Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  "No 3953 for you, eh? Spann sports a double stack, like real guys. I always said the day a broad makes the team, my bet was it'd be you."

  "That's what I don't like about you, Ed. Bullshit, by the shovel. We both know the rules are fixed to keep me out. The ERT team operates like a fraternity. Leader is elected by the group, so rank is irrelevant to who's in command, and a single blackball is enough to prevent undesirables joining. But you don't need a ding session to keep us out, since no woman has bulk enough to bench-press the physical."

  The Mad Dog poked her breast. "Get working on your pecs."

  The ERT command trailer marked the center of Zulu base, which looked more like a set from M*A*S*H than it did a police action. Encircling the trailer were canvas tents dusted with snow, served by blue portable toilets lined in a row, and an icy parking lot beside a chopper clearing. One of the tents was a field hospital staffed by paramedics, but shortly before the snowmobile had roared in with George holding Spann, they'd been called out to an accident on the Kispiox road. The Mad Dog filled the gap by playing doctor in the trailer, and that done, the two cops bundled up and opened the door and stepped out into the vortex of action prompted by the MVA and rebel shot at her.

  Dubbed "the big red tomato," a Bell 212 hovered in ground effect, rotors swirling up twisters of snow like whirling dervishes.

  Vehicles rumbled in and out of the parking lot, an ambulance approaching from the Kispiox road, while four Bison APCs on loan from the Canadian army churned away, each armored personnel carrier, tailgate up and turret closed, marked with the crest of the RCMP. Caged inside were ERT cops and "Members without badges," all German shepherds except for one Labrador to sniff for bombs. A convoy of cube vans trailed behind.

  With them gone, there were still cops in camp, for fifteen emergency response teams—235 assault troops—had been choppered in from detachments around B.C. and Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ottawa. In whiter camouflage they drifted like spirits through the snow, as if Ghost Dancers had besieged the camp, as Spann and the Mad Dog wound their way to a winter morgue on the edge of white woods.

  The corpse cut from the waterfall was still in its shroud of ice, and now lay on a sled for transport east to Dodd's plane. George was about to pack it hi sawdust like ice men of old, then zipper it into a thermal body bag, but on seeing the pair approach, he left the remains exposed. Spann took a long look at what had brought her here, the naked blue body frozen hi blue ice, the genitals shriveled to the size of a baby boy's, the cuts on the bare feet from running through icy bush, the wrists locked together in front with handcuffs, the healed end of the right ring finger missing a phalange, the arrow angling out of the heart, the tubes hi the stump where the head was hacked off.

  "You okay?" George asked.

  "Yeah," Spann replied. "You see who shot Moses John hi front of me?"

  "No," said the Cree. "The shot came from the west. From the sundance circle or farther on. Wind cleared a sightline for the marksman, but snow hid him from view. All I saw was John's head explode."

  "Why shoot the holy man?" the Mad Dog asked. "Kill him so Grizzly has no power rival hi camp? Now he's the undisputed leader of the rebels."

  "And can say we shot their spiritual leader," said Spann.

  "Assuming the target was Moses John," said George. "He stepped toward you a moment before the shot. How do we know the target wasn't you? One in the" doomsday cult striking out at the New World Order."

  "Either way, if he's involved, Grizzly just passed the point of no return. The hope for a peaceful outcome exploded with John's head." Spann turned her attention back to the corpse in the ice. "How tall is the stiff?" she asked.

  "Five-six to the stump."

  "That matches Jed Vanderkop. The hunter from Idaho who vanished near here last month. The stiff is missing the end of the same finger as him. Looks like an archer bow-hunted Jed."

  "Stripped him, and cuffed him, and let him run for sport," said the Mad Dog. "Stalking him through the icy woods above the waterfall, where he was finally brought down with a damn good shot. The stream carried him over the falls, and he froze in the pool below."

  "A white guy shot with an arrow close to a camp of white haters picking up ancient ways. The archer's M.O. seems to fit the rebels," said Spann.

  "Hardly ancient ways," the Mad Dog countered. "The arrow's an Easton XX75 2219." With his glove he tapped the plastic nock of the olive drab camouflaged aluminum shaft. "Cam prevents sun splashing off it as a warning. It's fletched with three soft-yellow plastic vanes, for quieter flight and no moisture flattening out. From the slits around the wound, I'd say Jed's spine was slammed by a Wasp three-bladed broadhead 130-grain chisel-point or similar arrowhead. The archer uses an oversize arrow with a forty- to forty-five-pound bow. Any stronger and the shaft would punch through the spine. I know lots of bow hunters who'd shoot this arrow, and all of them are white."

  "That jibes with what John told me just before he was shot," Spann agreed. "He said he may have spied the archer hunting in the bush on the bluff above the falls at twilight prior to the freeze. When I asked who, last thing he said was 'The white man . . .'"

  "The white man?" echoed George. "Not a lot to work with. But maybe someone knows a Caucasian who bow-hunts near here."

  "Unless he meant the White Man," stated Bush Dodd. "In which case you're looking for a native trapper with lines around here."

  "A native called the White Man?" wondered Spann.

  "He's albino, and whiter than you or me."

  "Real name?" George asked.

  "Winterman Snow."

  "Met him?"

  "We crossed paths a few tunes in the woods. When I landed hell and gone in the bush. The guy's a lone wolf who lives off the land. Only comes out now and then to sell furs."

  "You know," said Spann, winking at Dodd. "The good old days might not be over yet. We may get to bush-hunt our own Mad Trapper."

  Tzantza

  Vancouver

  Saturday, January 6

  Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq returned home a day early from his vacation in France, riding the bus before sunrise this morning from Domfront to Flers, and then the train to chug three hours east to Montparnasse station, and then the Metro to snake underground to St. Michel-Notre Dame, and then the RER sixteen miles north to Charles de Gaulle Airport, there to board Air Canada Flight 881 to Toronto, with a two-hour stopover between planes, then on to Flight 147 to Vancouver, arriving at 5:09 in the afternoon, actually two in the morning plus jet lag his time, and here took a cab through Vancouver rain to his office at Special X, where the shrunken head sat on his desk.

  "Grueling trip?" Zinc Chandler asked as DeClercq dropped his suitcase just inside the door and shucked his raincoat.

  "Except for the half hour of Mr. Bean crossing the Atlantic."

  "Is Katt peeved to lose a day?" inquired Gill Macbeth, craning her neck to see if the teenager was standing in the hall. The pathologist sat on this side of his desk with the head blocked from view behind her.

  "It worked out well," said DeClercq as he hung his coat on the stand. "We parted in Toronto, where she took a flight to Boston. She'll spend the time with her mom, then fly back for school."

  "Corrine's living Stateside?"

  "On and off. She purchased a mansion to redecorate in Boston this summer. Katt will work with her and get to know that city, and Corrine doesn't have to pull up roots."

  "So everyone's happy?"

  "Most of all me. How Corrine handled this mess is class all the way. I think Katt harbors the fantasy one day I'll marry her mom."

  The mess DeClercq referred to was a mess indeed. A situation pregnant with tragedy for all involved. After Katt had been rescued from Deadman's Island—father unknown and mother one of the Ripper's victims—she had become the daughter death stole from him. Katt was his replacement for Jane. But then he discovered Luna wasn't her mother after all, having kidnapped Katt as a baby from Corrine in Boston, before smuggling her into Canada to
raise as her own. DeClercq called Corrine, who wanted her daughter home. Katt, who had lost her "mother," balked at losing her "father" for a mother she didn't know. Were Corrine not Corrine, heartbreak would have happened, but instead of ripping Katt out of her "home," she adapted her life to the teen's. Katt, American by birth, lived in Canada for citizenship, so she could apply to become a Mountie like DeClercq. Corrine, who bought, then refurbished old homes for profit, lived with Katt when she worked here, and shared her with DeClercq when she worked in Boston. Corrine had Katt. DeClercq had Katt. Katt had Corrine and DeClercq.

  "Will you?" Gill asked.

  "Will I what?"

  "Marry Corrine so Katt can live happily ever after with you?"

  "Why are women such meddling romantics?"

  "Is it not a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife?"

  "No," he said.

  "Yes," she said.

  "No," he said.

  "Yes," she said.

  "And if it were, a wife of his own choosing."

  "So," said Gill, cocking her head, "is she not the woman for you?"

  No, thought DeClercq. My kind of woman is you.

  The more he was around her, the more he felt drawn to Gill. Handsome, not pretty, she could pass as a twin for Candice Bergen. His side of forty, with auburn hair and emerald eyes, she still had a figure trim enough to turn heads on the street and awaken fantasies in him he had thought long gone. Her mother, who had died from hepatitis, a risk of the job, was the first female pathologist in the Commonwealth, so while other girls were busy baking cookies with mom, Gill was learning how to dissect dead things, and was now the best forensic sawbones in town. As heir to her father's chain of Caribbean hotels, from which she split the profits with on-site managers, Gill owned the crown atop Sentinel Hill, a West Coast modern of cedar and glass, in which she lived, menage a trois, with Binky and Gabby.

  DeClercq had been there once.

  A party she threw for all who survived the sinking of the Good Luck City during the Africa case.

  "He's not for you, Gill," Gabby said from a perch he paced hi the huge aviary-cum-solarium he shared with Binky.

  "Don't mind him," Gill laughed, champagne flute in hand. "Gab makes disparaging comments about everyone he fears may take me from him."

  "A West African gray."

  "You know parrots?"

  "Bird-watching's a pastime I revive whenever I'm in the tropics."

  "Impress me," Gill said. "What's Binky?"

  "He's a green-winged macaw, right?"

  "How do you know Bink's a he!"

  "Fifty percent chance. And a lucky guess," Robert replied.

  "Careful, Gill," Gabby warned. "He's trying to get into your pants."

  "I doubt the chief superintendent is out to seduce me," soothed Gill, her head cocked to one side like the jealous bird's.

  "As I recall, an African gray is so intelligent it speaks with the ability of a seven-year-old child. Your guardian proves Freud right. Childhood is obsessed with sex."

  "Is Gabby causing trouble?"

  A voice behind.

  "Bad to worse," Gabby said. "The stud arrives."

  The stud was Corporal Nick Craven of Special X. He stopped next to Gill to wrap a possessive arm about her shoulders.

  "You should hear the noise they make in bed," said Gabby, bouncing on his perch as if to imitate the act. "All night long. How's a bird to sleep?"

  "Gab!" Gill scolded.

  Did she teach him that?

  DeClercq found himself cocking his head at Macbeth like the parrot.

  "Ruffle my feathers, baby," mocked the cocky bird.

  DeClercq left the trois and the interloper to sort out libidos, and snaked his way through the crowd until he bumped into a wall of books and CDs. Shakespeare, Austen, Wordsworth, Dickens, Conrad, Proust, Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Maugham, Greene . . . The same authors lined shelves in his library at home, joined by those Katt had added when she usurped the space as a bedroom: King, Koontz, Rice, Linda Lael Miller ... As he scanned titles—The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman, In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust—a vision formed in his mind's eye of Gill and him reading by a fire in what Katt called the Holmes and Watson chairs, discussing literature in a true meeting of equal minds. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms ... Similar CDs made up his collection— the "Emperor" piano concerto his all-tune favorite piece—so fantasy was further enhanced with music, roses, and wine, until it was Gill and him romancing all night which kept grumpy Gabby awake.

  If smart is sexy, Gill was as sexy as could be.

  He glanced at her.

  But saw Nick.

  And there was the problem.

  Gill was hi her forties. Nick was in his thirties. Had she worked out this relationship with a younger man to enjoy lustful sex without ties that bind? One eye on her biological clock, Gill had been pregnant with Nick's kid when the ship went down, but lost the fetus from stress and exposure to a winter sea. Was the ruckus which kept poor Gabby awake their labor of love to replace it? And if so, what moral right had he to obstruct her maternal instinct when he considered his fifty-odd years too old to start fathering babies, abandoning them too early to fend for themselves among cannibals if he passed on according to actuarial tables.

  In Search of Lost Time.

  Is that my Gordian knot?

  Replacing Jane has me yearning to replace my wives with Gill?

  And then there was the issue of him being Craven's boss. Move on a subordinate's love and there'd be doubt about his fitness to command, apart from undermining of morale. The moral man knew all was not fair in love and war. To this day he couldn't shake the feeling that his second wife had cuckolded him, for when she died in the aftermath of the Headhunter case, she was secretly with Al Flood at his West End apartment, Flood the Vancouver Police liaison with the Headhunter squad, and a student in the psychology class Genny taught. Had they been lovers? All he had was suspicion. But like Othello's Desdemona, the whiff of betrayal was there. Flood had hoped to cut in and "dance" with Robert's wife, and wasn't that what he'd do to Nick if he fell for Gill?

  The Gordian knot of desire.

  Too late to untie, and too damn moral to cut.

  Is Gill flirting with me?

  Better not to find out.

  "So," he said, "where's this shrunken head sent to me?"

  Rising from the minion chair in front of Robert's desk, Gill revealed the box in the shadow she cast over the surface. A strange sense of deja vu beckoned within his mind as the Mountie stared transfixed at the grisly miniature. How ghostly the shriveled ash-white skin was in its snake nest of tangled black hair. How empty both sockets without eyeballs seemed behind their stitching. How secretive the thin lips pierced by small gold rings laced together hoop to hoop with a zigzag black leather thong were. The chief had never seen a shrunken head in the flesh, so why did something about this trophy haunt his subconscious?

  "Tzantza," Gill said. "That's the Jivaro name. The Indians of Ecuador invented shrinking. The cut-off head is left in a wicker basket to drain off blood, while the Jivaro spreads banana leaves around a fire, above which hangs a large clay pot of boiling water. Bled, the head is gripped by the hair and immersed for thirty minutes, until the skin is paper-white and smells like cannibal food. Then sand is added to the pot and it's brought to a boil again."

  Her perfume is expensive.

  To mask the taint of the morgue.

  "The back of the head's slit open with a machete," she continued, "crown to nape of the neck to remove the skull, then the slit and both eyes are sewn shut. Using a tool like a trowel, the shrinker fills the empty head with sand from the pot, spooning it in through the open neck. After several minutes the cooling sand is dumped and replaced with hot. Eventually the head shrinks down to this, except for the hair, which doesn't shrink, and seems abnormally long."

  "The rings?" said Robert.

  "Yes, t
hat's odd. Stitching the lips shut ends the shrinking. Jivaros sew them together with a bone needle and thong. Trapping the victim's spirit inside keeps it from haunting the shrinker. Whoever shrank this tzantza added rings."

  "I wonder why."

  Zinc Chandler crossed to the Strategy Wall. It was DeClercq's habit when solving a case or plotting a book to plan visually, so two of his office walls were lined floor to ceiling with corkboard. The chief was proud to see Zinc adopt his method, and waiting for him were two collages split by a vertical line, so moving toward the inspector he said, "Fill me in."

  "On Wednesday night the Mad Dog found this corpse up north as he retreated from photographing the rebels at Totem Lake."

  Zinc tapped photos in the left collage showing the body under the frozen falls.

  "Headquarters was informed and word spread through the Force, but before the media were briefed early next morning, someone sent you the shrunken head by dropping a parcel into the chute out front of the main Vancouver post office."

  DeClercq held up three fingers to knock down. "The headless body and bodiless head are a coincidence. A leak in the Force prompted a copycat's act. Or the killer of the headless corpse sent me its head."

  "A copycat would have to kill, shrink, and mail so fast that I think that unlikely, unless the head posted was pre-shrunk," said Zinc.

  They moved to a color copy of the packaging pinned to the other collage.

  "Plain brown wrapper, available anywhere. Box from Christmas, for a tree ornament. Scotch tape to seal and rubber cement for the label. No fingerprints inside and no hairs or fibers except the head's. Lots of prints on the wrapper, but none CPIC could match. The typed label is from a daisy wheel. Replace the wheel and there goes any link."

  Zinc tapped the copy of the label on the wall:

  Commanding Officer

  Special External Section

  Royal Canadian Mounted Police