Swastika

by Michael Slade

  But first, this honor.

  Not every man gets to meet God on this side of the grave.

  Stealth Killer

  Vancouver

  May 24, Now

  In the newspaper business, battles are waged over the Story, a scramble for the Scoop. Scoop-scrambles ignite checkbook journalism. Checkbook journalism infects the newsroom too, because those reporters who land the huge Scoops find their paychecks fattened. Consequently, there are newsroom battles over the Byline.

  Byline is the name of the reporter credited on the front page with breaking the Story.

  And if the Story is Watergate—or something of similar importance—it takes only one to make your career.

  Woodward and Bernstein got the Byline for the Story that broke Watergate.

  Joe Schmo didn’t.

  Who’s Joe Schmo?

  Exactly.

  The Vancouver Times wasn’t in the same league as The New York Times or The Washington Post, but it had its Byline fights too. For the past few weeks, the paper had been running a series of articles on missing down-and-outers who might be unknown victims of foul play. All had been on the streets one day and were gone the next, as was common with transients who pass through this city’s skid road and along its prostitute strolls. The impetus for the series had come from Bess McQueen—a brassy, bleach-blonde queen bitch, in Cort Jantzen’s opinion. Jantzen and McQueen shared the crime beat at The Vancouver Times. For a piece of investigative journalism that widespread and time-intensive, they had tackled divergent angles and shared the Byline—until yesterday.

  Disposable People

  By Bess McQueen and Cort Jantzen

  The “high track” stroll on Seymour Street is run by pimps and organized crime. The “low track” stroll on the Downtown Eastside is for women who will turn a trick for the price of their next fix. The “kiddie stroll” on Commercial Drive has runaway girls as young as twelve working the sex trade. And “boy’s town” at the end of Homer Street caters to men who want sex with teenage males.

  Are they disposable people? Those prostitutes who have been forced by poverty, sexual abuse, alienation at home, bullying at school, and drug addiction into a dead-end life of victimization on our meanest streets? And if foul play should claim their lives, do we view them as less dead? …

  That first story in the series had been followed by other McQueen-Jantzen joint bylines:

  Does the Criminal Code Kill Hookers?

  By Bess McQueen and Cort Jantzen

  On the street, perverts can be as cruel as they want to be.

  It used to be that sex-trade workers did business in rooming houses. Back then, hookers walking the stroll knew there was a hotel they could safely use within a short distance. Car dates were frowned upon. It’s dangerous for hookers to corner themselves in cars.

  But the Criminal Code was changed in 1986 to make it illegal to communicate in public for the purpose of buying or selling sexual services. Climbing into cars to transact business became the best way to beat that law. Soon, most street hookers were being driven away to who knows where for whatever sexual acts were ordered by their captors. Lock the doors of a car and it becomes a prison …

  Last week, the joint McQueen-Jantzen byline amalgams had ended with this:

  The Less Dead

  By Bess McQueen and Cort Jantzen

  Vancouver targets prostitutes. It always has. There are now close to 2,000 prostitutes working the strolls of Vancouver, and they may as well have bull’s-eyes on their backs. To politicians, the police, and the pious, prostitutes are a nuisance. Vice laws are designed to drive them from one location to another, in the vain hope that one day they’ll simply disappear—and if one does, mission accomplished. That’s one less to worry about.

  Out of sight, out of mind. That’s how most people view them.

  To pimps, pushers, and predators, prostitutes seem like easy prey. All the talk of ridding our city of prostitutes gives those who victimize them a reason to do what they do. Kill a prostitute and does anyone really care? It’s not the same as killing a policewoman or a nurse. Good riddance to bad rubbish is the theme we send to predators. We expect the police to focus on crimes against the “more dead,” not the culling of the “less dead.” Those we physically marginalize by forcing them into darkly lit industrial back streets where serial killers hunt …

  The series had been a success. It had raised circulation. The public had reacted with a lively flow of letters, pro and con. That had prompted the managing editor to go to the well again … well, actually two more times, as Bess McQueen and Cort Jantzen had been sent out separately—“A little friendly competition,” according to their boss—to try to scoop each other with the best incendiary follow-up to their joint-byline series on Vancouver’s “disposable people.”

  Friendly?

  Ha!

  That bitch!

  Cort Jantzen had filed first with this story:

  Sex Trade a Leghold Trap for Kids

  By Cort Jantzen

  What begins as a game of catch-me-if-you-can for runaway kids ends as a leghold trap for those snared by the sex trade.

  They come from troubled families or a background of sexual abuse. “It’s easy to vanish down here,” says a twelve-year-old girl. “Lots of cheap rooming houses where I can hide during the daytime, then come out at night.” What brings her out at night is the need to turn tricks. Sex is all she has to barter with to pay for her room and her fix. Within a month of leaving home, that girl was a heroin addict.

  The Internet has helped to make Vancouver a well-known destination for sex tourists. Pedophiles sneak in to stalk the “kiddie stroll” and “boy’s town.” Websites provide the locations and a price list for sexual acts …

  The following day, Bess McQueen had filed this story:

  Is a Killer Stalking “Boy’s Town”?

  By Bess McQueen

  Too many boys have gone missing from one of the city’s prostitute strolls. Since the early 1990s, at least thirty young males known to have offered themselves for sex with men who cruise the “boy’s town” area of Homer Street have lost all contact with friends and family …

  The day before yesterday, Bess McQueen’s story had appeared on the front page of The Vancouver Times, and before the morning was out, the paper had received a request from Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq of Special X to brief the reporter of the “boy’s town” piece on the status of the Mounties’ investigation. Suddenly, that story had taken on dimensions of the Story of the week, and possibly the year, and that—given how pushy the queen bitch was—had resulted in yesterday’s Byline battle, which erupted in the office of the managing editor.

  “It was my story,” Bess declared. “So the interview with Special X is mine exclusively. And so is the byline on any piece that emerges from that scrum.”

  “We had a joint byline.”

  “Had, Cort. Had. Remember what you said in this very office, Ed? ‘A little friendly competition.’ Well, that’s what happened. And now that I have a scoop, Cort is trying to horn in.”

  “You don’t own boy’s town,” Jantzen fumed. “It came up in our joint ‘Disposable People’ piece, and I mention it in my ‘Leghold Trap’ story.”

  “Give me a break,” scoffed Bess, rolling eyes that were bloodshot from too many gin-and-tonics in the press club watering hole. “The idea for the series was mine. You were brought in as backup, nothing more, Cort. Do your own thinking. Don’t plagiarize me!”

  The mention of the P-word had galvanized Editor Ed into frog-leg action. He didn’t want any complaints made to the publisher, the press council, or God knows who. He’d rather have a pit bull tearing at his ass than the queen bitch.

  “‘Friendly competition.’ That’s what I said, Cort. The byline was split. There’s no denying that. Special X asked to brief the reporter who wrote Bess’s piece. Ipso facto”—Editor Ed’s favorite coffin nail—“Bess gets the interview, and the byline.”

  “Ed—�
��

  “That’s it! The press gods have spoken. Now, go write me a scoop about that African cannibal whom the courts, in their infinite wisdom, just sprang from the funny farm.”

  * * *

  Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.

  DeClercq didn’t.

  “If it bleeds, it leads” is the time-honored mantra of newspapers everywhere. Fear-mongering sells papers; comfort articles encourage people to turn on the tube.

  The past few weeks’ bleeding-heart series on “Disposable People” in The Vancouver Times was a case in point. It fostered the false impression that Special X was flat-footed when it came to catching those preying on the down-and-out. Reading between the lines exposed a well-worn and troubling subtext: Serial killers are free to murder the weakest members of society because the police suffer from linkage blindness—the inability, or lack of will, to see patterns in murders or disappearances, especially when the victims lack power and prestige. The dispossessed are refused the attention that should come automatically from investigators and those who pull the priority strings of Special X. Having been victimized throughout their miserable lives, they suffer a final victimization at the hands of apathetic cops.

  The problem, of course, was more complex than the Times’ articles suggested. Psycho-hunters were hamstrung by prostitution laws that had been designed to keep the most vulnerable on the move. Hookers elude arrest by criss-crossing the country and working serial strolls in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal, or down the West Coast into the States. Girls on the kiddie stroll and the “chickens” of boy’s town are trafficked by pimps in a circuit that links cities in the western provinces and states. Systems of dispersal are what thwart the police, for it’s hard to detect missing persons when those living on the edge want to get lost, and when the stealth killers who pick off the unwary sneak around the fringes of large, vague, general hunting grounds.

  But that didn’t mean that DeClercq had no detection card up his sleeve.

  So that’s why the chief was here.

  To set the record straight.

  * * *

  Returning to the newsroom from interviewing the parents of the girl killed by the Congo Man, Cort Jantzen found the briefing by Special X about to get under way. The fact that DeClercq had come to the Times was a draw in itself, but when Cort saw who he had brought with him—the famed Kim Rossmo—the tug was irresistible. Poised pen and notebook in hand, with a tape recorder running, Bess McQueen sat front and center in the chair nearest the two psycho-hunters. As DeClercq began to speak, Cort slipped into the boardroom and found a seat among the editorial hounds who’d gathered to hear what the chief had to say.

  DeClercq, the head of Special X, was in his fifties, lean and wiry in build, with dark hair graying at the temples and even darker, brooding eyes. This afternoon, he wore the blue serge uniform of commissioned officers, with his rank—one crown above two pips—displayed on the epaulets, the badge of the force as collar dogs on the jacket, and above the breast pocket his long-service medal: a ribbon with a gold clasp and three hard-earned stars known within the RCMP as “the Milky Way.”

  A Horseman’s Horseman, thought Jantzen.

  “Stealth predators,” the Mountie told the press, “are the hardest of all serial killers to catch. Why? Because the core strategy of such killers is to commit their murders in ways that will fail to attract notice. Bluebeards and black widows are good examples. These are males and females, respectively, who secretly kill off their spouses. Others have occupations that lure potential victims to them. The best recent example is Dr. Harold Shipman. As a family doctor in Britain, he probably murdered in excess of two hundred elderly patients in their homes. And then there are stealth killers—as you point out in your paper—who prey upon fringe members of society. The homeless, runaways, and sex-trade workers. Jeffrey Dahmer fits your profile. He picked up gay males and later ambushed them in his apartment, then used their skulls to build a shrine. The police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were unaware that a serial killer was stalking the homosexual community, even though dark rumors about missing men had circulated through that city’s gay bars.”

  DeClercq held up The Vancouver Times.

  “‘Is a Killer Stalking “Boy’s Town”?’” he read. “The investigative piece that follows seems to imply that Special X is unable to see patterns in the disappearances of those you call the ‘less dead.’ While that might have been true not so long ago, it isn’t true now. Though you leave that headline unanswered, we’re here today to provide that answer for you.

  “Is a killer stalking ‘boy’s town’?” DeClercq repeated.

  “Most likely,” he replied.

  * * *

  Vancouver’s loss was America’s gain.

  In hindsight, it seemed inevitable—given the number of psychos loose down there—that the United States would welcome Kim Rossmo with open arms. The man who took over the stealth-killer briefing from DeClercq had revolutionized the way that state-of-the-art psycho-hunters bring predators to bay. The first cop in Canada to earn a Ph.D., Rossmo, a math whiz, had come up with the concept of geographic profiling from what he observed while walking a beat in Vancouver’s skid road. Step one in psycho-hunting is to consolidate the pieces. You must gather a serial killer’s murders together to know he is stalking prey. For that, the FBI created the VICAP system, a nationwide databank that searches for links among crimes that might suggest a serial killer is operating. Step two in psycho-hunting is to profile the warped behavior inherent in the signature that lies behind those links in that consolidated series of crimes. For that, the FBI created psychological profiling, which has now been flogged to death in too many TV cop shows. What = why = who.

  But what had been missing from that equation was “= where,” and by tackling that puzzler with geographic profiling, Rossmo had entered the ranks of the world’s supercops.

  “The Hound of the Data Points,” according to Popular Science.

  “Mapping Evil,” according to Reader’s Digest.

  Rossmo’s simple theory: Each time a serial killer meets, attacks, kills, or dumps a victim, he leaves a point on a map. Because his hunting ground overlaps his “awareness space”—the areas of the city he moves through quite innocently from day to day—his crime sites are linked to anchor points like his home or his place of work. That which is predictable can be mathematically quantified, because by definition the laws of probability apply. By researching known killers’ typical journeys to their crime scenes, Rossmo created a computer program that plots a serial predator’s crime sites on a map, then draws a box around his hunting ground and divides it into a grid of thousands of pixels. Next, the computer calculates the probability that each point on the grid is an anchor from which the killer began. Finally, points of equal probability are linked together and color-coded according to a scale, and what results is a geographic profile of the hunting ground that shows the likelihood that any given area is the killer’s home or place of work.

  What = why = who = where.

  Build a better rat trap and the world will beat a path to your door. The first person to grasp the awesome forensic potential of what Rossmo had created was C/Supt. Robert DeClercq. If Special X psycho-hunters knew where to look for their prey, they could focus their attention on that neighborhood and apply the psychological profile generated by the crime scenes to the psycho possibilities within its confines. So as Rossmo the beat cop catapulted up the ranks to detective inspector in the Vancouver Police Department, the Mountie had embraced his creation and used it to hone Special X into a razor-sharp squad.

  Psychos respect no boundaries.

  Neither do supercops.

  What Rossmo had to offer was in demand around the world, so he was now a new breed of international cop.

  * * *

  The last time Cort Jantzen had seen Kim Rossmo in the flesh—assuming that phrase applies to an image on TV—was when he appeared with Chief Moose on CNN during the Beltw
ay Sniper Case. The Americans had called Rossmo in to geographically profile those murders. Back then, the cyber cop was living in Washington, D.C., having accepted an offer he couldn’t refuse as director of research with the Police Foundation. At the same time, he was establishing—as he had done earlier for Scotland Yard in Britain—a geoprofiling division for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Now Rossmo was ensconced at Texas State University in Austin, where he was rumored to be at work on the next generation of psycho-hunting tools.

  Shorter and stockier than the Horseman who handed him the reins, Rossmo was a physically fit man somewhere in his forties who had let the cop’s mustache grow into a beard. His eyes were those of a night owl, not of a lark, and the reporter had the suspicion that they exposed his mind. The darker the landscape, the more intense the hunt.

  “The stealth killer,” Rossmo warned, “is a tough nut to crack. No crime reports, no crime linkage. No crime scenes, no behavioral profile. No points on a map, no geographic profile. Our forensic tools become impotent. The stealth killer isn’t out for notoriety. His core strategy is to kill in such a way that nobody knows he’s on the hunt. The stealth killer sees himself as the Invisible Man.”

  “So how do you find him?” Bess asked.

  “We have to smoke him out.”

  “You’ve done that?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the boy’s town missing persons?”

  Rossmo nodded. “We have a stealth-predator pattern.”

  “Done how?”

  “Spatial-temporal clusters.”

  As the cyber cop explained his methodology, he turned around his high-end laptop computer so that Bess and the gathered editorial hounds could follow visually.