Primal Scream (8 page)

"Hair," said DeClercq.

"Hair," Carlisle agreed. "In
Psychopathia Sexualis
Krafft-Ebing describes the case of P, a man compelled to publicly cut the hair of girls. He was arrested with a collection of sixty-five tresses.
When he touched the hair with the scissors he had an erection
, Krafft-Ebing wrote,
and, at the instant of cutting it off, ejaculation
. Another could only orgasm while sucking on braids of hair, while a third gathered pubic posies from women with red hair to bind with black silk ribbons and place in a scrapbook recording each lover's name and the date she was seduced. King Charles II of England owned a wig made from his mistresses' pubic hairs. A British serial killer named Christie confessed to killing eleven women in 1953. He collected their pubic hair hi an old- tin to masturbate with later."

"I've seen that tin," said DeClercq. "In the Black Museum at Scotland Yard."

Anda grinned. "I'm lecturing you?"

"No," replied Robert. "You're providing focus. How might this kink have come about?"

"We'd have to know the
context
i
n which the fetish developed to answer that. Freud discovered how children pass through a series of oral, anal, urethral, phallic, and genital stages during psychosexual growth. Not only does this polymorphous maturation induce various sexual thoughts, but it switches the child's focus from one to another desired sexual object. Arrest of development at an early stage, due to a severe traumatic experience or overwhelming gratification, will lead to fixation. Oral fixation. Anal fixation. Or something else. Imagination complicates sexuality. A fetish develops when the human mind fixates on something extraneous to sexual biology, and henceforth requires it for erotic response."

"Why the rings through the lips?"

"Rings were part of the context that developed the fetish."

"How?" pressed DeClercq.

Carlisle shrugged. "Body piercing is popular these days. Men and women alike skewer their ears . . . and other parts. A classic European genital pierce is the frenum, a ring of Saturn through the underflesh of the penis to encircle the glans. I'm told it enlarges the size of an erection. Imagine a pedophile with such a cock ring. He forces a boy to fellate him as a prelude to anal rape. Might that not explain this fetish sent to you? A homosexual killer guilt-ridden by the abuse? By transposing his fixation from pubic to head hair he sheds the shame of his youth, then creates a shrunken fetish to reverse the rape, sewing his symbolic anus closed against those rings."

No blushing of the cheeks. No pursing of the lips. No hanky wringing over matters we dare not discuss. Big girls' games. Big girls' rules. God, he yearned to know what Anda was like in bed.

"He sent the head to Special X because he wants to be caught and punished," said DeClercq. "He feels guilt over killing to avenge the rape."

"He may have mixed emotions," said Carlisle. "What relieves guilt may also boost his self-esteem. Taunting the police to insert himself into the investigation not only sustains the thrill of the kill, but also exerts a power, control, and authority over you."

"
Me
," said DeClercq. "Not the police. Why send the
shrunken head personally to
me
?”

"Perhaps the killer locked minds with you sometime in the past."

That was it. That's why he was here. What American cops call
gut
and British cops call
nose
. This sense of deja vu harkened back to the Headhunter case, when that psychotic had taunted him with head substitutes, not unlike the psychology of whoever shrank this fetish and mailed it to him. That's what drove him here to reconsult with Ruryk, the psychiatrist who had helped track the Headhunter down.

It struck DeClercq that during this entire discussion, Dr. George Ruryk, head shrinker, had not muttered a word.

The North

Monday, January 8

Dawn broke over the plateau in the mountains north of Totem Lake. The sun rose to the east out of a sea of icebergs into an ocean of purple streaked with pink and crimson. A cloud line across the sky to the west marked an incoming storm, bringing yet another snowfall to the Skeena hinterland. The plateau was like a pothole among precipitous drops. Dancing over the tricky air currents above, fed by winds through the V'd valleys between the peaks, Dodd judged his moment carefully, then roared in to land the Beaver, pulling the plane's nose up at just the right second to touch down the skis. The plane shot up the plateau's incline at full power to turn its tail sideways at the top to keep them from sliding back down the skids. A final roar of the engine as it coughed and died, then ticking of the propeller as silence engulfed the cockpit.

Rubbing rime off the frosted window, Spann saw the mountain cabin.

"Looks deserted," George said. "Who'd leave a door open in this cold?" "Why land here?" Dodd asked.

"Request from the States. A nature artist named Cy Flint is using the cabin till Disney arrives to film in the spring. When he didn't radiophone Seattle yesterday as promised, Flint was reported missing. The state cops asked us to check on him," said Spann.

"Winterman Snow trap here?" George asked Dodd.

"Yeah. From what I hear, his trap line wanders far and wide."

They climbed down the strut under the wing to step into the snow. Snowshoes fixed to their boots, the trio trudged to Cy's cabin as the cloud line closed over the sky. Sunny and bright a moment ago, the plateau changed to dark and deadly, hungry wolves yelping in the forest surrounding them.

They neared the log cabin.

"The chopper set down over there," the Cree Mountie said. Bob George had been known as The Tracker when he was a special constable on Duck Lake Reserve in Saskatchewan. He pointed at tracks treading back and forth north from the cabin. "The crew unloaded Flint's supplies and then took off." He indicated a pair of showshoe marks coming in from the south. "Those were made by someone not with Flint's party. See how they overlap the tracks from the north? Whoever left them arrived after the chopper flew off." He pointed at identical snowshoe tracks following holes in the ice crust. "Two people left the cabin, one barefoot, and didn't return."

Noting blood drips on the half-open door and a fire log dropped outside, Spann withdrew the Smith semi-auto from under her parka. A push creaked the door open wide on frozen hinges.

The first thing George caught on shining his flashlight into the cabin was the Christian cross smeared in paint on the floor. Wrist ropes were lashed to nails hammered into the planks at the tips of both cross arms. Vomit on the cross shaft testified that Flint had been crucified facedown, while blood drops at groin level hinted that the unfortunate artist had endured anal rape. Slashed with a knife to strip him, his clothes were scattered around.

A quick search inside found no one home.

The searchers followed the barefoot tracks stalked by snowshoes west from the cabin. Large, lazy snowflakes began to filter from the clouds as they moved into the forest of hoary evergreens. Camouflaged, a snowy owl on a branch above watched them.

"If this turns into a whiteout, we'll have trouble taking off," warned Dodd. "Riding that bucking wind, it will be hard to tell if the plane's in a climb, a dive, a slip, or a stall."

"If we don't follow now, the snow will cover these tracks," said George.

"There!" exclaimed Spann, pointing ahead at a body spiked naked and headless to a tree trunk by two arrows through an arm and a leg. The snow surrounding the bare tree was stained deep red.

Spann and Dodd stayed where they were while George trudged in a wide circle to spiral in on the scene, his eyes alert to anything foreign to winter terrain. "Here is where the severed head landed," he called back. "The killer's glove left finger grooves when he picked it up to carry off. Blood drops from the neck run parallel to tracks snowshoeing south."

"Toward Totem Lake. The other archer and beheading site," added Spann.

"We follow," said the Cree.

"Whiteout," Dodd repeated.

"Go if you're worried," George said. "I'll survive until the storm clears. My people have dealt with these conditions for ten thousand years."

"Wop May," said Spann to goad Dodd. "Would he have cut and run?"

Bush guffawed. "I'm no coward. This is my element. It's you city tenderfeet I'm thinking about. You want a test of manhood? Lead on, lady."

Diffused light from the overcast infused the woods with a blue hue. Into this eerie landscape tumbled fluffy puffs of snow, white on blue like cotton batting backed by melancholy. The only sound was the
crunch, crunch
of snowshoes on ice crust, as deeper, deeper, deeper they penetrated unforgiving wilderness. Except for the trail made by the headhunter, the spoor around them were left by deer, moose, elk, hare, lynx, fox, wolverine, wolf, and grizzly.

In the fearful silence predatory eyes tracked human meat.

In a clearing canopied by towering red cedars, the three searchers found a sweat.

The sweat was an igloo-shaped lodge fashioned from cedar boughs, then covered with animal skins to keep in heat. The door flap opened east to face the rising sun: the sun, the fire, the mound, the door, and the pit all in line. The fire, now just ashes, had heated rocks. On the mound of earth dug from the pit within the lodge, a tobacco plug tied with red ribbon and a stick tipped by an eagle feather lay in offering. The rocks, still warm from recent use, had been shoveled into the central pit within the lodge. Closing the flap had made the sweat a sauna.

Ghost Keeper was veteran of many a sweat.

What bothered George about this lodge was what was missing.

When he undertook a sweat to purify himself, there were six ribboned plugs on the holy mound. Red, yellow, black, and white to symbolize the races, with green for Mother Earth, and blue for Father Sky. The ritual began with the Cree walking clockwise around the lodge before backing in, facing the sun, to return in reverse to the warm, dark womb of Mother Earth from which he was born. "All my relations" was the prayer George offered to his holy mound.

This mound wasn't holy.

For offered with the red-ribboned tobacco plug and sacred eagle feather was what looked like a human brain scooped from its skull.

The skull was missing.

As with the headless body spiked to the tree, The Tracker trudged in a closing circle to spiral in on the lodge. He crossed a set of snowshoe tracks heading away to the south, already losing form under this blanketing snow. Rounding the lodge as if preparing to undertake a sweat, he poked his head and flashlight into the gaping flap.

Face, to face, to face, to face, he faced a grisly totem pole staring back.

The miniature totem was erected on the far side of the central pit.

The four faces shone white in the dark. When the Cree undertook a sweat to ground himself, he moved clockwise within the lodge to hang four of the ribboned tobacco plugs to mark the four directions. Red to the east, white to the north, black to the west, and yellow to the south. Then he'd sit in the sacred circle of life, with his eagle feather, a bucket of water, and a cedar bough, now Ghost Keeper, the medicine man, here to heal himself. In the heat and dark of Mother Earth's womb, he would sing a song and say a prayer to link the spirit world to him— concluding with the amen, "All my relations." Dipping the bough in water, he'd then flick it at the rocks, so the sweat steamed hotter and hotter with each prayer. Prayer one in this round was said for the Creator, followed by prayers for the "sisters," then "brothers," then last for himself. A roll in the snow or dunk in the river would cool him off; then he'd return to the lodge for another sweat to cleanse spirit and being.

By the end sweat ran all into one. "All my relations." But not in here.

For not only was the sole tobacco plug on the outside mound self-centered red, but layered over the four carved wooden faces stacked on the totem pole were four faces skinned from whites.

Vancouver

Exiting from the airport with DeClercq lugging her bags, Katt sniffed the downpour and dramatically threw her reach skyward like a Broadway thespian. "Rain!" she rejoiced. "I must be in Vancouver. Goodbye, snowy Boston. Hello, damp and mildew."

"Good flight?"

"Lacking. No
Mr. Bean
."

"I missed you," he said. Which was true, though it was but a day.

"Of course you did. The abode must be dull without me."

True again. For when Katt was near, there was always
something
going on. Her latest kick was converting the parlor of their West Vancouver waterfront home into Holmes's and Watson's sitting room. "Bear with me, Bob. It's for a photo project." Though now he suspected that it was because 221B Baker Street was perennially untidy—in short, a mess.

"How's your mom?"

"Sends her best. You're to look after me. And curb my excesses."

"You? Excesses?"

"That's what I said. But you know how out of touch mothers are."

The car was parked by one of the short-term meters near Arrivals. A dollar per second, or something close to that. Katt took the keys and zipped through the rain to unlock the trunk, unlock the doors, and climb in out of the deluge. Like Friday, he sloshed and splashed and brought up the rear with her bags. As he got behind the wheel to chauffeur her to school— catching the ted-eye from Boston meant she'd reach first class on time—the teenager frowned at the CDs in the carry case. "Bob, I like the classics as much as anyone else" (to Katt, the classics were eighties rock) "but these old dudes" (the old dudes were Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms) "will put me to sleep."

She turned on the radio and twizzled to a symphony of tortured guitars.

"Did I say I missed you? I take that back," Robert groaned.

Katt killed the noise. "You're right. The Vampires suck."

They bridged the Fraser River with rush-hour traffic and inched across the city toward the North Shore. To fill the silence Katt drummed the dash in time with the slap, slap, slap of the wipers. "Anything juicy to report?"

"I met a bright woman I'm contemplating asking out on a date."

"Bob, it's winter. Raging hormones are for spring. How bright?" Katt asked, eyeing him with suspicion amid proprietary interest.

"A psychiatrist."

"Oh, no," Katt sighed, rolling her eyes. "The goal is to swell your loins, Bob. Not shrink your moonstruck head."

"I'm not an adolescent. My thoughts are not slaves to sex."

"You're a male," Katt said. "That's enough for me. But, hey, I could be wrong. Shall we try the test? Just how old is this babe?"

"What a sexist accusation."

" 'Fess up, Bob." She gave him her Spanish Inquisition look. "Is she in her fifties? That would be acting your age. No? In her forties? That would fail the test. Oh, oh! You're squirming. Does—"

"She's in her thirties." He slapped down his poker hand bereft of cards.

"Ah, yes," Katt said. "A meeting of the minds. You dirty dog."

"Is age so important?"

"Bob, she's old enough to be your daughter. You do need a shrink." "You're old enough to be my daughter," he grumbled sheepishly.

"Lust is blind. Work it out, Bob. I'm young enough to be your granddaughter."

DeClercq winced.

A sobering fact
, he thought.

Having dropped Katt at school in West Vancouver at the foot of the North Shore Mountains, DeClercq crossed Lions Gate Bridge to Stanley Park, at the edge of which he entered the downtown core. Through canyons of towers financed with Hong Kong exodus— the building crane was now Vancouver's most prolific bird—he was approaching the Expo site, which had fostered the boom, when a cell phone call summoned him to join Chandler, Macbeth, and Craven at ViCLAS.

The Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System ("Vigh-Class" to the Mounties) is a specialized section tasked with identifying serial killers in Canada. In the early 1980s sex killer Clifford Olson murdered eleven teens and kids across British Columbia. With each body found, local police investigated, but it was not until Olson's murderous rampage stopped that Mounties saw the pattern which linked the killings to onej man. Political fallout from that oversight motivated] development of the SexCri database, later replaced by MACRoS (Major Crime Organizational System), in turn replaced by ViCLAS, a nationwide computer program that stores and links all murders and sex crimes.

"If the case isn't on ViCLAS, the job isn't done." Here's how it works:

Step one is tracking. With every homicide (solved, unsolved, and attempts), sexual assault (real and false allegations), missing person where foul play is suspected, or finding of unidentified human remains, the cops investigating complete a crime analysis report. Each of the 263 questions has a specific purpose, ranging from establishing victimology, to developing offender behavioral traits, to determining geographical similarities. When the answer to each question is fed into the ViCLAS program, the computer scans the crime for patterns that reveal a serial killer or predict repeat behavior. It's like putting a jigsaw together. When you've got all the pieces in one box, it starts to make sense.

"In a world of serial killers, ViCLAS isn't a nice to have, but a need to have."

Step two is linking. In most murder cases police begin with the victim.
Who
is dead? And
how
did he get that way? From this center cops move out. But focusing on the victim won't work in serial killing, for fantasy is more important than
who
is dead. The scenario may be planned, but the victim is random. Stranger-to-stranger crimes require
wide
perspective, as recreational killers often strike from coast to coast. So ViCLAS goes a step beyond collecting basic crime data, in order to capture and profile the killer's behavior patterns. What's from within the offender's mind versus what's from without. This profile gives cops the basis to compare their case with other murders throughout the country for links. If there's a suspect from one of those crimes, so much the better.

"ViCLAS linking is a tool to surface your psycho." The link is fantasy.

Serial murder is a sexual act. Most serial killers also at some time commit sexual assaults. Serial crimes always have a ritual aspect in which the attacker plays out a secret fantasy. Though we all have fantasies, the difference is serial predators need to make reality fit theirs. In such fantasy everything unfolds the way the psycho wants it to. But when he does a killing, reality never lives up to fantasy, so he's driven to repeat the murder to get it right. He acts out this fantasy like a movie script, so ritual elements of his behavior remain unchanged from crime to crime. ViCLAS calls this ritual the "signature" of the crime.

It may be a fetish.

The distinctive feature of ViCLAS is how it seeks to surface a suspect by getting inside his mind. Human sexuality is ten percent biological, twenty percent physiological, and seventy percent psychosexual. Fantasy-motivated behavior rarely changes in us, so this is a fundamental premise on which ViCLAS is based. Sexual violence services some non-sexual need like power, control, or venting rage to avenge abuse in a psycho's past. Behavioral analysis examines in detail
what
occurred during the crime. Every single thing that happened and the sequence of events. Then it determines all the possible reasons
why
the psycho might have done what he did. Was it M.O.: to ensure success, or protect identity, or facilitate escape? Was it ritual: for psychosexual gratification? Was it a reaction to what the victim did, or prompted by the environment? A decision is made as to the most probable reason(s), then—based on
what
and
why
—the analyst draws conclusions on who would do such things for those reasons.

Different killers kill for different reasons:

The thrill killer murders for no other reason than to get a thrill from the act. Some people find violence erotic.

The over-killer inflicts more injuries than needed to kill the victim. Such frenzied activity is a venting of inner rage.

The lust killer covets and fantasizes about a victim until he acts out and kills. He may dehumanize his prey through mutilation.

The sadistic killer tortures in a way that reveals enjoyment,
often
to vent cold rage.

And so on ...

"To hunt a psycho, let ViCLAS be your bloodhound."

DeClercq parked his car at Special X, then splashed up Heather Street. The ViCLAS section covering B.C. and the Yukon was on the second floor of E Division H.Q. at Thirty-seventh. The office he entered was stark and computerized, basically desks, video monitors, and Members processing data. A guided tour of foreign cops was underway. Those from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands were already on the ViCLAS program. The Suits from the FBI had frowning faces. Two "It's-bigger-in-Texas" types, they had developed VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, only to have a thundering herd of states pick up ViCLAS. Tennessee, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and others were now on line. In a war between VHS and Beta, they were flogging Beta.

It hurt.

Chandler, Macbeth, and Craven were gathered around a computer in the corner office of Sergeant Rusty Lewis off ViCLAS central. A veteran of the Headhunter manhunt back in the eighties, Lewis had worked with Eric Chan—now the boss of E Division and top cop in B.C.—when the deputy commissioner programmed ViCLAS in 1992. Chan had promoted him to head of the section. Now he sat at his desk, watched by the trio staring over his shoulder and the boxed shrunken head, a red-haired man with freckles that clashed with his uniform when he donned Red Serge, feeding his computer crime analysis report data on this body part.

DeClercq joined them. "What's up?" he asked.

"The corpse from up north has thawed enough for me to examine," said Gill. "Though Vanderkop was raped, I found no semen in the rectum. The killer used a condom or didn't ejaculate. When I compared the beheaded stump with the shrunken head, the cuts didn't match. One slice slants down to the throat. The other slopes down to the nape."

"The head isn't Vanderkop's?"

"No," she said. "And when I did a magnified examination for marks, moles, and age, I discovered this. The missing Idaho hunter had no such mark."

Macbeth passed him the
tzantza
and a philatelist's magnifying glass. A spark shot from her to him as their hands joined, causing the head to jump in the box as if coming to life. "Must be the electricity zapping here," he said, to which she replied, "North and south poles?" Again he whiffed the sirens' perfume. Then, at the corner of his eye, he saw Craven glance from Gill to him.

A red light went on in his mind.

"What am I looking for?"

With tweezers Gill spread a wrinkled fold of skin near one stitched eye. In the crease Robert saw a tiny teardrop tattoo through the magnifier. It looked like a jailhouse mark.

"Get a hit?"

"No," said Lewis. The ViCLAS program on the screen mirrored the questions in the crime analysis report. On his desk, the booklet lay open at VICTIM INFORMATION—SCARS/MARKS/DEFORMITIES. ViCLAS had just run a check on "tear" and "teardrop" tattoos, in hope this distinctive feature might provide a link to a VICTIM/MISSING PERSON elsewhere in the country.

DeClercq picked up the crime analysis report booklet and flipped to page 9. There, under OFFENDER INFORMATION, he penciled in: