Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  5255 Heather Street Vancouver, B.C. V5Z 1K6

  "No note. No call claiming credit. Just the label, presumably addressed to you. The parcel arrived here in Friday's mail."

  "Check if the main post office has a cut-off time, prior to which a chute drop makes Thursday's delivery, and after which it's held for Friday's mail. That might tighten the time line."

  "The check is in the mail," Zinc punned. "I should have an answer soon."

  DeClercq sensed Gill approaching the wall as if on cue, then felt the caress of her breath on the hairs of his neck. As Chandler returned to the first collage, she slipped between the men, so near her static electricity tingled Robert's skin.

  Magnetism, he thought.

  "Yesterday the corpse was cut from the frozen pool up north and flown here by bush plane." Zinc tapped the postmortem Polaroids around the preliminary report Gill had delivered just before the chief arrived. "The stiff was taken to VGH morgue."

  The body on the autopsy table was still a block of ice.

  "Internal examination is days away," said Gill. "I have to wait for the flesh to thaw at room temperature, to soften cells now hard with ice crystals. However, we do know the corpse is that of missing Idaho hunter Jed Vanderkop."

  Macbeth-pulled an X-ray from her carry case. "This was sent by Vanderkop's doctor in the States. His chest was X-rayed for pneumonia last year." Handing it to the chief to hold up to the light, she pulled another X-ray from her bag. "This we took yesterday in the morgue, to track the arrow through organs in the chest." Gill held the second X-ray up beside the first, pointing out forensic features to him. "Here, here, and here, dips in the ribs are the same. A rib cage is like a fingerprint. It differs from person to person. See the same fracture in both from childhood trauma? Plus, the corpse is missing the same phalange."

  "The head?" said DeClercq. "Is it his?"

  "Without bone structure that's impossible to tell by comparing it with photographs of Vanderkop. Skin DNA will have denatured during shrinking, but mito-chondrial DNA in the hair shafts will remain. Wait a month, and a DNA test will answer that."

  "Nothing quicker?"

  "Perhaps," Gill said. "We may be able to match the cut skin of the stump with the cut skin of the shrunken head."

  "Jigsaw pieces?"

  "If we're lucky. The shrinking will make it hard to compare, and the stump hasn't thawed yet. The cleaner the cuts, the more difficult to match."

  Again, Robert imagined them in the Holmes and Watson chairs, playing case puzzles off each other like a game of forensic chess.

  "Vanderkop was sodomized before he was killed. The act was rape, not consensual sex. In active homosexuals the anus is funnel-shaped. The tissue here was bruised, bleeding, and torn. See how the buttocks have thawed in the Polaroids? But an internal check for sperm is still days off."

  "Visualize the killing?"

  "Yes," she said. "Vanderkop was waylaid, stripped, and raped in the bush. Then he escaped, or was released naked for sport. Fleeing through icy woods slashed skin from his legs before he was brought down by an arrow to the heart. Then his head was chopped off with a machete or similar blade."

  "Why decapitate him?" queried DeClercq. "Unless to shrink the head sent here. Which begs the question, Why taunt me?"

  "To answer that," Gill said, "you'll have to ask a shrink."

  Headhunter

  The North

  Sunday, January 7

  A snowy owl flitted through the somber gloom. Gray and murky twilight gripped the plateau. Into this vague immensity trudged two men, while meteors flashed across the dark northwestern sky. The indistinct glow of first dawn smudged the horizon to their backs, then gradually turned into a broader band of light. The hunted man was naked and fleeing for his life, facial features swollen around terrified eyes, the skin of his legs frostbitten and bleeding from the ice crust beneath knee-deep fresh snow. His senses keen to everything civilization steals from us, the hunter not too far behind was on the track of blood. Black mountains stretched away to all compass points, and wind whined through them with the sharpness of a knife. From somewhere to the north a prowling wolf howled as the snowy owl dropped, with talons spread, to pluck prey from the hoary woods.

  Winterman Snow was on the hunt.

  Like the owl and the white wolf, he was all white, too. He wore a white parka with a white hood, buried in the hole of which was his pale face. Gloves, and pants, and mukluks, and snowshoes were also white, so the only color about him was the RealTree camo on his Deer Hunter bow, and the soft-yellow fletching of arrows visible over his shoulder.

  Saint Sebastian, he thought.

  The image of it was ever in his mind, linking this shadowy world of the present with the even more shadowy realm of his people's past, back when nature and super-nature merged hi life and art, creating a mythic wonder in which men and animals as kindred spirits traded both secrets and bodies. That was the time of salmon, cedar, the potlatch, and totem poles, when all fish bones were returned to the rivers so they could swim to the Salmon House for reincarnation, fog brooding over tree-quilled slopes untouched by man, while twenty war canoes sailed off with thirty men apiece, chiefs clothed in sea-otter skins and warriors dabbed with red ocher sprinkled with shining sand, heading for headhunter battles from which they would return with baskets filled with the heads of enemies slain.

  Like yours, Saint Sebastian, he thought.

  Snow could hear the silence and feel the solitude. Mother Nature spoke to him through voices of the night. He knew the name of every creek, lake, and peak in this lone land. Not the empty names that white men had given them to honor then- own, but Indian names which honored the nature of what they described. Rivers and mountains and wilderness had a language, too, and his mind caught the echo of what they said. He felt their hate for what the white man had done to the land, just as he felt his people's hate for what had been done to them, after both they and all they held sacred were signed away without their consent so prosperity would accrue to the newcomers with their new order of things, not to ancient dwellers with their ancient ways. It was the same hate he felt for what the white did to him.

  Saint Sebastian.

  And Reverend Noel.

  Though he hunted like his ancestors, Snow's was no Indian bow. This compound bow like Rambo shot in one of his he-man films had a machined-aluminum handle bolted to Magnaglass limbs, tipped with wheel-like Synergy III eccentric cams or pulleys. Whereas longbows and recurve bows release energy stored in their limbs to propel the arrow, a compound bow stores its maximum or peak weight in the cams, then "lets off" half its draw weight after mid-draw so the archer can aim longer with less effort. Draw 40 lbs @ 50% let-off and you will hold 20 lbs, for mathematicians. This Deer Hunter had a thirty-inch draw of sixty pounds, modified to forty pounds (with holding weight of twenty pounds) so the arrows Snow fired would stick from his prey like those in the painting of Saint Sebastian behind the reverend's desk.

  Saint Sebastian.

  Martyr to the bow.

  The sun crept over the eastern rim to spew a flood of light. The teeth of the jagged horizon bit deeply into the bloody disc. A thousand tints of gold blazed around the solar ball and washed west across a sea of icebergs from the Rockies to the coast. Mountains soared around the plateau like white giants bald with age and cloaked hi mist, spiking peaks above veils of vapor, sudden warmth sucked from their glaring skins. The quick, unerring eye of the hunter tracked dark footprints over the dazzling snow from where he stood to movement in a spiny thicket beyond. There, where the hunted man sought sanctuary in the dregs of fading night, dawn cast shadows behind the white trees by shooting rays of sunlight at him similar to the metal arrow the archer pulled from the quiver on his back.

  Left side facing the man in the bush and shoulders in line with his quarry's spine, Snow kept his bow hand loose so not to choke the weapon, then nocked the arrow on the string he hooked with the first three fingers of his right hand. Bow arm extending toward the targ
et, he drew back the arrow to anchor the string at the corner of his mouth. As the pulleys tipping both limbs flipped toward him, the cables parallel to the string whispered taut with tension. The archer aimed "bare bow" without a sight, positioning his dominant eye directly over the arrow to mark the line of flight, judging the elevation required to hit the target by instinct, and relaxed his fingers to let loose the shot. The slingshot effect of the bow "picked up" the peak weight stored in both cams and hurled the arrow at the naked man.

  Shhhhewwww . . .

  Frozen to his soul by the terror of the moment, Cy Flint could not believe this was happening to him. Arms churning and legs struggling through the freezing snow, his face flushed from this desperate trudging away from certain death, his teeth chattering from stark fear and hypothermia, his breath gasping raggedly like a whipped dog's, he knew he must keep moving moving moving on, as only the dead and the earth could remain fixed in this white hell.

  Shhhhewwww . . .

  Cyrus Flint was one of Seattle's cultural elite, a nature artist whose overpriced prints graced mantels of Yups and Boomers from coast to coast, his Polar Bears and White Wolf at Dawn commissioned by the first lady for the White House. When Cy heard Disney had airlifted a log cabin here to film King of the Mountain in Canada this spring, leaving it for several months to weather a Skeena winter, he'd offered to paint the promotion bill in exchange for two months of bush work alone until the film crew arrived.

  Helicoptered in yesterday with all his supplies, a detour required because the Mounties had imposed no-fly restrictions around Totem Lake, Cy had spent the afternoon sketching wolves that wandered across the plateau, before snuggling in for the night with a snifter of brandy by the fire.

  A fire requiring wood to see him cozy through till dawn.

  So, before retiring, Cy had poked his head outside to grab some maple rounds, and that's when—crack!— a fire log smashed down on his skull. When Cy came to, he found himself crucified naked to the floor, paints from his art supplies used to smear a Catholic cross on wood planks near the fire, spikes hammered into the floor at the tips of both cross arms, Cy's arms stretched out and wrists tied to the spikes, wondering vaguely why he was facedown instead of faceup, until hands behind grabbed his hips and raised his butt in the air, hands so large the palms covered the spread of both cheeks, as fingers curled underneath to meet above his groin, while thumbs flanking his anus . . .

  Cy screamed . . .

  And cried . . .

  And screamed again.

  If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one to hear, does it make a sound?

  All Cy could think about was Deliverance, with him in the role of Ned Beatty which firelight played out on the walls, Cy grasping he'd fallen into the clutches of some mad Canadian hillbilly or worse, oh God, he wished he'd stayed in the civilized States, this shadow play a horror the imagination saves for godforsaken times like this, the shadow behind riding Cy's rump as it wrenched on the reins of his hair and cursed, "Take it, Reverend," between grunts.

  All night long.

  Rape on rape.

  Until Cy was cut free and shoved out into the snow with the cryptic warning, "Run for your life. May Saint Sebastian be with you."

  Shhhhewwww . . .

  The arrow streaked into the evergreens whitened by snow, zipping over Cy's tracks like some cruise missile reading the terrain, the broadhead winking as it passed from sun to shadow to sun, the shaft gone stealth where cam kept the sun from splashing off, then Shhhhewwww . . . Thhhunk! it sliced through Cy's arm and pinned him to a bare-limbed tree.

  His gasp was quick and sharp.

  Blood crisscrossed the snow as he struggled to rip free, an ordeal as arduous as the sundance performed at Totem Lake, this thrashing that which seizes a man when life is in the act, then Thhhunk! a second arrow pinned his leg below.

  Blood bubbled warm from the wounds, and pain sapped his strength.

  Cy tried to turn, but the arrows held him fast.

  Shhuugh . . .

  Shhuugh . . .

  Shhuugh . . .

  Snowshoes approached behind.

  Freaked out and teetering at the last extremity of fear and despair, gibbering Cy ground his tongue in the gears of his teeth.

  The shadow sliding up the bark near his face had a raised arm, the dark fist of which slashed a long blade in a wide arc toward the back of the neck of the nature artist.

  Then Cy was spinning like an acrobat in the air as blood fountained out of his headless body to splash and stain the snow, over and over and over until he plumped into a drift, cool crystals chilling the flush from his cheek, before a grasp as strong as that of death seized him by the hair, yanking his fading consciousness up to face Winterman Snow.

  "White man," the White Man said with contempt, and he spat in Cy's eye.

  Fetish

  Vancouver

  Vancouver is a lumber town gussied up. It all began with Gassy Jack. Owner of the Globe Saloon in New Westminster, John "Gassy Jack" Deighton earned his nickname from an aptitude for fluent conversation when he was in his cups. The Fraser gold rush over, his bar went bust, so in 1867 he sailed downriver to Burrard Inlet for a new start. Arriving with an Indian wife, six dollars in cash, a yellow dog, and a barrel of whisky, Gassy built a pioneer shack in a grove of maple trees on a strip of firm ground with the muddy beach of the harbor in front and False Creek swamp behind. With half a dozen logging camps and two sawmills serving lumber ships, his saloon had a lock on thirsty throats, as it was a fifteen-mile walk to any alternative source of booze. Soon all wages earned were filling Gassy's coffers, and five paths led to his door in Gastown. First renamed Granville to give it class, then Vancouver after the British explorer who charted the coast, Gastown with five streets joining at Maple Tree Square remains the heart of the city, gazing over which is a statue of Gassy Jack.

  George Ruryk's office looked out on the statue and the square. Behind the building was Gaoler's Mews, site of the city's first jail.

  DeClercq was shocked to see how haunted the shrink seemed now. When they had worked together on the Headhunter case, he'd been a man of advancing years and growing reputation, a top professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UBC, who favored tweedy jackets with leather-patched elbows, wire-rim spectacles around owl-like eyes, and a Vandyke goatee befitting Freud. Robert's wife Genevieve had suggested he ask Ruryk to apply the FBI's new psych profiling science to the killer, so, because he trusted her opinion, he had. Though the Mounties now had ViCLAS—the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System—to ferret out behavioral and psychological "signatures" in crimes coast to coast, and the Criminal Profiling Unit to read the signatures, something subconsciously drove him back to Ruryk, who had since left the university for private consulting here. Jekyll to Hyde, was that the effect of switching from academe's ivory tower to the real world? Whatever it was, something had changed the psychiatrist profoundly, for more than time had shriveled and shrunk the life out of him, turning his hair stark white as if from fear, while squinting his eyes with the tense gaze of a wretch who can no longer distance himself from the hell of his job.

  Haunted cops swallowed their guns.

  Haunted lawyers went berserk hi court.

  Haunted shrinks did what?

  Or were they haunted by what they did?

  When you look long into an abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss also looks into you.

  "Skid road to skid road to skid road," said Ruryk. DeClercq walked in to find the psychiatrist staring out his office window at the rainy square. "A virgin forest turned skid road to move loggers' logs. Then this heart of the city turned skid road by the Depression. Gussied up in the sixties to reclaim its heritage. Then I watch it slowly slip back to skid road."

  "A never ending battle," agreed the cop. "A metaphor for what we do," said the shrink. DeClercq joined him at the window to gaze out over the square. A hump in the cobblestones marked the place where Gassy's tavern had stood, surmounted by the statue gf Ja
ck standing on his barrel, and slumped at the base of it was a wino struggling to push down his pants. Across the square was the V-shaped Europe Hotel, Alexander Street angling left along the train tracks and the harbor, Powell Street angling right to the criminal courts and police station two blocks away. Down Powell drove a paddy wagon slick with rain, crossing the square toward Water Street to cruise on, until the cop riding shotgun spotted the wino exposing himself. The wagon stopped by the statue, and both cops got out. They opened the rear doors and approached the bum. One cop gripped him under the armpits while his partner reached under the shoved-down pants; then the latter jerked up his hands, covered with shit.

  "Now, that's indecent exposure," said DeClercq.

  "I know how he feels," Ruryk said, gazing into his own hands.

  It was now obvious to DeClercq that this was a bad idea. A decade ago this psychiatrist had profiled a mad killer who left behind bodies and carried off heads. So—given their success in that case—it seemed right to consult him about the flip side of that scenario: a mad killer who had kept or hidden a body and sent police its head. But what he had not factored in was the decade between, for it had been that long since he had last worked with Ruryk, and during that interval something had destroyed the man he knew.

  What? wondered DeClercq.

  "I've asked a colleague to join us, if you have no objection. Dr. Carlisle will assume my patients after I retire. Two heads—except in the case of your killer— are better than one."

  "By all means," said DeClercq, thankful to have an auxiliary support the burnt-out shrink.

  Ruryk pressed an intercom. "Please join us, Andy," the Mountie thought he heard him say.

  Bursts of color exploded against the dark paneling where pictures by Impressionists hung on the walls. The prints by Monet and Manet ("Tweedledum and Tweedledee," Katt the Critic opined), and Renoir and Sisley (the two DeClercq favored, after Monet), and Cezanne, the father of modern art (may he burn in hell) seemed no more than indistinct dabbling up close, but took on telling focus if you kept your distance.