Ripper (11 page)

Dawn smudged the east.

Behind him, down a grassy track that followed the cliff, nestled the faculty parking lot at the foot of Cecil Green. There, four hours ago, Crossbones had watched Skull unload Zoe's corpse. To Doe's right, beyond the drop, Point Atkinson lighthouse winked across the onyx bay. Ahead, licked by tongues of mist wavering like ghostly flames, loomed the mortuary house beside the square museum. It hunched like a demon cowering in fear of dawn.

Finger on the shutter, eye to the camera, Doe waited patiently as pale light tiptoed across the murky bluff.

Stunned, he missed the shot.

The mortuary house was backed by dripping trees. Its tall, thin door pole had Watchmen on top. A double mortuary pole stood in front: two vertical cedar trunks joined like a cricket wicket by a carved crosspiece. When a Haida chief died, his body was placed in a burial chest on a shelf behind the horizontal board. The carving on the crosspiece of this Dogfish Burial Pole depicted a shark sticking out its tongue. A rope thrown over the board like a hangman's noose was hooked into the skull of a mutilated woman. Beneath her skinned face, bones were painted on her chest. A narrow black zigzag halved her torso from throat to pubic bone.

Doe shot a roll—business first—then ran to call the cops.

7:57
A.M.

Eric Chan was shaving when Nick Craven phoned. He'd worked the Jolly Roger case till three
A.M.
with four hours leep, so his reaction to the news was
I must be dreaming.
A time warp had somehow returned him to the Headhunter case.

"It's not a crank," Craven said, reading his mind. "Campus security confirmed the report. A faceless body is hanging from the same totem the Headhunter used."

"Chief been told?"

"Not yet. He's winging East. I'll airphone the plane as soon as we hang up."

"Where are you?"

"HQ. Heading for UBC."

"Nick . . ."

"Uh-huh?"

"How far'd you get into the book?"

"Only to the part where the first body's hung. Had an early morning yesterday. I fell asleep."

"Check the fourth chapter where the next body's dumped. Jolly Roger leaves it
hanging from a pole."

8:01
A.M.

The cocker spaniel was old and hobbled with a limp. The army colonel was old, too, and walked with a cane. He knew he should have the dog put down, the merciful thing to do, just as he knew when Monique went he would follow soon. A few more weeks with nature and her was all he asked.

Monique was named for a cancan girl he'd met in wartime France. The dog wore a knitted vest with pretty pink bar-rettes above both ears. Rotund in his trench coat, the colonel was a sausage roll topped with a black beret. As man and dog crossed the open field of Musqueam Park, the last wisps of fog turned to silver rain.

The dog began to bark.

At first the colonel thought Monique felt the wet chill in her rheumatic joints. She limped, however, toward the trees instead of home, telling him she'd spotted something in the woods ahead. A moment later, he, too, saw the corpse.

Suddenly the old man was back in France, gazing up at a parachutist snagged in the trees. But he was now a she and naked, unlike then.

Monique stood barking by the mossy trunk.

Chloe's feet swayed above the spaniel's head.

Bewildered, the colonel gawked at the fishhooked chest.

Dimming eyes strained to focus on the bait.

8:26
A.M.

Chan was on Chancellor Boulevard when the radio squawked. The street was clogged with students on their way to class.

"Three echo two . . . Four three Vancouver."

"Four three, go ahead . . . Three echo two."

"Report of a hanging, faceless body, Inspector."

Chan frowned. "Almost there. Is something different?"

"The location. Musqueam Park."

"Not a
second
body?"

"Ten four," HQ confirmed. "Looks like we've got a double event."

Chan passed Craven near the museum, one car heading west, the other east. Beyond the cliff to his right lay the ocean vista: Howe Sound with the glaciers of Garibaldi, Vancouver Island across Georgia Strait, the Fraser River delta southwest around the point. After the Nitobe Japanese Gardens, the university gave way to undeveloped land. Three miles around the point from the museum, red and blue wigwags flashed in the park.

As Chan reached Musqueam, the downpour began.

8:32
A.M.

Craven crouched beside the Dogfish Burial Pole out back of the museum. Minutes ago sunbeams had bounced off its glass, but now the building was wrapped in a slimy gray skin. Dressed in white overalls—"monkey suits"—Ident techs videotaped and searched the scene. Three worked swiftly to plaster cast a print before the ground became a sea of mud. A fourth tweezered something into a paper bag.

"What'd you find?" Nick asked.

"No idea." The tech handed him the bag.

"Was it dropped? Or already here?"

"You tell me," the tech said, as Nick looked into the bag.

At the bottom was a soggy oval of fur.

Soldier of Fortune

East of Reno 

6:40
A.M.

Mercenary. Vietnam vet. Action in Africa.

Available for missions, no questions asked.

Half up front, half on completion.

Tortured in Angola, secrecy guaranteed.

Write "Corkscrew, " Box 106,

Rattlesnake, Nevada.

True to his ad in
Foreign Legion
magazine, Garret Corke was a Vietnam vet. Not mentioned was his discharge from the Air Cavalry as being "too vicious for war."

True to his ad in
Foreign Legion
magazine, Garret Corke had survived torture in Angola. The ordeal wasn't as arduous as it sounds, thanks to the fact Corke did the torturing.

The advertising world is full of deception.

In the early Seventies, Corke shipped out to Vietnam with a thousand hits of Owsley acid in his gear. Owsley was the Haight's best psychedelic chemist. In Asia, Corke wormed his way into the Air Cav so he could volunteer for "lurp" raids. During the day Viet Cong controlled the steaming jungle, returning to their villages after dark to sleep. Lurps were counterguerrilla raids where helicopter gunships strafed the villages at night, machine-gunning Charlie, his family, and anything else that moved.

Corke possessed a World War I aviator's helmet like that worn by Snoopy to battle the Red Baron. Once a raid was underway, he would drop a tab or two and strip off his clothes, donning the hood in the darkness of his gunner's turret. A horse's bridle lashed to it passed through his mouth. Just before the chopper swooped on a jungle village, he'd wrap his arms and legs around the mounted M-60 so he and it were one, the barrel jutting from his thighs like history's biggest cock. Trigger hooked behind the bridle clamped in his teeth, Corke would jerk his head back to discharge the weapon, causing the gun to jackhammer his groin until he shot a load. On a good gook-kill, he'd come three times.

Then word got around.

"Soldier?"

"Yes, sir."

"What the fuck you doing? Report is weird shit's happening out there."

"We're here to fuck the slopes, sir. Just following orders."

Twenty years had passed since then but Corke was still doing "missions." Have gun, will travel: this New Age Paladin. Terminations, for danger pay: this modern soldier of fortune.

Terminations like DeClercq.

With today to prepare.

Corke awoke at dawn to snow falling in the desert. His bivouac and the land around were dusted white. Wrapped in a zero-degree Polarguard mummy bag, he watched dawn smudge the horizon to the east. His Jeep and the "hanging tree" stood in black relief.

Naked, he climbed from the bag.

Whether Corke was sane or not depended on the day, for psychologically he lived in a borderline state. Long-boned and lanky, with ropelike muscles and goose-pimpled skin, this morning he fingered the piercings through his metal-studded flesh. While tugging the rings through his nipples and the hooks through slits in his chest, shadows passed behind his eyes like a burglar's image on drawn window shades. While tugging the guiche, hafada, ampallang, frenum, and Prince Albert studding his cock, his lids drooped half-mast and his jaw hung slack, then the goatlike smell of psychosis seeped from his pores.

Ready, Corke approached the "hanging tree."

Though missions brought him money, comfort meant nothing to Corke. Physical and mental toughness were his holy grails, and had been since the day his dad first withdrew the "witch doctor" from his workshop drawer. "Flinch and I'll repeat it. Cry and you get it twice."

The hanging tree was his version of the O-Kee-Pa Sun

Dance of the Plains tribes. The metal frame beside the Jeep resembled a playground swing: two upside down Vs linked by a crossbar. A pair of two-foot chains hung from the bar instead of a seat.

One type of Sun Dance was "Man Against Himself." The chest was pierced with fleshhooks tied by ropes to a tree, the brave struggling against them until he
ripped
free. Corke had done that, but not today. O-Kee-Pa was different, for it involved suspension. The hooks in Corke's chest beside the nipple rings were S-shaped piercings through his pecs. Gripping the bar with both hands, he chinned himself; wriggling until the S-hooks caught the last links in both chains. He lowered himself, head back, until he hung suspended a foot off the ground.

First there was pain.

Then pain became sensation.

Filling him with the white light of self-transformation.

Corke hung for ten minutes, naked except for the snow.

Until he smelled the rotting flesh that kicked in "stalking mode."

Consciousness left his body, freeing him from all restrictions, and hovered overhead like a master puppeteer.

His body was in the physical world.

His mind in the Astral Plane.

During the mission he'd feel no pain and have no fear.

He was ready to stalk DeClercq.

Like the forty-one others he'd killed.

The music blaring from the Jeep was Ministry's
Psalm 69.
"Jesus Built My Hotrod," "Corrosion," and "Grace." Industrial noise for the Fourth Reich, with Corke providing the screams. Dressed in a red-checked flannel shirt, green down-filled vest, gray Wrangler jeans and anaconda boots, he looked like any other pseudo-cowboy in the West. His Stetson rode in the passenger's seat.

Corke parked the jeep off South Virginia and strolled into the glitz. After a gambler's breakfast in the Eureka Casino— huevos rancheros, black coffee, and dry toast—he toured the parasites that feed off the Strip. Cheek to ass with Harrah's, Harolds, and the Nevada Club, a nether world of loan sharks, pawnshops, and check-cashers financed good luck. The sign outside the shop he entered read
we buy, sell, or
trade diamonds and guns. Superstition decreed he buy a new death-dealer for each mission.

Beyond the Indian jewelry and Wild West souvenirs, beyond the fur coats and ratty deer heads mounted on the wall, an L-shaped glass counter displayed guns, ammunition, and knives.

"What'll it be?" asked the clerk, drinking his morning Coke. His face was stubbled and he hadn't brushed his teeth. His T-shirt bore Nevada's seal and motto
all for our country.

".41 Mag?" he suggested, producing a nickle-plated gun before Corke answered. "Rare and deadly. A connoisseur's piece.

"10 mm FBI Special?" he countered, laying another weapon beside the Mag. "It's good enough for them, it's good enough for you.

"All my .357s are crackers," he added, sweeping an arm down the case to illustrate his point. Hanging from a steel rod through their trigger guards, fifty-odd revolvers hung upside down like sloths.

"The Colt Python is my fav—" he confided, but Corke cut him short with "I'm looicin' for a blade."

"Bowie's the best."

"Got one o' them. What'cha got in an I-talian switch?"

Smuggling a gun into Canada was too big a risk. Living in this town, you learned to figure odds. The clerk placed a tray of switchblades on the counter. Instinctively, Corke selected the deadliest one.

Kchuck!
The blade snapped open and locked when he pushed the handle button. Fingernailing the catch on top refolded it.

Kchuck!

Now you see it.

Kchuck!

Now you don't.

Kchuck!

He could already feel DeClercq's death throes along the blade.

Black Candles

Vancouver 

11:55
A.M.

Gill Macbeth was having one of those days. Last night the furnace in her home had conked out, endangering the African gray parrot and greenwinged macaw in her aviary. This morning her brand-new BMW wouldn't start, leaking a trail of oil down the driveway to the street. Late for work, she'd been drinking a cup of coffee in the cab when a motorist smooching his squeeze had rear-ended the taxi. Gill had arrived at the hospital looking like she'd peed herself.

And now to top the morning off that asshole Craven was back.

"Back for more?" the morgue attendant asked, winking at Nick. He locked the autopsy gurneys into stations side by side while the cops waited for Macbeth to show.

"Ice queen. Suits the place," said the exhibit man.

"But nice tits, huh, Nick?" ribbed the Ident man. "If her neckline gapes again, the dead won't be the only stiffs in here."

"Gentlemen, please," the attendant chided. "You're talking about my boss."

"Here," Nick said, producing a CD. "Play this when I give you the sign."