NIGHT MOVES: The Stroll Murders

by Gar Mallinson

  He watched the ferry appear out in the bay as it cleared the headland and made its turn into the docks. He headed back to his car.

  When the loading began some minutes later, he realized the ferry was full and his car was one of the last five to get on. He barely made the lounge before the ship’s whistle sounded and the ferry moved off. Dr. Spencer sat at one of the windows and watched the coast cliffs moving past, the houses crowded into tiny bays backed by steep wooded hills.

  He turned away and thought about the case he was about to get involved in. Two girls gone already, their bodies discovered in deep bush covered in strange markings, disembowelled, entrails arranged around them. He’d never worked on a case quite as bizarre. A psychopath, had to be, one who was still in control, still taking victims, if the last disappearance was any indication, and still unknown.

  Ritual serial killers with this kind of control were seldom caught, and when they were, it was usually by fluke. These guys, and there were more of them than people realized, seemed quite normal, were well liked, and lived lives that weren’t noticeably different from others. This one was going to be hard to find.

  His hunting ground and disposal sites were known, though separated by considerable distance. He preferred to hide his work. That made him a lot more interesting and far more difficult to identify. The markings were very unusual, a kind of freeform curvilinear design in the same place on each victim.

  He had all the photos, but the sketches were even more interesting, well executed and detailed, clearer than the photos. The desecration of the altar in the small church was an indicator of what was to come later. His mind was so caught up in the intricacies of the case, he was startled by the blast of the ship’s whistle signalling his arrival in Departure Bay.

  He returned to his car and took the sketches out of his file, since as one of the last on, he was one of the last off the ferry. He thought some more about the strange patterns on the altar cloth.

  The cars in front of him began to move and once off the ferry, Spencer drove slowly down Stewart, looking for Comox Street until he remembered that Alan had said it was across a bridge. He took Wallace to Fitzwilliam and turned right again up the hill. Police headquarters was a few blocks up past some shops.

  Dr. Spencer expected to meet several people, but he remembered none of their names except Alan. He reached for the accordion file in the back seat, and on entering the building, announced himself to the desk clerk. Moments later, he was greeted by a short dark woman who introduced herself as Spence Riley, homicide. That sounded right.

  The conference room was small, with a mess of papers, photos, coffee cups, and what looked like an old-fashioned murder book. He hadn’t seen one of those since the serial case in Massachusetts some years back. Now what he found in murder rooms was a table full of laptops.

  There were three others in the room, and Spence did the introductions. The two private detectives, Sabina Harris and Harry Hargreaves, were there, along with Alan Kim. All three stood there looking expectantly at him. He shrugged and grinned sheepishly.

  “Jeez, guys. Gimme a minute.”

  He placed his file on the table. “Anybody got coffee? We’ll need a pot at least and if you have it, real milk and some sugar.” Alan made a call, and they all sat around the table clearing spaces.

  John Spencer looked at each of them and began. “Okay, you’re tight for time, so I’ll get to it. You’ve got quite a guy here, very controlled and very dependent on ritual. One thing to note with a psychopath like this one is that the rituals are fundamentally important, even if we don’t know what they mean. They must be performed exactly, no deviations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he returned to the scenes after you guys were through to make certain all was as it should be.”

  Alan was about to speak when there was a knock on the door and a young woman in uniform delivered a tray with coffee and the requested milk and sugar. There was also a small box of donuts. Harry’s eyes lit up and Sabina kicked him under the table.

  Everyone took a cup and a donut. Harry looked them over when the box got to him, sighed happily, and took a cinnamon.

  John Spencer looked around the table questioningly, and Alan picked it up. “We’ve just sent a forensics guy back to see if anything is different. He might be back. I’ll check.” The others drank and ate.

  Alan looked at Spencer. “He’s on his way down. Need anything else before we start?”

  “I’m good. This is the best coffee I’ve ever had in a police staff room.”

  Spence eyed him. “We’re good at a lot of things, not just coffee. But with this guy, good’s not enough.”

  The knock on the door was followed by a head peeking around the edge. Alan waved him in, pointed to a seat and the coffee pot, and waited. The forensics expert was young, carried a notebook, and smiled thankfully at the coffee pot as he poured. Alan introduced everybody.

  “I’ve got the original photos and sketches, and the ones I took today,” he said. “I’ve also sketched the scenes as they are now. If you look at the photos from the crime scenes first, you’ll see differences when you look at the new ones. I don’t think the sites have been disturbed much—they’re too far out of the way and there’s the police tape. If you compare the two sets, you’ll see minor but careful adjustments in the placement of the objects there, particularly the stones themselves. That can’t really be accidental, like animal activity. It’s unlikely that anyone got to the sites, that it’s somebody just messing around. It’s also not weather-related.”

  He handed the sketches to Alan and waited.

  “Okay, thanks Tim. We appreciate this. Tell Georgie we owe him one.”

  “Anything else you need, just let us know.” With that, the young man left.

  John Spencer picked it up. “Okay, we’ve got confirmation that he’s likely been back to the sites, and that’s as it should be with someone like this. So let’s go from there. You can be sure that he’s been tracking you guys as well. It reaffirms his superiority and that’s important to him.”

  Another knock on the door interrupted him. Roberta Cannon came in, apologizing for being late, and Alan did the honours once again.

  “The profiler, good to meet you. We should compare notes later,” Spencer said. “We’ve just established that the killer’s been back to the sites to make certain they are as they should be, and we’re about to start on the markings. This guy’s really controlled, almost rigid. As you pointed out in the profile, he’s not escalating yet. He will, of course, we all know that, but not yet. So, the markings.”

  Spencer rifled in his file and pulled out some drawings. “These are some of the symbols I’ll be discussing. You can look at them as we go as a kind of reference. The sources are noted on the bottom.”

  He passed around the sheets, waited until they all had them, then started.

  “If you look at the zodiacal signs of Cancer and Capricorn, you’ll see some of the curvilinear forms that are mixed in with the patterns he draws on the victims. Cancer is the fourth sign and Orphic teaching sees it as a kind of threshold between this world and the world the soul enters after its release. Think of the sign as a representation of that idea.

  “Capricorn is the tenth sign and represents duality, the return to or departure from the wheel of life. If the designs do indeed incorporate these signs, as I think they do, then we can see some of the possible significance in the patterns this guy follows. He has some idea of the two worlds, however twisted that might be, and he seems to be intent on the task of delivering these girls to the other side through a repetition of necessary rituals. That’s quite primitive in some ways and rather sophisticated in others. Let’s go on.”

  They all glanced at the zodiacal signs, placed them on the table, and waited.

  “So we’ve likely got the idea of movement from one sphere to another. These are symbols of transformation and they’re all over the place in his strings of curvilinear forms. There are other significances as well. Along th
e flow of forms, there are many partial and complete circular patterns. Circumferential movement is a basic Gnostic emblem. You see it most often in the dragon or snake biting its own tail. It’s a representation of cyclic time and the central idea of death and rebirth fundamental to western religious visions.

  “Mind, that symbol is universal and much older than any religion we know. It’s the most basic of symbols and the most powerful. If you look at the strings again, the flow of curvilinear forms running down the bodies, you’ll see that circumferential form all over the place. Some representations even look like the ouroboros, that snake and tail symbol. It hints at the idea of inner unity and universal harmony, the yin and yang of existence, the coming together of opposites. If you marry that symbol to the zodiacal symbols, you can begin to see a single thread of meaning running through the design.”

  Spencer paused again and waited. The others remained silent but nodded. They were beginning to see where this might lead.

  “Then there’s the colour. Why blue? Why not green or red or even yellow? I don’t think the colour is accidental; I think it’s an added part of the symbolic significance of his design. And it’s not just any blue, it’s a blue-green if these photos are colour accurate, and that is an interesting mix. There are two things we should consider here: The inherent characteristics of the colour as simply objective fact, and the specific meaning of the colour in the culture in which it appears.

  “Blue is the colour of the atmosphere when it’s light, but this is a dark blue and it has green in it. So the night sky rather than the day, and the greenish addition is more indicative of death than of its lighter relationship with vegetative life. This is much hazier ground. Colour has so many possible meanings and is culture-dependent for its significance, but I believe that our guy used this darkish blue-green purposely and that it simply marries colour to the significance of the symbols. It’s all of a piece, as far as I’m concerned, and it fits with our more modern ideas on colour, at least in psychology and psychoanalysis. Two spheres of influence, then, come together here and reinforce each other. We have to add to this the idea that graphic symbols are extremely powerful, a sort of shorthand that encapsulates a great deal into single geometric forms.”

  XXI

  Harry and Sabina, Alan and Spence, and Roberta, looked a little stunned at this long explanation, but they slowly began to nod.

  Spence started. “So this prick sent us a message in a kind of code?”

  “Precisely,” John Spencer said. “Yes, code it is, and a message it certainly contains, but as much for him as for us.”

  Roberta picked up the photos of the bodies again. “That fits well with the profile we’ve drawn. His message on each body is both a way to secure passage for the girls through ritual and is a clear indication why these girls were chosen. And more importantly, what has been accomplished for them by our psychopath.”

  “What is less clear, perhaps,” Dr. Spencer continued, “are the specific rituals visited on the bodies of the girls along with the symbolic stream of images. Why the disembowelling? Why the specific protective settings? What meaning does the arrangement of rocks carry? We should look at these rituals in the light of what we’ve seen painted on the bodies, because that’s our roadmap. And you’re right, Roberta, all of this should give us some suggestion of the why. So let’s look at the other rituals, the ones associated with the site and the bodies.”

  He looked at each of them in turn. They were willing to hear him out, and that wasn’t always the case with cops who preferred hard facts and not conjectures like this.

  “I’m going to start by looking at ritual itself. What does it accomplish? Why do all cults use it? And I think Roberta’s right, this guy has a partner. So we’re looking, I believe, at a cult of two. That’s not unheard of but it is unusual. That’s why it’s so important for our guy to repeat things exactly.

  “Ritual is interesting in itself. Rituals exist to separate the members of a cult from the outside world. I believe our guys come from a repressive background, probably religious and probably strict, controlled by a powerful single figure who makes his own rules and governs accordingly. What happens is that the separation from the outside provides a kind of relief from anxiety. Our guys, if I’m right, get a double whammy of that since they are separating from a repressive cult into a cult of their own. That frees them from both the repression and the world at large.”

  John Spencer looked at them again, waited, and got hesitant nods. He continued.

  “So we have these two in a kind of social cocoon, isolated while creating their own definition of reality. Ritual is a kind of reinforcing conditioning; it reinforces the isolation, but it also creates a new reality.

  “What research has shown lately is that belonging to an organization like this changes individuals. There are alterations in consciousness, literally. There’s a psychological defence mechanism at work here that results in the rejection of other realities.

  “For these guys, the original reality they escaped from and the outside world’s reality no longer exist. All that is real is the world of the cult, of the rituals that reinforce it, the patterns that govern it. Our two are locked in, especially the weaker one. The power source, our psychopath, uses one to secure the other by creating symbols out of natural elements.

  “But all this only works if the repetition is retained. The created reality is dependent on the rituals that support it and on their repetition. We must keep in mind that the weaker one frees himself from any emotional distress when he immerses himself in this cult world. The powerful one, the one who performs the rituals and maintains the control, benefits as well. It is, after all, his world. He created it, and in it, he’s god. The power he holds is infinite. That’s his motivation, and he’ll come undone when he tries to impress those values on the world outside. And he will.

  “Xenophobia is a by-product of such actions. With the world outside in opposition, all its members are seen as the enemy, so sacrificing those who symbolize the values of the outside world is a way of controlling his own world. That’s what I think our guy does. He lives among us, finds his symbols on the stroll or close by, and uses them to reinforce his supremacy and that of his creation. There’s the motivation, and there’s the explanation for the rituals of evisceration and blood. Why those particularly, we’ll have to ask him when we get him.”

  Harry jumped in. “So the values he sees in our world are sexually based, perverse to him, and the girls he takes radiate what he sees as dangerous destructive activity? Dangerous to whom? Him and his world? And why just the sexual, perverse thing? Why not other parts of what we are as a society?”

  “That, I think, is the buried key. We’ll know when he tells us. But we can suggest a few things. His original repressive upbringing, the cult he was part of in his childhood, would see sex as the devil’s work. Or it’s possible he and his underling were punished for sexual misconduct when it was discovered, or for some other misdemeanor they practiced and were caught at. If the punishment pushed them together, then the bond was early and strong, and the perversity in things sexual may have come from something like that. If you take that into the world at large, it could account for the way he sees us. We’re simply a larger cult. It’s not something we’ll understand fully until he tells us.”

  “So that’s part of the picture. Then what happened to him early on?” Spence looked at John skeptically.

  “Absolutely, a central part. His vision, his world, are a direct result of whatever happened.”

  “We all got punished for stuff, and none of us turned out like that, so why did he? I mean, even if you look at these whacko religious groups, they don’t produce kids who turn into nut cases like that,” said Spence.

  “That’s true, and we don’t understand why it happens to some and not others. But there’ll be something so severe in his background that it twisted him.”

  Spence shook her head. “I don’t know. Sounds like you’re reachin’ to me.”r />
  “Building sand castles, theories made out of nothing? Yeah, that’s what I’m doing. But behind the theories lies a body of fact that reaches back as far as our research goes into cults and the nature of ritual and symbol. There are facts, but yeah, essentially I’m guessing.”

  Roberta looked at Spence and smiled. “I’m buying all of it. He’s given us an explanation for what this guy does and some suggestions about why. We run with this stuff, we at least get a direction. We don’t, we’ve got next to nothing. And it fits what we know as fact.”

  Alan nodded. “We try it out. It all fits. It doesn’t get us a killer, but it does get us a direction, a feeling for what the hell’s going on, and it ties together everything we know, even the church stuff. Spence can be our conscience in this, our skeptic, but we go with it.”

  John Spencer gathered up his papers, stuffed them in his accordion file, and nodded to the group. “Look, I’m around for a couple of days, got a room in the Dorchester downtown. You can get me there whenever.”

  Everybody stood. Alan thanked him, and even Spence shook his hand and grinned, shaking her head. “You might have hit the nail on the head, probably did. It’ll be interesting to see how close you really got, along with Roberta’s profile. Thanks for the insights.”

  ◆◆◆

  Dina moved as quietly as she could through the rough undergrowth. The bark shoes weren’t the best for this sort of movement, but they were far better than bare feet. The salal especially was difficult to move through without making noise, but she managed. What was important now was movement that left no trace. And speed.

  Below the surface of the salal was a treacherous mix of fallen limbs, decaying trunks and branches, and the tangle of undergrowth. It was hard going and being naked didn’t help. Her legs were suffering, the tiny scratches red and angry, the gouges from the stronger bits of forest refuse bleeding slightly.