her daughter home. Katt, who had lost her "mother," balked at losing her "father" for a mother she didn't know. Were Corrine not Corrine, heartbreak would have happened, but instead of ripping Katt out of her "home," she adapted her life to the teen's. Katt, American by birth, lived in Canada for citizenship, so she could apply to become a Mountie like DeClercq. Corrine, who bought, then refurbished old homes for profit, lived with Katt when she worked here, and shared her with DeClercq when she worked in Boston. Corrine had Katt. DeClercq had Katt. Katt had Corrine and DeClercq.

"Will you?" Gill asked.

"Will I what?"

"Marry Corrine so Katt can live happily ever after with you?"

"Why are women such meddling romantics?"

"Is it not a truth
universally acknowledged that a
single man in possession of a good fortune must be
in
want of a wife?"

"No," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"No," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"And if it were, a wife of his
own
choosing."

"So," said Gill, cocking her head, "is she not the woman for you?"

No
, thought DeClercq.
My kind of woman is you.

The more he was around her, the more he felt drawn to Gill. Handsome, not pretty, she could pass as a twin for Candice Bergen. His side of forty, with auburn hair and emerald eyes, she still had a figure trim enough to turn heads on the street and awaken fantasies in him he had thought long gone. Her mother, who had died from hepatitis, a risk of the job, was the first female pathologist in the Commonwealth, so while other girls were busy baking cookies with mom, Gill was learning how to dissect dead things, and was now the best forensic sawbones in town. As heir to her father's chain of Caribbean hotels, from which she split the profits with on-site managers, Gill owned the crown atop Sentinel Hill, a West Coast modern of cedar and glass, in which she lived,
menage a troi
s
, with Binky and Gabby.

DeClercq had been there once.

A party she threw for all who survived the sinking of the
Good Luck City
during the Africa case.

"He's not for you, Gill," Gabby said from a perch he paced hi the huge aviary-cum-solarium he shared with Binky.

"Don't mind him," Gill laughed, champagne flute in hand. "Gab makes disparaging comments about everyone he fears may take me from him."

"A West African gray."

"You know parrots?"

"Bird-watching's a pastime I revive whenever I'm in the tropics."

"Impress me," Gill said. "What's Binky?"

"He's a green-winged macaw, right?"

"How do you know Bink's a
he
!"

"Fifty percent chance. And a lucky guess," Robert replied.

"Careful, Gill," Gabby warned. "He's trying to get into your pants."

"I doubt the chief superintendent is out to seduce me," soothed Gill, her head cocked to one side like the jealous bird's.

"As I recall, an African gray is so intelligent it speaks with the ability of a seven-year-old child. Your guardian proves Freud right. Childhood is obsessed with sex."

"Is Gabby causing trouble?"

A voice behind.

"Bad to worse," Gabby said. "The stud arrives."

The stud was Corporal Nick Craven of Special X. He stopped next to Gill to wrap a possessive arm about her shoulders.

"You should hear the noise they make in bed," said Gabby, bouncing on his perch as if to imitate the act. "All night long. How's a bird to sleep?"

"Gab!" Gill scolded.

Did she teach him that?

DeClercq found himself cocking his head at Macbeth like the parrot.

"Ruffle my feathers, baby," mocked the cocky bird.

DeClercq left the
trois
and the interloper to sort out libidos, and snaked his way through the crowd until he bumped into a wall of books and CDs. Shakespeare, Austen, Wordsworth, Dickens, Conrad, Proust, Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Maugham, Greene . . . The same authors lined shelves in his library at home, joined by those Katt had added when she usurped the space as a bedroom: King, Koontz, Rice, Linda Lael Miller ... As he scanned titles—
The Lifetime Reading Plan
by Clifton Fadiman,
In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust—a vision formed in his mind's eye of Gill and him reading by a fire in what Katt called the Holmes and Watson chairs, discussing literature in a true
meeting
of equal minds. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms ... Similar CDs made up his collection— the "Emperor" piano concerto his all-tune favorite piece—so fantasy was further enhanced with music, roses, and wine, until it was Gill and him romancing all night which kept grumpy Gabby awake.

If smart is sexy, Gill was as sexy as could be.

He glanced at her.

But saw Nick.

And there was the problem.

Gill was hi her forties. Nick was in his thirties. Had she worked out this relationship with a younger man to enjoy lustful sex without ties that bind? One eye on her biological clock, Gill had been pregnant with Nick's kid when the ship went down, but lost the fetus from stress and exposure to a winter sea. Was the ruckus which kept poor Gabby awake their labor of love to replace it? And if so, what moral right had he to obstruct her maternal instinct when he considered his fifty-odd years too old to start fathering babies, abandoning them too early to fend for themselves among cannibals if he passed on according to actuarial tables.

In Search of Lost Time.

Is that my Gordian knot?

Replacing Jane has me yearning to replace my wives with Gill?

And then there was the issue of him being Craven's boss. Move on a subordinate's love and there'd be doubt about his fitness to command, apart from undermining of morale. The moral man knew all was
not
fair in love and war. To this day he couldn't shake the feeling that his second wife had cuckolded him, for when she died in the aftermath of the Headhunter case, she was secretly with Al Flood at his West End apartment, Flood the Vancouver Police liaison with the Headhunter squad, and a student in the psychology class Genny taught. Had they been lovers? All he had was suspicion. But like Othello's Desdemona, the whiff of betrayal was there. Flood had hoped to cut in and "dance" with Robert's wife, and wasn't that what he'd do to Nick if he fell for Gill?

The Gordian knot of desire.

Too late to untie, and too damn moral to cut.

Is Gill flirting with me?

Better not to find out.

"So," he said, "where's this shrunken head sent to me?"

Rising from the minion chair in front of Robert's desk, Gill revealed the box in the shadow she cast over the surface. A strange sense of deja vu beckoned within his mind as the Mountie stared transfixed at the grisly miniature. How ghostly the shriveled ash-white skin was in its snake nest of tangled black hair. How empty both sockets without eyeballs seemed behind their stitching. How secretive the thin lips pierced by small gold rings laced together hoop to hoop with a zigzag black leather thong were. The chief had never seen a shrunken head in the flesh, so why did something about this trophy haunt his subconscious?

"
Tzantza
," Gill said. "That's the Jivaro name. The Indians of Ecuador invented shrinking. The cut-off head is left in a wicker basket to drain off blood, while the Jivaro spreads banana leaves around a fire, above which hangs a large clay pot of boiling water. Bled, the head is gripped by the hair and immersed for thirty minutes, until the skin is paper-white and smells like cannibal food. Then sand is added to the pot and it's brought to a boil again."

Her perfume is expensive.

To mask the taint of the morgue.

"The back of the head's slit open with a machete," she continued, "crown to nape of the neck to remove the skull, then the slit and both eyes are sewn shut. Using a tool like a trowel, the shrinker fills the empty head with sand from the pot, spooning it in through the open neck. After several minutes the cooling sand is dumped and replaced with hot. Eventually the head shrinks down to this, except for the hair, which doesn't shrink, and seems abnormally long."

"The rings?" said Robert.

"Yes, that's odd. Stitching the lips shut ends the shrinking. Jivaros sew them together with a bone needle and thong. Trapping the victim's spirit inside keeps it from haunting the shrinker. Whoever shrank this
tzantza
added rings."

"I wonder why."

Zinc Chandler crossed to the Strategy Wall. It was DeClercq's habit when solving a case or plotting a book to plan visually, so two of his office walls were lined floor to ceiling with corkboard. The chief was proud to see Zinc adopt his method, and waiting for him were two collages split by a vertical line, so moving toward the inspector he said, "Fill me in."

"On Wednesday night the Mad Dog found this corpse up north as he retreated from photographing the rebels at Totem Lake."

Zinc tapped photos in the left collage showing the body under the frozen falls.

"Headquarters was informed and word spread through the Force, but
before
the media were briefed early next morning, someone sent you the shrunken head by dropping a parcel into the chute out front of the main Vancouver post office."

DeClercq held up three fingers to knock down. "The headless body and bodiless head are a coincidence. A leak in the Force prompted a copycat's act. Or the killer of the headless corpse sent me its head."

"A copycat would have to kill, shrink, and mail so fast that I think that unlikely, unless the head posted was pre-shrunk," said Zinc.

They moved to a color copy of the packaging pinned to the other collage.

"Plain brown wrapper, available anywhere. Box from Christmas, for a tree ornament. Scotch tape to seal and rubber cement for the label. No fingerprints inside and no hairs or fibers except the head's. Lots of prints on the wrapper, but none CPIC could match. The typed label is from a daisy wheel. Replace the wheel and there goes any link."

Zinc tapped the copy of the label on the wall:

Commanding Officer

Special External Section

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

5255 Heather Street Vancouver, B.C. V5Z 1K6

"No note. No call claiming credit. Just the label, presumably addressed to you. The parcel arrived here in Friday's mail."

"Check if the main post office has a cut-off time, prior to which a chute drop makes Thursday's delivery, and after which it's held for Friday's mail. That might tighten the time line."

"The check is in the mail," Zinc punned. "I should have an answer soon."

DeClercq sensed Gill approaching the wall as if on cue, then felt the caress of her breath on the hairs of his neck. As Chandler returned to the first collage, she slipped between the men, so near her static electricity tingled Robert's skin.

Magnetism
, he thought.

"Yesterday the corpse was cut from the frozen pool up north and flown here by bush plane." Zinc tapped the postmortem Polaroids around the preliminary report Gill had delivered just before the chief arrived. "The stiff was taken to VGH morgue."

The body on the autopsy table was still a block of ice.

"Internal examination is days away," said Gill. "I have to wait for the flesh to thaw at room temperature, to soften cells now hard with ice crystals. However, we do know the corpse is that of missing Idaho hunter Jed Vanderkop."

Macbeth-pulled an X-ray from her carry case. "This was sent by Vanderkop's doctor in the States. His chest was X-rayed for pneumonia last year." Handing it to the chief to hold up to the light, she pulled another X-ray from her bag. "This we took yesterday in the morgue, to track the arrow through organs in the chest." Gill held the second X-ray up beside the first, pointing out forensic features to him. "Here, here, and here, dips in the ribs are the same. A rib cage is like a fingerprint. It differs from person to person. See the same fracture in both from childhood trauma? Plus, the corpse is missing the same phalange."

"The head?" said DeClercq. "Is it his?"

"Without bone structure that's impossible to tell by comparing it with photographs of Vanderkop. Skin DNA will have denatured during shrinking, but mito-chondrial DNA in the hair shafts will remain. Wait a month, and a DNA test will answer that."

"Nothing quicker?"

"Perhaps," Gill said. "We may be able to match the cut skin of the stump with the cut skin of the shrunken head."

"Jigsaw pieces?"

"If we're lucky. The shrinking will make it hard to compare, and the stump hasn't thawed yet. The cleaner the cuts, the more difficult to match."

Again, Robert imagined them in the Holmes and Watson chairs, playing case puzzles off each other like a game of forensic chess.

"Vanderkop was sodomized before he was killed. The act was rape, not consensual sex. In active homosexuals the anus is funnel-shaped. The tissue here was bruised, bleeding, and torn. See how the buttocks have thawed in the Polaroids? But an internal check for sperm is still days off."

"Visualize the killing?"

"Yes," she said. "Vanderkop was waylaid, stripped, and raped in the bush. Then he escaped, or was released naked for sport. Fleeing through icy woods slashed skin from his legs before he was brought down by an arrow to the heart. Then his head was chopped off with a machete or similar blade."

"Why decapitate him?" queried DeClercq. "Unless to shrink the head sent here. Which begs the question, Why taunt me?"

"To answer that," Gill said, "you'll have to ask a shrink."