Primal Scream (8 page)

"Nick," DeClercq said to Craven, "find Wren's home and toss it."

Craven had left for Wren's hotel in skid road, and Macbeth had driven the shrunken head back to the VGH morgue for more postmortem. Chandler went down to H.Q.'s canteen for cinnamon buns and coffee, and now DeClercq and Lewis sat munching hi the sergeant's office. Outside in ViCLAS central, the Suits wore smiles.

"Why the change in attitude?" asked DeClercq.

"I told the corporal guiding them to point out our Acknowledgements." Lewis flipped forward in the booklet to page iii:

This questionnaire and computer-aided system used by the ViCLAS units are based on the research and experience of members of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (VICAP), the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation's Sex Crimes Analysis System, the Washington State Attorney General's Homicide Investigation and Tracking System, the New York State Police's Homicide Assessment and Lead Tracking System, and RCMP E Division Violent Crime Analysis Unit's Major Crime Organizational System.

"You brown-noser," said DeClercq, grinning.

"Ours is the first time any country has programmed a system for murders, sex crimes, missing persons, and abductions on a national level. The FBI's contains just murders. ViCLAS casts a wider net, and bridges language barriers through no key words, just point and click. So we're asking the FBI to look at upgrading our system by adopting it in
theirs
.

"The piss-off," added Lewis, "is we've got foreign police beating a path to our door, yet it's a hard sell to convince our own to use the system."

"We're notorious for overburdening our detachments with paper," said DeClercq. "A survey of twenty-five hundred Members found 'excessive paperwork' the top cause of stress. No wonder with nine hundred different operation forms to fill out. We'd rather tackle a crook than wrestle with an arrest report. Risk from working alone was
far
below. I pray the Simplified Paperless Universal Reporting System helps."

"SPURS won't help me," grumbled Lewis. "The ViCLAS joke with Members is 'We're not here to prevent crime—we're here to report it.' "

"The Bic is mightier than the Smith & Wesson, eh?" said DeClercq. "A cop can pass through his whole career without drawing his gun, but an hour into the job will see him Sourish a pen. We don't lug briefcases around because we like big lunches. Someone in Ottawa seeks to explore the outer limits of clerkishness at the Force's expense. Why sixteen pages of forms for run-of-the-mill impaireds?"

"One thing for sure," said Chandler. "You'll never see me write up another UFO."

"You're kidding?" laughed Lewis.

"I wish I were. That file was a nightmare from the idealistic period of my service. This guy swore he saw a UFO over the Rockies. From what he reported, it could have been a distress flare. If I had written it up like that, it would have taken two pages. But no, I was dumb and went by the book. Twelve volumes, each six to eight inches thick, and sure enough, our manual has procedure for UFOs. In following it, I had to check with National Defense, Search and Rescue, the Weather Service, nearby airports, air traffic controllers, et cetera, et cetera, for rational explanations. The file kept growing. Next, calls and letters started coming in. Scientific groups, wanting me to check this and that, find witnesses, work with Fox Mulder. Before long the file was thicker than the manual. But never again. Unless I
see
the UFO land, then little green buggers running around."

Droopy bedroom eyelids made Lewis look like he was going to cry. "That's the problem," he said. "It's hard to persuade skeptical cops to invest an hour in filling out a ViCLAS report. Behavioral analysis is mumbo-jumbo to some, and those who already have a suspect see us as a waste of time. The big push now is to get one hundred percent reporting, with fifteen thousand cases a year flowing in. Veteran cops moan they've yet to see a computer that'll solve crime. We reply a computer will never replace the gut feelings of a detective, but—like the Fingerprint Identification System and Forensic Lab—ViCLAS will be a useful tool. If tied to a national DNA databank, this will be twenty-first-century policing."

"We may need a law that makes filling out a ViCLAS report mandatory," said DeClercq. "Till then I'll make it easy for you with this one."

The chief superintendent completed page 35:

Lewis entered the information into the databank to search for a link. A link was a signal that two murders were probably committed by the same person. ViCLAS gave him this:

"A computer will never replace the gut feelings of a detective?" echoed DeClercq. "I don't know, Sergeant. ViCLAS has definitely picked up mine."

Carnival

Round and round went the tape in the tape recorder playing on George Ruryk's desk. Listening intently, the psychiatrist jotted notes . . .

". . . the black girl's name was Crystal. She was in her teens. Through the keyhole of my cell I could hear them talking in the boudoir off the Mask Room. They had sex, and were snorting cocaine ..."

"Crystal," Suzannah said gently. "I must ask you a question. Listen before you answer. Okay?"

The girl nodded.

"The moment I spied you this afternoon, I knew we were the same. That's why I followed you from the laundry after work and sat beside you in that greasy little restaurant. You looked so alone. Have you enjoyed what we've done this evening?"

The girl nodded.

"Well, there's no reason in the world why you must go. No one knows you're here. No one knows you're with me. And no one needs to know. Would you like that?"

Again the nod.

"Good, because tomorrow night I'd like to take you to Europe. To London, Paris, and Rome. I'd like to buy you fine clothes. I'd like to give you all the coke you want. I'd like to spend hours playing with your pussy, till you're so hot you fear you're going to melt. Sound like fun?"

The girl swallowed hard.

"Here," said Suzannah. "Let's run away for good." Pulling open the washstand drawer, she withdrew a thick pack of hundred-dollar bills and tossed it to the girl. Crystal's mouth dropped. The cash slipped through her fingers and tumbled to the floor.

"Go on. Pick it up. That's yours," the woman said. "There's ten thousand dollars at your feet. And that's just spending money."

"Where'd you get it?" the girl exclaimed.

"From my guest
before
our guest who comes tonight. This one will bring us another twenty grand. After he's finished, we're off and free. I'll have earned a hundred grand from Mardi Gras this year. Not bad for two weeks' work, eh?"

The dumbfounded girl was speechless, as stoned eyes gazed at the money.

"Crystal," Suzannah said softly. "It's time to answer that question. Do you want to stay with me—or go back to slaving at the laundry in fear one day your pig of a father will hunt you down?"

In a flash the girl crossed the space between them and cuddled in her arms. Tears touched Suzannah's flesh where glove joined corset. As the woman soothed, "That's my girl" comfortingly, she studied the maudlin image in the washstand mirror.
Snaring her was easy
, she thought with pride.
Once you know the market of life—and what fools need to buy.

She held the girl a moment longer, then extricated herself. "No turning back, love. Is that agreed?"

"Yes," Crystal said.

Suzannah led the "Carnival" back to the Mask Room. There she opened a door sandwiched between her boudoir and the eye at the keyhole to Sparky's prison. The dark maw dropped down a spiral staircase. "Come," the dominatrix lured. "And Mardi Gras with me . . ."

"... Mother's guest that night was the Axman of New Orleans. Not the real Axman of the First World War, but a businessman who made his fortune in nuclear arms, and who lost the love of his mother after a black girl sent to fetch a doctor forsook the errand. Guilt twisted him up inside, which Mother relieved.

"By candlelight I saw the silhouettes in the Mask Room. ..."

Suzannah sat imperiously in the whipping chair and told the Axman to strip. Having come from the Rex Ball, now in full swing at the Municipal Auditorium up on St. Peter Street, he wore a tuxedo and black Carnival mask. Chained to his wrist was a briefcase, which he unlocked and opened at her boots before shucking off his jacket to reveal the ax. The hatchet hung in a sling under the armpit of his ruffled shirt.

"The bitch who killed your mother is here," Suzannah said.

The words hardened his penis as the Axman shed his pants. When he was naked, except for the mask, he slung the sling again, then crossed to the wall by the French doors to pull on the Ku Klux Klan hood which hung there for him.

Kneeling, he stacked the money in the briefcase at

her feet.

Then one gloved hand, tips sliced off to bare her scarlet claws, gripped him by the hard-on to tug him to the dark maw.

The eye at the keyhole watched as both silhouettes disappeared below. . .

". . . I knew she'd return to the Mask Room for me. I often overheard her discussing me with the masks. 'When you don't have the one you hate, you work with what you have.' I'd be crying through the keyhole, 'Mommy! Mommy, I'm sorry! Forgive me, Mommy! Please!' Mother would cackle and tell the masks, 'What you hear bawling is my special project.' She loathed my father. And she didn't want me. So she killed him and buried him under the ice and went to work on his child.

"I heard footsteps on the stairs.

"Then saw rings at the keyhole ..."

Round and round they descended down the iron steps that sank from the Mask Room to the cellar with a trapdoor in its floor. The hand which gripped Sparky's hair never let go as Suzannah set down the hurricane lamp to yank on the rusty ring. A belch of foul, damp air burped from the pit below.

Held out in front like a headhunter displaying her trophy, Suzannah pushed Sparky down into the hole. Here a slimy ladder clung to oozing brick walls, the shadows cast by the lamp above dragging down the child. Whining wind and running water filled the cavern with noise, as down the pair went to a flight of stone steps, and down again.

The vaulted cavern materialized once Sparky's eyes adjusted. Its floor of chipped flagstone, its arches of masonry, the corridor stretched away to black infinity, where a barred grille blocked the mouth of the channeled stream to the right fed by the Mississippi. As this was a smuggling depot for French pirates hi the seventeenth century, shadows cast by the dancing lamplight could be their ghosts.

From a door off the corridor to their left, a godless gibber wailed.

Sparky pulled away.

Suzannah tightened her grip.

The dominatrix pushed open the door and shoved her child in.

She, too, entered.

The lock behind snicked.

The key on a chain noosed around her neck slithered between her breasts.

The stone crypt was a torture chamber, twenty feet by thirty. The chimney from the fireplace snaked up one wall like a sucking vein, while cobwebs hung like veils from its bricks. Branding irons dangled from the rim of a brazier glowing by the hearth. Its wheels with clamps a metaphor for pain, dark stains discolored the surface and ran in drip lines down the side of the rack against the opposite wall. Door gaping open on a hundred spiked teeth, an iron maiden crouched in the corner. As horror closed in on the child, Sparky's terrified eyes skipped about, from ivory grins leering on the skull rack overhead, to gleaming surgical instruments laid out in tidy rows, to whips and cat-o'-ninetails hooked on the wall to which Crystal was fettered by a collar locked around her throat.

The ax leaned near the rack.

The mummy hung suspended from a meat hook fastened to a chain. At least it looked like a mummy, this trussed-up thing, except both arms were stretched out as if in crucifixion. The form encased inside was bandaged in plaster of Paris, holes cut in the hood beneath for the mouth, nose, and eyes, holes gaped in the body swathing for genitals and anus. The enamel tray positioned under the dangling feet was spattered with red, white, brown, and yellow. Thrashing within caused the mummy to swing, side to side, then back and forth, on the hooked chain. The swaying became more frantic as Suzannah approached, her fingers plucking steel torment from the instruments displayed.

"No, woman!
Pleeease!
I'm so afraid of
neeeedles
!"

"There, there," Suzannah cooed. "Endure two more." And she jabbed the slivers of steel into the pincushion head of his penis.

Crablike, Sparky hid under the rack for safety.

Shrieks bounced wildly off the stone walls, ending with chokes and blubbers. Lips twisted within the mouth hole of the plaster mask, yammering and beseeching, but only whines came out. The man ground his tongue between his teeth.

"If only he were your father," Suzannah snarled at the rack, while she rammed a needle through his scrotum between his testicles.

"
Noooo
!" screamed the mummy, his lips a rictus of dread. .The naked kids cowered away as the howl tore his throat. Growling insanely, the mummy thrashed and spun, a squirt of white arcing from the prong por-cupined with steel, then . . .
craccck . . . craccck . . . craccck
... the plaster of Paris crumbled, chunks raining down on the flagstone floor as white dust billowed up, choking Sparky beneath the rack while flecking Crystal's black skin, the mummy wrap shedding like a cocoon to release the Axman locked inside.

Unhooked, he crumpled to the floor amid a cloud of powder.

Crystal freaked when he grabbed the ax.

"You killed my mother, bitch," he croaked hoarsely as she struggled to break free from the collar chaining her.

Sparky wormed back beneath the rack to the dungeon wall, eyes fixed on the shadows that mirrored what went down above.

The shadow ax rose.

The shadow ax fell.

Crystal broke free as a splash of blood and an arm hit the floor. The arm quivered spasmodically while the fingers closed in a fist.

The armless shadow wailed and staggered around the crypt.

The Axman shadow stalked.

Up, down . . . up, down . . . the ax rose and fell, as the splat of blood became a pool that washed about the girl when she fell in.

The Axman dropped to his knees to chop, chop, chop in a frenzy.

Sparks burst from the stone floor with each
clang!
of the ax.

"Bitch! Bitch! Bitch! Bitch! . . ." the Axman spat in counter point to the blows. Bones cracked and chunks of flesh plopped about.

A red wave surged in to inundate Sparky.

The red sea parted around spike-heeled black boots with red laces, the tongue of a whip dangling down like a snake to swim in the blood.

"Will you come out, Sparky? Or do I come in to get you?"

The child knew only too well the price of flouting Mother's will. On hands and knees Sparky wriggled out. Suzannah towered overhead like some Colossus of Rhodes. Boots led to stockings that rose to white thighs, lined like blood drips with red garters. Where thighs joined, her black bush nestled rings, laced up by a black thong that hung like the whip.

"Carnival. 'Flesh farewell.' Our guest gives Mardi Gras such literal meaning."

Looming high, the bald head laughed.

Behind Suzannah, the "Carnival" called Crystal had ceased to exist. All that remained were chopped-up bits on the floor, which the Axman fed with relish to the Ku Klux Klan hood.

Glint . . . glint . . . glint . . . Golden rings.

"Are you your father's spawn? Or do you belong to me?" Suzannah's voice was a throaty rasp. "Prove you're mine, and no one will hurt you. Unlace me, Sparky. Then kiss your Mother's lips." The child began to screech. And weep out of control.

"Daddy! Where are you, Daddy! Help me, Daddy! Please!"

("I'm here, Sparky, i am you.")