Primal Scream (23 page)

"Yes," said DeClercq. "But another time. Give me a rain check until you return from the Mystery Weekend. I look forward to hearing how good a sleuth Inspector Chandler is."

So he escaped; Elvira died; and the rain check was never cashed.

Until now.

The flashback faded.

* * *

DeClercq dealt a second photo faceup on the floor beside the print of the head and the bucket of sand. It was a head shot of Al Flood, dressed in the blue uniform of the VPD. Late thirties, strawberry blond, freckled and puffy face, his eyes reflected the self-awareness letter to his dad: tired, haunted, cynical, and burnt-out. For years he had pigeonholed Flood as a renegade cop mixed up with drugs who took Genny down with him, but now historical perspective offered another point of view.

He fetched the honeymoon shot of Genny on a beach in Western Samoa from the mantel, and set it on the floor beside the head shot of Flood.

Think
, he thought.

The Headhunter is on the loose, and I'm cracking up. Flood is VPD liaison to my squad, and neurotically obsessed with severed heads. He takes the self-awareness course from Genevieve, and falls for her like I did. His love is unrequited because Genny loves me, but he'll do anything for her. Afraid I'm going to snap and unable to consult the Mounted for fear I'll be yanked from the case, she goes through the file at home and consults the outsider—Al Flood—over lunch.

She knows he'll do anything for her.

The night the Headhunter is supposedly shot, Flood receives the taunt of the head and the bucket of sand mixed with maple leaves. Genny's ordeal is over. But not his neurosis. So, still obsessed, Flood enlarges the taunt as he did the Polaroids.

He spots the different maple leaves.

For some reason he doubts Hardy's guilt. Perhaps the same reason that vexes me. The Headhunter raped his victims but didn't come. Before AIDS and DNA, that was evidence of sexual dysfunction. Hardy climaxed with the hookers he pimped.

Flood conveys his doubt to Scarlett, Lewis, Spann, Tipple, Mad Dog, and Macdonald.

He follows the trail of maple leaves to Elvira and beyond.

Flood finds the missing heads and takes them home. All are shrunken, with stitched lips pierced by small rings.

At lunch Genny had asked him to help save me from public disgrace.

I got the wrong man, so disgrace looms again.

Flood still loves her, and has honor.

He calls Genny before she leaves to join me at the Red Serge Ball, and asks her to meet him as she passes through the West End.

She does, learns what he found, and phones me at ' the ball.

"Fetch Robert, Jim. It's important."

"He's not here yet. We expect him soon."

"The moment he arrives, pass this on. I'm with one of my students, and there's a serious problem. Tell him he's a policeman and has to speak to him on a matter of grave concern."

"I'll make sure he gets it."

"Good. I'm on my way."

DeClercq reached for the booklet of Ident photos from the alley shoot-out. He opened the Acco fastener to remove the prints, then discarded those above the shot of ashes and gold rings in the burning tin. Dealing the photo off images below, he laid it on the floor beside the taunt of the head stuck on a stake in the bucket of sand.

The Headhunter discovers the shrunken heads are gone.

He recalls Flood expressing doubts to him and the other Members.

Back when he framed Hardy by planting the head of Genny's student and the nicked knife in the mountain cabin, hoping the bust later that night would boost him up the ranks, he stole a bag of coke from Hardy's cache under the floor.

He takes the coke to Flood's apartment in the West End.

Flood meets Genny away from home.

While he's gone, the Headhunter breaks in to steal back the heads, and burns them in the tin smoldering in the alley.

Flood returns with Genny, and they park their cars. They take the elevator up to his apartment to show her the heads. The Headhunter plants the coke in the hubcap of Flood's car, then calls Spann anonymously and tips her to the fact.

Spann arrives and finds the drugs a moment before Flood and Genny return to the lot, on their way to the ball to tell me.

The shoot-out between Flood and Spann is a set-up, Flood mistaking her for the Headhunter on the prowl, and Spann reacting in self-defense to a coked-out cop going for his gun.

Flood runs.

Spann follows.

It fits, he thought. If Spann was mistaken about Charlotte Clarke phoning in the tip.

No longer was he the child arranging soldiers on the floor, for now—or so he thought—the battle plan was clear, prompting him to rise from his knees to sit in the Watson . . .

... no, the Holmes chair.

But no sooner did his flayed bum hit the cushion than a wince of pain jerked both hands in the air, and there before his eyes was the final clue to solving the Headhunter mess.

The armchair detective stared in disbelief.

Jesus Christ!

When he had been called this morning about the attack at UBC, DeClercq had been going through the Ident photos of the shoot-out scene. Interrupted at the picture of the burning tin, he'd bookmarked the booklet to continue on later. The photo jerked up before his eyes was the next in the pile: shot into a garbage can beside the burning tin.

In the can was an open Adidas bag.

In the bag was an object resembling a Janus head. Two small faces back to back, with eight-inch rounded tongues protruding from each mouth curving up in opposite directions.

It was a fetish.

And something else.

DeClercq wrote a note for Katt, then went to get his gun.

He had a reopened file to close.

And a score to settle.

Headshrinker

The Headhunter passed DeClercq on Marine Drive. So deep in thought were hunter and hunted that neither saw the other drive by. From his home DeClercq headed east toward Lions Gate Bridge. The killer passed him driving the opposite way. Conversation with Mother an hour ago in town echoed in the psychotic mind unable to separate fantasy from reality:

"Mommy, he knows!"

"Easy, Sparky. We've been through this before."

"DeClercq isn't Flood!"

"DeClercq can be broken. You broke him once. We'll break him again."

"It's too late! He knows!" "If he knew, you'd be under arrest. Or there would be a takedown alert for you."

"If he doesn't know, he's damn close."

"And that's why you must do exactly what I say to cover our tracks."

"Our tracks, Mommy?" "The tape of you and me. We're not the only head-shrinkers in this." "What tape, Mommy?"

"Think, Sparky. Think. The tape in the recorder on his desk."

"I was taped!"

"You were under hypnosis. Taping what patients say is standard procedure."

"What did I say?"

"You spilled the beans. His office, and his desk, and his tape recorder. Your deepest secret on the tape in his hands. What if he decides to play the tape for DeClercq?"

"I'm fucked."

"We're not fucked yet. Both he and the tape must be erased."

"What about DeClercq?"

"Break him, Sparky. Fill his mind with anguish so he can't solve the case."

"The kid?"

"That'll break him."

"What if it's too late and DeClercq comes for me?"

"I'm dead, child, yet I live on. Death is a door to afterlife. If he comes for you, come to me. Promise you won't let him take you alive."

"I promise, Mommy."

"Good. Give 'em hell."

Beams probed the darkness for numbers up the road. Except for artificial light, this was a black-and-white world. The night was clear; the stars were out; and the moon had yet to rise. From black sky right to black sea left the mountain sloped white. The Jeep scurried along Marine like a black bug. Trees looming along the route gloomed it with shadows. The eyes of houses glared gold from the seaside woods. The address jumped like a jackrabbit into the beams. Sparky drove on and parked the Jeep out of sight.

Like Marine, the path to the house was shadowed by trees. Wind jerked the shadows like a silent film. Bony black bogeymen stripped of leaves voodoo shuffled amid thin pyramids on a snow-white screen. One hand around a limp sack to bag the head, the other gripping that two-foot machete with sliding six-ounce weight, the shadow of the Headhunter spooked the dark.

The windows of the cottage ahead glared like cat's eyes. Twin gables jutted from the roof like cat's ears. Bushes bristled by the door like cat's whiskers. Jagged icicles over the threshold yawned like cat's fangs. The Headhunter crept close to peer in one eye.

A real cat snoozed in front of the cheery hearth. The hearth was flanked by reading chairs. Glow from the fire gilded several books circling one chair. Window to window, the psycho circled the house, but there was no sign of the reader within.

No one home.

Sparky would have to wait.

The wait was filled with winter sounds. Foghorns out on English Bay. Trees groaning and creaking before the wind, and occasionally the snap of a broken branch. The swoop of an unseen owl overhead, then the squeal of prey caught in its talons. Cars slushing by on the road up the path. A car pulling in off the road, followed by the slamming of a door. The trudging of footsteps along the path. The soft crunch of snow as Sparky hid behind a tree near the cottage door.

Machete raised.

Weight near the handle.

The footsteps drew closer as a new shadow entered the horror film. The newcomer passed the bogeyman cast by Sparky's ambush tree. The shadow hugged something to its chest. Breath plumed from passing lips to blow back on the breeze.
Swoooshhh!
the machete arced from behind the tree. The leafless bogeyman near the door sprouted an extra arm. The weight slid to the tip of the blade with a metal-on-metal clang, centrifugal force added to the beheading.

The head of the shadow jumped off its shoulders in fright.

A fountain of fake blood exploded on-screen.

Moments later, real blood showered the path.

The headless body crumpled to its knees, releasing the bag clutched to its chest, then pitched stump first toward the door.

Sparky emerged from behind the bogeyman.

Sparky plucked the head with twitching lips out of the film.

Sparky gazed into the fading eyes of consciousness dying.

Like a servant of Madame Guillotine, Sparky showed the head to a mob of one.

"Delicious!"
Mother cried in glee from deep within the Headhunter's head.

Bomb Shelter

Vancouver

Don't buy a new dress

Don't hire a baby-sitter

Don't pay for parking

and

DON'T ATTEND!

Rather, stay at home and read a book and have a ball.

The Friends of the Vancouver Public Library request the pleasure of your participation in a "novel event." Don't pay for a ticket, a baby-sitter, and parking and get all dressed up to attend a glamorous public function in shoes that don't quite fit. Instead, sometime on Saturday, January 13, send us a donation (it's 100% tax deductible). Then snuggle down with your bunny slippers in your favorite cozy chair and get into your novel, knowing that just about all the proceeds from this fundraiser will go to supporting the efforts of the Vancouver Public Library.

My kind of party!
he thought.

Stamping his feet and hugging himself to ward off the cold, DeClercq stood in the concourse of Library Square, perusing the notice taped to the door of the staff entrance promoting
The first edition of the Stay Home and Read a Book Ball
as he waited for someone to answer his insistent pushing of the intercom button. He had no intention of wearing a dress and he didn't own a pair of bunny slippers, so he pondered whether all the Friends of the Library were women, and if not, how the gender-centric ad got approved in such an oh-so-proper P.C. institution, and what was this
just about all the proceeds
. . . but that was the cop in him.

Answer the door, dammit!

The wind roared in the concourse like a Colosseum lion.

The teeth of its bite bit into his bones.

The glory of ancient Rome survives in Vancouver, B.C. At the heart of this city with a downtown grid of tall, narrow, glass-faced buildings spreads a coliseum to rival Nero's sport. The only Christians fed to lions and gladiators clashing for a thumbs-up from the crowd are in History & Government on Level Six, unless you count novelists flayed by artless critics on the ground floor. The building, too, has suffered its share of rebuke, trashed by the Tinker Toy elite as "reflecting an ancient culture not relevant to a modern world-class city, blah, blah, blah." A full downtown block in girth and eight stories high (nine including the subterranean level), the Coliseum, opened in 1995, is a $100,000,000 offspring of the "free public library" launched with a $250 grant from the city council in 1887.

Now, that's inflation!

The security guard who released the door was six foot four in a blue uniform stretched as tightly around his bulk as Batman's get-up, with a ponytail cascading to his bottom and hands so huge they could tear the Mad Dog apart. Special Collections on Level Seven must recently have

scooped a hell of an acquisition.

The guard's name was Moe.

Moe used a security card strung around his beefy neck to pop internal doors. The staff elevator conveyed them up to Level Four, shared by Business & Economics and Science & Technology. Popping a door between the staff area and the public shelves, Moe blazed a trail through B & E to the escalator and elevators dividing this half from that of S & T.

"A lot of shelves," said DeClercq.

"Twelve miles," said Moe. "We got a million books and room for a million more."

"Must have been some move."

"Six hundred truck loads. First book to arrive was the World Bibliography of Bibliographies. I got all the facts."

"Security here dull?"

"It's got its moments. Fingers took a punch at me today. This time of year we get a lot of street bums in to keep warm. Fingers is this blind guy madly in love with Eve. Eve's the sign on the women's john. All signs in the library are tactile and braille for the sight-impaired. The washroom signs are triangles for men and circles for women."

"How Freudian. Who thought that up?"

"It's code of the state of California."

"Of course," said DeClercq.

"Tonight I get a complaint that Fingers is back. I go to the women's john, and sure enough, he's standing there fingering the circle on the tactile sign. He's mumbling to Eve that Casanova is his middle name. I walk up and tell him to leave the sign alone, and he takes a swing at me for trying to steal his girl."

Sex in the nineties
, thought DeClercq.
Anything goes.

Science & Technology covers pure sciences such as astronomy, mathematics, and zoology, and also applied sciences like medicine, forestry, and engineering. Here is where you find information on patents, construction, cooking, car repair, computers . . . and gardening. Waiting for the Mountie behind the service desk sat an owllike woman in Coke-bottle glasses with silver hair tucked in a bun reading Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. Nothing was more comforting to DeClercq than dealing with someone who fit the stereotype.

Moe bid him adieu and vanished.

"Thanks for staying after hours. I'm Chief Superintendent DeClercq."

"We aim to serve. I'm Charity Cox."

"The Franklen Collection." "The collection, ironically, is scattered about."

"Specifically, Pacific Planter for 1955."

"Let's check the Q.R. file."

Call him a Luddite, but DeClercq yearned for times past when libraries centered on books. The Coliseum was wired for the brave new world ahead, with seating for 1,200 readers and 800 computers, evidence of which was everywhere. Terminals to the left of him and terminals to the right; and fiber-optic vertical risers extending from the communications unit on Level Seven to switching points on the other floors. Virtual reality was closing fast, and he wondered if he'd see the day when the library checked out CD-ROMs of Monroe and Madonna and Harlow and other sexual fantasies for the plugged-in to take home to bed in their virtual-reality suits with a Suck-U-Lator attached to each wirehead's penis, gender-centrically speaking.

Stay Home and Have a Ball.

A fund-raiser indeed!

But what really concerned him was the virtual abattoir. A serial killer like the Headhunter had grown out of mental trauma, some incident so horrific the mind was unable to cope, resulting in psychotic or psychopathic warp. With virtual reality applied to games like
Doom
, soon every mind will be able to live similar trauma at home. Locked in a slaughterhouse as "real" as any on Earth, chainsaw killers will buzz butt as wireheads run shrieking through slabs of bloody human meat hung on hooks. Many will overload from the terror of it all, an experience like dropping acid in a waxworks Chamber of Horrors, resulting in psychotic or psychopathic warp. In the near future computers will generate psychos for ViCLAS to hunt.

Glory be, the Q.R. file was a
card catalog.

"The quick reference file cards what's not in the database," said Cox. "It's an index to continuations in the Doc Room beyond. Continuations are publications by organizations, and are alphabetically shelved in boxes by name of the group, not their newsletter. Here it is.
Pacific Planter
. The voice of Green Thumbs."

She led him through a gate in the service desk to skirt ranks of "green stripe books" in the Reference Room beyond and U around to the Doc Room behind the Q.R. file. Rows of blue boxes lined metal shelves labeled
University Docs, U.S. Federal Gov Docs, Canadian Gov Docs, and Foreign Gov Docs.

"No Vancouver city docs?" he asked.

"We file the hand that feeds us under
Foreign Gov Docs
," said Cox.

Librarians' humor?
he wondered.

Continuations lined the shelves to the right. Cox found
Pacific Planter
under G for Green Thumbs and took down the box for 1955.

"Anything else?"

"No," he said.

"Then, if you don't mind, Moe can see you out when you're through, and I'll go home to read."

In your bunny slippers?
he wondered.

He thanked her and took the box.

A building within a building, a rectangle in an ellipse, the Coliseum is a library turned inside out. The classic library layout is readers at the center and books around them. Here, the inner rectangle housed the books, and wrapped around it was an oval-shaped Reading Gallery which gave the building its Roman look. The, gap between the inner core and outer arcade was spanned by open "suicide bridges" that reached ten feet across the skylit atrium. As DeClercq carried the box across, he peeked over the rail, a thirty-nine-foot plunge from halfway up.

How long till some fool takes a swan dive?

Seated in the gallery at a cherrywood desk, a huge Diahann Carroll gazing in at him, DeClercq gazed out at the Ford Theater and
Sunset Boulevard
.

His eyes dropped to the intersection of Homer and Georgia below as a cop car turned the corner Al Flood might once have patrolled.

The trees on Georgia were maples.

Maples had brought him here.

"We found the location in the July 1955 Pacific Planter," Elvira said. "Shall I show you the article on the bomb shelter?"

He emptied the contents of the box out onto the desk. He leafed through the mimeographs until he found Pacific Planter, July 1955. The bomb-shelter piece was on page 5:

READY FOR WAR, BUT HOPING FOR PEACE

Maple trees flourish today above Mr. Albert Stone's bomb shelter. Mr. Stone acquired his property at a public auction of land confiscated from the Japanese during World War II—and this he says accounts for its fertility. "The place used to be a truck farm before the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor," Mr. Stone informed this columnist. Mr. Stone is quite a character.

We stood today in his garden fronting on the mighty sweep of the South Arm of the Fraser River. This writer asked him why he had planted a maple garden above his recently completed atomic bomb fallout shelter. "Is that not a strange juxtaposition?" your astonished reporter asked.

"Not at all," Mr. Stone countered. "When the commies send their nukes and the Big Hot One is on, this is one old man who's going to be ready. But until then me and my wife's memory will sit in our front garden."

And that, gentle readers, is what brought your columnist out here today. For among the varied saplings of acer macrophyllum stands the only sycamore maple so far planted in western Canada. It is a hardy little plant and certainly worth the drive on a Sunday afternoon.

It is perhaps the only acer pseudoplatanus that you might ever see.

"My wife was from the Ukraine, God rest her soul. She brought that seedling to the West—it was her Freedom Tree. When she died, I moved it. ..."

The Mountie took out his notebook and jotted down the address of Mr. Albert Stone's garden with the hardy little sycamore maple tree.