Evil Eye

by Michael Slade

  Removing the bandage revealed a small cut.

  "A recent incised wound one centimeter long on the

  palmar aspect of the left index finger over the distal phalanx," Gill recorded.

  The Ident tech snapped photos as she worked. Every find was marked with a number and two-centimeter scale. Location shot, to 2-to-l, to 1-to-l with a macro lens, he filled each frame with as much detail as possible. Shot in close proximity to the finger, 1-to-l captured the cut on the negative life-size.

  "No defense marks on the palms," Gill noted. After she scraped the nails, the Ident tech inked and printed the fingers.

  The pathologist used a scalpel blade to shave the bloody scalp. Matted hair fell away to reveal a zigzag-patterned bruise on the skin both sides of an irregular laceration. 'The force of the blow that tore the scalp imprinted the mark," Gill said. "This pattern is on the striking surface of the weapon."

  "A club?" Rachel asked.

  "Possibly."

  "With an ornamental zigzag on the head?"

  "Embossed. Raised in relief. Not carved into the surface."

  "Like an Indian war club?"

  "Your field, not mine."

  The Ident tech tried different lights with filters to enhance the mark. "Contrast photography will show it better. Can we take the skin to close the split back at the Lab?"

  "Preserve the skin," the tool marks examiner said, "and we can match the bruise with the weapon when it's found."

  Gill reflected the scalp from the skull to cut the skin away for the morgue attendant to treat. The skull beneath was indented with a semilunar hollow radiating linear fractures. "Single-blow blunt-force cranial cerebral trauma," she recorded.

  "Instant death?" Rachel asked.

  "No, but immediate loss of consciousness."

  "All that blood came from the brain?"

  "From the scalp," Gill answered.

  At the other station, Dr. Singh examined Jack Mac-Dougall faceup, due to the intestines spilling from his belly. Pinkish-brown last night, the coils were turning

  purple. When Singh rolled the body on its side to probe the back of the head, Gill and Rachel joined the group at his dissecting unit.

  "Same weapon?" Rachel asked.

  "No opinion. Repeated bludgeoning pulverized the back of this skull. The scalp was shredded when he was dragged faceup by the feet."

  "The wounds don't link the killings?"

  Gill shook her head. "The same killer or different killers, I can't tell."

  Singh checked both corpses and confirmed the open question.

  Back at her dissecting unit, Gill opened Dora up. Cutting from throat to pubis, she peeled skin and fat away to expose muscles covering the internal organs, cracking the rib cage with bone shears to access the lungs and heart. From the heart she siphoned forty milliliters of blood to inject into Vacutainers destined for the RCMP Forensic Lab. Red top tubes for Ci plain" blood. Gray top tubes for "preserved" blood. Purple top tubes for DNA blood samples.

  The exhibit woman marked each tube with an exhibit number.

  The tubes were signed by Gill Macbeth and the exhibit woman.

  The autopsy over, Rachel Kidd checked the evidence the exhibit woman would convey to the Lab, dotting the /'s and crossing the f's of continuity. If the case went to trial, defense counsel would try to break the "chain of continuity" to raise a doubt in the jury's mind whether exhibits may have been "tainted" before they were lab tested. Clothes, shoes, apron, samples of Dora's blood, tissue, hair, body swabs, and finger scrapings: all was in order. Satisfied, Kidd left the hospital and walked toward her car.

  She stopped short.

  Macbeth's BMW was parked next to the ghost car. As the pathologist unlocked the driver's door, another car pulled up and honked. Nick Craven was behind the wheel. Gill smiled, waved, and relocked the door. She crossed to Nick's car and climbed in. Through the rear window, Rachel saw Gill kiss Nick hard on the lips.

  EVIL EYE 99

  Hmmm y she thought.

  Coquitlam

  Staff Sergeant Bill Tipple was one of the living dead. He was eleven years into his afterlife. It was thanks to crime that he was still on Earth, instead of blown to smithereens when an overpowered, underworld bomb blew his car apart.

  Zombie, they called him.

  The bulls in GIS.

  Tipple had made his name in the Headhunter case. A man of slight build with a pockmarked face and dusting of dandruff on the shoulders of his sports jacket, he wasn't the sort of Mountie the Force used on a recruitment poster. But what he lacked in looks he made up in energy, plus the fact he was blessed with horseshoes up his Horseman's ass. Having intruded himself into that pressure-cooker case—he was a Special I eavesdropper with Commercial Crime at the time—luck found him in the right place when the bust went down. Then the night of the Red Serge Ball to celebrate victory, he'd walked to the mall for aspirin to dull a nagging headache, and that's when a thief hot-wired his car and set off the ignition bomb.

  Initial reports had Tipple killed.

  When he returned from the dead, they promoted him in lieu of a funeraL

  Now "Zombie" was head of the Plainclothes cops in Coquitlam GIS.

  Rachel's boss.

  The staff sergeant at his desk and the corporal to one side, they sat talking in the glass-walled cubbyhole off the bull pen. Two constables in the main room were munching lunch. Tipple stopped Kidd midsentence. "Close the door," he said. The route this "bounce" was taking he wanted no one to overhear. She shut the door tight.

  "You know what you're alleging?"

  "Yes," Rachel said.

  "You know the consequences if you're wrong?"

  "I'll be frozen out."

  "You understand what that means?"

  "Fail in going after one of our own, and I'll be shunned."

  "So?"

  "So any charge has got to stick."

  "Okay. I'm listening. Make your case."

  "Corporal Craven informed me he's an only child. I double-checked and he's the only birth registered to his mom. This letter was found in one of the drawers at the murder scene."

  Kidd placed the copy on Tipple's desk so he could read:

  December 2, 1993 Mother—

  It's taken my lifetime to uncover your whitewashed secret. Discussing it face to face on my birthday seems fitting. I'll call on the 7th.

  "Typed and not signed," the staff sergeant noted.

  "Yes, sir," Kidd said. "But he's the victim's only child and the seventh is his birthday. He was at the murder scene from four-thirty to five-ten p.m. yesterday. Just mother and son for a private birthday party. Dora baked a pumpkin pie whipped-creamed 'Happy Birthday.' She was doing the dishes— two pie plates, two pie forks, two teacups—when she was clubbed at the sink. Who would she cut the pie for but the Birthday Boy? The window above the sink reflects the room behind. Someone she knew took her by surprise."

  "Craven ate the pie?"

  "Says he didn't."

  "Why admit being there and deny that?"

  "So it looks like someone came after him."

  "Assuming he typed the letter, what's this 'whitewashed secret?' "

  "Just a guess."

  "Let's hear it," Tipple said.

  "Craven told me his father shot himself the day he was born. His dad was a Member in Alberta, I found out. The night he died, only his wife, sister, and the baby were in the house. It was a home delivery in Medicine Hat. There was an inquest and both women were cleared. Craven told me his aunt died last month. Fell

  down the stairs in the house where he was born. What if he subconsciously blamed himself for his father's death, then recently turned up something implicating his mom? Might he not explode with repressed rage for depriving him of Dad and burdening him with guilt?"

  "Evidence?"

  She tapped the letter. "Circumstantial conjecture. The murder has all the elements of a close-relationship crime. No break-in. No robbery. And no sexual assault. Beating the face points t
o a killer related to the victim."

  "The face was beaten?"

  "The back of the skull was crushed."

  "Careful," warned Tipple. "Hardly a fren.

  "No," said Kidd. "But psychologically sound. Cold heart. Cold mind. Kills in a cold rage."

  "Anvthing in Craven's background that shows he's capable?"

  Rachel placed Nosy Parker's scrapbook on the desk. Tipple studied the Jekyll-to-Hyde photos of Nick. "Ran afoul of drugs in his teens." she said. "Demons under the surface? Hiding from Mom? He changed when she was comatose in the hospital. Dad dead from suicide and son raised by mom. Matricide profile. And his girlfriend is older than him."

  "How much older?"

  "Five years," Rachel said.

  "Careful." warned Tipple. "I had a girlfriend much younger than me."

  "Not the same. Oedipus angle. Younger man. older woman equates with Mom. And this older woman is part of the case."

  "Who?"

  "Dr. Gill Macbeth. She did the autopsy. I saw them smooching in his car and got suspicious. What's a VGH pathologist doing at Royal Columbian Hospital? Helping out, she said. Truth is she phoned and asked to do the postmortem. Crime and Punishment? Is Raskolnikov using her to interfere in the case?"

  "Smoke," said Tipple. ''Gimme fire."

  "Craven arrived at his mom's at four-thirty p.m. He was wearing an overcoat over his Red Serge. When he left at five-ten, the coat was missing and he was carrying a large plastic bag. He told me he spilled tea on the coat

  and left it behind. No coat was found in the house and no murder weapon. He was the last person seen there until we arrived. No sign of tampering and all the doors were locked. His mom, he said, would never open the door to a stranger."

  "Theory?"

  "The house was locked and Mom let him in. He had a bone to pick with her as evidenced by the letter. The date—his birthday—is somehow tied in. Anniversaries always play on the emotions. Wearing the overcoat, he clubbed her from behind. The bloody club and coat went into the bag. When he left the house, the door locked after him."

  "Why lock the door? Why not leave it open? Schreck on the loose, we'd think it was him."

  "Schreck's a coincidence after the fact. He killed the deputies and escaped at five-ten, the same time Craven was seen leaving the house. Luckily for us, the locked door eliminates Schreck."

  "What about MacDougall? Craven's clear of that?"

  "Yes, he was talking with investigators on Colony Farm at the time."

  "Schreck killed MacDougall?"

  "Or someone else."

  "The autopsies support your theory?"

  "The sheriff's deputies were stomped, not clubbed. MacDougall and Dora were bludgeoned, but their wounds don't link the weapon."

  "Why write his mother? Why not phone? They live in the same city. Who writes letters these days?"

  "Maybe it isn't a letter. Maybe it's a note. Dropped by, she wasn't home, so he stuck it to the fridge."

  "Fingerprints?"

  "The original's being checked. Preliminary report says just hers."

  "Typewriter in the house?"

  "Doesn't match. Perhaps he typed it beforehand in case she wasn't home."

  "Anything else?"

  "No," Kidd said.

  Tipple turned sideways to face her straight on. No mistaking the seriousness in his voice. "Reason you're in GIS is I asked for you. Reason you're a corporal is

  my recommendation. You've got a future. Don't ruin your career with this case. I won't shut you down. Craven's in the frame. But there's far from enough to support a charge. By the book, hear me? Give yourself an out. Tug the rip cord if you smell danger. First thing you do is ask him about the letter. Cards on the table. Nothing up your sleeve. If your bluff gets called, walk away from the game."

  ASSIZE

  New Westminster Tuesday, March 1, 1994

  Three months after Dora Craven was bludgeoned to death, Lyndon Wilde called Rachel Kidd as a Crown witness in Morgan Hatchett's Court.

  Lyndon %c Broompole" Wilde QC was a blustery, short, stout, ruddy-cheeked, mustachioed lawyer. He resembled a cross between the Quaker Oats pitchman who says fc Tt's the right thing to do," and Rich Uncle Pen-nybags, the chairman of the board in a Monopoly game. Rotund in the black silk of Queen's Counsel robes, his barrister's vest glittered with the fob chain of a pocket watch he flipped open and snapped shut when he wanted to attract the jury's attention. Perched halfway down his rubicund nose were reading glasses, another tool he utilized in court. Perusing notes through them made him look like a wise old owl. Peering over them with a withering stare conveyed the impression he just uncovered a lie. Taking them off to tap his teeth displayed rumination, while whipping them off to stab the air thrust home a telling point. On this stage, he was as skilled in the use of a prop as Alice Cooper.

  The nickname "Broompole" dated from his first big prosecution. The year was 1967: the Summer of Love. Two hippies high on LSD were hitchhiking on Fourth Avenue. A van with smoked windows stopped and the

  nearest head got in. Before his friend could follow, tattooed hands grabbed the hippie from behind as the door slammed shut and the van peeled rubber down the street. The Headhunters Motorcycle Club had a "buttler for the meetin' meetin' " that night.

  The Headhunters' Den was the anteroom to hell. The only light within was cast by lamps on a line of "hogs" down one wall. Around the room were "colors" seized from rival gangs: emblems of the Grim Reapers, Gypsy Jokers, Undertakers, L'il Devils, Outlaws, and Coffin Cheaters. The trophies they prized most adorned the bar: the skin off a killed Hell's Angel's chest inked with a naked woman forming the crossbar of a bike, and a royal blue-and-gold crest hijacked from the Special E Gang Squad of the Mounted Police.

  Stripped, the hippie shivered in the glare of the lamps as demons lurked in the shadows.

  Every member of this gang was a l%er, the percentage of bikers who are a law unto themselves. For rides and meetin' meetin's like this, they wore "originals," jackets pissed on for initiation and never cleaned. The colors on back were a severed head stuck on a stake. In addition to iron crosses and swastikas on both sleeves, their leathers bore "wings" proclaiming sexual acts: Red Wings for "eating Mama on the rag," and Black Wings for "tonguing black tang."

  The hippie was whipped with a bicycle chain, then kicked in the face with winkle picker shoes. The Junkman gave him a rag and bucket to wash up the blood. A plastic "buttler's hat" was placed on his head and torched so "napalm" seared his shoulders and back. To cool him off, he was submerged in a bathtub floating with ice, while the drunken spectators hooted for more. The encore was he had to dance naked with a broom and masturbate to show respect for the bikers' girls. When he stumbled, Fat Fred took the broompole and rammed it up his butt with such force he was driven across the room. The "buttler" sobbed on the end of the stick as he was hobby-horsed around the den.

  The hospital called Special E.

  The trial came on before Mr. Justice Colefax. The Crown was represented by Harris Foot QC and new-to-the-bar junior counsel Lyndon Wilde. Against them were

  nine of the best trial lawyers in B.C. The indictment listed counts of kidnapping, confining, wounding, and indecent assault. The only direct evidence was the word of two drugged hippies.

  The first witness, the other hitcher, crumpled on the stand. It was '67, the jury was straight, and hallucinogens were new:

  "Tell me, witness, this LSD, do you shoot it with a needle?"

  "No"—a smirk at defense counsel—"you drop acid as blotter or windowpane."

  "Y-o-u drop it, witness. Not me. Does drop it mean swallow?"

  "Yeah."

  "You say the two of you were high while hitchhiking on Fourth?"

  "We were tripping."

  "Do I have this right? Tripping means blowing your brain?"

  "Your mind, man. Blowing your mind."

  "And when you blow your mind, what's the effect of this LSD?"

  "When you experience an event, you l
ive one reality from cause to result. Acid expands the mind to other dimensions. When I experience an event, I live hundreds of realities, each with cosmic causes flowing to Tarot results."

  "Fascinating, witness. But that presents a danger. When you take The Bible in your hand and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which of your 'hundred realities' do you select to give as evidence?"

  The tortured hippie was next on the stand. Harris Foot QC was in the middle of direct examination when he stopped, clutched his left arm, and dropped dead from a heart attack. Court recessed so a stretcher could carry out the corpse.

  "My Lord," said the spokesman for defense counsel when court reconvened without the jury. "If you declare a mistrial and traverse this prosecution to the Spring Assize, in light of the lengthy adjournment, we request bail."

  "Mr. Wilde," said the judge. "When were you called to the bar?"

  "In September."

  "The loss of Mr. Foot is most unfortunate. It does seem a mistrial—"

  "You can't grant bail, My Lord. If the accused are released, the case will collapse. The Headhunters have a bounty on the witnesses. These nine have every reason to collect."

  "Tomorrow morning, Mr. Wilde. Unless you're ready to go, it's a mistrial."

  At ten a.m. the next day, the nine accused were in the dock, the jury was in the jury box, the witness was on the stand, defense counsel were at their table, and the judge was on the bench.

  "Where is Mr. Wilde?" Colefax asked the clerk.

  "No idea, My Lord."

  With a crash, the doors to the Assize Court burst open, and Lyndon Wilde, his robes askew and collar tabs dangling, dashed to his seat with papers flying to drop his notes on the counsel table.