Swastika

by Michael Slade

  So was the cop standing in the pathway.

  Having recently returned from five weeks in the South Seas, Zinc Chandler of Special X—the Special External Section of the RCMP—was sporting a tropical tan around his dark sunglasses. The tan clashed with both the pale scar left by a knife wound along his jaw line and the metallic tint of his hair, the color, since birth, that had given him his name. His jacket was slung over one shoulder of his muscular frame, exposing both his Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol and the bison-head regimental badge clipped at his waist.

  “Chandler. Special X,” he declared.

  The uniformed cop blocking the path let him through. “You’ll find Sergeant Winter under the overpass. Hug the creek and you’ll see a gap in the fence.”

  The hum of the city had retreated with his descent into the gully, and from there to here, it hadn’t been able to compete with the gurgling gush of the rapids. But now the hum returned, stronger with each step he took along the banked stream, until he caught sight of the overhead span through the curtain of creek-side saplings.

  Foom … foom …

  The Trans-Canada Highway cut across the face of the North Shore Mountains on its way to a screeching halt a few miles to the west, where the Pacific Ocean lapped into Horseshoe Bay. The original bridge across this creek and the Trans-Canada Trail had been widened not too long ago with a second span. Now for every foom of the cars whizzing by, disturbing the peace of nature, there was twice the noise—foom, foom—to pollute tranquillity.

  Ahead, the path zigged right toward the water, and the rustic fence ceased for several yards. The gap between the creek and the first pickup post where the fenced path zagged inland around the bridge supports was just wide enough for Chandler to sidle through. Ducking into the foliage, he detoured up the path fit for contamination, the forensic route cleared by the Ident techs.

  One minute, the Mountie had the sun on his back.

  The next minute, he was in the chill of the underworld.

  * * *

  Concrete Ts supported one span of the double overpass. Vertical pillars met the horizontal beam of a highway trestle. The parallel span to the north was held up by a concrete arch. Chandler felt as if he was gazing out through the mouth of a sewer.

  The waste of the over-world collected down here. The dual spans were no more than a few feet apart, but that left enough room for the garbage of a throwaway culture to slip through. Packaging from fast-food joints and discarded candy wrappers had wafted down from passing cars like confetti at a wedding, or had been flushed down the open corrugated culverts during rainstorms. Other junk had come in by land: empty cases of beer and rusty shopping carts, spray-paint cans left by graffiti artists, a wayward motorcycle helmet. The artists had festooned the concrete pillars with colorful tags, most of them street names in a bubble-like mural. The black helmet, discarded on the garbage-strewn earth, was also a gilded work of art. Golden jaws with sharp fangs decorated the front, a hand with an upright middle finger the side. And on the back, the words “Go fuck yourself” in what could pass for Old English script.

  Poetry in motion, Chandler thought.

  The cop coming toward him on the Ident-cleared path seemed as tall as Zinc, just over six feet. Like Zinc, he was athletically built, but he was slimmer than the inspector. Basketball, not football or hockey, would be his game. Sandy-haired and cobalt-eyed, he wore the dull plainclothes of GIS, the General Investigation Section of North Van Detachment. The Mountie carried a plastic evidence pouch in one hand and held the other out to shake as he neared Chandler. Behind him, where the arch of the upstream span met the bank, a saddle of Horsemen worked around a body that had been staked to the earth.

  “Sergeant Winter, I presume?”

  The cops knew of each other. Several of Winter’s case reports had crossed Chandler’s desk.

  “Nice tan.”

  “Just back from the South Pacific.”

  “On account of me? Hope my call didn’t interrupt your vacation,” Winter kidded.

  “Planes don’t fly that fast. Thankfully, you pulled me away from a pile of paperwork.”

  “Here’s another sheet to add to the pile,” the sergeant said, passing Chandler the see-through pouch.

  The inspector held the crumpled note up in front of his eyes. It had been torn off the corner of a larger sheet of paper. Scrawled on the scrap was “Zinc Chandler” and his home address on Kitsilano Point, across the harbor.

  “What’s that doing in the pocket of a cannibal, Inspector?”

  “Alleged cannibal,” Zinc said dryly.

  * * *

  Across the creek and up the bank on the opposite side of the water, sunlight flashed off the telephoto lens of a top-end digital camera. The glint came from the bushes just to the right of the overhead spans, at the point where the multi-lane highway left the mountain slope to bridge across Mosquito Creek’s gully.

  “Did you get it?” the reporter asked.

  The photographer nodded.

  “Both the patch and the stake through the other eye?”

  “If you don’t believe me,” the cameraman said, “see for yourself.” He held out the Nikon and pressed the monitor button to display the digital images on the camera’s LCD screen. The last three shots, taken down through the forest of concrete pillars, had caught in sufficient detail the head impaled by a stake.

  “Good,” said Jantzen. “The cops on the path—”

  He had to pause while a car passed on the nearby off-ramp, its stereo so loud that it drowned out the noise of the never-ending traffic on the Trans-Canada Highway. Fittingly, the tune that blared was AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”

  “The cops on the path to the body are Inspector Zinc Chandler and Sergeant Dane Winter,” the crime reporter continued as again he focused his binoculars on the underworld. “Shoot some of them with the stiff—hey, they’re moving across to it—then let’s stake out the cars on Fell and catch ’em coming up.”

  * * *

  “Recognize him?” Winter asked, raising his voice to counter the rumble of traffic overhead.

  “Yeah,” said Chandler, squatting beside the body at the foot of the arch. “I saw him yesterday at Colony Farm. Just before they sprung him from the mental hospital.”

  “You went there to see him?”

  “No, to question the Ripper. The Ripper’s a psycho who wants me dead for locking him up in the nuthouse. He recently tried to orchestrate a hit from inside the psych ward by talking a visitor into stalking me to the South Pacific.”

  “Obviously he failed.”

  “But not for want of trying. I spent the next month relaxing, and when I got back, I went out to face the Ripper at Colony Farm. He refused to meet me, but I caught sight of him in the exercise yard with this guy, who I hadn’t seen before. The nursing staff called him the Congo Man because of some calypso tune.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Fooling around with a deck of tarot cards. The Ripper’s obsessed with the Tarot. He was doing a reading. The Congo Man left when it was time for his release.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” said Chandler. “The Ripper glimpsed me as he went back to the ward. Grinning like the maniac he is, he ran a finger across his throat.”

  “Sounds like the Ripper may have enlisted this Congo Man to finish what the earlier killer failed to do.”

  The inspector nodded. “That would explain why my home address was in the dead guy’s pocket. And I’m pretty sure this handwriting is the Ripper’s.”

  “Not very cautious.”

  “He doesn’t have to be. The Ripper is about as psychotic as a man can be. He’s already in the psych ward. There’s nothing worse the law can do to him. He wants me dead and won’t stop until one of his psycho henchmen succeeds.”

  “Well, you’re safe from this guy.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “So who killed the Congo Man?” Winter asked.

  * * *

  There w
as no need for either cop to fill the other in on the background of the Congo Man. The Vancouver Times had been reporting on the case for the past few days. In fact, that morning’s edition had run a front-page story under the banner “Alleged Cannibal Freed by Appeal Court.” The story was by Cort Jantzen.

  VANCOUVER—A Liberian refugee alleged to be the cannibal killer of a six-year-old girl was released from custody yesterday by order of the B.C. Court of Appeal. The court ruled there had been insufficient evidence produced at trial to support his detainment in the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital at Colony Farm …

  The trial had been a cause célèbre because of the lurid details of the crime. The victim was a white schoolgirl who’d been snatched off the street; the accused was a black refugee from war-torn Africa. The girl’s body was found cooking in a canning pot under a bridge where down-and-outs—like the refugee—often slept in the rough. The discovery had conjured up nineteenth-century cartoons depicting pale explorers bubbling in black cannibal pots.

  As near as the immigration department could tell, Marcus Cole—the Congo Man—was from Liberia, an African nation founded in 1822 as a haven for freed American slaves. He had arrived in Canada with just the clothes on his back, claiming to be a refugee from the Liberian civil war.

  The horrors of that war were familiar to those who watched the news. From 1989 to 1997, seven warlords had used every barbaric tool they could think of—including sorcery, blood-drinking, and cannibalism—to terrify their rivals and seize control of the country. Ragtag armies of teenage killers, stoned on drugs and alcohol, had fought the war with red scarves, dark glasses, and AK-47s. The Poro was a bush school where elders initiated these soldiers into the ancient rites of the secret Leopard Societies. A Leopard Man’s borfimor was a talisman that powered his virility once it was anointed with human fat that had been boiled down in a pot. The “bush devil” had to be fed, so each initiate also ate human meat from the same pot to assimilate the power of those slain and cooked.

  The article went on:

  Marcus Cole wasn’t a refugee, the prosecutor alleged. He was a cannibal killer fleeing from the outcome of that war. By 1997, Charles Taylor had become the strongman in Liberia. It’s said that he tortured, dismembered, and cannibalized enemy captives in the presidential palace at Monrovia …

  The trial had been a minefield of evidentiary bombs. Marcus Cole was one of the homeless sleeping under the bridge, but no credible testimony linked him to the cannibal pot. The testimony there was came from a camp of drunken bums, two of whom had past convictions for sexual perversions. Not only had Cole refused to confess to the police, but he’d refused to speak to pretrial psychiatrists as well. The shrinks were left to psych him from the details of the crime, a murder that the Crown could barely pin on him.

  So incensed was the trial judge by the nature of the case that she had flouted the law to put the Congo Man away, shipping him off to the psych ward at Colony Farm to get his head shrunk. The appeal court, however, was less cavalier, and yesterday had overturned the original verdict and ordered that the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital turn Marcus Cole loose.

  On hearing the appeal court quash the trial verdict, the outraged father of the murdered girl stormed from the law courts building. “If the law won’t give us justice,” he swore, “I’ll hunt that African monster down and kill him myself …”

  * * *

  “You look healthy,” said the pathologist, Dr. Gillian Macbeth. She, too, seemed the epitome of wellness and youth, thanks to the best rejuvenation money can buy. She wore the same white hood, jumpsuit, and foot coverings as the other forensic techs combing the area around the body.

  “He just returned from the South Seas,” Winter explained.

  “I know,” said Macbeth.

  The sergeant caught an exchange of looks between the pathologist and the inspector that made him wonder if any hanky-panky was going on. In fact, Gill Macbeth was dating Chandler’s boss, Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq. In addition to being the Special External Section of the Mounties—the cops responsible for investigating crimes with links beyond Canada’s borders—the squad did double duty as the Horsemen’s psycho-hunting unit. Consequently, at lots of crime scenes in the past, Gill and Zinc had stood together over bodies on the ground.

  “Something different,” Chandler said.

  “I don’t get many stakings. Vampires are foreign to this part of the world.”

  “Missed the heart by a mile.”

  “Don’t touch the stake,” cautioned Macbeth. “There’s blood up on the handle.”

  The pathologist had moved back to let the inspector squat near the body. Crouched on the balls of his feet, Chandler felt the earth vibrate as heavy rigs crossed the overhead span. The Congo Man was sprawled face up on the bank, with his crown toward the arch support and his soles toward the creek. With arms as big as other men’s legs, a chest the size of King Kong’s, and a skull that seemed to reduce a bowling ball to the girth of a pea, he was a giant of muscular power. Tussling with him, Chandler had thought yesterday at Colony Farm, would be like having Tyson going for your ear.

  “Cause of death?” he asked Macbeth.

  “His skull was caved in with a blunt instrument just before he was spiked through the eye. See how splinters of the zygomatic arch sink into the socket around the stake? Someone approached him with a weapon in hand, clubbed him across the side of the head, shattering his skull, then rammed the stake into his eye after he hit the ground.”

  “Dead either way?”

  “Uh-huh. He was probably in his death throes when he was spiked to the earth.”

  “What sort of blunt instrument?”

  “It could be the stake. The handle’s made of wood, but the lower shaft is metal.”

  “Like the head of a spear?”

  “It’s about the length of a walking stick. The killer would seem to be hiking as he approached, then suddenly the walking stick would turn into a baseball bat. A whack across the side of the head and down would go the giant. Plunging the tip into his eye socket would spike him to the ground.”

  “Wicked.”

  “And effective. Three tools in one.”

  “The killer’s lucky the bat didn’t break.”

  “But unlucky if the blow cracked loose this splinter.” Gill pointed to a sliver of wood still attached to the handle. “See the blood on the tip? That could be from the killer. Even wearing gloves, he might’ve pricked his hand as he drove the stake through the skull. Perhaps he didn’t notice at the time.”

  The Congo Man wore a black patch over his other eye. He looked like a pirate who had seen his last doubloon.

  “Check under the patch?”

  “The eyeball is missing. Probably lost it in the Liberian civil war,” said Gill.

  “Anything else?”

  “Examine his forehead, Zinc. You’ll find a possible motive hidden in the blood.”

  The Congo Man’s face was a mess of gore. Blood had bubbled out of the spiked socket like an erupting volcano. The red lava had begun to clot on his black skin. Moving in for a closer look, the inspector breathed in the sweat of insanity wafting up off the cadaver. Then he discerned the symbol that had been carved into the forehead of the African refugee, above and equidistant to the pirate patch and the vertical stake.

  The symbol, covered with blood, was instantly recognizable:

  “Motive?” Chandler asked, glancing up at Winter.

  “Hate crime? Possibly. Lots of hate around. Sikh stomped to death by skinheads outside his temple. Jewish graveyards desecrated. Refugees waylaid. Cole might have been sleeping rough under these spans when a neo-Nazi gang chanced along.”

  “Or?”

  “Or the swastika might be a red herring. Someone killed him for a personal motive and masked it as a hate crime.”

  “To avenge the dead girl?”

  “Perhaps,” said Winter. “Or it could be a hit gone wrong. The Ripper enlisted the Congo Man to kill you. Maybe Cole teamed
up with a partner, and they had a falling-out.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “A jogger with a wayward dog. He’s clean.”

  “That’s several leads. It’s your case, Sergeant. Where do you plan to start?”

  “Feel like a drive?”

  “Where to?” asked Chandler.

  “Inland to Colony Farm.”

  * * *

  Cort Jantzen, the crime reporter for The Vancouver Times, waylaid them as they crested the path to their cars.

  “Is it true that the vic is the cannibal killer who got released yesterday because of a foul-up by the courts?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Winter replied.

  “Is the vic Marcus Cole?”

  “Yes,” responded Chandler.

  “Do you suspect that an outraged relative of the cannibalized girl took justice into his own hands?”

  “The investigation is ongoing. No comment.”

  “A vigilante?”

  “No comment,” echoed Chandler.

  “The jogger who found the body says it was nailed to the bank by a stake that had been rammed through the head. Do you have any reason to suspect it’s a hate crime?”

  “We have inquiries to make,” said Winter. “Media Relations will issue a press release.”

  They left the reporter scribbling empty words in his notebook. For decades, the Mounties had used “key-fact hold-back” evidence as a sneaky trip-up tool. Key facts known only to the primary investigators and those involved in an offense were held back from the media as a means to weed out false confessions and expose those with inside knowledge of the crime. In this age of the Internet and people willing to say and do anything for their fifteen minutes of fame, key-fact hold-back evidence was even more crucial.

  Cort Jantzen had been closing in on the key fact in the Congo Man killing when the cops had ducked away. They didn’t want him to catch them on record with a lie.

  The key fact was the Nazi swastika that had been carved like a Cyclops’ eye into the cannibal’s forehead.